Easter Island

I recently read a biography of Katherine Routledge, who was obsessed with Easter Island (which is really named Rapa Nui) and went there with her husband on her own private yacht to explore those huge stone men that are sprinkled around the island. She was kind of a bitch and absolutely racist, like everyone in the early 1900s, but still a cool lady. She went to Oxford when women weren't allowed to get degrees, drew a lot of wonderful sketches of the island, and documented a lot of folklore. Although I'm not so sure all of those things are necessarily good deeds. She also robbed a bunch of graves and stole precious artifacts from Rapa Nui and other Pacific Islands where she worked.

The biography was not great. The research was well done, but the writing was silly, and I think the author was too caught up about whether to celebrate Routledge's career for paving the way for other women archeologists or denounce her for her shoddy research methods and racist ideology.

Anyway, I always seem to be writing about women who I love and hate, and I think that the most important thing is to give up caring about them. The more indifferent I am to a writer's life, the better I think about them. Which is why I don't really care about Mansfield, at least not in the way that this woman cares about Routledge. KM was a bitch but she was also very nice and she wrote some neat stuff. That's all I want my thesis to say. I guess maybe you can tell that I'm about to write the introduction to my thesis, and this is a way of putting it off. Sorry if you've just read this and felt jipped out of a real or semi-entertaining post; you've really just read my warm-up.

Here's a picture of the Rapa Nui sculpture the English stole by ripping it from the ground and dragging it across the island with its proper owners staring in disbelief. It's on display in the British Museum now, and I touched it. Thanks, imperialism: