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Barack Obama  |
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Rob Kailey is a working schmuck with no ties or affiliations to any governmental or political organizations, save those of sympathy.
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Wed Jun 25, 2008 at 13:02:08 PM MST
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| The Getty in Los Angeles has a pretty cool exhibit - on a topic I'm happy to tell you I'm fairly intimate with: Maria Sibylla Merian, a 17th-century engraver who applied her artistic talents to science, drawing and observing insects in the jungles of Surinam, and one of the first to apply the scientific method to the process of metamorphosis.
Merian truly spawned across many disciplines: art, science, printing and literature, even adventure.
It's with disappointment then, that I heard that the exhibit would be reviewed by the Los Angeles Times...in its "Home" section.
Kinda' reminds me of the opening of Virgina Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," in which she's contemplating a topic she's been assigned - "women and fiction" - on the campus of Oxford University. Only she's chased by a beadle from the park where she sat musing by the river, and denied entrance to the university library to do research...because she's a woman.
That's the thing with sexism today, isn't it? It isn't heavy-handed, but still puts up a velvet rope to steer women away from serious topics. Get out of line, and the beadle shouts at you.
Speaking of Woolf, I've written out a couple of interesting quotes from the same book below the fold... |
| Jay Stevens :: Creatures of illusion |
Life for both sexes - and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement - is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority - it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney - for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination - over other people. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power.
And...
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheepskins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste...Whatever their use in civilized society, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action...That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgment, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?
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