“You’re you, you see, and nobody else. You are you, right?”
- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the ShoreBecause I had nothing better to do and Nina was my only high school friend nearby, I went to stay with her in Marblehead, Massachusetts for a few days towards the end of August. She was going to Wellesley the same week I was going to Brown, and we were both looking for ways to stretch days into warm limbos of memory, preserving a carefreeness we could look back on once the demands of college ramped up.
Back in 2020, separated by the pandemic, she’d sent me snippets of the coastal town through photos she’d taken from her bedroom window—a red sky spilling into a harbor of sailboats—accompanied by a text message that read something along the lines of, “sunset today!!!” An ocean away and who-knowshow-many days into Shanghai’s lockdown, I’d respond cooped up at my desk: “WTF wish I was there.” She’d
The fact that I might be in print,1 in physical paper, physically held, gives my voice substance. The presence of the reader is no longer implied; it feels as if I am no longer addressing an absence.2 A new year has begun and its physicality is palpable—is fall the new spring? And now that I am asking questions: So what if the one washer in your building has been broken on-and-off for a month? So what if the class you feel lukewarm about was the only one that gave you an override? So what if you feel newly unmoored even if you are a senior (freshman/sophomore/junior)? If there’s one thing we can learn from Brown’s way of doing things, whether it is the three-week long shopping period, or the ability to request incompletes for any class, it’s that “time is
make the same comment about the view coming straight out of a Monet painting, how much I’d love to take my camera there. Now, as she led me up to her balcony so I could see for myself, I gushed because it was true.
Something about being close to water always makes me feel like Kafka Tamura from Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore . He’s a 15-year-old boy who spends the majority of the novel entangled in adventures along coastlines, trying to reinvent himself away from an omen while watching the ocean ebb and flow. I dogeared every other page of the book, when waves crashed onto the shore. I loved the intensity of it all. I pictured my feet planted in the sand and some wonderful thing beneath erupting, like a bud I just needed to tug open with my toes.
Marblehead was foggy the day I arrived. I held each inhale at the base of my tongue, afraid that if I were to release my breath, all the magic in the air would disappear with a pop. The grayness that stretched
before me seemed like a perfect canvas. All of a sudden, I felt 11 again, sporting a holey JanSport backpack and too-big sneakers in some neon color, restless for the start of middle school and my life in Shanghai. I was hopeful, homesick, helplessly awkward. Seven years later, there I was, nervous for college on a different coast, still trying to figure out what marked ends and what marked beginnings. I’d grown out of a lot of things over time, but never that nagging anticipation for the future, the wave of longing and anxiety that would consume me before the start of anything new.
The next day, we went to visit the Jeremiah Lee Mansion, a 200-year-old home-turned-museum. The tour guide was an old man who had lived his entire life in the town and was so deeply intertwined with the place that I thought I could see the bend of Main Street in the hunch of his spine, the barnacles on the rocks in the gray-brown patches of scabbing on his cheeks. It was hot and I was getting lightheaded. I absentmindedly tracked the saliva that would foam at the edge of his
limited” and/or “constantly running out” are lies made up by Big Hourglass and Big Stopwatch. Time flows, it’s precious, but there’s always another week, another semester, another year. It’s never too late.
In Feature, the author writes about her trip to Marblehead over the summer and explores the town's history, delineating it as an emotional full-body sensory experience. In Narrative, an author writes about her trip to Dublin and how each experience reinforced her zest for life, another writer talks about her obsession with stars and their recurring presence in her life. In Arts & Culture, one author writes about her journey with all-consuming grief as understood through podcasts and authors; another takes the reader on a trip to the Venice Film Festival! In Lifestyle, our fan-favorite writer Sean returns with a fun guide on dressing
for the in-between seasons with some tips for staying warm (and cool!). We didn’t know about Houndstooth and Prince of Wales-check before we read this, but now we do!
As you try desperately to balance your love for literature/psychology/theater with your love for being employed eventually, we offer you the breakthroughs you need in the form of 1500 word wisdoms. post- Magazine looks forward to another fun-filled semester. Don’t forget to check out our new weekly addition: fun, themed, student-produced crosswords, and remember, we love you.
Living, laughing, and loving, Kimberly
mouth before disappearing with a swipe of his tongue, how even that looked a little like the white line where the ocean fell onto the shore.
