Sansa likes to back up into my mom to get her butt fluffed. There’s a lot of butt to be fluffed, frankly.
In 16 “undisclosed locations” across northern Los Angeles, digital eyes watch the public. These aren’t ordinary police-surveillance cameras; these cameras are looking at your face. Using facial-recognition software, the cameras can recognize individuals from up to 600 feet away. The faces they collect are then compared, in real-time, against “hot lists” of people suspected of gang activity or having an open arrest warrant.
Considering arrest and incarceration rates across L.A., chances are high that those hot lists disproportionately implicate African Americans. And recent research suggests that the algorithms behind facial-recognition technology may perform worse on precisely this demographic. Facial-recognition systems are more likely either to misidentify or fail to identify African Americans than other races, errors that could result in innocent citizens being marked as suspects in crimes. And though this technology is being rolled out by law enforcement across the country, little is being done to explore—or correct—for the bias.
I love a good fabulist, so I found this INCREDIBLY detailed look at a woman who’s been cheating in triathlons to be utterly fascinating and damning (it does seem odd to devote so much space to a relatively unimportant athlete, but she’s also a serial cheater and thems the breaks):
The winners were announced: Julie Miller first, Susanne Davis second. “She didn’t come down and shake our hands,” Davis said, referring to Miller. “In my entire 20 years of racing, I’ve never had that happen. That’s when I looked at her and said: ‘Gosh, I didn’t see you. Where did you pass me?’ ”
Miller replied that she had been easily recognizable in her bright green socks and then all but ran off the awards stage, Davis said, telling Davis that she would see her at the world championships in Kona, Hawaii.
Davis compared notes with the third- and fourth-place finishers. They, too, were mystified. They had not seen Miller on the course, either.
Reform Jews are getting it done:
At its biennial meeting in Orlando, Fla., members of the Union for Reform Judaism approved the resolution that calls for their congregations and children’s camps to have gender-neutral bathrooms and encourages gender-neutral language. The resolution, which passed on a voice vote, also calls for religious school staffers to receive training on gender issues and urges members to lobby governments on behalf of the transgender community.
it’s all about the money / money / money:
Laurence Olivier, Inchon
How did Laurence Olivier, the finest actor of his generation, end up starring in Inchon, a war movie funded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon that’s widely regarded as one of the worst films of all time? We don’t have to guess, as Olivier gave a very candid answer in an interview on the film’s set. “People ask me why I’m playing in this picture,” he explained. “The answer is simple. Money, dear boy.” The 73-year-old Olivier, who was paid $1 million (delivered by helicopter) to play Douglas MacArthur in the film, compared himself to a vintage wine: “You have to drink me quickly before I turn sour. I’m almost used up now and I can feel the end coming.” With the void approaching, the only thing that mattered was making as much money for his family as possible. “Nothing is beneath me if it pays well,” he concluded. “I’ve earned the right to damn well grab whatever I can in the time I’ve got left.” Olivier would live another eight years, taking 15 more screen roles; his answer went on to inspire an entire TV Tropes page.
I honestly do not know why anyone would bother writing this book?:
But Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings, judging from early reviews, is most interested in exploring potential ambiguities of their relationship. The book wonders: Did Hemings perhaps enjoy it? To what extent was she complicit?
According to Kirkus, in this novel Hemings enthusiastically consents to the relationship: “And so, when some half hour after Sally Hemings arrives late at the upstairs parlor, and Thomas Jefferson confesses breathlessly that he would very much like to lie with her as a man lies with his wife … she whispers that she would like that, too. …”
NPR quotes a passage in which she whispers ecstatically to Jefferson, “I want us always to be as we are here … where we are only our eyes, our hands, those parts of us made for each other by nature, where our only words are the ones we whisper in the little caves we make between pillow, cheek and lips.”
carly my love:
Our VP of compliance emailed and my direct supervisor and me (we’re in Human Resources) to say that the CFO’s son is going to do an internship with her (the CFO). He will be doing financial auditing on behalf of compliance. She stated in her email that she didn’t think it was a conflict of interest. She also said we should amend our conflict of interest policy because it currently says that as a member of the executive team, the CFO cannot hire a relative. Also, despite the fact that we have never had a paid intern before, she said that the CFO/mom is giving up part of her budget to compensate him $13 an hour. As a side note, this is a higher hourly rate than many of our entry-level employees. She then asked us to let her know if we had any issues with the arrangement.
I strongly felt it was unethical so I wrote back and highlighted my concerns: he would be auditing work done by his mom and her department, which could cause internal control issues and may compromise the accuracy of his findings; him being paid, especially out of her budget, could be seen as preferential since we’ve never paid an intern before (we have around 30 unpaid interns at any given time); and lastly, I felt the policy should stand because nepotism can cause several problems.
She came down to my office shortly after and told me I need to work on my communication as my email was very harsh, shocking, and unsettling. I had had a colleague of mine read my email before I sent it and she had helped me soften the language considerably so I definitely didn’t think it was “shocking” or “harsh.” She stated that she was only telling me that for my own growth and development. She then proceeded to explain the situation to me again and insist it was kosher and said she would proceed. My supervisor, who had previously agreed with me, completely backed down and said she should go ahead with the internship. Am I living in a twilight zone or is this really weird and unethical? And wasn’t her reaction weird and defensive?
Friend of The Toast Esmé Weijun Wang on what it means to be “the good schizophrenic”:
According to stereotype, schizophrenics are seen as some of the most dysfunctional members of society: We are homeless, we are inscrutable, and we are murderers. We are mass shooters like James Holmes, Jiverly Wong, Maj. Nidal Hasan, and Jared Loughner. Less headline-grabbing are people such as Elyn Saks, a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant who is a University of Southern California law professor, advocate, and author of a critically acclaimed memoir about life with schizophrenia. In a 2008 paper, Saks recalls, “When I was examined for readmission to Yale Law School, the psychiatrist suggested I might spend a year working at a low-level job, perhaps in fast food, which would allow me to consolidate my gains so that I could do better when I was readmitted.” The criteria for being able to return to a top-ranking law school, it seems, is being able to have a job, thus proving that you’ve returned to productivity — yet having schizophrenia is seen as canceling out the abilities that allowed someone like Saks to get into law school in the first place.
I am indeed terrified of getting sepsis in a hospital, so I guess it’s good to be aware of the symptoms (EMPHASIS IS MINE):
Until recently, the CDC failed to even mention sepsis in it’s A–Z index of medical terms. Then, following the tragic death of a 12-year-old boy named Rory Staunton, Rory’s parents successfully lobbied the CDC to add it. While the CDC’s new fact sheet is, indeed, largely factual, it would be hard to read it and other similar online resources without concluding that you need to run to the hospital every time you come down with a flu-like illness. For example, in response to “When Can You Get Sepsis?” the CDC explains: “Sepsis can occur to anyone, at any time, from any type of infection, and can affect any part of the body. It can occur even after a minor infection.” Additionally—in the sepsis acrostic, the I stands for “I feel like I might die.” (If you ever genuinely feel like you might die, please go to an emergency room immediately rather than consulting the internet.)
Picture a single tear rolling down my face, crushed by “Robert”‘s cruel jibes:
Link list addition: Baldur’s Gate under fire for “inclusion of a variety of characters in a fantasy world, including a powerful woman and a trans woman.”
http://www.polygon.com/2016/4/5/11371428/baldurs-…
Because how DARE you try to be diverse, video game.
Baldur’s Gate still exists?
Yup! Per the article, “An Enhanced Edition was released in 2012 by Beamdog. Siege of Dragonspear is a 30-hour expansion on that game.”
Man, I’ve been waiting for this expansion for so long! I’m super excited to play it! It sounds great.
I know, right? I’m like, yes please, I will take Baldur’s Gate awesomeness + inclusiveness, thank you.
ughhhh these dudes. I admit I haven’t been wild about the Beamdog additions to BG1 and BG2 (OK, this is maybe because some of those battles are so. damn. hard.), BUT I’m really excited to try Dragonspear with my mage 🙂
Don’t forget the part where they harassesd the writer off of Twitter. At least Beamdog seems to have her back for once.
I am delighted that their response to the whole GG faux-concern was to say that we see how having a trans character in a minor NPC role could be tokenizing, so in future we will include trans characters in more fully expanded roles.
“Jefferson was a rapist.”
“Yeah but but but what if she actually DID want to have sex with her 30-plus-years-older owner????”
“No he was a rapist.”
“Yeah but but but what if it wasn’t really rape because it was romantic? What if I dress it up in a lot of flowery language, does that make it OK???”
So many questions about this. How does one decide it’s a good idea to write/edit/publish this? Why are most of the reviews like “yeah it totally could have been a love story!”?
Soooo many questions. I can’t believe this didn’t get shut down at some point in the publishing process.
The one thing I agree with is that yes, it’s possible she had Stockholm Syndrome after a certain point. But that’s not romantic. At all.
Yeah, “she’s been abused and brainwashed until she is cool with it” is not really happy romance fun times. Which leads to another question, who thinks Stockholm Syndrome is romantic?
Fans of Beauty and the Beast?
BOOM.
Worse, I think. This version doesn’t seem to acknowledge that there was anything beastly about Jefferson’s behaviour.
it looks like the dividing line between this and like 75% of crappy mass market romance novels I’ve seen at the bookstore is that this time someone was dumb enough to make it about real people at the same time as some other people were dumb enough to print it
why are people pretending it’s an intellectual exercise, if you sign your book Stephen instead of Ellora Rosewhite or something does that just automatically get you Serious Literary Reviewers wrinkling their brows and stroking their beards over your colossal postmodern reimagining
Hey, let’s not unfairly drag romance novels into this shitshow. While yes, we could look at the romances of 40 years ago (Sweet Savage Love, etc) as legitimately awful relationships dressed up as TWU WUV, romances now? It’s the biggest-grossing genre in publishing, it’s almost entirely women-focused (women writers, women editors, women purchase them), and the rapey alpha hero trope is pretty much completely unacceptable at this point. When something does come out with a power imbalance like Jefferson/Hemings, it gets rightfully shredded (see the Nazi/Jewish prisoner romance that came out last year http://dearauthor.com/features/letters-of-opinion….
sry, my conception of the genre was kinda fixed around the days of dramatic reading horny werewolf stories with the other staff in the Borders breakroom
still, this seems more than a little familiar. maybe this guy couldn’t hack it in those circles anymore and hence
I bet you’re right that it’s getting treated as Intellectual in a way it wouldn’t be if the author was Stephanie, though.
Thank you!
OMG that sounds disturbingly like an infamous piece of fanfiction I remember being shredded all over the place in the early 2000s!
I interview erotic romance writers and the alpha trope is still alive and well. I have to be very careful to actively avoid getting ARCs and booking writers who do this. I had a very awkward situation once where a writer had a scene where her guy was stalking his love interest and it was soooo romantic and I had to voice my objection, but stay polite and still keep the interview going to fill the time slot.
Which isn’t to say there isn’t wonderful feminist romance out there. But alphas are still quite popular.
Unrelated, but how would one go about getting a job like yours?
Well, it’s more of a volunteer gig that I do for free books/movie screeners, etc. But look up your local university radio station and pitch them a show (or be known enough in a certain community that you’re asked when an existing show needs a host, which is what happened to me.)
“BUT WHAT IF SOMEHOW WE CAN FIND A REASON WHY IT WAS OK?” is literally someone’s response to like every rape ever tho
Exactly! There’s always someone (a man) saying, “What if these six totally improbable things happened to make it not a rape? Or twelve totally impossible things? You can’t prove they didn’t.”
“You can’t prove that they didn’t,” is the part that always gets me, that belief that if we didn’t personally witness everything that happened then we have no grounds for thinking that what happened was rape. Completely ridiculous; as if we’d say, “Well, sir, I wasn’t there, so I really can’t know that he burgled things from your house, can I? Maybe you invited him in and gave him some spontaneous gifts and then changed your mind.”
I wonder if that ‘you can’t know what REALLY happened’ is literally a hangover from the days where a woman’s testimony was considered to be half that of a man’s i.e. when the misogynist idea that all women are lying liars who can’t be trusted was actually written into law (and still is in some parts of the world, unfortunately)
It’s a handmaiden to “but what if she liked it?”, the point of which is to create a world where a woman’s “no” is emptied of meaning because her “yes” didn’t matter to begin with.
Of the hundreds of billions of couples that have had sex in the history of the world, why fantasize about this one? Why strain to make it OK?
This is where I’m at with it. “Why do I want this to be okay?” is a very good question to ask oneself periodically. This writer should have asked it every second of every day until they realized it was time to delete the document and step away from the computer.
Because the idea of a revered Founding Father being a rapist really, really upsets people, so they need to work harder to make sure that everybody knows it’s totally not true, you guys, it was a different time, they were super in love.
And it, like, shows how complex he was! No. No, it does not.
Yup, this. People are very protective of their legendary cultural heroes, especially when this stuff has been drilled into you in school since elementary school.
(I also think this type of thing gives validity to criticisms of Hamilton that focus on the way the show mostly glosses over race issues with the exception of occasional references to “slavery is bad, you guys” and the Sally Hemings line. I’m not sure I agree with the idea that the musical’s creators are obligated to portray historical figures in the most complete and nuanced way possible–it’s an artistic interpretation rather than a historical account, they are telling a specific story in a very streamlined way and diverting focus from stuff that isn’t crucial to that one narrative, the casting of POC as canonized white characters is a revolutionary act in itself, etc. etc. But you do come away from the musical with the impression of Thomas Jefferson as a lovable asshole who swans around in velvet suits, and that can be equally hard to reconcile with the reality of Jefferson as a slaveowner.)
I dunno, I feel like Jefferson is already the only person who takes any criticism for his slaveowning in the musical, and that criticism is very direct. I don’t think the show would be morally strengthened by making Jefferson less flashy and charismatic–it’s powerful to have him bragging about the Declaration of Independence in the same scene where Hamilton yells at him about his slaves, to have his accomplishments forced to share space with his wrongdoing like that. There’s a balloon-popping effect you wouldn’t get if the balloon weren’t inflated in the first place.
What I would have liked more about was Washington’s slaves, and to some extent Madison’s and the Schuyler family’s. Especially Washington, though.
That’s true. I agree that it wouldn’t help to make him less charismatic–I think maybe where I’m coming down is that the musical, as an overall piece of work, doesn’t try to engage much with the full implications/consequences of slavery, and it probably isn’t equipped to. They can gesture toward it, and do, but fully tackling that issue would probably make it into a fundamentally different piece.
