"One wants glimpses of the real," wrote Harold Brodkey in his last journal entry before his death. "One almost never gets the real thing," lamented Saul Bellow in his last novel, Ravelstein.

Embodied in God, or a loved one, or, say, an adored work of literature or music, the experience of the real, the real thing, must be a perception of the truth of existence. At the very least the truth of one's own existence. Why you are here. What really matters. Who you really are. What Brodkey and Bellow seem to have in mind is a vision or a conviction of what Yeats called the deep heart's core.

In the same week during which we have followed the death of someone so unreal that it doesn't feel as though he had a self for us to mourn, we encounter the letters between the ridiculed and reviled governor of South Carolina and his Argentine lover, Maria.

Whoever released these private emails must have thought he was getting some sort of revenge. He was wrong. In revealing the authentic words these lovers exchanged with one another, he gave us a glimpse of the real.

I understand that the real in this case includes adultery and all its pain and betrayal.
When I first heard the farcical story of the governor's disappearance and then confession, I found it easy to laugh along with everyone else. I found it easy to agree with Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist as well as a journalist, that there was something bizarrely self-destructive in Sanford.

Now, having read the letters -- or the excerpts running in the South Carolina papers -- I'm not doing that anymore. The letters reveal nothing more nor less than true thunderbolt from the sky love. English professors tend to be people who love language, and who seek in language, more than in other places, the real. The Sanford/Maria letters have in them the grain of that sought-after actuality. Every word, every phrase, comes from the deep heart's core.

Maria's fractured English is as beautiful as Nora Barnacle's in her love letters to James Joyce.
Perfection after all isn't the real; Michael Jackson's multiply knifed face was a horror. The flaw and the fracture that convey our humanity and its exertions toward expressivity is the real.

Sanford's sincere, halting, emotional prose carries the impact upon him of his having been hit, and hit hard, by passionate love. Rather late in a very public life, Sanford has suddenly felt the bliss of utter enchantment with another human being.

[M]y weakness [is] doing rather than being — though you opened up a new chapter last week wherein I was happy and content just being. Last point worth further discussion... [The film Holiday] made me think of you — its mood and the notion of a holiday (wrapped up in our case over two days) certainly fit as well ... (though our visit in some ways for me was as well less of a holiday than it was uncovering and realization of some things and feelings that again are worth longer conversation)... The rarest of all commodities in this world is love. It is that thing that we all yearn for at some level — to be simply loved unconditionally for nothing more than who we are — not what we can get, give or become. [W]hile I did not need love fifteen years ago — as the battle scars of life and aging and politics have worn on this has become a real need of mine... I feel a little vulnerable because this is ground I have never certainly never covered before — so if you have pearls of wisdom on how we figure all this out please let me know ... In the meantime please sleep soundly knowing that despite the best efforts of my head my heart cries out for you, your voice, your body, the touch of your lips, the touch of your finger tips and an even deeper connection to your soul.

The quietude of private joy with another human being; this seems precisely what so many public figures, so many politicians, don't have. Maybe don't want. How crazy it must have felt for Sanford -- a powerful politician, a presidential prospect -- to be propelled into that realm of the private, where people act spontaneously, without thought of personal gain, and where they make all-too-human mistakes. Maria writes:

I haven’t felt this since I was in my teen ages, when afterwards I got married. I do love you, I can feel it in my heart, and although I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to meet again this has been the best that has happened to me in a long time You made me realized how you feel when you realy love somebody and how much you want to be beside the beloved. Last Friday I would had stayed embrassing and kissing you forever... Sometimes you don’t choose things, they just happen ... I can’t redirect my feelings and I am very happy with mine towards you.
What's striking about the email exchange is how much longer than Maria's Sanford's letters are. When's the last time the man wrote longer love letters than the woman?

First we feel, wrote James Joyce toward the end of Finnegans Wake. Then we fall. Relatively late in a pulled-back life, the governor of South Carolina felt. And of course he fell. But maybe this was - even with all the obvious disasters it brought down on him - a fortunate fall.

The latest controversy over the outing of an anonymous blogger has UD thinking about privacy and writing.

It was by accident that UD entered the blogosphere un-anonymous. She'd planned to hide her identity, but she forgot to tell her computer-savvy niece, who helped UD set up as a blogger, and her niece put UD's real name on the blog.

In retrospect, UD wonders how accidental this was. When she tries to imagine writing an anonymous blog, she can't. Given the sort of person, the sort of writer, UD is, given her range of subjects, public and private (the recently outed blogger confines himself to the public realm of politics), it's hard to see how UD could have sustained a plausibly anonymous voice.

The anonymous political blogger - his viewpoint is liberal - wished to retain anonymity for personal and professional reasons:

Professionally, I’ve heard that pre-tenure blogging (particularly on politics) can cause problems. And before that, I was a lawyer with real clients. I also believe that the classroom should be as nonpolitical as possible – and I don’t want conservative students to feel uncomfortable before they take a single class based on my posts. ..Privately, I don’t write under my own name for family reasons. I’m from a conservative Southern family – and there are certain family members who I’d prefer not to know about this blog ... Also, I have family members who are well known in my home state who have had political jobs with Republicans, and I don’t want my posts to jeopardize anything for them ...

Anyone who wants to blog anonymously, for whatever reason, is fine by UD; but she's struck nonetheless by the comprehensive nature of this list of reservations. With so many reasons for wanting to be unknown, why write at all? The classroom reason, for instance, strikes me as silly. Should Posner and Becker have blogged anonymously? Tons of politically out-there professors blog and hold class just fine. And -- because you blog from a liberal point of view your relative's job will be compromised?

No, there's something more comprehensive here about the rather unnerving act of free, individual writing itself -- writing that doesn't take place within the formal and formulaic confines of, say, law review articles - as a sort of unacceptable exposure, a thing that by definition threatens your privacy, that gives too much away, that makes you fly a bit too much by the seat of your pants.

The decision to be not merely a professor who writes formal articles and books, but also a person who writes informal posts, perhaps on a daily basis, is not an easy decision. The book comes packaged by a press; maybe it's part of a series; maybe it's co-written... The article comprises part of a journal full of other, related articles. There's plenty of cover here, if you will, plus a slow, familiar process of publication, reading, review.

Blogging, no matter how public your subject matter, is just you out there, saying your thing in a kind of stark, extra-institutional freedom. Thousands of people - professors from all disciplines, undergraduate and graduate students, journalists, fellow bloggers, scientists, political activists, administrators, government appointees, business executives -- read UD's blog and comment on it all day, every day. That happened not because a press or a professional society or a newspaper or magazine or journal housed and published and accredited her thoughts, but because one day she and her niece decided to make a page on the internet for UD's writing. It was just UD, and it remains just UD.

More and more writing, in the age of the internet, is like this -- unsponsored, free -- and UD thinks, on balance, it's a very good thing. She agrees with Andrew Sullivan:

Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader. The proximity is palpable, the moment human—whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends.

… Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.

The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed.

I'm not sure how much humanness Anonymous can convey. By which I mean to say that while there are some good reasons for some bloggers to choose anonymity, it's a pity they feel they have to. They're not beginning to use the power of this new medium.

I rail against distance learning, laptops in classrooms, PowerPoint, and other trends toward too much technology in university life, yet yesterday I made an audition lecture cd for the Teaching Company.

If the sample audiences around the country to whom TC will now send it like UD's lecture, she'll prepare a TC lecture series. Instead of lecturing to fifty or so people every semester, she'll have an audience that spans the nation. She'll become a distance instructor. Big time.

How to wrestle her way clear of this hypocrisy?

Well, how about this:

Universities are one thing, and companies that make educational videos and disks are another. Throughout her years of blogging about universities, UD's been arguing for the survival of four years of liberal arts education on a campus set apart - physically, metaphysically - from the world of the streets. Professors dwarfed by PowerPoints, students invisible behind laptops, destroy the immediacy of human interaction, the give and take of spontaneous, attentive discourse that challenges and changes you in college.

Universities that move more and more toward downloaded stuff and in-house distance learning units betray their fundamental responsibility as universities to be the unique place in the culture where our full capacities -- public and physical as much as private and mental -- are engaged in the dynamic setting of the classroom. However good it is, distance learning will never be as good as proximity learning -- learning that takes place with other living, breathing beings close to you, with whom you press an issue, embody thought's passion, generate the energy of conflict and complexity.

The university has given you - professor, student - the removed setting in which to express this immediate intellectual activity. How perverse to disdain that setting and stick your nose in your slides and your screens...

But most people are not in a university, and have no plans to be there. The impulse toward enlightening yourself transcends one's university years, and it's fitting that other forms of education, non-university education, exist to respond to that impulse. Yet watching UD talk, in a Washington studio, about how to write well will never be as good as being with her, week after week, in a classroom - challenging her, watching her fuck up, having her get all excited and spit on you while she speaks, laughing at her and seeing what effect that has, running your berserker theory about metaphor by her and getting her riled, etc., etc.

