my professor (lovely man, married to our TA, 5’2", about as intimidating as a muffin) is a dendrologist by trade, so he studies trees. it was about three hours into our social sciences course, last lecture before exams, everyone was frazzled and exhausted, so he told us about his most exciting/in-depth research to date to cheer us up.
(the few of us who actually showed up were like “ok sir im sure its fascinating” but in our minds we were totally like its trees what. is. exciting. about trees. You might be wondering the same thing – the acorns? the leaves? the roots? BUT NO. IMMA FUCKIN TELL YA.)
ANYWAY we settle in, he had a few pictures loaded up from his field work (we were chuckling at this point…. ‘hehehe field work’ i giggled to my frend. its trees.) and began to tell his tale. it’s long, imma warn you, but……. god. just read it.
theres an species of tree called the cucumber tree (Magnolia acuminata, if ya wanna get all Latin-y). its super endangered, in our region there’s only ~280 that are registered by the government, yadda yadda yadda. my prof thought that was tragic (i know) but also strange, because when he was writing his thesis about local trees years ago, he kept coming across cucumber trees in really random places. we’re talking like backyards, independently-owned nurseries, etc. WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE because, according to tree law (i know) it is very strictly protected by the government, and thus super “illegal to possess, transport, collect, buy or sell any part of a living or dead member of a listed species if it originates from wild sources.” essentially, the govt takes control over growing the trees and anyone who independently raises them is breaking the law (i know)
so he’d ask people “do you have a permit for these trees?” and they were like “uh no, it’s just a tree someone sold me, i think it looks nice, are you gonna arrest me?” so he’d be like “nah nah nah just tell me who sold it to you”
eventually, months/years later, someone did, and turns out it was like this underground sort-of illegal tree dealing club (i know). so my prof went, got a bit of funding from the government, who were getting pissed at independent cucumber tree numbers, and THIS IS WHERE IT GETS INTO THE GOOD SHIT I STG.
he infiltrates the tree trafficking organization. he buys a cucumber tree from an independent nursery, raises it for months, ensures he gets noticed by the traffickers, and then INFILTRATES it and convinces its leader to LET HIM JOIN. he has to pay like a steep entrance fee, which he does (and it blows my mind that the government of my country paid money to illegal tree dealers), but then he is given full access to records and maps because they think he’s one of them, not a SECRET AGENT.
now this part blows my mind because the tree lords don’t even have to try very hard to find cucumber trees because government agents MARK THE TREES AND DISTINCTLY TAG THEM SAYING THIS IS ENDANGERED DO NOT TOUCH. so, ya know…………. it’s a bit obvious. my prof hangs out with the members so much that he figures out their “hit spots”. these are where the trees are relatively secluded and unguarded. (he writes all this shit and numbers down for his research.)
BUT THATS NOT ENOUGH BECAUSE THE GOVT SAYS HES WASTING THEIR FUNDING IF HE DOESNT HAVE PROOF and they are willing to take LEGAL ACTION for misuse of funding (my prof doesn’t have the money nore time nor power to take them to court, which would also blow his cover). so my prof literally STAKES OUT a copse of cucumber trees at a recognized wildlife reserve for. DAYS. he camps there, and watches the trees, is about to give up, he’s going off an unreliable rumor from the traffickers that a harvester would be going there within the next week. finally, this guy comes and takes the cucumber tree seeds from the CLEARLY MARKED trees by the government, and my prof takes pictures (we are shown these pictures, most of us are speechless at this point). dozens of candid shots of a man my grandpa’s age with a grocery store bag, garden shears, and a ladder, clipping away the illegal seeds and then going on his merry fucking way.
so my prof has the proof, he’s been undercover for months now at this point, he writes up his report, gives it to the government who is like…….. “oh shit”, helps them draft up a new LESS COMPLETELY FUCKING OBVIOUS way of marking endangered trees (so that way non-tree-lovers wouldn’t damage them further, etc.), and then never returns to the tree traffickers. he’d given them a fake name, address, everything….. he disappears.
