… ‘this great abeyance’ — not Plath’s Berck-Plage, but our own Chesapeake Bay, where Les UDs will wander islands and shorelines, scoping out black sky as well as family reunion locations.

At the moment, their best location for next year’s Perseid meteor shower seems to be Assateague Island National Seashore, which allows late night visits. But we’re still looking. A good excuse, in any case, for some adventures.

Blogging continues undaunted.

Sure.

The one thing missing in the latest fifteen year old mass killer’s parents’ statement was the only thing that matters: How many and what type of guns in the house?

Between 12 and 14 ain’t so cool either, and 7, as this writer correctly notes, is absolutely out of the question – parents are in the position of forcing modesty garments on someone too young to choose to wear them.

The parents are doing it because you want to get your daughter used to thinking that covering up is her only option in life. It’s the only thing she’s ever known. She’s always hidden her hair (and probably her body – such girls are often put in body-hiding robes).

The observation in my headline is one of many comments on a NYT article about multiple lawsuits, character-assassination, and life-destruction resulting from a seconds-long incident in which a 7 year old hijabi’s teacher touched her hijab. Was it an innocuous effort to clear the girl’s vision, which seemed to the teacher for a moment to be obscured by the hijab? Was it a vicious humiliating “stripping” of the girl’s clothing, self-respect, and personal integrity?

Another commenter:

[W]hy is a seven-year old girl wearing a hijab? A hijab is a statement of modesty, a way of deflecting unwanted attention from unrelated males. The girl is seven! In what culture are such innocent creatures the objects of unwanted sexual attention?

The answer is clear: You want girls from the moment they enter the public realm to see themselves as destructive temptresses; and you certainly want them to regard all males as people to whose drives and dominance they must in every way from the very beginning of their conscious lives defer.

Another commenter:

I’m sorry, why is a seven-year-old girl covering her hair? What does she have to be modest about at age seven?? I thought girls were only put under hijab when they began menstruating? How early in our lives do girls and women have to have others’ expectations and projections of what it means to be a “good girl” or “ladylike” foisted upon us?

Another:

I am mostly sorry for the child. Having lived in very conservative parts of the Middle East for some time, I know that seven-year-old children typically don’t wear hijabs unless their parents are really extreme religious fundamentalists.

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In Muslim countries where I lived, hijabs are not worn by 7 year olds. Girls starting puberty wear them. Forcing a 7 year old to wear one sounds…

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[T]he early Muslims including Prophet Muhammad PBUH did not preach covering the heads of pre-pubescent girls. This trend simply marks the increase of religious conflict and religious fundamentalism (across many religions).

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More on this controversy.

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Tarek Fatah on Twitter: “Forcing #Hijab on a 7-year-old American girl? Has my Muslim community lost their bearings? Imagine telling a child, her hair triggers sexual desire among men! What has gone wrong with my Muslim community? What next? A hijab for newly-born infant girls?”

Sarah Longwell, The Bulwark.

… For a while, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was supposed to be the Good Republican: a fusion candidate and progenitor of the post-Trump future. Now it turns out that he is a despicable human being, a performative culture warrior who uses the levers of government against companies who engage in speech he doesn’t like and treats refugees as pawns in his political troll game. He keeps a keyboard-warrior press secretary who screams “groomer” at anyone who disagrees with her boss. Oh, and he’s campaigning for Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, a committed election denier who not only attended January 6th, but bussed others there as well...

[Virtually every once-sane Republican governor] is campaigning either for or with an election-denying lunatic. Ducey, along with the Republican Governors Association, has thrown in with Kari Lake. Sununu has embraced election conspiracist Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. Kemp is campaigning with the pro-coup GOP nominee for lieutenant governor and supporting the supremely unqualified and scandal-ridden Herschel Walker...

 Glenn Youngkin? Holy crap. He’s the term-limited governor of Virginia. There’s zero reason for him to be in Arizona stumping for the BDE candidate who wants to jail her political opponents.

Except that there’s a very good reason: Glenn Youngkin isn’t campaigning to help Kari Lake. It’s the opposite. He’s trying to hug Lake in the hopes that her radioactive Trump energy will contaminate him. Youngkin is trying to make up for having been a Good Republican. Because he realizes that’s a dead end…

Normal GOP politicians who don’t want to swim in the right-wing infotainment cesspool are deemed traitors for throwing in with the “corporate media” and so lose credibility with GOP audiences…

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Strong words, well-deployed.

Color UD mildly shocked but pleased to see this quite explicit article. Reading its concern about how best to have a clitoris, and then enjoying the sometimes hilarious comments on the piece (“Yes, yes. But what about inflation?”), UD kept thinking about the simple solution to the problem offered all over the world to more than two hundred million women.

Haha, I mean not offered; imposed. When they’re children.

IF THEIR CLITS OFFEND THEE, CUT THEM OFF.

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As long as we have people like Alan Dershowitz in the United States (and, on the other side, Ilhan Omar), female genital mutilation will continue to be a popular option among some groups even here. England’s got a rampant case of it.

Entire religious groups, like India’s Dawoodi Bohra, make it the centerpiece of their spiritual practice.

It’s nice that the 164.8 million women in the US get to live in a country whose paper of record cares about their sexual pleasure. It’s disgusting that 200 million (and growing) women – children – outside the US endure the forced amputation of sexual pleasure.

The argument in support of the hijab proceeds on a deeply flawed assumption that girls have an option to wear or not wear it. And since they have exercised their free agency and chosen to wear the hijab, the laws of the land must respect their choice. This argument fails to recognise the fact that the families that prescribe and subscribe to the hijab usually make it mandatory for their female children, when they are as young as four or five years old, to wear the garment whenever they step outside their home or when they are in presence of male family members. The choice of wearing or not wearing the hijab is already made for them by the accident of their birth. The collective pressure exerted by families, especially the male members, a deeply conservative society, and the burden of arcane interpretations of religious dogma make it virtually impossible for any of the hijab-clad girls to exercise free choice.

The head of the ultraorthodox party announces:

‘English, math studies [are] useless for Israel’s economy.’

…. but time and time and time again the court affirms the right of businesses to ban hijabs.

Relying on two previous headscarf-related rulings, the five-judge panel held that employment policies that ban head coverings do not violate EU employment law so long as they are applied in “a general and undifferentiated way.” 

Not sure why, given airtight certainty that they won’t win, the cases keep coming.

The solution for women who absolutely refuse to part with their modesty garments seems pretty obvious: Try to get a job at the tons of other workplaces in Europe that don’t object to modesty garments, or perhaps try to move to a part of the world (Indonesia, for instance, is full of hijabs, and lacks Iran’s violent insistence on them) where no one is going to object to them.

The hijab-obsessed Iranian regime needs help. Millions across the country are stripping off – and burning – their hijabs, a non-negotiable modesty garment as far as the mullahs running the country are concerned. The little hat that hides at least a bit of female obscenity (the body-covering robe women are encouraged to add to the hijab certainly helps even more in the endless task of making women somewhat less obscene) means everything to the guys, and their government’s tanking as much of their population says fuck the hijab.

Short of shooting everybody to death, the government appears to be trying some soft power. Most recently, it displayed, in central Tehran, an enormous billboard with a photo collage of happy proud Iranian women brandishing their wondrous hijab. Immediately a number of the women demanded their photo be removed; they might have worn the thing once under duress, but they hate it and they hate the regime.

Some of these women are high-profile performing artists, and they filmed themselves denouncing the ‘murderous,’ ‘disgusting,’ regime.

Funny, ain’t it, how erasing images of women from everywhere is Job #1 in many Islamic regimes (and of course in their doppelgangers – ultra-Orthodox Jewish circles), but when they start feeling truly endangered they plaster women’s photos in the city square…

Anyhoo here’s the help they didn’t ask for but will now get.

You wanna keep women in hijabs you need to launch a trendy American style campaign, with goofy bold ecstatic young Iranian women dancing wildly while singing a new hit song, inspired by the massive Will Smith hit, Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It. The Gettin’ Hijjy Wit It campaign will transform the hijab from a drab oppressive requirement to a wild and crazy Fun Thing. Trust UD. Give it a go.

Such lovely names in that lovely Raleigh neighborhood: Greenway; Osprey Cove; Bay Harbor. You can just see the place – “single family homes and golf courses.”

As for seeing its mass shooter, here’s a description from a witness:

 ‘He looked like a baby. I just don’t even have the words to explain. This is not OK.’ 

Police say he’s between 13 and 16 years old.

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Enjoy the police chief’s rollicking explanation for this event.

‘I think people are on edge coming out of a pandemic,’ she said. 

‘I think we have mental health issues that are also contributing to that. I believe also too what we’re facing as a nation: the war in Ukraine, inflation, gas prices. 

‘All those things coupled together, I think results in people wanting to solve their disputes or their issues with gun violence rather than just maybe taking a pause, stepping back, and then re-approaching the situation.’

She forgot to mention an uptick in breast cancer cases in Asian women aged 45-65.

Just got back from the object of my pilgrimage: The Cy Twombly collection at the Menil in Houston. As I entered the Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair room, I found myself weeping – not knowing why, not caring why, but weeping. As if that moment – all alone in the beautiful building dedicated to his work, no one else anywhere, the sound of complete silence – were the reason, the real reason, the full reason, UD hauled herself onto a plane from DC and came down here. And – listen up!

