Issue 1

INSIDE PHIL WEINSTEIN’S RECOMMENDED READING

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Chains and Whips Excite Them Sometimes

by Anna Gonzales photos by Julia Carleton

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CONTRIBUTORS Nyantee Asherman ‘15 is a sociology and anthropology major who would’ve been an art major if it didn’t look so hard.

Caroline Batten ‘14 believes in Tinker Bell, the green light, and the King in the North.

Julia Carleton ‘15 is an English and education major from Cincinnati, OH. Danielle Charette ‘14 is an honors English major from Durham, CT. She is minoring in political science and philosophy and is co-founder of the Swarthmore Conservatives Society.

Daniel Y. Cho ‘13 is a history major who is interested in architectural photography. He is from Fargo, ND. Ari Efron ‘16 is a freshman from Brooklyn, NY who doesn’t take life quite as seriously as he probably should.

Anna Gonzales ‘16 is a pre-Starbucks major studying English and art history.

Philip Harris ‘16 is a prospective English major. He was recently the proud recipient of a much-coveted “Parrish Beach” insulated tumbler in honor of his M&M jar capacity guesstimate submitted during the “Thank-ADonor Day” proceedings.

Nora Kerrich ‘16 likes movies and cats. She probably won’t like you, she told us.

Letter policy Letters are welcome from all readers. We will not ever publish letters anonymously and we reserve the right to edit all letters for length and clarity without contacting the letter writer. Letters generally should run no longer than 1,000 words. They should be sent to swarthmorereview@gmail.com.

How to contribute The contents of this first issue were solicited by editors. For future issues we will continue to solicit articles, though we will also accept submissions of long-form reporting, personal, argumentative and photo essays, book and movie reviews, short stories, poems, and anything else that seems suitable. Submissions will be considered from Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and will be considered anonymously, though we will not, except in a few cases, publish anonymously. Submissions should generally not go longer than 10,000 words.

We are also looking for editors and staffers of all kind—staff writers, graphic designers, artists, web designers, section editors.

Contact: swarthmorereview@gmail.com.

Izzy Kornblatt ‘16 is a prospective philosophy major from Northampton, MA. Trip Lenahan ‘15 is a religion major from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Billy Lennon ‘16 is a prospective political science major from Cleveland, OH. Mike Lumetta ‘15 hails from the great state of Missouri and acts with the according slowness.

His secret ambition is to become Matt Saracen from the TV series Friday Night Lights.

Monika Zaleska ‘13 was Co-Editor in Chief of the Daily Gazette, and now serves as Multimedia Editor. She also writes poetry and fiction.

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ILLUSTRATIONS NYANTEE ASHERMAN

REPORTING & POETRY ANNA GONZALES

PUBLISHER & EDITOR AT LARGE KOBY LEVIN

Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com

Yumi Shiroma ‘16 writes poems about gender, sexuality, and power.

Phil Weinstein is Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English.

EDITOR IZZY KORNBLATT

S W A R T H M O R E

Founded 2012 | Vol. 1, No. 1

Design © 2013 the Swarthmore Phoenix. All content © 2013 by its listed author unless otherwise noted. The “R” logo is based on the font Layer Cake by Luzia Prado. The “Review” logo is based on the font Soraya by Pactrice Scott. We can be contacted at swarthmorereview@gmail.com. Printed at Bartash Printing, Philadelphia, PA. Please recycle this magazine.

“Life always has an unhappy ending, but you can have a lot of fun along the way, and everything doesn’t have to be dripping in deep significance.”

Roger Ebert, 1942-2013

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Arts

FROM THE EDITORS

How to Contribute 2

BOOKS

Send us a letter, write a review, design graphics, etc.

Light/Dark 20 A strange new story collection from Karen Russell

by Monika Zaleska Recommended reading from Phil Weinstein

“Common Sense” 4

An introduction to the magazine

by Izzy Kornblatt

Chains and Whips Excite Them Sometimes

by Anna Gonzales photos by Julia Carleton

Inside Swarthmore’s BDSM subculture

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The Confessions 22 Literature can’t save David Shields’s life

Photographing a dorm room

by Trip Lenahan

MOVIES

The Tarantino Effect 24 These movies just keep getting worse

Navigating Public vs. Private Space / photo essay by Daniel Y. Cho

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by Izzy Kornblatt FICTION

Recommended viewing from Nora Kerrich

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Zmyey

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by Caroline Batten

The Good, the Bad, and the Reference 28 A phenomenon goes too far

by Philip Harris

COMMENT

POEMS

When the Waiter Asks 18

6 Post-Op Being a conservative afer Obama’s reelection

by Danielle Charette

by Mike Lumetta

MUSIC

Something to Say 30 The three best albums so far of 2013

by Billy Lennon

Defense 23

by Yumi Shiroma ILLUSTRATIONS

Drawings by Nyantee Asherman

7 Disgrace Revelations about a conservative speaker

by Ari Efron

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EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

“Common Sense”

by Izzy Kornblatt

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think that most reasonable people are liable to find, at moments, that academic liberal arts culture is suffocating and pretentious: there is a sense of being out of touch with the ways human beings actually think and behave, a lack of tolerance of dissent, and a moralizing streak uncomfortably close to that of the Christian fundamentalist right. There is also the related phenomenon known as “political correctness.”

One whiff of irony would topple the whole thing in a second. That may be why the chief perpetrators have no sense of humor. I should add here that being a good liberal, I support most of the causes championed at Swarthmore. And I too am guilty of pretentiousness, closed-mindedness, and all the rest. But I am not proud of it.

This fall I wrote a review of the movie “Pariah” for the Phoenix. It is about a black lesbian teenager coming to terms with herself and her family. Someone could, of course, make a good movie about that, but “Pariah” is not it. I said as much in the review, only to learn that I’d missed the memo about white men no longer being allowed to be critical of movies about black people: in the ensuing comments I was called “bigoted” and “homophobic,” informed that my contention that “good storytelling has nothing at all to do with social justice” comes

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only from my “PRIVILEGE,” and on and on.

It seems that some of those who justifiably complain about being reduced to their race and gender are perfectly happy to turn around and reduce someone else to those very things.

I understand that internet comments are never to be taken too seriously, but I think this is symptomatic nonetheless of certain ideas and convictions being taken much too far.

If I call this an appeal to “common sense” some will reply that “common sense” really means resorting to a set of problematic oldschool assumptions. And indeed many such appeals are precisely that, and deserve to be called out for what they are. To take a famous example, Michel Foucault may have had some far-out beliefs, but they are mostly understandable given his life and the intellectual climate of his time, and I would take them any day over those of the critics who insist that “common sense” dictates that he was “perverted” and thus ought to be ignored. What is needed is a gentle insistence on a reasoned common sense, but not on the prejudice that often implies, and indeed an insistence on skeptical thought—that is, thought that allows for real doubt—as a part of everyday life.

Much of the politically correct left seems to me unable to stomach real doubt.

