art
literature
essays
the undergraduate journal of humanities
Fall 2008
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Cover Art: Burgeon, Janis Finkelman, Mixed Media, 14” x 22” This multi-media work on paper is the culmination of a “layered” development. It grew in a way mirroring the multiplication and regeneration of cells in a growing form. The detailed nature of this piece suggests an organism or network comprised of smaller components that contribute to the structure of the whole. Through the compartmentalization of each spindly protrusion or globule, that which is depicted in this work operates in both small and large spheres.
About the Artist
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Janis Finkelman is interested in investigating those physical forms that occur at multiple scales in the natural world. Her work is a visual exploration of physical laws that guide how structures ranging from internal organs to nebulae to lichen are shaped; the images that result from this interest are often ambiguous and may suggest multiple living organisms, components of their structures, or the environments in which they dwell. It is the artist’s hope that the viewer of her work will draw from their own conceptions of form and function in the natural world to determine what they are looking at. 1. Vacuon, Mixed Media, 13” x 20” 2. Sporozoa, Etching and Colored Pencil, 18” x 22”
Table of Contents
Fall 2008
Poetry 4 5 6 7 7 8 9 10
Arse Poetica, Lee Crickman Punch Drunk Beautiful, Mary Chen This Side of Saturday Night, Katie Malchow Homesick, Rachel Detra Lift, Amelia Foster The Concert Hall, Ashley McConnell Little Brother, David Labedz The Myth of Chang’e and the Archer, Mary Chen
Prose
16 Three Stories, Allison Pearl Snow Welch 18 Phantom Limb, Evan Hall 25 Blueprint Composed on a Bank and Shoal of Time, Aaron Greenberg
Essay
28 Thawing the Pre-med Curriculum, Shuhan He 30 The Coarsest Lust, Laura Frank
Wisconsin Idea
34 Education is the Root of Change, Michael Kenyon & Hannah Brown 36 The Center on Wisconsin Strategy, Alidz Oshagan
il . lu . mi . nate
To enlighten intellectually; to make illustrious or resplendent.
Staff
Letter from the Editor
Sandra Knisely Elizabeth Barth, MaryJo Fitzgerald Stacy Randolph, Kara Kopec, Gayle Cottrill Kate Campbell Art Editor Kerry King, Alaura Seidl, Art Reviewers Clarissa Zimmerman, Zahra Haider Aurelia Moser Art Gallery Coordinator Emily Smolarek Copy Editor Jessica Slicer Copy Editing Assistant Paulina Schemanski Essay Editor Joanna Davis, Amanda Detry, Essay Reviewers Eamon Doyle, Paul Waldhart, Jamie Upthall Cailin Gath Poetry Editor Poetry Reviewers Gerilyn Hisiger, Hanna Schlosser, Cara Dees, Adi Lev-Er, Rachel Bindl Jack Garigliano Prose Editor Michelle Czarnecki, Prose Reviewers Anna Wehrwein,Greg Langen, Patrick Johnson, Carolyn Lucas Sarah Ackerman Publicity Director Gayle Cottrill Staff Assistant Sarah Horvath Submissions Editor Jessica Slicer Submissions Assistant Joel Hans Web Editor Kate Neuens Wisconsin Idea Editor Savannah Camplin, Wisconsin Idea Reviewers Maya Primor WUD Publications Committee Annie Kleinert Director Vickie Eiden Advisor
Dear Readers,
Editor-in-Chief Layout Editors Layout Assitants
Board of Advisors: Al Friedman, Richard Brooks, Carrie Kruse, Elizabeth Owens, Jim Jacobson, Kathi Sell, Ken Fraizer, Mary Rouse, Ron Wallace
Sponsors Lemuel R. and Norma B. Boulware Estate Wisconsin Union UW-Madison Libraries
This year marks our fifth anniversary of production as UW-Madison’s only student-run undergraduate humanities journal. I have had the privilege this semester to serve as editor during one of Illumination’s most exciting times. This summer we received a substantial endowment that will ensure Illumination continues to print thousands of high-quality journals for years to come. The endowment comes from the Lemuel R. and Norma B. Boulware Estate and was established for the journal by former UW-Madison Chancellor John D. Wiley. With this gift comes a renewed energy for Illumination, and we have spent this semester growing as an organization and testing new ideas in order to include a wider diversity of voices in the journal. A record number of 40 undergraduate students comprise our staff, including the first-ever Web editor and coordinator for our art gallery in College Library’s Open Book Cafe. We have made a special effort to reach out to undergraduates from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines, and I believe this issue well reflects our work. We have strived especially to include students working to uphold the Wisconsin Idea. Thanks to all those who have helped the journal along the way as advisors, supporters and friends. Thanks particularly to this year’s staff, which rallied together to continue our tradition of excellence. I hope you enjoy our seventh issue, and please stay in touch with us via our website, http://illumination.library.wisc.edu. Cheers,
Sandra Knisely
Mission The mission of Illumination is to provide the undergraduate student body of the University of Wisconsin-Madison a chance to publish work in the fields of the humanities and to display some of the school’s best talent. As an approachable portal for creative writing, art, and scholarly essays, the diverse content in the journal will be a valuable addition to the intellectual community of the University and all the people it affects.
Thank You
Illumination would like to thank the following people:
Vicki Tobias, Dave Luke, Andrew Gough, Eliot Finkelstein, Kelli Keclik, Glenda Noel-Ney, Adam Blackbourn, Stephanie Krubsack, Gary Sandefur, Nancy Lynch, Jenny Klaila, Emily Auerbach, Ron Kuka, The Font Bureau, Inc., Magdalena Hauner, Kristin Hunt, David Null, Pamela O’Donnell, Chris Kleinhenz, Tom Garver, Mary Czynszak-Lynn, Paula Bonner, Lee Konrad, Bill Reeder, WUD Art Committee Special Thanks to John D. Wiley for establishing sustainable funding for Illumination and the Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library for providing Certificates of Achievement and honoraria for select literature and essay pieces.
Artist Index
cover 4, 37 5, 29 6, 35 7, 14, 15 8, 12 9 13 17 20 22, 32 24 27 31 33
Janis Finkelman Kori Kowitz Kelley Benes Amanda Schmitt Mary Coats Evan Owens Aleks Olszewski Katie Gallik Allison Pearl Snow Welch Logan Woods Nick Potts Ahmed Fikri Ashley Glodowski Dana LeMoine Nicole O’Connor
For more information and to submit work visit our website at http://illumination.library.wisc.edu.
Poetry
Kori Kowitz , Body Pots, Clay
Arse Poetica Lee Crickman I like my martinis like I like my humping— dry poems are good that way too, parching, burning all the way down. Throat chaffed like a saddle. None of that sweet swallow give it to me raw with Spanish olives stuffed with pimentos, red peppers pickled and soaked in vermouth my mouth tastes of verbs my cup’s full of gin.
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punch drunk beautiful Mary Chen
Kelley Benes, Untitled 2, Mixed Media
feminine devotion is out of fashion, she says, only the masculine is sincere. could I get away with: my love, your muscled fuselage breaks my dumb unconscious heart? do you believe in the guttural contraction? the uterine crimping of slender I hope you need me misery. could I get away with: sugar your deep-songed tutelage riddles my thick blood? like the touting of imagination my loquacity beginning with: in a dream last night is squinted at, discarded, whereas: at a party last night strikes a relevant chord, especially to those who wither at social gatherings. so, at a party last night in which the ceiling rocked like the peg leg of an earthquake and plaster lapped upon our dark heads I tossed back my briny, fecund hair and slit, licked the oracular lip of insobriety: “deceive my blood!” can’t a heart run? can’t a heart ride a bike? eat a cake? at a party last night one such organ did eat cake. in fact ate everything in its baleened wake, amoeboid, thousand-tendriled, amorphous. us, unawares, seawall of me too! o really! hot!, lame apostrophes. the degree of pathos hardly matched by blood alcohol levels. when we looked outside by accident due to edificecollapse, “holy man! what are those white splotches in the sky? bat feces?” I finally gained my third eye, stitched like a button to the labial lapel of my heart, yes heart. deceive my blood. I foamed with pretty women while dog-eared men scribbled with sweat sought to fill in our absences, interpreted cleavage as forlorn, as huge wounds. the bigger, the lonelier. silly things. how blind we are. he wanted to know if I missed him, the flat-chested god, a perfect and detachable parasite. there were paper moons on the walls, dozens, because the nude reality of the actual thing is harrowing. a child’s pure gaze, a shipwreck’s pallid hull.
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Poetry
Amanda Schmitt, Coney Island, Lithograph, 15� x 13�
This Side of Saturday Night As though touching made us more tangible, as though they meant to leave more than imprints of lips along our limbs, as though they cared that the lines of our spines were as thin as wishbones, as though longing was a wine they declined each time we offered up our own; and we tell each other everything is right, choking down worries wedged like bones in our throats until we feel blessed, allowing them to kiss us in circles as we sink into forgetfulness.
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Katie Malchow
Homesick Rachel Detra Roots do not hold days or bones-they are glass caskets, oblong and twisted, sealed with lead, vacant except for shadows of the ground and mistaken woodworms who clamber in, seeking a nest. Instead they find hollows, deep as the cavernous light between branches, deep as the space between belonging. Listen to their breath: it’s like wind, another traveler looking for too much.
Mary Coats, Landscape 2, Oil and Encaustic on Canvas, 24” x 18”
Lift
Amelia Foster
The sun seldom rises. This morning, I think between the bird calls; all week talk of what’s natural. The light might indicate dusk, but I wake with a throat thick from confession, you put your ear to my stomach. How do I keep this skin smooth? How do we make room for baking chips? Garbage trucks gasp past us, I imagine the gravel in the gutter. Feels like I’ve caught some in my throat again. I feel marbles beneath my tongue again. You breathe audibly and pass a thumb over small stretches of skin. We wake sleepless, dreamless, our eyes streaming beads of hope.
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Poetry
Evan Owens, A Moment Over Rome, Digital Photograph
The Concert Hall
Ashley McConnell
I remember that night Dad, a summer lost in the folds between my bare little piggies slapping on asphalt still warm from the day.
You in the driver’s seat Me in the passenger’s and the music washed over us, waves in the night as I closed my eyes and listened.
Lost in the squeak of a rusty door latch. Lost in the smell of skin and wood and you that I can still catch.
Listen to the bridge. Can you hear the bass line? The crack of a lighter. The music and smoke, waves in the night
Lost in a toothy smile, lips stretched across a yellow-white fence. The smell of stale cigarettes from the ashtray
and as the final note hung soft in the air burning red as your cigarette, you squeezed my hand and called me your little girl.
grey and dusty. Your rough working hands and cracked sausage fingers cupped mine soft and smooth, delicate and light in years.
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Little Brother
David Labedz For me, it’s difficult to watch you act, Yell, and I can’t tell who you’re yelling at— I hear mom yelling, and you yelling back. I can’t help crying when you cry onstage, To me, your method of acting is plain— You cry over homework from second grade, You cry over mantras of ten-year-old tantrums, Retrieving rage between the lines you say— After the play I bought you a flower, A dyed-red carnation that cost me a dollar; You told me Mom and Dad always bought You fake flowers because they never rot. You said you never liked all that pretending, “It’s like a play: the prettiest part is the ending.”
Aleks Olszewski, Of Small Things, Chalk Pastels, 16” x 20”
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The Myth of Chang’e and the Archer Poetry
Visitation at the Foot of the Bed
Mary Chen
First, the contour of a ghoul where the half-gone bones of women chime like piano keys. The forms he takes most often: stalactites, windmills, orphans, reptiles. Each has a different allure. Echoes, the melancholy of wind, or dark-set eyes and cool skin. Second, my female ancestors inched their way into his hands, burrowing their small bodies into the black bud of his heart. Stereotypically, he is only active when the moon is full. Some say because the rabbit in the moon causes him anguish, or maybe the woman in the moon, and the huge wind which pins him to the earth. Iris is Dead Third Sister, who believes in ghosts, tells me how they fill her teacups with feelings, and these feelings flavor her days. She opens her cells and looks for them through a microscope, finds recycled molecules like tiny sentences. Says my ghoul is a fox. Perceptive, literate, sensitive to these things. Fourth slow spreading gill of knife wounds and a legion of shame: What he feeds on he is eager for. Menstrual earth collects each flaccid letter of the word ‘massacre’. Reduced to atoms, grandmother told of her marriage to miscarriage, in her words the human brain is large, you know, it is huge like a maze. I remember… I forget. Women perish because of the brain, too large to birth. She never mentions what happened during the conquest, but I know she misses my grandfather. The Pill of Immortality When she is happy, she says she is floating to the moon. When she is unhappy, she says she is escaping to the moon. She has a ring box in which she stores her pills. It is difficult for third sister to keep track of them, because grandmother likes to hide one at night, never saying which. The next morning, she will wander the rooms
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light and rustling, a wreath of dried flowers. It is as if sleepwalking until she stumbles on something, finds the capsule. Then, her face lights up like a greedy dewdrop. She cries: Finally! Finally! The Jade Rabbit Fifth holiday: the best times are moon-festivals because she shines at making mooncakes. Her lotus paste exceptional, opalescent, tasting like coolness. We have to eat them outside, under the moon as we ponder the ten suns. Her story of Chang’e gets further obscured each year, her voice fainter as if ascending steps. Chang’e, she says, took the pill to escape persecution by the ghoul under her bed--Death being a lune-shaped word sewn from birth by nuptial touch-metamorphosis of beating in which a person finally achieves pure flesh. What about the archer? What archer, she says. Who shot down the nine suns? Desert in a Ghoul’s Wake I am surprised that instead of desiccation we blossom. The five arms of the saguaro include 1. the stem of milk, 2. the umbilical, 3. the hungry bellybutton reincarnating itself, 4. spines arching against the sun. Most importantly, night blooming flowers where light would blind the sensitive one. For six hundred years, the giant grows. Eventually it breaks through the star-pocked ceiling of the mind. Elixir of Life Seventh grade. I came into pubescence as she quit fertility. The kids were high with youth’s ruin. The word ‘penetration’ itself a scintillating half-joke. At school, I felt release as loud as drums despite the air being taut with the voices of boys strumming the brink of insanity. We experimented, exchanged brownies for Ritalin
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and Adderall. I chased boys. Kicked them, kissed them. Talked and talked like a blooming soda can about my moonstruck grandmother to keep her alive.
Poetry
The Ghoul Has No Name Eighth feeble elaboration. Menarche came like a monarch, slow and with matted wings. Men are strange, my sister said, they are just like us. Two bodies are one then one is a ghost. She was not very good at mathematics. Where the stone was soft his hands found mouths in the ossified rock. He shred holes in the mattress and made white flutes from the ivory stammer of the dead. Ninth time harvested me for my lungs. Punctured my arm for the green vein, slipped into my machinery and made way like a thumbtack on a map, X pasted on the right bronchus. Used it to play the nocturnal flute. How it turned out; He was not an archer with a bow after all but a pathetic flutist. The flute’s whistle sprouted like hair, the ghoul calling to: How many souls must I carve to find you? Can you still kiss that you have no lips? This poem was selected to receive a Certificate of Recognition and $200 honorarium by the Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library.
Evan Owens, Solitary Stroll, Photograph
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Katie Gallik, Between the Space, Watercolor, 39” x 27”
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Mary Coats 1. Moor 1, Oil and Encaustic on Canvas, 40” x 60” 2. Landscape 3, Oil and Encaustic on Canvas, 24” x 36” 3. Untitled 10, Oil on Canvas, 24” x 48”
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1
2
3
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Three Stories
Prose
Allison Pearl Snow Welch number one: the author internally contemplates the nature of her supper.
Cole slaw: what a terrible name for a food. Slaw. It belongs to the hairy lunch lady who slaps the teeming mess of cabbage shreds onto a geriatric’s plate, saying from the side of her puckered mouth, “here’s yer SLAW.” And here I am, eating it with a pair of eightysomethings, filling up at 5 o’clock. Foreign noise is crowding my head – since when have we started up a new conversation? My grandmother’s struggling through a monologue, drowning her exploration in memory
and we were all crammed in that little car, number two: (Mary Ann. Her rode about three hours. Got there so late, head has turned to direct about ten or eleven at night, don’t you think? its eyes to the remaining When we finally arrived, she had a meal hairs, static laid out for us, reheated, even. on René’s head. She What a feast! There was a huge speaks! Digs ancient fish on the table – its head still intact – and Brian fingers into heart. wouldn’t eat it. Remember? Brian had such long Her son, hair then, the women on the trains kept mistaking him states removed for a girl. from this human-shaped When was that, René? Do you remember reliquary, will remember what year that was? faster than
–huh! you say something, Mary Ann? number three: René What year was that when we went to France? Provence.
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–huh. Provence. I fought near that place in World War II. Shoulda bought some property. Nobody wanted to live in France, see? They were giving away the land. Boy, you look at a place there now, it’s gettin’ sold for millions. Shoulda bought something, I guess. Coulda made a nice little vacation spot for you girls
Well you didn’t, did you. I remember that house, it had three stories. They took us up to our rooms after supper, up on the second and third floors. Beautiful spaces, they were. And René, do you remember
showed me his sword collection when I was four years old.
–That house, was that the house with the huge fish?
He pulled out a rusted
–And we drove about three hours to get there?
dagger, and asked,
–In France.
How’dya like THIS
Yes, René. –Okay then.
in your stomach? I was four years old. He never was a man for conversations on the appropriate topic. This story was selected to receive a Certificate of
Three Stories
Yes. Yes.
Allison Welch
what was in our room? a sink! It was built right into the wall, hiding behind cupboard doors. Those French – they know how to live. And the house, it opened right into the street, everything was so close. The government buildings, only a few steps away. We looked right into the square.
number one, two, three: (assume eating habits)
Recognition and $200 honorarium by the Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library.
Allison Pearl Snow Welch, After Papa, 120mm slide film, 7” x 7”
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Phantom Limb
Prose
Evan Hall
race Melody screamed, “Oh, God,” like a vulture, sharp and fierce as a heifer in labor, the lonely wail of a fox in the dead of night. It rose up from the fields, the aisles of corn stalks that had grown only knee high that summer, tufts of white silk drooping in the breeze like Grandpa’s comb over. She screamed as if she had discovered it all. I was halfway to the henhouse, a wicker basket cradled in the crook of my left arm. Dad had only partially re-roofed the shed before he died, and a blue tarp slapped the naked rafters in the early morning breeze. The path was damp with crushed corn and bits of straw under my bare feet, the sweetness of manure lingered in the air. I looked out past the barn, with its flaking red paint and sagging roof. The combine, slicing sunlight into shade, had lurched to a stop in the fallow cornfield, its blades still whirring, engine a highpitched whine. She was down on her knees before the altar, shrieking, tossing her snarled orange hair back and forth, little fists clenched at her sides. Mother watched her with wet eyes, hymnal clutched to her breast, nodding her head while Caleb snickered behind her in the pew. I started murmuring those mystical sweet nothings, that soggy gibberish that
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slid off my tongue like the lick of a melting lollipop ahrashashabalahronyteeteepolabusicanaron. I glanced around to see if anyone was watching. Mom just brushed her hand across my lips without even turning to me. It was a wild sound, swallowing everything around it — all breath, all movement, all thought. The cows turned their heads, grass still dripping heavy with dew from their loose jaws. A pair of plump geese waddling by like fat pillows stopped their squabbling, the mewing kittens under the porch steps hushed. I waited for the fields to combust into flames, the cows’ udders to shrivel up, the white clapboards to peel off the house like fingernails. That scream was ecstasy. Martha The day I was born the Lord planted a ticking time bomb in my womb, doomed to explode and shatter anything I came to love too much. He blasted my firstborn out purple and clammy, burst the brains of my rock and my salvation, and now the one thing beautiful in my life has torn asunder. Cursed are you among women! I am so sick of this dampness I wake up to every day. The dresses that cling to my armpits and the small of my back, the cow’s teats wet and doughy
Caleb Maggie ate another kitten today; my favorite one with the bright blue eyes like the marbles Uncle brung me. I wanted to name her Slice cus she was all black and had a white stripe down her face, and ‘cus Melody got cut in half by the tractor machine. I seen it from the attic, Mom made me stay up there today cus I put a sunny down Grace’s bathing suit at the swimming hole yesterday and she howled and giggled and then got really mad and hit me and ran and told Mom. I woulda stopped Maggie from eating that kitty cus Maggie’s eyes ain’t clear like kitty but cloudy like someone dumped milk in her eyeballs. Ginger had her batch of babies under the front porch; you could see them through the missing boards with the snot in the corner of their eyes. I bet Maggie just plucked um up in her teeth by the soft skin above the neck where the mama holds um. Probly that’s when I saw Grace and I wanted to yell look
Phantom Limb
was on. I didn’t like that hand, cold and heavy on my shoulder. It weighed me down, pushing me into the floorboards. I couldn’t move. “It’s fine, I’ll just sleep here.” He motioned to the living room sofa, which was barely long enough for the dog to stretch out on. “What’s in the bag?” Caleb asked, pointing to the black leather case strapped around his shoulders. James shrugged it off his back and zipped it open to give the kids a peek. “Just my guns. I’m sort of a collector.” There were shiny pistols, long-barreled shotguns, an old musket. Melody ran her hand along the smooth silver barrel of a tiny derringer, the flickering lamplight burnishing her rust-colored curls. Grace stood off in the shadows in a light violet gown, leaning against the cellar doorway with her arms crossed. James watched Melody’s movements closely, as if he wanted to tell her something, and then yanked the zipper back up. Melody pulled her hand away so it wouldn’t get caught. I realized in that moment I had no idea who this man was standing beside my kitchen table with his bag of guns and a tick-infested ogre. If I had known then what this man had really brought with him, I would have turned him back into the darkness and bolted the door behind him. Somehow I already sensed he was not the flesh of my husband. And even if he was, he had been somehow undone high above the jungle villages spraying Agent Orange, the ra-ta-tat of machine guns still pounding through his skull. He was the poison in our water, the mildew that crept along the ceiling, and the cool, musty absence in my bed linen.
Evan Hall
slipping through my hands, the mushroomy smell of disuse and decay that seeps into everything. All spring it rained, every day it seemed, unrelenting, punishing, pounding the roof and trickling down the walls, bulging in large bubbles from the wallpaper. The moldering roof of the barn sopped up the rain and finally collapsed in with a sigh. We had to move all the animals outside into the driving rain, their hooves sinking into the spongy mud. Ever since that man came trudging out of the black darkness of winter, with that loathsome beast stumbling at his side, my house sinks back into the earth, the fields are barren, the water runs fetid and brown. I should have known. He looked nothing like his brother, tall and slim, stubble on his cheeks and a greased black handlebar mustache. He wore a thin polyester jacket with Standard Oil stitched on the breast pocket, even though it was the bitter heart of January and snowflakes were hurtling down like powdered Russian teacakes. He had been in the Navy for a while right out of high school, let Hans take over the farm, then fell off the face of the earth. The letter said that he had been living with his dog, Maggie, out of their jeep in the Tetons. His dark brown eyes did remind me of Hans the way they glanced around nervously, never quite settling on an object. In his arms he hugged a turntable and a stack of vinyls. “Not in my house,” I told him. “You can throw those on the scrap heap for the wood stove.” He looked at me and smiled, exposing long, perfectly straight teeth. “It’s Beethoven,” he said in a whisper, even though everyone had gathered in the kitchen. We were quiet, listening to the wind groaning against the walls. A fly tittered against the frosted globe of the kitchen lamp. The dog, an old oversized poodle with knotted brown curls, was sniffing around, bumping her head into the stove and the legs of the kitchen table, and already searching out some whiskers to nibble. I felt ashamed of how filthy everything was. Crusted plates were stacked up on the counter, potting soil from the greenhouse spilled out onto the floor, and there were moldy white pits from the peaches grandpa had sent from Florida for Christmas. I scraped with my thumbnail at the sticky molasses stains on the apron I had thrown over my nightgown. “I’ll have to tidy up the guest room for you. I didn’t realize from your letter you were coming so soon,” I said. He placed his hand on my shoulder. It startled me, a tingle up my arm, and the electric pulse of live wire when I forgot the pasture fence
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Evan Hall
Nick Potts, Buy Me Some Peanuts and Cracker Jacks, 35mm BW Photograph 11” x 14”
Prose
Logan Woods,
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Figures ( (Wounded Beast), Acrylics, 30” x 45”
out! But the window wouldn’t open, Mom had nailed it shut cus the locusts come in through there the last time and I was banging with my fists but I’m not strong enough. Uncle said I’d be strong enough soon to drive the tractor but now I don’t wanna. Her arm just snapped off like the wishbone at Thanksgiving. I don’t know why she done that laying in the field. She’s not very smart sometimes, not like Grace. Grace got to skip the third grade and I hope I get to skip third grade, too. Melody never does her homework and just plays piano or writes with a stick in the dirt or shoots guns with Uncle.
Mom never puts her report card on the fridge. Sometimes I can’t even believe they’re sisters. Grace is taller than all the boys in her class and has straight auburn hair like me. Melody is small and has freckles and she pierced her own ears with a bobby pin, I saw her do it, even though Mom won’t let her. Now they’re even more different. Melody I like to lie against the ground and feel the moist, crumbly dirt against my cheek, whisper secrets into the earth, hidden by the green leaves and munching locusts. It had rained the night before and little earthworms were slinking around the reddish yellow soil. I stuck my pinkie out and a worm laced itself around my finger. Once I told Caleb that worms were good to eat, delicious even. He used to always believe me, like when I told him to pee on the electric fence. He put a worm in his mouth, still wriggling, and spit it out right away, crying and wiping sand off his tongue. I touched the little derringer in my pocket that I had stolen from James’ closet. I liked to feel its polished oak handle against my thigh. It fit perfectly in my palm, the trigger as big as my curled pinkie. James had shown me all his guns, but he told me not to tell any of my friends about them. He even taught me how to shoot an authentic Civil War musket that you have to pump with a little rod. We set up an old rusty can of pumpkin pie filling on a fencepost for target practice. He showed me how to cock it, put my thumb on the hammer, and held my hands in his big red hands that felt rough like Ginger’s tongue. He kept me close so when the gun jumped and I let go I fell against him. His black mustache brushed against my face; it tickled like toothbrush bristles. The gun was so loud I couldn’t hear him talking. The air smelled like wood smoke and burnt firecrackers, the can was oozing orange. I laughed. I was holding the derringer in my hand, thinking about the last bullet I had left, when I heard a loud noise coming from nearby whooshwhoosh-whack-whack-whirr-crackle-whack. I had heard it from far away before but never so close that it throbbed inside me. The blades pulled my arm into the shadow and twisted twice, then stopped rotating. My arm was like a banana caught in a blender. I felt something tear, the bone twisted and snapped and slid away. I was growing a wing. How strange, I thought, how painful. I screamed. When Dad had been around I loved to watch him work in the meat cellar amidst the hanging carcasses, dripping like hulking red icicles. His fingers were long and slender as a pianist’s, so
Martha I pressed Melody against me as hard as I could, as if I could squeeze her arm back on like a scrap of piecrust. My free hand clenched the steering wheel of James’s Jeep as we rattled down the gravel road toward town. I glanced at Grace in the rearview mirror. She was sitting in the backseat with her hands on her lap, staring straight ahead, her lips scrunched up in a frown. So proud. We had left James slumped atop the combine; I had completely forgotten about Caleb in the attic. I swiped the bundle of cash folded in a rubber band from the venison freezer and wrapped Melody in a wool blanket. She moaned quietly each time the Jeep hit a rut in the road, her eyes shut tight, freckles a dash of cinnamon on her ashen cheeks. I could feel the round plums budding up in her chest against my shoulder, realizing suddenly how much I had missed, sipping on my grief as if I could make it last.I hobbled into the waiting room with Melody’s jumble of skinny limbs in my arms. Grace had refused to come in and was waiting outside in the car. The waiting room was a deadened hum, everyone gaping at me, and then quickly looking away. I smelled. I knew it, looking down at my muck-kneed overalls and rubber boots. The lady at the desk tilted her head and looked up at me over her glasses. “What seems to be the problem?” I wanted to weep, but instead gripped Melody tighter to me. A moist circle was blooming like an inkblot on the dark gray wool. “Why didn’t you go straight to the emergency room?” The receptionist asked, leaning over the desk to get a closer look at Melody. “Let me walk you down there.” She punched a few numbers on her phone and turned away. Blood was dripping down my leg, my boots squishing on the tile.
Phantom Limb
Grace That man was something strange. He spent whole days chopping sodden logs or disappearing into the woods on the edge of our property, always with that long black case strapped to his back. Sat up late into the night; listening to Beethoven in the dark. I would tiptoe down the stairs and find him crouching on the sofa with his elbows on his knees, a lit cigarette in his mouth, locusts chirping and the turntable crackling. He glared at me when Mom read devotions after dinner and refused to fold his hands when we prayed. Just sat there, chewing on a toothpick in the side of his mouth. Every Sunday at breakfast Mom invited him to come to church with us, but he just shook his head, said he had too much work to do on the farm. “Hans never so much as lifted a finger on the Sabbath,” Mom would say. Caleb started grumbling that he didn’t want to go either, that he could help out James. Mom didn’t budge. It wasn’t like all James’ extra hours on the farm were accomplishing much, anyway. It seemed like everything withered away from his touch. The corn had come up scraggly and onion-pale, gnawed away by locusts. The alfalfa didn’t even bud. The sheep shied away during shearing; they would not submit as they did when Dad took them firmly by their coiled horns. At times he was like Dad, but then he wasn’t. His gruff quietness, his explosive sneezes, and the way he would take Caleb in his lap and patiently explain how the record player worked or how he shimmied up a pine tree to escape a bear in the Tetons—these things reminded me of Dad. Yet
there were also the long silences. The violent recoil if someone bumped into him by accident, as if he had been stung. The way his eyes emptied when he looked at Melody’s twisted body. I gasped when I saw her arm, dangling there from her shoulder like a scarf. But James went numb, just as Mom had stood paralyzed when Dad fell from the living room couch, clawing the shag carpet until Melody and I pinned him down under our knees. His brain had swollen like a balloon.
Evan Hall
different from Mom’s chubby sausages. Sliding a thin knife through the goat’s temples like butter, carving out bovine testicles and filling pig intestines; he could close his eyes and deftly navigate the maze of bones and fat—flank steak, brisket, rump roast falling from the bone. Now it was my bones cracking beneath the blade, flesh split open as my arm wrenched away from me. I couldn’t breathe, retching on the ground between shaking sobs, arm hanging beside me like a drumstick. Mom came running in her overalls and yellow galoshes, shouting at James to cut the engine. He hadn’t moved or spoken, perched up on the seat of the combine. He just stared at me, through me, as though I wasn’t there, the blank panicked look of the raccoon caught in the flashlight’s glare, pawing at the henhouse door when I’d step out to use the outhouse at night, trying to understand what I was.
James Every night I wake up drowning choking on the brown Mekong.
23
Prose
Caleb I found the kitty’s head rolling around in Maggie’s food bowl. Uncle was stomping around the house, slamming open cupboard doors and closets. His face was red and shiny as a radish. I asked him what the matter was and he just pushed me away and I told him Maggie was eatin’ the kitties and he shouted, “No, she ain’t.” So I put the kitties in an old peach box under my bed and I’m not gonna let Maggie eat them cus there’s only three left. Grace Melody got up to use the outhouse. She was gone for a long time. I had drifted off to sleep when I heard her piercing cry, slowly fading to a muffled whimper. When she got back her hair was tousled and she had burrs stuck in the frilly lining of her pajamas. She pulled a wood tick, swollen with blood, from her ankle and pinched it between her fingernails. She said she had seen a black bear in the chokecherry bushes. I asked her what it was like, but she turned away from me and curled up on her side. I could tell she wasn’t sleeping. I still hear her scream in the night, echoing through the forest, haunting my dreams.
Ahmed Fikri, Library Alone!, Photograph, 25” x 29”
24
Martha Sometimes the very thought is too much to bear as I watch her working that nub, the molded tan plastic hinging at the elbow and narrowing into a two-pronged metal claw. She sits there on the front porch, opening and closing her pincers, creak-creak, creak-creak. James left in the night, loaded up the Jeep with his guns and the big turntable and his records. We’ll have to find a hired hand to do the rest of the harvesting, though I reckon no one will want to come out to this God-forsaken strip of land now. But at least that man is gone, his lumbering Cerberus, the
dank odor of pomade. We opened the windows to celebrate the 4th, pried off the nails and thrust up the stiff panes. Already I feel that something has lifted from my soul. I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. My heart has been defused. Melody Caleb and I put pennies on the train tracks and peeled them off after dinner, still warm in our hands, rainbows and Abe Lincoln smeared like Picasso. We walked back on the baked steel rails; I kept slipping off and had to settle for hopping across the wooden ties. The setting sun followed us home, past the bowling alley; the two gas pumps at Jonzy’s Market, the grain elevators rising from the fields like scrap metal skyscrapers. Back in the yard we sipped lukewarm root beers, slapping kamikaze mosquitoes and watching Caleb run after tiny plastic parachutes raining down from the sky. The perfume of lilacs bloomed in the night air, mingling with the acrid smoke of bottle rockets. Mom and Grace were rocking gently on the front porch swing. I walked down to the pond on the far side of the barn, looking at my reflection in the still water, explosions of gold blossoming in the sky above me. I reached back and unhooked the clasp behind my shoulder, ripped the strap from my armpit and pulled it over my head, tossing the claw down on the ground. I sprinted into the cornfield, Mom’s voice trilling ME-lo-dy behind me. I kept running, fine sticky threads clinging to my skin, fireflies flaring up and disappearing in the dusk. As if I would find it there, amidst the bits of bone and dried blood. I look in the ground for the secrets I have hidden.
Aaron Greenberg
**** Well, my fellow man just interrupted me, and he began talking. Through blood-filled eyes, I gazed at his muzzle, inaudibly chomping, and the
polluted, disturbed air that vibrated beneath his nostrils. With a subaqueous silence around me I thought of my prophecy. I had said he would come and he came. I knew it would be so. As he spoke, I thought myself a golden prophet sitting, legs crossed, on the shore, or in a cold dark cave, or in a tent, unaccommodated and beautiful. He was my suitor or a foreign ambassador from some nation; he had been waiting outside in the ravaging sun, terrified of the sublime walls, trembling at the Moorish brilliance of the walls. When he entered the room, blind from the change in light and quivering with fever, I greeted him with charm and politeness. I performed every courtesy to him. I spoke in his tongue, in his mortal tongue, ponderous and unwieldy, grotesque as a snail on a nail. I thought not of my noble self, lofty and beautiful, while he was speaking (although that is what I am doing right now: he is still here, you see), but kindly made louder my animal instincts in the interest of seeming social. With my kind donation of time, I satisfied his appetite—so easy to satisfy—for conversation and sent him on his way. Do you see how much I do for people? And who said I wasn’t divinely generous? Now I will get back to this business of writing, this business of actually being purpose of capitalizing? Here. I have a pencil, yes. I have my paper, yes. Room cleared and mind cleared, yes, all ready to go. But wait, there is something missing. Yes, a dead brother. My brother is living. Like the Cash boy, cut up to bits. Or the Charles boy, drowned. Or stay, brother! Sufficient would it be to have a glimpse of this: angry serfs pouring Vodka down my father’s throat. Where can I accumulate suffering? Travel, skippy-doo! I will study abroad. I will abroad, broadly abroad where I will speak the
Blueprint Composed
got nothing now; the mind is clear and ready to be honest. Ready to make one or two profound observations about itself, record them half-elegantly, and then pat itself on its flabby back. Yes, I am here. Nothing but Robert Johnson’s drunken eyes on my nape (the poster was a gift from my sister), and a fellow man just outside the door who is most likely to interrupt me as he has not yet informed himself of my glorious enterprise and my superior disposition, which demands respectful silence from all spectators. I should go downstairs to the quiet desk. No, you will become enamored of a small object in transit and then you will become enamored with yourself for having such magnificent powers of observation, for having such a beautiful soul that is ready at all times to snort a shot of bitter insight. In your amour-propre you will lose the desire to write, and convince yourself of the following: “I am a sponge now, I will absorb but not write. I am living, yes, but I am not really here. I am here only to soak their horrors and to project the image, tattooed across my mangled, horrid corpse, to those yet unborn and unbegot. I am a spy in the enemy’s territory, but I am really faithful to the lonely art and to eternity. Trust me, you have every reason to believe me, I believe in the unbegot and dead but not in the living. That I am a cheerful sprite mingling in the mud with them does not mean I am of their kind. Therefore, do not write.”
Aaron Greenberg
Blueprint Composed on a Bank and Shoal of Time
25
Prose
tongue and look native. I will be creative there, too, and go to a bullfight at the Real Maestranza in Ronda. No, what if that’s not enough? I’ll join the army if I fail. Fail? Stick your courage to the sticking point and we’ll not—fail. Okay, just the basic training, to make me a soldier, and then get doctor’s note to excuse me from the war. No, I am an abyss gazer but I do not jump in. I will laugh at the brainwashers while they do work on me. They won’t know that I am one in a billion million. They won’t know that I am a divine sprite walking among men, visiting trenches before and after the battle, with an ironic and cheerful gait, wearing a comfortable white frock, a thousand rabid hellhounds snarling at my back. *** The notebook! The scribblings! Where have they been left? They are not here, and I fear they are perished. But then I have not lived for the last nine months. My thumb aches. It aches so badly. I gnash my teeth with pain. I make my suffering pulpy and visible for the public eye; I am proud of my war wound. Shot through the hand at the Battle of Lepanto in the year of our Lord, 1571. Mind is scattered, you know that it is. You cannot write because you only think of not writing. The moment to begin is now. You do not become a vagabond and a degenerate and a sailor marine and a professor as steps to the immortal sage; you hold those offices along the way. You have found your spirit before you have found your form. Am I a writer? I do not care for storytelling, but there are some that tell themselves without permission. My stretched leather corpse sits in this chair, teeth stained, breath putrid with coffee and bacteria, while the gods make war with each other on my puny plot of consciousness. Conscience, kobolds, or demons? Why me? Not just you, a million others. Every single person you meet. “I’ve had them same dreams, but the only person left after the war was me!”
