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Happy Lesbian Visibility Day!

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Hope Doe - Niji no Karakata, 2019

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Gloria and Charmaine. Baltimore, Maryland, 1979. From Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians by Joan. E. Biren.

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Out in America : A Portrait of Gay and Lesbian Life, 1994

"San Francisco, California Susan touching up paint at her home at the Castro. Photograph by Judy G. Rolfe."

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Isabella Rossellini at the Blumarine S/S 1995 fashion show.

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Campus uprisings have erupted all over the world in solidarity with Gaza. Young people are fucking fed up with the political class and their sneering condescension as they abet a genocide. The students are being smeared relentlessly by the ghoulish media, which is more concerned with decorum than the actual genocide that is unfolding in Gaza. Meanwhile, in Gaza, “Three separate mass graves containing 392 bodies show signs of executions and people being buried alive”. Field assassinations of doctors. Children. Murdered. Their hands zipped-tied behind their backs. What does the political class say? “We’ll look into that.” They’re always “looking into it” while 2000 pound bunker buster bombs are being dropped on Palestinian civilians.

Marching with the Harvard students yesterday, I was so proud of how flawlessly they pulled off erecting the camp in Harvard Yard—using subterfuge, organizing on Signal, smuggling tents into the yard in the middle of the night. When they rolled out the tents, it brought tears to my eyes. I am so proud of these kids...still fighting even though the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee was just banned. We made a circle around the students setting up the tents and linked arms, but the cops did not come to make arrests.

Things unfolded quite differently at my home institution back in Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, where administration recently canceled the valedictorian speech of Asna Tabassum because she is Muslim. The perfidious president brought hundreds of LAPD cops to campus to make mass arrests, even violently assaulting a student organizer.

55+ students and 3 faculty members were arrested (update: 93 people arrested), including my dear friend and colleague, who is worried about losing her job. This was a real mask off moment. I’m so fucking disappointed with my university. I was hired as a professor of “critical carceral studies” because the George Floyd protests had put policing on the agenda. It’s all ultimately just PR, a total sham. University administrators and the cops are bedfellows—the police will always be called in to repress political dissent and use brute force to bring students back into line. The students are completely right to be enraged by the hypocrisy of the “grown-ups.” Civility is really just complicity with genocide.

In this moment, it is the students who are teaching us. They are waking us up. I believe it is our duty to show up for them.

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(x)

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Bunny Yeager ǁ Bettie Page & Bunny Yeager (1954)

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Sigh. Well I loved you Tumblr.

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Carl Wilhelm Wach (1787-1845)

The Beautiful Velletrinerin, 1820

Kollenburg Antiquaris

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Thank you for completely wrecking Tumblr. It was fine before you broke it.

#algorithm

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We're spirits. And so nothing on Earth really matters. We get abused. We try to join the abuser in the place where nothing matters. But that soon eats away our materiality. So we try to get to the truth that we mattered all along. But soon the truth that nothing matters catches up with us. And we take something to numb the pain of being alive. Who can tolerate full sobriety? Isn't that a little masochistic? And for what? We can be pure later. No, the trick is to find a suitable palliative for being alive as long as you want to. Know that nothing matters. But act like it does. So the caring is the in joke actually. Looking not for clarity but for lucidity. And I think what takes the edge off ultimately is the lightness of being.

#thesis

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DICKINSON (2019-2021)

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Emily Dickinson, from The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

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It took about two hours for Daina Taimina to find the solution that had eluded mathematicians for over a century. It was 1997, and the Latvian mathematician was participating in a geometry workshop at Cornell University. David Henderson, the professor leading the workshop, was modelling a hyperbolic plane constructed out of thin, circular strips of paper taped together. 'It was disgusting,' laughed Taimina in an interview.

A hyperbolic plane is 'the geometric opposite' of a sphere, explains Henderson in an interview with arts and culture magazine Cabinet. 'On a sphere, the surface curves in on itself and is closed. A hyperbolic plane is a surface in which the space curves away from itself at every point.' It exists in nature in ruffled lettuce leaves, in coral leaf, in sea slugs, in cancer cells. Hyperbolic geometry is used by statisticians when they work with multidimensional data, by Pixar animators when they want to simulate realistic cloth, by auto-industry engineers to design aerodynamic cars, by acoustic engineers to design concert halls. It's the foundation of the theory of relativity, and thus the closest thing we have to an understanding of the shape of the universe. In short, hyperbolic space is a pretty big deal.

But for thousands of years, hyperbolic space didn't exist. At least it didn't according to mathematicians, who believed that there were only two types of space: Euclidean, or flat space, like a table, and spherical space, like a ball. In the nineteenth century, hyperbolic space was discovered - but only in principle. And although mathematicians tried for over a century to find a way to successfully represent this space physically, no one managed it - until Taimina attended that workshop at Cornell. Because as well as being a professor of mathematics, Taimina also liked to crochet.

Taimina learnt to crochet as a schoolgirl. Growing up in Latvia, part of the former Soviet Union, 'you fix your own car, you fix your own faucet - anything', she explains. 'When I was growing up, knitting or any other handiwork meant you could make a dress or a sweater different from everybody else's.' But while she had always seen patterns and algorithms in knitting and crochet, Taimina had never connected this traditional, domestic, feminine skill with her professional work in maths. Until that workshop in 1997. When she saw the battered paper approximation Henderson was using to explain hyperbolic space, she realised: I can make this out of crochet.

And so that's what she did. She spent her summer 'crocheting a classroom set of hyperbolic forms' by the swimming pool. 'People walked by, and they asked me, "What are you doing?" And I answered, "Oh, I'm crocheting the hyperbolic plane."' She has now created hundreds of models and explains that in the process of making them 'you get a very concrete sense of the space expanding exponentially. The first rows take no time but the later rows can take literally hours, they have so many stitches. You get a visceral sense of what "hyperbolic" really means.' Just looking at her models did the same for others: in an interview with the New York Times Taimina recalled a professor who had taught hyperbolic space for years seeing one and saying, 'Oh, so that's how they look.' Now her creations are the standard model for explaining hyperbolic space.

-Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women

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