Seriously, Trigger Warnings

In 1989, I started graduate school at a university that I'll call The U because three decades have passed.  Maybe things have changed.  Anyway, there was a serial rapist working the campus, striking at night in certain parking lots and various locations around town where students and teachers lived.  

And quite a few of the graduate level history classes took place at night, including one in a professor's home.  In fact, once a rape occurred less than a block away from that house while we were in class.  So that worked out quite well for the professor, but it made for disturbing walks to and from the car for the rest of us.  

Yes, we female students including me always asked one of the guys in the class to escort us to our cars, and they always cooperated, so leaving class wasn't a problem.  The tough part was parking at night, when you got out of the car with your books and notebooks, trying to breathe normally, keep walking, while looking around like your eyes were on swivels...  One of the parking lots had had four assaults, and that's where I had to park for one class because it was  the closest to the building, and anywhere else would have meant that I'd have to walk through two other parking lots which were just as dangerous, because the rapist struck randomly.  

The administration never admitted that the rapes were going on. They did send out a "safety memo" that women should seek escorts at night, just as a matter of common safety.  No mention of the rapist.  And the campus police (more on them later) were never around at night.  A huge number of students signed a petition asking for campus police to monitor the parking lots - but the university said there simply weren't the resources to do that.  Just seek someone to escort you and stay out of dark spaces.  Ignoring the night classes.  The dark parking lots, where sometimes a light went out and wasn't replaced for a few weeks.  The dark street where the professor lived.  And back then, no cell phones…

Hell, I'm getting triggered just writing this.  Because that was a long stretch to live under constant tension and fear, and even after two years on the streets of L.A. as a teenager.  I guess I'd hoped life would get safer, especially at the posh university I'd been lucky enough to get accepted by.  Wrong.  

So I have a few comments about the Cornell 7 and the handling of Jane Doe's case.

Especially after reading what's been made available of the group text among the guys that started off with “Free p---y” in the house, continued with a discussion where one fraternity brother responded to that piece of information by writing “I f---ing love Chi Phi”; and another either sought or provided clarification, “Like you can walk in and whip it out,” and yet another, “Shop still open?” at 1:42 AM on Oct. 19, 2024.

As Monica Hesse said on WaPo:  

“Shop still open?” is a kind of wordplay that requires a little brainpower, especially when made at 1:42 a.m. Your mind may be fuzzy with alcohol or ketamine, but not so fuzzy that you cannot dig out your phone and add a question mark.

The question mark is needed because you do not know whether the woman — a student, just like you — is still there. You are not there, after all. You are in a different room. You are making a premeditated inquiry as to whether you should bother traveling to another part of the house in order to have sex with a woman you have identified as a shop. You have to think about it. You have to press send.

You do not know whether she is conscious or consenting. You are not texting her to find out. She could probably be a better judge of whether she was conscious or consenting, but you have instead decided to group-text your fraternity brothers, entrusting them to be the judge of whether the shop should be open. If you text the shop, you might learn that maybe it never wanted to be open in the first place.

The presence of a group text is both gobsmacking and banal. It conveys that whatever was happening in that room — however drunk or drugged everyone was in that room — several people still thought to document the evening in real time. To make it a bonding experience. To make it a party. To make sure everyone got to the shop before the shop woke up or tried to hide under covers or started crying or wished to get out of that room or did whatever else it is that shops do.

“Shop still open?” wrote one young man, and another wrote back, “Yeah.” (LINK)

Now let's get to the Tompkins County DA, Matthew Van Houten, who said that his decision not to bring charges was based on the contents of Jane Doe's signed 2024 statement. But he told CBS News New York's Saeidi on Tuesday that he had never seen the transcript of what Jane Doe told campus police before his office decided not to bring charges.

NOTE:  This transcript included the direct statements:

“I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.”

"And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard." 

Anyway, Van Houten said,  

"I'm going to follow up on this because this is news to me," he said.

When told Jane Doe had said she was confident she was raped, Van Houten said, "That wasn't information that I had, first of all. Second of all, that is a legal conclusion."

"If she had said those words, we certainly would want to have explored that more," Van Houten continued. "Like I said, that wasn't provided to me." (LINK)

Now the Cornell Police Department reports ONLY to the Cornell CFO (Chief Financial Officer). And the victim only talked to the Cornell Police Department (remember what I said about university "police departments"?), who condensed the interview to 6 pages that "omitted some of the more forceful and definitive language she used. And it was missing her unequivocal statement that she had been raped." (LINK) The Cornell Police Department sent the condensed version to the CFO of Cornell University, and then it was sent to DA Van Houten, who did what is the standard thing you do for the university that keeps the city in business. Bury it.

“I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.”

"And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."

Anyway, the Ithaca Police Department NEVER SAW THE STATEMENT, NEVER WAS TOLD ABOUT THE CRIME, AND SO NEVER INVESTIGATED, even though Jane Doe and her family thought they were involved in the investigation.  

PLUS

The night before she was gangraped, a student had overdosed from ketamine at that very Cornell frat house.
A recent campus climate survey at Cornell University found that 35% of undergraduate women reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact.

Guess what?  Nothing was done about any of these!  Wow!  What a surprise!  

OK. A couple of suggestions:

(1) Do not let universities and colleges handle their own sexual assault investigations ever again. Ever. Anywhere.  Campus police are basically there to break up street fights and keep things quiet. They ignore the rich frat houses and mop up bad situations. Bury things. They may be called "police departments" but they're not qualified. They certainly weren't back at The U and they apparently weren't at Cornell. 

(2) Ban fraternities.  I don't care how much money they have, or how they're conduits to "good futures".  There's too much bad shit that goes on, from hazings that end up killing students to alcohol and drug overdoses to sexual assaults.  And even though I realize doing this is like closing the barn door after the cattle escape, I really am sick of rapists, alcoholics, and drug addicts reaching high levels of power and influence.  At least the geyser might turn into a trickle.  

"Records show that from 2018 through 2024, more than 1,200 incidents of sexual assault, dating and domestic violence and stalking were reported to Cornell University’s Title IX office, USA TODAY has reported."  Read more at:   (LINK) I'm sure that NONE of them were publicized.  

(3) Quit the rhetoric that it's the woman's fault.  (I know, that's a dream...)  Young men can do stupid things, commit crimes, brag about it online, and the general rap is still, "Do we really want to ruin a young man's life over 20 minutes of action?"   

*(Quote from the father of Brock Turner - at the time in a frat at Stanford - who violently raped an unconscious woman and got six months in jail*.)  BTW, fun fact - the two men who stopped Brock Turner in mid-rape, chased him down, and held him until the police arrived were Two Swedish graduate students, Peter Lars Jonsson and Carl-Fredrik Arndt, may praise be to their names forever. So immigrants saved her. None of the frat brothers.  

ANSWER:  Yes, we do want to destroy a young man's life over 20 minutes "of action".  Because certain kinds "of action" destroy a young girl's life forever. 

(4) Recognize that in an authoritarian world, the real definition of power - unprettied, unsoftened - is the ability to do whatever you want and get away with it. And one of the absolute proofs of power, to sociopaths, psychopaths, and pack mobs, is the ability to do anything you want to someone subordinate/inferior to you and get away with it. Especially sexual dominance. That's why rape is a standard weapon in war, gangs, prisons or anywhere else where someone has to prove they're the ones calling all the shots.  

*BTW, when Jane Doe said “I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.” "And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."

This is exactly what Andrew Tate & his scumbag brother, and every other pimp has been doing since the dawn of time: get the woman back to the pad; drug her; rape her; beat her up; share her around; humiliate her; repeat.

Drug, rape, beat, abuse, humiliate. That’s the pattern.  Time for that shit to STOP.

Got Poe?

 

'Tis the season for all things spooky and macabre. Which all-time classic author comes to mind this time of year?

For me, it's Edgar Allan Poe.

I have a few things in common with the Father of the Detective Story. We both have called Richmond, Virginia and New York City home. We both share an affinity for ravens. And we both studied at my alma mater, the University of Virginia.

