November 29, 2005
(While we’re being all polite: Thanks to Joe for preafrooding.)
The good: Carl Buell, who is just what the Miocene needed, has finally followed the urging of his friends and fans and got his blog running. Go now, and we can finish this recitation when you get back. Ta!
OK, back to annoyances. I don’t know whether this is good or bad, but I have an appointment with an orthodontist on Thursday. Yes I need braces. Yes I’m finally doing something about it. Now, I know Life Ain’t Fair and I could have been born with cancer or I could have had CF and died before puberty and all that stuff I told myself back when I was meeting people in those situations every day at work. Somehow that sort of reverse Schadenfreude just doesn’t work for me, though. It’s goddamn weird to have braces and zits and hot flashes all at the same time. And don’t get me started on the effects of hormonal low tide on one’s brain; it’s true what they say about estrogen and nominal aphasia. Whatever the hell they say, I forget.
The orthodontist, it turns out, is one I’ve been driving past on San Pablo Avenue for years. I know this because there’s a very strange ad-sculpture above the door, of a huge lipsticked smiling mouth with these little people on rappelling lines and scaffolding with hammers and stuff, working on the teeth. It’s conceptually nifty but for some reason quite unsettling to look at. It makes me go nnnnngnnn every time I see it. I’m unsettled enough already, thanks.
And.
I guess I’m not working for Terrain any more. I got this weird sort of drive-by firing embedded in a note about would Joe do a book review and by the way my paid position was being eliminated and did I have any ideas or sources about the topic that’s planned for the next issue. When I had lunch with the editor and she made nice about the manner of its happening and wanted me and Joe to keep writing the columns we’d been contributing for free for the last decade (the note had said: “If you want to argue for writer’s pay, I’ll listen.” Wow, gracious.) and talked about what was going on at the Ecology Center including the demand that she knock another 20 grand off an already skimpy budget while increasing the number of issues annually and quintupling the free distribution, I found I had no desire to go back under any circumstances. Joe had blown his stack at the original email and swore he wouldn’t touch the thing again noway nohow. The best I could say was, “If the Center decided to fully fund Terrain, let me know and I’ll re-think.”
Mostly I was just feeling used up and worn out. I even like this editor—hell, I was the one who campaigned to hire her, though her job interview did most of the work for me—but between the (to be kind) klutzy manner of the notice and the general lack of institutional support for the publication—and as Chris can attest, that’s nothing new—I mostly feel that the rewards aren’t equal to the loss of stomach lining and tooth enamel and the general chronic debilitating demoralizing aggravation. I seem to have been asked to fight for a job that won’t even pay me anymore, for an institution that has shat on me more times than I can wipe it off. Being taken for granted is one thing; contempt is another.
I’ve said the same things, made the same rousing speeches, the same passionate listings, to at least three sets of people now; I’m beginning to see that there really is an institutional culture that supercedes any and all of the individuals involved in a place. I’ve even had come-back lunches with two different editors of the same magazine… It seems I get do-overs in the parts of my life I’d really rather not do over, thanks.
Maybe it’s too much of my life spent being a Good Catholic Girl (see previous posts) and maybe it’s too much time spent grinding myself up in nonprofit institutions (or maybe that’s two names for the same syndrome) but it’s actually taken me all this time to start asking that question: “Why would I want to do that?” I’m not claiming to be generous—just stupid. And I’m wagging my finger at all who read this: Beware of Nonprofits. They tend to see people—their own staff and volunteers—as renewable resources, and they’re right; there’s an endless line of highminded suckers marching forth from the wombs of the world. Put in some time for whatever cause you’re passionate about and then get the fuck out before you’re 30. Honest. You can always contribute in what kind and amount you can spare after that.
It’s funny, that thing I mentioned in the post about my last Confession. (BTW, the Catholics are calling that the “Sacrament of Reconciliation” lately. Old wine, new bottles—no, new labels. SOS.) That thing about knowing certain things in one’s gut.
I knew in my gut that I was being marginalized at the magazine, and even tried to take some action about it, however pitiful—I offered more work, asked to be let in on the story process earlier, etc. And I kept telling myself I was being paranoid.Two things at work here: One, the reasonable thing about fact-checking, not going with one’s impulses and prejudices, that becomes reflexive in any honorable media worker. (This is something we have in common with science… I guess, in a way, like good field birding, it is science.) The second is a bit more invidious: When you’ve lived long enough in enough closets, knowing that one’s feelings were unacceptable—and this affects, aside from the obvious, anyone who has learned not to cry over certain “normal” slings ‘n’ arrows, certain routine official insults… yeah, any woman—you stop recognizing them yourself. Really, you have to look at yourself from the outside to see from the diagnostics that you’re upset, angry (especially angry!), sad, in love, whatever. So your gut feelings get relegated to the back of the line, and you sometimes even fail to notice them, or mistake them for indigestion.
