Good News!

SPRINGFIELD – The Illinois House on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly to change the University of Illinois Board of Trustees to an elected body and downsize it from 10 voting members to eight.

HB 3289 passed on a vote of 113 to 1, and now heads to the Senate for consideration.

Of course Illinois Republicans pushed the switch to a Governor-appointed Board of Trustees, back when Illinois was in the midst of a long line of Republican Governors.  Now they’re singing a different tune.

The News-Gazette thinks that this is because of Chief Illiniwek.  I’m sure that’s true in part, yet I can’t imagine that an elected BOT would really make a difference on this issue—no BOT will want to exclude Illinois from NCAA events and enter another 10 year phase of lawsuits and protests over this.

Most importantly, this (if passed by the Senate and signed by the Gov) will discourage the rampant cronyism that’s infected the Board ever since this change converted BOT positions into patronage perks for the Governors friends and donors.  Good news all around. 

One worry however: the News Gazette points out that under the proposed system there will be eight candidates, each of whom will come from separate districts in Illinois.  This seems a little worrisome, insofar as such districts might tend to minimize the importance of voters in areas of concentrated population (i.e. Chicago), and give undue influence to white rural conservatives (as electoral politics do on a federal level, of course).  This may not be a problem now with a democratic Governor and state legislature, but it will certainly become one if/when Repubs take over state Government.  The old system of state-wide election of representatives was advantageous for Democrats, since voters tend (with good reason) to vote Democratic on issues of education, particularly when the candidates running are not well known to them (candidates for the UI BOT were rarely well known to voters). 

It will also be interesting to see whether the UI Alumni Association will try to reassert a role in nominating candidates to run for these positions.

Despite a few concerns, this seems like good news for the University of Illinois, and the Democratic process, insofar as a system of regional elections will give voters the opportunity to know more about the candidates for whom they’re voting.  Some Republicans may assume that this will push the BOT to discriminate against same-sex couples and reinstate its racist mascot and so forth; however I suspect that such retrograde reversals are unlikely to come to pass.  We’ll see, I suppose. 

“Kids don’t always know what their parents do all day at work, but they instinctively understand the importance of them working safely,” he told the audience, which included children who had won a safety-poster contest. “In contrast, adults could stand to learn a thing or two. Looking at the posters, I was reminded of a couple examples of safety and health bloopers that are both humorous and horrible.”

Yesterday’s cool restaurant augmented its coolness by adding a tapas bar.  The grapevine tells me, in all sober seriousness, that its next-door competitor plans to one-up the old schoolers by building a mozzarella bar.  (Like this?)  I am told that you will also be able to rent storage space for ‘yer wine in their refrigerator(s), for premium $$. 

Ah, rumors.

I enjoy watching the News Hour with Jim Lehrer; however, aside from that, it’s difficult for me to imagine watching most television and cable news programs for any reason other than to examine the state of the Media; certainly, anyone interested in actual news will gain nothing but frustration from most of these shows—although I confess that it’s thanks to ABC News that I’m now in the know about the Webkinz child cult (and haven’t we seen this somewhere before?).

Brian Wilson, one of the strangest and most horrible of the network news personalities, recently held forth about the unseemly competition from below:

“You’re going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe. All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I’m up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn’t left the efficiency apartment in two years” — Brian Williams, anchor of the “NBC Nightly News,” speaking before New York University journalism students on the challenges traditional journalism faces from online media.

It it possible that Williams doesn’t realize how hopelessly outmatched he is in this contest?  While Williams spends his days promoting his show, getting his make-up done, and currying favor with tv execs and politicians, Vinny spends his time reading the news. 

Anyway, so the clip above was of interest to me.  Not only because agnostics like myself are routinely told not to apply to teaching jobs at religious schools in the US, but also because of the form and execution of the video essay, in which Albert 10110 goes back and revises the CNN program to make it less stupid.  I like this form, and I hope we see more of it.  But I suppose that CNN etc. are likely to pull the plug on their YouTube materials once the popularity of de-stupified news programming begins to approach that of the originals.

The excellent historical materialist blog Histomat,  recently featured some excerpts from James Boswell’s pro-slavery love poem, No Abolition of Slavery, or the Universal Empire of Love.  One section of Boswell’s poem on the beauty of slave-based civilization, caught my attention (especially after reading another fascinating post at Lenin’s Tomb about Baudrillard’s skepticsm) was this one:

Let COURTENAY sneer, and gibe, and hack,
We know Ham’s sons are always black;
On sceptick themes he wildly raves,
Yet Africk’s sons were always slaves;

Who, I wondered, was this latter-day Montaigne, raving on “skeptic themes” against slavery?  I’d never heard of him, and it was harder than I imagined to find out.  But the DNB and ECCO helped me finger John Courtenay (1738-1816), secretary of Geroge III’s Master of Ordinance, and occasional pornographic revolutionary, at least in the sense that he was, like Samuel Johnson but unlike James Boswell, an staunch opponent of slavery.  I’m still not sure what works of Courtney’s Boswell was mocking in his slavery/love poem, but a good guess might be Courtenay’s 1774 An Epistle from an Officer at Otaheite, a short humorous piece on “savagery,” sexuality, and empire. 

The Epistle describes sexual practices in Tahiti (ones which Boswell presumably found horrific and incompatible with his notion of “civilized” monogamous love), and records  Courtenay’s boundless enthusiasm for ceremonial sexual practices, quoting Milton in a way that seems a surprisingly appropriate invocation of a Puritan who was indeed an early admirer of an imagined pre-civilization sexuality.  Courtenay writes:

Experienc’d dames, then led the smiling maid
To the sweet umbrage of the plantain’s shade.
Her bed, like Eve’s, with choicest flowers blooms,
And hov’ring Cupids shed divine perfumes.
With tuckt–up shifts, the fairest damsels sing [. . .]
Their brilliant bums in rapid circles seen,
With dazzling lutstre shine, before the Queene;

So said he, and forborne no glance nor toy
Of amorous intent; well understood
Of Eve, whose Eye darted contagious fire:
Her hand he seized, and to a shady bank
He led her nothing loth; flowers were the couch,
Pansies and violets, and asphodel,
And hyacinth, earth’s softest, freshest lap.  (Paradise Lost)

The Virgin’s eyes in light luxuriant swim,
Her mantling blood glows thro’ each brighting limb.
A vigorous youth soon clasps the beauteous prize,
Lusty and brown (almost your C—ny’s size).
Whilst over the rites, the Queen herself presides,
And in mild accents, Otheothea guides.

“Now Gently heave, in wanton fields entwine,
To aid his bliss, let every nerve combine;
See his lips tremble and his eyelids roll,
Suck the last breath, and catch his flying soul.”
She hears; obeys, in speechless transports drown’d,
Whilst sympathetic murmurs float around,
Meetee Attira! murmurs every lass,
And thousands fall, extended on the grass.

O blest employment of a Sovereign’s time,
How seldom seen in Europe’s barbarous clime!

Well.  Quite a bit’s going on here, to put it mildly.  Courtenay’s discussing the South Pacific, not Africa, but I’m guessing that Boswell was willing to over look that minor detail.  It doesn’t seem like Courtenay’s work is very well-known (or perhaps I’m mistaken?), and I suppose he’d be an interesting character for some enterprising student of Georgian English literature and politics.  He didn’t write too much, but I’m sure he’d also make for a very manageable article or two, or perhaps something longer, if manuscript materials are findable.

“I’ll miss having them around,” Reynolds said. “I’m mourning the friends who died combating and carrying out this momentous act, but at least I know their sacrifice was not in vain.”

Behind me right now, they’re having a conversation about God, Jesus, and Money.

Unidentified woman behind me says:

“God never says to his people, “this is your season to be poor.”  Money is power, you know, and influence, with money you can buy anything you want.  And the Devil wants that influence, and so  he introduces vows of poverty to deceive the church!”

Jesus said, “Come to my house,” so he was a landowner.  When they killed Jesus, his clothes were “seamless,” and so nice that the soldiers gambled for them.  I mean, that’s *nice*!  That’s like Armani!”

Also something more elaborate about Solomon and how rich he was and how Christians should all try to be that rich too.

Tickets for individual films at Ebertfest are now on sale.  They were selling like meth-laced pancakes this morning when I stopped by.

Sadly, Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival is always at the end of the semester, when time is very hard to come by.  Still, this year the festival is looking good, and the man will probably be well enough to come by himself.  So, I bought tickets for Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (which I’ve never seen) and Gattaca (hardly overlooked, but I’m enough of a fan to love the idea of viewing it at the Virgina).  Only Werner Herzog’s Stroszek was already sold out this morning (Herzog himself will be there to discuss the film).  I’m thinking that tomorrow I may zip over to the box office to get tickets for Sadie Thompson, since seeing silent films with orchestra at the Virgina is something I especially enjoy.

I’m back in Champaign, after a long weekend in Connecticut and Massachusetts, which was amazing.  Above you see a past president of Yale U, who appears to be having an an astonishing realization, or preparing to stand up and whup the fear of God into some young miscreant.  Perhaps both?

New England was interesting and beautiful, although I had many travel nightmares both on the way there and back—delayed a day and stuck in a hotel, the plane having to break up into the air again during a too gusty landing, and (on the way home) a crowd of furious passengers beating on the window of my taxi threatening to hurt me if I dared exit the vehicle.  I’ll forbear to share more travel stories, but I collected quite a few.

The conference to which I traveled was small, and owing to my delays I missed much of it, but I did manage to hear at least a few interesting talks.  One about Walter Crane (by Francesca Tancini) was especially interesting, as an introduction to the tarot-like work of an illustrator who’s work I must confess was entirely new to me.  My own talk had to be moved to the last slot in a session on the second day; it went well enough, although there didn’t seem to be a great many early modernists at the conference.

I suppose though that the best part of the trip was that I had a chance to see some Eastern friends, who toured me around Yale and Massachusetts.  New England was interesting in many ways, but especially for me in the very palpable puritan influence of the place.  Ole’ Ted Wolsey, pictured above, is a bit of a post-Puritan, but not so this fellow, who seems either like an American Hudibras, or else like the squat, angry, hammer of God himself. 

Even the name of Yale University—spare, somewhat ugly, but full of purpose and direction, in contrast to the warm clubbiness of “Harvard”—helps to make this point.  And so do the memorable architectural features of the campus, like the marble cube in which the cultural patrimony of the West sits like a Leibneitzan mind, or Woolsey Hall (again, named for Theodore Wolsey, above). 

Wolsey Hall, especially, provided a remarkable experience.  Neo-Classical (but Puritan neo-Classical), this white Mausoleum-like building is a memorial to Yale students who fought, or died, in the service of the United States (”Yes, but where’re all the names of the alums who fought in Iraq?” asked one of my guides). 

Yet not withstanding the likely paucity of Yalies on the front lines in Iraq, Wolsey Hall was not entirely uninspiring.  As I walked into the dome of Wolsey Hall, I looked at the friezes on walls, and this one in particular, the empty chambers on the ground floor was flooded by inspirational music in rehearsal, which sounded vaguely familiar.  Familiar, I realized, because it was the music from Civilization IV, filling the quiet building with the sound of the Lord’s Prayer, sung in Swahili, transformed into an anthem not to God but to Civilization—as if there were something there still worth keeping around—some vast project worth taking up and pursuing, again. 

A cheap and vaguely fascist sentiment, brought on by a war memorial and a video-game jingle, right?  And what would Theodor Adorno say?  I know.  And yet maybe not quite.

We had to miss the Video Game music performance later that evening, but most of it is available on You Tube.  We made our way back to Massachusetts, where I saw RL in a lovely Under Milk Wood, and visited Emily Dickinson’s house (we couldn’t find her grave).

And after a few delays, and a near riot at O’Hare airport, I was back in Illinois, at 5:30 in the morning.