Originally published: February 11, 2025 at 11:24 a.m. PST

I broke his neck.

When I made a vase on the bike of the Potter, I called his slippery neck once I tried to dilute him right into a graceful curve.

I find vases enjoyable and their shapes particularly nice for the attention. However, vases must even be treated with special care, since a part of their “body” – the neck – is usually so narrow that it could be easily broken.

On this present day on the wheel, I noticed that it was not unlike the human neck. Although only a small a part of the human body – About 1% in accordance with surfaces – Our necks have an amazing influence on our psyche and culture.

From selfies to formal portraits, the neck positions the top in expressive poses. Vibrate the vocal cords of the neck to make sensible words and moving songs. We kiss it passionately and inject it with seductive perfume. We use it to nod in the top in agreement, tilt our heads confused and bend our head in prayer.

Ornaments akin to necklaces can express the sense of fashion and the signal of prosperity and standing. Collar can emphasize the face in portraits and describe the skilled class. Blue collar against white collar.

Despite all its aesthetic and expressive effectiveness, the neck can also be a spot of fear and deep vulnerability. Villars and vampires zero on the neck. Stress working days let our neck muscles break until they pain. A pleasing meal could be torn into terror if a bite within the improper tube slips on the neck and sends us right into a coughing.

For millennia, people have suppressed their subjects in power by profiting from the narrow and fragility of the neck – a dark history of dominance and terrorization with bonds and loops and guillotine. The widespread video by George Floyd's murder was a brutal memory This violent suffocation is hardly limited to the distant past.

When I became aware of the importance of neck within the culture, I started to look at how these two properties – its expressive vitality and annoying susceptibility – could possibly be coexisted and so intensively concentrated in a small area of ​​the body. Ultimately, It was a book.

I’m above all a biologistAnd once I wrote my book, I discovered that the vitality and vulnerability of the neck are rooted in its biology: the neck carries out a very number of decisive functions and is the product of a unusual evolutionary history.

The neck does so many things at the identical time. For example, It transports 2,000 kilos (907 kilograms) blood, air and food between the top and upper body day by day. It moves average every six seconds to attract our visual attention. Its vocal cords Vibrate a whole bunch of times per second With every spoken word.

This multifunctionality, this vitality, is just possible due to its susceptibility. To be mobile and versatile, the neck have to be tight and is subsequently barely tense. The decisive transport pipes – the trachea, the esophagus and the blood vessels – must even be thin and shut to the surface, which supplies them barely fitting and compressed.

From water to land

Our ancestors of the vertebrates “invented” this special invention once they developed from water to land.

Our ancestors with fish had no neck because They needed a single rigid axis to maneuver through water efficiently. Since the movement on land didn’t need a stiff spine, early terrestrial vertebrates were developed flexibility directly behind the topAllows you to scan the environment comprehensively and steer your mouth towards prey without moving your whole body. Imagine a zebra that the top -an pages -monitoring of the savannah for predators or a lizard that tends your head down and aside to call up a creeping mistake.

Early land vertie Also developed lungsAnd this transformation filled the gill structures that fish used to breathe as a way to have developed into different useful and sometimes problematic neck structures akin to the voice box, the almond and the small rag that separates the air tube and the esophagus.

This conversion of scrap, that are left of the gills of our distant ancestors, contributed to the varied capacities of our neck. But as products of a unusual evolutionary “renovation”, people and other country live with a design oriented by Jerry that creates us to wear many collateral weaknesses on the neck.

The strange human neck

While the human neck retains the fundamental design of our ancestors, it continues to be quite unusual for vertebrates.

Most agricultural animals increase their bodies on 4 legs in order that their necks should be long enough to scale back their heads on the ground to feed, and powerful enough to extend them up to go searching. Think again of a zebra that feeds on the savannah.

Since people go on two legs, we balance our head on our spine. Since we use our hands to grab our food, we don't need strong neck muscles to maneuver the top around. Compared to most mammals of our size, our neck are relatively weak, which makes it more prone to stress and injuries.

As one other milestone in human evolution, The voice box migrated into a comparatively low position within the neckAnd this unusual placement contributes to our ability to create a very big selection of vocal sounds that we use for the language. However, this descent of the voice box within the throat also makes us more prone to suffocate and sleep apnea.

The neck embodies the double nature of the human condition, the way in which through which beauty and frailing are sometimes intertwined, two sides of the identical coin in our biology, in our relationships – and even in ceramic vases.

Dorothy Allison, who died on November 5, 2024published her first novel “Bastard from Carolina“, in 1992, when she was 42 years old.

She used her own life to create the semi-autobiographical work that it became a finalist for the National Book Award.

Allison grew up poor in Greenville, South Carolina, enduring all types of abuse before becoming the primary in her family to graduate from highschool and college. As a lesbianshe faced additional challenges and hurdles. Before she achieved literary fame together with her first novel, Allison ran a feminist bookstore and a women's center. She was broke when she finally sold Bastard Out of Carolina.

To me, Allison is a shining exception in an extended line of authors who’ve tried to jot down about poverty but fail to totally capture it.

In my book “Poor Things: How Those Who Have Money Represent Those Who Have No Money“I explain the genre of what I call “poornography” – stories written about poor people by individuals who haven’t themselves had the experience of being poor.

Most readers are probably aware of the usual themes of those works: violence, sexual abuse, addiction, filth, and degradation. Allison was clearly not in that camp.

She broke this mold by finding beauty in her impoverished surroundings and specializing in love, humor and family bonds.

Beauty in a hopeless place

Even if “Bastard out of Carolina” is ultimately about physical and sexual abuse – which after all it’s just isn’t limited to poor people – This represents only one element of a bigger emotional and physical landscape.

Allison's hometown of Greenville can also be the setting of the novel – and it’s a place that the novel's young narrator, Bone, describes as “the most beautiful place in the world.” She adds:

“Black walnut trees dropped their green-black, fluffy bulbs on Aunt Ruth’s matted lawn, past where their gnarled roots jutted from the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty, dark-tanned, scarred children. Weeping willows marched across the yard, following every wandering stream and ditch. Their long, whip-like fronds opened cracks that protected sweet-smelling beds of clover.”

However, extreme hunger only occurs in poverty and is something poor writers often remember with a vividness that will elude middle-class or wealthy writers.

“Hunger makes you restless,” writes Allison. “You dream of food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one cut of meat, the precise taste of buttered corn, tomatoes so ripe they burst and sweeten the air, beans so crunchy they bite between the Teeth bursting, gravy like mother's.” Milk sings in your bloodstream.”

In “Bastard out of Carolina,” Allison doesn’t have fun hunger. But she manages to seek out humor in it and show how laughter might be used as a coping mechanism.

When Bone complains about hunger within the novel, her mother talks about her own childhood: Back then there was “real hunger, hunger for days, with no expectation that there would ever be cookies again.” And during this time she and her siblings made up improbable stories about strange dishes: “Your Aunt Ruth always talked about frogs’ tongues with dewberries. … But Raylene won the prize with her recipe for sugar-glazed turtle meat with poisonous greens and hot piss dressing.”

Humor just isn’t intended to obscure the severity of poverty. But Allison desires to indicate that each can exist: they’re all involved in a life lived.

American madness

I can't help but compare Allison's work to that of an writer like JD Vance. His 2016 memoir states: “Hillbilly Elegy“Vance revels in his grandmother's anger and violence as an emblem of her feisty hillbilly spirit.

On the opposite hand, Bone remembers her mother saying flatly in “Bastard out of Carolina,” “It's nothing to be proud of when you shoot people who look at you the wrong way.”

So many other writers about poverty have characters who long for the fabric comforts promised by the American dream, be it Clyde Griffiths in Theodore Dreiser's “An American Tragedy” or George and Lennie in John Steinbeck’s “Of mice and men.”

Allison's characters, however, learn to see through this false promise. In one scene, Bone and her cousin break in the local Woolworths.

Previously she had looked longingly at a bulging glass box stuffed with nuts. But when she smashes the display case, she realizes “that the display case was a deception.” There were not more than five centimeters of nuts pressed onto the glass front and supported with cardboard.” Her response: “Cheap sons of bitches.”

Reflecting his class consciousness, Bone eventually recognizes the false appeal of low cost goods. “I looked at all the things on display. Trash everywhere: shoes that broke in the rain, clothes that came apart at the seams, stale candy, makeup that cracked the skin.”

In contrast, she thinks in regards to the value of her aunt's homemade canned goods. “That was worth something. All that stuff seemed tacky and useless to us.”

“I'm jealous of you for what you have”

At one point Bone formulates the concept of poornography without using the term. She talks about “the mythology” that plagues poor people:

“People from families like mine – working poor people from the South with high illegitimacy rates and all too many relatives who have spent time in prison – we are the people who are seen as the class that doesn't take care of their children, that rapes and are mistreated.” and violence are the norm. That such assumptions are false, that the wealthy are as more likely to abuse their children because the poor, and that Southerners have a monopoly on neither violence nor illegitimacy are realities which can be difficult to make people understand.”

In “Bastard out of Carolina,” Bone resents the wealthy as an alternative of admiring them. In a conversation with one in every of her aunts, she says she “hates” them. Interestingly, her aunt provides the poor person's counterpoint to hatred.

“Maybe they're looking at you sitting up here eating blackberries… maybe they're jealous of you because of what you have and afraid of what you would do if they came into the yard.”

Allison shows readers how class animosity can go each ways and that for all of the contempt the wealthy and powerful have for poor people, there may also be a component of envy and fear at play.

Trees: They produce almost a 3rd of the world's oxygen are sacrificially harvested to construct our homes and produce goods from rubber to coconuts. But are they art?

A brand new exhibition of large-format photographs on the David Brower Center in Berkeley argues that they’re indeed value our attention. East Bay photographer Stefan Thuilot has been pursuing what he calls California Forest Projectwith tens of hundreds of images captured from all 25 of the state's forest ecosystems. Yes, there are that many, from the paranormal redwoods of the north to the rugged conifers of the high plains to the gnarled oak groves of our own Henry Coe State Park.

The technology needed to print Thuilot's high-resolution images, composed of a whole lot of photos, at full size doesn’t yet exist – he hopes it can be available in the longer term. But the photos on display are still breathtakingly large, tree-like as much as 4 meters tall. In these photos, he tells stories not only in regards to the world's largest living organisms, but additionally about looming dangers reminiscent of inadequate forest management and increasingly devastating wildfires.

“I believe photography is a powerful tool,” he says, “to depict the changing landscapes that threaten their heritage.”

Details: Free admission. Open Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Friday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. within the Hazel Wolf Gallery of the David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley; browercenter.org. The opening reception is May thirtieth at 6:30 p.m.; the show runs through August twenty second.