Post- Sept. 24, 2015

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Editor-in-Chief Yidi Wu Managing Editor of Arts & Culture Abby Muller Managing Editor of Features Monica Chin Managing Editor of Lifestyle Cissy Yu Managing Editor of Online Amy Andrews Arts & Culture Editors Liz Studlick Mollie Forman Features Editors Lauren Sukin Nate Shames Lifestyle Editor Corinne Sejourne Copy Chiefs Lena Bohman Alicia DeVos Serif Sheriffs Ellen Taylor Logan Dreher Her Grey Eminence Clara Beyer Head Illustratrix Katie Cafaro Staff Writers Kalie Boyne Kevin Carty Katherine Cusumano Eleanor Duke Rebecca Forman Joseph Frankel Devika Girish Emilio Leanza Caity Mylchreest Tanya Singh Bryan Smith Andrew Smyth Staff Illustrators Yoo Jin Shin Alice Cao Emily Reif Beverly Johnson Michelle Ng Peter Herrara Mary O’Connor Emma Margulies Jason Hu Jenice Kim Cover Katie Cafaro

contents 3 upfront

coffee and conversations Post- magazine

4 features mirror, mirror Yidi Wu

5 lifestyle

melancholia Miriam Langmoen adopting my culture Sara Al-Salem

6 arts & culture waking old english Lucia Iglasias tony soprano Yidi Wu

7 arts & culture

editor’s note Dear readers, This week’s issue is on the serious side. We try not to be fearmongers (if you can imagine us successfully mongering fear, let us know and we will take a stab; we will try anything once) and we’re not interested in merely bemoaning the world’s ills (everything is terrible the man is against us). However, there are issues, complex and unsolved, to which we don’t propose solutions, but on which our writers hoped to shed some light. This week’s issue talks about a few. They’re slow issues, where having both a list of the problems with the past and a clear picture of a better future doesn’t provide a very satisfactory solution for someone who wants to make big change to the present. Our writers don’t seem to be moralizing, and they are not catastrophizing. We encourage you to read with an open mind and neither to jump to condemnation nor to glowing praise with too much haste.

A range of pieces that include personal experiences provides some of the best use of our publication space. Individual and visceral stories illuminate events and make them real, and critical and broad pieces give us the words and concepts with which to shape our thoughts about those experiences. We’re always looking for new stories, new writers, and new friends to join our community. Reach out to us if you’re interested, in need, or just looking for a place to write.

game over?

Joshua lu

8 lifestyle

top ten overheard at brown salt lake city Bonnie Pan

Best,

Yidi

we’re taking this week off...

send us your photos! more press is good press!

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coffee and conversations minus the coffee, minus the conversations POST- MAGAZINE editors and staff

As we roll into the first few weeks of our semester, the Post- editors have been musing on our goals for this year: hopes, dreams, bucket lists, whatever we’re looking forward to. Good luck to everyone embarking on this journey with us, however focused or aimless you may be! Here’s to a fulfilling, validating, relaxing, self-indulgent, and fun semester.—Monica Chin, Managing Editor of Features I read an interesting blog post this week from Wait But Why, an interesting and forthcoming blog by Tim Urban and Andrew Finn. They write about issues ranging from sports economics to procrastination (one of my favorites) and try to explore the topics in honest and clear ways. The particular post was called “Your Life in Weeks.” It visually represented a 90-year-old’s life in weeks using a block for every single week.

There aren’t that many squares, and there aren’t that many squares between your life events as you mark them out: first day of elementary school, high school graduation, first job, first home, first grandchild. I would like to live in the present. The point of the post isn’t to stress you out. It is quite sweet and smart: All people whom you admired lived their lives inside those little blocks as well. There is no reason you’re less capable of filling out those boxes— but you do have to fill them out, day by day. I’ve finally grown to have an inkling of an idea of what it means to live mindfully. But I think that to do so fully and well, without guilt and with purpose, one has to keep an eye on the future. —YW I’m from St. Louis, but I doubt I had given two thoughts to Ferguson until I woke up one morning and discovered the entire suburb was burning. Over the next few months, there would be tear gas in my backyard at 3 a.m., highway shutdowns, and more fires. But I really shouldn’t have been surprised by the explosion. St. Louis is one of the most racially segregated cities in the country—the BBC even came to make a condescending documentary about our issues. St. Louis has always been a tinder box. It was only a matter of time.

But what are my dreams for my city?

As tempting as it is to hope we will all sing Kumbaya, I think I can hope for something more concrete. I hope that the city and the county in St. Louis will work together. I hope that St. Louisians can learn to accept that others have a different lived experience. And I hope for patience for my city. We need to recognize that the struggle will not end overnight. —LB

I went to two different high schools; each was in walking distance of the other. At the end of senior year, both schools had their own spectacular senior tradition. At the first school, seniors would pay into a large pot of money, break into teams, and compete in a scavenger hunt; the winning team would receive the payout. At the other, students would cap the year off with a school-wide water balloon fight, complete with catapults, spray guns, and, inevitably, the cruelest water balloons of all: those filled with glitter.

Fortunately, I got to participate in both, splashing my friends from my second high school with water balloons and helping a team of my friends from my first high school with their tasks.

The highlight of the hunt was when a friend tattooed the word “relentless” on his arm--despite the tattoo artist’s skepticism (he even forced my friend to reconfigure the design before he would agree to complete the task.) Other teams did even stupider activities, from ordering drugs at a Taco Bell to stealing street signs to very public nudity. As again I enter my senior year, I’m hoping that my friends and I can have our own “scavenger hunts,” exploring new corners of Providence, trying new activities, meeting new people, and maybe even having a water balloon fight. But I hope that by now, four years after I sat in that tattoo parlor, we’ve all grown up enough not to get into a stranger’s car or try to rearrange the furniture in Christina Paxson’s office. —L(R)S It’s hard not to think about this prompt in the short term, because I’m a senior and so everything after May 29, 2016, is a complete mystery to me right now. I do have post-college goals—what I want to do, where I want to live, who I want to be. But for the time being I’m trying to focus on the here and now.

