11/29/2012 Phoenix

THE

DAILY PROPHET THE SWATTIE WORLD’S BEGUILING BROADSHEET OF CHOICE

UNDESIRABLE NO. 1

UNDESIRABLE

RITA SKEETER TELLS ALL. PG. 12.

RITA SKEETER TELLS ALL. PG. 12.

NO

LIZ BRAUN PHOTO BY RAISA REYES

CONTACT THE PROPHET IMMEDIATELY IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION CONCERNING HER WHEREABOUTS. FAILING TO REPORT WILL RESULT IN IMPRISONMENT.

REWARD

10,000 GALLEONS ON HER HEAD YULE BALL FUNDING

3

UNDESIRABLE NO. 1

POTTER IN THE CLASSROOM

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STAFF EDITORIAL

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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

The Daily Prophet

G N I V LI & ARTS annette L n or i

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“Music Man” Makes Magic in Media What’s a theater-lover to do in JK Rowling’s books?

Theater guru Jeannette Leopold explores a production she believes may have prompted Rowling to include more musicals in the series, if only she’d seen it.

PAGE 8 Apparate to Paces for a Mind Fuck New campus theatre troupe Architectronic Laboratories presents “The Horizon Line: Salvador Dali Fucks with You for an Hour in Paces,” a mix of improvisation, surrealism, and everyone’s favorite 20th century Spanish painter. PAGE 8 Hot Diggity Dog: Phil Everson & Otis After adopting a puppy from Petsmart, Phil and Andrea Everson named their new family member Ottis Reading. Ottis enjoys hanging out with Nigel, a parrot, and howling along to his favorite music. PAGE 9 Swarthmore Quidditch Ever wanted to fly around on a broom? Evade a speeding bludger? Clutch a golden snitch in your hands, victorious? Swarthmore’s Quidditch team takes you as close as you’ll ever get to winning the House Cup. PAGE 10.

Reflections on Four Years at Hogwarts Looking back on Swarthmore is a bit like looking into the mirror of Erised, says Cathy Park in this pensive remembrance of four years, both magical and mundane. PAGE 12.

Dear Nestor How can you tell if someone wants to go to the Yule Ball with you? How do you even tell if you really want to go with them? According to Nestor, you

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Film Review: The Life of Pi Izzy Kornblat explores moments in the work of Ang Lee in which the utterly predictable is somehow rendered magically poignant. PAGE 7

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Missing Parts: To the Columnist of the Order of the Phoenix Sex columnist Vianca Masucci may not have the potion know-how to solve your sexual woes, but some good old-fashioned Muggle advice might just do the trick. PAGE 6 Speechless: A Strange Encounter with Manon de Boer’s “Resonating Surfaces: A Trilogy” Art columnist Zoe Wray expresses befuddlement over the artistic decisions made in representing the lives of three women in a collection of films. PAGE 13 The Habit of Art: Why I Can’t Write For those of us who don’t possess Rita Skeeter’s magical note-taking pen, writer’s block is inevitable.

Columnist Kieran Reichert shares reflections on his own compositional difficulties.PAGE 9.

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SwatTank Means Business SwatTank, an event modeled after the TV show Shark Tank, will provide student teams with support to compete for winning business models. PAGE 3 Swarthmore’s Dry Side: Students Voice Concern Over Lack Of Dry Events With the Yule Ball, one of the few dry night-time events of the year, approaching, students point out that Swarthmore may be lacking in the dry-events department. PAGE 4 Swat Compliments Buoys Bubble The newly created Facebook page, inspired by quite a few others before it, encourages Swarthmore students to post compliments about one another anonymously.

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SPORTS

BUSINESS

O on t e l Car es a y artin Froger-Silva, Jul i l e u Editor: J isa R g, M Adriana Obiols, S a y a, h e Z Editor: R n gl an ,

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don’t need a wand to figure this out. PAGE 12.

Bloody But Unbowed: Swat Alum Debuts Memoir John Seaman ’56’s self-published memoir “Bloody But Unbowed” delves into brothels, nude photography, and the distinction between art and science. PAGE 14.

Opinions

The Next Four Years The 2012 election was not as big a disaster for Republicans as it seems, Tyler argues. The party must look forward and refocus itself on the big issues.

PAGE 15 Black Friday Sales Rise, But Don’t Forget About Family The infamous post-Thanksgiving shopping day experienced an unprecedented boom this year; what does that say about consumerism in America? PAGE 16 Voting Rights In the Hands of the Supreme Court Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which governs what states may and may not do with regard to voting laws, will go to the Supreme Court. Aaron believes it’s time for the federal government to step up and stop voter suppression. PAGE 16. 失戀與語言 Andy Lee and his all-Chinese column return to the Phoenix; this time he discusses his personal experiences with studying the language. PAGE 17.

Sports

Men’s Basketball Opens New Season Improving rapidly under coach Larry Kosmalski, the Garnet hope to move past their 0-4 record. PAGE 19.

Women’s Basketball Starts Season on Right Food The Garnet won the Swat Tip-Off Tournament and their first Centennial Conference game to open the season on an unbeaten streak. PAGE 20.

News

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

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The Daily Prophet

re Whe

ault When You Need It? V s t t o g Is n i r Harry’s G Yule Ball

Budget

By ANNA GONZALES News Writer

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his year’s Yule Ball will feature the usual wizard rockers, enchanting decorations, and magical food and drink, but on a significantly tighter budget than in years past, as the Student Budget Committee (SBC) decreased funding last spring for the Social Affairs Committee (SAC), which finances social events for students each weekend.

Last year’s Yule Ball, based off the dance in the fourth book of J.K. Rowling’s enormously popular “Harry Potter” series, received $8,270 from SAC, according to SAC CoDirector Renee Flores ’13. For this year’s event, Yule Ball Director Yana List ’14 expected around $5,000 but instead received $3,000.

List was dismayed when she learned of the budget, as she had already signed contracts with various vendors from which she could not back out. Fortunately, Coordinator of Student Activities Paury Flowers and Dean of Students Liz Braun have stepped in and agreed to cover the costs of Yule Ball for which SAC funding was insufficient.

Flores and fellow SAC Co-Director Sera Jeong ’14 said that the committee’s decision to allocate less funds for the Yule Ball was the result of a limited budget from SBC, which distributes the money from student activities fees to a number of groups. During spring budgeting, Jeong said, SAC received less funding from SBC than proposed by the previous SAC co-directors. SAC members have been increasingly mindful of their budget for the year. “To be consistent with that, we wanted to be prudent with our spending with the Yule Ball as well,” Jeong said.

Jeong said that with other SAC-funded events, such as weekend parties and Halloween, the committee has at-

S W A T T A N K M

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tempted to keep spending low as well, asking students who propose weekly Saturday night parties to request only the necessities when looking for SAC funding.

Jeong placed the reduced funding for the Yule Ball in the context of the Halloween party, which cost $3,422 this year, much less than the $7,500 that List requested from SAC. “The committee feels that it would be inconsistent in our decisions to have an exception for an extravagance that, given our budget, we can’t really justify funding,” she said of the Yule Ball.

While List understands SAC’s tighter budget and inability to fully fund the ball, she said that as a dry event, the Yule Ball’s expenses are vastly different from those of an event involving drinking, something she feels was not accounted for in the funding decision. She added that the comparison to the Halloween party was unfair.

“For the Halloween party, there aren’t many expenses besides music and alcohol,” List said. “The Yule Ball needs food and something pretty to look at, because people are sober … I just think they’re totally different events.”

Funding for the Yule Ball will go towards removing tables and chairs from Sharples ($2,500), decorations ($2,000), food and drink ($1,500), cleanup ($600), Alex Carpenter, a magical musical guest from California ($600), and DJ Glitter Bomb ’15 ($70).

List and SAC members also disagreed over the location of the Yule Ball. SAC members recommended that the Yule Ball be held in Upper Tarble, a designated dry space, instead of in Sharples.

“From our perspective, this is a dry event that should be held in a dry venue,” Jeong said, adding that the $2,500 required to move Sharples tables could instead be put towards the cost of the party itself. The committee also felt that for the entirety of the event, Upper Tarble would

By CHI ZHANG News Writer

warthmore students who wish to turn their business ideas into reality will soon be able to. Divided into three phases, each containing business seminars and a round of selection, SwatTank, the first business-plan competition at Swarthmore, will provide students with a platform and guidance from alumni to transform their innovative thoughts into well-formed business plans.

The application for the vcompetition, which is currently available online and will open to students till December 8, asks candidates to describe their business ideas, the problems their businesses may solve and the potential solutions. The applicants also need to show the financial feasibility and sustainability of their plans and persuade judges why should they invest in the projects.

The first webinar on idea generation and team building, open to all students on campus, will be held on December 1 and will be led by Cathy Polinsky ’99, senior director of software development at SalesForce, and Chuck Groom ’00, head of engineering for SurveyMonkey’s Seattle office. Aiming to provide teams with resources to enable them to fully formulate their ideas, the first phase of the contest will have alumni judges selecting 10 teams based on the viability and quality of ideas.

have the capacity to hold all Yule Ball attendees.

List’s perspective differed. She feels that the budgeting decision and location recommendation were tied to SAC’s perception of the Yule Ball as a smaller event than the Halloween Party, though she said that the two events have similar attendance. “If you look at photos from last year, Sharples stays pretty crowded throughout the evening,” List said.

Regardless of size, List also emphasized the importance of dry events on campus, which she feels are necessary to hold in a large, formal way at least once a year, whether or not they are Harry-Potter-related. List said that the desire for a party without alcohol as the central focus was common among her friends and many members of the student body. “I get where SAC is coming from … but the Yule Ball is such an important event,” she said. “It’s a different kind of party, a different environment for people to hang out in.”

Jeong said that SAC’s funding decision was not driven by anti-dry event sentiments or anti-Yule Ball sentiments. She mentioned that outside of the Yule Ball, SAC funds many dry events.

“It just came down to being pragmatic and having a budget to work with. Objectively, it’s feasible to throw a dry event for $3,000 that is successful and well-attended,” she said.

This year’s event will be surrounded by others related to Harry Potter, including a Sharples takeover involving students dressed as Death Eaters and members of the Order of the Phoenix (iconic groups from the Harry Potter canon), a Harry Potter-themed edition of “The Phoenix”, waltz lessons in preparation for the Ball, and a Quidditch session open to the student body and coached by Swarthmore’s own team.

These 10 teams will go on to the second phase of the competition. During this process, each of them will form their business plans with the help of an alum mentor. After hearing seminars on financing and sustaining a startup, creating a business plan and networking, each team will submit their plans at the end of this period and four teams will get into the final round of the competition.

The final phase is scheduled for March 23, 2013, the last day of the Lax Conference for Entrepreneurship. The teams will pitch their ideas to possible partners and investors in up to five minutes and will answer judges’ questions afterwards. The winner will be awarded a prize of $500 to $1500, depending on the team’s size.

The structure of SwatTank was inspired by the various forms of different competitions in both large universities and liberal arts schools. “We ultimately merged them into a competition that best suited Swarthmore,” said Aldo Frosinini ’15, copresident of the club.

“Swarthmore students will finally have a vehicle for developing winning business plans and funding their ideas earlier on in their career,” said Lisandra Lamboy ’03, a National Urban Fellow serving as Special Assistant to the Director of the Houston Department of Health and Human Services. Lamboy came up with the idea of having such a business competition and believes that entrepreneurs at Swarthmore will develop social enterprises that can greatly contribute to the Swarthmore community and beyond if given proper support and platform.

Antony Kaguara ’15, a member of the Entre-

preneurship Club, agrees with Lamboy. “If students can understand from an early stage how to develop their ideas, they can be the dynamic business leaders of tomorrow,” he said. “Entrepreneurship is going to define the workforce in the future.”

Kaguara met Lamboy during last year’s Lax Conference, where he first learned of her competition idea. After talking to Career Services staff, the club was told that the office was also thinking about organizing a similar event. Co-sponsored by the Career Services Office, the Dean’s Office, the President’s Office, the Center for Innovation & Leadership, the Lax Conference for Entrepreneurship and the Entrepreneurship Club, SwatTank will be more than just a competition.

“We have designed it to be beneficial, win or lose,” said Marisa Lopez ’15, co-president of the Entrepreneurship Club.

“Students who participate in SwatTank will finish with more networking experience, improved communication skills, and the knowledge of how to be a better team player,” Lopez said.

Lopez does not see a strong enough awareness in the college about the benefits of entrepreneurship. “Being an entrepreneur is not just starting a company or coming up with some new design, it is a way of thinking,” she said.

She appreciates “intrapreneurship,” which refers to behaving as an entrepreneur within an existing company, and hopes to learn how to think like an entrepreneur.

SwatTank will be holding an information ses-

EANS BUSINESS

News

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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

The Daily Prophet

Swarthmore’'s Dry Side By nehmat kaur News Writer

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hroughout the course of the night of the Halloween Party, approximately 200 students showed up to the Women’s Resource Center, highlighting the possible need for having more dry social spaces and events on campus.

Currently, if a Swattie chooses to spend a free evening engaged in a non-alcoholic activity, chances are that the person will spend a night in with friends, attend the weekly movie screening or use the Women’s Resource Center as a social dry space. In addition to these, they might play pool at Tarble or visit Philly. While dry options for teetotalers — or even just someone looking for some sober fun — are not non-existent, they lack the regularity of Pub Nite and frat parties.

Some might argue that alcoholic parties can be attended and enjoyed by people who don’t wish to drink, but Yana List ’14, Yule Ball Director, pointed out in an email that, “There are a lot of students (myself included) that just don’t attend wet events because they can be uncomfortable if you are not interested in drinking.” Her statement brought to light the fact that while students who drink may comfortably attend a sober event, students who don’t drink are socially limited by their discomfort at alcoholic parties.

List, who manages the year’s largest dry party, stresses the importance of dry

tures, it is around 1,000. Sharples stays pretty crowded for most of the night.”

This optimistic view of the Yule Ball is countered by Joan O’Bryan ’13, a host at the Women’s Resource Center: “Not a lot of people turn up. The times that I’ve attended the Ball, I’ve danced for a bit with my friends but not for long.” Though O’Bryan feels that dry dance parties cater to a small part of the student body, she endorses the need for more non-alcoholic events. In her opinion, “There is a silent majority on campus who doesn’t drink or attend alcoholic events. I guess Paces can hold 200 people, Olde Club another 200 and the frats about 150. So on any given weekend, that leaves about 1,000 students,” she said.

A consistent member of this assumed thousand is Kelley

who just need a break from the atmosphere at weekend parties than for those seeking sober socializing. As O’Bryan recounted, even on the night of the Halloween Party, only about 50 of the 200 who turned up were sober. The Yule Ball is only one event that fits the category of a big non-alcoholic social gathering.

The dry option that is considered the main — and most consistent — nonalcoholic activity on campus is the weekly movie screening. According Catherine Kelley ’14, movie c o m m i tte e coor-

Students enjoy y u m m y snacks and talk during WRC Coffee House Hours.

dent groups on the weekend, especially on Sunday nights when people need a study break and could use food.”

Kelley also presented the perspective that large dry parties are not the only kind of sober fun desired by students. “I know that with my friends, if I’m not going to a party then I just stay in with them because nothing else looks interesting, or all the dry events were earlier in the day. Sometimes it’s not so bad though, you just want to spend some time with close friends hanging out in your room or catching up with work.”

She added, “But it would be nice to have more late evening dry events.”

Kelley and List have their proposals for non-alcoholic events.

Kelley referred to her rugby team’s chosen low-key method.

“My rugby team socializes on on Friday nights because we can’t drink before games on Saturday mornings, and we just hang out in the WRC with food, do some work, play games and relax. That’s really nice, and maybe Swat could use more socials like that on a weekend.”

List has more elaborate plans up her sleeve. “ I think that w e need t o en-

Juliana Gutierrez

events for bringing the student body together. Talking about how the Yule Ball came about, List said, “At the very first meeting for planning the Yule Ball, one of the major things we talked about was how there really weren’t many dry events on campus and how this could be an opportunity to bring people together, whether or not they drink.” Elaborating on the Yule Ball’s popularity, List continued, “We don’t have perfect numbers because we don’t require wristbands, but based on the number of people that signed the card last year, and on pic-

Langhans ’16, who voiced her opinion about dry events at Swarthmore. “There are not that many dry events. There is something at the WRC but I didn’t even know about it until recently. I think even the WRC is a space where you can drop by and get food; it’s a temporary non-alcoholic space as opposed to a gathering. There aren’t many options where you can go out and do things that are non-alcoholic.”

Langhan’s observation about the WRC being a temporary space is true; the Center is more of a safe space for those who are really drunk and those

dinator, “The most popular ones that the Movie Committee has shown so far are the most mainstream ones, such as “The Avengers” and “The Dark Knight Rises.” But besides these well attended movies, on average about 40 to 50 people attend screenings on Fridays, and 15 to 25 attend Saturday screenings.”

She voiced her personal opinion on the irregularity of other dry events at Swarthmore, saying, “That’s okay, really, because I can’t think of a social dry event that could take place on evenings on a weekend other than a movie, but maybe there could be a parlor party type of thing hosted by different stu-

courage more events like the Yule Ball. This is Swarthmore, we should embrace the kitsch. I am always open to more fandom ideas. It would be awesome if we staged the Hunger Games on campus, with different dorms, or academic departments representing the districts, or a Game of Thrones party … just imagine the costumes.”

The question that the WRC’s growing number of visitors really raises is if there is indeed a “silent majority” looking for innovative and enjoyable dry events where they can spend their free time and if so, how the student body and administration can facilitate such events.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

News

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The Daily Prophet

Swarthmore Compliments Buoys the Bubble

By DANIEL BLOCK News Writer College students have a habit of creating online forums about their schools.

Usually, such mediums satirize aspects of the college. Facebook is littered with various college meme pages like Swatmemes. Twitter feeds that poke fun at school culture, such as Swarthmore Girl Problems, abound.

But the most recent Internet phenomenon at Swarthmore is not rooted in sarcasm or lampooning. Indeed, it is quite the opposite.

Swarthmore Compliments, which joined Facebook on November 20th, just in time for Thanksgiving, is an online forum in which students have the opportunity to anonymously submit a compliment about a fellow member of the Swarthmore community. The compliments are then posted for everyone to see.

Reception to the page has been extremely positive. “I just saw it in my news feed on Facebook as something that a number of people had liked. So I checked it out and I loved the concept,” said Nick Allred ’13, who himself has been the benefactor of a compliment. “I like the way in which it just brightens people’s day within the community.”

Mickey Herbert ’15, who also received a compliment and has been active on the page, agreed. “I think it’s a great idea,” he said. “You only get nice people saying nice things.”

The founder and coordinator of Swarthmore Compliments, who opted to remain anonymous, expressed similar sentiments. “It’s really nice to see the eagerness of Swatties to form a community like this,” they said.

This forum is not unique to Swarthmore. Indeed, according to the page, the concept originated as a social experiment at Queen’s University. Since then, it has rapidly spread to other colleges.

The founder said they were personally inspired by similar pages at Columbia and Brown. “I saw their pages on facebook and thought that it would be really nice if Swat had something like that,” they said.

It has also rapidly spread through the Swarthmore community. As of Wednesday morning, Swarthmore Compliments has over 500 likes, all in the span of nine days.

Students seem to particularly value the fact that names are not attached to the compliments. “I think what’s coolest about it is it’s particularly rewarding to get an anonymous compliment simply because you know whoever is saying it has no agenda,” said Allred. “When it’s coming from no one in particular, it feels in some ways that it’s coming from everyone.”

The coordinator agreed. “There’s no pressure to compliment someone, since you wouldn’t get credit anyway. Because of this, the person complimented knows someone went out of their way to brighten their day.”

Herbert expressed support for the decision of the page moderators to remain anonymous. “If you knew who was running it, that might change the whole dynamic of it and affect what people are sending,” he said.

The coordinator agreed. “I think it’s better this way—people might be more comfortable relaying compliments through someone who they don’t know.”

Many Internet pages, like Swatmemes, quiet down after initial bursts of popularity, a possibility that some see in the future of Swarthmore Compliments. “I’m sure that the flurry of activity will die down to some extent. I don’t know how long it will stick around,” said Allred.

But the fact that it is popular now, in Allred’s opinion, makes up for that.

“To the extent that it’s existed at all,” he said, “I think it’s done wonderful things for our community.”

Martin Froger Silva & Yenny Cheung

Swat students marching for peace in Israel/Palestine, and making pieces for the One Million Bones Project.

LIVING & ARTS

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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

(Sex) Columnist of the Order of the Phoenix

The Daily Prophet

VIANCA MASUCCI Missing Parts

Miss Columnist of the Order of the Phoenix, I seem to be having a dreadful dilemma. After six loving years of marriage to my red-headed delight of wife, I find that I am utterly incapable of getting it up. I was very active in the early years of our marriage, but lately, my poor penis just won’t stay hard long enough for us to engage in the act of love. We’ve reached a terrible point of frustration surrounding this matter. I am afraid that these unsuccessful attempts have begun to taint any sexual activity. We are both wildly anxious every time we have sex and depressed after every failure. It is the most desperate of situations — it’s so bad that I’ve begun to avoid sexual contact alotgether. I’ve tried every remotely useful charm I could think of, including Duro, Engorgio, and Wingardium Leviosa. However, nothing has been able to get it hard, big, or up. Help us in our desperation. Please, any advice you can give us would be great. I can already feel our marriage losing its magic.

Signed, The Boy Who Lived (but can’t get it up)

Have you been saying the spell correctly? I hear it’s “levios-a,” not “levios-ar”. If you try that and it still doesn’t work, the first thing I recommend is going to see a doctor. A Muggle doctor. You should rule out the possibility of a medical problem which can have more direct solutions.

Now, if your doctor explains that everything is physically in tip top shape, we must get back to the bedroom. Psychological blocks such as the one that you may be experiencing are fairly normal — some men have periods of impotency that are related to stress, change, monotony, etc. Your wand won’t get hard now, but you may get the magic back soon enough with some small changes to your routine.

Firstly, stop paying so much damn attention to your dick in bed. The reason you and Gin–, uh, your wife, have fallen into this pattern of raging in anxiety every time you attempt to screw is because you’re basing the success of your sexual encounter on whether or not you have penetrative sex. In fact, this performance anxiety is probably one of the causes of the loss of magic in your wand. Just because you can’t get hard, it doesn’t mean that you two can’t be intimate, nor does it mean that you can’t have sex. Sex is many things — from penetration to pensive naughty verbalizations. Decoupling your ideas of sexual satisfaction from penetration will help you put things into perspective. Next time you have sex, focus your energies on sex acts that don’t necessarily require the use of your penis. Rubbing, sucking, verbalizing, fingering, dildo-ing and sex acts of that sort take the pressure off of you by taking the pressure off of your cock. You may also want to look into more the psychological sexual aspect like role play and kink. You can find my columns on non-penetrative sex, kink, and oral sex on the Prophet website. Instead of concentrating on ‘hard penis’, concentrate on mutual pleasure and fun — that is, after all, what sex is about.

On that note, have you considered what your avoidance of sex is doing to your wife? You mentioned that she is also erotically frustrated and I think that your neglect of her sexual feelings is selfish. I know that seven volumes of tireless narration following your every move may have made you believe that the world is about you. It ain’t. Sex includes two partners (or more), not one, and two pairs of junk (or more), not one. Just because your broomstick won’t fly doesn’t mean that your wife isn’t looking to take off herself. Your first priority in this situation should be to provide your wife with the sexual satisfaction that you’ve been depriving her of because of your perceived shortcomings. Redirect your erotic goal to fueling your wife’s Goblet of Fire. I’m sure you’ll find that this will greatly reduce the tension in your relationship and will eliminate your wife’s anxiety surrounding your penis. A combination of an alleviation of performance anxiety, witnessing your wife’s pleasure, and/or the addition of role play may be all you need to power up that Patronus.

To the Columnist of the Order of the Phoenix, An unfortunate situation has inspired me to seek your advice. I’m almost too ashamed to inform you of the particulars of my situation, but I find myself out of options. My husband refuses to perform oral sex on me. He claims that my vagina is too malodorous for the act. He claims that he once got a Bertie Bott’s Bean flavored like vagina and the flavor made him awfully sick.

He claims many things, but does nothing. I’ve tried to refuse him sex without first receiving oral, negotiating with him, and even arguing with him. He responds to all my attempts with aggressive jeering and the silent treatment. We have been married for quite a while and I don’t want to break apart our marriage for, what I see as, a resolvable issue. However, I am awfully upset with the situation and I don’t know how to address it anymore. Can you offer me any advice for potions, enchantments, charms, or spells to make it smell better? I was a top student at Hogwarts and I am certain that a cure for this condition was not covered in Herbology! I appreciate any help that you can offer.

Signed, Mousy Hair Downstairs Unexamined

I’ve gotten lots of letters this week from readers under the assumption that I have magical prowess. Sorry to disappoint you, but I am totally ignorant of any form of potions, spells, or anything else of the magical sort. I’m not a witch.

No, no. I think you heard that word incorrectly.

Witch, bitch, or otherwise, I can give you some nonmagical advice: One of my favorite quotes about women states that girls are sugar and spice. Your husband may have missed the ‘spice’ memo and expected your cauldron pie to taste like Ton-Tongue Toffees and smell like daisies. Well, unfortunately for him, his expectations were unmet. Although vaginas do produce sugar in the form of glycogen and have a little bit of a sweet tang to them, they are accompanied by a little bit of a spicy smell. After all, any spot of the body that has a high concentration of sweat glands and is hardly exposed to air or sunlight is not going to smell like peppermint

humbugs. I’m sure that the stank of his scrotum is not reminiscent of fresh Butterbeer either. Part of being intimate with a lover is becoming accustomed to their smells and tastes. Junk, as I always say, is an acquired taste and it’s your lover’s responsibility to acquire it. Happiness can be found in even the darkest and sweatiest of places, if one only remembers to compromise.

It sounds like your husband is being a real Death-Eater about this. His childish aggression is telltale of his selfishness and his absolute reluctance to change his mind. He is being aggressive because he wants you to be afraid of complaining about this so that he never has to come to a compromise on this issue. Any man who reacts this way to providing you pleasure is the kind of dick that you dump. But, seeing as you already married him, you must proceed with more consideration.

The first thing you should do is take a trip to the gynecologist. Make sure that you don’t have any condition that is causing a malodor. If you’re healthy, have a sit-down conversation with your husband one more time. Explain to him that you expect him, as your only sanctioned sexual partner, to meet your sexual needs. Construct an argument that is focused on the point of compromise, acquired taste, and mutual sexual satisfaction. Whatever you do, don’t allow yourself to become aggressive or belittling — it sounds as though he will latch onto those behavioral modes.

I know that may be hard, but this may be the only way of getting what you want. Err on the side of oral sex. If he responds with his childish aggression and refuses your proposals, you have a difficult decision to make. Is oral sex an absolute “must have” for you? I know that for many women, it is the cornerstone of sexual satisfaction. If you are one of these women, you may consider finding sexual satisfaction outside of your marriage. This can be realized in terms of a split-up or an extramarital contact agreement. You sound reluctant to end your marriage in search of this form of sexual fulfillment — this may mean that you are generally happy with your marriage, you have a lot invested in this relationship, or you have children to consider.

Whatever the circumstance, you need to negotiate extramarital fulfillment in a way that works for you. Maybe your husband would grant you permission to see someone outside of your marriage strictly for oral encounters? It sounds outrageous, but, with his strong aversion to going down, this may seem like a great alternative for him. If he’s not up for it, you may want to seek this fulfillment without his permission or even consider a split. I know that these may seem like extreme alternatives, but the situation that you are in is rather unfortunate. When you marry someone, the assumption is that they will hold the sole responsibility of fulfilling your sexual needs if they expect monogamy. If he breaks his part of the deal, you may have to break yours too.

If you do break up with him and seek a new lover, practice some stuff you learned in the Defense Against the Dickheads. Please, don’t marry or even entertain sexually selfish boyfriends.

Smaller molehills of problems become mountains in marriage. My suggestion is that you go out and find yourself a real wizard who isn’t afraid of a little Lady’s Snare.

Treacle Tarts

Makes one nine inch tart, or two dozen tartlets

Courtesy of bakingdom.com

Ingredients FOR THE CRUST 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 1/3 cup confectioners’ sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup (1 stick) cold, unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces 3-4 tablespoons ice water

FOR THE FILLING 18 oz. golden syrup (or 12 oz. light corn syrup combined with 6 oz. molasses) 2 eggs finely grated zest and juice of 1 small lemon 3/4 teaspoon ground ginger 2 tablespoons heavy cream 1 cup fresh bread crumbs

For the crust: In the bowl of a food processor, combine the flour, sugar, and salt with two or three pulses.

Evenly distribute the cold butter over the flour mixture and pulse 10 to 12 times until the mixture resembles coarse corn meal. Sprinkle one to two tablespoons of the cold water over the flour mixture, and process with four to five pulses. After processing, the mixture should look sandy. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl. Sprinkle another tablespoon of the water over the mixture and use a rubber spatula to press the dough together. When the dough looks shaggy and a bit dry, but holds together, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead three or four times until the dough comes together completely. Add more water, up to one tablespoon, as needed.

Handle the dough as little as possible to prevent melting the butter.

Continuing to handle the dough lightly, shape it into a disk six to seven inches across. Wrap the disk in plastic wrap and chill in the freezer for 30 minutes, or the refrigerator for at least two hours.

Once chilled, place the dough on a lightly floured surface.

If making many small tartlets, work with half of the dough at a time. Roll the dough to about one-eighth of an inch thick. Line tart pans as directed above.

Place the tarlets on a baking sheet and chill for at least 30 minutes, preferably in the freezer.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Once chilled, line the tarts with bits of foil or parchment and fill each one with a small amount of pie weights or dry beans. Bake mini tartlets for 15 minutes. Bake a full-size tart for 20 minutes. Allow to cool completely before filling.

For the filling: Combine all of the ingredients in a medium bowl and pour into the cooled tart crust.

Bake for 20 minutes (for tartlets), or about 30 minutes (for a standard tart), or until the filling has set.

Allow to cool completely before serving. Serve with clotted cream, vanilla ice cream, or fresh whipped cream.

Life of Pi

The (Other) Boy IZZY KORNBLATT Contributer

L I W HV O E D

with all the animals.

But the ship sinks in the Pacific, and soon Pi is alone on a small lifeboat with a Bengal tiger (named Richard Parker), a hyena, a dying zebra, and an orangutan.

In lesser hands what follows might be insufferably boring.

Fortunately, Lee renders it beautifully, both through his painstaking development of the relationship between boy and tiger, which is the movie’s heart, and simply through the spectacles of open sea and Bengal tiger. I did not see the movie in 3D, but no matter: the cinematography, by Claudio Miranda, is stunning, and Richard Parker is digitally rendered, well, ferociously. He seemed to me as real as Pi. Slowly and with great courage, Pi learns to live with Richard Parker. They have their separate sections of the boat, and they develop a sort of mutual respect for one another. They keep each other alive.

(Richard Parker never gets hungry enough to eat Pi, or if he does, he is by then too respectful or too weak to do so.) Is Richard Parker really a character? I don’t know. He is a person as much as any animal is a person, which is to say that he both is and isn’t: he doesn’t speak, and he might remorselessly kill and eat our hero at any moment, but we can empathize with him; we can see when he is hungry or happy or playful or territorial.

It is a surreal situation, this, and soon it becomes increasingly fantastical. Lee handles things superbly, with all the delicacy he showed in Crouching Tiger: somehow Pi’s relationship with Richard Parker perfectly reflects and grounds the story’s increasing absurdity (I mean that word in its most serious sense). My favorite scene is when a school of flying fish suddenly fill the sky, hurtling into and past the lifeboat, hitting Richard Parker and Pi, a divine gift.

But there is a sizable problem with the novel. It has a very didactic message about faith/story: that we ought to believe, both in the power of story and, if it suits us, in God as well, for belief’s own sake.

That may go over well with the many these days who see faith in precisely those terms, but congratulating an audience for what it already believes is not serious inquiry into really anything at all.

The story’s glib ending, which I won’t spoil here, hammers home this point without even the vaguest pretense of subtlety, and it is a shame for the book as well as the movie. Everything is tied up too neatly. The human (and animal) messiness evident in Pi’s anthropomorphizing relationship with Richard Parker is sadly scrubbed away, and the result is a sorry shallowness.

Lee seems to know where this story’s heart really lies, though. As Martel’s ending smugly wraps itself up, Lee, in a powerful moment of deviation from the novel, takes us for a moment back to an earlier shot, a shot of Richard Parker walking slowly away into a forest. The tiger does not look back, and when he is gone, the shot becomes blackand-white. It is another moment — like that one in Crouching Tiger — where Lee has expressively opened his movie to the imagination, where he has wonderfully let its emotions escape their bounds— and what better way to capture life for Pi after his ordeal, after Richard Parker, than through a world

O

About halfway through Ang Lee’s extraordinary 2001 movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, just as the pace is quickening and the plot is intensifying, we suddenly find ourselves in an empty desert. This is a flashback, but we do not yet know this. A caravan inches along, and in one of the carriages we see a character we know: the young aristocrat-cumsecret-martial-arts-master Jen, who sits quietly with her mother. Suddenly, bandits attack, and everything is in disarray. Their leader rides past Jen’s carriage, and reaches toward its window and grabs her comb.

Jen jumps from the carriage, finds a horse, and pursues him across the desert. She fires arrows, and he ducks. She shows off her martial arts skills by taking down a couple of his men, and he is impressed, but he doesn’t give back her comb. She continues to chase him until she passes out from dehydration. The screen goes black, and when she comes to, she finds that he has brought her to safety and found her food and water, but she does not forgive him. She wants her comb, and the chase continues.

Sometimes she scores victories; he, the rogue bandit who knows desert life, does not quite take care of her but always leads her. Over and over again, she becomes exhausted, the screen goes black, and then she awakes. At one point, right after waking, she jumps on him: it’s a surprise attack, ostensibly to get back her comb, but a moment later they are kissing.

What is it about this brief sequence that captures romantic love so powerfully? How is it that it is as or even more acute than Lee’s own Brokeback Mountain, an entire movie dedicated to a painstakingly detailed, perfectly realistic love story? Crouching Tiger’s characters are hardly rounded, there is almost no dialogue, and yet it is an unforgettable sequence, one of the most moving I have ever seen.

It is a bit mysterious how this little passage — and I think we all know passages like these — actually works, but I think it may have something to do with how a generally “realistic” movie suddenly seems to forget itself and become somehow richly imaginary, at once truthful to life and entirely unreal. This can happen in fictional writing, too, but it has uniquely cinematic possibilities, and Lee knows it: he understands the subtleties and emotional possibilities of spectacle — the open spaces, the repeated blackouts, the memorable image of chasing.

I include all this not or not only because I so love it, but also as an introduction to Lee’s new movie Life of Pi, which is not a masterpiece on the level of Crouching Tiger, but which makes similar use of this sort of unreal spectacle (for lack of a better term). Indeed, its source material, Yann Martel’s 2001 novel of the same name, seems perfect for Lee’s sensibility: it tells the story of a boy caught on a lifeboat alone with a Bengal tiger for 227 days, and as the story progresses, it becomes increasingly surreal, increasingly fictional.

Pi Patel (played for most of the movie by Suraj Sharma), our hero, is a true believer: he is a Christian, a Hindu, and a Muslim, all at once. We meet him as he is first picking up these faiths as a young boy, in the pleasant city of Pondicherry, India, where his father owns the city zoo (the movie’s opening credits are set against beautiful shots of the animals). The beginning of both the movie and novel is ponderous, taking time to track Pi’s youth, but it is not slow or boring. We see Pi at school, with his first girlfriend, with his family; and then, when he is 16, his father announces that the family is moving to Canada — on a freight ship,

n Wednesday at 4:35 p.m., a local high school senior embarked on a Swarthmore admissions tour, completely unaware that he had arrived at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Friends and family confirmed that Matt Hughes, 17, a lifelong Harry Potter fan, had no idea that Swarthmore College was an exact duplicate of J.K. Rowling’s Hogwarts.

Sources confirm that at 4:37 p.m., Hughes had begun to taste the magic that was in store for him. Staring dreamily over at Clothier Bell Tower and the Tarble student center, Hughes marveled at Swarthmore’s castle-like design, which — despite the fact that dozens of other universities employ gothic architecture — he found reminiscent of the fictional Hogwarts Castle.

The tour continued towards Sharples dining hall, a building that did not remind Hughes of any sort of fantasy whatsoever.

“Sharples is the site of many of Swarthmore’s most exciting traditions,” said the guide, for the 15th time this month. “In December, Sharples hosts the Yule Ball, a Harry Potter-themed formal that features a Potter cover band, chocolate frogs, and hundreds of students who’ve realized that they don’t know how to interact without a BAC over .20.”

“The Yule Ball is just one of many social events open to students who prefer not to drink,” he lied.

Hughes spent the next five minutes explaining the setting and plotline of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire to his parents, who spent that time wishing they had visited Haverford instead.

According to sources within the admissions office, the tour group then adjourned to Mertz field, where Hughes stared incredulously up at McGill walk, completely unaware that he would spend the next four years cursing the steep incline as he trudged to class each morning.

“On Sunday afternoons, our Quidditch team practices here — you should come here, we’re fun and quirky,” noted the guide, who had put in two consecutive all-nighters to finish a paper on a French philosopher whose name he still could not pronounce.

The sight of running students with broomsticks clutched between their legs proved too much for Hughes, who had already mentally began planning his application essay.

The final, carefully crafted 450-word essay — which included 400 words too many comparing large research universities to Lord Voldemort — contained references to President Rebecca Chopp, Albus Dumbledore, the Biology department, Herbology, and, improbably, pasta bar.

“While we appreciate your rich inner life and creativity, we regret to inform you that we cannot offer you admission to Swarthmore at this time,” wrote Dean of Admissions Jim Bock. “We wish you the best of luck in your applications to other colleges and in life, but recommend that your effort to memorize the entire Potter series might be better spent by actually learning about Swarthmore.”

“I should probably read those books before I train the next batch of tour guides,” sighed Bock.

At press time, the Phoenix EdBoard, driven The Squashed tomato

STEVEN HAZEL

Muggle Mistakes Swarthmore For Hogwarts

The Daily Prophet

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

LIVING & ARTS

PAGE 7

LIVING & ARTS

PAGE 8

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

NO THEATER AT HOGWARTS? MUSIC MAN

Let’s be honest. The magical world suffers desperately from a lack of entertainment.

Sure, there’s Quidditch. Quidditch has flying and Bludgers to make it exciting, but is that really enough? In the Muggle world, the most popular sports include football and ice hockey, sports that involve smashing into people as hard as you can. Quidditch players tend to be able to avoid getting smashed by Bludgers, which does make me wonder whether the magical world is really as enthralled with the sport as JKR seems to think.

In any event, there is at least one sport in Harry Potter world. There are plenty of games to play — Gobstones and Wizard chess included. But what about people who don’t like watching sports and don’t want to play chess? Where is the entertainment for those people? In short, where is the theater?

A lack of theater is one of the serious shortcomings of the Harry Potter series. Without looking at all into

AT

By JEANNETTE LEOPOLD Living & Arts Writer

The Daily Prophet

WALNUT ST. THEATER

JK Rowling’s life, I venture that she never saw great theater as a child or young adult, because if she had, she would certainly have realized that theater is a magic beyond all we do here.

If Rowling had, for example, used a Time–Turner to watch “The Music Man” at the Walnut Street Theater in the fall of 2012, she may well have been moved enough to schedule in a theater class before Potions and after Transfiguration.

“The Music Man,” written by Meredith Wilson and directed at the Walnut by Marc Robin, is an excellent musical. It feels like a chick flick: a man, Harold Hill (Jeffrey Coon), fakes an interest in Marian the Librarian (Jennifer Hope Wills) in order to keep her from discovering that he is only pretending to be a professor and music instructor. Without meaning to, he falls in love with Marian, and she with him — not without the classic chick flick plot twist of she discovering that he is a fraud and he convincing her that he truly loves her deeply.

JK Rowling would have discovered that it’s a feel-good musical had she had the good sense to use that Time Turner. It’s also thought-provoking and

By JEANNETTE LEOPOLD Living & Arts Writer

Apparate to

By RENU NADKARNI

APPARITION AT SWAT

With tears in his sometimes green, sometimes blue eyes, Josh McLucas ’15 related the sometimes tragic, often challenging, ever exciting process of creating “The Horizon (Line): Salvador Dali Fucks With You For An Hour In Paces,” the first devised piece

by Swarthmore’s new theater troupe, Architectonic Laboratories.

“It started as ‘Dali gives a lecture about his life and maybe it turns into some crazy shit,’” McLucas said.

“We tried to explore all the major aspects of his life, his relationships with his parents, with his muse and eternal love, Gala, and her ex-husband Paul Elluard, the surrealist poet, who lived with them for a while.”

McLucas said it is hard to define a specific plot, but that the play loosely follows Salvador Dali’s life.

The play is a devised work. As a general rule, this means that the play does not follow a traditional script, and that the play is created collaboratively by the group working on it. For McLucas, the process began last summer, when he and the creative team (playwright Swift Shuker-Haines ’14, producer Anita Castillo-Halvorssen ’15, stage manager

o f s e c a P

funny. One of my favorite songs was “The-Sadderbut-Wiser-Girl,” sung by Hill and his friend Marcellus (Fran Prisco). The song features lines such as “I hope, I pray, that Hester will win just one more ‘A’!” and “The only affirmative she will file / Refers to marching down the aisle!” Two grown men onstage singing, in euphemism, about wanting to have sex is something that should not be missed.

“The Music Man” is full of dancing, romance, and the simple pleasures and difficulties of a small rural town. The audience take-away is a huge smile and the thought that music can bring with it a tremendous amount of joy.

It looks like JK Rowling is going to keep writing books for some time. Maybe someday she will write a prequel to her famous Potter series. In that prequel, she may just explain the tremendous gaping hole in her books where theater ought to be.

“The Music Man” runs through January 6 at the Walnut Street Theater in downtown Philadelphia. Reserve tickets online at www.walnutstreettheater.org, or buy them at the door. Tickets can be as cheap as $10, and the show runs 2 hours 45 minutes.

a r

c u k F d n i M

Treasure Tinsley ’15, costume designer Dyan RizzoBusack ’15, and sound designer Trip Lenahan ’15) “threw ideas around.”

This concept of throwing ideas around played into their entire process. McLucas stressed that first and foremost, the devised process is about collaboration. “Essentially, everyone on a team, regardless of position, has equal say in how we go about making this thing.”

Yes, as the director, McLucas can accept or reject various ideas, but he likes to keep the flow of ideas completely unrestricted from everyone on the team. The end result is a show that is created by the actors and the creative team.

Their audition process points to the qualities that McLucas found especially important in his actors. “Auditions consisted of a scene that Swift had written over the summer, so the first time through it was a cold reading, the second time it was read it through and continue off book through improv, and the third time it was to interpret the scene through movement to a track that Trip made,” he explained. “It was really just to see how adventurous people were going to be. It’s not about picking the ‘right’ thing to do or doing the scene or movement correctly, but it’s about doing it in a way that is correct to you. Committing to what you feel is the way it should go. Making a choice.”

In the end, what is this play? It’s a combination of scripted work, improvisation, and movement. More specificially? “No one’s really gonna know what this is until it actually happens,” said Castillo-Halvorssen. “Not even the actors.”

For an intense hour of surrealism, chaos, and excellent theater, come to Paces Café this weekend! The shows are on Friday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 7 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. There are only about 30 seats per show, so email ttinsle1@ swarthmore.edu to reserve tickets.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

LIVING & ARTS

PAGE 9

The Daily Prophet

Why Can’t I Write?

I

t’s come and gone. scaping business. Recently, he and his wife No, not Thanksgiving - I’m filed for divorce, and the proceedings are in referring to the yawning abyss a holding pattern as far as I can tell. From whose arrival I fear with the my early memories of he and his wife, I very quarks of my being: a lack can make out more animosity towards her of ideas, an inability to write. from my parents than him, and I am subRead along as I try to figure out consciously aligned with him without really why that could have happened. knowing why.

I applied for and took this job (as a After a few games of ping-pong as a Phoenix columnist) as a means of erecting digestive stratagem, I rode back with him structures to enable and support my writing to the house where we were both staying.

- deadlines, editors, print - and somehow This was the first time I could rememI dodged the swinging hammer and put off ber ever being alone with him, I noted as my column for another week, which turned I stepped up into his giant SUV. He’s got into two thanks to Turkey Day. As any- a funny kind of wit, one that works best one who has written anything can attest to, playing off somebody else, and therefore I there’s something about staring at a blank started the talking. I asked him about his page, literally or imaginatively, that knocks two eldest daughters, the two of his children you down to your lowest peg, where no I’m closest to in age, and he told me about foothold is visible and the summit seems one’s first semester of college and the other’s unreachable. Many words have been writ- semester abroad in Italy. That out of the ten on the subject - many, I suspect, as a way, I asked him about his college experiwild grasping for any words to stand upon ence, about which I knew next to nothing.

- and so I will not go He told me that he studied finance into any further and got his master’s degree redundant dein tax. He could have tail. Suffice it to been an accounsay that writing tant, really is hard, and wanted to maybe I be one, in fell vicfact, but tim to had two KIERAN REICHERT that kids by the habit of art difthe time ficulty he finished y e t school, and again. they needed A l to be fed. So he ternatively, went into landscapthe banality of ing, and made a nice Swarthmore daily life out of it. He told me he life could have swallowed me makes more money through that business up. Just yesterday, I completed a project than he would have being a CPA, but he still minutes before the deadline. As a lifelong has the desire to make use of his education. procrastinator, I am certainly no stranger Here I chimed in, putting two and two to the screeching approach of a deadline, together, and pointed out the possibility that the adrenaline rush of rushing a paper in now might be a perfect time to make a life under a professor’s radar. But yesterday, change, what with the divorce and two unlike many due dates in my past, I did kids already in college. I didn’t mean to ignot feel the bodily anxiety nor did I hear nore the risks and moxie necessary for that any sort of ticking clock. Instead, I parked kind of change, but it seemed like his life myself in McCabe basement and wrote a de- had reached as neat a turning point as lives cent paper in a few hours, put my name do. I said as much, and he agreed withon it and emailed it in. Though this was out the slightest hesitation or quaver, with far removed from my first paper written the resolve of a man with decades of hard or my first successful making of a deadline, years behind him and vibrant, novel ones something about this paper was different. ahead. He did not look like a man decelMaybe it was the fact that it was the first erating through his fifties in that moment, day back after Thanksgiving and I was still but rather like a man reborn, his eyes wet fat with cranberries and turkey, or that I again with purpose and drive. simply had an open evening to spend writThough I’m still thirty years behind him ing a single paper. Either way, I cruised in life like everybody else around me, I through the paper and walked out of McCabe saw something of myself in him. Think of like a marathoner finishing lengths ahead of graduation like a divorce, full of financial anyone else. difficulty, life choices that will determine A heavy sleep and a leisurely morning our course for the next batch of years, and and here I am, back on the computer, typ- general sadness with the world and its cruing again. This time it is an article for The el ways. Come May, I will be tapping my Phoenix, an optional assignment of sorts, reserves of fortitude to find my way in the but tonight may be long and full of thesis world, just as my uncle does ahead of me. research and writing. It is this quality of This could easily be my excuse for not interminability in Swarthmore that sends writing last time, namely that I was anme to a state of anguish. Could I have been guishing under the building weight of my slowly crushed by the weight of Swarth- impending graduation and release into the more’s workload, the very thing I am try- real world and thus had little time to think ing to combat with my column? Maybe. But of, let alone write about, the beauty of daily I don’t think so. life at Swarthmore.

There you have it. Blame it on a falter*************************** ing in the face of the blank page, on the increasing pressure of Swarthmore’s diffiAt Thanksgiving, I got to see an uncle culty, or the looming guillotine that will cut with whom my family had a schism years off my time here at the neck. I did not write ago and whom I don’t know so well. He’s last week, and do not write most days, but the youngest of my dad’s brothers, the father now I feel much better and give thanks for of five children, and owns his own land- the opportunity to write.

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diggity PHIL EVERSON & OTIS

dog

gabriela campoverde

THIS ONE CHOSE US:

Professor of Statistics Phil Everson and his wife, Andrea, decided to add a new member to their family two years after their previous dog, Miles, passed away. (The couple actually met while Andrea, previously a physics professor at the College, was walking Miles on campus.) After receiving notice from petfinder.com, the two ventured to a local Pet Smart where shelter dogs were brought in for adoption. They quickly approached a litter of pups, and Otis immediately ran up to them. They couldn’t resist and left for home with the pup that chose them.

TOP OF THE CLASS, ONLY WHILE IN CLASS:

Otis attended Puppy Kindergarden when he was younger. There, he showed off his obedience training and became the teacher’s pet.

However, when the trainer isn’t around, the pups will play, and that is exactly what he did. He would not be the star student he was while class was in session. During trips to Smedley Park, Otis would occasionally run off and have Phil search for him for an hour or so. Regardless of his behavior, Otis is always up for fun and ready to meet new friends.

A BIRD’S BEST FRIEND:

At hime, Otis shares a household with a small four-year-old parrot, Nigel. They manage to get along very well. In fact, there was one time in which Nigel flew onto Otis’s back, and poor panicked Otis quickly ran up to Phil not knowing what to do. Nigel was hanging on to Otis for dear life!

A MUSICAL TRADITION:

The Everson family is filled with a talented bunch of pets. Otis is named after Otis Redding, known for his talented song writing in soul music and rhythm and blues, and Nigel is named after Nigel Tufnel, a character who plays a guitarist in This is Spinal Tap.

A NEAT HOWL:

Whenever he hears loud sirens outside, Otis is ready to let out a long howl. Phil commented on how his howl is very calming and is almost song-like. I heard a recording of Otis, and completely agree that it is very different from that of other dogs. With his very smooth howl, I think Otis lives up to his talented name!

PAGE 10

LIVING & ARTS

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

The Daily Prophet

SWARTHMORE quidditch

PPHOTOS BY NITHYA SWAMINATHAN

By AXEL KODAT Living & Arts Writer

A

s Swarthmore undergoes its now annual transformation into a secluded wizarding utopia, you may notice that, well, it already is one. We don’t, admittedly, have a massive lake populated by merpeople — and the continued lack of any courses touching on Arithmancy and Defense Against the Dark Arts clearly suggests a staggering and systemic curricular deficiency — but we can take heart in the college’s surplus of archaically academic stone buildings, reportedly enchanted expanses of forest, and, legend has it, a prodigious array of dungeons under Parrish Hall. Perhaps most importantly, we have Quidditch.

Muggle Quidditch, as it’s popularly known (though many players would fervently reject this “offensive” term), was founded in 2005 by a group of students at Middlebury College. Since then, it has gone from niche collegiate pastime to full-blown craze to an established global presence, with teams registered in locations ranging from the US, Canada, and United Kingdom to Croatia, Iran, and Russia, according to the International Quidditch Association, the sports governing body.

Swarthmore’s own Quidditch team was founded only two years ago, by a Middlebury student studying at the college for a semester. Perhaps surprisingly at an institution so thoroughly immerse in Harry Potter fan culture, the team initially struggled to gain a sizable group of regulars. “We started getting an actual player base last year when Strath Haven High School started practicing with us, because then we had enough players to actually play Quidditch,” says team co-captain Cole Harbeck ’15. A sizable group of first-year recruits means that the team now numbers at roughly eight to ten committed members.

The gradually increasing membership hasn’t slowed the groups enthusiastic and occasionally aggressive recruitment efforts, aimed at any and all wanderers potentially willing to join practice and play. Remarked co-president Elaine Zhou ’16: “We have a habit of yelling at people that walk by, ‘Come play Quidditch!’” It is a tactic that has resulted in a range of spontaneous playmates with little to no expertise, including an array of specs, a strolling group of girls from Virginia, and an entire family from South Korea.

The rules of the game are fairly straightforward for

anyone familiar with those of its magical cousin, with slight modifications to account for the sad but (for now) unavoidable fact that the brooms — “Costco 2005s,” according to co-captain Andrew Early ’16, “with a highclass red finish” — remain resolutely earthbound, the playing balls unenchanted. Instead of the snitch, for instance, a human snitch is designated to roam the campus until caught by either team’s seeker, though the team frequently plays without a snitch, due partly to insufficient numbers and partly to the job’s perceived loneliness and undesirability. “We just pretend there’s a snitch,” said Harbeck.

“The seeker is the easiest position to get rid of. Usually it’s just a casual stroll around campus with the other seeker. That’s not necessarily true, but captures off the field are pretty uncommon.”

Possibly the most distinctive sight associated with the burgeoning club is that of students sprinting across Mertz Field with brooms held between their legs. But as Harbeck puts it, it’s just part of the game, and one that quickly begins to feel natural: “When I’m at Quidditch practice and I don’t have a broom between my legs I feel uncomfortable.” Harbeck is also quick to point out that “Quidditch is technically a full contact sport,” and the team has instituted a regular drill called Tackle Muggle Muggle Wizard to get new members accustomed to the technique involved.

As core membership grows and the club solidifies, the team has begun to morph into something of a serious athletic pursuit. “When we came into this semester, we were just a discombobulated group of people who came together to play Quidditch,” remarked Harbeck. “We’ve started running actual drills about the mechanics of the game, and it’s gotten more intense.” Long-term goals include attending more tournaments, securing further SBC funding, and, of course, expanding the core group of members. The team is also in the process of applying for PE requirement accreditation. “I can confidently say we’re going to have a PE credit by exactly a year from now,” commented Zhou, and with the prospect of Quidditch entering the Swarthmore College Catalog, the club’s future is looking bright. Above all, the team emphasizes that, as Harbeck says, “Quidditch is about fun, and definitely about getting better, but also about fun.” Or, as Early put it: “There’s no way to take yourself seriously when you’re flying around on a broom.”

And what of the persistent rumors that Swarthmore actually is a secret wizarding school? “The Qudditch Team has no comment on this issue.” The team practices at Mertz Field on Fridays at 4 and Sundays at 2 p.m.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

LIVING & ARTS

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The Daily Prophet

TrelawnEy’s Tea Leaves: Reading The Future of Harry Potter

H

By TAYLOR HODGES Living & Arts Writer

arry Potter. It hardly seems possible to imagine a time when the name could be read on a page without conjuring (no pun intended) associations of bygone hours of enraptured entertainment for every reader, or even the casual filmgoer. The franchise has been built by the marketing forces behind international publishing houses and movie studios into a monument within the zeitgeist.

Not to mention that the books themselves work a special magic of their own.

But now that the novels have stopped hitting shelves and the films’ stars are trying to craft careers outside the restrictions of their “Harry Potter” roles, the franchise has left the immediate world of popular entertainment to which it was raised by commercial titans of entertainment industries and has receded into the cultural background, awaiting presumed canonization.

Presumably the franchise will still be popular for years to come and Swarthmore will fund a few more Yule Balls, but ultimately the intense hold the books had on fans, the one that lead them to midnight releases of books and films alike and spawned untold Halloween costumes whose maroon and gold scarves even invaded everyday wear, will lessen and the books will become revered, but not idolized with the same fervor by the next generation of pre-teens.

The books will be read for at least several generations into this millennium, but – because of the nature of the books and their serial release – they’ll never be received by future readers in the same way. New Potter fans will never have to wait for the saga’s next installment. They can breeze through the whole series as soon as they discover it. While this seems like a godsend for new fans, one akin to retroactively discovering a great TV drama via Netflix,

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they will lose the opportunity to grow up with Harry, which is more important than it may seem.

Many have noticed that the series shifts in tone around the fourth volume, “The Goblet of Fire,” becoming a much darker series. The films, too took a thematically darker tone in the third film when family-friendly director Christopher Columbus was replaced by Alfonso Cuarón, whose gritty visual sensibilities would later lead him to direct the acclaimed apocalyptic drama, “Children of Men.” Many readers see the shift in tone as a change in Rowling’s intention for the series, but Swarthmore professor Melinda Finberg disagrees.

“We’re always reading the books through Harry’s eyes, so it makes sense that the books get darker, that things get more complicated,” Finberg said. She examined the books closely with Swarthmore students in a first year seminar, “Battling Against Voldemort: Harry Potter and the Heroic Quest,” which paired the books with other fantastic epics like “The Odyssey” and “Lord of the Rings.”

This is the problem for new readers consuming Rowling’s masterworks wholesale. The result of such an aging in narrative perspective is a series that may draw in a young reader, but become too dark by its end. The inverse could hold true, too, and a reader who might enjoy the relative complexity of the latter volumes could be lukewarm about the simplistic fairy-tale nature of Harry’s first three years.

However, Finberg still thinks that this perspective progression was one of the novels’ great strengths. “[Rowling] drew people in with books that were directed toward eleven- or twelve-year olds,” Finberg said. “And as the series became more sophisticated, parents began to become interested, too.”

Finberg contrasts this appeal of Harry Potter with the reduced appeal of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy.

“From the very beginning, these are much darker books and they stay that way all the way through.

That limited its appeal because it was something teenagers read to themselves and was more isolated in that sense. At the least, it lacked the social aspect of parents reading the books to their children.”

The social community of Harry Potter readers has long been part of its broad appeal and this activity was only broadened by film adaptations that brought together Harry Potter fans and inductees alike via the social tradition of film-going.

“As with ‘Lord of the Rings,’ the fact that Harry Potter now exists in two media, books and digital images, means that kids get the pleasure of comparing and contrasting the two and arguing over which ‘text’ is better and why — which means they’re getting introduced to the pleasure and value of interpretation itself.” said Swarthmore English professor Peter Schmidt. “Immersing yourself in a virtual world is very much like dunking your head in a pensieve in Potter. It’s fun, scary, mind-expanding, and (as Rowlings pun suggests, it introduces you to the power of being pensive, i.e. thinking).”

This social aspect of the novels will surely exist for readers of subsequent generations who talk with their friends about their favorite books in the series and compare the films to the original texts, but some of it will certainly be lost. No one will post a Facebook status about waiting in frustration for the next film to reach theaters and few will argue about who gets time with the family copy of the latest book.

Readers will still exist within the imagined community that collects readers of any book, but gone will be the direct social interaction and media barrage, the veritable tornado of excitement that met each movie premiere and book release.

Yet this is not such a shame, since the lasting value of the books has always really been, well, the books. And will they last?

“None of us can know this for certain,” Schmidt said. “We know what needs to happen, though, for such immortality: one generation needs to say to the youngest one, “you have to read this; it’s great.”

LIVING & ARTS

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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

The Daily Prophet

RE

FOUR N O S N O I T C E L F

YEARS AT HOGWARTS

CATHY PARK

sonal pensieves, take a swig of pumpkin juice and relish the dulcet tones of caroling nymphlike students because, honestly, where else would you ever experience such a ball? Where No one knows where Swarthmore is ex- else could I indulge in my fetishistic love of cept for the few who live, teach or are taught a childhood novel while continuously shirkat Swarthmore, undeniable evidence that the ing my inevitable entrance into the Muggle school is actually unplottable. Our campus lies world? I hold a time-turner in my hand, alwithin the Forbidden Forest and we—forbid- most willing to turn back to the day I entered den to climb our carefully labeled trees as pre- this fantasy. My first term here, I felt like I caution against the unsuspected attack of hid- was on a constant dose of Felix Felicis. No den Whomping Willows—barely ever venture longer was I a misfit of the Muggle world but outside this magical fortress. This charmed a readily embraced member of a world of misacademy trains us to be the greatest witches fits (which, whether true or not, was exactly and wizards of our time, fostering a sense how Swarthmore was introduced to me by a that we can all become “The Chosen One”. Our recent alum). It would be facetiously accustudents spend their social hours, not in a rate to say that in my honeymoon phase with Swarthmore, I would student center but in have been able to use the Great Hall, where the Mirror of Erised the Yule Ball was held a normal mirror. this past weekend.

This was a night to fling aside like Almost three and a Ta n t a l i z i n g dissonant thoughts of ‘I should half years later, the armies of chocolate frogs amidst our be doing work’ in personal pen- Mirror of Erised would show me holdnewly seeded organsieves, take a swig of pumpkin ing a lot more than a ic lawn and floating bursts of musi- juice and relish the dulcet tones of pair of socks. A recal entertainments caroling nymph-like students be- flection of me taking over the world, Dark fluttered around the campus for days be- cause, honestly, where else would Lord style, perhaps.

Yet, something fore. Unsubstantiated you ever experience such a ball? about this magical rumors of Headmisdome draws me in tress Chopp’s latest like a Siren’s call. dancing frenzy to a Maybe I’ll be closer to who I want to be remix of “Gangnam Style” and the Hogwarts school song, supposedly choreographed by a if I… There are still many people I have yet to talented student-run dance group to be performed at the ball, encouraged Swatties to put meet, too many subjects that I have yet to on their dress robes and descend the stairs to learn, too much that I missed as trade-off for cereal-dom. Just around the corner, all the taking on other responsibilities.

The transmagical experience of common long tables had been swept away and replaced with a stage and ample dancing space. Ap- suffering with fellow witches and wizards parently the administrators had thought of is too valuable and nostalgic to pack away in placing an undetectable expansion charm to the category of “past.”

I have no idea how to reintegrate back in give students more room to dance but rejected the plan, realizing that college students prefer the Muggle World. … to stick close to one another in the face of Enough. Get out of my senior pensieve. It looming dark times.

Dementors of deadlines and finals hov- is time to produce the patronus of productivered over every student, sucking out their ity, combat the dementors and reluctantly acsoul by the minute. But this night was one cept that without the Sorcerer’s Stone, I am to celebrate. A night to fling aside dissonant going to leave. But wait, since I’m 21+, I can thoughts of “I should be doing work” in per- use magic outside, right? Cheers.

Through Rose-Tinted Swoggles

Finding Magic With a Swattie Dear Nestor, How can you tell if someone likes you? When do someone’s actions go from being simply friendly to more than friendly?

Thanks for your help, Clueless Dear Clueless: To be honest, this can be so hard to tell. One thing that I have learned is that one person’s expression of his/her liking can be the polar opposite of another’s. To draw a comparison, when some people are hurt by a friend or loved one, he/ she could express this pain in passive-aggressive or volatile behavior. Oftentimes, there are those that are more naturally touchy-feely. I realize that if you don’t know the person well, it can be difficult to figure out whether he or she is crossing that “line”. Even if this person is a close friend, they may be trying to hide it. It is very difficult to know when someone likes you romantically.

What I would suggest you do is first figure out how you feel.

If you don’t know how you feel, then my best advice would be to give it time. Time to sort out your feelings, or let them sort out organically. Maybe, talk with friends. Oftentimes, the ones closest to you have a certain insight into your life that you cannot see.

By the fact that you are asking this, I can surmise that you do have some interest in this boy/girl. (Again, I could be totally wrong myself). On the chance you do like him/her, I say just be honest. If this is someone you don’t know well, I would say something along the lines of “listen __________, I like you. I would be interested in getting to know each other better. Let me know if you are interested as well.”

Oftentimes, people find it intriguing when a girl/guy is really gutsy, even if it is defying that typical gender role. If he/ she responds with interest as well, then that will be exciting.

At this point, however, if he/she says no, then all you can do is thank them for being honest. Honesty goes a long way. You wouldn’t want a guy/girl to lead you on and/or not be true to his/her feelings. Down the road this will cause more pain.

Even though it may be hard in the moment, realize it will give you the chance to pursue someone else. Now that you know that this guy/girl is not a viable candidate, you will be in a more secure place. It is often easier to know the truth, then to keep guessing at what the truth may be. Ultimately, as I have mentioned before, this is in no way a reflection on you.

I hope this helps, Nestor P.S. Feel free to respond with a follow up question. Also email me and let me know how this all goes. dearnestor@ swarthmorephoenix.com

SADIE RITTMAN

Rhythm ‘n Motion’s fall show on November 18th performed to a packed auditorium in LPAC.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

LIVING & ARTS

PAGE 13

The Daily Prophet

RITA SKEETER TELLS EXCLUSIVE: BRAUN UNCOVERED

YANA LIST AS

favorite monster is the basilisk. Famed author and former Hogwarts professor Bathilda Bagshot, in the last interview before her tragic murder, hinted to me that Dean Braun is a Parselmouth. This skill might come in particularly handy, given that there is the Crum Wood on Swarthmore’s campus.

Braun seems to be a very likeable personage, although she has an unusual affection for frightening monsters. She described Hungarian Horntails, her favorite type of dragon, as “Quite cuddly in their own way.” Rumor suggests that Braun and several friends acquired a dragon egg while they were still in school.

An anonymous source hinted that the damage in the Crum Woods, reported to be caused by a sewage pipeline, was actually the result of a dragon gone amuck.

Of course, dragon breeding is an illegal practice.

Muggle studies is often criticized as an illegitimate field of study, but Braun describes how interesting muggles can be: “Their approach to things is just fas-

cinating. They do things like put bread into a machine to make it brown, and they call it toast. They have so many gadgets, the way they live is just so interesting to me.”

Arthur Weasley, head of the Office for the Detection and the Confiscation of Counterfeit Defensive Spells and Protective Objects, and self described muggle enthusiast, expresses admiration for Braun’s methods.

“Few witches have done as much to encourage magical and non-magical so much as Liz Braun. All enthusiasts look forward to when she publishes a book to teach us even more about how muggles live their lives.

I am particularly intrigued to learn more about the purpose and functioning of ‘rubber duckies.’”

My book will reveal Ms. Braun’s historical friendship with Rubeus Hagrid, now Professor of Magical Creatures at Hogwarts, the things that Braun believes that wizards can learn from muggles, and the spells that help maintain Swarthmore’s campus.

MANON DE BOER ZOE WRAY

Aesthetoc Apperceptions

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ometimes, art leaves us with incredibly intense emotions.

We fall madly in love with one painting, nearly convinced that our true soul mate exists as a pigment applied onto canvas.

Another painting might provoke the exact opposite reaction: it may make us recoil in disgust, having such a visceral, repulsed reaction that we actually beg to leave the room—nearly convinced that there is no more unthinkable form of torture than to force someone to endlessly stare at that painting. Other artworks compel us toward neither of these two responses, and we stand before them completely dumbfounded as to our position regarding the work. Such is the case for me with Resonating Surface—A Trilogy, a series of three films of about forty minutes created by Manon de Boer. Each film is a “portrait” of three semi-famous women whose careers blossomed during the 1970s.

According to a pamphlet that accompanies the film screening, which will occur in the Julien Levy Gallery in the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) until February 10th, De Boer’s film portraits “engage the artistic agency of her subjects while revealing a larger philosophy of existing in the world infused with creative purpose and a sense of self-determination…[they] investigate the relationship of the human body with the perceptual field, especially with sound, while exploring the space and time in which these relationships take shape. The body as a resonating surface for lived experience is at the center of De Boer’s oeuvre.” This description, I can at least say, seems quite generous in the credit they give De Boer for the effectiveness and power of her work. As I walked away from viewing the films, I did not feel any clear indications of the exigence behind the films nor what De Boer was attempting to accomplish with them. I strained to find any sort of deep meaning, any sort of artistic revelations that usually emerge quickly to the surface when I view other artworks. Instead, I was left wanting

and feeling confused, as if I was missing something that the curators who arranged the exhibition seemed to grasp comprehensively, as evidenced by the way they gush about De Boer in the exhibition literature.

The first film, titled Sylvia Kristel—Paris, consists of a study of the Dutch actress Sylvia Kristel, who became famous for her lead role in the 1974 French erotic cult classic Emmanuelle. Throughout the thirtynine minute running time, Kristel discusses her acting career while panoramic views of Paris are displayed on the screen for nearly the entire film. One of the major problems with the film, at least for viewers who cannot speak French, is the fact that Kristel speaks in French. This forces viewers to concentrate on reading the English subtitles shown at the bottom of the screen instead of experiencing the film as De Boer probably intended, taking in the vistas of Paris while listening to Kristel’s disembodied voice speak in the tongue of the denizens of the City of Light. As a result, we focus solely on Kristel’s story and the words, rather than absorbing De Boer’s constructed synthesis of visual and auditory elements.

At two points in the film, the images of Paris and Kristel’s voice are replaced with the appearance of an aged Kristel and near silence: as we watch Kristel smoke a cigarette with a faraway look in her eyes and listening to her almost imperceptible, shallow breathing. The exhibition pamphlet claims that De Boer chooses to scarcely show viewers Kristel’s face in order to, in a feminist fashion, deny chauvinistic voyeurs of the female gaze, “particularly relevant when hearing Kristel’s account of her career as a celebrated sex symbol in front of the camera.” But this seems like a gross exaggeration, a typical instance of art historians reading too much into the work.

It seems more plausible that De Boer doesn’t show Kristel’s face in order to submerge viewers into the past, when Kristel was more youthful and beautiful and spent her time in Paris speaking French, her nonnative language. Then when we finally see Kristel for the second and final time, with her morose expression and wrinkled complexion, it becomes a resonating surface in its contrast with Kristel’s past which we had just finished exploring so extensively.

The next film in the Resonating Surfaces trilogy, titled Resonating Surfaces, examines the life of Suely Rolnik during the 1960s and 70s. De Boer takes the same stylistic approach that she used in Sylvia Kristel—Paris to portray Rolnik, a Brazilian psychoanalyst, cultural critic, curator, and professor at the Catholic University of São Paulo. The landscape of Paris is replaced with that of São Paulo, while Rolnik speaks in both Portuguese and French and makes limited appearances, just as Kristel did in her film.

Rolnik’s story unfolds in a scattered manner, and even if this may be the most authentic way to capture Rolnik, it detracts from the potential power her words might have had if they were recounted more

PHILLY ART MUSEUM

RESONATING SURFACES

My dear readers, in my many years writing for you at The Daily Prophet, I have brought you many important biographies of leading personalities of our time, including Armando Dippet: Master or Moron?, The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, and Snape: Scoundrel or Saint?

My newest work, Liz Braun: Ministress of Muggles explores a whole new facet of our magical world.

Most wizards are bewildered, amused, and generally dismissive of muggles. Not Liz Braun. She is the Dean of Students at Swarthmore College, a muggle institution of higher learning. She spends all of her time with muggles who remain totally unaware of the magical presence in their lives.

Braun is an alumna of Hogwarts School, and when I sat down with her for an exclusive interview, she wore her Gryffindor tie proudly. But it seems there is something of Salazar Slytherin in her, because the first thing Dean Braun confessed to me is that her

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clearly. Another aspect that confuses the film is the appearance of other people at the times when we see Rolnik herself. De Boer gives no explanation of who these people are and how they relate to Rolnik, further confusing the narrative of the film and causing viewers to ponder its strange details rather than derive its aesthetic significance.

The third film in the trilogy, Think about Wood, Think about Metal, introduces viewers to a fragmented picture of Robyn Schulkowsky, an American percussionist who drew immense influence from John Cage. While this film does not have the same problem that the first two films have due to their narration in foreign languages, since Schulkowsky speaks in English, De Boer’s overall point here is unclear. In this film, we don’t see Schulkowsky’s face at all, only seeing her arms as she plays her personal creations of percussive instruments—instruments she seems quite proud of, given her expressed appreciation for “an unfinished instrument that doesn’t allow a complete mastery.”

These images take up most of the 48 minute film, but De Boer periodically intersperses them with panoramic views of present-day Berlin and the Westdeutscher Rundfunk building, “the public broadcasting institution that was the center of German avantgarde music production in the 1970s and 1980s.”

At the end of the film, just as at the end of the other two films, I felt uncertain about its meaning and importance. I almost felt as if I were missing something, as if there were something more to the films that I was not aware of. Why do these films warrant an exhibition in a major museum like the PMA? Perhaps they are so avant-garde, they transcend the understanding of the average art lover, a group which I still belong at this point in my art history career.

But if this is the case, and I remain skeptical that it is, then the PMA needs to work harder to cross that divide of understanding and provide its audience with sufficient information to properly appreciate its art cinema.

LIVING & ARTS

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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

The Daily Prophet

By ALLI SHULTES Assistant Living & Arts editor

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BLOODY

ohn Seaman’s life, as described in his recently self-published memoir, “Bloody But Unbowed,” is as eccentric as the man it captures in its pages, and defies attempted categorization. A self-proclaimed atheist, Naturist, nude photographer, recovering schizophrenic and Swarthmore graduate, Seaman and his memoir expose a psyche riddled with the could-be contents of an impossible work of fiction.

There’s hallucinatory electronic explosions; there’s reflections on religion, Communism, and Freudian psychoanalysis; there’s depictions of life on the streets and evenings in flophouses.

And there’s sex. Lots and lots of sex.

For fear of distorting the scale of the book, the word “epic” nonetheless seems to slip between the litany of strange twists and turns and the understated narrative style. The memoir portrays a journey — from Seaman’s hospitalization after being discovered slitting his wrists on Fifth Avenue to his success as a nude photographer — wrought with unlikely obstacles on his path to sanity and fulfillment. Organized in chapters dedicated to stages in his life, Seaman explicitly highlights the “beats” that comprise brushes with adversity and the moments in which he overcomes. His loose, informal prose maps the specific locations of his travel and day-today living and caricature his many acquaintances while simultaneously offering deeper philosophical musings — in some ways reminiscent of a Kerouacian description of an individual’s movement through the world.

The memoir, which took 14 years to write, is described in its pages as an attempt to offload “a lot of sexual and spiritual baggage;” however, Seaman confirmed in a phone interview a greater purpose implicit in its publication.

“After I recovered, I wanted to show how people

ALUM DEBUTS MEMOIR

could make something of themselves,” he said of publishing his story.

The memoir is both unbowed (as per its title) and unapologetic. Seaman’s often-contentious views — some of which seem to be products of a gaping generational divide — are asserted with breathtaking self-assuredness. He posits that every woman should be as well-learned in the bedroom as the

“...I have ARTISTIC TALENT, which I must LIVE WITH and USE. It’s IMPERATIVE TO DO THIS OR I WOULD GO CRAZY AGAIN. I do it in the MOST DIRECT, SEXUAL, WAY POSSIBLE, by photographing young female nudes. It pleases me that my chosen mode of art is a little perverse. I get back at ART that way.”

- John Seaman, “Bloody But Unbowed” prostitutes working in the brothel he frequented for fourteen years; he asserts that love is a hindrance to productivity; and he quashes artists as “flaky” and second-rate next to men of science and mathematics. In describing a past lover, he writes, “She was, unfortunately, very flat–chested (like Twiggy, incidentally). [Her] nipples were different sizes. One looked like a fried egg.”

After the raised eyebrows have fallen, one begins to register these moments as critical to understanding Seaman himself: an author with staunch views on the human condition, rooted in his own idiosyncratic experiences.

The breadth of Seaman’s endeavors alone are indicative of the sheer volume of snapshots he draws

from in his memoir. He served as a writer for the American Institute of Physics and worked as the chief science editor at Columbia University Press, writing articles for encyclopedias; he was hired as a proofreader for large legal firms in the city; he worked in a chain of Marlboro book shops scattered throughout the streets of New York. The memoir’s form is representative of the diversity of experiences: it’s a tapestry of narrative, letters to therapists and psychoanalysts, articles, and the odd Rorschach diagnostic test.

Through the various stages of Seaman’s memoir, sex receives no peripheral role. From the opening pages describing a brothel in New York that Seaman frequented to his recountings of self-conscious encounters while at Swarthmore, the role of “clinical sex” — an act of balance and stability rather than emotional expression — is trumpeted as a saving grace in the years after Seaman’s hospitalization.

Unable to cope with the social nature of a relationship, Seaman’s frequent visits to “Patricia’s brothel” provide an outlet for meeting essential physical needs.

“The only decent thing in all my later life was the brothel,” he writes.

As a thread that runs through the different segments of the book, Seaman’s treatment of sex also seems to connect his memoir to life on campus today. In how many minds has the Saturday night hook-up become an act satisfying a need for a physical outlet, and not an emotional channel? Seaman often lapses into reflections of “lost opportunities” for sexual fulfillment, particularly in relation to his early life. While campus culture might leave some disillusioned, it no doubt offers opportunities for stability which Seaman did not have access to during the heavily supervised years of the early 50s at the college.

Ultimately, the voice breaking through the pages of “Bloody But Unbowed” doesn’t read as being as far removed from the present as the years dividing us with the author’s experiences may initially suggest. Seaman’s memoir is inarguably a product of his time, but in its candidness, it also registers as a project of human scale. In his celebration of our bodies – through his art and his fixation on sex – he celebrates us, with all of our flaws and strangely-shaped nipples, and in his recounting of his struggles, he celebrates our ability to perservere.

BUT UNBOWED

DOWN 1. Four circles car

2. Kind of cereal, sometimes with raisins 3. Blood-colored third letter of the alphabet 4. Double vowels all the way down!

5. Bard of wizarding fairy tales 6. With Raymi, Incan ceremony of the Sun 7. “I’m ___ you!” (I know what you’re up to!)

8. Aung San ___ Kyi 14. Symbol on a banner 15. K-O separation 16. Note well, abbrev.

17. In Mexico it’s made with real sugar 18. Yes, in Budapest 19. ___ buco, Italian veal dish 20. Belly muscle 21. Crossed (out) 24. Self 28. “___, ourselves, and we”

By PRESTON COOPER, Puzzlemaster

CAN YOU “SPELL” YULE BALL?

ACROSS 1. With “cadabra,” the original non-Potter spell 5. Life stories 9. Nitrogenous chemical in excrement 10. Tedium 11. Miami-___ County, South Florida 12. Caesar’s accusation 13. Fiery spell 14. Quiet spell 20. Established truth 22. Swamps 23. “Away with you!”

25. ___ Miserables 26. Site of 1509 battle between Portugal, Venice and Ottomans 27. Bird droppings, valued as fertilizer in South America 29. Turn on the lights spell

Can You “Spell” Yule Ball?

CAN YOU “SPELL” YULE BALL?

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

OPINIONS

PAGE 15

The Daily Prophet

Sauron Death Eaters must put aside DIFFERENCES to stop nation from tumbling over fiscal cliff ,

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First, it shows the power of establishing and sticking to a consistent message. The Romney campaign was often criticized for not being bold enough on the issues. I think the Medicare fight proves that this was not entirely true.

While the economic and tax arguments could have had more force and substance, the Medicare plan was clear and direct. And, Republicans won on this issue by not losing senior votes.

While Obama did the GOP a favor by cutting over $700 million from Medicare as part of the Affordable Care Act, the idea of Republicans “winning” a reform debate on Medicare was unimaginable to political strategists and politicians alike since the 1980’s. Now, we’ve done that.

In the next couple of years, the Republican Party needs to continue to build, not rebuild. Mitt Romney was a step forward for the party, and probably would have made an excellent conservative president. The time for that has passed.

The GOP has a solid bench of individuals who must step up to the task and run in 2016. Many people complained about the lack of many strong candidates in 2012, making Governor Romney the clear favorite from the beginning. Next election, we need a primary that is not about minor points of disagreement, but about the big stuff.

We need a candidate who can articulate a conservative vision that appeals to all of America. Without an incumbent running, the GOP will be in a far different position to start with in 2016 than in 2008. We can’t squander that opportunity.

But, that is four years from now.

Right now, the Republican Party should start the process of tailoring its message, and find qualified conservative candidates to run in the 2014 Senate races. This whole debate over Grover Norquist’s Tax Pledge is an absurd media trap to put Republicans in positions of getting challenged from the right in a primary. This will make it easier for incumbent Democratic candidates in the competitive races to start their general election campaigns earlier. Republicans should ignore questions about the Pledge, and focus on fixing our fiscal mess in Washington. Raising taxes just gives more opportunity for the government to expand, and unless the Democrats agree to a serious reworking of our federal budget, there is really no need for Republicans to engage with the media about breaking the tax pledge.

We still control the House, which puts Republicans in the position of vetoing any deal that does not seriously curb spending.

President Obama, bring bipartisanship back to Washington and create a deficit deal all parties can be happy with. Remember hope and change?

The

Next

Four Years

TYLER BECKER

the prophet conservative

that she will step down in January after intense criticism for weakness taff ditorial on national security. “I let the hobbits into Mordor,” the giant arachnid he 2012 campaign season is said. “The buck stops with me. I let barely over, and the Dark the hobbits into Mordor and I must be Lord Sauron has narrowly responsible for the consequences.”

Boromir, the Dark Lord’s Ambassawon reelection as President of the League of Evil, dor to the UN, defended the Adminisbut already the nation fac- tration’s record, saying they had done es a new high-stakes polit- everything they could to secure the ical showdown. A majority of muggles Stairs of Cirith Ungol. “I told them, one believe the so-called “fiscal cliff” poses a does not simply walk into Mordor,” Bogreat threat to our financial stability, as romir said. “After that, there’s really a combination of spending cuts and tax not much else we can do.”

However, we feel that these issues hikes is set to take place on January 1, legitimate avada kedavra, 47 percent of 2013, if Orcs and Death Eaters within the nation being muggles, and hobbits the League of Evil do not compromise on walking into Mordor - are simply disa deal to avert the calamity. tractions from the most important issue “People just don’t have faith in evil at hand, which is stopping the economy anymore,” said League of Evil House from going over the fiscal cliff. PartiSpeaker Lucius Malfoy. “If we don’t san bickering no longer has a place in work together to solve this thing, Mugthe League of Evil.

Thirty-two days regles may lose their faith in the dark arts main until we go over the cliff, so Orc altogether.” and Death Eater alike cannot afford to Malfoy’s own party, the Death Eatwaste another minute. ers, is reeling from a stinging loss in Of course, any deal requires comthe November elections which cost them promise.

Orcs want to see taxes raised several seats in the League of Evil House on shops in Diagon Alley; Death Eaters and Senate. Finger-pointing among the want to reform social programs such as Death Eaters continues. Many blame the reconstruction of Minas Tirith to Voldemort, the Death Eaters’ challengmake them more cost-effective.

Hower to Sauron for the Presidency of the ever, each group has signaled very little League of Evil. Voldemort’s campaign faltered after his comments that “47 willingness to embrace the other side’s percent of the nation are Muggles. My proposals.

“Death Eaters kept their majority in job is not to worry about them.” the League of Evil House,” said Severus Others blame down-ballot candidates Snape, Voldemort’s running mate in the who allegedly tarnished the image of the presidential election. Snape, who holds Death Eaters. In August, Senate cana seat there, believes that the Death Eatdidate Draco Malfoy, in response to a er majority is a voter mandate not to question about his unusually high numraise taxes. ber of Unforgivable Curses, defended his League of Evil Vice-President Sarurecord by saying, “If it’s a legitimate man, however, believes that his and avada kedavra, the muggle body has Sauron’s reelection is a mandate not ways to, you know, shut that whole to reform entitlement spending. “They thing down.” [the Death Eaters] would bury the MugMany Death Eaters then distanced gles, as they’ve been buried the last four themselves from Draco. “We’re not reyears,” said Saruman.

“They want to lated,” said House Speaker Lucius Malgut reconstruction funding for Minas foy. “Even though we share the same Tirith and Hogwarts, so they, the folks last name, we’re not related.” at the very top, can get a tax break.”

On the other side of the aisle, Orcs Continuing this blame-tossing past have also had issues reaching out to votthe election, though, is highly irresponers. Dark Lord Sauron essentially censible.

It appears the League of Evil is tered his campaign around raising taxtruly living up to its name. It is time for es on shops in Diagon Alley, drawing the League to acknowledge that both encriticism from many Death Eaters that titlement reform and revenue increases such policies would hurt the wizarding will be necessary to reduce the deficit. economy. Sauron has been repeatedly But even if the League of Evil Congress criticized by Death Eaters for his views on small business. “If you’ve got a shop passes a half-baked bill to avert the fisin Diagon Alley, you didn’t build that,” cal cliff before the end-of-year deadline, the Dark Lord said. “Someone else ... the nation’s trust in them will be ircough ... me ... cough ... made that reparably damaged.

“The League of Evil doesn’t work happen.” anymore,” said Libertarian Party canSauron also faces continuing scandidate Darth Vader. “It’s time for some dals in his administration. His Secrenew ideas about how to govtary of State, Shelob, has announced

O

ver the last few weeks, pundits and politicians have taken to the airwaves to offer hundreds of explanations for the Republican losses on November 6th. Some insist it was the Hispanic vote, others say it was the Republican turnout operation, the messaging, or the candidate at the top of the ticket, Mitt Romney. Each person gives you their numbers and claims if their post-hawk strategy was followed, things may have turned out differently.

As a politics buff, I engage in this back-and-forth just as much as everyone else. Post-election assessments are important, and I don’t want to discount them. But, when your side loses, these evaluations are overwhelmingly negative and ignore any progress that has been made.

The 2008 election was a disaster for Republicans. Gains made by the Democrats in 2006 in the House and Senate were widened. The Democrats enjoyed a 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and with Barack Obama in the White House, Republicans were scrambling.

This election was not even close to as bad as 2008 for Republicans. We still control the House, and the presidential ticket made important gains in all the swing states. While the gains were not enough to win, we maintained and expanded the 2008 levels of support for the Republican ticket. Mitt Romney won more votes than John McCain, despite a decrease in turnout. Romney won more votes than President George W. Bush in his 2004 reelection win in many of the swing states. These numerical gains cannot be discounted. Democrats managed to counter Republican gains by turning out more Hispanic and African-American voters in the swing states than in even 2008. Nobody predicted this would happen, and it speaks volumes about the need for Republicans to compete in these communities.

Where Republicans made real progress, thanks to Romney and Paul Ryan, was in advancing a reform conservative agenda for the country. Entitlement reform took center stage. Romney, Ryan, and Republican candidates down the ballot laid out a coherent plan to reform Medicare using a more market-based approach, without losing the votes of seniors. A greater percentage of seniors in Florida voted for the Republican ticket this election than in 2008. Scare tactics from the other side failed to convince seniors of the preposterous lie that Republicans are trying to take away Medicare for good.

This is significant for two reasons.

OPINIONS

PAGE 16

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

The Daily Prophet real-time prices to compare. It also gives personalized location-based notifications and sales based on which store the user enters. Amazon also has a price-checker App that provides a similar functionality.

The competition amongst big-time resellers like wouldn’t say that my Thanksgiving is the Walmart and Target or eBay and Amazon is very traditional, family-centered meal, but it close, and could explain many of the recent changes in sure is memorable, fun, and relaxing. I Black Friday shopping. Both firms have started earlier remember when I was young, we would sales to steal sales from the other firm — hence pushing gather with a group of about seven close back sales to Thanksgiving Day. Both try to betfamilies to share at least three turkeys and ter innovate and market themselves to encourage many other dishes. Afterwards, we would sales, if that means another TV ad or pertalk, watch movies, and play cards until we were haps a mobile App aimed at notifying users exhausted. of discounts.

Across the board though, we However, this Thanksgiving was a little differsee that businesses are starting to spread ent. Instead of a carefree, carpe nocte gathering, out Black Friday to Black Weekend or it felt somewhat rushed and ended awkwardly even Black Week. This allows firms to early. After we had quickly filled our stomcapture sales that may have otherwise achs, not fully savoring the hours of prepabeen lost. ration that went into each bite, some of It is difficult for me to justify the us valued a bargain more than our once hours of waiting or camping out, simannual ritual, and took to the Best Buys, ply for a chance of decent discounts. It the Targets, and the Malls. Black Friday is almost like spending $300 on a tent struck early this year. to camp out, in order to save $100 on The push for early sales by businesses a TV. Although some may say that these was striking to say the least. Sales on sales only come once in a year, I do believe Thanksgiving Day soared 21% from last that regular sales throughout year are very year, as companies hoped to steal holiday similar.

It seems to me more of an excuse to shopping a day earlier. However, Black Friday go shopping, marketed strategically by businesses, didn’t just end on Black Friday. As we all may rather than a way to really save money.

After all, if have noticed, sales extended well into the weekend, one wanted to actually save money, they wouldn’t go and even past Cyber Monday, Mobile Tuesday, and shopping in the first place! so on. s e n d However, there are those that see Black Friday as As crowds for sales get larger and larger, lines w o u l d alerts, reminders, and sales directly to your phone. an experience (with or without family and friends) to enter extend around the block, and the stock of Walmart even had a component in its App that allowed that is worth more than the discounts. To that, I products held at stores sells out quickly, many consumusers to find certain products on sale within a certain say that is fine, so long as you are giving up someers are smarter to shop online in the comfort of their store!

Target has also tried adopting the same feature thing also less valuable than the experience. Although own homes. Online sales on Thanksgiving Day climbed onto its App. I, myself, am guilty of participating in Black Friday 17.4%, while Black Friday Internet sales increased Online resellers were also able to cleverly compete shopping this year, I did not let the hype of the sale 20.7%. with in-store resellers. eBay’s RedLaser App allows get in the way of more important things — friends, Even for those who want to get their purchases imusers to scan products at competing stores and give family, and good food.

HARSHIL SAHAI

Conservatively Liberal Economics

I

mediately, or just enjoy the rush, excitement, and experience of camping out in front of their favorite store, it pays to have a smartphone. The recent smartphone surge has driven the creation of many Apps to better find sales and receive discounts. Walmart, Target, Macy’s, eBay, and Amazon all had tailormade Apps that

se,

But Don

o F ’t

r g e t A b out Family s ck Fr e l a iday S

Ri

B la

Voting Rights In the Hands of the Supreme Court AARON KROEBER The Civil Libertarian

A

t the moment, there is only one thing that holds any state accountable for its election practices, only one check on the ability of states to disenfranchise large segments of their population and discriminate indiscriminately. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court seems ready to threaten this check, the Voting Rights Act, and to throw back to the states federal elections and with it endanger any hope of fairness whatsoever in an already beleaguered electoral system.

In September I wrote, regarding the Pennsylvania Voter ID law, that vesting control of elections with state governments was bad policy. This has been clearly demonstrated by the prevalence of gerrymandering and unfair election practices in such states as Pennsylvania and Ohio and the relative lack of such practices under the law in the South. The reason here seems to be Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires certain jurisdictions, primarily in the South, to clear any changes to their election laws with the Department of Justice. While this has not always been perfectly implemented, it has done a great deal to reduce institutional issues with the electoral process and reduce discrimination.

Unfortunately, the tides may be turning on Section 5, as the Supreme Court may well vote to strike it down as unconstitutional. That would be a mistake. The problem with our elections is not too much federal intervention, it’s too little.

Why should the federal government not have the right to decide how its own officers are elected, or at least to decide whether state laws are unreasonable? It seems reasonable that elections should be decided at the level of government to which they apply, local elections by localities, state elections by the state, and federal elections by the federal government. The current system allows parties to influence Congress not through congressional elections, but through state legislatures. By focusing resources there, they can pack the houses and create ger-

COURTESY OF MUGGLENET.COM

rymandered districts that cement their majority at both the state and federal levels. Such has been the case under both Democrats and Republicans.

Bringing election law up to the federal level would shine a light in an otherwise opaque system. It seems inconceivable that systematized discrimination and disenfranchisement could be supported at the federal level in the same way that it is at the state level. There is much more attention paid to the federal government by each branch at the others and by the media. It is far easier to find out what is going on in Congress than in state legislatures, as there is always someone from the opposition yelling on TV. Have Congress create a standard system of election to be implemented across the country, and the issue would no longer be at all hidden from the public view; there would be vigorous public debate.

Partisan politics at the federal level is frequently a roadblock to progress, but it also ensures that issues are brought to light. A vocal opposition with a national pulpit prevents the majority from ramrodding legislation without oversight. This level of opposition is not shared in state legislatures, think Massachusetts or Utah, nor does any assemblyman have the same access to the public forum as does a member of Congress. By putting partisanship to work, by taking this issue from states and giving it to the federal government, we can ensure a

more transparent and, hopefully, fairer process.

The Supreme Court may disagree with me here. I acknowledge that their job is to interpret the law as it is, not to find the best policy .If they decide to uphold the law, I would hope that we can move to extend the act to the entire country, and give Congress the power to standardize federal elections nationally. If the law is struck down, then election law may well be set back decades. The law that forced an end to voter discrimination and rolled back Jim Crow laws would lose one of its most powerful tools, in a way which seems to prevent any meaningful way of enforcing anti-discrimination laws.

For anti-discrimination legislation to be successful, there must be a way to enforce it, and that is exactly what Section 5 does. I say we take it a step further and acknowledge that there is discrimination everywhere, not just in the South. It shouldn’t matter where one votes, the process should be the same, and eligibility should be subject to the same rules everywhere. None of this is new, this is just democracy. We should protect our democracy, not hide its process and lessen the ability of the government to fight discrimination and corruption. The Voting Rights Act does not overstep, indeed it does not go far enough, but it is the start of a job that we should work to complete.

OPINIONS

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

PAGE 17

The Daily Prophet

Letters, opinion pieces and online comments represent the views of their writers and not those of The Prophet staff or Editorial Board. The Prophet reserves the right to edit all pieces submitted for print publication for content, length and clarity. The Prophet also reserves the right to withhold any letters, op-eds or comments from publication.

attributed to groups, although individual writers may request that their group affiliation be included.

All comments posted online and all op-eds and letters must be signed and should include the writer’s full name.

An editorial represents the opinions of the members of the Opinions Board: Marcus Mello, Menghan Jin and Preston Cooper.

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The Daily Prophet South Side, Diagon Alley London, England Please report corrections to: corrections@swarthmorephoenix.com Letters, corrections and news tips may also be submitted online to the paper by clicking “Contact” on the Prophet website.

In T

n A l l - Chi

he t g

his T f

age

aL n g u

時， 我考慮 了很久我 是否應該對徐 小姐表白，因爲我 怕被拒絕。我發現自己 開始在意對方的想法，而這 有重大的含義。若真正對她表 白，在未來的日子裏，我得展 開内心，讓她聽見的的心聲， 於是給予她能力撼動我的心 情，意味著顯出我的所脆弱。 本質上，我會失去我的感情防 備，值不值得？ 有些人稱學語言很難，我 想法和他們一致，但我覺得難 的部分並不在於純粹語言，而 在於勇氣。我和大部分的人一 樣，不喜歡被人欺負，但我很 早就領悟到，學習外語的過程 中一定會遭遇被打擊的情況。 因爲中文不是我的母語，我偶

Reflects O n T w

LETTER, OP-ED & COMMENT POLICY

he Se

Le e

第一段：追逐 當初我對戀愛不熟悉，對於 追逐女孩的方式，我完全不懂。

第二段：投入的勇氣 投入戀愛的人很了不起，因爲 他們爲了追求幸福做了一個 很勇敢的決定，那就 是接受被別人傷 害的風險。 當

olumn, An C e es

dy

引言: 剛升高四的我喜歡上一位來自中國 湖北性徐的國際生。至今我仍然不動我 爲何會喜歡這位徐小姐，其實我也不會 去想戀情的來源，因爲我發現情是個很 神奇的東西，而有些東西卻無法解釋。 因爲父母親不懂英語自小我就他們講國 語，雖然如此我的中文表達能力不好， 總之我在美國長大，致使我的中文詞彙 局限於家裏常用的簡單詞，比方説“我 吃飽了”，“功課做完了”。徐小姐了 解這點，可是她堅持地用國語和我對 話，因爲中文是她的母語，亦即最自然 的表達方式。彼此的對話產生兩個結 果，首先我的中文迅速地進步，並且透 過中文我更能了解對方的文化與思想。 直到那時，我和台灣人相處比較多，因 爲台灣是父母親的故鄉，以至於徐小姐 是第一個人帶領我走入中國文化。 固然我被這位湖北姑娘着迷了，她和 美國女孩不一樣，她更輕聲細語，個性 内向。因爲我們來自不同的文化背景， 我發現彼此之間的話題更有趣，彼此的 對話和我與一般同學的閒聊相當不同。 我開始對徐小姐的文化感到好奇。我記 得她經常會用些詞彙來形容我，問題是 她很多的用詞我都不明白，甚至有一次 我誤解善良的意思，以爲她在嘲笑 我，說我軟弱。總而言之， 我想更了解對方，但自 己明白若要真正達 成這個目標， 自己得 先 提高本 身的中文 水平。

ears of Studyin

兩年前我開始學中文，起因是失戀。

oY

中文的故事

con d I ns a

失 戀 與 語 言

李芳謀

爾會說錯字，而這時候會被人嘲笑，無 論這嘲笑存在善意或惡意，我總是會感 到一點銘感。其實這是小事，更可悲的 就是，被人欺負而無法防備的感受。失 戀那天，我和徐小姐對罵，當時我被她 罵的很難聼，但只能默然無語地承擔她 的打擊，因爲我即使有尖銳的反駁，卻 沒有能力使用中文來表達我的想法，那 天我真的很可悲。 我覺得，人越長大越怕被打擊，因爲 我們 學會顯示安全 感，懂 得

lment o tl

開頭

無論如何，我同於那些電影裏的初戀主 角，我有誠意，我有熱心，我有信心， 於是願意花無數的時間去學習。簡單 說，我被吸引了。我把徐小姐的所表情 與話語記錄下來，以這些資訊來作分 析，目標是看清她對我的感覺，而判斷 這個感覺是否存在好感。我還記得很清 楚那些和朋友們一起討論如何追逐女孩 的夜晚，話題包括是否該寫情書，何時 表白最好。或許最傻的話題是，如何使 一個女孩吃醋而使她更喜歡你。現在回 想到那段時刻，總是感到青少年的幼稚 和愚蠢。擧例來說，我陷入了徐小姐 的陷阱，天天都想增加和她相處的 時間，因爲和她在一起的時候 我很開心。或許我當時有點瘋 狂，有點太投入情感，或許 我被太多愛情劇洗腦了， 可是這就是我的個性，學 習中文也不例外。 我發現學習中文同於 追逐女孩，相同的部分 在於過程的首段。當時 我對中文很感興趣，因 爲一旦學到新的詞彙或 語法，就仿佛深入那段 情的多一層，我更能了 解徐小姐的所話語，更 能表達我想說的話。令我 驚訝的是，我發現我開始 更了解父母親和家人，因爲 中文進步，我更能理解他們的 話語，因此聼進他們所提及的意 見與想法。於是，我逐漸開始看清 中文的含義，這個語言不僅僅是個工 具，通過中文我和家人的關係增加了密 切，恍然大悟，我了解了中文的可貴。 此後我願意付出所有剩餘的時間去學習 中文，因爲這付出帶來充沛的回報，我 不僅僅察覺到自己的進步，而察覺到自 己的成長，意謂我開始了解新的文化， 而這些文化所帶來的原則與觀點。從此 以後，任何人都無法搖動學好中文的決 心。直至今日，我覺得學習中文不艱 苦，因爲每一分每一秒都值得。

反 駁 別 人 的 貶 損。總之，決 定學習語言就得失去反駁之武器，因此 容易被人欺負，並且難於說過別人。有 些人避免這個挑戰，我反而歡迎，因爲 我發覺雖然外表上會被人打擊，真正決 定是否要讓別人影響我是我自己，亦即 沒有任何人能竊取我的安全感。 結尾： 徐小姐和我最終分了手。 毫無質疑失戀使我非常的沮喪，我 唯一的遺憾就是沒要求一個清楚的説明 與解釋。徐小姐沒跟我講她爲何和我分 手，導致我不斷地問自己，我究竟做犯 了何錯誤。我不斷地假設，如果我當時 我更了解追逐女孩的方式，我是否會成 功，如果當時我不接受她的拒絕而一直 追，如果當時我的中文不是個障礙，我 是否會成功？ 分手後，我沒放棄中文，每 每學到新的詞彙就會回到 那時段，去尋找失敗 的緣故。坦白 說，有一部 分的

我 ， 無 法放開那段情， 不敢對自己承認那段 戀愛已經成爲了過去事，再也無法擁有 了。過了很久我才了解，失戀只證明兩 人沒有緣分，而失戀並不表示一個人具 有缺陷。 我佩服投入愛情的人，與此同時也佩 服學習外語的人，尤其是那些遭遇過挫 敗的人士，因爲多多少少我能體會他們 經歷過的艱苦與煎熬。 無論碰到何種難關，這些人依然勇往 直前，可惜這些人物在此時的時代逐漸 變小數人物。

PAGE 18

sports

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

The Daily Prophet

iudm TIRED OF THE BAD GUYS? (THE DAILY GAZETTE)

JOIN

DUMBLEDORE’S ARMY (THE PHOENIX)

IS NOW HIRING

BE PART OF A SWARTHMORE TRADITION. REPORTERS COLUMnists copy editors APPLY ONLINE AT staff ARTISTS SWARTHMOREPHOENIX.COM Photographers ABOUT -> HIRING -> APPLY graphic designers crossword writers

SPORTS

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

PAGE 19

The Daily Prophet While the team is certainly not celebrating its 0-4 start to the season, it recognizes that learning a new system is a process that cannot be completed in just a few games. Swingman Jay Kober ‘14 acknowledged this, saying that “With a new coach there is definitely an adjustment period.” However, the junior, who has been off to a hot start this season, averaging a team-leading 16.8 points and 6.0 rebounds per game, stressed that the team expects improvement, adding, “We have all really bought into what coach [Kosmalski]

By SCOOP RUXIN Sports Writer

T

here is a newfound energy in the Swarthmore men’s basketball team.

Anyone who saw the team in the weight room all fall could feel it, and anyone who happened to be in the vicinity of the gym at 9 AM every Sunday morning in November could feel it too. The message rang loud and clear from the beginning of the semester: the 2012-2013 version of the Swarthmore men’s basketball team is going to be unlike any in recent years.

With a new coach, straight from NCAA Division I powerhouse Davidson has come a

o n a s e we S

36% average. Additionally, the team has been competitive late into games. In 3 of 4 games, the team has been within single digits of the lead at halftime, including the Roanoke game, which Swarthmore led, 45-36, at the break. Swarthmore also currently

s e n N p l b es k t a l O

year. His 11.2 points per

t

pec x E rs

s s e c Suc

game rank second on the team.

He has also allowed Swarthmore to spread the floor effectively by ranks shooting a team-leading 48% from besecond in the yond the arc.

Conference in reboundAfter helping the soccer team to ing, putting it in position to the NCAA Sweet 16, Keedy made his reach Kosmalski’s goal of being “first in presence felt immediately, logging 32 h a s the Conference” in rebounding. minutes off the bench in his return to been teaching In order to move into the win col- basketball Monday night at Rosemont. new us and we are all excited umn, Swarthmore will need to reduce Keedy poured in 13 points and 6 resystem, and a about the potential that this team its turnovers. In the loss at Rosemont, bounds, helping Swarthmore remain “much more intense” has.” For his part, Kosmalski praised the team gave the ball away a season- competitive until the game’s closing work ethic, in the words of the team’s effort: “All of our guys have high 24 times, a number difficult to minutes. forward Will Gates ‘13. Coach Landry been working extremely hard on a con- overcome. However, as Gates points Although Swarthmore was picked to Kosmalski has demanded a new style of sistent basis…Our focus is on getting out, “We have a completely different finish tenth in the Centennial Conferfast-paced, unselfish basketball, with a better every day.” system than we had last year.” As the ence, the team, with its new coaching focus on defense. Kosmalski pointed this Guard Karl Barkley ‘15 echoed Kober team learns this new system, the team staff, new philosophy and new energy, out, saying, “I think we are playing and Kosmalski’s hopeful tones, say- should be able to decrease its turnovers, is confident that it can exceed expectaa little bit more uptempo offensively, ing that, “The new system has been increase its assists, and begin to work tions. Swarthmore was competitive in which is probably the biggest change a a learning process, but we are getting towards its goal of finishing in the top its Conference opener against Dickinfan would notice.” The new coach and to where we need to be with it.” While five in the Centennial Conference. son, despite the fact that the Red Devils system has brought a renewed sense Barkley admitted that “Its tough to start As Barkley put it, “Guys are con- were picked to finish in second place. of confidence to a team coming off of [0-4],” he emphasized that “We gained fident in the system, now it’s just a Moving forward, as the team gains a difficult 2011-2012 season that was a lot of experience from the early games matter of really executing it and being confidence and experience with the marred by the resignation of long-time that will make us better in the long exact.” new coaching staff, Swarthmore should head coach Lee Wimberly. The changes run.”

Two bright spots so far this season catch its Conferenc have allowed the team to set lofty goals There have been several encouraging for the Garnet have been Barkley and e opponents by surprise. Swarthfor itself. According to Gates, “We feel signs from the team’s early games. In forward Joe Keedy ‘14. After playing more basketball has moved into a new that we are in the top half of the league, the team’s opener against Roanoke, the sparingly during his freshman season, era, and with it, expect to see wins, so our goal this year is to make the Con- team shot 48% from the field, a signifi- Barkley has been one of Swarthmore’s playoff appearances, and exciting, upference playoffs.” cant improvement from last season’s most consistent players early on this tempo, competitive basketball.

Garnet Athlete of the Week

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What He’s Done: Placed 57th at the NCAA Division III National Chapionships out of a field of 276 runners.

Favorite Career Moment: Finishing 57th at Nationals with a 25:22 Goals for Track Season: Break the school records in the 5k and 10k and qualify for Nationals Favorite Cross Country Course: Johns Hopkins’ course for Centennial Conference Championships in 2010. The course was hilly and idyllic-- we even ran through an orchard.

Pre-Race Meal: I’m boring. I can literally only eat three things the day of a races: bananas, peanut butter, and jelly.

J ACOB P HILLIPS SR., CROSS COUNTRY, FORT WAYNE, IND.

SPORTS

PAGE 20

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012

The Daily Prophet

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he Swarthmore women’s basketball team couldn’t ask for a better start to their season – with wins against Chatham and Cabrini in the Swarthmore Tip-Off Tournament, and a 70-63 victory against Dickinson in their conference opener last Tuesday, their undefeated record is nothing less than thoroughly impressive.

One thing fueling their success is their lock-down defense, possible because of the high level of athleticism amongst the team. “For the first year in a long time, we have ten, eleven, twelve athletes on the team...they all can play a bunch of different positions,” explained head coach Renee DeVarney.

Now using a full court press for the majority of the game, the Garnet have been able to force turnovers and convert steals into easy points.

“It’s not something you can do unless you have a bunch of athletes. We have all athletes,” said DeVarney. While physically demanding, it catches other teams off guard, and delivers results.

“The faster pace we want to play at is very different from past teams,” said guard Katie Lytle ’14.

Team chemistry is another thing contributing to their victories. “Each and every player brings a unique style of play and a unique personality to the team, and it is really astounding how we really mesh well,” said guard Madeline Ross ’13. “Our three freshmen bring with them lots of hustle and positive energy, our sophomores bring great intensity and enthusiasm, our juniors bring with them calmness and a sense of entitlement, and our seniors bring with them lots of experience, leadership, and tenacious play,” she continued.

The freshmen in particular have impressed both players and coach alike in their Swarthmore debuts. “When our games against Cabrini and Dickinson became close, they handled the pressure well and made some key plays,” said Lytle. DeVarney had similar praise, adding, “They have been a great addition to the team.”

As the season starts to unfold, the team is looking forward to continuing their undefeated streak – and perhaps surprising a few of their opponents along the way. “We are ready to join the ranks of powerhouse teams,” said Ross. “We have so many scoring threats on the team, and everyone has such an enthusiastic and driven outlook.”

With a majority of the winter season still remaining, there is still much that the team hopes to work on. Rebounding the ball is one focal point for many players; “I think I can do a better job of crashing the boards and help limit the other team’s second chance opportunities,” said Lytle.

For DeVarney, improving their outside and three-point shooting is

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By JENNI LU Sports Writer

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priori t y . “ W e haven’t been shooting well our last two games... once we start shooting better, and we have good defense, it will be really exciting,” she said.

Confidence is running high, and expectations have been set even higher. But despite the amount of pressure facing them, the Garnet aren’t fazed. “I am really just excited about the fresh new ‘walk with swagger’ mindset of the team,” said Ross. She and her teammates have only one goal: “We are looking to prove that this is a new era of Swarthmore women’s basketball.”

The women’s team will be looking to extend their conference record to 2-0 tonight, as they take on Muhlenberg on their court at 6 pm in hopes of snapping a sevenyear losing streak against the Mules.