* A Yale Legacy: Blue Legs

Blue Dramaramas

Yale's theatrically inclined graduates have managed to produce a kind of  extra-genetic lineage of their own: from the godfather of the American theatre Thornton Wilder ('20), to Henry Winkler (M.F.A. '70) and Meryl Streep (M.F.A. 75) , and now, in the Broadway production of The Great Gatsby ( word for word, in toto) by a theatre company created by a Yalie (below).


"Break a Leg!"

Rebecca Mead, Onward and Upward with the Arts, “Adaptation,” The New Yorker, September 27, 2010, p. 44

“Gatz”;Elevator Repair Service;“The Great Gatsby”;F. Scott Fitzgerald;Novels;Theatre;Scott ShepherdABSTRACT: ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about “Gatz,” Elevator Repair Service’s staging of “The Great Gatsby.” It would be misleading to call “Gatz,” which débuts at the Public Theatre later this month, an adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” since nothing in the novel has been altered to conform to theatrical constraints. Nor is it precisely a theatricalization of the novel: there are no bobbed hairdos, cigarette holders, or flapper gowns. Rather, in “Gatz”—which is the real surname of Jay Gatsby—the text of “The Great Gatsby” is spoken aloud, all forty-nine thousand words of it, and the action unfolds solely within a shabby office space. For the first half hour, the narrator (played by Scott Shepherd), reading aloud from a paperback copy of the novel, impersonates the other characters in the book. But eventually, the other workers in the office begin speaking the dialogue. The remaining text, including every “he said” and “she said,” is supplied by the narrator, who both is and isn’t Nick Carraway. The show lasts for a Wagnerian eight hours, including two short intermissions and a dinner break. Rather than dramatizing “The Great Gatsby,” “Gatz” dramatizes the experience of reading “The Great Gatsby” and in so doing it delivers the book back to its author. Tells about previous adaptations of “The Great Gatsby,” including a 1926 Broadway staging written by Owen Davis, film versions in 1949, 1974, and a televised adaptation in 2000. In 2006, a new attempt was made to bring “Gatsby” to Broadway. The show, written by Simon Levy, had an out-of-town tryout in Minneapolis. After Variety deemed the show “less than satisfying,” the Broadway plan was shelved. Members of Elevator Repair Service first came up with the notion of making a play out of the “The Great Gatsby” in 1999, when Steve Bodow, a founding member of the company, brought the book to rehearsal. (John Collins founded Elevator Repair Service in 1991, soon after he graduated from Yale. Bodow is now the head writer on “The Daily Show”; Collins remains as the company’s director.) Tells about previous production by E.R.S., including adaptations of “The Sound and the Fury” and “The Sun Also Rises,” and describes the process of creating “Gatz.”







Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/27/100927fa_fact_mead#ixzz116C3nkQy

*Poison Ivy Kings: Passing the Blue Blood

Prescott Bush ( Yale's Skull and Bones Secret Society)

George H.W. and George W. (two Blue Blood presidents-in-waiting)

The Divine Right of  Blue Blood?

Today's  NYT Op-ed Page takes on the Constitutionality of "legacy admissions" on the basis of blood (The Divine Right of Blues):


"Affirmative action policies are controversial because they pit two fundamental principles against each other — the anti-discrimination principle, which says we should not classify people by ancestry, and the anti-subordination principle, which says we must address a brutal history of discrimination. Legacy preferences, by contrast, advance neither principle — they simply classify individuals by bloodline."


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/opinion/30kahlenberg.html?th&emc=th

* Goring PK

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2010/mar/02/who-is-paul-keane-m-div-80/

  Here's One I Missed

"Who is Paul Keane, M. Div. '80?"  This article (link above) appeared in the Yale Daily News almost SEVEN MONTHS ago (March 2) and I never saw it until TWO DAYS AGO ! 


I would never have seen it at all (it's buried in YDN archives) except that I installed Google Analytics on this web site a month ago and it brought the link to this article to my attention as having been "hit" many times.


Google Analytics tells me that since August 29th The Anti-Yale has had 1116 visits from 981 viewers in 63 countries and territories.


I am amazed. And humbled.

*Posting Bond

Yale or jail; Park Avenue or park bench; my posting is dedicated to egalitarianism, not elitism.

Whatever bond I had with The Yale Daily News posting board after two full years and the beginning of this third academic year of posts, ended suddenly with the last word of my final post: EXORCISM (9/21/10).

It's as if writing the word itself put a final incantation on the spell and the Yale/New Haven demons were gone ---- at least from MY life.

My first year, I posted anonymously, contriving an insoucient name for each post.  I can't even recall what drew me to the YDN in the first place, or what names I used.

The second year--when news coverage seemed to have gravely serious and inflammatory topics (such as Yale Press's cowardly collapse under the pressures of terrorism by censoring all of the controversial Muhammed cartoons in a book it published on that very cartoon controversy over images of Islam's Prophet ), I decided it was cowardly to hide behind anonymous posts and started using my name and that of this, then newly founded, blog, The Anti-Yale.

With the murder of Ms. Le on campus during the fortieth anniversary (academic) year of my own witnessing of four murders on an Ohio campus, I felt eerily drawn to stay with the YDN, even though it brought up many PTSS memories.

So too with the subsequent drug-overdose death and then the suicide of promising Yale undergraduates.  At one or two points I even felt as if my comments might have been useful to the community. ("Tragedy" is too trite a word here for any or all these events.)

But the exorcism is over.

My abilities are better utilized elsewhere.

I may have stopped following  The Yale Daily News, but I wish Yale, Yale students, and New Haven well.

I  continue posting on this blog, The Anti-Yale, although, after more than 250 posts in sixteen months, one wonders how much longer the Muse will choose to extend her (could be "his") visit.

Paul. D. Keane (M. Div. '80)
The Anti-Yale

* George's Tongue and His Cheek

Jill Lepore's brilliant article on the biographies of Washington ("His Highness", The New Yorker, 9/27/10), and, in the process, the vanity  and scholarly recklessness of a Harvard president; and finally (and poetically), about the futility of fame itself:  has a facinating bit of trivia in it - - - the kind of image which makes history come alive for me:


"The mar to his [Washington's] beauty was his terrible teeth, which were replaced by unsuccessful transplant surgery and by dentures made from ivory and from teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves." (Lepore, p. 27)


So, not only is the cherry tree a lie, so too are the wooden teeth.


And WHAT A LIE!


It turns out (also from Lepore's article) that Washington couldn't put two words together on paper with any beauty, and his Inaugural Address and his Farewell Address were written by others  (Madison, Hamilton) but spoken  (which apparently he executed with great effect on all occasions) through the teeth of slaves.


Our original orator, our prime president, our foundingest of fathers, spoke through  ivory imposters imprisoned TWICE: once on George's plantation, Mt. Vernon, and a SECOND time in George's mouth.


Yes, upon his death Washington did free his slaves in a directive in his will, perhaps (Lepore suggests), hoping to set a precedent.


"It didn't."

(she says in a colossal understatement, including six decades, four MILLION human souls, and the Civil War)


One only hopes that when he "freed" their teeth, Washington waited until they NEEDED to be extracted, before appropriating their use to his presidential purposes.


Lincoln said,"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master."

Washington manged to be both.

And one wonders what it does to American history to know that its most famous founding orations were  delivered with the tongue of a master and the teeth of a slave?


1 Corinthians 13:1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of ...

* THE TIDBIT GENERATION: Thinking in Tidbits from Oprah's Digital Throne Room

A Hundred Million BUCKS!

The Smaller Picture (and Shorter Sound)

No one can criticize Oprah for not trying.  She has done more for reading than any person in the last century in America, perhaps exepting the married couple who owned Reader's Digest for most of the 1900's.  Her book club and her championing of kindle are notable, formidable contributions to literacy. (Even I bought a vintage Oprah-discount-special-kindle circa November, 2008 when she offered a 24 hour-only discount of $50.)

