Happy 10th anniversary of this blog

Just realized that today marks the 10th anniversary of this blog. Not that many people who started blogging in late 2001 are still doing it. I don't know what that makes me. But, well, huzzah.

Summer of Infinite Jest 15 -- the last 50 pages or so

I went today to the rooftop garden of the S.F. Museum of Modern Art, to which I am admitted free because we have a yearly membership, and sat with some coffee (which they sell there) and finished reading "Infinite Jest." 

The last 50 pages feature the last part of Hal's apparent breakdown in the video viewing room, a surreal scene showing what becomes of Orin, and finally an even more surreal scene, drawn out in pornographic detail, showing what becomes of Gately -- one of those endings which, because it is surreal (cf. Morrison's "Song of Solomon"), is annoying. Because it's surreal, and because it resembles the dreams Gately has been having for the last hundred and fifty pages, you don't know if it's another dream or not. I still don't know.

We never find out whether the competing spy agencies find the magically compelling videotape (or "cartridge"), and unless I missed something, we never find out exactly how Hal's tennis career ends, though what I gathered is that he manages to injure himself accidentally-on-purpose. So it seemed to me that the author ended by being more interested in the characters than the themes or the plot. Which is fine, but is inconsistent with the book as a whole.

As soon as I was done with the book, I found myself contrasting the way I felt with with the way I felt on finishing "2666," which is also a monumental novel that ends without the "story" being quite tied up. On finishing "2666" I wanted to go back to the beginning immediately and read it again now that I really knew who all the characters were and why various long episodes were even in the book. On finishing "Infinite Jest" I only had that annoyed feeling of "Did I miss something here?" and paged back through the last 50 pages a little -- but only for a minute. I didn't really care that much whether I had missed something. More than anything else I felt tired. Not even exhausted, just ready to be done with it.

My final conclusion is that it's a promisingly brilliant work by someone whose mental illness accounts for a certain amount -- perhaps most -- of the work's envelope-pushing. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the same mental illness (and I wrote before about not being able to read without thinking about it) doomed the author, who never finished another novel. ("The Pale King" is notably unfinished, and not like "2666" is unfinished, but really only speculatively pulled together by an editor, according to reviews I've read.) By its length and complexity, it begs comparison with "2666," but it's unfair to put "I.J.," a second novel by a 30-year-old, up against the crowning achievement by a 53-year-old who had already written ten other novels and then "The Savage Detectives." Because if it begs comparison, it also pales in it.

I think "Infinite Jest" gained the aura of masterpiece because readers loved the way it captured, and thus validated, the voice of generation whatever-DFW-was-part-of ... X or Y, whatever. The slangy way of talking that accounts for most of the novel's length is the way that whole generation talks, and this novel perfectly captures it. Plus DFW's death has given rise to a kind of hagiography about him, similar to the aura around Kurt Cobain. One of the reasons I wanted to read "I.J." is to find out whether this attitude is justified. In my opinion, it isn't. There are probably fifty or a hundred novels from the last third of the 20th century that will endure longer.

Eugenides not pushing the envelope this time, maybe feels okay about it

Q: People are starting to notice that a generation of writers, which includes you and Jonathan Franzen, are wrestling with the question of how you create a novel after postmodernism.

Jeffrey Eugenides: Schoenberg said it's still possible to write music in C major, and that’s coming from Mister Experimental himself. That strikes a chord in me; I think with the novel, at a certain point you realize it's still possible to write in C major and have some kind of narrative content. And meaningful characters that readers can, you know it's an old-fashioned term, but people can fall in love with the characters and become caught up in their lives. If you don't have that, you cease to have the kind of novel that can be compelling.

--Interview with novelist Jeffrey Eugenides
in the L.A. Times

This is a real issue. I constantly struggle with the imperative to create new ways of seeing and story-telling, which is what the word "novel" implies, and this traditional approach. I've written before about how I love mid-century writers, and how Larry McMurtry's now obscure early novel "Moving On" was a model for me for many years. The roomy character-driven traditional narrative informed the writing of my first novel, "Make Nice." But in my current project I'm trying to get away from it.

It's a struggle, and not only because I love the mid-century novel (by which I mean the thoughtful character-driven novels of McMurtry, Heller, Highsmith, Roth, Mailer, Salter and others) but because this approach seems so natural to me. But I also love the mid-century departures from this model (Kerouac, Henry Miller) and post-modernists from DeLillo to Acker. (And DeLillo's accomplishment in the 1970s and 1980s is now awe-inspiring to me. He didn't have a model for what he was doing, he really was making up a new way of story-telling.) Not to mention the Latin Americans, including You Know Who.

