us vs them

poetry

fiction

nonfiction

criticism

visual art

from Davidson College Students

u s v s t he m

featuring Davidson College Literary Award Winning Writers Amanda Ottoway, Poetry Hannah Wright, Poetry Camilla Domonske, Fiction Amanda Lehr, Nonfiction

April/May 2012

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LIBERTAS|COVER ART

H s a r a - c l a i r e c h a m b l e s s

libertas

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us vs. them April/May 2012 Emily Romeyn and Vincent Weir Anonymous Will Reese Michael Bachman Laura Romeyn Hannah Wright Lauren Kamperman Tim Rauen Lucia Stacey Amanda Ottoway Madeleine Brown Camilla Domonoske Rebecca Hawk

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Editors’ Notes Letters to the Editors

5 5 5 8 24 10 10 11 11

POETRY 121 Peach Orchard Lane Erroneous Assumption My Little Pony What I Know of Communism Modern Man and Woman Hate-Horses in the Dungeon Wargame The Haus am Wannsee The Ex

7 15 21

FICTION Past Tense Lungstory Driving From Eros, LA

Mike Anderson Marie Doyon Amanda Lehr

4 6 17

Yuxi Wang

23

Will Stratford

12

Michael De$imone Hayden Higgins

26 25 26

Riley Ambrose

9

Will Stratford

10

Vincent Weir

12 14 14 19

Colin Thomson

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CREATIVE NONFICTION The Homophobic Laugh Smokers Non-Anonymous Bunburying in the Breadbasket: Queering the Male Appetite in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest Coveted Common Flavors MUSIC Purity Ring: Consummating New Art Energies Top 50 Albums of Our Generation Music for the People: DJ’S A-LIST Thirty-two Observations in Response to Stratford’s Top 50 FILM/MEDIA A Game of Complex Commerical Considerations Naïveté CRITICISM #Abstinance and Other Social Network Ethics Davidson vs. Yale College Power Ranking How Davidson Intellectuals Could Be More Like Fratstars Definitions: Doubt VISUAL ART

SaraClaire Chambless Jordan Luebekemann Vera Schulman Emily Romeyn 2 LIBERTAS

1 17 22 27

Dear Libertas, How come the front page of the last issue was called “Emily Romeyn?” I thought the magazine was called Libertas?

And why didn’t you include my picture? Why can’t you look at Truth in the eyes?

And I quote: “But while bodies certainly played a role in creating this issue…” –How many people did you have to kill to create an issue of Libertas?

Is this a reference to prostitution? That’s illegal. And wrong.

I like Vincent. He writes good.

And I quote: : While we remain a paper committed to publishing all well-intended submissions…” –Yes! I intend this!

I liked the gangsta title, “What a Poem Does, (yo).

I know who Homer is (remember, I represent the people).

I think all the poems are very serious. And I respect that.

I bet the upside down page was on purpose. Nice!

I still quote: “Music. Can’t live without it, can’t live without it.” Whoever wrote this is trying too hard.

I think I don’t understand “Last Stop.” I wonder if other people do. I know the writer does. I can sleep at night knowing the writer does.

Sarah Williams writes, “There are black and brown and white people, which are the easy ones to identify. If you don’t mind sounding like an arrogant asshole, I guess there’s the yellow and red people, too.” I really like what she’s getting at here. I understand.

“Porgy and Bess is a classic American opera, and, importantly, the first ever performed by an all-black cast.” I like the use of commas.

Who has ever heard of Bibio? I haven’t (the people). I bet he’s shit. Probably super artsy though (the people).

I have heard of “vomit girls.” I see them every Friday at F. They’re there.

Colin Thompson is so serious. I respect that. I wonder if he’s cute. Sorry. (The people).

Colin Thompson is a boy’s name. I could like boys or I could like girls.

Vincent Weir: “Most of us know the U.S. News and World Report numbers.” That’s a value judgment.

I stopped reading “A beautiful faith.” I got through part of it.

Reading the whole issue takes some time. I don’t know if I have the time to give to it. Who am I? The last page was like the basketball tournament. I liked watching Davidson play on TV. Proud to be a Davidson student, because some of our students can play basketball well. I watched in Commons, with the rest of you. The people.

Till next year.

Davidson’s lowest common denominator, Unanimous Anonymous

editors’ notes us vs. them

B

y selecting this theme, Libertas invited contributors to Other one another and arrange the chosen opponents on the page to have at it. While this theme could instigate some angry, confrontational writing, I was comforted that the open scales of an unassigned binary were what would inspirie that sort of venting.

Several submitters wrote from a literal us and authored pieces inspired by personal experience.

Content ranged from cheeky confrontation (Marie Doyon’s Smokers Non-Anonymous, 6) to aching disappointment (Colin Thomson’s Defnintions: Doubt, 13) to light-heartedly prophesy (Will Stratford’s Purity Ring: Consummating New Art Energies, 12), but the choice to reveal a personal moment or accumulated experience of conflict or confrontation energized each piece with its author’s earnest desire to be heard.

Libertas is also proud to feature in this issue award-winning writers Amanda Ottoway (“The Ex,” 11), Hannah Wright (“What I Know of Communism, 8; “Modern Man and Woman,” 24), Camilla Domonske (Lungstory, 15), and Amanda Lehr (Bunburying in the Breadbasket: Queering the Male Appetite in The Importance of Being Earnest, 17).

Polished styles, clear voices, and inspiring scholarship distinguish them as four of Davidson’s finest senior writers.

I want to thank Marie Doyon, our sole senior on staff, for her work as Creative Nonfiction editor this semester. Despite it being her Senior Spring, Marie brought her signature wit and boundless enthusiasm to the magazine, saturating her published essays with a readable and likeable sassiness. We wish her the best of luck, and she will be missed.

As an editor of an artistic publication, I take it

as my role to lead and encourage my staff through positive reinforcement and open dialogue. With many staff members traveling abroad, the Fall semester will bring new staff, new perspectives, and yes, new problems. But what better place to work them out? Libertas has always prided itself on being an open and creative safe-place where artistic people of every media can communicate, collaborate, and be heard campus-wide in print.

If you’ve yet to grace us with your ink, I encourage you to introduce us to your summerauthored artistry next semester.

With this I invite you to enjoy the last issue of Libertas of the 2011-12 school year.

is in a white person’s best interest. Oh certainly it would be in their best interest to help end racism—but is that what speaking out does? More often, it seems to fuel hate in the opposite direction. In my experience, race conversations seem intent to expose hegemonic privilege and publicly denounce any regress into it. If these denouncements are supposedly in the interest of both parties, then why do they so often shame whites to elevate non-whites? That’s certainly not a win-win, but it is a reason for white silence.

In today’s intergroup dialogues, it’s hard for whites to voice opinions about race without feeling humiliated for complacency or wrong opinions. I’m

not suggesting complacency and I’m certainly not suggesting humiliation. I’m suggesting that power may be like cash—that we can create more for everyone by coming up with ideas that benefit the producer and consumer. I’m suggesting that there may be a win-win solution that both sides would jump for, and that right now white reluctance to join in the conversation means there’s something wrong with the current attempts. I’m suggesting that both sides might be wrong today, but that both can be righted soon. I’m suggesting Us Vs. This.

‘til the Fall,

H e m i l y r o m e y n

us vs. race

I

n the weeks following two racially-charged campus incidents, Libertas would be remiss to exclude the issue of race from its reflections.

Yet it almost did. A month ago, when these pages were still in the planning stage, two members of our predominately white staff brought race-related pieces to the drawing board. Yet neither one came through—precisely because it seemed race was a topic too dangerous for whites to discuss (“without research,” that is—but who has time for lit mag research?).

As someone who has engaged race issues before, I don’t blame them, even if I lament the silence.

Unfortunately, I don’t see how speaking out today

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LIBERTAS|EDITORS’ NOTES

H v i n c e n t w e i r

The Homophobic

LAUGH

How comedy can marginalize minority groups with a smile H m i k e

T

a n d e r s o n

he GSA recently sent out an e-mail asking if any members of the LGBT community had ever felt marginalized in the classroom. Of course, it’s uncomfortable for a gay student to ponder this question. No one enjoys reflecting on times of exclusion from the larger community. It took a couple of e-mails to coax a response out of me, but I decided to act. Here, I’d like to parse out an instance in which I personally felt marginalized in the classroom, and then I’ll explain how I suspect homophobia operates subtly—it’s hard to recognize because it’s often masked with laughter.

In one of my classes this semester, we watched a film adaptation of a play we’d read earlier that week. In this production, a fourteenth-century king turns away from his queen to dote on his male lover. The king heaps piles of money on this man, which angers the nobles, who in turn revolt. The rebels then find the king’s lover and execute him.

In the next scene, the king discovers his lover’s fate and, of course, is devastated.

When we came across this scene in the film adaptation, when the king broke into tears, a few members of the class laughed. While it’s true that the actor’s performance was dramatic, I couldn’t help but feel offended. I imagine if we had watched a film where a man discovered his female lover had been executed, the mood in the room would’ve been much more sober (I’d like to recognize here that the professor shared my confusion at this laughter.

At the end of the film, he asked the classroom, “Is this funny?”).

I wish I had spoken up earlier, but here I am, expressing my distaste. I’m not attempting to shame any of my classmates. Rather, I’d like to point out a larger problem in hopes of an open dialogue: we often laugh at whatever feels abnormal to us. We marginalize the LGBT community with

a hearty chuckle. We shove them into the corner and say, implicitly, “That’s odd,” thereby upholding the status quo. This response is not okay. I would ask that we think about why we laugh at certain things. Not everyone’s sharing in the joke.

In the last couple weeks, my criticism has found a friend in Dr. Randy Ingram’s lectures. He taught me about the conservatism of commercial comedy.

When I say “comedy,” I do not necessarily mean “funny;” I’m referring to the genre as it was understood in the Renaissance. The comedy is a relatively light-hearted, sometimes humorous play that has a happy ending. This genre often presents so-called “abnormal” content. But so-called “deviant” sexual behavior is “corrected” by the end of the play—at the end of so many comedies, there are as many as three heterosexual weddings, or at least male-female unions. Any threat to the status quo is nullified and wrapped up in a box with a ribbon on top.

This is an awfully loaded concept, I know. Dr. Ingram helped explain with an unlikely example: Superbad. After an intense bromance between Jonah Hill and Michael Cera’s characters, the two best friends separate. They pair off with their new girlfriends, and the last shot, pointedly, shows the two couples riding separate escalators, and going in opposite directions.

This moment feels a little too neatly packaged, given the intensity of Michael and Jonah’s friendship. For example, toward the end of the film, Jonah Hill and Michael Cera’s characters have a very intimate moment: intoxicated, they seclude themselves in a bedroom to have some bro time.

They say, “I love you” repeatedly. Then, Jonah, in a display of affection, starts poking Michael’s nose and, with every touch, says, “Boop.” “Boop. Boop.

Boop.” Cute, no?

I’m not trying to argue that this moment is homoerotic. But it is an expression of male-male desire

that isn’t quite, well, “normal” in the way some of us like to define same-sex relationships.

This scene is on YouTube, and a lot of the comments essentially state the same thing: “No homo lol.” This is where I see comedy’s darker side; it can provoke laughter with conservative overtones.

Laughter at Jonah and Michael, in this instance, implies, “Oh, if I were in their place, I’d feel ridiculous. It would suck if people thought we were gay together ‘cause that’s just not normal.” An “lol” usually punctuates one of these comments.

The “no homo” response to male-male affection is homophobic discourse, even if the speaker doesn’t realize it. It’s as if male-male affection needs an excuse, needs to be categorized as something apart from homosexual desire. Sure, plutonic and erotic man-on-man relationships are not one and the same. But why must there be so much anxiety about it? I think Superbad shares this discomfort. The audience laughs at the male-male affection, and then the boys and girls pair off at the end of the film. “No homo.”

You all have heard that expression. I’m sure you’ve heard some others, too: “That’s so gay,” “Fag,” and many more.

Homophobia has been more overt on this campus, too. The most memorable instance is Michael Spangler’s infamous Davidsonian column of two years ago, when he called for an end to the Day of Silence, because, according to him, showing respect for gay people flies in the face of Davidson’s Presbyterian tradition. The administration’s response to his bordering-on-hate speech was tepid at best. They said it’s up for debate. Don’t call the struggle with homophobia a “debate;” it’s a fight for rights and respect.

Let’s not be so passive next time. Let’s do away with homophobic rants and expressions like “No homo.” And let’s talk. The best way to combat homophobia at Davidson is an open and ongoing dialogue.

My Little Pony Yesterday I passed through daze & daze until the day became bright and alertness took me fully.

I formatted questions in my mind before going verbal, after some time summoning brain suds asking nurse if I was dead, & she said, no woman, you are not. There is still time to drop.

Lavender bath at six O’clock your head is shrinking, your eyes are growing, your hair is hay, here comes your mask.

Here lies the very first time in this life that I’m draped in a harp, streaming let’s go on down to the nursery, gotta thread you a newborn needle.

I’m an ancient ship rocking itself to sleep in a hangar, never going to make it, rocking itself to sleep in a hangar. My veins have always been tiny, my blood has always been plums. I was once a little girl.

Hl a u r a r o m e y n

121 Peach Orchard Lane The red oak’s imbricated bark.

The midnight wind.

Dew-sapped front lawn grass.

The ceiling fans’ whir overheard Faintly. Light like overhead Projectors casts florescent On the bed, you. I In the tree. Kissing Streetlights goodnight. You Kiss your husband. Between us A screen falls. The silhouettes Like shadow puppets Stage a window show For the great horned owl, The wing-rubbed crickets And me.

Hw i l l r e e s e

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ERRONEOUS ASSUMPTION Hey, you.

You’re different.

You’re different and it’s causing me to Boldly judge you in the comfort of my cranium.

‘Cause yesterday I heard you, Talking with that lisp – the one where you Flourish each “s” into this fabulous hiss – And I’d be remiss to dismiss such a hideous accent As slewed pronunciation slipped through strange lips.

You just sound gay.

Why ask?

H m i c h a e l b a c h m a n

SMOKERS NON-ANONYMOUS H m a r i e d o y o n

T

elling someone you smoke cigarettes in Argentina was like admitting that you drink coffee. Not a big deal. You could buy a pack for two bucks at any of the thousands of kiosks that seemed to punctuate every street corner of Buenos Aires. Didn’t want a whole pack? Fear not, you could buy loosies too. Well, actually, the sale of loose cigarettes got banned at some point during my year there, but you could generally wrangle one out of the nice kioskeros with a butterfly bat of your eyelashes. And if that didn’t work, it wasn’t unusual for strangers to bum squares off each other at street intersections, door stoops, or bus stops.

Smoking was technically banned in public places, but like most rules in Argentina, the law was more of a suggestion than anything. You could smoke in taxis, provided the cabby was cool with it (and sometimes he’d even join you). You could smoke in nightclubs, when they got full enough that the bouncers’ lasers couldn’t single you out (and then everyone was doing it). You could even smoke in back of public buses (given it was late enough at night).

Have I made my point?

I will not lie to you and say I was an impervious stronghold of health, a relentless crusader against cigarettes. Hell, most of you have probably seen me ripping cigs around campus. For a pre-disposed social smoker, such as I was going in, the Buenos Aires smoking culture was an irresistible trap. I joined the masses of American students who crystallized their addictions while studying abroad. Guilty as charged.

I had eleven months of pleasant brainwash. Then, when I came back to the US, one year and one very

6 LIBERTAS|NONFICTION

dirtied pair of lungs later, you can imagine my surprise—not only to find that the price of a pack had soared to $10 (at least in NY), but to notice that people were giving me flagrant dirty looks when I lit up.

At first it made me tremendously uncomfortable— it bred a kind of paranoia. As I crossed campus, I would pass people and see them glance at my cigarette, and I would worry what they were thinking.

I would notice this moment of recognition (real or imagined, but mostly real) when they said to themselves—“Ohhhh, she’s a smoker.” The voice was always disdainful in my head. Oh my Dios, I would worry to myself, did they respect me less now?

Would they think I was dumb? Would boys find me repulsive?

And it almost took the appeal out of my cigarette.

Almost. But then I started to think, you know what?

Screw those people! Half of them probably social smoke on the weekends anyway, whatever that means (really just using alcohol and nightfall as an excuse to enjoy the pleasure I allow myself in broad daylight).

So I continued down my self-destructive road with an added air of defiance. And I found myself part of a new community: smokers non-anonymous. When I passed other people puffing on a cig, I began to reciprocate the nod of acknowledgement, the little eye twinkle. This was our unspoken expression of commiseration, a silent understanding of the trials and tribulations we both suffered as part of the same self-selecting minority.

Slowly over the months I picked out my fellow smokers. The companionship they provided, even

from a distance, helped strengthen my sense of entitlement.

Now I understand the dangers of second-hand smoke. I understand that people should have a right to clean air. But what about smokers’ rights? To a motherfuckin’ cigarette, in peace, without anybody mean muggin’ the shit outta you? It’s bad enough that we’re quarantined to small, disgusting rooms in the airport that reek of death and the stagnant stench of travelers’ sweat. It’s bad enough that we are asked to leave the empty patio of the Mellow Mushroom to smoke in the street. Not so mellow now, huh? It’s bad enough that we spend half our allowance voluntarily killing ourselves. Just let us do it in peace.

Let’s be clear on something: I no longer get my feelings hurt when you look at me like I just called your mom a dirty word. It’s that I just don’t appreciate it. It’s unnecessary, and quite frankly, childish. I promise you, you’re not going to change my habits with one nasty glare. So really, it’s just a waste of energy on everyone’s part: yours for the contortion of facial muscles into a position that will convincingly scream, “you’re disgusting, stop that nastiness!” and mine for the deep sigh of annoyance and exaggerated eye roll that I am obligated to repay you with.

Smokers are people too. We have rights. Cigarettes are still legal. Fuck yeah we know they’re bad for us. We don’t live under a rock. We just smoke there, because you won’t let us do it anywhere else. We’re not asking you to stand next to us and inhale deeply.

Just carry on you wayward son, and keep your dirty looks to yourself.

Hj o r d a n l u e b e k e m a n n

Past Tense H m a d e l e i n e b r o w n

I

t was nearly dark out when I got home from the salon. I let myself in through the back door, and allowed the keys slip from my fingers and clatter to the floor as I headed for the kitchen sink. I splashed my face with water from the faucet, soaking my front.

“Ma,” I called. I slid out of my heels and stripped down to my shift as I made my way from kitchen to dining room. It was ninety-six degrees out, and the stiff, mint green canvas dress I had to wear at the salon was soaked under the armpits and around the waist where it clung tightest. As it hit the floor a cloud of hair clippings rose from it. I could never manage to shake them all out.

Barefoot and formless in my unstructured cotton shift, I padded into the living room. Ma sat in her leather recliner by the window, bony hands tangled in a crochet blanket on her lap. Eyes trained on the doorway, her features were alert with palpable energy. Her jaw, frozen in concentration, sent currents of barelysuppressed emotion through the muscles of her face. The tufts of pencil-tight curls around her temples shivered at something, or someone only she could see or hear.

Then her lips curled into a smile I recognized—the one that didn’t extend to her eyes—and I knew it was Dean.

I’d never seen a picture of my father. In my mind, Dean was a smell, a color, a tiny house without windows in the stifling heat of summer. Until Ma began to grow distant from the reality of things, he’d only been an absence. I was nearly grown when Ma’s past began to encroach upon the present, and his appearance in the spaces of doorways gave definition to his void.

The first revelation was an accident. I was only five in her mind, and just then I was her older sister, Louisa. In spite of my guilt I listened raptly. Dean had been a mechanic.

“At first, it wasn’t so bad, the smell. Except on his hands, those always smelled of gasoline. But the longer we lived in that house, the smaller it got and the more that smell began to fill it up. I imagined the air shriveling and falling down where he walked. Choked. And his hands…they were terrible. They weren’t the same hands, you see. Six years we were together, and those hands…” she laughed.

“When I first met him I marveled at them. They were big and broad: one alone could near wrap around my waist at the time! The calluses on his palms sent shivers through my skin… But then the grease wouldn’t come out of his hands anymore. I first noticed it gathering in the crease where his fingers met his palm. Between the calluses, like little hills, the grease gathered. Locked in.

I tried everything. I scrubbed them with lemon juice, soaked them in whiskey.

They wouldn’t come clean. Before long his hands had turned black.”

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Later I learned of the black, purple, green of the bruises my father’s black hands had given her, and I understood how the smell of gasoline became one of foreboding. The taste of stale beer often lingered on his lips from the cone-top cans he emptied as soon as he’d left the house. As soon he returned, he’d start on her. I wondered if the tarnish of Dean’s hands was exaggerated in her memory now.

Over the past few years, the memories that lapped against the dams of her secrecy had begun to leak through. Those dams, which had held in old fears, the details of how we’d come to live this way—my mother and I and my catalogue of imagined fathers–couldn’t hold much of anything anymore, past or present.

They spilled out of her, unraveling the self-pity I’d nurtured since childhood.

“When I found out I was pregnant, I began having nightmares…I dreamed she came in the middle of the night while I slept, that she climbed her way out of me with a pair of little black hands,” I’d heard Ma confessing to the wallpaper. “When she finally did come, it was afternoon. She came quickly, and she didn’t cry, she just looked surprised. She was so curious, looking around at everything in the room. I lay in bed with her, her tiny hands curled around my fingers and I looked with her. I watched dust particles become invisible in the fading light, and when she looked at me, I hoped to God she couldn’t see those horrible things I’d dreamed.”

And there she sat now, looking. Neither Dean nor any of Ma’s visitors ever came closer than a few feet inside the door to the living room. Maybe the intensity that now animated her face was a visible sign of some mental energy she expended to keep them there. Or bring them closer.

At this thought, it occurred to me for the first time that the small smile I’d read as defiance might be genuine. Maybe at the sight of him she betrayed a long-forgotten fondness, in spite of herself.

“Goodnight, Ma.” I closed the door to my room softly behind me and collapsed onto the bed. I thought I could hear an audible crunch as my hair-sprayed curls compressed upon impact with the mattress, and the smell like fresh paint hit my nostrils.

Before I’d even lost consciousness, I began to dream.