Nina, with her miraculous ability to get along with anyone in any situation, made chit-chat for the both of us. On the second floor, we arrived in a room more quiet than the rest. Miniature beds, chairs, and toys formed a lopsided centerpiece in the middle of the room, and on the walls were portraits of children, each with a neat label: Age 3, Age 2, Age 4. One of the child’s hands held a wilted flower, while the other pointed an index finger downwards. We learned that this pairing meant that they had died. The room had been a nursery. The tour guide launched into an explanation of infant mortality rates two centuries ago, as if he, closer to death than any of his visitors, had taken on the burden of subduing its senselessness to us all. I thought: nothing can rationalize an end brushing so close to its beginning. The portraits were done post-mortem, the artist called in to look at a dead child when they were still presentable. Quick, capture this little life before it dims. I tried to seek out a frenzy of brush strokes, a particularly tender rendering of a nose not yet fully formed, a breath of detached grief. But all I saw was stillness. Them, looking out. Us, looking back.
Out in the garden, Nina plucked a little wildflower from the grass, handed it to me a little droopy. I took it with something between a grimace and a laugh. She took pictures of me holding it. As we joked, I listened to waves lap onto the shore over and over, imagining the silent rise and crest of each mere seconds before. Just as a wave peaks right before collapsing into itself, the children in the nursery must have lived every day with the want of a lifetime. And if coastlines were where this energy came to gather, I hoped, perhaps I could take part in it too.
Later, the morning’s rain cleared and we went out for a swim. I decided to jump from the dock. I imagined that such picturesque coming-of-age activities called for a burst of courage rather than a hesitant loss of control, and I, forever inclined to the latter, wanted to ride the momentum.
The water awoke myself to my body, a thing so funnily forgotten. The coldness pressed against my limbs so that I could feel every hair I’d always pondered shaving off, and in the full of my throat a fresh thud of heartbeats gathered. I felt so alive, like I was going to drown the next second. I kept observing the way my legs appeared nimble and luminescent in between streaks of sunlight, how if I tipped the back of my head into the water just enough, a shudder would run down my spine in the most perfect way.
The ocean’s heat waves rocked through me slowly, warm surges followed by lapses of cold. Somewhere in between, so many things had visited me like this before:
first crushes that taught me a hunger in my hands, the rush of familial anger dampened immediately by an instinct to apologize, anticipation equal parts excitement and fear. I couldn’t wait for college to begin; I wanted summer to last forever. I could never really put into words what I was feeling, the obstinacy of language mingling with a deeper uncertainty, always tiptoeing somewhere in between extremes. My true identity hung on some hotel ceiling fan, spinning round and round and round, and I (the present, physical version) sat often on the bed below, watching, wondering where one rotation gave way to another. I thought about how nice it was that the ocean seemed to translate all of this into the easy dichotomy of hot and cold my body could ration without overflowing.
Nina and I spent the remaining nights watching romcoms, me in her hoodie and her head brushing my neck. We played the rain scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral over and over and laughed until it got too late to be making noise. I could trace the smell of lobster juice lingering on my hands, or on hers, or in the breeze passing through the window. I became conscious of how peace spread itself fully at the pit of your stomach, so comfortable you could lose yourself in it. We stayed up until our eyes ached to close more than our chests ached to remain open, sucking in what was left of August with the hunger of an ant and its crumb. I imagined being a kid buckled in and held back just before a zip-line, the way the world must seem to bend outwards and offer you everything—here’s the next moment of your life, it’s all yours, you better be ready. How beautifully the anticipation must expand you.
There’s a moment towards the end of the book where Kafka stands at the “edge of the world.” He’s just about to leave a time void, stripped of any personhood and responsibility, and he’s been warned to walk straight out and back to his life, to never turn around. The reader knows that if he looks back in the next paragraph, he’s lost himself. The temptation is too strong. And sure enough, he looks back. And looks forward again. And makes it out. The first time I read it, I gasped.
It wasn’t Kafka’s strength but his momentary hesitation that I resonated with—the suspended moment on the diving board where you think it might be easier to chicken out than to jump in. Maybe you even take two steps back. My stay at Marblehead reminded me a lot of that paralyzing state of limbo. But it also gave me time to find pockets of courage in the smallest of places. I trust that if I keep digging, underneath wishes I’ve come just short of grasping and wilder dreams I’ve held onto nonetheless, amidst this lull of summer that is rapidly dimming, I know his strength too. It’s around me and inside me. I’m looking back and looking ahead, and I’ve never been more sure of anything.
I learned how to deal with space at college. I went from having my own room—big enough to fit my own bed, a couch, and every knickknack I had collected over the years—to sharing quarters one-third the size with three times the people. I barely had enough time to call my parents. Most of the time, when I called my friends across the country (and some across the ocean), they were busy (or asleep). The space between me and my old world felt huge, like a whole galaxy. I could never wrap my head around how vast the universe was, let alone Earth. With my whole world suddenly spread so far out around me, I finally had a little taste.