Having never read a Jeffrey Eugenides novel, I can't say whether it's working for him. Maybe Eugenides is trying to fend off criticism in advance here. Maybe he feels a little bad for not pushing the envelope in his latest work. Without reading it and knowing his work, I can't say.

In which I ask myself the same questions they asked Joan Didion

Questions from L.A. Times interview by David Ulin.

Jacket Copy: Throughout [book title] you speak (or write) directly to your readers. How did you develop that device?

Me: Oh, I don't know. Our Town?

JC: Your language is very stripped down in the book: spare, declarative. That makes for a certain tension, given the emotional murkiness of the narrative.

Me: It's because I was in a big hurry. Can't bother with a lot of romantic foofaw.

JC: How much does that have to do with the difficulty of writing about a child? It's harder than writing about a spouse.

Me: You can say that again. Children can't get back at you, at least until they grow up and write novels in which you're the bad guy, but I'll be long gone by then.

JC: What was her reaction to being written about?

Me: Well, she thinks everything's about her anyway, so it was very natural to her.

JC: You write about her presence in your working life -- on assignment, in hotel rooms -- and the effect this may have had on her childhood.

Me: It's true, she had to watch a ton of TV. It's a good thing everything on TV is suitable for children. (Laughs.)

JC: Do you regret it?

Me: Well, there was a period in which she insisted I was Yogi Bear and she was Boo Boo. I had to call her Boo Boo for weeks.

JC: Part of the book deals with parental guilt, or parental failure. You write: "I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents."

Me: Yeah, I hate contractions. I had an editor at the student paper who was just nuts about contractions, would not allow a single one. Now when I use them, I feel dirty, but it's a good dirty. As for my failure as a parent, that's well known. I've pretty much failed at every human relationship. But we never expected to be successful as parents.

JC: When you say "successful as parents," what do you mean?

Me: The child goes on to be a very high-earning child star. I know how few of them there are; you have to have the right agent. But we acted as her agent, so we failed at that too.

JC: That's a tendency with all parents, I think. Not quite to see your children, to minimize their concerns ...

Me: Well, they're children, I mean really.

JC: In [book title] you say that writing no longer comes easily to you. But you've never given the impression that writing was the easiest act.

Me: Yes, it is hard to write using no adjectives and contractions. Harder still to talk that way.

JC: What about your novels? Do you find them easier or more difficult to write?

Me: The main problem is maintaining momentum. I go on a tear for a few months, but it takes longer than that to write a novel, for most people. I really admire Georges Simenon, who would write a whole novel in two weeks, though it exhausted him and made him a sex maniac.

JC: With a book like [other book title] it's as if you were building a structure, literally using narrative to stave off chaos and loss.

Me: That's the beauty -- I mean, that is the beauty of being able to talk anyone into anything.

JC: This book, too, attempts to use literature to work through something. You call it "maintaining momentum." But you also note that maintaining momentum ...

Me: Is so difficult when things are happening all around you. You know what Woody Allen said about how a relationship is like a shark: Unless it keeps moving, it dies. But so many things get in the way.

JC: Still, there's a cost, too, when we don't maintain momentum.

Me: It's really true of most things -- damned if you do and damned if you do not.

JC: So for you it's a matter of failing yourself, not other people?

Me: Like I say, what choice do I have?

JC: As if you haven't completed the task?

Me: One is never finished. Why should I finish?

The mob capturing Gaddafi

This video showing a mob of militiamen abusing and dragging around a bloodied, confused and terrified Gaddafi is awful to see -- though it's probably the way we'd like every evil dictator to wind up. Contrast it to the image of Slobodan Milosevic dying quietly in his cell at the Hague, or even worse, Francisco Franco dying an old and free man.

As a document, it's not very useful. It has edits, for one thing. And the camera is constantly jostled, spun around, and shoved into people's faces. Also, I didn't see anyone in a Yankees cap.

