Author Archives: Mira

Some thoughts on the meaning of success for an artist, Or, The art school and its former customers

Today I receive from a former student one of the many exhibition notices I get, for a group show, including other former students. It’s a phenomenon rarely discussed: faculty who teach over a long period of time track the careers of their former students over years, not all of them but those who stay in their memory and on their screen, and among these not just the few who make it big, possibly bigger than the teacher–in fact often those former students never even keep you in the loop, because they are doing so well and most likely feel their teachers had no role in their success, and perhaps quite rightly so, and they may even erase their education from their bio notes–but from the ones who two, three, and more significantly five or ten years on, continue, getting their work into galleries, organizing group exhibitions with some of their fellow artists/former classmates, their immediate cohort.

You can see the patterns of friendship and allegiance and ideology, you can see the struggle to just get a show in the city you live in much less the global arena that the rhetoric claims we are training them for. As an artist I know how hard that struggle is just to continue to make work and try to get yourself out there and create a discourse around yourself in the face of jobs done to survive and in the face of waves of new fresh MFAs and in the face of the sheer difficulty of continuing and defining oneself, and growing. If you continue at all, if you continue to grow as an artist, that is, you remain alive within thought, maintaining a belief in your work that is inflected with self-criticality and willingness to expose yourself to challenge, you have achieved a measure of success, though not success as it is presented in the media as defined by monetary value nor necessarily success according to dominant values in art academia at any given moment and place.

Educational institutions often don’t show enough interest in many of their former students’ accomplishments, particularly if they are of this journeyman nature rather than of the spectacular framed by the market and selected elite art institutions. The individual teacher who has had a human relation to the individual student and who has at best invested some of her own life energy into someone else, has a different relation to the former student than the institution which moves on to what can only be best described as both new future product, but also current customers who are by definition fungible. Faculty who teach a long time in sense have deeper institutional memory than the institution itself and what their memory holds may even be inconvenient: the institution is always reconstituting itself as being up to the latest date, that is both the genuine desire, the rhetoric, and the marketing ploy. It seeks to, it promises to prepare the student for what it sees as the future that the student will live in, which is of course an important goal, particularly when education is increasingly generating enormous student debt, but inevitably the institution’s concept of the future is based on ideologies that are themselves date-stamped in one past or another. Only rarely is there a fortuitous near synchrony between the ideology and the school–we mark those in history, the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, Yale, NSCAD, CalArts, among these, each at specific moments in time even if the institution continued to exist past that moment of cultural synchrony. When the institution asserts that its goal is to shape the artist /citizen of the future, it may call on new ideologies that it feels necessitate the erasure of the old ones so it is inconvenient if long time faculty know that former students who are successful according to the terms of the new ideology in fact emerged from instruction in the old, discredited regime.

This is part of what I think of when I receive the email announcements from one former student or another, from last year or two decades ago. When I posted a version of this text on Facebook a couple of days ago most people took it as an appreciation of the teacher / student relation, and of the struggle just to continue to be an artist and thus a questioning of what definitions of success are for the artist. But that very questioning is embedded within the experience gained over a lifetime of being an artist who teaches in institutions of higher learning in the arts and how that very experience is considered by the institutions.

Teaching is also a very human interaction so that for better or worse, patterns of favoritism based on aesthetic, political, and philosophical ideology, but also on the simple relations of affinity and friendship persist through time, past graduation, favoring some students over others depending on the regime in place.

However the lack of connection between student and educational institution is also a mutual thing: many MFAs programs do have websites for former students to send in notices of exhibitions but most former students don’t use them. Nevertheless the institution is more likely to be indifferent to markers of the every day survival of the every day artist, rather than to the star turn which will reflect best on the institution.

Interiority and reversibility

A few works on paper that I did in the 1970s are going to be shown for the first time in Four Figures, a group exhibition curated by artist Tom Knechtel at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills, California, opening Saturday July 12 through August 23.

These are part of a body of work from the mid-1970s in which the overall subject was interior language, or, coming from a more political, feminist approach, the idea that women are filled with language, rather than being empty vessels whose exterior nubile beauty as a commodity to be traded among men is the principal focus of their value in most societies.

I wanted to approach representation of women, and specifically self-representation as living inside a female body, with a mind, no longer from the point of view of figuration, whether realist or surrealist, which had been my first approach to representing myself as an agent in the world, much as a number of women artists associated with the Surrealist movement had done–I was already on that path even before I first saw works by Florine Stettheimer, Lenore Fini, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and Dorothea Tanning, having found cultural permission for narrative and representation in the works of male Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst and René Magritte as well as from early Italian Renaissance and Flemish painting, Rajput painting, and Japanese emaki–but, now, from the point of view of an interiority of thought, with the image of language as the sign for thought.

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There were five groups of work done between 1976 and 1978: the first were a group of unfolded or folded fan shapes covered with handwriting, followed by a touchstone, foundational work for me, Book of Pages in 1976, followed by a group of masks many of which kept the idea of the book so that the mask has several layers, as did a series of Dress Book pieces, and finally the Dream series, in which the image was the text of a dream handwritten in black ink, with my interpretation and associations in sepia ink. While the shapes changed accordingly, the “image” on the surfaces was my handwriting recording dreams or diaristic personal writing and in some cases directly addressing a specific person, a much bemused male muse. Some works also incorporated diagrammatic drawings. All works were made from hand-made Japanese rice papers, some diaphanously delicate and made translucent with Japan Gold Size medium which also fixed the dry pigment I used for color used as matter rather than illusion, some other paper richly fibrous and sturdy.

All the works were two-sided: each component or piece of paper was worked from both sides so that the “front” was created by material applied to the “back” in order to create the effects that underlay the writing in the “front” but in the process the brute instrumentality of the work on the “back” often ended up trumping the more intentionally produced “front,” bolder and more abstract. Because the paper was often translucent, text could be doubly difficult to decipher: my handwriting was inherently difficult to read, and some of the text that was foregrounded was backwards, with the legible face permanently inaccessible to the viewer.

Since many of these works continued to work with the format of a book of pages that could be turned, these works were also layered dimensionally, you could turn the pages of the woman, her dress, or her face (where you might also try to lift a veil) and try to “read” the woman, but I came to writing as image at the moment when I saw that my handwriting had achieved an abstract beauty that was unrelated to easy legibility. Even the Dream pieces, one of which is in the Four Figures exhibition, though flat, were not only reversible, but sometimes contained a shape sandwiched within layers of paper so that what you thought might be revealed if you turned the piece over never actually surfaced.

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Mask-Book,-floor-plan,-Sept-2,1977-open-SM

These works were difficult to categorize: though I thought of myself as a painter, as I had earlier when working with gouache on paper, in defiance of the rules left over from Greenbergian formalism in the New York School that made oil or acrylic on canvas the probative medium, these were not paintings. But though they were objects they were neither conventional sculptures, nor could they be folded into any type of avant-garde sculpture focused on the readymade. The use of ink on paper made them drawings, but aside from the occasional diagrammatic sketch, writing escaped back into the category of actually being writing, not drawing. Because the writing was personal, the private made public yet retaining its illegibility, and because the image was my handwriting as opposed to printed text as many conceptual artists used at the time and rather than being writing that was meta-generic, in the manner of Hanne Darboven‘s (or Cy Twombly’s) scrawls, and because they did not turn their back on visual pleasure, they were not dematerializations according to the interpretation of that term as codified at the time. They were materializations of thought.

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They were things, intensely personal things, that for the fullest understanding and apprehension, had to be experienced not just optically from a respectable spectatorial distance but viewed/experienced by an individual, pages turned, a veil lifted, a work turned over in your hand, with perhaps a grain of pigment or even a trace of the aroma of the medium remaining with you as material traces.

Thus, though they were things, and even quite precious ones, rare and fragile, they were the opposite of art commodities. They were and are still best experienced by hand but practically for their protection they require special handling and framing, thus are hard to exhibit to the fullest extent of their meaning (in Four Figures for clarity of presentation and their protection a number of works from this period are assembled together under Plexiglas and thus only one view of each work is available, other solutions include two-sided frames or the treatment accorded rare manuscripts, in a vitrine, open to a selected page, occasionally turned).

Because of their basis in feminist desire for alternate representations of the experience of being a woman, because of their focus on language as subject and image, because of their interest in scale through accretions of modules (in this case pages), because of their seriality (though this was narrative rather than in relation to mechanical reproduction), and because of their thingness yet impracticality, making them both experiential and notional, they have always seemed to me like archetypal 1970’s art, feminist and otherwise.

