Louisiana- Sportsman's Paradise

If you've ever driven around Louisiana, you'll notice that the nickname "Sportsman's Paradise" is imprinted on all of our license plates. The nickname has its roots in Louisiana's rich history in fishing, hiking, hunting and it's beautiful bayous where much of these sports take place. But in recent years, the saying has come to take on a whole separate meaning. Why? Well Louisiana, New Orleans, and Tulane, are all one heckuva sports paradise.

Hopefully you all were able to catch the New Orleans' Saints trouncing of the New York Giants on Monday Night football this week. I was able to head over to the Mercedes-Benz Superdome to check out the game, and it was a blast. The 'Dome is also where the Tulane Green Wave football team plays is games, (although rumor has it that this may not be the case for much longer...). And if the Saints and the Green Wave weren't enough to satisfy your football palate, I hear there is a team up there in Baton Rouge that is evidently having a pretty good season as well...

The Super Dome all lit up for last week's Tulane game

More than just the sports that  take place in our great state is what is to come for athletics and sports in the state of Louisiana. In fact, I would venture a guess and say that this is probably the most exiting time ever for sports in this city. Why? Over the next 18 months, New Orleans will be hosting the college football National Championship game (in January), the 2012 NCAA Final Four and SEC men's basketball tournament, the 2013 Women's Final Four, two Sugar Bowls, and of course, last but not least, the 2013 Super Bowl. I mean, this is unprecedented to have so much going on so soon in this town. See what I mean? Sportsman's paradise!

And the best part of all, Tulane students and the rest of the New Orleans' community get to take a large part in all this excitement. Tulane is the host institution for the 2012 NCAA Men's Final Four and for the 2013 Women's Final Four as well. Campus is already buzzing with excitement for these events. Along those lines, just last week, Tulane cut the ribbon on the brand new Hertz Practice Facility. It's a brand new basketball and volleyball facility right on our campus that is one of the most state-of-the-art in the country. I got to tour the 43,000 square foot facility during its grand opening last week. The film room rivals any luxury private movie theater!

Tulane students were also invited to help in various capacities for the upcoming Super Bowl. The Greater New Orleans sports foundation reached out to our students to help whit a variety of tasks from "welcoming visitors, teams and coaches as they arrive in the Big Easy [and] assisting with the complicated logistics of those major events."

Mardi Gras Indians welcomed the Super Bowl
Host Committee to the Super Dome!

Speaking of being invited to help... well let's just say that yours truly is pretty pumped about his opportunity to help in the planning of Super Bowl XLVII. I was asked to be a member of the 2013 Super Bowl Host Committee. I think the last time I was this excited to be asked to help with something like this was never.

Being a part of the Host Committee has been awesome. Two weeks ago, the NFL and the Super Bowl Host Committee held a three day FAM meeting for the NFL and all of their affiliates. FAM being familiarization, so nearly 100 people from various companies and NFL affiliates (think Under Armour, Play60, FedEx, DirecTV, Nike, etc.) all sent reps down to New Orleans to get familiar with the city as they plan their major events and parties that will take place over Super Bowl weekend. I got to spend three days with these awesome folks showing them all that NOLA has to offer. And the lunch on the field of the Superdome wasn't too shabby either! The whole event was hosted by Super Bowl Chairpeople James Carville (The Rajun Cajun! And Tulane professor!) and his wife Mary Matalin. It was the coolest experience. I am sure I will have more on this to come.

Mmmm. NFL Cookies! 

Lastly, speaking of coolest experiences. I suppose you are wondering about that photo at the top of this blog. I was able to meet my hero, Saints QB Drew Brees, while at a layover at the airport in Houston. He just so happened to be next to me in line as I ordered a quick BBQ sandwich before the second leg of my flight back to NOLA. For years, I had rehearsed in my head what I would ever say if I ever happened to meet the Modern American Hero. When I finally did, I was so awestruck, so baffled I barely could formulate sentences. Finally I got up the courage to chat with him about NOLA, etc and we ended up talking for a few minutes. I got to meet his wife Brittany as well, who is also a delight, and snapped that photo of Drew and me. Drew was a total class act and one of the genuine nicest guys I have ever met. So that picture there, next to the Saints Super Bowl win in 2009, is probably the single best moment of my life.

I mean, talk about PARADISE.

Mmmm NFL Watermelon!  

The brand new court at the Hertz Patrice Facility 

A serious Film Room!

Here's me at the Hertz Ribbon Cutting

Announcing that Tulane will host the Final Four!

The brand new Hertz Patrice Facility 

Me at MNF! 

