Turkish sculptor Selçuk Yılmaz (previously) just completed work on three new mask-like sculptures depicting the heads of a lynx, tiger, and fox. Yılmaz uses thin strands of hammered and welded steel that give each piece a beautiful curved musculature. You can see more details of each piece over on Behance.
road trip clouds
[these photos were taken over 5 hours of driving, just for context]
i’ve always said that arizona has the best clouds. clouds that make you feel like you could reach up and touch them. clouds that make you realize there are clouds.
i’m having to amend this statement in light of new evidence brought forth by southeast nevada. their cloud game is strong.
we may have a tie.
Jessica Rohrer, “Impatient” (2013), gouache on paper, 13 x 13 inches (all images courtesy of PPOW)
“Something strange is creeping across me.” The first line of John Ashbery’s poem “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” came to mind while I was scrutinizing the modestly scaled, seemingly benign works included in Bloomfield, Jessica Rohrer’s latest exhibition of paintings and works on paper at PPOW (May 28–June 27, 2015). In the poem, Daffy Duck calls his creator, presumably the poet John Ashbery, “That mean old cartoonist … ” In Rohrer’s punctiliously painted world, there are no figures that might complain about the way their architect has treated them. In fact, on first glance, everything in this uninhabited domain seems chillingly perfect.
Imagine a suburban world where everything is tidy and antiseptic, where order has been restored and nothing is out of place. Imagine a world where signs of entropy have been banished, leaving in their place precise, detailed views of such subjects as the inside shelf of a refrigerator door, shelves of footwear, a shiny red lawnmower beside a fence, and a sun-dappled suburban street on which every lawn is perfect, and all the cars look as if they have just been washed.
Jessica Rohrer, “Refrigerator Door” (2013), 15 x 11inches (click to enlarge)
It is Rohrer’s desire for perfection that I find beguiling and frightening. Everything seems to have been staged by the artist, a feeling that is reinforced by her thorough depictions of controlled environments, such as toy houses made of Legos or molded plastic. It is as if the artist wants to stop time, to achieve a kind of stillness that borders on claustrophobic silence. However, it was when I began examining the gouaches of houseplants, many of which the artist depicts in their transportable containers, ready to be planted in the yard, that I noticed the bug-eaten leaves and other signs of decay and inevitability.
Rohrer’s fastidious depictions of sunny suburban streets seemed to molt before my eyes, swiftly transforming from the idyllic to the horrifying with nary a leaf changing place or color. Here is where the artist’s works elevate themselves onto another level of perception. For all of her ability to achieve a flawless pictorial world, where it is apparent that each leaf of grass is perfect and all the backyards are neat, the artist knows that she can make this ideal world but she cannot inhabit it. But isn’t that one reason why many people moved to the suburbs in the first place? Didn’t they believe they could find some measure of perfection there? Didn’t they believe they could create the perfect circumstances in which to grow up and grow old? Didn’t they yearn for a world from which thoughtlessness was banished?
Jessica Rohrer, “Lego House” (2013), 10 x 10 inches
By becoming a witness to this deep-seated desire for control and perfection, Rohrer evokes the emptiness that seeps into many lives, no matter how outwardly content they might initially appear. The other thing she focuses on is the desire for acceptable accumulation – from spices to shoes to games to membership in a book club. We need to fit it and be part of a larger, collective community that reads certain books and is knowledgeable about food and the other finer things of life. In addition to suburban views, she indexes collections of things, such as toiletries, shoes and crafts supplies, that we think enhance our life, and perhaps they do. And yet, as Henry David Thoreau observed in a letter: “It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?”
Jessica Rohrer, “Front Door” (2013), 15 x 12 inches (click to enlarge)
While various critics have linked Rohrer to the Precisionists, particularly Charles Sheeler, I think the comparison overlooks a very real and basic difference. In his depiction of skyscrapers and the new modernist architecture, Sheeler inched towards abstraction. Rohrer, however, focuses on details; nothing seems to escape her attention, not even the numbers on the license plates of the parked cars. This attention to detail belies a desire to understand the mechanics of looking; what do we actually see? And what does seeing what we do mean?
In Rohrer’s paintings, the symmetry of the views, the tight cropping, the spatial divisions of the plane and a growing interest in reflections undermine the solidity of the views. In “Front Door” (2013), which is a mere 15 x 12 inches, the full-length glass pane of the outer front door reflects what is across the street. The viewer has to untangle the various perceptual layers the artist has compressed together.
In “Front Yard” (2013), Rohrer depicts a slightly elevated view of a quiet suburban street lined with one-family houses. The elevated view suggests that we are standing inside our doorway, looking out, surveying our domain. And what we see are mirror images. Moreover, the street spanning the lower part of the painting is perpendicularly intersected by our neighbor’s driveway, with a car parked at the far end. Everywhere we look, parked cars, – vehicles that would enable anyone to escape this life and supposedly start a new one – hem us in.
Jessica Rohrer, “Front Yard” (2013), 12 x 16 inches
The longer I looked at Rohrer’s paintings, the more I found something stifling about the views. There is no relief in sight, not even in the backyard swimming pool or the table with four chairs by the outdoor grill. It is as if what is missing from all these scenes – and I believe Rohrer is getting at this – is life itself. Am I reading too much into these works? I would say yes and no. Rohrer’s painting invites speculation. What is it that we want from life? And why? In Rohrer’s case, I would say it is to make paintings that raise questions, rather than provide solutions. I cited Thoreau earlier because what I think both Rohrer and the New England transcendentalist share is their commitment to see everything through a moral lens, which is not the same as moralizing.
Bloomfield continues at PPOW Gallery (535 W 23rd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through June 27.
This Rachel Dolezal situation is all sorts of fucked up (and hilarious imo). But since I heard about her, I can’t stop thinking about the history of white women trying to “pass” for black in order to co-opt the struggles black people faced, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance. I don’t recall any of them going to quite the same lengths as Dolezal, though Lillian Wood, author of “Let My People Go,” was believed to be a black woman for some time and just…never corrected anyone.
During the Harlem Renaissance, there was a pretty active group of white women who basically moved to Harlem and basically forced themselves into black social spaces, calling themselves “voluntary Negroes”. They made themselves “authorities” on black issues, collected black art and commissioned work from Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston for photos and papers on “authentic” black life, and in some cases, really did consider themselves to be black at heart: Nancy Cunard, “I speak as if I were a Negro myself,” and Charlotte Good Mason, “I am a better Negro than most of the Negroes I know.” (Mason would also make her patrons, including Hughes and Hurston, refer to her as “Godmother”.) This phenomena was discussed in Carla Kaplan’s needlessly empathetic book Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Harlem Renaissance, published in 2013, that more or less paints them as forward-thinking revolutionaries…
These women fetishized the experiences of black men and women to the point that they convinced themselves they intimately knew what it meant to be black–and even become black themselves. Because most of these women were wealthy and privileged, they exerted power over these black artists who were often just trying to make ends meet. Without their financial contributions, a lot of the work we enjoy from these writers especially would likely have not seen publication.