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*Works reproduced include a view of Book of Pages, 1976; and from the exhibition Four Figures, three views of Mask Book: Floor Plan, September 2, 1977, ink, dry pigment, Japan Gold Size medium on rice paper, front with page closed, page open, and a view of the back, which will not be visible in the exhibition; and Dreams, February 25-26, 1978, ink, dry pigment, Japan Gold Size on rice paper, c. 18″x29,” image of the side that will not be visible in the installation in the exhibition.

In the June Issue of The Brooklyn Rail

This month’s Critic’s Page section of The Brooklyn Rail is organized and introduced by artist and educator Ann McCoy. In her words from her introduction “Wellsprings Reconsidered,” it presents “a long overdue re-examination of the role of the unconscious in art making.” This subject seems very timely, and the contributions include very interesting texts and images. I am delighted to be included. Because the communities of The Brooklyn Rail, A Year of Positive Thinking’s subscribers and readers, and the Facebook community don’t overlap as perfectly as might seem likely, here is the direct link to my contribution, “The Warp and The Woof.”

In my text I refer to four works. Two are reproduced in the Rail. Here are all the works referred to, beginning to the first two works or series of works referred to, which are not reproduced in the issue.

The first, The Two Miras, is part of a group of gouache on paper works from 1972-1973 that I called “Story Paintings,” a number of which were done based on dreams, including this one, according to what friends remember my saying at the time. Each painting was on Arches paper, 22″ x 30.”

Mira-Schor-The-Two-Miras-1973

The second instance is from Dreams, a series of works done in 1977-1978, ink and mixed media on rice paper, each was about 18″ x 29,” worked from front and back so that they are two sided works. Each presents the text of a dream written in black ink, with my analysis of it written with a different pen in sepia ink. Here are two such works, including a detail of the second piece. The first one, directly below will be included in “Four Figures,” a group exhibition curated by Tom Knechtel at Marc Selwyn Fine Art opening in early July in Los Angeles.

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MIra-Schor-Dreams-Feb-11-12-1978

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I created a very limited edition color Xerox artist’s book in 1979, mostly typing diaristic reflections, artists’ statements, and dreams onto pages from a series of booklets I found in Chinatown, Vere Foster’s New Civil Service Copy-Books Medium Series, this one #6, from Hong Kong. These were relics of colonial British rule which taught cursive script in a manner and style very similar to the way I was taught how to write, in a French Lycée (a trace of a colonial experience in itself). The series begins with the basic forms of letters and ends with a booklet of sometimes familiar, sometimes esoteric British proverbs and sayings. I called the book Chinatown Notebooks. These were the final two pages.

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The last image reproduced is My Dreams Are Emptied Out, an ink on gesso on linen work from 2011.

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When I’m 64!

Being 64 was very distant, for the Beatles as for me, back in 1967, but compared to my thirtieth birthday, today was a walk in the park. In fact I just took a walk in the Park to the Frick Museum, content to be alone on a lovely afternoon. I stood in front of the Pietà by a follower of Konrad Witz from 1440 and then in front of the nearly identical but flatter and more “primitive” but somehow equally powerful Pietà with Donor from the School of Provence, a near copy of the Witz school painting, from some time later in the fifteenth century, studied with the deepest engagement and pleasure the complex similarities and differences, why the less sophisticated painting nevertheless manages to represent Christ’s “humanation” (cf. Leo Steinberg) with if anything more contingent embodiment, while feeling sorry that anyone could today consider being an artist without giving themselves the opportunity to experience such works even if they are so far in our distant past.

Thinking back to past birthdays, turning thirty was a dark transition. Although my older sister Naomi told me that basically one’s twenties were an utter waste of time, as I turned 30 the energy, intellectual drive, and native optimism of youth that had gotten me past my father’s early death, through adolescence, into the world, into the artworld, suddenly dimmed. Old habits of being no longer functioned properly at my new age and in changing cultural conditions. I was blindsided by the radical changes in art, theory, and politics, which in 1979 became suddenly tangible if not immediately at least to me comprehensible. It took me several years to take the measure of the new culture and to adapt, essentially reeducate and recreate myself on my own, on the fly, not in school, more or less into the person who writes this blog, and my understanding of the meaning of those cultural changes continues to unfold even now, maybe more clearly than ever now, because we are only now, post 2001 and 2008, living in a present of the full effects of things that began to manifest themselves then.