An ant ventured its fragile eyelash of a leg from the stalk to the satiny underside of a tobacco leaf as I watched from below. It advanced each leg slowly, rhythmically, like the oars of a canoe until on the fourth it lost its grip; it disappeared once again into the thicket of grass below that was supple as water. My elbows burrowed into the moist ground as I scooted beneath airtight canopy. At last I saw sunshine peeking through the stalks, and, before I drifted to sleep, I thought how glad I was not to be the ant, the world suffused with green light maybe for days.

What I Know of Communism What the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all, is its own gravedigger.

1) At the market, I buy two postcards. Wall murals of Salvador Allende and the Communist flag. The old merchant kisses them both. Cards held high in the air, she says, To help you remember.

2) I see my first movie alone. Ticket stub, small badge of independence, of knowing the right sequence of small, orange buses to take. Small oranges to be peeled, overlooking the city from a kitchen on the twenty-eighth floor, or at the juice stand on the corner, standing, as sun floods fast between buildings. There are many kinds of orange here.

a. Most movies are shot in English, overlaid with accentless Spanish dubbing, the hills and dells flattened out of speech until no one can tell where anyone else is from.

b. The film I see is Chilean. The only one in Spanish. Sparsely attended. The premise follows the man who autopsied Salvador Allende. Just a ham and eggs and porn man. Some nights his sultry neighbor, a dancer, comes over for dinner and the occasional good-humored. They are middle-aged, crushed cigarettes, not attractive, but people you could see on the bus.

c. The plot is quiet; the audience, popcornless. Glass afraid of itself, breaking in the streets. Tanks rolling, the twitching feet of those in the audience who lived through the erratic blackouts of childhood, rationed days without orange juice, a screen taller than all of us.

d. Mortician as leading man.

3)

He sneaks his dancer-neighbor into the morgue to show her the body of Allende.

Did he kill himself ? goes unanswered.

8 LIBERTAS|POETRY

Hh a n n a h w r i g h t

A Game of Complex Commercial Considerations H r i l e y a m b r o s e

C

ersei is a bitch, to purposefully say the least.

Joffrey is too, but no one cares about him.

Having read the popular fantasy series by George R. R. Martin, I submit that Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have done a marvelous job thus far in providing a true-to-thebook adaptation. This adaptation demands a lot of its actors in its maintenance of type-resistant characters, especially of Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister). Playing this enormously complex character, it should be noted, demands that Headey probe further than multiple viewings of Mean Girls for inspiration.

The role demands an organic, visceral knowledge and understanding of what I will vaguely call love.

She has to play the chimera, while simultaneously showing us that a mythological composite is the most natural of creatures.

Generally, the story revolves around characters’ interactions as they each work in their own way to determine the next king of Westeros following the death of the late King Robert. Cersei, as Robert’s Queen, remains in power, providing manipulative and biased advice to her child-king Joffrey. The titular “game” refers to the political maneuverings of each of the series’ characters to either secure the throne for their own party or, given their reluctant involvement, to remain alive. The game, or the relationship between the main characters, takes on an impossibly complex nature difficult to convey on the screen. Benioff and Weiss successfully executed the entropic effect of the first season and now must deal with their own chaotic creation. I offer this praise with one proviso: Maintain the integrity of the novels in their complexity of character and psychology; keep it so the audience has trouble deciding who should be king; do not provide us with a clear enemy; let the characters exist solely within and for the diegetic world and not for program approval ratings or financial benefits. The political allegory of the story fulfills its purpose so long as there remains a degree of uncertainty to the characters’ actions and fates.

(Spoiler alert) Jaime – that bastard who almost kills with shocking indifference our paradigm of innocence to cover up his incestuous relationship – becomes impossibly awesome. I say “awesome” in order to avoid prescriptive terms such as “good” or “bad,” or any similar adjectives that categorize the character and limit his agency. I say “awesome” because the audience is not allowed to appropriate Jaime’s character; his psychology remains out of

9

reach and enigmatic. I say “awesome” because his actions as portrayed in the later books evoke, in their immediate context, a gut reaction, a superficial judgment that is best signified by the term “awesome” (“inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear”).

The shift from the dehumanizing epithet “Kingslayer” to Jaime parallels the revelation of his own human character, endowing his contentious actions with, in the least, a believable explanation, and, at its greatest, a sympathy and – dare I say – love, usually reserved for only the most tragic of heroes.

An explanation then about why my Direwolf undies are in a wad: from the first three episodes of the second season I can already tell that the writers are beginning to feel the immense pressure of continuing the series. Martin displays his genius by juggling multiple story lines without sacrificing the relevancy of each. In other words, he creates a single believable world through the coalescence of dominant paradigms. In doing this he necessarily sacrifices, at times, the direct portrayal of a character, allowing the vast diegetic communication networks of the ravens to deliver second-hand the actions of those silent characters. For example, the coincidental presence of Katelyn and the strategy rooms of the Lannisters convey and sustain much of Robb Stark’s presence in the second book. In the miniseries, it appears as if Daenerys will remain, for the time being, suspended in the middle of the desert; the Daenerys favoring watcher will remain in almost unbearable suspense. The novel appears better suited to maintaining identities, as it can, due to its medium specificities, provide more information than the camera lens. Silence and simplification, both specific to characters, appear to be the easiest ways to maintain a coherent plot, but these will necessarily detract from the show’s fidelity to the novel. The writers are in a tough situation concerning character presentation.

A prima facie Cersei, admixture of Eve and Helen, dons the mantle of standard female characters who just fuck everything up (or get blamed for it anyhow). Yet,while Eve’s fate seemed oddly predetermined by the circumstances of her creation and her nature, Cersei retains a characteristic obstinate agency, a factor of volatility resistant of convenient classification. Her fate seems realistically indeterminate. Cersei does manage to fuck most things up (mostly through the agency of the child-king Joffrey), but she diverges from the effluvium of sexist female stereotype, that symptom of a slovenly mind,

LIBERTAS|FILM/MEDIA

by exposing a psychology deeply rooted in her love for her family; she differs from Ned Stark only in her lack of a more principled, extra-familial moral code and her outstanding ability to keep her head attached to her shoulders (and that’s just the point, isn’t it?).

She is a bitch only because she kills people, and her particular killing of people is not justified by my dominating, 21st Century sense of justice and equality (perhaps Robespierre may have liked her – who knows?).

The point is, Cersei cannot be written off as an “evil” character, a Cruella Deville with bastard children. Doing so necessarily reduces the series to a fairy tale, making it Walt Disney’s extravagant wet dream (think Khal Drogo as The Beast, Cersei as the Wicked Witch, Sansa as Cinderella, Arya as Mulan?...). I personally dislike her at the moment. I personally dislike her because her family-centrism is quite obviously antithetical to the demands of ruling a kingdom, the incongruous combination of which results in her condemnable actions and appeals for a concrete negative classification. Other than that, I applaud her devotion both to her kids and her brother/lover Jaime.

Understanding, then, that adaptation necessarily requires certain modifications in the story, I would humbly ask of the writers and producers that they place the maintenance of the original characters at the top of whatever priority list they may have in bold typeface framed by flashing light bulbs (I am envisioning a 5th grade electricity project: “press the paper-clip to the thumb tack and see which aspect of the novel I like the best…”).

Everybody who has ever read fantasy understands that in a series as large as Martin’s there will inevitably be sections of almost unbearable boredom. The inertia generated by the preceding chapters will, if the series is good, carry the reader through the assault on his or her need for immediate gratification.

Though this tendency may be antithetical to the commercial exigencies of a popular television show, I would urge the producers to get creative in the boardrooms, explaining that this “is new, y’know?

It’s a fantasy mini-series, not a titflick like Entourage; we are trying to make the genre”; and, ultimately, they should argue for a broader evaluation system than the standard episode-by-episode system. The fact is, I (and I hope I am not alone in this) want to see whom the damn king or queen is going to be; I don’t want to watch the fulfillment of a hackneyed and self-fulfilling script.

Wargame H t i m r a u e n

I want to play a video game that makes me never want to play another video game, but makes me want to.

I want to play a video game that I don’t stop playing after the war is over.

I want to play a video game where the woman in the factory that casted bullets has a face and her face is achingly beautiful to someone.

I want to play a video game that makes me want to go home.

I want to play a video game that makes me want.

I want to play a video game where the place I have destroyed exists after I have destroyed it.

I want to play a video game where someone has to burn the bodies, and that someone has a name and her children have names.

I want to play a video game where the man I killed today was kind to a beggar yesterday.

I want to play a video game where the enemies have names and their children have names.

I want to play a video game where a frag grenade kills a terrorist and also a child who might have become a terrorist but was not a terrorist.

I want to play a video game where hope matters to people who only exist to someone else.

I want to play a video game where hope matters to me.

I want to play a video game where I sit in a bunker for nine hours with nothing to eat or drink just staring into a washed out horizon at nothing and then die.

I want to play a video game that exactly simulates the texture and color of my blood.

Naïveté

I want to play a video game my mother begged me not to play.

I want to play a video game that hates me.

I want to play a video game about war.

I want to play a video game that makes me hate war and want war.

I want to play a video game that makes me hate.

I want to play a video game that will ruin me.

Hate-Horses in the Dungeon Worthless men bleed for borders slung on violet hills.

Hate lets midnight wax harm on the horizon And hunger leaps silently.

Hands will kill kind loyalty when it comes.

An archer shot a man in his back.

We’re hiding in the wet-bricked dungeon, Then striking the men found between the cracks; Last night sought no peace.

Hear the sounds of marching feet slipping on blades, Ungrounded. Hear sounds not of bloodbath, But of daring shields on weak arms Begging for grace amidst wickedness.

Wealth has a high, menacing pull Towards green villains, dumb, bombarded With altar-stricken idols that awaken loathing.

Who are these soul stealers, these hate-horses in the dungeon?

Hl a u r e n k a m p e r m a n

W

atching a Hayao Miyazaki film, I am always awe-struck by the expressive hand-drawn animation. But what tends to linger with me, and what the beautiful animation so effectively works toward, is a narrative mode and ethos vastly different from that of the Western tradition.

For instance, in the West we are taught that a sound understanding comes from observing differences, but Eastern thought draws attention to notions of synthesis, not analysis. The ethos of coexistence manifests most explicitly in Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke (1997), in which the fantastically noble-hearted Ashitaka struggles to maintain a violently threatened

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harmony between humanity and nature. The Western lens may decode Ashitaka’s pure intentions as childish and naïve, condescending to the film as a charming but altogether unviable account of human character. Yet that is exactly what makes Miyazaki’s films so enduring, their candid insistence on goodness in the world.

Nothing comes further from the straightforward narrative logic and simple ethos in Miyazaki’s films than the ironic modes that pervade so much of the modern Western canon of film and literature. Without making a value judgment in favor of a particular narrative mode, I wonder if our constant exposure to narrative

LIBERTAS|POETRY|FILM

irony obscures our reading of works that do not work within that mode at all. I confess, I couldn’t help but chuckle during Princess Mononoke’s introductory voiceover, which, in all its unadulterated sincerity, never once doubts the viewer’s suspension of disbelief: In ancient times, the land lay covered in forests, where, from ages long past, dwelt the spirits of the gods. Back then, man and beast lived in harmony, but as time went by, most of the great forests were destroyed.

