The Argus Magazine: Issue 1

Colophon The Argus Magazine is printed on 70 lb semi-gloss paper and the cover is printed on a non-gloss 80 lb paper

by Boston Color Graphics. MrsEaves was used for the body text, as well as the titles and headings. Helvetica was used for the bylines. 300 copies of the magazine were printed and distributed free of charge. The art and literature in this magazine is not to be reproduced without the explicit permission of the artist or author.

How to Get Involved If you are interested in the production of The Argus Magazine, we welcome your involvement in any capacity— be it as a contributing writer, artist, part of the editorial staff, design consultant, or otherwise. You may contact us at argusmagazine@gmail.com.

Editors-in-Chief

Alex Wilkinson Alexander Hoyle

Executive Editors

Justin Pottle Olivia Horton

Layout Director

Emma Singer

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Writing at Wesleyan and the Wesleyan Student Assembly for their generous financial support—without their assistance, this magazine would never have become a reality. We would also like to thank Anya Backlund and Katherine Mechling, the Ford Fellows in the Writing Programs, for their invaluable guidance, particularly in the early stages of planning and production. Finally, we would like to thank everyone who contributed to The Argus Magazine, who made this first issue such an amazing success.

Artistic Director

Adam Forbes

Contributing Artists Adam Forbes Andrew Ribner Zach Valenti Emily Klein Alexander Hunt

Contributing Writers Carolyn Mortell Alexander Hoyle Shira Engel Jenessa Duncombe Leo Liu Alex Wilkinson Lauren Nadler Valerie Puciloski

Cover Art

Adam Forbes

Editor’s Note The Argus Magazine is a new student-produced publication focusing on long-form nonfiction and journalism.

By showcasing creative, engaging pieces from a variety of academic fields, we seek to channel the diverse array of student perspectives, experiences, and knowledge endemic to the intellectual vitality of our campus. Fundamental to this endeavor is an emphasis on collaboration between writers and editors, a process we feel is essential to producing polished, innovative work.

Throughout the years, The Wesleyan Argus has served as a widely-read vehicle for journalism, features pieces, profiles, reviews, and editorials. However, we have felt that the newspaper’s bi-weekly publishing schedule has limited the possibility for articles to achieve their full potential, constricting their ability to cover subject matter with the necessary attention and depth. To this end, we determined that a magazine would be the most appropriate venue for the kinds of pieces The Wesleyan Argus cannot feasibly print: long-form articles, essays, and fictions designed to educate and entertain a general readership.

While affiliated with The Wesleyan Argus, The Argus Magazine is meant to serve as a curated forum for all student non-fiction and journalism, thus filling a gap in the spectrum of campus publications. Though focused on non-fiction, we also accept and publish creative non-fiction, photojournalism, and academic works so as to better represent the scope of student talent. In the future, we plan to print issues that investigate and critically engage with particular thematic concerns.

We hope you enjoy the inaugural issue of The Argus Magazine.

Alex Wilkinson Editor-in-Chief Wesleyan University Class of 2013

Alexander Hoyle Editor-in-Chief Wesleyan University Class of 2013

Table of Contents 6

In Search of “True” Memory

Carolyn Mortell Photography by Andrew Ribner

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Madness Within Civilization

Alexander Hoyle Photography by Adam Forbes and Alexander Hunt

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Tattoo Stories

Shira Engel Photography by Zach Valenti and Emily Klein

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Department of H2O

Jenessa Duncombe Photography by Adam Forbes

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Friggin’ Freegens

Leo Liu Photography by Andrew Ribner

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A Good Meal for the Soul

Alex Wilkinson Photo Courtesy of Kilkenny Arts Festival

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the boogeyman’s a star

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Malevolent Gondii

Lauren Nadler

Valerie Pucilowski

In Search of “True” Memory Carolyn Mortell

My family, like many large Midwestern clans, is deeply rooted in tradition. Although I grew up in Minnesota, my parents were born and raised in Wisconsin, so that’s where we took vacations. We went to the same places and did the same things with the same people every single time—small lake towns in the summer; Madison for the holidays; five hours in the car; stop halfway at the same gas station for a leg shakeout, a Reese’s twosome, and a can of Squirt; hug all thirty relatives when we get there. Five times a year, every year. Take Wautoma, for example—one of the summer places. There was not a year in my memory when I didn’t visit the Farm Market there, a combination antiques/sundries/souvenir sweatshirt shop.

There was never anything worth buying, but that weekend in August wouldn’t be complete without stopping there. We always waved to the giant iron bull (Boris) outside the restaurant a block down from the lake house, even when we got too old to really be excited about it anymore. We only stopped frequenting the one candy shop in town because the owner turned out to be a child molester. It’s hard to let any one tradition die, so we continue them all.

Even more important than what we would do during these Wisconsin holidays, though, was what we ate. Some of my fondest memories are centered around food. There’s Ardy & Ed’s, a 50s-era Oshkosh drive-in that serves me Fourthof-July lunch every year: a juicy, cheddar-coated beef patty topped with ketchup, mustard, and pickles surrounded by a soft roll, always washed down with a scoop of vanilla ice cream

floating in cold, pungent homemade root beer. There’s “the tower,” concocted by my grandmother to appease my small, sugar-loving self: layers upon layers of fresh strawberries, clouds of whipped cream, and just a sprinkling of molassesbrown sugar. There’s the seven-layer chocolate cake my aunt makes for my grandma’s birthday, with its dense, reddish crumb and fudgy frosting. There’s Wisconsin brats: beerboiled then grilled and topped with raw onions, paired with perfectly ripe corn on the cob, smothered with melted butter and salt. There’s the thousands of peppernut cookies we make every autumn, the finicky brown dough rolled over and over again to create the thinnest, crispiest possible spicy ginger rounds. Then, of course, there’s Thanksgiving lunch and Christmas dinner, the same extravagant meals one month apart, with just enough in-between-time to recover: a twentypound turkey with crackling, salty skin; savory, thick, abundant turkey gravy; ten pounds of mashed potatoes; brown sugar pooling around sweet potatoes; pumpkin pie, smooth as velvet on skin, slathered in barely sweet, freshly whipped cream; and the obligatory fruit salad for “health.” However, there is only one difference between the two meals: for Christmas, my grandmother, a two-time Pillsbury Bake-Off winner, homebakes an enormous and diverse cookie platter: peanut blossoms, which are peanut butter cookies very slightly crispy on the outside, tender and chewy on the inside, crowned with a melty chocolate kiss; spritz cookies, almondy and flaky with a smack of salted butter, squeezed from an ancient press that

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seemingly yields only to her hand; impossibly buttery Russian tea cakes (or Mexican wedding cakes, or Viennese sugar balls, whichever), tossed in powdered sugar; snappy, smooth toffee, broken into jagged pieces with light taps of a small silver hammer; and the only dried apricots I’ll tolerate, tart and plump and robed in chocolate.

These are the things I ate at the same times of the year, every single year, without fail. However, besides the expected changes that come with growing up, my family eventually branched out from our Wisconsin-only vacation rut. My parents were bitten by the travel bug around the time I entered high school, and traveling to a new country (or several) every year became routine. I went to Italy for a month and missed that year’s summer trips in one fell swoop. We’ve skipped Thanksgiving for the past two years in favor of London and Paris. I’ve eaten fall-off-the-bone duck confit at a château in French wine country, and lamb tagine—fork-tender meat stewed for hours in a clay pot with preserved lemon and whole spices—in Marrakech. I’ve tasted nearly everything on the menu at a world-renowned sushi place and, at a Parisian restaurant with two Michelin stars, savored an objectively perfect chocolate soufflé, its crisp sanding-sugar crust giving way to an airy mousse-like center.

Now, I clearly value and appreciate food, so I spend quite a bit of time thinking about hypothetical food-related questions: If you could only eat one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be? What is your favorite food? If you were sentenced to death, what would you request as your last meal?

And surprisingly, though I have had many unforgettable dining experiences, ranging from spectacular home-cooked meals in foreign countries to ten-course tasting menus at exorbitant restaurants, I often find my mind’s eye (or, in this case, my mind’s mouth) wandering towards more familiar territory— that Christmas dinner, those beer brats, that chocolate cake.

Sometimes, after making these imaginary decisions, I metaanalyze them. Why did I pick that root beer float for my very

last beverage instead of a glass of Bordeaux? Why was that excellent tournedos Rossini, a medium-rare filet topped with a hunk of pan-seared foie gras and a generous ladle of Madeira demi-glace, passed up in favor of plain old mashed potatoes and turkey gravy? Why would I choose a Reese’s peanut butter cup over any other candy I’ve ever tried? The answer, I think, lies somewhere amidst the enormous body of research on human memory. *** We tend to view memory as infallible. In a recent study, 85% of college students agreed that memory is akin to a storage chest—we create memories and put them in the chest, where they remain intact, a perfect copy of the event we experienced, until we decide to withdraw them. If we remember an incident as having happened a certain way, we believe memory to be an accurate representation of what actually occurred. And why shouldn’t we? In many cases, the only record of a situation is our memory of it, so why should we second-guess that memory’s validity?

A growing body of research, however, suggests that we shouldn’t be so trusting of our storage chests. Our memories, it seems, are less accurate than we think, and can mutate from day to day depending on how our opinions have shifted since the time of the memory, how many times we’ve accessed or recounted the memory, and even the mood we’re in when we remember it. When recounting the past, we tend to downplay bad behavior and exaggerate good behavior in order to make our past selves match up with our ideal self. Nostalgia for the good old days could just be a manifestation of the social psychological phenomenon known as rosy retrospection, where we subconsciously block out the negative aspects of an experience and remember the positive aspects as more pleasant than they actually were. If we recount an event accurately, we’re later less susceptible to suggestions that may alter our memory of the event. Conversely, if we retell an event inaccurately, even if the inaccuracy was intentional to begin with (like a braggy

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fisherman exaggerating the size of his fish), we’re more likely to incorporate that information into our actual memory. In one study, newlyweds were asked to rate the quality of their partner and their marriage. Being newlyweds, most said they were very happy. Then, two years down the line, they were asked again. Couples whose marriages were going downhill now remembered being unhappy from the beginning, while couples who were still content in their marriages tended to have fond memories of the time spent with their partners. All this evidence points to the idea that memories are far from static entities—they can be unconsciously and unstoppably altered by a number of forces.

In recent years, DNA evidence has proven innocent many people who were thrown in jail after being falsely identified as criminals; some narrowly escaping execution. This revelation sparked a slew of research on the accuracy of witness identification, and although eyewitness testimony is still taken as proof in court, ample evidence now shows that it’s shockingly unreliable. In several different studies, subjects were asked to pick a suspect out of a lineup after witnessing a crime that was (unbeknownst to them) staged. Across studies, subjects selected an innocent person 55-60% of the time, although this number drops down to 20% when subjects are told that the guilty person may not actually be in the lineup. These kinds of studies obviously have important implications for the state of the judicial system, but for our purposes they are just another reminder that memories are easily confounded.

In neuroscience literature, there are a few different types of memory that are extensively researched and written about, each involving overlapping but ultimately different brain circuits. Implicit memory refers to things we’re able to do without conscious thought—using language, for example, or performing learned motor movements like riding a bike or playing a phrase on the piano. Explicit (or declarative) memory refers to anything that can be recalled on command and is split into two categories: episodic memory and semantic memory. Semantic memories are learned facts, like historical events, names, and dates. Episodic memory, also known as autobiographic memory, is memory of personal experiences.

The studies mentioned above about the fallibility of memory are all concerned with episodic memory. Emotional memory can latch onto any of the aforementioned memory types, and allows us to both process emotional events and conjure up how something in our memory made us feel. It’s versatile in that it has elements of both conscious and unconscious memory. To give an example, unconscious emotional memory plays a part in learned fear—when I see a daddy long-legs skulking on my wall, my natural fear response (freezing, elevated heart rate, urge to run far away) is activated before I can form a thought about how that ugly spider makes me feel.

Because neuroscience as we know it today is a relatively new field of study, a schematic of all of the interactions between the body and the brain, and between structures within the brain, is far from complete, and some of our more complex neural

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processes are only just beginning to be pieced together in a way that will eventually lead to full understanding. Encoding and retrieval of memory are two of these processes. Although much research has already been conducted, neuroscientists haven’t yet come close to closing the book on memory, due mostly to limitations in brain imaging technology snd ethical concerns (experimental brain surgery went out of fashion after the era of ice-pick lobotomies). However, some inferences can be made about the neural basis of memory, thanks to studies conducted on animals and brain-damaged patients.

The hippocampus seems to play a large role in the retrieval of episodic memories. The hippocampus is part of the limbic system, a group of structures that lie beneath the cortex, which is the outermost layer of tissue in the brain. The limbic system was originally thought to be a center for emotion, a theory that was later revised to include memory formation and fear learning, among other things. When the hippocampus is lesioned or damaged, retrieval of autobiographic memory is significantly impaired, more so than retrieval of semantic memory, the other type of explicit memory. In fact, it seems that the hippocampus is the most important structure involved in recall of episodic or autobiographic memories.

Emotional memory seems to be completely separate from episodic memory. First of all, although emotional memory also seems to be regulated by the limbic system, this time it’s the amygdala, not the hippocampus, that plays a role. The amygdala is considered the emotional hub of the brain. It serves to mediate the fear response, receiving hormones from the pituitary gland and signaling to the autonomic nervous system (which controls heart rate and breathing) that it’s time to fight or flee. It’s also greatly involved in recognizing and expressing emotion. For example, people with UrbachWiethe’s disease, which presents itself in the form of destructive calcium deposits, are unable to identify emotions when shown pictures of faces and also fail to read sentences in a way that conveys emotion. The amygdala, as I mentioned earlier, is also involved in processing and retrieving emotional memory.

Unlike episodic memory in general, both positive and negative emotional experiences are likely to be remembered in clear detail, because of a rush of hormones that stimulate the amygdala when an experience is particularly emotional. A study was condcuted on patients who had lost the ability to retrieve explicit memories but whose amygdalae were intact. When the patients were shown pictures of some relatives and some strangers and asked to say which people they liked better, the patients always chose pictures of their relatives. Although they didn’t recognize the faces of their loved ones anymore, they were still able to perceive an emotional connection to those pictures, however unconsciously. According to this and other studies, the amygdala can be thought of as a storehouse of emotional memories, both conscious and unconscious. *** Let’s take a moment to talk about madeleines. The mad-

eleine is a small cookie baked in a scalloped mold. It turns out cakelike, softly crumbed with crisp, golden edges. The batter—just eggs, flour, butter, sugar, salt, and vanilla—can be a vehicle for any number of imaginative flavor combinations, but traditionally the French, in appreciation of simplicity, add a few tablespoons of grated lemon rind and call it a day. This humble treat secured a place in history when it was prominently featured in Marcel Proust’s most famous work, À la recherche du temps perdu, or In Search of Lost Time. In the section titled La madeleine, Proust describes the sensation of sipping a spoonful of tea containing the crumbs of a madeleine and being stricken by a sort of sourceless joy, which upon some self-reflection turns out to be the physical manifestation of an incredibly vivid childhood memory revolving around the tea-soaked bites of madeleines his aunt Léonie used to give him.

I feel as though Proust and I have something in common.

I, too, have felt the joy of biting into a small cookie- this time perfumed with almond and flaked with butter- that conjured up a vivid childhood memory of my own, figures and scenes rising up around me like Proust’s Japanese paper sculptures.

The same thing happens with bites of beer brats, rich chocolate cake, Thanksgiving turkey, and strawberry-whipped cream tower.

In terms of pure volume of scientific research, olfaction usually gets placed on the back burner in favor of the senses seen as more useful, more practical, more essential for survival: vision, audition, and touch. Research on scent memory is even less common. Every study and statistic regarding memory that I’ve mentioned so far is concerned not with all-encompassing memory, but memory as it’s known in the research world: a combination of images, words, and/or sounds. In the few papers that focus on scent memory, it’s portrayed as the “other” memory, totally separate from vision and language or sound. There’s a reason for this, and it goes hand in hand with why Proust had such an intense reaction to the taste of that madeleine, as well as why I’d eat my grandma’s turkey noodle soup over pretty much any other dish out there.

First of all, let me clarify the difference between smell and taste. Taste is comprised only of five elements: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami (the newest member of the taste family, umami, also known as savory, is the reason why mushrooms make a sauce so rich, why Parmesan cheese is the missing piece to your pasta, and why soy sauce adds so much more to sushi than regular old table salt). Taste is what you get when you plug your nose and drink your cough syrup—bitter (or sweet, or sour, or salt, or umami), but nothing else. The all-encompassing sensation of “flavor” is what happens when you combine those basic taste sensations with smell. In this case, smell manifests itself as something called retronasal olfaction, which occurs when odors from the food you put in your mouth travel up to the nasal cavity, the destination for regular smells that go in through your nose, by way of the nasal pharynx, a fancy name for the tunnel that connects your nose and your mouth.

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So, when I’m talking about smell or olfaction, I’m referring both to odors that go in through your nose and those that go through your mouth via food.

So what happens after a smell enters the nasal cavity? Every smell that enters your nose contains one or several odorants— the molecules that make up odors—that travel up to an area at the top of the nasal cavity known as the olfactory mucosa. This region, about the size of a dime, is home to olfactory receptor neurons that receive information from odorants and relay that information up to the brain. The first stop in the brain is the olfactory bulb, where glomeruli live—structures that each receive information from a different type of olfactory receptor neuron. The glomeruli effectively organize all this information and send it up to both the primary olfactory cortex and the amygdala. Somewhere along this pathway it starts to become clear why smell is a little different from the other senses, especially those heavily represented in the research literature on memory.

First of all, the neural olfactory pathway is unique compared to audition and vision (I’m ignoring taste and touch when going through these comparisons for brevity’s sake, but they too have similar pathways to vision and audition). Odorants entering through the nostrils or the mouth converge at the level of the nasal cavity. The olfactory pathway is the quickest to the brain, because odorants only have to travel through the olfactory mucosa before reaching the olfactory bulb.

The pathway is also quickest to areas of synthesis, in this case reaching the primary olfactory cortex at the same time as the amygdala, that hub of fear learning, emotion, and memory.

Information from the visual world, on the other hand, goes through each separate eye—cornea, lens, pupil, retina— then through the optic nerves, the optic chiasm, and the optic tracts, before finally converging in the thalamus, an area of the brain that acts as a relay station for all senses except for smell.

From the thalamus, information is sent to the primary visual cortex, and then from there onto higher level visual processing areas and eventually areas of synthesis. Auditory information jumps a similar series of hurdles, twisting and turning through the complex mechanisms of the inner ears before again converging upon the thalamus and eventually entering the primary auditory cortex and higher level processing areas, including the hippocampus. Compared to the direct, quick path of the olfactory system, audition and vision take a much more complex, roundabout way to get to effectively the same place in the brain.

Regarding the hippocampus, there is another important difference between olfaction and the dynamic duo of vision and audition. One study conducted on rabbits found that formation of visual and auditory memories relied heavily on the hippocampus, but the formation of olfactory memories did not. Instead, the olfactory pathway ends up in the amygdala.

This partially explains why scent memories are often inextricably linked to strong emotions, because instead of ending up

in the brain area for episodic memory formation, olfactory information ends up in the area for emotional memory formation. I believe this difference can also explain the sensation of surprise and joy that come along with smelling something you haven’t smelled in a while, and realizing that it conjures up memories that you haven’t accessed for a long time. In fact, one study found that “autobiographical memories triggered by olfactory information were older than memories associated with verbal and visual information. Specifically, most odorcued memories were located to the first decade of life…whereas memories associated with verbal and visual cues peaked in early adulthood.” These findings make sense because memories from the first decade of life, during most of which a child is pre-linguistic or in the process of learning language, are probably going to be less verbally framed than memories from the second decade or later.

In reference to a few of the studies I mentioned earlier regarding the fallibility of memory, I believe that one could make a strong argument that scent memories are more reliable than memory is typically thought to be. First of all, I argue that, given the process involved in accessing a smell memory, it’s more of an implicit memory than an explicit memory. In my experience, it’s practically impossible to imagine a scent vividly enough to trigger an actual scent memory—scent memories are usually brought about unexpectedly, like walking down the street and getting a whiff of the cologne your ex-boyfriend wore. When a scent memory happens, it’s immediate and unconscious. Secondly, scents are hard to imagine, and therefore scent memories are very difficult to conjure up. Because of this, it seems that scent would be impervious to the types of alterations that occur when we access memories too often: the more often we think about and rehash a memory, the more it’s subtly amended depending on our attitudes at the time of retelling, the subtle exaggerations and plot changes that get worked into the storyline, the rosy retrospection that slowly glosses over the negative aspects and magnifies the positives.

With scent memory, none of these things take place.

So if one could argue that scent memory is the most immune to interference from other forces, then by consequence it could be said that olfactory memory is the truest form of memory, the closest thing to withdrawing a memory intact from its place in one’s mental storage chest. These pristinely preserved memories also happen to be colored with all sorts of emotions that come rushing back when the chest is unexpectedly unlocked by the taste of, say, a root beer float, because the root beer float is inextricably linked with fireworks on Lake Winnebago, learning how to water-ski off the back of our rickety speedboat, the Lucky Pierre, and pickup soccer games at dusk. When Proust wrote of the intense nostalgia brought on by a nibble of madeleine, he wasn’t just waxing poetic—he was describing a powerful and unexpected neurological phenomenon, under-researched yet glaringly obvious to those who have been whisked into the past with a single bite.

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Madness Within Civilization Alexander Hoyle

My first visit to the Connecticut Valley Hospital (CVH) was at dusk in late autumn; a friend and I drove in from Middletown, which lies just over a mile to the West from the hospital. Although we were secure inside his tiny car, a weighty eeriness seeped in as soon as we crossed over the Chester Bowles Highway, the border to the compound. Throughout that first visit, I dared not exit the car. My companion, Eli, following a drug-related arrest, scheduled his community service hours at facilities in the area. Sunday idleness prompted this little excursion, with Eli* as my guide. Utterly captivated, we rolled slowly past the 19th-century redbrick buildings that peppered the slab of hillside south of the river.

Eli nodded toward an edifice strangled by untended ivy creeping up boarded windows and faded bricks.

“It’s abandoned,” he said. “I think most of the hospital is, actually.”

It certainly seemed that way: weaving about the complex, barren trees stood aside vacant buildings in an unsettling inversion of the New England mill town. This was an industry of a different sort. There were few people; those I did see shuffled listlessly, or stared vacuously at their feet, or smoked, or talked (often to no one in particular). We went by, for the most part, entirely unnoticed. Aside from Eli’s brief explanations, one of us would periodically break the silence to emphatically comment, “This is so fucking creepy!”

“So fucking creepy,” the other would agree.

“And that’s where I signed up for the community service shit, The Connection,” Eli said as he gestured toward several bearded and disheveled men waiting at a bus stop. I looked over at the group; one of them caught my gaze and waved. The place had that peaceful-but-disquieting quality of a graveyard.

And yet, I was fascinated. I had to come back. *** When thinking about a place, we consider where it is, what it is, and how the two—location and purpose—relate to one another. When this happens en masse, we create a kind of “normative landscape.” That CVH lies just on the edge of Middletown proper inherently implies a social relegation of the mentally ill. Connecticut Valley Hospital was founded in 1866 as the Hospital for the Insane (renamed in 1961).1 Numerous reports to the governor issued by the hospital around the turn of the century provide insight into the hospital’s workings. Constantly overcrowded, the staff had to turn many away and faced serious labor shortages.2 Patients were denied visitation by family members for the first month, and many came from distant towns within the state. Until 1942, many patients were sterilized, as their illnesses were believed to be hereditary.3 Alcoholics, too, composed a large number of the population, marking a trend of drug-abusing patients that continues to this day.4 A significant portion of the patients

*The names have been changed to protect the privacy of those mentioned in the article.

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were homeless “paupers” and immigrant workers. Members of these marginalized groups were consigned there, and many committed suicide. Still more were ordered there by the court system, having committed crimes as a result of their illnesses.6 Due to the powerful negative stigmatization of mental illness at the turn of the century, over 700 gravestones bear only identification numbers to avoid bringing shame upon patients’ families.

In a classic social psychology study conducted by David Rosenhan, eight participants with no history of mental illness checked into different psychiatric hospitals complaining of voices in their heads. Immediately upon admittance, they reported that their symptoms had ceased. Even so, the staff could not let go of their diagnoses; they analyzed the pseudopatients’ behavior through a distorted lens. The participants found themselves “depersonalized” and feeling “invisible” as a result of “attitudes characterized by fear, distrust, and horrible expectations.”7 Only one patient was released. The implicit associations the staff had with the mental hospital itself caused “normal” behavior to be read as abnormal. The social stigma was too strong.8 At the piece’s conclusion, Rosenhan recommends a movement toward “community health facilities” that “retain the individual in a relatively non-pejorative environment.”9 *** As it happened, I returned to Connecticut Valley Hospital a few weeks later by mistake. I had become intrigued by the non-profit organization Eli worked for, “The Connection,” which runs a number of halfway houses, shelters, and rehabilitation programs for the de facto untouchables of American society: ex-cons, the homeless, the mentally ill. I had a friend drop me off at what I thought was a “Connection”-run halfway house for recovering substance-abusers offered a way out of prison. As I soon discovered, I had arrived at a different Connection facility, the “Eddy Center,” “a residential treatment center providing intensive supervision, counseling and monitoring for individuals who are offered an alternative to incarceration:”10 a this-is-your-final-warning motel. I had an interview with the director of the halfway house, called “The Connection House,” Michael Black. Resigning myself to waiting around and taking the bus back (my friend had left), I called Mr. Black to reschedule. He immediately offered to come pick me up. Disbelieving, I stammered my thanks, that he didn’t have to do that. He said he was already on his way.

I began to walk toward the bus stop that services CVH and the Eddy Center, where the group of men had stood huddled during my last visit. I saw two middle-aged women walk toward the Center sporting 6-inch heels and carrying grocery bags.

Both had matching bleached blonde hair and caked-on rouge.

I scanned the group of commuters as I timidly approached the beat-up shelter: most were smoking furiously, and a few were chatting. There was only one woman. Feeling increasingly uncomfortable in my blazer and tie, I remembered that I had a fresh pack of cigarettes. Hoping to strike up a conversation, I offered a cigarette to no one in particular.

“Yeah, sure, thanks, man, uh, thanks a lot,” said a young fellow wearing a baseball cap and thick black parka.

Several can-I-grab-one-too’s later, and I had relaxed a little. A strikingly tall man, who had been talking with the lone woman, noticed my generosity and came over. He looked to be in his late 60s, had a long, unkempt white beard, and was dressed in a tattered blue tracksuit. As he grabbed the cigarette, I noticed the sleeves only reached his wrists. He thanked me and took a puff.

“You aren’t afraid of hanging around here? Around us folks?” he chuckled. He was difficult to read, and spoke haltingly.

“No, I mean, it doesn’t seem too bad.” I answered.

“I used to dress like that, heh, when I was in prep school, just like that.”

“Oh, yeah?” I responded.

There was a pause. He turned and pointed to the woman, who was now speaking with a man about my age who was smoking a cigar. She, too, was older, and had thinning hair that matched her oversized gray sweatshirt.

“She says I’m pissing her off, does that mean I’m pissing on a tree?” he half-smiled and emphasized, “She says I’m pissing her off, does that mean I’m pissing on a tree?” Pause.

“Pissing on a tree, heh.” I started blankly and shrugged. “It’s a joke,” he explained. “Well, I’ve got to get going. So long.”

I smiled, and he turned to walk toward the hospital’s inpatient dorms.

I turned and walked closer to two men sitting beneath the housing of the stop, both smoking wine-flavored Black & Milds. One of them was about 40, clean shaven with bold features and a pronounced underbite. His slicked-back dark hair came to a point in a sharp widow’s peak. The other sported a tarnished tan leather coat, was in his mid-fifties, and had gaunt cheeks that matched his inset eyes. I lit up a second cigarette and tried, unsuccessfully, not to eavesdrop. They were enjoying a fervent but well-spirited debate of suicide methods, and when I came near, they got louder.

“You gotta do it with piano wire, man! Fuckin’ piano wire!” The second man laughed and spoke excitedly, but at times would slow down and speak deliberately, drawing out each vowel. “I mean, it’s quick and painless. There isn’t much set up either, right?” He looked up at me and grinned. His enamel was worn off.

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“But you gotta do it right, see, ‘cause otherwise you’ll just end up slicing up your neck,” added the fellow in denim. I laughed apprehensively and clenched my jaw. He continued: “You need to experience the death. I want to experience death; I want to know I’m dead and feel it. I think decapitation is how you have to do it. Your brain still lives for a few minutes, you know. Imagine seeing that! You’d see your own headless body!”

His speech was slurred, and when he smiled at me I realized it was due to a missing set of front teeth.

“That’d be some trip,” I said.

They both laughed more than the comment merited. They

continued the argument for some time in similarly morose and violent terms, calling on me to weigh in on the matter. The older man asked me if I was seeing a shrink at CVH. I replied that I was doing a research project.

“Well, if you want to study me, I’m a goddamn head case,” joked the toothless guy. “I talk to my shrink about killing myself all the time. They’re gonna lock me up for good. I’m a real head case.”

He explained that his stepson had attempted suicide several times and that his wife had left him. But he was not engaged

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in the story; he seemed disconnected emotionally in a way that my mother would graciously describe as, “a little off.”

The younger man asked me about my courses, my opinion on Freud and psychotherapy; he seemed to be glad to chat. Neither of them looked me in the eye when we talked; although they would become animated, their eyes remained glazed over, staring past me. Soon enough, the conversation returned to suicide.

“Y’know, if you did it right: jumping off a bridge.

You’d have those few moments before you died.”

“Yeah. That’s the way to go.”

My ride pulled up and I said goodbye, never learning their names. *** Established in 1972 by Kätchen Coley and Nan Flanner with the help of community members from Wesleyan University and CVH, “The Connection House” originally served only young people suffering from addiction issues (and often poor mental health) who would otherwise face prison. Kätchen, Wesleyan’s first graduate in Anthropology,11 had been volunteering at Woodward Hall, an inpatient addiction services facility at CVH. Kätchen had witnessed firsthand the deficiencies of its program.12 “The problems of their clients were getting too complex to be solved by only a [GED tutorial.] Young alcohol and drug addicts, no matter how well they were tutored by the volunteers, had nowhere to go after Woodward. They had no way of reentering society after they had served their sentences.”13 Thus, Kätchen proposed “a home in Middletown that would get them used to living a normal community life…a transitional home [that] would help them to stay off drugs by....[getting them] interviews with various local merchants and businesspeople. The home would help these people connect with a physically, mentally, and financially healthy way of life.”14 She was trying to change the role of mental health institutions with respect to larger society.

In 2007, a “scathing federal report” cited CVH as having “fundamental breakdowns in patient safety, care, and

treatment” that was “grossly inadequate.”15 Meanwhile, “The Connection” has a payroll in the millions, and concrete results16 thanks in part to The Drug Abuse Office and Treatment Act of 1972, which provided funding for community health initiatives and allowed those who committed crimes while under the influence to be offered alternatives to incarceration.17 There has been a shift in perspective on both the level of both the state and that of the community. Instead of consigning the mentally ill to isolation, we have begun to accept them. CVH is a dying vestige of a less tolerant era.

In the interviews I conducted concerning the placement of “The Connection House,” all cited the “NIMBY [Not In My Back Yard] phenomenon.” After a brief ride, sitting inside the warm, welcoming house with Mike Black, he explained to me that new residents moving in to the neighborhood around the Connection House take issue with its presence. Originally, “The Connection House” was on Washington Street, across from Indian Hill cemetery and away from other residences.18 Today it is located on the pleasant, suburban Lincoln Street, and is now a residential substance abuse treatment center for men. Mike told me his “clients” (not, take note, patients) “shovel the walks for neighbors. They’re good neighbors. They’re good people.”19 Simply by merit of being part of the city itself, “The Connection House” affords its residents a sense of community and breaks down outside prejudice. The staff offers a “toolbox for reentering society.” Often, new clients are wearing prison garb, and their only form of identification are their release papers.20 Due to the house’s established presence in Middletown, local businesses hire clients fairly readily.21 The process is effective: four of every five clients do not recidivate. It is not a stretch to say that every Middletown resident has encountered and interacted with Connection House clients and graduates without realizing it. Walking out of the home after my interview, a client walked down the stairs. He approached me, smiled, and shook my hand firmly.

“Hi, I’m Doug. How you doing?”

If you would like to learn more about The Connection, visit the official website at www.theconnectioninc.org

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Shapiro, D. (2010, December 10). Interview with Deborah Shapiro, Middlesex County Historical Society. (A. Hoyle, Interviewer) Trustees, B. o. (1900, 1901, 1902, 1920). Report of the Connectut State Hospital to the Governor. Middletown. 4 3 Lombardo, P. (n.d.). Social Origins of Eugenics, Eugenics Sterilization Laws. Retrieved 12 15, 2010, from Eugenics Archive: http://www.eugen icsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay8text.html 4 Interview, Deborah Shapiro 5 1920 CVH Report 6 1920 CVH Report 7 Rosenhan, D. (1994). On Being Sane in Insane Places. In S. L. Ellyson, & A. G. Halberstadt, Explorations in Social Psychology (pp. 37-46).

McGraw-Hill Humanities. 43 8 Rosenhan, 41 9 Rosenhan, 46 10 Eddy Center. (n.d.). Retrieved November 20, 2010, from The Connection, Inc.: http://www.theconnectioninc.org/Eddy_Center.html 11 Coley, K. (2010, December 16). Interview with K채tchen Coley, Founder of The Connection, Inc. (A. Hoyle, Interviewer) 12 Hallie, P. (2001). K채tchen in Middletown. In P. Hallie, In the Eye of the Hurricane: Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm (pp. 174-207).

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 181 13 Hallie, 192-193 14 ibid.