I have had to recreate myself several times since then, as we all have to do. And, by the way, every major birthday since my thirtieth has been so much better, being whatever the age and also the actual celebration itself: by the time I arrived at my thirtieth birthday party, I had been so miserable about everything that some of the friends who were throwing it for me were barely speaking to me and the day was thunderous, humid, and sulpherously dark; I threw my fortieth for myself and it was fine; my 41st birthday, with chicken wings from Pluck-U and freshly blended strawberry daiquiris, was the most fun ever; 50 was fine though it was about 100 degrees and 50 was a great year. I threw a great party for my sixtieth, having gotten past the major regeneration of my life and work after the death of my mother. So I could take in stride a modest and quiet “When I’m 64.”

As one example of a reinvention: the year of 1983, as part of a desire to move from the kind of work I had been doing towards work that was larger, whose goal was to project a new and more accurate metaphor of self, one less fragile than that projected by my earlier materials of delicate rice paper, I turned from small works on paper to sculpture, done with plaster and paper on a simple armature, in a back-assed manner, since I had no technical experience in how to create something large by hand that would stand in three-dimensional space.

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I worked on forms similar to figurative, nature-based stencil shapes I had developed in the early 80s, as in a delicate pastel and dry pigment work on rice paper from 1982, The Birth of the Little Shark, and my biggest most solid sculpture from 1983, the year of sculpture, was a work called Birthday.

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Just one little fly in the ointment of “When I’m 64” is that some forces in the world turn their beady little eyes on you and want from you things that would require changing the few irreducible things you absolutely can’t change–the time and the place of your birth, the history you have inherited by birth, and the memory and lessons of the times you have lived through. In other words, you can learn a lot of things, and adapt as well as any of us can to changing circumstances and ideologies, but if you’re 64 the one thing you can never do is be thirty again. But, to those some forces in the world, as the song says, someday “You’ll be older too.”

But, staying on the positive, I thank my friends including my many Facebook friends for the many warm greetings and let’s sing along with Sir Paul, who is about to turn 72 June 18,

When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now
Will you still be sending me a valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I’d been out ’til quarter to three, would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m sixty-four?

You’ll be older too
Ah, and if you say the word, I could stay with you

I could be handy, mending a fuse when your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside, Sunday mornings, go for a ride
Doing the garden, digging the weeds, who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m sixty-four?

Every summer we can rent a cottage
In the Isle of Wight if it’s not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Ah, grandchildren on your knee, Vera, Chuck and Dave

Send me a postcard, drop me a line stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say, yours sincerely wasting away
Give me your answer, fill in a form, mine forever more
Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m sixty-four?

Mira-Schor-Tabula-Rasa_Drawing-2013

Tabula Rasa, Sine Qua Non, from 2013 (back on delicate paper): Sine Qua Non, what you carry with you, what the world says that you must carry with you, that without which you are not yourself, and Tabula Rasa, where you always begin again, seemingly at zero, with, and for a painter, on a blank slate.

#YesAllWomen‬ and #NotAllMen‬

In the past two days, since the latest mass murder at Isla Vista, California, the Twitter hashtag #NotAllMen has generated a responding hashtag #YesAllWomen which has gone viral, with over a million tweets within 48 hours. This evening I counted about one tweet per second. That is, via #NotAllMen men have made the generally reasonable but also defensive assertion that not all men are homicidal misogynists, or maybe that at least not all misogynists are homicidal maniacs. There are also many Tweets by women at #NotAllMen responding to the more defensive aspects of the comments by men. Definitely the subject matter for someone’s dissertation! #YesAllWomen has responded with the widely shared experiences of women that not only do many–some statistics say one in three, some say one in four–women experience sexual or gendered abuse in their lifetime, but all women live with fear of violence based specifically and simply on their being female as well as with other forms of discrimination. The tweets including many images have contained damning statistics, and also deployed humor very effectively. I read the text in the image below out loud to a friend over the phone, as the script of a skit. Try it.

There are so many dimensions to the most recent, Isla Vista/University of California at Santa Barbara massacre, and discussions and reactions have focused on mental illness, gun control, racism, misogyny. It is important that the rage that women feel at the misogynist component of this latest of so many similar tragedies/atrocities afflicting this country in particular must be accompanied by a feminist, gendered analysis of events and of power so that outrage can lead to all types of political activism, whether it is in the form of marches and actions that raise awareness, like the #YesAllWomen phenomenon has, or in the form of involvement in politics in a more conventional form, helping defeat the legions of Tea Party assholes making idiotic claims about female anatomy and restricting women’s access to health care, abortion, birth control, equal pay for equal work, justice in the military etc…

So, I posted the following today on Facebook:

Re #‎NotAllMen‬ and ‪#‎YesAllWomen‬, here’s a less sexualized point: all women have to study the creative work of men, if they go to school, if they want to succeed in professions, but in my experience as a feminist artist and educator practically no men ever feel that the incredibly rich body of artwork, literature and discussion by women specifically in the period of second wave feminism of the past fifty or sixty years (as well as in the hundreds of years before) is necessary for them to study and learn from. I’ve been to countless panels over the years where really important art and ideas were discussed but since they had to do with women artists and feminism, there were maybe 5% men in the room. It’s something people joke about it is so pervasive. Male artists have certainly benefited from the permissions both formal and thematic coming from feminism but they don’t see the need to participate or even witness the discourse. Perhaps they feel excluded or that they wouldn’t be welcome, but women don’t get to make that kind of decision about taking courses or attending lectures and symposia on world literature, philosophy, art etc etc etc if they want to survive in the world. …so much more to say and many different ways of saying it.

The entire post and comments thread is public, here are some heartfelt, eloquent and thoughtful selections from the conversation that followed:

Joni Spigler: Totally on or off topic, last night I decided to download Sense and Sensibility from the Pirate Bay and because I guess mostly guys use torrents all the comments were in the form of “hey this is a great film if you want to impress your lady”. There was no other reason for that film to be on the site or for anyone to download it….Whereas any action movie gets comments about image quality and screen ratio, sound etc.

Tracy Ann Essoglou: Yes, thank you again Mira. This is what I call “The disproportionate work of being human.” We study not just ‘them’ but always and only ‘through’ them: be it creative, philosophical, medical… The white European male is still the standard in all disciplines, evaluations, social terms… expecting access and dominion. Th rest of us are still mostly just scurrying about for the crumbs.

Ken Vallario: there are many men who agree, but such men are also victims of dominant males, and similarly alienated from an art world that is not ideology-neutral. feminism is for me, as a man, husband, father of a daughter, one of my primary philosophical commitments…i think the art world is too corrupt to be fixed, and so i have begun the philosophical process of trying to create new categories for intellectual engagement that is holistic, sustainable and egalitarian. and the fact that such a thing can be strongly female, seems to me to be a plus. i think the art world, as is, is a bubble that will eventually implode, and there will be a great hunger for alternatives when that happens…consider me an ally. We live in a world with many evolved women and men have not fully realized that they too can rise up against male dominance, as the sensitive ones feel conflicted about confrontation…

Michelle Rogers: We also need to consider how we women continue to support these structures. Look at the amount of women that you see visiting any museum or attending art galleries. We show up, we keep applauding and supporting these guys and institutions that are so prejudiced against us!

Mira Schor: we show up because we are interested and want to be informed.

Amy Ruth Buchanan: Perfectly put, thank you. It starts in childhood. Generally speaking, girls will get more support and approval for “crossing over” into traditionally boy-identified games, pop culture, and interests than the reverse.

Lucy Meskill: When there is only one door to enter a power structure through, one must avail themselves of it, it is what one does once they are inside that makes a difference. I do not blame any woman for learning to play a man’s game, since it’s the only game in town, once enough of women are in power positions that in theory should make more portals of entry available. That is if we remember to be agents for change once inside.

