Leland Quarterly, Vol. 3 Issue 1, Fall 2008

FALL 2008

MEGHAN

DANIELS offers a scrapbook

ANDREW

VALENCIA explores our dialogues

DANIEL

HIRSCH finds revelation

AMY

KURZWEIL puts it on the wall

ANDREW

ZHOU

decries the audition

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LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2008

leland

QUARTERLY

EDITORIAL STATEMENT

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Volume 3, Issue 1

Copyright 2008 by Leland Quarterly • Stanford University All Rights Reserved.

Giant Horse Printing • San Francisco EDITORIAL BOARD, FALL 2008 Editors-In-Chief OTTO LEINSDORF, MICHELLE TRAUB

Senior Editors

REVTI GUPTA, JANET KIM, RUTH MCCANN

Associate Editors

FRANK GUAN, ELISSA KARASIK, RACHEL KOLB, BRIAN LEWIS, BILL LOUNDY

Resident Cartoonist YUN LIANG

Layout Editor JANET KIM

Web Manager JADE WANG

Financial Editor

LINDSAY SELLERS

Advisor

JOSH TYREE

Special Thanks JOSH TYREE and TOM KEALEY for their continued support

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.

Our mission is to tap into the almost incomparably diverse talents of Stanford’s undergraduate student body, soliciting a wide array of poetry and prose, and working closely with authors to achieve a publication of superior content and design. Leland’s statement––from fiction to poetry, essays to reviews––will be enduring, common, recognizable, and extraordinary.

spend three months living in Paris. My family is only a husband and wife. Their son has joined the French military and is now training to fly helicopters to Afghanistan. My host father, Laurent, is sixty-five but quite vigorous and robustly French in all its stereotypes—he speaks not a word of English. His wife Philippa is a naturalized Norwegian whose fluent French, like her broken English, is overwhelmed by the rhythms and intonations of her native tongue. Since my arrival I am worrying about communication, reminded of what I have read in the translator’s note of a great novel: foreign languages are so difficult to translate not because of the differences between the words, but due to the incompatibility of their sequences.

I tend to speak in basic sentences, noun-verb-noun, noun-verb-adjective, noun-verb-adverb, the simplest paradigms shared

by French and English. Reduced to these three act tragedies, my first two months show me that my words no longer carry the texture of my thoughts.

Though Laurent is a retired engineer he is frequently traveling on weekends—“potential free-lance clients” he explains to me, though I have not asked. Phillipa is not fooled by this explanation, and when he is home she works to perturb him: He cannot open a container because his hands have lost their dexterity so she turns to me and snickers.

She knows he has interest in something she is saying at the dinner table so she switches to the broken English he cannot understand. Laurent tells a story so she rolls her eyes and casts a long face. It seems that in a marriage too old to terminate discontent is aired in the form of these petty revenges.

Today is Phillipa’s birthday and Laurent has prepared hors d’oeuvres and purchased an expensive bottle of rosé champagne. They invite me to share this treat with them in their living room, a large rectangle with Guimard windows overlooking Place Jeanne D’Arc. Phillipa is smiling, waiving the bottle of champagne in the air while slowly removing the cork with her fingers. Laurent wheels around her, arms flailing, yelling his guidance over the sounds of giddy anticipation.

The cork pops off like a gun shot and foam spills everywhere. We all laugh and drink up our first taste contentedly.

We talk coolly for some time, gnashing on morsels of bread and cheese and smoked salmon.

Laurent gulps down his third glass of champagne despite Phillipa’s protestations. The more he drinks the more he speaks. Of their son and his service, of the troubles in Afghanistan, of the American election, of President Sarkozy and his new topmodel wife. This leads him to the words “la vie moderne en France” and “aujourd’hui, la divorce est normale”—divorce is common today. He is focused solely on me, excited to give me explanations I can barely follow. He seems not to notice that his wife has stopped speaking altogether, that her eyes are starting to glisten with tears.

When it is time for them to leave for dinner Laurent is sprightly and flushed red from the champagne.

He stands up, pounds the table with one fist and lets out a happy laugh; there is a kick in his step as he carries our empty glasses to the kitchen. Once he is out of earshot Phillipa speaks her first words for some time:

“Laurent n’etait pas là”—Laurent wasn’t here. I don’t know whether she is referring to tonight, a moment in the past, or their entire marriage. The remark has no context and it hangs in the atmosphere of the gray evening light like a dislodged entity. I have nothing to say, and I sense that my face betrays me. It knows only the force of the simplest of sentences, a reminder that they too can overflow with meaning.

–– OTTO LEINSDORF & the Editors of Leland

contents

ARTWORK

Cover photo, Michelle Traub

FICTION

City Video

Andrew Valencia

Of Revelation and Secret Meaning Daniel Hirsch

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26

Sunday School, or the Miseducation of the Jew Amy Kurzweil

Scrapbook

Meghan Daniels

Chiquita

Selena Simmons-Duffin

19

Playgrounds

6

24

Heat Lightning

36

32

Good People

CREATIVE NON-FICTION

(38), Mae Ryan

POETRY

Revti Gupta

Tom Wiltzius

(26), Mae Ryan (41), Linda Green

Selena SImmons-Duffin (18), Mae Ryan

CRITICISM

The Music Audition Andrew Zhou

Living Statue

47

Real Bodies

20

(30), Michelle Traub (8), Katie Salisbury, L station at dusk

35

Revti Gupta

Tom Wiltzius

CULTURE & SOCIETY

(46), Linda Green

From the Gr. ανωνυμία: “without a name,” “namelessness” Nick Hoy and Bob Borek

48

(29), Janet Kim

(23), Janet Kim

(36), Mae Ryan

(16), Michelle Traub

(24), Alex Greenburg (32), Mae Ryan (42), Linda Green (10), Mae Ryan

(45), Michelle Traub

(34), Janet Kim

CREATIVE NONFICTION

Sunday School

BY AMY KURZWEIL

n o i t a c u the mised

These are the sounds of Sunday School: an off-key guitar spitting songs against the stained glass windows. The whispers of boys in vans and kippahs. This is what Sunday School tastes like: grape juice.

Challah toasted with honey. This is what the synagogue smells like: a vacuumed rug. This is how I feel: like I don’t belong.

Eleven am Sunday brings me here against my will. I am 12 years old and I have better things to do than shift awkwardly in a pew while pondering why the lady with the guitar is always so happy. The room is dark, the windows full of jewels. Stand up, sit down.

The red cushioned pews make a whooshing sound when you land. The boys giggle. I mouth words in Hebrew. I don’t know what they mean. Words in my mouth like skittles, full of sweet, innutritious familiarity.

Secretly, of course, I love it. The whole thing, especially the pretending not to love it part, especially t h e

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feeling out of place part. I love the songs. I love the crazy lady with the guitar. I love the lamps dangling like angels from the ceiling. I love the doors that hide the Torah, painted with some fantastic abstraction of color and swirl. I love the food, pieces of sweet bread rationed out, savored like chocolate truffles, and cups of juice so tiny they make you thirstier. This is a world unlike my own. Food is scarce and treasured. People smile for no reason. Songs uplifts without meaning. Most of all, God. God! Who is this God and why doesn’t he live above my house too? He must love all those tiny pieces of Challah with honey. He must love music and color and shiny happy people.

Sunday School is an alternate universe where the 10-12 year olds of my largely Jewish town go to learn how to be Jewish Adults. We do not know the truth: This ritual is an excuse for our parents to outdo each other with big fancy parties when we turn 13. I go compliantly every week. I am always late (my parents’ fault – our house, unlike Sunday School, does not run on time, nor does it include morning smiles or songs) The day includes a half-hour service in the chapel and an hour-long class. Here, the jewels of Jewish wisdom are fitted for our ears. We learn about the Torah and our holidays and our great ancestors of the past (yay). We learn about Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (boo). We learn traditions and food and stories and games and charity.

We sing songs and color and bake and smile. It is one of those places where you know you are being treated much younger than you deserve, like summer camp, or the pediatrician’s office, but you tolerate it. As a kid, you can see there is, perhaps, something inappropriate about this kind

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of world view, and yet, it is all you really know.

It is here, among honey and music, among the fellow jeans-and-Skechers-wearing sons and daughters of the commandments, where I first learn about Zionism. Zion.

I think I’d heard the word once in a Bob Marley song. Little did I know Zionism was INVENTED by a Jew. His name was Theodor Herzl and he was born in 1860.

Cut out a picture of him, color him, put him on the wall. Zionism is a tangible religion. It yields results; the state of Israel was founded in 1948. Cut out the state of Israel, color it, put it on the wall. Many people helped establish and care for this wonderful place.

Cut out a picture of Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, color them, put them on the wall. However, the Zionist path is paved with hardship. 1948.

1956. 1967. 1973. 1982. And yet we prevail.

My name is Amy and I am a Zionist. Color it, put it on the wall.

I will not remember the face of a single Sunday School teacher I ever have. I will remember every crevice, every eyebrow out of place, every intonation and awkward kitchen smell of my grade school teachers since kindergarten, but I will not recall a face or even a gender of a single Sunday School teacher from these few years. This is who I will remember: Ben Goldberg.

Oh how I love Ben Goldberg. He is skinny and white with orange freckles and matted brown hair smashed against his forehead like thick acrylic paint. He always wears the widest leg cargo pants out of everyone, with silver chains that hang mysteriously from the pockets at his knees, and too-small striped colored shirts. He is the prototypical, Alpha, Jewish, 12-year-old Male. Always raises his

of the

hand first. Friends with everyone. Wideeyed. Smiling. Always doling out purple pieces of Bubble-Tape from one of his many pockets. Plus, he stutters, spewing words and spit with the kind of delightful enthusiasm that only boys of 12 can expound.

One day we are discussing AntiSemitism and Unidentified Teacher asks us if we’ve ever experienced prejudice because of our cultural and religious affiliation. I rack my brain. I love to talk in class, but this one has me stumped. I always think racism, or anti-Semitism, like World Wars and black and white TVs, is a thing of the past. Ben raises his hand, my heart pounds and the skin below my fingernails feels warm. We are seated on the floor and Ben rises to his knees. He stutters through his story, loudly chewing his purple gum and rocking his hips back and forth to absorb some of that explosive boyish energy. This is the story: one time Ben was called a Kike.

I have never heard this word before and I am rapt in attention as the teacher has Ben explain what this word means. Ben tells us and then elaborates on how he stood up for himself, telling the offender not to use offensive language. Oh Ben, my heart. How dramatic! How righteous to be slandered and given the chance to show such strength and moral standing. What a hero, what a knight. In my charmed middle-class town, the worst name I’ve ever been called is a Robot. I secretly romanticize the strife of a persecuted people. Perhaps it is my legacy.

My confused sense of guilt. My 12-year-old brain cells born from bruised and exiled

Jew

women now buzzing in the shadow of a hatred I’ve never really known. My family’s history is like a phantom limb, a third arm, the one that’s always raised, asking a question.

The teacher tells us about Israel’s “problem.” The problem, as I understand it, is Anti-Semitism. It is beautiful Ben being called a Kike. In regular school we learn about these assassinations: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. JFK. Now I learn about the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It has been three years since he was shot and Israeli dreams of peace fell to the ground like snow. Show a picture of Yitzhak Rabin, reaching over the body of President Clinton to shake hands with Yasser Arafat, cut it out, put it on the wall. This tragedy joins the other benchmarks in my mind. There is a quiet air that settles over a classroom when you speak of important assassinated people.

Children learn at a young age not to ask questions about the dead.

But there it is, my third arm, raising again. My phantom limb knows death, knows about the darker things that come from silences. Knows about hatred as more than words and history. Knows about historical cycles that build slowly like musical crescendos. There are always questions.

And we, our tiny legs tucked under single desks filled with colored crayons, will learn to ask the right ones one day.

I raise my hand. Who killed him, I ask. The teacher does not answer right away. Who? I ask again. This is what I

will remember most: we are surprised that Rabin is killed by a Zionist. Already my mind is forming blockades, easy smiling compartments, black and white, good and bad. The teacher does not want to disturb the clean desk drawers of my young mind.

I don’t understand. Why did he do it? I will not remember the answer. But don’t all Israelis want the same thing? Aren’t we on the same side, the right side? The questions loop in my mind like blank typewriter tape.

Forming words into punctuated sentences until there is nothing but the loud hum of misunderstanding. If I could remember, I would see in my teacher’s eyes the reflection of cracked stained glass windows. The tumbling compartments of my mind, sticky with honey and breadcrumbs.