Summer of Infinite Jest 14 -- Things come to a head

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

-- Hal's internal monologue in Infinite Jest, page 900

I reached the long stretch recounting Gately's sojourn in the hospital, where he suffers a dark night of the soul as he bravely/stupidly refuses all narcotic painkillers for fear they will get in the way of his recovery. (I almost capitalized recovery. Must be careful not to let DFW's tics infect my own writing, which is something I'm sure all writers experience.) These scenes, at once comic and heroic, alternate with incidents back at the tennis academy where one of the secondary characters gets his face stuck on a cold window, and then protagonist Hal has a nervous breakdown. I'll let the English majors determine how the character Stice more or less literally losing face contributes to the breakdown, and how this is thematically beautiful; no connection occurs to me right away, but I'm probably not reading carefully enough.

Hal's nervous breakdown is accompanied by enhanced perceptions and a rush of thoughts, as if he were high on something, though he isn't -- unless I missed something. And the quotation above, which more than any single sentence in the book could serve as its epigram, comes amidst a slew of disconnected thoughts:

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me* that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately -- the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into.

* None of the sections about Hal were in the first person until a few dozen pages ago, when suddenly first-person sections started to appear. So "I" is Hal himself.

Here's the author, using the first-person perspective to bring more immediacy to the words, stating the book's theme as clearly as it's ever stated. The book is all about this quest to care deeply, to commit oneself totally. The tennis players commit their young lives to the sport ("games"); the addicts commit their lives to addiction ("needles"), then to recovery; the terrorists commit their lives to their cause.

Simple, and very clear once you're this far into the book. It takes your own commitment, as a reader, to get this far, though. Again, that's payoff enough for me. I don't need the plot to all wrap up nicely which (I've heard) it won't.

It also occurred to me today: the tennis academy sections of Infinite Jest are a Y.A. novel. Maybe the publisher should extract them -- the way Don DeLillo's publisher extracted the first, unbelievably brilliant baseball section of Underworld -- and publish it separately. Titled, maybe, "Dawn Drills."

Today in Collapse-obsessed foamer blogs

Everyone has heard the dictum "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged." It means that when crime strikes you personally, you supposedly forget all your liberal pieties about race, gun ownership, non-violence and so on, and instead go out and buy a gun and start voting for Nixon.

How about this one: a real conservative is someone who goes through a natural disaster and, instead of forming compassion for others and realizing we all have to depend on each other in an emergency, comes away with a resolution to hoard, arm himself, and fortify his compound.

During a major disaster, food will quickly disappear. Living for over 3 decades on the Gulf Coast, I can tell you with absolute certainty that whenever disaster strikes (usually an approaching hurricane, for those folks), food and provisions at the store sell completely out in a matter of a few hours. People panic, and within hours, you cannot find food, bottled water, ice, generators, batteries, candles, etc. ... Furthermore, almost all disasters include a complete loss of electricity. The water supply is compromised. Bottled water becomes more valuable than bank accounts. Dehydration becomes a very real and present danger. I remember witnessing a man offer an ice vendor $100 for an extra bag of ice during Hurricane Ivan. My wife and I went 2 weeks (14 days) without electricity in the aftermath of that hurricane. Believe me, I got a taste of just how precious bottled water, ice, batteries, generators, fuel, etc., can become.

-- Far-right preacher-politician Chuck Baldwin

Okay, sure, preparedness. Good idea for everyone. But it's telling that the writer doesn't mention how he helped that man who wanted ice so badly, or his neighbors who were also suffering without electricity or water.

It's also telling that he doesn't mention how the National Guard was there within 48 hours to secure the area and then coordinate either evacuation or helping the survivors, including with water. Because for far-right conservatives, the government can never be seen in a positive role, it can only stand in your way (at least) or oppress and imprison you (more likely according to this worldview).

No, in Baldwin's world, there's only you and the free market against the elements and the devil. He probably wishes he was the ice vendor who anticipated there would be desperate people waving Franklins after a hurricane. (As for the man who offered $100 for ice, I have the feeling he needed it to keep his insulin cool, not his gin and tonic.)

Then in my favorite collapsitarian blog, the always-excitable Mac Slavo quotes someone predicting violence, death, dead cops, disaster in NYC.

According to the insider, the Obama White House and partisan organizations that support the President are now actively promoting chaos in New York and other cities as a form of punishment and intimidation against those on Wall Street (and elsewhere) who have spoken out against the administration. The chaos, he says, will lead to elevated levels of anger and the real possibility of nationwide violence and riots...

