I just finished going through the page proofs of my forthcoming book on the artist Stephen Willats (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). The publication process for this book has taken a long time; I signed a contract in early 2017. While I have moved on from writing any more monographs on artists, I’m still compelled by aspects […]
Seeing Poorly. Feeling a Lot.
My eyesight has deteriorated in my sixties. Those times when I cut a thread with blunt scissors, it unwinds as I try to insert it into the eye of a needle. The needle has an eye and my eyes can barely see it. The thread bends and goes off to one side or the other […]
Panicky Pandemicky Thoughts
Embodied anxiety scatters my attention and makes my heart race; it takes a lot of concentration and determination to breathe into the anxiety and lessen my level of panic. Despite my angst I return again and again to online newspapers, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Zoom, Bluejeans, and FaceTime. Words I have said in the past […]
Walking Down a Black-and-White Road
My parents, my two older sisters and I lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, between 1960-1963. I was in third to fifth grades. During our years there, we marched in protest of segregated restaurants, movie theatres, and drugstores, boycotted segregated businesses, did voter registration drives, staged sit-ins, and were threatened by gun-wielding white men. The […]
Bank of America?
We are actively starting dumpster fires with our extractive technologies. I emailed the following message to two CEOs of Bank of America today. Their emails were not on the corporate website, but after some searching I came up with what I hope works: brian.t.moynihan, anne.m.finucane at bankofamerica dot com I didn’t tell the CEOs that I […]
The Creation of the Champaign County ACLU in 1940
In 2016, I came across an old letter from a long-time family friend, Mulford Sibley, among my father’s papers.[1] Mulford, writing on May 29, 1940 from Urbana, Illinois, to his sister Margaret, pinpointed the beginning of the Champaign County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Mulford Sibley (1912-1989) was a professor of political […]
Countering Pusillanimosity
I’m reading Ali Smith’s Autumn: a novel (Pantheon Books, 2016). The main character is an art historian (and she’s employed!) But it is really about deep relationships among a few people across a number of decades. This excerpt made me sad, angry, sympathetic, and distressed, because it captures my swath feelings as we start 2018: […]
A Tribute to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)
My father, Don Irish, died in April of 2017. For the last five years of his life, many of us helped him write his memoirs. We self-published the book in 2015. I share an excerpt here that seems particularly relevant to the harassment of untenured professors (often people of color) that is occurring across the country […]
What’s Next with “No Budget”?
The president of the University, Tim Killeen, just sent an email to everybody in the University of Illinois system called “No state budget.” I do not want to minimize the enduring damage that has been done to programs and services that have benefited many people in the state and that have had to close due […]
Dear Governor Rauner
I am not proud to say that I stopped writing politicians several decades ago. OK, I’ve sent an occasional email, usually prompted by some Facebook post, but my overly-long, impassioned missives to national and state officials ended with my use of the typewriter and carbon paper. Similarly, this old newspaper photo of me in front […]