After a long stretch of years, I found myself drawn to re-visit the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston this past spring. It felt like a homecoming. I stood in the room containing the polyptych in five parts, “Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair” (1985), for hours, observing the subtle shifts of light and shadow with tears streaming down my cheeks. Twombly’s inimitable handwriting was so familiar, although the colors—burgeoning wine-drunk purples and devastating orange-reds—had been so hard to hold in the mind and the realization that they would slip away from me again was heartbreaking. This has been the one group of works about which I’ve been unable to write. These tender pink blushes and bruised blooms always struck me as too achingly beautiful, almost embarrassingly so, to put into words. They contain all that they need in phrases drawn from Leopardi, Rilke, and Rumi (“In drawing and drawing you, his pains are delectable. His flames are like water.”). More text, it would seem, could only serve [to] diminish them.

That’s a whole other human being, tears streaming in front of the exact same work that brought on my waterworks! Listen to what else Claire Daigle has to say about UD’s way-favorite artist.

It has become something of a cliché to call Twombly a painters’ painter, but with his charmed bookishness, he is foremost, in my mind, a writers’ painter. His gestures move between those of writing and drawing, between drawing and painting. Signs perch on the verge of manifest expression, often evading, occasionally gratifying legibility. His [art] partakes of Hermes’s signs, gathering in force as they range from mark to word to quotation through redaction and negation to clamor and quietude. The chromatic incidents—from tiny gem gleams to full blown detonations—and the extraordinary range of types of mark are felt only by the body, Dionysian. They remind us of all in art that escapes the verbal clutch that would hope to seize that which exists only in moments when the attentive gaze is fully present.

It was Roland Barthes’ essay on Twombly that got me going on the man, and I’ve never stopped loving him

From New York Magazine:

From the first day, I put my scarf in my bag and never put it back on my head. We know that we can be arrested for not wearing our scarves, but we know that people will defend us. And the police know how angry people are. At night, I look online for tips on how to defend myself: if they tie my hands and legs, how I should fight back. We share this information with each other and take it very seriously. 

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What is a priority for me is true freedom, collective freedom — where we have a route to express our grievances. It’s striking for me to see the younger generation on the streets — people in their early 20s. They are extremely brave — more so than I. I think the government itself was not expecting this generation to be this fiery. Any stereotypes about women as fragile and weak are completely gone.

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It’s not unusual to see girls wearing hijab among the protesting students. Girls with scarves and girls without scarves hold hands together and chant slogans demanding justice and freedom of choice to wear what they want. It is common to see women without scarves walking around the city. I saw a young girl without a scarf boldly pass in front of police on the street. A few meters away, some young Basijis ran after her. The girl continued walking slowly. When the Basijis approached her, she turned around and shouted, “What, what? Come on, kill me. Don’t you want that? Just like you did to Mahsa and Hadis?” All three of them stopped dead in their tracks, shock visible on their faces. They didn’t dare say another word.

Even if the government wants to fight to enforce the dress code, it can’t. It’s impossible to count how many women are bravely walking without their headscarves. These days, no morality police can be seen on the streets.

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This is a critique of unequal power relations in all forms — of anyone who is stepping on your rights and limiting your freedom. This critique can be applied in every time and place. The worst thing that could happen would be if people in other countries look at us and see us as poor, oppressed women who are stuck fighting for rights like American and European women did a century ago — that they think we’re at the beginning of the road. People need to understand that our fight is shared with people all over the world including themselves.

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Don’t you want that? Don’t you want to kill me? She’s right – annihilating women under burqas, policing them in hijabs, removing the genitals of baby girls, making them clean themselves up all the time in ritual baths, refusing to sit next to them on planes and buses, erasing them and their images from the public square, making beating them legally permissible, etc. – they do want to kill her.

What’s striking in the scene described is the apparent shock on the part of the Basijis as they confront, no doubt for the first time, this desire.

As for their confronter: She can die protesting in the streets, or she can rot to death behind their shrouding and numbing and homicidality.

… burqa (they’ve had a ban for a while), and as Aljazeera restates the party line on how appalling it all is, let me link to this UD post.

To understand why it’s officially the worst state in the nation, you have to drill down to the details. A routine event hits the national news because it involves (what else) football. The son of an NFL player does that thing. That all-American, but way Louisiana thing. Drives around (maybe drunk) on a Saturday night. Just a tadpole at 21 years of age, but out piloting a huge black Range Rover SUV late at night all by his iddy biddy self. Although he kills a pedestrian … hits and kills an entire adult human being…. he … doesn’t notice. Three days later when witnesses start coming forward his parents get him a lawyer.

I’m waiting to hear he was carrying mucho assault rifles in the car too. All in good time.

And yes, it’s quite likely he waited three days in order to get rid of whatever was in his system.

And the wayest Lousiana thing? Judge will let him off scot free cuz … you know… young, football, booze, gigantic SUVs — it’s not a crime. It’s a way of life.