Why was this forthright introduction funny to me? As an English

major, I fear I am trading the capacity to be swept away by fanciful storytelling for a nose that can sniff out irony around every corner. Fortunately, Miyazaki helps remind us that we are still capable of entertaining our imaginations. But in order to do so, we must be able to shake off inappropriate modes of interpretations. Only then can we delight in the vibrant colors of Miyazaki’s creations.

I quickly realized that my chuckle was directed at myself, at the absurdity of my own hesitation. How inappropriate of me to have doubted.

Of course the spirit of the gods dwelt in the forests from ages long past.

Duh-uh.

The Haus am Wannsee On a bright September Friday, all brisk wind and white sunlight, three sailboats drift like clouds in a world upside down, along the green-grey waters of Wannsee.

They pass by summer homes

[children with ice cream beards,

red-lipped women sipping Radlers and smoking cigarettes] they pass by docks where red-faced boys drink stolen wodka, and slip shaking hands up summer dresses.

And they pass by the Haus am Wannsee, shrouded by willows, the ornate ribbons of concrete that twist to form reliefs along the grey-green walls, glowing white in sporadic bursts of sunlight, as clouds shift.

The Ex

The flowerbeds glow orange and red, even in the shade – but who tends to the Gardens at the Haus am Wannsee now?

Say you’ve been dating a woman for three years. You think she might be it – that’s how perfect you think she is. You’ve spoken with her father, browsed the sparkly stuff, thrown out your magazines, put the toilet seat down.

Surely, the Nazis smoked cigarettes, flicking butts into the flowerbeds so that the soil soaked up the dregs of tobacco and Nazi saliva – and the housekeeper filled the Haus with

She’s a poet, which is one of the things you love most about her. She’s good for you. She keeps you unbuttoned. She does odd things like collecting your semen in measuring cups and pouring it on her papers, but you find this arousing.

formaldehyde and benzene bouquets – and perhaps, even now, the roses and carnations blossoming from sick soil, glow with chemicals and the spit of the other gardeners

[those who planted kommische flowerbeds –

soil, fertile, watered with blood, and blossoming,

ever blossoming,

with the bodies of Jews.]

She tastes like a bubble, salty and a little bitter. Sometimes you’re not sure where her skin ends and the air begins. You float and merge. But say one day she writes a poem about you. Not about your eyes, or your mouth, or your dick even, but about your inadequacy as an emotional and intellectual companion – an attack that cripples everything you thought she thought of you.

That she might prefer another’s manhood is something you think maybe you could concede. But if she doesn’t want the man beneath then you’ve lost her, to the measured restraints of an artistic vision.

Say this happens to you. Say you read this poem on your lunch break on a Thursday. Say she tells you she’s published it.

Say you tell her it’s over. Say she starts to cry. Say you gather her tears in a measuring cup. Say you pour them on her manuscript.

The sailboats skim the water whose waves lap at the soil of the Haus am Wannsee –

still toxic, from times of a world upside down.

Say the lines blur.

Ha m a n d a o t t o w a y

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LIBERTAS|POETRY

H l u c i a s t a c e y

#Abstinance and Other Social Network Ethics Why Gossip Presents a Unique Problem to the Social Network Generation and What You Can Do to Stop It

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ach age is cursed to learn and blessed to begin solving the next moral problem. 2500 years ago when Athenian aesthetes realized that statues didn’t buy happiness, they began a long tradition of philosophy in the hopes of satiating their complex desires with immaterial solutions. In the 1830s and ‘40s, prescient thinkers of early capitalism saw the evils of class inequality and sparked a long chain of attempts to solve it. In the 1960s, great leaders like Dr. King and Harvey Milk exposed the hypocritical limits of civil rights to a multi-cultural American democracy mature enough to respond. The cycle continues.

Today, in the age of social networks, what defining problem must we confront? Certainly the civil rights battles our parents started have yet to end. But our generation knows what it needs to do about these ills and devotes much energy to doing it. The ethicists of the past did well.

Meanwhile, our age possesses enough integrity (in both senses) to merit its own struggles—and therefore its own contribution to ethics.

@ v a n g o g h t m i l k If our post-9/11 world is indeed marked most by the hypertrophy of communication—by mobile phones, the Internet, and social networks—then perhaps the problem of our age lies somewhere atop this issue.

When any substance increases, all its properties magnify; when communication increases, its benefits increase with its drawbacks. Such is true of gossip. The problem of gossip is neither new nor particularly offensive at first glance—certainly less offensive than racism—but its harm increases as communication plays a larger role in defining human life.

At a small school like Davidson, we see gossip’s unique power to damage reputations and prevent social mobility.

First, we were just talking about S----’s classroom comment, then we started talking about her eating disorder-then we made generalizations about her character.

Suddenly, in a school where we will soon encounter S., we strike her down before she can defend herself.

And so it seems that social networking makes our broader culture more and more like Davidson. Increasing connections shrink the world, strip our shields of privacy, and make us increasingly vulnerable to reputa-

tion attacks. Perhaps we, more than other generations, must confront this problem. If so, the age-old issue of gossip—of negative judgments—takes on a unique urgency in our time. Civil rights and class were once unchallenged assumptions—acknowledged problems, yes, but thought unconquerable. Somehow we must learn how to balance shrewd decision-making with charitable renderings. We must learn how to describe people in a way that leaves them free to challenge our descriptions.

We must balance the freedom of our tongues with the confines of a socially networked world.

If this argument holds and history offers precedent, we will be called to sacrifice old liberties to make way for a more ethical social contract.

One way to start looks like this: when you describe people, try to do it in a way that lets them have the last word. When you tell stories, try to create autonomous characters through your words--subjects rather than objects, real people rather than charactures. This is a serious art, one that many novelists have tried and failed to employ. Fortunately we live in an age where new media will likely replace novels.

Purity Ring: Consummating New Art Energies Hw i l l s t r a t f o r d

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ometimes we feel history move. In response to an exhibition of Manet and the PostImpressionists in London, Virginia Wolfe famously wrote, “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” While I can’t say as much about March 21, 2012, the Purity Ring concert in Chapel Hill seemed to impart a modest rupture in the way live music is carried out. Let me relate my experience to you.

The concert cannot be reduced to the music of Corin Roddick and Megan James, the duo that make up Purity Ring. The whole atmosphere of the place conspired together to create the impression of modernity. It hit me right about the time when the fresh pop melodies, engulfed by sub-bass leaning against our bodies, were pantomimed to Megan’s

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mallets carefully striking the color-shifting lamp-like arrangements, basically a makeshift plastic instrument/art object that work as MIDI triggers to produce synthesized sounds. There was absolutely no fierceness behind her movements. You could say they lacked passion. Each measured stroke of the mallet seemed to say, “This is what I’ll do. I’ll hit these colorful lights in the dark, and I’ll wear a prim vintage dress when I do it. What else is there to do?”

It was a spectacle to behold: the perfect, and perfectly simple, visual-aural synchronization with its brazen correspondence in time, the composed earnestness in Megan’s face, the childlike attentiveness directing her mallet strokes, the humpty-dumpty stage arrangement of drum skins and lanterns, Corin’s skinny body, the scruff on his face, the

LIBERTAS|CRITICISM; MUSIC

discipline behind his movements on whatever new machine the kids these days press to make music, the delicate sway in the crowd’s legs, the way that they all seemed to be dancing with their brains, the solidarity in being there.

Purity Ring’s sound is not avant-garde. In fact, they classify their music as “future pop.” And that’s exactly what it felt like, a sound that the new generation of young people could rally behind. It was impossible to imagine the same show taking place even ten years ago. Whether it was the minimalist backdrop, just three solid-colored drapes and a few bright lights, or the captivating image of Megan holding up a lantern while singing in the dark, they created an atmosphere, more of a snapshot really– an exhibition of what our generation has to offer.

Definitions: Doubt

Long-Time Columnist Laments the Ways Davidson Doesn’t Live Up to Its Promises

I

n the past six issue of Libertas, I have taken what I hoped was the tough-love position on Davidson’s culture. My plan for this issue was to take a stance on race. The issue of race, depending on your perspective, receives either far too much attention or not enough. This first article had what I think are some tough questions on how we view race as part of identity at Davidson, but was intentionally incendiary and had not been discussed with enough people from different backgrounds. As fitting as this article seems for the “color” and “Us Versus Them” issue, I really haven’t the stomach to publish an article purposefully controversial and intellectually dishonest.

The other reason I want to step back from hard criticism this issue is that, for the first time in three years at Davidson, I have felt disappointed with the community here.

Instead of openly confronting the College’s problems, administration and students alike try instead to either ignore issues or abashedly project the opposite. Examples that come to mind are race, vandalism, sexual assault on the Court, and until very recently, the role of Davidson’s Presbyterian heritage in the operations of the college and lives of students. Most importantly, I am disappointed in how the college—again both from the administrative and student ends—claims to be intellectual community when that clearly is not the case. An intellectual community has more in common than studying on the same campus—it has a common priority of fostering creative, analytic minds in the search for truth.

I think we can all see that the intellectual life (closely tied to,

but not the same as, one’s academic life) is not what defines a Davidson student’s experience at the college. Administration from the president to tour guides tells us that Davidson College is a place to cultivate the mind, and we tell ourselves that we work exceptionally hard in our academics. The truth, though, is that most Davidson students find a corner of academics—again, not to be unduly conflated with intellect—and stick to it without allowing it to take over their whole college experience or branching to other disciplines.

I don’t think any one person can decide who Davidson college is for. I will never say that Davidson should be exclusively for those who plan to be academics or otherwise make a career in an intellectual circle. But the rhetoric of “community of scholars” that we hear so often is bordering, at this point, on an outright lie. That every Davidson student spends every night engaged in some philosophical discussion is not the goal—but the whole Davidson family does itself a disservice by pretending that cultivating one’s intellect takes precedence over grades, alcohol abuse, or job prospects.

Writing from a place of disappointment, I am not wholly comfortable with such a stark criticism. In past issues I have been so in love with Davidson that I know my criticisms came from a hope of improvement. At the moment, I worry that my criticisms are more emotional than objective. For that I apologize, as I expect that my disappointment created an unnecessarily negative tone— but I cannot continue to claim pride in Davidson conscious of its inconsistencies.

H c o l i n t h o m s o n

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LIBERTAS|CRITICISM

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Davidson Vs. Yale Is Davidson College Pretending to Be a University?

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iberal arts colleges supposedly differ so much from other universities that they merit a separate ranking system.

Yet even this divide has a chance to mislead us about Davidson.

While the statistical virtues of the liberal arts—small classes, pleasant ratios of various kinds and undergraduate focus—apply here, the spirit of our student body often strays from the liberal arts into that of national universities.

In “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” former Yale professor and alum William Deresiewicz laments the shortfalls of his alma mater. Lest we condone Yale for producing leaders like George Bush and John Kerry, Deresiewicz says, we should challenge its educational method. Under the current system, elite schools seek to “manufacture” wealthy alumni who already believe they do everything right. Elite universities encourage students to master efficiency: climb ladders faster and higher than everyone else, they say. Moral shortcuts are unfortunate necessities. The source of this efficiency model, and the “most damning disadvantage of an elite education” is, according to Deresiewicz, “profound anti-intellectualism.” If this seems counterintuitive, it’s simply because we misunderstand what intellectualism means. Kids at elite universities may be the smartest (at least in the narrow analytic sense) they may work harder than anyone else—“indeed, harder than any previous generation”—but being an intellectual means more than being smart and doing homework.