I hope this magazine will make the case for a reasoned common sense in practical terms here at Swarthmore: that it will model discourse that is grounded, unpretentious, accessible, reasonable, and open-minded not just in name only (though of course there are ground rules). Certainly I think the magazines this one is in part modeled after—the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New Republic, the London Review of Books—do so for the larger culture. We will publish longform reporting, essays, reviews, photography, fiction, poetry, and anything else that seems suitable, monthly. Dissent is to be encouraged not least through what we hope will be a lively letters page. u

In future issues this will be the letters page. Send us a letter. swarthmoreview@gmail.com Our complete letter policy is explained on page 2 Swarthmore review

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COMMENT POST-OP

Staying conservative after Obama’s reelection

by Danielle Charette

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that local communities used to provide. But the small town life, localism and social engagement that Nisbet mourned are not totally lost. If they were, Nisbet’s 1953 book would have no meaning, when in fact, it reads as a clarion call to reengage with and reclaim the communities we know to exist. Swarthmore is one such hub in which community is present—where students and faculty greet each other in the halls of Parrish rather than projecting their communitarian hopes onto faroff politicians or super-PACs. My own goals are less political then they were a few months ago. It is refreshing to spend more time volunteering with the local Swarthmore Presbyterian Church’s youth group than checking Drudge Report. These days, I would much prefer offering my time to chaperone a middle school ski trip than to Mitt Romney’s phone bank. I suspect that I have a natural disposition toward politics, but that doesn’t necessitate sitting idly in front of our 24-hour news cycle. Lately, I am more interested in the literary debate between Hemingway and Faulkner than the speeches on Capitol Hill. It is amazing how much more nuanced a conversation about “American exceptionalism” can be when you are talking to an English professor about Walt Whitman rather than Sarah Palin.

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y return to more localized academic and community interests has inspired my vision for a revival of American federalism. Americans shouldn’t be projecting our own personal goals—whether that means highspeed rail, organic farming, or Baptist churches on every corner—onto the national government. Doing so means fantasizing versions of community rather than going outside and greeting our neighbors. A national projection only leaves us atomized and alone.

Many of us on both the Right and Left wrongly assume that our kind of government and our kind of political revolution will leave all of America for the better. But once our ideal coup d’état runs its course, what’s left? Bureaucrats don’t make very good friends—or as Robert Putnam might say, bureaucrats only leave us bowling alone. Suddenly, we are by ourselves, exiled behind a computer screen.

Now, obviously, some national government is necessary, and I would argue that the more engaged our citizens are, the more they will

Photo courtesy of the American Conservative

ong before Facebook and Twitter, Robert Nisbet, a prominent 1950s sociologist at U.C. Berekeley, warned against the “growing appeal of ‘pseudo intimacy’ with others, a kind of pathetic dependence on the superficial symbol of friendship and association.”

I would imagine many people who care about civic engagement—especially young people— agree with Nisbet’s diagnosis and believe that our culture’s level of “pseudo-intimacy” has only gotten worse. Consider the fact that the marriage rate has dropped 20 percentage points since the time Nisbet was writing. Or the fact that the American Psychological Foundation finds the number of college students taking psychiatric medications to be up by 10 percent over the past decade. In his oft-cited “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam calls our age cohort’s higher rates of headaches, insomnia, indigestion, and mental health problems to be indicative of our “generation gap in malaise.”

Malaise is supposed to be the topic of the woebegone Jimmy Carter’s speeches—not young students. Can our education, localism, and intellectual interests at Swarthmore rescue us?

Since the presidential election, I have revisited Nisbet as a figure who engages with American life and our human thirst for civic connection. Like Nisbet, I worry that Americans are too quick to look to the federal government to fulfill a purpose and meaning

Robert Nisbet

prudently balance federal and local priorities. For instance, infrastructure projects are historically best handled by state officials familiar with the local work environment, costs and commuting trends. The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards recently took to the Wall Street Journal to showcase various bridge and tunnel examples from the state of Virginia, where public-private partnership projects were more likely to lead to timely, less expensive infrastructure improvements.

Though I would prefer a more robust vision of federalism, Nisbet never thoroughly engaged the topic of the American states as government intermediaries between the atomic individual and Leviathan. I suspect that he thought even states were too large and too anonymous for a binding civic life.

In his epochal “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” Edmund Burke argued, To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.

In the spirit of community I have been emphasizing, Burke’s oft-cited “little platoon” is a call for an orientation in the community we actually live in, not the community we imagine Washington, D.C. to be. The only way to have good government is to have solid, functioning, sociable communities. Establishing these communities is no small task. But it’s a feasible option, and a necessary the ONLY one.

Reading Nisbet and Burke in this light, I like to think of little way to platoon, I believe, is kind of an create aesthetic version of federalism. BeNisbet was a sociologist and good cause not a political theorist or strategist, government he doesn’t necessarily offer us a meaningful policy prescription for is to start how to build community and not quest for it. But his greatest with solid, just offering to those of us who care sociable about politics and policy is to offer an abstracted, idealistic vision communitY of the small town life and civic connectedness. This vision can indirectly inspire a commitment to localism and, by extension, a more humbled, federalized form of government. Nisbet’s contribution, then, is a poetic vision of what community is and could be. u

DISGRACE Revelations about a conservative speaker

by Ari Efron

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he passage of time is a funny thing. It gives people time to change and to grow, which is what the Swarthmore Conservatives are probably hoping happened to Doug Bandow, a speaker they invited for an April 9 lecture they called on Facebook “Terry Eagleton, are you SURE that Marx was right?” The event is the group’s response to the renowned Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton’s April 5 planned then later canceled lecture “Why Marx Was Right.” Within hours of the conservatives’ creation of their Facebook event page, someone who will not be named posted to the page a link to an article that explained that in 2005 Bandow resigned from the libertarian Cato Institute think tank after it was discovered that he was paid by Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff to write between 12 and 24 positive op-eds about some of Abramoff ’s clients.

The link to this information was, of course, posted by someone hostile to conservatism, and the only words accompanying it were: “Doug Bandow, everybody.” Now that is what they call “othering.” The word “everybody” sets up Bandow in opposition to all Swarthmore students and to the community in general. He has been made into just a series of mistakes, a series of transgressions. This obnoxious comment ignores the possibility that someone with a dubious moral character could have interesting and valuable things to share.

The next comment on the thread was just “why can’t you liberals ever mind your own business,” which isn’t a response to the article in any way, and in any case since Bandow himself is speaking as a reaction to Eagleton, in this case it seems like really it’s the conservatives who can’t mind their own business. The main defense of Bandow presented in subsequent comments is that it has been eight years since his behavior was discovered, and that he might have changed since then. This is a valid point, but it is something of a rearguard defense and it is not at all clear why the conservatives couldn’t have just found someone not implicated in a well-known bribery scandal in the first place. It’s rare to see both sides offer such obvious self-parody. Fittingly, the most liked comment in the thread is a .gif image of Stephen Colbert eating popcorn. u Swarthmore review

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PHOTO ESSAY

Negotiating Public vs. Private Space What dorm room photographs mean to me

Junior year—the time I began filling my room with documents of my new experiences

by Daniel Y. Cho

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or me, dorm room photographs act like “self-portraits” during a formative period of my life. They record how I clothed and marked a physical space as mine. My rooms in Dana, Pittinger, and Parrish were all carefully molded and forged. By reflecting on what I considered when assembling each space so far, I can better plan what I want to build in the future and, more importantly, what type of structure I ultimately want to fortify. I need these blocks, I need these photos. When I feel that I am outgrowing the space in my

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room—I click.

I spend time putting thought into how I express myself in the clothes I wear and the way in which I journal. However, I would like to think that different types of mediums of expressions vary in how public or private in nature they are.

Clothing, I think, has a public nature to it since clothing is expressed through public presentation. I wear a dress shirt, for example, to appear professional for an interview, to suggest that I am neat and orderly to my employers. Journaling feels the exact opposite. Expression through journaling is not contingent on anyone else’s response; there is no process of

selection or filtering because a journal is a closed space that is exclusively open to me.

For me, college dorm rooms are different from clothes and journals in that they are a space for expression that is both public and private. It was an interesting challenge for me at the beginning of college to understand that how I interpreted, arranged, and designed my half would be exposed to my roommate, hall mates, and our friends. This was particularly the case because when I lived in Fargo, my room was more of a space that was private because we seldom invited guests over to our house. Before college, never had I shared such an intimate and private

space so publicly. When I was a resident assistant my junior year, my room became the space where hall mates congregated and socialized. My bed became a public bench and my laundry was open to all eyes.