They used Harlem artists as textbooks and walked away with only the most basic, surface ideas of a “black identity” that was built on stereotypes. Similar, as I suspect, to Dolezal, this kind of mimicry has less to do with a genuine desire to aid the struggle for civil rights, and more to with a desire to enjoy “exotic” black culture while co-opting blacks’ oppression for their own purposes. I also feel that in many cases, this has to do with some white women/peoples’ issues of privilege and wanting to align themselves with oppressed minorities, so that they may claim that oppression for themselves and deny their own racial privilege.
There isn’t a ton of scholarship on the subject, unfortunately. (If anyone has addt’l links they want to add, please feel free.) I’m mostly going off of what I learned from an amazing professor I had, Autumn Womack, who taught us about the role white women had during the renaissance. I’ve linked to a video of her giving a lecture on the subject below; it’s definitely worth the watch.
Some links:
Uptown Girls: “Miss Anne in Harlem” by Carla Kaplan -NYTimes
Women Without Race: Miss Anne in Harlem - The Daily Beast
The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance
Langston Hughes “Slave on the Block” from The Ways of White Folk
Artist Lecture Series - Autumn Womack [on White Patronage in the Harlem Renaissance]
It is so hard being extremely wealthy in this communist nation:
Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.
People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”
Yuhas lives in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic Southern California hamlet of ranches, gated communities and country clubs that guzzles five times more water per capita than the statewide average. In April, after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) called for a 25 percent reduction in water use, consumption in Rancho Santa Fe went up by 9 percent.
But a moment of truth is at hand for Yuhas and his neighbors, and all of California will be watching: On July 1, for the first time in its 92-year history, Rancho Santa Fe will be subject to water rationing.
Will these people be able to survive if they xeriscape their yards? Or instead should the state reduce the water use of the poor to 1 shower a week while the ultra-wealthy open fire extinguishers to run down the drain because they can?
For the second year in a row, Portland is the only city in the United States that is even basically livable, though just barely, according to Monocle, a London-based culture and global affairs magazine.
"Portland has gone from obscurity to an exemplar of US urban good life," writes the magazine for its annual Quality of Life survey, sponsored this year by AKZONobel, a sustainable paint and chemical company. "Farmers' markets and restaurants overflow with hallucinogenic bounty thanks to the Willamette Valley, and, as important, urban sprawl controls that preserve land."
The review was written by Monocle contributor (and Portland Monthly editor) Zach Dundas, who writes that one of the reasons why these denizens of London believe Portland to be a possible location to live, if one MUST leave the continent, is that people swim the Willamette on their lunch breaks. "Can you bring a towel to work (for a cheeky outdoor lunchtime swim)? The Willamette is safe to swim in after a major environmental clean-up. Go for it."
But don't get too excited, Portland. This year the monocled ones have dropped us from 23 out of 25 to 25 out of 25, saying that if we want to stay livable by British standards, "Public transport should continue into the night, while neighbourhoods on the city's fringes should receive basic amenities such as pavements."
So, let's get this together, guys. If we slip off this list, it may be impossible for true citizens of the world to visit our country while maintaining the quality of life they require. Invest in pavements (sidewalks? actual pavement? bands from Stockton?) and busses. Do it for America. Do it for the world.
See the full review here:
A while ago I read a post by Chuck Wendig titled In which I emit a lot of grr-talk about your writing career that really inspired me, but ironically I’m only just now getting around to writing about it. The gist of the post, so that this one will still make sense if the link ever breaks, is that there is no magic wand anyone can wave that will make you a writer. You have to do the work. And it is work, sometimes really hard work, but no one can do it for you. And as an aside, I strongly recommend not reading the comments on that particular post. At the end of the series of tweets he storified, Chuck acknowledged that thanks to being a white guy things were easier for him than they otherwise would have been and a whole lot of commenters shit their pants over that.
But before I get too far into my post, I want to throw a quick disclaimer in here. That post is only helpful (which Mr Wendig himself freely admits in his other post, The flipside of my writing tirade), if you’re in a space where a kick in the pants will do you any good. Sometimes you’re not writing (or anything else-ing) because you really for really real can’t. If that’s you, neither Chuck’s grr-talk nor my post apply to you, and you should maybe go read the flipside post instead and definitely do something nice for yourself if you’re able.
To quote Chuck from a reply he made to a comment on his flipside post:
[…] being me, I get a lot of writers who want to talk to me at cons and email me and tell me how much they want to be a writer but then lament how they’re not writing, and you hit a point where it’s like, I can’t help them unless they write. I can’t make it all better. I can’t fix it. You wanna write, you gotta write. *shrug*
That’s basically the message I took away from the grr-talk post: if you want to do the thing, whatever your thing is, you need to sit down and do it. Technically Chuck’s posts were about writing, but really they apply to anything you keep saying you want to do but aren’t doing. For me, I’d been telling myself for a long time that I wanted to actually read the programming books I’d been collecting, and up my game as a programmer, and learn some math just to see if I’m smart enough, and work on personal projects, and, and, and… and none of that was actually getting done. Now, part of that was because things had gotten pretty bad at my previous job and getting through the day without flipping a table and storming out was eating up pretty much all of my energy, but even before things started really sucking I wasn’t getting the stuff done that I wanted to.
Thanks to a combination of happening to have read Chuck’s post at just the right time, happening to have changed jobs and gotten my work/life balance back, and happening to have gotten sick of my own complaining about how I wasn’t getting stuff done, I started making some real progress. I certainly haven’t gotten to everything on my list yet, but I’m actually doing stuff!
So, uh, I guess my big productivity tip is to get tired of your own whining and then get a much better job so you feel able to do things besides pour wine into your face when you go home. That’s totally within everyone’s reach, right? That’s probably where some more of Chuck’s advice comes in. Sometimes things suck, sometimes you really are very very busy and it’s really, really hard to find a spare 20 minutes to write. But if you want to be a writer, or if you just want to get that coverletter done so you can escape your miserable job, you have to make time. It sucks but there’s no way around it.
What I’d like to add, though, is that it’s okay to not want to do the thing. Sometimes, at least for me, procrastination is a sign that I don’t actually want to do the thing, I just know that I’m supposed to want to. To keep running with the writing example, just because you were the kid who rocked every writing assignment they were given and people liked the stories you did write when you were inspired to write them doesn’t mean you have to want to be a professional writer. Maybe you hate the idea of this thing you love becoming a chore, maybe you don’t want to have to run your career like a small business, maybe having a stable source of income (and health insurance!) is really important to you. You’re allowed to not want the thing everyone says you should want, you’re allowed to try it out and decide it’s not for you, you’re allowed to love it for a while and then change your mind, you’re allowed to change your priorities.
Of course, sometimes procrastination is just procrastination. I’ve read some really interesting articles about how people procrastinate when the fear of trying and failing is worse than not trying at all, and that fits me to a tee. I’ve by no means mastered that particular issue, but there are a couple of things that have helped.
First, you’ve got to set goals you’re actually in control of. For me, that’s stuff like ‘I’m going to work on project x for half an hour’ instead of ‘I’m going to finish feature y in project x.’ The problem with ‘finish feature y’ is that I get really anxious about whether I actually can finish feature y or if I’ll spend four hours fighting with a nasty bug and what that means for my identity as the smart one if I can’t get it done in the time I have and then I don’t get anything done at all. But if my goal is just to work on project x for half an hour, that’s something I know I can succeed at and that lets me sidestep the whole ‘oh god what if I’m not smart enough’ thing.
Second, it can be really handy to get into the habit of asking yourself if the thing you’re doing right now is what you really want to be doing. Not in a ‘stick to beat yourself with’ way, but in the sense that if you’re going to screw around on the internet, you should at least do something you enjoy. I have a terrible habit of aimlessly scrolling through tumblr while hours go by and then all of a sudden it’s dinner time and not only did I not get anything accomplished, but I didn’t even have fun. That just feels shitty, so I’ve been trying to play games I actually enjoy or read stories I actually like if I’m going to screw around on the internets.
Third, reasonable goals, like Chuck said. This ties in really closely with my next point, which is about habits versus motivation. Basically, getting shit done is more about building the habit of doing a little at a time than about waiting for the magical day when you’ll be super motivated and get everything done in one marathon burst of effort. To get stuff done a little at a time, you need a schedule you can keep up in the long run, which means you need to work at a pace that won’t burn you out and leaves room for fun in your life. For my life and my schedule, I try to give myself no more than three goals for personal stuff to get done on a weekday after I get home, and most of those goals are things that don’t take very long, like ‘spend half an hour reading that dry technical book.’ You might be way better at time management than I am and can do five things after you get home, or maybe you have kids and pets and have to do your own cooking and cleaning and maybe you can only do one thing every couple of days.
Finally, and this is something you’ll hear from basically every productivity expert, it’s more important to have habits than motivation. Motivation comes and goes, you’re just not going to be on fire about working on your thing every single day. As much as I love my field and love learning, I’m not exactly counting the minutes until I get to go home and read dry technical books. Waiting until you are on fire about it means you’re going to spend an awful lot of hours waiting around when you could be getting shit done, feeling good about making progress, and then doing something fun without feeling guilty about how you’re not doing the thing.
Speaking of getting things done a little at a time, according to wordpress in the roughly three years this blog has been going I’ve written about 129,000 words. According to this article at Writers Digest, that’s a longish novel. Sure, it took me three years to write that many words, but that was three years of roughly one post a week, averaging 675 words. Of course, writing a coherent novel is way more work than a series of largely unrelated blog posts (yay for not worrying about plot holes!), but that’s a lot of words for not a lot of effort every week.
Readers, if any of you have productivity tips (especially about procrastination!), I’d love to hear about them. Think of it as your good deed for the day 
I was 18 years old. We were in fashion school and we were overworked so we did a fun shoot. We didn’t sleep that night and went to school together after. I believe that this was the moment when I first felt sexy and confident. I never did a shoot with just a bra before, it was scary but exciting for me. I was always the odd girl, not the pretty one that the boys wanted to date. In college I blossomed with confidence. There is always hope.
When my dogs disappeared, I called the first psychic at the urging of a neighbor. I cringe now at the need to refer to Cassie as the “first” psychic, for it forces me to reveal that she was not the last.
I had no history in believing in psychics. I had never spoken to a psychic. I had long regarded them as con artists living out lives at the other end of 1-900 numbers—preying on people’s gullibility. But there is a thing that we say about desperate times and what they call for. I emailed Cassie first. She wrote back immediately that she was just coming in her door after a motorcycle ride, but that she was already getting a mental picture of my dogs. My relationship with Cassie and her psychic business partner, Rita, evolved over the next several months. We talked on the phone. We emailed. They gave me directions. “Go stand by your front door. Look north. Go that way. Your dogs are that way.”
And so I did that. I went north. I knocked on every door north of my front steps. I did not find them.
They said, “Try to reach out to your dogs in your mind. Try to visualize them. They will hear you.”
I soaked in a hot bath for hours in a bathroom lit only by candles. I played soft music. I got quiet inside. I called out—through my heart—to the universe. I called to the dogs. I reached out. I visualized. Nothing happened. There was no scratching at the door. My dogs, Hazel and Daisy, remained at large, somewhere out in the woods, in whatever place they had fled to the morning that they had run away. I imagined them out there, merely turned around and lost, trying to find their way home.
The morning that they disappeared didn’t seem unusual at the time. They were in the yard while I got ready for work, and did not come when I called them. I went outside, dropped my laptop and purse into the passenger seat of my car, and went to look for them in the field behind our house. I saw them there, poised at the edge of the woods. I shouted, “Stay!” as Daisy disappeared into the trees. Hazel turned at the sound of my voice, then faced the woods again. Something was out there in the forest. Something compelling. She paused for only a second, as I shouted her name. “Hazel! Stay!” One leap, and she was gone.
They did this when they felt like it—running off to chase rodents or deer. They always came back when they felt like it. Their disobedience made me furious that morning, and I left for work assuming that I would return home to find them pressed against the back door, tongues hanging. But that’s not what happened.
Several weeks into the search, a friend suggested another psychic: Kaimora and her student, Sandra. I talked to Kaimora on the phone, and once she and I went out and drove around.
I do not live in the Maine of postcards and scenic calendars. I live in Washington County, which backs itself into the easternmost point of land in the US and shares more in common with the wildest parts of New Brunswick than it does with Portland or Bangor. This is the Maine of scrubby blueberry barrens, monstrous twenty-foot tides that swallow acres of beach then spit them back out again over and over every day, and hard-working, hard-living families in hardscrabble homes tucked into pockets of forest at the ends of dirt roads.
Kaimora and I slowly cruised along many of those dirt roads, peering down long driveways, following her urges to look more closely at this house or that. Sandra came along too. Heads leaning towards each other in the front seat, they conferred about what they were feeling. Kaimora spotted a husky tied to a doghouse in a neighbor’s yard. She exclaimed, when she saw it, “Is that your dog?” As if I would have needed a psychic if my dog was in plain sight. As if it could be that easy.
Years later, I saw Sandra at the grocery store and she told me that Kaimora had died unexpectedly. She had been elderly, but healthy, and her death had come as a shock. Sandra had given up the psychic business—she had lost faith in her mentor. I asked how that happened.
“She didn’t find your dogs. I had to wonder.”
In the weeks right after my dogs ran away, Rita and Cassie continued to offer advice over the phone. Upon hearing that I had talked to Kaimora, they said, “Stop trying so hard. You’re looking in too many places.” Finally Rita told me that I was scattering my energies too widely. “Your dogs aren’t coming back because you’re not focused.”
I hung up on her.
When the dogs had been missing for two months, my mom found one more psychic three hours downstate. She lived above a drugstore in downtown Skowhegan in an apartment decorated with scarves and psychedelic posters. She had long black hair, and wore her nails as long as her dangly earrings. We sat around a small kitchen table and watched her randomly draw lines and circles on a map of Maine. The map was flat on the table in front of all three of us. We held down its corners as it tried to fold and curl back up. In an apparent trance, she circled letters on the map and drew lines between the circles. She became convinced that my dogs were either in Blue Hill or Columbia Falls: both towns were hours from my home. She was the only psychic who ever asked to be paid. My mom gave her $100, and I dutifully hung posters in convenience stores and banks in both towns and went door-to-door handing out flyers. I waited for weeks, but this process yielded no dogs.
I wasn’t used to problems that were bigger than any solutions I had at hand. Daunted, but certain that I could find them if I just looked a little harder, I kept going. I didn’t know it, but as I was running around, talking to psychics and looking for my dogs, there were hard lessons ahead.
My boyfriend, John, (who ultimately became my husband back in the days before he was my ex-husband) and I searched in all the conventional ways as well. We hung posters. We walked trails. We drove miles beyond measure down back roads, main roads, and winding, dirt logging roads.
We developed a method of covering the miles. We would drive to a road that hadn’t been searched yet, and he would get out of the car and start walking down the shoulder, calling for the dogs. Whistling, clapping, calling their names. I would drive on farther, then pull over, leave the keys in the ignition, and start walking in the same direction, whistling, clapping, and calling their names. When he reached the spot where the car was parked, he would get in it, drive past me, pull over and park, and resume his walking and calling. We leapfrogged down countless miles using this method.
One afternoon, I walked along the gravel shoulder of County Ridge Road. It was July-humid, and one unceasing horsefly dumbly buzzed my head. I called for my dogs—shouted their names into the empty woods and whistled. My voice, my sharp whistling, didn’t seem to penetrate the forest at all. It seemed to hang up on thick barricade of Maine pine, all branches and needles. The trees were scraggly. White moss hung like untrimmed facial hair from dead branches. Those acres of wild were not about to cough up what I was missing no matter how much I clapped and whistled. It was as if I was using a silent dog whistle—a Galton’s whistle—and nobody was there who could hear it. The beseeching behind the sound was beyond human hearing too, beyond my own ears.
The sun was noon-high. Both sides of the road were walled-in by ancient pine growth, but the trees cast no shadows. I adjusted my hat, trying to maximize shade falling from underneath the brim, trying to get it to fall across my face. John’s car rode slowly past with the windows down. Our eyes met, but we didn’t say anything. I called some more for the dogs and kept whistling. A few hundred yards ahead, he pulled his car over, shut the engine off, and got out. He walked on the shoulder—headed the same direction I was walking—and I heard him calling. Heard him whistling and clapping. His sounds rolled out through the woods, then came back in echoes. I worried that no dogs could hear us, that this was a whistle that only we could hear.
This is the summer that turned into the year that turned into the two years that I spent looking for my dogs. This is also the summer that I got married and that turned into the year I conceived and lost my first baby in a miscarriage. This is the summer that, by all reasonable measures, I lost my mind, along with my dogs and my baby. I stayed crazy for years. The crazy, high-pitched and all-consuming at first, became something that rose and fell in cycles.
I grew up believing that I could solve any problem if I was willing to sit on hold and ask for the manager’s supervisor. Someone always had the authority to fix it. I knew that nonrefundable airline tickets were refundable if you said the right thing to the right person. I knew that laws could be rewritten if they were unjust. I knew that, to change anything, you merely had to show up, and if you showed up fully enough, you could fix it. You just had to ask the right person or apply force to the right place.
That’s why I had spent weeks sleeping in the living room so I could hear the dogs if they came to the door. I printed posters and hung them, not just in our town, but throughout the county. I found an online list of statewide animal shelters, and sent them all an email with pictures of the dogs attached. I called everyone I could think of: game wardens, animal control officers, veterinarians. Nobody had the answer. Nobody had my dogs. Nobody heard my whistle.
This summer’s losses were the events that grabbed me by my shirt collar and shoved my back up against this single truth: Not even the manager’s supervisor’s supervisor can fix everything.
*
Five weeks after the dogs disappeared, John and I got married in a ceremony on the deck of our house. Our guests were invited, not just to a wedding, but to a deck-building party that happened to include a wedding. John and my father had somehow found time in those five weeks to pour footings for the deck and to construct the frame. Led by John’s father, our wedding guests pounded steel nails through blond cedar planking to make the deck’s surface and built a railing and stairs. When it was completed, we brought out pots of flowering plants and hung them from the railing and John’s nieces scattered dried rose petals across the floor.
John wore a tuxedo he borrowed from a friend, and I wore a straight white dress I found on Ebay for $10. We both wore Birkenstocks. He had trimmed his beard neatly, and looked like the man I was supposed to marry: glasses, artsy, liberal, and smiling. I had ordered a crown of sea lavender from the florist, and I wore it perched on top of my head. The crown was larger and spinier than I had intended, and it made me feel a little bit like a mermaid, but I wore it anyway.
That day, I did not think about the dogs. For that one day, amidst the sounds of the hammering and John’s mother and her friends keeping the coffee going and my mother bringing out trays and crock pots of food for lunch and all of our friends and their guitars, I was able to forget that my dogs were missing. I relaxed into the warm din and married the man I would divorce just a few years later.
It was only two months later that I was pregnant. This was by design. I was thirty-three, and I feared that my childbearing years were almost over. I bought a book about how to get pregnant by creating charts and logging daily body temperatures and monitoring the viscosity of my vaginal fluids. I did these things, and was able to identify the exact moment of maximum fertility. I took on this process with complete confidence that if I followed the instructions I would prevail over the vagaries of mere chance. It wasn’t romantic, but it worked and we conceived a child that summer.
Once pregnant, I followed the books to the letter. I gave up alcohol and caffeine. I drank glass after glass after glass of water. I got lots of sleep and ate foods full of fiber and low in sugar.
And I kept looking for the dogs.
During the eleventh week of my pregnancy I went for a routine visit to the midwife and she used a handheld wireless device to try to detect the baby’s heartbeat. As ultrasounds go, this was on the low end of the technology scale, so when she couldn’t find a heartbeat, she said, “It’s nothing to worry about. This thing isn’t very reliable.”
I was lying on the exam table in her office, the paper crinkling beneath my back. My belly, not yet bulging, was exposed.
She tried once more, moving the rounded wand across my skin. It left a trail in the gob of lubricant she had smeared on moments earlier. The device did not detect a heartbeat, but it did, for just a moment, pick up the local radio station. We heard a snippet about rain coming. The midwife snapped the device off.
“Okay,” she said, looking directly at me. “Now you’re probably nervous.”
