What Time Is It? It's Senior Thesis Time

Actually, it's past senior thesis time. I advised two wonderful honors students, read five other theses (also real labors of love -- my Zenith students never fail to impress me when they put their hearts into something), awarded a prize or two (or six, depending on who and what you are counting), and I have two more comments to write. Then I am done for this year. And of course, just as we send this group off into the sunset, the juniors start poking their heads around the doorjam and saying, "Professor Radical -- I'd like to talk about my idea for a thesis?"

It's the time of year that I am full of gratitude: gratitude for students who did their work with integrity and shared it with me, gratitude that a new group has enough faith in my powers of whatever to give it a whirl despite my obvious flaws, and gratitude -- well....

That I wasn't Aliza Shvartz's tutor at Yale!

You knew I had to get around to this story eventually, didn't you? I am proud to say, as a former member of the editorial board of the Oldest College Daily, that the Yale Daily News report on this strange event is still the best and least sensational account of Aliza's senior art project -- which may or may not have happened -- a performance piece for which she claims to have inseminated and aborted herself repeatedly. Yale says it didn't happen; Aliza says it did, although initially (apparently) she said it didn't and then she changed her mind. What we can infer is that she doesn't appear to have any politics whatsoever, since the project was all about her feelings and experiences as she turned her body inside out, but not about abortion per se.

All the same, incoherent and weird as this seems from the sparse and contradictory information that has leaked from meetings where Yale officials are ripping their hair out, subsequent media coverage has just been too bizarre. FOX quotes NARAL communications director Ted Miller's opinion that Shvartz's project "is offensive and insensitive to the women who have suffered the heartbreak of miscarriage" (since when has miscarriage been a critical issue for NARAL?); and National Right to Life Committee President Wanda Franz's view that the Yale senior is "a serial killer."

As FOX says: We Report. You Decide. Just like on Tenured Radical.

Perhaps in an attempt to be helpful, Discover Magazine suggests that Yale test the installation (which never got installed) for Shvartz's DNA, while the New York Times helpfully notes that it could also be tested for the presence of hormones only produced during pregnancy. Oh, let's not and say we did. Maybe instead Yale could gift some DNA testing to some poor schmuck on death row somewhere, now that the Supremes have decided that death by lethal injection is not cruel after all.

Sigh. Such a mess. The Chronicle of Higher Ed has some pretty good coverage, although click here if you want to read ninety-six ways to call someone you don't know, and know almost nothing about, a sicko. However, in yet another moment where women become responsible for all the moral outcomes of reproduction, no one but the OCD is interested in pursuing the question that first popped into my head (after, I admit, "What was her advisor thinking?") which was -- where and how did she collect the alleged sperm? As Yale Daily News reporter Martine Powers explained,

"The 'fabricators,' (nice touch, Martine - sift through these articles, and you will see that I am not the only person who thinks there was no sperm) or donors, of the sperm were not paid for their services, but Shvarts required them to periodically take tests for sexually transmitted diseases. She said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages. (Really? Perhaps because the doctor would have told her she was completely insane. Just a thought. And anyway, she had an advisor in the Art department for that kind of conversation!)

Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, (ok, I'm thinking you loiter around Tang Cup practices, ask for volunteers, plastic cups are right there and can be rinsed out) as well as the number of times she inseminated herself....Pia Lindman, Schvarts' senior-project advisor, could not be reached for comment Wednesday night."

Well, I'll just bet that Professor Lindman was not available for comment. I would have been at home, cell phone at the bottom of the toilet tank, heavily medicated and wishing I had really insisted on those weekly tutorial meetings after all. And my guess is that the next time she is available for comment she will be working somewhere else. Yale -- otherwise known as Oligarch in these pages -- does not take kindly to having been made a fool of.

But my other thought is -- if Shvartz is not deranged, which she might be (it is also worth noting that academics at all levels who are otherwise sane are capable of telling giant, improbable whoppers, so it's hard to know) -- maybe the "abortions" were never the "performance" in the performance art at all -- maybe it's the rest of us responding to it that is the actual art! Now, how radical would that be?

Hello Dali!

OK, so your Radical is in convention recovery, in St. Petersburg Florida, by a pool. All I can say to everybody up north is: Nyah, nyah.

Just kidding.

OK -- so part of the package is that I am in temporary charge of a three year old nephew. Big deal. He's a sweet boy with a lovely smile. And, after an hour or so at a splendid playground and park by the water, he agreed to accompany me to the Salvador Dali Museum. I have been waiting approximately twenty years to get someone to do this with me, since surrealist art is never on the top of our agenda when we are visiting relatives who don't see us much. But this morning, it was just me and the boy. So of course I jumped on the opportunity to take advantage of a companion who a) must do what I say, no matter what; b) has a pleasant disposition; and c) has a tendency to say "yes," "no" or "OK" when you ask him a question. Hence, you have a 66.33% chance of total agreement to any activity.

"Want to go to the Salvador Dali Museum?" I said.

"Okay," he said.

And we were off. We went through at his speed, which is a fast trot. It is my opinion that viewing art at the child's pace, even if you are wearing trifocals and need a second or two more than he gives you to focus, is one good way not to ruin museums for him. As a counter example, my parents used to saunter through them at a leisurely, thoughtful walk, discussing the paintings one by one, as though they were in a group entirely made up of adults. Needless to say, being treated as an equal has other advantages, but this, I found, was not one of them. My sister and I became adept at standing in front of Major Works looking as though we were thinking Deep Thoughts about them, but we were secretly bored out of our minds. I never enjoyed art at all until my twenties, when I started gallery hopping with a gay man who would literally go through SoHo at a dead run, stopping only for an occasional vodka.

If you are in the St. Pete area, and you haven't been to the Dali Museum, go, and if you are with a child, double-go: I think it's a great little museum, and of course surrealist paintings make no sense, so they are kind of more intriguing for kids than realist art. In addition, right now the museum has an exhibit of surrealist paintings, sculptures and drawings done by school children in the community that is really very impressive. I mean, the work is impressive, but they also obviously have some great art teachers working in this city.

And you can get a fabulous foam Salvador Dali clock, where the 12 and the 6 wag back and forth, for only twenty dollars. My nephew now has one, although he will need a more conventional time piece to learn to tell time -- one where all the numbers are actually lined up on an axis, for example. Even I can't tell what time it is on that clock. We also have a book for children on The Life and Work of Salvador Dali. My favorite page says "Salvador was expelled from art school in Madrid because he caused trouble. In Paris he met a Russian girl called Gala. She became a model and then his wife." What they don't tell you in the book is that he was expelled because he announced that his teachers were not competent to examine him; that he was a big Franco-phile; and that Gala was married to someone else when she became his "model." Details, details. We should all be writing children's books.

But, since I would agree with the editors' view that three year olds are a little young for conversations about fascism or adultery, I would actually support the central historical argument here, which is:

Causing Trouble ---> Spectacular Artistic Career.

Finally, I want to take this opportunity of a relative lull in the academic schedule to introduce you to Historiann, a newish blogger doing a dynamite job, who is now on my blogroll. Click now for some historical context on Gloria Steinem's recent remarks about the relative weight of racism and sexism in the Democratic primaries. Historiann ain't buying it. She also led me to this pithy commentary on Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes.