Death of the Ayn Rand Scholar by Gray Cavender (red scrolls of magic TXT) 📗

got. The first guy, Professor Sylvester, wasn’t home, so I left a message. Louisa Disis didn’t answer, either, and I was in the process of leaving her a message, when she picked-up. She said she thought I was a solicitor. Oh well…anyway, first, I’d describe her a fairly snarky. And second, she’s definitely no fan of Professor Naremore. She said, and I quote, ‘that man has got an attitude problem…and he’s a menace to society.’ When I tried to unpack all that, I mainly got that she had her bureaucratic hackles up, and was not happy with his certificate proposal…whatever that is. Once she got her bureaucratic recriminations over and done with, she did say that he had, indeed, threatened Professor Siemens…that she was afraid he’d hurt her, and that she was, and I quote again, ‘a step away from calling campus security.’ We’re on with her at 9:30…that the first she could ‘work us in.’ Very important woman, this Louisa Disis. By the way, Jilly, just exactly what is a certificate?

“Lots of students these days have double majors, you know, like Ersula. Others have one or even several minors. And, now, for grad students, and undergrad, too, there are all sorts of certificate programs. A student takes three or four specified courses and gets a concentration in some area…it’s listed on their transcript. For instance, in my program, there are certificates in Economic Justice or in Socio-legal studies. They can even include courses in other departments. I guess that’s what Professor Naremore was doing…adding one in Regulation…and his was going to be at the grad level.”

“OK, got it. I also called Professor Jeff LeJohns, who was home. Right off the bat he said that, given what had happened to Professor Siemens, he wasn’t surprised to be hearing from us. Anyway, he said that he’s actually friends with Professor Naremore and his partner…”

“Professor Russell Griffiths.”

“Right. Anyway, he and his partner…they’re all friends. We didn’t speak for very long because he was headed out for the evening, but he did confirm what your friend told you…that things got heated during that committee meeting, that Professor Naremore overreacted, and that he convinced him to leave. He did say that, even though Naremore was in the wrong, Professor Siemens goaded him. We’re on with him tomorrow at 10:30…that’s after his morning class.”

“So, it doesn’t sound as if Professor LeJohns saw this as a serious physical threat.”

“Well, they are friends, so I had the sense that he was putting the best possible face on their argument. And, he did say that Professor Naremore overacted. We’ll get to the bottom of it tomorrow, Jilly. For now, fix yourself a glass of your wine and try not to worry too much about this. It’ll get sorted. We’ll do what’s right…whatever that is.”

At first, Jillian just sat and thought and worried…and read her notes again. Finally, she realized that she was rehashing in her mind the same things over and over…speculating without information, which was never a good way to go.

At that point, she decided to take Wes’ advice and have a glass of wine. She was till antsy, though, and needed something to do…something that was relevant to the case, but still a distraction. So, IPAD at the ready for note-taking, she hit play to stream The Passion of Ayn Rand, a biopic starring Helen Mirren.

The film had a real 50s sensibility: lots of cocktails and apparently back then everybody smoked cigarettes (Rand sometimes used a cigarette holder, which was maybe supposed to be glamorous, Jillian wasn’t sure). Mirren’s hair was thinned and slicked-down for the role.

As she watched, Jillian’s mind was a jumble of images, careening among Rand’s photos on Wikipedia, the two Rand posters in Professor Siemens’ offices, and Helen Mirren in the film. And across all of this, she kept visualizing Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison.

The film was aptly named, she thought. It was not so much about philosophy or ideology. Instead, it was mostly about Rand’s personal life, in particular an affair between Rand and her assistant, a much younger married man. In the film, his wife knew about the affair and seemed to think it was OK (sorta) and so as did Rand’s husband (again, sorta).

Jillian took notes during the film. Some were little more than random thoughts, but other notes posed questions about the investigation. She saw both kinds of notes as ‘food for thought.’

She was reminded of how much she always liked Helen Mirren’s acting. She imagined a resonant voice-over for the biopic saying something like ‘Helen Mirren IS Ayn Rand.’ She smiled, then went to the bookshelf and pulled her copy of Carolyn’s book about women detectives. This meant violating her rule (actually, it was Wes’ rule) about working late, but she returned to the chair and her IPAD and read the article on Prime Suspect. The author was a top British cultural studies scholar. Jillian remembered that this contributor was one that Carolyn really wanted in the collection.

It had been a while since she’d read this article, but she smiled as it came back to her. She speed-read through the more academic section on ‘the gaze.’ This was the argument that in detective fiction, the reader or the viewer is prompted to derive pleasure, often sexual pleasure, by following the writer’s words or the camera’s eye as it/they dwell on the woman…whether she’s a detective or a victim, or both. This creepy, sexist stance is called scopophilia.

Jillian made some notes on this, but what she really wanted was in another section of the article…about how London Police Detective Jane Tennison (Mirren) solves cases. According to the article, the series writers avoided the sexist ‘gaze’ by having Tennison actually looked at women victims, and look at them with empathy, which drives Tennison to seek justice for them. It also produces important clues. This ‘look’ includes attention to detail, for example a woman victim’s clothes, which in her first case led to a correct ID of the victim