post- 09/13/19

In This Issue Secondhand Summer Siena Capone 4

Kànzhebàn

Kaitlan Bui 4

The Inside Scoop

Sydney Lo 2 Griffin Plaag 5

How to Rent a Room Naomi kim 6

Witch's Brew

postCover by Rémy Poisson

SEPT 13

VOL 24

— ISSUE 1

FEATURE

The Inside Scoop

Flavors of the New Student Ice Cream Social

By Sydney Lo Illustrated by Ashley Hernandez

T

he final breaths of summer exhale through the still-unfinished construction sites and buildings of Brown University’s campus, a campus that, until 12 hours ago, held the quiet of an empty home—save the nightly Thayer Street bustle.

Now, just past 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night, it hums with pop music and chatter. Undergraduate orientation has arrived, and with it, the New Student Ice Cream Social.

Enticed by the promise of free ice cream despite being well beyond my first year, I walk to it with some friends who have come back to Providence early. We meander down Thayer Street from our off-campus apartments, then cut through Ruth Simmons Quad.

Groups of staff and students clean up from the Parents and Families Welcome Reception under a white tent

in the middle of the green, rolling out tables and folding chairs. We smile and talk about our upcoming classes, our goals for the new semester, how we plan to spend our last year at Brown. Still, senior year seems intangible, impossibly distant. How could we be so close to the end of university when it feels as if we’ve only just arrived?

Three years ago, my family flew with me to Providence to move me into my first-year dorm.

We carried suitcases up flights of stairs, attended tours and welcome events, and raided Bed Bath & Beyond for shower flip-flops and pillows. Finally, we celebrated my budding higher education career and move—thousands of miles away from my hometown in Minnesota—with a goodbye dinner at Los Andes.

After that, I was left startlingly alone, listening to

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, Welcome (back) to a whole new year of post-!

If you have been a devoted reader of this here editor’s note over the past year, you will perhaps notice that something is afoot. Why is this Jennifer person back despite bidding a tearful farewell on December 6, 2018, and what has she done with Anita?

Rest assured, no bloody coup has taken place. I, as it turns out, am simply unable to say goodbye to this publication, even after a solid eight-month international absence. At this point, I have outlived all but one other staff member (Hi, Celina!), and as such, feel like a wise old crone/unofficial publication historian. post- has grown so much since my first stint on staff three years ago. We have said our goodbyes to Nice Slice’s excellent vegan BBQ

Bad Dates

pizza and developed an unhealthy passion for Double Stuf and Birthday Cake Oreos; our website survived the minimalist blog aesthetic of 2018 and now possesses better typography than ever. Above all, our sections have evolved to bring you better content each year. Arts & Culture has shed the arbitrary judgments of review articles, Feature has solidified into a single cohesive headline piece, and Lifestyle was rebranded as Narrative before ultimately reappearing as its own section. That said, we respect tradition: post- will remain lowercase and purple, with Top 10, Overheard@Brown, and Hot post- Time Machine gracing our back page for countless issues to come.

We hope you follow my example and find yourself returning to post- over and over in the coming years. We’ll be here, bringing you food for thought and comfort every Friday.

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Happy new academic year,

Jennifer

Copy Editor and post- Godmother 2 post–

my new unit neighbors in the hall and looking over the orientation schedule. Only one event was left that Saturday: the New Student Ice Cream Social at 10:00 p.m.

The premise is simple: Incoming students flood the Main Green for free dessert. The orientation pamphlet for 2019 promotes the event­—“Get ready to unwind and celebrate your first night at Brown with your fellow classmates under the stars on the College Green! Cool down from the summery weather and grab some free ice cream, then grab a spot on the College Green!” It’s an opportunity to meet peers and attempt to form friendships through the shared love of chocolate ice cream. You collect phone numbers. You ask and answer, “What do you plan on concentrating in?” over 20 times. You wonder

10.

