In This Issue
Oh, This Old Thing?
Siena Capone 4
Finding Coldness
Joyge Gao 2
Rachel Carlson 5
Embodied A Las Calles Dorrit Corwin 7
A Labor of Love Kyoko Leaman 6
postCover by Deirdre Klemek
APR 9
VOL 27
— ISSUE 10
FEATURE
Finding Coldness on making sense of brain dumps By Joyce Gao Illustrated by Habesha Fasika Petros
In praise of coldness by Jane Hirshfield “If you wish to move your reader,” Chekhov wrote, “you must write more coldly.” Herakleitos recommended, “A dry soul is best.” Flicking the page’s edge, I frowned at these two stanzas. From my experience and those of
many of my friends who write, I can say with confidence that the young writer’s mind is anything but cold and dry. Instead, it flares and charges blindly in the dark, bouncing off walls and chasing itself in circles. Thrashing in this chaos, young writers produce their first works. Like many emotionally sensitive but socially awkward teenagers, I processed many life-shaping events by thinking and writing about them in my bedroom, alone, and often too late into the night.
Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, Maybe I’m a romantic, but there’s something about sitting in the starry dark slowly icing over the day’s slap of sunshine that just screams Spring Weekend. Well, okay, this isn’t how I imagined the end of the semester, but in a way, it’s better: a scattered crew of post-its has assembled on the Green to roast each other and sway to indie music, so basically just us indoors, but outdoors. With distance, and struggles to recognize each other’s masked faces. And despite the chill that has us desperately tucking our hands under our laptops, I am warmed by this group of goofy and thoughtful, yet delightfully crass, individuals who make post- happen. I am grateful to our seniors (whoa, there are adults here?), Minako and Christina, as well as the people who just joined this semester (a crazy feat, truly): Andrew, Emily, Sam, Lily, and Sharlene. And then of course all the rest of you old dogs. Our final issue of the semester is ending on a similarly nostalgic note. The Feature writer looks back at their journey with writing in solitude and for an audience (post-, in fact!). In Narrative, one author sifts through meaningful objects in her life 2 post–
while the other processes the physical memories of her eating disorder. Meanwhile, the writers in Arts & Culture sweep us away to other places: one to Bogota and its inspiring street art, and the other to Britain, or rather the Great British Bake Off and a quest to create some art of the culinary variety. We return firmly to Earth and to a crashing wave of nostalgia in Lifestyle, where senior writers Gus and Eashan give us their last irony-packed hurrah. Expect to snort while reading. It honestly is unbelievable on days like today, when students cluster––now with caution––on the Green to stare up at the budding magnolia trees, take advantage of free ice cream on Brown’s dollar, and spread rumors about the Spring Weekend lineup, that this is the end of the spring semester. Whatever we imagined it would be one month, six months, a year ago, there’s something beautiful just in the fact that we made it here. And thank YOU for joining post- along the way. Wistfully elbow-fiving the school year goodbye,
Olivia Howe Editor-in-chief
I felt there was a transparent shield that grew thicker as the night unfolded, and the later I stayed up, the safer I was from the rest of the world. Once I was sealed off, a new world awakened under the dim lights of my dorm room: a world composed of suburban nights, my twin bed, Virginia Woolf novels, a malfunctioning heater that clattered and clanged, and endless writing. I did not write complete, coherent pieces in high school. Rather, I created a new document
Things to Unsee from Spring 2021
1. Me 4x-speeding lectures in my pajamas 2. Sex with the blinds up in the window across mine, every Friday night. Like clockwork. 3. Mask-under-nose syndrome 4. Men doing sports shirtless (and maskless) 5. Frat boys tearing down ESV posters 6. “Follow the arrow” signs in every building. 7. Socially distant breakups :( 8. People dressing great. It’s too much for my tiny heart. You will live in my dreams forever <3 9. Heterosexual buffoonery 10. My Popeyes order missing a chicken sandwich :’(
FEATURE every six months and dumped everything I wanted to say into it. It included indignant paragraphs from arguments that I wish I had won (“Come on—philosophy and psychology are not boring; they are important areas of study that are missing in the current high school curriculum”), selfperformed psychoanalysis, vague contemplations about the meaning of art (“I am starting to think the idea of ‘art that stands for itself ’ is a bit of bullshit”), and too many pages spent on fleeting crushes. I never showed these documents to anyone. I just tried to understand the mystery of my mind by delving into it again and again. Sometimes, I found a piece of realization that I could fit somewhere into my identity, but more often I returned with nothing. The nights I returned empty-handed, I turned to Virginia Woolf. For a non-native English speaker, her novels were not the easiest reads. I have no concept of the London morning into which Mrs. Dalloway plunged, and I initially didn’t understand what Mr. Ramsey could mean with the word “flounder” if not the fish. But I waded through the pages, excavating the shimmering lines that seemed to be buried there just for me. I felt as if I was lingering on the shore of the ocean she so often describes, sifting through the pebbles as I marked and underlined with my favorite sky blue pen. She wrote in The Waves: “I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.” I marveled at sentences like this, folding page corners and muttering them