Yeah, it’s hard. It’s such a huge topic, and it didn’t get anywhere near resolved in Hamilton’s lifetime. Somewhat ironically, I think the slavery issue is treated more thoroughly in 1776, even though Jefferson is more of a good guy there.
Exactly–I don’t think there’s anything in Hamilton as outspoken about slavery as the “Molasses to Rum to Slaves” song in 1776! And it bothers me that the only character who’s seen as morally tainted by slavery in Hamilton is the one who was already the antagonist, whereas Washington is just saintly…
So, I do sometimes think about Jefferson and Hemings and what actual affection may have existed between them. Except, I wonder about that from her perspective, because Stockholm Syndrome is weird and complicated. Plus, from what I know of their history, they had actual conversations about his work, and having her opinion heard by a man who was legit a genius could have made her feel not-shitty. And what do those not-shitty feelings mean when you’re feeling that way about the monster slave owner who is raping you?
I guess I’m really interested in their story in the sense that I’m really interested in her story and pissed that we’ll never really hear it from her.
Thing is, even if she (hypothetically!) on some level wanted it, IT WOULD STILL BE WRONG ON HIS PART. I mean seriously, this stuff isn’t hard. If someone owns you, there really can’t be any meaningful consent.
If someone owns you, he also doesn’t love you, regardless of what he tells himself at night.
What do you bet these apologist dudes would flip their lids were they to discover their daughters were into consentual BDSM with otherwise egalitarian same-aged partners?
Exactly. If “no” isn’t an option, “yes” will always be suspect.
Yeah, if you have every opportunity to leave and you don’t, you’re probably there because you want to be.
The concept that I sometimes feel gets shafted in consent discussions is that if a person is unable to refuse, their consent has no meaning.
Could Sally Hemings have safely and meaningfully refused to have sex with Thomas Jefferson? Nope. So still rape.
Oh my god, they’re still commenting on the white men books article? Someone should tell Robert about this thing in comedy called timing.
Robert is obviously unwilling to sacrifice to the “dread god Deadline”. He has been composing this comment since the article was published
*enthusiastic applause*
It would require us to feel empathy for his misfortune, though, and that cupboard is bare, fellas.
There was a someone on the “What Was Your First Username?” piece who had a comment posted on her LiveJournal years later because a guy needed to correct her on DC comics lore.
Ugh I was yelling about it on Twitter but like UGGGHHHHHH that Jefferson book makes me so mad and grossed out like WHAT EVEN was anyone’s plan?
On the bright side, I’ve been listening to Tegan and Sara’s “Boyfriend” on repeat all morning, so I guess everything evens out in the end. (??)
I’ve been really enjoying the Jefferson take-down that’s been happening in the last few years,* so I soothe myself with the knowledge that this dumb book happened now when we can all take this opportunity to make explicit just how awful he was, rather than years ago when it would have gone by pretty much unquestioned in the mainstream.
*my fave example: the scorching article in The Smithsonian http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-si… , well, scorching for The Smithsonian.
Has anyone been following the stories about Gay Talese? I thought I was knowledgeabe about narrative nonfiction, and I never heard of the guy. But maybe that’s with good reason, given that I’ve seen two stories about him now in the Washington Post: one that he’s a grotty sexist boogerperson and another about his supposedly nonfiction book about a motel owner who spied on his guests for years and maybe witnessed a murder that he maybe also caused.
I’m ready to chalk it all up to another reason to stick with women authors and never stay at motels, but am I out of the loop on this one? Who’s got the scoop?
Eh. If you like Frank Sinatra, read “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold”, then you can be done with him forever.
Thanks. I’ve never really been into Sinatra either, which maybe explains why I was unfamiliar? (That or I spend most of my time living under a rock.)
It’s a pretty good read even if you don’t like Frank Sinatra, but this is life and there are plenty of things to read in it.
“grotty sexist boogerperson” is my new go-to insult.
You might have heard of his article “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which is probably the most famous celebrity profile of the twentieth century. Other than that I’m not really familiar with Talese.
Have you read the New Yorker piece? Truly disturbing, and Talese’s complicity fails every journalistic ethic in the book. I can’t believe they published it.
No, I haven’t. I read a WaPo article about the piece, and it raised enough flags to give me pause, on top of the fact that it sounds like a gross story in the first place. So… maybe I’ll get to it to satisfy any remaining morbid curiosity, but also I have a busy couple days coming up?
I consider it a victory when Twitter blows up about some dude saying women can’t/don’t do X and I can just say “Who?”
Most of what I know about 70s era pop culture I learned from reading my dad’s Doonesbury collections from that time, and there is a good chunk of strips satirizing Talese as an arrogant asshole who uses his writing to brag about his sexual prowess, so this didn’t surprise me at all (other than not being aware he was still alive).
And he is married to Nan Talese, who publishes my favorite feminist authors, but love is a mystery and life is a rich tapestry and I don’t have to pay attention to this man
This is how I have heard of him, too!
Maybe it’s your age. I’m 50 and he was really all that for people in my parents generation. Quite an icon.
And a douchebag. Totally a douchebag.
I’d heard the name over the years and had no idea until last week that it was a man. Oops.
Just finished the New Yorker article and came here to see if anyone was discussing it, since I haven’t read anything else about it. Glad the commentary is leaning toward outrage, since it seems clear to me that Gay Talese doesn’t understand journalistic ethics. Biggest question mark for me: why did two different women agree to marry the creepy motel owner?
That is one of the parts straining credibility, truly. He comes out and says that the facts don’t line up, making Foos the unreliable source – fact checking shows he bought the motel in 1979 (three full years after he started his “journal”) – but never identifies himself as potentially unreliable. (The Slate article pointed this out.) I finally read the full New Yorker article yesterday after having had it on my short list for a couple days, and last week’s link roundup commenter made a salient point that (by the logic of both Talese and Foos) the supposed murder is the only real crime, when it is merely casually dropped that he witnessed multiple rapes over the years. They waited to publish until after the statute of limitations on murder? And yet Talese never fully settles the issue of his OWN motives, when his whole story rests on his supposed non-intention of violating the confidentiality agreement. The whole thing is pretty nauseating. He just wants free publicity to sell his book. Psst, world, don’t give him your money.
Wait, I thought murder was one of those crimes that didn’t have a statute of limitations?
Ah, yes, and when he thought about calling the cops, he said to himself, it won’t help her (being dead and all). Secure in my self-justification, I’ll just keep the rest of this moral ground unexplored.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Yeesh!
Thank you for summarizing all this, because now I don’t even need to give the New Yorker the page click. I’m all for reading true crime stuff, but I much prefer it when the “journalist” isn’t as scuzzy as the person they’re writing about.
I too am amazed that he found two people willing to marry him and keep his surveillance motel secrets. How does that initial conversation go down, and what was his plan if the reaction was “holy shit, I am calling the police”?
Grotty sexist boogerperson is right, yo.
I like the response to his inability to name an influential writer who is simultaneously a woman. I like that other writers are taking him to task on it via twitter, the guardian, etc…
And for the whiners who will inevitably start in with “Stop attacking Gay Talese!” I can’t wait to tell them “It’s about ethics in journalism.”
I mean, I found that motel article fascinating, but in a jaw-dropping HOW IS THIS REAL way, not in a “yes good job” way. Like, neither the motel owner nor Talese comes off as a remotely good or sympathetic person.
I know nothing about this person except that he has a hilarious name and sounds like a terrible human.
THAT TRIATHLON ARTICLE. OMG.
Kip Litton, who they mentioned in the article as another serial marathon cheater, pulled one of his first scams at my hometown marathon and still, no one can figure out how he did it. It’s a flat, fairly straight, out-and-back course with spectators and bike leaders and the works. The marathon course overlaps with the half marathon and 10K courses. There are people everywhere. Like… someone should have literally seen it happen.
Based on that paragraph in the article, Kip Litton sounds like such a character! I would love to know how he pulled it off in the race you describe.
It’s so bizarre. We’re a small town, and the running community is tight-knit, and I know basically all the organizers of the race. They’ve discussed it at length and they can’t figure it out to the point where they couldn’t actually disqualify him. Like, they know he cheated, for sure, but they can’t prove it enough to remove him from results. He’s still showing 21st place for the 2009 Bayshore Marathon.
The article linked in that paragraph is well worth reading. The level of effort Litton put into cheating is just bananas. Running and training for marathons is hard enough, I can’t imagine trying to cheat. I,too, would love to know how he did it.
Here’s the definitive piece on Litton, I think: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/06/mara…
(it’s New Yorker so you might get paywalled)
Re-reading it right now. Absolutely bonkers.
That’s a great article, and near the end it gets to the heart of the matter: someone who’s both dogged by persistent and irrational feelings of inadequacy (“His most enduring impression was of feeling daunted by the ambitions of his dorm neighbors. ‘Just hanging around those people, I felt like if I wasn’t going to be a neurosurgeon I would be a complete failure,’ he said. ‘I would be the least successful person—I probably still am the least successful person—who lived on my hall. So that inspired me to do something more with my life.'” If you’re not a neurosurgeon, you’re nothing? Really?) and also blandly self-deceptive; I wouldn’t say that everyone who’s been part of Amway is a con artist or a cheater, but being as successful as he claims to be (he could be lying about that, as well) seems to require a certain, ah, flexible relationship with the truth.
Man, I wish I had the confidence to cheat so boldly.
I’m so glad I read Link Roundup so avidly – i’m pretty sure she linked to the Litton story, like, a year ago, and I am just going to put myself solidly in the category of “gimme allllllllllll the stories about cheating in sports I will never play.” *grabby hands*
I saw a facebook post the other night blaming Jake Llyod’s schizophrenia on the Star Wars backlash. I actually yelled, that’s not how any of this works, at my screen.
My E-mail provider had a headline this morning that said something along the lines of “What happened to the once cute former child star?”, implying that he was somehow responsible for his illness/”the turn his life took”. It seems to be gone now, but I was so angry.
Ooof. Discussed Jake Lloyd in a large group recently, and it was handled pretty well by the entire group. A sort of— “not his fault, he did find as a child actor, the material he was given was just terrible, people shouldn’t be pissed at him, the poor kid!” followed by “didn’t he… die of an overdose?” followed by “no, that was just a hoax, but… he’s not having an easy time of it recently” followed by “poor guy. i hope life is easier for him, he didn’t deserve what he got, and it couldn’t have helped anything”.
The whole thing– focusing more about how geeks treat other geeks, and the ways in which the community has screwed up, rather than focusing on the schadenfreude of one child actor’s life being difficult at times, but also not making weird claims about mental illness in the process— made me really happy about spending time with that group of people.
(in fact, based on an unrelated exchange, it wouldn’t surprise me if one of the leaders and tone-setters of that particular discussion was a Toastie, but I didn’t get a chance to ask her– SHW, you around?)
That’s good to hear. One thing that I’ve never liked about Trek fandom was how some fans persisted in acting as if Wil Wheaton were responsible for how Wesley Crusher was written. (Wil, at least, has managed to mostly redeem himself in the eyes of geekdom in general.)
YES.
There are plenty of reasons to like Wil Wheaton, and plenty of reasons to dislike him, and exactly none of them are the way Wesley Crusher was written.
Oh gosh, I didn’t even know about his situation. That’s seriously tragic. 🙁
fuh-RIENDS pleease enjoy with me laughing at the nerd who wrote this book, and the nerd who wrote a REVIEW of this book, all lamenting where all the Tough Manly Male Authors Who Want to Write Books About Boning Teenagers have gonnnnnne
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/08/fashion/mens-st…
this goofy-ass John Turturro-looking nerd hahahahaha
Ever considered that no one wants the male-centric literary sex novel revived, John Colaptino? Ever consider that it should REMAIN DEAD FOREVER.
“Literally every publisher I submitted it to rejected it, so I did, however briefly, consider the possibility that I was wrong, but…no. No, impossible.”
It’s probably this overlong trudge of a book strung together out of noxious or dull sex scenes that are intended to reflect on the true emptiness of life and the squalid facts of human existence etc etc. “I rolled off her, and we lay side by side without touching. Already the effort expended on the act did not seem worth it; I could only concentrate on the smell of our sweat, the mole that sat at the corner of her mouth like misplaced punctuation. She asked me how I felt and I pretended to have fallen asleep.”
You know the kind. At this point it would be revelatory if anyone wrote literary fiction where the characters actually enjoyed their sex lives.
impossible; men who have enjoyable sex lives don’t become writers in the first place
O, snap!
Ever consider that enough people will read a male-centric literary sex novel, but yours is not good. And the publishers were trying to let you down gently. The arrogance he shows it mind boggling. Maybe you’re just not a good writer! Plenty of other books just like yours have been published!
“After all, Chloe is 18 when she succeeds in her attempt to sleep with the man who mistakenly believes she is his daughter”
Sooooo, borderline pedophilia AND incest? What’s not to love? *facepalm*
And he was expecting the publishers to get into a bidding war over it! Oh, dear.
Holy goddamn, this guy is Actual Barton Fink. Can someone get John Goodman to go yell “You. Don’t. LISTEN!” at him?
He’s also Noah Solloway from The Affair, I’m pretty sure. Wait until he beats up an adorable kid from Williams College for panning it as trash.
“But What About My Boner? The world needs another story about a white man who gets boners looking at attractive young women!!!! This is dangerous untrodden ground!!!! No one has told this story before!!!! Who will expose this amazing aspect of society????”
Ahahhahahahah it just cracks me up that White Male Authors *still* believe this subject matter is somehow trangressive. It’s practically drawing-room fare at this rate, dudes.
I love the but where they are like “exploring male sexuality has gone out of fashion”. Uh… I love that you think that exploring male sexuality was, like, a fad, and not what Literature was about all of these years? ’cause, like, that tradition in no way goes back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, nope nope. Only Miller. And Nabokov. And now this dude.
Protip, duders – “male sexuality” doesn’t have to be synonymous with “creepy sexuality”.
yeah there is something super-telling about the fact that a guy is like, “where are the books about male sexuality” and one of his go-to’s is a pedophile rapist.
The Lolita test* is a powerful thing.
*The Lolita test being whether someone (usually a man) sympathises with Humbert Humbert in some way/takes the line ‘She seduced me’ at face value/thinks that Lolita is an exploration of ‘male sexuality’ rather than a book about a paedophile rapist/etc. As discussed by me a few times in the comments here because dudes won’t stop being creepy about Lolita.
A thing that always seems interesting to me is the idea of Vladimir Nabokov finishing his book and then sending it out and then reading the reviews as they come in. “A feverish love story.” “Novel of love and obsession.” “Exploring male sexuality.” His face slowly contorts with horror.
