[ 01: king ]
My grandfather was a stubby little Thai man. Quiet but bold, he wore his surname, Sirithorn, with pride. And as mom would remind us, you don’t see many Thai names quite so short. It was supposedly a pseudo-royal name, gifted to an ancestor by a princess after they saved her life.
A load of bullshit, likely.
But growing up, I loved it. I liked the belief and the fantasy it conjured up: my all-too-feeble, diabetes-prone family, dressed in royal garb and fraternizing with the upper classes. Our faces full and cheeks pink, we’d lounge around in linen and silk and fan ourselves with local palms, pockets bulging with riches.
In every one of these fantasies, my grandfather, in all his five-foot-something glory, was the king. Fair, happy, and strong. And his worn-down, termite-ridden home,
Dear Readers,
It really is no coincidence that we get more excuses to gather and celebrate the passage of time the colder the weather gets. As refreshing as the first fall chill is (also: romantic, crisp, etc.), the cold snaps indicative of winter still rattle me bones and make me long for a packed, toasty room all the same. When the winds pass the threshold from fun to freezing, the part of us that hibernates through the warmer seasons each year reawakens and makes us nostalgi cally introspective.
In this week’s issue, our writers take a respite from the chill and reflect with warmth on people who’ve had major influences on their emotional and spiritual development. In Feature, the author speaks fondly of her family, specifically her grandfa
tucked away by the old Jakarta river: this little place was his palace. ***
Green thumbs are not green but a dark, sunkissed shade of brown, speckled lovingly with sunspots and creased deeply and irreversibly with age.
An avid gardener, the backyard was his royal grounds; a labor of unabashed love fueled by the murky, unsuspecting waters of Jakarta’s sewers. Basil, mint, orchids, monk fruit, jackfruit, bananas—he knew each plant intimately. He reigned over cuttings and saplings and breathed life into the soil where little else grew. When the neighbors inevitably snagged a fruit or two, he would let them, knowing that it all would grow back in time.
Even still, my grandfather was rarely home. He spent most of his waking hours working at a plantation, tucked
ther, the king of fruit. In Narrative, one author writes beautifully of her grandmother; the other about her relationship to ghosts—spending time in cemeteries daydreaming about the lives below the headstones. In Arts and Culture, one author reflects on the way we empathize and understand fictional characters using the movie Tár as a frame whilst the other contemplates Brown’s Professor Arnold Weinstein, particularly reflecting on his thoughts on reading literature as a means to separate from yourself into a different world. In Lifestyle, read a comprehensive gift guide for dogs, which really is intended more as a conversation starter between you and your beloved canine friend than an actual gift guide!
While we adventure outside of our comfort zones in summer, winter is truly the time to return to the comfort of wherever we call home. Some
away on a little Indonesian island up north. I thought of him as the man of the house and the king of the jungle, all at once.
What he did up there, I was never told, but the few texts he sent told me all I needed to know.
[ 12/26/18, 2:00 P.M : My durian. 3.85 kg. ]
[ 12/30/18, 9:17 A.M : Fourth durian. ]
[ 01/01/19, 7:59 A.M : Another durian today. ]
[ 02: princess ]
Children play favorites as much as their grandparents do.
Traditionally, Sirithorn women are loud, insistent folk. Assertive to the point of near-arrogance, my mother and grandmother were excellent debaters, but truly terrible sources of comfort. Their conversations were
times, as little humans, we just need to gather with our friends and family and reminisce, reflect, and be with each other. At the end of the day, we really are little amnesiacs that must be constantly reminded of and affirmed by love. Fully allow yourself to unwind and enjoy the season of comfort and familiarity, you deserve it!
Now wary that I haven’t called my mum in a while, Kimberly Liu
Managing Editorpeppered with venomous, pointed insults, each hurled in the hopes of gaining the upper hand.
Amidst all this, my grandfather loved me quietly, carefully. When fights inevitably broke out, he’d pull me aside and speak to me in soft, golden words. It was in these moments that I would hear about his latest fascinations. I’d thumb through the trinkets in his drawers, letting his words lull me to peace.
A gentle, graceful respite. ***
Despite being a man of many grunts and few words, I felt my grandfather’s love immensely. Every visit to his place was punctuated with some sort of gift, usually the subject of his current obsession. A new phone cable he found online, some Chinese battery pack he’d gotten from a friend, a whole pomelo he’d battled an old lady tooth and nailfor at the market. One time he’d gone off and custom-printed a mug with all his favorite mangoes on them: Irwin. Chok anan. Nam dok mai.
He fell right into the classic stereotype of an Asian parent. Rather than showing his love through words or hugs, my grandfather resorted to gifts and acts of service. This could have been attributed to any number of sources: Thai obsessions with masculinity; Asian stoicism; hell, even just plain introversion.
Regardless of the reasons, he loved giving gifts. On one day in particular, his affections had come in the form of a 32-ounce bag of dried butterfly pea flowers.
“Grandpa grew them,” he’d told me. His words were laced with pride. “Very good for you. An antioxidant.” He’d urged me to drink them as tea once a day, claiming they’d stop me from developing all kinds of cancerous sores.
Butterfly pea grows abundantly across Southeast Asia. Apparently called the clitoria ternatea, though I can see why my grandfather never referred to it as such. Their vivid blue shade is common in Thai desserts as a food coloring, irreplaceable in so many key dishes.
For a while, I heeded his words. I’d lay a large mug out and drench the petals in steaming hot water, downing the blue liquid with my meals.
But the flowers, pretty as they were, tasted horrible. The bag was left to gather dust. [ 03: jack ]
My grandfather was perfect until he wasn’t. I learned of the affair much too late. It’d come out by accident, an outburst during another argument between my mother and her own. Whatever their point had been that day, it was quickly rendered irrelevant by my tsunami of a revelation.
He’d had it all: a stable job, a loving marriage, kids who’d respected and relied on him. And some cheap lady in Hong Kong was all it took for him to give it all up.
I felt like my entire world had shifted. But even though I struggled to view my family the same, the knowledge didn’t change much in my day-to-day life. We carried on with life as usual. My grandfather was transferred to yet another vague island up north, where work quickly overtook him. I threw myself into whatever I could, busied myself with schoolwork.
My later memories of him were punctuated with distance. Meetings were rare, with me citing my busy schedule and him his own.
But even in this state, the gifts never stopped.
He sent me a jackfruit one night. Peeled and deseeded, the package was a labor of love, wrapped in shiny cellophane.
Jackfruit is many things—sweet first, pungent second. At its ripest, it overwhelms the senses and drowns you in putrid tones.
I tasted, then, only its bitter notes.
A sweet-toothed man with a round face, my grandfather had always been a tad pudgy; he’d spill out of his pants and puff out in his polo shirts, belly on full display. He had the makings of the classic Asian grandpa, well-fed and wrinkly.
As time passed, though, he thinned out. His waist shrank and his eyes hollowed out and, though we tried to fatten him up again, it was never to any avail. He’d work too long and too hard, and he’d eat too little, no longer keen to try anything we put before him.
Each new photograph I saw marked a new low.
“Why doesn’t Grandpa just retire?” I’d asked my mother once. The retirement age in my country lies somewhere around sixty; he’d long passed that mark by then, and had edged into his seventies with a distinct lack of grace.
My mother dons many smiles, but the one she reserves for her father is muted, sad.
“He can’t.” ***
In my nineteen years, my mother has taught me a whopping two words in Thai. The first: mu , for pork. A family favorite. And the second: kraeng jai
There’s a scene in The Big Bang Theory where this phrase is briefly mentioned, albeit poorly pronounced. “We’ve just had Thai food,” the scraggly Sheldon tells Penny. “In that culture, the last morsel is called the kraeng jai piece, and it’s reserved for the most important and valued member of the group.”
There are lots of things I dislike about The Big Bang Theory. For now, though, this is the most pressing. Sheldon’s definition of kraeng jai is shallow, a surfacelevel understanding that applies the concept solely to food.
But kraeng jai occurs everywhere. From my understanding, it is a careful sentiment, an odd crossroads between humility and hierarchy. I’m fond of author Andrew Biggs’s description: “the closest word to it is ‘consideration,’ but even that seems a little flaccid.”
Kraeng jai is an embedded cultural norm, something inexplicably Thai; it’s an inherent respect for societal conventions and standards set decades ago. To be considerate to one’s elders and superiors, to perform, unquestioningly, in one’s assumed “place.”
My grandfather was the epitome of this.
“He could have had so much better,” my mother told me. Promotions, bonuses, change. Rest. “But he never thought he deserved it.”
King, servant, man.
It is awfully hard to mourn a dead body over Zoom, and harder still when it is pixelated beyond recognition and when the Buddhist mantras blur into little more than stomach-churning static.
Greasy university dining halls don’t lend themselves well to grief. They’re drunken, sloppy places, liminal past a certain hour. But in that moment, the sticky, splotchy tables were enough.
The blurry men glued the casket shut. Spicy chicken sandwich before me, I wept.
***
The next time I came home, I was met with an unexpected family-wide problem.
Durian season is a treat for Asians everywhere, but it is especially cherished in the Southeast. It’s during this prized period that the fruit is, for once, affordable. Many take it as their chance to gorge.
Every island child knows the smell of durian by heart and remembers their first reluctant mouthful. Any repulsion melts away against the custardy flesh; the fruit’s bitter tones and mellow sweetness are a harmony sung only in the tropics.
My family has always loved durian season, perhaps a little more than most. In the wake of a bad year, though, they’d gone above and beyond, gorging themselves until there were no more fruits to eat.
The issue was not in their consumption, but in what they chose to do with their seeds. Thinking themselves more competent than they were, they’d planted them, leaving us with fifteen saplings.