Intellectualism is a lifestyle, not an assignment. Intellectuals have a chance to be the greatest leaders because they cultivate a passion for truth--because they challenge preconceived beliefs more thoroughly than others. And according to Deresiewicz, intellectuals grow the most at liberal arts colleges.

But here at Davidson we may be in danger of producing even worse leaders than the Yalies.

While admission pamphlets and other literatures depict us as an intellectual haven—a place where students and faculty collaborate, where small classes foster passion for ideas and facilitate their pursuit—we more often remember our education as a sweatshop, a book obstacle between us and our weekend playground.

Davidson may in fact be a place where Yale rejects reconvene to try ladder climbing on smaller ladders—to self-congratulate with less confidence. It seems that the same attitudes of anti-intellectualism pervading elite universities exist here on a smaller, less-endowed scale.

I remember waiting outside a professor’s office one day listening to a student ask for help with transfer apps to Georgetown, Cornell, and Vanderbuilt. “I need a more pretegious degree because of the job I want to get,” he said.

“No one’s heard of Davidson so it can’t really help me later on.”

As false as the observation was, I remember agreeing at the time.

Like the student in question, I too am a Yale reject, and just as guilty of equating big names with good education.

To state the obvious, we aren’t Yale, nor could we ever be. We don’t have the resources or the raw talent to compete at their level. But we shouldn’t want to either. Davidson, the school we chose through whatever reasons or fates, offers us something Yale doesn’t—the chance for a real education. While we may not have Wall Street connections across the quad, we have intellectual resources everywhere. With generous student grants, available faculty, and 1,800 students we have a much better chance to cultivate scholarship than we do to find random hook ups, alumni internships, or business majors. We’re a talented group of students, but we aren’t Yalies. Nor should we be.

H v i n c e n t w e i r

ns of over eighty Davidson students n precursor versions of this list.

14 LIBERTAS|CRITICISM

lungstory camilla domonoske

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LIBERTAS|FICTION

H The Vereen Bell Award Winner in Fiction

W

hen she arrives, James sits up straight, pulling his fragile body out of the canvas sun-chair and smoothing down his hair.

He tries to walk like a man who has his strength, just in case they can see him from that distance. Even from his patio, when they’re still at the car in the driveway, he can see that she is beautiful; dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin, of course, the pale skin.

Back straight, tie straight, breathing even. He walks slowly. “Ma’am,” he says, a little too weakly, tries again: “Ma’am, can I help you?”

She turns and smiles, a small, polite, and distant smile. “Oh, thank you,” she says. She hands him a trunk.

“Can you check us in?”

James winces a little. He’s used to having his chivalry mistaken for servitude; after all, he’s the only one at this sanatorium who pays his way with money he earned with his own hands. Surrounded by the sickly children of the rich, he’s been mistaken for an employee before. He says, striving for sophisticated diction, “I will find the director’s assistant for you, of course.”

She is helping a young man out of the back of the car, and James feels a jolt of jealousy; unreasonable, he knows. “Thank you,” she says, her southern drawl making the words feel like a benediction. James lingers a moment longer, watching her take the man – a boy, really, he thinks cruelly – from the car. Looking at the boy’s drawn features, he realizes the girl isn’t sick at all – her skin is pale but luminous, her cheeks are rounded.

She glows with natural colors, not the twisted sallowness of consumption. The boy, on the other hand, looks like an etching of death. He looks a lot like James.

Her name is Mary. Mary Elizabeth. And she is Irish, though it’s three generations back - Irish and rich! He can barely comprehend it. He writes letters to his dead father, tucking them away in the back of his suitcase, telling the old man that he can rest easy, that he fathered a son in a land where an Irishman’s daughter wears silk dresses to breakfast. He imagines his father bursting with immigrant pride, making dirty jokes in his thick, un-American accent, telling him to hurry up and father good Larkins children.

And with a secret relief James learns that the boy – older than Mary, actually, but blinking behind his round glasses, he looks like an over-tall child – is her brother, Bernard. He is the one who carries the sickness in his lungs, the reason they traveled for days by train to this place. A dutiful sister, she cares for him; a dutiful daughter, she writes weekly letters home with updates on his health. She speaks politely to James, like she speaks politely to everyone else. She answers his questions about her brother’s health with perfect charm but nothing more, and he stays up nights thinking about how to impress her.

When he learns she can play the piano, he shows her the old upright tucked into the back of a storage room. He thinks to himself of all the things he could tell her on the walk. He hates being idle, he thinks, hates the way they tell them to rest and rest and rest. He’s a working man, he could tell her proudly, an engineer, a bookkeeper, and he volunteers to help with the inventory. He knows where everything is in the sanatorium, knows about things even the director hasn’t found. But in the end all he says is: “There’s a piano back here that you could play.” He is rewarded with a smile, a girlish clap of her hands.

It’s frightfully out of tune, warped wood and cracked keys, but she makes it sing. Her fingers dance across the keys, and he sits a respectable

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distance away to watch her. She plays Debussy and Chopin, lingering over the notes, stumbling over passages she can’t remember. And then she hunches over the piano, coughing, and he watches her slim shoulders shake, like they’ll never ever stop.

James is angry. He is angry at her father, whom he pictures as a cruel-faced man in black. She tells him that he is a loving father, but she also tells him that he is a judge, and James cannot imagine a loving judge. He is angry at the relatives who stayed home and sent her here – a delicate girl, with a fragile constitution, anybody could see that, and they sent her into this house of death? He is angry at the director for allowing her to come. He is angry at Bernard, who blinks helplessly behind his glasses, like a bewildered rabbit. But mostly he is angry at himself, thinking of all the moments he spent listening to her, leaning in towards her. Thinking of his own treacherous breath.

Her health collapses inward, everything sinking towards her center. James curses everybody and everything. His own lungs have shown no sign of strengthening, though he spends all the sunlight hours baring his chest to the sky and breathing deeply. The rasping still haunts his ears, the shaking seizes his shoulders, and spots of blood stain his pillows. Days pass, and Mary’s lungs sink down towards lesions and secretions and pain, until they match his own. Soon she is sicker than he, sicker than Bernard; within two weeks she is the weakest person in the sanatorium.

The day that they collapse her right lung, he almost leaves. He thinks he cannot bear it to hear the screaming when they force the air into her narrow, birdlike chest. But he is too slow to decide, still standing in the courtyard when they wheel her towards the operating room. She is alone, and James curses Bernard yet again. James sees her eyes rolling. They remind him of the horses that pulled the trolleys back home in Philadelphia, the way they’d rear up wild-eyed when a car came noisily by. Trapped by their reins and terrified. He wonders if morphine would have stilled those frightened horses. It hasn’t calmed Mary.

He follows her in and holds her hand while they slide the needle between her ribs. She doesn’t scream, but he feels the joints of his fingers grind against each other as she strains against her instincts to run, to fight, to make it stop. Afterwards, as she struggles to draw one-sided breaths, he digs deep inside himself to find stories. He’s not a talker, but he tries. He tells her about the city: its raucous roads, its murders, its riots, the steel-boned factories and mobsters. He leaves out some of what he knows of speakeasys and alleyways, talks slowly about the hot stuffy rooms of summer night school, tells her about his dead mother, his dead father.

He is scared to tell her this but he hates to think of himself as a cowardly man, so he says it: “My father would have liked you. He loved Irish girls with pretty smiles.”

“Was your mother an Irish girl with a pretty smile, then?” She whispers from the cot, just louder than the breeze. They are taking the air, as always. Day after day of breathing outdoors as though they’ll inhale some magic to make them clean again.

“Oh, yes,” James says. “She certainly was. When he’d made her mad he’d tell jokes all day long just to see her smile again.”

“And did he make her mad a lot?”

“Not – not too much, I think. He wasn’t mean or ornery, I mean.”

“Oh, good. That sort of thing can run in families, you know. Ornery men.”

LIBERTAS|FICTION

“I’m not ornery,” James said softly. Mary smiled.

“I know, darlin’,” she drawled, and let her eyes drift shut again. He sat and watched her eyelids flutter, willing her chest to rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall. Forgive me, Father, for all the masses I have not attended. Forgive me the women and the liquor. Forgive me and please, Lord, just let her live.

The doctors are worried by the sound of her remaining lung. They say they may reinflate the dead one, wait, and then deflate it again, words which make Mary’s eyes go wide and her chest go still. James places his canvas chair besides her cot and joins her in his striped day-pajamas. She is strong enough now to speak, and she starts talking and almost doesn’t stop, her soft, slow voice sliding over the syllables. She is from a place in Kentucky, she says, where the summers are hot and endless, the porches wide, the swimming pools so cool they tempt even respectable girls like her to go for forbidden swims. She whispers that conspiratorially, and he thinks of it later, wishing he wouldn’t, unable to stop

She tells stories of her teacher-nuns. She tells him of her siblings and half-siblings, the wild boys she raised like her own sons, with a note of longing in her voice. The doctors told her she could never have children. James was there when they said it, and held her shoulders when she cried, but they’ve never spoken of it.

Mary pulls her dressing gown tighter around the sharp lines of her body, her collarbone visible through the silk. She picks at her food. James carves little animals from tiny bits of wood, presenting them with self-conscious flourishes, and she collects them on the table by her chair. Slowly, their breaths grow calmer, the air tastes sweeter, the blood stops rising between their lips. Bernard, breathing easily again, kisses his sister farewell and gives a warning glance to her friend. James scowls at his back, and Mary slaps his wrist, laughing.

They were young, beautiful, and dying; now they’re young, beautiful, and sliding past death’s grasp with every new breath. They teach each other how to Charleston on the top of craggy mountains, to the sound of someone’s high-powered radio receiver. She reads him letters from Paris, Berlin, New York, Knoxville, doesn’t mention that he gets no letters at all. Somewhere across the miles of empty desert, James thinks, the only men who would write him letters sit in an underground bar. A saxophone creaks, a whiskey bottle has his name on it, a woman staggers over, his construction crew cheerfully curses the name of Prohibition. He turns to Mary, reading in the sunlight about the fashions fresh from Europe, and doesn’t say a word.

To finish Camila’s story on the Libertas blog, use a QR reader on your smartphone or go to davidsonlibertas.blogspot.com.

Hj o r d a n

l u e b e k e m a n n

Bunburying in the Breadbasket: Queering the Male Appetite in The Importance of Being Earnest H a m a n d a l e h r

I

The Charles E. Lloyd Award Winner in Non-Fiction H

n the context of Wilde’s deceptively frothy dialogue, Algernon’s quip from The Importance of Being Earnest may appear to provide more spice than substance. Nevertheless, his comment seems to have been taken quite seriously by the media that reported on Wilde’s 1895 arrest on charges of “gross indecency” (184). Like the Evening News’ headline above, the Echo’s account of Wilde’s first night in jail describes what he ate and in what quantities with painstaking detail: “At eight o’clock a messenger arrived from the Tavistock Hotel again with his breakfast. This consisted of coffee and bread and butter. The coffee he drank, but the solid food he returned untouched” (186).

While the reporters’ fixation on Wilde’s eating habits may appear peculiar, each article invites a comparison between the abstemious man held at Bow Street and the Oscar Wilde notorious for his pursuit of fine food and male companionship— often, in immediate succession.

Without having to identify “the love that dare not speak its name,” the press collapsed Wilde’s sexual indiscretions into his gourmandism, making his disgrace into a parable about overindulged appetites (Holland 68).

The Importance of Being Earnest also enacts a narrative framed by food, with eating and drinking even more prominent in the play’s earlier drafts (Raby 42).

Jack’s and Algernon’s propensities for cucumber sandwiches, muffins, and costly restaurant dining are only rivaled by their devotion to what they call “bunburying,” their strategic use of a double life to shirk unwanted duties. While numerous critics have interpreted “bunburying” as a cheeky euphemism for sex acts between men, Christopher Craft argues that Wilde’s use of the word “bun,” rather than the English colloquialism “bum,” identifies “bunburying” with the male characters’ chronic overeating, so that gluttony operates “as a jubilant screen metaphor for otherwise unrepresentable

17

pleasures” (43, 32). Although the play’s queer heart may be most readily accessible through its stomach, not all eating in Earnest amounts to illicit oral gratification. Indeed, as the accounts of Wilde’s imprisonment suggest, the contents and setting of a meal may be more telling than the act of ingestion itself. If gluttony represents indulgence in homosexual activity, then the constant regulation of food in The Importance of Being Earnest reflects the complexity of navigating a Bunburyist’s double life, requiring that ventral and carnal appetites be sated, if not decently, then secretly.

While Algernon’s constant eating makes him the frequent target of ribbing or criticism, the opening scene of Earnest establishes certain appetites to be more proper than others. When Jack arrives at Algernon’s flat to announce his impending proposal to Gwendolen, he finds his friend predictably immersed in devouring a platter of cucumber sandwiches meant for his aunt. When Jack reaches for a sandwich, Algy declares his exclusive rights as nephew and slaps Jack’s hand away, redirecting his companion’s hunger toward a more decorous option: ALGERNON: . . . Have some bread and butter. The bread and butter is for Gwendolen. Gwendolen is devoted to bread and butter.

JACK: (advancing to table and helping himself) And very good bread and butter it is, too.

ALGERNON: Well, my dear fellow, you need not eat as if you were going to eat it all. You behave as if you were mar ried to her already . . . (Wilde 118)

Algernon offers Gwendolen’s food to Jack as onemight offer a dowry, as a proprietary right of the groom. His second comment, however, clearly aligns Gwendolen’s “bread and butter” with her sexual favors, which Jack may not sample fully before the wedding. Using food as a surface metaphor, the exchange frames heteronormative courtship in terms

LIBERTAS|NONFICTION

of ownership and controlled consumption, offering a prescriptive model for how male desire ought to be pursued and pacified. Nevertheless, Lane the butler’s observation that “in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand” implies that men who are “serious” about their meals must resort to equally “serious” extramarital Bunburying to meet the needs of their refined tastes (Wilde 116, 125, 169).

Algernon explains to Jack that “Bunburying” refers to his use of an imaginary, “invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose” (Wilde 123). The practical uses of Bunburying, however, seem intimately connected with the gratification of male appetites beyond the power of Hymen to satisfy. Algy tells Jack that “[i] f it wasn’t for Bunbury’s extraordinary bad health, for instance, I wouldn’t be able to dine with you at Willis’s to-night, for I have been really engaged to Aunt Augusta for more than a week” — an example which identifies the rewards of Bunburying with fine dining, male company, and the avoidance of undesired “engagements” with women (Wilde 123). Bunburying, then, represents both a necessary supplement to and negation of traditional marriage, taking place both at and under the table. While the play presents Bunburying as a masculine pursuit, its female counterpart may be “Harburying,” alluding to the crumpet-eating widow whom Lady Bracknell sniffs appears “to be living entirely for pleasure now” (Wilde 126). Lady Bracknell’s characteristically tart rebuke treats her neighbor’s fondness for pastry as equivalent to fornication. As Lady Bracknell partakes of the maligned crumpets herself, however, she seems not to object to Lady Harbury’s fare of choice

as much as to her solo indulgence — a kind of selfpleasuring akin to masturbation. Whether by implying too many partners or too few, Bunburying and Harburying threaten to disrupt the marriage dyad, requiring practitioners of either sex to be discreet if they intend to have their wedding cake and eat it too.Although Algernon never states “the rules” of Bunburying to which he refers, he and Jack discuss another set of provisions at length: the proper etiquette for eating muffins (Wilde 124). As muffins are the only food in The Importance of Being Earnest never consumed by a female character, the rules for muffin-eating seem to be aligned with the unspoken rules for Bunburying. Via a gleeful profusion of double entendres, Jack and Algy quarrel over the procedure for eating muffins to avoid appearing “heartless” or getting butter on one’s cuffs (Wilde 171). The muffin affair not only indicates what type of Bunburying the gentlemen may be enjoying, but continues to construct queer sexuality in terms of concealment. Christopher Craft maintains that this sequence makes a “fastidious allusion to Wilde’s sexual practice” as a parallel hand-to-mouth exchange (29). Although the scene’s use of coded language is arguably more flamboyant than discreet, Jack’s and Algy’s concern for keeping their cuffs clean seems particular to their boys-only “burying” in the muffin basket. Unlike the crustless, symmetrical cucumber sandwiches preferred by Lady Bracknell , a muffin has the potential for messiness, creating “horrible trouble” for one caught with sullied hands (Raby 42, Wilde 171). Although Jack protests, “Good heavens! I suppose that a man may eat his own muffins is his own garden,” the airing of Wilde’s affairs in restaurant cabinets and hotel suites during his trial demonstrated that supposedly private indulgences —whether culinary or sexual — could be penetrated by public scrutiny (171). Jack and Algy seem aware that, regardless of where one dines, men desiring to bury in buns of any sort require more than just privacy: deliberate secrecy.

The muffin as signifier also injects an element of class consciousness into the discussion of Bunburying that potentially reflects Wilde’s own sexual preferences. In David Urquhart’s The Pillars of Hercules, an eclectic travelogue and culinary history published in 1850, a chapter titled “The History of Muffins” refers to them as “cockney cakes” that were originally associated with country cooking and routinely dined upon by the working class (91).

Although the English muffin had been appropriated as part of the aristocracy’s afternoon tea by the early 1800’s, Urquhart’s description suggests that the muffin retained a degree of its affiliation with society’s lower crust (Mitchell 127). In Earnest, Cecily’s line, “They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance,” could be delivered archly or with ingenuous seriousness, predicated on the assumption that Jack and Algy helped themselves to the meanest fare by choosing muffins over tea cakes (Wilde 173). The muffin’s class connotations, however, tell less about Wilde’s taste in food than his taste in men. Rather than being produced in the home, muffins were distributed by pedestrian “muffin men,” preserved as a cultural figure in the 1820 nursery rhyme, as well as in these song lyrics from 1760 (Mitchell 126): . . . Careless and frisky, my bell I keep ringing, And walk about merrily crying my muffins; Lilly white muffins! O! Rare crumpets!

Smoking hot Yorkshire cakes!

Hot loaves and charming cakes!

One a penny, two a penny, Yorkshire cakes!

What matters to me, if fine folks run a gadding For politics, fashion, and such botheration; Let them drink as they brew, whilst I merrily bake

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For tho’ I sell muffins, I’m not such a cake ( A garland of excellent new songs)

Without specifying what kinds of hot loaves the frisky muffin man might proffer for a penny, the song depicts a distinctly lower-class man servicing “fine folks” above his station, similar to the way in which the prosecution would later characterize the relationship between young, unemployed Charles Parker or Alfred Woods and Oscar Wilde (Cohen 177).

On the stand, Parker testified that Wilde had treated both him and his brother, who worked as a groom, “to a feast in a ‘private room . . . lighted by candles with red shades”; afterward, Wilde was reputed to have “taken the younger Parker back to his rooms at the Savoy Hotel, plied him with drink, and thereupon committed the ‘indecencies for which he was indicted, giving Parker several pounds on his departure” (177). When asked why he took Parker to dinner, Wilde replied, “Because I am very goodnatured, because it is one of the best ways perhaps of pleasing anybody, particularly anyone not in one’s social position, to ask him to dine” (199). In what the press dubbed “The Savoy Hotel evidence,” food served not only as a precursor to seduction, but the pretense for a scandalous exchange of goods and services between men of disparate social statuses (Cohen 178). Wilde’s attention to his social inferiors’ “pleasure” made their intercourse seem even more transgressive. While, in The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack and Algy show no hint of curiosity to explore a world outside of their own privilege, their furtive consumption of muffins in a wealthy parlor gives this episode of Bunburying the flavor of a queer intersection of class, compounding on queer sexuality.

Concerns about privacy are further addressed in the play’s “Gribsby” episode, a sequence cut from the second act which depicts the serious consequences of Bunburying. In this scene, solicitor named both “Gribsby” and, with Wildean audacity, “Parker,” arrives to arrest Algernon, now calling himself Earnest, for dining expenses incurred by Jack under the same alias. The £762 bill is from the Savoy Hotel, the site of many of Wilde’s sexual encounters. Although the debt is not of Algy’s doing, he endures castigation by Miss Prism and Reverend Chasuble for his perceived excess, which they take as “proof of the disgraceful luxury of the age” (194).

As both “Earnests” —and, painfully, Wilde —learn, the semi-private space of the restaurant allows for what Rebecca L. Spang calls “public display[s] of private self-absorption,” but makes these displays into public property (Spang 87). Even to choose a private cabinet was to make a public statement, for a “dense web of nineteenth-century lore, legend, and popular imagery identified restaurant cabinets with honor led astray or laid aside” (Spang 210). Questioning Wilde about his young dining companions, the prosecution asked in each case —often multiple times — whether they had eaten in a cabinet room (Holland 139, 168). In the following transcript, in which Edward Carson cross-examines Wilde about a dinner he had attended with Lord Alfred Taylor and the Parker brothers, Carson’s thoughts about the implications of the private compartment are clear: Carson: Of course, you did the honors in a private room to the groom and the valet?

Wilde: I beg your pardon?

Carson: You did the honors in a private room?

Wilde: No, I say I entertained Mr. Taylor and his two friends.

Carson: In a private room?

Wilde: Certainly, in a private room (Holland 168)

As Carson immediately follows with questions of

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a more intimate nature, he treats Wilde’s desire for privacy as damning as a confession of guilt. Whether in a dining room or a hotel room, a Bunburyist in the Savoy had no place to hide, as hiding represented a form of self-disclosure.

With respect to class, the restaurant’s fusion of dining and display made it a charged space for performing social hierarchies. In her history of European restaurant culture, Spang observes that the restaurant “focuses issues and problems of where and how the ‘public’ in the sense of the visible . . . and the ‘public’ in the sense of the common do and do not coincide” (86). For Algy, dining at the Savoy or at Willis’s allows him to visibly display his uncommonness through his extravagance. When Gribsby tries to wrongfully charge him for Jack’s bills, Algy seems most offended by the solicitor’s assumption that he would carry cash, responding that “[n]o gentleman ever has any money” (Wilde 194).

