Leland Quarterly, Vol. 7, Iss. 3, Spring 2013

Spring 2013 grace

chao matt

grossman rogan

kriedt cliff

owl dana

yeo

leland Q UARTERLY

leland

QUARTERLY VOLUME 7, ISSUE 3 Spring 2013

Copyright 2013 by Leland Quarterly, Stanford University All Rights Reserved Giant Horse Printing, San Francisco Editors-in-Chief: Katie Wu and Brian Tich Managing Editor Rachel Kolb Senior Editors Chaz Curet Haley Harrington Benjamin Pham Kunal Sangani Rukma Sen Natalie Stumpf Dylan Sweetwood Van Tran Varun Kumar Vijay

Layout Editors Kunal Sangani Natalie Stumpf Joe Troderman Illustrators Bao Le Web Editor Tiffany Shih Financial Officers Chaz Curet Dylan Sweetwood

Leland Quarterly: A Statement on Literature, Culture, Art, and Politics is a general interest magazine that showcases the very best in Stanford University undergraduate art and writing.

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“The Monono-Lise,� Lauren Youngsmith

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contents

POETRY

Artist ProfilES Dana Edwards Photography

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FICTION

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The Leonard Lopate Show Matt Grossman

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Only Son of a Schoolteacher Rogan Kriedt

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Success Dana Yeo

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Karl Rogan Kriedt

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September Eleventh Rogan Kriedt

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Late Back from the Doctor Rogan Kriedt

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What My Parents Said the First Time They Visited Me in College Tiffany Li

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Cold Feet Tiffany Li

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NONFICTION The Three Essays Grace Chao

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Love Lost in an Age of Royalty and Preserved in Modern-Day Theater Halls Kelly Vicars

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Faculty profile

A Report Redacted Sophi Newman

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Anne Carson Brian Tich

Untitled Cliff Owl

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Untitled Cliff Owl

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Bring Us Lauren Youngsmith

Cover

Untitled Cliff Owl

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The Monono-Lise Lauren Youngsmith

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ink on paper

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Love Lost in an Age of Royalty

and Preserved in Modern-Day Theater Halls But that’s the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.

—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

His veneer and strut, Her cinematic gaze Oh linger, snow, and longing in the air ‘til sheets unfurl, clocks ticking, change– And give us fleeting frames, and notes that fall as feet spin onto floor, lift twirling pairs aloft into the air on breath that he draws in as her dress falls from shoulder, skin– lights wrap muscle and bone; the rolling of it, unfurling of it, the pressing on and on and fast– the going, gone.

Stage swallows scene, the curtains drawn.

Death greets them and it eats them, the reels and pearls spin on.

— kelly vicars

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the

leonard lopate

show

— matt grossman

M

y mother is Joan Hamburg. Yes, ‘that’ Joan Hamburg—who, as you might imagine, wakes up each pre-dawn to ride in the station’s town car to its glassy neon studio, high atop some snoozing monolith downtown. Doormen nod solemnly to her on either end of this trip, of course, new ones tenured every sixth or seventh year. On solo elevator rides—which are most of them, that early—surveillance cameras watch her whistle what must once have been girlhood tunes.

To me, Joan is much more than a radio personality. To me, she’s more like a normal loving mother who happens to go on the radio, for two hours each morning, as a matter of circumstance and financial opportunity. I’m nobody’s fool when it comes to the animal gristle of the city’s talk radio scene, the numbers and blood behind its dusty dreams. Last winter, arriving at the fragile age of seventeen, I was startled to find that the gossip columns had already penciled me in as heir apparent. The Saturday pullouts had done their cruel justice to my destiny, announcing for all the city to read that I had inherited from my mother a deep-seated gift for the genre of morning talk radio, and a freakishly instinctual feel for the proclivities of those who listen to it. “Samuel Hamburg,” they said. “Now he’s got the airwaves in his genes!”

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I’m no expert. Who could be? Heroes of morning talk radio were never crowned so glibly. Your radio hero is an underworld oracle, dispenser of balm and myth to the widows, the school-bus drivers, the old-world tailors, the travel agents, the salesmen in their side-street luggage shops. Full-bodied men and women who drag themselves home each day to select from chipping wooden cabinets the ingredients for cabbage soup, plastic shopping bags blowing through their rooms like tumbleweed. I don’t know much— really, I don’t—and yet when I curl out of some nights’ sleeps into the city’s gray twilight, I am sure it is in me, some day, to channel these people through my detachment. “And this kid,” writes a gossip columnist, already. “He’ll be a bona fide AM-talker!”

Odd hype as hype goes, but I’ll take my compliments as they come. I have rounded shoulders and temporal acne. All the vestigial parts that can go wrong long

swan-dive Central Park sunsets—always excavate signs of Joan’s imposing numerical age, a professional secret whose truth she reveals by keeping it even from me. It’s well known that the perils of morning talk radio careers lurk in the afternoons, and especially just after Daylight Savings begins are the solemn mornings of labor succeeded by super-expansive days whose enhanced sunlight illuminates most of all their emptiness. So Joan shuts lights and opens windows in sequence, to cool the air and fool the moths. She tears up the printouts from the elevator that promise A/C four days ago. She migrates from room to room, lugging her small portable radio with her, which is pretty much always on in the apartment, along with whatever magazine or book she might be reading and whichever scones or deli meats she might be eating. She takes these things with her and sits down again in each different room, rocking alike in chairs easy and not. She takes the subway two stops to Bloomingdales for perfume, Your radio hero is an underworld oracle, and comes home again in time for Judge Judy. She feels a palpable kinship dispenser of balm and myth. with Judge Judy, or at least a vicarious thrill. In real life they’re friends, Joan since have: the tonsils, the spleen, the appendix. and Judith Sheindlin, approximately the same age, Summarizing much, my friend Henry, referencing a approximately the same religion, and bearing more minutely delayed or soggy quality in the way I move than a passing facial and vocal resemblance. But around, calls me “Underwater Hamburger.” I don’t there’s more to it than that. There’s a definite vicarious think anyone would want to be called that. So I play thrill. Joan never talks about it but you can tell by the to the strengths. I sharpen the craft. I project the way she watches. After forty years spent advising and voice way out in front of the person, who lumbers cajoling a broadcast audience, how could you avoid along behind his own groggy shadow. Some days I’ve the temptation to command and condemn? You start spent a school bus ride crouched in the echo chamber to want to feel it. In the city’s steamy four o’clock April beneath the bench’s vinyl, articulating unseen to a ecstasies, you start to want to reign. small group of peers above me the intricacies of an

his particular hot spell, summer’s first false impending strike in the National Football League or a start, broke on a Wednesday shortly before rise in U.S. teen-marriage rates, hardly ever realizing what I’d begun—not until, trudging off at his stop, Easter. Indifferent, I took a midmorning break and someone will bump by me saying, “Man, Sam. You cut math class and Latin. I strolled out of school into light rain and a stiff cross-town breeze, heading down sure know how to talk it.”

The grocers and garage attendants and the avenue to a diner I like on East 74th Street. They play talk radio in there, Joan’s station, too. But by now grandmothers. of course her show was long done for the day.

You pick up on things, I guess.

“The Polish infantry had, of course, requisitioned prils in our apartment—on Fifth in the mid- that country’s actually considerable supply of sidewalk Eighties, you’d correctly envision, with those chalk,” a woman on airwaves was saying. “They used

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it for flares, to communicate over the irregular Polish mood again, yet. I’ve always been a little bit snobbish countryside. You know it’s truly a very irregular like that, the sort of person about whom others roll countryside. So what was the innovative way the their eyes and ask how come some way seems to Polish children found for playing hopscotch?” be good enough for everyone else. So I went home I ordered scrambled eggs and coffee. Now, eleven instead. There, I was startled to find that the entrance to one, it was The Leonard Lopate Show, whose to my room was impassable, blocked by a flying sheet eponymous host spent his two hours conducting of plastic strung across the doorframe and guarded worldly interviews and murmuring general assent. by a man in a construction helmet.

“Someone has to,” he’d say to me.

“You must be Samuel,” he said. “I’m the duct “Flares over the irregular countryside, is that right? worker. A member of the ductwork team. Maybe Interesting,” Leonard said on the radio. “Our guest is you’ve noticed, the A/C’s been offline this year.”

Cecille Perlman, Professor of History, who is about “I’ve noticed,” I said. “It’s been offline before, but to explain how the Polish children played hopscotch they’ve never had to do work in the apartments.” without chalk.”

He sighed. “This year, it’s extremely offline. The Lenny was a pleasant older man with a white upgrades look to be extensive. You’re lucky it’s only beard who would come by our apartment for dinner your bedroom, for now. Next door, ductwork has sometimes. He had trained as an artist in college occupied all three bedrooms and two-and-a-quarter and had worked in advertising for years and years bathrooms. Don’t be surprised if some serious before discovering his talent for murmuring assent. blockages crop up.”

For Leonard it had been a life, I think, that informed “I guess it’s for a good cause,” I said. his skepticism of some of the popular media’s more “Best there is. Climate control is what separates us breathless predictions of my own promise in his field. from the beaver and the leafcutter ant.”

That said, Lenny had always been encouraging when His lack of irony seemed to burden me with I’d spent any time with him. forgotten responsibilities. I went back to school, and “And I understand that Dr. Carmichael, also of your finished the day there. department, has recently published some interesting results on the Romansch belief in the sanctity of ou haven’t heard, Sam? It’s on all the dwarfism.” stations.”

The diner was a good place to be on a rainy day. I I’d returned for dinner shortly after six to find drank my coffee slowly, observing the feeling of the Joan fast asleep in her bedroom, and further, that the hot liquid rushing ‘down the hatch’ to my stomach kitchen, dining room, and living room had all been like water through a storm drain. I am always cordoned off just like my room had, behind great unsettled by the sensation. I’d want to imagine that screens of opaque plastics, electrical tape and handmy body enacts more substantial checks on the rate scrawled memos from the ductwork team. So I’d fled of flow of the liquid, exerts some better It was The Leopard Lopate Show, whose control over things going down its tracts. eponymous host spent his two hours conducting I’d been looking away worldly interviews and murmuring general assent. and when I looked down again at the cup, which had only been drunk a third of the way down, it had been afield.

“All the stations? We only ever listen to the one,” I refilled.

I finished before it was time to go back to school. said.

“Well that’s exactly it! Lopate’s gone off the deep Or, rather, I could have gone back but I wasn’t in the

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end! He’s been on the air for six hours. No signs of letting up.”

Before me, recumbent, eyes fixed on the ceiling, tossing and catching a pinky ball with an isolated wrist-flick: Henry Aiken IV, 17, wintertime warmer of flag-football benches, summer denizen of Camp Lake Fire-and-Brimstone, in distant Irondequoit.

Springtime idler, talk-radio fanatic, too star-struck to come anywhere near my apartment; though his, and his spare but spacious room, and his fire escape window, suited us just fine. I’d never met his parents somehow, but the refrigerator was always well stocked, so I assumed they just worked grueling hours like everyone else’s.

Henry went to set up his radio, a vintage model from the 1930’s that he’d restored with the help of an antique dealer he’d befriended on the way home from school one day. This is how Henry operated, dropping into folds of the city’s fabric obscured to others by the sharply cresting peaks of its better tread topography, emerging again with antique radios, or crates of imported marzipan figurines, or tickets to monster truck rallies at exits off the Jericho Turnpike.

He tuned to the station and it was Leonard Lopate all right, far too late into the evening, interviewing a man from a peculiar sect that denied the existence of the Internet.

“This is the Leonard Lopate Show,” he said. “I’m Leonard Lopate, filling in for your usual evening host, Kathleen Mangano, who’s sick tonight with Kyasanu forest disease, our best wishes to her.”

“Poor Mangano,” I said.

“But that’s what he’s been saying all day!” Henry said. “All the hosts have either been ‘sick’ or ‘messed

Sam. Lopate’s flipped a button, I’m telling you. I tried calling into the show but the switchboard’s jammed straight through. But if this lasts through tomorrow I think I’ve got a way in. What does Joan have to say?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I hadn’t seen her awake yet that day. I tried to imagine how Joan would react if Leonard shut her out of the studio the next morning, announced on the air that she had been absurdly incapacitated. I didn’t like to imagine it. “I don’t know,” I said again.

“She’ll know what to do.” Henry said. “She’s a professional if anyone is, these days. But if this lasts through tomorrow I think I’ve got a way in.”

Henry was the canny sort of kid who discovers early the wonders concealed behind all high schools’ locked doors; stashes of ancient course books, kickballs and their associated pumps and pump nozzles, Bunsen burners. Audio-visual technologia stored in subterranean caverns to which gym teachers retreat to smoke cigarettes. He explained that he knew of a device in one of these caverns; it’d been shown to him by the same gym teacher who’d shown him the kickballs. An auto-dialer, a machine that rapidly and automatically dialed phone numbers, useful for canceling school in situations of extreme winter precipitation. Naturally, then, a closely guarded apparatus.

“But I think I could wheel it out of there, during lunch tomorrow, if absolutely necessary. The switchboard wouldn’t be able to turn us away, not with the auto-dialer, I don’t think.”

I walked home, trying to picture what an auto-dialer would look like. It was strange about Leonard. I usually fell asleep to the station and tonight I wasn’t able to, not at all. Instead, I tossed and pitched, three-quarters awake, in the makeshift cot All night like that, pitch and then toss, listening that Joan had prepared for me to what were quickly devolving into a man’s in her room, which, besides the bizarre and uncomfortable ramblings. kitchen and bathroom, were all we had left on the outside of the realm of the enshrouded ductup’ or whatever. He said Roger Iverson’s ‘lost his work zone. All night like that, pitch and then toss, lisvoice due to environmental factors’ and that Lauren tening to what were quickly devolving into the man’s Riley was ‘suffering from emotions related to being bizarre and uncomfortable ramblings. Every two abandoned yesterday at the wedding altar.’ Not likely, hours, I hoped beyond hope that miraculously, the

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next host would step in, that the whole thing would old. This one is kids from the slums of Kolkata who be forgotten and done with, that Lenny would see form an unlikely water polo team.” reason and drop the terrible reins. But instead, ev“Looks a little arid for water polo, Kama-Lunda, if ery two hours, it was another solemn announcement you ask me.” about how this host had flown the coop to Mexico, “This being merely the sequence where they train, or that that one had fallen trying to change a bulb in Sam. The plot is that these unfortunate semi-profesa chandelier. Deep in the night, at what must have sional water polo kids are quite fully beholden to the been three or four a.m., I could have sworn that his monsoon season for their livelihood. This vision is speech devolved from syntax to vacant vocabulary to India, Sam. And this is the scrappiest team out there. syllables, glyphs, and pure stresses—and this is what Get the picture? They’re slum rats, they don’t even Henry remembers of that night, too, as, also sleepless, know how to tread water yet. Whereas the reignhe paced through the city’s palpitating chill on his fire So I slipped into the unguarded elevator and off escape. to Henry’s, pleased as I always am to find myself When light broke over the Upper East Side’s patchdisappearing down some dark city street. work roofline, the duct zone’s front had intruded farther yet, shutting us out of all but Joan’s bedroom. ing champs from New Delhi have been swimming I wasn’t at all even sure I could find my way to the shuttles across the Yamuna their whole lives, not to apartment’s door if I’d wanted to. I shut the radio off mention their papas run all the big outsourcing comand finally found sleep then, as the day’s light oozed panies, so they exploit all these other cheap slum rat through the muting duct men’s plastic everywhere. computer whizzes to forecast the monsoons for them,

which is just a tremendous advantage in this setting. hen it was dark again, and I rose from my cot So what you see right now is the Kolkata kids are in the corner. Joan and a swarthy, solemn man learning to speak the same athletic language, the very were sitting close together on her bed, legs crossed same sportsman’s Hindi, internalizing the heft of the in opposite directions, his right hand draped over water polo ball, getting their toes wet. It works on a her thigh. I stumbled my way over, tripping over couple levels, the sensibility being foreign, to be sure. the construction’s flotsam. It was Kama-Lunda, our Perhaps you’ve seen the Gandhi of Attenborough?”

I went off to cycle the lights and the windows in the doorman. He looked over his shoulder at me and shook his head a little, as if to say she wasn’t doing bathroom, the only retreat we had left from the enwell. I looked at him like who was he to say. But croaching repairs. Joan called after me not to worry, looking at Joan, I didn’t need to ask whether Lopate that Kama-Lunda would do it. But she was using her was still spewing. The lights were off and they were radio voice. So I slipped into the unguarded elevator watching something on TV, Kama-Lunda and Joan, and off to Henry’s, pleased as I always am to find myJoan without blinking, ever. It looked like footage of self disappearing down some dark city street.

Indian children tossing a volleyball to each other in a shallow pool. The music was strangely cyclical. My rossing Second Avenue—which other?—I nostanding cast a mild shadow over the screen’s glow on ticed suddenly that I felt as though I’d been the floor. As if to affect normalized conversation for perceiving this entire episode from without, that Joan’s sake, Kama-Lunda indicated the tube with his I was orbiting around or circling above the events. chin.

Sometimes it was my habit to narrate things to my“Seen this one, Sam?” self in my head, to consciously activate the process of “Negative, Kama-Lunda.” turning each thing seen or felt into something said or “One of those sports underdog stories. Never gets sayable. And somehow going up the stairs I realized

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that’s what I’d been doing this whole time, at least since I’d heard about Lopate’s marathon and since the duct work had begun, when all manner of things took a turn for the opaque. Indeed, so fluently had I been narrating it all to myself that I hadn’t even noticed I’d been doing it, until just then, going up seven flights of stairs to Henry’s apartment. It wasn’t unlike being shaken from a dream, but it was stranger than that, too, because I felt that I’d been shaken back into myself, compressed out of orbit and back into the flow of time and consequence.

When I dream about the radio future sometimes I’ll imagine what it’d be like for people to wake up to my voice on their nightstand clock radios, a thing of course I’ll never get to experience myself: getting jolted to sense by my own well plotted rhythms and thoughts, already laid out for me in consumable segments. Maybe this was what Lopate was after,

clined to believe the man.

H

enry had the automatic dialing machine rigged up to two nested surge protectors. It was, bizarrely, not at all different from how I imagined it might look: a horizontal board of codependent circuitry which lay under the wizardry of a labyrinth of controls, supported at waist height by chrome struts footed in swiveling wheels. Aside from the lone bulb that hung from Henry’s ceiling, all the room’s other electronics had been disconnected, apparently so that all available power could be diverted to the device. “Running by the seat of my pants here,” he explained. “Someone else’s pants, even. But we’ve achieved absolutely terrific levels of current. The machine is spanning differences of potential that I didn’t think it’d ever span. It’s attempting to connect to the station literally countless times each second.

The super knocked. He hollered that I’ve siphoned off more “One day you’ll wake up and you’ll be saying than my share of the grid, that something—you’ll hardly even realize—but, the building’s going down, that honest, rent-paying tenants boom! You’ll have cadence,” Leonard Lopate have been trapped by shorted told me. I’m inclined to believe the man. elevator circuitry for nearing three hours. I pretended I didn’t then—to talk out a great looping recursion aimed hear. I didn’t want to hear it. Man, Sam. This is back before something prior to structured thought. something else.”

“Is there a wolf on the roof?” I asked.

And I understood this, but I also knew then that my “I was wondering about that. I considered that. But endpoint would be different than his seemed; that it’d converge to quiet and not unfiltered noise. That when I think it’s a dog in a shaftway. I think the shaftway it came my turn to capitulate to whatever dark frus- gives the dog’s barking that unmistakably wolflike tration haunts radio endeavors, it would all finish for quality. I think you’re hearing a dog trapped in the me at a too fine distillation of content, maybe, at the elevator shaftway with those honest and admittedly empty, granular depth of silence that’s all everyone unlucky tenants. Man, Sam. This man is literally out of his head. He left it home this morning. The headcan share.

I think when I’m on the radio, I don’t want a radio less host. It’s like from Camp Lake Fire-and-Brimvoice. I think, if Henry listens to my show, I’d want stone. The father, the son, and the Headless Host.”

“I just thought of something,” I said. “The other him to hear me the way I sound any other time, affectless and briny. Leonard Lopate once told me that hosts.”

“The other hosts.” you don’t make cadence; it’s something that happens “They all must have shown up for work, right? to you. Joan has cadence, and even Kama-Lunda does, but I don’t quite yet, but I will and then I’ll be Joan’s cribbed up with Kama-Lunda, she’s not going ready. “One day you’ll wake up and you’ll be saying anywhere. But the others? All the hosts must have something—you’ll hardly even realize—but, boom! shown up, only to find themselves locked out of the You’ll have cadence,” Leonard Lopate told me. I’m in- studio proper. What are they doing in there?”

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“Congregating,” Henry suggested. “In the green windows onto lower Broadway like a ticker tape room.” parade. It was quaint, really, to think that today the I nodded in urgent agreement. “I bet they’re all just hosts’ words would be carried not over the airwaves congregating there in the green room. They’ve proba- in any abstract sense but down through them until, bly been milling around the green room for thirty-six buffered this way and that in the wakes of passing hours now. They can’t abandon the place. They know busses, they’d alight on the sidewalk, on traffic lights they can’t abandon the place. What if Lopate decides and awnings, on the bills of kids’ caps. Folks would to cut bait all of a sudden? You’d have a dead air situ- read them and see something pre-vocal today, a little ation. And you can’t expose yourself to the risk of a bit pre-patter, thoughts that hadn’t fully closed in on dead air situation. We’re talking about New York City themselves. here.”

By the time I got home Lopate’s terrific dominion There was a minor change in the room. Something had entered its fortieth hour. I shut the radio off changed, which our instincts received with wild op- and padded my way to the cot. Through sleep’s fitful timism. It was a new whirring or buzzing from the layers that night I dreamed that Henry and I were in auto-dialer, and several lights were blinking now, a rowboat, somewhere awash in its own quiet, like possibly more than had blinking before, definitely Long Beach Island or Oyster Bay. Leonard Lopate not fewer, and we looked at each other to see if the was our rumpled coxswain, his rhythmic commands other had counted. But then just as suddenly all the reaching us from beyond a wry and different history. noise stopped and all the lights went out, including And Lopate would spasm, and Henry would shiver, the one from the ceiling. and we would list and tilt insanely, and whatever “God darn it,” Henry said, lighting several candles rowing I managed was in stabilizing compensation he’d had at the ready. “What am I gonna tell Mr. Lewis for the manic forces that they bore. And then one tomorrow?” He deflated into a beanbag chair colored dreaming moment I knew that I was dreaming, like a soccer ball, fighting off sleep with a grudge. So which had never happened to me before, and it was I struck out for home, down the side of the blacked- very unsettling: clambering starboard I watched out building on the fire escape I knew blind, caught myself throw up into the queasy shoal. I awoke then, now and then by the beam of someone’s There was a minor change in the room. Something clever lantern.

I

changed, which our instincts received with wild optimism. It was a new whirring or buzzing from the auto-dialer, and several lights were blinking now.

couldn’t stop thinking of all those congregating hosts, overflowing out of the green room and back into the elevator, shuffling program notes and picking cuticles. “You have a face for the radio,” they’d be telling each other, to pass the time.

“A face for the airwaves.” You wouldn’t think that actual upmarket professional radio hosts would make that ancient joke to each other but they still do, I’ve heard them, you wouldn’t believe how many real live different famous radio hosts I’ve heard make that joke to each other, and how many times each.

And all those unused program notes fluttering down the elevator shaft and the stairwells, raining out the

keeling, clutching the side of Joan’s bed like it was the rim of the boat, Joan’s deep slumber undisturbed by Kama-Lunda’s foreign snores.

In real life I wasn’t throwing up but heaving softly: hiccups. It was almost pre-dawn outside, but for now the streetlights lent the veiling their strange scotopic glow. The grim thought came that one day I’d, too, have nothing to wake up for, and neither then would the amp-modal masses who’d sleep through my silence. I believe in them, you know. I found a glass of water and drank it upside down.

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Inheritance: Only Son of a Schoolteacher

The chickens scratched low in the cool dirt under the manzanita trees.

I watered the zinnias and artichokes, with a hose.

You came down to say hello.

You had been camping.

Your hair was dirty and in your eyes.

I asked you how it was. You smiled and said it was alright, and shrugged your shoulders.

I walked over to the strawberries growing still green under the trellises of beans I watered them too.

And I asked would you be around for dinner.

Your hands in your pockets you said I don’t know mom and smiled and I thought you looked just like my father, lines beneath your eyes.

I turned off the hose, coiling it by the rosebushes while you stood watching the chickens, sun on your back.

You said so long mom and you ran up to the house and later I could hear you talking on the phone with your friends.

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poems by Rogan Kriedt

Karl I.

II.

You read an article in the Times. In Norway there was a television program on chopping wood seen by nearly twenty percent of Norwegians. The last eight hours of a fireplace, a fire burning in it.

—that’s it.

A show about firewood.

For Christmas, we bought you a block plane from Canada.

—my mother’s idea.

You work, sawdust in the air, pitch on the backs of your hands and in your shirt, the dark grain wound, knots running beneath the plane, the blade, steady hands above.

The truing of wood, hard oak, Douglas fir, pine. Jesus was also a carpenter, a thick, shaved pencil in his pocket.

The article is about how Norwegian men are silent.

How there is language in woodcutting. Living wood beneath the dead, hard treebark.

Snowbound branches, sap flowing within them, this makes sense, goes without saying.

When you came to see me with new wiperblades for my car this is what you talked about.

This show about woodcutting.

And so here we are, four generations later and we’re still Norwegian.

And your name spelled as it is in the old country.

Folds down your face, grey, unruly eyebrows, fjords.

In America too, glaciers have done their work equally well —black veins run in our granite.

I’m lefthanded too.

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Late Back from the Doctor Late that night I sat at the fireplace reading the dog waited by the door after I made a plate of cold spaghetti I saw their headlights bending in branches the oak trees of our driveway the dog barking and my father untied his shoes and she took off her scarf and said sit down and this was the night my mother was rediagnosed with cancer and we eased back into an old routine

september eleventh my father carried me outside in my pajamas toward the seagoat’s shining points spinning low over point sur said look up this is the only night you will look up and see no planes

Rogan Kriedt is an English major. He grew up in Santa Cruz, California with his parents Pat and Karl and his dog, Sydney.

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in conversation:

Anne Carson & Robert Currie

Photo by Anne Carson

This Spring Quarter, the Creative Writing Department’s Mohr Visiting Poet was Anne Carson. In addition to her reading and colloquium, Carson also taught a class called “Forms of Attention,” in which she—along with her husband, Robert Currie, and Jones Lecturer John Evans—explored different kinds of attention with a group of twelve Stanford students. Themes for each week’s discussion ranged from ‘The Body’ to ‘Puzzles’ to ‘Outrage,’ and each class was divided into two segments: first, a semitraditional seminar-style discussion of the readings, followed by an hour devoted to specially devised activities or ‘actions’ relating to the week’s focus. After the first week, both portions of every class were planned and led by the students themselves.

Carson and Currie are not new to teaching; besides their class on Attention, the pair also offers a class every year at NYU on Collaboration. Earlier this Spring, one of our editors sat down with them to find out more about the ideas underlying the Attention class, how they fit into the context of Stanford, and, more generally, how Carson and Currie understand their place in the realm of academia.

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Leland Quarterly: In your New York Times profile, you’re quoted as saying, “when i began to be published, people got the idea that i should ‘teach writing,’ which i have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in. so now and then i find myself engaged by a ‘writing program’ (as at nyu, stanford) and have to bend my wits to deflect the official purpose.” Here we are at one of these ‘writing programs.’ Stanford is known as one of the most successful places for creative writing in an academic setting; it seems to be thriving here in an institutional way. You’ve said, though, that you want to move away from that paradigm in your own teaching—

LQ: So you’re trying to subvert the creative writing paradigm because it’s too narrow?

Robert Currie: But I think both of us have always said that the value Anne brings to this is an ability to make people remember other things they know how to do. So, you used to paint, and now she’s giving you the opportunity to say, ‘Oh, I can still paint, that’s going to make my writing a lot better.’ It’s less subverting [the paradigm], it’s more expanding it, making it a bigger space where the idea takes place.

AC: But I’ve found from talking to people who do it that although they are technically teaching writing, what they’re teaching—and say they want to teach— is reading.

So I think in that sense, the whole creative writing industry takes the form, and fulfills the useful function, of replacing a normal belletristic education which people used to get in college or in life, by the way they lived, the way they thought and the books they read—replacing that with this craft-oriented activity that involves learning about the world and its writing, but isn’t called that because that’s just not the fashion.

AC: That’s one thing. But again, I just personally don’t know how to do it. I don’t know what it is, to teach writing.

RC: Well, because you never took a writing class.

You were always a classicist.

AC: I mean, if I were to approach English as another language, I could teach it, like I teach Greek.

LQ: So what do you think about all the people here Anne Carson: ‘Move away’ is an understatement. who do teach writing, who don’t shy away from that?

‘Resist from within’ is my answer to this question.

AC: No comment.

LQ: So when you find yourself hired to teach writing, how do you approach that?

RC: Well…at NYU Sharon Olds teaches poetry, and she’s terrific at this, in this form. She’s been doing it AC: Like this—invent something else. Because all for 25 years and she understands how to do it, but in these people [in the current class on Attention] came her case, I think she hasn’t replaced the rigor, but she’s to do writing, I assume. But we’re not doing writing generous. That’s what Anne shares, she has the same much. We might do a little; a sentence a week seems generosity, it just happens to be placed in a different enough. way, in a different part of the process.

AC: That’s a bit more generous of a description. I tend to get curmudgeonly about it because I feel kind of cornered. But in practical effect, what happens [in a class like this] is that people go somewhere they haven’t thought they should be before, and they do write in that place, and probably write something RC: But also, going back to Stanford—you take different than they otherwise would. That seems to something like the Stegner [Fellowship], and it’s less me a bonus. about learning something, being taught something.

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It’s more about community. It’s an opportunity to be they’re always looking at their phones.’ It doesn’t in a community of writers where you can exchange seem to me to be the case. ideas, rather than a community of writers where you critique. To me, it seems the successful part is RC: Attention’s just interesting. creating a community.

AC: It’s interesting, and it can take so many forms.

AC: I think so, too. Good point.

Whatever the fractured form is that we use nowadays seems to work for the lives we live nowadays.

LQ: You mention the way in which the workshop is a kind of belletristic education in disguise, and the LQ: Could you elaborate more on the way that you way in which it gives you a community of writers. So two [Carson and Currie] work together? It seems could your own class on ‘Attention’ be called a sort of like some of the more performative or event-based workshop, only maybe not in the current sense? parts of the class may be coming from you [Currie]?

AC: Well, I thought I should address a topic that is AC: [to Currie] Oh, mostly, mostly from you. crucial to creative writing. Attention seems to be that.

And the main thing I like to do in a class, whether RC: Well, I can talk about how it comes together when

Anne Carson:

“[Attention’s] interesting, and it can take so many forms. Whatever the fractured form is that we use nowadays seems to work for the lives we live nowadays.” it’s a workshop or not, is to promote people’s minds to move somewhere. That’s really what learning is, and what thinking is—move somewhere you haven’t moved before with your particular mind. And so I sat down and thought up nine subtopics of attention that would lead to some kind of provocative change in people’s attitudes. I’ve done [the class] once as a more traditional seminar, but even there it kept devolving into more practical projects, and in the end we did a performance together. So maybe that’s just the trend of me, or maybe it’s something inherent in this method of avoiding teaching writing.

we make a piece. Anne always writes the text first.

I may have some input or not, but whenever I look at any of these things, I see it visually, sculpturally, before I see the language. When she puts out a book, I’ll flip through it and see what the visual rhythm is, long before I read it. Of course I’ve read it a million times before that, but not in the finished form. But I think of the language in a larger, sculptural way—in a way of taking up space. Anne thinks more about language in the mind than on the page…

AC: Grammar.

RC: …so we start with the language and then move it into a larger, three-dimensional space.

LQ: Is there a particular reason why ‘Attention’?

A perceived lack of this in the people that you’re AC: That thing that I do, words on a page and a line, teaching? can become something in space, with bodies and objects and time and other valences, with his help.

AC: No, I don’t think I ever went down that road of, By myself, I couldn’t do that. But as to the two parts ‘Young people can’t pay attention anymore because of the class, the sort of analytical part and then the Leland Quarterly Spring 2013

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active part: the first time I did a class, it ended in a performance event. At Michigan, I taught something called Decreation, which is the name of a book that I wrote. That book has an opera in it, and I just formed the course around the themes of the opera and gave the opera to the students to do as an opera, somehow, at the end of the year. And it was great because I didn’t get involved in it, I just gave it to them. And it was fantastic. There isn’t an easy way, within the normal analytic structure of a seminar, to do that kind of stepping back. You have to have a tactic for getting yourself out of the way.

to make. ’Cause in Greek, you know, ‘poet’ is ‘maker,’ that’s all it means. It doesn’t say what you make.

Could be dinner. Still, there’s a thought in it, and that can be widened or enriched.

RC: And I think the other side of this class is, people think, ‘Oh, we don’t have to write, it’s going to be easier than we thought.’ And it’s actually more difficult. The demands are actually greater instead of less, but they’re just a different kind of demand.

LQ: I’m also wondering what both of your impressions are of the working writer in academia, RC: And I was just thinking, we’re not alone in that especially because you [Carson] come from an idea of teaching writing in these ways. I think Junot explicitly academic background?

Díaz just makes people read like crazy. Jonathan Safran Foer does what we do, he makes people go RC: [to Carson] Do you consider yourself an out, go to the deli and whatever. academic?

Robert Currie:

“Sometimes people think that what we do [in teaching] is unique, and it actually isn’t that unique, it’s just more overt.

AC: He got that from us, though [laughing]. He has AC: Yeah. A fraudulent one, but an academic. It’s the office across the hall, he’s always stealing our my main interest. I think I would put it this way: ideas. everybody has the place in them that’s the roots and the place that’s the branches. For me, Ancient RC: Sometimes people think that what we do [in Greek is the root thing, and the other stuff—both teaching] is unique, and it actually isn’t that unique, scholarship about Greek and writing in English, and it’s just more overt. the celebrity thing—is all just foliage from that root.

So if I lost the branches and the foliage, that would AC: More unashamed. be ok, but I wouldn’t want to lose the root.

LQ: So is the goal still, let’s make us—the students— RC: And the thing is, in the performing arts and better writers? Or is it more general than that? the visual arts, people have to work all the time. The other side of the academy that’s kind of cool is, it AC: Yeah, it’s more general, I think. means we don’t have to say ‘yes’ to everything. We can say ‘no’ because we have an income.

RC: It’s to make you a better ‘something.’

AC: It gives you resting places that you wouldn’t AC: A better maker—maker of whatever you decide otherwise have. It is pragmatic, too, and I think that’s 20

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how I first bifurcated my life, stopped teaching full time and began to teach half time so that I could do the other stuff.

But I don’t find that it’s a friction, or a steep and difficult passage [from academia to the working art world], it’s just different parts of what I call ‘my mind,’ loosely. And they always energize each other back and forth. Maybe that’s just my opportunism, but it seems to be working so far.

LQ: So in terms of ‘energizing,’ what does being a visiting professor bring to the other parts of your life?

AC: I think, instability. Which is unpleasant, but not a bad thing for thought.I think when I stay at home, I kind of stagnate, get too used to the sound of my own voice and presumptions about the world, and it’s a good thing to be knocked out of those secure positions by having to go someplace where you don’t know how anything works, and you have to explain RC: And you also really like students. With Anne, I yourself all the time, or look at the back of your head notice that it’s like at the end of the term everybody and make sure it’s not too weird before you go out the door. For me, it’s the discombobulating that’s in the class is her friend now. refreshing. Which you would simply call ‘variety.’

AC: And it thereby does fulfill another function of the writer’s life, which is to get around being lonely RC: That sort of beautiful confusion. all the time. ’Cause that’s mostly what it amounts to if you’re just doing your work—you’re alone with your AC: Yes. And not always beautiful, actually, though now and again that pops up. notebook. You get crazy that way.

“A Report Redacted,” Sophi Newman Leland Quarterly Spring 2013

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All photos taken with a Leica M2 on Kodak T-max 100 ASA black-and-white film.

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the lost coast — dana edwards

The Lost Coast is a rugged stretch of California shoreline 200 miles north of San Francisco. Here the highway was never built, on account of trees and cliffs too tall. Here is only accessible by hiking, skydiving, or riding on the backs of whales. Here the giant redwoods give way to black-sand beaches, where black bears can gaze at frothing shore break. Here sunlight beams through morning fog before the rays expel the mist to light the day. Here is the spirit of northern California. Here three old friends— several years estranged—hiked for three days with three bottles of Charles Shaw wine and three pairs of eyes wide as the open sea. An impromptu trek on a long weekend in July promised only a breath of fresh air, but ended up blowing all the Pacific’s salty breeze into grateful gasping lungs. If god was what we were after then we would have found him. Instead we kindled fires and rekindled friendships with each other and the coast. There was a lot of gazing. I brought along my old rangefinder camera, a gift from my dad and the same one he used to record the same sense of awe half a century ago. This weekend on the Lost Coast, the shutter sort of tripped itself. These aren’t my photos but postcards from Gaia, reminders of why, frankly, life can be a really beautiful thing.

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— dana yeo

When Elisa was conceived, she looked like the seed of an avocado. With her mother’s effort, the seed became a coconut and the coconut, a head. With the head came a body, twisting in unison through the one-way trip out of her mother and severing the closest relationship they would ever have.

Once free, Elisa was mopped roughly by a nurse with stubby fingers, her skin transforming from a thick creamy hue to a warm olive-gold. She was then handed to her mother where she stuck, plastered to the woman’s damp chest, wet from sweat and tears.

When Elisa turned five, she had her first birthday party, Angie figured the time was right. Having never been given a birthday party herself, she was careful to highlight the importance of this moment in Elisa’s life. “Your birthday is all about you,” she urged, squeezing Elisa’s frail arms tightly while the little girl gnawed at the straw of a Capri Sun pack. “You’ll get presents and cake and be so, so happy.”

Occasionally, while planning the details, Angie’s face would glaze over as memories from her own childhood flooded her thoughts. In those moments she would look over at Elisa’s innocent smile, grin sadly, and gently stroke her daughter’s hair.

Elisa was born November 3rd, but her party was planned for October 30th, the eve of her mother’s favorite holiday. “People will be clearing their schedules for Halloween so more people will be able come,” she justified to Elisa as she pulled the moss-green turtle shell over Elisa’s raised arms. They had sewed and stuffed the shell together, embellishing the fabric with gold sequins to make an enormous number 5.

On October 31st, a ghost and a turtle sat near the

window of the living room, fingerpainting onto a large piece of construction paper. The turtle was Elisa; the ghost, her best friend Rachel. Near them, among the candles and cobwebs, Angie was surrounded by wellto-do women. While the others were draped in Anne Taylor and J. Crew, Angie was clothed in a cheaplymade ghoul costume from Party City, a splash of putrid green among a sea of pastels.

“I thought this was a birthday party,” one mother said, looking Angie up and down.

“Well yes but it’s so close to Halloween, I just thought it might be fun to...” she paused for a moment, “well I guess I thought it might be fun to dress up.”

“Oh honey, getting this together every morning,” another mother chimed in, pointing at her face with her index finger, “is work enough for me. Am I right?”

The other women laughed and nodded in agreement while Angie looked down at her costume. Her dark hair fell loosely around her face, draping her expression from view. She wanted to shrink, to minimize the spectacle that she had made of herself, and slouched instinctively.

Despite all the lively small talk that buzzed around her, Angie said next to nothing. She wanted nothing

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more than to blend in with the Halloween decor, wanted nothing more than to be a prop at her own party.

“Wait, ladies, did you hear?” a woman clad in a coral dress asked. “Barb was just elected head of the Board of Trustees at Lindelton.”

“You’re joking.”

“As if she didn’t have enough already.”

“I better not tell Earl or he’ll be green with envy. He’ll probably turn the color of Angie.”

Angie nodded politely as the woman chuckled. Her cheeks burned, who was Barb?

“Anyways,” the woman in coral continued. “I’m going to invite Barb for a weekend trip to our beach house,” she said smugly. “I’d love for Reese to go to Lindelton,” she winked.

“Well get in line.”

“Top of the guest list at my next dinner party.”

Without having met Barb, Angie was sure she would like her. As she listened intently to a redhead describing, in great detail, the first time she met the illustrious Barb, Angie grew more and more certain that Barb was a local Hillary Clinton—a class act, accomplished and respected. And then the thought struck her. It might be too late for me but Elisa still has a chance to be a Barb! And then she, Angie, could be Barb’s mother, an achievement in its own right. With that, her resolve was set—Elisa would be successful, maybe not the head of a Board of Trustees, but something just as good and likely even better.

not going is actually what’s best for you.” Elisa lifted her head, her eyes spiteful. Her trembling lip betrayed her as she embarked upon a one-sided glare-off with her mother. Angie turned away as she continued. “Getting ahead while you’re young is the best thing you can do in life. You’re too young to make the right choice now, so I’m going to make it for you,” she paused. “It would be easier, you know, for me to just pay for you to go.

But that’s not how success is made. I just... I just want you to have the best start in life.” She slowly turned back, meeting Elisa’s resentful gaze with earnest eyes.

Elisa showed no sign of relenting and Angie panicked, dismissively banishing Elisa to her room for her bad attitude and abruptly ending their conversation.

A week later, Elisa brought home her first C. At first her mother worried. Unsure of how to confront her, fearful of appearing unsupportive, Angie waited. If others follow, I’ll say something, she told herself. But none did and so, as far as she knew, all was well.