26
You are not unique; you are not gifted, charming, handsome, special, versatile, honest, loyal, or skilled. You are conniving, spiteful, and jealous. You are enigmatic naturally, but what’s even more nauseating is that you are intentionally so. You are bored and you are boring. You are exhausted always, without passion, without discipline, and without purpose. You have quirks that you mistake for a soul. You may authoritatively bequeath yourself such titles as strange, outcast, weirdo, nerd, character, loony, or artist, but you and nobody else has created them or knows that
they exist. You have not suffered; if you have pain, it is only because you have sought after it like a pigeon sucking crumbs off the filthy ground. You are a ghost: what your loved ones see in you when you meet is the food that your soul has consumed, is digesting, and will shit out by and by right before it slips out of your corpse like a traitor rat as they bury you down in the muddy earth. They look right through you really; neither crying nor screaming nor touching nor moaning nor kissing nor does connecting signify that you are in a permanent visible state. For that matter, there are no “mental miles” run. What did you do today, son? Asked my father. I did not do much, said I to him, but I ran many mental miles today. I strove with the greats, with their sounds and scribblings, and soared loftily. Ha! Did you believe that when you said it? Boy, you had only eaten more. You are a hungry little soul. *** Yes, in truth, there is a lot of surface area in my mind that must be covered with eternal mortar and concrete. I must eat and learn as much as I can. I feel the promise of a golden city, I behold my vast plot of land, but it is still empty. Build it then! But I need materials from all over. Heaven on earth it will be. Even if nobody sees the city once it is complete (though it will never be complete), they may still catch glimpses of the mythic blueprints. What are you going to do, sell them? Is that what you want, like a peddling gypsy? Yes, I will publish. Good Christ, the critics and professors will scream in accord, you are a certified loony and we would like to, bi-annually or so, hear your thoughts so that we may measure our own diseases with the standard of your own. They applaud and eulogize my arrogant smiling flesh. They hand me a microphone to make a speech. Bien oirés lo que diré: I’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books. I’m very well-read, it’s well known. More praise, more, more. I love it. I love every minute of it, more. Drink praise to the lees. Life of praise. Self-praise, appraisal and reappraisal. The lights die and there is silence. Wither did they vanish?
Ashley Godowski, Hospital Visit, Oil on canvas, 96” x 48”
Ashley Godowski, After Midnight, Oil on canvas, 36” x 36”
27
Thawing the Pre-med Curriculum
Essays
Shuhan He
lose to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.” — “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” Ernest Hemingway The pre-med syndrome is a common slang term for some undergraduates’ “single minded pursuit of admission to medical school,”1 causing them to become “narrow, grade-conscious overachievers, who are less sociable and more interested in money and prestige than are most other students.”2 While these claims shed a rather negative light on some of the hardest working and most academically successful undergraduate students, there is some truth behind the impression that the intense culture of the pre-medical curriculum does generate some hyper-competitive students who fit the above description. Pre-meds are all required to climb a large mountain of challenges. According to the AAMC, the mean GPA for a medical school matriculate in 2007 was a 3.65; the mean MCAT composite score was a 30.8, which is among the top 20th percentile of all examinees. They are required to do volunteer work to experience the doctorpatient relationship. They must conduct research to show an aptitude for scientific inquiry. They must take part in extracurricular activities because leadership abilities are highly valued. Furthermore, these skills and credentials are all indispensable, as patients place their health
28
in the hands of physicians. Doctors require an immense amount of technical skill in their craft— patients would be poorly served if one could not demonstrate the ability1 to learn the complex pathogenic mechanisms of diseases. It is not surprising, then, that pre-meds are competitive. Especially at an institution with exceptional academics like UW-Madison, which has ranked first among public universities in the number of professors who have won prestigious awards and grants.3 Like the leopard in the epigraph of Hemingway’s famous short story, students also occasionally become frozen while trying to climb that mountain of challenges, losing sight of the fact that being a doctor is a human endeavor. For example, how do you create professionals who can diagnose an elderly patient with Alzheimer’s disease and then explain to the patient and all their loved ones the physical implications of the disease, along with how to conquer the emotional challenges that arise with the diagnosis? It is important to note that this progression requires two parts: technical skill to understand the disease, followed by humanitarian skill to understand the emotions that come with disease. Thus, the training process should follow the same path. UW-Madison pre-meds would be well served by stacking their traditional pre-med curriculum prior to their sophomore year with the MCAT scheduled during the summer following their sophomore year (as opposed to the current nonstop curriculum that spreads physics to their
Kelley Benes, Untitled 2, Mixed Media
Thawing the Pre-med Curriculum
Endnotes: 1. Coombs, R. and Paulson, M. “Is Premedical Education 2. Dehumanizing? A Literature Review.” The Journal of Medical Humanities 11 (1990): 13. 3. McFarland, John. “To Cure ‘Pre-Med Syndrome,’ Medical Schools Need to Change Their Criteria for Admission.” Chronicle of Higher Education 34 (1987): B1. 4. Lombardi, John V, Elizabeth D Capaldi, and Craig W Abbey. The Top American Research Universities.
Annual Report, Tempe: The Center for Measuring University Performance at Arizona State University, 2007.
Shuhan He
junior year with the both the MCAT and medical school applications during the summer following their third year). Therefore, general chemistry and math requirements should be taken freshman year, with the sophomore year consisting of a schedule of organic chemistry, physics, and biology. This serves two purposes. First of all, the pre-meds are forced into an extremely academically rigorous schedule. They are required to learn quickly how to survive and to ultimately thrive under intense academic pressure, while also finishing their core curriculum halfway through their undergraduate career. It is a high-risk, high-reward proposition. The reward is the ability to know how to be successful academically under a rigorous schedule, while also allowing an entire year before applications arrive to explore other fascinating fields such as the humanities or to go abroad. These experiences allow the students to examine the dynamics of human behavior across a wide spectrum of environments. Whatever the outcome of their experiences may be, it is my personal hope that people on the path toward becoming doctors can understand the common foundations between the humanities and sciences, like those between North Americans and Central Americans. Between human endeavors that are poles apart, people are very similar in the critical aspects of their emotions and how they behave. It would be wise for future doctors to explore these similarities so they can clearly communicate with their Alzheimer’s patients, their families, and their scientific peers. The potential risk, however, is that the pressure of three simultaneous science classes may be too great for some at such an early stage of their academic careers. Ultimately, the abilities of students at UWMadison are incredible. There is no doubt that this strategy would foster people who never lose sight of their responsibility to other people, never lose their appreciation for the products of other fields, and never become frozen while trying to overcome the tallest of challenges. UW-Madison deserves to have scores of representatives in the world of medicine that can champion these ideals. Perhaps a climb early in their careers would acclimatize them well to this challenge.
29
The Coarsest Lust
Essays
Laura Frank
30
a A
small woman with keen eyes wrote about her orgasms. She sometimes called them “nervous fits, terrible convulsions,”1 and other times described how a “convulsive spasm ran over my whole system, giving me indescribable pain.”2 This public discussion of the female orgasm did not cause controversy, but when Mary Gove Nichols asserted that expenditure of sexual energy should exist only in passionate and consensual relationships – not necessarily ones of matrimony – and that women had a right to sexual gratification, her critics claimed she “quenche[d] the honest pride of her sex.”3 Sexual gratification and the function of sex in relationships coalesced into public consciousness during the early 19th century, when many reformers like Nichols included marriage within their reform doctrine. Moral, health, and sexual activists alike scrutinized marriage, an institution that was woven tightly into America’s societal and economic structure. Through literary publications and a lecture tour on the East Coast, Nichols advocated for women’s emancipation from the oppressive institution of marriage, promoted female anatomy education, and challenged norms about the proper role of sexual gratification within relationships. Why, then, would Nichols’ reform endure harsh personal and moral criticism from the Women’s Rights Movement? Already an established medical and social reformer in New England, Nichols could not escape the public spotlight when she published her first novel Mary Lyndon: Or, Revelations of a Life. An Autobiography in 1855, despite the anonymous publication. Newspapers, particularly the New York Tribune, incited sensation around the novel, while predicting it to be “more read and talked
about than any other novel of the time.”4 Mary Lyndon only thinly masked Mary Gove Nichols’ life events; because her audience was already acquainted with her life story through her previous activist works. She used the name “Hervey” in place of Hiram Gove, her first husband, and gave the protagonist her own first name. J. Raymond, the editor of the New York Daily Times quickly exposed her identity soon after the novel’s publication. Her previous popularity made it “no secret that the author of Mary Lyndon is the physiological lecturer, Mrs. Mary Gove Nichols.”5 Mary Lyndon chronicled the treachery of Nichols’ first marriage to Hiram and used the pretense of autobiography to advocate for women’s autonomy over her own body, condemn the institution of marriage as unfair and oppressive to women, and to advocate for women’s sexual emancipation from the rule of her husband. Nichols and Hiram, who Nichols thought to be the “perfection of Quaker ugliness,” were married in 1831, just after Nichols reached the age of 21. One year later Nichols and Hiram celebrated the birth of their only child, Elma Penn Gove. For Nichols, the “sufferings of maternity” began in the marriage bed. She had not yet acquainted herself with her own sexuality, as Quakers held virtue in high regard, and now her body’s ownership was shared with a man she despised. She was not explicit in describing their sexual relationship, but her euphemistic accounts of her relationship with Hiram suggest a violent and abusive relationship in the bedroom. She compared him to a “machine… that was crushing me to death.” Hiram’s manner “disgusted me in more ways than I can describe. Every time he approached me or laid
Dana LeMoine, Interior Anxiety, Etching, 11” x 14”
The Coarsest Lust
Hervey’s asserted ownership of her body and “his right in [her] brains.”16 She saw herself as a “legal harlot,” bound to an unloving marriage that she contested, and deprived of self-ownership.17 She considered her marriage to Hervey a great annihilation and called herself a “bond slave.”18 Her husband controlled her income, determined the conditions of her relationship with Elma, their only daughter, and initiated unwanted and painful sexual relations with Nichols.19 She attempted to reveal truths to her male and female audiences, along with bringing light to “the mental darkness in which they groped.” She numbered the curses of the female and “spoke of marriage as an annihilation of women, as often the grave of her heart and the destruction of her health and usefulness.”20 The abrasive descriptions of marriage, paired with endorsements of divorce, aroused public criticism for the novel. Shortly after the novel’s release, the New York Daily Times published the largest and most public criticism of Mary Lyndon on August 17, 1855.21 Entitled “A Bad Book Gibbeted,” Raymond’s prose outlined a litany of refutations to Mary Lyndon. The sheer size of the write-up, taking up one full page of an eight-page publication, suggests a sense of imminent threat and urgency.