And now comes the founder of facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, (the very week an unflattering movie about his  golden-goose-invention, and his personal character, is to be  released) onto the Oprah show with a $100,000,000 check-in hand, offered to the Democractic Mayor of Newark, New Jersey and the Republican Governor of New Jersey, who, miracle of miracle, have agreed to COOPERATE in using Mr. Zuckerberg's hundred million dollar matching grant to "FIX"  Newark's "broken" education system, and make a model of that "FIX" for the rest of the country to emulate.

Both politicians agreed on Oprah's telecast today not to point fingers at parents, teachers, unions, or kids in blame for the "broken"  system, but instead to inspire cooperation from all those parties to rise to the challenge and throw off the bondage of failure.

Nice goal.

The problem is that the failure is a CULTURAL failure as much as it is an institutional one.  And you can't "FIX" a broken culture with matching grants.

I took a "Bibliography" course in graduate school and one of my assignments was to compare an 1869 Harper's Magazine with a 1969 Harper's Magazine and draw conclusions based solely on INTERNAL evidence from the texts of what had gone on in the 100 year interval between their publications.

One of the revealing conclusions was that the juxtapostion  of the two issues documented the increasing laziness and distraction of the human eye.

The 1869 version had narrow, uniform columns, with tiny black and white print and tiny 'headlines' spanning only one column at a time. The 1969 version had flashy headlines splashed across pages with colored ink and photographs, different sized print and text styles, and headings with catch-phrases to draw the reader into the article (as, admittedly, do I, here.)

The 1869 version (due to the primitive state of the printing press) ASSUMED that readers would read it from top to bottom, left to right, regardless of how many times the reader had to return to the issue, and that the reader  would put up with--indeed UNDERSTAND! -- complex sentences with subordinate clauses.

The 1969 version ASSUMED that the reader was BUSY, that his/her eye needed to be lured into and seduced to read the article and that the reader would not be so seduced by complex, subordinate clauses.  If anything, the sub-headline "blurbs' dis-assembled the subordinate clauses and used half of them to hook the reader's interest.)  

Tidbits for the Toothless Brain

Thus, the 1869 eye was required to perform DIFFERENT functions in reading the  text than was the 1969 eye. 

And the major differences were  expenditure of "time" and "concentration": DURATION OF ATTENTION.

Expected expenditures of both qualities had diminished in the readers over that 100 year period.

Now add to this observation new advances in BRAIN science and we can infer that the 1869 brain was exercising different regions of the cerebrum than the 1969 brain.

As with the eye, so too the ear.

Radio, television, the computer, and facebook with You-tube and other video clips, the ubiquitous cell phone,  have redirected the auditory circuitry of the brain, just as the evolution of print-journalism, inferred from Harper's magazines of 1869 and 1969, has redirected the ocular circuitry of the brain.

So inject all the MONEY you want into Newark schools: it will not address the fact that our brains  no longer exercise in lenthy processing of sound and sight inputs, but in a constant barrage of sound and eye-tidbits instead.

It is a telling indeed, that all guests on Oprah's show today announcing the hundred million dollar gift to Newark schools, spoke in short choppy, catch-phrase kind of sentences. That includes Arne Duncan, the pontificating U.S. Secretary of Education , who has given speechs which I have heard with MY OWN EARS in which he uses "infer" and "imply" incorrectly.  (Good goin' Arne! But boy, can he shoot hoops with the Bama!)

The poisonously empty prose documented in George Orwell's " Politics and the English Language" oozes into our brains constantly in ever shortened sound bytes and news headlines, even from the Self-Coronotaed Queen of American Reading's Digital Throne Room: Harpo Studios.

BRAINS simply aren't exercising with the same attention spans with which they used to be required to exercise.  Even Father Mapple's sermon in Moby Dick delivered to an 1841 congregation of rough and ready sailors and their wives and families, requires a level of concentration absent from any media presentations on commercial broadcasting today.

Our modern ears are being trained to stop listening to long sentences.

Brains today are slurping and spasming sounds and sights----not ingesting and aggregating them slowly, calmly and thoughtfully.

