Post-Hiatus & Elizabeth Edward RIP + Prizes (United States of Artist & Turner Prize)

It's been eons, but I fell down the rabbit hole of classes, committee work, and boom! it was already December. Now, classes are over, all my students have submitted their final papers or revised story or novel drafts (yay!), and I almost have a bit of breathing room. There's still committee work, and final grading, but I am greatly looking forward to the tiny break before classes resume the first week of January. (We are on quarters, which are bruuuu-tal!)

So much has transpired I'm not even going to try to cover all the ground between my last post and this one, so I will be posting some photos of events (readings, musical events, etc.) that I attended, with minimal commentary, and, in a subsequent post, a short note about a superb event I participated in this past weekend, one of the best things I've been a part of since, well, last December, when C and I went to Caltagirone, Italy.  This was in the C city where I spend a good deal of my waking life, Chicago, but it was almost like being in a magical place. But I'll say more in my next post.

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I did want to note the passing of Elizabeth Anania Edwards (1939-2010, at right, Reuters), a lawyer, author, wife, mother, and politically engaged citizen.  Elizabeth Edwards, who died of a recurrence of breast cancer, is best known for her support her husband John Edwards' campaigns for the Presidency and Vice Presidency, but both in 2004 and especially in the 2008 campaigns, she emerged as powerful public figure in her own right.  Edwards demonstrated tremendous poise, courage and resilience in the media spotlight, both after announcing that her cancer her returned and her husband's public disgrace, just as she did in her final days. RIP.

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Congratulations to Martín Espada, Greg Tate, Glenn Ligon, Renée Green, Mel Chin, Siah Armajani, Doug Wright, Danny Hoch, and all the other artists who received 2010 United States of Artists fellowships!

Also, today the Tate Britain announced the winner of the 2010 Turner Prize in Art. It went to Susan Philipsz, for an acoustic installation entitled "Lowlands Away," which was first mounted on three bridges in Glasgow, and then as part of the finalists' exhibit at the Tate Modern.  Previous winners have included Gilbert & George, Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley, Chris Ofili, Steve McQueen, and the infamous paragon of the Young British Artists, Damien Hirst.

I must admit that I was pulling for the exciting theory-and-cinema-focused Otolith Group, one of whose founding members is the extraordinarily brilliant artist and scholar Kodwo Eshun. There time will certainly come.  Simultaneous with last night's Turner Prize ceremony at Tate Modern, art students and their supporters protesting the new Tory-Liberal Democratic coalition government's proposed cuts in education and arts funding occupied one of the museum's gallery and also picketed the event. Turner Prize ceremony attendees, it's good to note, in the main supported the protesters.

I Like It To Make Sense

With 500,000,000 "members" on Facebook, can't they do something useful with that sort of base? I mean something really useful. Not something that's fake-useful. (By the way, I use the quotes around members because the number of accounts is different than the number of people who actually use the service on a consistent basis. See, I can do that when I'm not one of those who benefits from trumped up numbers. But either way, it's still an enormous buttload of people.) How about if I amend that request? How about if instead of asking if Facebook users could do something useful I instead ask if Facebook users could just stop doing things that do absolutely nothing, all the while pretending as if they're saving the world from certain destruction. (Trust me. Certain destruction doesn't sound that bad when the alternative is surviving with a bunch of morons that just blindly follow something without giving any thought to what they're doing.)

Here's the scoop: A certain status update has been going viral on Facebook. It's women who are blindly doing the updating without stopping to think a) Why am I doing this, and/or b) Why am I doing this? It goes something like this: The status starts off with "I like it on the" and then women are supposed to fill in the blank with where they like it. Like what, you ask? Why, where they like their purse, of course. Wait. Wait. Their...purse? Yes. Their purse. Melissa Bell over at the Washington Post explains it "Women are posting where they like to keep their purses when they come home, but they conveniently leave out the word "purse." Oh. Ha-ha. Is there a reason for this? Of course there is, silly! It's for breast cancer. Wait. What?

Correct. Breast cancer. According to The Huffington Post (which sites other references) "October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, and the "I like it on" trend is an attempt for women to unite around that cause in a top secret way. The idea is figuratively to leave men in the dark." Um, this might be one of the stupidest "feel good" things that I have heard about in quite some time.

First of all, how does posting where you like to keep your purse (assuming that you carry a purse) help raise awareness for breast cancer? And second, how is leaving men in the dark about it helping anything at all? (I realize that it's a small percentage, but it isn't like men don't get breast cancer also.) Is it just women who should be concerned about breast cancer? Assuming that this was even a legitimate tool for raising awareness, why is it that men should be excluded from all of the being aware? Explain to me how it is that men should be excluded from caring about breast cancer? Explain to me how it is that men are not affected by breast cancer? Better yet, explain to some guy whose wife has breast cancer how breast cancer awareness should exclude him.

I'd love to hear from anyone who actually posted this on their status so that they could tell me not where they like their damn purse, but what did they think was going to be accomplished by their going along with it? I'd like to know if they in some way felt smarter by posting it or if the goal was just to feel smarter than the men who had no idea what it could possibly mean (and who, stereotypically, just jumped to the assumption that it was about sex). Thank God that the folks who have been actually been doing actual things to raise awareness about breast cancer didn't run their campaigns with inane Facebook statuses.

Listen, if you want to raise awareness about something, what say you tell folks what it is that you want them to know, OK? Wouldn't you raise more awareness about breast cancer by simply posting on your status "October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Now you know."? Or something like that? I'm sure that you probably would, but that wouldn't be nearly as cutesy as where you like your damned purse. We're so doomed. So, so doomed.