Tales of Celan

JOMP BPC - 29th May - This Month's Favourite

I really enjoyed Enlightenment by Sarah Perry but in the end I chose Euphoria as my favourite for May - I found it absolutely compelling and my thoughts keep returning to it. It's a fictionalised account of the time anthropologists Margaret Mead, her then husband Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson spent together in what was then called New Guinea. Part of what makes it a riveting read is the messy, charged tangle of attraction, jealousy, and rivalry between the three protagonists. What I found even more gripping and at times really distressing is the account of these white Western academics 'studying' the people of New Guinea - the arrogance, the assumptions, the entitlement, the catastrophic misunderstandings - but also the thrill of academic work when it's going well, when your understanding is deepening and expanding; when the data fits your theory.

"Your wife is hot."

"...THIS ONE DWARF WITH IMPECCABLE TASTE CAN STAY"

but then I realised that same challenge would be infinitely more funny with folks who have atypical or horror OCs

New commission! This will be the last one I post for now, I’ve taken ordering down for all custom prints, but really happy with how this one has turned out!

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely.