The Big Picture and the Closeup

Of course, it’s not the State of Michigan itself establishing the threat, but rather the National Collegiate Athletic Association. “The NCAA has strictly limited the role you, as a Michigan Fan, may take with regard to prospects and student-athletes.” So the chill on Mark’s free speech works a bit like the scene we’ve all seen in the movies: the bad guy holds a gun to some terrified child’s head and says to a parent: “Keep your mouth shut or the kid dies.” It makes the parent think twice about exercising free speech rights to call the cops. The only variation here is that here the state actor issuing the warning isn’t the one holding the kid: the (supposedly private) NCAA is holding the kid.

However, for sheer guillotine-like intensity and definitiveness of severance, nothing in our society, short of divorces and funerals, begins to compare to the moment when parents leave kids off at college for the first time.

That was kind of the impression I got of Dorothy Ashby’s harp – that she had some abnormal number of fingers and strings to syncopate with. It was a preternatural experience. Which, come to think of it, is exactly the kind of thing orchestrators rely on harps to convey anyhow. I wanted to locate things that no one else knew were there, not just my parents but my contemporaries. Developing a taste for something obviously objectively very good, not just an affectation, which no one else I knew even knew about, that was one way to do it.