15 Kovner, J. (2007, August 15). U.S. Report Blasts CVH. Hartford Courant , pp. 1, 5.

16 Angle, S. (2010, December 13). Interview with Stephen Angle, Board Member of The Connection Fund. (A. Hoyle, Interviewer) 17 Interview, K채tchen Coley 18 Hallie, 193 19 Black, M. (2010, November 23). Interview with Michael Black, Program Manager, Connection House. (A. Hoyle, Interviewer) 20 Aaron, G. (2010, December 7). Interview with Aaron Gloster, Board Member of The Connection, Inc. (A. Hoyle, Interviewer) 21 Interview, Michael Black 1

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17

Tattoo Stories Shira Engel

We all have stories to tell, and different reasons for why our stories are worth telling. Some people tell their stories orally, over coffee at Pi or Espwesso, while others tell their stories virtually on Tumblr or Wesleying. And some of us tell our stories by showing them. We embody our stories on arms, legs, backs, stomachs, so that we not only implicitly convey them to passersby, but we also tell them to ourselves, over and over again. Tattoos are reminders. They are ways of creating oneself, art on skin.

My tattoo began as a reminder: to stay present, in the day. It is a day lily (a flower that dissipates after one day) with the letters ODAAT inscribed on each petal—a reminder to take life one day at a time, to be present. Roots grow out of the day lily, reminding me that, in order to be present, I must also stay grounded in my personal roots, my inspirations, and my passions. While this tattoo lies on my own back, it seems to serve as a metaphor for why a lot of people get tattoos: to be reminded to bloom as they stay grounded in what inspired them to get a tattoo in the first place.

Chances are, if you’re getting something permanently inscribed on your body, there’s a reason. Maybe that reason has to do with remembrance and commemoration, or perhaps moving forward. Some tattoos are symbols, while others are literal representations. Whatever they are meant to convey, this campus is teeming with tattoos. Here are their stories.

ANYA MORGAN Tell me about your tattoo.

It’s from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which is my favorite book. The full line is, “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.”

What does it remind you of?

It serves as a kind of “stay true to yourself” thing, and on the other hand it’s like, “be grateful that you exist,” because at the scene where she says it, she’s at her friend’s funeral. Her heart is affirming that it’s still there.

Did getting it on your back have any significance?

I wanted to get it over my heart, but I didn’t want it on my front so I got it on the left side of my back because it’s closer to the heart.

How long did you know you had wanted to get it before you got it?

A few months. I had another Sylvia Plath quote I was thinking of getting: “Remember, remember. This is now and now and now.” I kind of still want to get it, but I don’t want to be covered in Sylvia Plath quotes.

Do you have any perceptions of what people think when they see it?

A lot of people go, “You are what?” Or just read it out loud to me.

That has happened to me a lot in the airport because I have to take off my sweater when I go through security.

When people say, “You are what?” what have you answered?

I usually say, “Oh, it’s a Sylvia Plath quote from The Bell Jar,” but I sound really douchey when I say that so I try to think of a different thing to say. It just sounds really pedantic. It’s something about saying the author’s name and then apostrophe-s and then the work…it’s like I’m writing a paper, so I have to figure out a better thing to say.

What about the font?

It’s American Typewriter. I wanted something very simple, but I didn’t want to do Helvetica because it’s proclaiming that you’re a hipster, so I did American Typewriter because it’s the simplest.

Do your parents know?

They were surprised that I wanted to get one, but they were supportive of it. My mom has a tattoo of a snake on her butt so…she could not be hypocritical and say no. Also, they liked that it was a literary quote and that my mom is an English teacher.

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When you reference your tattoo, what does it make you think of now?

In contrast with something that isn’t a word, tell me about your second tattoo.

Definitely the book, but also, it’s something I really like about myself; so whenever I see it or am reminded of it, it gives me more confidence.

This past summer, I worked my ass off at two jobs for two months and made a ton of money so I could go to Europe for a month with one of my best friends from school. I packed up my backpack with tampons and protein bars, got on a plane, went to Italy, met her in Venice, and then went to Croatia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. This summer, I had a really formative experience in independence and taking advantage of opportunities. I realized it was important to be spontaneous and not plan things out, which for me is very potent in the word “live.” I just knew that was something I wanted to remember.

MEGAN NASH Tell me about the tattoo on your ankle.

That was my first tattoo. It’s a triangle for delta…so change. And that was exciting because my sister and I got them together the summer before I left for college. It was the last summer that we were going to be together before our lives diverged, so it was a monumental time. We wanted to get tattoos to commemorate that and our sisterhood. It was the most exhilarating experience. We realized we had just altered our bodies forever and we were always going to remember it, but we were living it right then.

What’s your next step?

I’m going to get a California poppy in the summer.

AMBER BALINEWSKI

Why such a scientific symbol of change?

Tell me about your tattoo.

I’m a not-so-closeted science nerd.

This is my bunny rabbit, Corlobe. He was my rabbit for about 12

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years. I got him at the beginning of middle school and he died when I was in college. He was my best friend in middle and high school and he was there for me to talk to when I didn’t have anyone else to talk to or feel like I could talk to anyone else. He was always there to listen and not be judgmental toward my weepy teenage woes. My mom didn’t keep the ashes after they cremated him, so I tried to think of a way for him to always be with me. I wanted to get his portrait tattooed on me because he played a huge role in my life. I would never regret having someone I love so much on my body. He’s not a symbol that can change over time; he’s something very personal.

Did it come from a picture?

I found a tattoo artist who only does portraits from pictures of dogs and cats and people. This was his first rabbit.

When you look at your tattoo, what’s the first thing that comes to mind about Corlobe?

I love him. I’m always happy whenever I look at him. He’s a reminder to keep trucking on.

What’s it like to have a living animal tattooed on your body?

It’s different because it’s not a person. You can talk to people, but Corlobe didn’t know that I was going to be putting his portrait on my leg. I couldn’t ask him if it was okay. I just did it. This one was my rabbit. He was my best friend. It’s a very personal tattoo.

Why on your ankle?

I’m going to be an elementary school teacher, and I wanted it on a place where it’s easy to cover up. I don’t want to affect my future by having a tattoo.

CLAIRE DOYLE What does your tattoo say?

Between two lungs, it was released. It was tattooed in my sister’s handwriting.

And it’s from a Florence + the Machine song?

The idea came to me while I was listening to the song and it totally felt right. I called my sister and asked her if I could get it in her handwriting while she happened to be listening to the song, so then I realized there was no need to overthink it.

Why that line?

I got it at a time in my life when I felt like I was letting go and moving on. The line made sense for me at that time, and I haven’t regretted it.

JAMES GARDELLA Why just the antler and not the whole deer?

I wanted something more botanical and what I was drawn to about the antler is that I felt it linked up more with what I wanted to express outwardly – strength and ferocity.

Yeah, I want it to express strength, but I like that it’s kind of ambiguous.

Next tattoo?

In San Francisco, I’m going to Black and Blue and I’m getting a small sunflower on my right front shoulder.

How is the antler symbolic of growth?

It gets bigger over time and then parts of it will break and layers of it will shed off.

Why the shoulder?

It was the site of what was an entry point into an assault so it was very charged for me and had a lot of energy locked up inside of it that I wanted to work with. The tattoo is a symbol of protection, like a guard or an evil eye for that area. It is also a metaphor of the healing process in general. I felt like this injury and the subsequent assault was largely out of my control. The healing of the tattoo was in my control. I’m the one who took care of it and it became a metaphor for something beautiful coming from the grounds of this injured, traumatized area.

I love how it’s not just about the product; it’s also about the process of taking care of your tattoo and having it heal and reflect other forms of healing in your life.

MAGGIE COHEN What was the inspiration behind your first tattoo?

It was during my yoga teacher training. I had been thinking about the idea of fear–meditating on it, dealing with it in my personal life, and then I was reading the Yoga Sutras. Then, I read a quote

by Eric Schiffman that said, “The release from fear precipitates the full flowering of love.” I took that as a sign. It was impulsive. I walked into a studio and did it that day. The tattoo says “Abhaya,” which means fearlessness in Sanskrit.

What’s the significance of the Sanskrit?

It’s not totally translatable. It’s a concept and mudra that I didn’t want to translate into English. It’s a reminder for me. It’s not something that needed to be in English for other people.

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How does your tattoo serve you today?

What do you think other people perceive of your tattoo?

As a slap in the face. My friends and family can use it to kick me into the present when I am acting out of fear. I got it because I want it to be a constant reminder. I do believe that fear and love are opposite and I wanted to live my life with as little fear as possible, which means emotional risk-taking and courageousness.

That I really like crocodiles.

What is your second tattoo of?

A crocodile and representation of the goddess, Akilanda Shivari, which means the Never-Broken Goddess. She is both the goddess represented by the crocodile and the rider of the crocodile. An article a friend of mine sent me over the summer from Elephant Journal called, “Why Lying Broken in a Pile on the Floor is a Good Idea,” inspired it.

What’s the story?

A goddess rides the crocodile, and as she rides it, she’s sucked into this muddy water. The crocodile eats her, and rather than chewing her up and that being the danger, it spins her around.

The disorientation is what shatters her. The crocodile spits her back out and it is from that place she is reformed. She forms back into a prism and that is where the cycle keeps happening.

She is always broken and always breaking. It represents the times in our lives with the greatest confusion and those are the times we are becoming most beautiful as we form into this unexpected thing of light and knowledge.

How do the tattoos work together?

The crocodile represents fear, and she both rides and is that.

RACHEL WARNER What’s the inspiration behind the tree?

I grew up on ten acres of forest where there were trees everywhere.

I got it during a time when my whole family felt like it was disintegrating. Each branch represents a person in my family. The tree is a symbol of roots and growth. It is not only about where I came from; it has everything to do with where I am going. My family influenced me so incredibly.

Is it a family tree?

No, it doesn’t have to do with genealogy. It reminds me while at school that my family isn’t actually so far away; they’re right on my back.

What does your second tattoo say?

In English, it means, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” It’s

a quote in a bastardized slang Latin, a rebel statement. It’s from the book The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. I read it twice in high school. The story behind it is that the handmaid finds it scribbled in a wardrobe. The previous handmaid who was executed already wrote it. It’s a reminder to stay strong. Bad things happen to good people and this is a reminder to not feel so personally defeated by it all.

Why on the hip?

Vanity reasons. I wanted it to stretch all around and flow with the hills and valleys of my body.

Do you like that it’s not in English?

People are less likely to approach you with shallow questions when they don’t know what it means. That’s how it appeared in the book, and I wanted to honor that.

ZACH VALENTI Your tattoo says “I am,” and then “surrender.” Can you break that up for me? What does that mean?

big on astrology told me “I AM” is the quote for the astrological sign associated with April. Those three words captured the meaning of the many quotes I wanted to get branded on myself.

Originally I wanted “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be,” from the “give a man a fish guy” and then “Get on with it,” from Ram Das. In the end, I stuck by my 10th Grade English teacher’s advice and omitted needless words.

What visual would go along with this tattoo?

A snake eating its tail.

My friend’s mom read it the week after I got it and said, “Don’t you get it? Surrender into being.” And I realized she understood it better than I did.

Do a lot of people have different interpretations of it?

Everybody reads it differently, and it’s all about the inflection.

Surrendering into being is what I struggle with, and is what I have gotten out of mindfulness.

What was the inspiration behind the tattoo?

I knew I struggled with letting go –surrender– and someone

What did you want to mark with this tattoo?

I found meditation and yoga. I am not sacred with these, but I found them as different approaches. I found the key to the availability of clarity all the time, in any circumstance, of how it all is.

Why so short?

It’s easy to get caught up in words, so having these three gets me into wordlessness.

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Department of H2O Jenessa Duncombe

To: The Almighty Lord Address: Office of Earthly Requests, In Heaven Above From: Department Head H2O Re: Regarding the Termination of the Department of Snow and Ice Dear Lord, I write to you regarding your letter in response to my testimony at the recent Weather Division meeting. You questioned both the credibility of and grounds for my statements. I address both concerns in full below, and share with you the stake I hold in these matters.

First, I reacquaint you with my commitment to the following responsibilities in my role as Department Head of H2O:

1. Maintaining the Hydrological Cycle [in conjunction with Solar Radiation from the Helios Department] 2. Promoting outreach to external parties and bonding with them [Polarity] 3. Maintaining bonds within my department [Adhesion] 4. Helping transport parties without means [Erosion Ini tiative] 5. Support for life on Earth

The aforementioned responsibilities have been completed in full while spearheading community partnership projects, such as:

1. Project SRE [Soothing Raindrop Effect]: creating a comforting noise when raining on thatched rooftops 2. No Snowflake Left un-Designed: a commitment to cultivate each and every snowflake’s unique gifts 3. LGBTQ Equality Initiative: working in conjunction with solar radiation to create rainbows in all settings

I have exceeded performance expectations of all of the above while simultaneously adapting to the increased demand of water in the past century, due to the invention of washing machines, water parks, and central pivot irrigation. Considering my record of dedication, I respectfully disagree with the recent decision made by higher management to terminate an underperforming department in my organization.

It’s true that, for the past three decades, the Department of Snow and Ice has produced unsatisfactory end-of-the-year results. A recent mismanagement of funds caused mass production during offpeak market time [i.e. the near liquidation of inventory in late October 2011 in the northeastern United States, resulting in so-called Snowpocalypse]. The Department of Snow and Ice is not at fault, however. The Department of Human Consumption has grossly overstepped its jurisdiction and negatively impacted other departments, as I explained in detail in the Weather Division meeting.

Even if the Department of Snow and Ice were responsible, you must consider the broader ripples that liquidating this department will cause. I agree that sentimental and cultural values cannot overshadow the more tangible quality of results. But what of public trust? It will dissolve and evaporate under the glare of public scrutiny. We currently receive heat from the media due to floods, wet dog odor, and water damage to personal cellular devices. Discontinuing the Department of Snow and Ice would perpetuate our wishy-washy image.

Lastly, the department offers vital services such as, but not limited to, annual snowpack and water reservoirs, Arctic ice and sea–level control, carbon storage in tundra, the formation of icicles, fall/ spring lake turnover, and infrastructure for igloos. We cannot cut these services. Furthermore, the decision will accelerate global climate change, altering the nature of this Earth and causing undue harm to all that inhabit it.

I understand that the decision to terminate the department rests on the shoulders of the shareholders and the board, as well as your Holiness. Please consider my words, and understand how dire I consider this situation. If upper management refuses to see reason, if it turns a blind eye to the organization’s integrity, I hereby declare my resignation.

I await your decision, and humbly oblige you to consider the earth.

Sincerely, Water

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Friggin’ Freegens Leo Liu

When I first met twenty-nine-year-old Zaac sitting in Wesleyan’s student center, I noticed he was still wearing a bike helmet, though his bike was nowhere to be seen. He wore makeshift shoes— it looked as though he wrapped the bottom of Christmas socks with duct tape. On his back, he wore a bag wrapped in bungee cord.

His left pant leg was patched, and dangling next to it was an empty water bottle. I later found out that he had biked three hours from New Haven to Middletown, which probably explained the empty bottle. He looked rugged, self-sufficient.

But in the student center, he looked distinctly out of place.

Despite Wesleyan’s hippie reputation, none of the students looked anything like him. People passing by wore North Face and Jansport backpacks—no bungee cords. They wore boots or shoes or sandals— all store-bought, not homemade. However, if Zaac felt uncomfortable, I couldn’t tell.

Although it may have looked like it, he didn’t forget to do his laundry that day. He isn’t homeless or uneducated. In fact, he graduated from the University of Connecticut with a degree in computer engineering. He’s not working a full-time job, but that isn’t because he can’t find one. He doesn’t want a job, just like he doesn’t want regular clothes or a car. Instead, he prefers to sew his own clothes and ride a bike. “I can spend money in the retail economy,” he said to me later, “but why bother? It’s a pricey lifestyle.” *** To outsiders, Zaac might look odd, if not pretentious; the way

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he’s dressed suggests that he finds wearing store-bought clothes too wasteful or consumerist. He tells me that we have a choice between living in or out of the traditional retail economy. What’s implicit is that those of us without duct-taped socks and bungee cord backpacks live within it, while he lives outside of it. And he’s not alone.

Zaac is what many people call a “freegan,” or a free vegan. The word is a bit of a misnomer, because not all freegans are vegans, though Zaac is. All freegans, however, do try to live free of money.

It’s an unusual goal, but not an altogether uncommon one. In New York City alone, there are more than five hundred active freegans.

Though most freegans have a save-the-world mentality—their lifestyle is a boycott of consumerism and waste—Zaac is a freegan primarily for himself. “I don’t want to need to work at a place that’s not fulfilling,” he says. “Even if it’s comfortable, it can be a suffocating commitment.” By sustaining himself on free things, he feels he can subvert typical income-oriented living. He instead leads wild foraging tours for money, which pay for everything he can’t avoid buying. *** Trying not to spend money, as well as being creative, has led many freegans to be dubbed “dumpster divers,” a label Zaac doesn’t mind. Zaac discovered dumpstering in high school, when he and his friends decided to build a tree house. “We went to the store to get nails,” he said, “but along the way, we found that there were so many construction sites all around, it just made more sense

to get nails from there instead. They would’ve been wasted. No one was going to use them.” Dumpstering allowed them to reuse what others threw away.

While it’s one thing to dumpster for old nails, it’s another to dumpster for food. Zaac told me that he and his friend Steven regularly go food dumpstering at an organic shop. This Easter, he’s not surprised by the food he finds, since he has done it many times before. As he shines his flashlight around the store’s pitchblack garbage room, there are boxes and boxes of food—not mixed in trash bags—but stacked and clearly organized. If the lights were on, it would look more like a storage room.

“Here we have some Clementines,” he says in the video he’s taking of his findings. (He likes to keep track.) He points his flashlight at a stack of cardboard boxes. They look like they haven’t been touched. “How many do you think we have, Steven?”

From the dark, his friend says, “I can’t see, but these boxes are usually pretty heavy.” He lifts and grunts. “This is about twenty pounds, maybe more.”

Zaac shines the flashlight to the left, where there are a dozen loaves of bread, some packaged tortillas (“which is nice because they have a longer shelf life than bread, despite what the expiration date says”), sixty boxes of jelly beans, and five pounds of bagels. He shines the flashlight down; there are fifteen pounds of onions, ten containers of hummus, oranges, organic rice cakes, and glutenfree cookies. To the right, there are organic medicinal supplements (“$44 a jar”), pizza dough, cheese, more bread, organic bananas, organic pears, organic apples, papayas, and grapes.

It’s a lot of food to bring home, but my question is: what of the health hazards? A box of strawberries only lasts three to four days—and that’s if it’s refrigerated. Strawberries in a dumpster, however clean, would definitely expire by the time dumpster divers find them. That goes for any fruit or vegetable. But Zaac says that in his many years of dumpstering, he hasn’t faced that problem yet.

After dumpstering, he cuts off the bad parts of produce and makes a large stew that he reheats and eats for a week.

“At least for me,” he said, “the chances of food poisoning are cut drastically because I don’t use animal products.” *** Back at Wesleyan, Zaac leads forty people on a wild foraging tour paid by Wesleyan student-farmers. When Zaac isn’t dumpstering, wild foraging is how he finds food. He walks between a hill and the road, stopping the group periodically to show everyone just how much food there really is to find. Where most people see a beech tree, Zaac sees a black-stemmed polypore growing in the trunk. Where most people see grass, he sees an assortment of foods, ready for cooking: pungent field garlic stalks and their tiny bulbs, chickweed for stir-fry and soup, and the bamboo-like Japanese knotweed which tastes sour underneath its thick skin. There’s also wild oregano, the heart-shaped wood sorrel, cleavers, clovers, and violets. Without walking more than a third of a mile, Zaac has dozens of foods available to him. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Every time he points something out, the group circles around him. He kneels down, pulls out a clump of plant, and passes it

around. As he describes the taste, the meaning of its Latin name, and how to cook it, a sense of wonder comes over the group.

The idea is enchanting. We are seduced into imagining ourselves as freegans who don’t do anything but gather our own food.

We’d drop out of college and, like hunter-gatherers, form groups and travel into forests to find meals. We’d come back home with ingredients for nettle salad, blackberry jam, and dandelion wine.

We might share our food with other freegans, or perhaps go back to the bartering system. I’ll give you a pound of stinging nettles for a half a pound of morels. Between finding and trading food, there’d be no need for a nine-to-five job.

But a freegan lifestyle isn’t as easy as it looks. We’d have to learn how to identify plants, as well as how to cook. Many of us have never sewed before, so we’d have to learn to do that too. Both cooking and sewing are time consuming. Even quitting a job, which sounds liberating, might force us to give up our cars, gym memberships, or air conditioning. If we don’t quit our job, would we have time to learn about what plants are edible and what plants aren’t?

One person in the group asks, “Is there an easy way to determine if a plant is edible?”

Zaac answers, “If you can’t identify it, you can’t eat it.” *** Not knowing what you’re doing when foraging in the wild is dangerous. There are over a thousand documented poisonous plants growing in North America. In 2011, the age of smartphones and tablet PCs, Zaac still relies on hand drawn keys to distinguish between different plant species. He’s especially careful with mushrooms, one of the most dangerous wild edibles. Though he’s trained to recognize different species, he doesn’t experiment with a mushroom unless it’s on his key. “I use the best field guides to define the mushrooms in the Connecticut area as thoroughly as possible.”

While mushroom-related fatalities are rare, they do occur.

Amanita phalloides—or the death cap—looks a lot like Volvariella volvacea, except it’s deadly. An amateur freegan wouldn’t know the difference. Many immigrants from countries without the death cap fall for the deceptive trap: its cap color and size, along with the white cup around the base of the stalk, all look like its edible counterpart. Immigrants, children, and even dogs have died from death caps in New York, California, and Oregon. There are other deadly mushrooms too. For example, the four deadly white species of mushrooms that herbalists call the Destroying Angels. In the past thirty years, seventeen people have died and thousands have been hospitalized from these and other poisonous mushrooms. *** Yet despite how dangerous, time-consuming, and inconvenient wild foraging is, there’s still something attractive about the idea. Forty Wesleyan students came to Zaac’s tour to learn about finding edible weeds, even though they have already purchased comprehensive meal plans. The last two times Zaac led tours at Wesleyan, they were just as popular. Even in New York, Zaac is able to lead regular wild foraging tours; ten to thirty people show

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up each time he leads one.

His tours are almost suspiciously popular. That he is making a profit by showing people how to live a free lifestyle strikes one as hypocritical; it begs the question of whether it’s really possible to live without money. If everyone he introduced to freeganism started making their own clothes and finding their own food, he’d have no business. It’s also ironic that he’s introducing us to the very lifestyle our ancestors gave up. It’s nothing new; it’s primitive.

Nevertheless, the freegan movement is appealing, because it offers a proven alternative. Our ancestors foraged successfully for thousands of years, but they eventually thought it easier to settle down and grow food instead, ultimately leading to mass-scale, industrial agriculture. Freeganism solves the same problem, but in reverse. Food grown industrially is no longer easier to get, because we have to work full-time jobs to pay for it. In some ways, it has become easier and more liberating to look for food than to buy it. The allure of freeganism seems to speak to the universality of not just wanting free food, but wanting freedom, too. *** So why the bike? Does Zaac enjoy biking three hours from New Haven to Wesleyan and then another three hours back? Like foraging, biking is symbolic of freedom. When he was at the University of Connecticut, he and his friends shared a car—the only time in his life he has surrendered to owning one. At the time, he figured carpooling with four other people compensated for how wasteful it was to drive a car himself. Little did he know that his car would leave him faced with a difficult decision. When they were picking an apartment at the end of their junior year, they had to choose between one that was much closer to the school and another that was fifteen miles away, but would cost $100 less every month.

Because they had a car, they picked the cheaper apartment.

Immediately, Zaac regretted it. If it weren’t for the car, he says, there’s no way he would have picked an apartment fifteen miles away. “I realized having a car is uncomfortable,” he said, “because for fifteen miles, I’m sitting in a steel box and I have to worry about traffic, the police, getting a ticket, or my car breaking down. If I were on a bike, I wouldn’t have to worry about any of that.”

After college, he made sure to find an apartment that was a mile away from his job. He got rid of his car for good and made himself a bike. “It’s been better,” he says. “But sometimes, I think even a bike is too fast. There’s a lot I’d see if I wasn’t on the road—like mushroom species yet to be discovered with a discerning eye.” *** Back on the tour, Zaac—still wearing his bike helmet—rustles through the foliage behind Wesleyan’s gym.

He tells us about a phallus-shaped plant that’s currently out of season. He shows us mullein, which is good for preventing allergies. He feeds us red clover, cherished by the Irish as a cureall. And he tells us that mugworth causes vivid dreams if someone

smells the aroma while sleeping. He hasn’t tried it himself.

“What’s this?” asks a girl, pointing at what looks like a weed.

Zaac bends down. People circle around him, as he pulls the plant out. He pinches it in half and smells the goo with his eyes closed. “Hm...” he says. Just as we are convinced that he must know everything, he tosses it. “I’m not sure. I could probably find it in a field guide.” He can’t identify it, so we don’t try it.

We follow the road, and Wesleyan is up ahead. The sun is setting, and the tour is ending. Though he doesn’t mention it to the group, Zaac had hoped to finish much earlier. He didn’t want to bike home in the dark. *** Today, Zaac lives 65 miles away from Wesleyan at the Wassaic Community Farm, on the New York side of the Connecticut border. He lives among other freegans who also dumpster, forage, and grow food. Once a year, he compiles statistics of what he finds in dumpsters to find patterns. Whenever he finds something valuable while biking, he sells it. And twice a week, he heads to south Bronx with vegetables, herbs, and mushrooms to distribute to the needy.

While Zaac enjoys his lifestyle, it’s not for everyone. He doesn’t lead foraging tours to recruit freegans. Though Zaac disagrees with how most people live, he doesn’t care which lifestyle they ultimately choose. Instead, he’s happy to lead interested people on tours to make what little money he needs. Most people can’t imagine spending three to seven hours a day biking. Zaac would travel three times faster if he drove, but he doesn’t see this as an inconvenience at all. Others would probably disagree. *** It is early morning. Zaac is standing next to his bike. He takes out his video phone, one of the only modern conveniences he can’t live without, and starts recording.

The video is shaky. The camera shows crunchy leaves and thick tree roots covering the ground around the Wassaic Community Farm. His feet are outlined against the leaves, his colorful duct-taped Christmas socks demanding attention. The camera zooms and focuses on his bike handles. They are wrapped tightly with rubber, clearly homemade. Resting on the left bike handle is a small pouch. He says in the footage, “So here’s the thing I just constructed with an eyeglass case and homemade rubber bands. I made this contraption so that I can video while bicycling.”

The video cuts off and suddenly he’s riding his bike. The camera is fastened onto his bike handle, the lens facing upwards.

The footage shows a white morning sky, with tree branches and telephone lines passing quickly as he covers distance. His head is in the middle of the screen with his signature bike helmet strapped tightly. The wind makes it difficult to hear as he yells, “I’m probably riding at about thirty miles per hour at the moment!”

“Yesterday I bicycled to Middletown, Connecticut to lead a foraging tour there,” he pants, the sky above him getting brighter. “And right now,” he shouts, “I’m heading north to lead another one!”

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“A Good Meal for the Soul” Alex Wilkinson

Francisco Goldman is the award-winning author of three works of fiction—“The Long Night of White Chickens,” “The Ordinary Seaman,” and “The Divine Husband”—as well as a nonfiction book, “The Art of Political Murder.” His recent memoir, “Say Her Name,” details the life of his late wife Aura Estrada, who died in a body-surfing accident off the coast of Mexico in 2007. Goldman, who is of Guatemalan and American descent, has spent many years as a journalist covering conflicts and political movements in Latin America and has seen his work published in The New Yorker and The New York Times. He is currently on a lecture tour for “Say Her Name” and generously took the time out of his busy schedule to talk with me at the Middletown restaurant, Mikado. Over plates of sushi rolls and mugs of green tea, Goldman discussed his writing process, his cultural identity, and the meaning of beauty.

How did it feel to have critics receive your first book, Long Night of White Chickens, so well?

I remember a lot of things went wrong for that book right out of the gate. It was almost the most amazing thing—I would have been rich. The New Yorker had accepted a big long extract, and I was told it was a done deal. And then apparently, at the very last second, their head fiction editor decided it didn’t have enough closure, and killed it, just like that. I was that close. So my perception was that the book had really bad luck out of the gate. Meanwhile it was getting all these really nice reviews, but not in the [New York] Times.

I remember being very frustrated, actually. And then I think the book had practically disappeared, and its ass was totally saved when it won the American Academy First Fiction Prize and the Penn/ Faulkner finalist prize, and then after that it sold really well. So I could say prizes don’t matter—but they don’t matter unless you win one, and then you see what a difference it makes. I really felt the American Academy saved my career.

Tell us the story of that first book.

The way this book came about was that my publisher wanted to sign a collection of my short stories. So he approached my agent, and she said, “He’s not really doing short stories anymore, but it would

be great to get him out of Central America and get him working on a novel.” So I hatched this plan together, and they gave me a very modest advance for a novel—they offered me $10,000. So I went to Madrid and spent six months trying to start this. I spent all my money and didn’t write a page, and I went back to Central America. This happens in the book—all that stuff about the bottles and the fake death squad assassination, all that happened. So my grandmother’s house seemed too risky. Me and a bunch of journalists rented a floor in a hotel, and I just sat down and said, “OK. If all of this had really happened, if I had to tell it to someone, I’d be able to tell it. You can tell anything that happens to you to somebody.” And I just sat down with that in mind and wrote what is basically still the first page. That’s how it finally got going.

How has your experience been with publishing your other books?

Well, writing is a hard career. I think now, finally, things are going well. For many hard years, I think my books always got a lot of critical acclaim, but it was hard to connect to a readership- I’ve always been an outsider. I’m never easy to fit into any [category].

I think I paid a bit for that. A lot of it is just luck, and I also think the country has changed- a lot of intermarriage.

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People aren’t so strict about how they define people. You just sense it through your pores: America is much more hospitable to me now, as a writer, than it was twenty years ago. And then my own fault was taking too long on some books, like Divine Husband—I just took forever with that book. That’s definitely the book no one ever gets.

Would you say that’s your favorite book?

Maybe. No, Say Her Name is my best book, because of what it’s about; but it [Divine Husband] is my most ambitious book. I like that book. It was a book that was totally misunderstood by mainstream reviewers; they didn’t sense what a goof it was. It was a comedy, really, about history, and they thought I was trying to write seriously about history. Too many pompous mail reviewers—and again, that’s about luck. And then female reviewers would get it, would get that I was just having a ball. But they were never in the most mainstream places.

It’s not easy to have a writing career, so I’m really grateful I have gotten to have one. I’ve had great support from my publisher; my publisher has been constantly behind me. And somehow things really feel like they’re clicking now in some way. As a writer, I’m really excited about things I’ve learned. I’m really eager to write more books. And I don’t know how they’re going to turn out.

It’s funny, baseball players come into their prime when they’re 28 or something—you never know when a writer is suddenly going to hit their stride. And I just really feel that way now. I think it’s because experience has taught me so much. It’s not that there aren’t other writers who’ve had experiences, but I’ve had a lot. There’s so much violence in it [my life], so much trauma, so many disasters, and somehow I’ve come out alright. I’ve come out strengthened as a writer.

There are a lot of things that could’ve broken me. I know, for a fact, that people didn’t expect to see Say Her Name. They thought I was going to die—they did! Or that I was going to just dissolve into a drunken state of uselessness. They weren’t expecting the book at all. And I think that book made me strong. And now I feel like I know things. Of course. everyone wants to write beautiful books— but how do you define beauty? Not in a corny way, right? You want to be able to reach all kinds of readers, of course. It’s really hard to explain, but I would just really love to write something that is especially meaningful and nurturing, like a good meal for the soul, for people who have really suffered. That’s my dream. Which is hard to describe—I’m not even sure what I mean. [laughs]

There are so many different perspectives at play in your first novel, Long Night of White Chickens. How did you manage all of the shifting narrative voices?

I don’t know how you do that—through hard work, by focusing on hearing your characters. You’re focused on the language. You have to believe in their reality, even if their reality is something you’re making up out of words, imagination. As Falubert said, “The right

style and form only come along when the illusion of the subject has become an obsession.” I still think that’s exactly what writing novels is—a search for style and form, a search for shape. That doesn’t come from without—it has to come from within the book. It happens from within the book because this illusion that the characters are real becomes so real to you. Eventually, you begin to discover the right language, the right form—it has to be organic. That was one of the wisest thing about how novels get made that I’ve ever read.

What were you trying to convey to readers with that novel?

I remember very clearly that I had thought I had made my imaginary homeland here [with White Chickens]—that I had knitted my two worlds together, I had done this magic trick where I made Guatemala as big as the United States within the pages of this book, since they occupy the same amount of space. I was insane about this idea of fusing two different kinds of writing. It’s nothing that I would try to do now.

In a good “Boom” [a Latin-American literary movement] novel, the protagonist is everyone, the whole town. In America, there is a tradition towards the narrator being “I.” That’s why you get differences in the way Roger speaks—in “I”—and the way Moya speaks. I thought I was going to try to fuse the two, and that was the way I would make my imaginary homeland.

That’s exactly the way I thought of this first book. Then life took over, and now I live my life equally in the United States and Latin America, and it’s become second nature. I don’t think about it anymore; I don’t wonder about my identity. I guess I mostly feel at home in Mexico, in a strange way. Very slowly, that’s how life took shape, and I don’t really think about it anymore. Maybe I should; maybe I’ll do that in a new book. That said, I think in the U.S. spectrum of things, I definitely identify as Latino, for all sorts of complicated reasons. Also because of how I’ve lived my life. Much of my life was spent working as a journalist in Latin America.

The chronology of White Chickens is quite fragmented.

Was the way in which you ordered the events intentional?

I remember doing endless outlines. If you look at the books I used as models—Absalom, Absalom! by [William] Faulkner, Dog Years by Günter Grass, Conversation in the Cathedral by [Mario] Vargas Llosa— they go all over the place too! So that’s what I was trying to orchestrate: a book that moved through time in a complex way. Part of that was inexperience, and part of that was an ambition to fracture time in that way.

Was there a particular reason that you concentrated a lot of the “big reveals” in the novel in the last section?

There was one moment where my agent told me that she didn’t think the last third was working, and I totally rewrote it. At first it didn’t work at all, and I think I grew up as a writer during that section. I remember being in a total panic trying to bring everything together—I really thought I was dying. I had gotten more money for the book, so there was lots of pressure on me. Even a striped shirt, or walking by a fence, would send me into these panic attacks.

