Post- 02/09/18

In This Issue – NEWPORT – VALENTINES – SUSHI – FINE DINING – LOVE STORIES

PostCover by Doris Liou

FEB 09

VOL 21 —

ISSUE 2

“As our conversation went on, what I learned about food at the Refectory turned my misconceptions on their undercooked heads.”

Table of Contents

—Taylor Viggiano, "The R atty's Underbelly" 02.11.2016

feature

Romance, Riches, and Rocks J.B. NOVAK 3

lifestyle

Candygrams ANONYMOUS LOVERS 6

Trust Me EMERSON TENNEY 6 arts &culture

Got Beef?

PIA-MILEAF PATEL & JULIAN CASTRONOVO 7

The Professor of Love (Stories) HANA PARK 8

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, Our collective, conflicted, carnal thoughts on Valentine’s Day: Beef Barn, where not to take your date, and Cliff Walk, where you should.

Watch Love Actually, if you’re feelin’ the holiday spirit, or The Lobster, if you’re really not. Under no circumstances watch Valentine’s Day, even if it’s featured on Netflix.

If you need heart-shaped sprinkles, order a Cherry Mocha from Starbucks and they can do that for you.

You will not get a table at Duck and Bunny. Buy your cupcakes at the Blue Room.

If you’re out of flex dollars and real dollars, check out our Analysis of the Mega Stuf to Double Stuf Cost to Stuf Ratio in the Standard Nabisco® Oreo® Chocolate Sandwich Cookie Tray and Its Potential as a Chocolate Substitute online.

Pay ARRR!!! to sing a telegram to yourself in Principles.

For a more academic approach, attend “What’s Love Got to Do with it? Scholarly Citation Practices Courtship Rituals” at the Rock.

Hand-draw and hand-deliver your own Valentine to protest the $1.1 billion greeting card conspiracy.

Follow Donald Trump Jr’s advice and buy a teddy bear with a Trump-branded bathrobe from TrumpStore.com.

Celebrate Singles Awareness Day (SAD) instead by eating Pringles in your dorm room.

Happy Early Valentine’s Day!

Saanya & Jennifer

editor - in - chief

this week’s

&

fe atures managing editor

1. More Than Ready 2. First Dude 3. Philanthropist 4. Super Saver 5. Caleb's Posse 6. Unusual Heat 7. Catholic Boy

Racehorse Names That Are Also Boys I've Met on Tinder

2 post–

8. Into Mischief 9. Point of Entry 10. Square Eddie

Editor-in-Chief Saanya Jain Features Managing Editor Jennifer Osborne Section Editors Anita Sheih Kathy Luo Lifestyle Managing Editors Annabelle Woodward Pia Patel Section Editors Divya Santhanam Arts & Culture Managing Editor Josh Wartel Section Editors Celina Sun Marly Toledano Julian Castronovo Copy Chief Alicia DeVos Zander Kim Amanda Ngo Design Head Sarah Saxe Layout Chief Livia Mucciolo Julia Kim Gabriela Gil Media Head Claribel Wu Samantha Haigood Illustration Head Doris Liou Becki Shu Caroline Hu Erica Lewis Harim Choi Kira Widjaja Molly Young Nayeon (Michelle) Woo Staff Writers Andrew Liu Anna Harvey Bianca Stelian Charlie Stewart Daniella Balarezo Eliza Cain James Feinberg Nicole Fegan Sydney Lo

feature

Romance, Riches, and Rocks Cliff Walk has it all

By J.b. novak

Illustration by Becki Shu

No matter the circumstances, the task of conceiv-

ing a Valentine’s Day date idea is daunting. The date must be thoughtful but not overwhelming, romantic but not cheesy. The task is even more difficult for couples who have been dating for months or years (an eternity in Brownland time) and have already hit all the affordable date-nights in Providence. Sure, you could take your significant other to the RISD museum again, but eventually you will both get tired of looking at the same contorted chair and monotone canvas with a fishhook in it.

Luckily, there’s an underappreciated local date spot you can take your SO to: the Cliff Walk in Newport.

There’s no admission cost for the Cliff Walk, and the Number 60 RIPTA bus that runs between Providence and Newport is completely free for Brown students. The Cliff Walk appeals to a wide variety of interests, and the trip is an easy all-day adventure around Newport.