The murky waters of Jakarta’s sewers should have deemed them all a lost cause.
But we’d learned from the king of fruit, and that was enough. ***
I can’t tell you if my grandfather was a good man— but maybe I don’t need to.
Some tastes are simply acquired.
“I’m not diagnosing you with anything… but in her case? I’m a mental health professional.”
“Excited to enter my mid-twenties yeehaw era in a few years.”
“I forgot my towel so now I’m just Wet Beast Wednesday.”
When I close my eyes and picture my grandmother, she's in her silk bathrobe, propped up in bed. There's a recording of a church service playing on the TV. My mom is sitting next to her, and they're talking about something in a way that feels conspiratorial, confidential; I'm straining to hear every word. Gran seems to have just realized I'm there, and she turns to me. "Be a dear, Olivia," she says to me, "and get me a Perrier from downstairs." There's already a little green bottle perched on her bedside table, seal unbroken, but I get up anyway—wishing I were old enough to contribute to their conversation, but somewhat relieved for an excuse to venture out of her hydrangeablue, upholstered, stifling room.
As it turns out, my mom remembers Gran in the same way I do. When I ask for her happiest memory of her mother, she recalls being six or seven years old, living with her mother and siblings in a big house on Cooke Street. She would return home from school in the afternoon to find her mom reclined on the sofa, still in her robe, cigarette in hand, talking to her father on the phone. My mom remembers running to the couch and lying across Gran's lap, feeling the vibrations of Gran’s voice through her chest, Gran’s fingers stroking her hair.
She also remembers laying in her mom's bed at eight years old, pretending to be asleep while Gran
whispered to my mom's oldest sister, who was sixteen at the time. "Your father isn't sending us enough money," she would say. "700 per month? For nine children? He wants me to raise nine kids in poverty; he wants us to starve." It sure seemed that way. There was no food in their house except for bread, but the bread drawer was permanently wedged shut because of the humidity. The bottle of orange juice in the fridge had curls of green mold floating on the surface.
But that didn't mean Gran didn't love them. When the older kids went off to boarding school in their teens, she would call them often. If the line was busy, she would request an emergency breakthrough to the operator ("No emergency, just calling to say hi."). When my mom was teased at school, Gran would console her with well-meaning but misguided affirmations ("You're just so pretty; they're jealous of your beauty.").
Gran herself spent her whole life hearing people tell her she was beautiful. She had thick, dark hair, high, round cheekbones, full lips, and porcelain skin. She had been her father's favorite daughter—his princess. When she didn't want to do chores growing up, she would pretend to faint, and her father would come rushing to her rescue. "Everyone clear out," he would say. "We need to get Pauline to bed!" She spent her childhood like this, clad in glass slippers, ever-aware of her own allure, watching the world open up to her like a spring rose wherever she went.
Near the end of her life, she would ask my mom every time we visited: "How do I look? Do I look younger? Do you like what I've done with my hair?" When my mom was in her twenties, Gran told her not to smile so much: "It will give you lines around your mouth."
But Gran’s beauty was both a blessing and a
curse. When she was 18, she left her home in suburban Connecticut to attend the women's college next to Notre Dame. There, she met my grandfather, who was 25. He was a cowboy, a cattle rancher from Nebraska. She was enchanted by his gruffness, his grit, his ambition. He was enchanted by her looks, but he also saw in her a personal challenge. He thought he could toughen her up. They married within the year, and at 19, she was pregnant with their first son. At 20, she was pregnant with their first daughter. She stayed pregnant for the next eight years straight until, after nine children—including a set of twin girls—she was told she could have no more. She had her fallopian tubes tied, sending her into premature menopause at the age of 28.
This sequence of events sent my grandmother spiraling into a nervous breakdown. She wanted to see a therapist, but my grandfather refused, maintaining that talking about your own emotions is self-indulgent. She started drinking heavily. She had always been delicate, but once her youth was stolen from her, life seemed to lose its luster. She wilted. By 33, when my mother was five, she and my grandfather divorced— Gran was living in that big house on Cooke Street on her own, and my grandfather promptly moved back out west, to Colorado.
Gran didn't take well to being on her own. She had always been taken care of—by her own father, by her boyfriends, by my grandfather—and she wasn't accustomed to looking after herself. After one year, she remarried, this time to an oily, ambulance-chasing lawyer: a rocky relationship that quickly ended in a second divorce.
Then, five years later, she met another man. He was a businessman, like my grandfather, but a different kind: He was a Harvard graduate from a wealthy family,
an East-Coaster with a strong moral compass and a gentle demeanor. In him, she saw a real opportunity. He was a chance to start over completely, to create the comfortable life for herself that she'd always imagined. This was the type of person who could take care of her like her father had. This was her ticket back to the comfort she'd known as a girl.
But there was one obstacle in my grandmother's path. She still had three children living at home. My mom was 12, her older sister was 13, and her little brother was 11. If she was to truly start a new life, she couldn't continue to drag the collateral of her failed marriage behind her wherever she went.