When Elisa was thirteen,

she participated in her first violin competition. She had been practicing for months on end, six hours a day, seven days a week. She approached the instrument as she approached everything, with a ruthless discipline, working her fingers raw across the narrow fingerboard, learning to calculate and compensate for the careless temperaments of both her instrument and her fingertips.

By now Elisa was well on her way to reaching the level of success Angie had envisioned for her, and her mother Rachel’s family invited her to Disneyland. The trip, they could not be more thrilled. A Barb in the making, she said, would cost a hundred dollars. Angie declined. would grin silently to herself, the Hillary Clinton of the “Elisa is busy that weekend, we’re going to a family next generation. gathering,” she lied. “Thanks for the offer though. It was To catalyze Elisa’s success, Angie encouraged practice. very thoughtful. Be sure to take pictures!” Angie put the Seven hours is more than six, and eight hours is more phone back on the receiver gently, wondering how she than seven. She rarely did it outright, never yelled or might explain this. Elisa’s head was buried in her arms scolded, preferring instead to leave Elisa’s violin in on the kitchen table, her body trembling beneath her absurdly visible places—like on the toilet bowl—as a tousled brown hair. Angie sat across from her. Leaning gentle reminder. over the short length of the table, she cupped her While Angie counted hours, Elisa counted measures, daughter’s small hands in her own and released a small meticulously crafting her performance. She made a kiss into her wet palm. habit of recording dozens of slight variations on single Angie smiled meekly at Elisa, caressing the top of phrases repeated over every phrase of an entire piece. her hands slowly while giving her a moment to collect When she was finished, she would begin the gruesome herself. “You can’t see it now,” Angie began quietly, “but task of splicing combinations of phrasings together

When Elisa turned ten,

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until she had constructed her ideal performance. not the piece they had practiced and she was right, Elisa Preferring darker interpretations, she often struggled was performing the Shostakovich Violin Concerto, a with romantic or sentimental motifs. At first, she tried dramatically different work. to grasp them, scourging her feelings as precisely as Angie’s fury swelled beneath her collected exterior. she could, only to find that the subtle themes for which How could she do this to me, she thought. How could she searched were simply missing. Eventually Elisa she do this to us? After all those hours? She took a few abandoned these efforts, and, too prideful to merely breathes, physically preparing to run onstage to confront imitate, she turned in another direction, burying these Elisa. When the music ended, she jumped to her feet, elusive passages in surrealism, abstracting them away ready to make the 30 yard sprint to her daughter—only from reality, an uncommon and disarming choice. she couldn’t move. She couldn’t move because everyone Angie, assuming what any mother might about their else was standing too. Elisa was receiving a standing child staring at incomprehensible shapes ovation. Angie scowled, trying to squeeze and lines on a computer screen, between her neighbors. Americans This was all just a thought Elisa played too many are so fat, she complained. By the videogames and never thought time she reached the aisle, she means to an end, that’s to understand her struggle. had a full view of the auditorium all, she said to herself as she In the week leading up to and, more importantly, of the her performance, Angie and judging panel. They too, were looked around the room, standing. Suddenly, she broke Elisa were arguing over the phrasing of a short passage in her free of her trance. Looking to her taking it all in. performance piece, Zigeunerweisen. right, then to her left at the cheering “It should be big, loud,” Angie said crowd, she found herself instinctively enthusiastically. “That’s how it’s always played. Even pressing her hands together, slowly at first, then faster Joshua Bell plays it that way.” and faster. Within seconds she was clapping loudest, Elisa rolled her eyes, scoffing at her mother’s reference. yelling to her nearest neighbor, “That’s my daughter!

“I don’t want to play it that way. I want it soft, to build up My daughter!” This is all just a means to an end, that’s tension. Like this.” She teased her bow across the strings. all, she said to herself as she looked around the room, “No, no, no. You haven’t thought this through. Trust taking it all in. No reason to be mad. The whole point me, I know what’s going to work. You’ll do it the other was to win and she won. We did it! way. Now, do it the other way.” Angie spoke with the same authority as before, despite her painfully obvious lack of experience with anything remotely musical.

Elisa dropped her bow across the G, giving her mother precisely what she asked for. she tried smoking for the first time. She was lying in “Perfect.” her sparse bed coughing up a storm when Angie peered On the day of the competition, Angie sat restlessly through her open door. in the third row. The crowd applauded as Elisa walked “What is that…” Angie’s nostrils dilated as her eyes onto the stage. Her slender form and the juxtaposition traced the faint appearance of smoke. Angie’s face flushed of her bright skin and dark hair made her appear angelic. a deep crimson as she stood in the doorway, paralyzed.

Well, she’s certainly the prettiest, her mother realized For a moment, she was speechless, her mouth making as the piano accompaniment began. For a few minutes the beginnings of words and sounds that could never Angie was incredibly pleased, noting the freshness of quite take shape. After Elisa let out a small snort. Angie the sound. She could see that the crowded was very stopped trying, hiding her embarrassment at her vocal receptive to Elisa, swaying and jolting with the music. fumble by turning away from Elisa and lunging for the It wasn’t until past halfway through that she realized the drapes. “The Martins might see you,” she seethed, as her music was too fresh, too new. Towards the end of the heart raced. “God, can you imagine what they would performance she was almost absolutely sure this was say? About you? About us?” She retracted the fabric a

When Elisa was fifteen,

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few millimeters, peering through the glass panes for a home?” set of inquiring eyes. “They already don’t like us after “A real beach house where you can ‘vacation in the the trashcan incident.” summertime’ or whatever,” Elisa mocked.

“The trashcan incident was your fault,” Elisa replied, “Well...” her mother pondered, thinking of Elisa’s watching her mother flush once more. “Look, I need looming SAT and the family reunion that fell closely this. It’s relaxing. It calms me down. My nerves have after. “Alright, alright. I do want you to be able to relax. been getting out of control lately. The stress is becoming That stress really isn’t good for you health. But no more too much.” than a pack a week. And no smoking in the house.”

Angie struggled to stomach it all. Now that the Angie walked as she spoke, purposefully avoiding possibility of humiliation had faded slightly, she began looking at Elisa’s face. noticing the numbness of her limbs. Her arms and legs felt oddly separated from her body, as though they might take a life of their own and simply wander away.

Thinking—but not caring—that her knees might give out from under her, Angie stared blankly at the wall, she was on the verge of finishing college. A genius, confused as to how they ended up here. She thought the girl’s simply a genius, her professors declared. Yet, that if she didn’t look that maybe this wasn’t actually despite her success, her mother could never quite happening, that maybe this wasn’t real. Ever the remember her major. Electrics and computer circuitry, pessimist, Elisa read her shock as rejection.

Angie would say. By her third year, she had sold her Elisa’s voice dropped to a solemn scratch. “I had a first software patent for $200,000. By her fourth, she feeling you might react this way. You give me this, and operated exclusively on cigarettes, caffeine supplements, I’ll give you a beach house before you turn 55.” and Adderall.

“A beach house,” her mother repeated, as though they In her last winter at MIT, Elisa decided to visit home were new words, saying them without fully absorbing for the first time in four years. She had news to deliver them into her consciousness. Despite the wrongness of that just couldn’t wait. By all accounts Elisa had done her the moment, Angie felt oddly comforted by the smell best to look the part of the accomplished daughter her of tobacco as she admired the cleanliness of Elisa’s wall. mother always wanted. Her clothing had been pristine, Angie’s father had been a smoker. Dad lived to be 90, the precise style that her mother adored, Audrey meets Angie recalled, that’s a long time, maybe Elisa Jackie. And by any account, she failed. No has good genetics for smoking. Forcing color sat naturally on her sallow herself to look at her daughter, skin. No cut could quite flatter By her fourth year, Angie turned to examine her. her famished frame. Her teeth she operated exclusively on were a urine yellow lined She saw her tender fingertips, raw from her habit of nail- cigarettes, caffeine supplements, with a rich caramel brown. biting, saw the sizable patch of Her scalp was now visible in and Adderall. hair missing near her left eye, bald large patches. Her appearance due to her compulsive hair-pulling in was almost mocking. When she times of stress, and couldn’t help but pity her. arrived home, unannounced, her mother “You know Susie Wells has a beach house,” Elisa could barely recognize her. If it weren’t for those same continued, trying to egg on her mother. “Apparently it’s chocolate eyes, eyes that made anyone feel uneasy, eyes so nice that it was featured in an architecture magazine that softened at the mention of sweets, be it chocolate, or something. They did this whole editorial spread.” cookies, or candy, Angie may have not opened the door.

A book toppled from the sizable stack on her bed.

But she knew, and knowing, she did.

“That’s true,” her mother nodded vigorously. Maybe Angie had not been prepared to see her daughter. A she really needs this, she thought. “A real beach house? small gasp escaped her lips while she digested her form.

Beachfront property and everything? Like a vacation She was, at turns, ecstatic and horrified. She wanted to

When Elisa was nineteen,

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grab her, to hold her and feed her and put her to bed “I’m dropping out of school,” Elisa stated. and tell her she loved her, but she was too afraid. She What little color remained in Angie’s face disappeared. was afraid of knowing how far Elisa had pushed herself “I’m starting a company,” Elisa continued. and terrified of finding out who she might blame. So she Silence. tried to make the most of it, resting comfortably in her “I’ve had offers before but it’s never been right. This is denial, convinced that this too would pass—like playing absolutely right, these people are incredible,” she urged the violin, or smoking. It was ephemeral, just a means before her voice fell flat. “This is my decision and it’s the to an end. To be fixed at a later date. Still, she could not right one now. I won’t need your money anymore.” bring herself to touch Elisa. It was as though an invisible Angie wanted to be supportive, to tell Elisa that she barrier had erected itself between the two admired her and that she had surpassed women, though it was hard to say who her expectations. And on some level, “There’s no one it belonged to. After a small nod, deep within her psyche, beyond Angie moved aside, motioning any place she could consciously above me, Mom,” she for Elisa to enter. grasp, she was supportive. But laughed bitterly.

“No one The living room was her mouth acted on impulse. aesthetically overwhelming, a “But what about our plan? Do even comes close.” Everyone you know how that makes me cramped hodgepodge of patterns and textures. The couch where Elisa look?” she blurted, regretting the there knows it.” sat was covered in a pattern of pink words as they evolved from her lips. and red roses and rested beneath checkered Her hand clasped over her mouth, but it window drapes of blue and teal. The armchair beside it was too late. She had hammered the final nail into her showcased a fabric brimming with dragons and lotus daughter’s coffin. flowers. “So tell me about school, how are you grades?

Elisa laughed, savoring the palpable sense of panic and How is work?” Angie asked as she seated herself in the remorse. This time there was no miscommunication, armchair. that much was clear, Angie had meant what she said.

Elisa cleared her throat softly before launching into “I’m willing to do whatever it takes,” she said soothingly, a short summary of her accomplishments. Her class with a subtle hint of sarcasm. “You’ll have plenty to brag ranking. Her many patents and research publications. about in a year or two, when people start kissing your Her endless job offers. Her nomination for ten out of ass to get to me.” With that, she stood to leave. Halfway twelve graduation awards. “There’s no one above me, to the front door, she turned back, curious. Angie’s soft Mom,” she laughed bitterly. “No one even comes close. hand was still pressed firmly over her lips. For a moment, Everyone there knows it. I could be anything I wanted Elisa felt close to Angie, cradled in a warm embrace by really.” She seemed neither proud of nor contented by her mother’s guilt. The look in her eyes hinted that she her words. Instead, she seemed anxious, unsettled by yearned to stay, but a quick shake of the head awoke her how much farther she had yet to go. Her body was a from her trance and she pummeled onward as before. symphony of rhythmic spasms, a physical manifestation of her growing spite. Her head bobbed to a silent melody, her hands kneaded her jittering thighs. “S-sorry,” she stuttered, “do you mind if I smoke?” her company was preparing for their Initial Public Angie was at a loss. How could she deny her daughter Offering. 78.3% of my paycheck, she decided. That’s anything after she’d achieved so much? Before she could how much I’ll send home each month. At first the respond, Elisa had already lit up, tilting her head back checks were small, a few thousand here, a few thousand as she inhaled. Her warped figure turning smooth there. But by the time she turned 21, she was sending as she relaxed, her free hand alarmingly still, resting home tens of thousands and by the time she reached 23, comfortably on a pillow. She was imbued with a new hundreds of thousands. grace and Angie was glad.

It would be a lie to say Angie didn’t enjoy it. She did.

When Elisa turned 25,

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She really, really did. She loved the freedom of lavish my little Marshall could deliver the kind of loot yours living: no dress was too expensive, no meal too pricey. has,” the man continued, jokingly placing his hand over Money was now an unrestricted resource and comfort. A his heart. “But alas, all he gives me is grandchildren.” lifelong certainty. But what she loved most was showing “Yes Angie, any pearls of wisdom for us?” another people. “Look what my daughter bought me,” she would gentleman chimed in, resting his elbows on the table say. In her mind, she knew it wasn’t completely true, but as he eagerly leaned forward. “How about an insight or it wasn’t completely false either, she would reason. It’s two from the woman who bore the youngest billionaire true in a roundabout way, she would convince herself. in history?” he urged. “Or excuse me, future billionaire, As her wealth grew, Angie was introduced to the after tomorrow’s IPO.” most exclusive echelons of society (or at least the most “Oh really I couldn’t,” Angie sputtered, raising her exclusive in her county). People would swarm her, hands defensively in front of her. hound her over her daughter’s success. At events they “Come on!” the group urged, laughing. would ask about Elisa. I recently saw her on the cover “No really, I don’t know anything, I promise. I’d tell of Forbes, they would say, nudging Angie’s arm with you if I did but I don’t. Elisa makes her decisions alone their elbows, the girl knows no limits huh? What is her now.” next move? Any advice from the budding A few faces turned skeptical. After an pioneer? uncomfortable pause, the man with the It would be a lie to One evening, at a gala for glasses broke the silence. “Well not St. Jude’s Children Hospital, to worry eh? Sometimes success say Angie didn’t enjoy it.

Angie sat at the highest skips a generation or two.”

She did. She really, really did. ranking table for those Another woman spoke for whose donations exceeded the first time, grinning at the She loved the freedom of lavish rest, the million dollar mark.

“Did you guys hear? Billy Dressed head-to-toe in living: no dress was too expensive, Anderson is getting divorced luxury brands, Angie looked again.” no meal too pricey. comically expensive, diamonds “No. What a dog.” dripping from her ears, neck, and “That bitch ain’t going down easy, she’s hands. Relative to the rest of the gathering, going to cost him an arm and a leg, that one.” she blended perfectly, humoring mediocre jokes with Angie kept silent—who was Billy Anderson? gentle chortles, placing manicured hands on neighbors’ shoulders. Despite the ease with which she seemed to hat evening, Angie undressed slowly in front move, this was the first sit-down event Angie had ever of her vanity, mostly because her gown was had with this particular crowd, and she was anxious. skin-tight. I wonder what Elisa’s thinking right now, The prospect of a more involved conversation with she thought, stepping out of the gown and tugging them made her thighs clench until they hurt. at her jewelry. Her mind rested upon her musical “Angie, who are you wearing?” one woman asked, performance so many years before—her radiant glow, her indisputable potential. As the gems slithered off, she pointing fondly at Angie’s dress.

“J Mendel,” Angie replied, looking down at her felt as though a weight had been lifted off her. Whoever says silk is better than cotton is just being pretentious, rosebud-colored gown.

The woman sighed, casually fondling her sapphire she said aloud to an empty room as she pulled on her sheep-printed pajamas. Leaning into the mirror, she necklace while she spoke, “it suits you perfectly.” took a cotton ball in her long, frail fingers and daubed “Than—” “Oh Angie!” a bald man with round spectacles it in makeup remover. Starting with a small region on boomed. “Didn’t see you there. How’s that little diamond her left cheek, Angie began drawing concentric circles along her skin, freeing her pores of an hour’s worth of Elisa?” artistic work. The blush, the foundation, the concealer— “She’s well...” Angie started.

“Must be nice huh, living off your daughter? I wish they all came off together, revealing uneven coloring

T

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Untitled, Cliff Owl Leland Quarterly Spring 2013

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and clusters of freckles and age spots along the edges of figures and numbers Angie couldn’t understand, Angie her face. Before long it was just lipstick. A barren face felt a growing discomfort looking at Elisa’s pixelated marked with a bright red hue. I look ridiculous, Angie face. thought. No wonder everyone was treating me like an The truth was that Elisa looked horrible. Photoshop outsider. Well I showed them, Angie gloated, smirking couldn’t save her from a live recording. Her skin sagged at the thought of her considerably larger contribution and jiggled as she spoke, reminiscent of a French to the hospital. Yet even alone, she reddened slightly, Bulldog. Her wide gestures revealed new bald patches avoiding her own gaze in the mirror. When the lipstick near her ears and around her crown. Her voice was a was off and her face was clear, she took a moment to forceful rumble muffled by phlegm. The only pristine enjoy the starkness of it, welcoming the slight of her part of her appearance were her teeth, covered with laugh lines as she smiled earnestly in the mirror. Much veneers and noticeably larger than the ones she had six better. years prior. Angie felt her heart pounding in her chest.

As she smiled she reached for her phone, holding 2 How could she age so much so quickly? Maybe that’s the on her touchscreen. Biting her lip in anticipation, her new PR person, she thought. But the name Elisa Chiu foot jiggled to and fro as she counted the number was written in large block letters beneath her of rings before she heard the recording face. Or maybe it’s just the lighting. that had become too familiar.

But Ellen looked beautiful. But In spite of herself, “This is Elisa’s personal what bothered Angie most Angie was giddy.

“Hi Elisa, ” number. For all professional was how Elisa spoke, an matters please call my she shouted at the screen, tears undertone to her words assistant Fred Cooke. Leave a only a mother might welling in her eyes.

Turns out message.” notice—a subtle bitterness Beep. and hollowness, as though she’s not a Hillary Clinton, she “Hi Elisa, it’s Mom. Just calling the words she uttered held no laughed to herself. to wish you luck before tomorrow. meaning for her.

I’ll be watching,” Angie said softly, her Then the conversation turned to voice cracking slightly despite her efforts to sound things Angie could comprehend. cheery.

“Tell us Elisa, what’s the secret to your success?

The message you recorded could not be sent. Inbox You’re the first female founder-CEO of a publicly traded filled. Goodbye. company in history. You must be proud. Every kid your In reality, Angie and Elisa hadn’t spoken since the age out here is going to wonder just how you did it. night she visited years and years ago. Desperate, Angie Throw ‘em a bone.” swiped swiftly across the screen of her smartphone, Elisa chuckled. “Proud?” she repeated. “Proud? No. logging into Twitter.

Ecstatic? No.” Elisa paused, looking directly into the AngieChiu wishes @ChiuEO the best of luck tomorrow. camera lens, her piercing gaze aimed straight through At 6:47 the next morning, Angie turned on CNBC’s the television. In her living room, thousands of miles morning call. She quickly hit record on her TiVo. away, Angie felt faint. Her hands were going numb. Her “And today we have a very special segment. In light feet were tingling. of Veebream’s IPO this morning, the elusive CEO, “So what’s your secret?” the anchor pressed.

Elisa Chiu, has agreed to a short interview,” the anchor “My mother,” Elisa rasped. The right corner of her announced. “Good morning Elisa.” The screen split into mouth turned upward as an insidious smirk bloomed two to make room for her. across her face. Her eyes were vindictive.

“Good morning Ellen,” Elisa replied.

Fumbling with her phone as tears fell from her face, In spite of herself, Angie was giddy. “Hi Elisa,” she Angie logged into Twitter. Knowing that it would be shouted at the screen, tears welling in her eyes. Turns seen by not just all of her followers, but all of Elisa’s, out she’s not a Hillary Clinton, she laughed to herself, Angie said something she never knew how to say before. she’s more a Marisa Mayer. As the two women discussed AngieChiu is sorry @ChiuEO. 38

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What My Parents Said the First Time They Visited Me in College We are hard-boiled eggs: ordinary and stinky and good for you.

We are broccoli stems, fibrous, made for gnawing.

We are full, full of iron.

You should let us strengthen you.

If you leave us outside all winter we won’t rust. In the spring we’ll remain just as we were. We will always remain just as we are.

We’ll pry open what’s closed.

We’ll sharpen what’s dull.

Please carry us always on your belt, or in a back pocket.

— tiffany li

y Bao

Illus

ns b tratio

Le

Cold Feet What an appendage!

His spindly toes, that odd hair, his doorknob ankles and woodchip toenails.

This, sacred? Ha! Yet, I kiss his elephant hide heels.

I would wash these, lay myself down before them.

I am broke open.

Love is not as I thought—high, holy light through a church window.

Love is not the soft sweet flesh or the juice dribbling down your chin.

Love is not the fruit.

Love is dark peat, decaying wet leaves, earth full of worms with bellies full of earth.

His cold feet startle me awake each morning. And every morning after I awaken, I reawaken.

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— grace chao

the three essays 40

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My parents say the worst thing life offered me was choice.

They mean the option of selection, the act of choosing itself: the opportunity to nurture a precious talent, pursue that burning passion, and mold a fulfilling, rewarding life. It has a lot to do with the fact that they think I don’t like anything.

“That’s not true,” I say. “I just don’t like anything enough. Or I don’t know what I like enough.”

Perhaps it’d seem perfect that I was going to a school whose motto boasted Die Luft der Freiheir weht: “The wind of freedom blows.”

Incorrect. This big blowing wind of freedom, along with Stanford itself, would emerge as a blessing and a curse. Two years of experience would not leave me simply lying on my bed, switching majors yet again in my mind, wondering why nothing seemed actually interesting (because “interesting” can be a very empty word).

In fact, palm trees would turn into weeping willows, Palm Drive into a gauntlet, and everything that lay beyond into a maze of bittersweet bricks for me to decipher.

W

hen I was seven years old, my sister Annie came home one afternoon and announced to the living room that her friend’s brother was going to U.C. Berkeley.

“Is it the best college in California?” I inquired. I didn’t know the names of any other schools.

“No. The best one is Stanford. It’s very close to our house. We pass it sometimes.”

“Stanford.” It sounded very stately in my head.

So I decided I would go there, and went back to sketching my horse. You always had to pick the best, didn’t you?

T

wo months later, I still loved Stanford. I had some gust of freedom, certainly—I had no curfew, could converse with boys without subsequent parental interrogation, could eat as many breadsticks and brownies and Ike’s sandwiches as my stomach would process.

I could breathe.1 I had friends who wanted to play—and finish—a game of Trivial Pursuit with me; we stayed up till five in the morning doing so. I had friends who would stay up even later than five, discussing religion, marriage, physics, and life. I loved when people taught me new things—whether it was about Ambrose Bierce, or the th en years later, at 5:30 P.M. on December 11 , Nine Inch Nails, or that Bakelite, developed a hundred 2009, I knew three things: years ago, was an early form of plastic. I knew a little My parents were deliriously happy, about a lot, had a penchant for storing dates and names I was so happy that tears dropped from my eyes, and and accomplishments that weren’t my own.

I was attending Stanford in the fall. friend once asked if I realized that trivia was n a video montage pieced together by my freshman named trivia for a reason. Why was it that I had dorm, you can see me walk up to the check-in table a knack for remembering all things unimportant? on the first day of school: a smile reaching across my I told him I didn’t know. face, the bounce in my hair matching the bounce in my “But isn’t it amazing how many pieces of knowledge step. I have on a green headband, dark jeans, and new this world contains?” I asked. “Don’t you want to soak shoes, and I remember why I looked so pleased. in as much as possible? Don’t you want to know a little The dorm staff had ushered me in with whoops and bit of everything, everything that’s ever been?” cheers of Grace—apparently they’d spent the night I pointed out that Sylvia Plath had uttered a great before memorizing all our names and faces. Later that quote about wanting to “live and feel all the shades, evening an a cappella group visited the dorm and picked tones and variations of mental and physical experience me to serenade; they knew my name as well. in life.”2 There’s a feeling of importance that comes when He pointed out that she had realized that she was someone knows you, before you know them. And I knew that I liked Stanford so far.

1 Convinced I could “do better” than my older sister in academics and college admissions, my parents were much It was fun, and I liked everybody.

T

I

1. Virtually all of Stanford’s undergraduates live on campus. What would you want your future roommate to know about you? …I love Jeopardy, trivia, board games, riddles, and puzzles; they break the bubble of plain math, English, and history. One of my goals this year is to finish a New York Times crossword puzzle, and to me, brainteasers could comprise the material of an ideal course. I love movies as well: whenever I discover a hard-to-find homage in a film, it feels as if I am sharing a secret with the director.

A

stricter with me in high school. Mall trips could wait until Christmas, movies until summer, and birthday parties until next year. What could be more effective than educational house arrest?

2 “I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want?

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”

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“horribly limited,” stuck her head in an oven, and died.

B

uried underneath all these endless possible “experiences” was academia.

A prospective Human Biology major, I took chemistry, math, and Stanford’s required humanities course. None were very intriguing, but my parents wanted me to be a doctor, my friends were taking the same classes, there was an apparent stigma carried by “fuzzy” majors, and pediatrics sounded decent. After all, I liked kids, and I liked helping people.3 I didn’t forget what prestigious educational institutions were for, of course—I just wasn’t as concerned, invested, or interested as everyone else.

It didn’t scare me that a single midterm could make or break a grade. The idea of office hours was foreign, and anyway, I needed them after midnight. If there was no homework to submit, I could not bring myself to open a textbook and study.

In high school, I’d sit down at ten o’clock the night before a test, memorize everything before two or three, and regurgitate the following morning.4 I began papers when birds began chirping. I was the poster child of Parkinson’s Law,5 and only urgency could inspire and push me to think. I had written all my college essays the week they were due; my common application I’d started and finished the day of submission.6

3 I also grew queasy at the sight of blood, but my parents said I’d get over it soon. A friend offered me ten dollars to watch Zombieland for “practice,” so I sat on my hands, forced open my eyes, and collected my Hamilton.

That night, I realized that comedic gore was much easier to handle than bloodshed from Saving Private Ryan—or, more importantly, blood from real life. Psychology played a bigger role than I’d previously thought.

4 Before the clock struck ten, I was reading the news, the mail, Wikipedia, my chapstick ingredients, and the chat messages from my sister who sat five feet away. I could do anything that my parents couldn’t hear and could be contained in my room.

5 (Cyril Northcote) Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

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W

hen fall quarter ended, my grade point average was a full point below what I normally received. Of my friends, I had the lowest marks. Before, I had never made any curvy-shaped letters; now, they were all I had.

I knew that college material would be heavy, but I couldn’t shake my thirteen-year habit of waiting until the last minute to study. I must’ve been spoiled by high school. Maybe I’d been fatigued by high school. For some reason, I simply did not have the mentality, the motivation to concentrate—and this continued for the rest of the year.

It didn’t hit me how humiliated I would feel until summer began, however. Several of my friends were conducting research for various science and engineering departments; I’d be working at the Boys and Girls Club.

The program was arranged by Stanford, but it was also something I suppose a year of Stanford wasn’t necessary for. I just hadn’t thought of doing anything so academic right after freshman year.

Our spring quarter grades were released, and mine should have made me keel over. They were worse than my winter curlicues, which were worse than my fall marks, which were mediocre to begin with. Freshman year’s average was supposed to be your buffer for the future, but I had fashioned mine into a darling rescue victim.

I had to report the victim to my father, who was so angry he told me he’d never use any of the Stanford paraphernalia I’d purchased him until I could accurately represent the school.

“Do you not understand what you’re being taught?” he yelled, about to crash our Toyota.

“I just need to work harder,” I said flatly.

6 The Monday after I was accepted to Stanford, a student in Journalism overheard me telling my Yearbook adviser and trusted teacher why I hadn’t had him edit my essays—there was no time because I finished them at six in the morning. She looked at me and commented in a very particular voice, “Funny you got in when everybody else spent so long on their applications.” I felt embarrassed and slightly attacked because I really did want to go to Stanford; it just took an eternity to put words to paper. “I thought about them for a long time,” was all I could say, and I’m sure my face reddened as well.

I

“Your mother will be so disappointed,” my father n the midst of a meet-your-professors lunch for replied. “She’s going to be if you never reach your sophomores held at the Stanford Faculty Club, the potential in anything.” cheerful, bespectacled professor of Human Biology asks what we want to do after college. Where do our interests hy hadn’t I tried harder? Why was I wasting lie in this vast field of humanity and biology? what Stanford had to offer—incredible Michelle answers that she wants to use technology teachers, opportunities, internships, lunches and and social media to educate and improve the health of organizations? I was supposed to set a good example for teenagers. my siblings, to bring forth lemonade from lemons. Was Margaret says she plans to research infant and toddler I representing Stanford at all, if I clearly wasn’t a driven development, then attend medical school and become a academic or extracurricular overachiever? doctor.

Back home, my friends from high school complained Ashley likes athletic medicine and will be interning about their 3.8 averages, which disheartened me. When with a physician over the summer.

I gathered with college pals, I’d be reminded of school I put down my lemonade glass. “I think I’m interested and how much worse I was performing; I felt absolutely in kids. Maybe public health. Possibly nutrition.” Smile. inferior. Still to avoid were conversations with my I might as well add the gourmet cookies they’re parents’ friends because they liked to exclaim, “And serving to the end of my list, because they sure are how are you doing at Stanford?” with prying, lipsticked delicious, and just as interesting. smiles, perhaps partially salivating for a Not so great.

In my eyes, everyone inadvertently put me down, one here is a tragic but beautiful short story line or another. Yet I didn’t want others to worry for me, called “Paul’s Case,” written by the romantic, 7 either; I had been the “happy” girl, who spewed trivia unforgiving Willa Cather. facts and laughs and the occasional riddle, since grade His “case” is that he deems regular schoolboy life school. meaningless, vacuous, and undeserving of respect. He admires only high society, finds it darkly delightful: suits he only thing I could tell my father, and myself, and the city and opera and ballet. When Paul realizes was that come next year, I would work much, that he can never truly join the cultured elite class, he much harder. leaps in front of a train and dies8.

I am not Paul. School is not a black hole. I am not 2. Tell us about an idea or an experience you have had a melodramatic, cynical, and jaded little arrogant head case, but sometimes I feel a degree out of this world, if that you find intellectually engaging. …Joan Didion’s assertions that “self-respect has nothing you could count Stanford as one.

My roommate declared her major sophomore year. to do with the approval of others” and that people with self-respect “have the courage of their mistakes” generate She was going to be a mechanical engineer, she wanted so much truth. I don’t feel that [self-respect] regards the to help people, she absolutely loved her design class, and tangible, but is much more personal and primitive. Why she was excited. To top everything off, she was so glad do people often create hierarchies with themselves on that she’d joined a hip-hop group, because she’d found the bottom? We must remember that those who might her passion and now she wanted to “dance all day.” intimidate are equal in “worth.” I have a duty to make my life worth living.

8 “He felt something strike his chest, and that his

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T

T

7 This was mostly a result of the fact that the natural shape of my jaw and bite seemed to lend my face a constant, built-in smile.

body was being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed. Then, because the picture-making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.”

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I celebrated with her, but I couldn’t help feeling envious. My grades had improved somewhat, but what were my passions?

I know that lots of young people “don’t know what they want to do,” but even hobbies I seemed to love to a lesser intensity.

I played the cello and enjoyed performing, but hated practicing. I liked to write and draw, had won essay contests and gotten artwork published in my favorite magazine as a child, but now there was nothing to draw. I’d never been crazy about a band, never watched a movie thirty times in a row, never found or created something that I could do “all day.”

I could browse Wikipedia for an hour, but maybe that was considered dabbling. Could dabbling, could simply liking to know things, be a passion? Did I really enjoy crossword puzzles, if I didn’t enjoy solving them by myself?9 And while the thirty-unit Human Biology core contributed a wealth of information to my storage—I learned everything from physiology, cell functions, and ecology to human history, psychology, and health care systems10—nothing captured me to the point of pursuing it after college. I was still afraid of blood. Public health and research moved too slowly. In lab, I couldn’t hold my pipette past the two-hour mark without it becoming a dagger11.

It was just nice to have the knowledge inside of me, and that’d be the end of that.

That, unfortunately, was the problem.

“I

f only I liked something enough. A lot,” I tell Nick, arms folded behind my head, sighing a

9 Assuming I genuinely loved puzzles, I should probably love my life to death.

10 Why didn’t I seem as enthusiastic about my freshman classes? Well, I’d never delved into policy or the social sciences before.

11 I tried hard to physically appreciate the wonders of Polymerase Chain Reaction and centrifuges and yeast strains and biotechnological innovations, but I guess it wasn’t enough. My gratitude, admiration, and reverence for the prolific scientists behind them, however, are enormous.

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large sigh. “That’d make me a better student. It’d give me more motivation.”

I watch him pin a crossword puzzle we’ve completed to the wall. He turns around, drops down next to me, grins. “You’re just lazy. How’d you do so well in high school, then?”

It’s easy to answer this one. “Because I knew I had to go to college after high school. I didn’t really like anything, so I had to do well in everything. Or else I wouldn’t come here, and they don’t make you declare till junior year, remember? I need that.

“But college is different, because there’s no set plan afterward. Some people go to grad school, go to med school, go get a job. I don’t know what to work toward.

I wish I loved something. My dad’s always saying that I’ll have gone to the best school, but ended up with the worst job. Or no job.”

Nick lies down, looks away.

I sit up, bang my head in slow motion against my knees. “I should’ve gone somewhere else. I’d get more A’s.12 I’d earn enough money to at least afford my own apartment.”

Nick turns impatient. Sometimes he acts mature for nineteen. “You know how lucky you are, to be able to complain about your future career, and at such a good school? Listen to yourself!” He looks at me.

I know, and can recite, that there are starving children in North Korea, seven inches too short and twenty-two pounds too slight,13 but I just cannot help that this is the worst I’ve ever felt, I’ve ever known.

The feeling that I’ll never truly like the job I end up with, not knowing what to say when people inquire after my interests. Perpetually one step behind everybody else, bearing a constant miasma of underachievement, no matter how relative. My parents and older sister have ceased pushing me toward a specific field, but that hasn’t made decisions easier. I have friends whose mothers and fathers still mandate M.D.s, when they 12 One of my good friends (who’s probably the prime incarnation of Parkinson’s Law, but also very passionate about his activities) says the “problem” with Stanford students is that they’re “abnormally responsible.”

13 According to Junior Scholastic’s 2005 World Almanac, which I subscribed to in middle school.

desire to be something else. I remember all the times I’ve been asked what I want to do “when I grow up,” and the first thing I think is, “have a family”—even at eight, ten, twelve years old, because everyone wants to have a family, at some point in their life.

Maybe this is what they mean by life’s not fair, but I want unfair in another form.

And of course, life’s not fair could mean that if I wanted to make a living, then I might not like my job.

If I didn’t genuinely love anything, what was so terrible with pursuing a more financially viable career—one that could send my parents and myself and my future children on trips and cruises around the world?

A few days ago, I reread my three Stanford application essays, untouched in a red folder labeled Colleges—one thousand bright, naïve words, composed in two nights, that so hopefully and stupidly mapped out an entire future—and my reaction to this distant voice was a hollow, insidious realization of sheer, self-perpetuated waste.

“I guess I feel like I’ve let down my parents,” I say, teardrops slipping. “And Mr. C. R. John Redlich, Jr.14 And Stanford. I should’ve studied more because that’s what all students are supposed to do, anyway. I’ve wasted two years.

“And sorry for complaining.”

Nick says sorry too. “You can always start over,” he whispers.

the first day of English 91, but I like the class.

Perhaps Self-Respect slowly spoke to me as the year came to an end, or maybe I was tired of numbers and laws and formulas. Maybe I wanted something different.

O

ne of my very favorite scenes in Pulp Fiction is where Jules is about to shoot Ringo and Honey Bunny16 but stops and declares, “Both your asses would be dead as fucking fried chicken, but you happen to pull this shit while I’m in a transitional period.”

That’s what I’m in, I think: a transitional period.17 I don’t know what will be at the end, but I do know it’s frightening to start over.

I’ve dropped the pipette, and picked up a pencil.

I have no idea if I’ve found my true calling—if I even have one—as an English major, but I like writing more than a lot of things, to synthesize and design and create.

And though it didn’t occur to me as a career, describing things pleases me: words can sound like music, and music generates feeling.

Some days I walk by beautiful new buildings, whose better parts have been constructed by a single man’s millions of dollars. I picture the life-saving discovery, or cutting-edge technology, being made within those university walls, and the masses upon masses of people who will become happier because of it, and then I wish I could be one of the scientists inside.

Some days I am back to laying on my bed, and I remember the fleeting, fantastic moments where my elf-respect has nothing to do with the approval eyes have welled from reading—not at a tragic ending’s of others—who we are, after all, deceived easily pain or the relief of a joyous one, but from a writer’s enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which as brilliant imagination, and the beauty of his language.

Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people 15 Though nothing is ever definite, is it? Oddly enough, with courage can do without.”

It’s been three years since I first read On Self-Respect, the writing class in which I re-read On Self-Respect was held in the Human Biology building. in high school.

I’ve missed it.

But something made me drop that pipette for good15, 16 Near the end of Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece, longtime hitman Jules Winnfield decides, rather abruptly, and now I’m sitting in a creative nonfiction class, dozens to become a messenger of God. (This isn’t a spoiler, because of states away from a ritzy New York internship. It’s only Pulp Fiction is fucking-fried-chicken unpredictable.)

“S

14 MCRJRJ, whose name I like articulating, is a generous financial aid donor. The Stanford Fund requires me to write thank-you letters each year, but I think I’d do so anyway.

17 I have no gun to drop and no world to shepherd, but since watching the 1994 film, my foremost connotation of “transitional period” has somehow always been, and will likely always be, the marvelous scene of Jules’s retirement.

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I think of Murakami and Nabokov; I think of Didion and Salinger and Joyce.

There is an utter bliss in the dreaming of words: the words that touch closest to describing what is raw and ineffable.

I wonder if I’ll do something different.

I wonder where I’ll be in five years, but I’ve been humbled yet lifted and I think I’m growing up.

I’m finding, I think, a new freedom.

me to Stanford.

“Grace needs to see Stanford at least once before she applies,” my mother decided.

So we drove through Palm Drive for the first time, and it felt like Hollywood. I thought of my Stanford bookmark with the picture of Memorial Church, and wondered why my parents had waited so long to bring us. The university was, very visibly, a mecca for Asian tourists.

3. Tell us what makes Stanford a good place for you.

“The wind of freedom blows.”…It calls for individuality.

I want to like the subject that I earn a degree in. I [want] to attend a school where college isn’t just an escape from curfew. I need the freedom to experiment, [to know that choices aren’t] irreversible. I am ready to be in a place where education is a chance to simply learn, think, and ask questions—even if they cannot be answered immediately, or ever.

September 7th was Labor Day, so parking was free. My younger sisters and I hopped off the van, ran through the Oval, and into the entryway of the Quad.

Memorial Church was now just across the courtyard, kissed by blue skies and beautiful architecture. I imagined the insides of the buildings, I imagined what extended beyond, I imagined myself going to class and bathing in sunlight and then starlight and getting married in the church.

It was so clean, so immense, so divinely picturesque.

This is where I want to be, I thought.

So this is where I’ll go.

A

few days after my seventeenth birthday, my mother told my father to bring my sisters and

from the blog...

“Anyone who’s tried to translate from one language into another will inevitably run into the difficulties. Connotations, syntax, and certain cultural ideologies often get lost in translation. Still, despite the difficulties that language barriers pose, Leonardo Wilson and I embarked on a quest to render the first ten lines of the Daodejing into English. Though ten lines might not seem like much, it took us hours to deliberate over subtleties in meaning and phrasing.” –Van Tran

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Leland Quarterly Spring 2013

The Way which can be weighed is not the everlasting Way; The Name which can be named is not the everlasting Name.

From the Nameless arise Heaven and Earth; From the Named promulgate ten thousand things.

So, always abandon desires to observe Creation.

Always embrace desires to observe Limitation.

Twins coexist, though emerge different after names.

Coexisting they conjure the mystery, Mystery which cannot be undone: The gate of many wonders.

Contributors

GRACE CHAO is a junior from Cupertino, CA DANA EDWARDS is a junior from Carpinteria, CA MATT GROSSMAN is a senior from New York, NY ROGAN KRIEDT is a senior from Santa Cruz, CA TIFFANY LI is a senior from Deerfield, IL SOPHI NEWMAN is a senior from Sunnyvale, CA CLIFF OWL is a senior from Murphy, NC BRIAN TICH is a sophomore from Ellicott City, MD KELLY VICARS is a senior from Monument, CO DANA YEO is a senior from Glendora, CA LAUREN YOUNGSMITH is a senior from Denver, CO

contribute

• We consider work by current Stanford students only.

• Submissions are reviewed on a rolling basis throughout the year. We publish on a “Stanford quarterly” basis—that is, three times a year (fall, winter, and spring).

• Submissions must be original, unpublished work.

• To avoid redundancy, please do not submit any work to Leland that you are also submitting to other campus publications.

• We accept submissions from all genres: we are concerned first and foremost with quality of expression, not in the genre of the work itself, so feel free to innovate.

• All submissions are reviewed anonymously by the editorial staff. If selected, contributors will work one-on-one with Leland Quarterly editors to produce a polished piece for publication.

Ready to Submit?

Visit www.lelandquarterly.com Leland Quarterly Spring 2013

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Q Volume 7, Issue 3 Copyright Š 2013 by Leland Quarterly Stanford University www.lelandquarterly.com

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Leland Quarterly Spring 2013