Years later I will go. I will climb the steps, one foot at a time, to the spot where Rabin was shot. I will go to his memorial monument. A pile of black rocks lit with orange lights. An Israeli soldier with sad eyes will whisper in my ear that Rabin’s peace was false, a show, a sham, a detriment, of course the man was shot. He will mumble something more in Hebrew, the drawers of his brain sealed shut, the whole desk wobbling. And mine: unhinged. I will stand and read: Here, at this spot, on Saturday, November 4. 1995, Israel’s Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered. In capital letters, scratched in marble plaques: PEACE. In black spray paint on stone: PEACE. On paper, in murals, around necks. PEACE. Cut it out, color it, put it on the wall. L

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CHIQUITA From the train window as we arrive, one man leans against tile, and peels a banana.

The doors slide, with seconds to resettle, depart, or stay and he doesn’t see us, only the sudden metal shape of our arrival. But from here, I realize: I know how that tastes.

The soft, the distant bitter, the sound of the peel tear to rest cool and limp. I can’t say where he placed the flimsy oval sticker, or when this morning he stuck this in his bag thinking, I’ll need this later.

I don’t know where he bought his clothes whose collar bone he has coveted, his signature joke and can only barely imagine his hair matted down with sweat in a dim eggshell room.

But I have felt tile against my back in a station.

And I too have failed to consider the scrutiny of passengers within the trains pulling up before me.

–– Selena Simmons-Duffin

Katie Salisbury 8 LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2008

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CITY VIDEO

BY ANDREW VALENCIA

MAE RYAN

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MOST of the time, you can learn everything you need to know about a movie from the first fifteen minutes. Comedy or drama. Action or suspense. Romance or tragedy. Nine out of ten times you can predict how a movie is going to end after the first fifteen minutes, unless the movie’s trying to be way, way realistic, and then you just have to expect to be shocked and maybe even a little outraged by the ending. Things are a whole lot clearer in a movie. Maybe that’s the reason I like them.

I work behind the counter at City Video. I’ve seen the movie Rear Window more times than I can remember. There’s a TV hanging in the top back corner of the store, and Rear Window is the only movie my boss Harry likes to play. After fifteen minutes, you know the real question isn’t whether Thorwald murdered his wife. The real question is whether Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly will end up together at the end.

If they do, then it’s a classic. If not, then you’ve got something else altogether.

On Friday night, Harry comes in through the back door at a quarter to ten lugging a box full of the new releases for this month. He sets it down on the floor next to the return bin and leans against the wall to catch his breath. Since his bypass surgery, Harry only comes into the store for a few hours every day, when he comes in at all. He tells people that his health is improving— the doctor’s got him on a low cholesterol, ultimate fiber plan—but it still looks like he’s falling apart faster than Jack Nicholson.

Since Ultra Video moved into town, Harry’s been slowly on his way to another heart attack. Profits are long since gone, and just covering the overhead has become a challenge. Even though it’s Friday night we’ve only had a handful of people come in to rent movies. Half of it’s Harry’s own fault—he still has two separate sections for VHS tapes and DVDs, he only rents out new releases for one night, and he refuses to

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spend money on a computer or an ATM scanner for the register. Since business started dropping, the best idea he’s come up with has been to start handing out free bags of microwave popcorn with every rental.

Harry scuttles around the front of the store in a way that seems both anxious and random at the same time. “How many sold tonight?” Harry asks me, eyeing the door as he leans on the counter.

“Six DVDs—all new releases,” I tell him. “Nobody rented any cassettes.” Hint, hint, I’d like to say to him.

Harry shakes his head and pounds his fist against the counter so lightly it barely makes a thud. “It’s the goddamn video pirates that are the problem,” he says.

I get a mental vision of Jack Sparrow swinging by a rope through the store, swiping up videos and flashing his strung-out googly eyes, and I have to keep myself from laughing. “The what?”’

“The illegal downloaders,” he says.

“They steal all the movies they want off the computer for free and it takes a big fucking chunk out of my business. If I had it my way they’d lock ‘em all up.” Harry sighs and looks out over the stacks. “I gotta get up at six in the morning tomorrow to drive up to the coast to see some damn specialist about my palpitations. All I can say is he better figure out

what the problem is, ‘cause I don’t have the time or money to waste on these kinds of trips.”

He comes behind the counter and heads for the back door. I call after him.

“It’s Friday, Harry.” I don’t welcome the indignity of pointing out that it is my payday, not in the state Harry is in. But thankfully the remark is enough. Harry returns with a thin wad of twenties and lays them out one after another before putting them back together in a neat stack. He makes an effort at a grin as if to say, “enjoy this,” and then retires once again to the back of the store.

I lay the money out on the counter and shuffle through it a couple of times. I know it’s all there, but at the end of the week I like to see and feel what I’ve put five nights of work into. It’s not much, and most of it’s going to go to gas and car insurance in the end. But little by little, after almost eight months behind the counter, I’m starting to save up enough to start thinking seriously about things again. Maybe going back to school, maybe renting my own place. And further down the road—maybe getting out from behind this counter.

The store is empty, and I’m stuck behind this counter for another hour and a half. Up in the corner, Grace Kelly is giving Jimmy Stewart the lap treatment while his mind is out the window and across the courtyard. A cable leads through the walls from the TV to the VCR, a big ancient silver monster right next to the register that moans like an accordion while it’s running. Any other night and I’d be too somber not to watch, but tonight I have money in my pocket and tomorrow’s the weekend, so I don’t let it get to me. “Andy Dufresne,” I say to the deserted store, “who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.”

After another ten minutes of watching Jimmy Stewart’s strangely bronze forehead wrinkle, I take a break in the empty parking lot behind the store. I have one joint in my pocket that I smoke in four big hits. Under the yellow streetlights, the stars are nothing but flickers on the outer edges. Across the parking lot a dog barks at me from behind a chain link fence.

*** The joint is working its way through my system and I’ve now got

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the store to myself; I’m thinking Back to the Future. I switch the tapes in the machine, and as Doc Brown’s laboratory comes into being I settle back down behind the counter with my head resting on its cold blue surface.

All of a sudden a strange but familiar tune fills the store and I slowly lift my head up and take a look around. I spot a long shadow moving between the stacks—someone must have come into the store while I was outside.

I recognize the song they’re whistling as the Daryl Hannah version of “Twisted Nerve” from Kill Bill: Vol. 1; a giddy little stoner smile creeps across my face. If I knew how to whistle that well I would join in.

A good-looking guy who could be anywhere from eighteen to twenty-six comes out from behind the stacks, swaying his head to the tune he’s recreating, and walks up to the counter.

“Pai Mei taught you the five point palm-exploding heart technique?” he asks, setting his movies down by the register.

“Of course he did,” I say.

His eyes jump up from the counter— I’ve surprised him. He gives me a huge smile that one might call “award-winning.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he continues.

“I don’t know. Because I’m a bad person.”

“No. You’re not a bad person. You’re a terrific person. You’re my favorite person.

But every once in a while, you can be a real cunt.”

We both give an awkward kind of laugh where we open our mouths but not our teeth. I don’t know who he is, but he knows his stuff. He doesn’t say anything after that. He just stands there smiling, looking very calm. It might just be the weed, but it seems like he spends a long time just looking at me.

“This going to be it for you tonight?”

I ask.

“Yup.” “Do you have an account with us?”

“Not yet.”

I grab a pen and a note card from the box on the shelf and hand it to him. “Go ahead and fill this out. Name, address, phone number.”

“You got it, slick.” He looks at the register uncertainly. “You don’t take ATM cards, do you?”

“No,” I say, “but if you fill out the card you can charge it to your account and we’ll

bill you at the end of the month.”

“Sweet.”

He hands the card back to me and I write down the names of the DVDs he’s picked out. He has good taste—Full Metal Jacket, Raising Arizona, Ghost World—the kinds of titles Harry usually regrets ordering because they never fly off the shelves the way The Dukes of Hazzard and Saw do.

“You know, it’s funny,” the guy says.

“I can’t remember the last time I had to fill out a card in a video store. Even the public library has a computer by now.”

“Don’t get me started,” I say, sticking his card in file.

He leans forward on the counter.

“You like working here, man?”

I’ve rented out movies to more people over the last eight months than I care to remember, and until now no one’s ever asked me that. Harry’s never asked me that.

My family never has.

“You know that scene in Office Space where the guy’s talking to the hypnotist and he says that since he started working—” “Every day has been worse than the day before it, so every day you see me is the worst day of my life?”

“Right. Well, I don’t think I’m there yet, but talk to me in six months and…I don’t know.”

He laughs. “You gonna burn the place down then?”

“And give up three free rentals a week? No way.”

“Maybe I should get a job here,” he says.

“Why?” He grins. “Because it smells like a party.”

“What? Oh, yeah, that…”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell on you,” he says. “The Dude abides.”

“Yes, that he does.”

Up in the corner, Marty McFly tailgates through town on his skateboard as “The Power of Love” roars in the background.

“So you think I picked out some good ones tonight?” he says.

“Kubrick and the Coen Brothers— how can you go wrong?”

“What about the other one?”

“Ghost World is fine, but it drags on in a lot of parts. And nothing really gets resolved.”

“You got a better recommendation?”

Another unprecedented milestone.

“Follow me,” I say.

I lead him to the shelf in the back right corner where we keep the staff picks.

There are two perks of working at City Video—three free rentals a week and I get to make recommendations to the customers.

The two other guys who work the counter on my days off don’t make a lot of picks, so the shelf is mostly just a shrine to my favorite movies at the moment. I reach under the “Adam’s Picks” sign and grab the case right up front.

“The Squid and the Whale,” he says.

“I’ve heard good things. What did you think?”

“It’s a pretty awesome little indie flick,” I say. “Jeff Daniels usually gets panned as a B-star, but he always does a solid job and I’m a pretty big fan of his. He’s in top form with this one.”

“Sounds good,” he says, taking the case. “So I take it you’re Adam, then?”

“That’s me.”

“I’m Liberty.”

“What?”

“Liberty,” he says. “The name’s Liberty.”

“Your parents named you Liberty?”

“Guilty,” he says, bowing his head.

“That’s kind of awesome,” I say.

“Seriously, that’s kickass.”

We walk back to the register. “You work here a lot?” he asks as he is paying.

“Every night,” I say, “except for weekends.”

“Jesus.” There’s the smile again.

“Aren’t you dedicated…”

I shrug. “It puts money in my pocket.”

“I’m sure,” he says. “Well, maybe I’ll see you around sometime.”

He turns to leave with the movies.

“Wait,” I say, reaching under the counter into the box of Orville. “You forgot your free popcorn.”

“You keep it,” he says, walking backwards out the door. “Have a little snack on me.” And then he’s gone. I lean forward on the counter with my eyes fixed up at the TV. Another couple minutes and Marty McFly will hit 88 miles an hour in the De Lorean. When was the last time I really had a conversation with a customer? I hope he does come back. An hour goes by and no one else comes in. I close up the store at ten to eleven.

*** My car is the best thing I own, even though I don’t really own it. And it’s not a car technically—it’s an SUV. The lease is still under my mom’s name, even though I pay for gas and insurance and I’m the only one who drives it anymore. It has a DVD player up front with a screen that comes down behind the driver’s seat. I like to listen to movies at night on the drive home from work, when there’s nothing to look at but rows of fruit trees in the darkness. It doesn’t matter that I can’t see the screen— after a while I find myself starting to mouth the dialogue the way most people do with song lyrics on the radio.

Mom is already in bed when I get home. My sister Judy is lying on the couch in front of the TV with her boyfriend Josh, her chubby legs stretched over his lap. She glances up at me as I come through the door.

“Hey,” she says. “How was work?”

“Fine,” I say.

“That’s good.” Josh starts to stroke her thigh. “I had a pretty good day at the restaurant. An old couple’s fortieth wedding anniversary. Best tips I’ve gotten all week.”

“Awesome.”

Josh takes a sip of beer from the bottle in his hand and then lowers it to Judy’s mouth. “You still working at City Video, man?” he asks me. A little beer spills down Judy’s cheek and onto the cushion.

“Same as always,” I answer.

“How was it tonight?” Judy asks, wiping her mouth with one hand and the cushion with the other.

For a second I think about telling them about Liberty, but then I wonder what there really is to tell, and what they would really think about it. “Lousy,” I tell them.

“Almost nobody ever comes in to rent movies after nine.”

Josh smiles really wide and his head bobs, but his voice doesn’t make any noise.

“You guys should try selling porno movies in the back,” he says. “Then you’d get some late night customers for sure.”