And all the book covers showing sexualised little girls which he specified should NEVER be on the cover of Lolita :/
I imagine this must be like a nightmare, like if Jonathan Swift woke up one morning to find out that the British Parliament had read “A Modest Proposal” and then passed a law legalizing baby cannibalism.
“Thank you Mr Swift for his suggestions to decrease the surplus population”
If The Prince really is political satire Machiavelli must be so sad somewhere.
I wish his vengeful ghost would come back and Ring-style hunt all these dudes.
I read Lolita in a Great Books group years ago, and one line of argument put forth by a couple of dudes was, “It was gross, and then Nabokov revealed that the girl was kind of into it, and then it was OK!”
They just couldn’t understand the rest of us trying to explain how, no, Humbert Humbert was still fucking horrible and a pedophile.
Whenever men trot out that argument it’s like, either you are clueless and being ignorant and annoying or you would totally bang a 12 year old if she showed some degree of sexual attraction to you.
That is just so worrying. How many seemingly normal men are walking around holding these awful views? what is wrong with men aaaagh.
THIS IS THE MOST UNRELIABLE NARRATOR IN THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE YOU DUMB FUCKS. Is what I would have said.
I definitely left their full of rage, as did several other people.
I will say that this was the point at which I checked out of the group. This same group had complained that reading Hugo’s Les Miserables was “too long (we read it over 2 months, not just 1), and that Philip K. Dick’s Valis was “too weird.” So I had kind of begun to hate them anyway.
This was also done in the Adrian Lyne movie version. The morning after her first rape in the book, Lolita is crying, screaming, and trying to get away at the gas station. It underlines the difference between Humbert’s delusions and reality. In the movie, they changed her to laughing and teasing because they were worried it would make Humbert too unsympathetic.
Am I misremembering or did that happen a while after the rape, because Humbert didn’t tell her that her mother was dead at first? Not until he realized he could swing it to his advantage, naturally.
I am possibly also misremembering. I think it was after the rape but before the mom’s dead revelation. She’s threatening to report him as a rapist. Played in the movie but not the book as humorously teasing. He then tells her that her mother is dead in order to control her.
Yeah, I remember Jeremy Irons making some comment about how the drama of the book is that he’s besotted with this ‘awful’ girl who’s ‘cheap’ with ‘bad skin’ etc. and how in contrast, Dominique Swain is ‘this stupendous little kitten’. Which makes it creepier how the film was such a passion project for him, especially considering his odd comments about sex since.
Yes! That stopped me, too–the conflation of consensual sex with pedophilia and then the announcement “It was all up for grabs, and how they grabbed it.”
Wow, dude, you are saying a LOT more about yourself than maybe you want to? But ok good, because now you are on my (admittedly long) list of Gross Men To Be Avoided.
Ah yes, how tentative these modern times that pedophilia is not celebrated! Lament these tentative times! Oh, to hear the lamentations of the men! Now please begin tearing your hair and rending your clothes and piling ashes on your heads, ye weeping men. I will get the popcorn.
can you IMAGINE men feeling GUILT over their history of raping teens? HOW HAS THE WORLD FALLEN
So much ash-piling, at the foot of the Altar of Thwarted Boners
It is part of the Noviates’ duties to regularly sweep the Altar of Thwarted Boners and gather those ashes, and it is the joy of the Priestesses of the Temple of Male Frustration to then redistribute the ashes to incoming male supplicants.
But it is in the opulent quarters behind the Altar where we hold our bacchanalian celebrations that no man ever sees.
*chef kissing fingers emoji*
“Reasons I Would Make An Excellent Priestesses of the Temple of Male Frustration And You Should Consider Me For The Position”
Also, Cleland. Dude. Do not use Cleland as your literary-smut hero. He literally wrote Fanny Hill TO GET OUT OF JAIL. Basically you’ve just said you’re aspiring to the 18th c version of Danielle Steel. Which, lest we forget, is ok only because a) dude and b) HISTORY.
Also. You are not Rabelais. Staaaaaaaaaaaahp. Please.
Seriously, don’t use Cleland. Do you want to start a discussion about 18th c novels & rape culture? Because we can start that discussion, sir.
OMG, is he seriously saying, in the self same interview that a) more smut needs to be written and b) he cannot write it? WHAT EVEN IS THIS BOOK FOR THEN?
THAT WAS MY FAVOURITE PART
By men, about men, for men. The article, the subject, the author. I don’t know about you all, but I don’t have enough of that in my life.
It is excellent fuel for righteous rage-mockery. Which is a thing I thrive on.
Oh, I lie awake at night wondering why newspapers don’t publish more male-driven content.
“For all the unease it caused publishers, “Undone” may not have much to offer in the way of arousal. The dramatic scene between Chloe and the man she dupes into a faux-incestuous liaison lasts little more than a page, and the language throughout is curiously chaste. Roth, Mailer and Updike were far more graphic in their descriptions decades ago. So why not be explicit in 2016?”
But you guuuuuuuuuuuuys, the reviewer needs more smut in his life! Won’t someone please help him and show him the internet?????
I honestly just took that part of the review as, “Literature has so little explicit sex these days, and I define literature primarily by ‘not part of the romance genre.'”
Right, because he doesn’t want his hetero sex tainted with GIRL COOTIES, aka “female perspective”.
To quote, “Publishers of literary fiction, perhaps afraid to alienate their biggest customers — women, who read more than men — aren’t exactly rushing to release the next male-written sexually provocative novel. That space would seem to belong to women” and they got their cooties all over everything! Guh-ross!
I think the fact that he wrote the book is maybe less extraordinary — a lot of dumb books get written, and somehow even more get published — than this amazing reivew. Like, how can we live at this point in history, when so much has been written about the Male Literary Canon, that a guy can just sit down and write a review like this without irony?
I mean. Then said man would have to STFU for a second and assimilate knowledge that comes from external sources. But, a listening man is not a real man, a man’s man, and OBVIOUSLY no one but a Real Man could possibly appreciate the glory that is the revival of gross dudes appreciating themselves, and therefore would be entirely unqualified to write this review. So. Catch-22 i guess?
I feel like we can blame Jonathan Franzen for this. But I feel that way about a lot of stuff like this.
I think a good rule of thumb is just a categorical percentage of blame assigned to Jonathan Franzen at all times.
“Revives” is an interesting way to put it. “There once was a time when stories about men were great, and great male authors took delight in writing them… that time is no longer, except in the work of our hero. The insipid characters of literary workshops are not his characters, no feeble workshop creation his!”
“Like a fish, or a shark, or a strong aquatic metaphor, he swims against the current”
I feel like it’s more like “resuscitates even though the patient signed a DNR” than “revives.”
^ ^ this times seventy billion
Yep, A+ analogy right there.
The poor man. All the feminists have come in the night and stolen his boner.
It’s what we dooooooooooooooo
Wrote his graduate school thesis on Nabokov wow how brave to write about old dudes fucking teenagers, so edgy, so new, this has never been done before
So edgy. Much pedophile.
“who wrote his graduate school thesis on Nabokov” YOU DON’T SAY
And the publishing house is called “Soft Skull”? Is this an Onion piece?
they published Sheila Callaghan’s play collection which is pretty good, but there’s an awful lot of dudes on their list, which doesn’t speak to their credit
The sarcasm of the NY magazine response to this dude was perfect. http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/04/John-Colapinto-ha…
You’re right, that is perfection ^_^
Beautiful.
But she’s 18, technically, when the sex act happens, so it’s FINE.
(At least, that was the point in the review where I would have blacked out had I been playing a White Dude Literature drinking game.)
“Guys it’s LEGAL what is the problem here”
“uh, my friend, if you were worried that the problem we had was with the legality of your teen-boning novel then I am not sure you understand anything in the world at all”
You can pretty easily imagine how, in revising his first draft, he crossed out “16” and put in “18” and thought, “There, now nothing here is problematic!”
Uhm, is there a White Dude Literary Drinking Game? And if not can we make one? Because I am not drunk enough lately, i guess?
brb, composing drinking game bingo sheets for Cliterature, a White Dude Revival; please watch this space and propose ground rules should you wish to participate.
Potential squares: justification of adultery by blaming one or more female partners, alcohol abuse depicted as sexy.
Free space: self-destructive behavior idealized as The Only Way to Be Something Other than Sheeple.
“Sex with someone he knows he isn’t supposed to have sex with, but he feels super guilty about it so it’s okay.”
The only lady character is described as a “distraction” the the protagonist’s otherwise all-consuming work. She also just happens to be sexually liberated and ALSO smokin’ hot.
AKA the one song in the entirety of “Hamilton” that I just can’t get into.
Ah, so many of these bingo squares make me feel as though I am watching Mad Men again. Nostalgia: it’s delicate but potent.
yessss
– use of the word “coed”
– female partner has abortion; abortion scene depicted as entirely about the dude’s feelings and/or a statement on Society These Days (why not both? two drinks!)
– non graphic sex but graphic description of losing one’s boner
– she orgasms due to something extremely unlikely, anatomically, to make that happen
– he reads to her from some other white male canon book
– she either starts out or ends up dating a woman (two drinks if the word “bisexual” is outside the author’s vocabulary!)
She is his undergraduate student, and she is brilliant, unlike all the other girls. Also, she wears low-cut tops.
there’s got to be an automatic bonus square just for Tits
or like a bonus drink per every 5 poetic analogies for tits so the author doesn’t have to come out and say “she had nice tits”
ohhh and also a bonus drink for the size/shape of said body parts being a personality trait
It is a proven fact that the lower an undergraduate girl’s top, the more brilliant she is. Because women actually carry their brains in their boobs.
You can tell she’s brilliant cause she’s able to see how brilliant the important man is and be attracted to him in spite of his less-than-stellar looks, unlike all those other not-brilliant coeds.
No.4 is perfect! I remember reading Henry Miller when I was younger and stupider (forgive me, goddesses) and there’s a scene where he’s having very basic piv sex with a woman in the back of a cab, and he says ‘she had three or four orgasms’ and I was like LOL NO SHE DID NOT
-Female love interest is enigmatic.
-Male character contemplates his own mortality by cataloging the ways in which his body shows signs of physical aging. Take an extra drink if this is accompanied by a contrasting description of the female love interest’s youthful attractiveness.
-Male character has a stiff drink in order to avoid engaging with his feelings.
-Male character makes Art.
-Male character is sad about not being able to make Art.
-Male character compares self to character from western literary canon.
-Male character’s penis is described as if it is a character with desires and/or autonomy of its own. If it has its own name or oddly specific euphemism, finish your drink.
Also, that DFW essay from 1997? Still relevant.
-Male character is in therapy
–at the insistence of his wife or employer
–He’s ashamed of going and implies that anyone would be
–The therapist is a woman of a certain age
—but she’s oddly attractive
—they end up having sex
–Every therapy scene is like a caricature that hasn’t been updated since 1970
–The therapist gossips about his secrets with her husband but never reports him for rape
—Until they have sex and then break it off, then she does it for revenge
god damn this stuff writes itself, where’s my publication deal
At this rate, we’ll all be blacking out by Chapter Two.
Well, at least that way we won’t have to remember the experience of reading it.
I thought that was the point?
This game is the best!
Yes. Yes. Forget Cards Against Humanity; Cliterature is the next Hot Thing We Never Knew We Always Needed.
Not to mention “Hot Thing We Never Knew We Always Needed” would be a great subtitle for pretty much the entire genre. ETA by “great” I mean “appropriately pathetic” just in case anyone was wondering.
I would still play it 😉
Going off a comment already made above–unfulfilling sex symbolizing the emptiness of modern life.
A sentence beginning, “Once, women like her would have…”
Aah! WHY is there a conspiracy to silence men’s really important men feelings about sexy 18 year old girls who want to sleep with older men? Thank goodness one lone man stands, brave enough to expose and explore the dangerous feelings of lust and faux-incest that the rest of the world just can’t handle. How daring, to “play the role of a middle-aged male sexual provocateur in an era of safe spaces and trigger warnings.” Speak truth to that power, 57-year-old author! Celebrate male heterosexuality, for god knows there are so few spaces to do so!
yeah god could you imagine the horror if people believed that the idea of nubile 18-year-old girls wanting to fuck middle-aged John Turturro-looking-ass writers was a MYTH?
How terribly *dangerous* it is for him to speak his forbidden truth. People all over the world are silenced and attacked and even killed for speaking their truth, but of course *he’s* the brave one….
“play the role of a middle-aged male sexual provocateur in an era of safe spaces and trigger warnings.”
He actually wrote those words? How embarrassing for him.
How DARE he bring Nabokov into this
a REAL MAN dares anything when boning teens is on the line
The same thing applies to this guy as does to all his ilk – the world does not *need* to hear about your boner. Your boner is not actually important in and of itself. There is absolutely no need to tell the world about your boners, and the things that give you boners. That is not censorship, because having a boner and talking about having a boner are not the same thing. There is no god-given imperative on you to ‘just be honest’ about these things. Most people do not care about (a) your boner and (b) why you get boners. Nobody is waiting with baited breath to hear about your boner. Your boner is your own business. It’s just one of many millions of boners. It is not important. Keep your boner to yourself.
But why even are internet comments, then? My adoring public, my oppressed enthusiasts, the SILENCED MEN!
I literally can’t even finish that review, I got to the point where Fifty Shades is being brought in as an example of woman-centered literary erotica and my brain shut down entirely
I appreciate 50 because it has given freedom to people to own their desires where perhaps they may not have felt able to before, but there is nothing literary about a book that can’t tell the difference in how to drive to Seattle from Vancouver, WA as opposed to Vancouver, CA.
(Ana gets on 5 heading “south towards Portland” to drive from Vancouver, WA, to Seattle. This is the wrong direction.)
I love that THAT is the problem that you have with the book ♥
There is a fair amount of distance between the Washingtonian Vancouver and the Canadian Vancouver and I take offense at this failure of geography!
O yes, I am not suggesting that it is not an egregious error. But honestly, this is coming from someone who apparently knows how to use a keyboard, but not ctrl+v, so the bar is set preeeeeeeety low in my world.
Publishers of literary fiction, perhaps afraid to alienate their biggest customers — women, who read more than men — aren’t exactly rushing to release the next male-written sexually provocative novel.
Yup, the problem here is that women have leverage their disproportionate buying power to effectively censor the voices of men who just want to write about fucking nubile teenage girls. Bitches, man.
I love that this is somehow unfair, and yet the jerks who would whine about this are the self-same jerks that want to “let the market decide” about whether or not other things – like fair wages and time off – are feasible.
But see, that’s about people voting with their wallets. This is about women voting with their wallets, specifically as part of a thought-crime-fighting cabal.
O, the international cabal that is women. Wrecking your literatures, taking down your heroes with “unproven” allegations of sexual assault, and insisting on being thought of as ppl since feminism reared its ugly head.
It’s all so very tiresome, and what’s a decent man to do? It’s literally impossible to predict when the women will get upset about your discussion of your boner. Like, sometimes it’s fine, and sometimes they just turn into shrieking harpies at the first mention of nubile flesh. Who can even keep up?
Why try? It is, after all, a woman’s prerogative to change her mind 😉
God how embarrassing must this be for this guy’s wife and teenage son? So gross.
I don’t know I think that when you’re the family of a guy like this a certain kind of Stockholm Syndrome sets in, I bet she’d be right out in front defending him.
You mean how her husband/his dad writes hundreds of pages about wanting to have sex with girls his son’s age? Why, what’s the problem with that? There’s a problem with that? He’s just speaking for the Universal Male Boner.
Who wants to bet he sends out heavy duty creeper vibes to any girlfriends or female friends his son brings to the house?
I mean, he has to do research, otherwise his sexually precocious teenage female characters will sound ~inauthentic.~
(God I just grossed myself out so much with this comment)
plus dick pics
OMG if it turns out he’s having an affair with a grieving woman from Montauk, who picked him over COWBOY HAT WEARING PACEY WITTER, I’m turning this planet around right now.
Also, I love how OFFENDED the dude seems that WOMEN get to write about lust. It might help that they aren’t writing about it in ways that are both gross AND unoriginal!
I WISH “heterosexual male lust” had gone out of fashion.
Esmé Weijun Wangs article on schizophrenia is so good and important – and at the same time incredibly hard to read for me.
I also found it compelling and difficult.
Good morning. Everything is terrible, but please join me in laughing your ass off at this amazing story in tweets: https://twitter.com/JoshRaby/status/7194042488034…
Ha! “I do have many apple pies.”
I like to think they weren’t actual employees and that, given that they met there, they snuck in to pretend to work as a date to scratch a very particular itch.
I had to hide my face in a tissue to disguise my guffawing at work.
I was holding it together until “you get to drive away” and now I must go hide in the back lest my coworkers ask why I’m cackling.
Yeah the poor third guy working there was obviously in his own personal hell. Poor dude.
Yes! That poor co-worker
I… did not see where that story was going. I mean, whuh?
When the takeout attendant said, “I am not ok,” my first thought was THIS MAN HAS STUMBLED ON A MCDONALD’S WHILE IT’S BEING ROBBED.
Mine too.
This is everything to me.
“you get to drive away”
I read this on the bus this morning and realized nothing better will happen to me today.
I did not realize that by “lost my wife” he literally meant “I do not know my wife’s physical location.” Narrative twist!
She was hiding behind the boxes!
I have so many questions, and I’m never going to get answers for them.
It is almost physically painful to me how much I want answers.
On the other hand, I’m almost certain that the actual answers will fail to live up to my fevered imaginings.
That was the point at which I lost it.
This sounds like a long lost Achewood comic arc.
howling
All day, I have been thinking of this story and having to suppress laughter. “She was hiding behind the boxes!”
Oh so it’s ok for me and my children to work unpaid for the experience but when its your kid he needs to get paid? Super fair.
Several of my coworkers have suggested asking the metalworker/sculptor who works in our same shopping complex to build us an outdoor structure for free (because we’d put up a plaque with his name on it, so he’d get free exposure!), and I’m all, “nonononono Jesus Christ we are not asking anybody to work for free this is not ok.”
*sigh*
Say it with me people, ‘exposure’ doesn’t pay the rent.
Fortunately, my boss agrees with me that paying people for the work they do is important.
Unfortunately, this “free exposure” and/or bartering is what artists face nearly every damn day. Madam, as much as you like my elegantly matted & framed original drawing, and as much as I like food, I cannot draw on garlic bulbs. Cash buys me paper, m’kay? This is painfully apparent in the small rural area where I’m currently living (West Kootenays, BC).
It’s so damn insulting! Would we work for free? Unless we’re specifically volunteering for a charity build, no we would not. Is other people’s time valuable? Apparently you guys don’t think so.
I had the same reaction to a coworker saying “that’s cool, interns are free” when he found out we’d be getting a summer intern from the UVA business school. No, interns are not always free, we’re paying him, the school is absorbing half the cost, but we’re paying our goddamn interns.
My understanding is that they’re betting artists/students/women/brown people don’t know the value of their own work and can thus be lowballed and it won’t count as an insult. These are the people who would offer a wage to a female employee that they would be embarrassed to offer an equally qualified man. Or they assume they can get away with it because the person doesn’t have any negotiating power and would get lowballed everywhere else too.
This metalworker is a grown man with his own studio. “You never know unless you ask” seems to be the operating mindset here, which somehow makes it ok to ask sellers/artists/vendors if they’re willing to sell something at a loss/give it to you for free. I wish my coworkers, when they did this, considered our reaction to people asking this of us, and then applied that to people who aren’t us. That would be cool.
I may be misremembering, so I won’t name the city, but back in the 90s, a new public building was in the works, city hall, I think. Nothing had been budgeted for art, so someone thought it would be good exposure for artists to donate their work for the building. Win win, amirite?
Who wants to do some fist-pumping at awesome women? An article about the female fighters in Sinjar in Iraq who are laying waste to Isis: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-ea…
[I know there are some issues with the PKK and other Kurdish separatist groups, and they’re not necessarily going to build a utopia in the middle east, and the tone of the article is very militaristic, but I still find these women as a group incredibly inspiring, with a good dollop of /misandry too]
“The fight of our women is a fight for all women” <3
Ok, reposting this here so that hopefully more people can see it:
If, like me, you feel the need to do something to help and have a few spare dollars, you can donate directly to Yazda (the group mentioned fencing off the mass graves in the article): http://www.yazda.org/
I need a movie/documentary about these women ASAP because I would watch the crap out of it.
I regret I only have one thumbs up to give.
Action Potato!
I just got him that toy yesterday and he was so excited he carried it all the way to the park and all the way back by himself and it was SO CUTE. I’m undecided as to whether it’s cuter than when he carries his leash to the front door so I’ll take him out, though. Maybe they are tied?
I always sigh in pleasure and relief whenever I get to see a CPHB photo. He is truly a delight.
It’s basically the highlight of my morning. And I might alienate myself from this entire community by admitting that I’m not particularly fond of dogs in general. The pictures of this dog are so wonderful. What a fun little guy! (The name helps too.)
#teampotato
your potato is SO MUCH BIGGER than I thought he was! I am delighted beyond words.
The potato has grown! Does he sleep overnight in the soil or something???
Do you use a particular growth-encouraging food perhaps? Or a special light? A cuteness-growing light?
Charlie Potato Hashbrowns, you are the wind beneath my wings.
As always, thank you. The Potato is a bright spot in a dark and rainy day.
Both are good.
Shout out to Gann Academy in Boston, the Jewish pluralistic school my husband teaches at, for introducing gender-neutral bathrooms this year. They also were the first Jewish day school in the country to start a GSA, more than ten years ago. It’s a great school whose administration really cares about the students. And there’s a Hamilton sing-along happening in the halls at any given time, so you know the kids are all right.
I know a bunch of queer folks who were Gann students during that era when the GSA was being started – it seems like such a cool place. I’m always so glad when I see organizations in the Jewish world Doing It Right!
I want to thank everyone for their support from my post on last Monday’s roundup (about my marriage proposal being turned down). I’m still in this weird, shocked, limbo zone; but thank you so much for the insightful comments.
That said, is anyone else into the Bletchley Circle? I just started watching it on Netflix (mainly to distract myself from the above), and I am LOVING it.
BLETCHLEY CIRCLE!!! I loved loved loved the first season; season two kinda lost me and I’m not really surprised that it ended after that. But oh my god, season one is just perfect. A very good distraction device.
I have only seen the first season, but I have seen it maybe three times and I love it so so much.
I do love Bletchley Circle. I also love yelling out loud at the stupid MEN in that show. Who I know are fictional, but come on, listen to the women who are smarter than you ever will be, Jeezy Chreezy.
Wow, I came back to so much Bletchley Circle love!!! And yes, good lord, the men. The men!!! How does her husband not even know about the work she did in the war or how intelligent she really is? How is it not obvious?!?!?
How does her husband not even know about the work she did in the war
I have not watched the Bletchley Circle, so this comment may be completely non-applicable, but everyone who worked there had to sign the Official Secrets Act, and couldn’t even tell their spouses or family members about that work. Some kept the secret for decades!
Aha! That explains it. But still, this character is literally bursting with intelligence and gumption and he truly thinks she spent years filing papers or something??? I guess it makes sense for the time but still, aargh.
Yeah, the impression I get (from the first season; I haven’t watched the second one) is that he knows she’s clever but he doesn’t really have anywhere to put that information. He’s not allowed to know what she’s accomplished, and in their life together he’s never seen any scope or venue for what she’s capable of. It’s heartbreakingly easy for her to just be someone who’s good at puzzles, who can’t see her way clear to tell the people in her life that she’s capable of being so much more than that.
At one point he promises to buy her another book of crosswords. !!!!! I like your analysis.
I think they mentioned the Official Secrets Act at some point in the show. Season 1 was soooo great. I did not finish season 2. But I still re-watch season 1 because greatness.
Yeah, the Official Secrets Act was a very big deal; plenty of Bletchley codebreakers died without ever telling their spouses what they did, because they would have been committing a crime and potentially jeopardising national security if they did.
The thing is, lots of women were bursting with intelligence and gumption, and their jobs were to file papers. Next time you hear a man over 60 talking about how standards of education have gone down, remember that when he started work, women who were perfectly capable of becoming doctors or getting higher degrees in astrophysics or running hospitals with 3000+ employees probably went to secretarial college and typed out some dude’s letters.
See also Olivia Williams’ character on “Manhattan”– a PhD in her own right who isn’t allowed to work.
That is a really good and really depressing point…thank you?
I must delurk to tell this story :
My uncle was acquainted with John Diefenbaker, a Canadian prime minister in the 60’s, and got to be good friends with his secretary. Through him we sometimes went for dinners with her as well, or had her over to our house – she was really cool spinster who was full of life and humour.
But it wasn’t until she died and we read her (full-page) obit in the newspaper that we found that she had done codebreaking work while she worked for the government! So cool!
I forgot about Bletchley Circle but I really want to watch it now.
Yay Bletchley Circle!
Sorry about being turned down, but congrats on being brave enough to try!
And YES, The Bletchley Circle is the BEST.
Bletchley Circle is so great! Sadly short-lived.
I loved Bletchley Circle! I loved smart women getting shit done when no one thought they could. I loved the costumes and sets. I loved it all!
YES Bletchley Circle!
I need to rewatch! I was DVRing when it came up at super-weird times on my vaguely secret PBS station, and I couldn’t keep up, but it has so many of the things I love!
Oh man, people lying about extraordinary athletic accomplishments is my favorite flavor of boutique investigative journalism (tied for first place with cruise longforms) GIVE ME ALL OF THEM!
Sorry for the repost, but I put this in the OT late on Saturday and wanted to bring it up again:
A hospital where I used to work has a (ridiculous, imho) policy in which placentas from all deliveries are held for a minimum of 7 days in a refrigerator, in the event that the newborn will develop a complication. New parents who have asked to have their placentas released to them within the first 24 hours have been denied.
I’m not a big fan of change.org in general but please consider signing this petition asking the hospital to change its policy. (Note that there is lots of gendered language in the petition and even in its title.)
I initially read the second sentence as ‘in the event that the newborn will develop into a complication’ and was racking my brains as to what medical situation that could refer to.
Well done on setting up the petition – it sounds like a weird and unnecessary policy.
Not my petition, just signal boosting… I have precisely zero social media presence but I figured the-Toast would have some helpful folks 🙂
I have a friend who needed her placenta tested for genetic reasons, but the nurses actively lied to her and they had no policy, so it was destroyed before she could get the doctor who requested it to intervene. Without policies like this to prevent destruction and make sure they are stored properly in the meantime they can keep doing this to others. I really can’t see how keeping them a week harms anyone but I can see what happened to my friend, so I am sorry but I can’t support the petition.
Personally I feel that the hospital’s reasons for wanting routinely to keep a placenta *just in case* are valid, but as is the case with any other recommended treatment, there should be a system in place for patients to refuse treatment/testing.
Ideally everyone gets what they want out of their placenta – some get to keep it for testing (as your friend would have done; and btw that’s rank BS that her placenta was destroyed when she had specifically requested it not to be), some get to keep it *just in case*, some get to take theirs home as soon as possible. (One of the things I like about my current workplace is that everyone does get what they want out of their placenta.)
The reason why some want to have it released to them within 24 hours is that if you are going to encapsulate your placenta (make supplement pills out of it), it really has to be done right away or else it’s no good. (Personally I’m no placentophage. I’m a big fan of placentas while at work but the thought of eating my own, in any form, was a non-starter.)
If I may add to the link roundup, this Buzzfeed piece (“Why Hamilton Matters”) by the co-author of the #Hamiltome is marvelous: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jeremymccarter/saving-ame….
This comment, from the Kirkus Sally Hemings review, is so gloriously dumb and offensive I would like to preserve it for posterity. Also if lots of us read it perhaps we can set it on fire with the combined power of our pained incredulity.
Don’t beleive anyone who claims that Jefferson “raped” Hemings. “Rape” isn’t characterized as siring four or five children and remaining with a woman until she is well past her prime. “Rape” is being redefined as inequality, or “She would have had no recourse if he had WANTED to rape her, therefore all sex between them was rape.” Using that definition, almost all marriages, until very recent times, could be defined as “rape” because wives had no legal right to refuse sex with their husbands. The real purpose of these “rape” accusations against Jefferson is to create feelings of guilt and inferiority about white ancestry, especially in people with a mixed racial lineage.
“Her prime”. If the rest of that didn’t tip you off about the author’s attitude towards women, those two words make it crystal clear.
Right? I mean, if you think about it Jefferson was a real prince, to continue sexually assaulting her even when she was no longer hot.
Also she had children and rape – sorry, “rape” – can never result in children, especially not multiple children, because… the body has ways of shutting that down? I don’t even know.
It’s almost like it is a crime that is more focused on a power dynamic or something, right? Nah, that couldn’t be it. Musta been love.
Yes, he still owned her body like it was his own property, even after she couldn’t make him slave babies any more. And this proves… what, exactly?
Yep. I recoiled at that exact part (and then maintained my recoiled horror throughout the rest of it).
Interesting that he thinks suggesting that many historical marriages included rape under this definition somehow means that what Jefferson did wasn’t rape? As if we have all, as a society, agreed that non-consensual sex during marriage doesn’t actually count as rape.
Someone should tell this guy that rape in a marriage does exist and is not just a myth made up by feminists.
Yeah, my response to “Using that definition, almost all marriages, until very recent times, could be defined as “rape” because wives had no legal right to refuse sex with their husbands” is, “Sadly, yeah, they could be defined like that”. If he’s trying to suggest that it’s a ridiculous suggestion and thus must be discounted immediately, he’s not doing brilliantly.
Yup, same here. And he doesn’t seem to find that a problem! It’s just normal!
So he’s right about some things without even knowing it–some marital sex was indeed rape. And also, how can he not see the difference between a relationship entered into freely and actual SLAVERY, oh my god, I will now retire to my corner to froth at the mouth for a while.
“Using that definition, almost all marriages, until very recent times, could be defined as “rape” because wives had no legal right to refuse sex with their husbands. ”
hmm makes you wonder why they went to the trouble of changing that rule then doesn’t it hmmmm
I see this a lot, where anti-feminists and feminists actually agree on the observed facts, but one side says “lol, so what’s the big deal, then?” and the other says “WTF”
Do we really want to follow this line of reasoning? I mean, Jaycee Duggard had multiple children by her rapist/kidnapper, too.
Well, WE don’t, but clearly HE does.
This guy watched Room and wondered what all the fuss was about.
The real purpose of these “rape” accusations against Jefferson is to create feelings of guilt and inferiority about white ancestry, especially in people with a mixed racial lineage. WHAAAAaaaaa?
Yeah, THANK GOD multiracial folks have this hero on their side to remind them that there is nothing uncomplicated about their family history. Now multiracial people can continue their lives, untainted by fucked up racial dynamics.
I hope we call all agree that JeffersonBros are somehow even worse than BernieBros.
100% focussed on what Jefferson did, not on what Hemings may have experienced. And that says a lot about his definition of rape, doesn’t it.
John Colapinto, is that you?
Is rape ok if the woman enjoys it has got to be the biggest delusional excuse of all time.
Sally was a slave. There was no consent. This man was her master. I’m sure she knew her life depended, literally, on his approval.
This author has basically written the rape apologist handbook.
I know it really bothers people that Jefferson and Washington and a lot of other Founding Father icons had slaves/did horrible things/were flawed humans but we have to acknowledge that and grow up.
I’ve been wondering about that Sally Hemings book too. Is it perhaps reactionary? Now that a certain segment of the population is vocal about the fact that that “relationship” cannot have been consensual, the part of the population that’s uncomfortable with that truth is trying desperately to make it “ok” again?
Honestly, I am also baffled.
I am slightly fascinated by it, because it seems like a perfect metaphor for the white/European urge to make slavery (in the US) and colonialism (in Europe) bad but not all that bad. Like, there is an AMAZING amount of effort that people go to to portray the relationships of white and black people under the linked systems of colonialism and slavery as, like, obviously unequal, but still like, kind of affectionate, and to deny the incredible amounts of violence that are required to for one group of people to keep another subservient. Like, if Germany talked about the Holocaust the way Britain talks about the Empire, you’d have people arguing that maybe, like, a small number of people were killed deliberately but the rest just consensually got on trains to death camps and agreed that it was probably for the best.
I think people look at the situation of slavery and assume there must have been widespread consent because the actual violence and pain required to sustain those systems is concealed by/from white people. And if you believe in those white ancestors as “mostly nice people like us” to believe that they could have lived with that level of violence.
I agree that it’s fascinating too…I suppose I’m conflating my OWN journey towards understanding how effed up it was with the state of the general populace, which is obviously wrong of me. I took a whole class on race in “Jefferson’s Virginia” at Jefferson’s alma mater and the discussion about Sally Hemings was HEATED. There entire seminar was white kids who had never really apparently thought about problematic founding fathers before? I mostly stayed quiet and watched…I was still just a baby feminist at the time or I probably wouldn’t have. It ended up with our professor being the only person willing to even SUGGEST that Jefferson was in the wrong, even about his flip-flopping on emancipation. It was…eye opening.
I once had the honor and privilege (??) of spending part of an afternoon socializing with one of the charter members of some Thomas Jefferson historical society who gave me an impromptu lecture on how he devotes his work there to dispelling “the myth of Sally Hemings”–how Thomas Jefferson was a great man and therefore would have absolutely never slept with one of his slaves (in his head, this totally mythical and imaginary relationship was also completely consensual and I really didn’t have it in me to correct him on that), and how he can prove it with Actual Real Facts About History. He also had his whole theory about why people had decided to make up this whole story out of nowhere to sully Mr. Jefferson’s spotless reputation, but I honestly tried very hard to retain nothing he was saying at that point in order to preserve my sanity.
So. That was an afternoon. And I sort of like knowing that he would hate this book as much as me, but for totally different reasons.
…was this before or after the DNA evidence came to light?
This encounter was maybe only at most two years ago, so . . .
Ahhhhh, UVA?
I’m pretty sure he’s given this lecture a few places, so I would not be surprised if UVA was one of them, but he lives out in what I refer to as “Virginia rich person horse country” somewhere. (That whole Warrenton/Middleburg/wineries/foxhunting region.)
He was the middle-aged son of a couple that had been neighbors and friends of my grandparents once and this whole thing took place in the couple’s living room, with the white lace and porcelain figurines and the tall glasses of iced tea. The little old man played some killer harmonica–old French songs he learned during WWII–and the little old lady recited antiquated and occasionally sort-of-accidentally-racist poems she wrote about seventy years earlier.
And their son lectured me about how Sally Hemings was a lie.
It was an illuminating experience? I guess? (Actually, it was a bit like being in a Tennessee Williams play but without anyone having a breakdown.)
ETA: This son also sent an email to my mother after the Charleston shooting explaining how the Confederate flag carries no blame in the tragedy and he had never encountered any racism among his brethren in the Sons of the Confederacy, only a respect for our country’s history. So. Nuff said, I think.
Additionally, this sterling gentleman and advocate of historical accuracy also did send us an email after the Charleston shooting, explaining how the Confederate flag is in no way to blame for the tragedy . . . I just re-found it in my inbox and it’s just as painful to read as I remembered. (Example: “And certainly no one I have ever met among my thousands of fellow Compatriots of the Sons of Confederate Veterans across the country has ever demonstrated such bigotry or hatred of anyone. Indeed, they are among the most Christian Americans I have ever known, striving to follow the examples of Lee and Jackson, and many others.“)
. . . I kind of want to take a break from humanity for awhile now.
OMG PLEASE WRITE A VIGNETTE
oh, jesus, I grew up with people like that. gahhhh….
From the end of the sepsis article: … (it’s silly, but sometimes doctors don’t respond well to even the subconscious assumption that a patient is questioning their judgment). … The first question is often misunderstood by doctors as bothersome, or even uncooperative.
Nope. Not silly. Also not something that patients should have to accommodate for.
‘Its you’re own fault you’re dying of sepsis, you hurt my ego by asking if it could be sepsis.’- some doctor somewhere probably.
I am starting to think that my Dad’s attitude of “never go to the doctor” is the right one.* (I think he’s been once in the 35 years I’ve been alive, and it was because someone drove her car into him and hurt his leg.) You’re doomed whatever you do, but at least if you stay home you don’t run up a bill or catch a nosocomial infection.
*Except for the bit where it worries my mother to pieces and puts extra stress on her.
Also not something that patients should have to accommodate for.
Sadly, though, this is actually a really useful script (“what would this look like if it were [condition]?”).
I think of it this way: any patient that I see is absolutely the expert on their own body. (“No, this is really unusual for me” or “actually, this really worries me, can we check it out?” or “I can’t quite put my finger on it but something here is off” are all perfectly reasonable things to follow up on!)
OTOH I am educated and licensed to be an expert in ob/gyn in general — and I am a human being after all, I admit that I find it annoying when someone without that training background tells me what diagnosis they think they have. I try really really really hard not to let that annoyance affect the job I do in taking care of them.
But a little script like this can actually go a long way! Think of how many times someone posts on here about “I want to see a doctor about this but don’t want to come across as one of THOSE people, I want to be taken seriously.” Siiiiiiiiiiiigh.
Yes completely, my gripe is with the medical personnel and training systems that lead to situations like this; but it is very helpful for patients to be given scripts that help them personally navigate the quagmire of medical care.
Had sepsis, nearly died. Nothing on this checklist would have helped. Focusing on the initial source of the infection and ways to treat that did help. I lived. Only because they did surgery despite not having the blood tests back yet.
Noooooooo I can’t access the Carly Rae Jepsen video from my country, I’m screaming
Edit: I found a site that plays it just fine. No longer screaming.
You’ll be screaming again soon. It’s transcendent.
This was already my favorite song off the album and you are absolutely right there is no other word to describe what just happened
Oh my Goat. http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/04/10/rohne…
This is amazing and thank you so much for sharing!
The Starbucks across from the University I used to work at! Oh, I miss having goats and sheep as part of my commute scenery.
Wow, how come this kind of thing wasn’t happening when I was a student there? I would have been delighted to ride a goat to class.
I love benign stories of animals wandering into human society that doesn’t know how to deal with them.
1: I’m a specialist in European history, but in grad school I took a course on the history of slavery. I wrote the seminar paper on manumission in 19th century Virginia, a practice that’s the source of so many American myths.
2: during my research, I came across an extraordinary document. A planter, who died fairly young and unmarried, addressed his will to his younger brother, the heir. In this document, he detailed his 20 year affair with his enslaved mistress, which started when they we’re both teenagers.
3: it’s clear from this document that he loved this woman and their children. He’s very emotional about the whole thing, and instructs his brother on their manumission and attempts to leave this family quite a lot of money. I was quite moved reading it.
4: this is the closest I’ll ever get to understanding this relationship. Even with all this information I would NEVER ASSUME that the woman felt the same way.
5: comparing Jefferson’s actions to this man’s is pretty damning for old Teej.
6: nobody ever seems to mention that Sally was his dead wife’s half sister, which makes the whole thing extra creepy.
(I’m in the middle of outlining an article so I’m thinking in bullet points.)
re: #6 yeah, even the review seems to not be very clear on this, I had to read it a couple times before I understood that “daughter of a southern planter and a slave” meant “daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law”.
When I teach the slave trade class, I make this explicit to my students. They are always properly horrified. Its actually rather heartening.
dang i am pretty glad that I never really went into the “idolizing figures from history” thing because so many of the easy ones turned out to be creepy-ass monsters
I’m delighted to hear that your students had the proper reaction of DDDDD: because how in the nine hells can somebody react otherwise? He literally owned her! She was his wife’s half-sister and he literally owned her! How can people think this was okayyyyyy at alllll omg.
And hired to take care of her half-sister’s children, who were right about her same age.
Jefferson apologists can’t handle the truth.
wait wait am i understanding correctly?
are you saying that Jefferson’s children were the same age as their aunt, who was made to take care of them, and whom Jefferson decided would also take care of his sex needs?
not that “aunt” is a very accurate word socially for “my mother’s half-sister who is a slave” except that it clarifies hereditary relationships.
Yep. Technically the one who she was officially caring for was about five years younger than her, but I think it can be assumed that she also had some responsibilities which involved the other children of Jefferson who were her age when they were in France, where the “relationship” began.
Eurgh, on top of all the other No Way WRONG about Jefferson, I will never not find it creepy when someone has a sexual relationship with a person the same age as their own children (or younger!). I can’t even pinpoint why such an age gap is disturbing, but it is. Even if they had children at a very young age, like 13 or 14 and in other cases I find a 14-year-gap eyebrow raising but not disturbing.
Considering how many men literally owned their children (whom they had sired by raping those childrens’ enslaved mothers)…
“6: nobody ever seems to mention that Sally was his dead wife’s half sister, which makes the whole thing extra creepy.”
WTF?!?
Yup. Plus Martha made Teej promise never to marry again as she was dying. Unfortunately, he was a well-known horn dog. Lucky for him, he owned a woman with a striking resemblance to her. The whole thing is stomach turning.
I … never knew all of this, and now I am horrified.
Me, too.
I knew some, but mostly about the She Was His Slave part and Took Care Of The Kids part, but the relation to his wife and the age…I have somewhat intentionally not read about TJ because I don’t want to honor him with my attention, like I want to ignore him and make him as much of a non-entity as I possibly can, but clearly this approach has made me unfortunately ignorant and might should need some revision.
“Thinking in Bullet Points” is the title of my imaginary soft-rock album.
Why couldn’t he free them and give them money during his own lifetime?
Because that would have given her the option to leave him before he was done using her.
Accurate and extremely nauseating. Poor Sally.
In the case the of my planter: by this time manumission (by law) meant you had to leave the area you were enslaved in. So he would have had to say goodbye need to only to her, but to his young children, and they would lose his protection.
(Please excuse my typos, BTW. My phone’s auto correct is extremely pushy)
A nuanced understanding of numbrs 3 and 4 is so important! There is no question that some slave owners felt intense emotions towards their slaves, emotions that they would have described as affection, love, friendship, and so forth. And some slaves’ accounts suggest that they felt emotions towards their owners that were not entirely negative. But this doesn’t somehow make it not slavery or not inherently violent! There seems to be a sense that if we don’t portray slave owners as sadistic villains, we are somehow sugar-coating slavery. In my view, though, a central horror of slavery is not so much that bad nasty people used it as an opportunity to do bad nasty things, but rather that it embricated people who understood themselves as perfectly decent in a system of intense violence and violation.
Yes yes yes. I’m limited by the fact that I’m on my phone, and I worried that my summation made this sound like a romance novel, when I fact it’s a very sad and complicated story that we only have one person’s side of.
Yes. Love and violence are not mutually exclusive, as we see with domestic violence–parents can and do kill the children they love. And the sense of ownership makes violence much more likely to enter into a relationship. If you were a slave owner, and you stayed in the house and the only slaves you ever saw close up were the domestic servants who were probably quite happy to be there considering their only alternative was the fields, and your only contact with the field workers was hearing them singing in the distance, you could probably make yourself believe all was well.
People can make themselves believe the most amazing things. My slave-owning ancestors were Quakers. How does that even happen? You’d think that would be the one denomination that would know better, but apparently not!
Yes please write this! I’m a Canadian so had no idea about all this stuff; then we visited Monticello over the holidays and now I’m totally fascinated by this whole story.
Aah, this has nothing to do with Monticello or any other Jefferson/Carr plantation; I only bring it up as a case where we know something about the emotional lives of at least one person in the relationship.
My article is about ritual stag hunts in 17th century Germany, nothing to do with this.
(IIRC I found the document reprinted on JSTOR, but I’ve gone looking for it since and can’t seem to find it. I sadly lost the paper when my laptop blew up 6 months after that class ended. I’ve since learned to back up. I invite anyone with better familiarity with US history journals than I have to go find it. I’d give my eyeteeth to have the citation.)
Yeah. That she was quite possibly the teenage half-sister of Jefferson’s wife Martha makes it even more shades of F*D UP that Jefferson would prey on her that way. Although it makes me sad that we’re so jaded about slavery’s horrors that somehow that is more shocking than the fact that he raped a woman enslaved to him and fathered her children. D:
I know that there are some Philadelphia Toasts that are acquainted with The Cat Doctor and City Kitties Rescue, and if you didn’t see on FB, they lost Archie this morning. :'(
Poor Archie 🙁 I got to skritch his ears once and it’s a treasured memory.
Oh no, Archie! 🙁 🙁 🙁 Godspeed, you spindly little gentleman.
Thank you for saying something; I hadn’t checked Facebook yet today, though I knew he was doing poorly.
“I honestly do not know why anyone would bother writing this book?”: because fanfic doesn’t pay?
because fanfic doesn’t pay?
Fanfic has beep profitable since time immemorial.
http://bookshop.livejournal.com/1044495.html
I don’t think fanfic is terrible and should be banished from the earth! I just can’t help comparing what’s essentially Teej/Sally Hemmings fiction to other “Why???” ships like Rey/Kylo Ren, Jessica Jones/Purple Man, etc.
I know you don’t hate fanfic, or want it banished. I was countering your saying “because fanfic doesn’t pay?” by providing that link.
There are so many other books that actually need to be written!
But how am I supposed to know if I feel like I’m about to die? I’ve never died before. This is not useful advice.
I have felt like I was going to die a couple times before without even being wounded! How do I know if this is the *actual* time I’m going to die? o.o
It’s like listing “sense of impending doom” as a heart attack symptom. I HAVE AN ANXIETY DISORDER, I ALWAYS HAVE THAT.
So very, very true. If my perpetual sense of impending doom lifts for a moment I *really* start to worry because it means I’ve forgotten something big and unbeknownst to me, “Fate is slipping the lead into the boxing glove” as Wodehouse puts it.
As always, Wodehouse has a perfect quote.
I describe it as having the narrator from that awful weather channel show Twist of Fate in your head all the time “Little did she know choosing the green toothbrush would bring her within moments of her fate.”
Or when Harold Biffen in “New Grub Street” talks about “the fateful power of trivial incidents”. What if getting on this subway car instead of that, or wearing this pair of socks instead of that, really is what lands you in trouble?
(Now that I know where I am going to live I really, really need to resume Project Find a Therapist.)
Exactly. How am I supposed to identify a secondary Impending Doom? (The “yes, these are life-threatening symptoms” sense is real but very different. Partly because the Impending Doom makes one want to give up but thinking one could really die in the next few minutes is extremely invigorating. Source: time I hovered around going into anaphylactic shock, which is to say I went into mild passing-out shock but my throat didn’t close up or anything.)
Good luck with Project Find a Therapist!
HA, RIGHT! I didn’t even read the article b/c I knew what would happen.
I think it was a poorly worded way for them to describe “feelings of impending doom”. At least from when I was an EMT, it was described as an actual Medical Thing. That a patient in pretty severed shape will sometimes know it and tell you. I’ve felt it twice myself– once when I was in anaphylactic shock (severe allergic reaction before I knew I needed an epi pen on me at all times), and another time when I had high altitude cerebral edema (brain swelling) in Nepal that got a little too advanced before I was brought back down to a lower altitude.
It’s hard to describe how it was different from that feeling of “Oh god I might be dying” when you have the stomach flu, or are terrified by a weird sudden symptom that you research on the internet at 3 am (hey, we’ve all been there!), etc, but it just somehow is. But that’s entirely unhelpful to just list on a fact sheet since many might interpret it as these latter kind of examples.
I mean, I *figured* there was some kind of difference, intellectually… “feelings of impending doom” is just weirdly non-specific.
I saw this issue in an Internet discussion about “intrusive thoughts” as well– apparently “everyone has them”, but there’s a difference in intensity and urgency for people where it’s a legit mental issue that the neurotypicals just don’t have a baseline for.
I have them. They are different than just “I have a song stuck in my head,” which seems to be most neurotypical’s idea. I get songs stuck in my head too. This is different.
“feelings of impending doom”
Yes, I’ve seen that in medical records a number of times.
I was too sick to care, honestly. Only a very concerned friend insisting on taking me to the ER got me there. I only remember fever and pain.
Once I was very, very ill with an infection and I had an allergic reaction to the antibiotics I was taking, but I didn’t know for days that was happening. So the infection was continuing to spread and also my skin was peeling off among other symptoms. I vividly remember leaning against a wall at work and thinking very calmly, “I’m dying.” And that, I think, is when you know you’re in trouble: you have a sense of doom, but you’re really calm about it. My boss called my husband who took me to the ER and I got all sorted out. But it was very strange to me how worked up everyone was and I felt like a rock in the middle of rapids, just there, quietly accepting my fate.
It’s like the pain chart–I always feel like I might be spending my pain points too easily–I mean, I’ve never been hit by a truck or given birth to a 13 pound baby or had any number of injuries whose names I won’t Google because I might see pictures. . .how do I know?!?!
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/02/boy…
OH, thank you. One of my favorite comics and it still makes me laugh like I stole somebody’s jelly beans.
A doctor asked me about that last week for an illness and I was like, “I don’t know how to answer that.” Eventually, I was like, “It ranges from 3-5 if you give mastectomy an 8. I assume there’s something worse than mastectomy, but I haven’t tried it yet, so I’m leaving room.”
I like the Hyperbole anchor points better.
I send this to all my friends who have had serious medical trauma, once I’ve verfifed they will not further hurt themselves from laughing.
Brb, listening to Emotion for like the billionth time….
<3 u Carly
So this weekend I met a guy and he was Very Attractive, but I got a weird vibe from him (starting when his favourite book was Naked Lunch). He seemed to talk at people instead of to them, but he was cute and I wasn’t involved in the conversations to really know. He was a beer rep and I was behind the bar, though, so we chatted a bit when I wasn’t pouring pints. He had to leave early, so he gave me his card.
The next day I happened to sit next to the man he was talking to/at, and we mentioned the night before.
“Oh, now, I’m not one to speak ill of somebody who isn’t here to defend themselves…but he went from very friendly to misogynistic twat in about 20 minutes.”
Apparently he’d said/done some truly awful things (sparing y’all the details), and absolutely horrified the lovely man he’d been chatting to. Said lovely man was rather determined to save me from this dude, and took off back home the next day safe in the knowledge that Beer Rep Dude would not get a text from me. I can’t put into words how much I appreciated it, and if you’ve never heard a man say “misogynistic twat” in a posh British accent, I wish you luck in hearing it soon.
If a man has a job like “beer rep” and his favorite book is in any way associated with the Beat Generation, Bukowski, Hemingway, or Hunter S. Thompson then RUN, do not walk, away from this douche.
I vaguely remembered a Toastie saying that anybody who cites Burroughs as their favourite author was on their “nope, nope, never” list, so that was an instant “Mmmmm, probably not.”
I would be curious to know whether straight guys who cite Naked Lunch have any idea that Burroughs was gay. And also, on that note, I peeked at the Wikipedia page for Junkie and it’s all “YUP THIS BOOK IS JUST ABOUT DRUG ADDICTION WHAT DO YOU MEAN GAY? NOTHING GAY HERE MOVE ON”
I GET TO HEAR MY HUSBAND SAY IT ALL THE TIME, IT’S GREAT
I’m not especially interested in Jefferson’s tortured psyche (actually: I’m the opposite of interested and I rather suspect that his psyche wasn’t especially tortured), but this part of the WaPo review almost makes me think the book might be trying to do something interesting: “[T]he most troubled and troubling chapters come from the fictional diary of Sally herself. It’s here that O’Connor dares to imagine both her hatred and affection for her famous owner. Under slavery, she writes, “one’s very desire to live a decent and ordinary life can be an unending source of humiliation.” In this intimate, blazingly candid memoir, we see her repulsed by Jefferson, horrified by her position and outraged at his endless equivocations and deferrals. And yet, we also see her in love with the president and capable of considerable resistance to him. In O’Connor’s telling, she is a person with the emotional capacity to understand Jefferson’s tortured soul without excusing him for enslaving so many of the people who make Monticello possible.”
Not interesting for the “but what if she actually kinda ~liked him~ apologia” but for the hints of “Sally Hemings responds to Jeffersonian hypocrisies.”
Except then I read the Kirkus interview with O’Connor:
“One of the things I wanted to do was have Sally Hemings be Jefferson’s equal. I wanted her to be able to talk to him on his level.” O’Connor’s Sally Hemings is fiery, insolent, and opinionated in a way that a person of her race and gender most likely couldn’t have been in the face of authority…. “I had to make Sally Hemings probably different than she was historically”.
ahahahaha nope. And, y’know, I get that he’s trying to have Hemings be a symbolic opposite number to Jefferson, but a) It’s actually a little Too Soon to be reducing a real black woman to a symbolic discursive figure, given that Jeffersonian freedom-for-all-is-not-incompatible-with–a-racially-justified-caste-system is still very much alive in the US and b) enough with the “I intentionally made this historical woman more awesome than she could have been because as we all know women and especially enslaved black women had no interiority in The Past” and c) F___ you and your (commonly-held) idea that ‘being Jefferson’s equal’ = ‘being able to speak in terms of his elite white male discourse and its intellectual tradition.’
I love it when being “fiery” and “sassy” makes up for lacking legal rights, privilege and wealth!
do any of these reviews acknowledge that this is like blatantly that guy’s fetish
This is just a really good, thoughtful comment. Thank you for it.
I’ve gotten sepsis from a sneaky, unnoticed UTI, and the more I think about it, the more I can definitely see it getting confused with the flu. In fact, I definitely thought I was just coming down with a very severe cold (with an extremely high fever to boot), and didn’t go to the hospital until I started uncontrollably shaking.
Memorably, I remember trying to go to class (this was in college) and telling someone dreamily “I feel like my proteins are denaturing.” I ended up getting a ride home (I lived on campus) because I was struggling so much with moving that a kind female stranger I met in the women’s bathroom in one of the classroom buildings gave me a ride home. Kudos to mystery woman.
*shudders* That was an awful time.
This. The person who actually is this sick is way too out of it to get themselves help. (At least I wasn’t)
Yes, definitely. I should’ve also added that I was so grateful and lucky that my roommate and my boyfriend were able to take me to the emergency room almost immediately after I had my first bout of uncontrollable seizures. I didn’t know the mortality rate of sepsis is so high, but I’m not surprised given how sick and helpless you feel once it gets bad enough to be worse than a “typical” case of flu.
I meant to say, I wasn’t able to help myself, I was too sick to care.
Something similar happened to me, in that I got a mostly asymptomatic UTI, then actually caught the flu immediately afterward. So when I remained tired and run-down and achy for weeks afterward, I thought it was just the flu being really persistent. (The fact that my routine 7-minute morning walk to the subway left me overcome with exhaustion and having to sit down should have been a clue, maybe.)
When I eventually went to the urgent care place, it came out that I’d had a UTI for almost a month that was slowly making its way toward my kidneys. It was terrifying.
I’m still kind of mad about and terrified by my one instance of an asymptomatic UTI. It’s almost like I feel that this bacterial infection was cheating, which is completely irrational and yet, I feel it all the same.
I would’ve taken care of you sooner, Body, if you had just told me what was going on!
Monday cuteness!
OUTSTANDING!
#lifegoals
SQUUEEE!
The Toast linked to something I wrote I can die happy!
Anyway, I wrote that Vox piece on the Jefferson book, and if anyone wants to see the creepiest tweets I’ve gotten about it I am ready and willing to share.
Yes, please! (I don’t know why I want this, except that I am bored at work and also sometimes I like being angry about people being Wrong?)
So many people are so Wrong:
“Hemings would have been a fool not to choose Jefferson.” (That’s nice, but she wasn’t given the option to choose? Because she was a child that he literally owned? That’s how that works?)
“you r dead wrong, the people who did the DNA study retracted. TJ didn’t father the children.Your facile article is despicabl” (Speaks for itself, I think.)
“Very reductionist view of Jefferson and Hemings. You might want to admit you’re not a U.S. historian.” (I am not, in fact!)
I also blocked a few people who were getting creepy so I can’t see the tweets anymore, but it was something along the lines of, “You look pretty good for someone who was around in the 18th century to see Jefferson rape Hemmings.” And I also got a bunch of men trying to contact me on Facebook messenger, offering to show me the error of my ways and teach me history.
Oh! I also got one that said, “Get a real job Grady!” which kind of delights me with its charming retro-ness.
I _am_ a historian (albeit not of the United States), and I actively avoid writing for a non-academic audience because I am afraid I could not handle the abuse/harassment/misogyny that would come with it. So I’d like to be able to compliment you simply on a very fine article, but I must also applaud your bravery. You’re a bad ass.
That’s super nice, thank you! I’m actually a brand new writer in my first month of a writing fellowship, and this is the first thing I’ve written that provoked this much outrage. I knew that being a woman writing on the internet would lead to some harassment, but I naively did not think that stating historical facts about someone who’s been dead for hundreds of years would lead to quite so much anger. Live and learn!
As a US historian, I fully support everything you wrote! I doubt that this person is a US historian, anyway. I don’t count “person who furiously reads biographies of presidents and has visited many battlefields” as a historian.
I’m a Bette Davis girl, but how amazing did Joan Crawford look in “Trog”? She did a lot of things badly, but skin care clearly wasn’t one of them.
In a memoir, Guinness told a jolly story about bringing a child to tears by asking him to never watch Star Wars again. As he summed up the incident: “I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.”
His thirties? Oh, Sir Alec. (Just got my copy of TFA today.)
Anthony Ramos sang the national anthem at the NYCFC v Chicago Fire match last night and it was probably the only time I haven’t muted the television during the anthem. He was delicious. That’s all I got.
Anthony Ramos does not get enough credit for his ridiculous level of talent and charisma.
He sang with Chris Jackson, it looks like? OMG.
