May be that nothing brings me out of blog hiding quite like the opportunity to shame a celebrity. Naomi Campbell, you might be the worst person alive this week.

Decent background on the whole thing here.

To sum up: Naomi Campbell, whom you might be familiar with as a supermodel who abuses staff, had dinner in the late 90's with Charles Taylor, whom you might be familiar with as a mass-murderer responsible for war crimes, mass rape, and crimes against humanity. Taylor, it seems, was smitten with Campbell and sent his men with "blood diamonds" to her room in the middle of the night. This event is confirmed by Campbell's assistant and her companions, to whom she desribed the encounter and the diamonds.

As it happens, this event is one of the few verifiable links between Taylor and the diamonds, a necessary link for the prosecution at the Hague. And yet Campbell has been unwilling to testify, going so far as to claim the whole thing never happened, until she was subpoenaed. [To be as generous as I can, I will note that her excuse was actually as follows: "This is someone that I read up on the Internet that's killed thousands of people, supposedly," she said. "And I don't want my family in any danger in any way."]

In her testimony this week, she noted that she was extremely "inconvenienced" by having to be there and went on to disavow any knowledge that the "dirty stones" she received were either diamonds or from Taylor (claims that is contradicted by both her assistant and Mia Farrow). She further claims that when she got wind of the possibility that they might be diamonds, she immediately gave them to Nelson Mandela's charity (a claim that Mandela has proven demonstrably false).

To recap: you are the person capable of providing the testimony that convicts Charles Taylor of war crimes and for years you refuse to appear, nominally out of safety concerns but, let's be serious, because of the bad PR associated with your having received a blood diamond. When you are forced to show up, you note your status as inconvenienced and you claim total ignorance of the origination of the stones as well as of their precious nature and further claim to have given the stones to Nelson Mandela when you really didn't? You both demur from giving decisive evidence against Charles Taylor *and* throw Nelson Mandela under the bus? Worst person alive.

(apologies for the silence. have moved. unpacking, prepping for new job, orienting, feeling mostly really happy.)

Labels: Charles Taylor, war crimes

I don't know if mass layoffs have struck BPhD or everyone's gone walkabout cause its high summer.

Probably the latter. I woulda heard about the former. Last hired, first fired. You know how they do.

Well, if they want to lay me off, they going to have to take it up with the Local. I got a contract. I got recall rights. And I get severance pay.

Its High Summer on the Flowage and a more fecund summer you will not find. Everything is ripening and reddening and gestating. The very air seems fertile as if vines could sprout from the clouds and the fog could bring forth honeyed fruit.
The crops look stupendous. Thick stands of rye and oats are marshalled across the county. Even a slight breeze casts them into motion, the grain rocking in slow rollers from fenceline to treeline.
Fields planted in corn and beans crowd the horizon. Field corn is already seven feet tall and the beans; Great Northern, Pinto, wax, and soy, are keeling over from the weight of their beany bounty.
Two crops of alfalfa have been put up already and the third crop is mowed, raked, and drying on the hillside. If the rain holds off for a few more days, it will be in the barn by the end of the week. There's plenty of time for a fourth crop. Nothing makes a country boy content like an overstuffed haymow.

The critters are thriving, too. I can't tell you how many sets of twin fawn Whitetail I've seen this season. I even saw triplets the day before yesterday browsing with their mama on an island in the Flowage. Its not unusual for two or three fawns to be born at one time but its unheard of they should survive this long into the summer. Tells you how rich is the browsing this year.

There's a merganser in the backyard on her third crop of offspring. She burrowed into the shoreline in the spring and has been here ever since raising babies and eluding Fox. She's had a couple close calls but Fox keeps falling for the broken wing ruse. He must see through it by now. I suspect he's so well fed he harasses the merganser strictly for amusement.

The boys are thriving like little idjits. I don't know if I told you but there's three boys spending the summer here. They range in age from eight to eight. It took me two weeks to learn how to tell them apart.

How they all ended up here is another post but suffice to say, one is the son of my stepdaughter, one is the cousin of the son of my stepdaughter, and one is the son of my niece, Moya. We call him Poco. You've heard me talk about him before.

Anyway, they're all here and carrying on like so many cocker spaniels. I admit to a moment of panic at the beginning of summer when they all parachuted in. I even tried giving them away to my blogging sisters. No joy there. They all had thin excuses.

Now, though, its working out pretty well. They go to a day camp four days a week and spend the other three days roaming the Flowage on their own.

I've got an old aluminum canoe they've commandeered to sail about in. Venturing out onto the broad waters on their own is forbidden but there are lots of sloughs and channels and shallow bays for them to reconnoiter. From time to time, they've even brought home nice fat perch for our supper.

I'm thriving, too. Its been six months since my surgery and I had my 5000 mile checkup last month. Three days of intensive poking and prodding and prying and sticking me with needles and examining my various fluid outputs have resulted in my being declared a cancer-free zone. I'm clean. I'm not sober but I'm clean for the first time in a year. My strength is just about back to form and my stamina is right where it should be.

I still have a little problem on my left side. After the operation, my remaining parts were reassembled into something of a loose confederation. Due to some mashed nerve bundles, my left or southern flank did not immediately join in the new regime with enthusiasm. The next six months were taken up with restoring central control over all constituencies of the taddyporter body politic.

Restoration is nearly complete but it turns out laying on my left side for the nine hours of the procedure tore the rotator cuff in my left shoulder. Surgery is the only way to fix it but, you know, its enough already with the surgery.

I'm just going to put it off for awhile. The shoulder can't get any worse. Who knows? It might get better on its own.

It could happen. Its High Summer.

I've reached the point in this (second consecutive) summer of upheaval where I'm starting to feel unhealthy. Not been sleeping very well for a month; I drop off fine usually but wake up a million times. The packing has me mired in stirred up dust and fleas, probably, so I'm sneezey and my eyes itch. I've been drinking more beers/wine than what is my standard routine, smoking more cigarettes. And not sleeping. Plus, eating down the pantry is anti-healthful. I'm scared to buy any produce because of an overdetermined sense of the move being imminent. Pasta, quinoa, black beans, beer beer, rice, can of soup, beer, rinse, repeat. my god, we wouldn't want to have to move with this *vanilla*! Better use it up! More peanut butter cookies; in my weakened state I tend to bake only half the dough and just straight up eat the rest. Further, like all good hells, the eating down the pantry hell is all the worse because it is a hell of your unique making. I, for example, have a grocery store weakness for two-for-one specials, for boxes of rice/herb combos, for cans of refried beans, for on-sale granola bars, and for oversized bins of risotto. This is my processed carbs hell, for now.

I cleaned out the last bits of stuff in my office yesterday. Something I love about myself is the way I invest in a place and develop a relationship with it, but yesterday that investment, only a year long, felt like more than I had room to indulge. I felt exhausted and sad in my empty first office. I walked down the hall to drop off my key and three of the offices I passed, colleagues, have my kid's artwork taped on the doors.

I don't feel like I've written much about this job over the last year and now I don't know how much I trust myself because I feel weepy effusive. It would be, I imagine, for me, much easier to leave this job if it were a traditionally "really good" job. I know, y'all, its a tenure track job, it's a really good job. Just like the one I am going to, which is a 4/4 with tons of comp and a new institutional structure, is also a good job. I do know. But y'all know what I mean: the kind of job that my grad program trained me to think of as aspirational. R1, 2/2, minimal comp teaching. That scenario presents a clear dichotomy: privileging family togetherness over career ambitiousness, without entirely sacrificing the latter.

Instead the situation is this: my job, my first job, was a 4/4 with constant comp responsibilities and a spartan upper-level rotation that had me in my speciality only once every 3 or 4 semesters. I had weighty service responsibilities, very little funds for conference/research travel, and a very small salary. My colleagues have pursued relationships with my daughter and played with her feverish self while I taught. They hang her art in their office. They have hosted my family for bbq's and riverside crab eating. My chair, when I called her in June to say I was leaving, spent 20 seconds being sort of shocked and then 20 minutes assuring me that I was making the right decision and she was so proud of and happy for me. She also began scheduling meetings with me 2 months into the job to discuss things like my 3rd yr review file, how to think about the committees involved, how to game my committee responsibilities. Maybe most importantly, I am thinking, is that my colleagues here have worked so hard from the day I arrived to convey that I was the best fit for the job, that I was an asset to the department, that I made the school better. The did this because they are decent and because they meant it all, but also, I expect, because they knew how much it meant for a first year assistant professor - any first year assistant professor but especially one struggling with some single mothering and an absent partner - to be reminded of herself as a competent professional with an identifiable career trajectory. That is, at any rate, the effect it had on me. I feel, as I'm sure is clear by now, very sad about leaving these people and this job.

