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Sifting through the aftermath of a disastrous blaze. The romance that launched a thousand Supreme Court opinions. A poetic ode to a simple life, well lived. Tracing the arc of food writing. And examining the hidden costs of a particularly sensitive surgical procedure. Our favorites of the week, pulled from all of our editors’ picks.
Megan Greenwell | Wired | June 27, 2023 | 7,987 words
Megan Greenwell’s piece does what the best longform features do: It mesmerizes you with an opening so powerful and a story so compelling that you deliberately read it slowly, just to make it last. This piece—about a devastating fire at a branch of the National Archives and Records Administration that happened to contain records belonging to Greenwell’s grandfather—is nearly 8,000 words long, but the prose is so sharp and cinematic that you’ll wish it was longer. “The National Personnel Records Center fire burned out of control for two days before firefighters were able to begin putting it out,” she writes. “Photos show the roof ablaze, a nearly 5-acre field of flame. The steel beams that had once held up the glass walls jut at unnatural angles, like so many broken legs.” Even were it not set against a backdrop of the U.S. government, this would be a fascinating mystery: What or who started the fire and how do workers attempt to uncover precious facts from seriously damaged files? Did Greenwell’s grandfather’s records survive the blaze? Be sure to take it slow and let this story smolder. I’m certainly glad I did. —KS
Kerry Howley | New York | June 21, 2023 | 7,555 words
My husband sent me this story while I was reporting in Idaho last week, with a message that said, “Isn’t this by that writer you like?” The answer, reader, is yes. Kerry Howley’s 2022 story about anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser was rightly named a finalist for a National Magazine Award—one of several nominations Howley’s work has received in the last several years—and I suspect this piece about Clarence and Ginni Thomas will be in the running for many, many honors. Whereas with Dannenfelser, Howley was shedding light on a powerful person who isn’t a household name, here she tackles two of the better-known political (yes, SCOTUS justices are political) figures in America. She does it without access to them, instead surveying pre-existing material on the Thomases with remarkable facility, mustering everything she needs, and nothing she doesn’t, to tell the story of their marriage. Take the seemingly mundane detail of Ginni telling a bunch of right-wing youth that her favorite charm on a bracelet Clarence gave her is a pixie because, to her husband, she is “kind of a pixie…kind of a troublemaker,” which Howley convincingly positions as a metaphor for the havoc Ginni has wreaked on American democracy. Consider this brilliantly constructed sentence: “They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift.” And that’s just in the first section! This piece is one for the ages in both substance and style. I mean, damn. —SD
Jeremy B. Jones | The Bitter Southerner | June 6, 2023 | 1,580 words
I have never before picked an obituary for our Top 5, but Jeremy B. Jones’ ode to his grandfather deserves recognition. At just over 1500 words, it’s not a particularly long piece, but it’s a particularly poetic one, and is enough to get to know—and respect—Jones’ Papaw. Ray Harrell lived a simple life on a little bit of land in Fruitland, North Carolina. To many, it would not be enough; for Harrell, it was plenty. After all, as Jones writes, he had “a reliable tractor and a fiery woman.” It was a good life because he appreciated what he had, was contented with his lot. Jones notes that these quiet lives often slip past unnoticed, “yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.” A small essay about a simple life that I found hugely moving. —CW
Marian Bull | n+1 | June 15, 2023 | 3,978 words
In reviewing Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires, Marian Bull looks at how infusing recipes with introspection and experience begat the cooking memoir. What I loved about about this piece—besides spurring me to pick up Small Fires, which also appeared in our recent feature “Meals for One”—is that while Bull surveys chef memoirs, she hails Johnson’s book as one for the home cook, the self-trained enthusiast. “Johnson has inverted this form by writing a memoir of a recipe, rather than a ‘memoir’ with recipes,” she writes. Johnson looks at cooking as translation and recipes as a form of performance, which is comforting for someone like me who views a recipe as a guide: “The unpredictable ‘I that cooks,’ who resists the recipe again and again, generates new translations.” How inspiring and affirming to be invited to take a seat at this generous table where nothing is lost and everything is gained in translation. —KS
Ava Kofman | ProPublica and The New Yorker | June 26, 2023 | 8,601 words
It’s easy to think that “men trying to upgrade their dongs” is a journalism cheat code of sorts. Having written about them myself many years ago, I can assure you that it’s not. Pitfalls abound. Tone is everything. Jokes are easy; reserve is hard. (So is avoiding double entendres.) Yet, Ava Kofman manages to thread every needle in her stunning examination of the state of penile-enlargement procedures, which focuses primarily on issues surrounding the popular Penuma implant. She writes compassionately about the patients, not dismissing the complex psychological situations that led them to pursue surgery. She writes unblinkingly about the doctor who popularized the procedure, and whose practice seems at times to operate with all the care of a 30-minute oil change joint—and about the surgeon who “was doing such brisk business repairing Penuma complications that he’d relocated his practice from Philadelphia to an office down the street.” And speaking of unblinking, I dare you not to wince as she plays fly on the wall during an implantation; you may never hear the phrase “inside out” the same way again. This story may have drawn you in with its imagined salaciousness, but it delivers something far better: truth. —PR
What piece did our readers love most this week? One that makes clear that the kids are not all right.
Joseph Cox | Vice | June 20, 2023 | 2,111 words
Those looking for dirty deeds to be done seem to be going no further than the Comm, a series of Discord communities in which people order violence, including commissioning robberies for bitcoin, and organizing swats against vulnerable people for perceived slights and insults. For Vice, Joseph Cox infiltrated this vile, testosterone-fueled world of crime. —KS
Every artist explores dimensions of space and place, orienting themselves and their works in the world, and orienting their audiences. Then there are artists like Vincent van Gogh, who make space and place a primary subject. In his early paintings of peasant homes and fields, his figures’ muscular shoulders and hands interact with sturdy walls and gnarled trees. Later country scenes—whether curling and delicate, like Wheatfield with a Reaper, or heavy and ominous, like Wheatfield with Crows (both below)—give us the sense of the landscape as a single living entity, pulsating, writhing, blazing in brilliant yellows, reds, greens, and blues.
Van Gogh painted interior scenes, such as his famous The Bedroom, at the top (the first of three versions), with an eye toward using color as the means of making space purposeful: “It’s just simply my bedroom,” he wrote to Paul Gauguin of the 1888 painting, “only here color is to do everything… to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, looking at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather the imagination.”
So taken was the painter with the concept of using color to induce “rest or sleep” in his viewers’ imaginations that when water damage threatened the “stability” of the first painting, Chicago’s Art Institute notes, “he became determined to preserve the composition by painting a second version while at an asylum in Saint-Rémy in 1889,” then demonstrated the deep emotional resonance this scene had for him by painting a third, smaller version for his mother and sister.
The opportunity to see all of Van Gogh’s bedroom paintings in one place may have passed us by for now—an exhibit in Chicago brought them together in 2016. But we can see the original bedroom at the yellow house in Arles in a virtual space, along with 1,500 more Van Gogh paintings and drawings, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam’s site. The digitized collection showcases a vast amount of Van Gogh’s work—including not only landscapes, but also his many portraits, self-portraits, drawings, city scenes, and still-lifes.
One way to approach these works is through the unifying themes above: how does van Gogh use color to communicate space and place, and to what effect? Even in portraits and still-lifes, his figures compete with the ground. The scored and scalloped paintings of walls, floors, and wallpaper force our attention past the staring eyes of the painter or the finely-rendered fruits and shoes, and into the depths and textures of shadow and light. We begin to see people and objects as inseparable from their surroundings.
“Painting is a faith,” Van Gogh once wrote, and it is as if his paintings ask us to contemplate the spiritual unity of all things; the same animating flame brings every object in his blazing worlds to life. The Van Gogh Museum houses the largest collection of the artist’s work in the world. On their website you can read essays about his life and work, plan a visit, or shop at the online store. But most importantly, you can experience the stunning breadth of his art through your screen—no replacement for the physical spaces of galleries, but a worthy means nonetheless of communing with Van Gogh’s vision.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
Related Content:
Experience the Van Gogh Museum in 4K Resolution: A Video Tour in Seven Parts
Vincent Van Gogh’s Self Portraits: Explore & Download a Collection of 17 Paintings Free Online
Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”: Why It’s a Great Painting in 15 Minutes
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Is there value to be found in national, or language based preprint servers? Matthew Salter discusses lessons learned from the first year of Japan's Jxiv.
The post Guest Post — A Year of Jxiv – Warming the Preprints Stone appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
If you spend any time at all in archives of early American material, you will stumble over genealogies. Lots of ways and types of producing genealogy. What I call “vernacular genealogy.” (And you can see lots of examples on my Instagram, where my handle is VernacularGenealogy.) Although the John Carter Brown Library is known as a world-class collection of early American printed materials (books, maps, prints about the early Americas and the Caribbean), with one major archive, the Brown Family Business Papers, we do also have a few codices. And last week I stumbled over one I hadn’t read before, an account of the Kimber family of England, New York and Pennsylvania. This notebook of family history was written by multiple hands, from the mid- 18th into the mid-20th century.