The classroom's unplanned to a large extent. That's the best thing about it. I mean, lesson plans, yes. To be sure. But they're a framework. They exist as something you depart from in the interest of free-ranging inquiry. If UD gets to do Teaching Company lectures, they'll be beautifully sculpted by many careful hands. There will certainly be some spontaneity on her part, some departure from a script, but for the most part this form of instruction will indeed be instruction -- a profoundly valuable thing, but not the same as the experience our universities were established to provide.

2009 is the centenary of both Malcolm Lowry and James Agee.
James Dickey coupled them:

[M]y personal heroes of the [totally responsive... intensified] sensibility are John Keats, James Agee, and Malcolm Lowry.
Dickey quotes Lionel Trilling calling Agee's long paean to American sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, "the greatest moral document of the time."

More than that, says Dickey, "it's an example of the ability of the human sensibility to go very deeply into life.... [Agee had a] quality of complete participation, of commitment of the self to whatever it was he contemplated."

Lowry too had "this extremely deep immersion in things."

Dickey goes on to suggest that both writers hit the bottle and died young in large part because of their intense sensitivity, their uncontrollable ability to enter entirely into - in particular - the sources of human anguish.

In Alabama, writes Adam Kirsch of Agee, "he was undergoing something very like a spiritual ordeal, in which he was granted a vision of the infinite value of each individual human being, even or especially the poorest." Lowry's narrator, in his great novel Under the Volcano, asks his wife: "How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o'clock in the morning?"

Because they managed to get what they saw down on paper before they died, Agee and Lowry can be thought of as two of our more powerful poet gods, in the sense that Richard Rorty, with his religion of art, intended.

Rorty argued for "a religion of literature, in which works of the secular imagination replace Scripture as the principal source of inspiration and hope for each new generation." He suggested that

'spiritual development' is usually used only in reference to the attempt to get in touch with the divine. But it is occasionally used in the broader sense, one in which it covers any attempt to transform oneself into a better sort of person by changing one's sense of what matters most. In the broader sense of the term, I would urge that the novels of Proust and James help us achieve spiritual growth.
The great writer, as "the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages," is "the vanguard of the species." Lowry and Agee immerse us deeply -- in the burden, moment by moment, of being human. At their most powerfully creative, they overtake and change us forever.

A Letter from Key West

To My Friend David,

In Memory of his Sister,

Eve Sedgwick

The southernmost sky is strange at ten at night,
Still mildly blue with midday clouds and a calm
Wind that lifts the clouds to show a star dead white,
Dead white and barely there above a palm's black head.

The three macaws who shriek behind the palms have gone to bed

And all the traffic in the tropics pauses for the moon.

Your sister, you said last week, will be dead soon.

II

So, tonight, a queer evening on Bone Key
In memory.

This is a world unwilling to dim its light.
A gray deck shines at my feet,
The swimming pool’s electric blue.
The palms shake out their canopies
And their understories.

All thrilling,
In the way of the last Key, with its late night heat,
Its sweet gardenias, and the night blooming jasmines
Glimmering under still-white clouds.

III

The dying coral, the marl's clay,
The bones of the dead that named the place Bone Key --
Consider these at noon, when the passion flower is red.
Consider these at ten, by the gulf and the sea.

Consider where the cancer spread.

“It’s in her spine,” you said.
That was June. And I said,
“What was the word they used?
Somnolent? Slow?”
“That was ages ago.”

IV

The canopy and the understory, the overarching line
And the trace of something deeper…

The delicacy I saw first in her baby pictures
(You showed them to me in Bethesda in 1969.) –
Your pale soft preoccupied-with-a-doll sister.

A piece of paper on the wall of her teenage room
Inked with the beginning of one of her poems:
O little Norwegian city and town!

Beauty, absurdity, and yearning all woven
Into her, her language, her infantile maturity.

V

The darkly flowing understory that she lifted,
Maternal, into her palms - the masturbating girl,
Fat art and thin art, the closet's episteme –
All of that is lighter now, as light as this queer evening.

This year's winner of the Pritzker architecture prize, Peter Zumthor, has a rare ability to convey in words the spirit of buildings.

Even rarer, this spiritual disposition accompanies a carpenter's pragmatic sense of materials. (His father was a cabinet maker.)
A short slide show from the Washington Post evokes the eerie, otherworldly feel of his work, work which nonetheless manages to establish a strong sense of permanent emplacement on the earth. There's also a photo of the architect, looking appropriately monkish.