Furthermore, the threat of imprisonment distresses him primarily because he views prison as woefully middle-class: “Well, I am not going to be imprisoned in the suburbs for having dined in the West End. . .

What ideas you have of the sort of society a gentleman wants to mix in” (198). Regardless of whether he had actually spent £762 at the Savoy, the idea of moving from the West End to the suburbs offends Algy’s elitism beyond toleration. The common society Algy rejects, however, was exactly the company — the Parkers, the Woods, the Shelleys — for whom Oscar Wilde sold his reputation in the finest dining establishments in London. For lavishing uncommon wit, wealth, wine, and attention on uncultivated young men, Wilde violated every prescription separating the privileged from the public on an unforgiving public stage, an infraction for which he soon traded his table at Kettner’s for a cell in the suburbs.

While Jack takes care of Gribsby’s reckoning so that Algy may dine — and perhaps Bunbury — another day, Parker would soon arrive in court to collect his due from Wilde. Perhaps fittingly, Wilde’s descent began with a wretched meal. As the cast of The Importance of Being Earnest munched muffins and cucumber sandwiches on the play’s opening night, the Marquess of Queensberry left a salad of decaying vegetables at the stage door for the playwright —a gesture heralding their destructive legal battle which would result in Wilde’s conviction and public flogging (Raby 40). During his two years of imprisonment and hard labor, Wilde wrote nothing except his “cry from the depths” De Profundis, from which the voice of the former epicure emerges almost unrecognizably:

I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world . . . My only

mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom . . .

I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at all (64).

In seeming earnest, Wilde performs the roles of the chastened sinner and, in the words of Reverend Chasuble, the embodiment of “the disgraceful luxury of the age” (Wilde 194). He caters to his contemporaries’ desires to appropriate his person as an overdetermined symbol for homosexuality, decadence, debauchery, elitism, or martyrdom. Pressed into containing these myriad meanings and anxieties of his epoch, Oscar Wilde renounced his excess, only to endure a semiotic force-feeding.

How Davidson Intellectuals Could Be More Like Frat Stars

W

H v i n c e n t w e i r

hat if Davidson could provide a confederation platform to the twenty-six arts and letters groups that now exist

in isolation?

Confederation has always played a part in Davidson’s social history. Ever since the college has been able to support a plurality of likeminded groups, students have found reasons to unite them. When fraternities came here in the 1920s they formed the Pan-Hellenic Council (a precursor to the PCC).

When a number of unique service organizations came to life in the late 80’s and early 90’s, Reach Out (later, Engage for Change) rose as a service umbrella to accommodate them. Likewise the Student-Athlete Advisory Council (SAAC) came out of the natural tendency for autonomous teams to group together.

Umbrella organizations such as these make sense for many reasons. Perhaps most importantly, they create fast access to big resources. Besides gathering the populations of the confederate groups, umbrellas also bring in extra money. Like any other organization, the umbrella applies for a budget over and above the budgets of its individual members (and the ATC’s usual $250 cap for newly chartered organizations does not apply). With these expanded resources, umbrella groups have greater capabilities. They can support more ambitious projects than single clubs with small budgets and they provide all members with a potential support base. They can

empower the members of smaller clubs, maximize efficiency by cross-referencing calendars to avoid schedule conflicts, and create an organized

base to promote output and collaboration.

In general terms, these are the benefits of any confederation. But of course the well-known benefits come with well-known drawbacks. Bureaucracy, for example, often becomes the unnecessary opponent of action, and organizational red tape can frequently undermine personal initiative. Furthermore, in a case where parties of the contract are fundamentally incompatible, some confederations actually undermine freedom and exacerbate conflict.

When considering a potential alliance, therefore, we must ask the following questions: (1) do the potential benefits of the confederation outweigh the drawbacks and (2) are the parties concerned fundamentally compatible?

In the case of campus arts and letters, we believe the answer to both is yes. Though artists sometimes self-identify as “counter-cultural” and therefore resistant to institutional cooperation, we believe that

Davidson artists are likely to sacrifice this stereotypical image in order to receive tangible benefits. And such a confederation could also provide the following benefits: (1) Summer research funding for the arts (2) On and off-campus networking and mentorship (3) A permanent space to hold meetings, display art work, host social events, and offer employment (equipped with 24-hour access) (4) Campus-wide collaborative art festivals (5) Art-related social balls (6) Artistic Retreats Right now the Davidson art community is perfectly situated to consolidate. Though there are twenty-six campus art organizations at Davidson—each one speaking the same language of production and creativity—no single organization oversees them all. Meanwhile the artistic culture is tied unnecessarily to the underground. Without the unity or the size of the PCC, campus art groups are unable to host parties that make the social calendar.

Without a formal space, they are confined to houses and apartments. Without a designated research fund, artists are forced to compete against each other for the few summer grants that tangentially include art. In other words the current art community is informal, difficult to access, and inefficiently equipped to prosper. These are exactly the problems a confederation can fix.

The following list enumerates the twenty-five arts and letters organizations available for confederation, sourced from the Davidson website.

1. Davidsonian 2. Libertas 3. WALT 4. Ars Longa 5. College Chorale 6. Concert Choir 7. Dance Ensemble 8. Dance Team 9. Availing 10. Androgeny 11. Freeword 12. Delilahs 13. Gamut 14. Nuances 15. Generals 16. Shades of Brown Step Team 17. Improv Troupe 18. Hobart Park 19. Swing and Salsa Club 20. Exit 30 21. Bhangra Club 21. Eumenean Society 22. Philanthropic Literary Soceity 23. Film Club 24. Production Group 25. Quips and Cranks 19

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A special thanks to Elizabeth Harry for rediscovering this manuscript in an the 1929 Quips and Cranks. The original author is unkown.

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Driving from Eros, LA Hr e b e c c a

S

omewhere east of Birmingham, everyone else in the car has fallen into half-hearted sleep. You’re in a sort of attentive daze, no longer bothering to notice the passing license plates: Massachusetts looks like Ohio looks like West Virginia. Somewhere between your second and third cups of coffee—paper cup, plastic lid—you become feverish, practically buzzing with unfocused energy. And you are thinking, as you tend to do around hour four or five, about physics.

People are most beautiful in their moments of personal discovery. That’s what the girl in your passenger seat said earlier. Like when they figure out the perfect way to say something. Like when you were sitting in the pizza parlor with only three tables, looking at the “We Deliver” sign taped to the outside of the window, and you realized that “deliver” backwards is “reviled.” You wanted to tell everyone else at the table about it, but you got caught up in another conversation.

They’re making you look like fish food, she said later. You picked the wrong lane. Reviled. She was mostly right—once you’d made it safely out of Tuscaloosa, the northbound traffic quickened and flowed. The side mirrors of kid-laden station wagons glinted in the late afternoon sun. You depressed the brake to stop the cruise control and launched into the other line of cars. You thought about speed and constancy. The improvised rhythm of hundreds of people, driving.

Your eyes are bright and narrow. The sun is on your left.

If Car A and Car B drive in opposite directions for god knows how long, and they’ve each listened to four or six records and they just can’t stand it anymore, and Car A slides over and out of the treed median—Authorized Vehicles Only—and speeds toward Car B: so what? Salmon swim upstream every year.

You are thinking: I could run this fucking car off the road.

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h a w k

* * * Once, pre-puberty, when you got into in the car with your mom, you didn’t quite close the passenger door as she backed out of the driveway. You made sure it was just secure enough to stay shut.

When you got to the interstate, you held your breath and opened the door to release the latch.

It was a lot harder to shut it with the fast air and semis all around. You pulled the door in hard and flipped the lock and put your hand over your closed mouth. Your mom took another French fry from a hot paper bag.

Your dad always told the same story at family reunions, when he wore sandals on the dock and the toe was exposed. His mom used to let him and his sisters ride on top of their car on the dirt road near their house. One day your dad—you know, before he was anybody’s dad—climbed onto the roof of the car. His mom, sitting in the driver’s seat, didn’t hear him and shut her door hard on his left foot. His big toe turned black, then purplishgreen, and then most of the nail fell off for good.

The remaining square of toenail looked like one of the Hawaiian Islands from above, Oahu or Kauai, disproportionately small in the arc of the other four. * * * You’re going eighty-two in a seventy, keeping with traffic.

God, the girl says, I am exhausted. She extends an arm to the back of your seat and twists away from you to crack her back. God, she says again.

Her fingers brush your elbow as she pulls her arm back. Can you believe how far we’ve driven today?

It would be easy: Maybe the driver of Car B sees your dim headlights and grins. You float toward him—graceful, confident—and you both explode upon contact.

You are aware of the dust and burning, though you don’t smell it. The two cars, compacted, are indistinguishable. The newly ragged metal flaps in

LIBERTAS|FICTION

the air as if in greeting to passing rubberneckers.

Maybe the cars part for you, divide into frantic new lines. All the drivers flip you off and yell as they swerve to avoid your front bumper. You drive for miles, untouched.

Maybe you lose momentum as you’re crossing the median and remain hidden among the foliage, a reluctant fortress. * * * About a month ago, you developed a recurrent spasm in your left eyelid. Every so often, and usually in public, the thin skin would flutter and ripple as if your brain were vibrating against the hard surface of its skull. In the mornings, your heartbeat took on the sporadic cadence of a pot of cheap coffee brewing. You researched Tourette’s, dystonia, caffeine withdrawal. You started running again and promptly twisted your ankle. It swelled up, but not too much.

You bought a lot of chicken salad from the local grocery store’s deli. You ate it for two lunches and threw the rest away. Your phone bill was lower than usual. You bought a pack of cigarettes in hopes that you might take up recreational smoking. The plastic film is still intact.

You said you were in love. Yesterday, you discovered you weren’t, though you had really tried to convince yourself. * * * You’re in the left lane, thinking about inertia.

The girl flicks your shoulder lightly, twice.

Maybe we can grab something to eat at the next exit, she says.

You ease up on the gas. Before those first creatures grew legs and pulled themselves to land, coughing up water: a collision. You are thinking: Give over. Just cross the solid yellow line and you’ll be out of it. Forty-five degrees northwest at eighty miles-per-hour. Your tires sing as you glide over the disbelieving rumble strip. Delivered.

Hv e r a s c h u l m a n

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Coveted Common Flavors H y u x i w a n g

6pm, the unshakable dinner time in Commons. I took a look at the menu as I do everyday.

“Lo mein”---De Jour bar.

Standing at the entrance, I felt disappointed. My friend next to me was confused: “Hey, it is not easy to get Asian cuisine around Davidson especially after your ‘all time favorite’ Bonsai is gone.” True, but all I was thinking was that once one item appears on the Monday menu, it becomes the de facto item of the week. I’m also just tired of eating the soy sauce with vegetables. But I’m Chinese…soy sauce for me is like cheese to Americans. How can I possibly hate the soy sauce that constitutes part of my blood?

What do I expect to happen after eating raw lettuce, tomato sauce with chicken, and oven baked dough with cheese every day?