If you aren't familiar with Poe's UVA college days, here are a few factoids you may enjoy:

• Seventeen-year-old Poe enrolled at UVA on February 14, 1826--yes, Valentine's Day--and remained through the full academic year, which ended in December.

• Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, former US president, and founder of UVA passed away five months after Poe moved to Charlottesville. Though not confirmed, it is likely Poe met Jefferson at school functions and attended the memorial services held to honor the University's founder, including by wearing a black arm band.

• Poe had an impressive athletic record while at UVA. He was a record-breaking swimmer, having swum six miles against the current on the James River. His running broad jump distance was 21' 6" with a running start of twenty yards.

• Of the eight academic schools possible to enroll in at the time, Poe registered for two (modern and ancient languages). Of note, most students in those days enrolled in three schools, but Poe couldn't afford the extra fifty-dollar fee.

• He was secretary of the University's Jefferson Debate Society.

• Poe lived in a section of UVA's original academical village called The Range. His single dorm room, coincidentally and ominously No. 13, is now referred to as The Raven Room.

• Mary Stuart Smith described Poe's dorm room (May 17, 1899) ~ There was one window, and opposite it, a door, both furnished with green blinds. There were two closets, one on each side of the open fireplace, with a book shelf, a single bedstead, a table, a wash stand, and a small travelling trunk. The walls were whitewashed, and adorned with quantities of spirited sketches in charcoal, drawn by the skilled fingers of the two-fold artist who was its occupant.

• While living in 13 West Range, Poe etched a verse on the glass pane of his window:

Oh Though timid one, do not let thy

Form slumber within these

Unhallowed walls,

For herein lies

The ghost of an awful crime.

• His nickname was Gaffy, the hero of a short story he wrote and read allowed to several classmates who had gathered in his room one night. According to legend, Poe flung the pages into the fire, destroying the only copy, after a friend noted it had repeated too often.

• Poe wrote Tamerlane while at UVA. Later the University influenced two of his short stories, "William Wilson" and "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains."

• Poe had a strained relationship with his uncle, John Allan, who was his guardian at the time and limited Poe's funding. By the end of the 1826 academic year in December, Poe had resorted to burning his furniture to keep warm. When he left for winter break, Poe had every intention of returning to UVA the following February, but . . .

• Allan refused to continue financially supporting Poe at school, so he never returned to the University. Thus, he never graduated from college.

• Poe left behind many personal debts, which Allan refused to settle. Worth noting, a century later, the University's librarian, Harry Clemmons, paid Poe's outstanding library fines.

• UVA commissioned the sculptor George Julian Zolnay to create a bronze bust of Poe to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his death.  The bust was displayed in Alderman Library before the renovations commenced this autumn.

• If you ever visit Charlottesville, Virginia, stop by No. 13 West Range. UVA restored and furnished Poe's old dorm room to its period-appropriate spartan glory, though I suspect the  raven statuette was added later.

 . . . evermore.

Sources: 

The University of Virginia, Albert and Shirly Small Special Collections Library, The Raven Society, Bookman by C. W. Kent (1917), and Edgar Poe and the University of Virginia by F. Stovall (1969).

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The Possiblities Are Endless

This week marked the start of the new semester at George Mason University, and except for an immediate snow delay Thursday and the cancellation of classes Friday (and potential syllabus reshuffling), all has been going well.
One of my classes this semester is a fiction workshop, and on the first day, I invited the students one by one to introduce themselves, to provide some background about their writing, and to say what they hoped to get out of the semester ahead in terms of honing their craft. Several of them mentioned various elements of fiction—character, plot, setting—as areas they'd like to focus on, but one student's response seemed particularly frustrated. She said that she simply had trouble finishing her stories.

I asked for clarification about that, since—to my mind—there were at least three different things she might be saying, specifically: 

1.  I have trouble writing full drafts of stories.
2.  I have trouble writing endings in particular.
3.  I can write full drafts and get endings, but no matter how much I revise, the story on the page ever feels done, never seems good enough, never seems like it matches what I pictured in my head, etc. 