Sending the children to live with their father was out of the question. My grandmother had been engaged in a seven-year custody battle with her ex-husband over their children, and her pride prevented her from sending my mom and her siblings to live with their father. So she gave them up to foster care, and off they went—my mom, her sister, and her little brother—to start middle school in Nebraska with a new family.
In Nebraska, my mom and her siblings traded their mother's casual negligence for abuse. They shared the house with their foster parents' three adult children. Their son, Timmy, was home from a dishonorable discharge from the army, and he took a special interest in tormenting my mom and her siblings. His two sisters, Trudy and Theresa, spent their days chain smoking and taking little beetle-like pills, uppers called "black beauties." My mom and her siblings slept on the couch and spent their afternoons after school pulling weeds in the backyard. They put their dirty clothes in the laundry hamper and would find them later piled in the dryer, unwashed and undried. They weren't allowed to send letters to their parents, not that they received any word from their mother anyway. She had evidently settled down with her new husband and an adopted baby boy, her plush new life well underway.
The foster arrangement lasted until my grandfather got word of their captivity and whisked my mom and her siblings off to start school in Colorado. Over the next eight years, my mom saw her mother only once, when she went to visit her in Palm Springs. All she remembers about the trip was the sharp sting of unwantedness , this persistent feeling that her mother was unhappy to spend time with her. Even once they were in contact again during my mom's early adulthood, my mom described her relationship with her mother as "reticent." Gran was never angry, just emotionally unavailable. She often wouldn't return missed calls from my mom; if she did, she would be distant and hard to read. Other times, though, it seemed as though my mother was Gran’s main confidante. She would divulge secrets, give my mom little gifts, make my mom feel like her favorite daughter.
I always wondered whether my mom was angry at my grandmother. But when I asked, my mom said that she just felt sorry for her. The people in Gran's life—her children, my grandfather—had asked her to be a dandelion, ready to spread her seeds wherever the wind might take them, unfussy and resilient. But she was no dandelion.
My grandmother was an orchid, delicate and beautiful, built to thrive only in the most temperate environments. When I picture her—at 70 years old, surrounded by embroidered pillows and upholstery, her pet poodle curled at the foot of her bed—I believe she eventually created those mild conditions that allowed her to flourish. But it took everything she had to find peace for herself, and when it was all over, she simply had nothing left to give to the people who loved her.
I go down to the small cemetery by the edge of the river. Everything shines—there is no darkness here. The headstones persist in spite of what they know. They keep themselves up, pushing against that knowing which pulls them down, down. One stone is laid with a coquettish flower-crown, the next with a few pebbles. The poor person who sleeps beneath each stone doesn’t have much say in the matter. Perhaps the girl beneath the flower-crown thought daisies were for little girls with schoolgirl crushes—she would flush red with embarrassed rage to see a pile of their limp white heads draped over her final resting place. I can’t help but shake my head at this phantasm of my own making. Poor dear, to be decorated even in death with a flower she despised.
Ghosts are the best fuel for my daydreams. The specters wander in and out of my halfmemory as I weave threads of fiction and real life together, until I can imagine a whole person who might have lived just so.
Daydreams are but very small hauntings, after all.
The verb “to haunt” is derived from Old French’s “hantise,” which translates to “obsession,” or “obsessive fear.” That is, unless it comes from the French “hanter”—to “visit regularly” or “become familiar with.” Or perhaps it comes from the Germanic “heimta,” which means “to bring oneself home.” Etymology is a slippery thing, I’ve found.
Of course, I would be remiss to write about ghosts without mentioning my dear Amelia. Somewhere between phantom and imaginary friend, Amelia was a bright, fast-talking scullery
maid with a gentle spirit, who spoke in a bawdy British dialect. She lived in the hallway outside my childhood bedroom, and was always reminding me to brush my teeth.
Amelia had bouncing dark curls which were always on the verge of escaping her bonnet. Her hands were perpetually tucked into the edges of her petticoat, because idle hands are the Devil's playthings, didn't you know? That's what she always said, anyway. She was all very tsk-tsk toned and overbearing, but not the least bit nagging. I absolutely adored her.
“Now, Mackenzie,” she would huff, “Don't you dare go to bed without giving your teeth a good scrub. You wouldn't want to get yourself a nasty case of trench-mouth, would you?”
In the hallway, or the bathroom, or my bedroom—she never ventured beyond her particular haunts—she wavered, misty-edged and smelling of lemon and lye soap. On mornings when I woke up just minutes after an alarm that had failed to go off, I would wake to her voice crackling like a hearth, saying, “You best get yourself up now my dear, lest you be late for school.” I usually remembered to thank her, to which she responded with a bobbing curtsy, and a wink.
Perhaps Amelia was simply the product of my slipping too quickly between the house of my imagination and a half-asleep dream. Perhaps Amelia was only a floating remainder of my own subconscious, or a figment of an overly jumpy daydream prone to sprinting off of its own accord; maybe she was comfort incarnate, maybe a short story character in the making. She might have
been a delusion, or an escapist fantasy, or just an imaginary friend kind enough to keep drifting by, no matter how many times I begged her to let me sleep in a little longer.
I am the sort of person who lurks in cemeteries, though it is a rule that the ghosts you know, who you most desperately beg to see, will never show their faces. Still, I long to enter that chilled noman’s-land at every hour of late afternoon, when the gravestones’ shadows begin to slant against the setting sun. It is cold there under the ground, all alone when the dirt grasps at the very fibers of your skin until it begins to unravel. Here, I settle into the kingdom of apparitions, crumbled and snoring. Here I sit, listening to ghosts.
Ambrose Dyer , Loving Father, 1816-1872 , wanders around with an engraved tobacco pipe dangling between his lips. He is the sort of man who lingers a bit too long in front of shop windows to adjust his hat. Mary Ann Blanche , In Loving Memory, 1894-1942 , always walked on tiptoe (a habit she picked up from her big sister), which always left her last pick to dance. Alice SydneyGreen, 1914-1917, was always quite partial to her blue teddy bear, aptly named Blue Teddy, and she dragged him on the floor everywhere until his ear snagged on a chair and tore half-off.
You must be careful not to stumble on the ghosts of children.
They all seem to wave—or tip their pipe politely if I'm lucky—as I walk past. It's nice to be noticed, after all; they rest a little easier in their dreams when someone leans back against their stone, or stretches their legs over that small patch of grass. I can almost feel their dreams, too, when I sit above the place they rest, that merrygo-round land of clouds and golden baubles and honey-sweet sleep.
I spend my life daydreaming amongst the dead. I am not yet laid to rest, a wandering mind and a pair of perked-up ears; I am the scent of lemon-lye, I am an in-loving-memory in the making. I am a sparkling eye, winking from the hallway, delightfully haunted.
We were “duped”—it was “trickery”—we had fallen right into “a trap.” Who, you might ask, was the agent of this malevolent manipulation? A dating app catfisher? The con artist at the top of a pyramid scheme? No. According to a number of critics (and audience members who took to Twitter) the trickster, here, was the writer-director, Todd Field, and marketing team of the 2022 feature film Tár.
Tár centers around Lydia (Cate Blanchett), the eponymous contemporary classical music superstar and conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, in the days leading up to her live recording of Mahler’s fifth symphony. Lydia is a white lesbian woman in early middle age, married to the concertmisstress Sharon (Nina Hoss). She is a staunch skeptic of what she might call—for lack of a better term— “woke culture.” In one early scene, she argues that Bach’s misogyny and racism have no bearing on the value of his music, and disparages the Black conducting student who suggests otherwise. She also has a predilection for pursuing and (maybe) sleeping with younger members of her orchestra— the film is intentionally vague about the real extent of her wrongdoings. Tár tells the story of Lydia’s professional and psychological decline as her actions and their muddled consequences push their way into private and then public view.
This movie, like many—if not most— other movies shown in theaters these days, is fiction. Anyone who has seen Tár can attest to the thoroughness and deftness of the movie’s hyperrealism, but realism is not the same as reality—a distinction that audiences, in almost all cases, are willing to accept. What made audiences react so differently to Tár?
I came into Tár aware of the movie’s genre
(drama, not biopic) and so was not in a position to feel “duped” as others had, but I wanted to figure out where this sense of betrayal and frustration might have come from.
I watched Tár at 7:30 on a Saturday evening, in the Coolidge Corner Theater in Boston. Like Providence’s own Avon Cinema, stepping into Coolidge Corner is like traveling back in time, to a pre-AMC era where movie theaters played double features and had elaborate painted woodwork on their ceilings. It’s an apt setting for the kind of world-transport that movie-watching provokes. Yet as soon as the previews were over and Tár began, I felt almost as if I’d been taken out of the theater and plopped right back down on the street outside.
The film begins with Lydia talking with Adam Gopnik (real person, played by himself) at the (totally real) New Yorker Festival. Gopnik introduces Lydia, making reference to her many accolades, including her title as an “EGOT” (real). Lydia talks about her admiration for Leonard Bernstein (real), Gustav Mahler (real), and Caroline Shaw (a more obscure name-drop to those audience members not at least semi-immersed in the classical music world, but totally real and an immaculately clever insertion; I, a formerly-serious flutist, knew who she was, and had a silly moment of self-satisfaction).
I started to understand why the audience might have assumed this was a biopic. Lydia is surrounded by pandemic references, Wikipedia pages, and ultraspecific fancy pen brands—she’s even surrounded by real people. Amidst all this precise reality, she is the only true contrivance. It’s disorienting.
Is this dissonance between fiction and reality enough to explain the outrage viewers have expressed with Tár? That is, we can be confused or surprised by the knowledge that Lydia isn’t real, even as she inhabits a world that the director makes no attempt to differentiate from our own—but why are so many viewers so put off?
There are two possible answers, I think. By setting Tár in a world that is indistinguishable from reality and then placing issues of sexual power, identity, and “cancel culture” at the film’s
thematic center, the director inserts himself— quite explicitly and precisely—into these ongoing debates.
And maybe there is a point at which the critique becomes uncomfortable to witness. You might think that that point is most quickly reached through realism: How could we not feel indicted by watching our worst sins play out, straight, no sugarcoat, on the screen? Now, there’s plenty of realism in Tár , and it does serve the director’s purpose in highlighting some of the uglier sides of how power plays out in the classical music world and outside of it.
But I would argue that the movie’s small dose of fiction makes its social criticism even more powerful, because—hear me out—fictional characters can hold a symbolic weight that reallife people do not. While real people are molded by and positioned in culture, they are also products of narrow and specific circumstance. Fictional characters, on the other hand, are pure culture. Yes, they are often colored and marked by the limited experiences of their creator—but a writer, wonderfully, can reach outside the realm of his own life, constructing a new being by drawing from all that surrounds him. This process of construction also relies on the audience, whose varied and unfettered interpretations of a character make the character who she is just as much as a writer might.
In that sense, fictional characters could be any of us, while real people are, to some extent, only themselves—which makes it possible to distance ourselves from them. Had Lydia been real, we could have found something soothing in interpreting her as a specific and unsavory aberration. But with the conductor as a character, we are robbed of this recourse.
But maybe the problem is not that Lydia Tár’s fiction makes her a better vessel for reality. Maybe the problem is that while the rest of the movie feels hyper-real, Lydia is not just fictional, but totally contrived—that is, having no plausible parallel in reality. As one commentator writes: “How do we know that a queer woman chief conductor would act so egregiously? There haven’t really been any.” (Only one queer woman has ever led a major orchestra in the U.S. or Europe). Maybe, when viewers feel betrayed, they are responding to having been misled and misdirected towards dwelling on a “problem” that, while hypothetically possible, is not exactly salient in the real world.
This argument collapses as soon as you admit that Tár is certainly not just trying to comment on the phenomenon of female conductors’ sexual impropriety. Instead, the film situates itself inside conversations about sex and power more broadly. That issue: totally real. Do narratives of gay women abusing their power (also real) fit within this framework? Of course. Now, it’s entirely productive to consider male/female dynamics of sexual power as they relate to Lydia’s female/ female story, but the two are not the same. Lydia, while powerful, does not possess or exercise power in the same quality, quantity, or flavor as would a man—but Tár makes little attempt to acknowledge this, self-consciously presenting Lydia’s experience as parallel to that of a male mentor.
I respect Fields’ intent in wanting to make a movie that allows for a nuanced exploration of sex, power, and how accusations of sexual abuse play out, for better or worse, on the public stage. That’s a worthy goal. But when we talk about sexual harassment, we tend to talk about men harassing women, and while that might not be the whole story,
that focus is justified: It’s the more common case. So why did Fields decide to make his protagonist a lesbian—a category of people who are hardly at the center of our debates about sexual misconduct? His failure to meaningfully explore the differences between Lydia’s experience and her male mentor’s makes it possible to see the protagonist’s gender as something of a tool.
Consider this: There’s a new movie out. It’s called Tár . It centers around a renowned conductor—his name is Lyndon Tár. He’s married to the concertmistress, and he’s rewriting audition ratings to favor the hottest cellist. It seems like he may have slept with his old protegé, Krista. But wait! He’s complicated! Have some sympathy! Give him a break!
I would not go to see that movie. I think not very many people would. Because what makes Tár a really good movie is the fact that we do sympathize with Lydia, despite all she’s done—and I think that sympathy would not have been possible had the protagonist not been a woman. So, in the most cynical of terms, Lydia may be the ultimate contrivance: a character with no real-world analog, constructed only to capture our sympathies in order to make us think in a way that we otherwise would not. Here is the betrayal; here is the baitand-switch.
But after all of that, I’m still not sure. Because when art makes you think in a way that you otherwise would not, is that really a betrayal? Is it manipulative—or is it powerful—in just the way that art should be?
I have no answer to that question, but please, go see Tár, and maybe you’ll manage to put a finger on it.
and letting go of ourselves when reading literature
by Aalia Jagwani Illustrated by Connie LiuComing into college, I expected my education to be intellectually demanding, but I was not prepared for it to be, to an equal extent, emotionally stimulating. In my first semester, I took a comparative literature class with Professor Arnold Weinstein. Learning about Freudian complexes and literary traditions, my intellectual boundaries were pushed, but my emotional boundaries were tested just as much. After a lecture on Waiting for Godot , I was moved to despair; after reading Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, an old favorite, I was filled with an almost irrational hope. Most of all, though, I remember being completely overwhelmed and in awe of the depths I was about to spend the next four years diving into.