ZuccottiPark should have been cleared last week. ... Now if there is a move by law enforcement against the protesters, the dangers will be greatly increased than just a week ago. The violence will be much-much worse. Police will be harmed. Citizens will be harmed. Businesses harmed. ... I don't wish to be overly dramatic here -- but violence. Injury. Perhaps death. Most certainly destruction of property. It's getting dangerous. I can sense it. It's palpable. And you feel it too, don’t you? Something terrible is coming just around the turn. So for now, I'm getting out.

Oh well, it's a good thing he doesn't want to be overly dramatic. I guess if he were overly dramatic he would break out the exclamation marks. Then I'd really be terrified.

All supposedly because Obama somehow "promoted" this by not breaking the heads of protesters. I don't know if Occupy Wall Street is making the 1% afraid, but it's certainly successful in exciting the foamers.

Dear Matt Taibbi, don't be such a one-noter

The reality, of course, is that people like Rush, Romney and Obama are all becoming cognizant of the deep frustrations that exist across the political spectrum and are growing desperate to prevent the powder keg from blowing completely – hence the intense effort to describe OWS as a top-down manipulation.

-- Matt Taibbi, writing in his Rolling Stone blog today

Yeah, but. How can anyone who mentions how far-right foamers are responding to the Occupy protests, and especially who uses words and phrases like "the deep frustrations that exist across the political spectrum" and "desperate" and "powder keg," fail to mention last year's Tea Party protests? That's last year, when the same words were used to describe those people?

What's different this year is the concept of "the 99%." It's inclusive of those Tea Party idiots for the most part, isn't it? I mean, not including the Koch brothers and whoever else funded the whole Tea Party thing to begin with -- you can't deny that there really were a lot of pissed-off people who felt disenfranchised. And now this year we have a whole additional bunch of people who feel disenfranchised.

If these groups really were likely to unite, that truly would be the far-right's worst nightmare, as they have been working to divide the country into warring camps since the days of Nixon -- and succeeding beautifully. However, until the two groups -- who don't resemble each other and probably think the other group literally and figuratively stinks -- actually develop a common cause other than "chanting" and "funny signs," I don't see much real threat to Limbaugh, the Kochs, etc.

Nutty goodness: Collapsitarian foamer skips easy pun

The collapsitarian foamer Mac Slavo posted a scare piece (which he does almost every day -- see yesterday's link in my blog) today about peanut butter -- no, really. The price is set to spike, following epic drought in peanut-producing lands.

What's funny is that the Collapse is often referred to by collapsitarians as the Crunch* -- and Slavo made it through the entire peanut butter price spike piece without making a pun once. Come on, man, sharpen up your game. Really.

* Not to be confused with the Big Crunch, in which the universe collapses into a black hole the size of Newt Gingrich's heart.

Collapsitarian: Mad Max-like collapse 'has to happen'

Here's some collapsitarian getting a hard-on about his favorite subject:

You are going to see, in metro areas, the absolute worst in humanity, as the people that are most dependent upon a collectivist system, whether they're these Occupy Well Street [sic] people, or people who are loaded up with debt, they are totally unprepared for an economic reality where their paradigm does not function.

As a result they’re going to go through the absolute most disgusting inhumanity that I think any American has ever seen as they go through this anger phase -- and it's going to result in riots, and starvation and bloodshed.

It has to happen. You don't have people's life savings and people becoming desperate and not have that happen.

It has to happen. Sure -- even though it's never happened before on the grand scale he predicts. Scattered food riots, yes -- in which maybe a shop, or at most a row of shops, gets burned. Widespread panic and pants-shitting, no. But they sure love to fantasize about it.

If you want to get a glimpse of one of these people in the wild, check out the guy's website. The article is about the Collapse and how to prepare for it -- buy lots of silver, oh and also send him money! -- but also great is the collection of advertisements on the right side of the page. Just looking at them is like being dragged by a pickup truck through a segregated whites-only trailer park in the most depressed town in Florida.

Still Indian Summer

Courtesy blog MissionMission, a lovely photograph of Dolores Park, already starting to be shaded by the autumnal sun. That's a lovely construction/refurbishment project on the right side; ignore it, everyone else does.

Summer of Infinite Jest 13 -- up to page 800

Well, after all the mystery, many facts are revealed in an interrogation of the previously unpromising Molly Notkin, the film grad student and friend (and roommate? I forget) of Joelle, by secret agents. Not the same secret agents who are, creepily and comically, in wheelchairs. Among Molly's revelations:

• The title of the magically compelling videotape;
• A confirmation of the previously suggested fact that Joelle stars in it;
• A description of its actual contents;
• A possible explanation for its magical qualities (to wit: lenses)
• Joelle's backstory, including how she came to be among the "deformed."