There’s a lot that’s interesting in this volume, lots of ways it echoes other like family histories, but one thing caught my eye immediately. There are pages missing. Right at the start of the volume, one page is torn, and one is cut. I can see some letters from words in the gutter of the latter, nothing of the former (torn too close). I always wonder what could possibly have been there to warrant its removal. It could be sensitive material. Or it could be that, like many of us and like many of their contemporaries, the authors of the volume started to use it one way, then decided on another purpose and just got rid of the first few pages.
What’s helpful about these kinds of material observations is they remind me to stay close to the purposes of the work–even when that’s obscured. Someone had intent here in the production of these texts, the full volume itself, and even in the pages torn and cut away.
The post What’s Missing appeared first on Karin Wulf.
Beaumarchais and <em>Electronic Enlightenment</em>
The addition to Electronic Enlightenment (EE) of nearly 500 letters from the Beaumarchais correspondence is a significant event in eighteenth-century studies. Drawn from the second volume of Gunnar and Mavis von Proschwitz’s edited collection, Beaumarchais and the “Courrier de lÉurope”, first published thirty years ago in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, these letters join with 175 letters from the first volume (previously included in EE). The total of 660 letters in this collection include a combination of letters printed in that periodical and letters from public and private collections. (In 2005, von Proschwitz published a selection of 107 of these in a French edition, entitled Lettres de Combat.)
Collectively the letters being published by EE represent the largest tranche of Beaumarchais letters available for online research; moreover, they constitute approximately one third of Beaumarchais letters published to date and over one sixth of all known Beaumarchais letters in existence.
In the context of eighteenth-century correspondences, the Beaumarchais archive stands out for several reasons. The first is the volume of the archive. The known portion of the Beaumarchais papers is over 4,500 documents, constituting one of the largest corpora of eighteenth-century papers known. The full archive, if ever fully inventoried and edited, would run somewhere between 6,000 and 20,000 documents. At the upper range it would become among the largest known archives of personal papers of the period.
The second is geographical breadth—from Vienna to Madrid to the Netherlands to England and North America, the Beaumarchais correspondence is important because it shows how actually we limit our understanding if we focus on solely “French” or “Francophone” correspondence networks.
The third is sociological breadth—Beaumarchais as an historical figure offers us insights into the eighteenth century that stand apart from the major figures whose correspondence has been edited and studied. He was an artisan, a musician, a financier, commercial entrepreneur, printer, investor, politician, judge, diplomat, spy, litigant, criminal (he was imprisoned in at least four capitals), husband, lover, brother, father and, of course, a playwright. His correspondence, and thus the network of correspondents connected him to a wider swath of eighteenth-century European and North American society than almost all personal correspondences studied to date, rivaling and perhaps exceeding the Franklin and Jefferson papers in this respect.
The editorial history of the Beaumarchais correspondence extends over two centuries of literary and political history. Since 1809, when the first edition of Beaumarchais’s Oeuvres was published, over 1,500 letters have been edited—though most of them not with the critical apparatus of the Proschwitz letters published by EE—over the course of more than two centuries.
Nearly 500 letters were printed in partial editions of Beamarchais’ work or correspondence, from 1809 to 1929. The first edition of his complete works edited by his amanuensis, Gudin de la Brenellerie (seven volumes, 1809), included 55 letters that Gudin had transcribed. A second edition, by the journalist, historian and politician Saint-Marc de Girardin in 1837 included 53 additional letters. A collection of 29 letters from the Comedie Francaise archives were published in the Revue Retrospective (1836). In his two-volume biography, Beaumarchais et son temps (1858), Louis de Loménie, referenced and included partial transcripts of hundreds of letters, but included in the appendix only 35 complete texts of previously unedited letters. A second biographer, Eugène Lentilhac, in his Beaumarchais et ses oeuvres (1887), included 12 partially transcribed letters not previously published. In 1890, Louis Bonneville de Marsagny published a biography of Beaumarchais’s third (and longest lasting) wife, Marie Thérèse Willermalauz, and claimed to have consulted “sa correspondance inédite” though no letters are reproduced or directly referenced.
In the early twentieth century, the first effort to produce a complete edition of the correspondence was made by Louis Thomas; however, as he explains in the preface to his edition entitled Lettres de Jeunesse (1923), his military service during the Great War put an end to his research; so in 1923 he published 167 letters from the first two decades of Beaumarchais’ adult life, some of which had been previously published. Several years later, in 1929, the eminent French literature scholar in the United States of the day, Gilbert Chinard, edited a collection of Lettres inédites de Beaumarchais consisting of 109 letters acquired by the Clements Library at the University of Michigan; these consisted of letters to his wife and daughter.
In more recent decades, over 1,000 additional items have been published, between the edition launched by Brian Morton in 1968, continued by Donald Spinelli, which added an additional 300 previously unpublished letters over four volumes of Correspondence, and then in 1990, the Proschwitz edition.
Proschwitz, a noted philologist, added to these letters the most extensive critical apparatus associated with any edition of Beaumarchais letters. He did not seek to produce a critical edition or a material bibliography of these letters, approaches that are difficult to apply to eighteenth-century correspondence in general and to the Beaumarchais archive in particular. Rather, Proschwitz in his notes emphasized the significance of these documents for our understanding of Beaumarcahis’ life and of the eighteenth century. In these letters, we see Beaumarchais not only as a playwright seeking to circumvent censorship to have Marriage de Figaro finally staged, but also as an entrepreneur, a printer, an urban property owner, an emissary, and a transatlantic merchant. Through this window we have a window on the eighteenth century that is geographically, socially, and culturally much broader and more diverse than what we generally encounter through the correspondences previously published in EE.
With the appearance of these letters and the launching of the first new projects on Beaumarchais’s correspondence in 50 years, including the effort spearheaded by Linda Gil to produce a definitive inventory with a material bibliography, and my own work to analyze the network of correspondents from the known correspondence, this publication in EE offers eighteenth-century scholars new reason to consider a longstanding, but still little understood, figure of the age.
A version of this blog post was first published on Electronic Enlightenment.
Featured image by Debby Hudson on Unsplash (public domain)
Yeshiva University has said it is a religious institution, not an educational institution. But that raises questions about whether it can receive public funds designated for schools.
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A Federal judge's ruling offered a stern rebuke of the Internet Archive's National Emergency Library and its controlled digital lending service, providing a significant victory for the four publishers that had filed suit.
The post Controlled Digital Lending Takes a Blow in Court appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
On Friday, the Internet Archive lost its "controlled digital lending" case on summary judgment. Reactions today from our Chefs Rick Anderson, Joseph Esposito, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Roy Kaufman, Roger C. Schonfeld, and Karin Wulf.
The post The Internet Archive Loses on Controlled Digital Lending appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
This essay was originally published at The Rumpus on April 30, 2017.
Sophomore year of college, on my school’s monthly blood drive day, I was seduced by a sign outside of a Big Red Bus that decreed, “You can be a hero! Donate blood and save three lives today!” The sign was written with hot pink dry eraser marker in cheery, swirly letters as if advertising today’s lunch special: Destiny. Of course. I have always known that I’m destined for greatness—a triumph so epic you could hear my name drifting in the winds if you simply stood still and tuned your ears to history: Edgar Gomez is a hero. Or maybe: Edgar Gomez, the hero. Whichever is easier on the winds.
I had skipped breakfast that morning and wondered if they were offering anything more substantial. On the back, in case being a hero three times over wasn’t enough of a draw, the sign continued: “Free small pizza and movie ticket with every donation.” A small price to pay to save three lives.
Giddy at the arrival of my big break, I climbed aboard the bloodmobile, vibrating with the knowledge that this was finally my chance to prove to everyone what has been so obvious to me my whole life. I had been waiting for a sign for so long, and here it was at last, so satisfyingly literal. Inside, I was promptly greeted by the check-in nurse in the customary heroic way.
“We don’t have time for you,” she said, shifting her eyes to the packed bench where a queue of students sat waiting to be harvested. I stared at her blankly, my mouth struggling to find the words that would communicate to her how vital it was that I be allowed in, that this wasn’t just about donating blood, that this was larger than the both of us, her rejection could very well likely forever alter the fabric of history and space and time.
“I have time,” I said.
“Okay,” she shrugged. “You can wait if you want.” At that, she turned and disappeared behind a thin screen door. Another nurse motioned to a rack on the wall stacked with clipboards.
“Fill out one of those,” she said, gesturing with a Ziploc bag stuffed with a foam rubber ducky. “Try to be as honest as possible. Oh, and fill the boxes out completely,” she added as an afterthought. “The machine doesn’t recognize partially filled out boxes.”
On a nearby donor bed, a pale woman nodded off with her hand raised like she was asking a question in her sleep, a dark purple spot bleeding through the gauze where the needle had punctured her skin.