At the beginning of this year, Professor Weinstein of the Comparative Literature department published a book called “The Lives of Literature.” In a blog column for the Princeton University Press, he explained that his book attempts to answer the questions of why we study literature and where its value lies in today’s information-driven world.
These questions did not readily yield answers. “The elemental questions are the hardest ones to answer,” he wrote in the column.
This should not have been surprising to me, but it was. Having taken Weinstein’s class in
my very first semester of college, I developed a confidence in the value of studying literature after only just starting to do so. It felt like I had already received an answer to his questions, albeit not explicitly.
Or perhaps this is a misrepresentation— an unnamed, ambiguous sense of importance seemed to shelter me from the anxiety of having to answer these questions decisively, inspired by Weinstein’s faith in the works he taught. Had I actually been asked for an answer, I would have been wholly incapable of providing one.
Or at least not one as profound as Professor Weinstein’s turned out to be in his column: “The very experience of reading fiction—or, for that matter, poetry or plays—is inevitably an invitation to slough off your skin and become, for a while, someone else.”
First through his class and then again through these words, he confirmed that my lifelong enamorment with literature was not borne out of childish, romantic stipulations, but a legitimate exercise in the expansion of the human consciousness and our capacity for empathy.
While Weinstein’s class, pedagogy, and philosophy immediately moved me, I realize that not everybody today views literature in quite the same light—as a way of embodying the “other.” “Inhabiting—for the duration of the reading experience—those characters’ minds and hearts,” as he wrote in a column for the Brown Daily Herald.
In the same column, Weinstein admits that most of his colleagues and fellow scholars would reject the case he makes for identifying with characters in this way. Criticism today tends to center around how “the critical issues of race, class and gender” inform our experiences, which raises concerns about identifying with characters across these boundaries, instead emphasizing objectivity and distance.
That these issues of race, class, and gender are crucial is indisputable, and that literature has a lot to teach us about them is equally evident—but when this discourse restricts us from also seeing that which is universal within the pages of what we read, this begins to feel like an unbearable loss. If focusing on objectivity prevents us from accessing the inner consciousness that expands beyond our own, it is too high of a price to pay.
A common criticism of author Sally Rooney, for example, is that, although people claim her books are “relatable,” they ultimately depict privileged white people, attending college and receiving scholarships. But to me, the point is that there is something universal in these books despite the privileged characters they depict. Self-loathing, fear, anxiety, the need for intimacy—these are human experiences that span demographic boundaries. Rooney’s books, and literature in general, allow us to experience a universality in lives that bear little external resemblance to ours. Only while reading can we be at once “other,” “self,” and some universal self that completely breaks down this binary.
There is to me something inherently beautiful about this conflation of boundaries—as though it offers a secret pathway to overcome the distances between people that are inevitable in “real life.”
This is also why I have always loved Whitman’s Song of Myself: “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” he famously wrote. But I soon realized that the poem was more divisive than I had previously thought, coming into college.
Song of Myself is a big, transcendental poem about the universal self and life as cyclical, among many other things. It is an endlessly generous poem in many ways: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love/If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles,” Whitman writes at the end of his poem. “Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged/Missing me one place search another/I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
Through the poem, Whitman identifies with “other” selves, ultimately claiming a cyclical oneness with the others and the universe. But in this process of identification, he claims to embody the “long dumb voices” of those who are not as visible or privileged as he is—including “prisoners” and “slaves.”
While some people think of this sentiment as democratic, some are put off by a white man claiming to identify with historically marginalized groups, which seems at first glance to be indisputably “problematic.”
But Song of Myself , I am convinced, was never meant to be tied down in this way—like the network of leaves of grass, the poem itself spreads through the earth, across dimensions and lifetimes. To read this poem we have to allow ourselves to forego the idea of the self as a separate, individual entity altogether. It is the only way to fathom the possibility that such crucial markers of identity can be overcome.
And maybe this is why the poem has always enticed me—I am incurably attracted to the idea of deconstructing barriers, separations, and distances. The idea of an inevitable interconnectedness, not as something we have to actively strive for or learn, but as a state of being
that cannot be altered, seems like a wonderfully hopeful model for existing.
Far from being ignorant, I think this is progressive—Whitman deconstructs the Western individualistic model even as he writes from arguably the most individualistic country in the world. In fact, I discovered years after I first read the poem that Whitman was rumored to have been influenced by Hindu philosophy. This circularity, from the stories and philosophy I grew up consuming to the poetry I now love, felt uncannily appropriate.
The Hindu principles of Yoga, the universal self, rebirth, and the soul that transcends the body are embedded in Whitman’s poems. “The smallest sprout shows there really is no death,” Whitman wrote, “and if ever there was it led forward life.”
Ultimately, I am unable to come to terms with the loss of such philosophically rich texts and ideas that often comes with the insertion of identity into the relationship between readers and literature. The conversation so often ends with the word “problematic”—as though once the word has been attached to it, it has been designated as irredeemable. But literature is not that easy to categorize, and if anything, this is where the conversation should begin.
