julia

For Teenage Girls With Wild Ambition and Trembling Hearts, Clementine von Radics (via jebiwonkenobi)

xx.

-Anna F

"What’s your biggest dream for your child?" "We’ll let him dream for himself."

Columbia student will carry her mattress until her rapist exits school September 2, 2014

While most students at Columbia University will spend the first day of classes carrying backpacks and books, Emma Sulkowicz will start her semester on Tuesday with a far heavier burden. The senior plans on carrying an extra-long, twin-size mattress across the quad and through each New York City building – to every class, every day – until the man she says raped her moves off campus.

“I was raped in my own bed,” Sulkowicz told me the other day, as she was gearing up to head back to school in this, the year American colleges are finally, supposedly, ready to do something about sexual assault. “I could have taken my pillow, but I want people to see how it weighs down a person to be ignored by the school administration and harassed by police.”

Sulkowicz is one of three women who made complaints to Columbia against the same fellow senior, who was found “not responsible” in all three cases. She also filed a police report, but Sulkowicz was treated abysmally – by the cops, and by a Columbia disciplinary panel so uneducated about the scourge of campus violence that one panelist asked how it was possible to be anally raped without lubrication.

So Sulkowicz joined a federal complaint in April over Columbia’s mishandling of sexual misconduct cases, and she will will hoist that mattress on her shoulders as part savvy activism, part performance art. “The administration can end the piece, by expelling him,” she says, “or he can, by leaving campus.”

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Conrad Martens - (Honorary) Scientist of the Day

Conrad Martens, an English artist, died Aug. 21, 1878 (he was born in 1801, we don’t know the exact date). Martens happened to be in Montevideo in 1833 when HMS Beagle came into port. Robert Fitzroy, the captain, had just lost his ship’s artist to illness, and he hired Martens as a replacement. Martens was thus on board the Beagle when it sailed down to Cape Horn, and Martens’ images of the Beagle in the straits of Tierra del Fuego, and of the Fuegian natives who lived there, have become classic accompaniments to any account of Charles Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle. Martens left the ship before it got to the Galapagos Islands, so we have no good images of that famous part of the voyage. Instead, Martens booked passage to Australia, and remained there, as a very popular landscape artist. He and Darwin became friends and continued to correspond long after Darwin came back home.

The first two images above are original watercolors by Martens, of the Beagle in the straits of Tierra del Fuego, with Mt. Sarmiento looming large, and of a native Fuegian, with his hut and family in the background. Below these are the same images as they appeared as woodcuts in Fitzroy’s printed Narrative (1839). Darwin was not allowed to use any of Martens’s drawings for his own volume, Journal and Remarks, which nevertheless became much more popular than Fitzroy’s.

We displayed both Fitzroy’s and Darwin’s narratives in our Grandeur of Life exhibition in 2009, where you may see Martens’ image of the Fuegian native.

A PALAVRA Já não quero dicionários consultados em vão. Quero só a palavra que nunca estará neles nem se pode inventar. Que resumiria o mundo e o substituiria. Mais sol do que o sol dentro da qual vivêssemos todos em comunhão, mudos, saboreando-a.