In November, there was the first blood moon in three years. I did not get up to see it myself. Instead, I allowed myself the few extra hours of sleep I would get by missing it. That morning, I woke up and reached for my phone again, tapping through picture after picture of the bright red orb that filled the sky last night. Students here used telescopes and special applications to see the moon in her full glory, sharing the photographs on various social media platforms. My friends across the country shared pictures too. And so did my parents. I swiped and tapped and opened messages. All of the same red moon. I felt grounded. We are in the same universe. We look up at the same stars each night.
*
Do you see them too, the stars jumping across the night sky like bugs dancing across a river?
It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity, an obsession. Looking at the corner of my eggshell-colored notebook page, a small figure has been etched from a jerky, five-step method ingrained into the center of my brain: a wobbly, uneven, fivepoint star. On my wrist, three inky stars begin to bleed into the tiny lines of my skin, jet-black like the night sky.
Stars are everywhere. The sparkle of chimes or violins or electric keyboards; five-petaled flowers, if you squint; spiky creatures lounging on the ocean floor. Cutting into a papaya in full ripeness spills seeds out of a star-shaped hole. The five green, leafy tops of tomatoes resting on the counter point away from each other, just around seventy-two degrees apart.
Star-studded and starstruck and stark. Starry-eyed girls and lemon-flavored Starbursts and singing along to “Starships.” Summer nights turn cold and dark and lonely until your gaze turns upwards, the stars a sparkling assortment served to you on an obsidian platter.
But one always loses their footing and falls, falls, falls. Starving, uneven, and broken, an empty feeling not dissimilar to the one that creeps into my brain when I draw one point, the next, the next, and the next. The proportions miscalculated, so
1. Intramural volleyball
2. Write the entire syllabus for an independent study you and your friends are always talking about putting together
3. Readings
4. Joining the niche club your acquaintance is running, thanklessly, once again this year
5. Get dinner with that one friend you make small talk with
6. Go to the Nelson (consistently)
7. Read Today@Brown
8. Get your nose pierced
9. Drastically change your wardrobe (finally start dressin’)
10. Eat the correct number of vegetables per day (at least 2)
“ I think being a hater has protected my peace”
“ I have a thing for females with their nipples out, I feel like it’s an accessory”
the lines of the scribbled five-pointed shape do not meet, leaving an open gap, the insides of the star spilling onto the page.
Stars are surrounded by darkness, a darkness that hides smog and imperfections and the other side of the moon. The stars are so far away that we cannot see their imperfections, their wobbly silhouettes and misshapen orbs; they fly under a film of perfection. If we were gazed at from so far away, would we be viewed as beautiful and faultless too?
While the stars are out, the darkness hides everything else—the people I am surrounded by are suddenly only identifiable by voice. The stars are out and the darkness forces me to only focus on them and their glorious, steadfast grid of constellations, but I need to close my eyes and remember everything else around me.
*
On that one specific night, it is dark and late and things go so wrong so fast. My friend leads me by the hand into the woods behind the big house. We lie down in the grass with our gaze upwards, the darkness a warm blanket. We make our own canopy with the stars, and I am reminded again of their ability to calm me with their pattern and their nature and their bright light.
I yearn to look up at the sky and gaze at everything, before it truly all goes dark. Before the sky drowns, suffocated by smog, pollution, secrets. The stars pepper space like silent warning signs, etched and echoed with an invisible pencil.
When a star falls, where does it go?
The shooting of a star fills me with glee, but its absence reminds me of the blank, empty feeling of loss, of losing, of feeling utterly and completely lost. Being alone, and feeling that missing piece I am so soundly used to. Or being at peace, simply by myself with the space that surrounds me.
In the daytime, the stars are hidden, not there at all. Because I love the stars, I love the sun, albeit in a different way. Beneath her basking light, I know the stars are still there, waiting patiently for me, for night to fall, to hug the moon in a celebratory greeting. I sometimes wish the stars were always the same—steadfast and reliable. Falling, falling, falling—how uneasy is it to know that those stars I look out at and see tonight may not be the same ones there tomorrow?
Mid-December 2022. Heavy snow. All Ryanair flights had been canceled indefinitely.
My friend Kayla and I caught an Uber from Stansted Airport to downtown London, then took several trains to Crewe.
Then U.K. train strikes started, so we took a taxi to Holyhead and got onto a ferry to see a blue island emerge from the waves and turn dark green, defined.
We finally arrived in Dublin.
*
The Dublin Port looked modern. Crowded,
messy, full of life. Having survived border control, we entered another hallway that led to the exit. The grayish sky, still bright, illuminated the passage. Conversations there had a different intonation. We were supposed to meet Orla, my colleague with whom I had co-organized an environmental TEDx conference in 2021 but had never met in person. “Orla! Hi!” I shouted.