To begin with, there are the famous Newport mansions that tower above the Cliff Walk and draw in most of the 200,000 visitors the trail sees every year.

Many of the mansions were built in the latter half of the nineteenth century by wealthy New York industrialists who vacationed in Newport in the summer. For the SOs who are interested in architecture or history, these Victorian manors will make a great date destination.

The mansions are also an inside look at how the local bourgeoisie lived, which holds an ironic appeal to the SOs who spend their time reading The Communist Manifesto.

Here’s a quick rundown of what you might find on your visit, but how to spin the trip is up to you.

The Breakers mansion was built in 1893 by Cornelius Vanderbilt II, the grandson of the railroad industrialist.

The locals refer to the 70-room colossus as a cottage, out of spite for the high admission fee. As you enter the home, the ceiling of the Breakers castle extends 30-some feet into the heavens above, rendering even the tallest guests insignificant proles compared to the mighty captains of industry who once lived within its walls. Signs with informative room descriptions such as “Bath” and “Kitchen” direct your journey from the gaping chasm of the entryway to the remainder of the gilded interior, and the walk under the twin chandeliers and ceiling fresco of the dining room will remind you that wealth truly does trickle down.

Marble House on Bellevue Ave is another worthwhile but pricey mansion stop. The home was built between 1888 and 1892 as a birthday gift for Cornelius’ wife, Alva Vanderbilt, who later left him for a Congressman from New York. Remember that this Valentine’s Day: Money can’t buy love, only rent it. The design of Marble House was inspired by the Petit Trianon, a chateau at the Palace of Versailles. This is definitely worth pointing out to the Communist Manifesto-loving SO, who will likely be all over the parallels between modern America and revolutionary France when it comes to the conditions that nurture an income-inequality-inspired revolutionary movement. The Chinese Teahouse on the Marble House’s grounds is another oddity worthy of a visit, allowing visitors to plainly see the passage of cultural appropriation from one generation of white february 9, 2018 3

FEATURE

LIFESTYLE

There’s a simple beauty to this quartz complex that puts the vanity of the mansions on the cliff into perspective. aristocrats to the next. Alva Vanderbilt commissioned the tea house in 1914 and sent a team of architects to China to research the project. The result is an over-exaggerated imitation of the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Chinese Imperial Palace, complete with arched roof and guardian lions. Alva Vanderbilt even celebrated its opening with a Chinese costume ball, and local gossip indicates that she was crowned empress of the estate later that night.

For the more outdoors-oriented folks, the Cliff Walk trail is a great Valentine’s date option. The trail overlooks the Rhode Island Sound and winds three-and-a-half miles down the coastline of Newport directly past some of the mansions. Access to the Cliff Walk trail has been a point of contention between the local fisherman and aristocratic homeowners for much of the past centuryand-a-half. The landowners have financed many creative attempts to keep the public at arm’s length, erecting fences, walls, and even boulders over the footpath to block visitors from making the hike down the coastline.

Others once posted dogs and even a bull to scare away tourists. To this day, there are still disputes at points along the trail.

Personally, I think the trail itself is the most romantic part of the Cliff Walk. Why? Rocks. Most people walking the trail ignore them, leaving them to bear silent witness to Rhode Island’s distant past. The major rock units increase in age from the northern to the southern end of the trail, making the walk a journey backwards in time through hundreds of millions of years of geologic history. For this reason, the Cliff Walk has long been a destination for Brown’s introductory geology class, Geology 0220. A detailed interpretation of geologic features is a skill that takes years to master, but there are some fascinating formations along the Cliff Walk that anyone is sure to find pretty cool. So, let’s take a quick trip through time.

Today, Cliff Walk is a mix of paved, easily navigable paths and unpaved rocky areas. These paths were built during the major restoration of the Cliff Walk that occurred after Hurricane Sandy, replacing the walkways that local landowners had been building since the 1880s on top of the trails once used by the European colonists.

The colonists had inherited the paths from the local Narragansett People whom they displaced, who used them after they had been stomped out of the ground by decades of deer migration.