Well, my gut was right about that one, sure. I’ve got a few other gut feelings—hell, this is a 56-year-old gut, it ought to be educated by now—and I’m now figuring our how to make provision for the future if they’re true. (No, this is not about Joe.) It’s an interesting dance, and more similar to fieldwork than to fact-checking.
Posted by Ron Sullivan |
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November 28, 2005
BY Joe Eaton
My thanks to Ron for providing space for a guest rant.
What set me off was a trip we made recently to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It had been a couple of years since the last visit, and while it was good to see the various inmates — the giant Pacific octopus, the ocean sunfish and sea turtle in the Outer Bay tank, the mesmerizing jellyfish — there were some things I found disturbing. One, as our friend Gene also noted, was that the signage and exhibit design seemed to be geared to about a grade-school level, not just in the hands-on lab upstairs but throughout. The dumbing-down was especially striking in a temporary exhibit about sharks and rays, which did have some nice touches (Haida dogfish masks, videos of West African hammerhead dancers). But none of the live specimens on exhibit were identified by Latin name. Come on, folks, a Linnean binomial or two never hurt anybody. I for one could have handled it at 7 or 8, which was around the time I imprinted on dinosaurs and was tossing off Latinoid polysyllables right and left. And the kid-oriented prose (“Doris the dogfish munches a mouthful of wiggly worms,” or words to that effect) was a real irritant. Having visited a bunch of splendid natural history museums out in the hinterlands last year — places like Albuquerque, Flagstaff, even Norman, Oklahoma — I had to admit that the MBA did not shine in comparison.
Then, already working up to a cranky mood, I started looking harder at the signs in the rest of the Aquarium, the regular exhibit space, and the absence of the E-word began to bother me. When you think about it, what better venue for introducing the notion of evolution than an aquarium? All life came from the sea, after all; it still runs through our veins, and we respond to its tides. And some prominent lineages went back to it, sometimes repeatedly. Just looking at mammals, you have varying degrees of commitment to a marine environment, from the sea otters that are still broadly similar to landbound weasels, through the sea lions and seals to the whales. Whales, I would hope to the discomfiture of the creationists, have turned out to provide one of the best fossil sequences documenting a major evolutionary transition: ancient amphibious beasts paddling around in the shallows of the Tethys Sea whose descendants morphed into the likes of blue whales and bottlenose dolphins. Why not build that story into the Whale Hall?
I began thinking about the contested functions of institutions like aquaria and museums: they’re about education, or should be, but they’re also about show business. Just bones, even the real bones, aren’t good enough anymore; the dinosaurs have to be animatronic, and a flashy sound-and-light show can’t hurt either. If you start looking at an aquarium as a venue for entertainment, you have to think about capturing as broad a market share as possible — especially if, like the MBA, you’re positioned as the prime tourist magnet in a tourism-oriented town. Maybe, if you’re where you can set the tone for the institution, you try to play down anything with a whiff of controversy about it; you don’t want to offend those nice fundamentalist families from Kansas.
So much for sins of omission, occasioned by whatever mix of gutlessness and venality. But it got worse. Around the corner from the giant octopus, two large ugly fish, a wolf eel and a lingcod, share a tank. To one side, skeletons of each species are on display. The accompanying text goes into the difference between the abundant teeth of the lingcod and the blunter teeth of the eel, and says, as nearly as I can recall, that the lingcod’s teeth are designed for impaling smaller fish while the eel’s are designed for crushing mollusks. Right — “designed.” Not “adapted,” not “have evolved to” whatever — “designed.” Nothing there that the good folks at the Discovery Institute could cavil with. This was late in the day, after a nice lunch at the Portola Grill, and I didn’t have the energy to retrace my steps and re-examine other labels for signs of creeping creationism. But I have to wonder how much of this kind of thing has gotten by under my radar in the past.