Laura Frank
his hand on me, a convulsive spasm ran over my whole system, giving me indescribable pain.”6 Her pain was mostly physical because of her lack of sexual experience, and Nichols supposed that understanding of her own anatomy would help to alleviate the mental anguish and tension that rendered her powerless and debilitated.7 Nichols’ discovery of the relationship between body, soul, and sex would become important in her later activism. Nichols drew upon the works of her contemporary health reformers to promote female autonomy in marital relationships by lecturing to women about their reproductive anatomy. In 1838, she began lecturing to audiences throughout Boston and New England. She received invitations to lecture in Philadelphia in 1841, and by 1842 she published comprehensive volumes of her works.8 By introducing women to their intimate anatomy, she hoped to inspire these women to assert their control over their reproductive organs: the spaces that were controlled by their husbands.9 Through her sexual experiences with Hiram, she understood her own physical pain as an extension of her own ignorance.10 A woman’s ability to escape the sexual oppression of her husband is possible if she could “know her own organization… she will tremble at the thought of sacrificing herself, for she will know that she is doing it.”11 Nichols made female autonomy possible by championing individual choice as the key to a wife’s authority in her relationship. A woman had a right to choose with whom to have sexual relations, but, more importantly, Nichols asserted that they had a right not to have intercourse, regardless of marital status.12 Nichols’ open and frank discussion of female anatomy in the public lecture circuit certainly challenged 19th century gender roles, but failed to generate deep criticism. Audiences reprehended her for her public appearance, not for the content of her lectures. They frequently proclaimed “shame on a woman for speaking before men, setting herself up as a teacher when Paul expressly forbade a woman’s teaching.”13 But Nichols’ activism within the lyceum was welcomed, and her lectures to audiences created no unexpected controversy. The lecture elicited attention, but commentators more frequently commended Nichols for her utility, not targeting her for deviating so far from “what should be considered the appropriate sphere of a woman.”14 Nichols recounted “warm hands grasping at mine at the end of my lecture and the hearts of men were melted toward me in a loving enthusiasm of acceptance.”15 Her immediate purpose, however, was to speak out against oppressive relationships, such as the legal contract of marriage that bound her to such a despicable man. Nichols used her Mary Lyndon to criticize marriage on both personal and political bases. Much as in her own life, Nichols revolted against
31
Essays
Nick Potts, Back of the Bus, Photograph, 8” x 10”
32
The criticism came from the pen of Henry J. Raymond, the editor of the Times in 1855.22 He first dismissed Mary Lyndon as a: “public crying spell, garnished with spasm and hysterical shrieks, over the wrongs she has suffered and the wretchedness she has endured … hankering after the sympathy of a public crowd.” Mary Lyndon, or Mrs. Hervey, as she is called in the editorial, married of her own accord. Raymond blamed women for their own misery in unhappy marriages, especially the “thousands of women who marry as unthinkingly and as stupidly as she did.” A poor personal decision should not be afforded repentance, especially in the instance of a legally binding relationship. A wife had no right to dismiss herself from the binding union. Raymond accused Nichols of pruning the roots of the family. “If a wife or a husband may be abandoned at the convenience of either, why not a child, parent, or a friend? … Why should the sexual passions enjoy an immunity from the restraints of law, and not the passions of revenge, avarice, and ambitions, as well?” Marriage, even if unequal or unhappy, contractually bound two people to one other, and sexual commerce was only appropriate within the relationship. Nichols’ anti-marriage, pro-gratification advocacy appealed greatly to the Free Love Movement, a controversial group whose aim was to dissolve the institution of marriage. It was Nichols’ association with Free Love that sparked her condemnation among Women’s Rights reformers. In a letter discussing the connection between the Free Love and the Women’s Rights Movement, a female commentator fiercely describes the disconnect between the two movements. “How then are women’s rights identified with the free-love school? Women do not desire or advocate such
things, none but Mary Gove Nichols, whose name closes the lips and quenches the honest pride of her sex.”23 The letter continues with an account of a woman divorcing and then remarrying “ala Mary Lyndon,” but does not condemn the woman who dissolved her marriage. “We see nothing to find fault with in this,” it continues, because “the law recognized the cause by absolving her from her one-sided partnership” But this was exactly what Nichols advocated in her lectures, her early short fiction, Mary Lyndon, and even her shared publications with her second husband Thomas. But the author placed Nichols’ name in the company of other Free Love activists, and collectively disregards their social philosophy as one that “denies that the moral standard for the sexes is the same, and proposes to reduce woman to the degradation of polygamy.” Nichols never spoke these words, but the label of Free Love attributed the philosophy to her. Thomas would later use the words “Free Love” to title a discourse on Spiritualism, but the publication followed Nichols’ public criticisms. Neither Nichols nor her novel was mentioned in the publication, which functioned as more of a descriptive text than an outright promotion of Free Love.24 Earlier opposition to the Women’s Rights Movement by Thomas Lowe Nichols, Nichols’ sometimes compromising accounts of a women’s intellectual role, as well as her interpretation as an immoral licentious women, certainly colored her reception by women’s rights activists. Her husband, from whom Nichols could not disassociate, condemned the movement for not speaking out against marriage and “looking the problem full in the face.” Until the reformers did this, Thomas argued, they had no right to themselves.25 Nichols softly echoed this sentiment when she wrote, “These women know not what they ask,” regarding the Women’s Right’s Convention of 1853.26 Nichols undoubtedly advocated a female’s selfownership, though she sometimes compromised a woman’s intellectual caliber. She wrote in a letter to John Neal: “I don’t believe women were made to know as much as men. I believe … that man is more essentially intellect and women love. Even Mary Woolstoncraft [sic] was all women in her affections.” She also called a women’s spirit “feeble” and remarked on “a woman’s limited knowledge.” 27 Her inconsistencies and the sharp retorts of her husband did not appeal to the Women’s Rights Movement, but her criticism predominantly stemmed from her inclusion in the Free Love Movement. Not surprisingly, Nichols did not let her absorption into the Free Love Movement nor her public criticism pass unanswered. Nichols swore Raymond’s ill descriptions in the New York Daily Times mattered not, but the article otherwise threatened Nichols because “thousands read a
we may yet speak to the coming generations.31
The Coarsest Lust
Endnotes: 1. Mary Gove Nichols, Letter to John Neal, 1 February 1842. Quoted in Irving T. Richards, “Mary Gove Nichols and John Neal,” New England Quarterly 7 (1934), 354. 2. Mary Gove Nichols, Mary Lyndon; or, Revelations of a Life: An Autobiography, (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1855), 128, 136-137. 3. “Women’s Rights and The Free Love System,” New York Daily Times, 26 September 1855, 2. 4. New York Daily Tribune, 4 August 1855. As quoted in Silver-Isenstadt, 178. 5. “Mary Lyndon – Who is She?” 6. Mary Lyndon. 128, 136-137. 7. Ibid. 131. 8. Nichols’ Health Manual. 429. 9. Silver-Isenstadt, 59. 10. Mary Lyndon, 131. 11. Mary Gove Nichols. Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology. (Boston: Saxton and Peirce, 1842), 97 12. Stephen Nissenbaum. Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980),169. 13. Mary Gove Nichols to John Neal, 4 April 1841. From Richards, 347. 14. Lectures to Ladies, 172. 15. Mary Lyndon, 167. 16. Mary Gove Nichols to John Neal, 10 August 1841, as quoted in Richards, 351-352. Emphasis in original. 17. Mary Lyndon, 214 18. Ibid. 214-215 19. Mary Lyndon, 124-125, 130. 20. Mary Lyndon. 164-166. 21. “A Bad Book Gibbeted,” New York Daily Times. 17 August 1855, 2. The following paragraphs, unless noted, are drawn from this source. 22. Silver-Isenstadt, 85. 23. “Women’s Rights and The Free Love System,” New York Daily Times. 26 September 1855, 2. 24. Free Love: A Disourse on Spiritualism. 25. Marriage, 119. 26. “The World’s Conventions,” Nichols Journal 1.7 (1 October 1853): 55. As quoted in Silver-Isenstadt, 7. 27. Mary Gove Nichols to John Neal. 1 February 1842. From Richards, 346., 350. 28. “A Letter from Mrs. Gove Nichols.” New York Daily Times. 12 October 1855, 5. 29. Ibid. For an example see also “Mary Lyndon – Who Is She?” 30. “A Letter from Mrs. Gove Nichols.” 31. Thomas Lowe Nichols, Woman, in all Ages; Mary Gove Nichols. “To My Friends,” From Silver-Isenstadt, 248249.