(There's a whole trope about how the deformed are a special class, and go around wearing veils. Yeah okay sure.)

And then after this, several climactic events at the tennis academy. In other words, the plot is suddenly rocketing forward, at least in comparison to its progress up to page 740. I guess this would cause some readers to expect there is candy at the end, or something. But there's already plenty of plot for me. Really I don't care if the secret agents of various vague nationalities catch up to the magically compelling video. Isn't the whole book a coming-of-age story, or rather multiple coming-of-age stories? Yes, they're coming to a climax, but that's the thing about coming-of-age stories -- they never end satisfactorily, because they're just the beginning of someone's story.

Maybe that analysis would get me a C in English class, but that's how the book strikes me now.

Things I continue to miss

I hate crowds and I'm too old for such things, but in addition to Litquake, another huge event in San Francisco I missed this weekend was the Treasure Island Music Festival. I don't even know how all those people got to Treasure Island.

This is why I was eager to help my friend Catherine with her solo show in the Fringe Festival last month -- because I get out and participate in the life of the city less and less.

Haven't participated in the #OccupySF protests either, but then, neither are many others. Hasn't quite caught fire here the way it has in other cities. Added the next day: Here's a video from Sunday night's dust-up, shot by the notorious Josh Wolf, giving me a good reason not to go -- I couldn't stand listening to that strident white girl in dreadlocks.

(I'm exactly of the age such styles are supposed to annoy, but I didn't like the style 15 years ago when it started and I was only 40. White people in dreadlocks -- really??)

Summer of Infinite Jest 12.1 -- page 740

(The oeuvre of James Incandenza) was amateurish, she'd seen, when Orin had had his brother... lend them some of The Mad Stork's Read-Only copies. Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a brillian optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow empty, no sense of dramatic towardness -- no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience.

Ha! I get it.

Of course DFW's work does not really meet that description at all. That's more a description of, say, Alain Robbe-Grillet. But this passage is the author saying "Yeah, I know all about your anxiety about narrative, and I can play with it, and I'll continue to do so." And also saying that he has this anxiety about his own work, that he's afraid his technical brilliance will keep people from enjoying it. And also that he knows something about alienation, the gulf between his mentally ill self and others, and anxiety about whether his novels can bridge that gulf where nothing else can.

Later on that page the expression narratively anticonfluential is coined with reference to Incandenza's work. Anticonfluential! I bow in admiration.

Summer of Infinite Jest 12 -- page 726

I'm not cheating. It's Indian Summer in San Francisco, temps in the 80s, a dry, calm and smoggy atmosphere. Street fairs abound.

Page 726 reveals what the reader has been suspecting for at least the last couple hundred pages, that Joelle Van Dyne, aka the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (PGOAT), aka Madame Psychosis of MIT's student radio station, is in fact the person who appears in the mysteriously compelling video. Aka The Entertainment.

We're in the middle of a long section in which the Wheelchair Assassins (whom I don't find nearly as compelling as I think the author did; in my opinion they're a minstrel show) zero in on a copy of the magically compelling videotape at a Boston-area video store. A bunch of bodies are piling up, it's not clear why, when their methodical search finally uncovers the McGuffin. And in a bit of indirect narration, the author explains the W.A.'s tactics of having various people under surveillance, including Hal the tennis prodigy.

In fact, several of the seemingly disparate plot threads are finally being drawn together. Joelle is in Ennet House, down the hill from the tennis academy; she appears in the videotape, which it is now clear is one of the works (perhaps the final work) of Hal's father James Incandenza; a menacing organization is on their trail. And she's in love with Don Gately, who just got royally beaten and shot in an extremely entertaining dust-up. ("Just" meaning a hundred pages ago.)

And I'm kind of sad that after 725 pages of free-ranging exposition a plot has started to raise its head. I was reading an essay on PopMatters, "The Collision of Roadside Picnic and Infinite Jest," where a critic says something I've read in other places, that there is no big payoff to the story in I.J., that the book just sort of stops, like the final episode of "The Sopranos."¹ And I've read that this failure to bring the book to a standard ending is regarded universally as simply one last joke on the part of the author.