Let me be as clear as possible about my own biases: I believe the late geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky had it exactly right when he entitled an essay, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” The evolving concept of evolution — classical Darwinism plus Modern Synthesis plus Punk Eek and Evo Devo — is foundational to the life sciences. I would hope that it remains central to public school curricula, but with the political climate in much of the country, that’s not something we can count on any longer. Which makes it all the more important for independent institutions like museums, zoos, and aquaria to take up the educational slack. Who knows, a model of Ambulocetus, the prehistoric walking whale, might do for some tourist kid from Kansas what the Darwin-centennial series in Life Magazine did for me a long time ago: jump-start a lasting curiosity about the true history of the earth and its living organisms.
Posted by Ron Sullivan |
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November 28, 2005
Heo Cwaeth—Welcome!—
said in a reply string the other day:
He also openly stated—in class, no joke—that women had no business in the academy…
Oh yes. And this was in the ‘80s. It’s slow going, isn’t it. And with that, you triggered another one of mine. One of the reasons I’m a feminist is also one of the reasons I’m not a Catholic any more.
For the first time ever, in my freshman college year, I had a Philosophy course. Imagine the thrill: Pure Thought being taken seriously enough to own a whole course. We’d been undeniably admitted to the Olympus of Higher Learning. Plus it was taught by a priest I’ll call Father Thing (partly because I seem to have flushed his name), who was one of those photogenic stately white-haired types, just all approachable dignity and pink (but not round) cheeks. He was also the college chaplain and counselor.
His was the course where I learned that one use of long hair like mine is to hide behind when you’re sleeping in class. I learned something else, but it took a long time to sink in.
The course itself was basically rehashing Jaques Maritain about how Thomas Aquinas was correct about everything, and Aristotle was his prophet. Now, imagine — imagine! — a group of young women sitting quietly through months of hearing from that pigheaded misogynist. We were supposed to take things gratefully from the brain that had inflicted that “woman is misbegotten man” meme on European civilization, or at least reinforced it as church teaching, not just ancient Greek. You can find lots of intellectual tapdancing from Catholic philosophers and apologists to maintain that Aquinas never said that women are really inferior to men, or even, incredibly enough, that we ought to embrace our inferiority as it was assigned by God and therefore contributes to the perfect order of the universe. But the guy who taught our class never even bothered to go that far — and most of that stuff that I’ve seen was written years after my philosophy class.
After a few weeks of listening to this stuff — mind you, I was still a believer, all wide-eyed and receptive; one just gets used to this crap, growing up in the church, it’s as if all your shoes came with a built-in stone inside, and that was that — I at least figured out that this wasn’t exciting, and was basically just another catechism class. There was a standing joke that Father Thing graded exams by tossing the pile of bluebooks down a flight of stairs and grading them by what step they landed on. One of my classmates swore she’d written a straight answer on the first and last pages of hers and filled in the rest with repetitions of the Hail Mary, and got a B+.
Somewhere along the term, another classmate reported hearing Father Thing in conversation with a couple of the Jesuits from Scranton U. He’d said in so many words that he didn’t approve of higher education for women, and he wasn’t being the least bit embarrassed or clandestine about it, he wasn’t disclosing any secret about himself. (Except he probably said “girls,” but that wouldn’t matter much, would it?) And then other people mentioned that yeah, they’d heard that from upperclasswomen, alumnae older sisters, even a talkative nun or two. Well, it explained that class: we were supposed to be pious, not learned.
Understand that this was a women’s college. Not co-ed then (though I note with amusement that it is now), all women — to which, as chaplain, counselor, and philosophy professor, the Diocese had in its divinely inspired wisdom assigned a priest who right out loud didn’t believe in “higher education” for women. Why yes, that is a bit like putting a Creationist in charge of freshman biology.
But none of us, as I recall, ever complained that we were being cheated out of part of the education most of us, or most of our parents, had paid for. And as a full-scholarship student, I didn’t dare to rock any boats until a few years later. Even then I was awfully polite.
And it was also a couple of years later, and maybe even wiser, that I went to Confession for the last time. I don’t even remember why, but I was still devout, and maybe I wanted to clear my conscience before going to Communion the next day. I believe I was the last one in the chapel, and Father Thing was hearing confessions.
An aside here: I was even then pretty damned naïve about the anonymity of the confessional. In retrospect, I suppose the parish priests must have recognized me as the only third-grader who used words like “thrice” — and I used “thrice” in Confession because it was the only place I felt I could use it and not get hooted at. I have since been told that my voice is distinctive enough that people hearing it on the radio knew it was me, as I accidentally outed myself a decade ago as a Prozac user. Oops. (shrug)
So OK, into the confessional I went just as usual, and somewhere after the “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned” ritual I said I’d sinned against the Sixth Commandment. (Catholics number the Ten Commandments differently than Protestants do. Six is the one about sex.) The avid sharp intake of breath, the eager forward thrust of the head that I could just make out behind the cloth screen, the anticipation in the voice were unmistakable. “Sins of touch or intercourse?” he demanded… but not angrily. Eagerly. You know how phone trainers tell you that people can “hear a smile” in your voice? Well, yes they can, and I did.
I don’t even remember what I mumbled back at him, something polite, but I got through the rest of the drill and stumbled out to the pews, and then walked out of the chapel without bothering to say whatever prayers he’d assigned as penance. I was simultaneously numb and hyperalert. And I knew damned well what I’d just experienced. I thought it over, not really wanting to believe that of the old coot… and I still knew. And I know to this day.
No, I didn’t leave the church over one sanctimonious voyeur. It was an accumulation of nasties, the same as my — simultaneous, believe it or not — decision that I wasn’t going to join the Mercy order after all. (The biggest part of that was seeing how the nuns I liked most, who I saw as most like me, were treated. Interesting: all but one of the ones I got to know at all well dropped out of the order within about five years.) And somewhere along the string of outrages—current and historical, traditional, even, it would seem, doctrinal—that kept telling me “By their fruits you will know them and these aren’t plums” I realized that I didn’t believe any of it, so the whole thing was moot.
Somewhere in my college courses, I began expecting things to make sense. Not as divinely ordained, just as logical, and if we’re talking about explanations, as reasonable and as backed up with, of all things, evidence. And damn but it’s intellectually and emotionally a lot more joyous and fulfilling.
Posted by Ron Sullivan |
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November 26, 2005
Since one current fashion seems to be recounting Thanksgiving menus, I’ll do it too. Actually, I’m doing it mostly for fun.
We had TG with Kate and Gene, which is now somewhere between habit and ~Tradition~ (too bad there isn’t an HTML tag for some Gothic font) for the four of us. This is because we like it so much.
We went to their place in San Francisco. They were on the porch, OK, the porchette, looking at a raven and a couple of crows that had been going overhead. We unloaded ingredients and Gene made us each a French 75, named after a WW1 gun of some sort and involving champagne, vermouth, and Grand Marnier… was there something else? I forget. But they’re tangy and very good. Right up there with Lolitas in my estimation. A bowl of pumpkinseeds and almonds, light stuff because we had plenty waiting.
Intersperse this description with retiring to the comfy chairs now and then to just yak. That’s at least half the fun.
Chestnut soup, with the French equivalent of five-spice… um, white pepper, cloves, um, uh-oh, Kate? What was that? Duck Two Ways—duck confit and, because Gene just didn’t feel right about so little fuss, grilled duck. Kate had also made this wild rice thing with cranberries and pignoli. Little onions, red and white. Parsnips. (Turns out we’re all parsnip fans.) Joe made a Spanish chard recipe involving pignoli (we voted to keep the pignoli in both dishes, and no regrets) and slivers of jamon serrano. I also forget the name of the wine, but it was red and very good, especially with the chestnut soup—there was something going on between the two that evoked a faint and lovely taste of mushrooms. Spooky wine alchemy!
For dessert, Joe’s Shaker lemon pie and, in the sort of detail I love them for, custom newly invented drinks. The Veronica (damn name must be good for something) is coffee with frothy milk and a shot of the orange liqueur that the cranberries had been infused with. The Joe substituted Wild Turkey for the liqueur, and that’s about ethnicity, thank you, not an invidious comment on character.
The best part’s always the company, and damn but the food is good. I could rhapsodize, but let this be it for now. I think it’s time for my annual brief post-Thanksgiving depression. I have a lot of theories about the cause, but I can pretty much rule out turkey.
Speaking of love/hate times of the year: It rained last night and today, though not exactly a monsoon, and it’s getting less and less warm when the sun does come out and more and more cold at night. I don’t want to put away the aloha shirts and dig out the sweaters, but I’m more than ready for fire season to be over.
Posted by Ron Sullivan |
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November 23, 2005
...who will be Bush’s Edward R. Murrow?
I’m also wondering whether what I’m really wondering is: Who will be Cheney’s Edward R. Murrow?
Posted by Ron Sullivan |
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