So here’s what I want for this year: I want to take classes that are interesting and useful and challenging, classes I’ve always wanted to take but now it’s really my last chance. I want to procrastinate less (unlikely, but still).

I want to work hard and write a thesis that I’m proud of... although first I need to actually identify a topic (see procrastination problem above). I want to spend a little less time in the SciLi, my home away from home. I want to meet new people in my various classes and activities and to spend plenty of time with my friends. Sometimes I think I might want to fall in love. I want to learn to cook at least three meals that aren’t pasta-based. I want to say yes to opportunities and to try new things and all that other clichéd stuff.

Sometimes I feel like senior year might kick my ass—but I remain hopeful that instead it’ll be the other way around. —AA I hate bucket lists.

It’s not that I’m not a planner—my iPhone notes contain hundreds of to-do lists, and my finals study plans are carefully constructed. But I’m all too aware how even the things that you theoretically need to do go undone or forgotten, anxiety growing as you transfer it from one list to another. How bizarre to impose that system of stress and productivity on things to do for fun Besides, isn’t it a little creepy to make a list of stuff that should be spontaneous? I’d rather run into the ocean on a whim or suffer SciLi-induced alcohol poisoning impulsively rather than carefully checking it off and moving on to the next calculated experience.

Actually, what I’m against is the whole industry of senior year nostalgia, this idea of immortalizing the year before it even happens. I’d rather not have a “great senior year,” thanks; I’m looking for a great year, period. Why go to Louis at 5 a.m. when I could go at 10?

No huge desire to make out in arbitrary places either, or steal silverware from the Ratty. I think I may have a better year just hanging out with friends and letting things happen.

So I’m not making any lists for senior year beyond the basics: grocery lists, reading lists, playlists. I’m hoping the rest will sort itself out. —L(S)S For this lifetime? Get enough sleep, learn more words, waste less time on tiny decisions, like nature, and quit looking at my Facebook News Feed. For this week, same thing, and I need to remind myself to visit the mailroom— self, when you see this, visit the mailroom. You have a package. —CY Normally I am a big bucket list fan, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about being present. Right now, I think my biggest goal is to mindfully take everything one day at a time and enjoy it. I cannot believe this will be my last year at Brown, and right now I’m doing my best to remember to savor the little things (friends, classes, the beautiful weather while it lasts...). I guess this would count as a big to-do list for life as well. —CS At last week’s Rosh Hashanah services, my rabbi said that the Jewish High Holidays always come too early or too late—too early to allow time for real

reflection, or too late to remain relevant to the year behind.

I don’t know whether they’re early or late for me this year—no matter when they fall, they always seem an inconvenience. It lies in the choices: Ditch class to take the two and a half hour trek to my grandma’s? Attend services in Providence? Avoid the issue all together and celebrate Yom Kippur at Flatbread?

Any choice I make, I come out feeling guilty. I’m not a good daughter, I’m not a good student, I’m not a good Jew… although you could argue excessive guilt makes me a very good Jew indeed.

Regardless. This is a very roundabout way to say that my current project is dragging my thoughts away from my thesis to understand what this season means, and how I can use that to change my life for the better.

There’s a recurring thread in service readings about how to make yourself a better person. Be less slothful, more generous, live for others before yourself.

Carpe Diem. Seize the day. Make your life extraordinary.

(And certainly don’t waste your time rewatching Dead Poet’s Society. Do not.

You’ll hate it just as much every time, no matter how much Robin Williams make you cry) Most of it feels too dogmatic to me. It goes against the ethos of selfcare and self-acceptance that I’ve been struggling to arrive at for a long time.

This constant striving, constant betterment—yeah, you might have more fun, might be more fulfilled. It just sounds exhausting.

So at this point? Perpetually sleepy, eternally stressed, worrying about the future and myself and my friendships and whether I’m good enough for any of this—fuck seize the day. I can barely wake up long enough to experience it.

I don’t want to live an extraordinary life. I want to be ordinary. An ordinary daughter, an ordinary student, an ordinary Jew. That I can arrive right on time. — MF In a continuation of my ongoing effort to be the biggest parody of myself possible, the first thing that comes to mind as far as hopes/dreams/goals go is getting to New York City to see Hamilton, which I’ve been listening to for more or less the past two days solid. This is a great short-term goal because tickets are pretty much sold out through the end of 2015, so I can comfortably put off the logistics until I have to buy plane tickets back from winter break. Another thing I am comfortably putting off dealing with right now, but which I am sure will edge its way

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rapidly into the “anxiety” part of my brain as soon as I get on that plane back north in January: Graduation. I’ve been sitting with the idea of the thing since the day I set foot on campus freshman year (missing high school friends desperately, I reminded myself one day I’d be sad to graduate from here), and I’ve been making melancholy half-jokes about it since May, but soon it’s going to be real and looking katie cafaro, e sports, issue 2, september 23.png me in the face. Worrying, my brain’s go-to, isn’t going to do anything here besides make it harder to

love this spring and my time here as fully as I can. So my real goal for this school year? Face the fact that it will end, bravely and calmly, and meet it when it comes.

—AM I’m one of those people who fucks things up a lot. It is, to a certain extent, a function of surplus boldness—I am often so confident in my own opinion or plan of action (it’s very easy to slip into a vortex of “I am so absolutely correct and everyone else is so horrendously wrong”) that I swashbuckle into a blunt, potential-

ly offensive statement or righteously idealistic but ultimately futile procedure as a solution to a problem: social, academic, or otherwise. Somewhat ironically, I think insecurity plays an equally prominent role. Fear of inaction, fear of failure, fear of any sort of consequence on both the world and my outward image, often shove me into rash attempts at rectification and aesthetic self-improvement that I later regret.

Impacts? I’m a polarizing character, an acquired taste. As I’m phased into leadership positions with my upperclassman

status, the importance of delicacy of behavior, of contemplation, consideration, and cooperation becomes increasingly evident to me. Goals for this year? Think, breathe, love, live, do all of it harder, do all of it better. Be grateful for my friends who, though comparatively few, are the smartest, coolest, and most accommodating people I know. Make change without making a mess. Make time to think.

Make space to be happy. Be a better me.

Be the best me. —MC

mirror, mirror stop looking at me!

YIDI WU editor-in-chief I have, on innumerable occasions, had friends tell me they did not think they were beautiful, or not beautiful enough. They wanted to eat less and exercise more. They were jealous of others’ appearances, and the life afforded by a lovely face. They thought that their relationships would be better if their partners found them more desirable—and, at the same time, they thought the very fact that the health of their relationship depended at all on their appearance was troubling and unfair. I have never had a satisfactory response. I have, on almost every occasion, provided the appropriate ones: you are beautiful, or sometimes, you are beautiful to me. Diet and exercise are good, but for health reasons. I understand how you feel, and I do not and cannot judge you, for I have felt the same things and seen how complex a matter it is to assign blame. I am here to talk, if you want. Be well. Take care. You are dear to me.

These responses are true and genuine.

But they fail to convince me when I say them to myself. They seem, at best, to be woefully inadequate. They point at temporary coping mechanisms to ease the unbelievably brutal path through life. The reality is that you can’t live with beauty, and you can’t live without it. The correct response to an incorrect situation is not to bite down and simply bear the pain; to simply learn to cope is not enough.

It is hard not to feel that beauty is real.

It is easy to know that fifty, a hundred, two hundred years ago women were judged along different standards. It is almost impossible to therefore not judge other women based on the standards of beauty today, nor to instinctively respond to their appearances. It is easy— perhaps mandatory—to understand the

incredible harms that come from the desires that dictate appearance. It is hard not to like what you like. I have many male friends who refuse to date any but the most exceptionally attractive women. They are not shallow in all ways: they value intelligence and kindness, and they seek genuine connections. But they would never, and have never, dated women whom they have considered plain or perhaps even ugly. And what would be the alternative? For them to try to feel differently, if it is possible? For them to try to date people for whom they felt no genuine physical attraction, as a part of a self-improvement campaign? This seems disingenuous and exploitative.

Surely we are not all so exact in our standards, and most of us do not exclude the less beautiful from our lives. But when you see the tiny girl with the beautiful eyes and the dirty white converse sneakers sitting on the Main Green, does she not break your heart? Tell me truly.

Beauty is, for almost all purposes, a fixed concept. I do not mean that there is an objective standard for ranking physical appearance, as prevailing beauty norms have changed from one age to another, and individual responses vary from person to person and within place and time. Rather, I mean this: what most people consider beautiful is very likely what any single person thinks is beautiful. Those who are not beautiful are treated differently—often, and consistently, worse in many ways. And beauty is almost inherently a hierarchical concept: sure, everyone can be beautiful, but it is important that you do not think she is prettier than I am. Beauty is a concept, one that can shift, but one that binds wherever it shifts. And let us not pretend that beauty is a “subjective” matter alone

(some people like blue eyes and some like brown!), because there are patterns within that subjectivity that seem to eerily and consistently cut against those who are already disadvantaged: those to whom race, class, and gender were not kind (some people like blue eyes, a disproportionate number like white skin).

I write of women in particular, not because others are not affected. I do so in part because it is what I know best, and in part because, though beauty is an insidious thing for all, it is especially so for women. For one, beauty is associated for women with femininity, and often, therefore, with weakness. There are exceptions, and people are inventive and sometimes extraordinary, but for the most part, the sexualization of men includes power in a way that it does not for women. Largely, men who are supposed to be desirable are older, charming, and powerful—physically and otherwise. Women, by contrast, are supposed to be young, innocent, malleable, and dependent on the kindness of men.

For another, despite all the rewards that beauty holds, you can never be beautiful enough if the rewards are the reason you seek beauty. Even women who seem

to be, in all conventional ways, perfect are criticized still for not being perfect enough. They inspire extreme hostility even from those who covet them or their beauty. And even when appearance causes desire, that is no reassurance to the beautiful that they are truly worthy of desire.

All of this, of course, is interesting, but perhaps not useful. I would never recommend telling a friend, “beauty doesn’t matter” as an attempt to comfort.

I promise: it won’t help. First, it is obviously false. For my own part, as much as I wish that my appearance did not matter to others, I want as much -- or more -- that, since it does, those who love me do so not for my beauty in addition to everything else. But more importantly, to claim that “beauty does not matter” in the face of the clear evidence that it does is to callously miss the rare opportunity to repair the damage. Instead say this: “beauty can be empowering.” As long as it exists, it may be more important to decouple beauty from worth than to helplessly insist that it is not real.

Illustration by Alice Cao

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melancholia

when everything external is gone, what do we really live for?

MIRIAM LANGMOEN contributing writer Trigger Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of suicidal thoughts and self-injurious behavior.

Something happens to you at the end of your freshman year. What happens is not important. What matters is that it triggers a chain of events that slowly and inevitably takes over your entire life.

You go through the five stages of grief like clockwork. After the initial denial, you spend the summer in a state of blind rage. You go out every night and walk up and down the streets hoping to get into a fistfight with someone.

When you see a group of loud drunken men you cross the street and walk towards them, glaring at them and silently daring them to attack you. You’re begging for an excuse to unleash your anger at someone. You scream at your family a lot. You say horrible, cruel things to people you care about.

The bargaining starts as soon as you’re back to college. Administrators serve you platitudes about how you’re holding up. You give them a shrug and a platitude back. You arrange meetings, talk to counsellors, do sensible things to minimise the impact you can feel creeping in on you. The depression hits you slowly. That should be an oxymoron, but it genuinely feels like a slow-motion punch in the stomach. The meetings are done, the deans have been informed. There is nothing left to do but take it. The anger has already left you, and now everything else is leaving too.

You gradually stop going to classes. In the beginning, you feel a soul-crushing despair

when you fail at something. Then you feel nothing. You stop eating. Eating requires a conscious action. You aren’t particularly concerned about your weight, but the energy and initiative you’d have to muster up to eat seems insurmountable. It helps that you’re never hungry. You discover a strange drowsiness that kicks in after 24 hours without food.

The constant ache in your stomach becomes a comfort.

At one point, you realise that you’ve spent 48 hours in bed without eating, drinking or going to the bathroom. A few days later, you do it again. It only bothers you if you think about it for too long, so you don’t.

You sometimes tell your friends that you don’t eat, but you make it sound like a joke.

Haha, college stress, you know? I just forget all the time. When they ask if you’ve eaten today, you lie and say yes. You do the same when your roommate asks if you’ve been to classes. You tell people you feel ill and that’s why you’re not eating. It’s almost true at this point.

You know—with a fatalistic certainty— that you should be dead.

You stay in bed.

You stop paying your bills. People who are going to die don’t need to pay bills.

You stop brushing your teeth. People who are going to die don’t care about cavities.

You’re rotting from the inside out and if you just stay completely still, you’ll rot through the mattress and disappear.

You go a week, sometimes more, without showering. It feels like making your outside match your insides. You cover up how dirty

you are in baggy hoodies. Someone compliments the scarf you’ve tied around your greasy bangs. You haven’t washed your hair in nine days. You feel like you’re already dead and just prematurely decaying.

You binge-watch things on Netflix and can’t remember a single thing you saw afterwards.

People ask if you’re doing okay. You usually reply with a “yes”. What else is there to say?

You’ve had an anxiety-management strategy for as long as you can remember: You sing to yourself, silly little comforting phrases over and over. It’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay to a cheerful tune, just like calming down a scared child. It evens out your breathing. It’s November when you realise that you’ve changed the lyrics to gonna shoot myself in the head, gonna shoot myself in the head, gonna shoot myself in the head, fourteen times in the head, fourteen times and you didn’t notice when it happened. It sounds even better in Norwegian. “Fourteen times” in particular has a nice ring to it, so you say it as often as you need to: fjorten ganger, fjorten ganger.

From the outside, it might look like your world is contracting down to your room, then to your bed. You know it’s really the other way around. You’re shrinking until the bed is so large and you are so small you couldn’t even get off it if you wanted to. You are slowly and peacefully ceasing to exist. You’re not certain anyone notices. You have three different plans to end yourself, but you lack the energy to implement them.

You begin philosophising over what taking

your life would mean. You still understand that if you were to cause your own death, it would be a horrible experience for your friends and family. You can distance yourself from your friends (you’re already doing it) but you can’t escape your family. You owe them something for having been born. I didn’t ask to be born, you think. You feel that there is something unfair about being brought into the world already tied down by these obligations. The most fundamental question—to be or not to be—and we aren’t even allowed to answer it without concerns for others.

Like a bad paper draft with everything superfluous edited out, you’re left with just yourself. You’ve isolated yourself from everyone around you. Your physical needs have been cut. Your academics are gone. You have dropped out of every extracurricular you ever cared about. When it becomes too hard to think, you use your neck as a stress ball. It’s warm and solid under your hand. You squeeze until your vision flickers and you wonder: Is whatever’s left something you want to live as?

Is there anything in you worth saving?

Miriam Langmoen works with the Brown chapter of Active Minds, a group committed to opening the conversation about mental health on college campuses. Join them on Facebook to learn more.

Illustration by Peter Herrera

adopting my culture it’s not cultural appropriation, but it’s still frustrating SARA AL-SALEM columnist Like many students entering the Brown bubble, I remember learning many new phrases and keywords in listening to students’ casual jargon in my first weeks at school. I quickly picked up the vital ones—“homogeneous,” “juxtapose,” “gender-fluidity”—the list could go on. My first encounter with the phrase “cultural appropriation” was during my freshman fall semester. I was taking a class in American Studies, “Revolting Bodies,” which centered on how media reacted and dealt with varying topics.

Cultural appropriation first came up as a topic while we were watching one of Iggy Azalea’s music videos. In the video for her song “Bounce,” she danced in different colored saris before a backdrop of Indian dancers, and our discussion centered on Azalea’s shameless appropriation of Indian culture. So began my understanding of cultural appropriation and its varying degrees.

The first thing I learned about the term is that many people use it rather carelessly. Anything from learning a language to visiting a

country has been deemed “cultural appropriation.” I wish I were exaggerating, but having overheard many a conversation on campus, I know it to be true. Too often students tend to take “politically correct” to an extreme that devalues certain, if not most, terminology.

I say this to buffer my claim. I am not one to point fingers at things I dislike in order to further some sort of political agenda.

But I have noticed a trend amongst students learning a new language of engaging passionately with a culture not their own. It is a trend that I don’t think is necessarily culturally appropriative, but it is one that at the end of the day rubs me the wrong way. I have found it frustrating to be on the receiving end when other students—recently returned from study abroad programs and with course level knowledge of a language not surpassing Brown’s “400” level—try to teach me my own background.

More often than not, I am personally flattered when someone is engaged with Middle Eastern culture and excited by what

I have to say about my experiences. I think it is humbling to know that there are people who are genuinely interested in my culture, and I admire their diligent efforts in trying to immerse themselves within it.

However, there is a difference between admiring and engaging with a culture and becoming an omniscient cultural scientist who attempts to supersede those who actually grew up in a given society.

For example, a student, who recently returned from Lebanon and studied Arabic, tried to convince me that my grandmother’s Lebanese identity was illegitimate because of the political warzone of the state at the time.

They addressed me as if I were the impostor who wanted to tag along—and it felt ridiculous, and uncomfortable, to try to position myself back into my own heritage as if I didn’t really belong there at all.

I felt similarly displaced from own identity when another student came up to me and showed me a song in Arabic with which I was unfamiliar and then mocked me for not

knowing my culture well enough. I understand that the intention is not malicious, but when people learn a culture, they must make sure they grasp its breadth and reach. To assume that learning a culture and its language for three or more years makes you a virtuoso creates a separation between the learner and the natives.

While I do not, and will never, see attempts to positively join a culture as culturally appropriative, I do hope that moving forward, those who take on this challenge tread lightly the line of interacting with a culture and overstepping someone’s personal history. Keep on the admirable efforts, but realize that behind the textbooks and Rosetta Stone clips are individuals who have a thousand different stories and experiences to share if you are willing to honestly listen.

Illustration by Michelle Ng

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arts & culture

waking old english a historical novel in a foreign tongue LUCIA IGLASIAS contributing writer Cnaw thu hwat I eom secgan? I eom secgan lysnan, lysnan. This is a talu for thee, a talu of Angland, a talu of 1066.* If you are reading this article you are familiar with the English language, but what of Old English, our modern tongue’s mother? Old English casts a long shadow over the language we speak today, as you can see when you try to untangle the example I left for you at the start of this article. You know these words. Their meanings sleep in your subconscious. But trying to capture them is like trying to remember a dream. The harder you clutch at sense the faster it slithers from your fingers. Read it aloud. Can you hear it now? All around you, the old tongue struggles to wake up, struggles to be heard in echoes of today’s English.

I have been chasing this dream-language since my first seminar in Old English last fall.

But reading real Old English epics requires a dictionary and feels more like deskwork than bedtime reading. For those of us who want to experience Old English as a living language, Paul Kingsnorth has written The Wake, which was released in the US this month. The novel, set in 1066, tells the tale of a band of English guerrillas making a doomed last stand against the French in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings. Kingsnorth writes in what he calls a “shadow tongue,” an artificial language that has the soul of Old English but is enough akin to your own English that after a few chapters you’ll feel settled into the sense of it. (A few days into reading I found myself misspelling modern English words; I had been struck by historical dyslexia.)

Kingsnorth isn’t just writing this way to mess with your mind and ruin your spelling.

He wanted to write a historical novel that honored the soul of the historical language as much as it honored historical facts. In a note at the end of the book he points out: “To put 21st-century sentences into the mouths of eleventh century characters would be the equivalent of giving them iPads and cappuccinos: just wrong.”

When an infant learns her first language, she isn’t just learning words—she is learning a worldview and way of life. So it is for Kingsnorth’s reader. As you learn his shadow tongue, you become submerged in this AngloSaxon way of speaking the world: language and experience are not discrete entities, rather, the way we speak shapes the world we live in.

Kingsnorth explains in his note: “The early English did not see the world as we do, and their language reflects this. They spoke their truth, as we speak ours. I wanted to be able to convey, not only in my descriptions of events and places but through the words of the characters, the sheer alien-ness of Old England.” As you fall into the world of The Wake, you will discover that April was once called thrimilci, for the cows were milked three times a day, and November was blotmonth, when livestock were killed for winter. Only by listening to old words can we hear how man was once ruled by the land, and not the other way round, as it is now.

Kingsnorth’s Old England is indeed alien.

His tale takes place mostly in the fens, a marshy place of darkness, with whispers of aelfs and wihts (elves and spirits). At the end of the novel he provides a partial glossary to guide you through this alien landscape, but many words in the book are not to be found in glossary. They have no modern translations; they do not belong to our world. You must learn their meanings as you experience them in the world the story builds, just as a child learns language by living in a speaking world.

Certain words will be more familiar. Every few pages the misanthropic narrator, Buccmaster, spews phrases like “scut thy fuccan mouth.” After William the Conqueror took control of England in 1066 and his French minions became the country’s elite ruling powers, the French language began to insinuate itself into English. As Old English became Frenchified, evolving into Middle English, it was the upper classes and the upper spheres of language that changed to reflect this new,

refined culture. Vulgarities belong to the language of the commoners, and survived virtually untouched.

Buccmaster’s angry tongue introduces you to a bitter, betrayed man. This is a man who wants to cut open a French bishop’s back and pull out his lungs like the wings of an eagle. The conquering French destroyed his home, his family, and his way of life.

He wants vengeance, whether his small troop of guerilla rebels stands behind him or not. You will cringe.

You will hate him. You will pity him. But when you are certain he is just a loudmouth coward, he turns into an irresistibly incendiary leader. And even when you are certain he is crazy, you can’t quite brush off the suspicion that he really is hearing whispers from the old, neglected Anglo-Saxon gods. It is for these Old Gods that Buccmaster is really fighting. He will kill French soldiers, but he will also kill his own Christianized countrymen, because he believes in an older England in which they do not belong. He is fighting a war that was won centuries before his birth by the missionaries who converted his country.

His struggle is doomed before it began, and he knows it; that only makes him all the more ruthless.

Buccmaster’s narrative is told using only words with Old English or Germanic ancestors, so his words are simple, his lexicon small.