My friends and I will frequently go off campus, and there is no doubt that we always go to a Chinese restaurant. Despite the fact that I know the noodles in these places are cooked similarly, I always ask whether they have Zhajiang noodles that are cooked with soy sauce and ground pork. Surprisingly, all my attempts fail because even the “Zhajiang” noodles still tastes like those in Commons. I started to question my taste buds, because why would all Chinese food taste the same to me? More than that, what flavors am I looking for exactly? Having been in the US for 3 years, I started to wonder where the soy sauce vegetables were that would make me want to lick the bowl like I did when I was little. Do they simply no longer exist?

For the past 3 years I’ve always ordered noodles wherever I go to a Chinese restaurant. Now I simply eat the noodles on the menu without even caring about the sauces. I no longer feel excited when I first step into the restaurant, because I know the Chinesenesss is simply a decoration floating around the place.

Nonetheless, I know it is CHINESE! At least there are chopsticks.

Despite having more than enough soy sauce noodles in the U.S., I always request to have noodles as my first meal when I go back to China. Zha Jiang noodles are my mother’s speciality: ground pork cooked with soy sauce, crunchy cucumbers, fried garlic, and beef tendon in red pepper oil, all mixed together with chewy, home-made noodles. I was a little upset at first because they reminded me of my lovely stale noodles in the US. But after the first bite, I could not ignore the intense flavors exploding in my mouth, accompanied with amazing enjoyment in my mind because I finally found my taste buds. I even licked the bowl after I finished eating, just like I did when I was little.

Last night, I had a dream. The Lo mein in Commons was somehow elongated, and I rode it back home where I have working taste buds.

23

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modern man and woman We are naked, sculpted by the light of a stilled television —a man scooping human remains into a plastic bag from subway tracks, blood on his face, subtitled: brown the onion lightly in oil— a tableau: portable heater, listless socks, thick blankets, lukewarm beers, languishing cigarette.

Right now may be the most beautiful part of the day. Is that scary?

We kiss. Press play.

Add some paprika, but you must be really careful with it Kiss me again.

It’s too soon to say.

24 LIBERTAS|POETRY

H h a n n a h w r i g h t

Music

for the

People

DJ’s A-LIST “The Narcissist II feat. Inga Copeland”

“Wouldn’t It Be Nice”

Dean Blunt

Bullion

“Big Spender feat. A$AP Rocky”

“Get Free feat. Amber Coffman of Dirty Projectors”

Theophilus London

Major Lazer

This is the song that soothes the hurting soul. The repetitive, slow beat holds no surprises and both Blunt and Copeland’s vocals lead one through the song’s dark cityscape.

This is night music at its finest. Listen to: “AMIR voc mix”- Hype Williams

Even though Bullion’s Pet Sounds: In The Key of Dee came out in ’08, it definitely deserves to be revisited. Producer Bullion took the best of J Dilla beats and combined them with his own samples of The Beach Boys’ opus Pet Sounds to create an electronic masterpiece. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” stands out as the ultimate summertime pop track with its vocal sampling and drumbeat. Imagine tribal dancing on an island beach at sunset. Listen to: “Far Nearer” - Jamie xx

This is DIRTY rap. The show-tune style sampling emphasizes London and Rocky’s larger than life personas and the sampled horns punch out every bar dropped. A$AP is turning into the King Midas of rap. Listen to: “Hands on the Wheel ft. A$AP Rocky”- Schoolboy Q.

Even though Diplo and Switch’s project Major Lazer is known for its emphasis on dancehall party beats and vocals, this song has neither. Coffman uses her powerful vocals to automatically take control of the song’s simple island beat. This is great easy summer listening. Listen to: “Colourless Artibella”- Major Lazer & La Roux, “Cannibal Resource”- Dirty Projectors

Libertas -May 9, 2012Vol. 16 No. 7

Mast Head

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Head Editors Emily Romeyn-Vincent Weir Section Editors Riley Ambrose - Madeline Brown - Marie Doyon Will Reese - Madeline Parker - Lucia Stacey - Will Stratford Layout Editors Mike Anderson - Colin Thomson - Marie Doyon Vincent Weir - Emily Romeyn Photography/Visual Art Jordan Luebkemann Vera Schulmann, Lauren Kaperman, Emily Romeyn Poetry Will Reese - Lucia Stacey, Head Editors Laura Romeyn -Tim Raun - Michael Bachman - Amanda Ottoway Fiction Madeline Brown, Head Editor Madeline Parker - Meg Mendenhall Film & Media Riley Ambrose, Head Editor Non-Fiction Marie Doyon, Head Editor Mike Anderson, Amanda Lehr, Yuxi Wang Criticism Colin Thomson, Head Editor Drew Masterson, Vincent Weir Music Will Stratford, Head Editor Hayden Higgins

LIBERTAS|MUSIC

Faculty Advisor Scott Denham Previous Editors Hannah Wright - Rebecca Hawk - Zoe Balaconis - Kate Kelly -Nina Hawley Jessica Malordy - Lila Allen - Kate Wiseman Chris Cantanese Elizabeth Burkhead - Catherine Walker - James Everett - Scott Geiger Erin Smith - Ann Culp - Vic Brand - Mike Scarbo Founder Zac Lacy Special Thanks To Zoran Kuzmanovich - Ann Fox Paul Miller - Cynthia Lewis Alan Michael Parker - Randy Nelson The Philanthropic Literary Society Spiritus Mundi Libations In the Name Of Byron - Apollo - Skrillex Michael Brun Contact Us emromeyn@davidson.edu viweir@davidson.edu scdenham@davidson.edu To the Editors of Libertas P.O. Box 6055 Davidson NC 28035 Placet

Will Stratford’s “Top-50 Albums of Our Generation” 50. Viva La Vida, Coldplay (2008) 49. Noble Beast, Andrew Bird (2009) 48. Mezzanine, Massive Attack (1998) 47. Boxer, The National (2003) 46. Good News For People Who Love Bad News, Modest Mouse (2004) 45. In an Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel (1998) 46. Brother, Sister, mewithoutYou (2006) 43. Portishead, Portishead (1997) 42. Welcome 2 Detroit, J Dilla (2003) 41. The Bedlam in Goliath, The Mars Volta (2008) 40. Funeral, Arcade Fire (2004) 49. I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, Bright Eyes (2005) 38. Companion, Gold Panda (2011) 37. Our Endless Numbered Days, Iron and Wine (2004) 36. Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, Bright Eyes (2005) 35. Floating World, Anathallo (2006) 34. OK Computer, Radiohead (1997) 33. Broken Social Scene, Broken Social Scene (2005) 32. Strawberry Jam, Animal Collective (2007) 31. The Campfire Headphase, Boards of Canada (2005) 30. Innerspeaker, Tame Impala (2010) 29. Loveless, My Bloody Valentine (1991) 28. Jay Stay Paid, J Dilla (2009) 27. Takk…, Sigur Rós (2005) 26. Swim, Caribou (2010) Thirty-two Heartbreaker, Ryan Adams (2000) O b s e r v a t i o n s 25.24.

Kid A, Radiohead (2000) 23. Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective (2009) In Response to De-Loused in the Comatorium, The Mars Volta (2003) S t r a t f o r d ’s To p - 5 0 22.21.

Hail to the Thief, Radiohead (2003) 20. Feels, Animal Collective (2005) Hh a y d e n h i g g i n s 19. In Rainbows, Radiohead (2007) • I don’t know if I missed the Clark train or what, but Mr. Stratford’s got a chub for that guy. In other 18. Yellow House, Grizzly Bear (2006) news: 17. Ágætis byrjun, Sigur Rós (1999) • There is a question to be asked about the word 16. Turning Dragon, Clark (2008) “generation.” Including an album from 1991—when 15. Bitte Orca, Dirty Projectors (2009) I was, well, one—stretches things, and invites the 14. The Creek Drank the Cradle, Iron and Wine (2002) inclusion of a number of albums left off here. I 13. Music Has the Right to Children, Boards of Canada (1998) guess you could say that Loveless has proven relevant 12. Amnesiac, Radiohead (2001) to our generation in a way that, say, Talk Talk’s 11. Veckatimest, Grizzly Bear (2009) Laughing Stock has not, but still.

10. James Blake, James Blake (2011) • “Face Tat”? Please tell me it’s a concept album 9. Face Tat, Zach Hill (2010) about the redemption of Mike Tyson.

8. Cosmogramma, Flying Lotus (2010) • The music on here is pretty divisible into a couple different categories… there’s the electronica (Boards 7. Body Riddle, Clark (2006) of Canada, Clark, Bibio, James Blake), the freaky, 6. Ambivalence Avenue, Bibio (2009) more maximalist shit (AnCo, Mars Volta, Dirty Pro5. Los Angeles, Flying Lotus (2008) jectors, even FlyLo in a way), and then the hushed 4. Lifted, Bright Eyes (2002) wimp-folk (Iron & Wine, Bright Eyes).

3. Geogaddi, Boards of Canada (2002) • There’s a pretty clear salience bias here—of the 2. Person Pitch, Panda Bear (2007) top eleven, only three are from before 2007.

1. Totems Flare, Clark (2009) • With so many repeat contenders, it would be interesting to see this list formatted differently. Only 32 unique artists are here by my count. Radiohead can’t hog all the glory.

• Speaking of which… I love Amnesiac. I have my Amnesiac cred. But above Kid A AND OK Computer?

Hold your horses.

• Absolutely no rap, no punk, some post-rock, no pop, little folk.

• Finally, the deserving missing. I tried to think of those albums that marked turning points, whose influence has been imprinted on our generation’s musical experience—not necessarily the best, but the most ours. For example, It’s Blitz (2009) might be better than Fever to Tell (2003), and Bon Iver (2011) may be front-to-back more quality than For

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Emma, Forever Ago (2008)—but the first time you hear “Maps” or “Re: Stacks,” you know there is no turning back. So: • I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, Yo La Tengo (1997) • The Moon and Antarctica, Modest Mouse (2000) • The Reminder, Feist (2007) • The Soft Bulletin, The Flaming Lips (1999) • Sound of Silver, LCD Soundsystem (2007) • White Blood Cells, White Stripes (2001) • Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone, The Unicorns (2003) • Discovery, Daft Punk (2001) • Is This It?, The Strokes (2001)

LIBERTAS|MUSIC

• My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye West (2010) • Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco (2002) • Stankonia, OutKast (2000) • The Monitor, Titus Andronicus (2010) • Illinois!, Sufjan Stevens (2005) • The xx, The xx (2009) • Silent Shout, The Knife (2006) • Drum’s Not Dead, Liars (2006) • Halcyon Digest, Deerhunter (2010) • I See A Darkness, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (1999) • Fever to Tell, Yeah Yeah Yeahs (2004) • Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes (2008) • For Emma, Forever Ago, Bon Iver (2008) • And, of course...Third Eye Blind, Third Eye Blind (1997)

l e f t e y e & c h e e k b o n e s : i e k e l i e n e s t a n g e ; r i g h t e y e : s u c h i n p a k ; n o s e & l e f t e y e b r o w : c h e g u e v a r a ; l i p s : m a r t i n l u t h e r k i n g j r. ; e a r s : t r e y v o n m a r t i n ; h a i r : c a p t a i n j a c k - - m o d o c

left e ye: horse; right e ye: puf fer fish; left ear: dog; right ear and nose: cat; mouth: gorilla

He m i l y r o m e y n