Brace yourselves, dear readers. Colette is positively trembling with feminist rage.

What, you ask, could make a person so upset, so swollen with indignation? I fear we need a trigger warning before you click below.

Via Herb Deutsch, Heather Mac Donald on the self-destruction of the humanities: 

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton — the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing. In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalogue, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilisation of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.[…] [Consider] the resentment of a Columbia University undergraduate, who had been required by the school’s core curriculum to study Mozart. She happens to be black, but her views are widely shared, to borrow a phrase, “across gender, sexuality, race and class.” “Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart?” she groused… “My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism. It’s a racist core. Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women, no people of colour.” These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one disgruntled student; they represent the dominant ideology in the humanities today.

Yes, what could the music of Mozart possibly have to offer a black woman, any black woman? After all, he was a composer of pallor, and male, and therefore, apparently, in the service of evil. Mozart ain’t for dark folk. Nothing to learn or enjoy there.*

That isn’t pubic hair. It’s a big ball of spiders. // Parrots in flight. // The museum of Spam and other “spiced pork artefacts.” // Sculpted hybrids. // A lesson in sign language. // If babies kept on growing. // On oddball baby names. // Neglected trees. // It’s all there in the eyes. // An interactive atlas of US historical geography. // Regular ice. // Origami masks. // Motorised camera stabiliser. // How to move a drink from one glass to another. // Frozen. // And finally, an impressive display of 3-dimensional mid-air acoustic manipulation. 

Or, the Fast Show meets the Guardian:

[This year] I will only read novels written by authors who are not from western-European backgrounds. I will not be reading anything written by white authors.

So says Sunili Govinnage, who is clearly better than you. On account of what she will not read.

In which we revisit the towers of academia, the intellectual boiler-room of contemporary art and various lamentations from the pages of the Guardian.

In January we marvelled at the inventive ways in which the Arts Council sets fire to our earnings:

One might have thought that buskers got their money from passers-by, depending on whether or not they were any good. Apparently, it is much more sensible to take money from taxpayers and simply hand it over.

Our ongoing series of agonised tweets illustrated the rich spectrum of leftist emoting. From sadness and bewilderment to self-satisfaction, determined righteousness and a tearful longing for “uncomplicated anger.” We also met a student named Arun Smith, a radical saviour of the hypothetically downtrodden, who showed us just how complicated – and dishonest – anger can be:

Despite his extensive commentary on the subject, Mr Smith still hasn’t specified any actual remark that offended him sufficiently to vandalise the free speech wall then boast about it online. Regardless of its content, the free speech wall is, we’re told, “an act of violence.” A “microaggression.” And so Mr Smith feels obliged and entitled to retaliate, in order to pre-empt any hate (as defined by him) that might potentially occur at some point in the future. A line of moral reasoning that’s rather bold and which gives our saviour enormous scope for “forceful resistance” against almost anything he doesn’t like, even if it hasn’t happened yet.

February brought us connoisseurs of stiffness and axial rotation, and the pioneering work of the Institute for Centrifugal Research, where human endurance meets “excessive G-Force.”

March was of course the month of The Incident, a “level 3” violation of school behaviour, following which a classroom of seven-year-olds were urged to “share their feelings” about a partly-chewed pastry. Other highlights included students at the University of Tennessee being enlightened by a lesbian bondage expert, a reminder of the wickedness that is racist hair, and further evidence of the Arts Council’s discernment and competence. Qualities best illustrated by the £60 million West Bromwich arts centre, which promised to “make the arts more accessible” and two years after opening had failed to attract a single paying customer.

In April Martin Durkin aired an excellent documentary in which he made full use of his right eyebrow. There was also a breakthrough in eco-friendly parenting, and we beheld the theatrical stylings of Bulgarian performance artist Mr Ivo Dimchev.

Traffic lights in fog, near Weimar, Germany. Photographed by Lucas Zimmermann.

Seven years, good grief. As is the custom here, posting will be intermittent over the holidays and readers are advised to subscribe to the blog feed, which will alert you to anything new as and when it materialises. Thanks for another million or so visits this year and another six thousand comments, many of which prompted threads that are much more interesting than the actual posts. Which is kind of the idea. And particular thanks to all those who’ve made PayPal donations to help keep this rickety barge above water. It’s much appreciated. Newcomers and people with nothing better to do are welcome to rummage through the reheated series and greatest hits. There you’ll find, among other things, great feats of artistry, an ongoing catalogue of leftwing agonies, the bewilderment of George Monbiot, the mind-blunting effects of pretentious racial guilt, and a righteous denunciation of the barbecue patriarchy. 

Lyrics here. To you and yours, a very good one.

A man who was caught masturbating in the meat aisle of a Sainsbury’s store has been banned from every supermarket in Britain – unless he is supervised by another adult. Eugenio Freitas, 49, was captured pleasuring himself through his trousers for 10 minutes on CCTV cameras. The married father of four went to the store in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire “fully intending” to go shopping, but then became overwhelmed by his “excessive sexual drive,” a court heard.

Via Julia, who seems to have an eye for stories involving irregular arousal. 

I question the physics of this. // But what if the knives were on fire too? // Your very own tabletop fire vortex. // How low? This low. // Hardcore poodle. // Yes, but then I’d have to dress for blogging. Formally, I mean. // At last, dehydrated beer. // Seaboard, a squishy keyboard with intuitive pitch bend. // Upmarket electronica from Woob. // The robocallers are coming. “She says of course she’s a real person.” // Don’t prod the moth. // Traffic sorted by colour, as it should be. // Hand-coloured photos of 19th century Japan. (h/t, Coudal) // “The anechoic chamber is so quiet the longest anybody has been able to bear it is 45 minutes.” // Why rats don’t rule the Earth. // Walking cube. // And just wait for the foot. 

As an artist, of course I do seek attention – I want to express and communicate ideas, and refuse to feel compunction for that. Even in the face of criticism, I will make no apologies for my art.

So roars Ms Casey Jenkins, the “performance artist, craftivist and rabble rouser” whose vaginal knitting video thrilled us recently. And who now seeks to widen the minds of Guardian readers:

Over the past two weeks, over 3.5m people have watched the YouTube clip… documenting my 28 day performance piece, Casting Off My Womb… The short clip… gives an overview of the work in which I used skeins of wool lodged in my vaginal tunnel to knit a long passage, marking one full menstrual cycle.

Yes, a mighty work. Colossal in its scope and profundity.

My image and work have been consumed, contemplated and commented on by millions across the globe. It’s interesting then, that all of this electronic crackle and buzz has not altered my identification with it at all… The response to the clip was immediate, massive and, for the most part, negative, marked with fear and repulsion. The word “ick” features heavily, as do “eww,” “gross” and “whyyyy?”

Well, pulling wool out of whatever bodily orifice it’s been crammed into, especially wool that’s smeared with menstrual blood, isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, or idea of a rich aesthetic experience. In much the same way that the audience for viewing used tampons and used toilet paper is somewhat niche and limited. But then I’m sure Ms Jenkins knew that before she began, and indeed was counting on it. For the talentless, transgression is the only card to play. It’s therefore unsurprising that mockery, bewilderment and mild repulsion are insufficient to prompt Ms Jenkins to rethink her artistic medium and life choices more generally. Clearly, she is impervious to mere public feedback and is happy to construe disdain as in fact an affirmation:

Commentators seem to be genuinely outraged that I would dare to do something that they view as strange and repulsive with my body without displaying shame. Women putting themselves forward in any capacity in the world is frowned upon, and for a woman to put herself forward in a way that is not designed to be attractive or pleasing is downright seditious. People are incensed!

Yes, incensed, outraged and afraid. The patriarchy trembles. Proof, if proof were needed, of just how radical and daring Ms Jenkins really is.