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Text: [Women] in STEM
Author: Sara Matson
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Plot: An invisible fabric wraps itself around the brains of men and forces them into the lunatic position that women cannot be scientists cos they once ate an apple in a make-believe garden.
Subplot: Twenty or so women become trapped inside quantum-poetry, with abstraction the only way out.
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[Women] in STEM is a series of mostly surrealist/abstract poems inspired by the lives and accomplishments [and possible flaws] of the following women [in STEM]:
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Sau Lan Wu // Hypatia // Mary Engle Pennington //
Edith Clarke // Tu Youyou // Katherine Johnson //
Cecilia Payne-Gasposchkin // Helen Gwynne-Vaughan //
Ana Roque de Duprey // Maria Hibrea (Mary the Prophet)
// Valentina Tereshkova // Rebecca Lee Crumper //
Annie Turnbo Malone // Mae Carol Jemison // Maria
Telkes // Eustice Newton Foote // Maria Sibylla Merian //
Cheung Shien Wu // Mary Anning // Emmy Noether
~
How many of these women do I know?
At a glance, maybe two or three. Katherine Johnson [from the movie Hidden Figures], Mae Carol Jemison [astronaut/Star Trek fan]…and that’s about it.
The discoverer of gluons should be more famous, definitely.
Hypatia sounds familiar, but I could be mistaking her for another ancient Egyptian name.
Mary the Prophet?
I know Mary Sidney and her basement of occultists. The Soulmother of Küssnacht. Annie Besant. Marie Laveau. Fang the Alchemist. Sybil Leek.
[Women] in OCCULT CIRCLES = next book?
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STEM.
Can’t say much about Tech, Engineering or Maths, but I did read a lot of hard physics at Atomic Rockets to prep for the scientist characters in Planet Rasputin. That was the anarchist/sci-fi novel I wrote a few years back. Ten dissidents on a ship heading nowhere, with two of them backgrounded as trained scientists. For some reason, I wanted to include some stuff about teleporters, and I knew it wasn’t scientifically viable – the energy required is ludicrously high and you can’t break down a human body into separate atoms without killing it, obviously – but I included it anyway.
It was tough.
Science really isn’t my strong point.
Which is weird as I’ve watched endless episodes of Star Trek, and some of that science is at least theoretical [if not very likely]. I guess I just didn’t listen very closely. Or I didn’t understand what it was I was listening to.
Graviton emitter has stuck with me for some reason.
And neutrino scanner.
Neutrinos are lighter than light, right? Or they travel faster than light? I wrote the character of Chu knowing about this specific thing and now I can’t remember what I wrote her knowing.
My brain is leaking.
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Of course, if you look over at Film Dada, you’ll see the sixth one down is written by Sara Matson, the author of this work.
Johnny Mnemonic, that was the film she committed ekphrasis on. I remember the first pic I did for it was a bit shit [the crucifixes were out of focus, the colour was weird] so I redid it a few months later and I think it looks a lot better now.
Just like the Johnny M piece, the poems in [Women] in STEM – I’ll abbreviate that to WiS from time to time, just for the sake of variety – are intensely lyrical, abstract at times, surreal within moments of muck and abjection, contradiction queens etc.
She also likes to use < > whereas I usually go with [ ].
Is there a danger of repetition after ten poems or so, if the style doesn’t change?
Maybe.
Theme could be a difference maker. Character/cultural context too. The twenty women featured aren’t all from the same race or background. And one of them is a multi-millionaire entrepreneur, which sets off alarm bells, but I’ll get to that later.
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When Geordi LaForge and Data start riffing in TNG, I usually switch off and follow the emotions behind the scientific esoterica being said [or ejaculated in Geordi’s case – Burton is great at giving life to technobabble, he’s very dramatic]. They’ve got the solution and that’s it. Same with Dax and O’Brien, or Janeway and Seven, or Janeway and Torres, or Janeway and the replicator.
I’m a bit worried that a lot of STEM references, or STEM specific vocab is gonna fly right over my head in these poems, but it’s not a huge worry as I’ve also read Batesian Prey of the American Southwest, where I didn’t know who Kersey was, and Pilot, where I had only a cursory idea as to what happened in the TV show Lost, and Sorcererer, where half the words weren’t even in the dictionary [exaggeration, but the vocab was tough].
It should be fine.
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There are 20 STEM women listed [I just counted them three times to make sure], so, realistically, to stop this thing snowballing into Gravity’s Rainbow, I’m gonna aim for 2-300 words on each one. However, that’s very tentative. These de-con-strucs rarely go to plan. The last four I did were around seven thousand words.
I’ll see how it goes.
May not have much to say about some of them, due to the above-mentioned scientific ignorance, and general brain fatigue.
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Sau Lan Wu
Bio: gluons and the God particle
My initial plan was to just put up key lines from each poem and discuss [with myself], and I will do that for most of them, but I think the opener needs to be spread out full body, to give an idea of Sara’s style, formatting and methodology.
I’ll go shorthand with this.
The first line shows the first of many contradictions to come with ‘balanced species’ followed by the bracketed ‘[experimental].’ Well, either contradiction or juxtaposition. I suppose ‘experimental’ doesn’t necessarily have to be in contradiction with ‘balanced’, but it feels like it does. As in, a balanced species is the consequence of fine-tuning or long-term development, whereas ‘experimental’ is a koaowl or catmeleon.
‘Parameterized’??
Ah, describing the parameters of something. Should’ve guessed that one.
‘Quantum numbers or family symmetry.’
A sense of order or stable reflection from things that are inherently chaotic or dysfunctional.
‘Charmed, I’m sure.’
Lightens the tone, adds something ineffable e.g. what is charm? Willem Dafoe in a dressing gown? Maggie Cheung speaking Cantonese?
Could also be a reference to charm quarks, which I remember from googling Quark from DS9 and accidentally veering into quantum physics [on a Blogspot site].
‘Decaying into duality.’
Why decay?
A reference to an inner duality within the psyche-construct, or the forced splitting of men/women by the patriarchy?
Not sure.
This is a poem of contradictions, hitting each other like the Higgs-Boson thingy. Chaos vs Stability, everything vs nothing. Some of the scientific terms aren’t solidified in meaning for me, kind of like listening in at the warp core again, but I think I get the intention.
Everything is interacting with/pervading everything.
~
‘maybe i’m too hard on myself
but that doesn’t seem likely’
~
These last 2 lines are more mundane, a self-rebuke as potential mini-thesis that she [the subject/author?] herself is sceptical of.
What does all this say about Sau Lan Wu? [or Wu Sau Lan in the Chinese way – the western way feels weird to read for me, but I’ll leave it as it is in the book]
Perhaps the beautiful madness of working on something like the God particle, matched with the madness of the quantum realm, whatever/wherever that is.
Not Antman.
Not Fluidic Space.
Maybe the chaos of working with cold men?
Don’t know much about the details of her life, what obstacles she had to overcome. Sexism, I suppose, either overt or buried in mannerism. I won’t say microaggressions cos some people just naturally look like moody cunts. Like the uncles sitting in Dai Gah Lok staring at me. And, I think, back in the old days, the misogynists didn’t really bother with the micro part. It was just, ‘get back in the kitchen, are you aware that your female is talking, two coffees, no milk, luv’ etc.
The last line of this is quite jarring though. Like a cut-out from the rest of the poem.
Was she too hard on herself?
Or is the last line an implicit [and defiant] accusation that others were too hard on her?
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Hypatia
Bio: Egyptian scholar, murdered for being Head of a Uni [labelled ‘witchcraft’ at that time]
Recently I asked a student of mine [female,11 years old] where she would time travel to if she could, and, with almost no hesitation, she said 1842. She would sit on a clifftop behind an invisible forcefield and launch two atomic weapons at the British Navy shipping opium.
Made me laugh.
But then I said the Chinese would either worship her as a deity and go insane from over-devotion, or execute her for practising witchcraft.
Only those two choices, obviously.
Not sure if the Chinese ever burned witches. In the West, the witch figure is typically related to the religious figure of Satan, which didn’t exist in China until the missionaries turned up. Was that during the Ming dynasty?
They did have alchemists and paganists though, like Fang during the Han Dynasty. Was she considered a witch?
I’ve just checked and the first missionaries turned up in 6th Century China, then got suppressed by the Tang Dynasty, then made a comeback in the 16th Century when the eunuchs were in charge. Well, kind of in charge. One guy in particular is always demonised in Chinese dramas set in that era, which is an easy way for the ruler to-
Big tangent, back to Hypatia.
~
‘Dispute the mythology but paint the philosopher’
~
Nice contradiction – be sceptical of story-creations from the past but at the same time use art to create a story-creator for the present and future i.e. the philosopher.
It’s interesting, the language in this poem is a mix of historical-myth and scientific method, which makes it slightly different from the first [Sau Lan Wu].
~
‘authenticate the belief of sacred [numbers]
speak the blessed tongue of universal equations’
~
Gives a strong vibe of old Belfast Egypt, ritualism meshed with materialist study.
Dark turn at the end.
You’ll have to take my word for that.
Or go buy the book.
Or I could just put the line up
~
‘the death of the matriarch will always destroy
even the tiniest blooms on the vine’
~
See, quite dark.
Hypatia got executed and if you were a woman in Egypt after that you wouldn’t be applying for Uni head anytime soon. Unless you had a death wish. Or desired to follow your idol [Hypatia] into A’Aru [The Field of Reeds/Afterlife].
Suicide by Academic Achievement = the Egyptian equivalent of suicide by cop in the US
Hmm.
Is there a reason why Hypatia comes after Sau Lan Wu?
One of the most modern of the STEM women flanked by one of the most ancient and persecuted. Chaos and beauty of the first poem versus a fragile mix of ritualism and nascent discovery in the second.
Feels a bit like the God particle is the prologue, and then Hypatia is a flashback to primitive male flex, almost like the Boson particle itself has been unleashed by Sau Lan Wu and is now going to bounce around the rest of the book in tune to its own insanity.
Or maybe there is a purpose to the order of the poems.
Is there?
If I take the first 5 – Sau Lan Wu [God Particle], Hypatia [Scholar], Mary Engle Pennington [Bacteriologist], Edith Clarke [Electrical Engineer], Tu Youyou [Scientist] – and stare at them long enough…
I don’t know.
Will have to ask Sara later.
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New methodology:
Instead of going through all twenty poems, I’m gonna pick out the ones I’m most interested in. This should leave something non-spoiled for those who haven’t read [Women] in STEM yet. And allow me to sleep before 3am.
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Tu Youyou
Bio: scientist who discovered the cure for malaria [and has her name written in the Chinese way – maybe cos she’s Chinese, whereas Sau Lan Wu is Chinese-American?]
Not just a scientist but an expert in traditional Chinese medicine, which I have some experience in. Or my wife does.
The basic concept: find the underlying root cause vs the western approach of Panadol Panadol Panadol. Obviously Panadol does work, and it’s normal to take it when you have a headache, but the Chinese approach seems more caring somehow i.e. they want to stop future headaches.
My experience?
Well, not as a doctor or practitioner, clearly.
But I do live in Hong Kong.
There are three Chinese medicine centres in my neighbourhood <that I know of – sometimes they’re hidden upstairs> and they’re all fairly popular.
I mean, there are always people sitting in there, waiting to be seen.
My wife has been there too, and to various other centres over the last decade or so. She used to take this thick brown stuff that tasted vile [I tried some too], apparently to repair her general bodily health. Almost had her neck snapped off when she felt a bit stiff around the shoulders one time [by one of the practitioners downstairs from us, possibly a rookie]. Did acupuncture for some reason or another [also uncomfortable].
Chinese medicine can be brutal, and the brown stuff tastes like shit, but it can also be quite effective.
Apart from the neck incident.
That did fuck all.
~
‘wholly traditional synthetic
violet brown and intensely aromatic’
~
First line = another classic Matson [Matsonian?] contradiction. Synthetic is unnatural and therefore not likely to be traditional in the sense of how we understand it now. Maybe in the year 2324 though.
Second line – ‘violet brown’? I’m not familiar with that colour mix.
~
‘volatile and lost in the sky’
~
Maybe not a contradiction [which I’m beginning to realise is the source of all great poetry, maybe, could be, who knows?] but the inner state of instability within the outer state of maze-perplexity. Usually something is volatile within a stable environment so as to be described/defined as volatile [unstable]. And now that it’s crossed over into its own negation [stability], the sky has become confusing.
Do I need to know more about Tu Youyou? Or the properties of malaria?
Some of the scientific terminology makes the imagery hard to grasp.
Doesn’t matter.
I’ll just go with my <derivative> gut.
~
‘iron bridges melt my cleavage
while blood digestion releases the
hope of millions airborne
like a virus //’
~
First line is a mystery. The industrial revolution dilutes the urge to show tits?
Second line could be a malaria reference. Mosquitoes suck blood, take the virus airborne?
All I can do here is guesswork.
Admire the contradictions <which I am doing>.
Digesting blood is bad but in this case it releases the hope of millions airborne, which in turn is akin to a virus that may infect and murder those same millions [and their hope], or maybe other millions.
Just like the West sacrifices lives in the Global South. The hope of white millions versus the abject fucking misery of the rest.
You could go down any artery with this.
With all the poems in this book.
I say ‘artery’ cos I’m also reading You With Your Memory Are Dead and there’s a line in that which isn’t a contradiction in the strictest sense but does give the imitation vibe of one. ‘Abandoned artery growing God on a chair.’ Something like this. Feels like a bleaker version of Sara’s stuff, or even something she may have written too, only with a line break after ‘growing’.
Look:
‘Abandoned artery growing
God on a chair.’
See?
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Katherine Johnson
Bio: human computer who saved John Glen from exploding in space.
I know Johnson from the movie Hidden Figures and her long journey to the bathroom when all she wanted to do was solve equations.
What else?
She turned up at the Oscars once, poor woman.
Probably the Golden Globes as well. And the SAG Awards. And the Venice Film Festival. And all the other film festivals. And The Breakfast Club. And Sesame Street. And Space Precinct. And Art Attack. And Kevin Costner’s house.*
And now she’s dead, apparently.
*She wasn’t in Space Precinct.
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I mentioned it at the start, but is there a point when the style of the poems becomes repetitive? We’re five or six poems in and the format hasn’t changed much. I’m not fatigued, but it does feel a bit blended together if you read through continuously.
I recommend a break between each one, to recharge and re-reflect.
[Same goes for my stuff. A lot of my poems felt samey before – I noticed some vocab and patterns repeating, a weird addiction to the word ‘enervating’ – so I started incorporating black scrawl images and weird collage and just going fully into the trance state, basically. And now, after doing that for almost a year, I’m starting to see repetition in that too. Could be burnout on the horizon. Which in itself could be inspirational. What kind of art comes out of a failed mental state?]
Difference in theme/references?
Each poem is a little bit othered from the others.
The starkest example was Sau Lan Wu and Hypatia, but all of them have their own details orbiting their respective character-subject.
With Johnson, it’s space and maths. Separation instead of duality. Or separation forcing duality.
~
‘loving to learn the intricate [but possible]
contrast in desire
our great divide’
~
It’s unclear if this is supposed to be read as one complete conceit, but I think it is.
What is the ‘contrast in desire’?
I’m not sure.
A black woman’s desire is oppressed, she has to claw back with subtle swipes to overcome, while a [white] man’s desire is coddled/subsidized by society.
The contrast shouldn’t exist but does.
~
‘take us beyond the stars inside the calculations’
~
‘polar eccentricity igniting endless brilliance
seeing the distance between dreamed + solved’
~
Being weird leads to endless brilliance.
Sara constantly utilises a duality that, at times, is in opposition to the other but, overall, I believe she wants it all to gel.
I know I said ‘separation’ a minute ago but duality is there too.
There is hope in the macro [beyond the stars] and the not so macro [inside the calculations].
What is the distance between dreamed + solved?
The effort of making something imagined real?
The beauty of the distance that gives us something to always rail against/strive for?
‘infinite beauty in infinite diversity.’
That’s a Trek quote, not Sara’s, though I suspect she would endorse it. Spoken by Spock, a half human, half Vulcan born into a glaring contradiction of a culture <like all cultures>. To be fair, Vulcan logic is predicated on the ludicrous premise that all ancient Vulcans were innately violent and volatile, which ignores completely the few motherfuckers who were starting all the wars i.e. not the average Vulcan fishmonger, electrician, doctor, social worker.
Sara inserts a lot of the same glaring contradictions and…tries to make them work together? Feels more like a half-designed experiment, to be honest, which is the way all poetry should work. Just put in what was, all aspects and traits of that specific woman <in STEM> and her era-context, and then see what comes out of it.
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Peseshet
Bio: an enigma, no bio presented
Too ancient?
~
‘false door secrets etched in stone
read my symbols // //’
~
The door is false and has secrets and those secrets are kept by someone etching them in stone, which means the secret holder wants that secret to be known, to guide someone through the door that is allegedly false.
But if you read their symbols, things won’t be false anymore.
~
‘ocean of humanity pressing down
on every coughed syllable
images / / represent
but we only get so close
bubbles of sound
bursting upon impact’
~
This poem is gum fantastical.
‘Coughed syllable’ implies it is hard to speak, possibly due to climate change, and the collective unconscious of humanity in which Peseshet sits as one of the first, carries a weight to keep this shit going even though this shit is run by capitalist psychopaths who have reduced our world to an image that represents nothing except a sound bubble that will burst upon impact i.e. the object rules passively and is already tired of it.
According to wiki, Peseshet may not have existed. Or maybe she did.
The first two lines play with that idea.
Also interesting that Sara didn’t include her in the main list or the bio list at the end.
Very sneaky.
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Ana Roque de Duprey
Bio: Puerto Rican writer, women’s rights activist, scientist + founder of a university.
~
‘empowerment is opening the door
helping other voices emerge like
thorny vibes spiraling up delicate limbs’
~
This is half of a more direct/straightforward approach, muddied by the third line which says…what? That the empowered voices will not be saint-like?
I would guess that’s it.
Did Sara consciously have that thought when writing this poem? That there were some parts within the chaos that had to be made as transparent as possible. Usually these bits pop up at the poem’s end. It is jarring in a good way.
The rest is rampant collision art, throwing opposites together, forcing them to have mutual relations/violations.
Fuck.
According to wiki, Duprey married a slave-owner. But was also the first female editor of a Puerto Rican publication.
I’ve hinted at it already, but there’s a class issue at play in [Women] in Stem. I suppose in relation to all of them to some degree. Wouldn’t have been easy to make it in STEM without at least a middle class background, right?
Being the first female editor of a publication is not terrible, obviously, it does open up some doors that were shut previously, but not to women in the lower classes. Or I assume not. Could be wrong though.
Did she do anything for the workers?
Maybe.
Can’t count it out.
In a way, she reminds me of 19th century Manx preservationist, Sophia Morrison, who was also a women’s rights activist, and possibly gay, but definitely not a Communist or even a Fabian Socialist.
Historical figures will invariably disappoint you.
Cos if you’ve heard of them it means they were in a position of wealth that permitted them to be heard of.
With a few exceptions, of course.
Maybe more than a few.
I’m losing focus a bit, I’ll come back to the class issue later.
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Valentina Tereshkova
Bio: First woman in space + political hack in the Duma right now
~
‘nine bullets for the seagull
bleeding under the skin [centrifuge]
daughters of the sky slip their stone tongues
into the mouths of war’
~
Seagull might be a Chekhov reference.
Bleeding under the skin suggests a hidden wound.
Stone tongues = euphemism for reluctant fellatio?
The last two lines are interesting, and kind of beautiful [even if the euphemism is accurate]. Stone tongues into the mouths of war means the tongue has no feeling. An innate lack of feeling or developed that way through exhaustive use?
Could be a metaphor for the use of Tereshkova during the Cold War, an astronaut forced into a political context when all she wanted to do was see the Earth from up there.
But that wasn’t all she wanted to do.
She joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1961, when it had long been drained of any relation to Communism. Since then she has served as a political hack, a typical nationalist calling for a war in Ukraine that she will never have to fight in. Just like the little midget in the Kremlin. Black belt my fucking ass.
But, despite all this, she was still the first woman in space.
And should be known for that.
Celebrated for it?
~
‘a Soviet job meant worrying about
how much she pissed + who to trust’
~
Possible reference to Tarkovsky’s Mirror here i.e. the mother’s run to the office bathroom <plus dash through the rainy streets to get to the office>
Was it raining in that scene?
Might be confusing it with the ethereal hair-washing routine.
Love the abundant use of ‘+’ instead of ‘and’, I do that all the time in my work.
< > is growing on me too.
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Annie Turnbo Malone
Bio: African-American multi-millionaire, invented and manufactured non-damaging hair care products for black women.
~
‘rooted at the scalp
family herbalism + chemistry’
~
Why the gap between family and herbalism?
Sara often employs gaps. And // //.
And widow lines jutting out, typically at the end.
But why the gap here?
Family is separate from the work branches, but still on the same line and qualified by the ‘rooted at the scalp’ phrase above.
It’s like two parts of her, both equally important to who she was.
That’s a guess.
I don’t know for sure.
I don’t know anything for sure.
That’s the beautiful grotesque of experimentalism.
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Malone is a tough one to write about. I see the phrases ‘multimillionaire’ and ‘entrepreneur’ and Kropotkin bells start ringing. Yet she was also African-American in the Reconstruction era and during Jim Crow Segregation. Everything was against her achieving anything.
Or was it?
From wiki, it appears that she was lower middle class. In fact, her rival, Madam C J Walker came from a poorer background, joined her company, ripped off her invention and also became a multi-millionaire.
Why is she not having a poem written about her?
Because she didn’t invent the hair care product and had no real involvement in STEM, I imagine.
Hmm.
This is tough.
Many conflicting feelings.
She was clearly a capitalist but also did philanthropy + ensured all employees were paid well and given opportunities for advancement, so not the worst kind of capitalist. And she opened up a social community centre.
But there are no details.
Did she pay her workers fairly?
It says she had a factory in the Philippines.
Jesus.
Capitalists lie about their achievements, create their own mythological background, fabricate typical work day routines with a million highly pressured tasks, no coffee, and only two hours sleep. One of my adult students said this about her septuagenarian boss [of a large Cashmere-producing company in China], that he’s amazing cos he only sleeps two to three hours a night, and has done so his whole adult life. Her evidence: he sometimes sends e-mails at 1am. My evidence against: two-three hours sleep for your whole adult life = dead at 35.
Verdict = her boss is a psychopathic parasite.
Back to Malone.
Was she just a relatively okay capitalist compared to the parasitical ones surrounding her at that time?
I might be too harsh here.
Most other historical figures were the same. Communists and Anarchists typically came from a privileged background and carried that baggage with them in a multitude of often contradictory ways e.g. the Soviet leaders frowning on experimental art collectives like Oberiu cos, according to them, the working class wouldn’t like it. In fact, in KRV, I went through a similar <self> debate about these idols, white, black, Cuban, Albanian, Vietnamese, Russian, Chinese etc.
They did some good things but definitely weren’t anything to worship. The better ones would’ve agreed with that sentiment too.
Not Mao and his fucking painting, obviously.
Back to Malone <again>
The theme/intent of [Women] in STEM is to celebrate these women who have been ignored. Or to give their thorny vines a shot at those delicate limbs.
Is there a responsibility to also show their flaws?
To what degree?
Was Malone even a capitalist?
I don’t know.
This is mostly just instinct kicking in.
Some people become rich through inventions, or sports players via their cultivated skills, but that’s a direct cash correlation almost beyond their control. Malone was an entrepreneur, she opened up factories, not a collective.
Better than another [white, male] capitalist swooping in and stealing her invention surely.
But…did she pay her workers well?
Maybe she did.
I hope so.
But I doubt it.
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Eunice Newton Foote
Bio: rich abolitionist who pissed off future Republicans by discovering the Greenhouse effect.
~
‘roll me to the waist
pinned at the hip
pulling at shoulders or hairs like a sticky child
[absolutely free]’
~
Could be more free <obviously> considering the era she lived in.
Not sure which way she’s being rolled.
Or who’s pinning her hip.