to myself again and again, just loud enough to feel the syllables clicking through my mouth, but quiet enough so as not to disturb the magical tranquility of the night. On winter days after fresh snow had fallen, a soft, bluish hue would envelop my small bedroom, and I felt as if the entire space had sunk to the bottom of one of Woolf ’s seas. I huddled in my twin bed, the wind outside an echo of the buzz in my mind, and imagined that the only faint glimmer in thousands of miles was my bedside lamp. In those moments, I was completely—wonderfully—alone in my head. I thought this was what Woolf meant when she wrote about the “solitude in which to unfold my possessions,” so I rooted myself within my solitude and grew my writing out of its soil. I grasped onto this belief whenever I found myself standing awkwardly at a social event or failing to articulate my thoughts to others. It’s okay, everything during the day is frivolous and nonessential, I assured myself, because I grow and untangle only under my dim yellow lamp. But what I was doing in those nights wasn’t
writing; I was only documenting. If I was indignant, I documented my anger; if I was sad, I documented the tight clutch in my throat. Completely unfiltered, my thoughts poured onto the page and became unintelligible mutterings that made sense to no one but myself. As I focused on the “solitude” part of my cherished Woolf quote, I omitted its beginning: “I want to give, to be given.” Deep in my own head, I was oblivious to how isolated this made me, and how much it had deprived me of the opportunity to communicate and to absorb. And so at the center of many great works is found a preserving dispassion, like the vanishing point of quattrocento perspective, or the tiny packets of desiccant enclosed in a box of new shoes or seeds. But still the vanishing point is not the painting, the silica is not the blossoming plant. When I handed in the rough draft of my first piece for post-, the Google doc was filled with highlights and comments asking for further clarification. “Why did you feel angry in this anecdote?” the editors asked. “It would be really helpful if you explain a bit more.” But why did I feel that way? When I put myself back into the anecdote, my vision was occupied by the way anger and frustration had crawled up my fingertips in their red, liquid form. But why this specific feeling? I didn’t know what to say, because I never had to do this much explaining when I wrote in my room to my audience of one. Those days were great because I could get very close to my emotions, but they were awful because I got so close that they were all I could see. At times, my writing process feels like a blind contour drawing. As the name of the exercise suggests, you fix your eyes on the subject, turn your body away from the paper, and draw its contour without looking at your drawing or breaking the line. In the process, the artist is unable to see their progress or start over again, so they must put extra attention and faith into their only connection with the drawing—the single point where the pencil presses upon the paper. Usually, the drawings end up comically disproportionate. My drawing appeared to me like meaningless tangles of lines, but my art teacher once pointed to a specific spot after a glance and said: “See right here? This is where you got tired and lost control of your line work.” Following her instructions, I took a step back and squinted my
eyes: she was right. The pattern was exceedingly clear once it was no longer right in front of me. The editors must have seen a similarly glaring oversight in my draft, one that I was too close to see myself. As I anxiously bit my nails and procrastinated as much as possible, I realized that if I wanted to explain my anger in that anecdote, I would have to take a step back. In doing that, I may be able to find the “vanishing point” that Hirshfield’s poem describes: the less obvious and vibrant, but the most necessary. Chekhov, dying, read the timetables of trains. To what more earthly thing could he have been faithful? – Scent of rocking distances, smoke of blue trees out the window, hampers of bread, pickled cabbage, boiled meat. Scent of the knowable journey. Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble. While I searched for the right words to wrap up this piece, I stumbled upon a webpage that introduced a meditative activity called the “brain dump.” In this journaling method, you dump “all the contents of your mind onto paper as one might dump the contents of a purse onto a table.” Then, after you have made a mess, you start to throw away useless bits, observe patterns, and reorganize. The overarching theme here is so simple that a random website on journaling knows it. The writing process is analogous to the process of creating a brain dump. Ever since high school, I’d used writing as a way of unloading all my disorganized thoughts onto paper; now, I need to sort through this dump. To do that, I have to use a sense of dry dispassion to slow down and examine my racing thoughts, so that it can expand its capacity to become the slow, steady train in Hirshfield’s poem. Ceremoniously, I folded the page corner to this poem—it is time to board the knowable journey. With that said, after I have given and received all that I can handle on this journey, I will still retreat to my solitude. I will process my thoughts late into the night, sifting through Virginia Woolf novels and piling more nonsensical mutterings onto the page. But when the day breaks, I am ready to step out of my bedroom, edit with dispassion, and make sense of my mind.
“Have you ever seen a clown clown? As opposed to a human clown.” “Why is Blue Man Group so famous? They don’t even do anything—are they just independently wealthy?”
April 9, 2021 3
NARRATIVE
Oh, This Old Thing?
pastimes from a past time by Siena Capone Illustrated by Mika Ando 1. The Olivetti Lettera 32 My parents got me an Olivetti typewriter for my birthday. It came from a nice Italian man on the Internet, and the box was swaddled in so many layers of packing tape that it felt like I was handling something classified, or sacred (it was, to me). When I opened the box over FaceTime, I couldn’t stop laughing in delight at how perfect it was: slim, a sweet pale green with an airy and open keyboard, a piece of yellowed paper already wedged in it. And it was an Italian machine—at one time, my Uncle Elio worked at Olivetti as an engineer. There was something heartening about this circularity. The blueprints on his desk became the gift on mine. I felt like I was looking at an extension of myself. Screw what they say about materialism: I felt complete. And where to start—a letter to my siblings? A poem that hadn’t been playing nice with my computer? Here was another entrypoint into my favorite activity, wondrous and strange. I had to remind myself that there was a time when typewriters were much more common desk dwellers. Passed time has made mine a rare green bird, peering at me and preparing to parrot whatever it is I had to say. In “Projective Verse,” the poet Charles Olson wrote: “It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables [...] which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had.” Olson’s manifesto is flawed and evidently malecentric. I’ve had to read it for just about every Literary Arts class I’ve taken, and I get a hearty eyeroll out of it each read. This passage always made me wonder: if the typewriter is the best poet’s tool, why does the computer—also a keyboard—feel so distant? How could it possibly be different? I think now I understand what he was talking about. 2. The Carole King Record Goodbyes aren’t what they once were. Every coming and going is cushioned by a thick layer of uncertainty, and quarantine. At the end of my time in Colorado with my boyfriend, Ben, we were stewing in our melancholy in the basement of his house. The whole home is open, airy, colorful, formerly belonging to an artist who took chunks out of walls and counters to make shadow boxes for displaying their work. It feels right that Ben, with the birds flying up the neck of his guitar and his clothes in lively oranges and reds, should live here. An artist where first there was another artist. An old record player at a desk in the corner of the room draws us out of our mood. We rifle through stacks of records and it feels like looking at a musical yearbook: a younger Elton John, postured with a golf club in hand, stacked on top of Michael Jackson’s stare. But we go with Carole King, the photo on the front of Tapestry a personified version of soft old denim. Her cat, the patterned curtains rendered translucent in the light, her bare feet. Ben positions it in the record player and her voice erupts. As the record spins, so do we. I smile into his shoulder as we sway in a Denver house, the mountains tall and silent above our basement shadowbox.
4 post–
3. Marvel Comics’ Journey Into Mystery The comic addiction was definitely an accident. My roommate Maya and I spent a couple weeks watching New York City repeatedly disintegrate and get saved by the same cast of earthly and unearthly men and women with iron suits or red glowing hands or guns. But who could blame us? The Marvel movies were so neatly set up for us in a chronological timeline. Destruction, rebuilding, destruction, rebuilding, some aliens in between and unfortunate ties to military propaganda. But we were having a lot of fun. So much fun that I found myself neck-deep in comic books a week later. It suddenly made sense to me that the adolescent boys of ‘80s-film frequently got their textbooks plucked away by chastising teachers to reveal an opened copy of Superman inside. Comics are funny, and so beautifully rendered by talented artists of every identity. The industry has a long and fascinating history spearheaded primarily by Jewish writers, editors, and artists. Also, I like the characters. I do not need to explain myself! Get a spoonful of Cherry Garcia ice cream and a snarky bisexual sorcerer (Loki, my beloved) on a Friday night and tell me you’re not having a good time. But the thing I love most about superhero comics is the possibility for endless reincarnation. Whereas the cinematic universe tears down and builds up cities over and over, the comics champion the infinite rebirth of characters. They morph across time periods, gender identities, moral alignments, moral predicaments, and storylines with ease. Losing lovers, falling from grace, sorting through traumas. If there’s something you need from a story, you can probably find it in comics. And what is getting older if not adding on to your lore? 4. The Little Yellow Envelope Somehow, the three-inch by three-inch pale yellow letter had gotten swept under the doorway to my apartment building. Curious at what appeared to be the tiniest missive I had ever seen, I turned it over to see my sister’s lovely elliptical handwriting on the back, and smiled. We text every day: about songs, TikToks, embarrassing things that happened to Haven at her bakery job. And more importantly, we have the kind of relationship where she always feels present even when she’s not there; I hear something and think she would laugh at it, I emerge triumphant from Nostalgia on Wickenden with a fistful of necklaces I know would earn her appreciation. That kind of love is like a second brain, my neurons running about with a butterfly net scooping up thoughts to tell her later. But we also write to each other. Because when I
