Doris Lessing on the Nobel Prize: When reporters in 2007 told Ms. Lessing that she had won the Nobel Prize for literature, she said, “I couldn’t care less.”
Doris Lessing, the uninhibited and outspoken novelist who won the 2007 Nobel Prize for a lifetime of writing that shattered convention, both social and artistic, died on Sunday at her home in London. She was 94.
Doris Lessing in 1992 in her garden at home in London.
Her death was confirmed by her publisher, HarperCollins.
Ms. Lessing produced dozens of novels, short stories, essays and poems, drawing on a childhood in the Central African bush, the teachings of Eastern mystics and involvement with grass-roots Communist groups. She embarked on dizzying and, at times, stultifying literary experiments.
But it was her breakthrough novel, “The Golden Notebook,” a structurally inventive and loosely autobiographical tale, that remained her best-known work. The 1962 book was daring in its day for its frank exploration of the inner lives of women who, unencumbered by marriage, were free to raise children, or not, and pursue work and their sex lives as they chose. The book dealt openly with topics like menstruation and orgasm, as well as with the mechanics of emotional breakdown.
Her editor at HarperCollins, Nicholas Pearson, said on Sunday that “The Golden Notebook” had been a handbook for a whole generation.
As a writer, from colonial Africa to modern London, Ms. Lessing scrutinized relationships between men and women, social inequities and racial divisions. As a woman, she pursued her own interests and desires, professional, political and sexual. Seeking what she considered a free life, she abandoned two young children. Still, Salon, in an interview with Ms. Lessing in 1997, said that “with her center-parted hair that’s pulled back into a bun and her steely eyes, she seems like a tightly wound earth mother.”
It was this figure, 10 years later, who arrived at her house in sensible shoes to find journalists gathered at her door waiting to tell her that she had won the Nobel Prize for literature. “Oh, Christ!” she said upon hearing the news, adding, “I couldn’t care less.”
The Nobel announcement called her “the epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”
And in the presentation speech at the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm, Ms. Lessing was described as having “personified the woman’s role in the 20th century.” (She accepted the prize at a ceremony in London.)
The cavalier and curmudgeonly Ms. Lessing was making headlines again a few days after the announcement, dismissing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States as “not that terrible” compared to the toll from decades of Irish Republican Army violence.
‘The Golden Notebook’
“The Golden Notebook,” which critics generally consider her best novel, has been published in many languages, and 50 years after it first appeared, it is still in print. It consists of a conventional novel, “Free Women,” and several notebooks, each in a different color, kept by the protagonist, Anna Wulf, a novelist struggling with writer’s block.
The black notebook deals with Africa and the novel Anna wrote from her experiences there; the red notebook chronicles her Communist Party days; the yellow is an autobiographical novel within the larger novel; the blue is a diary of sorts. The golden notebook, at the end, brings together ideas and thoughts from the other sections.
Ms. Lessing wrote that she had intended the novel to capture the chaotic period after the Soviet Union officially renounced Stalinism. Under the pressure of the revelations about Stalin’s crimes, the movement that had been the glue of her social and intellectual circle came undone.
She considered the novel to be a triumph of structure. By fragmenting the story, she said, she wanted to show the danger of compartmentalizing one’s thinking, the idea that “any kind of single-mindedness, narrowness, obsession, was bound to lead to mental disorder, if not madness.”
But her book was seen as a feminist work, a response that irritated her. Even though her novels and stories were filled with the issues at the core of the feminist movement, Ms. Lessing had sharp words for feminists.
Speaking at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan in 1970, during the Vietnam War, she told her audience, “I’ve got the feeling that the sex war is not the most important war going on, nor is it the most vital problem in our lives.” In 1994, she was no less critical. “Things have changed for white, middle-class women,” she said, “but nothing has changed outside this group.”
A version of this article appears in print on November 18, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Sweeping Aside Convention in Novels and Life.
In May 2011, almost a year and half after a Tunisian street vendor’s self-immolation sparked waves of revolution still rocking the Middle East, Bahraini journalist Nazeeha Saeed was tortured during her 13-hour detention before signing a confession she was not allowed to read.
Saeed, who had been covering Bahrain’s pro-democracy movement for France 24, was blindfolded, slapped, kicked and beaten with a hose in Riffa police station where she had voluntarily gone for questioning.
She was charged with fabricating news reports, working with Iranian and Lebanese channels and being part of a terrorist cell. A photograph of her covering a protest in the capital, Manama, is the only evidence she’s seen.
Following complaints from France24, Bahrain’s Ministry of the Interior launched an investigation that resulted in the acquittal of one female officer two years later.
Saeed was never tried or sentenced. Lingering psychological trauma prevented her from fully returning to work for six months.
Though King Hamad of Bahrain’s ruling Sunni Al-Khalifa family has urged for reform in the Shia-majority island kingdom, freedom of association and online activism are severely restricted, while charges of torture and unfair trials continue to surface.
More than 60 people have died since protests began in February 2011.
On Jul. 9, Bahraini officials said two attacks in a Shia-majority village left one police officer dead and at least three others injured.
“My country was not violent before Feburary 2011,” Saeed told IPS correspondent Jasmin Ramsey. Excerpts from the interview follow.
Ramsey: What is press freedom like in Bahrain?
Saeed: Since two years ago, it has not been easy for us journalists to work. The freedom we were used to has been reduced. We have to be careful with each and every word we write and say in our coverage. We can be arrested; we can be interrogated just for using certain words.
Ramsey: What happened two years ago?
Saeed: Two years and four months ago the uprising started in Bahrain. People went into the streets inspired by the Arab Spring, asking for more freedom, democracy and accountability. But there was a huge crackdown and maybe that’s why people in Washington and other cities don’t really know what happened.
Maybe they know that at one point people went out to protest in Pearl Square for a month, but since then they may have heard little to nothing because most of the protestors were either arrested, sacked from their jobs or left the country because they felt they were in danger. Some were killed.
Ramsey: Can you describe what happened to you while in police custody?
Saeed: On May 22, 2011, I got a call to go to the Ministry of Interior for questioning. Sometimes they come to your house, sometimes they call. I am a journalist. I thought it would be good to cooperate. I thought it wouldn’t be more than a couple of hours so I didn’t inform my family, I only told France24 on the way to the station.
A male officer met me and said it’s better I tell him everything because it’s useless to lie. He said they had all the videos, phone calls and pictures that prove I’m guilty.
Ramsey: What did they charge you with?
Saeed: There were three charges. Fabricating reports and news, dealing with Iranian and Lebanese channels that I have never worked with, and they accused me of being part of a terrorist cell – its media element.
I said where did you get this from if I didn’t do these things?
He said I should stop lying.
Then a female officer came into the room and began punching me on my face and pulling me from my hair. “Don’t lie, don’t lie, you are a liar.” “You are a Safawi” — a term used in Bahrain to insult Shia and accuse them of being loyal to Iran.
Then another policewoman came into the room, pulled me from my hair and threw me onto the floor. All of them started to kick me, punch me and step on me. This happened in an office with a desk and computer in it.
They made fun of the way I looked and dressed. One woman put a shoe in my mouth and said it was cleaner than my tongue. She said she was so happy to see me like this. I had that shoe in my mouth for 30 minutes.
They took me to another room with other female detainees. I could only hear their voices. Every time they moved me from room to room they pulled me by my hair, so hard that it was bruised for days afterwards. They told me to face the wall and put my hands up. After 30 minutes they came in again and began beating me from all sides with a hose. They go in and out of the room and since you’re blindfolded, you can only wonder who will be beat next.
Then it got more professional. They shocked me with electronic Tasers. Every time I got shocked, they all burst into laugher. Then they took me out of the room, put me on a chair lying on my stomach and beat me on my back, head, legs and the heels of my feet with a hose. They accused me of working with an Iranian TV station and I kept saying no. They said I lied in my reports about people being killed by the army.
During one of the sessions a female officer tried to force me to drink from a bottle. I was blindfolded and she wouldn’t tell me if it was urine so I pushed it away with my hand. She poured it on my face in anger (it left an allergic reaction). She also pulled me by my hair and forced my head into a toilet.
I was there for 13 hours before being allowed to leave.
Ramsey: What did you sign?
Saeed: I don’t know. I wasn’t allowed to read the document. I was just shown the place where I was supposed to sign.
Ramsey: Bahrain’s government argues the protest movement has been incited by Iran. You interviewed many of the protestors. What is your take?
Saeed: Such a thing never came up Pearl Roundabout. I never saw an Iranian influence. I can’t speak on behalf of all the protestors. Maybe some of them are allied with Iran. I’m not sure. But the protestor’s demands are obvious. Some said they wanted to overthrow the regime, but that’s an example of freedom of speech. The protestors were demanding freedom, democracy, accountability and the end of corruption.
During my arrest they identified me as Shia. All the time they were accusing me of being allied with Iran. They said I supported Velayat-e faqih [a Shiite principle that gives supreme power to a religious figure and was implemented in Iran after its 1979 revolution] but I didn’t even know what that meant at the time. They accused me of many things I didn’t know the meaning of.
Ramsey: What can Washington do to support the movement for democracy and human rights in Bahrain?
Saeed: I need support from any human being in this world. This is my story and I didn’t get justice. All governments, be they American, British or any other, should influence my government to implement fair trials and to stop harassing journalists.
This article was first published on Truthout and any reprint or reproduction on any other website must acknowledge Truthout as the original site of publication.
To the underpaid, well-educated magazine scribes hoping for a break in an industry with little growth opportunity, there is hope.
This week, Mental Floss, the magazine that was begun a dozen years ago in a Duke University dorm room and is now published nine times a year, announced a new editor in chief. No, she is not the daughter of media royalty with a résumé of gilded publishing internships.
She is Jessanne Collins, 34, a Smith College graduate with a sociology degree who toiled for three years at the Harvard bookstore, hawked behavioral science books for an academic publisher and then moved into publishing pornography. She was hired by Playgirl in 2007 as an associate editor after writing an essay on orgasm-induced migraines.
In her e-book “How to Be a Playgirl,” published in 2013, Ms. Collins chronicled the longtime love of magazines, which involved reading copies of Sassy growing up, that prompted her to apply to Playgirl. Her book described her days at Playgirl reporting to executives at a publishing house that produced a bevy of pornographic titles, working with budgets so tight that she was used as a model to pose with models in the magazine and sifting through reader mail divulging all types of disturbing reader fantasies.
Ms. Collins said the work she was most proud of at Playgirl included coverage of hazardous toxic chemicals in sex toys and how her female co-workers struggled to keep the magazine going before it folded in 2008.
“Despite all of the strangeness about working for an environment that seemed like a factory for porn production, the Playgirl magazine had this core four women,” she said in an interview.
The editors of Mental Floss originally hired Ms. Collins as an editor in 2011 because she had experience working on a small staff. Ms. Collins added that it helped that Felix Dennis, the owner of Mental Floss, brought Maxim to the United States and “there was a sense of humor and curiosity” about her previous job.
At Playgirl, she gained experience organizing photo and video shoots, which Mental Floss needed. Since then, she has overseen the Danger Lab column, which describes scientists’ adventures from the field, and a recent series about the creative life of artists.
Mangesh Hattikudur, a founder and former editor in chief of Mental Floss who has been promoted to work on bigger projects, said that Playgirl and Mental Floss were similar because they had small staffs and “it’s this egoless job, which has this strong connection with its audience.”
Ms. Collins’s parents seem relieved.
“They’re thrilled,” Ms. Collins said. “They were very traumatized by the Playgirl episode. They love Mental Floss.”
A version of this article appears in print on November 25, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Top Editor at Mental Floss Has Some Spicy Credentials.
Your activism helped free Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh. Thank you.
Dear Karen,
A year ago, Nasrin Sotoudeh was languishing in prison - jailed by the Iranian government on trumped up charges of "spreading propaganda against the system."
The human rights lawyer was serving a six-year sentence. She couldn't visit with her husband or two young children. In protest, she staged a 49-day hunger strike.
Today, she is free thanks in part to your support of Amnesty International.
After years of campaigning on her behalf, Amnesty celebrated Nasrin's release in late September.
We often write to you about people like Nasrin who have been unjustly imprisoned. As the holidays approach - a time when we reflect on the year that has passed -- we also remember the victories we helped secure.
You helped free Nasrin and other prisoners of conscience, like Shi Tao of China and Cuban journalist Calixto Ramón Martínez Arias.
You helped pressure the US to sign a historic treaty to keep conventional weapons out of the hands of human rights abusers.
You helped mobilize a global movement to save Beatriz - a 22-year old woman in El Salvador who was being denied lifesaving medical treatment by her government.
These are just a few of the victories you helped make possible. I hope they inspire you as much as they inspire me.
Thank you for your partnership and your ongoing commitment to human rights.
Sincerely,
Steven W. Hawkins Executive Director Amnesty International USA
Target: Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India
Goal: Demand comprehensive action from the Indian government to address the country’s rape crisis
Beyond fueling widespread protests within India, the nation’s rape crisis has now pushed the United Kingdom, France and Canada to advise citizens traveling abroad to exercise caution. In 2012 roughly 24,000 sexual assaults occurred in India, and since then many brutal and highly publicized cases have awakened the world to the seriousness of this epidemic.
It is not surprising that the vast majority of sexual assault victims are female, as the widespread oppression of women continues to put them at especially high risk of violence. Professor Jacqueline Bhabha, director of research for the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard, summed up the situation by saying that ”once large sections of Indian society accept that women are there to service men, that men are justified in hitting their wives, then pervasive gender violence comes as no great surprise.”
Most rapists are never punished, as crimes are frequently overlooked by police. A committee led by Justice Verma, former head of the Indian Supreme Court, has called on the government to enact numerous changes. From redefining rape and the way survivors are examined, to reforms in law enforcement, education and legislation, much must be done to ensure the safety of India’s citizens. Demand that India’s Prime Minister act immediately to end the country’s rape crisis.
PETITION LETTER:
Dear Prime Minister Singh,
The governments of France, Canada and the United Kingdom have recently warned their citizens to exercise caution when traveling to India. Impact on tourism is, sadly, by no means the most damaging consequence of India’s current rape epidemic. In 2012 some 24,000 people were sexually assaulted in your nation, the vast majority of them Indian women. This is an emergency demanding your immediate and dedicated attention.
When Justice Verma’s committee on the crisis reported back in 2013, its findings were clear. Punishing a few high-profile criminals cannot solve the problem. Rather, numerous reforms in law enforcement, education, and legislation are needed. Without such depth of commitment, the women of India will continue to live in fear of sexual violence–and this is simply unacceptable.
Speak out to your people on this terrible epidemic. Urge your citizens to stand up for women’s rights, and to work with you to create a safer future for all the people of India. Tell the world in no uncertain terms that rape and other forms of sexual violence will not be tolerated, nor the systematic oppression of women which is largely to blame for these attacks. Commit to ending India’s rape crisis, without delay.
I was pretty thrilled when I landed in Jamaica last May. The sun was warm, I looked good in a bikini, and here I was on my first-ever trip with a significant other.
Adding to the excitement, this was my boyfriend's first time out of the country. Within a few hours, we'd be eating rice and peas in a villa overlooking the Caribbean Ocean.
My boyfriend and I in Grand Cayman, where we went after leaving Jamaica. This is when I started showing signs of PTSD.
The reality wasn't so picture-perfect. The town didn't seem to have any tourist presence, now or ever. On our drive from Kingston's airport, a young mother selling fruit advised us to be careful as we traveled ahead.
But here we were, feeling informed with our guidebooks in hand, stubbornly optimistic for our beach vacation and myself, anyway, overly adventurous from a lifetime of travel "off the beaten path."
The villa had a view, but it also had bugs, a layer of grime and an unsettling vibe. I wondered aloud if we shouldn't find a different place to stay. With our non-refundable deposit already paid, we decided to wait until tomorrow's daylight to make any decisions.
When I woke up a couple hours into a restless sleep, I could still hear music playing from the beach below. I sat up slowly, letting the sleep fall away before grabbing my glasses.
I stumbled naked into the narrow bathroom. When I turned to sit, there stood before me a a tall, thin man, his face illuminated by the near-full moon. This man, who I later learned is named Yuan, stood a foot away from me, smiling from behind the large machete he held samurai-style.
He was the same man who had come by earlier on the pretense of selling fruit. He had seen me in my underwear, and, it seems, gone back to his home next door, armed himself, and waited in the bushes outside our villa until the lights went out.
There was only a beat before I screamed and Yuan swung that machete at me. While the machete hit me repeatedly on my left, his hand grabbed at the bare breast on my right side.
I don't remember well what happened then. There's no visual memory anymore, only the memory of that scream, mine eventually joined by his, this man who had been seconds away from slitting my boyfriend's throat a few minutes before.
When this man sliced through the mosquito netting around our bed, next to where my boyfriend was sleeping, he presumably hoped to kill my boyfriend before coming after me. This man did not expect me to wake up, and I imagine he didn't expect a fight if I did.
But I did fight, blocking that sword from ever hitting my throat or chest, where he was aiming, and finally pushing him out of the bathroom so that he could not lock me in, as I believe he planned to do.
Once out of the bathroom, my boyfriend jumped up and grabbed a kitchen knife. With my fists flying relentlessly and my boyfriend approaching, Yuan turned and ran out the back door.
My boyfriend and I locked ourselves in the bathroom, where the toilet had come out of the floor and the walls were covered with blood. In that small bathroom we waited three hours, thanking god for a working cell phone and switching lines between an incompetent police operator, a useless representative from the American Embassy, my surprisingly composed mother, and one very helpful police detective.
It was that detective who would eventually find us, my boyfriend standing at the busted-in window, watching for signs of our attacker, and myself, holding my own machete, which I'd found in the bathroom after our first few minutes locked inside. I stood next to this detective, still naked and dripping blood, and surveyed the scene of a death I saved myself from.
The terror of that night ended, but its horror haunted me for months to come. Within a couple weeks, I developed debilitating tendinitis in both wrists. It was so painful that many nights I couldn't brush my teeth. I suffered a full four-months of the worst cramps I've ever experienced, and almost daily bleeding. (I had an IUD put in a week before the attack and I believe the PTSD compounded its side-effects.)
Even sleep was exhausting. I spent long, restless hours dreaming of horrible things, trapped in terrifying scenes that often felt like reality even after I woke up.
I took to compulsively writing “Higher power give me peace” and “This is not my life” in my journal.
By the end of the summer, I was suicidal. I scoped out the edge of bridges, fantasized about buying a gun and spent one long night eating through a bottle of painkillers. In November, I realized that I needed intensive help. I checked myself into a psychiatric hospital, and began the difficult work of healing.
Remembering that night, there lingers a haunting fear of the dangers that might still lie ahead. Yet that memory also brings pride. I am proud that I fought back.
Certainly no woman can make a wrong choice when being attacked. She does what she can to survive. But it often seems that the only stories we hear are of women as victims. Even as children, we knew Little Red Riding Hood only escaped the wolf because the gallant woodsman came and saved her.
When we returned home from Jamaica, almost everyone who heard the story commended my boyfriend for saving me. I still get angry about it.
I refuse to lose my story to the power of a social narrative that says women are always victims. I saved myself from the big bad wolf. I am a victim, yes, but I am also my own hero.
I have amassed quite the teddy bear collection since last May.
by Sara MorrisonPublishedFeb. 19, 20149:12 amUpdatedFeb. 19, 201412:18 pm
The Women’s Media Center released its third annual Status of Women in the U.S. Media report today, and if you’ve been paying any attention to gender imbalances across print, broadcast and online platforms, it’s more of the same. Men – especially white men – vastly outnumber women. Still.
“The media is failing women across the board,” Women’s Media Center president Julie Burton said in a press release that accompanied the report. “The numbers tell a clear story for the need for change on every media platform.”
The report compiles recent studies from several sources — Media Matters, the American Society of News Editors, even Gawker — all of which show that despite efforts (or at least talk of efforts) to achieve parity in media organizations, from CEOs to copy editors, we haven’t come close.
An ASNE newsroom census cited in the report showed that newsrooms were 63.1 percent male and 36.9 percent female in 1999. In 2012, those percentages were exactly the same. For 2013, it was actually worse: 63.7 percent male and 36.3 percent female. That said, when it came to journalists of color, gender representation tended to be more balanced, and there were actually more Asian women than Asian men (52 percent versus 48). That’s great, but the percentage of minorities in newsrooms is far smaller than their representation in the United States population. That’s not so great.
WMC also highlighted a study of female sports journalists — still a rare breed, despite the fact that more women than ever are sports fans. Sure, Meredith Vieira got the chance to host the Olympics in primetime last week, but she was the first woman ever to do so and it was only because regular host Bob Costas had double pinkeye and first-choice replacement Matt Lauer was too tired.
An Associated Press Sports Editors-commissioned report by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found that there was an increase in women of color sports journalists, but it still wasn’t enough to merit more than an F grade for gender representation in columnists and editors. And the majority of female columnists and editors worked for ESPN, which the report notes has made an effort to diversify its newsroom. Without ESPN, things would be far worse. As it is, 90 percent of sports editors are white and 90 percent are male.
It’s not just the journalists who tend to be white men; their sources are, too. According to Media Matters, non-MSNBC Sunday morning shows were more likely to feature a white man than a white woman or minority of either gender combined. (MSNBC, led by the Melissa Harris-Perry Show, was much more inclusive.) Another study showed that male sources in New York Times front-page stories outnumbered female sources 3.4 to 1 in January and February 2013.
At the time, Times Associate Managing Editor for Standards Phil Corbett said that he found the gap to be “disappointing” and that the Times would continue its push for a more diverse newsroom. New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy says now that this continues to be a priority for the paper – “not just gender diversity, but also racial, ethnic, geographic and religious diversity.” Half the editors on the Times’ masthead are now women – a significant milestone – but only one isn’t white. Executive editor Jill Abramson told public editor Margaret Sullivan that one of her goals for this year is to “make good gains in areas like race as well as gender.”
That said, the majority of bylines on The New York Times’ front page belong to men – often by a wide margin – according to the daily byline tracking site WhoWritesFor.com, recommended by WMC in its report.
Perhaps the most depressing thing about WMC’s latest report is its similarity to the ones that came before.
“Women, it seems have come far only if you count progress in inches,” Arizona State University’s Cronkite School associate dean Kristin Gilger said in the press release. “This report reminds us all how important it is to take a step back, see where we’re at and pay attention to how far we still have to go.”
To that end, the report leaves us with suggestions for what news organizations and consumers can do to make things more balanced. So far, it seems, few have been willing to follow them.
Zakia, 18, and Mohammad Ali, 21, in an undisclosed location in Afghanistan last month. They eloped against the wishes of Zakia’s family, and fear being killed.CreditDiego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
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KABUL, Afghanistan — An 18-year-old runaway named Amina agreed two weeks ago to leave the women’s shelter in which she had taken refuge in northern Afghanistan and go home with her brother and her uncle.
What happened next is a cautionary tale for two young people from Bamian Province who eloped and are still in hiding, even as some activists are trying to persuade them to turn themselves in.
Amina had run away to avoid marrying a man her family had forcibly betrothed her to, and agreed to return only after her family had signed guarantees that she would not be harmed. For good measure, her father and brother repeated their vows on video camera at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Baghlan Province, and she left with them.
She never reached home. Hours after she got into her family’s car, a gang of gunmen dragged her out of the vehicle and shot her to death, her brother and uncle later claimed. Everyone else was unharmed.
Whoever was responsible — the police blame the jilted fiancé’s family, but women’s activists accuse Amina’s family of staging her killing — Amina became yet another victim of an “honor killing” to absolve some sort of family shame.
Zakia and Mohammad Ali are fleeing threats of arrest and death in Afghanistan as a result of their marriage, which crosses cultural boundaries.
CreditDiego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Rubina Hamdard, a lawyer at a coalition of women’s advocacy groups, the Afghan Women’s Network, estimates that 150 cases of honor killing occur annually in Afghanistan, based on statistics kept over the past five years. Fewer than half of them are formally reported, however, and very few end in convictions.
It was just such a possible fate that prompted the Bamian couple, Zakia, 18, and Mohammad Ali, 21, to flee into hiding after they eloped in March, fearing that Zakia’s family would kill them because she had refused her father’s choice of a husband.
Neither Amina nor Zakia and Mohammad Ali did anything against the law — or, more specifically, against two of the legal systems in effect in Afghanistan: the body of civil law enacted over the past decade with Western assistance, or the classic Islamic code of Shariah that is also enshrined in law. Both protect the rights of women not to be forced into marriage against their will.
But in Afghanistan, an unwritten, unofficial third legal system has remained pervasive: customary law, the tribal codes that have stubbornly persisted despite efforts at reform. “In Afghanistan judges stick to customary law, forget Shariah law, let alone civil law,” said Shala Fareed, a professor of law at Kabul University.
Ms. Hamdard said: “In any society it’s not just the law that shapes everything, it’s the behavior of the judges, and how they interpret the law.”
But in many places, judges are poorly educated — a majority do not have actual law degrees, and a significant percentage have not even finished high school — a situation that continues to exist, despite $904 million in “rule of law” funding from the United States alone between 2002 and 2010, much of it earmarked to improve the judiciary.
Under customary practices widely prevalent here, fathers have absolute power over their daughters until they marry, when such power passes to their husbands. They can marry girls off at birth, or at any age, with or without their permission, often making them bartered goods to solve family debts.
An often-invoked customary offense that does not exist in written Afghan law is that of running away from home. Even if the runaway girl is 18, legally an adult, courts still frequently impose a jail term of one year, based entirely on customary law. In fact, Afghanistan’s Elimination of Violence Against Women Act specifically forbids prosecuting runaways. “There is no such crime as running away from home,” said Shukria Khaliqi, a lawyer and legal program director at Women for Afghan Women, an aid group that runs women’s shelters. “In some cases the judges don’t even pay attention to Shariah law; they ignore that and they will say to the girl, ‘It’s not Europe or the West here, it’s not up to you, it doesn’t matter if you’re an adult or not.’ ”
Despite the problems with the courts, Ms. Khaliqi said it was possible, particularly in Kabul, where judges were better educated, to win cases like those of Zakia and Mohammad Ali. She has been in touch with them by telephone to persuade Zakia to let her take her case to court — which would mean she would have to return to a shelter while the case was decided.
Reached by telephone in their undisclosed hiding place, Mohammad Ali said the couple were unpersuaded. Zakia had already spent six months in a shelter in Bamian, with no legal relief. “No one takes the law seriously in this country,” he said.
Statistics suggest as much. Of 4,505 cases of violence against women last year — which includes issues like “denial of relationship,” or trying to prevent someone from choosing their own husband or wife — less than 10 percent are resolved through legal process, according to the latest report from the Women’s Ministry. Nearly half of the cases were either dropped or settled out of court, often to the women’s detriment. “We are safe where we are,” Mohammad Ali said. “Either we leave the country or we stay in hiding.”
Zakia’s brother, Gula Khan, 20, also reached by telephone, was unrepentant about the family’s threats against his sister. “If we were men, we would have done something by now,” he said. “She really dishonored our family. As they have ignored the law, we should as well.” But he said that the family had no violent intentions against his sister. “We don’t know if she is dead or alive,” Mr. Khan said. “If she is dead, we want her body. If she is alive, we just want her back with us.”
In northern Baghlan Province, Amina’s brother and uncle had said pretty much the same thing, according to Uranus Atifi, head of the legal department of the women’s ministry in Pul-e-Kumri, the provincial capital. Amina had run away from her family in a remote village rather than obey her father and marry a man who she believed did not care for her. Undercover police found her wandering in a bazaar in Pul-e-Kumri, trying to find the women’s ministry, and brought her to a women’s shelter.
When the police in Afghanistan find unmarried women, even though legally adults, unaccompanied by a close relative, the women are arrested and routinely subjected to a virginity test by a forensic pathologist, another customary practice that exists outside the law. Amina passed the test, and was not charged.
Ms. Atifi said she only handed over Amina after meeting with her privately. “She didn’t want her case to get bigger and create more problems for her,” she said.
But Ms. Atifi was worried enough that she called Amina several times during her long car trip home. She last reached her at 8 p.m. on April 21. “She told me she was all right and they were still driving,” Ms. Atifi said. At 10 p.m., her cellphone no longer answered. The next day, contacted by Ms. Atifi, the young woman’s brother said that nine masked men had stopped the car, dragged his sister away and shot her to death. Her family did not seem concerned enough to report the crime, until the women’s ministry did.
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WASHINGTON — In a rare venture into foreign policy, Michelle Obama on Saturday condemned the abduction of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls by terrorists and said that she and President Obama had been personally touched by what she called an “unconscionable” act.
“In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters,” the first lady said in the weekly radio address that is normally delivered by her husband. “We see their hopes, their dreams — and we can only imagine the anguish their parents are feeling right now.”
Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist network, has claimed responsibility for abducting 276 girls from a school last month. The taking of the girls and concern about their fate has prompted nations around the world to offer help to the Nigerian government of President Goodluck Jonathan.
Mr. Obama said last week that he had ordered a team of military intelligence specialists and hostage negotiators to Nigeria to help in the search.