*
To give blood in the United States today is like joining an elite, profoundly uncool, hyper-exclusive club. If you are under seventeen years old, depending on the state, you must have your parents’ permission. There are cruel limitations as to where and when you may have travelled. For example, you may not have spent more than five years at the Sorbonne in Paris getting your doctorate degree about French movies about trains. You may not have had a tattoo done within the past twelve months, even of a really tough looking anchor on your chest. You must weigh a minimum of 110 lbs. As per American Red Cross eligibility requirements, there is no upper weight limit for donors “as long as your weight is not higher than the weight limit of the donor bed/lounge you are using.” To give blood, you must be able to fit on a donor bed. Add to the reasons you might be denied at a blood donor center: the summer you spent in Ireland in 1993 looking for Bono, the lip piercing you got after your last break up two months ago because you desperately needed change, the pill you took this morning.
I scanned through my donor questionnaire, making sure to answer each question as honestly as possible.
“Feeling healthy and well today?” There was no box for “Sometimes I feel like I died 400 years ago and every now and then my right arm has a strange spasm which makes me suspect that I may be a demon who took over some poor kid’s body and he’s desperately trying to get out one limb at a time,” so I shaded in the box for “Yes.”
“Have you taken anything with aspirin in it within the last twenty-four hours?” No. Demons don’t need medicine.
These requirements are not particularly stringent, yet still only an estimated 38 percent of the population is eligible to donate. Of that, less than ten percent actually do, and that is in part because to give blood in the United States today, you must answer the question: “From 1977 to the present, have you had sexual contact with another male, even once?”
I was wearing cut-off jean shorts, an extra small plain white tee that bordered dangerously with crop top territory, and dollar store glittery nail polish chipping at the edges. No, I decided, my pencil carefully outlining the box, thoroughly shading it in so the machine would have no trouble understanding. Not even once.
*
On paper, I know why gay men are not eligible to donate blood. The rationale for these regulations is straightforward. Aside from making sure we don’t find thumbs in our chicken nuggets, it is the responsibility of the Food and Drug Administration to minimize the threat of the public contracting through blood transfusions infectious diseases such as human deficiency viruses or hepatitis. Men who have sex with men are the population most heavily affected by HIV infection. Among the nearly 50,000 new cases of FDA reported by the Center for Disease Control in 2012, more than 30,000 were transmitted from male-to-male sexual contact. In order to keep as few contaminated donations from entering the national blood supply as possible, several safeguards have been set in place, from rigorously testing donations for everything from syphilis to West Nile Virus, and beginning with the initial donor screening process, which takes the form of a mini-physical and a questionnaire that is designed to weed out potential risks.
Despite the dozens of tests performed on each unit of donated blood—to establish blood type and test for infectious diseases—the FDA stresses that these tests are not foolproof. However, to put your potential exposure into perspective, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), “your risk of getting HIV from a blood transfusion is lower than your risk of getting killed by lightning. Only about one in two million donations might carry HIV and transmit HIV if given to a patient.” Though the source of these infections are not always linked to gay men, it is the policy of blood centers, under current FDA regulation, to place all gay men who admit on their questionnaire to having had sexual contact with other men within the past twelve months on a one-year deferral list, which is a way to soften the reality that gay men are simply not permitted to donate. While ostensibly this is an improvement on their previous ban on gay men, it’s still less “come back next Wednesday,” more, “we’ll call you when you decide to move to the Andes, shave your head, and take a vow of celibacy.”
Besides the FDA’s implicit verdict that two gay men in a monogamous relationship pose the same threat to the national blood supply as a heroin addict, or the propaganda ingrained in children at birth that only gay people contract HIV when, according to the Center for Disease Control, most new HIV diagnoses in women are attributed to heterosexual sex, not to mention the outright homophobic logic couched in the idea that the nation cannot trust gay men to know their own status, the FDA fails to account for one crucial fact: I am a hero. I am special. I am destined for greatness.
*
How my greatness will manifest itself is unknown to me, a mystery that has filled every moment with a sense of sweet, mouthwatering opportunity. Even as a kid I knew the world needed me. Whenever I was out in public, I would openly exhibit my karate skills, demonstrating perfect horse stance for the passersby outside of the mall JC Penney’s, waiting for my choice sensei to pluck me from obscurity and launch my career as the martial arts champion of the galaxy. In my fantasy, I told myself he had only planned to stop by Yankee Candle to shop for candles for his dojo, a quiet masculine scent like Motor Oil or Sports Tears, yet seeing me and my ability to stand with my legs splayed and bent at the knees, my arms akimbo, my fists locked tight at my waist for over fifteen minutes while my mom perused the clearance racks inside, he would instinctively know, like a mother penguin can pick out her chick in a colony of thousands, that we were lost kin.
“Is it really you?” he would ask, recognizing something ancient and powerful within me. Without waiting for my answer he would sweep me away to someplace majestic where he would rededicate his life to teaching me how to snap two by fours in half with my palm. Initially, my mother would be devastated by my disappearance, throwing herself completely into her job at Starbucks where she would make crude drawings of my face with the foam in her customer’s lattes, but over time she would grow to accept it, knowing deep down that I was out there being the hero the world needed of me.
As a teen, I would stalk the aisles at my local bookstore with my eyes opened as wide as I could hoping that something would irritate them and I would be reduced to tears. Sobbing, I would sink myself into the nearest seat with an intellectual looking book, something like The Diary of Malcom X, and squint my eyes, letting the tears roll down my cheeks, imagining that an agent would see how emotionally raw and unguarded I am and, unable to control himself, yell, “Look everyone! It’s the next Nick Jonas! I have to sign him immediately!” I would be plucked from my humdrum life and become an overnight celebrity and an ambassador for UNICEF, traveling around the globe teaching children the value of environmental sustainability through interpretive dance.
“Life on land is finite!” I would shout into the crowd of kids gathered around to watch one of my performances in a remote village in Nicaragua. “Return to the sea is inevitable!” My work done, I would hop into the back seat of my Hummer limo and speed away to my next humanitarian destination, listening as the chorus of applause trailed off in the distance.
*
My blood pressure was too high. Classic superhero—always overachieving.
“It needs to be below one hundred for you to be eligible to donate,” reported the nurse taking my vitals. She had her hand wrapped around my thumb, squeezing it in a python grip so that my blood dripped onto a glass slide.
“One hundred and seventeen,” she droned, holding my limp hand like a jaded psychic fed up with telling her clients how old they would grow to be. I imagined her tracing her sage fingers down my palm, stopping dramatically to investigate a fine line.
“Just as I suspected!” she would announce, pulling me in with an all-knowing squint. “You were really good at basketball in a past life!” Then, rolling her eyes to the back of her head in a state of supernatural bliss: “Oh, and you’re totally gay.”
“Wait a little while and we’ll test you again,” she interrupted, throwing a glass of ice water on my fantasy and forcing me back to reality. Five minutes later, she tested my other thumb, pricking my finger with a medical tool that resembled a mechanical pencil. She squeezed more of my blood onto a fresh slide. Now it was too low, meaning that my blood pressure is in a constant state of flux between extremes.
“You can go ahead and donate,” she concluded, then turned around to tune her radio dial until she landed on a breezy R&B station. She hovered there for a minute, mouthed along to a few words, and gave me a this-is-my–song look. Maybe my blood pressure would just even out.
*
According to the official American Red Cross website, the average process of giving blood, from arriving at your local Big Red Bus blood drive to stepping off with your complimentary cranberry juice cocktail and sugar cookie, takes approximately an hour and fifteen minutes. They also maintain that every two seconds, someone in the US needs blood, meaning that for the national blood supply to remain sustainable, in the amount of time it takes for one person to give blood, enough of the stuff must be collected nationwide to meet the demands of over one thousand people. The most alarming aspect of these figures? They get it. In a year, the American Red Cross and similar organizations collect 15.7 million donations in the US, over 700,000 more donations than needed. I imagine a nurse splayed out in a blood bank vault making blood snow angels with the amazing surplus of donations she collected that day, which is to say, they are very good at their jobs.
Why, then, are stories such as “The Nation Has a Major Blood Shortage” being relayed on major news outlets like ABC? One ominous headline from Wisconsin Public Radio’s website alerts: “Urgent Donations Encouraged As Nation Faces Looming Blood Shortage.” Another, from Georgia’s Albany Herald, reads: “American Red Cross facing possible emergency blood shortage.” These headlines stand in stark contrast to the Food and Drug Administration’s claims that “the blood supply in the US has been very stable.” So, which is it?
Technically, the FDA is not incorrect. The US blood supply is indeed stable. The catch: the blood supply is just about the only national resource that is, in fact, stable. With decreasing mortality rates, a rapidly growing population, and a rise in complex therapies such as cancer treatments and heart surgeries that require large amounts of blood, the public doesn’t need the blood supply to be stable, it needs it to flourish. This is because the national blood supply is constantly, literally, hemorrhaging. Not only are approximately 41,000 blood donations used every day, but donations are expiring. Red cell donations, for one, have a shelf life of forty-two days, so they must be perpetually collected for the supply to remain “stable,” which leaves the nation’s blood banks playing something like blood whack-a-mole. Every time they block one hole—the 41,000 donations needed each day, a new natural disaster that requires the acquisition and distribution of thousands of new donations—another emergency threatens to deplete their resources, which brings us to not-too-optimistic headlines like U-T San Diego’s “Local blood shortage worsens,” a close cousin of “Blood Good, Supply Bad.”
*
One by one, the donors in line in front of me were escorted to beds, plugged into blood sucking machines, and ejected back into the wild with a soft drink and their free loot. When it was finally my turn, I asked my nurse if I could have a juice.
“We have apple and orange,” she said, then, in a sudden, manic twist, added: “But we just got Pepsi and Mountain Dew!” She plugged me into her blood-bot and I lay back and drank my Pepsi in a napkin cozy, watching my blood travel through a silly straw into a bag on the floor as she explained the new donating procedure I had volunteered for.
“All we’re taking is your platelets,” she said.
I nodded in understanding. Of course. My platelets! Who needs those? I pictured a cabinet in my dining room full of fancy dishes, my platelets, withering away unused.
“The blood we extract today goes into this machine,” she continued. With her foot, she tapped what looked like a miniature crib on the floor rocking my blood back and forth, lulling it to sleep. “Once the machine is done separating your platelets, the rest of your blood will be returned back to you.”
I tried to hide my horror at this new revelation with my impression of an easygoing, I’m-not-freaking-out-at-all smile. Inside, I tried to process what she meant by your blood will be returned back to you. They were taking my blood out, sending it to a bag on the floor, then shoving it back in where it would touch all my important inside parts. This had to break the three-second rule.
Passing me my very own rubber ducky in a Ziploc bag, she instructed me to squeeze it every five seconds and left to help out other donors. Every few minutes she would come back, look at the bag that was slowly filling up with my blood, and ask, “ARE YOU OKAY?” as if she’d seen a spider crawl out of my veins, or just discovered that instead of blood, I was running on red Jello.
“I’m fine.”
Ten minutes would go by and again I would be pulled out of my phone’s trance by a shadow hovering over me.
“YOU STILL OKAY?”
“Yes.”
“Sure?”
“Yes, thank you.”
I thought she might call an ambulance, but then I remembered that I was already in one.
*
After the procedure, I called my best friend, Arthur, and we drove to the pizza place twenty minutes away to redeem my free voucher. Over cheese slices and Coke, we played “Would You Rather?” It was the middle of the day so we had the restaurant all to ourselves, him in his Christina Aguilera t-shirt and me picking at my nail polish. A vaguely Italian song chimed in through the speakers. Would you rather have spaghetti fingers or always look like you just came back from a long, grueling run? Would you rather only be able to bathe in soup or be Osmosis from Osmosis Jones? Arthur phoned his in: Would you rather be an octopus or a squid?
“If I choose squid, is someone hunting me?” I asked, attempting to add drama to his scenario.
“Why would someone be hunting you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m a monster?”
He told me that when people are cremated, most of the ashes they give to the families belong to someone else. I told him that when I die, I want my ashes scattered over an ant-hill. I confessed that I lied on the questionnaire.
“It’s so weird that they make you choose,” he said. “You can either save someone’s life or you can check that you’ve had gay sex and let them die.”
“I kind of wish I was cool enough to tell them I’m gay,” I told him. “Like, as an act of revolt?”
I wondered what that might look like. Putting myself first.
A little boy named something devastatingly cute, a name only a kid can pull off: Max. As an adult, he will go by Maxwell, but for now, he’s just Max. He has a gap tooth and freckles, the kind of kid you can see on the cover of an off-brand box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. He has a rare cancer, so rare his parents are considering an experimental treatment that requires huge amounts of blood. We share a blood type.
“Sorry Max,” activist me would say. “I can’t donate. I’m making a political statement.”
*
Back on campus, it was still too early for my night class, so I made my way to my favorite quiet spot on the third floor of the cafeteria to read. Usually I have no trouble lugging my body up three flights of stairs, but this time I felt nauseated, so I gave up my original plan and saddled myself into the nearest seat I could find. At the table next to mine, an athletic couple studied silently from a mess of books and papers laid out before them, the man pausing every few minutes to take a gulp from a Herculean gallon of water.
I looked down to the first floor where I could see hundreds of students dashing in and out, a few daring ones riding their skateboards right through the cafeteria, late to class again. Another hurried student stepped on a corner of the Pegasus insignia printed on the floor. University legend warns that stepping on the Pegasus ensures that you will never graduate from the school, which is why it’s usually partitioned off by velvet ropes. An icy shiver passed through me. Rubbing my hands for warmth, I noticed that they were a shade lighter than usual, and suddenly they shifted into a blur and I couldn’t discern what color they were at all. I stood up to go to the bathroom, hoping I could make it to a stall before throwing up.
Sometime later, I woke up on the floor crumpled up in a ball and blind. I could hear two girls exchanging feverish words next to me, but we were separated by a wall of black.
First one told the other: “He’s waking up.”
Then, to me: “You passed out. Are you okay?”
I closed my eyes, figuring it wouldn’t make much of a difference because I couldn’t see with them open anyway.
“Don’t go to sleep!” a voice ordered, shaking my arm back into existence.
“You’re probably dehydrated,” someone speculated. A red-headed blob gradually came into focus.
“Can you bring me water?” I asked, feeling self-conscious.
Was I being too demanding?
I once heard on the radio that people regularly die choking alone in restaurants. Instead of asking anyone for help, they rush to the bathroom not wanting to bother anyone. They pretend they’re just having a run-of-the-mill teary-eyed, claw-at-your-neck coughing fit, and once inside they choke quietly by themselves.
People don’t want heroes. We want to be able to save ourselves. I closed my eyes again.
You’re not going to die in such a wimpy away, I told myself. If you’re going to die, it better be being hunted as a squid.
A third girl came up to me with water. I snatched it from her hands, but within seconds she took it back.
“Actually, if you’re dehydrated, you shouldn’t be drinking water,” she said.
I now saw that I was surrounded by a swarm of white girls. Maybe I was already dead, I thought, or in limbo: an infinite series of white girls bringing me water and taking it away.
“Are you sure?” I wanted to ask, gazing longingly at the cup of water in her hands, but I was too confused and out of it to reason with her. Instead I just curled back into my ball. Maybe she’s pre-med or something.
Soon, the paramedics arrived. They measured my blood pressure and told me I was dehydrated. They told me I needed water.
“Have you had any water?” one asked. I looked at the cup the girl brought me, still full on a table too far for me to reach.
“No.”
They plugged me into an IV. An Evil-Dead quantity of blood squirted out of my arm. The paramedic wiped it with a tissue.
“Why did you donate blood? For the movie tickets?” he asked straightaway, maybe not his first time doing this.
Partly. But don’t forget that I’m a selfless hero.
“Was it worth it?” he asked, not waiting for a response to his first questions.
I leaned my head against the wall and felt the cool liquid from the IV travel through my veins, a million microscopic glasses of ice water splashing along the insides of my limbs, gradually waking my body up.
“You have two options,” he went on. “You can go to the hospital or you can stay here and drink a lot of water.”
I am asked to monetize my life. I could probably survive if I stay, I calculated half-conscious. This wasn’t my first time fainting. A few months before, while staying at my mother’s house, I sliced my thumb trying to open a can of tuna. I woke up a few hours later in her bed. I had passed out. Not sure what to do, she had simply dragged my body to her bedroom and resumed cooking dinner.
“I’m really poor and have really bad insurance, so I think I’ll just stay here,” I said.
“You will almost definitely pass out again if you stay,” he countered, more stern.
Then why even give me the option? Is this some kind of fun game paramedics play: put the patient in a life or death situation, ask them to choose death, then force them to live anyway? Still, I thought I had a shot at making it on my own. There was a water fountain a few feet away. I was lucid. I said out loud, “I’m lucid,” figuring that anyone who can remember the word lucid must be it. Besides, if I couldn’t afford breakfast, I sure as hell didn’t have money for an emergency room.
“I think I’ll stay,” I repeated.
“We’re taking you to the hospital.”
*
In the ambulance, I discovered that my phone’s flashlight feature would not turn off. Thank God: I had broken my fall with my new cellphone I’d saved up for months for. I turned it around in my hands, not really sure what I was looking for. A hidden magical switch that would help me in exactly this kind of situation? I didn’t care about the phone. I was worried the battery would die and I wouldn’t be able to call anyone to pick me up from the hospital. I had twelve percent battery left. I called my mom. No answer. Eleven percent. Again. No answer. I called my brother and went straight to voicemail. Nine percent. I called Arthur. He’s coming.
Later, I will find out that after my call, he rushed out of bed and ran out of his parent’s house, frantic to see that I was okay. His mom was maneuvering into the driveway, coming home from work, and parked an inch from the driver’s seat of his car thinking it would be funny if she made it hard for him to get inside. Assuming he was overreacting over her innocent joke, she roared into her steering wheel laughing hysterically as he flailed his arms and shouted at her to cut it out. Meanwhile, I was in the back of an ambulance plugged into an IV with a computer printing out a series of zig-zag lines quantifying my life. I still think she’s funny.