Turns out the answer was a little of all of that.

I assured her and the class that many writers have struggled with these same issues. Endings are indeed, for me, often the hardest parts of the story to write. And I'm a constant reviser—even after I've submitted a story for publication, I often keep tinkering with it—so I understand that sense of a story never feeling like it's entirely finished.

I've written elsewhere before—in other blog posts and interviews (so excuse me if you've heard it)—about a lesson I took from the work of sculptor Alberto Giacometti and specifically his Women of Venice series. Back when I worked at the North Carolina Museum of Art, we hosted an exhibition that included one of the sculptures (the series as a whole is pictured to the left), and I was fascinated not just by the artwork itself, the texture of it, the existential starkness of it, but also by the story of how Giacometti created the series. As I understood it, all of them were cast from the same mass of clay, clay which Giacometti worked and shaped and reworked and shaped until eventually it reached a form that he found suitable, at which point he called his brother in to make a cast of the "finished" product.

And then he began working and shaping that same clay again.

In the end, Giacometti ultimately created ten sculptures, each unique in its own way, each with a kinship, clearly, to her sisters, and each—here's the key—equally finished, perhaps equally perfect, as the next in the series.

Over the years, as I've thought and reflected on this anecdote (and hopefully not transmuted it in my own mind from the truth of it), it's become core to my own sense of process. Certainly we can and should keep searching for the best word, the best rhythm of a given sentence, the best flow of a paragraph, the best structure to a story, etc.—but after a point, we could keep working and reworking any choice we've made as writers and it might be tough to say with certainty which revision is better.

I'll likely bring up this story to my fiction workshop later in the semester, and as we embark on the revision section of the course, we'll study Raymond Carver's stories "The Bath" and "A Small Good Thing" in their various incarnations—the same story told in two dramatically different ways, and each with its own strengths and weakness, to the point that in the past when I've taught them, no class can agree which is better, which more finished or complete than the other.

It's not only the new workshop that has me thinking about this, but also a book that I've recently picked up. As I mentioned in my previous post here at SleuthSayers, I like to kick off a writing session by reading a little something about writing: craft essays, exercises, etc. Having finally completed Rules of Thumb, the book that had become a regular companion in that regard, I've just started browsing between two other books: Patricia Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (a rereading in that case) and Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, which was recently recommended my way.

Though I'm only partway into the Queneau, I'm already fascinated by the project—which reminds me of the Giacometti anecdote but also takes things a step further. Exercises in Style presents a very short story about a man on a bus—an argument, and a chance encounter later the same day, the whole thing barely a half a page in length—and then retells that story 99 different times, determined in each case by certain approaches. "Notations" is the headline of the first version, which presents the story as fragmented notes. "Litotes" tells the story in understatements. "Retrograde" tells it backwards. "Metaphorically" tells it... well, you can see where this goes. In addition to underscoring the fact that there are many, many, perhaps innumerable ways to tell any story—and tell it well each time—Queaneau's project also reminds us that writing is or can be or should be fun, playful even, which is something that I sometimes forget, I'll admit. That's a lesson for my students as well there, some of whom might be as fretful as I often am about my chosen craft.

Queneau's Exercises also remind me of something else too, an idea inherent in all of this: Style is constructed out of a series of choices.

Yes, we hear folks talk about a writer's style as if it's a natural part of their being, or about a writer needing to find his or her own style, as if it's waiting there for each of us if we'll just look hard enough. And maybe after a while, each of us does have a set of approaches and mannerisms, etc. that become like second nature—a part of who we are as writers and instantly recognizable to readers too. But at the same time, I think it's worth recognizing and remembering that the development of that style reflects a series of preferences and opinions and decisions; and an awareness of those preferences, opinions, and decisions—of the impact of those choices—enhances our skills as writers.

At least I hope.

Maybe.

In any case, I'm enjoying the new book, and I'm curious if others have read it—and curious too about a number of other questions. How would you define your own style? Is style something that you have self-consciously cultivated? Do you shift styles depending on the project at hand? Would love to hear, of course, about others experiences!