College dorm rooms were a space that had to be both presentable and “my personal cave.”

And that is why pictures of my dorm rooms are so interesting to me; they reveal how I negotiated the space as both public and private: how did I dress my room and, at the same time, express what was going on inside my head? In retrospect, it is especially delightful to reflect upon how I understood the space each year. How clearly did my room house my thoughts?

With what did I adorn the space? And how did I consider the “public” when I was a freshman and had a roommate? Then, compare this view to how I express myself in my room today. Most of the time, dorm rooms are standardized and you have to adjust to the space. Dorms rooms as subjects are compelling to me because I ask myself, how did I force them to adjust to

me?

Photos help me answer this question. I began Swarthmore by bringing everything that was comfortable and familiar, everything that was “me.” But, ironically, by doing so, it made it harder to understand who I was; I didn’t know how to organize what was me from the familiar and old.

Click. Sophomore year felt much the same. It was only until junior year when the landscape of my room significantly changed. New experiences and newlyintroduced artists (“strangers,” in a sense) carpeted my walls more so than memories of the past. Click. The compulsion to post the “new” had a limited life, however. By the end of that year, every bit of decor that had been previously hung went down—I had enough of documenting my life onto my room. Click. The summer following my junior year was a time when I was adjusting to this new lifestyle. I felt lighter with less surrounding me, but still itched to post various thoughts on the walls. My compulsion to archive was not entirely dead. Click. By senior year, I lost the

BELOW: Junior year—me with my hallmates. My room was as much for me as for my friends. ABOVE LEFT: Junior year—by spring, I had outgrown my firstsemester self. The room adjusted accordingly.

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Above Top: Summer between my junior and senior year—the time I felt a need to throw away my possessions. Everything felt either/or. Above: Senior year—my idea of decor changed. Bare walls gave me a feeling of relief. Right: Freshmen year—“me” on full view.

need to document everything. I felt more comfortable letting things go; I felt a sense of security that what was important would stay in my memory; and finally, I felt at ease in making the private my public. No longer was there a need to negotiate these two spaces—they were the same. Click.

I have never liked taking self-portraits.

Even if I am pleased with the photograph, the knowledge that the presence of a camera changed me ruins it as a selfportrait. The shot becomes more about how well I interacted with the camera 10

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than who I was at one particular moment.

As a result, the less control I have over the creation of a self-portrait, the more accurate and real the image feels; the more control I have over the camera, the less it becomes a type of documentation I need to have. I am changing every day at this school, and consequently, so is my room. It is not enough for me to simply know that I changed; I also need to see the ways I grew and matured during my fours years here.

Uniquely, dorm room photographs satisfy this need. u

EXCITE THEM SOMETIMES

by Anna Gonzales photos by Julia Carleton

“Harder.”

Reed’s friend, who is smacking her, hard, with a riding crop, is surprised at this command. The friend brings the riding crop down on Reed’s flesh with more force, testing her limits, wondering how hard she wants to be hit, beginning to enjoy her reactions.

This isn’t sexual at all, Reed explains: it’s intimacy, it’s human contact, and it’s any old Friday night in the dorm, watching a movie.

Two years ago, in the summer before Reed’s sophomore year at Swarthmore, her boyfriend of six years abruptly broke up with her.

“I felt like half a person for a very long time, and was completely disillusioned about life and myself and had no idea who I was anymore,” Reed said.

Then, Reed made some new friends who were “very cuddly,” and discovered exactly what she had needed all along: more hu-

man contact.

Reed’s new friends, who were part of what she described as “the ML crowd,” provided her with just that. The group went skinny dipping in Crum Creek at night, piled on top of each other while crowded around a table at Sharples, explored the nooks and crannies of campus, hung out naked in dorm rooms all together. There was a lot of skin to skin contact. Reed found a new reason to be alive, and a new personality.

“I had been a very different person before meeting them,” Reed explained. “I thought I was private, quiet, shy, not very touchy.”

Anyone who meets Reed now—shameless, theatrical, handson and touchy, with a loud laugh and a well-known affinity for riding crops—can’t believe this story of her old personality.

“I feel like soon I may be the only person who remembers the old me,” Reed said. “And I don’t feel like that’s a loss. At all.”

During her freshman year, in the introductory course for the Gender & Sexuality Studies department, Reed watched documentaries and discussed BDSM (which stands for Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/Submission, and Sadism/Masochism) with Swarthmore review

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her classmates. BDSM is defined as a continuum of practices and expressions, both erotic and non-erotic, which involve restraint, sensory stimulation, role-playing, and a variety of interpersonal dynamics.

Though she was fascinated by her classmates who practiced BDSM, and had been a self-described “cuddly-naked enthusiast” since making her new friends during sophomore year, Reed never actually saw herself participating in kink until this fall semester, when she went abroad to Japan and studied Zen Buddhism.

While there, she studied with Zen Buddhist monks who used a flat wooden stick called a keisaku (“warning stick” or “encouragement stick”) to remedy sleepiness or lack of concentration during meditation. Monks strike the meditator with the keisaku in the muscular area between the shoulder blades and the spine.

The thin, flexible switch causes a momentary sting but does not injure the meditator.

“This is the really silly part,” Reed said, “but I think that, indirectly, getting hit with sticks by monks during meditation was the thing that made me face up to the fact that I enjoy pain.”

While everyone joked about this part of Reed’s transformation into kinky, she found it true. “From discovering my spiritual ascetic tendencies, it was only a short jump to realizing that I also find some kinds of pain arousing. And, well…then I just stopped fighting it and went to Philly to buy a crop and a collar,” Reed said (Philadelphia, like most major cities, is home to a host of clean, well-lit, fully-stocked sex shops, staffed by professional and helpful employees who encourage shoppers to pick up whips and riding crops and take a swing).

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Reed didn’t hesitate to share her newfound interests with her friends, most of whom, she said, live in Mary Lyon dormitory, fifteen minutes’ walk from campus. “The people who live there are as diverse as any group, of course, but as a whole they tend to be very quirky, open-minded, and prone to just jump in and go along with any situation. That’s one of the things I love the most in a potential friend, the willingness to just go with things,” Reed said.

She and her friends elaborate endlessly on non-sensical jokes, and hanging out sometimes ends up with everyone naked and covered in Sharpie drawings. “We have no idea whose idea it was, but it doesn’t matter, because it was awesome,” Reed said.

In short, Reed has found people with whom she can explore her interests--or rather, as she puts it, “I didn’t even go looking, but they end up in my room smacking me hard with a riding crop whilst watching a movie anyway.”

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ne of Robin’s earliest memories is of playing make believe with their friends in second grade, acting as characters from Digimon in various types of power exchanges. For this reason, Robin believes they discovered BDSM far before sexuality.

Robin, who identifies as agender, found their initial attraction to BDSM in male homosocial/homoerotic tension, primarily in science fiction TV shows, but also in fantasy and action films.

They listed Firefly, Stargate, and Supernatural as examples of shows which follow a particularly appealing pattern.

Star Trek first piqued Robin’s interest.

Usually, Robin said, the archetype goes like this: the protagonist (Captain Kirk, usually) is unexpectedly captured or heroically gives himself up for his companions. Interrogations commence, consisting of some kind of combination or variety of shirt removal, insults, physical restraint, or bondage.

“What interested me about this recurring trope was how the protagonist was clearly at least equal, if not superior to the villain, which is why he always won in the end, yet he kept finding himself in positions in which he was deprived of his agency,” Robin said.

This is what Robin finds most interesting about kink: the way in which power can become unequal between two equals. “It’s really about subverting the ‘natural’ order of things,” Robin said.

Many conceptualize BDSM as an accompaniment to sex, something added to make sex sexier, like lingerie. But because of this power exchange, Robin thinks of BDSM more as a category of interpersonal interaction, such as verbal speech, sexuality, or romantic attraction. BDSM interactions needn’t even involve sex.

Robin enjoys them both, and says they rarely have one without the other, sometimes they engages in impact play (hitting with a hand or crop or some other type of implement) to relieve tension without sex occurring. “Asexual kinksters totally exist,” they explained.

The main ingredient of BDSM, for Robin, is something entirely different. “BDSM is an interpersonal interaction which involves a voluntary power exchange, experimenting with agency,”

Robin said. “I consider its core to be power.”

While Robin has found some people at Swarthmore, including their significant other, who are open about their BDSM preferences, it has been difficult to find others compatible with their kind and other identities. “Preferences, including kink, are very contextual, so It’s impossible for me to separate out my kink from my race, gender, and sexual orientation,” Robin explained.

Robin considers BDSM practices far more intimate than sex. In BDSM scenarios, they identify with an image of heroic emasculation, and it wasn’t before they arrived at Swarthmore and found the queer community that they met others who could relate.

“I never really felt ashamed of it before Swat, I’d just never found someone who came at it from that particular angle,” Robin explained.

Still, Robin says, they have not thrown themselves into the BDSM scene here, both because of their current monogamous relationship and because they believe BDSM communities have had a historical tendency to excuse problematic behavior as sexual preferences: “i.e. women are naturally submissive so it’s okay to touch them without asking; white folks not understanding why asking a black person to be their slave could be offensive; general racial fetishization, and so on.”

Discussion of BDSM also suffers from a typically Swarthmorelike problem of too much theory: “It can be difficult to find people who want to discuss kink at the intersection in a personal, rather than strictly academic way,” Robin said.

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Even in private, though, BDSM can carry risks. “You can be into something and still recognize that in ‘real life,’ that’d be pretty fucked up,” Robin said. “I think it’s vital with kink to recognize that, in order to not re-inscribe oppressive social standards.”

Consent is central for Robin during BDSM because of this power dynamic. “Consent and communication are especially important in BDSM because of the actions and implications of what’s being done,” they explained.

Robin continued, “Power exchanges, when done involuntarily, are what we usually call oppression or violation. Furthermore, gender, sexuality, race, class, and other boundaries have to be navigated carefully in order to keep the engagement enjoyable for all folks involved.”

To navigate these boundaries, partners in BDSM often check in with each other as activities take place.

“Before playing with a new partner, I always let them know my safeword and gesture and any hard lines, things that are instant scene-enders,” Robin said. While Robin is fine with verbal putdowns and dirty talk, such as being called a slut (even though they acknowledge that this carries gendered, raced, and sexual orientation connotations), “bitch” is an absolute no-go.

Robin also informs their partner of their interests (they like impact play, biting, and marking), and their soft limits (partners should avoid biting tendon or tensed muscle, and shouldn’t touch broken skin).

“Doms have always checked in with me during the course of what’s happening, usually verbally, in the form of asking “is that okay?’,” Robin said. (Robin identifies as a “sub,” which in BDSMspeak refers to a submissive partner, who will be dominated by a “dom.”)

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the rest of society conceptualizes sexuality, and from the types of re-inscriptions of oppression which are normalized.

“Voluntarily giving up control is a way to ease the pressure of society taking control away from me,” Robin said. “It helps me re-center myself after dealing with all the shit the world is ladling out.”

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he consent process for Sarah also occurs during the course of the sexual activity. She asks if things are OK before she does them, and whether what she does is too hard too soft.

“I get scared sometimes, because when you’re administering something, you don’t know what it feels like, and you don’t know what that person’s limit is, and with things that involve pain, I get worried because I can’t feel what they’re feeling so I don’t know where they are. It really helps when you’re able to maintain communication,” Sarah said.

Sometimes, partners have told Sarah that doesn’t need to ask, but she continues to do so anyway. “I’m not going to stop asking you,” Sarah tells her partners. “It’s my responsibility. I have to worry about the mental and emotional health of the other person,” Sarah explained. After-care, she said, is also important, in the form of checking up on a partner the day after the activity.

She might make a lot of phone calls: Sarah once told me that she would have sex with almost anyone. If she’s is comfortable enough to talk to someone, she’s comfortable enough to be physically intimate with them.

Sarah’s polyamory may be a manifestation of a cultural shift in relationship models, away from relational or companionate ideals of monogamy and of finding a potential spouse, and towards a recreational model, with casual sex and friendship at its center.

The change has been dubbed “hookup culture” after a recent coverage by the New York Times (the buzzword refers to casual meet-ups and sexual encounters rather than traditional monogamous dating), and was met with alarm by adult readers but is well-known to high school and college students.

Sarah has taken this model a bit further than others.

“I think I kind of de-value sex more than most people. It’s important to me, but it’s not just for specific people,” she said.

“For most people with whom I form relationships, I want to be intimate with them. I don’t draw a line between reserving [physical intimacy] to one person or people or whatever.”

For this reason, Sarah sees herself as polyamorous—she has many loves. To Sarah, a traditional monogamous relationship where two people share physical intimacy is no more valuable than a friendship.

Sarah meets those who are interested in hanging out naked— or in more sexual activities—by simply being open about herself.

“I introduce that I’m interested in these things to people I meet, with the hope that if they’re also interested we can both enjoy those things,” she said. “It’s not necessarily sexual. Being naked with people isn’t sexual, really.”

O

n one afternoon in late October, Sarah’s upper thighs in shorts revealed matching sets of long, red scratch marks, slightly bruised around the edges. When she turned around, similar scratches were visible on her back as well.

“What are those from?” asked a teammate on Sarah’s sports team.

Smiling, Sarah said, “I can tell you, but it’s a long story.”

This fall, The Daily Gazette began publishing a column called “Bound and Shagged,” featuring first-hand accounts of kinky activity and BDSM by a student writing under the pseudonym “Knotty Girl.”

Knotty Girl immediately came under fire for her sexual practices by commentators. One questioned the writer’s mental health: “Would you consider writing a future column considering whether BDSM is an emotionally/psychologically healthy practice, and considering whether there are alternative ways to satisfy whatever BDSM does for you?”

While students and Knotty Girl quickly fired back at the commentator and at others who questioned whether BDSM was an appropriate topic for a sex column, and despite the fact that according to K.E. Ernulf and S.M. Innala’s 1995 study “Sexual Bondage: A Review and Unobtrusive Investigation,” an estimated 10 percent of the general U.S. population engages in some kind of BDSM activity during sex, this stigma of poor mental health clings to kink.

Sarah confronts this stigma often, due to her enjoyment of bloodplay, which involves drawing blood and cutting skin with needles and knives. The marks on Sarah’s thighs and back were from one evening when Sarah felt particularly sexually frustrated and decided to engage in bloodplay, relieving some of this tension.

“It sucks, because there’s an association with mental illness with [bloodplay], and that’s something I’ve dealt with for a long time, because I love getting cut and bruised,” Sarah said. Sarah has faced this association with self-harm for a long time, and says she understands it, but hates that people make assumptions and worry about her mental health.

In fact, BDSM and kink as sexual practices involve an enormous amount of prior thought, planning, training, and consent.

“I have to think a lot more than most people about these things--what’s healthy, what do I want to do, what won’t affect me negatively in the future, here are the things I won’t do,” Sarah explained. “It’s so important in BDSM because you can physically hurt someone. Some things are really involved--people do crazy stuff like suspending each other from hooks, or crucifixions. People who do those things spend months preparing, and people tend to be really careful before doing that stuff.” Sarah stays up to date with books and articles about the kink which interests her, in order to keep her bloodplay safe and fun.

Because of BDSM’s emphasis on consent, some survivors of sexual assault enjoy participating in BDSM activities, because they feel as though control over their own sexuality is returned to them. `“Being a survivor of sexual assault and being interested in BDSM has made me a lot more aware of consent,” Sarah said.

“Before I even touch people, like giving them a hug or touching them on the head, I ask, because I know how important that can be.”

R

eed describes her contact with BDSM (and with queer culture) as one of the most amazing parts of her Swarthmore experience. She hails from what she describes as a rural, superconservative, Christian area, “where most queer people are still too afraid to come out to their neighbors and family, for fear of being ostracized or worse.” No one talks about BDSM back home, so Reed never had a chance to learn or explore these parts of her beliefs or personality.

“I am so happy to have so many friends here who are queer or into kink,” Reed said. “They bring so much verve and spice and amazing new things into my life that I never had before.” Reed sometimes jokes to her parents that each time she comes home, she realizes how much more open-minded she has become as a result of Swarthmore, and she soon won’t be allowed across Virginia state lines any more.

Reed’s entire outlook on sexuality has changed as a result of coming to Swarthmore. The more she experiences, the more she wants, and the less interested she becomes in making value judgments. Nothing fits neatly into categories, Reed says.

“There seems to me to be very little point in branding things as ‘sexual’ or ‘nonsexual’ or ‘straight’ or ‘queer’ or ‘slutty’ or ‘abnormal’,” Reed said. “Nudity is not inherently sexual. Nor is touching or caressing. What’s the matter with having sex with a whole lot of people if you’re clear and up-front with them and everyone gives consent? Why do we have to place so much emphasis on figuring out what to label our sexual orientation?”

Sometimes, Reed’s friends will use her riding crop on her in a non-sexual way when hanging out in her room. “The thing I really enjoy about these experiences is other people’s curiosity,” Reed explained. “I feel like not only am I getting pleasure out of the activity, but I’m also facilitating them finding things out about themselves.”

This process of discovery can happen through sexual activity, or not, Reed says. “It doesn’t really matter, in my opinion. Whatever it is, it’s intimacy and human contact and it’s beautiful.” u Reed, Sarah, and Robin are pseudonyms.

Swarthmore review

April 2013

15

FICTION

Zmyey

by Caroline Batten

C

ities grow tall in the thrice ninth land in the thrice tenth kingdom. The buildings sink iron claws into the earth to anchor themselves and soar upwards, in clouds of ash and glimmering electric lights. Their towers scrape the underbelly of the sky. The alleyways and train lines sprawl ever outward, creeping steadily towards the borders of our world.

Cities are haunted in the thrice ninth land in the thrice tenth kingdom. Demons cling to steel girders in underground tunnels, flexing their bat-like wings. Baba Yaga stands in a doorway, lipstick on her fleshless mouth. She beckons staggering men inside to look at her girls, girls with painted faces like masks around their tired eyes. And down one of the older alleyways, newly hemmed in by blackened tenement houses, there once lived the zmyey, the dragon.

The dragon walked like a man, and spoke like a man, and wore the face of a man, though his eyes were overbright and his skin was translucent, traced with the blue shadows of his veins. His fingers twitched, as if his hands were constantly on the verge of reaching for something. Baba Yaga would welcome him by name, smiling her lipsticked smile, but he always left her fine house and her fine girls looking thinner and hungrier than before.

Katerina Nikolaevna was not like them, those exhausted, painted dolls. There was still a blush of blood in her cheeks, a sup-

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pleness in her spine. She was one of the girls who arrived at the city gates clutching stamped papers, a battered crucifix, and a ferocious desire to be someone other than a bony-chested not-yet-woman shrinking in the shadows of tenements. Katerina Nikolaevna wanted to be out of her own skin. Her longing burned like acid in her throat and in her chest. In her dreams, she tore down locked doors with her nails.

Small wonder that the dragon found her.

Katerina Nikolaevna met him in the basement of the tenement house. She was standing over the tap, filling a chipped basin with laundry water, and he touched her, lightly, on the wrist as he passed.

Katerina felt as though someone had pressed a lit cigarette against her skin, and turned around to stare at the man as he held his long fingers before the stove. He took off his damp jacket and held it up to the heat. Katerina watched the muscles in his back shift under his shirt with a feeling that was almost excitement and also almost nausea. She had never seen a man like this before, with eyes so bright and muscles so tense.

He turned his head over one shoulder, the bony curve of his nose outlined in the flicker of light from the open stove. Come over here, he said.

Katerina came.

I haven’t seen you before, the man said.

His voice was very quiet, but his feverish eyes latched onto her face and would not let go. Who are you?

Katerina Nikolaevna, she said. Her

breath was catching in odd places in her throat. She disliked the way he was staring at her, as if she were a curiosity or a child.

Who are you? she demanded abruptly.

An electric spark jumped briefly in his glassy eyes. Zmyey, he said.

I’ve lived here for several weeks, she said, and I have not seen you.

No, he said, you wouldn’t.

Katerina did not know what to say. She did not know if it was appropriate to say anything. She did not know if it was appropriate to stand over a stove with a strange man, or if it was appropriate to meet his hungry eyes. She thought of backing away.

I am sorry I have not seen you, the man was saying. I should like to see you.

Oh, said Katerina. Well. We will. See each other, I mean. I’m sure.

And she finally wrenched herself back to her chipped basin and fled up the stairs.

K

aterina did see Zmyey. Silhouetted skeletal and black against the one window in the hall, smoke curling thinly around his head from what she assumed was a cigarette. Sitting at the landlady’s table, tapping his fingers one by one on the wood, when she came to pay her rent. Coming back to his room, late in the evenings, his face strained with new hunger. When he saw her, he would incline his head courteously, staring fixedly at her face, but never smile or speak. He began to stand silently by the locked doors in her dreams, and she would wake up feeling as though one of her vital organs were missing, a lurching, empty space in her abdomen.

Small wonder that one night, late, when Zmyey came back from his hungry wanderings and tapped lightly on her door, she opened it.

Small wonder that she offered him tea and sat next to him on the bed, her body humming with almost excitement, almost nausea.

You don’t mind, do you, he said, if I? Or do you?

Katerina was confused by the question.

No, she said, uncertain of what she was refusing.

Ah, he said. I didn’t think so, and he took her by the wrists.

She allowed him to do it. She allowed him to kiss her with an open mouth that tasted like ashes, allowed him to unfasten her dress and his trousers and open her legs with both hands.

Afterwards, he stood up abruptly and left, letting the door swing shut behind him. Katerina sat up and struggled to re-

Ilustration by Nyantee Asherman ‘15 fasten the buttons of her dress, bending her arms awkwardly around her back. She felt feverish and overheated, and her whole body swam with the lurching space of a missing organ, but something irrevocable had happened to take her out of her skin.

This, she thought, must have been what she wanted so ferociously. This must be what desire granted felt like. The women in the old stories, the beautiful ones, they were wives won and taken. Elena the Fair, golden hair.

Zmyey began to knock quietly on her door every night. He came always with the same expression, of starvation, and he clung to her body and pressed his mouth to her skin as if there was some energy, some life, in her flesh that would quiet his feverish eyes and strengthen his translucent skin. Sometimes, when he sank his teeth in too deeply, she would have to stifle a shriek and panic would press down on her lungs. But there was a wordless agreement

between them, a contract, and under the smother of his hands and mouth she would sink back onto the bed.

Zmyey did not offer to marry her, even when she told him, in a high, hysterical voice, about the child, and she had to demand it of him. He stared at her for so long that she began to fidget uncomfortably in her ill-fitting dress—for although she was certain she was pregnant she was also growing thinner all the time, her hipbones like two hard apostrophes, her collarbones protruding gauntly—and she felt like the not-yet-woman she was, for the first time in months.