sift through the glossy unrequited love letters from corporate America force-fed into my mailbox each week, finding an envelope with my name on it feels like remembering who I am. The physical act of receiving Haven’s letters lends a personhood that texts from people don’t always have: it’s her handwriting, not the same standard font. So even though I’m on my doorstep, I can for a moment sit on my sister’s bed at night and watch the projected blue stars illuminated on her ceiling while she fills me in on high school gossip, the gems she plans to put in her curls for prom, the vat of hot chocolate she ladles from at work. I can sit at my kitchen table among speckles of rainbow the afternoon light sends through my suncatchers, and write what I’d tell her if she was right across from me, the prismatic colors collaged with the freckles on her forehead. 5. Michigan Antique Stores Going home means well-spent afternoons antique shopping with my mom. I follow her through rooms of yellowing calendars, towering shelves of empty milk bottles, rusted bicycles and glass cases full of rings. Some of my favorite finds we’ve made together include a pink doll cabinet, an old illustrated copy of Jane Eyre, a tiny porcelain appaloosa horse figurine that I can see on my shelf as I write this. I love seeing what catches my mom’s eye that I may not have noticed myself. As the past is the past, there are always things that make us laugh, make us cringe, make us marvel. A love of old things should not come from a uniform romanticization of the past— that’s a luxury only people who would happily go back a century can afford. Instead, it’s knowing the past doesn’t have to go to waste. These old things are beautiful because we have put them in our complex, unresolved, imperfect modern times; because they have survived, like we have. Because we slow dance beside them in a basement, because they fill my mailbox and cure my screen fatigue. They get to exist in a time their makers likely could not imagine. I hope they’d be happy for us. In December, my mom and I picked our way through an antique store in Clawson, pointing out objects to each other as we went. She turned a corner and her face lit up. “Look!” A hallway filled from end to end with typewriters, clustered alphabets all over the room. Some may have been used to write endless correspondences and love letters. Some possibly have never been used at all, waiting here for someone to come by with something new to say, only looking for the right way to say it.
NARRATIVE
Embodied
on having needs and making them known (sometimes) by Rachel Carlson Illustrated by Elliana Reynolds The “I Want” Song Throughout my senior year of high school, a friend and I spent hours each week in a local musical theater workshop, where we wrote and staged an original show. Every Tuesday night, we’d arrive at the theater, and the two men who ran the program would look at one another, then turn to us and ask, So… have your “I Want” song for us yet? The “I Want” song is the big number in which the main character explicitly states their life’s great dissatisfaction and deepest desires. It typically occurs near the beginning of the show, so the audience knows exactly what to look for during the rest of the performance. This glimpse into the mind of our main character, Sarah, was the hardest for us to write. Even as I sat in the back of the theater watching her perform the song exactly as we’d practiced, I couldn’t help closing my eyes and cringing. With the first hollow note came a friend asking, Do you even know how to be vulnerable? With the next note, I told myself to listen— maybe I could learn something from Sarah—while simultaneously deciding that my lack of vulnerability must inoculate against some kinds of pain. The inner voice running my own show was repulsed by her blatant expression of need, patting me on the back only when I learned how to avoid having any at all. It’s not that easy! I wanted to scream at her (though part of me wondered if maybe it was). You just have to learn to love yourself, a friend said years ago as we sat together on the beach. She’d turned to me, and said she wouldn’t keep pretending not to realize how much weight I’d lost in the past year. This is why I didn’t say anything, I remember thinking. I had tried to respond, running my hands compulsively through the sand, dragging the clumps into tiny mountains. The conversation had been on the tip of my tongue for weeks, but saying the words out loud seemed incorrect now. I didn’t have the words to wrap up my experience and present them to her, and if the words felt wrong, then surely the experience itself was wrong, too. Can’t you see? I wanted to look her in the eyes, to confirm that she understood that I didn’t just have to love myself,
that everything hurt and I had no idea how to tell her. I wanted to say that I was scared––scared that I couldn’t explain how I’d gotten to this place, scared that I no longer had to think about it anymore, scared that I could no longer think about anything. I flattened the mountains in front of my towel and told her she was right. Question 30: Have you ever had an EKG? This was the only question that gave me pause on the Brown Healthcare Questionnaire for incoming first-years. It reminded me of a book I’d read on the medical complications of eating disorders. Inside, Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani discusses the “cave person brain” survival response to malnourishment: low heart rate and sudden arrhythmic death, slow digestion, and a farewell to nonessentials like hormones and energy. I thought back to July of 2019, when I’d sat alone in the waiting room of the hospital’s cardiac wing. I’d only ever associated this hospital with good things—my brother and I had been born there, and my grandpa had worked there for over 50 years. As I looked around the room, I found myself in the company of people who looked more like him than like myself. I checked in with the woman behind the front desk, and looked down at my doctor’s handwriting on the note she’d given me. I’d sobbed as my pediatric endocrinologist handed me that page from her prescription pad and told me my heart was no longer beating at a normal rate. I knew that the tears rolling down my face only proved that she was right. She was the first person I’d cried in front of in months, but she didn’t even flinch. She blinked twice, cleared her throat, and asked me to lay down so she could measure my resting heart rate. At times, I found solace in science, chicken scratch words instead of feelings themselves. On that day, however, I wondered if anybody over the age of three had cried in this room lately. I looked up as the metal stethoscope hit my skin. The ceiling was covered in smiling cartoon giraffes and elephants, which only confirmed the hunch that I looked like an overgrown toddler in my pediatric gown. I thought about my classmate’s dad leaning over to my mom as I walked across the stage at my high school graduation, asking, How could you let this happen to her? I averted my eyes to the blank wall next to me, and waited for my doctor’s voice to cut through the one inside my head. Get up slowly so you don’t get dizzy. Cave Person Brain The numbers were comforting, but they were part of the problem. They were easier to comprehend than how much I disliked being inside my own head.