Laura Frank
newspaper article who seldom read books.”28 She refuted Raymond’s criticisms and defended her moral character in a letter published on October 9, 1855. Although Raymond failed to mention Mary Gove Nichols by name in “A Bad Book Gibbeted,” the “charges against the author were nailed to the heart of the woman.” Raymond did name Nichols as the author of the novel in several subsequent issues of the Times.29 She dismissed his name-calling, arguing against the false labels coupled with her name, “‘Free Love,’ Adultery,’ ‘Gross Passions,’ and ‘Licentiousness.’” Despite the popularity of her text in the Free Love Movement, her words in the letter indicate she did not care to be affixed the label of a Free Love reformer. Nichols’ original agenda in publishing Mary Lyndon can never be known, but she made her desires to be considered a Women’s Rights reformer apparent. “I claim one right for Woman which includes all human rights,” she wrote in a letter in 1870. Despite her criticisms from within the movement, Nichols’ literature and lectures advanced the agenda of women’s rights. Even in her earlier days of reform in America, Nichols professed that she and her husband “labored in the great work of human redemption.”30 The inequality she encountered in her first marriage inspired her to actively participate in various reform movements. Nichols’ words still fall on audiences with sharpness and poignancy, and her claims to female autonomy are important even after the Free Love controversy has long passed. Nichols’ celebrity as a reformer may have been undue, but her enduring words “give direction and occupation to all man’s faculties and powers” so that “being dead,
This essay was selected to receive a Certificate of Recognition and $200 honorarium by the Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library.
Nicole O’Connor, Sterling 1, Chromogenic Photograph, 8”x 10”
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Wisconsin Idea
The Wisconsin Idea In 1904, past UW President Charles Van Hise proclaimed that he would “never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every family in the state.” His vision became the Wisconsin Idea, a philosophy that has guided UW-Madison’s outreach efforts for more than 100 years. The Wisconsin Idea has expanded along with the university: In a globalized world, it is important for outreach to encompass national and international communities, while preserving the tradition of university involvement in local Wisconsin communities. Illumination is proud to highlight some of the outreach projects developed and implemented by undergraduates working in a variety of locations and situations. These students are fulfilling Van Hise’s mandate to make a different with the skills provided by their UW education.
Education is the Root of Change Michael Kenyon and Hannah Brown
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he Wisconsin Idea demands that each citizen examine their responsibility to the world around them. How shall we leave the world that we have inherited? Certainly, we can agree that we have the potential to leave this world better then we found it. Education provides the foundation for the opportunity to embrace our responsibilities. In education we take only as much as we are willing to put in and this is the cornerstone of the Wisconsin Idea. We are invited to invest all that we can in the hope that the returns to the world will be great. We took the Wisconsin Idea with us as we traveled into Kenya. We may not have known then that the Idea came with us, but when we returned, it was clear where our ideas had been rooted. The three of us, Michael, Hannah and Alex, lived in small communities that welcomed us into their lives and culture. We stayed in wooden structures and small clay houses. We worked at Elephant sanctuaries and small banking cooperatives. We ate with our families each morning and came together again at night. Everywhere we went, we were amazed at the smiles. We were sure that our faces would have told a different story, had we been permanently placed in their situation to the passerby. Each day, we became more and more certain that people are the same everywhere, but that opportunities in life have been skewed in our
favor. Perhaps we should be more careful in our thoughts because there is always opportunity to become a successful person; however, our part of the world seems to have a greater say in how we as individuals and communities define success. When we came together toward the end of our time in Kenya, each of us realized the similarities of our experiences. We wanted to help the people that welcomed us so graciously. We were all frustrated that we did not have enough money to help everyone in need because we believed that charity is necessary, sister to sister, brother to brother and every place in between. Coming together, we formed a belief that charity alone does not change the reality that created the situation we found ourselves immersed in. Our desire to be charitable needed the direction of our Kenyan brethren. The Kenya School Libraries Program (KSLP) is the direction we and our Kenyan friends decided upon, although we had no name for it at the time. We wanted to provide our communities with something other than fleeting monetary donations. We wanted to create a sustainable charity whose benefits would transcend the current generation. We decided to invest in the community by allowing children access the vast world of information. Every secondary school would have a library, stacked with books, maps, magazines, encyclopedias and at least one computer. We would invest in the children of
creates in every individual a lifetime of choice. This is the Wisconsin Idea. Those of us involved in the Kenya School Libraries Program strive to live as students and stewards of our world. As such, we move forward in all of the directions that we may go with the faith that a greater access to the corpus of human thought creates choice and self-empowerment.
Pieta, Wood, 4’ x 3’ x 5’
Education is the Root of Change
Amanda Schmitt,
Kenyon & Brown
our community by allowing them to expand their purview, to become self-empowered and to invest in their own potential. All of us had formed a long list of individuals who were willing to help and desperate to invest in themselves and in the coming generations. It seems necessary as humans to invest in ourselves and our progeny. And yet, in a changing world, what currency do we invest with? We left Kenya after four months, hoping that in our pact to develop libraries we had found the correct currency: human knowledge. Before we left, however, we formed our first committee in the town of Maua, Kenya. Named the Maua Libraries Committee, this was the first organized group of local citizens willing to help us create libraries in every secondary school in and around Maua. The mission of the KSLP is to enhance the educational opportunities of the current and future generations of Kenyan students through developing libraries in Kenya at the secondary education level and establishing relationships between Kenyan constituencies and communities throughout the United States. There are 32 schools in Maua, and we intend to collect books and other education materials from the University of Wisconsin, local secondary schools, public libraries and the local community. These materials will be cataloged and distributed evenly throughout the district. We plan to collect these materials through book drives, fundraisers, and the generosity of UW students, who may donate new and used books and other materials which they are unable or unwilling to sell back to the bookstores. Through the help of librarians, we are planning to create a librarian training program to teach recipient schools how to properly catalog and incentivize these education materials. The Maua Libraries Committee is dedicated to creating and maintaining a reading culture in secondary schools. Through the Kenya School Libraries Program UW-Madison Chapter student group, we intend to create a space for conversation between the community of Madison and the community of Maua. The KSLP UW-Madison Chapter will act as the steward of our program for years to come. As we continue to create conversations, we plan to engage other universities in our conversation with Kenya about the need for greater access to information and education. Maua was the first community, Madison was our first University. We plan to create this same relationship in other communities in Kenya and other universities in the United States. Education is the root of change. This is our motto at the Kenya School Libraries Program. We strive for education in the lives of Kenyan students because change is necessary and knowledge is healthy in a free-thinking society. Knowledge creates the opportunity to view the world in unique and hopeful ways. Knowledge
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The Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) Wisconsin Idea
Alidz Oshagan
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he Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) is often called “the Wisconsin Idea in Action.” And throughout its 15 years of progressive policy-making and research, it truly has embraced the challenges put forth by UW-Madison president Charles Van Hise over 100 years ago. Founded and directed by UW-Madison Sociology and Law Professor and COWS director Joel Rogers, COWS is housed in the Sewell Social Science building and is a team of full-time professional policy-analysts and researchers. COWS focuses on implementing high-road economic development including a competitive market economy of shared prosperity, environmental sustainability, and capable democratic government. COWS works to find ways to create high-road economic policies with officials on the national and state level, as well as businesses, labor unions, and community organizations far and wide. Over time, COWS has developed various projects and affiliates. One of these projects is the Center for State Innovation (CSI), which works with state executives to incorporate progressive policies in their state governance. The Center for State Innovation provides CSI Strategy Academies, which are one to two-day policy academies for state executives across the country. The academies bring together Rogers and policy experts from institutions such as the Brookings Institution and the Economic Policy Institute. These experts and state executives participate in the CSI Strategy Academies to find ways to implement policies in areas such as clean energy, economic and workforce development, transportation, and smart growth. COWS also houses the Mayors Innovation Project (MIP), which does similar work to the
Center for State Innovation, but on a city level, with the idea that cities have the potential to become hubs of policy innovation, and that if high-road economic policies can develop in cities, they can lead the way for high-road policies to be brought about on a national level. Megalopolises, such as New York and Los Angeles, and smaller cities, such as Boston and Atlanta, are examples of participating MIP members. Twice a year, the MIP holds conferences that bring together mayors from across the country to share best practices and generate progressive policy ideas they can implement. These ideas range from how to create safe alternative modes of transportation, such as biking and walking lanes in large cities, to how mixed-income neighborhoods can be maintained to reduce neighborhood stratification. COWS often calls itself a “think-and-do tank,” and produces reports and briefs assessing state government policies and develops guidelines for how government officials can improve their existing policies as well as create new ones. In 2008 alone, COWS published over eight reports, whose topics included energy sustainability within the workforce, issues of gender and race and economic development opportunities in the clean energy economy. One of the most extensive repots that COWS published this year is The State of Working Wisconsin (SOWW) report, which is published biennially. Containing loads of data from the United States Census and other resources, SOWW is an in-depth, high-quality 60-page analysis of how state workers are faring in employment, wages, poverty, and economic inequality. One of the truly disappointing findings in the SOWW report is reproduced here: “The 2006 poverty rate for whites in Wisconsin—8.5 percent—was below the national white poverty rate of 10.5 percent. But at 35 percent, Wisconsin’s black poverty is second highest in the nation, far exceeding the already
Kori Kowitz, Big Chug, Bronze and found object
Alidz Oshagan COWS
extremely high national black poverty rate of 25 percent. Further, the 27 percentage point difference separating poverty rates for whites and blacks in Wisconsin was the second largest in the nation.” When state executives read the report, they hopefully will turn to COWS to understand why such a dramatic difference exists between whites and blacks in Wisconsin and what policies can be developed to help ensure equal outcomes for black and white high school students so that as many as possible can complete their higher education. As a previous COWS intern and current student hourly, I have written two policy briefs about the importance of state governments increases in the amount of child care subsidies provided to families and the need for employees to receive paid sick leave to care for themselves and their children. I have also helped the COWS staff prepare for various conferences, including the MIP conference mentioned above. As someone who plans on becoming a labor lawyer, it has been very rewarding to be part of a research team that is developing some of the most exciting and progressive research on worker’s rights. When I first started working at COWS, Rogers told me, “COWS is the Wisconsin Idea in the millennium—we want to build a high-road democracy in the society we live in.” When it was established, the goal of the Wisconsin Idea was to bring the University of Wisconsin’s benefits to every individual living in the state. Through institutions like COWS, however, we have grown to expand the influence of the Wisconsin Idea far and wide, addressing not only the problems within this state, but also helping to address of all states nationwide by developing the progressive policies needed to solve them.