I went back to trying to fix the light.
“You trying to take a selfie in an ambulance?” the new, younger paramedic riding with me asked, disapproval thick in his voice.
My eyes jumped from the tribal tattoo on his arm to the hurricane of wires coming out of mine. I didn’t answer, not wanting to explain myself to him.
“You got a girlfriend?”
Again, I looked down at my cut-offs and painted nails to what I thought was an obvious declaration of what type of boy I am.
“There’s lots of girls around here,” he continued.
I folded and told him that I didn’t have a girlfriend. Not really a lie. A part of me worried that if I told him I’m gay he would purposely mess something up. I was plugged into a lot of tubes and they all presented an opportunity for an “accident.”
“Is my water level thing better now?” I asked him.
“Your water level thing?”
“I don’t know what it’s called,” I said, “but the first paramedic told me I was dehydrated and needed water and he kept looking at a measurement I think might have been my blood pressure. I’m not sure though.”
“Are you pre-med?” he asked.
“No.”
“Thank God.”
“Well, how is it?” I asked, caring less and less about the possibility of an accident now.
“It’s fine.”
“What kind of tests will they do on me at the hospital?” I went on, running up the tab in my head.
“Are you anxious?” he asked.
“Only when I’m in an ambulance.”
*
It had been over an hour since I had fainted. Even so, the paramedics insisted that I be wheeled into the hospital on a gurney. A nurse behind the reception desk looked up at me.
“There’s my sixty-three,” she smiled.
“I’m your sixty-three,” I said back, then turned to the young paramedic. “What does that mean?”
“It means you’re her sixty-third patient today. You win a prize.”
“Like an Olive Garden gift card?” I asked, or free healthcare?
Her eyes flashed to my hands as I fumbled with my phone.
“Need a charger?” she asked.
“Yes! Please!”
“I’ll go get one for you,” she said, getting up from her station. She pushed through a set of double-doors and moved into the room next door. I never saw her again.
Classic hospital prank.
From there, I was wheeled into an emergency room about the size of a walk-in closet.
“Do I have to do these tests?” I asked my doctor. “I feel perfectly fine. There’s no way I
can afford this.”
“You look fine,” he said. “I’ll just give you another IV and you can go.”
My mind flashed back to the water fountain that was only a few feet away, the cup of water probably still on the table. Arthur arrived just as my doctor was about to go, his curly hair still matted down in the back from his nap. On his way out, the doctor warned me, “Watch out. The person you least want to see is on her way.” Minutes later, an Ursula-like woman entered the room pushing a laptop on a cart.
“Name?” she asked by way of introduction. Date of birth. Social Security number. Religion? At this, I felt myself losing my temper. Why did it matter what my religion was? In case you die, a voice whispered in my ear. The winds were betraying me. What do they do for agnostics? I wanted to ask. Throw their ashes on ant-hills?
“None.”
“Health insurance card?”
“How much is this going to cost?” I asked, digging through the several-month-old receipts and expired coupons stashed in my wallet.
“I can’t tell you,” she said. “You’ll get a bill in the mail.”
But I’m right here. Let’s skip the middle man.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Well, I can tell you your health insurance kicks in after $900. After $900, you pay ten percent.”
After $900? Ten percent of what?
“Don’t worry, though,” she said. “You’re on your mom’s insurance. She’ll pay for it!” I smiled politely, again doing my impression of someone who’s got it all under control. Of course, my mom will just hock one of the diamonds she bought with her glamorous, high-paying gig at Starbucks. No worries.
“It’s fine! I’ll just sell some more of my blood for money!” I yelled, but she was already out of the room.
Arthur, who has had cancer and been through the hospital bureaucracy before, explained: “Your health insurance only kicks in after the first $900. Anything before that, you have to pay.”
We waited ten minutes. Twenty. I could hear the nurses in the reception area talking about Game of Thrones. A main character had died, apparently. They were distraught. Thirty minutes. The monotonous beeps prompted by the wire connected to my finger started alternating their rhythm. Beep. Three seconds. Beep. Sometimes two consecutive beep, beeps—no intermission. I tore the wire off, feeling like a bad-ass action movie star, except twenty-two and puny. The same tired, limping woman walked back and forth down the hallway. There was a glitch in the Matrix.
“If you don’t go to the reception area and bring me a doctor, I’m going to get primal,” I told Arthur. He hurried out.
*
Driving out of the hospital, it was finally okay for me to be gay. Arthur blasted our best friend song on his CD player, B*Witched’s “Blame it on the Weatherman.” We listened to it when he was first diagnosed with cancer, now when I was released from the hospital, and years later driving by our old club, Pulse. Each time, we blamed it all on the weatherman, pleading at the top of our lungs for him to leave us alone. We stopped at a convenience store to pick up a bottle of water, my total coming out to a little over two dollars. I winced at the idea of paying for water. A week later, my bill would arrive notifying me that I owe $3,412.67 to the hospital for donating blood. A measly sum to a hero.
We talked about boys. I slowly came back to life describing Zac Efron on the cover of whatever magazine was in the checkout line, laughing in hindsight at the paramedic’s girlfriend comment.
“I asked the paramedics to let me stay,” I told Arthur, taking a massive swig from my water. “Even if it meant I would die.”
“Well, now neither of us can donate,” he told me.
“What do you mean?”
“In high school, on our blood drive day, I tried to donate,” he said. “But when the nurse handed me my questionnaire, I didn’t really know any better, so I marked that I wasn’t a virgin.”
He told me she informed him he would not be able to donate. When he asked why, she explained that it was because his blood wasn’t safe. The bus was packed with other high school students, jocks who agreed to be heroes so long as they could get out of fourth-period Biology.
“Everyone heard,” he said. “So I hid in a bathroom stall until the end of the blood drive so I wouldn’t have to go back to class.”
I watched as his grip on the steering wheel tensed, his knuckles white.
“Did you notice how all the guys that worked at that hospital were beautiful Aerie models?” I asked.
We played Would You Rather all the way to the university parking lot where he offered to drive behind me till I made it home. I accepted, letting him be the hero this time. I didn’t want to choke alone in the bathroom.
*
In the grand scheme of things, gay men donating blood might rank as a low-stakes issue, especially when compared to high publicity causes like marriage equality, the right to serve in the military, and LGBTQ bullying. After all, donating blood is inconvenient and time-consuming. Shouldn’t gay and bisexual men be grateful to have their hour and fifteen minutes spared? Why, that’s enough time to watch a couple episodes of Golden Girls and have a quick round of high-risk sex!
Amidst the controversy of whether gay men are too great a gamble to the nation’s blood supply, it’s the less overt threats that come with current discriminatory eligibility requirements that have largely gone ignored: that of supporting the false belief that heterosexual people who participate in high-risk behavior are at low risk for HIV infection, the danger that comes with reinforcing negative stereotypes about gay and bisexual people. When the American Red Cross cites that the two most common reasons people choose not to give blood are “never thought about it” and “I don’t like needles,” it suggests that gay and bisexual men are not interested in helping others and don’t particularly feel like being heroes, which is problematic, particularly when blood drives occur in workplaces, high schools, and colleges where donors may worry about the employment or social implications of not donating, all because needles hurt.
This battle isn’t Stonewall and the small victory that will come from gay men being eligible to donate blood will not drastically improve the lives of the LGBTQIA community. Yet, despite the near triviality of this issue, if anything, because of it, because lesbian and gay marriage is now a reality and because gay bullying is gradually becoming more of a taboo, it is the small battles that need to become a focus of the gay civil rights movement. It is the institutionalized homophobia, like that of a gay Iowa teenager who took his life and was not eligible to donate his eyeballs because his mother could not answer whether he was sexually active, that is the most insidious of all, because it hides under its apparent insignificance.
What’s most nefarious of all is that the FDA revising its policy on gay men to a one-year deferral as opposed to its previous lifetime ban is being heralded by many as a courageous move, as if the perception of equality is just as meaningful as equality itself.
***
Original art by Eva Azenaro-Acero, an artist, writer, and musician living in Chicago. Their work has appeared in Fanzine, Witchcraft Mag, The Parks Exhibition Center, and more. Find them on Instagram @birdlets or online at evaazenaroacero.squarespace.
Handwritten manuscript page from The Bluest Eye, and other Morrison papers. Toni Morrison Papers, Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Photograph courtesy of the Princeton University Library.
Visiting Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, on exhibit at Princeton University’s Firestone Library from now through June 4, 2023, is like going to a sauna. You enter a warm, windowless space, and as you rotate your way through each experience, you find you’re dunked suddenly into something that barrages the senses—fire-singed early drafts, a detailed map, alternate endings for Beloved, the photograph that inspired Jazz. But it’s also like taking a cold plunge: you’re carried along on the continuous current of Morrison’s voice and work, and you duck out refreshed, tingling, alive with more possibilities than you’d realized there could be.
