Published March 27, 2009 | 
Bad news tonight: 20-something brother of a friend was killed in a car accident. I ache for her and her family. For the long, long road of grief they’re starting to walk.
Futility
Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.Think how it wakes the seeds, -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved – still warm, – too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?–Wilfred Owen
Jesus, people, stop dying young. It is not romantic. It is not beautiful. It’s an ugly, horrible waste and a miserable drain on the survivors.
And live well, and love each other. That’s all we have.
Published March 24, 2009 | Florence Bascom became fascinated with geology while taking a driving tour with her father (president of Williams College) and a geologist friend of his. An unremarkable genesis for an earth science career, except that the driving tour must have been done by horse and carriage: Florence was born in 1862.
To put this in perspective: In the United States, 1862 was the second year of the Civil War, and one of the bloodiest: Shiloh, the Seven Days, Antietam. The Gatling gun and the iron-clad ship were the big military innovations.
President Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. He also signed into law the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Acts, which provided for the first transcontinental railroad, thus shaping the American West.
It was the year of Lady Audley’s Secret, Les Miserables, and Salammbo. Thoreau died at 44. Alice in Wonderland was written. Gustave Klimt was born (same day as Florence Bascom). The Albert Memorial and Westminster Bridge were opened. Princess Alice, Queen Victoria’s daughter, married Prince Louis of Hesse. Her daughter would become the last Empress of Russia.
In this world, higher education for women was a rarity. Nevertheless, Florence Bascom earned a BA and then an MS from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She became the first woman to be granted a PhD from Johns Hopkins.* She had to attend lectures behind a screen; women are not yet admitted to the university.
Then she started teaching at Bryn Mawr College, establishing their world-class geology department and training many of the great female geologists of the early twentieth century. Bascom is quoted as frequently saying that she didn’t want to be the only woman geologist. She did her best to make sure she was not.
Often, though, she was the only woman in the room or in the field. Her list of firsts is impressive:
- first woman geologist hired by the USGS
- first woman to present a scientific paper at the Geological Society of Washington
- first woman officer of the Geological Society of America
Florence Bascom isn’t important just for being the first woman. She made major contributions to earth science. She invented techniques that used microscopic analysis in the study of oil-bearing rocks. She was a major pioneer in igneous petrology. Her analysis of the complex orogeny of the folded-and-faulted Appalachians is still the basis for understanding certain aspects of Pennsylvania geology.
Nor was she merely an armchair geologist; she emphasized the importance of fieldwork. She also strongly encouraged independent thinking in her students, which is how she and two of her former students became involved in the Wissahickon controversy, the first all-female scientific controversy. They conducted their disagreement with scholarly courtesy. (Yes, Florence was right, although recent discoveries have fine-tuned the picture.)
Even after being acknowledged as one of the top 100 geologists in the United States, she continued learning. In 1906 she visited Germany to study theories of petrology. What she learned there helped her understand the formation of the Appalachian Mountains.
After her death, this observation was found among her papers:
The fascination of any search after the truth lies not in the attainment…but in the pursuit, where all the powers of the mind and character are brought into play and are absorbed by the task. One feels oneself in contact with something that is infinite and one finds joy that is beyond expression in sounding the abyss of science and the secrets of the infinite mind.
*One other woman had earned a PhD, but the university did not actually grant the degree until 1926. Male chauvinism or incompetent paperwork? You decide.
Published March 20, 2009 | A friend of mine is getting married tomorrow. What’s the best advice you can give to newlyweds?
Say thanks for all the little things. Appreciation is like lube. Makes everything go more smoothly.
Learn how to handle disagreements — with respect, honesty, love, commitment, understanding. That is the one vital skill you need to survive everything.
Published March 19, 2009 | Sheep, sheepdogs, LED lights, and a few dedicated nuts on the hills of Wales. Making art out of sheep, who don’t seem to mind at all.
Published March 15, 2009 | This font geek loved The Periodic Table of Typefaces. Thanks to hitchhiker for the link.
(I was particularly glad to see Stone sans serif on the list; it’s one of a relatively new series of font families that also includes serif, humanist, and casual typefaces. They’re all elegant and readable.) Sumner Stone is a hell of a good font designer.
Published March 6, 2009 | Remember what I wrote about shame a few weeks ago? This is the relevant bit:
But shame, at least for some of us, makes it hard to face anything but itself. Shame turns your energy inward, circling all attention around the horror. Like a tornado, it drags everything into its self-centered vortex–and destroys it.
There have been times I’ve carried around so much shame in myself that even tiny problems could evoke destructive levels of shame. Where the single match of a small mistake could consume whole mountainsides, until the shame became a self-sustaining firestorm that nothing could stop. There have been plenty of times when the major damage was done not by my original error but by the shame it evoked.
In that sense, shame is like an allergy. Celery in itself is not going to kill me. My body’s all-out reaction to celery could well do so.
That was about my personal reaction to shame, which tends to go inward. In similar situations, other people project their shame outward, where it becomes denial, anger, rage. A voice shouting, “I am not that!” until everyone else is silenced, deaf–or gone.
I think a lot of the defensive behavior in RaceFail09 is because people are so desperate to escape from feeling ashamed. Which in one sense is a good sign — it means that people take racism seriously and do not have nasty intentions. But good intentions are no guarantee that you won’t hurt someone else. And shame can make people less likely to recognize their own racially insensitive behavior. It can occasionally result in doing dreadful things in order to prove that one has not done a different dreadful thing.
Part of the problem is that in terms of shame and self-image, many of us think of what we *are*, rather than what we *do*. (That’s one difference between the utterly destructive toxic shame, which feels innate, and the useful situational shame.) But Platonic ideals can be misleading.
Let’s say J. Doe has an internalized image labeled Racist — maybe a KKK member setting fire to an agonized lynching victim. J. Doe knows zie is not that person. Therefore zie is not a racist. When told that zie has performed a racially insensitive action, J. Doe hears this as an accusation of the vilest possible sort and responds accordingly.
You can be a decent human being with the best of intentions, and still hurt someone else inadvertently.
It took me a long time to learn this. I was so overloaded with shame and guilt and failure over things I didn’t have any responsibility for that there was no room for me to admit my errors in the things I could have done something about. Paradoxically, I also ended up wallowing in shame and doing things that would keep me trapped in it, because I knew I deserved it.
I was brittle and defensive. Sometimes I still go there. God knows I still do things I am ashamed of. And there are still deep, ugly places in me where I *am* the shame.
But we’re all works in progress.
If you hurt someone, if you do wrong, if you make mistakes or fuck up, you can apologize and try to make it right. You can do better next time. It’s not easy. You may not be forgiven. But you still need to try.
C. S. Lewis said in The Great Divorce:
“Don’t you remember on earth — there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it — if you will drink the cup to the bottom — you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.”
Here are some links for positive ways to use this RaceFail-go-round.
bossymarmalade wrote a wry, eloquent, great-hearted post, and it makes a number of good points:
I realized that how pseudonymous people act on the internet to each other is an excellent marker of their good conscience.
Read it all. It’s brilliant.
bcholmes on Race Agency:
I think it’s my job to own my skanky race issues and part of that being my job involves writing my own job description and figuring out just how to own those issues. And that’s not just armchair pondering; that’s work.
ETA oursin mentioned the new fight_derailing community, which is designed as a way to keep the focus on the topic itself, rather than getting stuck in side issues.