Judy slaps his chest. “Be good,” she says. He starts to stroke the part of her belly poking out under her shirt. Josh was probably a pretty athletic guy in high school, but now he’s hit his late Brando phase, and he’s only 25. He still wears tight tank tops to show off his arms, but they only make his gut and newly-developed man breasts stand

>>>

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out even more. Judy was always chubby even back in high school. She couldn’t get many dates back then, but after a couple of years she found herself free to pick at the scraps. In the end, she picked Josh. Every Friday they go on a date to see a movie at the Coliseum 10, the stadium theater downtown between the hardware store and the vacant lot. Then they come back here and fall asleep in front of the TV. I go to the kitchen and make myself a bowl of cereal. Our two dogs follow me all the way and I nearly trip over them coming back out into the living room. There’s my sister’s Pomeranian, Bubblegum, and my black rat terrier, Keanu, named for his tendency to sit on the carpet and stare blankly at people. I give a short whistle and Keanu comes running and follows me down the hallway to my room.

I lie down on the bed and eat until there’s nothing left in the bowl but powder and purple milk. Keanu whines and scratches at the edge of the mattress. I get up and poke around in my DVD library, and after a while I end up pulling out Casablanca. I stretch out on the top of the covers and watch it the whole way through from the beginning. A little after one a.m., Bogart stands on the airstrip watching as Ingrid Bergman’s plane takes off into the sky, Louis standing by his side. I start thinking about Liberty, wondering if at that moment he’s in the same position on his bed watching The Squid and the Whale. I don’t know when I doze off. In my dream I find myself standing on the same airstrip in the movie, dressed in Louis’ officer’s uniform, with Liberty standing in Bogart’s place looking up at the sky. As we start walking off into the night, I know what line is coming. I wait for it. But Keanu barks and I wake up. An hour has passed and the screen is blue. Keanu sits by the door staring at me with his sad dark eyes waiting to be let out.

I get up and let Keanu out in the backyard for the night. On the way back through the hallway I see a light coming from under Judy’s door and I hear the wailing of hard sex coming from behind it. I figure the sounds are from a video, since the moan of the orgasm seems way too intense to be real.

I go back to my room and fall asleep as soon as I hit the bed.

***

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I never really expected to see much of Liberty again after that night. Thinking back to high school—and even during the one semester I spent in community college—he didn’t seem like the kind of guy someone like me would hang out with. He dressed too chic. He looked like he had money.

We may have had the same taste in movies, but I figured that was where it had to end.

So when he came back to the store Monday night, spinning off one-liners from Squid and asking for more recommendations, it was a surprise.

He became my entire late-night business during the week. He’d rent two or three movies at a time and trade them up the next night for a couple more. A lot of the time he rented the same movie two or three times in the same week. He said that he didn’t sleep. Period. He said that most nights he would just lie down in his room and watch movies until the sun came up.

He said that if you named any title, chances are he’s seen it. If not, chances were he’d rent it before the week was out.

Sometimes he would stay for ten minutes. Other times he would stay until closing time, when we had the store all to ourselves. Most of the time we just stood around talking and watching videos on the corner TV. Other times we invented our own entertainment—like the night he came in with a case of beer he said he found just sitting in the alley behind a liquor store. He made the job fun again. I never realized just how lonely and miserable I was behind that counter before he started coming in.

One night, maybe only half-joking, I asked him if he was real, or if he was just an illusion my mind had cooked up so I wouldn’t get bored at work—like Tyler Durden from Fight Club. He said if I really wanted to know, I should try shooting myself in the mouth. If he disappeared, then chances were he was never real.

It didn’t take long for it to come out that we were both stoners. On a Friday night about three weeks after he showed up, we’re sitting outside behind the store passing a joint back and forth. The dog across the lot barks at us, his mangy nose sticking out through the wire fence. We start talking about movies, like always, but somehow we end up talking about personal things that haven’t come up before. He starts talking a lot about his life and what he wants it to become. It turns out he doesn’t

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have money, but he can make it look like he does well enough. He says he wants to be an actor, but right now he’s unemployed and living with his mom.

“What do you want to do?” he asks me as he passes off the joint.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve got some money saved up, but not enough to really do anything with it.”

“How much money?”

“About four thousand dollars. When I took this job I thought I’d work for a while and then use what I’d saved up to go back to school. Now I don’t know if it’d be worth it.”

“So you dropped out of college, then?”

I nod. “My mom got sick,” I say.

“She’s got cancer.” I don’t tell many people this. I don’t like the idea of coming across as the poor, heartbroken son in a Lifetime movie. “She’s getting better, though. The chemo’s going well.”

Neither of us says anything for a while, and I worry I’ve made him uncomfortable.

The dog has finally gotten bored with us and crawled back inside his unpainted plywood house.

“You got any plans for later tonight?”

I ask him.

“Yeah, actually.”

“Oh.” I can’t help but feel jealous—I always figured he had his own set of friends, but I liked not knowing about them. “You going to a party or something?”

He shakes his head. “Friday nights my droogs and I go around town beating the shit out of homeless people,” he says.

“Then later we’ve got a brawl planned with old Billy Boy.” I smile. “Make sure you give him one in the yarbles for me, alright?”

“Viddy well, my brother, viddy well.”

We’re both maybe a little too jolly from the weed and it feels like a full minute before we stop laughing. We sit catching our breath and Liberty sighs. “We speak our own fucking language, don’t we, man?”

This settles me down a little bit, gets me thinking, and after a little while I shrug.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Sometimes it just feels like someone else’s dialogue can say what I mean so much better than I ever could.”

“I know what you mean,” he says.

“With me, people always thought I must have a photographic memory to remember

so many stupid lines from movies. I don’t know. I was never a genius in school, but I could always remember movies.”

He finishes off the last of the joint, sucking the flame in until it almost touches his fingers, then tosses the burnt out nub to the ground. “I was in a short film once,” he says, blowing out the smoke.

“Wow. That’s awesome. What was it called?”

“It didn’t have a title,” he says. He laughs weakly and stares out across the lot.

“This guy paid me 200 dollars to jerk off in front of a camera for three minutes. He put the video on the internet. You can’t see my face.”

I look at him closely. “You’re not joking are you?”

He shakes his head. “At first he offered me 150 bucks, but then he said if I could wait to cum until he had shot three minutes of footage he would make it 200.

So I jerked off in front of the camera for him, all the while trying to hold off cumming until three minutes were up.”

“I used to want to go to film school,” I tell him. It’s a dumb thing to say after his confession, but it seems to snap him out of the past and spark his interest.

“So what happened?” he says.

“I figured I’d go to JC for a couple years first and then transfer. In high school, I used to tell people I wanted to be the next Scorsese.” I feel stupid saying this, as I did back then, but he seems to take it seriously.

“We should make our own movie,” he says.

I laugh. “Thanks, but I’m not much for jerking off on camera.”

He glares at me and I can tell I’ve offended him. “I’m serious,” he says. “You want to be a director, I want to be an actor— let’s make it happen.”

“How?” He throws his thumb over his head.

“We’ll use the video store. We’ll make a short movie filming at night.”

“That’s going to take a long time.”

“What better things do you have to do?”

Touché. “But where are we going to find a camera?”

“We’ll find one somewhere,” he says casually.

“You really mean it?”

“Why not? Kevin Smith did. Anyway, are you interested?”

I can’t tell how much of this is the weed talking and how much is serious. But I want to believe him.

“Alright, I’m in,” I say.

“Cool,” he says. “Start thinking about ideas and I’ll look around to see if we can borrow a camera.”

He pulls another joint out of his pocket and hands it to me for the first hit. I take it in slowly, feeling something like

celebration.

“Liberty,” I tell him, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

*** The beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Making our own movie at night in the video store. All through the weekend I try to convince myself that it wasn’t just the weed talking. I feel excited. Ideas and storylines I had thought up as far back as high school are rising to the surface. Saturday afternoon I take an old spiral notebook out of my desk and start jotting down bits of dialogue. With Liberty as my leading man I build up stories around the characters I envision he could play—tough, complicated anti-heroes who love their mothers but hate authority, that kind of thing.

Harry is in a bad mood Friday night.

The distribution company got the week’s shipment wrong, or maybe Harry wrote it down wrong, but in any case instead of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium we’re stuck with five copies of the x-rated Mr. Bigorium’s Sexual Emporium starring Natalie Porkman. Harry is pissed off. A

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little after nine he calls it a night and exits through the back, muttering something about the state of the world today. March of the Penguins is playing in the corner.

Liberty walks through the door as the papa penguins are huddling together to guard their eggs against the wind. He hops up and sits on the counter and we both watch for a little while without saying anything. Then he turns and asks if I want to go blaze one. I’m about to say yes when a light bulb goes off above my head and I back away from the counter. “Dude, I got to show you something,” I say.

I head into the back and motion for him to come with me. He spins his legs across the counter and steps over to the other side, and then he follows me back.

“I’ve never been in the back of a video store,” he says, sticking his bottom lip out as he glances over the stacks of video cases.

“Pretty cool.” I put my backpack up on top of the cupboard. “Check this out,” I say, zipping it open for him to see inside.

“Holy shit,” he says. “Where’d you find it?”

“I bought it,” I tell him, carefully pulling the camera out with both hands.

“It’s mine. I just got it delivered yesterday.”

He gives his full award-winning smile and stands admiring the equipment. It’s no cheap camcorder piece of crap either—it’s a real Sony model with professional lens and audio and everything. “Cost me a thousand dollars on eBay,” I say. It’s the most impulsive purchase I’ve ever made in my life, but it still feels worth it. “Now we can make our movie.”

“Totally. You got film in it yet?”

“Just the tape that came with it.”

“Turn it on.”

I flick the switch on the side and with a small ding a light comes on to say the beast is alive.

“Can I give it a try?”

“Hey, who’s the director here?”

“Dude, fuck you, Scorsese, let me just try it out for a little bit.”

I hand it off to him and he holds it up to his face, looking down through the sight with the lens focused on me. “All right, now do something.”

“Do what?”

He adjusts the lens and grins. “Doesn’t matter. Just do something. Action!”

The light on the front of camera comes on and he starts filming. I look around for

something to do but there’s nothing around except videos. “Don’t look at the camera,” he says. “Just act natural.” As I’m thinking I start to sway from side to side compulsively, and then from this I transition into my best Mr. Blonde Reservoir Dogs dance. Liberty laughs.

“Nice,” he says. “Okay, now freeze.”

I do what he says. “Now listen to me very closely. I want you to do everything I tell you, okay? Can you do that?”

“Yes,” I tell him.

“Okay,” he says. “Just listen for a second. Forget everything you’re thinking about. Clear your mind completely. I want you to become completely relaxed, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now, with your mind all clear, I want you to become completely and totally uninhibited.”

“What?” I say it in a whisper as he moves the camera closer to me, one small step at time, closing in on the head shot.

“Don’t ask questions,” he says. “Just do what I say. I don’t want you to become a parody of someone else. That’s one thing I learned about myself by doing porn—I can imitate anyone, but I can’t pretend when it comes to that. I’m either jerking off or I’m not, there’s no faking it.”

“What? You want me to jerk off?”

Liberty takes his eye away from the lens and stares at me. “Do you want to?”

The recording light glows solid red in front of me, and I grow more conscious of how I must appear through the lens. “Turn the camera off, Liberty,” I tell him.

He keeps very still for a second and then he sets the camera down on one of the shelves with the lens still aimed at me, still recording. “I said turn it off!”

He just laughs and flashes me that smile of his. “I tell you, Adam,” he says to me softly, “you’re awful pretty when you get mad.”

“Do you know what movie that’s from?” he asks. “‘You’re awful pretty when you get mad?’”

“No,” I say.

“It’s from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. You ever seen it?”

I don’t answer, but he already knows I haven’t seen it.

“Well, it’s a classic. I’m not much for westerns usually, but this one is pretty great.

You should check it out when you get the

chance.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Tyler Durden,” he says, so close I can feel his breath on my face. “I’m Bruce Wayne and Alex DeLarge and Cool Hand Luke and whoever else you want me to be.”

“Have you been lying to me this whole time? Did you ever really think we could make our own movie?”

“I think we could make our own movie tonight,” he says, smirking.

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

I believe he can hear the hurt in my voice. He takes a small step back. I hang my head low and he presses his chest into my face gently. His arms wrap around me.

“I’ve never met anyone else like you,” he says. “But I can leave if you want me to.”

The problem isn’t about what I want or don’t want. The problem is the camera.

In the world that takes place in front of its lens, there’s a line that you can only cross once, and once you’ve crossed it you can never go back.

“You’re a very lonely guy, Adam,” he tells me. “I knew that from the day I met you. But you don’t have to be scared.”

He tries his best to be soothing, caressing my back the way a thousand onscreen lovers have done before. “You should be happy,” he says. “My first scene was with a stranger.”

I pick my head up, and as he starts to kiss my neck I stare out past the counter through the stacks to the TV at the top of the wall. Below the ice, the mother penguins swim majestically, beautifully.

But the hungry seal lurks in the shadows, enormous and terrifying. It is the thing children’s nightmares are made of. The music changes. The foreshadowing is laid.

Morgan Freeman’s voice ushers in the carnage that is to come. It is the kind of voice you like to imagine God would have.

You see the seal’s massive teeth. You see the penguins shooting out through the water onto the ice in orderly evacuation. Most of them make it out, but the seal snags one by the foot and drags it back in. There is an elegance to it all—living parts moving in perfect choreography. But I know it’s all just a trick of the camera. Careful editing gives it the illusion of grace. L

Michelle Traub 16

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Playgrounds The trees scatter notes of darkness over The children’s play, for they must soon journey Behind a noisy curtain: telephones And taxes, bank accounts and some obscenely Straightforward bills. These chords of dying light, And slightly off-key smash of trombones-Such hellish music is children’s birthright.

There is no way to stop the marching band: The balding flautist, drummer past his prime, The fat conductor whose baton swings through The summer air. I wish he’d keep his time Better-- for I can feel the beat in my bones And I can tell his rhythm is askew.

But kids do not think yet of metronomes.

For what do they know of those Weighty silences huddled on bedsprings And dinner tables between lying And untruth, and such other adult things.

Today at least they do not think of death.

Meanwhile the arc of the empty swing Measures out time with ever-shortening breath.

–– Revti Gupta

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LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2008

LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2008 MAE RYAN

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THE MUSIC AUDITION: Criticism

by andrew zhou

Note: all headings represent the five compulsory components for an audition for piano at the undergraduate level at Northwestern University.

I - a contrapuntal baroque composition equivalent in difficulty to a threevoice fugue I perFORM a suite of Brahms’ late piano pieces for a recital held by my professor that evening at one of Berlin’s best-known higher education institutes for art and music. I was in good company, hearing alongside my performance some prototypical Schubert, Liszt, Bach, and Mendelssohn.

In a very German tradition, the performances are celebrated by a postrecital drink.

Twenty-something-yearold musicians, still analyzing every minor imperfection after putting out the results of their hours of incarceration in practice rooms, are given the chance to unwind, or at least drink away their sorrows.

Where am I from? one of those students asks me. All ceremony. I answer ‘the US’ and throw the question back to him, although truth be known, his brand of

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Hochdeutsch already gives him away. Turns out that he has lived in Berlin his entire life.

Ein echter Berliner-‘a true Berliner’.

-And uh, how did you hear about this professor? he asks. Translation: How did I cut in front of all those other hopefuls in line for this coveted studio time?

-A colleague of the professor’s...

I answer with hesitation, partly because of my scrambling for German adjective endings but mostly because I know I’m revealing that I hadn’t gone through the full terror of auditions to earn a spot in the schedule. My fears are confirmed when he clarifies: -Oh, so you didn’t do a full audition.

I take a nervous sip of my beer to stall time, but what he says is clearly true. From that moment on, no amount of Pilsner can prevent the feeling of judgment being poured upon me. From that moment on to him, I am no musician, there is little echt about me. Schtum he keeps, but his irritation, compounded no doubt by the

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German love for doing things through the proper channels and fine print, is clear.

And, as what happens when time runs out at all auditions, he needs to move on.

“Thank you for coming today.”

II - a complete classical sonata, preferably by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert I somETIMES want to believe that conservatories are places of sabotage, where fierce competition between musicians leads to some rather impetuous offstage behavior.

In reality, though, the saboteurs are generally the unwarmed hands of the pianists, the unwatered throats of the singers, and the unprepared nerves of the chokers. The music audition, then, becomes the optimal scene of a crime.

This past summer over one hundred musicians, of which only ten could be selected, arrived in Berlin in hopes of securing a future in the world of classical music through the channels of a wellestablished music school. This future, contingent upon the assent of big-name professors and the attention of record labels, would all be determined in about fifteen minutes of stage time. Given the circumstances, one would imagine that musicians would be given full liberties to present ‘themselves’ to the faculty. Yet, as it is practiced in the great music schools and conservatories of the world today, the audition allows little room for variation.

Audition parameters, and the space of self-invention they delimit, tend to confine talent rather than liberate it. The audition poses the individual against the canonized conceptions of the proper repertoire and its standards of “interpretation”—whatever meaning that word still has given the

what it takes to be heard

context.

The set lists of audition repertoire define the range of music in which every student must demonstrate competency.

Although each music school has its own slightly different take on what is or is not musically significant, there is a general format, a square prix fixe menu: the Bach prelude and fugue or suite, the classical sonata, the large Romantic work, the work written in the twentieth- or twenty-firstcentury, and the virtuosic étude.

Each school has managed to make this simple, albeit restrictive, arrangement into a veritable menagerie of repertoire requirements, limiting the potential repertoire list even further as auditioners are forced to resort to Venn diagrams to find where all the schools can agree. For example, the “classical sonata” requirement at five of the nation’s most important graduate music schools reads as follows: Yale: “a sonata or variations by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert (for the recording, prepare at least two contrasting movements; for the live audition, prepare an entire work)” Manhattan School of Music: “complete sonata by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, or Beethoven” Northwestern: “a complete classical sonata, preferably by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert” New England Conservatory: “a complete Classical sonata.”

Juilliard: One of the following: a. An entire sonata by Beethoven (excluding Opp. 14, 49, and 79), or b. Haydn Sonata in E-flat Major, Hob. XVI: 52, or c. Mozart Sonata in D major, K. 576, or d. One of the following Schubert sonatas: G major, Op. 78; A

minor, Op. 143; A minor, Op. 42; D major, Op. 53, or one of the three posthumous sonatas, or the Wanderer Fantasie.

Significant composers of great classical era music like Clementi (we’re talking his sonatas here) and Hummel have been pushed out by the classical quadropoly: Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven.

The judges are trying to control quality by canonizing a set of works they feel equipped to adjudicate, all the while severely marginalizing other worthy works. “Classical” then becomes a narrowly represented style instead of a process of broad exploration. The intent it seems is to prevent those who thump out the first few bars of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” in the common room of a dormitory from ever getting a few feet from a sustaining pedal; perhaps this much they have accomplished.

But the required list of repertoire is simultaneously too restrictive and too inconsistent. The judges look for elements like technical ability, musicality and competency, but have dissociated these skills in a rigid format from creativity—the prime locus of true musical genius. Interestingly, the French and the Germans refer to this whole practical study as “interprétation” and “Interpretation” respectively, whereas the North American system refers to it as “performance.” The French and German models stress intellectual thought and recognize almost explicitly the subjectivity of the art. Each musician becomes a type of “re-inventor” and this type of informed reinvention is the acme of music making.

I decided to play Copland’s “Piano Variations” for a competition last year. My interpretation was overlaid with “bell-like” tones in the third variation and “coloristic” flourishes, the professor told me. He explained: -I really like it, but this judge has grown up with this work and has admitted to me

that he is predisposed to being prejudiced against any interpretation that doesn’t line up with his. Best avoid alienating him.

I ended up getting second place in the competition, alienating all the way through.

When I received my judging sheets back, one judge told me that my sound judgment intelligently shaped the trajectory of the piece. Another told me to go back to the drawing board and re-examine the structure altogether.

III - a romantic work It is quite a romantic notion to use the arts as a mode of re-enchantment of the world, as a force of heroism that reinvigorates one’s faith in mankind. Perhaps there are some ways to be creative and circumvent these narrowly-defined repertoire lists and re-invigorate one’s faith in music as an art rather than sermonized pedagogy.

Some tinkering is possible in Juilliard’s “Romantic” requirement: “A substantial composition by Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, or Mendelssohn. (Etudes, nocturnes, short dances, waltzes, or comparable pieces are not acceptable).”

Who is to say then, that Schumann does not mean Clara Schumann, whose artistic and performative talents were the subject of envy from her husband Robert, the Schumann to whom the designation clearly points? What about Felix Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny Hensel’s Largo con espressione No. 9, WV 322, a large work wrought with more disquiet than most, if not all, of her brother’s piano works? If we must resort to wordplay and onomastical divertissement to upset the system and bring back some fresh imagination to our musical regimens, it is only to reinvigorate a history of classical performance that seems to believe there is a dearth of good, “acceptable” standards.

(To be fair, there are many schools

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that specify, simply enough, just a complete romantic work, or better yet, a complete work of the 19th-century. Those playing Clara Schumann and Fanny Hensel would probably be considered with a fair amount of skepticism but also grinning appreciation.)

IV - a work from the impressionist or contemporary period The sPIRIT of the audition destroys the visceral character of music, and seeks to break down aesthetic balances of structure and form in favor of scheduling efficiency.

We would be wrong to believe that the last refuge of the classical sonata is within the conservatory. No, even musicians must often become deejays, cutting and pasting a work, disjointing and wrecking its inherent symbiotic relationships to meet time requirements. Despite the requirement for a complete contemporary work, a student who was making her rounds of auditions last year entered conservatories prepared to play only select movements of Boulez’s Douze Notations, a brittle, glassy, atonal, and at times extreme work from 1945, knowing full well conservatives would be more than willing to fragment this divisive piece. In more extreme cases, I have been forced to cut and paste phrases from single movements together to make sure I did not go over the audition time, the musical equivalent of actors making décollage of verses iambic pentameter. (In fact, artists recording back in the days of 45 and 78 rpm discs had to do something similar, accommodating “creatively” to fit 4-minute chunks of larger works onto a single side of the record.)

Auditions have also led me to believe that the moved audience member at live concerts is a complete faker fully able to contain his emotions. There is some vast, barren landscape on the psychological map separating a sweating candidate having just experienced musical catharsis and the sobering banalities of the adjudicating panel thereafter.

I am reminded of Gene Weingarten’s feature in the Washington Post about renowned violinist Joshua Bell’s 45-minute stint as a street performer, when he could not so much as get spare change performing in disguise on a $3.5m Stradivarius in a Washington Metro station (L’Enfant Plaza,

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to be exact) during the morning commute in January 2008. The experiment presupposed Joshua Bell’s “greatness” and tested people’s reactions to this greatness packaged in a context of shoeshiners, doughnut vendors, and other fixtures of urban junctures.

In auditions, the process is reversed: the greatness is attributed to the listeners, and it is the musician who must measure up. In either case, music is dropped into a particularly unfavorable environmentthe victim, like so much great art, of “viewing conditions.”

With professors listening eight hours a day to “Pathétiques,” “Appassionatas,” “Springs,” “Pastorales,” “Hiccups,” “Wild Hunts”, “Forest Murmurs,” “Happy Islands,” and, if they could be so lucky, “Dried-up Embryos” (that would, of course, be Satie’s pianistic ménage à trois invertébrés) listening less for intuitive impact but rather for the ability and potential to make such an impact, then shouldn’t we all concede that music simply cannot be judged in such sub-optimal conditions? Even if the state of modern music is that Cageian doctrine that music is where you find it, I sincerely doubt anyone ever thought Sibelius to stoic silence qualified as such.

V- an étude of virtuosity EnterING the practice rooms for the ten-minute warmup at auditions one spring, I entered an Ivesian world of cacophony, with snatches of the coda from a Chopin ballade and mammoth chords heaved out of a Rachmaninoff prelude, complete with sweaty-palmed conservatory hopefuls pacing, humming, playing passages into the pulsating air. We all know what we are up against—every single performance of the piece ever heard by the adjudicators, every pre-conceived notion of how a phrase could and should be shaped, every factoid written on how the composer might have intended such a work to be performed. Why do we put ourselves up upon the rack as so many before us have?

In a sense, the answer seems contradictory to what I’ve been writing about this entire time. Perhaps if we cannot escape the canon, we must become a part of it. It’s a tough, but not impossible task to woo the listening public over with your brand of interpretation. Some performers have “legitimized” their interpretation to

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such an extent so as to have left an indelible mark upon the work itself for future generations. Gould’s Goldberg Variations, Uchida’s Mozart sonatas, and Bernstein’s Appalachian Spring immediately come to mind. Music, like most other disciplines, is an art of persuasion, and it is a particular challenge in this case because all the persuasive arguments in the form of “definitive recordings” have come before.

Finding the new—this is the art.

So as I head into auditions, I won’t let my audition be my musical persona, but my persona will fully be present in the audition. The canon has potentially dire consequences for someone like me, who simply cannot accept a musical persona drawn up from audition repertoire lists.

As a result, I’ll have to partially divorce my audition repertoire from my other active performance repertoire.

Take, for instance, a performance of a Messiaen piano work planned for February as part of a belated centennial celebration that took over the 2008 classical music scene. In addition to a Messiaen work of my choice, I was told to perform a work by a composer influential on or influenced

by Messiaen. After scouring the literature for a compelling connection, I stumbled upon Albéniz’s Iberia suite, a collection of 12 impressions of Spain, infamous for its finger-contorting difficulties. The sheer profusion of notes, dynamics, and marks of articulation make the score of the ninth piece ‘Lavapiés’ look like Jackson Pollock’s ‘Lavender Mist’. Albéniz has little room in my audition program though, and it would frankly be a more economical choice to play a Bach prelude and fugue and push for the association with Messiaen so I can recycle it for my auditions.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Bach, but in a more intimate setting. Am I stupid to be pursuing far more hours than I need in the practice rooms learning the Albéniz for a single performance than to revive a multi-purpose, easily transferable Bach work? Maybe, but perhaps this is where the audition comes back with a wagging finger.

It’s like a mother telling a child to eat his vegetables, that he can’t actually live on cookies and ice cream alone. This is true, at least when you are under your parents’ roof.

When you grow up and free yourself from the confines of other people’s rules, that’s when you can eat to your heart’s content.

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Janet Kim

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HEAT LIGHTNING Bent backward over fence posts far from our houses and artificial light that summer we watched the sky like flightless birds, up there the dancers electrically blooming between the momentary and persistent, molten and vivid, we dreamed storms and got instead each other, caught conductive feeling out the gaps between our hands and stomachs close enough for a spark to jump, the fascinating arc of it.

–– Tom Wiltzius

Alex Greenburg

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ofREVELATION O

h, bless be Your perfect, divine greatness—that once again failed to notice me.

I sat and watched it all this morning, with Your irresistible graces yet to cloak me in that sacred warmth of rebirth.

When do I get to be chosen? When do I get to hear Your voice?

During today’s worship, Abigail Johnson made sure we all knew where she belongs in Your holy heart. She stood clutching the collar of her cape, placed her hand to her brow, and moaned in a manner of a cow needing to be milked.

She looked up at Pastor Baldwin and exclaimed that she had been reborn in the Lord’s glory, felt His presence all around her, His tender arms embracing her insides, His magnificence filling up her empty vessel. When she had finished, she smiled placidly, sat back down, and readjusted her black bonnet. The congregation sat enthralled. They cooed and gasped that one of their children should join the select, what a happy day to witness a true conversion they murmured to themselves, as Pastor Baldwin began where he left off in articulating the divine Word. Abigail looked around the room and smiled her wide smile. It made my stomach overturn itself. I had brief remembrances of England and the spectacles of the street scene, of jugglers, bears, and unsavory women.

Yet, who am I to judge true revelation from false, I have yet to be reborn. Abigail Johnson is fifteen, the same age as I. But I, born three months before her, study the Good Book with a voracity that could not be matched by a girl. I am learned and devout, the son of a pious man. I am goodly in games and chores of daily life. Despite all this, I have 26

yet to feel the surge of the Almighty’s very awesomeness and confess my moment of second baptism and transformation into one of His select. Father assures me that it will come in time, that all of the chosen eventually feel the transcendent light. I am bound by covenant to study and write and reflect, the better to read His symbols in the world around me, for it is then that I will truly decipher His meaning. And I am no doubt one of the chosen, but achieving conversion seems easy for my peers. I wonder what makes me different. Of course I am one of the chosen. I am good. My family is good. We are part of this tribe of New Israelites, moving perpetually towards a New Eden, ever so close to God’s wondrous bounty of heaven. I am good.

I am good. I am good.

Currently, the sun ebbs from the Lord’s palette of sky and I must put down my pen. The woods around our small village shudder with wind even in the mild evening of mid-springtime.

It is no doubt God’s hand rattling those twisted branches. But in the oncoming darkness and stretches of limbs and shadow, I sense a stirring of something other in the murky spaces.

Such foolishness, I write at this late hour. I am but a dumb-knuckled bobbin.

and secret meaning by daniel hirsch

*** “Blessed be the perfection of the Lord, for he has created long days for a glorious seeding time,” Father proclaimed this dictum to my brother John and I in early morning. He handed us two hoes and nodded towards the stretching fields where we were to plant endless rows of barley.

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John is seventeen. He confessed his redemption in front of the congregation at fourteen years and eight months. He is forever eating the best slice of Mother’s meat. We share a room and every night I am made to hear the Lord’s gift of John’s most fervent nighttime breathing. But my brother is good.

*** Already in the early hour, when we set out to our father’s acreage my vest was soaked with sweat. New England, unlike real England, has an uncompromising and merciless sun in the warm times. It tests God’s children in this wilderness. I am a constant mess of perspiration!

Our father’s fields are cobbled with large stones and clusters of hard dirt clods.

So when I grind my hoe through the ground, it resists my force, and my shoulder is sore with the work of it. After about an hour of such labors my hoe’s pole snapped in half.

Splinters flew through the air. John smiled at me and pondered out loud, “Did not Cain’s fields bear less fruit?” His face was bright and merry, his brow dry. I wanted to remind my brother of Abel’s fate in that parable, a brief imagining of the butt of my hoe in good John’s face flashed across my mind. Though I tried to shut it out for surely it is a wicked vision, the replaying of it made me smile as I trudged back to our cottage.

Upon returning, I had to tell Father of this mishap, of his broken property. I received the requisite punishments. Father reminds me that the Almighty punishes those of his flock whom He loves, the better to test their fortitude. Even now at the close of day, the skin of my back stills burns. It gives me solace to envision brother John’s face if thwacked with a piece of hickory. I am put to ease by such imagining. Wicked, I know. May God forgive a weary and aching boy’s fancies.

*** Yesterday after the morning Sabbath service, Father suggested that I might do well with extra study. On this day, Josiah Goodwin –age 13!— confessed he had been tormented by the Devil’s sulfurous hell fire in a dream, through the turmoil he learned to fully love the Lord’s flowing goodness, and so on. He professed for such an extent of time, so much so, that he grew red-faced

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from lack of breathing. I shall not continue, for to repeat the boy’s ejaculatory prayer would make my hand grow weary. He did go on and on—a blustering clot-pole if ever I have seen one. But yet, he is greater than me, he is now among the fold—however dubious his entry.

I jest.

Father suggested that revelation comes to those who labor, and I might do very well to have a companion in the working over of divine texts. He informed me that Edward Dudley’s son, William, is my age and has been studying scriptures with a dutiful eye and may prove beneficial to my meditations on the Lord. William has yet to confess his moment of spiritual rebirth to the congregation. I know of him.

He is a tall boy with wide shoulders and auburn colored hair. We have spoken very little. My father informed me that upon the renewal of the week’s work, I will spend the afternoon hours with William. I have no choice in the matter. But I will do what it takes to better understand the Almighty spirit and His beloved son, and feel communion and the like, for I am a goodly and righteous person.

*** Today, William and I had our first session of study. There was a strained quality to it all. William shook my hand with his rather large one. He held my fingers firmly.

I felt very much like a small child. I felt angry at his having this over me, are we not both without divine insight and conversion?

Are we not both equals? But I squelched this surge within, and we sat down for investigation of scripture. William opened his Good Book to the first few chapters of Exodus. “Might not our struggles in this New World be God’s reinvention of the Israelite’s struggle long ago?” he asked after we read several passages aloud. “Of course,” I replied, “That is obvious. Is that not what we are told every blessed Sabbath by our elders?” Immediately, I regretted speaking so sharply. But when I looked at William he smiled and responded, “The Lord has made you a swift minnow, friend.” To my amazement, he laughed.

We spent the rest of the afternoon reading aloud the story of the Hebrews in the toils of servitude—William read through the plagues with a rare zeal, using a comedic

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voice for Pharaoh, quite like a sacrilegious actor!—and then we parted ways with a firm shake once more. What an odd encounter.

How strange the way he said that word, “friend.” I feel no closer to feeling the awesome power of the sovereign ruler of the Universe, but on my walk home, I saw a red hawk circling the heights of Mt. Sugarloaf.

Its ruddy feathers cut across the sky, sharp and crisp and soaring. Might not this be some divine message from on high for his humble child to interpret? To decipher the Lord’s signs is a mysterious art. Perhaps, a bird is just a bird.

*** There’s news that East Havermore was raided by local heathens. One family’s house burned to the ground and a young girl was killed. Again, Father reminds us that the Lord takes away those dear to test our resolve. He punishes those He loves. It is His plan. Yet the girl was younger than I, she had no opportunity to experience His majesty and learn the visible traces of His wonder. Her eyes were robbed from her when they smashed in her skull with their most wretched and depraved tomahawks.

What of her test, I wonder. How can God give her the opportunity to understand, if He spills her young blood unto His thirsty earth? What of that, I wonder. What of that?

*** My peers are a burst with revelation.

Today it was Patience Witherspoon and Ascension Taylor trumpeting their new status as visible saints, as true children of the Almighty. It was a veritable marathon of divine insight. My eyes could not help but wander to William sitting with his parents.

While Patience described the specific details of the Lord’s tremendous touch inside of her, William’s eyes looked to the window, and he stared at the brilliant sun shining forth into our humble meeting space. Might he have thoughts like mine own? Might he feel beauty around him, have an inkling of sacred grace and power, but have doubts of its authentic texture? Might there be something at his core that holds him back?

Something uncertain and unknown in the pit of him, that draws him in unknown ways?

Unlike me, he is placid in the face of everything around him. There was a faint

Janet Kim smile on his face, as Ascension exhorted on the mysteries of God’s probing finger.

Could William have been amused by such an ardent display of spiritual jubilation? The light through the dusty panes of our chapel seemed to shine on him alone in the jittery mass of black-clad brethren. Perchance, there’s meaning in this small phenomenon.

*** William and I worked together to copy passages into our common books today. William has such a keen eye for the plain language of beautiful inspiration. We sat outside as we did so, upon William’s suggestion. Father says that worthy study of the Lord’s text demands quiet, dark interior spaces for utter concentration, but it was beautiful out of doors. The sky of a crystal clarity that I never remembered

seeing in England. And the sun was strong, illuminating the great earth of rolling green and forest. Father tells me to be wary of the wonders of the wilderness, within them the Almighty hand hath placed temptation and bestiality. But sitting with William on a small hill overlooking our patch of New England, I thought differently. He knows the name of every tree and shrub in sight. He says his favorite tree is the large White Maple that grows alone at the edge of his father’s field.

“So mighty!” he exclaimed to me as we sat.

William has whiskers coming in, that much improves his visage. And he smiles broadly, with a frequency I have not noticed in the countenance of any of our community.

I suggested we turn to the Book of Numbers to continue the discussion Pastor Baldwin had begun during the Sabbath, but William just lay back in the yellow grass

of his father’s field, resting his head in his palms. He told me, “I am forever fascinated with the clouds of the sky. They are both things and not things.” I asked him what relevance that had. He said it did not pertain to any part of our previous discussion, but that I should observe the bounteous white mysteries anyways. And so I did, the earth felt warm beneath my back. The clouds were of a thick nature today, pure white and robust. William’s breath rose and fell beside me. I pictured all the souls of those who had passed prior to achieving communion with the Lord, lifting up to the skies and entering these aberrant vapors, caught in the strange place between here and heavenly paradise.

Would they stare back down at us, ignorant to the sweetness of God’s kingdom, longing for the simple pleasures of the earth? For days like this in golden fields breathing in

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sun-soaked air?

I told William that I worry about my soul never finding salvation.

He told me to be still, he was in a reverie and I would be wise to join him.

*** Today Abigail Johnson was promised to dear brother John. We, of course, are all brimming with merriment. John suggested that I best take my studies seriously, lest I never acquire such a fine quality wife. I responded that dear Abigail was “certainly as sturdy as an ox, a fine match to your wit, brother.” He smiled at this, “Thank you kind brother,” he said and strolled away thinking sweet thoughts of himself as is his simple custom.

When I saw William later in the day at our usual meeting spot by his family’s home, I told him of the news, and he offered his congratulations to John and our family. Then he looked into the sun, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply, as he is wont to do. And then said, “Love is more great and terrible than all of God’s creations put together.”

