One early pre-dawn summer morning, Anne, the lost and cautiously sanguine BUCK JONES waitress, whispers words a friend emailed her the previous night, as she caresses her bump over a crisply starched apron. “Birthing smells like ham”.
Cooks are prepping for breakfast. An older, coarse-cut and Flo-like waitress named Chlorene refills napkins, ketchup, salt and pepper upon plastic, red gingham tablecloths, wiped down the night before with an atomized cleaning dilution.
Maybe no ham is being cooked. It’s hard to tell. Buck Jones has a delicately maintained ham bass note aroma. It is what is required, per the franchise-aspiring pages, in greasy sheet protectors within the big black three-ring binder on a shelf in the Buck Jones employee breakroom. It is also required for any performance of the opera BUCK JONES, per performance notes in the full score.
I believe that Lucy[1] was conceived in Marfa, Texas, at El Cosmico. It was December 23, 2018, a very cold night. We stayed in trailer thirteen. Sofia was always so much more daring than me, and that’s saying something. She showered under moonlight, in near-freezing west Texas temperatures, in an outdoor shower with no hot water. I watched her showering with veneration and admiration. But this moonlit shower was the second most venerable and admirable thing I ever saw Sofia do in the brief time we were together. The other thing would happen eight and a half months later.
The evening was a moist affirmation of the feeling called living. The internet of genes.
Over the next eight and a half months, Sofia and I were beleaguered, in all directions, by the utterly incompetent management of a brand-new department that was experiencing exponential growth of student interest and of my class, AET 304. Since Sofia and I both taught courses in music technology, we were tasked with making some sense of the music and sound components to the spiraling shape Pennycook had pulled out of his ass and spattered all over the dean’s desk, three years previously. The stress in our first trimester was deeply penetrating.
Two and a half years later, on August 21, 2020, Austin, Texas, just days before my terminated contract at UT would end, I wrote of this toxicity in a 25-page letter (over 90, if you count the exhibits I attached) to all School of Design and Creative Technologies faculty, calling out the UT College of Fine Arts’ administration and the university president. This is quoted from the letter, on the workplace toxicity present at the time:
“Dr. Pennycook asked M&S[2] faculty to find a way to incorporate his new track within his existing vision that Lorenzo[3] had approved and it needed to be done in weeks-time. This proved almost impossible for several reasons: 1) Pennycook’s rationale for his additional track was not based in fact. He made claims about the careers that would come from his additional music software development track that were (and are) objectively false. 2) Pennycook could not provide specifics about what he had in mind with this new track. We wanted to help him with his vision, and we needed a clear understanding of what he had in mind to do the curricular work we were tasked to do. 3) There was a concern in AET and the BSOM[4] that many of the courses Pennycook was proposing already in existed, in some form, in Electronic Music Studios (“EMS”) of the BSOM. This was a significant concern to BSOM and to Nina Young, in particular. She was the director of the EMS, who left after 1 year, and whose departure was partly attributed to Pennycook by other BSOM faculty[5]. 4) Pennycook’s software development track was at odds with the ethos and outcomes of all the other AET emphases and their constituent tracks. No other emphases were developing software, nor were they expected to. This would be corroborated by all AET faculty who existed in the department in 2018.
There were never 2 discrete visions for M&S offered by me and Pennycook. There was only 1 vision offered by Pennycook in the spring of 2018 that M&S faculty worked on conceiving for the rest of that term and the summer. Pennycook then altered his vision at the start of the fall 2018 term in ways that made it nearly impossible to complete the task of conceiving. The only “friction” came from Pennycook’s unfairly (and exaggeratedly) characterizing of M&S faculty’s sincere and appropriate questions and concerns about his proposal as a “protest.” I was scapegoated for the confusion and mess created by Pennycook’s abrupt and surprising changes to M&S. Into the early days of September 2018, [Sofia] had become the non-recognized, de-facto M&S Coordinator as I had stepped down in the preceding term due to previously described issues with Pennycook. This episode is troubling from the perspective of equity and equality. Pennycook had assumed the role of M&S Coordinator, though [Sofia] was performing all the functions of the role, putting in countless hours trying to make Pennycook’s new M&S vision work, without any recognition of the fact to COFA administration. This makes it even more dubious for the COFA administration to frame all of this as a clash of Pennycook and Stamps “visions.” It is simply not true.
The beginning of the fall 2018 term was the clear apex of the toxicity that both me and [Sofia] were experiencing in COFA, and particularly with Pennycook. Of course, no one could have predicted that we would have lost our child 2 weeks later but certainly Pennycook, Lorenzo and Dempster[6] should have had the awareness that we were 38 weeks pregnant and that the levels of stress we were experiencing at that time in COFA could not have been healthy for our child.”
In the spring of 2018, heading into our second trimester, Pennycook attempted to involve me and Sofia in a duplicitous and deceitful plan for the DAET that put us in an exceptionally uncomfortable position. He laid out a plan for a surreptitious appropriation of the UT Electronic Music Studio’s signature, state-of the-art, multi-channel PA system for our fledgling department. When Pennycook opened his written heist plan with, “hush hush until RP sails into the sunset in May”, he was referring to Dr. Russell Pinkston, Pennycook’s long-time colleague in the BSOM and director of the Electronic Music Studios. We were unclear what he meant by, “…the top two both think it is a great idea…”, later written in the heist plan. Sofia and I presumed he meant Lorenzo and Dempster. Sofia and I were very queasy about this, and we shared our concerns diplomatically in the thread. Pinkston was also a professor of mine during graduate school. Check his music out.
Pennycook put us in the cripplingly uncomfortable position of staying silently complicit with this shady plan, and it didn’t strike us as ethical. This was all happening as Russell Pinkston was finishing out his final term before retirement from a very successful career teaching electronic music composition at UT. What treachery.
The summer of 2018 came, and not in an ampersand of lightspeed too soon. It was an action-packed, fun-filled, hyphen-inspiring summer. Lilia[7], Sofia’s mom, moved to Austin and into the Hobbit House with us. I love Lilia. I love Sofia. We spent a lot of time doing wacky stuff with John Henry. Oh my, how Sofia and my son got along. She got him a BB gun and helped him make a politically incorrect human-sized target with politically incorrect anatomical hit-boxes[8]. We drove to Florida, all three of us, for a visit with Sofia’s family, a baby shower, and some everglade speed races.
Back at the Hobbit House, Lilia conducted prenatal exercises, like one in which the two of them would lay on their backs, facing opposite each other, bottoms of feet connected to the other’s and peddling, in push-me-pull-you. John Henry’s ninth birthday with H.O. scale trains tracking around the hearth of the second living area. Swims in every pool we could find, and heading into the third trimester, we were several light-centuries away from any of UT shit storms.
Seen from outside a life-car, looking through the windshield, the scene vibrating gently, Sofia, me and John Henry all somehow in the front seat, all hands somehow on the baby bump, while all manner of train wrecks, plane crashes and automobile accidents combine in a fiery, molten avalanche of carnage spattering down on the road behind us, in the not-too-distant distance. But, alas, a camera only points in one direction.
The fall 2018 term began on August 29. Clearly there was a pact made over the summer between Pennycook, Dempster, and Lorenzo. Academic administrators are not supposed to dictate curricula. It is written into all operating procedures at universities. It helps to maintain a trust that knowledge, warmly incubating new knowledge, is not subjected to the whims of bureaucracy or industry. Faculty, the doulas of new knowledge, decide what faculty teach and how to bring new knowledge successfully into a new world. Just assume it’s democratic.
Pennycook brought with him, to the fall 2018 semester, an entire vision for DAET Music and Sound. He was clearly empowered by some summer pact, a pinky-swear of sweaty little academic alley misfits with slingshots, to dictate his spattered vision.
September 19, 2018, was another busy, leadershipless day. Sofia spent the day doing some manual labor in a UT theater. She has a theater audio background and was helping reinforce some amplification need for the UT Theater and Dance department. I was probably planning content for AET 304. At the end of the day, Sofia contacted me saying she didn’t feel right, her voice winded. An extreme headache and dizziness. We contacted her OB/GYN, who advised us to head straight to the hospital, and so we did.
There were two professionals present in the cold, brightly lit examination room. It’s striking what PTSD can do to personal memories of tragic events. There were two professionals, probably a doctor and a nurse. The two of them began looking at each other just as the ultrasound screen projected still images and diffused silence. A kind of knowing look between them, and then I knew.
I imagined the feel of the cool gel between the transducer and Sofia’s belly and began to weep, in preparation for the deeply penetrating, bellowing howls of sadness, remorse and incredulity that would come from Sofia’s viola vocal cords in the very next moment, just after the ultrasilent moment in which we all four stared at the stillness on the screen. Her howl cut through the doctor’s words like a mercenary, “there is no heartbea … there is … no hea … I’m … we’re sorr …” The haunting wails and shaky screams, slowly rising in pitch and hoarseness, “no, no, no…” with one “no” in unison with a doctor’s “no”.
The professionals dimmed the lights before they left the room. We were just there, together, for a while. We made family calls. The internet of genes.
And so, dear reader, here it is. The most venerable and admirable thing Sofia ever did came next, right there in that cold and darkened examination room. She unflinchingly decided to have a natural birth for our daughter. The doctors okayed the plan and allowed us to stay overnight, and family traveled from San Antonio, New York, and Southern Florida to be present. It was a long and awful night.