But he agreed, and they were married, and she named their son Tugarin Zmeevich, Tugarin son of Zmyey.

Tugarin Zmeevich looked like his father, with overbright eyes and pale skin, but Tugarin Zmeevich had a fiery heart. Katerina could feel it burning hot against her hand when she laid her palm on the bony

cage of his infant chest. She could feel it in all his veins when she cradled him or held him to her, with a feeling that was almost a tugging, magnetic joy and also almost the swimming terror of vertigo. Something else had happened to help her shed her unwanted skin. And she thought, this must be what I wanted so ferociously, this must be desire granted. The women in the old stories, the strong ones, they were mothers.

One breast of milk, one breast of blood.

Tugarin Zmeevich did not cry as a child.

When he found words he spoke little, though Katerina Nikolaevna sometimes thought he was staring at her as though he wanted to yell. Katerina was not sure if many children did this. She did not know if it was appropriate for a child to look at anyone with such a twisted mouth. But she had made another contract, this one with the small boy; she was his mother. She had brought him into this city of glitter and ash, into this dim tenement room. And she Swarthmore review

April 2013

17

When the Waiter Asks

by Mike Lumetta

Before I spoke I knew it was perjury.

Every time I open my mouth it’s perjury.

That time on the phone, I was stuttering, afraid of perjury, and he laughed.

I perused the menu for anything like truth, but everything smacks of laminated perjury.

The note I left on the mirror: perjury.

What I said in class: perjury.

Subs for lunch felt like perjury but Chinese did also.

She said, I am an apple rotting only on the outside. Eat me.

Birds are entangled by their feet, and men by their tongues.

They subpoenaed me, so I perjured all over the subway station.

I have not yet found the diner where even requests for water feel like honesty.

I knew she was telling the truth, so I peeled back her skin and ate her.

Entangled by our tongues, we swear falsehoods as truths willy-nilly.

Eat, eat and become whole. After I ate her, she stuck with me for weeks.

Every morning now I stand sweating over the bath: How do I get out of all these skins?

I only perjure on Tuesdays.

I only perjure when the waiter asks.

You should know by now not to believe me when I perjure myself.

This morning I look in the mirror, past the words, and dig my fingers into my forearm, gouge for something which will not be perjured: something raw, pulpy, and green.

was proud of Tugarin Zmeevich and his fiery heart.

B

ut Tugarin Zmeevich had a strange habit. Katerina shuddered when she thought about it. He tore the wings off beetles that crawled under the window and laid them out on the floor in elaborate designs. Once he caught a bat—Kat-

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erina never discovered how—and broke its wings off as well, tugging and snapping the skinny bones. Katerina cried, Stop, stop, for God’s sake, and he laid the little corpse aside, but his eyes burned as feverishly as his father’s.

I am the son of the dragon, he said, the first words he’d spoken in days. I want my wings.

Zmyey, Katerina said that night, Tugarin Zmeevich told me he wants wings.

Zmyey turned his glassy eyes on her.

And? he said.

He said he was the son of the dragon, she said. He thinks he deserves wings. What have you told him? What have you said?

I have said nothing, Zmyey said quietly.

His hands twitched almost rhythmically on her skin. I have said nothing.

Did you tell him you were a dragon? she demanded, her voice shrill. Because you can’t say—you can’t be—such things.

Now he wants wings. Tell him you are not a dragon, Zmyey.

Zmyey said nothing, but stared at the ceiling, eyes glistening in the dark.

The next night, for the first time, he did not come back to the tenement house. Katerina sat at the small table waiting for him while Tugarin Zmeevich shuddered in his sleep, but Zmyey did not come. He stumbled back in the morning thick with paint and perfume, and though Katerina was still a not-yet-woman she knew enough to understand that he had been to Baba Yaga’s girls, had sucked the skin of those exhausted little dolls instead.

Katerina’s cheekbones jutted out of her face and the hollows of her collarbone deepened. Each morning her ribs, her knees, the knobs of bone along her pelvis were sharper than they had been the evening before. Zmyey wandered the streets all night. His hands twitched more than ever, and all the tendons strained in his neck, and his face filled with his old hunger, but he did not touch Katerina Nikolaevna. He wandered into her dreams again, silent and skeletal, and she was filled with the dizzy emptiness of a missing vital organ.

T

ugarin Zmeevich began to play out in the street with the neighbor’s son, a heavyset, squint-eyed boy named Aliosha Popovich. Katerina hated him in the unadulterated, furious way that only children hate. She had heard from the landlady that he had beaten another boy and broken his arm. When Aliosha’s father broke up the fight, the landlady said, Aliosha was pulling and pulling at the other boy’s arm as though he were trying to tear it off.

But it was not until she saw Aliosha Popovich under the shadow of the crumbling stoop, tying a pair of black paper wings to Tugarin Zmeevich’s arms, that she became hysterical.

Zmyey, she said, hearing the shrillness in her own voice, Zmyey, tell the neighbors that Aliosha Popovich can’t play with

Tugarin Zmeevich anymore.

Zmyey was standing by the window, staring out into the street. Behind his head, the clouds hung low over the tenements and the air outside was heavy and metallic.

The half-light turned him into a shadow of himself, a black profile. Smoke was drifting around his head again, though she had not seen him light a cigarette.

Why not? he said.

Because look! she shrieked. He is making wings! He is trying to give Tugarin Zmeevich wings! He makes him think he is the son of the dragon!

Zmyey looked down at the street for a moment, and then turned around abruptly to face her. His eyes had become like flames in their hollow sockets and the smoke was curling not from a cigarette but from his nostrils. Why not? he said again. Wings are a birthright.

Katerina Nikolaevna turned and ran out of the tenement house. She was only one small not-yet-woman, and her husband was a starving dragon and her child wanted wings.

She wanted to run all the way out of the city, but the effort of getting down the stairs left her clutching her chest. Instead she tottered down the narrow street, making for the place where four roads met among the tenements.

She stood at the crossroads, bent over to catch her breath, and The Enemy came to her, walking slowly into the street from a crooked doorway in a crooked building.

The Enemy comes when he is summoned. He stands in abandoned houses and at crossroads, and just behind men’s shoulders in the dark. He has as many names as there are languages and as many faces as there are kingdoms, but Katerina Nikolaevna knew him. He looked very much like Tugarin Zmeevich, and she could tell that he had the same fiery heart.

The Enemy said, What do you need, Katerina Nikolaevna?

My husband is a dragon, she said. My son wants to be a dragon. I need them back.

They were what I desired so ferociously.

They were taking me out of my skin.

The Enemy cocked his head and regarded her. Is that true?

Katerina was bewildered. Didn’t she now know what desire granted felt like? Yes, she said, it is true. Help me get them back.

The Enemy smirked, but barely. Then become a dragon in your turn, he said. Become a witch. And he offered her a needle.

Katerina nodded—another contract.

She pricked her finger on the needle. The Enemy took her hand, slid her finger into

his mouth, and sucked the blood from her fingertip.

This is a sign of the blood you owe, he said. Give me the blood of others. Bring them to me, or drive them to me as you have been driven.

Yes, she said. The Enemy released her hand and the contract was made.

Katerina Nikolaevna felt electricity rattling her bones and a hum beginning in her fingers, which were growing translucent in the thin grey light of the coming rainstorm.

There was a hollow hunger in her belly and a power in her hands. She could seize The Enemy, she knew, and not be burned. She was going to get them back. Zmyey would touch her as lightly as he had when she stood over her laundry water in the basement and her whole body had hummed for him. Tugarin’s heart would beat fiery and strong under her hands. She was starving for them. Her eyes were as feverish and brilliant as her husband’s, and she knew she had been wrong all along: this was the feeling of desire granted. For the women in the old stories, the powerful ones, they were witches. Bring me his heart.