*
When it got dark, we went to a concert at Coláiste Íosagáin, a girls’ secondary school where Orla was about to perform in a choir to celebrate the school’s 50th anniversary. Pupils in green sweatshirts and kilts welcomed us as we entered the building. Approaching the gym-like auditorium, I saw some older people in suits. I was asked to talk in Irish to one of those people. Feeling unsure about their pronunciation, I timidly recited the only three Gaelic phrases I knew. Much to my relief, the man nodded approvingly and welcomed us to the concert. Only after the encounter did Orla tell me that he was the school principal. I was glad she didn’t tell me that earlier—it saved me the adrenaline.
Everything at the concert—the speeches, performances, and even the conversations among those sitting around us—was in Gaelic. Orla’s choir gave a phenomenal performance of Vivaldi’s Gloria , followed by an orchestra with traditional Irish instruments playing upbeat folk tunes.
Feeling the music, the entire audience started clapping and stamping their feet in synchrony.
As the melody traveled in the air, memories of my past history and literature classes resurfaced. I had been taught in school that Ireland’s history was marked by desolation, pain, and oppression. But at that very moment, there was no sadness in the room. I felt invincible confidence. Growing up in a multicultural environment, I was aware that not all cultures had this confidence. I suddenly realized that confidence and oppression are not mutually exclusive concepts. *
The next day, Orla and I arrived at a boys’ secondary school called Ardscoil Rís where we were going to plant a tree. Orla gave the boys a bag full of spindle, willow, whitethorn, rowan, birch, blackthorn, guelder rose, and holly saplings, and dozens of spades. Following the teacher’s instructions, the boys started digging at the front side of a grassy area next to the school building. It was time for me to plant a tree, too, for the first time in my life. A few days earlier, I came up with the idea of naming the first self-planted tree the “Tree of Hope,” just because it sounded good. But at that very moment when I placed the sapling into the ground, I realized that hope might actually be planted and actively maintained by us . Just like a tree. I silently wished that the Tree of Hope would give the boys strength.
On our way home, we stopped by a meticulously-carved old building called the Casino Marino. Surrounded by an immense and vivid grass field, the building looked desolate but beautiful. It possessed the kind of beauty that was impossible to have without solitude. I could never know how many events, cheerful or sad, the Casino had witnessed. Could those memories still live in its walls? What did it think of them? I realized that no matter how much I study, there are certain kinds of knowledge I can never acquire.
When it got dark, Orla and I took a train to a pub she called “a famous Guinness place.” When the train crossed a large river, a harp-shaped bridge and purple and pink city lights reminded me of the cans of Guinness I saw in a friend’s dorm room in Oxford. I had seen cans and bottles of Guinness countless times before, but I had always decided not to try them, because I wanted the moment of me having my first Guinness to be in Ireland. This moment is going to happen in minutes, I thought. I couldn’t contain my excitement.
*
The pub walls were embellished with Christmas lights and a TV screen showing the World Cup semifinals. I took my first ever sip of Guinness. It was mild but tasty, unsweetened but soothing. It actually tasted like home, but I wasn’t able to tell why. A man offered us two empty seats. Orla asked me to say my three Irish Gaelic phrases, so I did and decided to add in “Sláinte!”
The man laughed and went away but Orla kept laughing. Her laugh was so infectious that it made me laugh too. I laughed and laughed and laughed until I was out of breath. What I felt in this space must be what some people would call the “craic,” an Irish word for good times, I thought.
*
At dinner with our TEDx teammates, we drank Merlot and talked about our lives, plans for the future, and problems in our current world. To my surprise, all my teammates looked way bigger and livelier than on Zoom. Every teammate had a different personality, and I felt as if I was entering multiple unique dimensions I did not want to exit as I talked to each of them. It was the combination of these personalities that made our team become our team in front of my eyes at that very moment. I felt as if I had witnessed something black-andwhite become full of color, something static become full of motion.
*
It was the last morning of my Ireland visit, the morning I dreaded, for I did not want to leave Dublin. After packing my bags, we headed to the coastal suburbs of Portmarnock for a site visit. The orderly line of delicate white houses seamlessly transitioned into the lime green forests at the seaside under the azure sky. Flocks of gulls were flying over the sea, and stretches of land appeared and disappeared near the horizon. At the seashore, a small forest of cordylines guided our way. The rays of the sun and thriving cordylines made Dublin look almost tropical. Soaking in the sunshine, I forgot about time and place. You couldn’t have guessed it was December.
*
Portmarnock was the most otherworldly of all sites. Everything there, from the pastel blue sea to the bright green fields, was so unbelievably bright. As I walked atop a hill, a neat row of saplings divided the vast field into two. The slight downward sloping field and the perfectly
horizontal skyline enclosed an acute angle for the sea to occupy. The pastel colors and simplicity of the landscape made me think that it could have been in one of Picasso’s early landscape paintings— such as Seascape or Mountains of Málaga . It felt like being in the middle of nowhere. But, for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel lonely at all and actually loved being in the middle of nowhere. I felt beautiful, just like the Casino Marino.
For lunch, we went to a seaside cafe near the village of Malahide. Colorful strings of wisteria flowers were hanging above the tables, and red and white poinsettias decorated the counter. The tables were display cases one would see in museums—pieces of shells, fancy antiques, and ancient photos were placed into compartments and protected with a glass ceiling. I savored my roast chicken sandwich and heavenly cappuccino as I gazed at the sky through the windows.
*
I took a seaside stroll in Malahide on my own. Unlike the sea in Portmarnock, this sea looked much darker. The sun made the surface of the water look as if it had thousands of stars floating on it. The dark blue waves reached the magnificent black stones of the beach in perfect harmony. The water was welcoming me, and I walked down the stairs to embrace it. It’s funny how each sea and ocean I have encountered in my life has a different aura, I thought. The shallow sea in the Bahamas, cheerful; the deep ocean in Rhode Island, melancholic. This sea evoked a sense of calm that enveloped me. Some might have walked by the
shore holding hands with their loved ones. Others might have visited this sea in hopes of receiving an answer to their despair. It was on one of these Dublin beaches that James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus found spiritual enlightenment. For me, it was this seaside that made me appreciate my life. At that moment, I was simply grateful to be able to observe something so magnificent.
* Walking toward my gate at the airport, I came across a tiny souvenir shop. Looking at the items covered with Dublin insignia, I chuckled at the thought of squeezing an entire experience into an object. The “Dublin” T-shirt could never represent the multitude of places I explored. The Guinness fridge magnet could never recreate the side-splitting laugh I shared with Orla at the pub. Before I even left, I started craving the past twoand-a-half days I had spent in this city.
Today, I still crave those life-altering days. I may be taking notes in a lecture hall, dancing with my friends at a party, or sitting on the couch alone at home, but that doesn’t stop me from catching an Uber from Stansted Airport to downtown London, taking several trains to Crewe, then taking a taxi to Holyhead, and getting onto a ferry to see a blue island emerge from the waves and turn dark green, defined. And finally, arriving in Dublin. In my head.
In the months before I first left for college, I started recording my friends. Not video, just their voices: the stories we exchanged in the car on the way to the movie theater, the way we said goodbye to each other after a day at the beach, the jokes we told at sleepovers—which we only found funny because we were so exhausted. The recordings carry not just their voices, but all the sounds that came with them: the clink of utensils as we ate, the music playing over the speaker at the mall, the flipping of playing cards as we played Egyptian War.
That August, after we all moved away, I picked the best clips from my Voice Memo app and combined them into a fifteen-minute audio diary. It was poorly edited, and although I shared it with my friends, I’m pretty sure no one listened to it but me.
The project was important to no one but myself, and even then, I cannot tell you why I did it. But I was seventeen and felt as though we were all standing on some sort of precipice, felt the strange grief of a childhood almost over, and felt the urge—so strong it was almost primal—to preserve what we had not yet lost. I wanted to be able to listen back to our voices years later and remember exactly who we had been.
I had forgotten that feeling until I listened to Sophie Townsend’s audio memoir, Goodbye to All This. The podcast tells the story of Townsend and her family as they lose her husband, Russell, to lung cancer. Townsend recounts her experience, from Russell’s first doctor’s appointment, to life as a widow with two young daughters, to moving out of the house she had shared with her husband. The BBC series, written and produced by Townsend, is so vulnerable that it often
feels more like a diary than the work of a journalist.
Much of the podcast’s effectiveness is precisely because it is a podcast. Instead of writing about her grief, Townsend forces us to listen to her speak about it. There are no official transcripts or web-adaptations of Goodbye to All This. The only way to access Townsend’s story is through her own voice.
There is a level of truth and trust that comes with telling a story out loud. Audio as a medium forces both the speaker and the listener to bring down their guard, be immediately vulnerable. I think it’s part of the reason why I desperately recorded my friends all summer before freshman year. In Townsend’s case, listening to her tell the story of her husband’s death makes it all the more devastating. Without the distance created by a written text, her unfathomable loss feels tangible, uncomfortably and suffocatingly close.
Like almost every work of creative nonfiction, Goodbye to All This reckons with the issue of accuracy in memoir. Townsend’s uncertainty is often at the center of her memoir. In one episode, she describes the faces standing around her husband’s deathbed. It sounds as though she is trying to describe a dream almost forgotten: “How did I hold Russell and my girls while I watched a scene in a room next to his bed? How did I somehow take it all in and take in nothing at all?” she asks herself.
Townsend allows other people to outright reject her narrative. She describes the hours before her husband’s death, when the doctor declares that he is in a coma: “I remember him asking me why I let Russell get out of bed last night on his own, telling me I should have helped him. This is why I remember him saying, ‘He’s in a coma now.’ My mother remembers it differently.”
Townsend is not afraid of creating contradiction and confusion within her retelling; in fact, she welcomes it.
At other points, the voices of friends and family disrupt Townsend’s narration, providing details that she has left out. They describe the way the children covered her husband in freshly-picked flowers as he lay dying and the silence that came after Russell’s heart stopped. Sometimes even these voices contradict each other. Two people say Russell looked at peace in his final hours, while one man remembers him looking ill. Their voices fade in and out of music, framing them in
an illusive way. While inserting outside quotes into a written memoir may have felt clunky, audio as a medium allows the polyphonic element of Townsend’s memoir to work seamlessly.
By introducing conflicting memories of her husband’s death, Townsend suggests that honesty and accuracy are not always the same. Townsend rejects that there could be one absolute version of her story. As a journalist, Townsend operates in a world that prioritizes objectivity and accuracy above all else. And although the genre of creative nonfiction allows more flexibility in terms of accuracy, the reader still expects honesty from the memoirist. But perhaps the most truthful way to portray grief is to acknowledge that it is inherently subjective.
Ultimately, no one can truly understand the pain of another. It’s a deeply isolating experience. Townsend compares herself to a ship lost at sea, one that struggles to look after her two children, to cook them dinner every night, to drive them to and from school, all on her own.
But by inviting friends and family to share their memories of her husband, as well as their feelings of loss, she portrays their pain as something simultaneously private and shared, a universal yet inconclusive experience. It is impossible to know someone else’s pain, but it is all pain. No matter how differently they remember the night of Russell’s death, they have that in common.
Goodbye to All This may be Townsend’s memoir, but it resonates because it is not her story alone. She puts her grief on full display, with all its messiness and nuances. And in holding out a hand to the others in her life suffering the same loss, she holds out another to her listeners. Your feelings may not make sense, she seems to say, but sometimes you must sit with the chaos.
And isn’t that true for all our memories—that most of them exist as a cacophony of contradiction? I’ve done what I can to preserve the past, to record every moment I had with the people I care about, and yet when I listen back to my audio diary, it’s all a jumble, sounds taken out of context and stitched together. The utensils clink, but I can’t tell you what we were eating. The music plays, but the song is muffled. The games go on, but we never know who wins. This is the closest I have to reliving it all, and maybe that’s enough.
Five days after I drove off the Universal Studios lot in 100-degree heat for the last time this summer, I flew to Europe for my semester abroad. My internship at Amblin Entertainment felt like a distant memory by the time my Spanish immersion program began two weeks later in Barcelona. After my first five days in Spain, I found myself again on a plane, this time headed to La Biennale di Venezia for the premiere of Amblin’s newest Netflix film, Maestro.
When the Venice premiere was announced in July, I realized that I could feasibly get to Italy for the weekend. I knew it would be a solo trip, but it was possible that some people I knew from work would also attend. At the time, the WGA writers’ strike and SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike were well under way but still shy of the 100-day mark, the day the 2023 strike would surpass the length of the previous WGA strike in 2007. As an aspiring writer, I felt a twinge of guilt and hypocrisy crossing the picket line every day, but the majority of employees in my office and I were not members of either union. Amblin, like most production companies, had movies in development and postproduction. While it was a somewhat slow summer to be an intern, there was still plenty to do.
The optimistic buzz on the Hollywood streets was that the strikes would hopefully end before Labor Day, thereby allowing writers and actors to return to work with fair pay. Millions of moviegoers across the world showed up in droves to this summer’s blockbuster bonanza, Barbenheimer, while thousands of writers and actors continued to protest and bargain with the AMPTP about fair wages and AI impact.
Meanwhile, I applied for a student pass to the Venice Film Festival and a few weeks later began receiving a barrage of Italian email correspondence, an implicit invitation to attend. By the time the first weekend of September rolled around, it was clear that the end of the strikes was nowhere in sight. This meant continued hardships for people still picketing day in and day out in L.A. It also meant that most American talent involved in the movies premiering at Venice would not appear on the red carpet, a stark departure from the 79 festivals prior. My boss, one of Maestro’s producers, w0uld not be in attendance. Neither would Bradley Cooper, the film’s writer, director, and star, who glamorously descended a boat with Lady Gaga at the 2018 Venice Film Festival for the premiere of his directorial debut, A Star is Born.
The red carpet looked different: It was flooded with mostly Italian and European stars. Rather than Maestro’s cast and the majority of its crew attending the premiere, Leonard Bernstein’s children graced the red carpet to pay homage to the biopic about their late parents. A select few crewmembers were able to be in attendance, like the prosthetic makeup designer, costume designer, and casting director. A handful of movies, among them Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, obtained a SAGAFTRA waiver to promote their films during the strike and had their full casts on site.
