men can’t find the clitic

~ Vessel in the form of a prone creature.

Date: 100 B.C.–A.D. 200

Culture: Zapotec

Period: Formative

Place of origin: Mexico, Oaxaca, Central Valley of Oaxaca

Here’s just a bunch of silly Ryland and Rocky art. I doodled (from memory) Eridian body language, doodles Rocky making braille notes on metal (we talk about Eridian written language lore in the discord server), Ryland being a softie, and Rocky in a sweater.

Most of these are based on stuff talked about in the Project Hail Mary discord server. If anyone is interested in joining then please do! :D join us in our feverish rambling about how FUCKING WEIRD Eridian lore is.

SO MUCH PROJECT HAIL MARY DOODLES!

Top left: doodle of Ryland and Rocky on Erid. Rocky wants to name his kid after Ryland because Eridians do it + Rocky knows Ryland will die much much much sooner than he will.

Top right: Ryland crying and hating his life after getting caustic burns from spending less than a second in Rocky’s hot, ammonia dense atmosphere. Seriously though, I feel so bad for Ryland. Those kind of injuries affect you for the rest of you life :(

Bottom left: doodles of scientists + Diagram of how I interpreted the biology of Eridians from the book.

Hugely valuable in the late 1990s and early 2000s because the discoverability of information in public-facing databases was fucking terrible and nobody knew how to organise anything; to

Effectively useless throughout the 2010s because search engines enormously and rapidly improved and computer literacy was at an all-time high; and

The remains of a huge carp fish (2 meters/6.5 feet long), analyzed by the Hebrew University, Bar-Ilan University Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with Oranim Academic College, the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research institution, the Natural History Museum in London, and the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, mark the earliest signs of cooking by prehistoric human to 780,000 years ago, predating the available data by some 600,000 years.

We began work on January 28, but the highlight of this week was the January 31 visit to the site by Anne Pasternak, the Brooklyn Museum Director, and members of the Museum’s Board of Governors. We were thrilled to be able to show them the site where Brooklyn has worked for the past 40+ years. We hope they enjoyed their visit.

As promised last week, here are the members of our team. Our foreman again this year is Abdel Aziz Farouk Sharid (left). He and our inspector, Haitham Mohamed Sa’ad el-Din are discussing the season’s work. The Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) assigns an inspector to every expedition to act as liaison with the SCA and help facilitate the work. We are happy to have Haitham with us this season.

Besides Abdel Aziz, the Qufti who working with us this year are Abdel Aziz’s brother Ayman Farouk Sharid (center), the foreman for the Johns Hopkins University expedition who works with us when Hopkins isn’t in the field; and Mamdouh Kamil, who has worked with us for many seasons. All are from the village of Quft (ancient Coptos), which has a long tradition of archaeology going back to the late 19th century. Ayman and Abdel Aziz are the sons of one of the great Egyptian archaeologists, the late Farouk Sharid Mohamed, who was a beloved friend and treasured colleague. His sons are worthy successors to him.

You are looking northwest at the first court of Temple A, which stands northeast of the Mut Temple. We are working in two areas of the court this year. In 2019 we were able to confirm that that the row of limestone features on the court’s south side were sphinx bases. This season we want to see if there are remains of corresponding bases on the north side (right). We are also clearing the corridor between the south colonnade and the south wall of the court (left).

By the end of the week (February 2) the results in the north square were equivocal. Looking north, you can see an area of decayed limestone on the right side of the square that might be the remains of a sphinx base. On February 1, Mamdouh uncovered the round, dark feature to the left of the “sphinx base” that might be a tree hole. Sphinx avenues often had trees planted between the sculptures.

The work on the corridor was more productive. By the middle of the week Ayman had cleared a mass of broken stone and revealed the lowest course of the court’s south wall (left) and the footing of the temple’s 2nd Pylon. Both sit on a sand foundation that you can see below the blocks of stone. It was common to use sand in the foundations to level out uneven ground.

On February 1 our Dutch colleague, Jacobus (Jaap) van Dijk joined us for another season. First thing on the morning of February 2, Ayman called us over to show us an interesting find: a large relief-decorated block. Jaap immediately got down to have a look.

The block has a beautifully carved relief of Amun that clearly is Thutmoside in style, that is, from the reign of Hatshepsut and/or Thutmosis III, of the mid-15th century BC. What makes it particularly interesting is the small, shallowly carved graffito of a God’s Wife of Amun facing the Amun and dating stylistically to Dynasty 25 or 26, about 700 years after the god’s face was carved. God’s Wives of Amun were priestesses, usually the sisters or daughters of kings, who wielded great political power in the Third Intermediate Period and later.