The one where the guy invites you over…but invites his ex to keep you company while he works The double date with your best friend, who your partner’s jealous of The concert where your date gets angry if you refuse to let them put their arm around you despite the fact that it’s a thousand degrees The movie date where they show up 30 minutes late… not counting trailer time The date you didn’t realize was a date until six other people mysteriously “cancel” The first time meeting your date’s parents…and your date The double date where you realize you’re more attracted to your partner’s friend The one where your partner stares at you the entire time and says they “just like watching you do things” The date where you accidentally get locked in a lingerie shop together The one where your partner tells you they love you… even though you’ve only been seeing each other for two days

if the rest of university will be as overwhelming and exciting as this.

This year’s social is remarkably similar to the one my first year. Pretty strings of lights hang throughout the Main Green, creating a false sense of daylight despite the late hour. A sound system adorns the steps of Faunce, blaring pop music. The Orientation Welcoming Committee staff stands with matching shirts at several sprawling tables covered in large bins of ice cream, distributing scoops into paper bowls and refilling the syrup containers that are constantly running out. Two massive loose lines of students run from the tables all the way to the gates on George Street. Ice cream in hand, they form little conversation clumps in front of the steps and anywhere else there’s free space. A few energetic first-years run throughout the Green, spreading the word about some dorm party, trying to meet as many people as possible. There is laughter and loud voices and the feeling of pure optimism. These are students with their whole academic lives ahead of them and the community of Brown awaiting.

My friends take a place in line and promise me a scoop of mint chocolate chip. I take to moseying through the crowds, meeting new faces and hearing perspectives that remind me why I decided to study at Brown for three (going on four) years. I talk with Juliana Lederman, an incoming first-year from north of Boston, whose favorite flavor of ice cream is Oreo, a trend, much to my surprise, I’ll notice as the evening progresses. Apparently everyone just loves cookies and cream. On being asked what she’s most excited about, she answers, “I’m excited about the people. Everyone here seems really nice so far, and I’m just excited to meet as many new friends as possible.” She smiles and tells me that she’s already met a few incredible individuals, including her roommate from Switzerland who “can speak in both an American and a British accent, which is really cool.” I wholeheartedly agree.

Another first-year I meet is Emma McFall from South Carolina. We wait together in line for a bit.

She’s excited to be back to where her mother grew up—Rhode Island. She shares Juliana’s outlook on the student body, telling me, “Everyone I’ve met is just really nice and different . . . They’re all from fairly different places. I’ve met more people from different countries than ever before in my life in one day, and they all have hobbies that are so unique.” I share a similar experience: my first-year roommate was from Malaysia, my friend from Principles of Physiology was from France, and my calculus TA was from China, just to name a few examples. During my time here, I have met maybe two people within 200 miles of where I’m from. According to the Brown University website, the undergraduate student body represents 47 states and 63 nations, speaking 69 languages in total.

A few minutes later I meet an incoming student from Denmark. Adrian Flarup-Johansen is a new member of the crew team at Brown. He’s eager to start rowing and taking classes, particularly in Economics, his intended concentration. Midway

through our conversation, some friends, or at least friendly strangers, come up and chat with us about a get-together one of the sports houses is throwing.

He begins to give directions, but not before leaving me with a succinct answer to his opinion on the Ice Cream Social: “It’s a lot of fun. Meeting a lot of new people.”

On my way back to my friends, I run into Leonardo Brito, an incoming PLME student from Miami, Florida. He plans to concentrate in Neuroscience and play club rugby, although he’s never played the sport before. When I ask what his favorite ice cream flavor is, he pauses for a moment, then says, “That’s tough. It’s mostly caramel—to me it’s Dulce de Leche because I’m from Miami.

Sometimes it’s coconut, too.” Even though we’re about to eat ice cream, he’s grateful for Providence’s cooler weather compared to the muggy climate of Miami. I ask, almost automatically at this point, what he’s excited for this coming semester. He responds, “I think working with other people and getting a lot of different perspectives. Just because I feel like even though I live in Miami, and it’s very diverse, it doesn’t offer me the type of experience that I would get at a place like Brown, where all these different people are coming from all over the world, and they’re here to collaborate.”