I nodded, pulling my shirt back down and sitting up. I wanted to say something out loud, to clarify that the word “nervous” didn’t come close to the panic that was setting in. I wanted to hear from this baby. I wanted to hear that reassuring, quick-paced “whoosh whoosh whoosh” that meant its heart was beating away in there.
“You don’t need to be, but I understand. We’ll order a better ultrasound at the hospital.” She must have noticed that I was barely breathing. “We’ll set it up for tomorrow morning.”
A nurse made the appointment for me and told me to drink a lot of water before arriving. I spent the night trying not to worry, trying to remember that this lousy piece of technology had transmitted the weather, trying to breathe.
The next morning, I filled a water bottle and drank it while John drove us both to the hospital. The bottle’s volume was marked in metric, though, and I miscalculated and drank at least four times as much water as I was told to. By the time we were led into the dark ultrasound room, my bladder felt ready to burst. I asked the technician if I could use the bathroom, but she said, “Try to hold it. We’ll get a better picture that way.” I complied, undressed, and lay down on the table.
Ultrasound technicians aren’t doctors. They are not supposed to interpret what they see on the monitor. I now know that they break this rule, over and over, when the news is good. When they can show you the heartbeat, the fingers, the face of your baby—they do. When they can find the parts that say “girl” or “boy”—they do. But when they can’t find anything at all—no heartbeat, no spine, no baby—they don’t say anything. I had a very silent ultrasound.
The wand was inside me, and the tech moved it in tiny motions, trying to get the right view on the monitor. It was like looking at outer space. Light and dark shapes came into view then receded. I didn’t know what to look for, but I searched the screen desperately for something, some movement, a set of tiny toes or an ear. Nothing emerged. John sat next to me, his hand on my arm, staring at the monitor. All three of us were quiet until I asked, “What do you see?”
The tech seemed uncomfortable. She wore a bright-colored nurse’s smock and white shoes. Perched on a chair between me and the monitor, she pushed the wand higher into my body, pushing uncomfortably up against my too-full bladder. She shifted and said, “I think we should call your midwife.”
There was no baby. There was no heartbeat, no fingers, no rounded rump. I knew this before my midwife came into the room. I knew this while I was allowed to leave the exam table and relieve myself in the bathroom. I knew this as I was getting dressed and I heard John say miserably to the tech, “We just lost our dogs, too.” In my head, I willed him not to say that. It sounded so dumb, so irrelevant, but of course it wasn’t.
There never was a baby, the midwife explained to me over a box of tissues that she held out for me in her office an hour later. I was seated in a chair, crying my way through the news. There had been a conception, but no baby ever formed. “This happens sometimes,” she said. “It’s normal.”
It had never happened to me, and nothing about it felt normal.
The midwife wanted to schedule a D&C immediately. My body still thought it was pregnant and she felt it was better to reset the whole system as quickly as possible.
I refused. My body, I knew, could handle this on its own. I talked to my family doctor, and she approved. “It’s a closed system. You’re not going to get an infection or anything. If it makes you feel better to wait,” she said to me in a phone call, “then I think you should wait.”
I would miscarry on my own.
*
In my rural community, going door to door involves a car, and the doors are spaced out—sometimes separated by miles. That same summer, I carried postcards with pictures of the dogs and our phone number everywhere I went. I talked to everyone in town through screen doors, on porches, on sagging back steps with kids peering at us through windows. I stuck the postcards into door frames when people weren’t home, but made sure to circle back to those houses later in the day. Sometimes John went out with me on these excursions, other times it was my mom. Sometimes I went alone.
My mom and I talked to one man who lived with his family in a house barely bigger than a shed, way down a back road. The yard was a circle of gravel. Tree stumps remained where trees had been felled to make room for the house. A pack of beagles, each chained to a doghouse placed at even intervals, formed a circumference around the gravel yard. They bayed at us as we parked. There was a rusted, blue truck next to the house with a bumper sticker reading, Shit Happens. The man invited us in, and we stood on the plywood floor of the kitchen while we gave him a postcard. He studied it and shook his head sympathetically.
“I love dogs,” he said, glancing up at me. “I really love dogs. And I’m in the woods a lot, working with my beagles.” He gestured vaguely toward the yard, my postcard in his hand, indicating his dogs, still out there baying and howling. His rough, stained hands had seen a lot of trees felled, driven a lot of nails, dug a lot of trucks out of the mud. His hands had grazed or even caressed the surface of many rifles too. “If your dogs are in these woods around here, I’ll probably see them.”
I felt hope step up next to me and take my elbow.
“I’ll keep my eyes open, and if I see them I’ll sure call you.” He looked me in the eye. His wife was working in the kitchen behind him, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. She had long, stringy black hair and wore an oversized T-shirt and a pair of dirty jeans. Their kids—I don’t know how many—peered at us from behind a curtain that served as a door leading into some unseen room. The wife occasionally barked at them to stay quiet. They stayed hidden.
It was years before I learned that this man, even as he met my gaze and made promises to help, had already dumped my dogs’ bodies in a swamp and left them there to decompose. By the time I knew, by the time the sheriff’s deputies had searched the swamp for evidence, all that remained was one bone. After the trial was over, the game warden mailed me that bone in a small, padded envelope about the size of a postcard.
*
I miscarried that pregnancy late one night in November. The news that there was no baby was approximately ten days old, and I had lived that time in torturous expectation. I still had morning sickness. I still felt pregnant. And I was, but I was pregnant with a blank space where a baby should have been.
It was the week of Thanksgiving, and my older brother and sister-in-law were visiting. John and I had given them our bedroom to sleep in and had moved downstairs onto the fold-out couch in the living room. Our house was unfinished and lacked some basic amenities such as bedroom doors and a second bathroom. The only bathroom was right next to the open doorway into the room where my brother and his wife were sleeping.
At some point, I started to bleed. Lightly at first, then heavier. Though I knew what was coming, I managed the holiday. I baked pies. We played card games. Watched movies. If I let on that anything was happening, I likely spoke about the miscarriage in the past tense—something that was already over.
During the last night of their visit, feeling sharp pains, I got up to check and the bleeding was severe. I made several trips up and down the stairs, in and out of the bathroom, trying not to make any noise. After I had soaked through three maximum-thickness pads in just thirty minutes, I returned to the bathroom and I did not leave it again until it was over. The pains became deeper and evenly spaced and blood and tissue heaved out of me like a dam had let go. I sat on the toilet, weeping, trying not to make noise, while John waited downstairs. He built a fire in our wood stove and waited. I flushed the toilet over and over, whooshing away the blood and the globs, hoping that I didn’t wake up my brother.
It felt like my uterus was trying to wring itself out like a sponge. Every nerve, every muscle crackled and twisted as the pains organized into contractions. I was folded over on the toilet, holding onto my ankles, waiting, and trying not to cry out. I felt a final, devastating contraction that felt like I was being skinned—and then it was over. Something soft and enormous slid partway out of my body and hung there, suspended above the bloody water. I had to push to fully expel that expectant, blank space that should have been a son or a daughter. It slid to the bottom of the bowl, and I never saw what it looked like. The pains abruptly stopped. I had done it—alone.