The exhibit pays careful attention to the geography of imagined space, as well as the processes by which Morrison’s novels—which seem so inevitable in their final form—took years of wrangling, revising, discarding, drafting, and re-forming. In her essay “The Site of Memory,” Morrison writes:
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.”
Curated by Autumn Womack, assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton, the exhibit is divided into six sections that flow chronologically but are meant to be experienced in a Morrisonian infinity knot, snaking in and around each other, distinct yet inextricably interlocked. “Beginnings,” “Writing Time,” “Thereness-ness,” “Wonderings and Wanderings,” “Genealogies of Black Feminism,” and “Speculative Futures”—each of these titles bears multiple meanings. “Writing Time,” for instance, refers not only to the interstitial moments in which Morrison squeezed novel-writing into her full-time job as an editor, around her off-the-clock family and social life—but also to her writings that are of and about time. Morrison took copious notes in the blank pages of her day planner, inscribing a kind of ancestral time into the calendrical present.
“Paradise,” visual schematic. Toni Morrison Papers, Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Photograph courtesy of the Princeton University Library Digital Imaging Studio.
Princeton itself is a site of Morrisonian memory. She taught at the university for seventeen years. In 2008, I had the insane good luck to take one of her final literature courses. The seminar was called “The Foreigner’s Home,” its apostrophe bearing layers: the foreigner who is home, the home that the foreigner possesses, and the paradox of the foreigner by definition both having a home and not being there. Morrison spun a master class on the interconnectedness of exile and writing, on the nature of “home” and “possession” in literature, and—ultimately—on how to be a human being. As we read authors Morrison loved—Coetzee, Hemingway, Ondaatje—she kept us grounded in the troubled site of Princeton, our own foreign home.
My primary sense memory from that class is the sound of Morrison’s voice: that throaty purr sure as a mountain spring. Her hypnotic tones were best when we could coax her into reading aloud from whatever text we were discussing that week, and better still when we could get her to read from her own work. For Womack, a crucial component of “Sites of Memory” is that Morrison narrates the experience. Morrison’s voice provides the soundtrack—no matter where you are in the space, you hear her speaking. A screen at the omphalos of the exhibit plays a continuous loop of two hours of footage that Womack culled from an eight-hour interview conducted with Morrison in 1987 at Boston University, just before Beloved was published. Drop in at any point and you’ll be mesmerized—I caught, for example, Morrison describing her oldest son spilling orange juice on the pages of something she was writing. Instead of stopping to clean it up, she wrote around the stain. “I wasn’t sure the sentence would last,” she said, “but I knew there would be more orange juice.” As you get closer and farther from the site of her voice, you experience a kind of Doppler effect: her words fade in and out of intelligibility, but her cadences concatenate.
Womack confessed to me, “I have two favorite children [in this exhibit].” One is personal: because her favorite Morrison book is Paradise, she loves the point-of-view diagrams for the novel, which resemble schematic galaxies. The other is a feat of pure archival magic. Morrison’s physical legacy does not lack for breadth—Womack and her team combed over two hundred linear feet of material—but a 1993 fire in Morrison’s upstate New York house damaged or destroyed many more papers. Until recently, scholars believed that all early notes for Song of Solomon had been lost in that fire. But in August 2021, as Womack and her team were finishing their research, they came across singed day planners that included mentions of characters from that novel: scrawled meditations on Milkman Dead’s name, in the forms both of memos and of preliminary dialogue, in blue ink and in black. Practical details from Morrison’s life bleed through the paper, a palimpsest of her life and the book’s timeline. These cherished documents appear as a spine down the center of the exhibit, laid out carefully like dinosaur bones, in the shape of the animal.
My own favorite child lives in the “Speculative Futures” section: it is an outline in which Morrison envisions Beloved as a nine-hundred-page trilogy spanning from the mid-nineteenth century up to the eighties. What if the finished novel itself is just a scrap in the Morrison archive, one that somehow continues to expand? Sites of Memory shows us that the finished products are but one form that her writing could have taken. The Bluest Eye began as a potential play or short story; Paradise first existed as architectural blueprints—the books weren’t the stories’ only possible manifestations. The forms they ultimately took are perfect and decisive, but what this exhibit reminds us is that perfect isn’t inevitable, decisions aren’t made in isolation, and fixed doesn’t mean locked. These might be the forms of the works we have today, but they exist in context, and they continue to live and breathe, as organisms with pasts, presents, and futures.
I also love a piece that’s not in the Sites of Memory exhibition but just across the hall. Princeton’s Firestone Library also houses the Cotsen Children’s Library, an amazing magical space complete with a Narnia lamppost and climbing tree, which has organized a small parallel exhibit, They’ve Got Game: The Children’s Books of Toni and Slade Morrison. They’ve Got Game showcases the eight children’s books that Morrison wrote in collaboration with her son. Among the items is a delicious correspondence with the illustrator Pascal Lemaître, in which Slade suggests that the early sketches of a lion looked like Toni. Both exhibits not only permit but demand the freedom to immerse oneself in Morrison’s work on all levels: to, rather than be afraid of the titan of letters she symbolizes, understand her legacy as one of attention and engagement, of rigorously breaking down assumptions and paying closer attention, of remembering to create time and space so that joy can flood back in.
Women in the history of linguistics—from marginalization to recognition
Women’s History Month raises issues of erasure and marginalization, authority and power which, sadly, are still relevant for women today. Much can be learnt from the experience of women in the past. We find inspiring stories of women who overcame prejudice and constraints of all kinds and who sometimes managed to gain recognition from their peers, only to be excluded from the history of their discipline.
In the field of linguistics, this marginalization relates to some extent to what is today considered part of linguistics and the current valuing above all of theoretical work. Words matter: a broader definition of linguistics allows women across the centuries to be included in this scholarly field. Given the cultural and practical limitations imposed on their access to education across all cultures, we need to look outside more institutionalized and traditional frameworks to discover the contributions made by women to the study of language structure and function.
“Words matter: a broader definition of linguistics allows women across the centuries to be included in this scholarly field.”
Classic histories of linguistics, very rarely, if ever, include women scholars. We set about uncovering the contribution of women linguists—from European and non-European traditions— and their ideas and writings to give them the recognition they deserve. A group of equally motivated and determined scholars joined us in our quest. We looked for names, works and ideas, especially in those liminal spaces not reached by official historiography, that is, outside institutions, universities, and academies in more private and domesticated spaces. We decided to challenge categories and concepts devised for male-dominated accounts and expands our field of enquiry: we turned our attention not only to pioneers and exceptional women, but also to those non-exceptional women who nevertheless quietly moved forward our knowledge of languages, their description, analysis, codification and acquisition. Painstaking research in archives and libraries, looking at manuscripts and printed sources, gradually unearthed rich, fascinating, and often unexpected evidence of women’s contribution.
For the earlier periods, it was difficult to find women who published grammars or dictionaries, but they did exist. Marguerite Buffet in seventeenth-century France wrote a volume of observations on the good usage of French specifically aimed at women (Nouvelles observations sur la langue françoise, 1668). Similarly, in 1740, Johanna Corleva published a Dutch translation of Port-Royal’s celebrated general and rational grammar. In Portugal, in 1786, Francisca de Chantal Álvares produced a compendium of Portuguese grammar for female pupils in convent schools, the Breve Compendio da Gramatica Portugueza para uso das Meninas que se educaõ no Mosteiro da Vizitaçaõ de Lisboa, at a time when the majority of women did not have access to formal education. Further afield, women missionaries were also active in the field. Gertrud von Massenbach joined the Sudan Pioneer Mission in 1909, as a teacher of mathematics in Aswan, in Nubian territory. Her linguistic interests led her to publish a dictionary with a grammatical introduction of Kunûzi Nubian (Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes mit einer grammatischen Einleitung, 1933) and a collection of Nubian texts (Nubische Texte im Dialekt der Kunuzi und der Dongolawi, 1962).
“We need to look outside more institutionalized and traditional frameworks to discover the contributions made by women to the study of language.”
But there is much more. Women were, for instance, the intended audience or dedicatees of some of the earlier vernacular grammars in Europe. The Gramática de la lengua castellana (1492) by Antonio de Nebrija, the very first printed grammar of a vernacular language in Europe, was commissioned by Queen Isabella I of Castile and, according to Juan de Valdés, was meant to be of benefit, “para las damas de la sereníssima doña Isabel” (“for the ladies-in-waiting of Her Very Serene Highness Queen Isabel”). Women were translators, language teachers, collectors of data on endangered languages, and creators of new scripts. In Jiangyong county (Jiāngyǒng xiàn) of Hunan (Húnán) province in China, a rural territory surrounded by mountains, the nǚshū script (“female script/writing”) was used and transmitted among village women for at least one and a half centuries: a variant of the Chinese script, it represents a significant example of Chinese women’s contribution to character invention and development.
