Bloomsday is tomorrow, and I suppose UD‘s little contribution to it would go like this:

Leader’s bio of Ellmann, who himself wrote the great bio of James Joyce, is currently much talked about. Ellmann was a friend/colleague of my then-boyfriend (and I mean then! we’re talking about what? the early ‘seventies?) at Northwestern University.

One afternoon Ellmann came over to our place to ask him a favor.

Ellmann had written a long angry defense of himself against some hostile reviewer – my memory is that the review appeared in the NY Review of Books, and Ellmann intended the defense to appear there? – and he wanted my bf to submit it under his name. As if he had written it!

Wee UD sat on a couch by the fireplace, listening to my bf, a professor much-junior to Ellmann, agree — uncomfortably — to do this. I recall the two of them reading over the letter together, my bf making occasional edits, and then the official handing off of the thing from Ellmann to my bf.

I was shocked! Tried talking to the bf about it and he shrugged. Let’s not talk about it.

It was a strange early lesson for UD (must have barely been in my twenties) in the ways of the world. The ways of some worlds.

The United States of America: Where we give everyone a gun and then watch what happens.

The focus on 2025 Ocean Boulevard shootings [in Myrtle Beach] began on April 26th when 11 people were sent to the hospital in a police officer involved incident where the juvenile who fired into a crowd was killed.

Several Ocean Boulevard shootings on successive weekends have happened since. Day trippers from towns approximately 100 miles in circumference to Myrtle Beach cause much of the violence … downtown on Ocean Boulevard.

Unsupervised teenagers ranging from 16 to 18 carry guns with them to the beach. Despite the pattern, Myrtle Beach police have yet to come up with a system for dealing with these unsupervised teens before the violence begins.

SC does not have truancy laws enabling MBPD to detain unsupervised juveniles until their parents retrieve them. Even when they identify potential violent teens, their hands are tied until the shootings start.

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Can this really be? A police force can’t detain suspicious people? They have to stand there waiting for them to start shooting?

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1AeWQsfZJV

… Garrett Park’s NO KINGS protest this morning. Good turnout, and tons of honks, raised fists, waves, and thumbs up from cars.

How Trump won.

Douglass High School on the city’s West Side now has 27 employees for 28 students.

That includes six regular education teachers, six special education teachers, a school counselor, a college and career coach, a conflict resolution specialist, a restorative justice coordinator, and an assistant principal and principal. The cost to run the school is $93,000 per student.

… dehumanizing.

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Consider on the other hand Mona Eltahawy:

A bizarre political correctness has tied the tongues of those who would normally rally to women’s rights. One blogger, a woman, lamented that “[then-president] Sarkozy’s anti-burqa stance deprives women of identity.” It’s precisely the opposite: It’s the burqa that deprives a woman of identity...

Why the silence as some of our women fade into black either as a form of identity politics, a protest against the state or out of acquiescence to Salafism?

As a Muslim woman and a feminist I would ban the burqa.

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And consider Marie Gilbert:

As a French feminist, I am surprised to see English-speaking feminists defend women’s right to wear the niqab. The niqab may be a religious symbol (something that is still, however, the object of much debate among specialists of Islam) and one that is (sometimes freely) worn for religious reasons. Those feminists who so openly criticise any stand against the niqab, however, seem to forget that the niqab, beyond its religious dimension, is also, very clearly, a sign of women’s inequality and inferiority. This, rather than an anti-religious feeling or Islamophobia, accounts for the French ban and for the call, voiced by some French personalities, on Muslim women to renounce wearing the niqab.

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Back to the burqa defender —

“The bloodstained perpetrators [are] sitting in the halls of political power,” writes she. Right out of “Politics and the English Language.”

Well babe see this is Massachusetts and the reason we have among the lowest gun deaths in the nation is because we bar idiots like you from our schools. Conceal carry your gun in Louisiana. You do it here, you’re trespassed from our school.

“[She is barred from attending] the sixth grade breakfast at Oak Ridge School with her daughter, and she asked the committee to allow her to attend.” Boohoo. Move to Shreveport.

Datz me. One of the No Kings demonstrations goes right along my town’s only through street, and Les UDs, plus UD’s cousin and her husband, will be out there with flags and signs.

Let’s take this one element at a time.

If anyone ever tries to sell you on the idea that wearing a burqa or niqab is comfortable, feel free to laugh in their face. Anyone who has ever witnessed what it’s like to walk around cities, often in sweltering temperatures, draped head to toe in black, knows just how punishing the garment is. Go ahead and argue that it pleases Allah to see women and little girls with no peripheral vision try to navigate busy streets. I mean, that argument at least is in line with twisted hyper-modesty edicts. But don’t try telling us that these deathly weeds are comfortable.

As for safety: Walking around severely perceptually and physically hampered is not safe at all; and if you mean safe from the raping ways of all evil men… Men who find your eight year old daughter as evilly seductive as they find you… Look at the normally dressed women around you, moving freely among normal men. Try to work on your attitude toward men rather than cling to an outsized sense of the degree of danger to you they represent.

Do you really think the people gazing at your invisibility behind full body black cloth feel respect? As your husband in jeans and a t-shirt, and similarly free boy children, gambol about in front of you?

There’s nothing patronizing about pointing out that there’s something disturbing about someone whose lived experience tells her that walking around with a symbolically rich black fabric over her mouth generates personal comfort and respect from others.

No kidding.

Years ago I bought three silver/gray wreaths for the house during holiday season. After that, I decided I liked them enough to want to keep looking at them, so I found a gray planter that seemed in the same color realm, piled them largest to smallest in it, and stuck it among some grasses and hydrangeas.

Why does this curious little item pack a certain aesthetic/symbolic punch? Why does it draw the eye?

Best I can do: Aside from the symmetry (tapered wreaths; tapered container) and the bird-nesty, kinetic feel of the wreaths as they deteriorate and put out a mess of needles, and the texture thing (rough/smooth), there is, I guess, the anthropomorphic nature of the thing. Piled up hair/turban, on a human face?

We’ve already encountered Spain’s Rafael Luque, who makes an excellent living charging random people all over the world to have their names added to his (bogus) chemistry papers. The currency here is number of references on scientific studies — the more journals your name appears in, the higher your salary, and the higher your university’s institutional ranking. Luque is an important part of “an international network of scientists dedicated to inflating their own prestige through cheating, thus falsifying the rankings of the world’s top universities.”

Yes, yes, he’s been dismissed by his university, had endless papers retracted, and been exposed in the press as a stupendous fraud; but he’s still chugging along. They love him in Saudi Arabia.

The problem with this Artnews piece about differential pricing at the Louvre begins with its eye-popping headline:

France to Charge Non-Europeans $10 Tax to See the Mona Lisa

!!!

White skin?

Do come in.

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Turns out they mean non-EU people pay more.