I cleaned up and went downstairs. John and I sat together, wrapped in blankets, looking at the fire until we both fell asleep on the couch. If we talked about it that night, we didn’t say much.
*
The dogs had been missing for fifteen months when I got a call from someone insisting they had seen two husky-like dogs crossing the road in Charlotte—about fifteen miles from my house. It was deep in autumn. I was, by this time, nine months pregnant: due any day. I picked up my car keys and drove to the spot where the caller had seen the dogs. It was not near a house. The only landmark was a junction with another road. I parked on the road’s shoulder and entered the woods. The trees were wet and there was no trail. I pushed my way through dripping branches, my feet shin-deep in fallen, dried leaves. I called, clapped and whistled, and pushed further into the woods. My hair was wet and water began to run in rivulets down my neck. Slowly, as I walked and called into the dripping autumn canopy, lights began to turn on in my head, like someone was walking through a house at dusk turning on lamps—illuminating one room at a time. I felt the camera pull back and I saw myself out there, pregnant, thrashing through the woods during hunting season at dusk with a temperature hovering close to the hypothermia mark. The stupidity of the situation appeared in the woods in front of me, waving its arms, demanding to be noticed. Arms in mid-air, pushing back tree branches, I stopped trudging. I studied that truth for a moment. The dogs were not out here. The dogs were not anywhere. I turned and went back to the car. I did not go out looking again.
A year later, I was at work when the Assistant District Attorney called to say that he knew what had happened to my dogs. I was working at a domestic violence agency, and was well-accustomed to phone calls from the police and the DA’s office. Someone handed me the message that Paul was trying to reach me. He had called twice—both times insisting that it wasn’t an emergency. I excused myself from a staff meeting, and called him back. Paul and I had been working together for years at this point, and our relationship was easy. I assumed that we were about to talk about a domestic violence case. I was ready to hear about some batterer that Paul was prosecuting—perhaps a victim to be warned of some upcoming court proceeding. I sat at my desk, leaning back in my chair, and held the phone between my head and shoulder. The heels of my shoes rested up on the desk, next to the phone.
“So, what are you doing?” He plunged right into the conversation.
“I’m at work, Paul.” I picked up and fidgeted with a desk knick-knack. It was a square, acrylic cube with floating gold glitter inside. It had a wire that jutted straight up out of it with a clip on the top; it was meant to hold phone messages. I twirled it by the wire part and watched the glitter spin. “Just like you.”
“Right.” There was a quality to his voice I hadn’t heard before. Was he nervous? It was as if maybe he was also fidgeting with something in his hands—the phone cord or his badge. “Are you sitting down?”
I put the glittering cube down on the desk. I tried to make a joke—tried to ease whatever this tension was. “Is this an obscene phone call? Do you want to know what I’m wearing?”
I heard him take a breath. His next words came quickly—like he wanted to get it all out without letting me say anything. “I know who killed your dogs, and I have them in jail right now. I wanted to tell you because it’s going to be in the newspaper tomorrow.” His voice softened. “I wanted you to hear it from one of us.”
By “one of us” he meant the cops in our rural community. Because of our linked careers, these men were my colleagues. We went to meetings together, sat on task forces, attended the same trainings. The men who killed my dogs—the ones Paul was holding in jail—were not arrested because they killed dogs. They were arrested as the result of an undercover sting. They were poachers—but that word doesn’t quite capture their depravity. They were killers. They killed every animal they came across. They killed seals. They killed bears. They killed eagles and crows. There had been a rare albino deer living in our town, and people caught sight of it now and again. It always caused a stir. People felt lucky to have seen it. Then, gradually, people realized that nobody had seen it for a while. These two men killed it. They killed late at night, with snares and guns and traps. They killed for fun, because it made them feel good. They didn’t eat what they killed. They left it. It wasn’t about surviving—it was about killing. They also killed dogs. They killed my dogs.
Paul kept talking, which was helpful, because I was immediately reduced to quiet sobbing. I was trying to keep it inaudible. Paul wasn’t someone I cried in front of. Paul was someone I joked with, did victim safety planning with, negotiated cop politics with. Paul was someone who let me be one of the boys, even though I wasn’t. I had not been in this role with him before—role of the crime victim.
“We’re trying to keep you out of the press, but this could be a big story. These are bad men, and people are going to be really angry at them. At some point, someone will make the connection because everyone knew about your dogs.” He paused. I tried to keep my breath evenly spaced so he wouldn’t know I was falling apart. He knew anyway. “You’re going to get some calls.”
I didn’t know that, while Paul and I were talking, there was an assistant deputy standing on the front steps of my house, having the same conversation with my husband. The law enforcement community takes care of its own, and I had become part of their net. And—of course—in a small town like ours everyone saw the cruiser parked in our driveway that day.
*
The footfalls of justice are slow and leaden. Months after the call from Paul and after the deputy had backed his car down our driveway, I sat across a courtroom from one of the poachers at his sentencing. I was not allowed to speak, but had submitted an emotional, overwritten victim impact statement. In those few pages of prose I had tried to describe to the judge all of the crazy that had rained down on my life as a result of this crime—the back roads, the psychics, the whistling and calling, the mourning, everything.
The poacher and I faced each other from wooden benches. I was his only living victim—there was nobody there to represent the loons, ravens, seagulls, or albino deer. I sat, hands tangled in a knot on my thighs, and looked anywhere but at him. He was a huge man in a clean T-shirt. He had a massive black beard, and a baseball cap hung from his bent knee.
The judge asked if he had anything to say, and the man crumpled the fabric of his cap in his giant fist as he stood, continuing to face me. I saw a stapled sheaf of papers in his other hand, and recognized it even from that distance as a copy of my statement. He tried to meet my eyes as he said, “Yes, your honor.”
I stared at the victim witness advocate’s knee, just inches from mine.
“I’m very sorry,” he said, looking at me. “For what I did.”
I didn’t know if he was the driver or the shooter, but the two men had apparently been driving when my dogs broke from the trees into the road. I learned from the undercover game warden that the driver veered to run over one with the truck, and when the other dog came back to sniff the first, they shot her.
My hands untangled and rose in front of me in a “stop” gesture. The previous years had filled me with empty spaces, but none of them had room for his remorse. I pressed my back into the bench, trying to increase the distance between us and shook my head. I wanted his silence. I don’t know what he said next. I couldn’t hear him.
He did in-state jail time, and the court awarded me five hundred dollars to try to fill the hole.
The other poacher, a felon who wasn’t even supposed to have guns in his house, went somewhere south to serve hard time.
And I had given birth to the daughter I had always wanted, and a son was to follow soon. I should have felt better. And I did. But I also didn’t.
*
The topic still comes up, a decade later, in conversations at the gas pump, farm stand, potluck dinner, or parent/teacher conference night. People who missed my picture in the paper, taken outside the courthouse, crease their foreheads and ask, “Did you ever find out what happened to your dogs?”
I have donned various responses the way we try on coats or shoes, the way I tried on therapists and cures in the years following these things that I could not fix, but I’ve learned that this isn’t a story most people want to hear when they’re making polite conversation over the unleaded nozzle. I either say, “No,” or “Yes, but it’s a terrible story for another time.” Then I pay for my groceries and move on to picking up my kids from swim practice or thinking about my next oil change—desperate for some reminder of my competence. People think they want to hear, but some sounds are too piercing for human ears to handle, and some stories are better left as blank spaces.
A year after the miscarriage, with a baby girl in my arms and my dogs still missing, I asked my brother if he had known that anything was going on just outside the door to that room that night, if he had heard my repeated trips up the stairs or the almost continuous watery sounds of flushing. I wanted to explore the edges of the thing—to understand how far sound travels.
“I didn’t hear a thing,” he said. “You were very quiet.”
***
Original art by John Leavitt, from a series entitled “Lost Dogs.”
I don’t understand some people’s delight in surrounding themselves with only people who are exactly like them. The declaration with beaming pride that you only associate with your own kind, that you make decisions about who to trust and who to believe and who to exclude based on identity markers.
And some of you at this point are nodding your heads in understanding and murmuring agreement — maybe you think I’m talking about racist idiots who only deal with other white folks, or rich snobs who wouldn’t dare to be seen walking in the same door as those poor working-class stiffs…
But I started writing this post because I’m sick of seeing people around me who are self-styled “progressives” and “liberals” and “open-minded queers and trans* folks” bragging about how the only people they have on Facebook are other queers, or how they don’t visit any businesses that are connected to right-wing leaders, or how wonderful it is that trans* women “all” have each other because “we” all understand the way the world works and nobody else possibly can.
Look, folks. Separatism sucks ass. Standing in an echo chamber where you can only hear your own words — or words identical to your own — just shuts out any possibility of hearing someone else, and if you happen to be full of shit, you’ve made sure nobody else can point that out to you.
I’m absolutely thrilled to have people on my Facebook, and people I interact with in meatspace too, whose ideas and opinions and worldviews are very different than mine. Some of those views I can say with absolute certainty are wrong, and are harmful to me and many people I care about — and I’d bet money that many of my own views and opinions fit the exact same description. But if I’m not willing to listen once in a while, I won’t have anything but myself and my echoes to tell me that I’m always exactly spot-on.
And I’m not saying that I’ll have my mind changed by simply listening — I don’t currently have any friends who try to tell me that the earth is flat, but if I did, it would be just another reminder that there are some people who insist on believing things that are demonstrably false. Same for other things that I do hear from friends, things that just make me more certain that I’m right when they repeat their lies. It isn’t a matter of “listening to both sides of the debate” to make an informed opinion — not when there’s only one side against a bunch of people scrambling hard to wish away reality.
And yeah, occasionally I walk away from an acquaintance online, or cut ties with a physical-world friend, when the only things I hear from them are of the “Nuh-uh, the world is too flat!” variety. I only have so much energy to spend on having that kind of silliness shouted at me. But I still make a specific effort to keep people around me who see things differently than I do — and not just “keep around” but have significant relationships with, to know them as people and not merely as props to remind myself that I’m right… because sometimes, I’m not.
So, I suppose that means that I’m not in a hurry to walk away from the many trans* women I know who only associate with other trans* people, though it does certainly irk me when I hear another hallelujah chorus about how they’re lucky they have hardly any cis* folks in their lives. And I’m unlikely to cut ties with the handful of “Guns and God and GOP, America’s the best country!” friends I have, either, though I do filter things on my own end to limit how much toxic nationalism-and-firepower-as-the-only-religion memes I expose myself to. And I won’t be saying “see ya” to most of the queer people I know who post about how they find pleasure in noticing that there are no straight people on their social media — because their voices are generally balanced out by the majority of people I hear daily discussing how “those people” are an odd minority.
Diversity in practice is a whole lot more enjoyable for me than homogeneity and lip-service to “inclusion” and “tolerance.” And I’ll probably still be your friend even if you find life more fulfilling for you in an echo chamber of clones — because my more diverse connections with friends and acquaintances means that yours isn’t the only voice I hear, and I can choose whose words I listen to.
Internet of Things design concept is a smart motorized desk lamp that can collect solar power through the day, convert the energy into money and invest in the stock market (to the benefit to the owner):
There is little information at time of posting about the project - all that can be made out is that this was part of a course at Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design entitled ‘The Secret Life of Objects’.
I’m sure some of you have read Jennifer Gonnerman’s extraordinary story about Kalief Browder, who was arrested and on the most threadbare of evidence charged with a minor theft. He was held at Riker’s Island, sometimes in solitary confinement and sometimes subject to horrible abuse, for three years without trial.
There’s no way for this story to have a happy ending, but there could be better and worse ones. You’ve probably anticipated that Browder’s case falls into the latter category:
Last Monday, Prestia, who had filed a lawsuit on Browder’s behalf against the city, noticed that Browder had put up a couple of odd posts on Facebook. When Prestia sent him a text message, asking what was going on, Browder insisted he was O.K. “Are you sure everything is cool?” Prestia wrote. Browder replied: “Yea I’m alright thanks man.” The two spoke on Wednesday, and Browder did seem fine. On Saturday afternoon, Prestia got a call from Browder’s mother: he had committed suicide.
Almost everything wrong with American criminal justice in one story: ginning up baseless charges based on particularly unreliable eyewitness testimony; prisons being run as torture camps; not only denials of basic due process rights but a hopelessly clogged system that relies on the vast majority of the accused to waive their right to a public trial and has various means of punishing people who won’t play ball. And, remember, this is a story of New York City — this is not just a red state phenomenon by any means.
welcome to the FEMINIST CULT, today we’ll talk about terrifying topics such as BEING NICE TO YOURSELF and PROPER SEX EDUCATION
Poor, poor pitiful Tim Hunt. He’s now complaining about his treatment as a victim of the “savage power of Twitter”.
I am finished,he says.I had hoped to do a lot more to help promote science in this country and in Europe, but I cannot see how that can happen. I have become toxic. I have been hung to dry by academic institutes who have not even bothered to ask me for my side of affairs.
He does not make a convincing argument. His wife takes his side; he’s a good cook and has a nice garden; he was just being totally jocular, ironic
(which is an odd thing to claim when even in his apology he said he meant it). Oh, and of course, it was just part of his upbringing. He went to a single-sex school in the 1960s
, because no one ever escapes the harm done to them in their childhood, unless it’s sexual abuse, in which case they should just grow up and get over it. It’s basically a cry that everyone is being so mean to him…which is a bit ironic, given that he’s relatively wealthy, has a nice home, has international prestige, and has a Nobel prize.
Some people seem to find these claims mildly persuasive.
Hunt’s comments were foolish and hurtful. I’m sure he regrets making them, but a smart man should know better. That said, I think this situation raises some interesting questions. I’d love to hear what you think too.