Without speaking to The Enemy Katerina turned and ran back to the tenement house. Her breath flooded her bony chest.

A sad drizzle of rain was falling, but it felt hot on her skin.

W

hen she opened the door, Zmyey was still standing by the window, staring at the fire escape. There was no longer any smoke about his head.

She came up behind him and snaked her newly powerful arms around his waist, turning him to face her. She could feel the life fluttering under his skin, less strongly, perhaps, than hers, but life enough. She was starved.

But his feverish eyes widened and he shoved her backwards. What did you do?

I am a witch, Katerina sang, I am a witch and a dragon now, too, and I will live on your blood the way you live on mine.

Where is Tugarin? Where is our child? I will give him all the wings he wants!

Tugarin Zmeevich has made his own wings out of paper, Zmyey said coldly, and he and Aliosha Popovich are out on the fire escape to learn to fly.

Katerina faltered. What?

Zmyey walked towards the door. Do not expect me back, he said.

Why not? she demanded. The hysterical shrillness was creeping back into her voice.

Why are you not coming back? Why are you going anywhere? I am a witch now!

And a witch has nothing to offer me, said

Zmyey. He stared pointedly at her thin, translucent skin, her hands that were even now beginning to twitch. You no longer have what I needed from you.

You sucked my life out for years, she shrieked.

He shrugged. And now there is none left, he said, and closed the door behind him.

Katerina ran to the door and threw it open, but Zmyey was already down the stairs. Wait! she cried, but her newly bewitched lungs and breath and bones told her that Zmyey would not wait, that he would not look back, that she could run and never catch him. She could wear out three pairs of iron shoes and break three cast-iron staves and gnaw away three iron loaves walking the cities of the thrice tenth kingdom, and still she would never catch him.

Katerina Nikolaevna stumbled back to the window. The electricity was dying in her bones, the hum slowly fading from her fingers. She became acutely aware of the rattle of her breath in her chest, the hollow spaces of her cheeks, the stutter of her heart. Soon all that was left of her witchcraft would be the gnawing hunger in her belly, biting at her ribs.

Outside, on the fire escape, Tugarin Zmeevich spread his black paper wings.

They were wilting limply in the rain. Aliosha Popovich’s eyes were fixed on Tugarin, a smirk as bare as The Enemy’s flickering on his mouth.

Katerina thrust herself with all her strength against the window, but her arms trembled violently and she knew she could not open it.

Tugarin Zmeevich was the son of the dragon. He launched himself from the fire escape into the damp, ashy air of the city, and he flew away from her.

D

own on the street, Zmyey walked away from the tenement house with quick, jerky steps, going to Baba Yaga’s. He would stay there all night and emerge in the early morning, livid in the streetlamp glow, to look for another Katerina, another fine house of fine girls.

Katerina could almost see them. Scrawny-necked Baba Yaga with her red lipless mouth, leering at Zmyey as he came to her ancient door. The girls behind her, waiting.

To Katerina Nikolaevna their faces were exhausted and hollow, their limbs bony, their breath thin and gasping. Their eyes burned with fever behind their painted masks. And their hearts stuttered like hers, sucked dry by their dragons. u

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BOOKS RECOMMENDED READING

Dark/Light

PHIL WEINSTEIN

REVIEW

Strange new stories from Karen Russell

Home

by Toni Morrison | 2012 KNOPF 160 pages | $24

Ever since “Paradise” (1997), Toni Morrison’s novels have been getting shorter. Her latest, “Home,” comes in at 145 pages, with large print and margins, a novella by another name. What’s at stake in this shrinkage? In the autumn of her career Morrison seems to be moving toward essence. The work is relentlessly pared down, reduced not in the sense of reductive, but as a sauce is reduced after hours of simmering. As in Beckett, Morrison is approaching the condition of pure narrative voice.

How does her minimalism work? First, spoken interchanges have become condensed, gnomic: “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry” or “You a privy or a woman?” No one hearing these utterances is going to push back. Second, “Home” is about minimalized—wounded— bodies: wounded in a Korean war no one can turn into purpose, wounded in a homegrown racism no black person can avoid. Not even a contest: you’ll be wounded if exposed to this violence. The War enters “Home” as an unrepresented monstrous reality narrated only through the protagonist’s shard-like memories.

Racism enters “Home” via the retrospective wisdom of figures who have spent their lives encountering what’s coming their way. The book isn’t about novel experiences, it’s about surviving familiar ones.

Morrison’s great earlier work proceeded otherwise. “Sula,” “Song of Solomon,” “Beloved”: each of these depends for its power on mesmerizing scenes unfolding in present time. Sula and the drowning of Chicken Little, Milkman and the menace of Guitar, Sethe and the killing of Beloved: these events are in your face.

But in “Home” the unbearable things have already happened; the work of the characters is to bear them nevertheless.

Beyond shock or surprise, Morrison’s narrative voice enacts a compelling minimalist project: to center on what has always been necessary—and on nothing else—if her people are going to survive. u

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Walter Benjamin, left, thought stories should provide counsel, not answers, an ideal Karen Russell, right, reaches for in her new collection.

by Monika Zaleska

O

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

ver spring break I was trying to make a dent in my Netflix Instant queue, which has been growing steadily as the semester has gotten more serious. And so I finally got to watch two films that have been on my list for a while, Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s “Reprise” (2006) and “Oslo, August 31st” (2012). I somehow knew I would love these movies before I saw them, just like sometimes I see the title of a book and know it’s meant to become one of my favorites. You can judge a lot from a title. Take Karen Russell’s “Vampires in the Lemon Grove”—it’s both dark and light, unnatural and natural, foreboding and

by Karen Russell KNOPF 256 pages | $25

eccentric, much like her stories.

Of course, contrasting the characteristics of her stories is easier than analyzing their incongruities. It’s what I’ve found so maddening about storytelling. It’s both simple, and yet inevitably terribly complex. At once, a story needs to be cohesive (whatever that means), full of possibilities yet unimagined, and still trembling with inevitability once you reach its end. Trier’s films seem to do all of these things. In “Reprise” we get dia-

Benjamin photo courtesy of Estafeta; Russell photo courtesy of Interview Magazine

logue played over closed mouths, flashbacks creeping into the present, and a potential future played out before us, that may or may not be how things turned out. Trier never tells us. In “Oslo, August 31st” we meet Anders, a former junkie, and live whole days of his hesitation beside him before he sinks into the inevitable. The simple part of storytelling: it’s only what’s on the screen, or on the page. The complicated part: that isn’t true.

In his essay “The Storyteller” Walter Benjamin wrote that stories should provide counsel: not answers, but a proposal for what could fill the stories negative spaces, what is left unsaid. What does it mean that we see Philip and Kari’s relationship extend into the future (“Reprise”), when we have just watched him have a break down? Does it fill us with despair? Or does it suggest a continuation of a cycle, for better or for worse? They break up, he breaks down, she hesitates, then comes back. Trier never tells us. If we try to answer the question, we’re not being true to the story. If we leave the ending be, we’re not doing the work the film would like us to. What can we do instead?

We can propose. If it’s true that they’ll be together, what does that mean? If it’s over, our hero unsaved, his darkest moments are then the most revealing of his nature. Trier doesn’t tell us.