Surely if you've read all the way to the end of "Infinite Jest," you're doing so for other reasons than wanting to know what happens at the end. That's why I find the somewhat obvious intrusion of narrative plot annoying. At this point I don't even care if there's a plot; it's like watching early seasons of "Big Brother" when all you're doing is watching the people in the house just being people in a house -- the quality of observation and language alone justify the time and expense of reading.

But I better get a move on, or I'll never finish before the end of Indian Summer.

1. See my comment on this sort of narrative frustration in a post I wrote on The Rumpus, The Limits of Narrative.

Things I had to look up: ludic

Once in a while I encounter a word that's new to me, and suddenly see it in more than one place, as if everyone had suddenly decided to start using it. Such was true of the word louche, which cropped up suddenly a few years ago and now I see it everywhere (and use it myself, because it's very useful). Now I encounter ludic:

The streak of sportiveness is there in Gosling's character, too, when he declares, "This is the big leagues. It's mean. When you make a mistake, you lose the right to play." Yet Myers is less ludic than his partners in the game, who've seen it all before; he behaves like someone seeing it for the first time, and his speech is larded with imperatives.

-- New Yorker review of "The Ideas of March"

In his Life: A User's Manual of 1978, [Georges] Perec showed how the contemporary novel might emulate the epic sweep of Ulysses, the nested stories of The Arabian Nights. Though never as ludic as Perec, Bolaño found, through the idea of multiple interviews in the middle section of The Savage Detectives, and through the twin foci or magnets of the Sonora Desert and the writer Benno Von Archimboldi in 2666, a means of licensing a similar kind of narrative proliferation.

-- Mark Ford, "Bolaño on the Edge of the Precipice," in the 13 Oct 2011 issue of the New York Review of Books

Ludic is said to simply mean "playful," but then why not just say "playful" in the above examples? What more does it mean? Is it significant, or just coincidence, that both examples use the word in the context of a comparison? Still hard to tell.

I'm still not sure what that last sentence means. "Licensing a kind of narrative proliferation"? What does it mean to license proliferation?

Today's fake: Indians imitate San Francisco 'school' real estate scam

In San Francisco, an institution known as the Academy of Art University is highly visible around town. Its advertisements are plastered on Muni buses, its own shuttle buses ferry students around the central city, and its logo appears on numerous buildings devoted to classes, workshops, dorms, or other, more vague purposes.

A tourist or newcomer might be excused for thinking the Academy of Art University is a thriving art institution in a town full of artists. But if you've been in town for a while, you start noticing that the AAU's presence constantly increases. More buildings, more shuttle buses -- impressive! You might wonder how they achieve such success.

In fact, the AAU is well known to San Franciscans as little more than a real estate scam. Yes, there are classes and workshops and dorms, and the shuttle buses ferry registered "students." But the quality of the art education offered by the institution is well known to be mediocre. How, then, is the organization apparently growing by leaps and bounds? Basically it works like this:

1. Government grants you status as non-profit educational institution. Under this status, you pay no real estate taxes.
2. Sign up students and help them get gobs of student loan money. The money goes straight to the institution for "tuition."
3. Hire mediocre instructors at low pay.
4. Use the extra money to buy San Francsico real estate. Pay no taxes on it.
5. Real estate appreciates, now worth 2x, 3x or more what you paid for it. Your "educational institution" now owns hundreds of millions of dollars worth of prime real estate in a world city. Happy!
6. Award "graduating" students worthless degrees, which they don't care much about, because many of them are foreign students here on a lark. They go home, resume their lives, having had a year or two jaunt as "art students" in San Francisco. Happy!
7. Many students default on student loans -- government and lenders unhappy.
8. City of SF loses ability to collect tax on dozens of buildings. Recipients of city services unhappy.

It works like a charm, and now they're imitating it in India:

... Several new private "universities" have also opened up recently in Himachal. According to a local daily, the Tribune, one of these institutions enrolled students and started offering courses even before it came into legal existence. You might put down this haste to the high demand for quality education among India's overwhelmingly youthful population. But as the Tribune described in a series of reports, the universities not only lack faculties, laboratories and libraries; a few do not meet the criteria for acquiring property in the state.

In other words, private universities have become a pretext for real estate speculators to acquire expensive land from the government: another example of the collusion between state and private business manifested recently in some of India's biggest corruption scandals. These sweetheart deals would be somewhat excusable if, unlike most Indian institutions of learning, the private universities offered an education rather than degrees. But they are only interested in extracting steep tuition fees from parents anxious for their children to join India's new economy. Not surprisingly, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates in India are unemployable.