This change in brain use, and not  poor parenting or poor teaching or poor study habits or poverty itself, is what needs to be addressed in reversing the so-called education "crisis", not simply in Newark, New Jersey, but in living-rooms across America generally.

We need to unenculurate the unrelenting speed of sensory-inputs children are exposed to in our digitized world if we are to "FIX" the "broken" education system.

I'd say "Slow down and chew before you swallow" except the problem is that there's nothing to chew:

Just tidbits, uendingly competing for our appetites.

* I DARE Yale to Censor Me: AN EXORCISM

(From the YDN posting Board, below.)

"Blah" calls me a two-year transient on Holy Hill:


I was born in Yale-New Haven Hospital ( Grace-New Haven). My grandmother lived two blocks from Yale the first 16 years of my life in a a third-floor ghetto walk-up with no hot water. After ten years in Ithaca and Kent for undergraduate (Ithaca College) and graduate degrees (Kent State) I returned to New Haven for 12 years from 1973-85.
Yes: I took my degree on Holy Hill, but I LIVED one block from Broadway and ate in Silliman. My courses extended from 1976-80. I created Sterling Library's Kent State Collection with the author Peter Davies in its Manuscripts and Archives Division and the Yale Political Union's five-day Colloquium on Kent State to commemorate the opening of that Collection.


I remained at Yale for four years thereafter, dragging Yale onto 60 Minutes (Feb. 84) kicking and screaming over the Yale President's refusal to expose the FIRST DOCUMENTED AMERICAN heterosexual connection to AIDS in the form of a Howe St. prostitute who had passed AIDS on to her infant in the womb and whose baby never left Yale -New Haven Hospital.


I spent four months researching the disappearance of Yale Divinity student Sam Todd, who has never been found. My report to the President's office was published in Connecticut Magazine, Spring '85 under the title "Fugitive from God, Country and Yale: The Disappearance of Sam Todd." You can read it (if you care to bore yourself any further with my FOX/MSNBC banalities) at http://yaledisappearance.blogspot.com/ link text


I was not paid for either of these projects which Yale considered both an annoyance and an embarrassment, and which cost me two years of my life and hundreds if not thousands of dollars.




My pamphlet A.I.D.S. (AIDS Information Dissemination Service) was pusblished at my own expense and distributed to 5000 Yale students over the OBJECTION of the then prissily Puritanical Yale Health Service (because it DARED to describe the sexual practices related to transmission of AIDS in detail and DARED TO POSIT HETEROSEXUAL TRANSMISSION of AIDS, then denied by most Americans).




That distribution to Yale students occurred through the President's Office's intercession which over-ruled the Health Service when I threatened to reveal to the press Yale's obstruction of timely health information to its own in loco parentis students in the face of the possible threat of heterosexual transmission two blocks from Yale.




I grew up in the shadow of Yale. Yale blocked a lot of light and much truth from my childhood and later from my young adulthood at the Divinity School.




I consider these posts an EXORCISM.




Paul D. Keane


M.Div. '80
M.A. (Middelbury '97)
M.Ed. (Kent State '72)


Posted by theantiyale on September 21, 2010 at 12:56 a.m.


PS If you don't like my posting , skip it. No one forces your eyes past the first word except yourself and your own control-freak desire to be Super-monitor. Until your Yale/New Haven resume exceeds mine, kindly refrain from suggesting I am a New Haven transient who brings nothing to the table of free speech.
____________________________________________________________

One of three College Street gunmen still at large


Two others hospitalized; NHPD chief calls police involvement justified
Bullets litter the street in the wake of Sunday morning's shooting.
 Photo by Victor Kang.
The Yale Daily News
By Egidio DiBenedetto, Colin Ross



Sunday, September 19, 2010

Police are still searching for a gunman they say fired at police officers on College Street early Sunday morning.

As clubs on Crown Street were closing at about 2 a.m., three men got into a shootout near the intersection of Crown and College streets, one block from Old Campus, New Haven Police Chief Frank Limon said in an interview. When nearby police officers responded, one of the gunmen shot at the them; police returned fire, but the shooter fled and has not been caught, Limon said.