While actors conversed over Campari spritzes outside the Hotel Excelsior and festival-goers packed into theaters together, I meandered through the alleys and canals I hadn’t explored since my eighth-grade spring break trip to Italy. Venice was my first weekend trip of my fourmonth-long journey abroad and my first time traveling alone; by chance, I found myself in a bed-and-breakfast. The space did not quite match the glamorous photos: Used towels lay damp in the tiny bathroom, and the rusted mirror hanging outside the entrance to my room was undeniably haunted. I vowed to spend as little time in my hotel room as possible, for (legitimate) fear of the spirits I might encounter there.
After a socially overstimulating first week of my abroad program—a first-year orientation week redux of sorts—a weekend alone turned out to be exactly what I needed to recharge. Luckily, I had
no plans other than attending the screenings I had tickets for and stuffing myself with pasta and gelato.
Several students from my program in Barcelona marveled that I was choosing to spend my first weekend on a solo trip. When I explained how my journey to Venice came to be, I watched their eyes grow wide with intrigue, imagining me dressed in a ballgown and schmoozing with celebrities at ostentatious and exclusive parties. In reality, I wore oversized jeans, talked to basically no one, and was in bed each night by midnight.
Venice, with its winding canals, is an unusual place to host a film festival of this caliber and size, despite being the home of the internationally acclaimed La Biennale arts center. In fact, the festival takes place on the Lido, an island of Venice slightly removed from the main “city center” where most tourists stay. Throughout the day, overloaded water taxis shuttled festival guests packed like sardines to and from the island where they watched films in newly constructed (and quickly destroyed) auditoriums, save for the permanent Sala Grande theater. The half-sinking boats packed full of people were oddly reminiscent of Coachella shuttle buses, the temporary screening rooms akin to different musical stages.
On my first night, I attended a double-feature of Poor Things and Finalmente L’Alba. Yorgos Lanthimos ultimately took home the Golden Lion, the festival’s highest award, for Poor Things, and I understood why it won. The film tells the story of an unconventional scientist (Willem Dafoe) bringing a curious young woman (Emma Stone) back to life. She travels the world with a troubled lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) and discovers her life’s purpose as an advocate for equality and women’s liberation, in a world that in certain ways resembles our own, but in most is far more fantastical.
I have never seen a movie so simultaneously inventive, erotic, creepy, and entertaining. I laughed out loud, I squirmed in my chair, and I truly felt immersed inside the surrealist universe Lanthimos so artfully created. “There are no words to describe the experience of watching Emma Stone orgasm 27 times and Willem Dafoe slice human brains with a knife in front of a festival audience of 1,700 people,” I wrote in a Letterboxd
review. I loved observing the reactions of the many hundreds of other spectators in the room. I rarely go to the movies alone, but doing so all weekend allowed me to witness people’s firsthand responses, as opposed to just conversing with whomever I might have gone with to the theater.
I did not love every movie I saw. The film that followed Poor Things was an Italian period drama that follows an aspiring actress (Rebecca Antonaci) throughout one adventurous and intense night in Rome. Lily James and Rachel Sennott made jarring appearances that took me out of 1950s Italy, none of the characters’ motivations made sense, and many people in the theater left halfway through: a statement providing stark contrast to the over 10-minute-long standing ovations given to films that were well-received.
What I came to see (Maestro) was well worth the trip. The film was nearly finished in postproduction by the time I started my internship at Amblin, which enabled me to take a look at production materials and read the version of the script they shot on set. There were a couple of scenes I read that I was sad to see didn’t make the final cut, but seeing the script come to life through such vibrant and entrancing cinematography was inspiring. The story is poignant, the plot deeply personal, and the score beautifully integrated without detracting from any other elements of Leonard Bernstein’s complex life.
Rather than focusing solely on Bernstein’s remarkable career in music, screenwriters Josh Singer and Bradley Cooper shone an equal spotlight on the beautiful marriage and children Bernstein shared with Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), while simultaneously navigating Bernstein’s identity as a closeted gay man. Bradley Cooper did an exceptional job of embodying Bernstein, but Carey Mulligan’s acting blew him out of the water. I truly felt her bouts of uncertainty and rage at being in love with someone who has not yet figured out their own identity.
I loved witnessing the epic standing ovation as the credits rolled; standing and clapping alongside a room full of strangers for over five minutes straight was one of the few times I felt I was part of something bigger than just spectating the whole event by myself. I love how the measure of a good movie at a film festival is the precise number of minutes the standing ovation lasts. The experience validates your personal interpretation of what you just watched through everyone else’s opinions.
It was surreal to recognize the names of so many people I worked with in the credits and gave me chills to watch them be rewarded for all of the time, energy, and passion I know they put into the project. As a Hollywood native, I’ve always paid attention to the credits of everything I watch, recognizing how many people are involved in bringing a project to life. At the same time, however, the strikes did seem to be a bit of an elephant in the room, as I witnessed the glamor of the festival and thought about how many people were struggling to make ends meet due to the direct and indirect impact of the shutdown.
This weekend was filled with contradictions, some of them more uncomfortable to reckon with than others, but all of them were experiences that pushed me out of my comfort zone. Off I went each morning, a cappuccino trembling in my hand as I clutched the railing of the water taxi, eagerly awaiting my afternoon surrounded by thousands of cinephiles from around the world, yet feeling at peace talking to almost no one.
The time is upon us when the sun operates as both friend and foe. In these transitional seasons, finding the right combination to keep you both warm for those chilly morning classes and cool under the scorching afternoon sun is almost impossible. A summer wardrobe feels discordant with the slow turning of the leaves and the inescapable autumnal moods on our New England campus; but a fall wardrobe is far too hot to wear except during the chilliest of morning Ratty runs and will have you sweating so much, you’ll average three outfit changes a day. Luckily, dear reader, I am here to guide you during these odd transitional seasons, to help make you a little more comfortable on these rather random September days. Below you will find a helpful guide, split into convenient sections of drip, to start you off on our school year.
Level One: Sauce Beginner
The natural starting point for all of our fashion journeys is acquiring the basics: nice shirts, nice pants, nice layers. That impress-your-grandma look. The most versatile shirt one can acquire in our dressed-down world is, without question, the Oxford cloth button-down. The rough, sturdy Oxford cloth combined with the casual roll of the button-down collar (the bigger the collar, the bigger the roll) makes for a shirt that can be as dressy or as casual as you need it to be, and equally as adaptable for the varying weather. Go for shades of powder blue for fall tones and white for versatility. Cotton sweaters are also worth acquiring—perfect to throw on during chilly fall mornings with a pair of jeans. For a more contemporary look, avoid the slim-fit nightmares of the 2010s and pick a pair with a higher rise and more room through the leg. Light wash jeans are on the up and up but as a sauce beginner, it's safer to stick with darker washes that pair more easily with your wardrobe.
Here we find the midpoint in our evolution—the oceanic transition into TikTok bisexual boy style— taking the lessons you learned in your sauce incubation and graduating into a sauce moth (the sauciest insect).
Naturally, as an Ivy mothman, you find yourself drawn to woolens and the crisp natural fibers of a weighty linen. Sweater vests are making a comeback right now and there’s no better time to hop on the bandwagon than Sweater Season itself. Start with ones in navy and emerald before exploring the ultimate fall pattern: the Fair Isle sweater. Throw these over your Oxford shirts for a cozy Leslie Howard look (just me huh?). On the topic of shirts, begin to add some heavier linen shirts to your wardrobe. While typically considered summer wear, a heavier linen will keep you warm when paired with a sweater and will perform exceptionally after your morning class, when Providence has suddenly transformed into an arid wasteland. Introducing footwear, I feel that a nice tassel loafer in a dark brown provides a transitional air, being both business and casual, both summer and fall. No longer shackled to the feet of lawyers, Reaganites, and homeowners associations, a good tassel loafer can provide an a flair to outfits of the coming season.
Congratulations, you’ve reached the top. If you’re at this level, you don’t need me for step by step advice, but allow me to plant some ideas in your drip garden anyway. For pants, gaberdine and tropical wool have been saving my life through most of the summer and early fall. More breathable than a cotton fabric, more drapeable than a linen, tropical wool trousers and gaberdines in white and natural tan give off the 1930s movie star vibes that I’m sure you’re all going for. Pair these with the fun tweed patterns that thrive in winter. And for a twist, instead of donning an 800 oz. Harris Tweed jacket and losing ten pounds in water weight by the time you take it off, wear the same pattern in a light worsted wool. Houndstooth, Prince of Wales-check, windowpanes, herringbone—the bigger the better. If you, like me, are trying to look like an extra in a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers picture, go for the full suit.
There you have it folks, your saucy guide to staying cool, staying warm, and staying fresh in this weird inbetween season. I look forward to seeing you all out there in your best fall clothing as soon as the winds blow colder.
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by AJ Wu
“Everything inside you beats: the thunderclap of your heart, the shuddering of your breath, the quivering of your stomach. It all beats. Like wings. Like things longing for freedom, longing for escape from this prison of flesh, blood, and skin that you call your body.”
—Daniel
Hu,“A
Glossaryof Terms for ” 9.23.22
“We think of spring as beautiful, watching the earth as it slowly reawakens from its hibernation and retains its summertime vibrancy. We don’t consider how painful this transition could be; we expect beauty to simply bloom at the snap of a finger.”
—Ellyse Givens “Changing My Seasons” 9.24.21
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