The kidnapping of the girls has prompted a viral Internet campaign on their behalf, with people around the world taking to Twitter and other social media to demand the return of the girls to their families. Mrs. Obama posted a somber-looking picture of herself on Twitter, holding a piece of paper with “#BringBackOurGirls” written on it.
In the radio address, Mrs. Obama said she wanted to use Mother’s Day to draw even more attention to the kidnappings.
“Like millions of people across the globe, my husband and I are outraged and heartbroken over the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian girls from their school dormitory in the middle of the night,” Mrs. Obama said. “This unconscionable act was committed by a terrorist group determined to keep these girls from getting an education — grown men attempting to snuff out the aspirations of young girls.”
Mrs. Obama has typically stayed away from foreign policy issues and has focused most of her official activities as first lady on issues like reducing childhood obesity and programs to help support members of the armed services and their families. She recently toured China without her husband and used the trip to offer some political messages about free expression and minority rights.
Mrs. Obama said Saturday that the abduction of the girls in Nigeria was not an isolated case of terrorism but part of a pattern of abuse directed at girls across the globe.
“It’s a story we see every day as girls around the world risk their lives to pursue their ambitions,” she said, referring to the case of Malala Yousafzai, a young girl in Pakistan who became an advocate for educating women and was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman on a school bus. Ms. Yousafzai survived the gunshot and continues to advocate the education of girls around the world.
Mrs. Obama said the courage of Ms. Yousafzai should serve as a “call to action” for Americans to value a quality education in the United States, and to make sure that their children do not slack off or drop out. She said she hoped the captured Nigerian schoolchildren would inspire Americans to stand up for girls “not just in times of tragedy or crisis, but for the long haul.”
“Let us all pray for their safe return,” Mrs. Obama said. “Let us hold their families in our hearts during this very difficult time and let us show just a fraction of their courage in fighting to give every girl on this planet the education that is her birthright.”
Mary Stewart, the British author of romantic thrillers who jumped genres in her 50s to create the internationally best-selling trilogy of Merlin books, reimagining the Arthurian legend from a sorcerer’s point of view, died on May 9 at her home in the village of Loch Awe, on the west coast of Scotland. She was 97.
Her death was announced by her British publisher, Hodder & Stoughton.
When “The Crystal Cave,” the first book of the trilogy, was published in 1970, Ms. Stewart already had a dozen or so novels to her credit — among them “Nine Coaches Waiting” (1958), “The Moon-Spinners” (1962) and “The Gabriel Hounds” (1967) — and was known for bringing an unexpected intelligence and historical resonance to what some dismissed as frivolous women’s fiction.
Reading Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “History of the Kings of Britain,” she was inspired to retell the story of King Arthur as seen by Merlin, the king’s adviser and house magician. The trilogy introduced her work to a new generation and, in many cases, to male readers for the first time.
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Ms. Stewart in the garden of her home in Edinburgh.CreditRon Appelbe/McGraw-Hill
In “The Crystal Cave,” Merlin is tutored in the sorcerer’s arts and moves Stonehenge from Ireland to Salisbury Plain. “The Hollow Hills” (1973) follows Arthur’s growth from afar while Merlin seeks the great sword that can bring Arthur to the throne. In “The Last Enchantment” (1979), Arthur is faced with sinister powers and plots while Merlin grows old, weak and mad. The books, set in the fifth century A.D., were praised for their unusual blend of fantasy and historical detail, beginning almost a quarter-century before J. K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book.
“The Wicked Day” (1983) was not technically part of the trilogy but is often discussed with those books because it focused on Mordred, Arthur’s illegitimate son. A much later title, “The Prince and the Pilgrim” (1995), was also set in the Arthurian era; its characters included the sorceress Morgan le Fey.
Many fans, however, preferred to see the Merlin books as a momentary blip in Ms. Stewart’s real career, that of elevating the romance genre.
“Mary Stewart sprinkled intelligence around like stardust,” the columnist Melanie Reid wrote in the Glasgow newspaper The Herald in 2004. “Every chapter was headed with a quote from Marvell or Shakespeare or Browning. The fineness of her mind shone through.”
Ms. Stewart was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1968, received the Frederick Niven Literary Award from the Scottish chapter of International PEN for “The Crystal Cave” and in 2006 was given a lifetime achievement award by the Scottish Parliament.
Mary Florence Elinor Rainbow was born on Sept. 17, 1916, in Sunderland, England, a port city and shipbuilding center in Durham County on the northeastern coast. The oldest of three children of an Anglican clergyman, she began writing as a small child; she told interviewers that she composed her first poem before she was 4.
She received a bachelor’s degree from Durham University in 1938, began teaching and was soon an English instructor there.
In 1945, she met Frederick H. Stewart, who taught geology at Durham University, at a costume ball celebrating V-E Day. She came as the Merry Widow; he was dressed in a girl’s gym outfit with a red bow in his hair. They were married three months later. Her husband was knighted in 1974, although she preferred not to be called Lady Stewart.
Ms. Stewart continued to write poetry. It was her husband who suggested she try her hand at a novel. Storytelling, she told The New York Times in 1979, “came as naturally as leaves to a tree.”
“It was a pity, I told myself, that I had wasted so much time,” she added.
Her American publisher, William Morrow & Company, estimated her American sales then at 25 million to 30 million copies.
Her first novel, “Madam, Will You Talk?,” about an Englishwoman on holiday in the South of France and a young boy’s father who may have committed murder, was published in 1955, shortly before she and her husband moved to Edinburgh. It was followed in quick succession by a series of works that combined elements of romance, suspense, mystery and a decided sense of place.
Between 1956 and 1980, Ms. Stewart published 14 more novels. She slowed down in the ’80s and ’90s to produce only six books, including a poetry collection.
Despite Ms. Stewart’s devoted following and sales success, Hollywood and its British equivalent rarely came calling. “The Moon-Spinners” was made into a 1964 American movie starring Hayley Mills and re-edited two years later as a three-part television film on the series “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.” In 1991 “The Crystal Cave” became a British television film, “Merlin of the Crystal Cave.”
Ms. Stewart’s final novel, published in 1997, was “Rose Cottage,” set in a small English village just after World War II. Her husband died in 2001. The couple had no children.
Interviewed in 1989 by Raymond H. Thompson for his “Taliesin’s Successors: Interviews With Authors of Modern Arthurian Literature,” Ms. Stewart sympathized with the women of Merlin’s time.
“Don’t forget what a dreadful life these medieval women must have led,” she said. “Shut up in those ghastly castles while the men were away having fun. Nothing to do but your embroidery and play at ball in the garden.”
Correction: May 16, 2014
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated how Ms. Stewart came to be known as Lady Stewart. Her husband was knighted in 1974; she was not.
Elaine Sturtevant, an American Conceptual artist whose work resembled that of Andy Warhol — and Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg and Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns and Keith Haring and a spate of other emblematic figures from the annals of contemporary art — died on May 7 in Paris. She was 89.
Her death was announced by her gallery, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, in Paris, where she had made her home since the early 1990s.
Ms. Sturtevant, known professionally simply as Sturtevant, was no forger. She was sometimes called the mother of appropriation art: the movement, which flourished in the 1980s and afterward, that makes new artworks by reproducing old ones. But with characteristic bluntness, she disdained the term, preferring to call her working method “repetition.”
“Manet had an intense dialogue with Velázquez, as did Picasso,” Bruce Hainley, the author of “Under the Sign of [sic],” a study of Ms. Sturtevant’s work published in January, said in an interview on Wednesday. “We don’t think of that as appropriation.”
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"Haring Tag July 15 1981."CreditPrallen Allsten/Museum of Modern Art
As a replicator, Ms. Sturtevant was an original. A Sturtevant work is as instantly and uncannily recognizable as a Warhol silk-screen, say, or a Johns flag. But, at the same time, each in its own way is a deliberately inexact likeness of its more famous progenitor.
By holding up her imprecise mirror to a gallery of 20th-century titans, Ms. Sturtevant spent her career exploring ideas of authenticity, iconicity and the making of artistic celebrity; the waxing and waning of the public appetite for styles like Pop and Minimalism; and, ultimately, the nature of the creative process itself.
“In some ways, style is her medium,” Peter Eleey, the curator of a major exhibition of Ms. Sturtevant’s work opening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this fall, said on Wednesday. “She was the first postmodern artist — before the fact — and also the last.”
The MoMA show, which runs from Nov. 9 through Feb. 22, represents the first significant exhibition of Ms. Sturtevant’s art in the United States in decades. Although her early work, from the mid-1960s, was well received, she came to feel misunderstood by the critics (and by many of the artists whose creations she reimagined) and stopped making art for about a decade.
She received a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement from the Venice Biennale in 2011.
In the beginning, Ms. Sturtevant’s work was praised for its wit, sly humor and desire to expose viewers to a blizzard of epistemological questions. “I create vertigo,” she liked to say.
Her first solo exhibition, at the Bianchini Gallery in New York in 1965, featured, among other pieces, a George Segal-like sculpture, silk-screens à laWarhol’s “Flowers” series (an obliging Warhol helped Ms. Sturtevant make them by lending her his original screen) and an ersatz Stella. In that show, and in her subsequent work, Ms. Sturtevant tacitly asked: When is a Warhol not a Warhol? When is it one — and what makes it so?
One answer, her art suggested, lay in the prototypes, which were, per the artistic preoccupations of the day, often copies themselves. (Think ofWarhol’s soup cans.) If one borrows an image that is itself borrowed, her work suggested, then perhaps neither is truly original.
Another answer lay in the differences between the prototypes and Ms. Sturtevant’s renditions. Take the “Segal” sculpture in her first solo show, as Mr. Eleey explained:
“It’s a man in white plaster that signals to us it’s a ‘George Segal’ sculpture, but it’s not based on any real sculpture,” he said. “Likewise, in her first solo show in Paris in ’66, Lichtenstein’s ‘Crying Girl’ is something that he made as a print. She made it as a painting, and much larger.”
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"Warhol Black Marilyn," from 2004.CreditRingier Collection, courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London
Ms. Sturtevant was, in essence, a composer writing variations on predecessors’ themes. But while no one ever took Brahms or Rachmaninoff to task for what they did to Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 for violin, the rules for visual art, Ms. Sturtevant found, were different — and the consequences severe.
Where Warhol had been sympathetic to her aims (queried about his silk-screening method, he was reported to have said: “I don’t know. Ask Elaine”), other artists were less so.
When, in 1967, just blocks from where the original had stood, Ms. Sturtevant opened her version of Claes Oldenburg’s “The Store” — a pop-up emporium featuring sculptures of ordinary objects he had erected a few years earlier on the Lower East Side of Manhattan — Mr. Oldenburg was not amused.
“Oldenburg is ready to kill me,” Ms. Sturtevant told Time magazine in 1969. “It all makes him dive up a wall.”
Over time, critical consensus turned against her, and Ms. Sturtevant withdrew from the New York art scene. She produced little from the mid-1970s to the mid-80s, re-emerging in 1986 with a show at White Columns, the alternative art space in Lower Manhattan.
Though she freely inhabited the artistic skins of others, Ms. Sturtevant took immense pains to obscure the particulars of her own history. Early in her career, she shed her given name like so much distracting baggage; to the end of her life, she countered interviewers’ biographical queries with a two-word response — “Dumb question” — insisting they focus on the work alone.
Elaine Frances Horan was born on Aug. 23, 1924, in Lakewood, Ohio, near Cleveland. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Iowa, followed by a master’s in the field from Teachers College of Columbia University. In New York, she also studied at the Art Students League.
Ms. Sturtevant’s marriage to Ira Sturtevant, a Madison Avenue advertising executive, ended in divorce. Survivors include a daughter, Loren, and two grandchildren. Another daughter, Dea, died about 20 years ago.
In recent years, Ms. Sturtevant worked increasingly in video, producing installations — some incorporating footage shot directly off her television set — that bemoan what she saw as the deracinated human condition in the age of digital reproduction.
If, at bottom, Ms. Sturtevant’s art was designed to raise questions about originality, uniqueness and posterity, then there was a telling indication not long ago that it had done its work.
In 2007, an original “Crying Girl” by Lichtenstein — to the extent that one print in an edition of identical prints can be called an original — sold at auction for $78,400.
In 2011, Ms. Sturtevant’s canvas reworking of “Crying Girl” — the only Sturtevant painting of its kind in existence — sold for $710,500.
Between sun-seared shrubs and the collapsed remains of Istanbul’s Byzantine city walls, police found the body of an American tourist, Sarai Sierra, 33, in February 2013. Ms. Sierra, a New Yorker and a first-time traveler abroad, disappeared after near-constant contact with her family for two weeks. What happened to her is still a little unclear, but a Turkish man has reportedly confessed to killing her after supposedly trying to kiss her.
This is not a case of wrong place, wrong time. Ms. Sierra was not wandering off the beaten path. She was not engaged in risky behavior. She was on a trip hoping to practice photography, according to news reports. This is a terrifying case of what can — and does — happen to female travelers abroad.
Since her death early last year, a number of reports of attacks on female tourists have made headlines. An Italian tourist was reportedly raped by police officers in Mexico in the same month that Ms. Sierra’s body was found. AnAmerican tourist was raped in a store in Israel last June. ANorwegian woman was raped (then jailed, for having “unlawful sex”) in Dubai; she and the man accused in her attack were eventually pardoned last summer. On Jan. 15, a Danish woman, 51, reported being raped at knife point in New Delhi. She said she had approached the seven or eight men who attacked her to ask for directions to her hotel. In March, a British womansaid she was raped by a security guard in a luxury hotel in Egypt.
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Sarai Sierra, a New Yorker on her first trip abroad, disappeared in Turkey in early 2013.CreditFamily Photo, via Associated Press
Whether it is on a bus in New Delhi or at a resort in Acapulco, Mexico, the risk of an assault may seem ever-present, if recent high-profile attacks in places like these are indicative of a general state of danger for female travelers. Such news reports have tripped an alarm for many of us who venture beyond familiar destinations, some seeking the sort of solo, immersive experiences that are becoming increasingly common.
We weigh our bodily integrity against our desire to see the world. For us, for women, there is a different tourist map of the globe, one in which we are told to consider the length of our skirts and the cuts of our shirts, the time of day in which we choose to move around, and the places we deem “safe.”
But what is the reality of violence against women now in the places we want to go — and should we be avoiding whole cities because of this risk, as some women are doing? What is the actual risk for women traveling abroad compared with the perception? I talked to statisticians and women’s rights advocates and visited a few countries where notorious cases have recently occurred to get a sense of what is happening.
Headlines in India
Since December 2012, ask most people what country they think of when they think of rape against tourists or others, and they will likely say India.
The brutality of the gang rape and murder of a young Indian medical student on a bus one December evening in New Delhi shocked many around the world. Protests erupted in huge numbers throughout India and beyond, and a government-led commission took an internal look at how the country prosecutes perpetrators of sexualized violence. But on the heels of the New Delhi attack came three more assaults on women in India that grabbed headlines. All three of the victims were foreigners: a Swiss woman during a camping trip with her husband in March 2013 in Madhya Pradesh state, central India; a British woman soon after that in her Agra hotel room; and a30-year-old American woman in the resort town of Manali.
These attacks have apparently rattled people enough to affect tourism. The New Delhi-based Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry reportedthat three months after the woman’s death after the attack on the bus, foreign female tourism to India fell by 35 percent.
Still, the truth is that other countries are even more dangerous for women than India. Without firm statistics on violence against female tourists, the closest yardstick is violence against local women — which experts say far outnumbers the better-known tourist attacks.
“The fact is that the rate of rape in Mexico is higher than in India,” said Carlos Javier Echarri Cánovas, a professor of demography at El Colegio de México who studies violence against women. There were 15,000 rape complaints in Mexico in 2010 and about the same in 2011, according to government statistics. Mr. Echarri explained that while 18,359 rape caseswere registered in India in the first quarter of 2012, according to theNational Crime Records Bureau, Mexico has one-tenth the population of India.
Yet even these statistics aren’t conclusive. Reports of rape in all countries are hampered variously by corruption and a cultural willingness to ignore violence considered “normal,” even close to home. The compelling narrative has been that as more Western women travel farther afield, the more they are at risk. But that is hard to pinpoint statistically. It might raise the question of why few are asking about the safety of traveling as a woman in Western Europe and the United States, a country of more than 300 million people. In the United States about 270,000 women were victims of rape and sexual assault in 2010, according to the Department of Justice. (The department culled data from interviews with households, which means that these are rapes that may or may not have been reported to police.)
Various kinds of Internet searches that I conducted turned up very few news stories about attacks on women in these destinations: There’s one from July 2013 about a tourist from Georgia (the state, not the country) alleging rape in New York and another about a woman from Canada who says a handful of French policemen raped her in Paris in April. Mainly though, searching for news articles on the rape of foreigners in the United States yielded only their mirror image — reports of violence against American women abroad. But this does not mean there are fewer attacks taking place on Western soil.
Experts note that this trend, so to speak, is amplified by the media, which makes individual incidents seem part of a larger pattern. “On average, attacks against white women worldwide receive more coverage than attacks against women of color,” said Cristina Finch, director of Amnesty International USA’s Women’s Human Rights Program.
Looking at the Numbers
Experts I spoke to say they cannot know whether attacks on female tourists are actually increasing. Hard numbers are difficult to come by. None of these groups — UN Women, an agency focused on gender equality; the United States State Department; and nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs — keep data on violence against female tourists. The British Foreign Office, however, does release statistics on how many Britons request consular assistance after a sexual attack; in 2012-2013, 310 people requested assistance, with 138 saying they had been raped and 172 sexually assaulted — an increase of 9 and 12 percent for the year respectively, according to figures from the office’s “British Behavior Abroad Report.”
But those figures are hardly the end of the story. A number of experts tell me that it is possible that violence is on the rise in part because more women than ever are traveling alone, and are venturing ever farther off the beaten path.
For sheer numbers, consider that nearly 25 years ago there were seven million United States passports in circulation, said John Whiteley, a State Department spokesman. Now there are 118 million. Still, Mr. Whiteley said he was not sure he saw a trend when it came to violence against female travelers.
“We do know that over the years that violence against women has become increasingly talked about and reported,” said Ms. Finch of Amnesty International USA. She agreed that there was no way to know whether actual violence against female travelers was up.
Dina Deligiorgis, a spokeswoman at UN Women, said there has been increasing attention to violence against women and girls in the last five to 10 years for a number of reasons, including the passage of various resolutions in the United Nations and the start of the United Nations secretary-general’s UNiTE to End Violence Against Women campaign.
How Safe Are Local Women?
Every expert I spoke to, whether in India, Mexico, Brazil or elsewhere, said that cases of violence against international female tourists are not only more likely to make the news, they are also more likely to see justice than cases involving local women.
On Feb. 6, 2013, six female Spanish tourists were raped in Acapulco. On Feb. 13, Mexico’s attorney general, Jesus Murillo Karam, declared the case “resolved.”
Teresa Inchaustegui, the director of the Mexican government’s Center of Studies for the Advancement of Women and Gender Equity, said that though that case had wrapped up swiftly, there were thousands of unsolved rapes of local women every year. And she noted that the Acapulco mayor initially tried to downplay the attack on the women, saying it had hurt the image of the town and that such violence could have happened “anywhere in the world.” (He later apologized for his remarks.)
“It’s undoubtedly a double standard,” said Laura Carlsen, director of the nonprofit Americas Program of the Center for International Policy, of the government reaction to the tourist rapes versus those of local women. Anoften cited crime statistic in Mexico is that 98 percent of the crimes in the country go unpunished.
Last May, I decided to visit Mexico because the country has long been on the international danger radar — rashes of drug-war-related violence have left headless bodies across the country for years, and recorded violence against local women is staggering. In the northern city of Ciudad Juárez alone, hundreds of women have been killed or have disappeared since 1993.
The United States State Department warns that women should avoid being alone in the country, “particularly in isolated areas and at night” and that rape and sexual assault “continue to be serious problems in resort areas.”
Overall, a number of people who study gender in Mexico expressed something similar to what Mr. Echarri at the Colegio de México told me: “You have a patriarchal society, a misogynistic one, with a widely held belief that women are the property of men.” This, it would seem, can lead to sexualized violence — whether harassment or assault — and foreigners predictably draw attention.
A Dutch citizen, Rachel de Joode, lived in Mexico last year and said she felt there was a reason to be more cautious as a woman “just because of what I heard in the media and around me.” She said she would never go anywhere alone after 9 p.m. without truly knowing the area and using a “safe cab” (one called from a reputable company, not hailed off the street).
Mexico City has taken recent precautions, creating women-only buses in 2008 — women-only subway cars were already in place — on which a number of female tourists, including Ms. de Joode, said they felt safer. And while Ms. de Joode told me that she had been grabbed at in the mixed-gender subway a few times, she had experienced that and worse on the streets of Berlin and Amsterdam.
Lonely Planet, a travel guide for the slightly more intrepid backpack set, also seems to fall on the not-as-scary-as-it-appears side: “Despite often alarming media reports and official warnings, Mexico is generally a safe place to travel, and with just a few precautions you can minimize the risk of encountering problems,” it states online.
In my half-dozen trips to Mexico, I have never experienced any kind of serious sexual harassment. I have, however, been asked for a bribe by the police.
Some Blame the Victim
When it comes to perception versus reality, it might help to look to Turkey. I was recently in Istanbul for a conference on preventing atrocities. I walked in the same places Ms. Sierra walked and felt no danger whatsoever beyond burning my skin in the blasting sun. I was warned, though, when I asked at the front desk of my hotel for directions one evening to a particular part of the city to meet a friend. “Be careful of the men there,” the staff warned.
Like many major cities, Istanbul has its share of crime. But what I found so ominous about this warning was that I was not told to watch for pickpockets or scammers or even violence from the anti-government protests that were in full swing last summer. I was told to watch for men.
Even so, multiple tour operators I spoke to in Istanbul said Ms. Sierra’s murder has had little effect on tourism in Turkey. Government figures show that the number of foreigners arriving in Turkey in May 2013 increased by 18 percent compared with the same month the year before.
Istanbul Tour Services said they had seen no cancellations or drop in reservations after Ms. Sierra’s death. Hakan Haykiri, 51, who owns a store that sells tourist knickknacks in the neighborhood in which Ms. Sierra was found dead, agreed that the case had not affected his trade, dismissing the violence as too common globally to matter.
“The same things happen everywhere in the world and it does not affect tourism,” Mr. Haykiri said. But he went on to say: “If the woman does not flirt, a man would not attempt to do anything, any harassment. Everything starts with a woman.”
This kind of victim-blaming was not terribly uncommon among men I spoke to in Turkey. Erkan Turkan, 30, a manager at Istanbul’s Volare Tour, interrupted a question about whether Ms. Sierra’s murder had affected business by saying, “She was asking for trouble.”
Victim-blaming is hardly unique to Turkey. Sara Benson, who has written for the Lonely Planet guidebook series since 1999, described an attack she experienced in Malaysia. Riding an old, rickety bicycle to update the company’s guide, she found herself being followed and taunted by a man on a motorbike.
“He’s laughing and cackling and making masturbatory gestures,” she said. “He circles back and I start hurling rocks at him.”
Shaken, she went to the police a couple of villages over. But all she got was laughter when she described what happened, she said. “You’re a white woman traveling around by yourself,” she recalled an officer saying. “You got what you deserved.”
How to Minimize the Risk
So what kinds of precautions can a concerned traveler take? Minimizing risk, whether in a foreign city or a local one, whether you are a woman or a man, is common sense. One easy way to do that is to check the State Department’s website for travel warnings before you head out; the site is regularly being updated and includes cautions about things like carjackings in Mexico and gender-based violence in and around protest areas in Egypt. For more women-specific updates, there are many “What can I expect?” message boards out there, including ones by Lonely Planet. Also, it never hurts to carry the telephone number for your hotel and the local police with you.
One out of every three women worldwide will be physically, sexually or otherwise abused in her lifetime, according to a 2013 World Health Organization study. Julia Drost, the policy and advocacy associate in women’s human rights at Amnesty International USA, said such violence “knows no national or cultural barriers.”
The question then, in the end, is: Should all this violence — real or amplified — stop us from seeing the world?
Summing up what seems to be the underlying sentiment of many female travelers I spoke to, Jocelyn Oppenheim, an architectural designer in New York who has trekked extensively through India, said: “Bad things can happen, but bad things can happen when you get in a taxi in New York.”
Maya Angelou, the memoirist, poet and author of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” died Wednesday. Her manuscripts are being preserved at the Harlem-based branch of the New York Public Library.
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Maya Angelou, whose landmark book of 1969, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” — a lyrical, unsparing account of her childhood in the Jim Crow South — was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide general readership, died on Wednesday at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C. She was 86.
Her death was confirmed by her literary agent, Helen Brann. The cause was not immediately known, but Ms. Brann said Ms. Angelou had been frail for some time and had heart problems.
In a statement, President Obama said, “Today, Michelle and I join millions around the world in remembering one of the brightest lights of our time — a brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman,” adding, “She inspired my own mother to name my sister Maya.”
Though her memoirs, which eventually filled six volumes, garnered more critical praise than her poetry did, Ms. Angelou (pronounced AHN-zhe-low) very likely received her widest exposure on a chilly January day in 1993, when she delivered her inaugural poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” at the swearing-in of Bill Clinton, the nation’s 42nd president. He, like Ms. Angelou, had grown up in Arkansas.
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Maya Angelou in 1969, the year of her landmark memoir.CreditChester Higgins, Jr.
It began:
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow,
I will give you no hiding place down here.
Long before that day, as she recounted in “Caged Bird” and its sequels, she had already been a dancer, calypso singer, streetcar conductor, single mother, magazine editor in Cairo, administrative assistant in Ghana, official of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and friend or associate of some of the most eminent black Americans of the mid-20th century, including James Baldwin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
Afterward (her six-volume memoir takes her only to age 40), Ms. Angelou was a Tony-nominated stage actress; college professor (she was for many years the Reynolds professor of American studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem); ubiquitous presence on the lecture circuit; frequent guest on television shows from “Oprah” to “Sesame Street”; and subject of a string of scholarly studies.
Throughout her writing, Ms. Angelou explored the concepts of personal identity and resilience through the multifaceted lens of race, sex, family, community and the collective past. As a whole, her work offered a cleareyed examination of the ways in which the socially marginalizing forces of racism and sexism played out at the level of the individual.
“If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat,” Ms. Angelou wrote in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
Hallmarks of Ms. Angelou’s prose style included a directness of voice that recalls African-American oral tradition and gives her work the quality of testimony. She was also intimately concerned with sensation, describing the world around her — be it Arkansas, San Francisco or the foreign cities in which she lived — with palpable feeling for its sights, sounds and smells.
“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” published when Ms. Angelou was in her early 40s, spans only her first 17 years. But what powerfully formative years they were.
Marguerite Johnson was born in St. Louis on April 4, 1928. (For years after Dr. King’s assassination, on April 4, 1968, Ms. Angelou did not celebrate her birthday.) Her dashing, defeated father, Bailey Johnson Sr., a Navy dietitian, “was a lonely person, searching relentlessly in bottles, under women’s skirts, in church work and lofty job titles for his ‘personal niche,’ lost before birth and unrecovered since,” Ms. Angelou wrote. “How maddening it was to have been born in a cotton field with aspirations of grandeur.”
Her beautiful, volatile mother, Vivian Baxter, was variously a nurse, hotel owner and card dealer. (Ms. Angelou’s 2013 account of life with her mother, “Mom & Me & Mom,” became a best seller.) As a girl, Ms. Angelou was known as Rita, Ritie or Maya, her older brother’s childhood nickname for her.
After her parents’ marriage ended, 3-year-old Maya was sent with her 4-year-old brother, Bailey, to live with their father’s mother in the tiny town of Stamps, Ark., which, she later wrote, “with its dust and hate and narrowness was as South as it was possible to get.”
Their grandmother, Annie Henderson, owned a general store “in the heart of the Negro area,” Ms. Angelou wrote. An upright woman known as Momma, “with her solid air packed around her like cotton,” she is a warm, stabilizing presence throughout “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
The children returned periodically to St. Louis to live with their mother. On one such occasion, when Maya was 7 or 8 (her age varies slightly across her memoirs, which employ techniques of fiction to recount actual events), she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. She told her brother, who alerted the family, and the man was tried and convicted. Before he could begin serving his sentence, he was murdered — probably, Ms. Angelou wrote, by her uncles.
Believing that her words had brought about the death, Maya did not speak for the next five years. Her love of literature, as she later wrote, helped restore language to her.
As a teenager, living with her mother in San Francisco, she studied dance and drama at the California Labor School and became the first black woman to work as a streetcar conductor there. At 16, after a casual liaison with a neighborhood youth, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. There the first book ends.
Reviewing “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” in The New York Times,Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called it “a carefully wrought, simultaneously touching and comic memoir.”
The book — its title is a line from “Sympathy,” by the African-American poetPaul Laurence Dunbar — became a best seller, confounding the stereotype, pervasive in the publishing world, that black women’s lives were rarely worthy of autobiography.