He added that the other two gunmen were hit by gunfire, though police have yet to determine whether they were shot in the original gun battle or by police as they returned fire. Police are interviewing the two wounded gunmen and other witnesses to gather an accurate description of the wanted man, Limon said.

Both wounded men were transported to Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven Police Lieutenant Joe Witkowski said early Sunday morning. City Hall Spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga said they sustained non-life-threatening injuries.

Mayorga said three police officers fired during the shootout. Though Limon said the investigation is ongoing, from the account he has received, he said he thinks the officers' shooting was justified.

"In my experience, when you have officers in uniform and shots are fired, they are trying to protect themselves and protect others in the area," he said.

Limon said the downtown entertainment district was fully staffed when the incident occurred Sunday, with 12 officers and one supervisor on duty.

"You can only do so much," Limon added.

Ward 7 Alderwoman Frances “Bitsie” Clark, in whose ward the shootout occurred, said she is “horrified” by the incident and that it is a “call to assembly.”

Clark said she has been working with local bar and club owners to redress the amount of violence in the city’s downtown nightlife district. She said Mayor John DeStefano Jr.'s current proposal to add a specially trained police detail to district is a good one, and that Sunday’s shootout is an impetus to find a solution.

“I don’t believe that you stop having an entertainment district — it’s very good for our economic development — but we certainly have to do something to prevent this from happening again,” Clark said.

Esther Zuckerman contributed reporting.



.More like this story



Comments

Do other Ivy-League campuses have a drug and prostitute section as close to campus as Yale? I know Cornell and Dartmouth first-hand and the answer is No. Harvard:Maybe. Princeton: No. Columbia: Surely. Stanford: No knowledge.

Thirty-four years ago when I went to YDS and lived near Patricia's Restaurant (across from Payne Whitney Gym), people would try to sell me cocaine in broad daylight on a Sunday morning on the sidewalk.

Gunfights? Not that I recall. But a Yale student was knifed and left to die on the front steps of the RCC Church (St. Mary's) three doors away from the Yale president's house on Hillhouse Avenue.

New Haven is crime ridden. Yale is a lure.

Posted by theantiyale on September 19, 2010 at 9:11 p.m.


Posted by Mikelawyr2 on September 20, 2010 at 7:35 a.m,.

 While this is not good for the city or for Yale, people make it seem that this - as with other incidence - are random acts of violence. Often drug dealers are shooting drug dealers, at Gotham two people with guns got into a fight with each other, and here police disrupted a gun fight in progress between two groups of thugs. While people could get caught in the crossfire, they very rarely due. You are generally save downtown all hours of the day and night if you yourself are not a thug or hang out with thugs.

I have lived downtown for many years and have NEVER seen drug deals or prostitutes. What happened 30-years ago, though relevant, was a long time ago.

theantivy: Harvard: no, Brown: yes, Columbia: yes - Stanford is NOT an Ivy!

Posted by grl8r on September 20, 2010 at 8:47 a.m.

 theantiyale, Harvard is statistically far more dangerous. It is in a much bigger, anonymous city with more random crime.

A shootout in a massive, bustling entertainment district with tens of thousands of visitors every day and 10,000 restaurant seats, like Crown Street, shouldn't be a surprise - similar events happen in all big cities with that number of people crowding into them.

Do the math per capita and, unless you are one of the dealers or prostitutes, you're far more likely to get struck by lightning than to get injured in a busy downtown district.

Posted by Sara on September 20, 2010 at 8:47 a.m.permalinksuggest removal.. Some strange justifications here: "...unless you are one of the dealers or prostitutes, you're far more likely to get struck by lightning..." and "You are generally safe downtown all hours of the day and night if you yourself are not a thug or hang out with thugs..."

Isn't the problem grounded in the fact that we have dealers, prostitutes and thugs in the first place? And that we can't seem to address the issues that give rise to them - a problem of strategy - or police them effectively - a problem of tactics?

Posted by Yalie on September 20, 2010 at 9:55 a.m. @grl8r:

My point was not statistical analysis: It was contiguity (contiguousness?) with campus. The drug and prostitute sections of town practically TOUCH campus at several points.
OOPS! Forgot Brown and promoted Stanford!

What part of downtown do you live in? Let me take you to upper Elm Street or Howe. So forget 30 years ago: You had THIRTEEN murders in New Haven durting the school year LAST YEAR.

Rose colored glasses?

PK

link text
Posted by theantiyale on September 20, 2010 at 11:40 a.m.

Posted by pablum on September 20, 2010 at 11:57 a.m.

theantiyale,

What does "Ivy League" have to do with your point?

Ivy League towns shouldn't have crime? Yale should have evacuated/fixed/cordoned-off from New Haven long ago? Yale's part of a larger post-industrial, poverty- crime- and drug-ridden problem? Swell, keep us guessing; but as a Dartmouth grad and Yale long-timer, I'm embarrassed that it was only Ivy League tit-for-tat that seemed to drive your post, and that moved me to reply.


Posted by amandab847 on September 20, 2010 at 2:08 p.m.

Antiyale,

San Francisco had 100 murders, and that's not including hundreds more right across the bay in Oakland, etc. The Boston area has had hundreds too. What's your point? As a standard-defined metro area, New Haven is one of the safest cities in the country. Every city has a few pockets of social pathology; New Haven's happen to be very small in relation to the city's size overall.

Go to Dartmouth or Cornell if you want to get away from the feeling of an urban area (even Dartmouth and Cornell have had their share of violent murders and robberies, but they may "feel" safer because the density is so much lower).

Posted by Sara on September 20, 2010 at 2:17 pm

@sara

The per capita murder rate in New Haven is much higher than New York or Boston. New Haven has a tiny metro area when compared to New York or Boston.

Posted by pablum on September 20, 2010 at 2:52 p.m.


Sara wrote: "Harvard is statistically far more dangerous. It is in a much bigger, anonymous city with more random crime .1"

What?! Surely you jest... Have you BEEN to Cambridge? It is the super-touchy-feely lib oasis (recently implementing "soft boots" for parking violators, because those nasty hard boots made cars feel bad--and, no, I am not making this up).

The comparative stats are in the other thread on this topic, indicating that Cambridge (AND Boston) are much safer than New Haven.

And for a REAL eye-opener, check out the crime scene at Boston College!

Even inner-city Boston's most notorious neighborhood appears to have a lower crime density than does 2010 New Haven.

1.I will grant you this: Crime in Cambridge may indeed be "more random": why? Because there are targets, at least for, say, robbery, other than relatively affluent, liberally dotty kollidge kidz upon which to prey. Under those circumstances, robbery may indeed happen to someone other than a Cantab, whereas Yalensians might as well be sporting neon "kick me" sweatpants.

Posted by Anonymous Bosh on September 20, 2010 at 4:26 p.m.

 @ amadab847,

I grew up 10 miles from Yale. My grandmother lived two blocks from Yale in a third-floor walk-up ghetto apartment with no hot water at State and Elm streets. I have lived in Ithaca for five years and now live five minutes from Hanover as I have for the last 20 years. I am interested (in a VERY PERSONAL WAY) in how Yale's affluence irritates the poor of New Haven.

@ sara,

My point has nothing to do with statistics. It is anecdotal. I was mugged twice as a Yale student, once at gunpoint. I was an apartment superintendent for an 88-unit low income housing project one block from Yale's Payne Whitney Gym during my four years at the Divinity School. A 90-year old woman tenant of mine was mugged in broad daylight. Another tenant was stabbed by his wife and left blood all over my lobby walls. (He survived.)

I was exposed to muggings, drug deals, a prostitute with AIDS plying her wares one block from my apartment and homeless people, including a 60-year-old woman who defecated in my courtyard in front of 40 tenants' windows on a freezing winter day leaning on a park-bench in the snow because she had no-where else to perform that act. She was pushing her belongings in a grocery cart. This was within spitting distance of the Yale Co-op (now Borders or some such) on Broadway while preppies drove by in their BMW's.

Kindly don't "what's your point" me with your bloodless statistics until you have walked in my (and my dead grandmother's) shoes.

Paul Keane M.Div.'80

link text



Posted by theantiyale on September 20, 2010 at 5:38 p.m.


 i used to enjoy the dialogue between yale students, alums, and the new haven community on the YDN comment boards. however, it seems that perhaps 80% of the comment boards are dominated by Paul Keane, who certainly has interesting things to say about some things, but has essentially become a troll who weighs in about EVERYTHING.

he should realize that as someone who earned a 1- or 2-year degree about 2 miles from the main campus, he will inevitably be a bit out of touch with many current issues on campus that would be better left to people with more recent and direct experience, and more knowledge of the facts. otherwise his opinions basically amount to the kind of ideological generalities that we see enough of on FOX and MSNBC. PK--use your head and use some restraint. Give others a chance to influence the discussions. unfortunately i imagine this plea will fall on deaf ears.

Posted by blah on September 20, 2010 at 9:55 p.m.



I DARE YALE TO CENSOR ME.

Blah calls me a two-year transient on Holy Hill:

I was born in Yale-New Haven Hospital ( Grace-New Haven). My grandmother lived two blocks from Yale the first 16 years of my life in a a third-floor ghetto walk-up with no hot water. After ten years in Ithaca and Kent for undergraduate (Ithaca College) and graduate degrees (Kent State) I returned to New Haven for 12 years from 1973-85.

Yes: I took my degree on Holy Hill, but I LIVED one block from Broadway and ate in Sillliman. My courses extended from 1976-80. I created Sterling Library's Kent State Collection with the author Peter Davies in its Manuscripts and Archives Division and the Yale Political Union's five-day Colloquium on Kent State to commemorate the opening of that Collection.

I remained at Yale for four years thereafter, dragging Yale onto 60 Minutes (Feb. 84) kicking and screaming over the Yale President's refusal to expose the FIRST DOCUMENTED AMERICAN heterosexual connection to AIDS in the form of a Howe St. prostitute who had passed AIDS on to her infant in the womb and whose baby never left Yale -New Haven Hospital.

I spent four months researching the disappearance of Yale Divinity student Sam Todd, who has never been found. My report to the President's office was published in Connecticut Magazine, Spring '85 under the title "Fugitive from God, Country and Yale: The Disappearance of Sam Todd." You can read it (if you care to bore yourself any further with my FOX/MSNBC banalities) at http://yaledisappearance.blogspot.com link text

I was not paid for either of these projects which Yale considered both an annoyance and an embarrassment, and which cost me two years of my life and hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

My pamphlet A.I.D.S. (AIDS Information Dissemination Service) was pusblished at my own expense and distributed to 5000 Yale students over the OBJECTION of the then prissily Puritanical Yale Health Service (because it DARED to describe the sexual practices related to transmission of AIDS in detail and DARED TO POSIT HETEROSEXUAL TRANSMISSION of AIDS, then denied by most Americans).

That distribution to Yale students occurred through the President's Office's intercession which over-ruled the Health Service when I threatened to reveal to the press Yale's obstruction of timely health information to its own in loco parentis students in the face of the possible threat of heterosexual transmission two blocks from Yale.

I grew up in the shadow of Yale. Yale blocked a lot of light and much truth from my childhood and later from my young adulthood at the Divinity School.

I consider these posts an EXORCISM.

Paul D, Keane

M.Div. '80

M.A. (Middelbury '97)

M.Ed. (Kent State '72)



Posted by theantiyale on September 21, 2010 at 12:56 a.m.

PS If you don't like my posting , skip it. No one forces your eyes past the first word except yourself and your own control-freak desire to be Super-monitor. Until your Yale/New Haven resume exceeds mine, kindly refrain from suggesting I am a New Haven transient who brings nothing to the table of free speech.