Women also assisted male members of their families, or male colleagues, in their work as linguists. Lucy Catherine Lloyd (1834-1914), the sister-in-law of the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek, was his most important collaborator. Together they created the nineteenth-century archive of ǀXam and !Kung texts (today called the Digital Bleek and Lloyd), an invaluable resource for linguists working on Khoisan languages. Cinie Louw followed her husband Andrew Louw to South Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) to work on the Morgenster Mission, learning the local language, Karanga, a Shona dialect, and becoming a fluent speaker. Their 1919 translation of the Bible into Karanga was a joint effort, preceded in 1915, by an important manual of the Chikaranga Language.
Other women’s linguistic work has been neglected or overshadowed, the men with whom they collaborated reaping the benefit of their efforts. The young Chiri Yukie (1903–1922) helped codify the oral tradition of the Ainu people of Hokkaido in northern Japan. Thanks to her bilingual and bicultural knowledge she was able to collect a wide range of oral performances, preserving them for posterity and making them accessible by translating them into Japanese. Her invaluable work ultimately ended up promoting, instead, the career of a prominent male academic who was awarded the Imperial prize for his work on the Indigenous language.
“Women’s personal and professional life cannot be separated in a way that has been possible for male scholars across the centuries.”
What came to light, piece by piece, through reading their personal stories, was the challenges women had to face in male-dominated academia. Women’s personal and professional life cannot be separated in a way that has been possible for male scholars across the centuries. Theirs are often tales of perseverance and determination. Take the example of Mary Haas, a stalwart of twentieth-century American Indian Linguistics and a central figure in the Boas-Sapir tradition, which laid the foundation for current language documentation practices. Haas found her marriage in 1931 to Morris Swadesh limited her opportunities both within linguistics and with respect to employment generally. Given the scarcity of academic appointments, she considered getting a teaching certificate to teach in public schools in Oklahoma to support herself and her fieldwork on Native American languages. However, as a married woman she was unlikely to get hired in a public school. Undeterred, she wrote to Swadesh asking for a divorce so that she might be able to support herself. Swadesh agreed. Their divorce was meant to allow Haas to pursue more avenues of employment, although her plans were ultimately interrupted by World War II.
Uncovering such stories proved complicated, but extremely rewarding. And the more we found, the more we have become convinced that there is still so much more to discover.
Read a free chapter from Women in the History of Linguistics on Oxford Academic.
Featured image from the cover of Women in the History of Linguistics by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Helena Sanson.
Don’t question Angela Davis’ manuscript, Toni Morrison warned her publishing colleagues. Davis was not “Jane Fonda” but, rather, “Jean d’Arc.”
The post Morrison and Davis: Radicalizing Autobiography appeared first on Public Books.
The French translator and theorist Antoine Berman has remarked that in a subset of great novels, it is exactly their “bad writing” which makes them rich. They suffer from an overabundance of voices, threatening to explode the form in an attempt to encompass their language of composition in all of its plurality and heterogeneity. The Hive, James Womack’s new translation of Nobel Laureate Camilo José Cela’s La colmena, is just such a work. Set in Madrid during the early 1940s, it is an admirable attempt at the surely arduous, and sometimes paradoxical task, of translating a polylingual novel that is richly rooted in a specific time and place.
True to its name, The Hive is buzzing with characters—over three hundred in all. They weave in and out of the honeycomb streets of Madrid, stopping in cafés, salons, dive bars, bakeries, antique shops, police stations, apartments, and alleyways. Most of them are cast in sharp, jocular detail for hardly more than a page at a time. These descriptions leave the impression that many of them are “types” more than characters proper. A favorite example of mine is a man introduced near the end of the book as nothing more than the father of another man named Fidel:
Fidel’s father, who is a pastry chef as well, had been a brute of a man who ate sand as a purgative and who spoke about nothing apart from folk dancing and Zaragoza’s protector, Our Lady of the Pillar. He thought a great deal of himself as a businessman, was proud of how cultured he was, and had two types of business card, one of which said “Joaquín Bustamante—Tradesman,” and the other said, in Gothic script, “Joaquín Bustamante Valls—Author of We Must Double Spain’s Agricultural Production.” When he died he left behind a huge amount of rough-edged handmade paper covered with numbers and plans: he wanted to double the number of crops each year using a system of his own invention: vast piled-up terraces filled with fertile soil, which would have water pumped into them via artesian wells and sunlight delivered to them by a system of mirrors.
Fidel’s father goes on to give his pastry shop a ridiculous, politically charged name—“The Sons of Our Forefathers”—and then we never see him again. His son complains about the name a bit, and then changes it, and then too disappears into oblivion, along with so many other colorful examples of 1940s Madrileños, after providing us with just a couple of pages of entertainment under Cela’s all-knowing smirk. Cela might have been writing about all of his characters when he comments on another baker, Señor Ramón, that “You could write his biography in a few lines.”
We meet many dozens of people like this before something like a plot begins to flicker into existence under the surface of these vignettes. The first chapter is composed of 46 short scenes, which are almost entirely set within the same café, and arranged in an unclear chronological order within a period of time that’s somewhere between a few minutes and a few hours long. It introduces us to more than twenty of the café’s patrons, employees, and its cruel owner, Doña Rosa. While many of their conversations appear to have no more purpose than to make us smile, or laugh, or frown, eventually something like the threat of a serious, violent event emerges. Other threats, major and minor, are much of what drives the drama throughout the rest of the equally fragmented book, which takes us out of Doña Rosa’s café and through the many shadowy alcoves of Madrid over the course of a few days. These are threats of violence, which is lurking at all times beneath the many characters’ daily toils, and of desperation, as poverty forces nearly everyone in the city to give up something they hold dear, and they seem to culminate in one major threat to one of the novel’s most frequently recurring characters, the down-and-out writer Martín Marco. But this arc is blended in with hundreds of such micro-episodes that have nothing to do with Martín Marco, and which on the surface have little to do with anything else either. It’s clear to the reader that, despite the haunting connections between the vignettes constituting the novel, its primary achievement is these portraits for their own sake. Cela’s ironic presentations of the folk of Madrid curdles into pity, and then love, as those of the best social novelists do.
A favorite irony of Cela’s seems to be the image of the woman who turns to prostitution to support a feeble or infirm male partner, with or without their knowledge or consent. Indeed, women are portrayed as being uniquely vulnerable to the poverty gripping the city, as the few men who have money use it to encourage, or even coerce, women to sleep with them. These and other, less troublesome sexual relations drive much minor action of the novel; the three most common activities we see Cela’s characters engaged in might be eating, complaining about not having enough to eat, and sneaking around at night. The frivolity of these cavalier episodes sometimes gets a little tiresome, and their juxtaposition with darker incidences of sex trafficking and violence is jarring. At its worst, reading them together can make you wonder if Cela, or his narrator, take threats to women’s agency in sexual situations as seriously he should. But as a whole, what emerges from the novel is a scathing critique of the kinds of relations that organize how people approach love, money and sex in 1940s Madrid. Concern with propriety and familial honor appear alongside desperate poverty as the factors that are most likely to leave women vulnerable to abuse, and this is surely one of the reasons that the novel was banned by the censors in Franco’s Spain, a regime which relied heavily on “traditional family values” in its rhetoric of a unified, proto-fascist, Catholic Spain.
Another reason would be the way The Hive foregrounds Spain’s linguistic and cultural heterogeneity. One of the most studied characteristics of the novel is its characters’ social class and cultural background: how much money they have, how they got it, and what they do with it; where they’re from, who their family is versus who it claims to be, and so on. The greatest tell, besides the characters’ material conditions, is their language: how they speak and to whom. Madrileños of various levels of wealth and background are surrounded by Galicians, Catalans, Romani, and other people for whom Spanish is a second language. All characters in The Hive are gently mocked by its narrator, but none are so thoroughly ridiculed as those who believe in the myths of superiority of certain backgrounds. Madrid is ultimately portrayed in a rich diversity that is not an aberrance from Spanish national identity, but rather constitutes it.
This is also where the process of translating the novel must have been the most challenging. How do you represent, in a different tongue, the languages within the language of the original text? The short answer is that you can’t—not exactly. To take an example from the novel, there is no perfect English translation for the idiom “Es que estoy que no me llega la camisa al cuerpo”; to translate it literally would not make its connotative meaning available for the English-language reader, and this is the meaning that is important: The man who says it is not really having a problem with his shirt. We can say the same for Womack’s decision to translate this idiom as “It’s just that I’ve got the heebie-jeebies.” There is no exact translation for “heebie-jeebies” into Spanish, or any other language for that matter; but it is something that someone might say in the same context, to paraphrase linguist Eugene Nida. This technique becomes absolutely essential when translating a novel as rich with colloquialisms as La colmena. It allows for approximations of those characteristics of language we call tone, style, register or voice, and if it does this sometimes at the cost of more direct translations of the sense of the words chosen, Womack deploys these approximations aptly in most cases. The characters of The Hive sing—or occasionally, in more dire conditions, croak—in distinct, lively voices, with great respect for the emotional valence and diversity of register that makes the Spanish-language original so compelling.