Entering the trail by the Breakers Mansion, the first visible features are the 4 post–

outcrops of tilted grey metamorphic rocks called phyllite that jut out from amongst the waves. These rocks are made from sediments deposited in lakes and streams over 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous period. At the time, giant 2.6 meter long centipedes and dragonflies with wingspans of over 30 inches roamed the Earth, and fern fossils from this period live on in some of the rocks. A few of these outcrops also have fractures filled with white quartz, forming especially beautiful veins in an outcrop on the beach just south of the Breakers, where the trail turns due south. There’s a simple beauty to this quartz complex that puts the vanity of the mansions on the cliff into perspective.

Sometimes, the best things are free.

Much farther south is an outcrop of greygreen rock that contains rock fragments that have been stretched into elongate shapes.

This rock is volcanic ash that was deposited over 540 million years ago during PreCambrian time, before the development of complex life on Earth. The rock fragments within were volcanic bombs that were ejected from long-gone volcanoes as they erupted— their elongated shapes, as well as the folded layers in the rock and its greenish hue, are the result of chemical processes that took place about 15 kilometers below the surface of the earth after ash was buried by younger sediments.

At around this time, the massive pink granite toward the southern end of Cliff Walk was born. This coarse-grained rock was formed by the upward intrusion of molten magma into overbearing rock and its slow crystallization about 540 million years ago in Avalonia, a microcontinent that lay just off the western coast of proto-Africa. When Africa collided with North America to form the Appalachian Mountains around 300 million years ago, Avalonian rocks were left attached to North America, including the pieces found here along Cliff Walk in RI. Along the Cliff Walk, you can see the remains of an ancient land and the story of the processes that have shaped it into the Rhode Island we see today. These workings of our Earth make both us and the towering mansions of the Cliff Walk small and insignificant by comparison. The Cliff Walk’s geology offers a perspective on how profoundly lucky we are, showing how many millions of billions of events had to have taken place for us to be spending this Valentine’s Day with our better half. I know it does for me. After all, where there are rocks, there’s romance.

Candygrams Post- modern love By anonymous lovers

frosting from a can frosting from a can i really like it sam i am - Cake1234 you will bald prematurely.

- RattyDaddy "A Brief Query for God" Dear God, Why do bad things Happen to good people?

Why do good things Happen to bad people?

And if nothing ever happens to me, What the hell is that supposed to mean?

- James Feinberg I laughed my first time. And second. And third. I’m a nervous laugher. My girlfriend was understandably upset.

- Sensory Issues 101 Those awful toe shoes Apparently he owned them Should have known better - Retrospective Red Flag Roses are red, violets are blue, taking physics was almost worth it, because I got to talk to you - I still hate the subject

into a pool of lemon laughter, toothy smiles we fall in, loving - LITR 0100B: Intro to Poetry Went to a party on February 10th and I was dancing with this girl, and then I was leaving the party and she was like, "Hey, can we exchange numbers?" And then I was like, let's do something on Tuesday. And then on Tuesday I woke up and it was Valentine's Day. I didn't want her to purposefully think I was taking her out on Valentine's Day. So I just decided not to address it. Yea. - ilovepodcasts i

LIFESTYLE have your senior year yearbook photo taped to the left inside cover of my english notebook i have the butt of the pencil you lent me even though i have long since used up the rest of it i have a memory of you, and me, with you, of us,

he played

my most cherished possession

guitar and

that im saving for a rainy day

i gave birth

- keeper of things

to a dear friend on stage. it was a variety show of sorts. during a quick change, the voice of an angel sung a song about surgery and wanting it and having it. i paid little attention, unable to unhook my bra under my sweater to slide on a tight-fitting pair

I don't want to know

of child's overalls.

About the inner movements

as we deconstructed the stage, he introduced

That dictate your gut

He

himself. when i saw him any time after, i

- Chanel No. 2

asked

called him Sam. he didn't correct me a single

me if I wanted to

time. soon i got giddy seeing him on campus.

I met up with a guy who invited me to hang out

smoke before we went to bed and

sometimes i rerouted my routes to overlap with

at 11 p.m., and after three hours, told me he was

I said yes because, even though I’m known

his. he carried a banana with him everywhere

going to bed. I asked him why he hadn't made a

to get habitually paranoid and nervous after

he went, a three-time a day ritual. he was sam

move, and he blamed the patriarchy. wut

smoking weed, I didn’t want to have to explain

the banana man in the text thread between my

- Obama

everything. I didn’t know how to say that I

mom and i.

don’t smoke weed, but like I’m a person who

then one night on a street corner, i asked for

would smoke weed, if you know what I mean.

guitar lessons, knowing very well i had no

Within minutes I was lying in a corpse position,

musical talent to speak of or show for. he tried

regretting the fact that I had taken the inside

to teach me a grip or two but i got bored so we

corner of the bed against the wall and would

watched a Spanish movie about a lady who

have to roll my body over his to get to water, or

became a house.

the bathroom, or the front door. He started to

when he told me he loved me, i said thank you

kiss down my neck and my stupid, hypercritical

sam. almost two years later and he still sings

brain started telling me that this is how sad

about surgery. almost two years later and i still

housewives feel when their white collar

don't play guitar. almost two years later and i've

balding husband comes home from work and

finally started calling him james.

can only get it up for a minute before rolling

- jane adams

over and falling asleep. I started laughing but bit my lip so he’d think it was a sex thing. He bit his lip back and I had to stop myself from gagging. When he slid into me, I had to hide my face in the crook of my elbow to keep from breaking into high pitched giggles. All sex is violence! My brain screamed. I tried to push off the ebb of intrusive thoughts but they kept coming in. There’s just no way this ever feels as good for me as it does for him. When he finished, he started to go down on me because he’s a good feminist, and totally believed me when I pretended to come in 30 seconds. All told: If you’re prone to paranoia and intrusive thoughts while smoking weed, it’s best to not do that before sex.

- High Maintenance did your roommate see my vulva?

- isn’t it cute??

Illustrated by Molly Young

february 9, 2018 5

LIFESTYLE

Trust Me

A friendship in conversation By emerson tenney

in japanese, "omakase" means that a sushi chef has taken full responsibility for their diner’s experience of a meal. They have chosen the highest quality fish, the most seasonal ingredients, the type of dishes they will serve, and the order in which they will serve them. For diners, “omakase” means that they put their full faith in the hands of the chef. They relinquish any tendencies toward fussy orders and modifications and trust that there has been unimaginable care put into what they are about to taste.

When Chef Kazunori Nozawa first opened Sugarfish in 2008, a restaurant which now has 10 locations dotted across California and one opening in New York City, he fashioned his menu around the omakase style. He said, “Trust Me.” And we all did.

On the first day of the New Year 2018, at 5:12 p.m., I was in my backyard playing fetch with my newly rescued, hyperactive American bulldog, wondering how much Xanax you can give a dog before it’s considered animal abuse when my phone buzzed. It was my childhood best friend, Alex, born in the same hospital as me 20 years ago, a mere five days separating our births.

Alex, 5:12 p.m. “Let’s get dinner!!!”

Me, 5:15 p.m. “Yes!!!”

“Where do you want to go??”

I’d moved inside by then and was watching the sun set between the eucalyptus trees that framed my kitchen window. A soft breeze blew in through its cracked pane reminding me of the gentleness of winter in Southern California. I was back on winter holiday from Brown and had been expecting Alex’s text for a few days now. Ever since we’d gone off to college two years ago it had become a tradition that at least once during each of our respective breaks back in LA we would meet for dinner and fill each other in on everything that had been happening in our lives since our last meal. I already knew where we would go, so I’m not entirely sure why I even asked.

8:39 p.m. “Anywhere you want babe! I’m biased and will say Sugarfish, but anything you want!”

6 post–

Sugarfish. There it was.

It was where we went the night before I moved to Providence. It was where we went the day I came back for my first Thanksgiving break and, subsequently, where we went every following break.

Now don’t get me wrong, Sugarfish is pretty flawless.

For its price point it’s some of the best sushi you can find in Los Angeles, and there are many a day I wake up on the East Coast craving the unctuous chew of their blue crab cut roll. But for some reason, this time when Alex mentioned Sugarfish something inside me snapped.

It was a small, brittle thing I hadn’t known was there in the first place, and its snapping sounded like years of resentment toward the cookie-cutter California lifestyle reaching its zenith.