While my brain was funneling resources into my heart rhythms and blood circulation, it forgot to save space for things like thoughts and feelings. On a particularly difficult day one July, I couldn’t shake the sense that I no longer recognized myself—not just my physical body, but the person being kept inside it. I had planned to go on a date to see Ari Aster’s Midsommar, and my date texted me, offering to pick me up. Though I’d been the one to suggest the movie, the thought of being trapped in his car brought on panic and a wave of tears. I replied with an anxious lie about an unexpected errand that required me to meet him at the theater, when all I wanted was to tell him how much I hated myself for not being able to say that I cared. I spent the next two hours and eighteen minutes with my knees pressed against my chest, braiding the fringes on my jeans as I watched the shadows flit across the screen and worried I might forget how to breathe. When he leaned in later on an empty sidewalk, I stepped back, high-fived him, and screamed at myself for not knowing how to explain that he seemed too real, and that the thought of interacting with anyone any more intimately made me sick to my stomach. My hair is falling out, I sobbed to my mom when she visited for parents’ weekend my freshman fall, feeling again like my July self. I avoided looking at my dorm room floor, my pillow, my shower drain, my hairbrush. The immediate sense of disgust at seeing clumps of hair fall from my scalp—Gross, glad they aren’t part of me—was almost instantly followed by the realization that they were, in fact, part of me (or had been at one point). And then came the slightly more frantic, more exhausting, Hold on, please, please don’t go. It was all over the place: a constant confrontation, my body finally speaking up for itself. I ordered hair supplements online in bulk after my mom left campus. [[ ]] I don’t know what I’m more afraid of: being seen hurting, or hurting and having nobody see it at all. I found this in the journal I’d kept throughout my last year of high school. I’d returned to the journal at the end of the summer, realizing only then that I hadn’t updated it since writing this down. Soon after, while reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, I came across a passage in which she writes about a magazine interview with Anne Carson. Instead of answering every question with words, Carson chose to answer some with blank spaces: [[ ]]. At first, Nelson feels ashamed of her opposite compulsion to put her cards more decidedly on the table. The brackets seem to haunt her, until she decides that they seemed to make a fetish of the unsaid, rather than simply letting it be contained in the sayable. When I was younger, someone told me I composed myself very quickly after I had cried or gotten hurt. Nobody would know unless they’d seen it. I used to find this masterful decathection reassuring. What good are lungs that collapse into themselves halfway through a breath? Part of me wonders if this was a good thing––my way of reminding myself that pain is still real when it isn’t self-inflicted or visible. At the same time, I don’t know how to reconcile it with Nelson’s passage: for something to be sayable and for something to be left unsaid, the months of unaccounted-for space in my journal, and the notion that my silences might only be reifying my fear of not being seen.
April 9, 2021 5
ARTS & CULTURE
A Labor of Love
learning to bake with bake off By Kyoko Leaman ILLUSTRATED BY Mika Ando In January, I returned at long last to Providence. After spending the better part of a year back in my childhood home, I was faced with the knowledge that my time at Brown hadn’t been a distant fever dream after all. The week before my 10 hour drive up the coast was punctuated with nightmares about leaving, nightmares about staying, packing too much shit for one room, checking the oil in my car, then the tire pressure, then the oil again. My mom piled snacks into moving boxes as though I wasn’t moving to a city with a CVS on every block. It was a comfortingly frenzied period of time, a release from the stasis of the previous eight months. Amidst the packing and cleaning, the rushing and waiting, I took an afternoon to claim the kitchen as my own and make a good old-fashioned mess. Early in quarantine, I’d made these cupcakes: Black-Bottom Cupcakes, with this gorgeous Dutch chocolate base and a cream cheese and mini chocolate chip filling. They were dopamine-sweet, but I’d fucked them up. I melted the butter instead of letting it sit at room temperature, so the batter got too hot and the cold filling sank to the bottom. Rather than having a perfect lake of cream cheese still visible from the top, the chocolate had enclosed the filling entirely. I resolved to make them again. They’d been the least successful of my quarantine bakes, and I wanted desperately to redeem myself. For hours I barred my parents from entering the kitchen, played my January playlist over the Bluetooth speaker, and baked. I sifted and stirred, puddled wet ingredients into dry, poured the batter into pale pink cupcake tins, and at long last, popped them in the oven. Prior to quarantine, I’d spent more time watching others bake than doing so myself. My childhood was splashed with sweet vignettes of watching my mother cook—me at the kitchen table, my mom standing over a bain marie at the stove, occasionally letting me taste a spoonful of custard. Countless times she’d given me a near-empty bowl smudged with frosting and a spoon to scrape it clean. Occasionally, she’d let me whisk eggs or pipe frosting, but I never took the initiative to learn how to bake on my own. *** My senior year of high school, I discovered a new way to bake vicariously: The Great British Bake Off. For those who are unfamiliar, GBBO (known as The Great British Baking Show in America due to trademark issues) is a reality competition show that follows a group of home bakers as they compete for the title of “Best Amateur Baker in the UK.” Up to that point, I’d always avoided cooking shows, claiming there was no appeal in looking at gorgeous food you couldn’t eat. In truth, I’d only seen shows like Chopped, which always seemed to have an intense, hostile energy. Bake Off differed from these shows in both format and tone: Rather than having professional chefs compete for cash prizes in standalone episodes, GBBO followed the same contestants across a full season with weekly eliminations, the competition narrowing as the finale approached. This gives the viewers a chance to get to know the individual contestants as they get to know each other, often forming strong bonds over the course of a season. The show also lacks a monetary prize, which removes an element of hostility between the bakers—they compete only out of a love for baking. The Great British Bake Off does more than just avoid the cutthroat atmosphere of many other shows; it cultivates a friendly, pleasant tone. The bakers encourage each other throughout the challenges, often 6 post–
helping fellow contestants finish their bakes. The original hosts of the show, comedians Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, set a precedent for comforting competitors when they’re upset and breaking the tension with welltimed innuendos. Subsequent hosts Noel Fielding, Sandi Toksvig, and Matt Lucas have followed suit, using their role as presenters to support rather than berate the bakers. Even the judges, Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry (replaced by Prue Leith in more recent seasons), refrain from being overly harsh in their critiques when they sense that a contestant is particularly emotional. For two years, I watched every season of GBBO I could find. I re-watched episodes multiple times, no longer invested in the question of “Who will win?” but instead paying attention to the friendships that contestants formed against the baking show backdrop. And, of course, I appreciated the bakes—gorgeous, towering cakes and tiny French patisserie creations. I loved them aesthetically, but maintained the conviction that I could never create such elaborate baked goods myself. I baked rarely, and when I did, it was always simplistic. I was a middle-of-the-night stress baker, following the cookie recipe that comes on the back of the chocolate chip bag. *** But then came the pandemic. The whirlwind of novel experiences and bright, newly forged routines of college life were replaced by a period of tense isolation. I was suddenly home, in the log cabin with the half-mile driveway. No neighbors walking past, no street noise out the window. Being quarantined in rural Virginia can trick you into thinking the outside world was never really real, just the most vivid of dreams. And there I was, attending classes that felt like figments, researching bilingual aphasia and reading literary analyses and feeling helplessly removed from life. When I began baking, I was still in this dreamlike state. Suspended outside myself and craving a Thin Mint, I asked my mom to pick up peppermint extract on her weekly grocery run and decided to make them myself. My cookies ended up a touch too minty, and I’d forgotten to roll them out thinly enough, but it didn’t matter. The pressure to bake perfectly, to only tackle recipes that felt “easy enough,” had evaporated along with any sense of normalcy. All that was left was me and an oven preheated to 350°. My first revelation was that baking was not merely functional. I’d thought that baking was just the necessary hour of effort that stood between me and a fresh chocolate chip cookie, but I realized that there was something magical about the act of creation. The sappy monologues I’d heard from countless Bake Off contestants had been true: Baking was about love. It was about putting care into something, creating something sweet and wondrous, all with your own two hands. The
second revelation was that I wasn’t half bad at it. It turns out that after years of baking vicariously, first through my mother and then through GBBO, I’d actually osmosed quite a bit of knowledge. I was enchanted. My bakes became increasingly ambitious, moving from simple cookies to yeasted rolls and then to crème brulee from scratch. I began by baking alone, but soon I started to bake with the people I love. My friends and I devised baking competitions of our own, simulating a GBBO segment called the Technical Challenge in which contestants are given a very simplified recipe and all attempt to make the same baked good, which is then judged blind. We made some terrible cakes, but redeemed ourselves with killer eclairs. I realized that baking could be both a soothing, solitary process, and a collaborative act of creation in turns. My most ambitious bakes were undertaken with my girlfriend, who embarked on her own personal mission to learn how to cook over quarantine. We spent two rainy May days picking fresh strawberries and wild violets, skipping between rows of strawberry plants and driving along the foggy Blue Ridge Parkway. Then we baked a lemon cake with strawberry icing, decorated with crystallized violets. For days, we ate cake for breakfast. During the same visit, we made crème puff swans, which a contestant actually made on the first season of GBBO I ever watched. They were my first foray into choux—that mythical, impossible pastry I’d seen on TV—and mine ended up near-perfect. It turns out the second-most essential ingredient for a good bake is the audacity to try. (The first, of course, is love. Hopelessly romantic and endlessly true.) *** Since returning to campus, I haven’t had access to a kitchen. I celebrated my birthday alone over Quiet Period, dreaming of strawberry cupcakes and an oven to bake them in. As the semester draws to a close, I get closer to being able to make them a reality. Perhaps the end of this particular semester comes as a relief to most, but I find it bittersweet. Baking chocolate melting on the tongue. The feeling of time passing always unnerves me, and there’s too much to say goodbye to. But I am excited to exchange to-do lists laden with problem sets for grocery lists of ingredients for whatever over-ambitious recipe I attempt next. Recently, I’ve been thinking about my first bake once I get home. Maybe it’ll be with my friends, flour-dusted and choked with laughter, or maybe my girlfriend and I will get to make the ginger cookies we keep talking about. But I like to imagine my return to baking happening the way I first found it: alone in my parent’s kitchen, music pouring from the speaker, forgetting to roll my dough out thin enough. However it happens, I know it’ll be a labor of love—just as Great British Bake Off has taught me. Love and a bit of hubris.
A Las Calles
street art in bogotá and beyond By Dorrit Corwin Illustrated by Meera Singh My senses are overloaded as I attempt to soak in the vibrant hues that surround me the way a canvas soaks in paint. Towering above me, lions, birds, migrant workers, and Indigenous women live together on walls of businesses and homes. It feels as though any second they will peel off the brick and appear next to me to share their stories. Every poster has a purpose, every mural has a message. Welcome to las calles de Bogotá. *** After an idyllic two weeks spent working on a mango farm in Anapoima and a sweltering but lovely few days in Cartagena, my friend and I made it back to Bogotá, the bustling capital of Colombia. Several friends of mine who had visited Colombia before suggested seeing Medellín instead, claiming that Bogotá was overrated, but that final day we spent in Bogotá was one of my absolute favorites. I had been in and around Colombia for close to three weeks, exploring and interacting with locals, but I hadn’t yet educated myself on the entire complex whirlwind that is Colombian history. We stopped by the Inquisition Museum in Cartagena’s Old Town, but that didn’t quite satiate my curiosity. Then, somewhat on a whim, we signed ourselves up for a graffiti walking tour of Bogotá. Local street art, as it turned out, captured the history and contemporary culture of the city and country more vibrantly than any museum, book, or movie ever could. We met our tour guide in La Candelaria, the heart of the city, full of tourists, government buildings, and colorful constructions nestled in the hills. Our only real clue as to who he was and where to find him was the text he sent me saying, “I’m holding a blue umbrella.” We spotted it across the plaza and were delighted to meet Jeff, a student at one of the 41 universities in Bogotá. He was articulate, informative, and had the ability to bring every mural, poster, and sticker we saw to life with a story. Jeff began our journey by explaining that graffiti is no longer illegal in Bogotá, which is why there is such
an abundance of it. In 2011, the police chased and killed a 16-year-old artist named Diego Felipe Becerra when they found him tagging a building. They attempted to cover their tracks by claiming that the young boy was an armed robber, but after city-wide protests and a thorough investigation, two officers were arrested, and graffiti was eventually legalized. Today, Bogotá’s buildings are swathed in art—much of it full of deep political symbolism, and many murals created by renowned street artists from around the world. Now, instead of preventing street art, officers watch and protect artists as their creations come to life on the sides of buildings—some as large as seven stories tall. We started off with historical context: Jeff walked us from The War of the Thousand Days at the turn of the 20th century through the grueling guerrilla war and Pablo Escobar to the current presidency and peace talks. It was a lot to take in, but without this context it would have been hard to understand and appreciate the art we witnessed on our walk. The first work that stuck with me was a poster, easily missed, due to its small size. At the top it read “¿Quién dio la orden? (Who gives the order?),” with black and white sketches of 12 state agents. A month and a half ago, when I saw the posters, the number at the top read 5763 “falsos positivos”; by March 7 that figure had grown to 6402—the number of illegitimate deaths presented as casualties in combat by state agents. Jeff shared this information with us nonchalantly, as though it was just another example of art inspiration, akin to a breathtaking landscape or spiritual awakening. My stomach was in knots. Colombia’s army is falsely declaring deaths of their troops in an attempt to increase civil war statistics amongst leftist rebel groups. But as the tour continued, I was reminded of the constant injustices and “false positives” present in my own country, realizing that there are just as many, if not more. As if Jeff was reading my mind, we turned a corner to discover a massive mural reading “Dilan,” with bouquets of flowers resting below and an entire shrine taking over a street corner downtown. We learned about Dilan Cruz, a Colombian teenager who would be my age if he hadn’t been killed by the police at an anti-government protest march in Bogotá in 2019. Sound familiar? The memorial is placed at the intersection where he was killed. Over the past year and a half it has blossomed into both a preservation of Dilan’s memory and a nod to current politics in Colombia and around the world. Last summer amidst American #BlackLivesMatter protests, #ACAB made its way south to Colombia. Many works of street art made to honor Dilan and to condemn other acts of police brutality have been censored and painted over, especially those using the “ACAB” acronym. In addition to the four letters, we saw four numbers painted all around: 1312. This sequence has become a universal EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Olivia Howe
“If, on this stretch of road by the sea in Maine, you crane your neck back until you hear your vertebrae uncomfortably protest and then look up at the night sky, this is what you see: a Jackson Pollock splattering of brilliant whites and yellows and reds and blues against the blackness.”
—Ethan Taswell, “Starless Nights,” 4.12.19
“The alligator in the video is in the yard, a guest at the party just like the humans (though it is quite rude to play with the mouth of a party guest). There’s no denying that the alligator performs an intentional role here—the watermelon could have just as easily been smashed on the driveway, or the ‘gender’ could have been revealed’ through a short SMS.” —Tal Frieden, “Gender Revalligator,” 4.13.18
FEATURE Managing Editor Alice Bai Section Editors Andrew Lu Ethan Pan ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Emma Schneider Section Editors Kyoko Leaman Maddy McGrath
code—1=A, 3=C, 1=A, 2=B. Colombian police officers may be obliged to support street artists as they paint, but that doesn’t mean they won’t erase their hard work soon after, especially if the intention of the art is to condemn their very existence. A few blocks east of Dilan’s memorial, perched on a narrow street, we were immediately captivated by an intense mural of an Indigenous Wayuu woman. The realistic painting of the woman dominates the composition, just as the mural dominates its residential setting. It was impossible to take my eyes off the portrait, which was painted by Carlos Trilleras to bring attention to the present-day persecution of Indigenous Colombian communities by the government. The Wayuu people, also known as the Guajiros, are known as the people of the sun, sand and wind, hailing from the Guajira Peninsula. Trilleras’ dignified portrait utilizes bright colors and modern lines to amplify the voices of Colombia’s often silenced Indigenous communities. Standing in front of a large horizontal mural painted by three different famous street artists in red, orange, and purple hues, Jeff asked us if we’d noticed that many of Bogotá’s street vendors appear to be quite old. He explained that many workers in Colombia work until the day they die because they can’t afford retirement and live most of their lives not covered by any kind of insurance. Meanwhile, there are several large Colombian corporations that storm into rural villages, many of which severely lack resources, and forcefully displace migrant farm workers. “Los desaparecidos” refers to the group of some 80,000 people who have been victims of enforced disappearance, their bodies never to be found. I left our graffiti tour with more questions than answers. I felt conflicted, yet uplifted. If graffiti were legal in America, there wouldn’t be a single blank wall between the Atlantic and the Pacific. While I often find myself frustrated with performative activism via Instagram graphics that disappear from stories after 24 hours, I appreciate street artists’ ability to fuse activism and art in a thought-provoking and poignant manner that leaves a lasting impact on both its immediate community and the foreigners who visit it. *** As I gaze up into the towering mountains enveloping the city, I can see miles of barrios carpeted in colorful paint, the pigments blending in the distance to create new compositions. I’ve only just scratched the surface; there is so much left to uncover here. Unlike in my hometown, where a plain pink wall has become Instagram famous just for being trendy, these walls have meaning. They advocate on behalf of marginalized communities. They support grassroots movements and organizations. In Bogotá, artists and activists alike take to the streets—“a las calles.” I’m lucky I had the opportunity to join them. NARRATIVE Managing Editor Minako Ogita
COPY CHIEF Aditi Marshan
Section Editor Siena Capone Christina Vasquez
Copy Editors Emily Cigarroa Samuel Nevins Eleanor Peters
LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Caitlin McCartney
SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS Tessa Devoe
Section Editors Kimberly Liu Emily Wang
Editors Kelsey Cooper Julia Gubner Kyra Haddad Jolie Rolnick Chloe Zhao
HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Joanne Han
WEB MASTER Amy Pu
CO-LAYOUT CHIEFS Briaanna Chiu Jiahua Chen Layout Designers Lily Chahine Sharlene Deng STAFF WRITERS Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Dorrit Corwin Eashan Das Danielle Emerson Jordan Hartzell Ellie Jurmann Nicole Kim Gus Kmetz Liza Kolbasov Elliana Reynolds Adi Thatai Victoria Yin
Want to be involved? Email: olivia_howe@brown.edu!
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