Womack has especially nailed what’s possibly the most important voice of all: the narrator’s. Though he never appears in the action, and only very rarely admits to his own existence by means of a personal pronoun, the text is thick with his irony, his judgments, his caresses, and his humor. He is similar to, but not quite the same as, the voice that writes the many prologues of The Hive, which addresses the world—and the book’s place in it—a little more directly. La colmena has had a long and complex publication history, and for at least six of these editions, Cela wrote a separate preface, which are dutifully compiled and translated in this edition. Of these, the most compelling are probably the first and the last, in which Cela enumerates some of the book’s early troubles getting past the censors of both Spain and Argentina, and considers the problem of translating a book written in and about “Spanish as she was spoken in the city of Madrid between about 1940 and 1942” into Romanian a quarter of a century later. In this last preface, written for the first Romanian edition, Cela is pessimistic about the possibility of translation, going so far as to complain that “if there were such a thing as good sense in the world, we writers would be the first and most stubborn opponents of translation.” But after reading this work of Womack’s, I don’t think we need to be. Despite Cela’s potent criticisms of their lives, his characters keep on plodding along, and despite whatever he thinks about the possibility of translation, his books will keep on being translated. Womack’s work in this new edition not only proves that this is possible but in fact desirable, and his work makes available much of what makes this important novel worth reading. I only wish Cela were still around to write a new preface for it.
***
We may have yet to develop the technology of time travel, but recorded music comes pretty close. Those who listen to it have experienced how a song or an album can, in some sense, transport them right back to the time they first heard it. But older records also have the much stranger power to conjure up eras we never experienced. You can musically send yourself as far back as the nineteen-twenties with the above Youtube playlist of digitized 78 RPM records from the George Blood collection.
George Blood is the head of the audio-visual digitization company George Blood Audio, which has been participating in the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project. “The brainchild of the Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, the project is dedicated to the preservation and discovery of 78rpm records,” writes The Vinyl Factory’s Will Pritchard.
The piece quotes Blood himself as saying that his company has been digitizing five to six thousand records per month with the ambitious goal of creating a “reference collection of sound recordings from the period of approximately 1880 to 1960.” He said that five years ago. Today, the Internet Archive’s George Blood collection contains more than 385,000 records free to stream and download.
The 78 having been the most popular recorded-music format in the first few decades of the twentieth century, George Blood L.P. and the Great 78 Project as a whole have had plenty of material to work with. In the large archive built up so far you’ll find plenty of obscurities — the Youtube playlist at the top of the post can get you acquainted with the likes of Eric Whitley and the Green Sisters, Tin Ear Tanner and His Back Room Boys, and Douglas Venable and His Bar X Ranch Hands — but also the work of musicians who remain beloved today. For the 78 was the medium through which many listeners enjoyed the big-band hit of Glenn Miller, or discovered jazz as performed by legends like Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. To know their music most intimately, one would perhaps have needed to hear them in the actual nineteen-thirties, but this is surely the next best thing.
Related content:
200,000+ Vintage Records Being Digitized & Put Online by the Boston Public Library
Rare Arabic 78 RPM Records Enter the Public Domain
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The Pacific nation of Tuvalu is replicating itself in the metaverse in an innovative bid to safeguard its culture and sovereignty in the event of territory loss and displacement due to climate change.
The low-lying islands could become uninhabitable by 02100 due to rising sea levels, according to a study cited by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By migrating governance and administrative systems to the metaverse, Tuvalu hopes to continue functioning as a state, regardless of where its government or people are located in the world. This works alongside Tuvalu’s current efforts to legislate permanent statehood and maritime boundaries, which climate change threatens under current international law.
“Our hope is that we have a digital nation that exists alongside our physical territory, but in the event that we lose our physical territory, we will have a digital nation that is functioning well, and is recognized by the world as the representative of Tuvalu,” Simon Kofe, the leader of the project and Minister for Justice, Communication, and Foreign Affairs of Tuvalu, told Long Now.
Tuvalu’s physical landscapes will be preserved through virtual twins, beginning with the small islet of Te Afualiku, one of the first places in Tuvalu likely to be submerged due to rising sea levels. In efforts to preserve cultural heritage, stories, traditional songs, historical documents and recorded cultural practices will be cataloged and digitized.
“We want to be able to take a snapshot of what culture is today, and allow my children and grandchildren to have that same experience wherever they are in the world,” Kofe said.
“So even if the physical territory is lost, we would never lose the knowledge, culture, and way of life that Tuvaluans have experienced and lived for many centuries.”
[Watch: Wade Davis’ 02010 Long Now Talk, “The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World,” which explores in part how Polynesian navigators mastered the Pacific Ocean without writing or chronometers.]
Guy Jackson, a human geographer and researcher specializing in climate-driven non-economic loss and damage, says that the biggest risks climate change poses to cultural heritage in Tuvalu are territory loss and changes in seasonality.
Small island nations are deeply connected to their sense of place, and as seasonality changes due to climate impacts, knowledge of the availability of species, foods and migratory patterns change, which Jackson says leads to a massive loss and sense of grief.
He says that while a preservation project such as this cannot arrest the mental health impacts of losing one’s territory, for those displaced, knowing that there is a record of land, important sites, and stories, could come with positive benefits.
“I imagine within the metaverse there will be stories linked to particular places so you can imagine as a young person, being displaced from your home due to climate change, it would be a way to stay grounded in your particular culture while obviously, things will still change. Having this as a place that could probably evolve and grow will give people a sense of continuity, despite all of the changes and uncertainties,” Jackson said.
“For diaspora communities, and with Tuvalu having a lot of people living outside of the country, even for people like that who aren’t technically displaced by climate change, having a record like this will be a great place for people to go to and consider and enjoy their heritage, and then use that to help the next generations that might not have access to that land.”
The use of digital twins for cultural heritage has predominantly focused on capturing the visual appearance of objects, collections, and sites, with a suite of historical buildings and museums becoming digitized.
Horizon 2020, the European Union’s research and innovation program, cited a need for a more holistic approach to cultural heritage digitization, expanding beyond the recreation of visual and structural information to capture stories and experiences, and their broader ‘cultural and socio-historical context’.
In this way, Jackson sees Tuvalu as a forerunner, and believes that their approach will spark other countries to use similar methods to preserve their ‘important landscapes, memories, and stories.’
Kofe says that beyond its future applications, having a virtual copy of Tuvalu has immediate benefits that will help the government be more efficient for its people.
“Anything that you can think of in terms of data that is collected in Tuvalu, it can all be uploaded onto the digital twin,” he said. “We can track the impacts of climate change on the islands, entering data that we’ve collected for many decades, and make projections into the future. With a lot of commercial fishing activity in Tuvalu, you can have real-time data showing the vessels, the fishing locations, the amount of fish, and the species that are being caught.”
In the event that Tuvalu loses their islands, having a virtual copy could also assist them in reconstructing their land.
While unique in its scope and connection to climate mobility, Tuvalu is not the first nation to commence a digitization project within the metaverse. Barbados is building a virtual embassy with the development of infrastructure to provide services such as ‘e-visas’ and a ‘teleporter’ that will allow users to travel through all meta worlds. The South Korean capital of Seoul aims to have a metaverse environment for all of its administrative services by 02026.
James Cooper, an international law expert and Director of International Legal Studies at California Western School of Law in San Diego, says that these moves within the metaverse raise issues of jurisdiction, liability, sovereign immunity, and human rights.
He believes these should be answered and regulated before technology and events outpace lawyers' ability to do so.
“Whose laws apply?” Cooper asks. “How do you address the rights of a citizen from another country who might be in the metaverse on your government services platform or space within the metaverse?”
“What do you do for people who may be hearing or sight impaired and not able to fully access the metaverse or have the financial means or the connectivity? Are they being placed in a compromised role or limited in the same access that they would otherwise get?”
Cooper says that Tuvalu’s small population of 11,000 people will give them an advantage in addressing these issues compared to a larger nation.
As the project enters its beginning stages, Kofe stresses that preparing for a worst-case scenario by no means indicates a reduction in the nation’s climate advocacy or fight for a just future. He says the government is and will continue to work to protect its islands by building sea walls, reclaiming land, raising the islands in different parts, and calling for international mitigation measures.
“You could say the project is a Plan B, because the ordinary Tuvaluan, if you talk to them on the streets, none of them want to actually leave the islands,” Kofe said. “My hope is that there’s a strong message that people can see when we are doing this. I’d like them to imagine if they had to plan for relocation because of climate change.”
According to Kausea Natano, the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Pacific Island nations contribute less than 0.03% of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions.
Kofe says that the primary solution to climate change is for bigger countries to reduce their emissions, and he hopes that this project will inspire the public to rise up and put pressure on their leaders to do exactly that. In his COP27 address he emphasized that while Tuvalu could be the first country in the world to exist solely in the metaverse, if global warming continues unchecked it won’t be the last.
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