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I went to a doctor. I thought I was having a heart attack, and I was breathing out of this paper bag. It was just pure stress—there was nothing wrong with my heart at all. And it all went away once I finished the book. And I said to myself, “This is the last time I’m going to start a novel with a murder when I don’t know who did it.” [laughs]

I found it fascinating that, in White Chickens, you would tell one story from the perspective of Moya, and then fluidly transition into a retelling of that same story through Roger’s perspective. Was that technique intentional, or did it arise organically from writing?

One of the underlying ideas I wanted to explore in this book is that everyone has their own versions of reality. In some ways, that book is about war. I was beginning to realize that it’s a war fought with words as much as with bullets; everybody is competing to have their version of what’s going on win out. I wanted to reflect that—that subjectivity, and a critique of that subjectivity, throughout the whole book. So in a way, every chapter, every section, is a different kind of storytelling, too.

You teach writing at Trinity College, and you teach occasionally at a journalism school that apparently people think you’re the director of...

Bolaño, [Horacio] Castellanos Moya. The boom generation, they were very influenced by ideology. From the Bolaño generation on down, it’s the disillusioned. There are no political illusions in Latin America; it’s a very politicized place, there’s no way to avoid it. But I think, even before I got to know their writing, I discovered that on my own, too—[that I wanted to] free myself from those kind of determining factors and ideas. The simplest way to put it is that, even at the time I was writing White Chickens, I didn’t believe in the things that older boom writers believed in.

Are you working on anything new right now?

Oh yeah, definitely. I’ve definitely got projects going.

Any fiction?

Yes.

Anything you can talk about?

No. [laughs]

Are you working on any more articles, like the one on the Chilean student movement that is going into the New York Times?

It’s weird, huh?

Probably. I think we’re talking about putting long versions of some of my pieces—because things don’t run at their full length of magazines—into a book.

It’s on Wikipedia apparently, and I don’t know how.

This would be your second non-fiction book?

It is?

Yeah. I think we’re going to do that soon.

Yeah, you could edit it yourself!

Do you find that those two aspects of your writing—fiction and non-fiction—speak to each other?

I don’t know how! [laughs] Could you take it off for me?

Sure! Would it be fair to say that you occasionally hold workshops there?

Yeah! Very occasionally.

So given all of that, what advice would you give to aspiring writers? How do you think writing culture is shaping up right now?

There’s too much safe writing in the United States. Bolaño used to say, “Leap head first into the abyss.” It’s a dangerous profession, and it should be. You should be willing to risk everything every time you write a book. When I say “risk everything,” I don’t mean risk becoming homeless—partly that. It’s that you’re doing something and you have no idea whether it’s going to work or not. You have to write in that kind of fearless way.

Some critics talked about your writing in Long Night of White Chickens as emblematic of magical realism. How would you pose yourself in relation to Latin American literary traditions?

Well, I’m definitely not a magic realist. But I’ll tell you, I feel kindred spirits in the Latin Americans of my generation, like Roberto

I’ve been at this a long time, and style inevitably changes as you grow older and learn different things. The way I write now is not the way I wrote then—though it’s interesting, in some ways it is. Say Her Name was a return for me to a more autobiographical-based fiction, or non-fiction. And I found myself really comfortable in that voice, though I don’t know if I’m going to do that again any time soon. What changed most of all is that Aura changed everything— it’s made me a different writer. But it’s amazing how much of that writer [of White Chickens] was already present here more than in subsequent books. It’s very bizarre that this book begins with someone grieving a loved one, before that writer [the narrator] really had any idea of what grief really is.

When I had to write Art of Political Murder, I had to learn a new way to write because that was such a complicated case—there was so much on the line. So many people were in danger, that I had to write it in a way that completely served the subject—there was no flamboyant writing, no writing that shows off its chops. I needed to get myself out of the way and have a really transparent style, and let the story and people in the story be front and center. It was really strange, because when I had to write this most autobiographical of books [Say Her Name], I found that what I had learned really

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served me well, since I, in that book, also wanted to serve just the subject and not call attention to myself and have it be about Aura. I wanted a complete absence of vanity in the writing. I don’t know how [my style] is going to change. You want to change; you don’t want to repeat yourself.

Do you think about the reader when you write?

I try not to think about the reader, outside of just not confusing them. I don’t think about how I want something to affect the reader, which is interesting because, in White Chickens, Moya is obsessed with how to get readers. He’s a character who is obsessed with how to get people to pay attention to Guatemala, but that’s not what the book is doing—the book is talking about that kind of person. When I was writing Say Her Name, I was only focused on Laura, and the right way to write about Laura. And thank god that’s how I did it. When I was being interviewed by someone in France, she asked, “Well this is really a risky book, isn’t it?” And I realized it’s true—I never worried ever.

I thought to myself, “Of course people are going to love Laura.” But what if they hadn’t? What if I had been aware of the danger. What if I had ever thought to myself, “I can’t write this about Laura, people will think she’s too neurotic.” Or, “I have to make sure people find her interesting.”

If I had had those kinds of thoughts in my mind, I wouldn’t have written nearly as lively a Laura. It never even occurred to me that I had to try to worry about how people might perceive her. And thank god. If people had read that book and not loved Laura, it would’ve been such a nightmare. For me as a writer, imagine failing on that level—not having the reader love the person you love. That would be heartbreaking. And thank god people did. But I’m sure one reason people loved her is because it never occurred to me that they might not.

Given your work as journalist and as a novelist, how do you feel a writer should represent violence?

Every writer has to find his own way of doing it. I think for myself, it’s really important to write about violence without serving a political agenda—it’s violence, and the reader can discern where it’s coming from. You [the writer] have to be focused on how violence affects people in their lives. A fiction writer always has to somehow be focused on this human mystery, whereas with journalists it’s very different. I use a lot of novelistic technique in my journalism, but I don’t think they [the two forms] are the same. The fundamental difference is that one’s not about answering anything—one’s about trying to create something apart from reality, something that’s on its own, that does whatever it is you might want it do. Whereas journalists focus on reality as much as one writer can do so. It [journalism] focuses on casting light on what’s happening in reality. Art of Political Murder is about who murdered the bishop, and whether the murder is true.

I don’t know if a novel can do that—what’s true, you know? A novel is about the mystery of existence. It’s also about trying to make something beautiful. And I think that trying to make something beautiful— whatever beautiful means—represents a violent disagreement with reality. I guess you could say that this is what humans do. Reality is repugnant and awful, and the artist has the right to try to change it into something else.

Some interview questions contributed by students in the Wesleyan spring 2012 course, “Senior Seminar in Advanced Creative Writing: The Literary Manifesto.”

An excerpt of this interview was published in The Wesleyan Argus.

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the boogeyman’s a star Lauren Nadler

It is generally agreed upon that most dads are (generally) alike.

For instance, when you ask them what’s for dinner, they are likely to respond, “Grub,” or, “Poison.” They think it’s funny to swerve the car back and forth when they drive you and your friends. Usually, they enjoy jokes about bodily functions. And they probably were the first people to tell you about the Boogeyman.

You know those fake hillbilly teeth they sell at the prank stores? My dad used to wear a pair to school plays. He cooked PlayDoh hotdogs and hamburgers with me when my mom took naps and he sometimes painted my toenails while I sat very still.

My dad loves antiques and bargains, and on the rare occasions when my mom was busy and he would watch me and my brother instead, we would have to go with him to all his thrift stores before he went to work at the restaurant. I think you would be surprised by how close the stores were to one another—within like 10 city blocks.

My dad has a usual route that he takes in order to hit up as many as possible most efficiently. I think the order goes something like this:

Goodwill, followed by Cancer Care Thrift Shop, Arthri

tis Foundation Thrift Shop, Memorial Sloan-Kettering

Cancer Center Thrift Shop, Spence-Chapin Thrift

Shop, and, depending on time and how tired my brother

and I were, maybe only a couple of others before Housing

Works.

I can’t be sure if that path is correct though—I haven’t been with him to all his stores in a while since I became old enough to watch myself alone. My brother and I always complained about having to tag along and my dad always yelled at us to quit whining. At each store, they know my dad by name because he is an exception-

ally big man and because he is friendly to strangers.

“Hey! Tiny! What’s good today?” the man behind the counter at Goodwill would holler. I liked his smile.

My dad told us to smile at the old ladies working at Cancer Care so they’d like us. They smelled funny and wore strange makeup. “Peter! Aw…You have the kids with you today?! Look at how tall they’re growing!” they’d say in weird voices. *** When we went inside a store, my brother and I could shadow my dad, quietly looking at every clothing rack as he did, reading each book title as he browsed the bookshelves, inspecting each shirt with him as he held up a hanger. When we did this, he taught us to look for stains and how to tell which stains would come out in the wash or not and told us which items were good deals or if you could buy the same thing new for the same price. When we did this, he also sometimes got annoyed if we were tired because we slowed him down.

Most times my brother and I would venture away from my dad in the store and go exploring on our own. I always worried about getting lost and losing my dad, especially now since I felt in charge of my brother who is younger than me. However, I tended to prefer this (over following my dad around the store) because I reasoned that this slight separation anxiety outweighed the tedious boredom of trailing my dad, who encouraged us to leave him alone anyway and assured me that he would always be able to see us.

We felt very much independent by ourselves, my brother and I, heading back in the store to where the toys and furniture are.

Together he and I decided which bed we would have if we could have any one and took guesses at the person who might have slept

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there before we found it. We imagined what the little babies who outgrew the cribs looked like now. Maybe one was a really old man with a cane now, my brother might offer, while I pictured a teenage-girl who wore bell-bottom blue jeans. We picked out which end tables were worst looking and took turns testing out each chair or couch before deeming one the most comfy. I would try to persuade him to spend more time with the dolls and stuffed animals (I never liked for us to be separated from each other in the store since we were already not with our dad) as I gave names to each teddy bear and regretted that I couldn’t take them home. I whispered promises to them that I only half-believed myself: that another little child would get his or her parents to buy them for him or her, even though they were all old and played with. I comforted them, assuring each that their new owner would love them so much.

I judged their previous owners. I assumed they must have been careless and heartless children who played rough with them and coolly stood by while they were allowed to meet their sorry fates here in the store that sells everything that has already been used. I mostly pitied the very dirty ones because I figured they were the least likely to get picked by another child. If my dad told me I could have one toy I tried to pick the ugliest one that I may even have been unattracted to myself, since the others had better chances.

Finally, my dad would come tell us it was time to leave and he would buy whatever he had found and we would go back out onto the street, which was always either far hotter or colder than it was in the store depending on which season it was. On the walk to the restaurant we would talk about whether or not Mommy would be mad that day because we bought too many things. If my dad only was carrying plastic bags it wasn’t terrible, but it was more likely that my brother and I also held at least two additional bags each, whether or not any of the stuff in the bags was for us personally. We always carried our own things if he did buy something for us. My dad’s favorite things to buy besides lots of T-shirts nobody needs are clocks and watches, despite the fact that (as my mom points out to him) we already have at least one clock on every wall of our apartment. “Your mother doesn’t understand ‘collecting,’” my dad explains. *** Once we got to the restaurant it was better because my brother and I were definitely tired by this point and could sit down. My dad went into his office, for he was grumpy by now and tired of watching us. Two waitresses were friends with our mom and liked to talk to us and give us one of their dupe pads so we could draw. They let us get our own soda from the shooter behind the bar, which was very fun to do. My brother drank Coke and I had Sprite and we ate grilled cheese at the end of the bar, sort of away from the retired day drinkers who are my dad’s friends. We usually wandered downstairs (carefully, some of the stairs wiggled and one was broken) to the basement on our own. Some days the bartender would ask us to play down there if it was getting busy. The cool air down there was refreshing and not unwelcoming and the air smelled damp. Maybe later my dad would call me into his office to count checks and read the numbers of the bills out loud for him to put into a calculator to help close the register.

My brother and I also liked to follow the two cats that lived in the restaurant. Their names were Whiskey and Sammi. Sammi would sometimes let you pet her but Whiskey mainly liked to sleep a lot in the potato boxes downstairs in the basement. He was older.

My brother and I fashioned the cardboard from the boxes into silly pants we wore while crawling on the basement floor under canned goods, copying the cats. I also made cardboard cat ears. *** I was twelve and my brother was nine when we found the evidence of something we weren’t sure was proof of. There had been indications of problems before. Whenever my dad made us cereal he used too much milk and gave us tablespoons to eat with instead of regular teaspoons. On one Christmas Eve he came home drunk from the restaurant and fought with our mom and took the glass of milk we had left out for Santa and poured it on her.

I don’t know how often my dad got too drunk or fought with my mom. I think it mostly happened after I was asleep. My mom used to be an alcohol and substance abuse rehab counselor. She believes a healthy relationship with alcohol (and drugs) is no relationship but she takes prescribed medication for OCD, anxiety, and depression.

My mom and dad had just recently started leaving us to be home alone by ourselves when they were not there (though we were not allowed to start the oven or open the door) and we took this opportunity to go through my dad’s things. He has always kept his stuff in a hoarder’s clutter. He has drawers in his clothing dresser that are not all for clothes. In one drawer, we found a diary. We realized it was from a period in my dad’s life when he was trying sobriety, a recovering alcoholic by my mother’s diagnosis. Probably his sponsor or Group made him write one. There was a list of life goals. The second goal was a good family life and the third goal was to run a successful restaurant, but my dad’s first life goal was to be a Star.

My brother and I laughed. Then we stopped and started wondering whether he was disappointed with his life now or not.

We were curious as to what type of Star my dad had wanted to be. A movie star? A star athlete like Michael Jordan? A rock star, maybe?

I didn’t know what being a Star meant to me and I didn’t know what it could possibly mean to my dad. I was sad for him. My brother told me that at least his life isn’t over so he maybe still has a shot if he wanted one.

We wondered whether or not having children prevented him from becoming a Star. I felt guilty. We still felt bad as we went into his top drawer where we also felt scared when we found his pot.

It was the first time either of us had seen any drugs and my little brother made me swear I would never go into it for myself and I agreed right away and made him promise too. We had only heard about weed before and were only able to identify it because we knew it was usually kept in plastic Ziploc bags. I was surprised and confused. We put everything we had touched back the way we found it and went back to our room.

Years later, we would talk about how it is generally agreed upon that most dads are (generally) alike and how we had both stolen from his stash at some point.

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Malevolent Gondii

Valerie Puciloski

The ultrastructure: an oblong cell, smooth lines of membrane encasing various organelles. These organelles perform discrete tasks that keep the parasite functioning and dangerous. These parts constitute a whole that wrecks havoc on the behavior of animals that are unlucky enough to encounter it. A nucleus looms large in the center of the cytoplasm, suspended in the viscous goo by scaffolding called microtubules. The nucleus contains the genetic material of the organism; its DNA-instructions by which various proteins are made to initiate or alter behaviors; it is the control center of the single-celled machine. Mitochondria float lackadaisically in the muck, providing energy for the movement and reproduction of the cell. The apical end of the parasite is thought to help penetrate the host cell, a sharp point that serves to puncture the soft membrane of its target. Sacs, called micronemes, hold proteins that facilitate burrowing into the host cell: they lubricate the entry point. The parasite enjoys a smooth invasion.

The parasite is called Toxoplasma gondii. Cats are the parasite’s definitive host. Although T. gondii can asexually reproduce in other mammals, sexual reproduction can only take place in the soft stomach lining of felines. Asexual reproduction can be carried out with only one cell. An individual T. gondii cell replicates its DNA, and divides its nucleus and cytoplasm into two, each containing a copy of its genetic material. The single, elliptical cell is pinched off at the middle, as if constricted by a belt, until membrane meets membrane and two cells are formed from one. The process is rapid and prolific. Sexual reproduction takes two: bits and pieces of genes from two individuals are contained in gametes -eggs and sperm- and recombined to form distinct offspring. This

cutting and pasting of genes is advantageous for the advancement of T. gondii, because novel combinations of DNA and mistakes made in the multi-step process can potentially give rise to new features that make the parasite better suited to survive its environment.

The various hosts T. gondii invades are crucial to the dual sex life of the parasite. The life-cycle of T. gondii is biologically inventive: it relies on a seamless transition between two mammals and involves various stages of cell growth and division. This intricate process causes unique behavioral changes in the secondary host- a mammal that is not a cat and is usually a rat, but is also sometimes a human.

The first stage of life for T. gondii is the result of sexual reproduction. The offspring are sequestered in cysts, and are the combination of two mature T. gondii cells, formed by egg-andsperm-making machines in the guts of cats. The offspring contain a full set of DNA, and can undergo asexual reproduction; though not quite yet. Infected cats release immature T. gondii from their intestines into the environment. I’m talking millions of offspring in these millions of cysts. They’re shed wherever the cat relieves herself, for as long as three weeks after infection. The immature T. gondii undergo a change that makes them infective after spending a few days in the litter box or on the ground.

They are consumed by a secondary host when drinking water or food is accidentally contaminated. Slurped right up with dinner by the average rat.

Uninfected rats view the world as a dangerous place. They avoid light and exhibit a fear of new things and are hesitant in new

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places. This neophobia often keeps them alive, sicne they avoid situations which could potentially cause them harm. And the scent of cat-urine is a red flag, a marker indicating that a rat’s most feared predator is nearby. The smell sends the little furry being into a flustered frenzy. The rat’s fear is all-consuming, and it will immediately scuttle to an enclosed area to feel safe again.

Once inside the gut of the secondary host, the cells of T. gondii rapidly divide: asexual reproduction, twenty-four seven.

The minuscule, 4x2 micrometer microorganisms travel to other parts of the rat’s body through the bloodstream, invading cells. Once within the cell, a vacuole is formed by T. gondii.

The vacuole, basically a fluid-filled pocket, prompts the cells to enter another stage of the parasite’s life cycle: cell division of the parasite slows and stops. At this point, exact replicas of the fully-matured parasite are present; encysted inside of host cells, they are protected from the host’s immune system. The dormant T. gondii-filled cysts are usually found in brain and muscle tissue, but can spread to skeletal muscle, cardiovascular tissue, and eye tissue, where they potentially remain for the duration of the host’s lifetime. The host’s immune system does not recognize a change in the elements of the organism, even though the body is supporting another life-form. The parasite bides its time, invisible, until it can sexually reproduce again. *** After one or more T. gondii offspring complete infection and encysted maturation, the parasite is in a privileged position. It begins to alter the behavior of the secondary host, nestled among the neurons in the brain. Infected rats become more active, less fearful, and brazen. They are more likely to explore traps- those set by humans and those inherently present in their environment. These crazy rats, these poor, infected, crazy rats, normally petrified by cats, driven away from any

location bearing the slightest touch of their scent, are suddenly aroused by the smell of cat urine and drawn to locations where cats are likely to be. The smell of cat pee turns them on, and they scamper right over.

None of the rat’s other behaviors change: they still have the same social status and reproductive success, but they suddenly act suicidal. Their risk of predation skyrockets as they rush right into the claws of cats searching for a snack. Anyone who has owned a cat and had a shoelace come untied knows that cats are immediately attracted to moving and exposed objects. On the other hand, they show little interest in stationary objects.

The infected rats increase movement and their time spent in locations that make them vulnerable. The rats are fearless, high on dopamine.

T. gondii alters the behavior of the intermediate host for its own selective benefit: to enhance transmission to the definitive host. Subtle, nearly undetectable behavior modification keeps the cat interested in catching the intrepid, and seemingly healthy, rat. T. gondii is in control, but the cat remains unaware. T. gondii needs to reproduce, after all, and it needs crazy rats to get eaten to do so. Imagine that a rat plagued by T. gondii acts in a manner risky enough to be caught and consumed: instead of safe in the cupboard of a kitchen, it ventures out and is pinned by the paw of a house cat. When the rat dies and is eaten by the feline, the cysts present in the rat’s brain burst open. The parasite is again activated in the small intestine of the primary host. The mature T. gondii cells prepare for sexual reproduction, and spew out half of the DNA necessary to form other parasites. The half-set of DNA is akin to eggs and sperm, and sexual reproduction occurs, completing the cycle.

The exact mechanisms of behavior modification that the T. gondii enact are not entirely known. However, it is known that the manner in which the parasite accomplishes this change

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in behavior is related to an increase in the feel-good hormone dopamine. The presence of parasitic cysts in the brain cause an increase in this hormone related to many aspects of behavior, including: cognition, voluntary movement, motivation, punishment and reward, sleep, mood, attention, working memory, and learning.

The same neurotransmitters present in the brains of rats -including dopamine- are present in the brains of humans.

Thus, the resulting personality change caused by T. gondii in rats can also be observed in human beings. Both subsets of behavior in rats and humans point to T. gondii breaking down behavior that would keep them -the secondary host- out of danger. I know of few human beings that are eaten by cats, but I can’t blame T. gondii for trying to make its way back to feline intestines by altering human behavior. The secondary host needs to kick the bucket; the parasite must find its way back to cat-gut to make love. The tricks that T. gondii uses on its rat host do not produce an effect quite as quantifiable as when used on humans. But there is a correlation between infection and personality, because human temperament is associated with varying levels of dopamine. Although the sex of rats infected with T. gondii makes little difference, the parasite has genderspecific effects in humans.

Regardless of sex, humans hosting the parasite appear to experience a variety of long-term personality changes [Webster 2001]. Otherwise healthy individuals may not question the initial sickness that T. gondii causes, never undergo testing for the parasite, and may not be aware of dormant T. gondii settling down in their precious brain and remaining there throughout their lifetime. Also encouraging: the cysts are very difficult to entirely eradicate, even with treatment.

Infected women experience an increase in the personality traits of intelligence, superego strength (defined as being

rule-conscious, dutiful, conscientious, conforming, moralistic, staid and rule-bound, and affectothymia )defined as being warm, outgoing, attentive to others, kindly, easy-going, participating and liking people); infected men score lower in the personality traits of intelligence, superego strength and novelty-seeking (low novelty-seeking indicates rigid, loyal, stoic, slow-tempered and frugal personalities). An increase in guilt-proneness -neuroticism- is the only personality change that is consistent in both men and women. Once T. gondii invades, both sexes have a tendency to be more apprehensive, guilty, insecure, worried, self-doubting, and self-blaming [Flegr et al. 2000].

Wide-spread T. gondii infection can plausibly cause mass personality modification. It is not implausible to suggest that the average personality of a population might be shifted if a higher proportion of individuals are infected with T. gondii. 38% of meat products available for sale in the UK test positive for T. gondii tissue cysts, some of which are probably viable [Aspinall et al. 2002]. It has been estimated that the parasite has infected about three billion people, or a little under half of the worlds population. This environmental factor that affects many personalities could, theoretically, influence culture from the bottom-up. T. gondii could potentially influence the personalities within a culture, causing changes in ego, money, material possessions, work, and rules. Of course, this is only speculation.

Here’s the thing about humans: we like to think we are in control of our behavior. But in some cases we’re not. Many external forces can be argued to affect the day-to-day decision making that all humans make. In this case, an external force made internal also comes into play. Microscopic organisms, each made of one single, seemingly insignificant cell, take control of a multicellular giant. Our bodies hopelessly conform to their will.

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The Argus Magazine Spring 2012 Issue 1