The memoirist and poet recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” in 1993 at President Bill Clinton’s first inaugural ceremony.
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The five volumes of Ms. Angelou’s memoir that follow “Caged Bird” — all, like the first, originally published by Random House — were “Gather Together in My Name” (1974), “Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas” (1976), “The Heart of a Woman” (1981), “All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes” (1986) and “A Song Flung Up to Heaven” (2002).
They describe her struggles to support her son, Guy Johnson, through odd jobs. “Determined to raise him, I had worked as a shake dancer in nightclubs, fry cook in hamburger joints, dinner cook in a Creole restaurant and once had a job in a mechanic’s shop, taking paint off cars with my hands,” she wrote in “Singin’ and Swingin’.” Elsewhere, she described her short-lived stints as a prostitute and a madam.
Ms. Angelou goes on to recount her marriage to a Greek sailor, Tosh Angelos. (Throughout her life, she was cagey about the number of times she married — it appears to have been at least three — for fear, she said, of appearing frivolous.)
After the marriage dissolved, she embarked on a career as a calypso dancer and singer under the name Maya Angelou, a variant of her married name. A striking stage presence — she was six feet tall — she occasionally partnered in San Francisco with Alvin Ailey in a nightclub act known as Al and Rita.
She was cast in the Truman Capote-Harold Arlen musical “House of Flowers,” which opened on Broadway in 1954. But she chose instead to tour the world as a featured dancer in a production of “Porgy and Bess” by the Everyman Opera Company, a black ensemble.
Ms. Angelou later settled in New York, where she became active in the Harlem Writers Guild (she hoped to be a poet and playwright), sang at the Apollo and eventually succeeded Bayard Rustin as the coordinator of the New York office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that he, Dr. King and others had founded.
In the early 1960s, Ms. Angelou became romantically involved with Vusumzi L. Make, a South African civil rights activist. She moved with him to Cairo, where she became the associate editor of a magazine, The Arab Observer. After leaving Mr. Make — she found him paternalistic and controlling, she later wrote — she moved to Accra, Ghana, where she was an administrative assistant at the University of Ghana.
On returning to New York, Ms. Angelou helped Malcolm X set up the Organization of Afro-American Unity, established in 1964. The group dissolved after his assassination the next year.
In 1973, Ms. Angelou appeared on Broadway in “Look Away,” a two-character play about Mary Todd Lincoln (played by Geraldine Page) and her seamstress. Though the play closed after one performance, Ms. Angelou was nominated for a Tony Award. On the screen, she portrayed Kunta Kinte’s grandmother in the 1977 television mini-series “Roots,” and appeared in several feature films, including “How to Make an American Quilt” (1995).
Ms. Angelou’s marriage in the 1970s to Paul du Feu, who had previously been wed to the feminist writer Germaine Greer, ended in divorce. Survivors include her son, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
Some reviewers expressed reservations about Ms. Angelou’s memoiristic style, calling it facile and solipsistic. Others criticized her poetry as being little more than prose with line breaks. But her importance as a literary, cultural and historical figure was amply borne out by the many laurels she received, including a spate of honorary doctorates.
Her other books include the volumes of poetry, “Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie” (1971), “Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well” (1975), “And Still I Rise” (1978) and “Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?” (1983).
But she remained best known for her memoirs, a striking fact because she had never set out to be a memoirist. Near the end of “A Song Flung Up to Heaven,” Ms. Angelou recalls her response when Robert Loomis, who would become her longtime editor at Random House, first asked her to write an autobiography.
Still planning to be a playwright and poet, she demurred. Cannily, Mr. Loomis called her again.
“You may be right not to attempt autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature,” he said. “Almost impossible.”
Patricia Lockwood, whose newest collection of poems, “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,” comes out this week.CreditMark Peckmezian for The New York Times
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Just before she took the microphone one soggy night in Portland, Ore., the poet Patricia Lockwood downed a shot of cheap bourbon. She had never had a drink right before a reading, but she often enacts some private joke when she speaks in public. It might be slurping her water loudly into the microphone, or rolling (instead of stepping) onto a stage, or, in this case, ingesting something that tasted to her like a puddle in a forest — anything to erase what she calls the “anxiety kegels” leading up to a performance.
That evening, more than a hundred poetry fans — most of them in their 20s, most of them clutching cans of bargain beer — crowded into a corner of a 12,000-square-foot wood-and-metal shop as Lockwood began a 12-minute romp of a poem called “The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics.”
Lockwood is all large eyes, apple cheeks and pixie haircut — like an early Disney creation, perhaps a woodland creature; one of her fans recently rendered her as a My Little Pony. The contrast between how she presents and what she writes is something Lockwood delights in.
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Lockwood’s office: ‘Whenever anyone asks me about process, I’m like a cat stroked the wrong way.’CreditMark Peckmezian for The New York Times
“Emily Dickinson was the father of American poetry and Walt Whitman was the mother,” she read. “Walt Whitman nude, in the forest, staring deep into a still pool — the only means of taking tit-pics available at that time.”
I laughed, like everyone else in the audience, and then settled in for a poem that re-envisioned two 19th-century pillars of American poetry through a kaleidoscope of contemporary obsessions. Occasionally, the sound of arc welding filled the silences between stanzas. It was, she later said, “the butchest I have ever felt.”
Not long before this performance, a friend of mine introduced me to Lockwood’s work, handing me a copy of her first book, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black,” which his small poetry press had just published. Large portions of it are meditations on the cartoon character Popeye. It would seem an unlikely candidate for a New Yorker critic’s end-of-the-year picks, yet it was, and it also became the best-selling small-press poetry book of 2013 (by a living poet), marking Lockwood as indie-poetry royalty. This week, her second collection of poems, “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,” comes out from Penguin, and in April, Lockwood announced the sale of her memoir to Riverhead.
Most poets who publish with the top indie or trade publishers in the country teach at universities, and nearly all have taken advanced degrees — an M.F.A. or even a Ph.D. in creative writing. The effect of grad-school workshops on literature in the United States has been the subject of endless debate — the M.F.A. vs. N.Y.C. meme being the most recent variation on the theme. Lockwood has no M.F.A., she never even went to college. She married at 21, has scarcely ever held a job and, by her telling, seems to have spent her adult life in a Proustian attitude, writing for hours each day from her “desk-bed.” Now, at 32, Lockwood finds herself on the verge of literary fame, a product of ill fortune followed by good fortune and the perhaps naïve expectations of success that only an outsider can maintain.
Lockwood, who goes by “Tricia,” may be best known for her persona onTwitter, where her steady stream of surreal, sexually explicit and often sexually impossible humor has won her 30,000 followers and a string of admirers in the world of comedy. Andy Richter, the longtime sidekick to Conan O’Brien, considers her a friend, though he has never met her offline: “She’s funny, she’s interesting and she’s a weirdo — which is all I ask for in a person.” Megan Amram, a writer for “Parks and Recreation,” came across Lockwood’s poetry first, relishing her ability to “heighten pop culture to saintly levels,” and then found her Twitter feed. “Both of us love the subversion of common sayings or verbal tropes,” Amram told me, “and we also love making fun of the way women are viewed as sex objects.” Rob Delaney, whom Comedy Central called “the funniest person on Twitter” and who has more than a million Twitter followers, heard about Lockwood from Amram. He “went insane,” he said, “and read everything by her.”
Lockwood’s Twitter “sexts” — inspired by political scandals and cable-news stories on the sexual menace of cellphones — reimagine the sweaty-thumbed expression of a generation’s libido as a kind of gnomic poetry. She began composing the sexts in 2011, and soon online journals were compiling their favorites. The Huffington Post ran an article with the headline: “Patricia Lockwood’s Sext Poems Will Make You LOL.” Many are unprintable in these pages, but here’s a taste:
Sext: I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me
Sext: I give u the Heimlich maneuver when u don’t even need the Heimlich maneuver. A grape pops out of u that u never even ate
Sext: I am a water glass at the Inquisition. You are a dry pope mouth. You pucker; I wet you
Lockwood has found that her Twitter fans have surprising patience with some of her longer and less accessible poems. “The idea about readers being too lazy to read poetry — they just need an in,” she said, “a voice they can trust.” Though Lockwood claims not to assert her politics in her poems, Don Share, the editor of the venerable Poetry magazine, in which she has been published, says that’s one of the most striking things about her work. “She’s right on top of politics, the economy, social situations, sexual situations, gender issues,” he says. “She converts the feed of information we get all day into these striking poems.”
That was certainly the case last summer when her long poem called “Rape Joke” went viral as no contemporary poem has before or since. Lockwood and her husband, Jason Kendall, a newspaper editor, refer to the poem as “R. J.” She began writing it in the spring of 2012, drawing on a painful incident from her late teens. “It wasn’t because I felt a pressing need to write about my life,” she says. “It was because the form arrived to me, the vehicle arrived, and it felt so perfect — the anaphora, the repetition.” She laid a draft of the poem out in notes and then, as she often does, set it aside.
That summer, during a stand-up set, the comedian Daniel Tosh went into an extended riff on rape jokes, which prompted a woman in the audience to shout, “Rape jokes are never funny.” Tosh’s response — “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now?” — sparked a nationwide debate about taboos in comedy: Are there things we just can’t laugh about, and who is the “we” that gets to laugh and in what circumstances? While comedians, feminists, survivors of sexual violence and the usual pundits weighed in, Lockwood went back to the draft and finished the poem. She sent it to The Awl, an online magazine, where it sat for months.
“The rape joke is that you were 19 years old,” the poem begins. “The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.” And then the poem complicates itself — with a joke:
The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.
Imagine a rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”
“It’s not a well-behaved poem,” Terrance Hayes, who selected the poem for the 2014 edition of “The Best American Poetry” series, told me. “It’s humor as we understand it from Richard Pryor, which is to say, there’s a blade at the heart of the joke, but there’s also a kind of suffering, and an awareness of that suffering, which gives it a kind of empathy for people who are exposed to it,” he said. “The whole poem is a big question, isn’t it?”
The response to the poem was huge across Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter — Lockwood was getting hundreds of tweets a minute the morning it was posted. An article published later that day in Salon declared that Lockwood “may have the final word in the rape-joke debate.” The Guardian noted that even as she “casually reawakened a generation’s interest in poetry,” she had done something perhaps even more difficult. “She may well be the first person with an actual sense of humor to write an attack on rape jokes. Or is it actually a defense of rape jokes?” Either way, it would be a mistake to reduce the poem to a manifesto. “Rape Joke” refuses not to be funny, but it also refuses to let you take comfort in getting the joke.
Later Lockwood tweeted: “The real final line of ‘Rape Joke’ is this. You don’t ever have to write about it. But if you do, you can write about it any way you want.”
Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., and was raised, as her author blurb states, in “all the worst cities of the Midwest.” What it does not say is that her father is a married Catholic priest, currently in a diocese of Kansas City, Mo. This requires a bit of explanation.
Greg Lockwood married Lockwood’s mother, Karen, when they were both teenagers; he had just joined the Navy. Karen was raised Catholic, but Greg was an atheist. During one patrol, on a nuclear submarine off the coast of Norway, he underwent what he later described as “the deepest conversion on record.” He claims it grew out of soul-searching following several personal setbacks, but the family legend ascribes it to the fact that he and the crew on his previous patrol watched “The Exorcist” more than 70 times in 88 days. Whatever the catalyst, Lockwood became a devout Christian. He started a family, attended college and seminary and eventually was ordained as a Lutheran minister. And then one morning in 1985 he “woke up Catholic”; a few years later he became a priest, with the zeal of the twice-converted.
In Lockwood’s telling, her father ruled the home as a loving and idiosyncratic patriarch who wore his cassock in the living room, or else very little — “It was either full regalia or nothing” — watched sword-and-sandal movies obsessively, played blues guitar, ate copious amounts of sausage and fed the family a steady dose of prog rock. Her mother was a more cautious presence who instituted family diets, watched her five children for signs of allergies and had a penchant for puns. The family calls her K-Rock; she claims to have known when Tricia was in the fourth grade that she was destined to be a writer.
As a child Lockwood was intensely pious. “Catholicism is very beautiful,” she told me. “When your father is a priest, it’s invested with extra authority, and your father is invested with extra authority.” As a teenager, she had a strict dress code and a very limited range of after-school activities, which included a youth group called God’s Gang. “There was a lot of talk about gangs at the time,” she recalled, “and the idea was, what if there was a gang but it was a cool gang — for the Lord?” In God’s Gang they spoke in tongues, and the leaders would outline “all the sex you can’t do.”
The family moved frequently within the dioceses of St. Louis and Cincinnati. Lockwood lived in at least five different rectories and attended six different schools, all of them Catholic. Her literary education was heavy on rules, and at home the reading was pretty much limited to “Tennyson, encyclicals and Tom Clancy novels.” But from age 16 she was always at work on a manuscript. These were intensely serious attempts to link Greek mythology to Catholic liturgy, much like the life’s work of Edward Casaubon, the dry old cleric in George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.” “It’s what 16-year-olds do,” she said. “Well, that’s not what 16-year-olds do; they fondle each other. I was fondling the Greek myths. You have to have some outlet. I was a hot teen Casaubon.” At some point, the faith that defined her childhood simply vanished. “Like virginity, you wake up one day without it.”
While in high school in Cincinnati, she encountered in an anthology a poem that was actually funny and learned that its author, Kenneth Koch, was a Cincinnati native. Koch — a fixture of the New York School, friend and contemporary of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara — came to read at a public library in town and Lockwood went to hear him, asking a question in the session that followed. She wasn’t surprised that he singled her out to talk with afterward. She was 18 and a poet. “You just expect that the world will notice you,” she said.
Lockwood planned on studying literature at St. Johns College in Annapolis, but on Christmas Eve before her first semester, her father dropped a bombshell: they couldn’t afford to send her. “It tells you something about my relationship to authority,” she said. “I didn’t even think I should try to get loans. I just thought, That’s that.”
She moved into an abandoned convent near her parents’ rectory, briefly got a job in a bookshop and hung out with what she describes as “a lesbian wolf pack — I was allowed to go feral for the first time.”
She also began posting on poetry message boards. It was there, online, that her poetry caught the eye of Kendall, a child of two missionaries who spent formative years in Thailand and Korea but who was by then living in Colorado and writing poems. The two corresponded and eventually began talking on the phone. At some point Kendall decided to drive to Cincinnati to meet her. “This was when it was still weird to meet on the Internet,” Lockwood said. He was 20 years old. She was 19, but he thought that with a name like Patricia, she was probably older.
When the distant suitor arrived and met Lockwood’s family, he found her father upstairs in the TV room, cleaning his handgun. The first thing Greg Lockwood said to Kendall was: “Give me your driver’s license. I’ve got cop friends.”