OK! I always wait for permission to express my opinions.
I thought Hunt’s plaintive whines were a big bowl of bollocks. Look, I know people are complex and more than just their one stupid off-the-cuff remark — Hunt’s work on cell cycle regulation was important, and I’ve heard from more than one person that he was not a raging misogynist in his lab, but actually did a reasonable job mentoring both men and women. I am not suggesting that he be taken out and flogged and then get damned to an eternity in Hell, or even that he deserves that. But it is precisely a problem when we are so dazzled by that shiny Nobel that we think someone ought to be given a pass for some odious and harmful attitudes.
I don’t even think the following are interesting questions.
Did we make matters worse?
Hunt’s comments were made in a non-public venue. They were brought to the public via Twitter. Blogs and traditional media extended the story’s reach. It’s safe to say that the average young female aspiring scientist would never have heard about his comments had it not been for the rest of us repeating what he said. …and I mean ‘us’ because I shared a number of those stories on social media too. Expressing displeasure and correcting mistakes is important – but did we (the online scientific and academic community & media) exacerbate the situation?
What exactly was done to Tim Hunt? His own words were made public. It is not an excuse to say that if there were no Twitter, no “young female aspiring scientist” would have actually heard those words. Do we argue that if we quit using those fancy diagnostic tools, we wouldn’t be diagnosing cancer as early, so people would have a few more months of blissful ignorance?
Exposing bias is essential to correcting it. What happened here is that a shameful bit of sexism was brought into the light, and the perpetrator was mocked and publicly scorned, but there were no “lynch mobs” or “witch hunts”, those favored phrases of the indignantly exposed — there was open discussion of what should be done. And UCL made their own decision that his views failed to appropriately represent the goals of that university.
Could Hunt come out a winner?
Unlike the time when Matt Taylor wore “That Shirt” – there seems to be much stronger pushback from Hunt’s defenders. They are painting him as a victim of overzealous ‘tweeters’ and institutions they say rushed to judgment. He and his wife have have also refused to remain silent, opting to defend themselves publicly. Is it possible that this strategy could turn things in their favor?
Tim Hunt did not receive a sentence of life in prison. There is no specific act that needs to be retracted or changed — he is who he is, warty exterior and all. What possible outcome are you talking about? That he didn’t say those stupid things, stereotyping women? That the public will change and say that it’s perfectly OK that he stereotyped women? I hope not.
Another point here is that people are already placing the blame on “overzealous tweeters” or people who went overboard in mocking his stupid remarks. What do you want, for everyone to shut up and be silent? It’s not a problem if no one talks about it? It’s not a problem for the privileged people who promote sexism, but it’s always a problem, silent or not, for the people who are targeted by sexism. The concern here is misplaced; it’s because open discussion of the problem flips the table and exposes the ideas of the perpetrators to criticism.
Somehow, when that happens, there’s always a group of people who are perturbed by the disruption of the status quo and think we need to do something to curb the critics. They don’t seem to consider that maybe the status quo sucks.
Will scientists be less likely to go-public?
If some ill-advised comments at a conference can deep-6 the career of a Nobel Prize winner, will other researchers think twice before stepping up to a podium? How about doing media interviews? Aside from the obvious impact on women, will this incident serve as a setback for all of science communication?
Oh, please.
There was no career getting deep-sixed. We’re talking about a 72 year old man with a collection of honorary positions who lost one; a man who thought his past laurels put him beyond question, and is now shocked that having a Nobel does not mean that he can say stupid things and be instantly forgiven. Talk to me when his grants, awarded for promised competencies in the lab, are retracted because he demonstrated social incompetence. These honorary positions are awarded specifically because the recipient is thought to add luster to the granting university. When the recipient does the opposite, it’s only fair that they be removed.
Are there researchers who don’t think twice before doing public lectures or media interviews? Then they shouldn’t be doing them.
If you’re concerned about science communication, then the harm was done when a prominent scientist stepped up to a microphone and suggested that women are too emotional and ought to be segregated into women-only labs.
Will other universities and scientific societies respond differently?
If Hunt worked for a U.S. university, I’m fairly certain he would have retained his position. The school may have expressed disagreement, but it would likely have stood up for academic freedom. Remember when Columbia University stood up for Dr. Oz after a group of doctors from across the country tried to get him fired for things he said?
I have academic freedom, too, but that doesn’t mean I am free of all possible consequences. I have a contract. As long as I do my job in the lab and classroom, I won’t be fired for expressing controversial opinions. I was not hired in a public relations move, but instead because I was considered a good teacher. So, yeah, if I don’t do my job, I’m out.
Hunt’s appointment at UCL was an honorary position — it actually was a PR appointment. His job was to be an ambassador for science and higher education, and he failed. I also suspect that there wasn’t a contract, or much of one, that granted him tenure as an honorary professor.
So when I speak out against religion in my private life, my university would have a tough time trying to fire me for that — that’s what academic freedom is all about, protecting the right of professors to speak their mind. If I’d had an honorary appointment at Liberty University — they’d been really thrilled with my work on grasshopper embryos 20 years ago — it would not infringe on my academic freedom if they retracted my non-paying title.
I don’t buy any of these arguments. What I see is a guy who did great work, was a competent scientist, who was lucky, hardworking, and privileged enough to win one of the highest honors you can be granted in science, who is now complaining that he’s being abused because people don’t like his hopelessly outdated and harmful ideas about women, or more charitably, that he’s an idiot when he gets in front of a microphone.
He was wrong. He couldn’t possibly stack up enough Nobels to change that simple fact.
Deborah Blum, who was at the conference, summarizes her meeting with Hunt. Yeah, he meant it.
You know, I don’t have a reputation for diplomacy or tact, but even I would not attend a Women’s Science and Technology Association meeting and babble about how women are weepy and difficult in the lab.
Michael Eisen says a lot of the same things I did.
1. You fucking live here
2. You fucking live here
3. You fucking live here
4. You fucking live here
5. You fucking live here
Rihanna Partying at Esquelita Club, NYC - May 31st
the front of her dress says “you will never own me”
the back says “i will never fear you”
June and Jennifer Gibbons (The Silent Twins)
June and Jennifer were identical twins who were born in Wales. They earned the name “The Silent Twins” since they would only talk to each other. Attempts to separate them resulted in the twins becoming catatonic and overly withdrawn.
They were both very creative and each of them ended up writing numerous novels. They ended up turning to crime for creative inspiration. The girls committed a number of crimes including arson, which led to their being committed to Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security mental health hospital. There they remained for 14 years.
While they were at Broadmoor they began to discuss how one of them needed to die for the other to live on. Jennifer decided to be the sacrifice. After Jennifer’s death, June began to speak to other people. In an interview she said
‘I’m free at last, liberated, and at last Jennifer has given up her life for me.’“
Race is a complex topic. And this story shows just how complicated it can get when you're Black and Latina.
JURASSIC WORLD
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