Just west of the Amun block was smaller cube of stone with a sunk relief depiction of a man’s foot on base lines with the top of a cartouche and the “son of Re” title below. The style of the foot (very long) and the vertical element of the cartouche date it to the reign of Akhenaten. It probably came originally from his temple in East Karnak, built before the king moved the capital to Amarna. The artist paid attention to detail when painting the relief, painting the head of the goose (“son”) blue but its beak and eye red. The Brooklyn Museum has an interesting group of Amarna Period reliefs showing a pastoral scene.

By the end of the week Ayman and his crew had cleared the bases of the first 3 columns of the colonnade, working from west to east. The blocks of the bases are large: 70 cm by 125 cm and almost 100 cm thick.

We are also planning on restoring 2 fallen columns in the colonnaded porches in front of the Mut Temple. The one in the East Porch is shown here as it was found in 1979. Work hasn’t started on these yet; there will be more about the restoration next week.

One of our favorite birds is the tiny, bright bee eater, so called because it catches insects in mid-air. This is the first we’ve seen this season.

An unusual cloud formation seen at sunset one night. Angels? Extraterrestrials?

I tagged this #i will not elaborate on this at this time, but now I will elaborate on it. 

I’m gonna go ahead and post the disclaimer: Academic studies of the nature of oppressive forces are generally a good thing. There’s even some value in the ideas of “unpacking language” and “deconstructing narratives,” because yes, sometimes those things matter. I’m specifically talking about a certain kind of academic writing that is hard to define, but tends to have a few specific characteristics: It’s usually focused on something “social justice” related, it’s written in extremely dense jargon, and it’s more focused on moralizing than making any meaningful analysis or providing practical recommendations. 

This kind of writing is not for the purpose of furthering our understanding of oppressive forces. This kind of writing is for furthering the careers of academics.

Academia works kind of like an MLM. Professors want to keep their jobs, so they need students to teach and graduate assistants to help with their research (and grade their papers for them), so they convince people to pursue education in their field. Then those people want to become professors, and they also need students and graduate assistants. A few rounds of this, and you end up with way, way more people with PhDs than positions for professors. This creates the increasingly cutthroat nature of academia. (I’m gonna come back to this.)

So how do you succeed in a saturated academic field? You look smarter than your competition, and you tear your competition down at every possible opportunity. That’s where this kind of writing comes in. It’s so dense as to be incomprehensible - but who’s going to admit that they don’t understand it and risk looking stupid? No, now you need to write an even denser, even more incomprehensible article, so you look even smarter. And the focus of “social justice” shields you from criticism. Any criticism of your writing or analysis can be turned back on you with accusations of bigotry or limited, privileged perspective. And you can’t defend yourself against accusations like that - it just makes you look worse. The more incomprehensible and “social justice-y” your writing, the smarter you look, and the less likely you are to be criticized - and the more credibility and leverage you have to criticize your competition. “Cancel culture” existed in academia long before it made its way to Twitter. 

This nasty little game was previously limited to the ivory towers of academia and the people who wanted to join them. The average person did not give a shit what the word “discursive” meant. If you had to engage with this in the pursuit of a regular degree, you nodded along, vomited back the language into your essays, and moved on with your life. (This stuff is partially where the idea of the “liberal brainwashing university” comes from.). For the most part, you had to seek this stuff out if you wanted to engage with it. The people whose dreams of an academic career didn’t pan out went and got jobs writing for snooty newspapers and/or teaching AP Brit Lit in their hometowns.

Enter social media.

Now you’re not just after that tenure-track job, now you’re after that blue check. Now the game plays out in the public sphere. Moreover, every bargain-bin Foucault knockoff who would normally move on from his failed dreams of being an academic at some point can keep playing the game forever. And every undergraduate with three weeks of Philosophy 101 under their belt and a 19 year old’s passion for social causes can also participate. Their friends, not wanting to be shown up or left out, also get in on the game. And so do their friends. And, like a virus, it spreads and spreads and spreads - with Tumblr and Twitter being the primary sources of infection. Super-spreader sites.

As it spreads outward, people lose sight of the fact that none of this ever mattered in the first place. This kind of writing doesn’t serve the purposes of liberation and never did. It was never meant to. It was always a shallow, artificial charade. But it becomes entrenched in the language of politics and liberation as if it was real. To use their own language, we’ve gone through Baudrillard’s four stages of the image. “It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”

And remember what I said about academia being like an MLM? This serves their purposes very well. More people are talking about their field, more people are interested in it! They have more students, they need more funding, they need to hire more professors! And we all know what professors need… It replicates itself to eat itself alive to replicate itself.