Yet the feasts and battles bloomed huge in my room as I read, the Anglo-Saxon world coming to life in language. As Buccmaster and his werod, his war band, troop through villages, he showed me lovers blushing as they crowned one another in blossoms at the spring festival, showed me maidens weaving a bride of barley sheathes for the harvest procession.

He showed me the old way of life; he showed me what he was fighting for.

In an interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered” a couple weeks ago, Kingsnorth said that as he was writing The Wake he thought to himself: “There’s no way anybody’s going to publish this. I’m writing a book about a period in history no one knows about, in a language no one can understand, with a central character who’s horrible. There’s absolutely no way anyone’s going to touch this with a bargepole, but I don’t care!”

Instead, The Wake won the Gordon Burn Prize and the Bookseller Book of the Year Award. Kingsnorth’s shadow tongue speaks to us, speaks to that ancient knowledge sleeping deep within our modern ears, makes us whole before we knew we what we were missing.

Wake up. Listen. *Do you know what I am saying? I am saying listen, listen, this is a tale for you, a tale of England, a tale of 1066.

Illustration by Katie Cafaro

tony soprano he’s a business, man

YIDI WU editor-in-chief I love a good antihero. Let me explain what I don’t mean. I don’t mean that I like characters proportionally to how much they transgress (except for Claire Underwood), and I don’t especially like watching characters start out basically good and collapse into moral treachery. Walter White, for example, provides solid entertainment but doesn’t strike me as especially compelling.

His story lets the audience off the hook too easily. Though White starts out as a sympathetic (practically pity-wrenching) character, I don’t think he ultimately causes audience members any concern about their own moral purity. When was the last time you stayed up late at night, tortured by the possibility that you would turn to a life of crime and violence if you got a terminal illness and needed to support your family?

A good antihero is more thought-provoking and prompts more internal reflection in reaction to her story. Her faults exist from the

beginning, even if you looked past them.

She gets smarter as you get smarter.

There are basically two kinds of antiheroes: the antihero who is supposed to be fundamentally good but breaks the rules and works outside of the system, and the antihero who’s very clearly transgressive but is also charming and relatable. I think the second is the more challenging kind, and when I think of the second, I think of Tony Soprano. As the pilot opens on Tony, we see this schlubby, balding, middle-aged man waddling into his pool and flinging crusty bread at a family of ducks that happened to pass through, excited beyond belief. He cares about family values, but finds it hard to relate to the family he has. And most important: if he really is on the side of good, it is far from obvious. He’s the caporegime of a Mafia. In the very first episode, he crashes his car into a man who owes him money, beating him bloody and telling him

he’d better pay up.

Through the course of the show, he orchestrates thefts, extortions, racketeering, and murders. And we see this all from the therapist’s office, where he is by turn defensive, defenseless, and one of the most charismatic characters I have ever seen on television. Like a good antihero, he’s flawed, as characters are all flawed. He does not pretend to be otherwise, as much as he wishes he could.

An anti-hero is useful when there are no heroes left, and I have ceased to believe in pure heroes. The biggest flaw of those who pretend to be perfect is their pretense, and the saddest mistake of those who believe them is their faith in that perfection. Openly flawed heroes depict themselves honestly, and a bit of honesty casts some light on the hard problems that we need so badly to

recognize. Yet there’s still something that makes me uneasy about how much I like Tony Soprano. I feel as though I shouldn’t, and yet I really do.

It is important for the purposes of this piece that you understand his magnetism.

He is positively endearing as he sits in his therapist’s office in his boxy suit with his growing double-chin and talks about how much he loves his Uncle Junior—though Tony tells us that he has some grievances against his beloved uncle. “When I was younger, he told my girl cousins that I was never going to be an athlete, and”—he pauses—“frankly, that made a big blow on my self-esteem.” If you go online, I’m sure you’ll find synopses of the show that de-

arts & culture

scribe Tony as a “sociopath with anxiety and depression issues.” This is a wholly inadequate description of a man who made The Sopranos a hit for six seasons. It does not capture his innocence and infective longing as he clumsily tries to nurture ducklings in only a bathrobe, his struggles to perform his duty to his family, nor even the frankly funny scenes, like when he accidentally poured too much lighter fluid on the grill at his son’s birthday party, creating an explosion, and passed out.

I suppose the appeal of Tony Soprano could be taken in an optimistic way: Is it not commendable when we can understand and empathize with those who are different from us, and isn’t it a success that The Sopranos makes us accept and like Tony? After all, to condemn too much is to understand too little. If Tony is flawed, as we are all flawed, then we should try to understand him and try to extend the same courtesy to

ourselves.

But to understand is not necessarily to accept, and there are numerous things we should not accept about Tony Soprano.

The Sopranos doesn’t work as a show if you write off Tony as a fundamentally a bad guy and tell yourself that you’re nothing like him. It also doesn’t work if you watch all six seasons and you still think he’s basically just a nice person who’s made a few mistakes—and incidentally discover that you really enjoy watching the inner workings of a criminal organization. And to their credit, The Sopranos doesn’t try to make either happen. It does something better. It shows that the traits we love about Tony are also the traits that cause the problems that make him a character worth hating. Tony wants to live the good life, and this is what makes him beloved: He wants to protect and provide for his family, he wants warm dinners and a warm bed at night, and he

7

wants plenty of glowing memories to carry him into old age. But this concern he has for himself and for his own is what makes the good life impossible for Tony Soprano.

He loves his pleasures more than he accepts his duties, and so every move he makes toward improvement drags him further down.

As he lies to his family about his business to keep them clean (officially, “waste management”), he pushes them away from him. As he seeks safety and security by exterminating those who threaten and challenge him, he deepens his involvement in deceit and danger. The Sopranos, in the end, doesn’t show just a man who makes ordinary mistakes and has ordinary desires; it shows the consequences of his everyday decisions.

Now, I might be moralizing a little bit (can you tell?). You don’t need to spend your downtime time constructing an elaborate framework of value around Tony’s visits to his mistress in place of enjoying the show,

especially for every episode over six seasons.

Believe me, I don’t. But I think watching a good show is not just about being a spectator: What makes Mr. Soprano interesting is not just that his life is bigger and brighter and more beautiful than ours (it very well might be), but also that his life intersects with and mirrors ours as he meanders across the screen, drinking orange juice, sitting in traffic, and lying to his wife about his infidelities. And in playing the interesting and fun game of dissecting his life and thinking about its trajectory, the audience starts to play the best game, starting from an easy level, where the higher objective is to turn that high-powered vision onto ourselves.

felt like there was no attempt to logically understand what it’s really about.”

He listed several reasons why having an official club would aid the scene, such as through benefits in recruitment and event coordination. His final point was more symbolic: Quah and others plan to participate in an intercollegiate Dota tournament, CSL, to represent Brown, and he said they would appreciate official recognition from the University.

“It’s odd to compete in Brown’s name while being completely ignored by Brown,” he said.

Other esports-based club applications were submitted last year, all meeting the same fate. Will Dawson ‘18 was rejected from starting a Super Smash Bros. Melee club on campus twice. “They seemed very reluctant to allow a video game club to be created,” he said. “After we answered all of their questions, they said they didn’t see why this club needed to exist, and they said to find other ways to meet up and group.” Dawson’s reasons for starting a club echo Quah’s, including the final one: Dawson and others represented Brown in an intercollegiate tournament last year, The Melee Games, and will do so again despite still lacking official recognition. “When we competed, the other college teams all came from official clubs,” he added.

The plight of esports at Brown is unfortunate but not wholly surprising, because despite the community’s exponential growth over recent years, video games remain stigmatized and viewed as meant solely for fun and not seri-

ous exertion. Even the term “esports” sounds silly to some; traditional sports typically entail physical activity, and while there have been many frightening cases of serious hand and wrist injuries, you don’t lose quite as many calories by clicking a mouse or controller.

But movement has never been the sole determining factor in defining a sport—professional darts and billiards players exist. Cultural similarities are more important and much more common, however. Both traditional sports and esports can be played for fun or for glory, with local, regional, national, and international tournaments. There are coaches, referees, commentators, and sponsors. The US even grants athlete visas for professional gamers (Key word: athlete).

There’s no reason why Brown should not take esports seriously iif the national government does. Hopefully this mode of thinking changes soon; both Quah and Dawson have expressed interest in starting a general esports club, designed to accommodate anyone wishing to pursue competitive gaming, and they hope they’ll be passed this time. We’ll have to wait to see whether Brown gamers will be allowed to officially make their mark on the ever-growing esports community. But in the meantime, I’m done writing. Is anyone down to play some Melee?

Illustration by Emma Margulies

game over?

the plight of esports at brown

JOSHUA LU staff writer Did you ever play Super Smash Bros.

Melee as a kid? You know, that game where you controlled Nintendo’s most iconic characters (and a couple random ones—“Who the heck is Marth?” my prepubescent self often wondered) in a brutal battle to the death. It was that game where Princess Peach could smack Kirby with a frying pan, that game where Yoshi could excrete an eggified Link off of Pokémon Stadium, that game where your friend annoyed everyone by spamming Pikachu’s Down-B. Nostalgia warning: That game came out 14 years ago, centuries in video game time. Two sequels have been made since, for the Wii and for the Wii U/3DS. Melee was released for the Gamecube, arguably Nintendo’s least lucrative console, and the game’s long been out of print. Discontinued and replaced, despite being beloved by many people, Melee has become a relic of the past.

Except not really. Despite the odds, Melee has remained popular over the decade, and the game has even seen a recent surge in popularity. This is due completely to its presence in the esports community, as Melee tournaments are constantly growing in numbers of attendees and in prize money. At the Evo Championship Series just this year in Las Vegas, Adam “Armada” Lindgren beat out 3,283 other players to win first place, taking home a clean $11,214.

That’s miniscule compared to other tournaments, however. At The International, a tournament held in Seattle this summer, 10 professional teams of video game players competed for six whole days. The game was Dota (Defense of the Ancients) 2, a free-to-play computer game with millions of active players.

And the prize for first place? Over $6 million out of an $18 million prize pool, an unprecedented amount in esports history.

I say history facetiously, because the

esports industry remains in its infant stage. But based on the numbers, the beast is still gargantuan. League of Legends, for instance, boasts 27 million daily players and 67 million monthly, according to a Forbes article from last year. Other games, such as CounterStrike, Call of Duty, and Smite, are popular amongst casual and competitive minds alike, and multi-million dollar tournaments have been carried out for all of them.

You would be forgiven for not noticing the cataclysmic rise of esports, because the scene here at Brown is virtually nonexistent. This is unusual.

Most colleges have an established video game club, and indeed quick Google searches reveal esports clubs for every other Ivy League school. Many even have multiple groups for multiple games—a Dota club, a Smash Bros. club, a League of Legends club, so on and so forth. But not Brown. This is puzzling—after all, people do play video games here, and many do so with competitive aspirations.

Our lack of an esports scene is not because of an uninterested student body, but rather of an administration strangely resistant to the idea of an official video game club. Last semester, a group of students attempted to start a Dota club. They were rejected, and the committee suggested they reach out to the Fantasy Gaming Society club to join forces. This sounds fine and lovely, except that the Society focuses on board and card games, not video games, and is largely geared towards casual gatherings, not competitive. The Society also appears to be inactive.

The Dota club’s subsequent appeal was also rejected. “What annoyed me is that when we explained the differences, and how the differences mean a lot to people, we were treated dismissively,” said Nicholas Quah ‘18, who has been playing Dota since 2004. “I

Illustration by Katie Cafaro

8

lifestyle

Look at you hiding under that tree!

You look like a little Easter egg What’s the value of promising?

Promising doesn’t make a difference.

There is so much sugar in my mouth... OMG, the sugar rush.

This is too small. When the fire happens, we’re all gonna die.

I’m definitely having like a gossip girl moment right now.

You can’t think like a student.

Hi, I just wanted to know if you rented full body mannequins.

It ended with, like, someone cooking a parrot.

It’s unclear what constitutes ‘fucking’ in this instance.

Up next, more dead white men.

I don’t remember exactly, but something funny about fascism.

hot post time machine “Having bad sex is like listening to Bob Dylan’s Christmas album. For one thing, they both sound a lot like dying poultry. There have been times, from the depths of post-coital purgatory, that I’ve had to resist the burning desire to blast “O Little Town of Bethlehem” just to juxtapose those 70-year-old vocals with my partner’s orgasm squawk.”

crotch botch

-03/04/11

topten

people we wish were running for president

1. Blue Ivy #2036 2. Left Shark 3. Lin Manuel-Miranda (he’s already played a founding father) 4. Old Dumbledore, but not “New” Angry Dumbledore 5. Double Trump toupee 6. Nice Slice 7. Russell Carey (National snow days, anyone?)

8. Ghost of Joffrey Baratheon 9. The pig’s head David Cameron (allegedly) fucked 10. Right Shark

salt lake city

a story

BONNIE PAN contributing writer They started coming after mother died. Little brown packages, tied with twine, filled with folded paper notes.

I’m sorry, they said, in blotted black ink. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. There was no return address.

When I bought my first apartment and moved to the city, another appeared on my doorstep. It was filled with bright, vulgar confetti that spilled out of the sides like water when opened. Inside, a crisp, cream card, and a cactus plant, with tufts of needles along its grooves. I pricked my finger when I took it out and watched a speck of crimson spout from my skin. I put it next to my desk, near the window, to let it bathe in morning sunshine. It flowers one day a year, read the card. Its blooms are radiant as the moon.

After that, they came every week.

Sometimes, they were neat, brown parcels with little trinkets: beautiful leather-bound notebooks, a fountain pen of lapis lazuli, fuzzy knit mittens in the dry city winter. Other times, they were letters, carefully handwritten, slanted words—the way they are in old, precious documents. Delicate f ’s and g’s, i’s with diminutive dots.

Have you ever thought of becoming a singer? I imagine the sound of your voice: I wake to it each morning; I fall asleep to it each night. In my dreams, you are a Madonna of song. The words would stick to my brain like butter on a pan.

I thought of the letters days after they arrived.

Sometimes, though it wasn’t often, they were packages like the first, filled with hundreds of folded notes, every one of them the same. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry— When I met Tristan from the next door over, he had just moved in. He had a sort of lost expression on his face that I felt sorry for, as though his life had raced ahead of him, and he had been left alone in its wake. He was hav-

ing trouble finding the garbage disposal and was lugging around a trash bag that seemed too small for its contents.

The head of a stuffed bear stuck out through the hole, the opening strangling its throat.

“Do you need some help?” He looked so pathetic.

“Um, would you happen to know where the, um, where to put our garbage?”

“I’ll take you there if you wait a sec, I’m gonna get my trash too.”

He watched me as I went to my room and crumpled the brown packaging and pieces of paper into a bag.

“You missed one.” He handed me a note I had dropped. I’m sorry.

“Thanks.”

We headed down to the dumpsters out back, pinching our noses to ward off the smell of decay. After that, we parted ways. Two weeks later, when we met again, tousled in the din and tumble of Miller’s, high on reckless youth, he took me home. When we woke, tangled together like twine, he kissed my forehead. I stared at him, and he blushed.

“Don’t look at me like that.” I didn’t say anything.

Your eyes are deep and blue as the winter sea. They watch me every night, before I close mine.

In the springtime, the flowers started coming. Tulips and lilies, daisies with sunshine in their petals. Folded paper notes to inform of their species: Pardalinum. Orithyia. Erigeron glaucus.

Instructions on their care—Keep in direct sunlight. Water twice a day. Trim dead foliage in autumn. In two months, I had a garden of dead flowers.

Tristan told me about Tara, the girl he loved, who wore her hair in blue satin ribbons. She’d promised him a future, and fucked the butcher down 42nd street, who was twenty years her senior. I told him about my mother,

who was sick, and broken at thirtyeight, and had given up before I’d become a woman.

“And your father?”

I’d never met him. He left my mother when I was born. She said he took a bottle of whisky and his old running shoes. She screamed until her voice was hoarse, but he didn’t look back.

“But he’s alive?”

“I guess.”

He took me into his arms then, and kissed me on the forehead. I flinched from his touch, nestling my head in my shoulders. We started sharing drinks, and beds. Then, we started sharing rent.

Summer came, and I was promoted.

Long hours kept me away from home and away from Tristan. I could tell he was irritated, but I was tired. When the necklace came, wrapped in another neat brown box on the doorstep of our new place, he became angry.

“Who gave this to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Liar.”

“I’m not lying, I swear. Please, Tristan, listen to me—” “LIAR.” “Tristan, listen—” And then he hit me.

I gasped, and felt the sting start to spread. It diffused into my skin, until my blood coursed with hot rage. I stared at him, my hand to my cheek.

He looked away.

Later that night, when he tried to touch me, I pushed him away. He drew me close, and whispered into my ear.

“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry…”

I felt his tears on my neck.

They wove themselves into my hair, like ribbons.

“I know.”

Illustration by Jenice Kim