Mira Schor: but the thing is, first of all, I don’t consider Goya, or Giotto or Dickens or Mondrian or Guston –fill in the blank–as a man’s game, those artists speak to me and give me language that is just as valuable to me as the language that Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Carolee Schneemann, Louise Bourgeois, Maria Lassnig, Ida Applebroog, and Ana Mendieta–fill in the blank– do, I feel they are my birthright as a human being, they enrich my life, and I am in conversation with them, but the reverse does not seem to hold true. But, second, there is a class of knowledge and art production that also gives me language but I feel it is masculinist and misogynistic, it still may be great but it is much more problematic to me but I still need to learn as much of it as I can, and what I don’t manage to learn or stir up enough interest in, I suffer from not knowing, and I mean suffer professionally as well as intellectually and perhaps politically in all senses: cf. in the 80s and 90s if you referenced Lacan you were on the right side of history, if you referenced Irigaray you were an essentialist and good luck to you. I’m not even bringing in the fact that in the post Lacan/Butler era many women refuse to identify with the word/concept Woman, don’t question their identification with masculinities in the name of gender freedom, and wouldn’t show up at the panels and symposia I’m talking about either. As I said, there is so much to say and so many ways of saying it. I also should say that I am to blame in that I have internalized the inequality: when I find myself in a really interesting discussion in a panel or symposium I kick myself for not having insisted that my students, male and female, should have attended because there is so much that is REAL that is being spoken about and deeply felt, as opposed to some other academic situations they may be exposed to, but I didn’t because I have internalized the meaning of that 5% attendance, that ghettoization of feminist concerns and practices.

Monika Weiss: This is such a vast and painful topic… and I am happy we are talking about it. Thank you Mira for taking this on. This is rather avoided from public debates, and by all means, omitted. It’s starts in schools, not in art schools but in regular primary schools, in fact it starts on the level of governments and education programs and what is required and what is not, to educate new generations. By the time I get my graduate MFA candidates, they went through all processes, have read “Lives of Great Artists” as children and grew up with covert (or not) misogynist stories with the assumption of normalcy. How to unravel this on the level of graduate study not to mention symposia and panels, which I also find disturbing in this way? It’s a cultural and political work, but also legal, policy-based and legislative. If for example a given enlightened/developed country might require that women writers and artists need to be part of the cultural histories taught in primary schools, as an actual enforced policy (literally, going down to numbers of women present in a given curriculum, like we did with gender based discrimination in a work place)—then perhaps after a few decades of forced and unnatural condition, we may arrive and “naturalness” of such approach. However this leads back to the government and the rather weak presence of women, even in more developed countries. This said – we also can help to some degree, perhaps by our teaching involvement (so many of us artists teach more or less throughout our lives) and by being vocal and present in public about it all [this is possibly funny coming from a rather shy person as I am]. But on a deeper level though, our main enemy – which is also the current system of inequality’s main friend — is the very idea of “difference” and of otherness, any otherness but in this case between men and women. Being in the position of inferiority (as perceived by the ‘master’ – the white, wealthy male) we cannot claim to possess exact sameness (just like black men/women or poor classes, immigrants etc) rather, we out to claim equality in difference, and I mean by it in any difference, not just the one that is genitalia-based… so while I will always support and identify with women around the world, I wonder how we can continue the philosophical (and therefore cultural and political) work of people such as for instance Judith Butler and her performativity of gender as well as her recent work against war, and Bracha Ettinger, and her brilliant work on matrixial space, for example. As artists, can we contribute to undermining this prevailing status-quo? A lot of progress has been made, especially within academia, where we have all kinds of Gender Studies or, from a different field, Holocaust Studies etc. but what has to be done with regards to the outside world, the world that reads the “Lives of Great Artists” and that believes that our senators’ knowledge of science is sufficient?

Andrew Falkowski: Is this statement pointed primarily towards major museums, collections, curation?

Mira Schor: no, my statement certainly includes these categories but I think it is pretty evident that it has to do with all aspects of cultural life, how is a woman educated, what is presented as important and essential to her being an educated person, how is a man educated, what is deemed important and essential for him to be an educated person.

Rachel Youdelman: Great discussion, Mira. At an event I attended when my daughter was in high school, the English teacher apologized to the parents of the boys in her class for teaching Jane Austen.

A previous conversation thread on Facebook yesterday was inspired by Rebecca Solnit‘s post of a section of her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, about the fear of assault that women feel at all times and that controls their behavior whether they are actually in danger at any given moment or not. See her informative posts on recent events here (most are set to public)

It is a sad but telling coincidence that my previous two posts on A Year of Positive Thinking were about the murder of Ana Mendieta.

The conversation goes on.