I was skimming archives and noticed that here, last summer, pre-move, I observed how sad people seemed for us when I told them I got a job, but Mr. V hadn't yet and we were shifting to a commuter marriage. This year, with this move, people seem so happy for us. It's much easier to react in an unambiguous way (especially to a woman) to positive family news than to positive career news. Even my colleagues are thrilled for us. And mostly I absorb that and it guides how I feel about the move: incredibly happy for us. But it's more complicated. Always is.

Labels: academia, family values, women and work

Judges. Juries.

Everyone.

Good news for everyone then.

ETA: added missing preposition in title and added patented academic flair brackets to more precisely convey bottom line.

Labels: children, rape, rape culture

The last thing this whole Daily Show/Jezebel fracas need is another linkfest, so I'm going to (sort of) abstain. I thought the Jezebel piece was basically reasonable. Everything that has gone on thereafter (with much of it being extremely well-written and reasoned, other parts less so) has seemed to me like such total insidery inside baseball as to be a little cringey. But I will say this" I read Olivia Munn's interview at Salon today. Uh huh. So, yea.

This is not a woman I had heard of prior to the aforementioned fracas (Munn suggests in the interview that various articles about the dust up are attaching her name in order to get page hits. I wonder, can that happen? Does everyone else know who she is?]. Now that I am acquainted with her, I have this to say: Feminism is for everyone. I think you, Olivia Munn, should benefit from its paradigm, its achievements, its humanistic hope for the world. Etc. I understand that you feel like the forces of feminism often work imperfectly (and even self-destructively) - a true fact - hence your statement that, "this [Jezebel] article was picked up and pushed out and these women sit behind this very thin veil that I can see right through, this idea that "we stand up for women." If you stand up for women, then don't bash me." Hmmm. I feel doubtful about the notion that because one is a feminist, one cannot critique other women or reflect on antifeminist forces that may be at work in their career trajectories, but maybe it really became a cabalistic sisterhood when I wasn't looking. Also, were you "bashed"? Hmm. So then, as I continued to read the interview, I thought, just who *is* this Olivia Munn and what has she been doing that is so insulated from feminist analysis?

A bit further down in the interview, re: people who had negative things to say about her Maxim cover shoot or her relationship with the new Captain Kirk: "And I really still believe that anybody who's sitting there judging my relationship does need to get the shit fucked out of them." Hmmm.

And then Lindsay Beyerstein [so, ok, this post is linky anyway] showed me the moving images I needed to see to complete my picture of Olivia Munn's contributions to the representation of women within dudely geek culture. Lindsay writes:

[T]he least Munn can do is stop acting all butthurt when feminists call her out. We geeks are not renowned for our social skills, but there's one thing we do know: You can't suck up to the cool people and dump on the other rejects and expect the rejects to like you. A corollary applies to women who ingratiate themselves to men while tearing down other women.

True. I mean, talk about manufactured outrage. Or, at the very least, total lack reflexive awareness. And, also, this "I'm easy to hate" and "expect them to like you" language is precisely the problem: this is, or was anyway, actually not a middle school catfight. Things - shows, public personae, career trajectories, workplace sexism - exist in real life. They are scrutable, legible, analyze-able, potentially educational. Introducing the language of petty jealousy is what turns it into a middleschool catfight.

All in all, in conclusion and since the beginning of time, the whole thing is wicked less soothing than packing and I am sorry I spent any time with it.

Labels: feminism, stupid shitstorms

Moving itself is a bitch, but I rather like packing. It appeals to the frenetic organizer in me. Also, if there is anything better than organizing, it is throwing away/donating. So liberating! I am ruthless and have very little sentimentality when it comes to this sort of thing. Eating down the pantry is goddamn awful, but other than that, reducing inventory is fabulous-feeling.

I have tended to have one major weakness in this process and have finally, in the last week, overcome it. I am here to share my enlightenment with you. If you are reading this blog, there is a strong likelihood that the insight is one you need. Here it is: your books do not love you. They are objects, and not morally superior to any other object in your house. Again, books are not morally superior to any other objects. They are just heavier.

Labels: books, moving