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IN DEFENSE OF RHYME AND METER

Lovers of poetry may wonder what happened to meter and rhyme. If one looks at modern poetry, one finds little meter and even less rhyme. Which raises the troubling question “What is poetry?” to which centuries have not provided a compelling answer.

Most famous among English attempts is Coleridge’s “the best words in the best order.” But what are the best words, what is the best order? That could be debated till the cows come home. So let’s take T.S. Eliot’s almost equally famous, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from them.” This raises more questions than it answers. Can there be a human being devoid of personality? Devoid of emotions? And why would one want to escape from them? Are they bad things? And if escape is needed, are there no better ways than through poetry?

Let’s try another famous poet, Pablo Neruda. “Poetry is a deep inner calling in man; from it came liturgy, the psalms, and also the content of religions.” In other words, poetry is the need for religion in its basic, verbalized form. But what if you are an atheist and can still write poetry? And is a comic poet really a seeker of God?

Famous, too, is Wordsworth’s definition: “Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” This is patently self-contradictory: where powerful feelings are in overflow there is no tranquil recollection; where tranquil recollection prevails, feelings are no longer powerfully overflowing.

Then there is Poe: “I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.” Is there poetry other than in words, except as a metaphor? And is satirical verse, for example, a creation of Beauty—with a capital B yet?

Or consider that notorious mystifier Wallace Stevens: “Poetry is a search for the inexplicable,” he writes; and “Poetry is the supreme fiction.”  What makes a fiction supreme? Is, for instance, a congratulatory birthday poem a fiction, let alone a supreme one? “Search for the inexplicable” is not bad, but it describes the why of poetry, not the what.

There is also A. E. Housman’s famous warning that poetry is what makes the skin bristle and should not be thought of while shaving because that incapacitates the razor. Charming, but surely a very personal, hardly universal, reaction to poetry; besides, does a bristly skin, whatever that exactly is, present that much of an impediment to a razor? And if it did, would we, to test whether something is poetry, have to promptly start shaving?

Well, let us forget about what is poetry and return to rhyme and meter. These, I assert without being startlingly original, are very useful poetic tools. They serve to make poetry musical and memorable. The musical aspect makes it enjoyable as music does; the memorable aspect makes it portable. It also enables us to recite it more easily for the delectation of others and ourselves. And for all our modern hostility to didacticism, we do learn something from poetry that is useful: that others have felt like us and how they dealt with it.

In the days before portable radios, the Walkman, and the more recent inventions like the Blackberry and all those things with a prefix in “i,” remembered poetry was our most comforting companion, and profited from any mnemonic devices. Which, as noted, were pre-eminently meter and rhyme. Blank verse—iambic pentameter—was particularly ingrained in our minds thanks to Shakespeare and the verse drama and is thus more easily recalled. And if there are such things as i-pods and i-phones and the rest, does it mean that memorization is passé?

Does the motorcar eliminate the horse-drawn carriage? No; we still enjoy such things as a romantic carriage ride through Central Park. Does the electric shaver doom the unmotorized razor? The Sweeney Todd kind, perhaps. But not the good old Gillette, which costs much less and requires no elaborate upkeep. Not even the bow and arrow have fallen completely prey to the gun. We still have archery as a not unpopular sport.

We still like rhythm. And isn’t meter a well-defined rhythm? It needs a bit of  variation to avoid becoming doggerel, but it is one of the things that make verse easier to memorize than prose. Many people can recite speeches from Shakespeare from memory; but can anyone recite paragraphs of Faulkner or Fitzgerald? I don’t think most people remember the line “To be or not to be, that is the question” merely for what it says and not as much for how it rolls off the tongue. Those three lovely iambs in the first hemistich, then the neatly bisecting caesura, and then a switch to the two balancing trochees, plus that extra syllable of the so-called feminine ending.

Or take the almost as well-known “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast.” Again, iambic pentameter, with the popular variation in the first foot to a trochee, good in beginnings where we like an accented syllable to start us off with a bang. But then we have the docile progression of four iambs, with that repetition aurally replicating the soothing in question.

As for rhyme; it even helps the poet to create. Suppose he writes a line that ends in “night.” Now he looks for a rhyme that is not the obvious “might” or “right” or “white.” (Rhyming dictionaries exist to help in the search,) And he comes up with things like “dynamite,” “plebiscite” and “troglodyte.” Each one of these can propel him in an original, unusual direction.

Beyond that, rhyme means symmetry and closure, and aren’t those good, desirable things? Doesn’t the saying “makes no rhyme or reason” entwine rhyme with the great good of reason? “Cela ne rime a rien” say the French, equating rhyme in its absence with the lack of good sense. Rhyme betokens order, harmony, fulfillment of expectation—all good things. So, poets, how about a return to rhyme and meter?

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