At the time I was very, “fuck the god of my understanding. Fuck it.” It felt only human to question ridiculous flaws in human design. Especially in human design so closely and indispensably tied to the creation of new life. The length of the human umbilical cord ranges between 3 and 300 centimeters, with an average cord length between 50 and 60 centimeters[9]. From less than 3 inches to almost 10 feet. Ten feet. To serve what purpose? To naturally select humans with no necks? To naturally select jump-rope champions? … ? … I am still working things out with the god of my understanding.
Sofia wanted to give birth to Lucy Stamps. And so, she did, the next morning, in a large, dimly lit room with tables and chairs, surrounded by our families. It was not a sterile room. No one was in a gown or wearing a mask. They didn’t need to be. It was not a labor, delivery, and recovery room. It didn’t need to be.
The pushing rhythmically dampened by weeping and tears. The clutch of our knotted hands. And then delivery. A beautiful little face on a head attached to a neck around which a very long umbilical cord was neatly wrapped, twice. We spent good time taking turns holding her and letting family members hold her.
If there was a god present, it was manifest in the singular glowing compassion and love shared by all, and fed by all, in that large, dimly lit room with tables and chairs. Stillbirth does not smell like ham.
Sofia wanted to get pictures done. Nice little pictures with beautiful clothes and sleeping and so we did. I was a mess. Sofia recovered much more quickly than I did, and things only got worse for our relationship. According to the Maternal Health Institute, couples who experience stillbirth are 40 percent more likely to separate.
The accounts here are real PTSD nightmare flashes I still get occasionally, five years later, both in dreams and waking life. Lucy, for me, will always be a superhero; her special power is immortality. She was born after she died! She was unborn a hero, into an unchanged world. Her hit-box was too large and way too vulnerable, in a poorly conceived video game called Life, developed by the god of our understanding. To me, that is certainly a more plausible explanation than being conceived in trailer number thirteen at El Cosmico in Marfa, Texas.
I still struggle with the question of whether UT had anything to do with the death of my daughter. It is impossible, even now, to regard Lucy’s death as separate from all the toxicity (that’s an overused but perfect word for it) we were experiencing at work. It was a jostling cradle, and we needed our jobs. Should Sofia have been on her knees working with some sound reinforcement solution in a theater at UT, two weeks before she was due? Sure. Absolutely. Women are powerful and some can take long runs or bike rides right up to the first contraction. Sofia was very healthy, and Lucy was very healthy until something changed.
And, oh, all the feigned empathy from Doreen Lorenzo at Lucy’s memorial service, at the Church of Conscious Harmony, in Austin, Texas. An empathy I’d later come to know as fraud and façade, punctuated by her massive lanyard collection, conspicuously seen through her glass office door.
In the end, did the University of Texas at Austin have anything to do with the death of Lucy? It is truly impossible to say it did. However, it is also equally impossible to say it did not. I am getting better at coping with it all. The PTSD suffered since then … it was surely baked in by the toxicity at work, shot from the slingshots of pinky-swearing sweaty little administrative misfits …
But Lucy is five now! Her mom and I took her to Buck Jones for her birthday. What’s not to love about that place? We sang the Kids Klub song, that used to play on public access, sitting at a table, with millions of little cups of ketchup everywhere …
“Come onto the birthday train
We’re heading to Jones depot
We’re going to take your birthday
Where it’s never been before
There’s plenty of room aboard this train
Its engine is a mighty flame”[10]
And arriving back at the Hobbit House at dusk, hazy-eyed and mustering a second wind, Lucy complained about her hair getting knotted up in the rubber band of her Kids Klub hat. And I freed the hat and cut the rubber band off and Sofia cut just enough of the tip of the cone off to accommodate her soft and small mouth, and her jubilant, gentle, megaphoned exclamation to the moon, from the main deck of the Hobbit House,
“Somewhere in all of it!
Not old, not young!
We run, climb a tree!
Wash in a river!
Say hello to a bird!
Sing to the sun!”[11]
[1] My daughter’s name has been changed, out of respect for privacy, as requested by her mother who also selected the name Lucy. [2] Music and Sound emphasis in the Department of Arts and Entertainment Technologies (DAET). [3] Doreen Lorenzo, the Assistant Dean of the College of Fine Arts and the director of the School for Design and Creative Technologies. [4] Butler School of Music at UT Austin. This is also where I got my masters and doctorate degrees. [5] Nina Young has since disputed this point when I asked her directly about it. This account comes from multiple faculty members in the BSOM who attested the antagonism between the BSOM and the DAET caused by the actions of Pennycook. I am choosing to withhold the identities of the faculty members. [6] Douglas Dempster, then-Dean of the College of Fine Arts (COFA). [7] Name change requested by Sophia, who also selected the name Lilia. [8] An invisible shape bounding all or part of an object in video games that is used to determine and measure damage, collision or other forms of interactivity. [9] National Institutes of Health Umbilical cord length study (2012). [10] Libretto and lyrics by John Navarro. [11] Ibid.
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