Attention Deadwood fans!
Off topic, but I have a follow-up question to an Open Thread discussion from a while ago. Somebody asked about favorite TV shows, and a surprising number of Toasties picked Buffy (my very fave), Friday Night Lights (my sweetie’s fave), and Deadwood. I had never seen Deadwood, but linked to two other favorites, Sweetie and I decided to give it a try this weekend. We got two episodes in and I’m not sure about it. It’s so mean! And none of the characters are likeable! And there’s so much historically-accurate yet still-unpleasant racism and sexism!
Should I keep going? Will there be redeeming factors soon? (Besides the hotness of Olyphant.) I don’t want to miss out on something wonderful, but it hasn’t grabbed me so far.
ooh, same! I’ve only gotten through most of the first episode, but yeah, didn’t grab me either.
I watched the first episode and stopped as well for the same reasons. Life’s too short! I really wanted to like it as I had heard so much about it but nope.
Personally I’m never going to insist that anyone keep watching anything. If it’s not your bag, it’s not your bag. (I’ve never watched Breaking Bad other than maybe an episode or two and whatever I saw while walking around when my husband was watching it.)
I do find the characters likeable, but I don’t know if it took me a few episodes to get there, it’s been a long time. There’s definitely racism and sexism in the entirety of the show (there are some times when the women get to step outside of that, from what I recall, but they battle it quite a bit).
Two hours seems like a reasonable investment. I mean, okay, try one more? If not, then to hell with it, life is short and there is so much good TV out there.
Co-sign this! TV is meant to be enjoyable, so if you’re not enjoying a show, don’t watch it! I have a friend who gets almost vehement in her TV viewing “recommendations” (they’re less recommendations and more orders) and it just turns me off TV-watching entirely. That said, I’ve found – and this seems to be true for a lot of people I know – Deadwood really grabs you at around S1E4. I’ve no idea why, but if you do have any inclination to stick it out that long, you may find it worthwhile!
It wasn’t really compelling to me until the first half of the first season. The characters I think aren’t so much likeable as…understandable, and wholly real in a way that you almost never ever see in historical drama. The politics and working of the town was so intriguing and compelling that I couldn’t stop watching it.
But if you aren’t into it, don’t waste your time! I hear people all the time telling me how phenomenal Joss Whedon shows and Doctor Who and whatever are and I couldn’t give a shit about fantasy, so I gave them a fair go and then said “eh, not my thing” because life is too short to watch stiff you’re not interested in when you can watch your favourites for the 50th times.
It’s brutal as hell and it’s not going to get nicer on that front. But as it goes on, you’ll see more and more of the oppressed characters given voices and depth. What I love about it is that it stays true to the era (no one’s going to bust out any anachronistic ‘you go girl’ feminism) while showing its female characters as real, flawed, interesting people. I’m trying to remember when characters are introduced, but you’ll get some more directly likable ones soon, and many of the horrible ones will become more likable, oddly enough.
Also, the themes of building society and power just really work for me. And I can’t stand watching GoT, for example, so I’m a huge marshmallow when it comes to gore and death and HBO boobs. YMMV of course. I’d give it two more episodes, and if you aren’t liking it by the end of “Here Was a Man,” give up on it.
Thank you for your thoughts, everyone! I will probably give it a couple more episodes. I just can’t wrap my brain around the thought that I might not like a show that’s so beloved by the Toast AND Pajiba. Does not compute!
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. I’m going to shamelessly thread hijack because I’ve been looking for an excuse to discuss this on The Toast, and I will definitely be talking about this again many times this week (I’m on season 5 AND I AM NOT OK)
I started watching because it was mentioned so many times in the OT thread, I’ve always known people thought it was good, but I couldn’t really believe that a show about Texas high school football could actually be that could and thought it must just be an American thing (familiarity? I dunno.)
I was so so wrong. Matt Saracen has broken my heart and I have an obsession with Tim Riggins that will not go away. (I just like his name, it rattles around my head all day. Tim Riggins. Tim Riggins.)
And now that I’ve hit season 5 I have that sense of impending doom because I know it will end soon and then I’ll be lost.
I know!! When the sweetie and I started dating, we decided to swap favorite shows: he watched Battlestar Galactica for me (and loved it) and I watched FNL for him, but there was MUCH skepticism. A football show? Seriously? But then I quickly fell eternally in love with Matt Saracen and the Taylors and just everybody. When Smash showed up on Agents of SHIELD the other week I did a happy dance.
I’m sorry you’re at the end, but I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it. I was a puddle of tears all through the final episode, so beware.
I just want to hug him and tell him it’s all going to be ok. (And I have a sneaking suspicion that Smash Williams is my spirit animal. I’m also adopting a weird Irish Texas drawl and referring to everyone by their full names. HELP ME.)
It me.
Vince did pretty well for himself too, apparently he’s pretty good in Creed.
To add to the gif parade:
I’m still in the middle of Vince’s story! I hope it goes well and his dad doesn’t screw everything up with TMU.
I don’t like sports, I especially don’t like football, and I’m not even American, but Friday Night Lights is one of my all-time favourite shows. There’s so much to love, but one thing is that it’s one of the only portrayals of an honest, communicative, loving marriage on TV.
And I will never forgive Billy Riggins. Never.
Eric and Tami are an amazing couple. I was honestly gob smacked by how realistic season 1 was, down to little things you could tell it was thought out and planned without the need to show off. For me, unless season 5 comes out of nowhere, it peaked a bit in season 1 unfortunately and I’ve just been watching hoping it gets back up there again.
But yes, here for it and will be re-watching many times I imagine.
I DON’T WANT TO KNOW. Tim… oh Tim… I don’t want to think about your poor pretty face in prison. (My crush on him makes me feel ick because he supposed to be about 17 for most of the show, but I justify it in my head because he’s clearly played by a 26 year old.)
25, you’re good. And isn’t it just so frustrating that, like, his whole life could have been different if somebody (I’m looking at you Coach, obviously not Billy) had thought “hey, let’s get this kid checked out for dyslexia” and then he could have had accommodations, an IEP and, like, hope!
Also Landry, I love that kid. It was so weird when he showed on Breaking Bad and he was totally evil.
I kept saying over and over (as I watched those Breaking Bad episodes with my spouse), “Oh, LANDRY.”
He has wrinkles!!! They all look so old its hard to remember they’re supposed to be teenagers, and almost makes all the relationships between high school students and grown ups OK, except no. Not OK. (Julie Taylor what are you doing, you are a walking cliche!!)
So much of the show is frustrating except it’s frustrating is real ways which makes all the difference! So many TV dramas go against all logic and responsible adulting just to put obstacles in the way of their characters for the sake of drama, but students falling through the cracks and funding problems and bad parents are all real problems that real kids face!
Sigh. Landry. Bless him.
It was noteworthy when an episode ended with me not choking up. I actively dislike football and still loved this show.
I really liked the ending if that helped.
I watch a fair amount of it (two seasons?). I think the constant drama and machinations kept me interested. I can’t say that I liked any of the characters, but their motivations were pretty understandable.
I was really annoyed that none of the women got to interact or team up. It seemed like every major female character was bracketed by two male characters; one antagonist and one white knight. I ended up feeling pretty skeevy about it, and started worrying that one of the women was going to get raped. I didn’t want to deal with something like that at the time, so I stopped watching.
Anyone who’s watched the whole series–does anyone get raped? Could I finish watching in peace?
I’m pretty sure no one gets raped (leaving aside the obvious problems with many of the prostitutes being in sexual slavery, anyway). There is one scene in the second season I have a really hard time with – VAGUE SPOILERS – of the murder of a vulnerable female character. Not a main character. But if you got through two seasons you probably saw that.
On the other hand, the third season isn’t quite up to the level of the first two because there’s no satisfying wrap-up, so if I were on the fence about the show I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to finish it at the point you’re at. Though Calamity Jane and Joanie Stubbs do get a plotline in the third (I think?) season.
If the first two hours didn’t grab you, I’d say skip it and switch to “Justified” for the Olyphant hotness.
I feel like “Deadwood” was important to me personally because (at the time) I hadn’t seen another TV show like it? Now that HBO puts out long-running dramatic TV shows with sex in them constantly, it doesn’t seem as cool. >.>
No. The whole point of it was that the characters are not likeable and that the show got much closer to how the language and behavior appeared in various primary texts (Twain’s Nevada and SF journalism is fascinating that way)
Now I felt by the end or at least the second season the show had slipped into modernizing and sympathizing the white women’s interiority in a way that it was never able to for Wu or the trafficked Chinese prostitutes or the native Indians, which I had a problem with but still loved to watch. Plus Miltonic-level swearing and profanity!
I finished the Chernow book this weekend, and one of the things I really loved about reading about politics and behind the scenes of the 1790s and early 1800s is no one really comes off that great. (Chernow himself has some biases, of course, especially with regard to Hamilton and Washington, but it’s easy enough to come to your own conclusions.) Virtually everyone is petty and consumed with their reputation, temperamental, spreading lies and rumors about each other, taking one side and then the other when it suited them, you name it. I always preferred European history to American history growing up, and I think it’s because the textbook version is so “great man” centric. Once you see them as fucked-up people, it’s ironically easier to deal with. And it certainly puts 2016 politics in perspective. The way they smeared each other, spread truth and rumors alike, invented scandals, believed virtually anything about an opponent whether it was based in reality or not, etc. makes their newspapers and pamphlets look not a whole lot different from the internet and Fox News. It’s so fascinating. Anyway, that’s kind of beside the point, but I am all for dragging people off their pedestals.
As a bonus, here’s one of the moments when I laughed out loud:
Hamilton, who can get ridiculously melodramatic at times, writes to Angelica as he’s moping but feeling that of course he couldn’t possibly step away from his job –
“What of my fame and glory? How will the world go on without me?”
Oh, men.
HOW INDEED
If anything, the musical downplays how very, very emo A.Ham could be.
YES. And in general his complete lack of judgment w/r/t Adams and in general post-Washington. But I get it, no one needs 4 hours digging into the details, that’s what the book’s for!
Yeah, I really enjoyed reading it more than I was expecting from its size. It was like a novel–flew by!
okay so like… this book isn’t the way to do it, it’s not it’s not it’s not, consent isn’t a thing when one of the parties is an enslaved person
but
there’s a strand of contemporary theory, located in the places where critical race theory and queer of color critique overlap (shoutout to Hortense Spillers and Sharon Holland), that points out that conversations like this frequently foreclose the possibility that enslaved women were capable of experiencing pleasure. which is also a problem, in that it flattens the life experience of folks who were/are already denied complex personhood both in their daily lives and in the retrospective lens of history.
however, again: THIS BOOK IS NOT THE WAY TO RIGHT THAT.
(i don’t want to bring this up to say Y’ALL WRONG — that’s not it at all — but that some black feminist thinkers/scholars are looking at sex and relationships under slavery, and doing valuable work around it, and that’s a thing that can be helpful to know.)
This sounds fascinating – I would read the shit out of stuff about that.
Yeah, I think it’s hugely important to acknowledge that within shitty, fucked-up and coercive systems, individuals still find pleasure and exercise agency. But I definitely think that we shouldn’t put white dudes in charge of deciding how and where black women manage to do that.
^^^^Yes.
I am very interested in Sally Hemings’ inner life, and whatever complex feelings she had about/for Jefferson. And I am interested in the ways in which slaves found to express their personhood and autonomy within a system which was designed to strip them of both.
I have literally zero interest in hearing the thoughts of white men on this subject.
true for all subjects, tbh.
The Kingsley Plantation NPS tells the story of Zephaniah and Anna Kingsley which hits upon a lot of the same muddled things, and I always feel awkward telling tourists that they should visit the site. Like, not to romanticise the fact that Anna was Zephaniah’s slave and he married her and set her free and so on, but because the plantation was established under Spanish law, which treated free people of color differently than English law, and at least for me, it was a shock to realize all the romantic notions I had unwittingly accepted about Virginia, Georgia, etc. style slavery weren’t universal. But it’s hard to put that into a short “oh, you should go visit the plantation”. (And I have no idea how many other people would visit and have similar shifts to their understanding or even realize that there were differences between English and Spanish like this.)
I mean, the quote Wikipedia shares about how Zephaniah established the freedom for his family to the Spanish crown:
Let is be known that I … possessed as a slave a black woman called Anna, around eighteen years of age, bought as a bozal [newly imported African][14] in the port of Havana from a slave cargo, who with the permission of the government was introduced here; the said black woman has given birth to three mulatto children: George, about 3 years 9 months, Martha, 20 months old, an Mary, one month old. And regarding the good qualities shown by the said black woman, the nicety and fidelity which she has shown me, and for other reasons, I have resolved to set her free … and the same to her three children.
Anna ended up being the master of at least one of the plantations Zephaniah owned, she owned her own slaves, too, and when the Spanish ceded Florida to the US, most (all?) of the Kingsley children moved to property in Haiti because English law no longer allowed them to live freely.
So how much autonomy did Anna have in the choices she made? How much was Zephaniah calling the shots even when he wasn’t “home” (with her) for months at a time, while he traveled to his many and varied properties/plantations? But at the time, the Spanish didn’t apparently consider slavery to be a For Life situation, and she apparently came from a culture that practiced slavery (which I understand to be transitional? not permanent?) so did she try to orchestrate this to gain her freedom/power? was it truly love?
Anyway, I could never ever get behind this TJ/Sally romance book as anything but horrible, and for the same reasons, I could never support a similar romance story about Zephaniah and Anna Kingsley. She was still his slave when she bore him 3 kids and even if she had more later, the power imbalance didn’t just disappear. But I do wonder about her side of the story and how much was her choice.
I think the English/American version of was one of the first (if not the first) to make it automatically “for life and for your children forever” until someone freed you – every other slavery practice i have read about it was much more normal for people to be able to buy their way out, their kids weren’t automatically slaves, and sometimes the slaves had their own slaves or servants, while still enslaved.
Right, but I would have never known that from what I learned about slavery in school. So the Kingsley Plantation historical site was this eye-opener, especially when pared with Fort Mose, which was a free person of color town established in part for escaped slaves from Georgia/further north, with the agreement that St Augustine would protect them and they’d protect St Augustine in turn.
I mean, even when they talked about Roman or Egyptian slaves in school, there was this idea I picked up of “oh, that’s not real slavery” and simultaneously “if it is, it would have been exactly like the English colonies’ versions in N.America”, though I did eventually learn otherwise through better/further education. And I’m still learning! It’s amazing how self-focused and misinformative the US education system can be.
ETA: OH GOSH ALSO not that I’m excusing any slavery or anything remotely like that with my comments here! I’m more trying to get across how fucked up it is that when I was young, I thought the US style of slavery was normal and universal, even if it was wrong and bad. So I unknowingly erased so many other experiences, removed any agency from those people if I had learned of them, and also too accepted this one sort of fringe version as central/fundamental, which means having a more difficult time recognizing modern slavery for what it is. (Thank goodness for education and the Internet and comment threads like this one that have taught me better over the last decade! But there are so many people with the US-centric educations who have never been exposed to these other ideas…)
It is also my understanding that chattel slavery (permanent and extending to children) was unique and unheard of previously.
Just to clarify one point — I’m not informed about most other historical systems of slavery, but Roman slavery absolutely was chattel slavery, legally mandated 100% social death for you and your children. Of course, slavery wasn’t racialized the way it was in the Americas, and manumission seems to have been a regular practice for some groups of slaves (numbers are impossible to even guess at with any hope of accuracy). In lower social strata, you do get a LOT of instances where a man seems to have manumitted and then married his slave so that their children would be freeborn. But of course manumission in the Roman world didn’t mean independence from one’s former owner: it carried legal obligations of service and obedience to them. A freedwoman would not have had much legal recourse against her former owner, let alone the social recourse to (start to) refuse him. There’s a quip that was circulating in early imperial intellectual circles: “performing passive sex acts is shameful for a freeborn man, compulsory for a slave, a duty for a freedman.”
In conclusion: slavery in the ancient world was different and offered some possibilities of esaping slavery for some slaves, but it was still an awful dehumanizing system of institutionalized chattel slavery that infected even the “happy ending” outcomes of manumission. (This isn’t direct at you, but at the general and long-standing tradition of apologia for ancient slavery)
Yes, you are correct. Virginia issued a series of laws generally referred to as the Virginia Slave Laws in the 1660s. The 1662 law stated that children would follow the condition of the mother, so that enslaved women would also bear enslaved children. But wait! What about white women who bear the children of enslaved men? Well, they shall be banished forever, says a 1691 law, so clearly someone was trying to exploit this loophole. Or they were petrified that all the white women were going to run off with non-white men. Or both!
Great and important point. Unfortunately this (written by a white dude) book is going to get way more press than all of that scholarship combined.
I think I am developing a crush on Erin McKeown. I was introduced to her a few months ago after starting to listen to Folk Alley last year, and I am like Wow What A Person. And then she posted this about why she’s not cancelling her shows in North Carolina this week, after the news that Bruce Springsteen was: http://www.erinmckeown.com/news/why-i-am-playing-…
And she said something on Twitter about how there are two different audiences for Bruce’s shows and her own, and thus two different ways to show support for the people of NC/protest the government, and it was just very lovely, I guess. (Rhiannon Giddens is my other recent musician crush and she tweeted basically the same thing, but also NC is her home.)
I’m sure other musicians are posting similar things, but Erin’s statement was the first I’d seen after all the Bruce Springsteen on my twitter.
Rhiannon Giddens is the best both musically and politically.
And I def. agree that it’s important to continue to support small businesses who make a point of supporting us LGBT folks. It’s not their fault that a few repugnant Republicans pulled off this bullshit law, and they need support to fight back.
I want to fangirl Rhiannon Giddens foreverrrrr. She came through my town with the Carolina Chocolate Drops 2 years ago and I thought “I should go see them!” but was lazy and forgot and I regret it so much. I didn’t even really know her/them yet, just saw the ad in the weekly paper and was like That Band Looks Amazing. So much regret. Nicole Cliffe’s day trip to NYC for Broadway a few months ago has inspired me to make fly-in trips to see musicians who Never Come To Florida (not my corner or conveniently, anyway), so maybe I’ll make plans for that next summer if my promotion ever happens at work and I can afford it.
But, yes, her statements and Erin’s both made me feel so full in my heart, like here i am in a similarly bullshit state with a backwards city and like all the liberals and/or MOGAS* folks in Texas or Mississippi or NC or wherever, it sometimes feels like the rest of the world is all “you’ve got what’s coming to you, you idiots”, and there are two people I admire who are saying “no, we know it’s your home and we will do our part to make it better for you”.
*i can’t remember if MOGAS is the awesome acronym or not. minorities and others of gender and sexuality, or something? i liked it because it was so inclusive and basically “everyone who isn’t the default straight cisperson” and the LGBT thing gets really unwieldy after a while.
Yeah, I live in Missouri and can very easily see people boycotting us next – and then what about all the little shops that emphatically make me feel welcome? Or what about the fact that the University of Missouri (whose curators recently caused one of our state’s two abortion clinics to close) is the only place I can get trans-friendly healthcare? A strict boycott mindset would result in me losing things I need to survive in a hostile land.
So far as acronyms go, I like QUILTBAG because it’s silly and I enjoy handwork.
starting to get off topic, but I feel like ants crawling on my skin when someone uses QUILTBAG in reference to how i identify. It’s…belittling, maybe? for a cutesy term that still makes me feel like an “other”, a cast-off that may have use someday, but not yet.
i feel similarly to the puzzle piece identifier for autism spectrum people. it’s supposed to be positive, but just reinforces the idea that i am a Thing to be Figured Out (a missing piece, even! often there is a puzzle grid with one piece blacked out) and not a full person.
I think I would feel differently if someone else were to apply it to me, I will admit. It’s much like how I feel about queer. I can call me queer, people I have given permission can call me queer, but I’m gonna side-eye the fuck out of unknowns who use it towards me because the line between reclamation (or tongue-in-cheek self-reference) is razor thin. Labels are complicated, and I think I shall stick to using an actual quiltbag. I don’t want to make other people feel bad. 😐
The ASD puzzle piece should just stop existing though. It’s all wrapped up in “we must find a cure!” thinking in a way that makes me feel profoundly marginalized, and honestly strikes me as centering the experiences of neurotypical parents while denying agency to actual people with ASD.
Ooh, yes, it’s definitely a much worse feeling when unknowns use QUILTBAG vs. people I know are being joking about their own identity. I can also see the positives in it, and the way it turns an alphabet soup into something easier to remember as inclusive, especially since I can never remember the excellent one I heard once. 😀 (But seriously, it was good – didn’t specify any particular identity, but also didn’t use “cis” or other terms that make the straight white men start arguing before they even hear the rest of the sentence.)
I think you’re thinking of MOGAI–marginalized orientations, gender alignments, and intersex.
Thank you, that’s it! I’m going to make a sticky note so I can remember it. I really like how inclusive it is without having to list every permutation, at least for referring to groups of people. It’s definitely not a phrase for a specific person, and I like that, too.
http://www.salon.com/2016/04/08/spreading_hate_ha…
Surprisingly good piece about the Republican Party selling out to Fox news and creating candidates like Trump and Cruz and therefore shooting itself in the foot.
I saw Batman vs Superman yesterday. I am now working on putting all the major characters in order by degree of competence. Bruce Wayne is in last place.
In case you want a fun (yet thoughtful) review, ComicBookGirl19 did this great one where she reviews BvS while also doing a tutorial on how to make a knotted pearl necklace (so that when Joe Chill kills you, your cheapass necklace doesnt rain pearls everywhere).
A friend of mine passed away about a decade ago from sepsis, after a long battle with leukemia.
After reading that article I realize I didn’t actually know what sepsis was until now. I kind of wish I still didn’t.
🙁
I just want to thank everyone who replied to me on the Thursday link roundup, my talk was on Friday and everyone thought it went really well. It is always good to hear other people’s tricks- I don’t remember who said it and I can’t check right now (writing fast) but someone gave the advice to be careful using the laser pointer because graduate students often shake it when they are nervous, and that helped a lot.
Thanks!
Wow that VP of compliance really needs to read the chapter on business ethics in “Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun.”
My OCD is not nearly as bad as it was when I was a kid but sepsis is still one of my major obsessions & I’ve found reading articles that explain the reality of diseases I’m obsessing about having is a good way to make it stop in a way that isn’t as damaging as like, washing my hands til they bleed, so definitely bookmarking that thank you!
God, I wish a CFO’s son so fucking bad.
So I’m not a compliance expert but my job is compliance-adjacent and that AAM letter sounds like exactly the kind of thing whistleblower provisions are made for.
Did you guys see this–Rick Scott released an attack ad against Cara Jennings, the hero who yelled at him at a Florida Starbucks! What a classy dude.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/04/10…
Co-worker sometimes jokes that I don’t really need to run my half marathon, I can just say I did.
NO, GOSH DARN IT. I’M GOING TO RUN AS SLOW AS MOLASSES BUT I WILL DO IT.
Also, because I figured out how to eat appropriately for all that business.
1) Has anyone else been keeping up with Outlander? The second season just premiered this past weekend. (I started the first book last year as vacation reading and then I got really hooked and read all eleventy billion pages of them, and now it is a whole Game of Thrones situation where I am Thoroughly Invested no matter how off the rails the plot gets, which is often very.)
2) Related: Here is an article about the sex scenes in Outlander being refreshingly female-gaze-y. Thoughts?
3) Really I am just trying to distract myself, because I am waiting on a Very Important Email that will 100% officially confirm some news I got in a phone call yesterday. I am not stressed exactly, but it is hard to let myself get excited about the thing in question until I see it in writing.
Here’s hoping your news is good, whatever it is!
I watched most of the 1st season last weekend (on ep left) and didn’t feel it got very far off the rails, but maybe I don’t remember the book that well. Agree on the sex scenes being female gazey, although they’re still not super realistic re: amount of foreplay before penetration (for those that involve penetration).
I think it’s interesting how the show has a reputation for lots of sex scenes, when most of the episodes don’t actually include one. I think in the first 8 eps, maybe 3 had sex scenes? More in the latter half of the season, but still not just a ton.
I guess people just see lots of reason to talk about them cause they’re so different from those of shows made more about/for/by men.
Oh, sorry, I should have been clearer. There’s nothing too ridiculous in the first season of the show, or even in the first several books, but the last few (there are seven at this point) have been absolutely bananas, but I’ve spent so much time and emotional energy on the characters by this point that I’m going to see things through regardless.
I don’t think it’s the amount of sex scenes so much as the way the scenes are shot–there’s a lot more emphasis on female pleasure than I usually see on film, and I don’t get the sense that the female nudity, when it occurs, is there for titillation. (Whereas with a lot of shows, it’s like “hey, are you viewers still paying attention? look, boobs!”)
Yeah, and in the scenes where female nudity occurs because of a man exploiting a woman there’s no ounce of sexiness to it. There’s no question you’re supposed to be horrified rather than turned on.
Now I’m curious what happens in all those later books. I wasn’t planning on reading them cause I think this is actually one of those rare cases where I like the story better in show form than book form.
The intern question almost made me want to throw my computer across the room. I’m almost done with the second of two year-long internships, all unpaid. I’ve spent a considerable amount of money travelling for my current internship and will never be reimbursed for it – that’s flatly against both the agency’s policy and the school’s. I firmly believe that all unpaid internships (for credit, as mine were, or otherwise) are unethical and should be illegal. Just thinking about this stuff makes my blood pressure go up.
The other day my internship supervisor told me if I stuck around this area long enough I’ll probably have to supervise interns myself someday. If there’s a merciful god in heaven that will never happen. I just can’t participate in something so terrible.
I feel the same way about unpaid internships. When I had to supervise interns, I made sure to follow the definition of what an unpaid intern for a nonprofit should be–I basically spent as much as time possible teaching them useful things and making sure that not only did they not really accomplish much to benefit the organization, they also took up a lot of my time so that I couldn’t finish as much of my regular work. It at least made me feel better about the situation.
I also feel this way! I did one for a publishing company that mostly put us to doing busy work and I had to travel for (like 30 min train ride, plus an extra subway ride, maybe $20+ bucks total to get there and back, but memory’s fuzzy). I didn’t get many useful skills out of it and still had someone tell me in spite of the internship + a 6-month stint working as a literary agent’s assistant that I didn’t have enough “experience” to make more than $10 an hour.
They were full of it, but it was a super disheartening day that I’ll probably always remember cause I did everything I was supposed to do! College degree at school with a great reputation! Internship! Paid job that should have looked damn good on a resume! And still I got that shit.
I really hope unpaid internships become illegal at some point in the near future.
Technology horror story – http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-g… .
Fabulists are pretty much the only way to get me to read a full-length story about sports.
But mostly I just want to know if anyone here was also reading truth-about-ruth and scammer-in-a-minivan in 2013? It seems like the kind of place some Toasties might have been, and there were parts that rivaled Ms. Scribe in the sheer drama/chutzpah, although also sadder in some ways in terms of it much more obviously bleeding into this person’s real life with her children. It seems to be mostly lost to the internets, though.
But damn, the analysis of those posts from the stamping forum (of all the places to wreak havoc) was AMAZING.
UNRELATED TO ANYTHING AND ALSO I DON’T KNOW IF ANYONE IS READING ON PAGE 2 BUT:
I am really proud of the cosplays I did at ECCC over the weekend and I wanted to yell about it.
The Morrigan/Babd from The Wicked and the Divine.
War Boy OC from Fury Road.
And yes, this is basically the internet equivalent of screaming WITNESS ME!
Just replying to say (a) being a late-riser on the West Coast is such a disadvantage with link roundup. I feel like everybody’s already checked out by the time I check in, and (b) I have no idea what that first costume is, but it’s super cool.
Here is reference for the Morrigan!
I am glad I’m not the only one!
Shiny and chrome!
WITNESS!
WITNESS
WITNESS!! EXCELLENCE ALSO!
You look AMAAAAAZING!!! I know you put a lot of work/thought into your costumes from my .001 seconds trying and failing to cosplay, so excellent, excellent work!
My dog does that exact thing, mostly when me or Partner is on the toilet.
Unfortunately most of the white collar professions in western countries seem to run on unpaid internships and if you can't afford toto work for free you're effectively locked out of those industries (law and accounting rely on post grad qualifications that a company usually sponsors you through, which means you work for them for little to no money for at least a year. TV/media and most finance companies won't hire a junior until they have at least a years experience, usually an internship or placement year at university.)
This is another area where young people are fucked over because they don't know their rights and follow the status quo, at least in the UK, there are laws around internships and when you should be paid (almost always) but companies continue to offer illegal unpaid internships because there's always a supply of parent supported middle class kids who are willing to take them.
I put my foot down and just refused to apply for any unpaid post graduate work and in the end I got a paid, minimum wage, 6 month internship. But I was also lucky that I got in with a company that treats their interns well and gives pretty much everyone a permanent job after.