8:41 p.m. “Sugarfish is always great but I’ve also wanted to try that new sushi place on Abbot Kinny” It was so predictable. I knew her suggestion even before she typed it. And maybe it upset me so much because it spoke to the predictability of Alex at large. After we graduated high school, Alex matriculated to UCLA for its dance program. As I packed my bags and moved 3,000 miles across the country, Alex left her electric car charging in her family’s garage and moved a quarter of a mile up the street from her house. Our first month apart I was jealous. I remember crying to my mom over the phone about how unfair it was that Alex still got to go out to eat at all our favorite restaurants, that when she had a stressful day in class she could walk home and bake cookies with her mom and little sisters and talk about it.

But, as those initial months turned into semesters, the convenience of Alex’s life started to irk me for a different reason. I was learning to navigate a new city, grappling with weather I’d never before faced, and creating a sense of self-reliance I'd never before needed.

I loved it. The world was expansive and fresh and mine. How did Alex not also want that?

Why was she content with being so safe?

I waited about an hour before following up my previous text with further pushback: 9:30 p.m. “There’s also a sushi place called King’s Burgers/Got Sushi? that is supposed to

be amazing but it’s in the valley so I get if you don’t want to make the drive” In 2011 Chef Jun Y. Cha, an alum of Sushi Roku and a few other high-profile sushi oases, opened Got Sushi? in the back of a tired fastfood burger joint in Northridge. Freed from the expectations of a glitzy Hollywood dining experience, Cha took the liberties to let his culinary imagination run wild. Seven years later he is still serving up some of the most innovative Japanese cuisine in the city. I had never been. I knew this was a long shot.

9:43 p.m. “I’m seriously fine with anything you want to try!!!”

During a phone call home in early December, Alex had told me she’d decided to study abroad this summer in Florence. I was genuinely surprised. Alex, who had never once traveled alone, not even to sleepaway camp. Perhaps a new hope really was on the horizon—a hope for forging new paths and eating mounds of barely-seared albacore smothered in charred enoki mushrooms and drizzled with creamy pepper sauce.

9:57 p.m. “It says it’s a 35 min drive no traffic for me, I’m totally down to go but do u know of anywhere closer?!”

In 1940, Los Angeles opened its first freeway, the 8.9 mile, six-lane Arroyo Seco Parkway that later came to be known as the Pasadena Freeway. Construction continued throughout the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, tearing through mountains and fracturing communities. The master plan was to create a 527-mile long freeway system across the city and California as a whole. Efforts petered out in the early ’70s, leaving pockets of LA in traffic traps. This halt was due, in large part, to protests from affluent homeowners who were too busy living their posh lifestyles on the Westside to be bothered with unsightly construction. To this da,y the Westside serves as a weekday wasteland between the hours of

Illustrated by Linda Liu & Pia Mileaf-Patel

ARTS&CULTURE

Tuesday, Jan. 2, 12:33 p.m.

“Ok I forgot I’m meeting with people around 2:30 and won’t be done til 5 which I know is bad for traffic but I will leave at like 5:15? And head towards u!

When I was eight years old, I was tasked with creating a “planet report” on Saturn, and I made a model to go along with my research. The model was the most exciting part. I planned it all out—I hot glued half of a Styrofoam sphere and half of a foam arc to a folding poster board. Then I covered the foam pieces in blue and red crystals I’d found at a local bead shop. Halfway through construction, it became evident that the crystals were going to be too heavy. They were pulling the foam off the poster board, but I couldn’t stop. It was going to be so beautiful if only I could force it to be what I had envisioned. “Trust me,” I said to the board. “Just stay together and trust me that this is going to end up being incredible.”

The board stayed together that night for the remainder of my hot gluing, but when I came downstairs in the morning it had completely fallen apart. It lay, fractured, in a pool of crystal shards.

Looking down at the glowing phone in my hand, I saw that old poster board and the Styrofoam slowly peeling. Why was I forcing it anyway?

12:42 p.m. “You’ll be dying! How about I just meet you at Sugarfish around 5:30?”

12:49 p.m. “Ok!” “5:30 is perfect!”

“Yayyyy.”

Got Beef?

Your V-Day date will never see this one coming...

by Pia mileaf-patel & Julian Castronovo

“Apple pie without ice cream is like a hug without a kiss,” proclaims one of the many plaques that decorate the knotty pine walls of the Beef Barn. The apple pie at the Beef Barn comes without ice cream, but sometimes a hug without a kiss is what’s appropriate. And when apple pie tastes like this one does, you need nothing but a fork.

Twenty minutes from campus by car, the Barn is slinging steak sandwiches, roast beef, and homemade pie in North Smithfield, RI. They also have grilled cheese for all you hardcore veggies out there, but the name “Beef Barn” was enough to make one easilypersuaded-meat-eating-vegetarian author cave hard. Salad exists on the menu, but honestly, why bother?

You can dine in at this literal barn for $6, which will get you a steak sandwich and large fries. And you should dine in at the Beef Barn.

A toy train runs circles around the light-box menu in the center of the open kitchen. Deep fryers line the back wall, churning out golden chicken fingers, and a huge roast beef slicer sits on the countertop, whittling hunks of beef down into thin, pink layers of meat on a soft roll. But when in Rome, we recommend the steak sandwich. Is it magic or is it MSG? Either way, we’ll take two please, with cheese and sauteed mushrooms.

The steak sandwich comes on a lightly toasted hot dog bun (brilliant—who thought of that?), with thin-sliced-but-still-pinkin-the-middle steak, and your choice of mushrooms, cheese, bacon, lettuce, or tomato. Douse it in mystery sauce from a barn-themed squirt bottle (we think it is ketchup with some A1 steak sauce, but who knows), and rip into it. Everything here is barn-themed. There are taxidermied chickens in the “Chicken Coop Room.”

Alternatively, try the roast beef sandwich, which, to be honest, has proven unremarkable with the memory gap of a three day lag between consumption and writing. So maybe don’t try it. We don’t really care as long as you get your butt to the

The Beef Barn Barn. But all we can remember is the steak Address sandwich, charred and 1 Greenville Rd North Smithfield cheesy, toasty, beefy.

RI 02896 Does beef taste better when you sit in a Phone Number red vinyl booth inside 401-762-9880 a mock barn, listening to Spin Doctors’s ‘Two Princes’? Does ketchup compliment fries more perfectly when it pools in the grooves of a styrofoam plate? Is lamp-lighting softer when the lamps themselves are red enamel, aluminum, and appear to be illuminating stable stalls? We think so. We know so. And the multitude of families enjoying a Superbowl Sunday beef lunch seemed to agree.

Thank god pumpkin pie is still in season in February. The Beef Barn knows what the fuck is up. And thank god there are coloring books, although they seem to have been monopolized by a certain crayon-wielding toddler named “Tallulah,” who signed all her half-finished works in cursive. We don’t mind, though. Being, technically, adults, we were offered no crayons. This was appropriate, but disappointing.

Beef Barn Boston cream pie has the irresistible appeal of frosting from a can if it were a complete dessert in itself. After objections from certain canned-frostinghaters, the authors would like to clarify that frosting from a can is officially good.

The pumpkin pie we ate had no trace of the stringy, gourd-y, pumpkin-ness everyone resents about Thanksgiving’s iconic dessert.

Instead, it was condensed-milk-sweetened and spice-packed, with a flaky dark crust and almost pudding-like texture. Honestly, it could win over my heart, if anyone is trying (It is up to the reader to discern which author wrote this sentence, although, frankly, either of us would take a slice of pie—this specific pie).

We bought T-Shirts at checkout. Sure, at $15 a piece, they were more than triple the price of lunch for one, but some fashion statements are worth any price. And these are most definitely statement pieces—you’ll see both of us on campus proudly wearing our shirts that feature a giant, stoned, anthropomorphic cow hovering over the Beef Barn.

Illustrated by Lisa Fasol

3 and 8 p.m. Cars toil away for brutal hours in order to inch forward the insurmountable 15 miles from office to home. If you live west of the 405, one of LA’s three primary freeways that did make it through the construction process, it’s a safe bet that you’ll be staying west Monday through Friday.

Alex doesn’t drive on the freeways, a fact that has baffled me since we turned 16. My mom lives in East LA, and growing up I was accustomed to the fact that if I wanted to see Alex, I was going to have to come to her. So her next text was nothing short of shocking.

11:27 p.m. “But I’m literally down for anything!”

“I could meet you at your house & we could drive together!!”

2:24 a.m. “My house in Studio City?”

“If you meet me there I can just drive us to Northridge” 2:29 a.m. “Sounds good to me!! What time?!”

2:30 a.m. “Anytime after 3:30 or 4! If you want to beat traffic you can get here at 4 ish and we can hang before we go out" 2:52 a.m. “4ish should be ok!!”

Things were settled.

february 9, 2018 7

ARTS&CULTURE

The Professor of Love (Stories)

An interview with James Kuzner by hana park

To me, the very existence of Love Stories is baffling. It is an English class, taught every fall semester, that studies ambitious novels and tries to capture the vagaries of love. The class aspires to provide a structural means of thinking of love, yet the very essence of love resists structure. To me, love is restless, messy, and trite.

I took Love Stories my first semester at Brown. I’m now in my sixth semester. With a more critical eye, I realized the reason for the class’s overwhelmingly popularity is due to Professor James Kuzner. Without him, there would be no class. Kuzner, an earnest man, wears a suit and tie every class without fail, and often speaks about his children, who are named after the Shakespeare characters Edith and Celia of As You Like It. He epitomizes the clean-cut nature of the class— kind and often unassuming.

Regardless, Kuzner is a notable presence among Brown students because he dares to even speak about love in an academic setting.

He critically examines the books while allowing sentiment to run through the room.

It’s the consideration that feelings aren’t actually undesirable, but human. In this way, the mere existence of Love Stories combats the tired cynicism that’s in vogue.

In an email exchange, Professor Kuzner shared his thoughts on love, his class, and his image.

2. Because you teach Love Stories, do you find that students talk to you about their love lives? If so, is that uncomfortable? Do you enjoy it?

Every semester there will be a few students who come to me with questions about their love lives. I’m not a trained counselor, but it doesn’t bother me at all. Everyone is hurting, in different ways and at different times, and again, I wish I had had an “old head” to counsel me when I was younger. I think it comes with the territory, but I try to focus more on asking questions than on giving answers, because I’m never really inside someone else’s situation.

3. Are you aware of the image that you hold as a professor on love and Shakespeare?

(For example, there was a Brown Bears Admirers post that said, “Merry Christmas only to James Kuzner”.)

I was not aware of that post. I do get the occasional singing Valentine or embarrassing student evaluation, but I know it’s all a joke. I’d be shocked if anyone actually romanticized me. What’s there to romanticize?

1. What made you think to teach a class called Love Stories? What did you hope to accomplish with the class?

I taught “Love Stories” because no one taught it to me. Between the ages of 18-29 I broke three hearts, and I thought “There has to be a better way.” As it turns out, there is. As a young person, I based my ideas about love on movies like Titanic and music like that of Boyz II Men—if I was being more realistic, I would have based them on The Princess Bride—and while these things have their place, I had no idea really that love could be

4. What do you think of hookup culture?

Or dating apps such as Tinder? Is it possible to find love in that environment?

It’s possible to find love—or possible for love to find you—in any environment. You never know when love will come around and surprise you. So, sure, I don’t see any problem with hookup culture or dating apps. I also think it’s fine if people aren’t looking for love or even aren’t interested in romantic love and would rather focus their erotic energies elsewhere. Everyone must love something—

Illustrated by Clarissa Liu

an art or a discipline. It is both, and it needs to be both. You need a class for it. That’s what Love Stories tries to offer: a structured way to think through the most important thing in everyone’s life.

so if it isn’t romance, it’ll be friendship, or weightlifting, or whatever. I do worry that hookup culture might raise the rate of heartache, and that I find that worrisome.

5. Your favorite Shakespeare play and why.

I don’t have a favorite, but if I had to choose, I’d choose Coriolanus. Maybe that’s just because some of my favorite actors (Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hiddleston) have played him. I love how uncompromising he is.

6. What Valentine’s day means to you.

Any plans.

Though I believe in true love, and know for sure that I have found the love of my life, Valentine’s Day has never meant anything to me and never will. It is a fake parasite that feeds on love and makes relationships worse.

7. How’re the daughters doing?

The daughters are doing great. Edith, the older one, has announced her marriage to Blinky (the six-eyed troll voiced by Kelsey Grammer in Trollhunters). Celia’s favorite thing to say to us before bed is “I love you, that’s all I can say.” That’s all she needs to say.

"I think I'll just wait for BUSSEL experiments."

"This school is a panopticon as soon as I put on sweatpants."

8 post–

"'I'm so sore.'

'Did you go to the gym?'

'No, I SafeWalked.'"