To me, buildings can have a beautiful silence that I associate with attributes such as composure, self-evidence, durability, presence, and integrity, and with warmth and sensuousness as well; a building that is being itself, being a building, not representing anything, just being.
This is altogether different from the tumbly edgy self-conscious postmodernity of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman; it's got some alliance with Heideggerian notions of rootedness in time and space.... though when you look at the work, it's not nostalgic in the way, say, Leon Krier can be. Instead, Zumthor seems able in some of his buildings to retrieve and revive basic forms and feelings.

Living in Key West for my sabbatical year, I'm most strongly taken with what Zumthor says about light:

Materials react with one another and have their radiance, so that the material composition gives rise to something unique. ... Thinking about daylight and artificial light I have to admit that daylight, the light on things, is so moving to me that I feel almost a spiritual quality. When the sun comes up in the morning - which I always find so marvellous, absolutely fantastic the way it comes back every morning - and casts its light on things, it doesn’t feel as if it quite belongs in this world. I don’t understand light. It gives me the feeling there’s something beyond me, something beyond all understanding. And I am very glad, very grateful that there is such a thing.

The modesty of this admitted lack of understanding, and the conviction that there's much beyond him, expresses itself in work that transcends the maker's ego and makes itself everyone's possession. Zumthor makes a similar point here:

The idea of things that have nothing to do with me as an architect taking their place in a building, their rightful place - it’s a thought that gives me an insight into the future of my buildings: a future that happens without me. That does me a lot of good.

Each suicide writes a new life story
With obvious portents like something out of Dreiser
Or like the junior high school poem Richard Corey,
Where, once he's done it, we're so much wiser
To the heavy-foreshadowed script;
The way the doomed life simply slipped
From one heavy-handed plot point to another.

Yes, heavy-handed plotting for the heavy-handed
Who banded plastic bags and smothered.
And yet if we were absolutely candid
We'd see our retrospectives as ordinary fables,
A filling-in of horror-gaps, grief-caesuras,
Narratives that turn unstable stable,
And, in their foolish fond old art, cure us.

Go wrap
Your head in the snowy rivers
Of the Brooks Range.

And that's what Nicholas Hughes did. His father, Ted Hughes, in his bitter poem, "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother," advised his children to "leave her," leave Plath to the literary beasts feeding off her myth, and escape into their own lives.

Like Natasha Richardson leaving the burden of Redgrave family renown for relative anonymity in New York, Nicholas Hughes left England for Alaska, where he pursued his fascination with the biology and sport of fishing. Avid for privacy and normalcy, he seems for decades to have found it in Fairbanks, where he was until recently a professor at the University of Alaska.

Yet like his mother he was a depressive who eventually could not hold off the darkness.

Of the sorrows his father wrote about in his poem "The Seven Sorrows," this one seems to mark the moment.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water -
The beetle's palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

Bernard d'Espagnat, a French physicist/philosopher, has won this year's one million dollar Templeton Prize, given to thinkers who attempt to reconcile religious belief and science.

d'Espagnat's ideas are intriguing enough that UD would like to feature them in a series of posts today, especially his claim that

There must exist, beyond mere appearances … a 'veiled reality' that science does not describe but only glimpses uncertainly. In turn, contrary to those who claim that matter is the only reality, the possibility that other means, including spirituality, may also provide a window on ultimate reality cannot be ruled out, even by cogent scientific arguments.

Atheists will argue that what we don't know about the universe we'll know in a matter of time; people inclined toward religious belief will often argue, like d'Espagnat, that immense obdurate mysteries, being a permanent feature of existence, suggest a larger supernatural intelligent design.

Of course, even if we can agree that there are limits to what can be known, this doesn't mean a god lies beyond the limits. Yet d'Espagnat's point of view is worth further investigation, which UD will now begin. She will chronicle her attempt to acquaint herself with d'Espagnat's ideas in a series of posts, of which this is Part One.

Rule One: Never make your reader laugh when she's not supposed to.
SUNY Binghamton got blasted in the New York Times for running a typically scummy Division I basketball team. Big deal. Tell it to Auburn. SUNY should have ignored it. No one cares.

But the president got all huffy, and so did SUNY's newspaper. Let's look at its sports editor's opinion piece.

Over the weekend, a story written by Pete Thamel came out in The New York Times concerning Binghamton University’s men’s basketball program, its head coach Kevin Broadus and other members of the school’s administration, including school President Lois DeFleur. The main focus was to drag the program’s name through the mud, and to be perfectly frank, I was offended by the entire piece.
[Drop "main." Much more importantly, remember what SOS has told you countless times: NEVER begin pieces of this sort by telling people how offended you are. No one gives a shit how you feel. It doesn't advance your argument. In fact, it retards your argument by personalizing things. Remember that a lot of people figure bigtime university sports as currently run are all about raw emotions, and really can't be justified in terms of anything a university represents. This sort of immediate announcement of how royally pissed you are confirms that suspicion. It's a completely empty polemical move.]

[And lose the "to be perfectly frank" nonsense.]
Like any student on this campus, I have heard all the rumblings about the “criminal element” of the team, the recruiting practices of the coaching staff and other gripes. Many of them have come from people who attend other institutions, but very few from people here in Binghamton.
[Why the quotation marks? We're talking about criminals. Remove the marks. Or can only "people who attend other institutions" recognize that people repeatedly jailed for violent crimes are criminals? Is SUNY a kind of mentally challenged Cosa Nostra?]

... [E]ven if these rumors [When did what the NYT report become rumors? You lose your reader's confidence when you do sly stuff like this.] do prove to be true, are we all so naive to think that the exact same thing isn’t going on at countless other institutions in this country? I sincerely hope that we’re not. [Drop the last sentence. And what a powerful argumentative move: Everybody does it.]
So I was surprised to see names from the faculty, and even formers players going on record to sully the good name of the basketball program in this article.
[Sully the good name is a terrible cliche. Everyone knows, and the NYT simply reports, that the sulliers are your coach and players. Our suspicion that we're in Calabria heightens now, as the writer attacks the local clan for breaking omerta.]

After reading through the article three or four times, it became apparent to me that the people quoted in the article, with the exception of most of the administration, were either disgruntled former faculty members, or former players who couldn’t hack it under Broadus’ tutelage.
[Pure example of ad hominem argument, in which, having no legitimate arguments, you hit out at people and call them names. Note that at this point the writer's entire defense of the school is based on visceral emotion...

But SOS! I hear you cry. How DO I defend the indefensible? ... Hold on. There IS a way. I'll tell you in a sec.]
The article also states that Broadus is known for “recruiting good players with questionable backgrounds.” This might be the case; I won’t disagree with that. [Good. You want to concede some stuff in this sort of piece. Good move.] Current stars D.J. Rivera, Malik Alvin and Emanuel Mayben have all had academic issues elsewhere. However, until it comes to light that they’re having the same troubles here at Binghamton, I don’t think there’s any reason to lose sleep over it. [Another cliche, and SOS is confident they're all already in trouble. Wake up.] And yes, players have also been in trouble with the law this season. Alvin was charged with assault, but the charges were later dropped. The way the article portrays the incident, it seems as if he maliciously attacked an elderly women. In reality, he knocked her over while running — albeit in the midst of an accused theft. [BINGO! What a beaut. See Rule Number One. SOS is still laughing over this line, and this is her third reading.] Still, this is a case where the casual reader will misinterpret the facts because of Thamel’s wording. [Yes. We want to be careful how we write.]
As with any negative article concerning the program, the piece brings up Miladin “Minja” Kovacevic. I don’t need to go into what he did; we all know. [What? You mean because he beat someone almost to death and then fled the country?] However, it is important to note that he is no longer a part of the program, and therefore Broadus isn’t responsible for his conduct. Kovacevic was at fault, and no one else involved with the program. [Except the people who recruited him, lad...]
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Okay. So you say: SOS! How can I defend my indefensible basketball, football, whatever program??

Listen up. There's only one way.

You have to be able to do a Gore Vidal / Christopher Hitchens / Evelyn Waugh / Oscar Wilde type defensive play here. If you're an undergraduate squirt, you're not going to be able to do it, so you have to hire a grown-up ghost writer. You can try reading those writers and learning their techniques, but it'll take you years to imitate their moves.

The only way to play this one is with haughty sophisticated hilarious cynical indifference. High-handed doesn't begin to get at it. You'll need to saunter onto the field and open with a sentence with such an irresistably rascally drawl to it that your reader laughs along with you at all those bad boys on the team.

Think Truman Capote, sucking on a long cigarette and batting tired ironic eyes at you... Think of what the Ridiculous Theater Company would do with this problem, and do that.

You don't know what the hell I'm talking about. You're not meant to. You're a sincere sports fan. But only camping it up and appealing to your reader's cynicism will win this one.