Father Lockwood eventually married them. The couple moved to Colorado Springs, where Patricia set to work on a novel. Their apartment looked out on a majestic park, Garden of the Gods, but she moved her desk into a closet so she wouldn’t be distracted by the view. With the hubris of a 20-year-old, she sent the finished novel to the top literary agents in New York. There was interest, and soon she had major literary representation.
The book was called “The History of Opposable Thumbs,” and it was unusual material. “Great novels have incest; if not, they’re not good,” Lockwood told me. “William Faulkner taught us that.” She and Kendall had high hopes, but the novel languished, and she was eventually told that, “in the climate after 9/11, people aren’t willing to take a chance on sister-on-sister action where someone loses a hand to gangrene.” The book fell off the map. “If something doesn’t get published,” Lockwood said, “I’m like a bear leaving scat in the woods. I move on.”
Over the next eight years, Kendall, who no longer wrote poetry, worked as a reporter, designer and editor at local newspapers in New Hampshire, Florida and Georgia. During that time, Lockwood was employed for four months at a Florida diner, where she mostly wrote poems on her order pad. Lockwood still planned to go to college, but in the meantime she undertook her own literary education, reading widely and voraciously — modernists like Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot; the aphorist Jules Renard and the essayist Michel de Montaigne; and piles of comic books, particularly the escapades of Scrooge McDuck. “I wasn’t concerned about taste,” she says. “I wanted to know things.” They lived frugally; she read and wrote, he went to work and took on the role of her manager, salvaging many of her poems from the wastebasket, submitting them to journals when she was disinclined to and maintaining a spreadsheet to track their efforts. “We blitzed everybody,” he said. “We started blasting people with her stuff.” The blitz went on for years. Eventually a poem was accepted by Poetry (Submission No. 179) and then The New Yorker (Submission No. 240), and that changed everything.
After five years in Florida, the couple found a home in Savannah, Ga. Kendall was working as a features editor at The Savannah Morning News. Lockwood had recently published her first poem in The New Yorker. And then Kendall began to notice something wrong with his vision; he was having trouble reading at work. An ophthalmologist found advanced cataracts on both eyes — quite rare for a healthy 30-year-old. If they progressed, he was told, the surgery could become too risky, and he would potentially lose his eyesight. Their health insurance didn’t cover the whole cost of the procedure, leaving them roughly $10,000 short. Desperate, Lockwood shared their predicament with her Twitter followers. Her online friends urged her to set up a PayPal account. At 11 p.m. one night, she tweeted that the account was up, and by 11 a.m. the next day they had raised the entire sum.
“It was shocking,” Kendall said. “How can people be so cool?”
‘I’m a puritan. I was a child bride . . . in order to get past that, I just have to push all the way.’
“Everyone except for a few people donated in small amounts,” Lockwood said. “Things like $4.20 or $6.66, people with user names like theslavekitten.”
Kendall had five surgeries. His recovery was slow, and eventually he had to face the reality that until he healed completely, he couldn’t do a job that required him to stare at a computer all day. Suddenly he and Lockwood were without a livelihood.
With few other options, they put their possessions in storage and moved into a 10-by-14 upstairs bedroom in her father’s modest brick rectory in Kansas City: a married couple in their 30s living across the hall from the priest and his wife.
With Kendall recuperating and with no income, Lockwood had to choose between finding a job or writing a book she could sell. She began a memoir, an attempt at flat-out funny prose, no 140-character limits, no line breaks. Between the interruptions of her father, dressed in his cassock and jamming on one of his left-handed guitars or shouting at the Cincinnati Bengals on TV, she traced her life thus far.
She was still living in the rectory when “Rape Joke” was published in The Awl. There is a section of the poem about the speaker’s parents’ response to the rape:
It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. . . .”
Lockwood came downstairs one night after the poem was published to find her mother sitting in the dark in front of her computer, reading the poem and crying. Her mother hugged her and said, “It’s O.K., you’re still standing.” But she had also read some of the ugly comments left on The Awl’s website — “oh, get over yourself, you attention whore . . . no one feels bad for you. you’re the rape joke.”
“Do you see what these people were saying about you?” her mother asked.
“Mom, it’s O.K.,” Lockwood said. “It’s just the Internet.”
Of her parents’ reaction to the rape, she later said: “People don’t necessarily respond as their best selves in the moment. The initial conversations were not totally ideal. But when you make art out of something, they get another chance.”
Today, Lockwood and Kendall live on the ground floor of a Cape Cod-style house on the east side of Lawrence, Kan., a 30-minute drive from her parents. When I visited in April, they had been there for just three months, and Lockwood didn’t know her own address. She handed the phone to Kendall to give me directions. Kendall now works as an editor for the newspaper in Lawrence and was able to cover the $600 a month rent for the house, which was sparsely furnished and adorned with action figures, Popeye and Olive Oyl throw pillows and a surprisingly heavy statuette of Chaim Topol as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Behind the house, trees line a creek named for William S. Burroughs, the literary patron of Lawrence. Lockwood likes to sit in a room at the back of the house in the afternoons, looking out the window and going into her own head. Some evenings, a skunk emerges from the Burroughs Creek bank and locks eyes with her before disappearing under the house. She feels as if they have forged a bond and calls the animal Big Boi, after one of her favorite rappers.
We took a walk along the Burroughs trail and up into the heart of Lawrence’s old downtown and talked about her poetry. “Whenever anyone asks me about process,” she said, “I’m like a cat stroked the wrong way: Get away from my belly!” But she is fundamentally a sharer, a poet for the age of sharing. “I’m verbally incontinent — anything just pours out of me,” she said. “My father’s that way. He doesn’t worry about it. My mother does. I got both. I say just the worst things the English language is capable of, and then later on I lie awake at night thinking, Oh, Tricia, you’ve done it again.”
Lockwood’s poems are most radical in their ability to convey the essential strangeness of sex and gender. “I consistently felt myself to be not male or female,” she said, “but the 11-year-old gender: protagonist. Maybe it’s a byproduct of reading a lot of books, of projecting yourself into different bodies. As an early teen, I thought I presented as androgynous, which was not true. But I had a short haircut, and I felt androgynous.”
There was no discussion of sex in the home growing up. She ascribes the birth of her own sexual knowledge to a road trip with her aunt when they listened to Jean Auel’s “The Valley of Horses.” “We’re driving along the Grand Canyon, the hugest vagina in the world, and my aunt is playing the audiobook of cave-man sex. I just pretended to be asleep or she’d turn it off.”
We stopped for a moment at a picnic bench in an idyllic city park. “I blush if I see people kissing in a movie,” she said. “There are certain cusses I can’t say. It’s a private joke: I’m a puritan. I was a child bride. There’s this prim, prudish part of me, and in order to get past that, I just have to push all the way.” As she spoke, an elderly couple walked along a nearby path, a young woman danced with a hula hoop near a fountain and a squirrel darted away from us toward a tree just beginning to leaf. “Nothing I say is actually physically possible on any plane of existence,” Lockwood added, watching the squirrel. “I may want to French a squirrel, but I can’t. It would be hard to catch. Rabies. Too much fur.”
Many of the titles of the poems in the new collection, “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,” rival click bait in their demand to be read: “Is Your Country a He or a She in Your Mouth,” “He Marries the Stuffed-Owl Exhibit,” “Search ‘Lizard Vagina’ and You Shall Find,” “Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It.” One poem traces the evolution of generic doe-eyed deer named Bambi into generic women named Fawn, with their “light shafts of long blond hair and long legs.” Yet the book, for all its playfulness, poses sharp challenges to many stereotypes, particularly those around gender. “List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers” starts with famous women who dressed as men and fought in battles, but then shifts closer to home. Lockwood’s younger brother, Paul, is a Marine who has served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. “We would always have dreams and then hear that something bad had happened near him,” she said. The poem touches on these close calls:
My brother is alive because of a family capacity for little hairs rising on the back of the neck.
“He’d always say, ‘I’m not going to go back’ and then do another tour,” Lockwood said. “The last tour in Afghanistan was tough. He just missed being exploded by an I.E.D. He lost buddies.” Yet what drew her into the poem was the interaction between her brother and his fellow Marines.
. . .“Kisses,” he writes to a friend. His friend he writes back, “Cuddles.” Bunch of girls, bunch of girls. They write each other, “Miss you, brother.” Bunch of girls, bunch of girls. They passed the hours with ticklefights. They grew their mustaches together. They lost their hearts to local dogs, what a bunch of girls.
“It’s such a macho culture,” she said, “but also the most affectionate male culture I’ve ever encountered. Sitting on each other’s laps, stroking each other’s faces. It’s very sweet. But at the same time it’s, ‘Be a man!’ ”
She didn’t think her brother would read the book. “He’s just proud that you’ve done it,” she said. “Same with my dad.” Her father has never heard her read her poems. “I stay away and let her do what she needs to do with her life,” Father Lockwood told me one evening during a visit to the rectory in Kansas City. “She’s crazy smart and very talented. Good theology teaches you that everyone belongs to themselves.” Then he turned to his daughter and said, “You come from us, but you’re not us.”
To Lockwood, that distinction was more mystery than theology. “I have this hall-monitor mother,” she told me later, “and this psycho freakout prog-rock dad just doing whatever he wants; he doesn’t even obey any laws except the laws of the church, and I came out. I’m not even sure how it happened.”
One afternoon during my visit to Lawrence, Lockwood and Kendall were in the side yard of their house, he drinking wine on the grass, she finishing a shot of vodka while sitting on a swing suspended from a large tree. At some point, a hare emerged from the Burroughs Creek bank and watched them — Thumper checking in on old friends. The conversation turned to whether she ever felt the lack of a college education.
“A nice byproduct of never going to college,” she said, “is that I’m never embarrassed about not knowing something. I’m missing such large areas. If you looked at my brain, it would be like those taxi drivers who have one huge lobe that just contains directions, except for me it would be metaphors. I felt like I had a freak ability.”
“Like you’re a good singer,” Kendall said.
Writing in Salon recently, Laura Miller drew attention to “a handful of great literary husbands” whose support enabled the likes of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot to produce great works: “It took an extraordinary man to acknowledge the superior gifts of his wife and to devote himself to bringing them to fruition.”
Kendall saw something from the start in those message boards. “I’m going to work and she’s going to write all day — when you are marrying a genius, that’s the deal,” he said, watching her on the swing. “It’s like marrying Aretha Franklin. She’s going to get to sing. If you hear Aretha Franklin sing — ”
“This is so grandiose,” Lockwood interrupted.
“ — you understand what’s going on musically. Whoever was the first person to hear Aretha sing, understood. I just happened to be the first.”
Last month, Lockwood and Kendall traveled to New York City. It was the first time for Lockwood. She was scheduled to give two readings and meet her poetry editor, as well as the editor of her memoir. Like true Midwesterners, they rented a car and drove all over Manhattan and Brooklyn.
On Saturday she was to be part of a distinguished poetry event with a number of well-known older poets at Sarah Lawrence College. The rest of her trip, including her birthday, would prove to be a comedy of errors — pants ripped on a bench, maxed-out credit-card (the memoir money hadn’t come in yet), passing out in a hot tub. “My disaster birthday,” as she would describe it to me. But Friday night, the young and clever of Brooklyn packed the Morgan Town Bar in Bushwick, where Lockwood was headlining a long bill of “Internet comedy writers.”
She gamely waited through seven other acts, laughing at the funny bits, smiling through the rest. Many people came up to talk to her — five minutes into a conversation they might reveal their Twitter handles, at which point her eyes sparked with recognition and she hugged them. One young man approached Kendall to introduce himself and ask about his eyes — he had contributed to the surgery fund.
At last, Lockwood’s turn came and, in a gray top and skirt that she had selected at the Goodwill in Lawrence, she did an impromptu barrel roll onto the stage for her private, nerve-calming joke. The piece she was about to read was a true story of a mother-daughter road trip interrupted by the discovery of less-than-spotless bed linens at a Nashville hotel chain. It’s about the moment when you and your mother first say to each other a slang word for a bodily fluid, at which point, she said, “there’s no going back.” The title of the piece can only be rendered in these pages as “The Semen Queens of Hyatt Place.”
Back in Kansas, she had already read it to her mother, who laughed out loud. In Brooklyn, they did the same.
Marilyn Beck, a widely read newspaper columnist and broadcast figure who helped introduce a style of impartial journalism to the celebrity gossip beat, died on Saturday at her home in Oceanside, Calif. She was 85.
The cause was lung cancer, said Stacy Jenel Smith, Ms. Beck’s writing partner in her last decades.
At their peak in the 1970s and ’80s, Ms. Beck’s syndicated columns reached 20 million readers in hundreds of newspapers, including The Daily News in New York. She was also a familiar presence on radio and television, hosting “Marilyn Beck’s Hollywood Outtakes” specials on NBC and long-running stints on the syndicated “PM Magazine” and on the E! Channel’s “Gossip Show.”
Ms. Beck was among the first Hollywood journalists to have an online presence in the late 1980s, eventually starting her own website with Ms. Smith.
Ms. Beck bridged two eras in Hollywood journalism — between the gossip columnists of the 1930s and ’40s like Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, who derived power from their studio connections, and a generation of reporters who came along after the death of the studio system. Ms. Beck forged most of her connections directly with the people she wrote about.
In the 1960s and ’70s, her straightforward style earned her the trust of many celebrities with stories to tell. Elvis Presley gave her his first interview after being discharged from the Army in 1960. Dick Van Dyke publicly revealed his struggles with alcoholism in an interview with her. And before supermarket tabloids got wind of it, Michael Landon told Ms. Beck about his dependence on prescription pills.
She could be as tough as a “60 Minutes” cross-examiner — questioning Sylvester Stallone and Clint Eastwood about leaving their wives; pressuring Bob Hope to talk about his money; digging up celebrity culture dirt in 1976, after the singer Claudine Longet was charged in the shooting death of her boyfriend, the skier Spider Sabich.
She could also be as fawning as — well, a celebrity gossip columnist.
In one of her biggest scoops, Ms. Beck was invited to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in 1963 to interview a Hollywood couple whose romance was the celebrity scandal of its day, both partners being married to others at the time.
“Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton have discovered paradise — and they freely admit it,” she wrote on Nov. 11 from a remote Burton-Taylor redoubt. “In this tiny tropical village they have found their heaven on earth, where they can openly display their love for each other, freer than they have ever been from notoriety and criticism.”
Ms. Beck had never intended to be a gossip columnist, she told interviewers; but having found herself in the job, she embraced it without pretense.
“The day of the wicked whisper is passed,” she said in a 1969 interview with Editor and Publisher magazine. “But gossip based on fact will continue as long as there is a Hollywood. Gossip is news.”
She was born Hanna Marilyn Mohr in Chicago on Dec. 17, 1928, and raised in Los Angeles. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in journalism, then married Robert Beck, a Los Angeles newspaper reporter, and had two children. She and Mr. Beck later divorced.
When her youngest child was in grade school, Ms. Beck began writing freelance articles for local newspapers and fan magazines. She became a Hollywood columnist for the Bell-McClure syndicate in 1967.
Ms. Smith was in her early 20s when she teamed up with Ms. Beck in the late 1970s, working alongside another young reporter assistant, Ms. Beck’s daughter, Andee (who went on to become a television critic in Oregon).
Ms. Beck’s columns were carried by The New York Times Special Features syndicate beginning in 1972 and by the Creators syndicate from the 1990s onward.
The column, “Hollywood Exclusive,” is now written by Ms. Smith.
She is survived by her second husband, Arthur Levine; her daughter, Andee Beck Althoff; a son, Mark Beck; a brother, Mitchell Mohr; and four grandchildren.
T’s critic at large Jody Rosen tracks the most essential tunes from the colossal pop star and culture issue cover girl. More…
If you’ve ever seen Beyoncé Knowles astride a concert stage or a red carpet, you know she is a woman with a flair for dramatic entrances. But no previous coup de théâtre prepared the world for the arrival of the singer’s fifth full-length solo record, “Beyoncé,” the “visual album” that airdropped onto iTunes at midnight on Dec. 13, 2013. For months, the music press had seethed with speculation about Beyoncé’s delayed record release, with rumors of disastrous studio sessions and dozens of scrapped songs. “There is utter disarray in Beyoncé’s camp,” the websiteMediaTakeOut.com hissed. It was an unheard-of turn of events for Beyoncé, whose career had been a testament to, as it were, array: a regal, orderly parade from hit to hit, milestone to milestone, strength to strength.
Sure enough, the alleged behind-the-scenes chaos turned out to be the usual behind-the-scenes order, in disguise: While the gossip mills whirred, Beyoncé stealthily recorded 14 songs and shot 17 videos, which she unleashed in that December sneak attack. Purely as a feat of information management, “Beyoncé” was impressive. The National Security Agency couldn’t stop its secrets from spilling all over the place; Beyoncé kept the lid on a project which, conservatively, involved hundreds of individuals — studio musicians, cameramen, key grips, personal assistants, even record executives, as a rule the least trustworthy people on the planet. The arrival of all that music, all at once and out of the blue, was an unprecedented shock-and-awe move, which rocked the record industry back on its heels and convulsed the Internet. A single Beyoncé video is capable of staggering the senses; the simultaneous release of 17 of them — an onslaught of sound and spectacle and costumes and choreography and, in the case of a video like the one for “Rocket,” stately slow-motion images of billowing silk sheets and water droplets tumbling onto Beyoncé’s bare midriff — it was a lot to process. We can only imagine the feelings of Beyoncé’s pop diva competitors, whose carefully plotted monthslong album rollouts were instantly rendered quaint, and moot. That whining, whirring sound you heard on Dec. 13, mingling with the strains of “Drunk in Love” — that was Lady Gaga, in her gloomy castle keep, chainsawing a meat dress into sackcloth.
Beyoncé is 32 years old. She was 9 when she began singing with Girls Tyme, the group she formed with friends in her hometown, Houston; when the successor to Girls Tyme, Destiny’s Child, first cracked the Top 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, in 1998, Beyoncé was just 16. She never seemed like an ingénue, though: Even as a teenager, she had gravitas. In one of the centerpiece songs on the new album, Beyoncé gazes backwards: “Look at me — I’m a big girl now . . . I’m a grown woman.” But the innocence-to-experience cliché doesn’t square with Beyoncé’s life, or art. From the beginning her message has been professionalism, perfectionism, power — ideals exemplified in her fearsome live performances and dramatized in songs that view romance through the lens of finance. Hits like “Bills, Bills, Bills” (1999), “Upgrade U” (2006) and “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” (2008) have found Beyoncé figuratively hunched over a balance sheet, weighing the costs of affections dispensed and luxury goods accumulated. She’s a fit star for our new gilded age, and an apt match, musical and otherwise, for her husband Jay Z, another arch-capitalist. In recent years, Beyoncé has toned down the materialism a bit, but ambition remains her calling card. In the torrid 2011 single “Run the World (Girls)” she sang: “We’re smart enough to make these millions/Strong enough to bear the children/Then get back to business.” The song is a postfeminist anthem, sure. It’s also a business plan that she’s followed to a T.
Photograph by Juergen Teller. Styled by Poppy Kain.Vince T-shirt, $60, vince.com. Louis Vuitton pants, $1,550, louisvuitton.com.
In 2014, Beyoncé’s grip on the zeitgeist has become a stranglehold. A recent “Saturday Night Live” skit revolved around the gag that Beyoncé-worship has become compulsory in the United States, that Beyoncé refusniks will be tracked down and eliminated by deadly government goons, the Beygency. (“He turned against his country . . . and its queen,” boomed the voiceover.) As “SNL” suggests, Beyoncé has become something more than just a superstar. She is a kind of national figurehead, an Entertainer in Chief; she is Americana. Someday, surely, her “Single Ladies” leotard will take its place alongside Mickey Mouse and the Model T Ford and Louis Armstrong’s trumpet in a Smithsonian display case.
Historically speaking, this is no small achievement. Black women have always been dominant figures in American popular music, but no one, not even Aretha Franklin, has reached the plateau that Beyoncé occupies: pop star colossus, adored bombshell, “America’s sweetheart.” Inevitably, Beyoncé is also a flashpoint, provoking ire from naysayers and ideologues of all stripes. In March, Bill O’Reilly decried “Partition,” a song that details a Beyoncé-Jay Z tryst in a limousine, for setting a poor example for “girls of color.” (Postmarital sex between consenting adults: immoral.) Last month, the black feminist author and activist Bell Hooks told an audience at a New School symposium: “I see a part of Beyoncé that is in fact antifeminist, that is assaulting — that is a terrorist . . . especially in terms of the impact on young girls.” There is a growing scholarly literature on Beyoncé; the Women’s and Gender Studies department at Rutgers University has offered an undergraduate course called “Politicizing Beyoncé.” Beyoncé is, as a cultural studies professor might put it, popular culture’s most richly multivalent “text.” The question these days is not, What does the new Beyoncé record sound like? It’s, What does Beyoncé mean?
Photograph by Juergen Teller. Styled by Poppy Kain.Louis Vuitton dress, $5,320, louisvuitton.com. Solange Azagury-Partridge necklace, $206,000, (212) 879-9100.
Of course, the meaning begins with sound — with the tone and timbre of Beyoncé’s voice, one of the most compelling instruments in popular music. Beyoncé has traditionalist skills. She can belt an adult contemporary ballad like Barbra Streisand; she can deliver a fiery gospel testimonial; she can channel Michael Jackson (“Love on Top”) or imitate Prince’s falsetto (“No Angel”). But she is unmistakably a product of the hip-hop era, a singer who has assimilated the aggression and slippery rhythms of rap into a virtuosic and strange vocal style. We have gotten so used to Beyoncé, it may be hard to grasp what an oddball she is, how different her approach to rhythm, melody and harmony are to those of previous generations. You can hear that eccentricity in the wild timbral shifts and skittering syncopations of “Drunk in Love,” a half-sung, half-rapped hit that sounds, in the best sense, like a song Beyoncé is improvising from scratch in real time. Like all innovators, Beyoncé has pushed back boundaries, expanding our sense of what music should sound like. To the extent that we hear Beyoncé as “pop,” it’s because she has taught us to do so.
She’s taught the world to see music differently, too. The 17 videos for her latest album capture the star in a head-spinning variety of attitudes and alter-egos: as a beauty pageant contestant; as a moll with a flapper haircut; as a roller-disco queen; as the leader of a militant street mob with her hair dyed green; as a Houston homegirl, vamping on a street in the city’s hardscrabble Third Ward, with a nasty-looking dog on a leash; as a stripper, an ardent lover, a wife; and, in “Blue,” as an earth-mother-with-child, strolling a sun-dazzled strip of Brazilian coastline with her daughter, Blue Ivy. More than three decades after the rise of MTV, there are still those who view music videos as debased or “inauthentic.” But Beyoncé’s music is inseparable from her movie-star magnetism: the way she stares down a camera, strikes a pose, wears her clothes and, especially, the way she dances. And why not? Popular music has always been an audiovisual medium. If Beyoncé is the dominant figure in 21st-century music, perhaps it’s because pop has circumnavigated back to its 19th-century vaudevillian roots, to a time before disembodied voices came to us through hi-fi speakers or noise-canceling headphones, when music was, exclusively, a performing art. Beyoncé is the greatest old-fashioned singer and hoofer, the supreme show-woman, in an era when, once again, we’ve learned to love a splashy musical show.
Of course, she’s more than that. Literally and figuratively, Beyoncé is a moving target — it’s as difficult to get a fix on her as it would be to keep up with her on the dance floor. Beyoncé represents down-home earthiness and impossible glamour, soul-woman warmth and diva hauteur, a nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic and garish 1 percent excess. Her new album is sexed-up to the point of lewdness, with punch lines about body fluids on evening wear and intimations of rough sex. Yet the sex — in the limo, in the kitchen, everywhere, apparently, but the bedroom — is married sex, family-values sex, which, the album makes clear, produced a bouncing baby girl, a result perhaps even Bill O’Reilly can feel good about.
Beyoncé’s songs are packed tight with such contradictions. Think of “Single Ladies,” an anthem of feisty feminist solidarity that endorses the most retrograde diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend brand of transactional romance: “If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it.” Or consider “***Flawless,” on the new album, which throws together a dizzying mix of sounds and signifiers. There’s a clamorous trap beat and pitch-shifted vocals; there are shout-outs to Houston (“H-town vicious”) and to Jay Z’s record label, Roc Nation (“My Roc, flawless”). There are coarse mean-girl threats (“Bow down, bitches!”) and a sampled snippet from a TEDx talk by the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie titled “We Should All Be Feminists,” which wags a finger at mean-girl threats: “We raise girls to see each other as competitors.” The video intersperses an excerpt from 10-year-old Beyoncé’s appearance on the TV talent show “Star Search” with the current-day Beyoncé, clad in Kurt Cobain flannel, executing a spectacular dance routine in a dank basement surrounded by skinheads. It’s all tied together by a refrain — “I woke up like this!” — which, among other things, does double duty as a boast about effortless beauty and a mantra of enlightenment. What does Beyoncé mean? What doesn’t she mean.
Makeup by Francesca Tolot using Diorshow at Cloutier Remix. Hair by Neal Farinah. Manicure by Lisa Logan at S. Murray Management. Photo assistant: Maxim Kelly. Digital tech: Devin Doyle. Lighting: Pavel Woznicki. Stylist’s assistant: Seana Redmond. On-set production by Leone Ioannou at Pony Projects.
Mary Soames, the last surviving child of Winston Churchill, lived a storybook life and chronicled it in her own well-received books. After her family announced her death at 91 on May 31 in London, Prime Minister David Cameron called her “an eyewitness to some of the most important moments in our recent history.”
There was the idyllic childhood at Chartwell, the family estate, where she tamed fox cubs, raised orphan lambs and played in a brick house built for her by her father, whose hobbies included bricklaying. Guests included Charlie Chaplin, who amused her by impersonating Napoleon, and T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, who dressed up in his princely Arab robes. On the eve of World War II, Noël Coward sang “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” to her family and their guests.
During the war, after overhearing a general advising her father, the prime minister, that England should seek women for undermanned antiaircraft batteries, she enlisted as a private without his knowledge. On the banks of the English Channel, she shot down flying bombs hurtling toward England.
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Lady Soames with Anthony Eden, center, her father’s foreign secretary during World War II.CreditAgence France-Presse — Getty Images
She accompanied Churchill to summit meetings as his personal aide, including the Potsdam conference in 1945, where her father, President Harry S. Truman and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin planned the postwar world. She found Stalin “small, dapper and rather twinkly.”
After several ill-fated romances, she married Christopher Soames, a dashing member of the Coldstream Guards, one of the most ancient regiments in the British Army, and nurtured his career as a prominent Tory politician, ambassador to France and the last governor of one of Britain’s last major colonies, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). They had five children — Nicholas, Emma, Jeremy, Charlotte and Rupert — who, with a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, survive her.
She acquired the title Lady when Mr. Soames was knighted in 1972. Queen Elizabeth II named him a baron in 1978. After Baron Soames died in 1987, she was chairwoman of the Royal National Theater for six years. But her most lauded personal achievement was a series of books she wrote about her family.
The first, “Clementine Churchill: The Biography of a Marriage” (1979), was a biography of her mother. It won the Wolfson History Prize, given annually to a British subject for excellence in the writing of history.
The book referred to her mother as “an old-fashioned radical” with “latent hostility toward the Tory Party,” which her husband led. It revealed their affectionate nicknames: She was “Kat,” he “Pug” and their children “kittens.” Once, Lady Soames wrote, an argument climaxed in Churchill’s throwing a plate of spinach at his wife, but they always made up quickly after their spats.
Her other books included an annotated family photo album, an examination of Churchill as a painter and a 702-page collection of letters between Churchill and his wife. They wrote each other every day, even when they were in the same house.
“The duration of the Churchills’ intimacy, their private day inside so much history, is even now — no, especially now — a source of amazement,” Thomas Mallon, a novelist and critic, said in reviewing the book for The New York Times Book Review.
In 2011, Lady Soames wrote of her life up to her engagement at 25 — and of her father’s penchant for funny clothes, including a 10-gallon hat — in “A Daughter’s Tale: The Memoir of Winston Churchill’s Youngest Child.” A review in The New Criterion called the book “clear, sharp, occasionally opinionated and understatedly witty.”
Lady Soames came to be regarded as something of a national treasure and was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Dame of the British Empire. In 2005, Queen Elizabeth appointed her a Ladies Companion of the Garter, Britain’s highest chivalric order.
After the death of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 2013, Lady Soames was one of only two living nonroyal women so honored. The other isEliza Manningham-Buller, who commanded Britain’s counterterrorism efforts as head of MI5, the internal security agency, from 2002 to 2007.
Mary Spencer-Churchill was born at Chartwell, in the county of Kent in southeast England, on Sept. 15, 1922. A year earlier, her sister Marigold died of tonsillitis at 2 ½. Her arrival, she wrote, helped compensate her parents for their bitter loss; she was, she said, “a child of consolation.” Her living siblings were so much older — Diana by 13 years, Randolph by 11 and Sarah by 8 — that she regarded them as “godlike Olympian figures.”