Theresa Wagner is part of the first-year cohort of Bonner Fellows, a four-year community engagement fellowship of the Swearer Center, and has been on campus for more than a week already for its preorientation program. As I’ve been helping to run said program, we’ve met before, and I’m eager to catch up. She is from Pawtucket, not far from Brown. I ask what she’s most excited for, and she replies, “I’m very excited to take classes in subjects that I’ve never even thought of before.” This is a bit different than the answer I’ve been hearing about Brown’s diverse student body, but it holds the same spirit that all these new students seem to share. They’re thrilled to learn about people, subjects, and perspectives they’ve never had the opportunity to engage with.

It’s easy to disregard such intense positivity as naivety, or with a passing just-wait-until-yourfirst-midterm thought. Yes, they’re wide-eyed, but it’s really just so they can take in all these new experiences. That isn’t to say that studying at Brown has not made me jaded, but I’ve had time to get used to the phenomenon that is Brown education. The open curriculum has passed into the periphery, replaced with concentration and premedical requirements.

The overwhelmingly interesting members of our student body have settled into their different departments and student groups, only intersecting now and then. The people I was once so in awe of have become my peers.

I ask Theresa what she thinks of the people she’s met. She beams and explains, “Very friendly.

Everyone is so nice, and it’s really easy to talk to people. And I wasn’t sure it was going to be like that, so I am very pleasantly surprised.” I tell her how glad that makes me and realize I’d been holding my breath for an unhappier answer.

All those years back, I walked down Brown Street to the Ice Cream Social alone. I wasn’t sure where the people in my unit had gone, and my roommate didn’t want to go. I was also nervous, excessively so. This was a chance to make friends, to put myself out there and discover the idyllic college life, complete with a close friend group to go on adventures with. It was a list of tasks—a networking event, more than anything else.

I managed to find the correct line for ice cream after mistakenly waiting in one for toppings for several minutes and then standing around in a group of students I had thought composed the ice cream line.

Once I had my ice cream, I wasn’t sure what to do. I stood awkwardly to the side, hoping someone would come up to me and introduce themselves. After a bit I decided to try butting into some conversations, which only ended in forced smiles and a few moments of excruciating silence after I tried (unsuccessfully) to seem as funny, smart, and aloof as I could while I introduced myself. I did manage to talk for a while with some students and get some phone numbers, but after about 30 minutes of struggling with small talk, I hurried back to my dorm.

For a long time, I considered my go at the Ice Cream Social a failure. I was barely there, and the people I met ended up as vaguely familiar faces rather than lifelong friends. Part of the reason I returned my senior year was to right that wrong, to experience the ice cream social I had wanted all those years ago.

Now, however, I’m faced with an ending rather than a beginning. This will, assuming all goes well, be my final year as an undergraduate. I will graduate in the spring and move on to other parts of life that don’t revolve around the Main Green. As I chat with the members of the Class of 2023, I’m struck with how little this night has affected the rest of my academic career. I still made lifelong friends. I still found interesting extracurriculars. I still learned so much from all the wonderful students I met and all the classes I took.

Nevertheless, I know I missed out. I’m surprised by how easy it is to introduce myself to these firstyears when I don’t put the weight of my social success at Brown on the interaction, when I don’t focus on making myself seem cool and interesting, and when the people surrounding me are just students, sharing and supporting one another’s half-formed plans and passions.

I finally make my way back to my friends, who have saved my ice cream scoop for me as promised.

I wonder how much faster I would have found them if I’d just taken the event a little less seriously. Yes, this is everyone’s first big social event at Brown, but it won’t be their last. I wish I could tell my younger self to soak it all in, to listen to a couple stories from interesting peers and enjoy the silly tradition without thinking too hard.

I take a bite and think of Theresa’s opinion on the Ice Cream Social, which captures the event better than I can: “It’s much bigger than I expected, and the music is very nice, and I love ice cream, so it’s all very exciting.” I relish in the sweetness of it all, and hope all the students around me do the same.

“It’s going to be a strong, independent concentration who don’t need no employment opportunities.”

“This stranger invited me into his house… but I said yes, because he looked like a cowboy.”

september 13, 2019 3

NARRATIVE

看着办 kànzhebàn

How Summer Snuffed (Much of) My Perfectionism

by Kaitlan Bui Illustrated by Caroline Hu I have lived a significant chunk of my life as a careful, oftentimes stuffy perfectionist—getting annoyed when the picture frame is not perfectly aligned with the edge of the wall; writing a sentence only to erase it, write another one and erase that one too; calculating the exact, dollars-and-cents amount to Venmo my friend after a night at Vivi Bubble Tea. In response to such “dramatic” behaviors, my brother would regularly spout an exasperated “Just DO IT!” Though he probably meant it for comedic purposes more than anything else, I pondered his advice earnestly. Mr. LaBeouf’s motto was (at best) gripping, but really—why would anyone ever “just” do it when you could do it and do it right?

On a small scale, my perfectionism meant wasted time; I’d do rounds of extensive edits to caption a Facebook post. On a larger scale, my inner voice could be deafening. During high-school group projects, no matter how low-stakes, I found myself unable to resist monitoring each inch of progress. The final product had to be perfect…but sometimes even “perfect” didn’t cut it.

Very often, I hated myself for being this way.

I hated my perfectionism because more than just slathering the label of “finicky” onto my forehead, it affected my relationships in a way that made people— myself included—uncomfortable, unhappy. But I didn’t know how to deal with the problem. Somewhere in the maze of my mind, haphazardly crammed in a box labeled “Things I Know But Don’t Want to Admit,” my perfectionism surpassed the definition of a character trait. Despite how miserable it made me, it was a moral imperative. I felt a sense of duty to get things right, as if the level of my perfectionism and (over)planning defined the level of importance something had to me.

In other words, I was experiencing a dangerous chemical reaction. My perfectionism catalyzed overthinking catalyzed worry catalyzed hesitation, and the result was a crippling conglomeration of insecurity and micromanagement. I didn’t know how to let go. *** “Alligator, alligator, CHOMP, CHOMP, CHOMP!” I croaked for what seemed like the 257th time that day.

This was definitely not how I imagined my summer— making a fool out of myself daily in front of a horde of five-year-olds who barely understood me. But what else could I do to hold their attention when Chinese was their native tongue and English was mine? What else could I do when my arsenal consisted of a crate of Play-Doh and the Baby Shark song? Perhaps it sounds obvious to you that a five-year-old will only stop throwing his paper airplane when something of greater interest catches his eye, but the realization humbled me. After my summer working in China, I’m ready to argue that no amount of “training,” no curated resume, no Ivy League education properly prepares you for impersonating an angry alligator. At some point, you just kind of have to whip it out and comply.

“CHOMP, CHOMP, CHOMP!” they screamed back at me.

I began my job as a camp counselor in China with a paper schedule in one hand and a class flag (featuring Peppa Pig) in the other. By the third day, the schedule had been tossed. By the third week, the class flag was abandoned. My brain was deluged with 4 post–

allergy information, favorite colors, whose water bottle was whose, and the best strategies for stopping fights (“if you don’t listen to me, I will eat your egg tart”). Naturally, my perfectionism was punched in the face—and the chest and the stomach and the groin, for that matter. These five-year-olds simply did not care about arriving on time to Activity One or reading The Assigned Book. And by the second week in, I didn’t care either (I did, however, make sure we read The Giving Tree). Often, I didn’t even know what we would be doing until 20 seconds before I informed the kids themselves.

Creativity, improvisation, and patience were the key tools of success; perfectionism, logic, and overly careful consideration were not. So whenever my co-worker asked me, “How does some group time watching Mr. Bean sound?” I would immediately respond in the affirmative. *** After camp ended, I decided to travel around China with a close friend I had made in the chaos of the classroom. Another insult to my perfectionism— we didn’t necessarily have a plan. We missed our train because we took the wrong subway line, we didn’t do half of the things we originally brainstormed, we ate corn for lunch and Oreos for dinner, we lost $70 because a typhoon cancelled my train back to Beijing... and despite it all, we had so much fun.

If you had told me this story a year ago, it would have sounded like irresponsible, poorly executed traveling.

But I have since come to value the imperfections of a good adventure: not stressing about the particulars, paying for each other’s meals without conscientious calculation, using hand towels to dry off after cold showers. Not to mention that I was obligated to depend on my friend to plan, choose, and order because I barely understood the Chinese language. For once, I was put in a position where almost everything was out of my control: Perfectionism was simply not an option. I had to trust, I had to wait, I had to accept. And if I didn’t, it was only at the expense of my own happiness. So I chose again to respond in the affirmative. When I did, I felt a peace and a joy I hadn’t experienced before. This was really living to me, really learning, loving. *** One day, laughing over yet another story about a childhood crush, my friend asked me what I was going to do when I got back home. "Nǐ huí jiā yǐhòu dǎsuàn zuò shén me?"

I thought back to my time that summer enacting an alligator. I remembered the 70 lost dollars and the canceled train and the impulsive street food purchases.

I replayed in my mind all the times that my plans had fallen to pieces and all the times that something even more beautiful had replaced them.

“I’ll play it by ear,” I said.

“Kànzhebàn,” my friend replied. “In Chinese, we say, kànzhebàn.”

As I repeated her Chinese, trying to get the pronunciation right, we turned the corner and stumbled across a stinky tofu stand. “Oho…” my friend began, and we slowly smiled at each other.

I laughed because we had just stuffed ourselves with dinner an hour before. Kànzhebàn, I thought, and

swung my arm around her shoulders.

“It’s on me.”

Secondhand Summer Making a New Self out of Old Stuff

By Siena Capone Illustrated by Ian Williams My mom and I stared at the blotch spanning across the knee of the pants, an orange sun rising in the middle of black-and-white gingham fabric.

The flared bottoms were supposed to render me a ’70s dancing daydream in the midst of a sweaty 2019 dorm-room party—or so I envisioned.

“It looks like she kneeled in spaghetti,” my mom said finally.

If that were the case, at least these stranger’s pants had paid their due to my Italian heritage. But at the time, this did not comfort me whatsoever. I was an expert in Depop by then, and when a seller claimed the item was in perfect condition, it was supposed to be just that—no enormous orange stains.

I had been cheated. Lied to. Left with nowhere to turn but a direct message, a process that made me break out in hives—much like when an adult suggests I should simply “tell the waiter my order is wrong.” Despite many years of arguing with my high-school classmates or telling off my eighthgrade teacher when he dress-coded me (what makes you think I’m still mad about that?), I hate negotiating when something came out not quite right.

Besides, such could be the case with an app that lets you buy stuff from total strangers. Depop allows you to sell anything in your closet that you don’t want or that belongs to an old self—not to say I’m ever selling my One Direction shirts—right out of your bedroom. It’s convenient and fun and environmentally friendly, shunning corporations that rely on unethical labor practices and dump their unsold products into landfills. Instead, you can rip them off by getting their shirts for 10 bucks from a 15-year-old kid who will subsequently spend it on a Hydroflask or their 53rd Brandy Melville tank top.

However, I have never found Depop to be anything other than an utter wonderland of vintage gems. It’s where I got my beloved “Hot ’70s Science Teacher Dress,” a miracle of weird purple geometric patterns that look vaguely bacterialike, along with my “Fruit-Themed Slot Machine Sweater,” which smelled of cigarette smoke but made me happy nonetheless, and my “’80s Sitcom Dreamy Older Brother Sweater,” which kept me cozy on my way to get my first Bajas burrito of the semester after winter break. These all fell into my hands from sellers far and wide, signaled by the same satisfying clunk of my mailbox lid that closed over the “Unusually Chic Farmhand’s Buttondown” my heart so much desired.

By midsummer, my Depop preference had blossomed into a full-blown obsession. There were soon enough floral dresses in my closet to make a meadow, each new installment in my patterned dress saga earning a judgemental eyebrow raise from my sister. I spent many a warm July night imploring some person in Philadelphia or Ashland or Queens to divulge their height. (It’s not weird. I

ARTS & CULTURE

needed to know if what looked like a breezy, villadwelling, Florentine woman’s sundress on them would look like a glorified rain poncho on my 5’5” self ). Interactions with total strangers became a staple in my life, little fragments of their worlds multiplying in my room like the bacteria pattern on that dress (nothing wrong with looking like a sexy amoeba, I say).

And with them came their stories—this is what I love even more than the self-expression or the eco-consciousness or the thrift that Depop allows.

I love stories more than anything in the world. And online thrifting was simply people-watching, just without arms filling the sleeves. People selling their ex’s band T-shirts or sweatshirts for schools they didn’t get into, people just trying to pay for college or their cat’s vet bills. Dropping little oneliners in their captions about having worn this when they fell in love, threw a surprise party, or ran away to another country to rent a small apartment and sit on a fire escape and dream. “only reason I’m not keeping it is because i wore it on valentine’s day with my ex haha.” “i had a rlly special night good memories in this dress and I wish the same for whoever buys it.” The stitches, little hyphens of memories in the seams, the what-ifs and the ever-afters.

When that item is in your hands, the story becomes yours to tell—a new beginning waiting in the confines of a bubble mailer. That was the kind of reclaimed magic I needed this past summer. My first year of college made me more of a stranger to myself than any scamming, pants-selling teenager in Oregon was, and I needed to know that it was possible to rediscover, to retell, to be something brand new even with the whole past behind me.

And so I set out sifting through the virtual racks to find, well, me. In Depop terms, I listed an “In Search Of” for myself. It wasn’t easy, and involved a lot of soul-searching. There was a dash of transcendental meditation (and more than a dash of extinguishing my skepticism about it), a bit of contemplating my purpose on rural Michigan dirt roads and buying a self-help book I never read (which was then used as a paperweight for angsty Taylor Swiftian poetry). I spent a solid amount of time in Florence trying to replace the creaky abandoned houses of my old feelings with archaic Italian cathedrals. But with time—and a willingness to give different selves a shot in the dressing room—the dichotomy of new-old in my life eventually came to mirror the one draped over

my clothes hangers. I was moving on from an old self and all of the things that held me down, but also stumbling upon the things I forgot about myself.

As I waded through Depop pages of forged Nike shoes and blouses full of holes not visible in the picture (buy it, they said; it adds “charm,” they said) to stumble across an "Ugly, Tourist Dad Shirt—But Make It a Dress," I remembered that I like to dress loud, to wear vibrant colors and funky dresses. That I’m not shy, and I love the sound of an orchestra tuning and cardinal birds and the way the sun looks bleary through Michigan trees. That I have places I want to go and stories I want to tell.

Every forgotten fact a vintage gem that had been waiting for me on the horizon like a spaghettisauce sunrise.

So when I packaged up my own pair of pants— also black and white, but sans orange stain—that someone had bought from me in August, that’s what a stranger in California was getting. I had kissed someone in the half-melted heart of March, stuffed my face with Blue State bagels in an essayinduced panic, and danced in my dusty dorm room by myself, all in these pants. I’ll never know what happens to them next.

I hope whoever wears them makes it a good story.

How to Rent a Room

On the Death of Indie Rock Icon David Berman

By Griffin Plaag Illustrated by Rémy Poisson Trigger Warning: Suicide, depression The afternoon that David Berman killed himself found me hastily throwing unfolded clothes into a duffel bag for a trip down to the Blue Ridge Mountains by way of Williamsburg, VA. The day before, I’d finally gotten around to putting an ear on the self-titled release from his newest band, Purple Mountains.

Later that day, I was rocketing down the 95 corridor, running through his lyrics in my head as though remembering a conversation with an old friend.

The poet and Silver Jews frontman has been an idol of mine for years now, exacting enormous influence on the music and poetry I write in my spare

time. Fueled by beer and a discontent with life under late capitalism, Berman’s brand of indie rock is quietly melancholic, masking its defeatism in slipshod doit-yourself musical compositions (often contributed by fellow indie rock luminaries Pavement) and the languorous comfort of his baritone voice. Rife with lyrics like, “in 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection,” Berman’s compositions access a distinctive hopelessness while also offering up a wink and nudge. As a student struggling with the fact that, even armed with my Ivy League degree and supposedly above-average Ivy League intellect (reports vary on this one), it will be astronomically difficult to exact enough influence on the world to reverse or at least hard-left-turn its charted course for self-destruction, I was instantly enamored with what Berman had to say, held totally fast by his style of presentation.

My first Silver Jews song was an accident, randomly shuffled into a friend’s queue as we sat in his beat-up, late-90s Accord. The song was “Pretty Eyes,” the closing track on The Natural Bridge, and its bleak poesy instantly threw my world out of orbit. I’ll never forget the pins-and-needles sensation I felt when I first heard Berman drawl, “One of these days, these days will end.” Arriving home, I immediately listened to the entire album, ran back to my car, put it on again, and spent the rest of the day fruitlessly hopping from record store to record store in an attempt to find a press of it. From there I discovered favorites on his other records: “Trains Across the Sea” from Starlite Walker, “Random Rules” from American Water, and “Time Will Break the World” from Bright Flight—a song whose title alone I’ve turned over in my head at least once a day since first hearing it. In a way, Berman became a friend of mine, at a time in my life that I often found cruelly friendless, an artist whose voice, while known to others, felt entirely mine. Even learning that his poem “Self-Portrait at 28” was a favorite of a close friend couldn’t change this feeling. Berman’s words and ideas were so close to my heart that he felt like my conscience. For the first time in my life, I felt as though I were really seeing the world.

If you’ll permit me to whine selfishly for a moment about the untimely death of a real human being: Berman’s death took Berman away, but it also took his art with it. Music it had felt safe to live inside instantly lost its comfort. Instead, I felt a strange paralysis. A person whose life and mind and verse I had so venerated and attempted to emulate, a person I had thought for a long time might be the smartest person in the world, had reached the end without any more answers. His lyrics, which had once sounded so wise, now sounded like calls for help (“No, I don’t really want to die / I only want to die in your eyes” or “And since then it’s been a slow education / and you got that one idea again / the one about dying,” to say nothing of the content on the new Purple Mountains release, which reads unsettlingly like a parting message). When I first discovered his writing, I often felt as though Berman’s words were a kind of mirror to my soul, one reflecting a clearer image than the one I was able to see by myself. He was a person who had felt all the same things I felt, and continue to feel—the same doubts,

september 13, 2019 5

ARTS&CULTURE the same fears—but had managed to conquer all of that, or at least transfigure it into something beautiful.

Losing him marked the death of a prolific artist, yes, but it also felt to me like the death of an idol, a friend, and a part of me.

There was no fanfare on the day that Berman died. Scattered obits cropped up around the internet.

A few musically inclined friends sent me messages or posted goodbyes in forums. My mom thought he was “the guy from Talking Heads” (that’s how she put it). But for most of the world, David Berman passed on quietly, unknown to them, another body in an endless history of bodies. Berman’s restless lassitude stemmed, at times, from his frustration at how transitory our world is, how impermanent. It was hard to see him proved correct.

I grieved harder for David Berman than I have for anyone—family members and friends who have left me included. I’m still grieving. Imagine you were a priest and the Bible committed suicide. Imagine you were lost in a terrible labyrinth of corporate highrises, condo complexes, and “Jesus saves” billboards, and your only map decided to self-destruct. Then you might understand how I could possibly mourn a person I never met. I would also recommend listening to The Natural Bridge if you relate even slightly to any of the feelings of alienation and distress I’ve outlined here.

Speaking from experience, I think it’ll do you good. *** “I asked a painter,” Berman relays with a terrible sigh on “Random Rules,” “why the roads are colored black. He said, Steve, it’s because people leave, and no highway will bring them back.”

And on the drive to Williamsburg, where Berman was born, I stared dry-eyed at the yellow lines in the rearview, following their bending path to the vanishing point before the sun set pink and burning on David Berman’s final day.

Witch's Brew

How One Children's Book Cast a Lifelong Spell of Imagination

By Naomi Kim Illustrated by Faye Thomas How strange. Of all the books I have read, the one that leaps to the forefront of my mind today is one I last read 10 years ago—a book whose ending I can no longer quite recall, whose characters I can

a family for the cantankerous Old Witch—and maybe, just maybe, starting to change her for the better. Reality and imagination blur and blend, for there really is an Old Witch, who really has been “banquished” because of Amy and Clarissa. ***

no longer name confidently. The details have grown hazy over the years, but I can remember quite clearly how much I loved Eleanor Estes’s The Witch Family.

The Witch Family! What images does a title like that conjure? A group of witches gathered around a cauldron in some muggy swamp, their hut standing on its chicken legs nearby? Or maybe a Halloween revel, the silhouette of a coven black against the full moon, the sound of high-pitched cackling?

No; instead, the things that my memory calls forth are a lonely glass mountain, a young witch named Hannah, two ordinary little girls whose names I cannot remember, a baby witch whose claps produce sparks, a magical birthday party, a game played on broomsticks, an old grumpy witch who softens just a little as the much younger witches join her in a family of sorts, and a spelling bee(a bee who talks by spelling out all his words).

The Witch Family. What am I forgetting? What have I already forgotten? And why, despite all the intervening years, do I still carry memories of this book with me, tucked away in my heart? *** The Witch Family is actually grounded in a make-believe game, so the 1960 novel is very much an ode to childrens' imagination. In The Witch Family, six-year-old best friends Amy and Clarissa (whose names I have only very recently relearned) bring Old Witch to life in their minds and in their drawings. But Old Witch is no Glinda, so Amy and Clarissa “banquish” her—“banquish” being an inventive, six-year-old version of “banish”—to a glass mountain, where, bitter and grumpy, she lives all alone with her black cat. The two friends’ make-believe games are able to create certain changes in Old Witch’s world, and it is they who send along Little Witch and Teeny Witch, forming

“In 2011, Mariah Carey spent countless hours on the Home Shopping Network peddling her then-new collection of clothing, jewelry, and fragrances to an eager audience of millions of Middle Americans and probably Eminem.”

- Ryan Walsh, “ch-ch-changes”

“And I want to emulate the toddlers’ starry-eyed outlook instead of walking from dorm to Ratty to library like a zombie lurching along.”

- Naomi Kim, “Schooled”

6 post–

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Anita Sheih a FEATURE

NARRATIVE

Managing Editor Sydney Lo

Section Editors Liza Edwards-Levin Jasmine Ngai

Section Editor Sara Shapiro

9.15.16

9.14.18

To the eight-year-old me, a voracious reader of fairy tales and fantasies, The Witch Family was one of the best finds in the library. It was the kind of book I sought out as a child for the pure joy of reading an unfettered flight of fancy. Something that would feed my own imagination and the “let’s pretend” games I played so often with my little brother. Our living room became a witch’s dungeon, or a pirate ship, or a dark forest teeming with magic.

A thousand imaginary worlds rolled out like red carpets in all directions, and a thousand imaginary creatures and people—some cowardly, some brave, some heroes, some villains—walked with us through our adventures.

I see now that part of the appeal of The Witch Family, outside of its charming storyline and winsome characters, was its presentation of the incredible power of imagination. The novel affirmed and validated the make-believe games that were such a central part of my life then and now. Three years ago, as I began applying to college, I was surprised to find myself writing my personal essay about the “let’s pretend” games I played with my brother. The Witch Family and all my makebelieve worlds, though I thought I had left them behind, were actually an integral, though invisible, part of me. *** Imagination, especially when it comes to storytelling, is a daring practice, drawing on creativity and courage, calling us to look at the world with eyes wide open. We create worlds, both better and worse, to call attention to things that are not yet as they should be. We take the ordinary and extraordinary from our real lives and spin it into the fabric of our imagined landscapes to remind ourselves of the beauty we already experience. And I want to participate fully and deeply in this bold practice, as a reader and as a writer.

And so, because it reminds me that imagination has power, The Witch Family is a book I need and love now, too. I need it and love it because it reminds me that even the cranky crave genuine companionship.

I need it and love it because it reminds me that children’s books do matter—and that they go on mattering even after children have grown up. There is no such thing as “just” a children’s book.

ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Julian Towers Section Editors Nicole Fegan Griffin Plaag Staff Writer Rob Capron

Managing Editor Celina Sun

Staff Writers Danielle Emerson Naomi Kim Anneliese Mair COPY CHIEF Amanda Ngo

SOCIAL MEDIA Camila Pavon HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Rémy Poisson CO-LAYOUT CHIEFS Amy Choi Nina Yuchi Layout Designer Steve Ju WEB MASTER Jeff Demanche

Copy Editors Jennifer Osborne Mohima Sattar Want to be involved?

Email: anita_sheih@brown.edu!