After a moment, I replied: “Might not love be especially terrible with Abigail as your wife?” William looked at me. “Come now,” he said. He closed his eyes and looked back to the sky, face suddenly solemn. In the silence, I sat wondering where he comes up with such things to say, if they approach blasphemy, and what love William has known in his young life. As I write now, these questions hop around my mind as the crackling ambers of our hearth’s dying fire.

The hour is late, but sleep will not come.

*** Again I am sleepless.

Today, William suggested we should walk to ruminate on Your glory.

“Flowing blood breeds revelation,” William exclaimed. And so, we walked. We walked along the crest of the grassy hill, passing the tall Maple at the edge of William’s father’s plot, and then cut along the road by the woods, at which point William’s meandering feet turned towards the shade of tree’s limbs. He ducked behind a thick bow. “Come,” he called to me, “come.”

And I followed, watching his shoulders

move through the twisted unseen paths of woods. Twigs snapped beneath our feet, and dry smells of dirt and dusky bark filled our noses. We bobbed under branches, and William cut through thick screens of the trees’ fingers with his body, and I followed in the path he cleared. And Springtime’s light shone through the netting of canopy above, and speckled the floor of forest with patches of yellow sun. I heard the rattle of a nearby stream. William stopped to listen.

He told me there was a “natural marvel” up ahead. We approached the stream, and walked along its rocky embankment. And soon, I was following William uphill along the stream. Its waters pushed hard against the rocks and the immensity of its sound began to grow.

Upon turning a bend in the stream, revealed before us was a rushing falls, water pouring down from granite high above, tremendous roaring noise, and air smelling of autumn morning fog. Mist kissed our faces. William, turned to me; his eyes clear and wide, reveling at the glory of the earth.

I was not thinking of You when we climbed up closer to the pounding force of the falls. And I was not thinking of You when William, held me by the waist so I could reach out to touch the power of the falling water, or when he asked if it was cold as my fingers skimmed the hard jet of white water. And I was not thinking of You, when his feet slipped on the wet rock, and his arms wrapped around me pulling me towards him, and we fell backwards onto steady ground, tumbling and twisting around each other, until we stopped, he on his back and I still holding on. And I was not thinking of You when I remained motionless in William’s warm grasp for that one fleeting moment, my face to his chest, his smells mingling with the clean scent of wet moss. It was when he said “Get off of me,” when I did not move for a moment, when he shouted “Get off of me now,” and when he pushed me so that I fell onto the hard rock besides us, when I felt Your tremendous presence beside me.

We stood and I looked up into William’s confused face. When he looked back at me, his skin warped and sharp, I saw You staring back from the swirling black hole

of William’s angry eyes. When he walked away back down the dark path disappearing instantly into the dusk, to leave me alone, bruised and shaking in the chilly air, I heard You shrieking in my ear—a thousand voices screaming all at once, crumbling earth, and thunder.

It was then, I knew of Your true terror, Your infinitely flawed creation, and the perversity of the trials You put Your meager servants through.

*** I am alone. I am stolen away in the pantry and I write by candlelight. Even the faint scratching of my quill seems to rattle the walls with its hissing. Sleep is dead to me.

But it is You that have made me rise, given me these things to write. You have unsettled the sturdy parts of my belly, ripped my heart from its usual rhythms.

In morning prayer, William presented the congregation with an account of his experience entering into the fold and being reborn. He rose before Pastor Baldwin could begin his sermon, and the room fell into a terrible silence. I could not see his face from where I sat. But his voice was steady and plain as he spoke. He said very little, I can hardly recollect what he did say, only the way his head moved when he spoke and the cadence of his once beautiful voice. He told of the true shock of the Lord’s damnation. He knew what it was to feel stirred by reverence and fright at the sovereign power of the Universe. “True love is the love one feels to You,” he said. That now his spirit is joined to the Almighty, in divine, eternal wedlock, that transcends the petty place of the earth, of human relations.

He sat back down and only deafening stillness remained.

I sat and watched in my family’s pew.

Happy brother John and goodly Abigail grinned next to me and the hard wood of the bench grinded against my spine. I felt something churn within me, but it was not Your Grace, it was something else altogether. And I am alone, with no more words for You. L

Michelle Traub 30

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GOOD PEOPLE We drifted from dusty velvet seats, ghosted black floors, crawls and stretches skyward while spots overhead wept fluorescent. Impatient we dusted off our damp spandex. You chided how we flaunted our young pudge.

My first shudder on the stage in your big hands, my first kiss in the greenroom. I felt through your leotard. Sex, you assured us, was not hold your head carefully in my hands pulse in your eyelids, in your bleating chest. Unwinding that taut curtain rope, your plaster mask laughed, my mask hated that youth you conjured from suicide and seduction.

We all had faces scratched in our skins from botched and sloppy births.

We all had weakness for poison and the stage.

Your song was kitsch, your lighting contrived: Fade and pause. Fade to black.

No one came to our shows.

The calculated color, inside jokes, share the wine routine. We teased your vibrato.

My voice whispered, who are you? How much is this is about flesh? I tried to tell you no amount of powder can conceal all our many pores.

––Selena Simmons-Duffin

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Living Statue “Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling” -W.B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium Slate drape of your dress, cradling Memory of stone, of quarries spent, Granite chiseled to mold The pleat in your skirt.

You blink, come to life, Bow to a child’s twisted curls And serenely incline your Head at the coin.

But the silver veneer At the base of your neck is cracked.

And cotton betrays your Dress from its stony home.

The next day you are gone.

In your stead is a loud young man Pulling flowers from children’s ears.

Ventricles of these streets pulse differently.

Though I have seen you before In Dublin, London, New York, And will see you elsewhere, speaking The same language of smooth silence, I still want you there.

And the third day you are back.

I watch you take a coffee-break, Hunched over on your pedestal.

Your back is to the crowd.

There is silver on the Styrofoam rim of the cup, Peeks of pink on your lips.

–– REVTI GUPTA

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LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2008 Janet Kim

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>>> mAE rYAN

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CREATIVE NONFICTION

S

ome possible hooks: 1. The pain. Ice pick jabbing into flesh. An electric shock. As though the wind has stripped your skin. The image of my grandmother’s face, skeletal and raw.

2. Adrienne: too much Tegritol and Dylantin; dead babies, writhing on the freeway. Passing out and throwing up; out at a restaurant for a Mother’s Day Lunch.

3. A post-it note sent last week.

My grandmother’s chicken-scratch handwriting reads like a poem.

Mae Ryan

Exhibit A

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crapbook

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by meghan daniels

*** But perhaps there is no hook sharp enough to reel you in.

I haven’t read George Eliot’s Middlemarch (I don’t even know what it’s about), but I have heard this quote: “If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.”

Pain is ordinary. Headache, stomachache, menstrual cramps, scabs.

This is an essay about an ordinary thing.

After all, our lives begin in pain. Our mothers scream in agony, and then we emerge, red-bodied, from their wombs.

Pain is ubiquitous, unavoidable.

Our desired response to that pain is empathy. And empathy is wonderful, laudable, something to strive for. But if I feel your pain like it is my own, and yours too – oh, and also you! – how will I ever live my life?

In her essay, “The Pain Scale,” Eula Biss says, “The problem of pain is that I cannot feel my father’s, and he cannot feel mine.” An afterthought: “This, I suppose, is also the essential mercy of pain.”

***

In 1969, Richard Nixon is president.

Neil Armstrong walks on the moon.

Woodstock erupts in Bethel, New York, with claps of rock music and heaving clouds of smoke.

Eighty-five miles southeast of the peace pipes and hippies and the bastions of free love, my grandmother, Fayne, reclines in a dentist’s chair. She has been having pain – electric shocks running through her jaw, brought on by the breeze or a toothbrush’s bristles, by red lipstick smeared across her lips.

The dentist is George Coulter; he is my grandfather’s first cousin. He knows about my grandmother’s pain, has been asking around about possible causes.

That day in his office, he does not say anything. In my mind the room is backlit orange; a diploma hangs slightly crooked on the wall. Dr. Coulter lifts my grandmother’s lower lip, suddenly, without warning: an attempt to diagnose.

A cutting scream, a body contorted.

“I’m sorry, Fayne. I had to do it.”

And this is how they know. A lip lifted in a dentist’s chair, under a bright light, on the main street of a one-stoplight town.

*** Trigeminal Neuralgia (TN) is a “nerve disorder of unknown origin that causes sudden shock-like facial pains, typically near the nose, lips, eyes or ears. It is said to be the most excruciatingly painful human condition in the world.” It affects an estimated 40,000 people in the U.S., and perhaps a million worldwide; most of the time, onset occurs after the age of 50.

They also call it “the suicide disease.”

Cf. Wikipedia, my grandmother, and my father. The pain is “stabbing,” “mindnumbing”; Dr. Kim Burchiel says that people with the condition “are begging to be killed.”

*** In 1677, John Locke, the philosopher and doctor, visits the Countess of Northumberland, wife to the Ambassador to France. Trigeminal neuralgia as manifested in her 17th century bosom seems theatrical, the tragic affliction of a respected noblewoman. Locke finds his Lady in a “fit of such violent and exquisite” – exquisite! – “torment that forced her to such cries and shrieks as you would expect from one upon the rack.”

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I wonder: how can something inside the head, a tiny nerve in the back of the brain, cause pain comparable to that of the rack?

Exhibit B

***

Treatments: Microvascular Decompression (MVD). Radiofrequency Lesions. Tegritol. Dylantin. Guided imagery.

Glycerol Injections. Yoga. Acupuncture.

Gamma Knife. CyberKnife. What works for one person will not work for another.

What works for another will work for you.

My grandmother had an MVD (that is, had brain surgery, a procedure that relieves abnormal compression of the trigeminal nerve), and the pain was gone for 10 years.

Later, after the pain came back, she had another. This time, the pain returned within 10 days.

TN is an orphan disease. There are no medications specifically tailored to target it: too few people suffer. The drug companies cannot be enticed.

*** I ask my father what he remembers about my grandmother’s treatments. He says the drugs made her “loopy.” He tells me that after my grandmothers’ radiofrequency lesions, a treatment designed to destroy the trigeminal nerve, a large part of her face was left numb. This was in the seventies, when my father was in high school. “I remember sitting at the dinner table,” he says. “She would get food on her lip, but wouldn’t know it.” He pauses. “I remember feeling badly about that. There was no way for her to know.”

I think about my grandparents’ kitchen, the wooden table by the fireplace, the stuffed buck’s head that hangs over the

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room. I picture a chunk of potato, the fleck of white on my grandmother’s red lips.

“Every time it happened,” he says – by now he means the pain, not only just the food – “you felt bad, and then you felt bad about not feeling worse.”

My father tells me about my

with a start) the scrapbooks are what come to mind. I think about the photos, of vacations and smiles and tightly wrapped arms – the recorded life, the chosen story. But now, when I see the scrapbooks in my mind, the white cardstock behind the pictures blares out too. All that negative space. Symbolic.

As if to represent the moments of pain, upon which no camera would flash.

How ironic, I think, as I walk between classes, messenger bag slung across shoulder, latte cradled between fingers and thumb. With her glue stick and pen, my grandmother, the careful cataloguer, documents and verifies the events of the past, constructs a narrative of our lives. But what of the electric shocks of pain that she cannot record, of frozen limbs at the kitchen table, a back hunched over a bathroom sink, clenched eyes, the stab of an ice pick

recessing into a jaw? Surely, this story will not be chosen.

But then I tell my grandmother about this essay, and a few days later, there is a manila envelope in my P.O. Box. Inside I find a white folder. Fayne’s Fight, my grandmother has labeled it, on the back and front. 1970-2008. Inside there is a thin stack of timeworn clippings, browning pieces of my grandfather’s company stationary. A Newsday cover from 1977: a yellow banner in the corner reads, “FIGHTING PAIN;” a red-hued drawing of a woman is splashed across the center page. The woman’s face is wrinkled and agonized, like an older, feminized Jesus, mounted on the cross.

Inside the folder, too, are coffeestained articles from The New York Medical Tribune, form letters from hospitals and doctors, an article on guided imagery, nerve

coagulation. Pages of hand-written notes and checklists. Questions for doctors and surgeons and technicians. A list: Procedures Used by Fayne Daniels for tic douloureux relief, written in handwriting that is undoubtedly my grandmother’s, but neater than any I’ve ever seen. There are three separate documents that list chronologies – noting severe attacks, family crises, crises of faith – written out for the years from 19691975.

When I talk to my grandmother on the phone I ask her about coping methods.

“I just keep fighting,” she says. She is like a boxer, rebounding from every punch, 39 years at the edge of the ring. Fayne’s Fight. In her list of procedures, number 5 is prayer. It helps! she writes, as if to convince an invisible audience.

***

grandmother’s MVD, her surgery in New York in 1979, when he was a senior in college. “There were complications.

Hemorrhaging,” he says. “She came really close – to not making it. My dad called me.

I wasn’t there.”

I think of myself, a senior in college now, sitting at my desk, talking to my father.

I have an image of my grandfather at a hospital payphone, twisting the cord, my father sitting in the middle of his frat house.

The smell of beer. The way my father would tell me, if he thought my mother was about to die.

*** In the guest room of my grandparents’ house, there is a closet full of scrapbooks, one for almost every year dating back to the 1940s, when my grandparents were in high school. Grampie and Deedee to me now, Ross and Fayne then. They were just friends. My grandmother was going to go to the convent. Instead, of course, she gave birth to six boys. Funny, the way things happen.

Deedee’s scrapbooks are simple and thorough, with pictures and newspaper clippings, greeting cards and chickenscratch captions, all pasted on to thick white cardstock. No ribbons or stickers or bright colored markers, no need for one of those scrapbooking stores.

When I first try to make sense of my grandmother’s years of pain (nearly twice as many years as I have been alive, I realize

Linda green

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“What I find myself thinking is that – this is something that that other person, that friend of a friend of a friend, has. Not me. This isn’t something that I have.”

In every Greek tragedy, there is a chorus. In this beige hospital conference room, in Room N, floor B, it is no different.

Whenever a sentiment is expressed, a treatment option brought up, there are the murmurs. Yes, me too; right right; oh really; yes I’ve heard of him. It is a small world in which each sufferer is living, a claustrophobic one when alone, and somehow more spacious when they inhabit it together.

Later, alone, Brian tells me that he can understand how, in medieval times, people with TN “might have thought they were being seized by the devil.” I get the sense that he feels the same. His diagnosis doesn’t seem to have quite sunk in; he is wide-eyed and aloof as he watches the other men and women, most of them older than him, meander around the room.

Linda Green

My grandmother struggled mostly alone with her TN until the early 1990s, when she decided to start a support group for the Hudson Valley area of New York, where we live. The group was founded under the auspices of the national Trigeminal Neuralgia Association (TNA). On my grandparents’ home answering machine, I hear my grandfather’s gravelly voice: You have reached Fayne and Ross. Please leave a message. If you are calling about the Trigeminal Neuralgia Support Group, Fayne would LOVE to talk to you…

The support group works with doctors, neurologists, dentists, and surgeons, to provide as many resources and as much information to the members as possible.

Every two years there is a nationwide conference. My grandmother is still involved with the Trigeminal Neuralgia Association, but her particular support group has mostly disbanded. Some people stopped coming; others moved away, or died.

I decide to attend a quarterly meeting of a San Francisco/San Jose chapter support group, at El Camino Hospital in Mountain

42

View. At the meeting, the leader asks everyone to introduce themselves, to share their story. By “story” she means “pain.” A woman named Carol stands up.

“Guess I’m the newbie,” she laughs.

Carol is stout, ordinary looking, undeniably charming. She stands upright, shoulders back. She tells her story, imitating her “dreamy” German doctor’s throaty voice when he gives her diagnosis. The words aren’t funny – “you have TN” – but the whole room laughs. Her accent is spot-on.

But when Carol starts to speak of the pain, her voice breaks like a betrayed lover’s.

“Just let me go to a dark room. Don’t let the dogs in, don’t give me anything to eat, I don’t want to watch T.V. Just let me alone.”

Carol is not the kind of person who has ever wanted to be alone. This is something you can tell.

She starts to sit down, and then straightens up again, momentarily. “I can understand why they might call it the suicide disease. Without medication – ” Carol pauses again “—I’d be on the edge of something.” She sits down. “That’s for

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sure.” Scattered laughter follows, twinged with something sour.

A woman named Adrienne tells about her allergic reaction to the medication prescribed for her TN. “I saw dead babies on the freeway,” she says. “I threw up in restaurants and then passed out.” Next to her, her daughter nods. Adrienne is around sixty, with dyed blond hair, falsely arched eyebrows, thick black eyeliner, smeared red lips. The natural shape of her eyes and mouth are nearly indiscernible under all the make-up.

Now, though, after a recent MVD, Adrienne is pain-free, cracking jokes, extolling her gratitude to all around. “Now I just need to find a handsome man to kiss!” she exclaims. Her daughter puts a hand on the shoulder of the man sitting next to her.

Watch out, she mouths, and everybody laughs.

The man next to Adrienne’s daughter stands up. His name is Brian; he is middleaged, healthy and robust, with a closely trimmed beard and a cell phone clipped to his belt. He was diagnosed just a year ago.

face,” she says when describing a photo of herself that a reporter took for an article on TN, back in the early ‘90s. Deedee is Irish, but her face isn’t fat. Her white hair is smooth and fine like new toothbrush bristles, carefully set and curled. She wears large clip-on earrings, jade and blue and seashells etched in white. They hang from her earlobes like buttons, dangling from a loosely knit sweater.

What else? When my grandmother slices cheese, her hand shakes. She has given birth to six boys: one, Edward, died within a few months of being born. Her voice is a proud soprano; it pulsates and soars in the open air. In Fayne’s Fight, there is a list from the mid-1970s entitled “Fayne’s Activities.”

Various charitable boards are listed, along with singing groups, Shakespeare Society, Garden Club. “Responsible for my mother’s well being,” she writes. “Housewife and mother; erstwhile graduate student; gardening; housework; lousy cook!”

fortunate having such long intervals of freedom and the relief that comes from rest and adequate sleep. … all I can add is that all of the studies that we did are essentially normal… you are a very healthy person facing alot of responsibilities to which you respond appropriately and at periods of time with fatigue and lack of sleep bind to precipitate electrical activity.

Best wishes, Earle M. Chapman, M.D. This last proposal – the binding of fatigue and lack of sleep, the subsequent precipitation of electrical activity –this would be like gluing a cotton ball to a blank sheet of paper and expecting an electric shock to result.

I wish this were a joke. I wonder what it means, that my grandmother kept this letter for her files.

***

***

***

Sitting around that table at the support group meeting, next to a table of store-bought cookies and Diet Coke, listening to each person’s story, I long for my grandmother.

We have met Carol, Adrienne, and Brian, but what about Deedee? What about my grandmother, after all?

In this hospital conference room, with the bright lights and the blasting air, I feel connected to her in a way I never have before. I want to hear Deedee tell her story, I want to watch as all the eyes fixate onto her. I want her to hear the heartfelt murmurs of these people, see their knowing frowns and supportive smiles. Tears are welling in my eyes. When I was eleven, my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer. His condition has since improved, but at the time, I remember collapsing into crying fits in my room, writing furious notes to God, praying for mercy, rescinding those prayers.

But I have never before become sentimental about my grandmother’s disease.

Fayne’s Fight, the folder Deedee sends me, contains one letter that makes me seethe. It is typewritten, from an Earle M. Chapman, M.D. It begins: Dear Mrs. Daniels;

While doing research for this essay, I speak on the phone with another doctor.

John Adler is a neurosurgeon at Stanford who invented the CyberKnife, a pioneering radiosurgery technique used to treat TN and other ailments. Radiosurgery allows for non-invasive surgery, using directed beams of ionizing radiation. Dr. Adler says it is like an MVD without the human error. And, he says, unlike the Gamma Knife – another radiosurgery technique – “we don’t have to screw anything into your head.”

I talk to Dr. Adler for twenty minutes.

When he asks me to run through my grandmother’s treatment history, I do my best to recall it from memory, in no particular order. Medication, prayer, radiofrequency lesions, successful, radiofrequency lesions, unsuccessful, MVD, successful, relapse, yoga, acupuncture, MVD, unsuccessful, medication. This is incomplete.

Dr. Adler asks me what year I am in school. “Senior,” I say.

Is my grandmother coming to graduation?

I tell him that she is.

“She should come to me. Get her face fixed,” he says. Dr. Adler told me at the beginning of the conversation that he was from Yonkers, a New Yawker. I didn’t hear the accent until now. He says this – get her face fixed – like an umpire, spitting out

*** All of this is reduction. I have been so caught up in writing about the presence of pain, in publicizing struggle, that I have barely touched upon a life.

Deedee is tall and slender, even now, in her mid-eighties. Blue eyes peer out lovingly from tanned and leathery skin. She is sarcastic, self-deprecating. “My fat Irish

This report is on your studies in the Phillips House of the Massachusetts General Hospital between February 4 and 7 when you entered at the suggestion of Dr. William Sweet for a complete medical check-up in as much as you had consulted him regarding your trigeminal neuralgia for which his special operative procedure had been considered.

It continues with a description of aspects of my grandmother’s character “which did not appear in the previous notes.” (Boldface mine.)

Such as you are a very busy housewife with minimal assistance, meeting the demands of five lusty boys and a dynamic husband. On top of this you do such things as attend various boards for good deeds and also do some solo singing at funerals and social occasions. It is no wonder that this combination at times leads to a lack of sleep and then the usual onset of pain in your right face which is severe, stabbing, and only partially relieved by your medication program…

Compared with some people I think you are

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the words.

I say I’ll tell her about him. He repeats himself. He is a salesperson, repping his product. “Nobody deserves to suffer,” he adds.

I hang up the phone offended. Could it really be so simple?

*** Since beginning to write this essay, I find myself thinking about my grandmother’s life as BP and AP. Before Pain, After Pain.

My grandparents have lived down Berry Lane, a bumpy rural road, still unpaved after all these years, since my father was in elementary school. Weeds straggle in between the concrete squares of their walkway; a dinner bell hangs from a tree.

It is the 1960s. I see a younger version of my grandmother, trim-waisted and darkhaired, stepping outside in her housedress to ring the bell, yoo-hooing her young sons in from tree climbing and tractor riding to a waiting dinner of meatballs and mashed potatoes. They smile and say grace and sit down at a neatly set wooden table.

I am simplifying things. There is no such thing as life before pain. I repeat myself (I repeat to myself): our lives begin with pain.

*** One morning, after class, I call my grandmother for a follow-up interview. I ask her to describe the pain.

In the middle of our conversation Deedee’s already deep voice darkens and breaks, hesitates. I am sitting outside in the California sunshine. In the fountain next to me, water spouts up and then crashes, up and then crashes, up, crashes. The sky above me is a shocking blue.

“Deedee?” I say, tentative. I recognize that jarbled voice, the pause, the quieting.

Until this moment I had somehow forgotten that I was talking to a living subject – that my grandmother’s pain was not in the past. So often it is masked, or I catch her at a good time, or perhaps she has just learned to always set her face to neutral, a road block to protect against guilt and burdens.

I cross my legs on the bench, picking at a toenail. The sun beats down. It is only 11 o’clock, already hot; sweat beads at my back.

44

“Deedee?” I repeat. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, yes,” she laughs, slightly, the way you laugh at a coincidence – when your birthday is the same day as someone else’s, when you run into the same person three times in one day. Or when you are talking about the theory of pain, and all the sudden, it strikes, superseding all.

*** In 1994, ten days after my grandmother’s second MVD, the one that didn’t work, she and my grandfather took me and my older brother and our two cousins to a dude ranch in Wyoming.

“I just said ‘I’m going,’” my grandmother says now.

And so we went. I remember vaguely that her face was hurting, that she would sometimes stay inside while we went to jump in the stream or roast marshmallows outside. But Deedee’s pain was a lurking demon, something I thought was better left unaddressed.

In the mornings we all went on trail rides. Always the sheepish one, I was assigned the oldest horse, Earl, a rickety thing with a swinging tale and a dirty-blonde mane. The saddle jostled me back and forth and I held on to the reins so tight they left indents on my fingers. The boys galloped ahead, and my cousin Lauren tore off after them. Deedee and I meandered slowly along in the background, the red canyons sloping at our sides.

*** My grandparents’ refrigerator is covered in photos, each grandchild and child and great-grandchild equally represented in the montage. Amidst the snapshots, there is a printed saying, the size of a small bumper sticker. IF IT’S NOT FATAL, IT’S NO BIG DEAL. As a child, this platitude, and more than that, its prominent display, infuriated me. I saw no way it could be true. Rationally, I still think that such a philosophy is naïve and blindly optimistic, impossible to live by.

And yet slowly, somehow, against my will, I have begun to come around to it. What other way is there to live?

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*** Picture a line of people, lying arm-to-

arm on the ground. My grandmother is first in line, waiting. Abruptly, a basketball drops from high in the sky, with monumental force. The ball pummels my grandmother’s stomach, knocks the wind out of her. It bounces back up with slightly less verve, and hits my grandfather, next in line.

The impact for him is still fierce, but vastly deflected. My father and uncles are next, alongside other family members and my grandmother’s closest friends. I am there too, lying on the hot pavement. The cement is hard and bumpy, unforgiving; it hurts my back.

I am far enough down in line that when the ball reaches me, it barely bounces, more of a roll than anything else. The experience is more inconvenient than painful. But at the front of the line, my grandmother still reels for breath. I get up and walk over to her, help her to her feet. I try to comfort her, but I have never been first in line, or even second; I have never had a basketball descend upon me with the force of the sky.

When I ask, my grandmother tells me that she sometimes explains her pain as akin to childbirth. But I have never had a child.

My appendix has never ruptured, nor have I broken a bone. No stitches, or cancers, or chemotherapy; I can’t even remember the last time I had strep throat.

Who is doling out these balls? And is there is a bucket of orange Spaldings out there somewhere waiting for me, teetering on a far-off cloud?

smaller, one of those diminutive little girls whose father calls her things like Mouse and Pipsqueak.

“Hold on tight!” I say, and my brother pushes the sled to start her off.

Lauren is so light that the saucer barely touches down upon the ground; it careens and whirls, tornadic, fast. The boys and I watch from the top of the hill, transfixed.

I hear the scream before I see the scene and somehow I am rushing down the hill. Lauren’s snow-suited body is a purple lump on the snow, the saucer has slid all the way down the hill, there is blood clumping out of her nose. She has hit a tree. Her brother leans over her, my brother leans over her, I try to nose my way in and then turn abruptly around, clomping toward the house as fast as my boots and bundled legs

will take me.

I burst in through the broiler room.

The air is hot and stifling. “DEEDEEEE!” I scream. “LAUREN’S BLEEEEDING!” We bring her inside and I fetch bandages and paper towels; we take off her snowsuit. Things are not as bad as they seemed. We do not go to the hospital; no stitches are required. When Lauren is finally cleaned up, finally warm, Deedee and she sit together on the brown rocking chair in the living room. The boys go to the basement to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I sit cross-legged on the floor, listening to Lauren’s trembling sobs, my grandmother’s quiet murmurs. Everything will be okay.

*** When my cousins and brother and I were small, my grandmother drove us to

Ames. She let us pick out one toy each.

We bought water guns and plastic handcuffs; on the way home, we locked each other’s wrists, tightening each cuff so it scratched against the skin. Route 55 was mostly empty, a two-lane highway with a dotted passing line and the occasional tractor-trailer prattling by. We goaded my grandmother to go faster until she relented, pressing the accelerator until the speedometer crept all the way to 90.

We whooped and stuck our bound hands out the sunroof; the wind whipped at our outstretched arms. My cousin flung the plastic key away, out into the sky, and it disappeared behind us, onto that long gray stretch of road, somewhere along the yellow line. L

*** I am eight years old. It is wintertime, just after a snowstorm. My brother and cousins and I are at my grandparents’ house; in the backyard, there is a hill that is perfect for sledding.

We bundle up and go outside. Lauren and I make the boys drag us on the wooden toboggan; I hold a flimsy red flying saucer in my lap.

The snow is smooth and neatly packed, spotted with patches of gleaming ice. We ride the toboggan together, screeching as we dodge trees and banks and branches. At the foot of the hill we roll off, trudge slowly back up. The boys and I take our turns with the flying saucer, and Lauren tries it last. The two of us are the same age, but she is much michelle traub

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45

Real Bodies Your brother was crying, his cat euthanized and his father paralyzed by the river inside of him–– in the water that seeped into the basement that March we saw the temper of the plains, we watched it like pioneers–– the fish your mother would make, entire, head and everything, like it was before America, before we ate meat on Fridays–– I was eating lemon slices from a bowl taking one bite then tossing the rest away imagining this must be the height of opulence–– sitting across from me, you touched my foot with yours at dinner, between us on the table we had the flesh of Christ, but when our eyes met we knew it wouldn’t be enough for long and your father, unnoticing, talked about the weather–– Our father, patron saint of pet cemeteries and afternoon sun, thank you at least for this–– I was envious, you wanted to be a writer and in your eyes you already had the blindness of poets: too long spent looking at the light.

–– Tom Wiltzius

Linda Green

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47

From the Gr.

ανωνυμία:

I’ve lately been rereading some of my favorite short stories, from a collection by Richard Yates called “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.” In “No Pain Whatsoever,” Myra visits her husband Harry, who has been quarantined in a tuberculosis ward for more than four years. Normally, Myra takes the bus to visit Harry, but on this Sunday she has been driven by three friends, including Jack, her lover, whose wandering hands in the backseat of the car mortify Myra’s sense of decency and propriety. Inside the hospital, thin and haggard, Harry is nonetheless in high spirits. One of his old friends has returned well from surgery and Harry too feels little pain as long as he keeps still. When Myra asks him if the doctors have told him anything new, Harry chides her. “You can’t count on anything in this business, honey, you know that.” They spend most of their hour together in silence.

After leaving Harry, Myra hears the strains of a Christmas carol sung from inside the ward: Hark the herald angels sing / Glory to the newborn king… Myra is wretched with sobs, alone in hoping for Harry’s recovery, a better love, and probably, a child. But while Myra has been visiting with Harry her friends have found a nearby roadhouse; they pick her up from the hospital drunk and thrilled to be alive. Myra wipes away her tears, and letting Jack set his hand on her breast and then between her legs, she implores her lover, “darling, let’s go right home.”

I mean to talk about anonymity, which can been euphemized and romanticized until a picture springs into our minds of a joyous and contemplative fellow, arrayed in a snappy argyle sweater, wandering the streets of Paris, wondering at the beauty of the world. (This is me most days.) But what is anonymity except temporary peaceful loneliness? The pleasure of being nameless in a crowd is the awful, sneaking pleasure we feel at the end of volunteering at a tough school, or worse, at a poor man’s funeral. The voice in our heads that says, “This is not me. I am better than this. This fate will escape me.” It is fine and well to be anonymous so long as we can go home to a place where we are loved and where our name is not unknown. Where we can give voice to our dreams and aspirations, or better, where they are anticipated.

There are easy cures for loneliness practically at every turn. But like a stubborn tuberculosis, loneliness consumes us from within, a nagging ragged breath of despair that can be scrubbed away in a night, but whose stain reappears in the morning. The joy of anonymity is the re-emergence into our comfortable little circles, and though the exercise in loneliness thrills us, we will never completely let out the leash that ties us to our better lives. L Nick Hoy

BEFORE

“without a name,” “namelessness”

cutting the umbilical cord that binds us to Leland, we wanted to say thank you to everyone who poured so much effort into the magazine over the last few years, and to wish the best of luck to those who have taken it over.

Running Leland is a lot like flying a kite. And we spent two years sitting on the beach, taking turns with our thumb on the spool, admiring a kite held aloft by extraordinary talent that was not our own.

I am searching for a friend between the ages of two and six. Idea being that we’d have about the same vocabulary, the same hold on French grammar, and, truth be told, a lot of overlapping interests.

Course they’ve got some of the same social conventions over here that we’ve got over there so I couldn’t just, say, wander over to the park and jump in on a game of marbles.

In other news, I’m older than I was one year ago. Not to mention that I’ve got an apartment, a couple odd jobs that almost add up to a living, and a vague sense of loneliness that makes me feel very mature. The whole growing up thing is, of course, belied by the fact that Nick and I share a room and that our beds are close enough together that we can do a high-five before turning in for the night.

On weekends, I’ve taken to doing day trips on my own, making brief forays into solitude: hiking Montmartre, getting lost in the throng of an open-air market, reading in parks and cafes. After a few hours alone, coming home is always something of a let down. I ride the metro with my chin perched on my palm, eyes an inch above whatever book I’m supposedly reading. I sit there thoughtlessly and stare out into a forest of calves and ankles: pantyhose, varicose veins, pinstripe slacks and circulationslowing jeans, pleated skirts and the houghs of knees.

These brief moments of forgetfulness are incredibly peaceful: long exhales of not thinking.

Part of it is, no doubt, the fact that I know no names and no one knows mine. But what really gets me are those brief moments of weightlessness, as if at some point in the afternoon I’d outrun myself, turned a corner and left behind all my needs and desires, my convictions and neuroses. I dub these my amoeba moments. It’s a single-cell feeling, a sense of being in complete harmony with what’s going on around me, a protean feeling that I can be exactly what I want to be because I don’t really want to be anything at all.

Of course, the thing about exhaling is that, sooner or later, you have to breathe back in: bills, family, housekeeping, living. And the thing about being an amoeba is that I’m not. I’ve, like, evolved, for better or worse, and what I realize is that these moments of forgetfulness are really just moments of nostalgia. I’m invisible to myself only because I’m everywhere: a beautiful Francophone on the metro is a potential bride to be; a display-window cake is there only for me; a stony general on horseback is my doppelganger in a different time.

It’s like I’m a child, still imagining the world as something that bends to my desires, that grants my every whim, that’s been created for me, to please me and only me. It’s odd how what sometimes feels like complete resignation is really just another version of wish fulfillment. Like waking with a start from a dead dreamless sleep and thinking, ‘Hey, that wasn’t so bad,’ and then settling back in, warm and rested, between the covers. L Bob Borek

Nick and Bob

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BOB BOREK is a recent graduate from Cincinnati, OH MEGHAN DANIELS is a recent graduate from Pawling, NY LINDA GREEN is a senior from San Francisco, CA ALEX GREENBURG is a senior from Upland, CA REVTI GUPTA is a senior from Bombay, India DANIEL HIRSCH is a senior from Westhampton, MA NICK HOY is a recent graduate from Toronto, ON JANET KIM is a senior from Seoul, Korea AMY KURZWEIL is a senior from Newton, MA MAE RYAN is a senior from Newton, MA

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Turtle Island Quartet and the Assad Duo - 8:00 PM - Dinkelspiel Auditorium - Tickets online at livelyarts.stanford.edu - $20 – $23 for students

Monday, November 3, 2008

Edward P. Jones Reading - Part of the Lane Lecture Series - 8:00 PM - Kresge Auditorium

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

MICHELLE TRAUB is a senior from Brooklyn, NY ANDREW VALENCIA is a junior from Dinuba, CA

Wednesday, November 19. 2008

SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN is a recent graduate from Shaker Heights, OH

TOM WILTZUS is a a junior from Champaign, IL ANDREW ZHOU is a senior from Fremont, CA

q: HOW CAN I SUBMIT TO LELAND?

– Leland publishes three times per year. We accept submissions on a rolling basis throughout the year. Submissions will be reviewed September through June, and we will do our best to respond within six to eight weeks.

– All submissions to Leland must be original, unpublished work. Please mention if you are submitting to other magazines simultaneously or if your work has received or is being considered for an award.

– Leland accepts and encourages submissions in a wide range of disciplines, including: fiction, poetry, art, creative nonfiction (e.g. memoir, campus culture, student life), reviews (books, movies, music) and political essays (full-length investigative pieces).

– The editors of Leland are concerned first and foremost with the quality of expression exhibited in a work, and not in the genre of work itself. Our goal is to have quality content across a breadth of disciplines, so please do not be afraid to innovate in your submissions.

– There is no expectation in terms of length of essays, poems, or fiction.

– Leland accepts submissions exclusively from current Stanford undergraduates.

– We encourage multiple submissions for as many issues to which you would like to contribute. That said, we request that you send in no more than six poems at a time and a maximum of four longer pieces.

– All submissions are judged anonymously by the editors.

Submissions can be sent to LelandQuarterly@gmail.com Check out lelandquarterly.com for more details.

LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2008

LOOP

Edward P. Jones Colloquium - 11:00 AM - Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460)

KATIE SALISBURY is a recent graduate from Arcadia, CA

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THECAMPUS

W H AT ?

WHERE? WHEN?

A NOTE ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Film and Discussion: The work of Tillie Olson - 7:30 PM - Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall

Saturday, December 6, 2008 Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ - 8:00 PM - Dinkelspiel Auditorium - Tickets online at livelyarts.stanford.edu - $12.50 for students

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Stegner Fellows John Evans and Harriet Clark reading - 7:00 PM - Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall

Friday, December 5, 2008

Paradise Lost Marathon Reading - 8:00 AM - 6:00 PM - Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall

Tuesday, December 9, 2008 A Chanticleer Christmas - 8:00 PM - Memorial Church - Tickets online at livelyarts.stanford.edu - $17 – $19 for students

q

Volume 3, Issue 1 Copyright Š 2008 by Leland Quarterly Stanford University http://lelandquarterly.com /