As a girl, she lived almost entirely with grown-ups. Her father wrote that at 5, she spoke “in the tone and style of a woman of 30.” He doted on her, but she said she did not become close to her mother until the two went skiing in Switzerland when she was around 13.
During her early youth, Mary’s closest companion was her nanny, Maryott Whyte, a first cousin of her mother and a trained nurse. Lady Soames once attributed the divorces, substance abuse and relatively early deaths of her siblings to their lack of a rock of stability like Ms. Whyte.
“I don’t know why I turned out like this while the others had such problems,” she said in a 2002 interview, “and comparisons are always odious, aren’t they? But I do think Nana made a great difference.”
During the war, Lady Soames was briefly engaged to the son of an earl and also had a romance with an American Army officer. In 1946, she and her father made a private trip to Belgium with the apparent goal of her becoming engaged to Prince Charles, who was ruling the country as regent. On Sept. 27, The Associated Press reported that an engagement announcement was likely the next day.
That never happened. Churchill decided to go to Paris to meet with the American secretary of state, James F. Byrnes. Lady Soames accompanied him and met Captain Soames, assistant military attaché for the British Embassy. She later said that he fell in love immediately, but that it took her a few weeks. In an interview at the time, she was asked if she intended to be a “career wife” or a “housewife.” “A housewife, of course,” she said.
Being Baron Soames’s wife involved staging famously entertaining parties in Paris. It also meant speaking off the cuff to 900 guerrillas in Rhodesia. Her husband’s political opponents often complained that they were actually running not against Mr. Soames but against the daughter of a national hero.
Lady Soames, who was short and stocky like her father and perhaps as stubborn, savored a fine cigar. After she quit smoking, around 2000, she auctioned off the family stash of Havanas for $221,000.
Maxine Greene taught at Teachers College for almost 50 years and became known for her work in “aesthetic education.”CreditKathy Willens/Associated Press
Maxine Greene, a teacher and education theorist who promoted the arts as a fundamental learning tool and in nearly 50 years at Teachers College, Columbia University, became its resident Pied Piper, known for her persuasive scholarship, her vivid writing and her imbuing teaching with a spirit of endless adventure, died on May 29 at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.
“With the passing of Maxine Greene, Teachers College has lost its brilliant philosopher queen,” the president of the college, Susan Fuhrman, said in a statement.
Dr. Greene was a very public intellectual, the personification of ideas in the world. In addition to her post at Teachers College — she was William F. Russell Professor Emerita in the Foundations of Education and taught as recently as this spring — she was philosopher-in-residence at the Lincoln Center Institute, the educational arm of the performing arts center.
Her apartment on Fifth Avenue, not far from the Guggenheim and Metropolitan museums, was a salon welcoming of students, current and former, and reflective of a formidable sphere of influence that included the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire; Rika Burnham, head of education at the Frick Collection; the playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith; the writer Frank McCourt; and the educator and former radical activist Bill Ayers.
Dr. Greene was a prolific writer and lecturer on topics in education like multiculturalism and the power of imagination, and she was often cited as an intellectual descendant of the progressive thinker John Dewey.
An opponent of stringent academic standards as measured by testing and other classroom accountability theories, she extolled the virtues of the Thoreauvian concept she called “wide-awakeness,” though she was undeterred by the pessimism of Thoreau, who asserted that “the millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life.”
Dr. Greene believed that creative thinking and robust imagining were the keys not just to an individual’s lifelong learning but to the flourishing of a democratic society. She espoused the view that students could be taught and encouraged to engage the world not just as it is but as it might otherwise be.
“I am suggesting that, for too many individuals in modern society, there is a feeling of being dominated, and that feelings of powerlessness are almost inescapable,” Dr. Greene wrote in a 1978 essay, “Wide-Awakeness and the Moral Life.”
“I am also suggesting that such feelings can to a large degree be overcome through conscious endeavor on the part of individuals to keep themselves awake, to think about their condition in the world, to inquire into the forces that appear to dominate them, to interpret the experiences they are having day by day. Only as they learn to make sense of what is happening, can they feel themselves to be autonomous. Only then can they develop the sense of agency required for living a moral life.”
As a scholar, Dr. Greene is probably best known for her work in aesthetic education, arguing that the arts encourage a kind of thinking that best serves humankind.
“Not only ought young persons (in association with their teachers) be provided a range of experiences for perceiving and noticing,” she wrote in a 1981 essay, “Aesthetic Literacy in General Education.” “They ought to have opportunities, in every classroom, to pay heed to color and glimmer and sound, to attend to the appearances of things from an aesthetic point of view.
“If not, they are unlikely to be in a position to be challenged by what they see or hear; and one of the great powers associated with the arts is the power to challenge expectations, to break stereotypes, to change the ways in which persons apprehend the world.
“George Steiner has written that ‘Rembrandt altered the Western perception of shadow spaces and the weight of darkness. Since Van Gogh we notice the twist of flame in a poplar.’ We can say the same about alterations in our vision due to the work of writers ranging from Shakespeare to Sartre, alterations in our hearing due to composers from Bach to Schoenberg and John Cage. The point is that such perspectives do not open up spontaneously. The capacity to perceive, to attend, must be learned.”
Dr. Greene was born Sarah Maxine Meyer in Brooklyn on Dec. 23, 1917, to the former Lily Greenfield and Max Meyer, who owned a company that made costume jewelry. She attended the Berkeley School (now Berkeley Carroll School) in Brooklyn, graduated from Barnard College and earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in philosophy of education from New York University. She joined Teachers College in 1965 as the sole woman in the philosophy of education department.
An early marriage to Joseph Krimsley, a doctor, ended in divorce. Her 50-year marriage to Orville Greene, a patent lawyer, ended with his death in 1997. Dr. Greene is survived by a son, Timothy Greene; a stepdaughter, Elizabeth Greene; a sister, Jeanne Shinefield; and a grandson. A daughter, Linda Lechner, died before her.
Dr. Greene’s books include “The Dialectic of Freedom,” “Landscapes of Learning,” “Teacher As Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age” and “Variations on a Blue Guitar,” a collection of essays on aesthetic education.
A documentary film, “Exclusions & Awakenings: The Life of Maxine Greene,” was released in 2001. But she may be best remembered for her classroom instruction, which drew on personal experience and a wide range of cultural references, from Sartre to Mel Brooks, and inspired a rare kind of loyalty and admiration among generations of students.
“At the very least, students were given access to an active mind, inquiring openly and in full view,” Mr. Ayers wrote in “Doing Philosophy: Maxine Greene and the Pedagogy of Possibility,” an essay that appeared in a 1998 collection, “A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation.”
“Because she harvested her teaching from her own lived experience,” Mr. Ayers went on, “it always had an improvisational feel to it — fresh and vital and inventive, yes, but also firmly rooted in a coherent ground of core beliefs and large purposes. We could see imagination at work, and questioning that knew no limits, and dialectics. And students were invited, if they chose, to join in, to open themselves in dialogue and pursuit.”
OVER the next three weeks, baseball players from around the country will compete in three regional tryouts for a chance to make it onto theUnited States baseball team. These are among the most elite, dedicated and talented athletes in their sport, and the best of them will go on to play against teams from Japan, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Venezuela and Taiwan in the World Cup tournament held in September in Miyazaki, Japan. But the team receives almost no attention, and many of its members weren’t even able to play their sport in high school. These baseball players are women.
The conventional wisdom is that baseball is for boys and men, and softball is for girls and women. But women have been playing baseball since long before they had the right to vote. As the national pastime went professional, women were forced out of it — and into softball. Title IX, the 1972 federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education, also protects equal access to and funding of sports for boys and girls at the school level, and girls have been fighting to play baseball — with lawsuits, if necessary — since the 1970s. But equal access is often interpreted to mean not baseball, but softball.
Both men and women swim, ski, snowboard and run marathons and sprints. Both play tennis and soccer and basketball. Softball, though, is a completely distinct sport, with different pitching — underhand — and different equipment, including a larger ball. It also has shorter distances from pitcher to home plate and between bases, fewer innings and a smaller outfield. Yes, Division I softball is demanding, far from the beery fun of middle-aged weekend leagues. But the women’s version of baseball is not softball. It’s baseball.
Baseball evolved from the British game rounders, played by both girls and boys. Softball was invented in 1887 by men, though it came to be seen as an easier, “safer” and more modest game — more suitable, that is, to ladies.
The sporting-goods magnate A. G. Spalding, determined to turn baseball into a patriotic pastime, created the origin story of its invention in 1839 by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, N.Y. Spalding proclaimed baseball to be not just all-American but also all-male: “A woman may take part in the grandstand, with applause for the brilliant play, with waving kerchief to the hero,” he wrote in his 1911 book “America’s National Game,” but she couldn’t actually play: “Base Ball is too strenuous for womankind.”
Yet the history of women playing baseball goes as far back as the 1830s. They played on barnstorming “Bloomer Girls” teams, on amateur teams and at colleges.
In 1931, a 17-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell of the Chattanooga Lookouts struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig consecutively in an exhibition game. Mamie “Peanut” Johnson pitched against male players in the Negro Leagues for several seasons. Women’s teams played one another during World War II, as depicted in the movie “A League of Their Own.” But in 1952, Major League Baseball officially banned women’s contracts.
The flimsiness of arguments against women’s participation was on display in the desperate legal efforts of Little League to bar girls after a string of lawsuits in 1973. Officials claimed that baseball was “a contact sport”; that boys would quit if girls were allowed; that girls’ bones were weaker than boys’; that facial injuries could ruin a girl’s looks and therefore prospects in life; and, most outlandishly, that girls struck in the chest by a ball might later develop breast cancer. One Little League vice president expressed his concern that coaches would not be able to “pat girls on the rear end the way they naturally do to boys.”
Girls are now allowed in Little League. And they have the legal right under Title IX to play baseball on a school-sponsored boys’ team if there is no girls’ team available, which there usually is not (and no, softball doesn’t count): “The law is very clear,” says Nancy Hogshead-Makar, senior director of advocacy for the Women’s Sports Foundation.
Nevertheless, teams often balk when girls want to play hardball. Last year, 14-year-old Jasmine Miles was barred from the boys’ team at her Arizona middle school. She had played on the team in seventh grade. “The coach thought I was pretty good,” she said over the phone, adding that he often had her play with the more advanced eighth-grade team. But when she wanted to try out for the team this year, “They said I couldn’t play because I was a girl.”
She was told to play softball, with the school district claiming that it was equivalent to baseball and thus complied with Title IX. Instead, she played baseball on a mixed-gender team in the local youth baseball league — which she will age out of when she turns 15.
Even where no official rules keep them out of baseball, girls face enormous pressure to switch to softball. “They get chased right out of middle-school baseball,” said Jennifer Ring, the author of “Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball,” whose daughter fought to play in high school and played a season on Vassar College’s Division III men’s team. When a girl persists in playing, Ms. Ring said, “you can’t count on it being a good experience, because you have to explain why you’re even there.”
Last year, 474,791 American boys played high school baseball, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations; 1,259 girls did. In some cases these girls were the only ones in their entire state. No college scholarships lie ahead, as they do in softball. Without the development of skills and talent at the high school and college level, a national women’s baseball team that plays in a World Cup will be treated as little more than a curiosity, struggling to find the attention it deserves.
What if we just admitted that softball and baseball are not, in fact, “separate but equal” but entirely different sports? There is no rational basis to claim that girls can’t throw overhand, run 90 feet between bases or handle a hardball. And there is no reason but sexism to prevent them from doing so.
Susan Spencer-Wendel, a former newspaper reporter who wrote a best-selling memoir about living life to the fullest after learning she had an incurable muscle-wasting disease — and wrote most of it on a smartphone with her right thumb — died on Wednesday at her home in West Palm Beach, Fla. She was 47.
The cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that causes muscles to atrophy. Her husband, John Wendel, announced the death.
Ms. Spencer-Wendel’s memoir, “Until I Say Good-Bye: My Year of Living With Joy,” published in 2013, chronicled the year following the diagnosis in 2011. She quit her job as a criminal courts reporter and feature writer for The Palm Beach Post — writing farewell articles describing the trips she and her husband took to Budapest and the Yukon — and resolved to do everything she wanted while she was still able.
Patients with A.L.S. typically live about four years after the onset of symptoms; Ms. Spencer-Wendel traced her first symptoms to 2009.
In her “final, wonderful year,” as she called it, she journeyed to the sub-Arctic in search of the aurora borealis, viewed the last space shuttle launch, and reunited with her birth mother in California more than four decades after she was given up for adoption.
She went to Cyprus to track down relatives of her biological father, who was no longer living and whom she had never known; swam with dolphins; and took her 14-year-old daughter to try on wedding dresses at a bridal shop in New York, knowing she would not live to see her married.
Ms. Spencer-Wendel managed an unusual blend of stoicism and passion in her final years.
“My philosophy is, ‘Do what you delight in — and do it no matter what’ — so I did,” she said in an interview with the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph. “You can’t fight nature. Don’t fret about what you can’t control — it can’t be undone. Death will be a blessing, I believe that every day, but I haven’t let that get in my way. There’s death, but first there’s life."
The memoir grew from a 12-page book proposal presented to Claire Wachtel at HarperCollins, which accepted it for a reported $2.3 million. Universal Pictures bought the rights.
Lacking the strength to use a regular keyboard, Ms. Spencer-Wendel began typing her manuscript on an iPad. When moving her hands across the screen became too difficult, she turned to an iPhone, clutching it with her left hand and using her thumb to type in the “notes” section.
“I would type each letter with my right thumb — tap! tap! — the only digit I could control,” she explained in the book. “I still had one helluva right thumb.”
Ms. Spencer was raised by her adoptive parents, Tom and Tee Spencer, in the West Palm Beach area. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida.
Besides her husband and her parents, she is survived by her daughter, Marina; two sons, Aubrey and Wesley; and a brother.
By the time her book was published, Ms. Spencer-Wendel was having trouble speaking and needed her husband’s help in answering questions in an interview with NPR. She described her early symptoms, her reaction to the diagnosis and the gentle gradualness with which she and her husband informed their children of the illness. She retold the story of the iPhone and thumb and explained how important it was to her that people not think she wrote a maudlin book.
Near the end of the NPR interview, there was this exchange with the interviewer, Scott Simon:
Mr. Simon: “Let me ask you about some of these trips. You went to the Yukon to see the Northern Lights.”
Ms. Spencer-Wendel: “Yes.”
Mr. Simon: “But the lights were off” (meaning the aurora borealis wasn’t visible during her visit).
Ms. Spencer-Wendel’s answer was inaudible. Her husband interjected, repeating her reply: “As you know, life ain’t perfect.”