The language is suppressive, like someone being played with/experimented on, the pulling at shoulders and hairs either the experimenter acting like a sticky child or the victim struggling to escape the rack.
[absolutely free] might be ironic, even more so given the brackets. A reference to the mutating of slavery during the Reconstruction era into a newer, more devious form. You’re free to get fucked in new and tediously legalistic ways, basically.
Foote is also another case of relative privilege and I believe it is referenced in the poem.
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‘we sang the truth [of rich white women]’
~
Don’t know why I said ‘I believe,’ it’s right there. So right there that the brackets part looks like I added it myself. [I didn’t though. It’s all Sara].
It’s an easier case this time.
Foote was a white woman within a white hegemony, her advantage is obvious, whereas Malone and Duprey were minorities. Actually, Duprey may have been white too. I don’t know.
God, how did I manage to suck myself back into this?
This is [Women] in STEM, not [Thorny Women] in STEM.
Let’s look for the greenhouse effect allusions.
~
‘influence of carbon [dioxides]
absorb my heat plenty to burn’
~
This is the most transparent one, I think.
It literally says ‘carbon dioxide’ and ‘plenty to burn’, though the ‘dioxides’ is trapped in brackets. Does that make it a stowaway? I’m a bit rusty, but isn’t carbon the building block of human life?
Yup, I’ve just checked and I’m happy I didn’t say carbon makes up most of the human body. It is vital to life though, as it can form bonds with other atoms, giving flexibility to the forms and functions that my prospective abs can take.
Carbon, therefore, is very influential.
So maybe the dioxide is hitching a ride, like a virus <carrying the hope of millions> into the sky that the oil companies are fucking up.
~
‘boned work rope on exaggerated statuesque
s-s-s-sound for an s-s-s-s-shaped ideal’
~
No clue what it means, but couldn’t leave without clipping it up here.
Grammatically, you can’t do that first line.
Poetically, why not?
I’m reading the second line as: ‘triple S sound for an essss-shaped ideal.’
And I think it might mean: the sound cannot quite match the ideal in number of S’s, and it’s the shape of the ideal anyway [the image], penetrated by a sound [language?]. And it almost matches, doesn’t it?
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Chien-Shiung Wu
Bio: atomic bomb scientist and expert in experimental physics.
~
‘deamonstration // promise
a holographer to
grieving docents’
~
Deamonstration = intentional typo?
A holographer to grieving docents is a beautiful line, unsure what it means, doesn’t matter.
Won’t go into the class issue again, but obviously what I said before about Malone, Foote, Duprey, most of the women in STEM etc., also applies to Wu.
She came from a well-to-do family.
But all notable figures in history had the means to become so.
Can’t pick on women.
Can’t not pick on them either as I would pick just as hard at men in STEM. Anarchists may be utopian [not me], but we’re well known for our consistency when it comes to shitting on things.
It is a tough one.
Context mutates within the shifting of the sand [environment] around you.
These women are both the thorny vines and the delicate limbs.
Maybe that’s the point Sara was making?
She did seem keen on a sequel to [Women] in STEM titled [Women] in Anarcho-Communism. Which would also have to deal with the class issue cos, like I said before and in KRV, most of those women will have been wealthy.
~
‘respect,
in consideration,
bowed head in sincerity
for my [w]hole
existence as oscillation
+ decay’
~
I’ve looked at this with a team of psychics and we’ve decided that [w]hole is a reference to Wu’s [hidden] part in the atomic bomb, which she is both responsible for and not.
[w] can stand for woman or Wu.
Without the [w], hole existence represents the guilt she may feel for the death of innocent Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Oscillation = alive, vibrating,
towards decay
which oscillates wildly.
+++
I just realised I forgot someone.
Mae Carol Jemison, American astronaut and one-time actress on Star Trek TNG.
Don’t know who she played.
Probably a background extra in Engineering or something.
Or was she the fellow abductee in season 6 episode Schisms, the crew member that Riker carries out of the dimensional portal?
I checked and it wasn’t her.
She was in the Two Rikers ep, Second Chances, operating the transporter.
Also went into space, if that wasn’t clear.
+++
[Women] in STEM is available here for around $8-10.
PsYChO hOLosUitE [zine] 