…there was a full minute of stunned silence from us students at this point, during which he grew more and more nervous (again, he’s a muffin) and all of us students are just like……. “whoa.” we asked him what happened to the remaining illegal cucumber trees & if he turned the tree dealers in to the government, and that is when he smiles a little bit and shows us the last few pictures. because here’s the kicker… he never turned the smugglers in. he burned all the data he collected, defied the government pressuring him to turn them in, and the only reason he’s not incarcerated is because his work is so prominent in certain circles now & universities love him, that there would be an uproar if he got arrested. he’s like a fucking anti-hero and then he tells us (i’ll never forget, it’s the most inspirational green-thumb thing in the world) “it may be ‘illegal’, but those who risk their liberty to ~save the world~ should never be reprimanded, no matter what those in power say.”
we are all stunned. some of us are considering dendrology as a field we’d now be interested in pursuing. he clicks his slide one final time, before we leave our last lecture and, since he had an asthma attack (lil muffin) he didn’t attend our exam, so i never see him again…………
and there, on the slides, the last picture? THERE HE IS. in his own backyard. with his equally lovely TA wife. both grinning innocently, standing underneath a……. FUCKING. FULL GROWN. ILLEGAL. CUCUMBER TREE.
there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of course there was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”
I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy.
have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:
my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?
wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.
background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.
so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—
then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”
some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.
much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.
so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.
my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. the panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:
I always send an email to my professors about a week before the semester starts that says this:
SUBJECT: Preferred Name
Body:
Dear [PROFESSOR’S PREFIX AND LAST NAME], My name is [YOUR FIRST AND LAST NAME], and I will be attending your course [COURSE TITLE] on [DAYS OF CLASS] at [TIME OF CLASS] this semester. I am transgender and have not yet legally changed my name. On your roster is my name is [LEGAL NAME]. I would greatly appreciate it if you refer to me as [PREFERRED NAME] and use [PREFERRED PRONOUNS] when referring to me. Thank you for your understanding, and I look forward to starting your course this week. Sincerely, [PREFERRED FULL NAME]
Also, look into seeing if your school has a preferred name policy! My school just implemented one last August! It still has some loose bolts so I email my professor’s still anyway but it can be helpful on school IDs and such!
As a prof, this is both overkill and perfect – very polite and very thorough.
I only say ‘overkill’ because I get a lot of email in August and September and would be happy with something that got to the point a little faster:
Dear Professor [name],
I’m in your [course number or title] class, [section number if applicable] this semester. My name on official documents is [legal name], but I would greatly appreciate it if you would use [preferred name] and [preferred pronouns].
Thanks for your understanding, [etc.]
I don’t need to know why, unless someone is comfortable disclosing. I just need to respect it.
(I’ve even had “hey, my name on the list is [name] but I go by [name] and [pronouns] instead. cool?” … But I teach in a very informal department, and while I was fine with it, I wouldn’t actually recommend that course of action as a first contact. XD )
I finally managed to get hold of a copy of my dissertation! You can read it on Google Docs HERE. Please feel free to download and cite the work if it helps you with your own studies. 🙂
You guys, this is 70 pages of analysis of tumblr language and you should probably read it. I know I’m going to.
Sometimes I remember that there’s a massive beef in the paleontological community between Jack Horner and Robert Bakker and it’s so big that when they both worked as advisers on the Jurassic Park films, Spielberg made 2 characters based on them and had a T. rex eat Bakker’s character as a favour to Horner.
“The bearded paleontologist Dr. Robert Burke, who is eaten by a Tyrannosaurus rex in Steven Spielberg’s film The Lost World: Jurassic Park, is an affectionate caricature of Bakker.
In real life, Bakker has argued for a predatory T. rex, while Bakker’s rival paleontologist Jack Horner views it as primarily a scavenger.
According to Horner, Spielberg wrote the character of Burke and had him killed by the T. rex as a favor for Horner. After the film came out, Bakker recognized himself in Burke, loved the caricature, and actually sent Horner a message saying, ‘See, I told you T. rex was a hunter!’.”
I wish i could find this one article written in I believe the 90’s that went under the radar on abortion. The author said that the “life” arguments are basically useless on either side and what actually matters is that humans shouldn’t have a right to use other human bodies as a resource without consent no matter how alive or sentient they are, even if they’re on the brink of death you have the right to deny them access to you. It probably was too radical for pro-choice activists back in those days but like…that’s the most robust arguement lol so we need 2 being that back and dead the pontifications and splitting hairs about “life” in my honest onion
I found it. Actually, it was written in the 70’s. She was way ahead of the curve.
The article is ‘A Defense of Abortion’ by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Essential reading!
If you cannot demand that a person donate their organs to keep you alive, you have no right to legislate that an embryo gets to use a woman’s body to keep itself alive without the woman’s consent.
so my campus is currently hosting an ENORMOUS conference of scholars who study medieval history. they’ve been completely flooding the tiny cafe where I work and drinking our coffee faster than we can make it, but the good news is that they provide some PRIME people watching, including:
the fact that all of their name tags include pronouns so that I won’t feel bad assuming anyone’s gender in this post
the woman RANTING about one of her colleagues on the following grounds: “he thinks he understands it from some class he took in 1996! FUCK OFF, TOM.”
the man who was loudly and earnestly discussing the “influence of the Harry Potter fandom on our modern political discourse” while he got a soda
before he was out the door he’d switched topics to his preferred methods for teaching students about elves
the two nice extremely polite young British lads who I could not tell apart to save my life. their name tags indicated that they were apparently not twins, but cloning does not seem impossible.
the sheer number of people graciously volunteering to buy lunch for people they’ve just met
an unexpected number of very handsome soft butch women involved in medieval studies. I am bisexual and weak.
the guy in the flannel shirt who had the coldest, softest, most feminine hands I’ve ever encountered. I fell in love with him for a good 60 seconds. I am bisexual and weak.
people who aren’t from America being cheerfully confused by our money, including my favorite, a Canadian woman who told me “I’m slow with American money because it’s all the same color.”
I’ve learned that people who aren’t going to be in the country for more than a few days don’t give a SHIT about their change and will toss all of it in the take a penny/leave a penny jar. I collected so many quarters, y’all.
also a nice British woman called it the penny pot, which is the cutest shit I’ve ever heard and absolutely its new name.
just in general the EXTREMELY good grace and patience with which everyone accepted that we only have 2 cashiers and that it takes about seven minutes to make more coffee.
SEVERAL times after I apologized for the coffee wait (because this is customer service and minor inconveniences mean we have to grovel) the response was ‘lmao no worries this just means I get a fresh pot’
a woman approached me to day with a fucking enamel pin of that old illustration of a nun gathering dicks from a tree (you know the one) and I said immediately “oh my god, is that a pin of the penis tree?” and she looked stoked and said “yes it is the penis tree! you’re only the second person to recognize it!” what kind of boring ass medieval scholars has she been hanging with???? she was probably so fucking excited to finally have company where she could wear that pin and nobody said anything??? rude.
you know, this one
I have more:
every single person who said “cheers” when I gave them their change.
the painfully hip young man who was dressed entirely in standard academic business casual EXCEPT FOR his shiny silver doc martens.
me: “you boots are amazing.”
him: “!!!! thank you!”
the man who walked in, spotted the selection of high octane energy drinks, and nearly cried with relief. when he came to the register to pay for what was probably enough caffeine to kill a horse he looked me dead in the eye and said cheerfully “thanks, I’m jet lagged as shit and I can’t be expected to function right now.”
the dude who overheard my friend Austin listening to Florence and the Machine, started chatting with him about it, and asked him out on a date
I sold a hot dog to An Actual Nun
I have a very important update for everyone who had questions regarding the penis tree pin (and there were many of you):
this post found it’s way to one Dr. Kara Maloney, who is in fact the proud wearer of the penis tree pin
as several people have suggested, it does in fact come from the Marginalia Paraphernalia kickstarter, so we can officially say we solved that mystery.
the Fast and the Furious franchise is a homoerotic exploration of humanity’s vision of a multi-ethnic mechanised orgy of pain and fraternal bonding. In this essay I will
I’m looking for this on jstor right now
@jstor are you hiding the full text of this? Share it with the world!
Steel Phoenix Studios 