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Kelley Benes: kbenes@wisc.edu. Hannah Brown: hbbrown@wisc.edu.
Contributors
Mary F. Coats is a fifth-year BFA student in Painting. Mary is interested in the manner in which we as humans endure in the face of great sorrow and pain. In many of her paintings, she envisions a world that has nearly been destroyed. If one was lucky enough to make it through this calamity, now it’s time to figure out how to keep living. Along with the strength and hope that comes with this choice to endure also comes anger, fear and a deep sense of loss. Mary is interested in looking at this aftermath along with the things she has lost and the things she is afraid of losing. She stresses the importance of confronting these fears and considering their importance. When she ventures outside of her painting studio, Mary enjoys riding her bicycle and doing yoga. mary.coats@gmail.com. Mary Chen: mfchen@wisc.edu. Lee Crickman is in poetry for the easy money. Her goals in life include flashing bling, throwing down fliff and burning fat stacks of cash to stay warm. crickman@wisc.edu. Rachel Detra is a senior majoring in English. She learned how to write poetry from her mother, father and brother, all of whom use an extraordinary lexicon distilled from imaginary words, bad grammar and lolspeak. detra@wisc.edu. Ahmed Fikri: I am a Computer Engineering freshman who is also interested in the beauty of life! I believe that we all see things that others don’t and it’s our responsibility to take photographs of these moments and share it all!! fikri@wisc.edu. Janis Finkelman: See inside front cover. finkelman@wisc.edu. Amelia Foster: anfoster@wisc.edu.
Laura Frank is a senior honors student in history and communication arts. Her main areas of academic interest are 19th century American history and gender history, and she plans to pursue her PhD. ljfrank@gmail.com. Katie Gallik is a senior at UW-Madison majoring in Fine Arts and preparing to attend graduate school in Occupational Therapy. She plans on using her degree in art to help others through her creation of adaptive equipment and inspire others to express themselves through the process of creating art. gallik@wisc.edu. Ashley Glodowski: I am a senior in Art Education, with an emphasis in painting. My work revolves around the power of expression and the narrative created from gestures and facial expressions. By exaggerating and distorting the figure, I am able to create my unique characters and relationships. asglodowski@gmail.com. Aaron Greenberg: I am a Spanish and English major writing my thesis on Shakespeare and the metaphysics of objects. After graduation, I plan to be a Teaching Assistant in France and then earn a PhD in English Literature with the eventual goal of becoming a professor. algreenberg@wisc.edu. Evan Hall is an English and Journalism major from Luck, Wis. He is presently debating how best to escape paying college loans--graduate school or the Peace Corps. elhall2@wisc.edu. Shuhan He: I am a senior in Biology who can be best described as a passionate person: I have competed in two marathons and am working to qualify for Boston. I wish to brave an Ironman, conquer Mt. Kilimanjaro, earn a medical degree, and launch into space as a NASA Astronaut. he2@wisc.edu. Michael Kenyon is a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison majoring in human environment interaction geography. He studied abroad in East Africa his junior year concentrating
on human-elephant conflict. mkenyon@wisc.edu. Kori Kowitz: kowitz@wisc.edu. David Labedz is a senior majoring in English with an emphasis in Historical Linguistics. In his poetry, he enjoys experimenting with the relationship between a piece’s content and its form. In his free time, he is the growling, grunting vocalist for local death metal band Buried Future. labedz@wisc.edu. Dana LeMoine: I am a senior undergraduate, working to complete my BFA. My studies are focused in printmaking. My most current work deals with women in various ways. I have worked with younger women and their body image and am starting to work with older women and how their lives have changed through time. dlemoine@wisc.edu. Katie Malchow: malchow@wisc.edu. Ashley McConnell is a recovering high five addict who’s taking it one day at a time. She is currently attending meetings and with the support of her friends and family has been clean for three months. ajmcconnell@wisc.edu. Nicole O’Connor is currently completing her last semester at UW Madison in pursuit of degrees in English literature and art. The photograph in this publication is from a series documenting abandoned or unoccupied buildings and the remnants of human presence that remain in them. noconnor@wisc.edu. Aleks Olszewski: When not drawing, Aleks Olszewski enjoys collecting grains of rice and doing the robo-boogey. aolszewski@wisc.edu. Alidz Oshagan is a junior majoring in Sociology and with a certificate in European Studies. She plans on going to law school after graduation, but is not sure what type of
law she wants to practice. She has worked at the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) since June of 2008 and has enjoyed every moment of learning about research and policy developments occurring in-state and nationally. She is especially looking forward to the holiday to spend time with her family and spend time away from school work. oshagen@wisc.edu. Evan Owens is currently a freshman within the College of Engineering. He plans on majoring in Civil and Environmental Engineering and works as a student assistant in the Office of Mechanical Engineering. He is also an active member of the Wisconsin Engineer Magazine working as a staff photographer. eowens2@wisc.edu. Nick Potts: In my recent photography work, I have tried to focus on images that relate to a specific time and place. The two pieces included within the journal use black and white film to capture a timeless, yet nostalgic feeling while concurrently hinting at an underlying narrative. Feel free to email me at npotts@wisc.edu. Amanda Schmitt is a senior Art & French major who works mostly with lithography and sculpture, tackling materials that are bigger and stronger than the artist herself, stone and wood. She can also translate this to French for you, très bien! schmitt2@wisc.edu. Allison Pearl Snow Welch is a senior BFA student in the Art Department. Allison’s future plans include feeding her artistic and poetic hungers in graduate school. apwelch@wisc.edu. Logan Woods: I seek to exhibit identities and environments in a state of flux and simultaneity. In response to a question I prefer simply possibilities. There is a point of balance somewhere between question and answer and it is here that the most potent truth lies. My work exists as remnants of my search for this ephemeral point. ljwoods@wisc.edu.
Final Thoughts: Our Benefactor
Lemuel Ricketts Boulware was, as Time described him in 1957, a “tough, trap-jawed Kentuckian” who came to UW-Madison to study commerce and play baseball. After graduating with a B.A. in 1916, Boulware went on to work for a series of businesses, eventually settling in Syracruse, New York to work for General Electric in a low-profile marketing management position. Shortly after World War II, workers from across the GE corporation went on strike, but those working in Boulware’s division remained on the job. Boulware’s leadership was noticed, and he was promptly promoted to vice president of public and community relations. In order to foster positive employee relations at GE, Boulware created newsletters that became famous for their bold, distinctive voice. Boulware disliked the bickering between corporations and unions. He devised a method in which GE offered workers a fair deal on compensation, circumventing the negotiation process. His strategy, dubbed “Boulwarism,” won him enemies among union leaders, though many executives and labor relations writers called the policy simple common sense. While Boulwarism is no longer practiced in labor negotiations today, Boulware’s influence on American economics persisted indirectly for decades. While at GE, Boulware hired a young actor to read the inter-company television news. The actor, a fierce liberal, was influenced by Boulware and eventually became the decidedly Republican President Ronald Reagan. Boulware’s legacy, however, should not be viewed solely in conservative-versus-liberal, corporationversus-union terms. His work is ultimately a tribute to innovative problem solving and creative communication strategies. He passed away in 1990, after a distinguished post-retirement career as a lecturer, communications consultant and author of two books. His wife, Norma Brannock, preceded him in 1987. The Boulware estate was left to UW-Madison to be used at the discretion of the chancellor. As one of his final acts, former Chancellor John D. Wiley designated Illumination as the recipient of the estate’s endowment. The Illumination staff is grateful for the gift and will strive to carry on Boulware’s passion for communicating across boundaries.
The cartoon images to the right are from GE employee newsletters printed in the 1940s and 50s. Reprinted from The Truth About Boulwarism by Lemuel Boulware, printed in 1969 by the Bureau of National Affairs.
This issue of Illumination uses Farnham for display and Bodoni for the body copy. About Farnham: German-born punchcutter Johann Fleischman, contemporary of Baskerville and Fournier, worked at the Enschede Foundry in Haarlem. Expert in advanced tools and the qualities of fine steel, he pushed beyond the frontiers of his time, cutting active typefaces famous worldwide for their “sparkle.” Christian Schwartz focused on Fleischman’s exuberant angularity, carrying it to all weights of his new Farnham series: FontBureau 2004.