Weinstein said something similar about Faulkner in an interview: “Once you see past the picturesqueness of Faulkner’s world, or the evils of both racism and sexism, … then you are confronting an extraordinarily rich picture of human maneuvering room: how you live with your inner ghosts, how you try to reach to the other.”
I believe that it is equally worthwhile to do
both these things—acknowledging the sexism and racism in the texts, but also reaching a place of seeing past this, instead of dismissing the author or text altogether. Literature is expansive and boundless, and it should not be “cancellable.” Even the racism and sexism in Faulkner expands our understanding of the human condition at his time; after all, there is a dimension of understanding which objective histories and facts cannot deliver, which can only ever come from this exercise of “inhabiting” the consciousness of the “other.”
Starting my college career with Weinstein’s class altered me as a reader. It equipped me to seek freedom and fluidity within the realm of literature, to resist building walls that I think we sometimes default to. I had always thought of my desire to slip in and out of characters’ lives as a form of escapism, but I think it is really a profound way of accessing a wider range of emotion and experience, of closing distances with unbridled empathy.
“I do not think one finishes a work of literature as somehow a better person, primed to do more good deeds or to vote properly,” Weinstein wrote in his column for The Princeton University Press. “Rather, I believe the very experience of reading about lives and fates not one’s own stretches and deepens the human imagination. This matters.”
There is no room left for me to doubt that it does. Just like I felt it while reading Whitman in Weinstein’s class almost two years ago, I feel it while reading George Eliot and Salman Rushdie for class now, and everytime I re-read Wuthering Heights in the winter. I might appear to be sitting still for hours, turning pages, but all the while I feel myself internalize, expand, and dissolve.
The holiday season approaches! And with it, (at least for me) comes the stress of gift giving. Giving gifts to humans is hard, so why not put it off by thinking about what to gift your dog? Don’t have a dog? No worries! Feel free to use these gift ideas for a little brother or a friend with a sense of humor.
*Note: no links for products have been provided—I’m not doing all of the work for you.
Specifically, yours. The bed should be a height suitable for your dog to clamber onto. If it isn’t, you should look into building a little ramp. See, dogs don’t like dog beds. Dogs like human beds because dogs like their humans and want to be where their humans are. If the human leaves the human bed and lies down on the dog bed, then the dog will like the dog bed.
Yours, as well. Not dog food, and nothing too salty,
too sweet, or containing chocolate. The sentiment is the same as above; dogs want whatever you’re eating. So maybe if you start eating dog food, your dog will do the same. If you’re not willing to go that far, share a bit of your food. As mentioned earlier, the table scraps you offer to your dog shouldn’t contain excess salt, excess sugar, or chocolate. Also, no grapes.
Like the two gift ideas above, “shoes” here refers to human ones rather than dog ones. In my experience, dogs aren’t fond of having items strapped to their paws. While you may have good intentions buying doggy shoes, there’s a decent chance they’ll never be worn. Human shoes, however, would make a great gift—as a toy. The rubberiness and odor of a pair of running shoes are what conventional dog toys strive for but never fully replicate. The best part is this gift comes at no cost: dig out an old pair of sneakers and you’re good to go.
This might take the form of another dog, a cat, or an emotional support rat (I’m not making this up—the other day I saw a video of a dog who has an emotional support rat). There’s only so much companionship we as humans can provide to our dogs. So if your dog doesn’t already have another animal in the house, a furry/hairy/feathered friend may be the best gift you could give this holiday season—provided they’ve got a social temperament.
Simple but effective. Your dog just wants a gentle pat on the head and a scratch behind the ears. This is also a good back-up option in case you forget to purchase a gift.
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Kyoko Leaman
“You watched as the hummingbirds floated up to the feeder, shy at first, sticking their long beaks into the plastic flowers to drink the sugar water.”
—Adi Thatai, “Birdkeeper” 11.13.2020
“There are still so many questions and so few answers, but the permutations of my identity don’t nullify my right to define it.”
—Kaitlan Bui, “I Am (Not) A Fake” 11.8.2019
Section Editors Addie Marin Ananya Mukerji
ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Joe Maffa
Section Editors Katheryne Gonzalez Rachel Metzger
HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Connie Liu
COPY CHIEF Aditi Marshan
Want to be involved? Email: kyoko_leaman@brown.edu!
LAYOUT CHIEF Alice Min Layout Designers Alice Min Caroline Zhang Gray Martens Jiahua Chen
STAFF WRITERS Dorrit Corwin Lily Seltz Alexandra Herrera Olivia Cohen Danielle Emerson Liza Kolbasov Marin Warshay Aalia Jagwani AJ Wu
Nélari Figueroa Torres Daniel Hu Mack Ford Ellie Jurmann Andy Luo Sean Toomey Marlena Brown Nadia Heller Sarah Frank