K

aren Russell’s second collection of short stories, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove,” follows her first novel, “Swamplandia!” The debut was nominated for the Pulitzer: it went up against literary giant David Foster Wallace and the infamous Denis Johnson but the committee couldn’t pick a winner. I first found Russell’s writing through “Swamplandia!,” a quirky book set at a family-run amusement park of the same name. The novel follows Ava, a young girl, and her family as they struggle to keep the dilapidated park profitable after the death of her mother. Much like the stories in “Vampires,” “Swamplandia!” is both funny and dark, strange and deranged, clever and sometimes confused about its own tone. It’s a book I had to force myself to finish because of Russell’s choice to bring the story to a “cohesive” emotional climax around Ava’s rape. In this scene, the storytelling fell apart for me. The text was telling me that this was the pivotal moment of change in this adolescent narrator, that it was providing me with an answer. But this “answer” left me, and many other readers, unsatisfied. I am unwilling to believe that rape, as a literary device, suggests any kind of positive, maturing change, or answer.

This is why this scene was so difficult to balance the book on. It presents Ava, afterwards, as perhaps marred but O.K., a proposal that I couldn’t believe following that scene.

And this is my main criticism of many of the stories in Russell’s new collection: they start with a premise that hooks the reader, truly delights them with its freshness of subject and attention to detail, but often fall flat at the end. “Swamplandia!” itself is based off a short story from Russell’s debut collection “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.” Take for example the premise of the story “The Barn at the End of Our Term,” which envisions the afterlives of American presidents, reincarnated as stable horses. Rutherford, our protagonist president-horse, is convinced his wife, Lucy Webb, has also been reborn, as a sheep.

At the same time Adams, indignant about his current bodily state, plots a march on Washington to reclaim the presidents’ honor. I started off reading this story with little patience for this odd premise, but by the time Rutherford discovers that his “Lucy,” sheared clean, is just a regular old barnyard sheep, I was heartbroken for him. Russell brings an “Animal Farm”-style satire to the legacy of our former presidents: Eisenhower believes that the CIA has found a way to hide him under-the-cover of a horse body, insisting alongside Adams: “I’m no horse!”

The stories in Vampires are diverse—one about Antarctic tailgating, another about a pioneer family surviving a drought, and a third about a veteran whose war tattoo seems to come to life. But they also feel scattered, not fully held together either on their own or in the larger collection. Take the this president-horse story, which ends with Rutherford ambiguously escaping the farm.

Their endings feel pulled together or abrupt.

I hardly feel up to the task of criticizing this—were I to start at story any one of these concepts I wouldn’t know where to go, let alone where to end. They’re bigger ideas than their lengths allow for.

H

owever, Russell’s imagination and empathy are often breathtaking. In “Reeling for the Empire” she imagines Japanese women bewitched with silkworm tea, and fated to become the beasts themselves, spinning silk that sprouts out of their fingertips. Although you could very well take issue with Russell’s somewhatappropriating narrative here, the results on the page are enthralling: But then I woke and pushed the swollen webbing of my thumb and a sprig of

green came out. On my day zero, in the middle of my terror, I was surprised into a laugh: here was a translucent green I swore I’d never seen before anywhere in nature, and yet I knew it was my own on sight.

The title story “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” is a strange love story. It’s about a vampire couple, weaned off blood and living off the juice of lemons, struggle against their darker urges. Well, truly it’s Clyde who struggles, and eventually fails to contain his bloodlust, but it is his love for Magreb, a vampire who cries at the thought of feeding off children, that makes him seek a more humane sustenance. Theirs is a story of recognition: I had been stalking her, following her swishing hips as she took a shortcut through the cemetery grass. She wore her hair in a low, snaky braid that was coming unraveled. When I was near enough to touch her trailing ribbon she whipped around. “Are you following me?” she asked, annoyed, not scared. She regarded my face with the contempt of a woman confronting the town drunk. “Oh,” she said, “your teeth...”

And then she grinned. Magreb was the first and only other vampire I’d ever met. We bared our fangs over a tombstone and recognized each other. There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.

This is Russell at her best: poignant and thrillingly weird, and able to bring something new and human to one of our oldest monster stories. Just as in “Swamplandia!,” when she shows us the behind-the-scenes family dynamics of running the this bizarrely-themed park, so here she introduces us to the inner life of a vampire struggling between love and lust for blood.

Russell shows off both depth and breadth in this new collection, and yet, to return to Benjamin, these stories seem to fall along the lines of providing answers, or providing endings that do not feel properly inevitable.

“You don’t need to accept everything as true,” Kafka writes in “The Trial,” “you only have to accept it as necessary.” Russell has a voice, that, while often far-fetched, attracts our attention and fields our emotions. The question is whether these premises always lead to necessary endings: to narratives that are inked on the page, but propose much more. u Swarthmore review

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The Confessions

REVIEW

Literature can’t save David Shields’s life

by Trip Lenahan

D

eath is that which is irreducibly one’s own, that which no proxy can be arranged to confront, that which no one can experience in another’s place, and knowledge of this stems from (or perhaps leads to the further realization of) one’s unique singularity and irreplaceability, a step toward the comprehension of death’s irreducibility, and an insight one can achieve without having to first access that great inaccessible mystery of one’s own nonbeing. Such is an extension of the

How Literature Saved My Life

by David Shields KNOPF 224 pages | $26

thematic thrust of David Shields’s newest effort “How Literature Saved My Life,” a book mixing equal parts memoir, literary collage, essay, and short story. Nearly thirty years into his career, David Shields resides comfortably in the interstice between short story writer and autobiographer. While remaining the hollow, detached observer he both hates and prides himself to be, Shields plunges further into the hyperconfessional style he’s become known for, exhibiting the hopeless abandon of a man who’s given himself to his letters, and who, perhaps overwhelmingly so, has given himself to his readers, who, in turn, for two hundred pages, are cast as psychoanalysts permitted to wander through Shields’s labyrinthine mind. Though a series of entertaining confessions (diary-theft and impassioned anilingus stuck with me) pepper the book, Shields is at the top of his game when confronting death, and though he charges the topic headfirst, he refrains from offering greater comments on the subject, opting instead for brief entries (mainly functioning as personal anecdotes and short-form literary criticism) which hint at conclusions, but, in the end, work to form a simultaneously cohesive yet hugely fragmented book that seems to mirror, quite deftly, the fragmentation of the human experience vis-à-vis our 22

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“The Death of Marat,” painted in 1796 by Jacques-Louis David

impending deaths.

The tragicomic remoteness of otherness pops up throughout the book, from Shields’s childhood preference not to play Little League but instead to watch games from a hill overlooking the field, to biting adulthood recollections of the deaths of family and friends. Shields gets at something haunting, though, in his treatment of the deaths of those to whom he had little relation or little interaction. The

deaths of strangers affect Shields similarly to (if not in exactly the same way as) the deaths of friends. Shields relates the loss of a former student he barely knew, and hints at suicide throughout (both his own considerations and the implied suicide of a pen pal). In so doing, Shields establishes the theme that death itself is tragedy, nothing more. Death is true otherness, overtaking friends and strangers indiscriminately. Shields comes across Painting image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

as the man uniquely capable of living up to the Buddhist ideal of not mourning the specificity of individual death by remaining equally horrified (or, maybe, equally unaffected) by death itself, no matter the human form it chooses to inhabit. It is through this bleakly distanced relationship to life that Shields gains his strength as a confessor—one gets the sense that Shields cannot work through his problems, that they have overtaken him, left him worn, haggard. An author might use writing to work through issues of self and otherness, but Shields rarely makes progress in this regard. Forgive me for revealing the punch line, but Shields concludes the book by relating how literature didn’t save his life.

How nothing will save his life, for that which grants immortality destroys death’s singularity. I bring death upon myself, an act that at once comes from me, is taken on by me, while ever coming from above, from beyond, a dual occurrence in the space between action and reaction.

Shields makes good use of false memory, collective memory, and confusion caused by the historicity of truth, themes subtly present throughout, and manifests this at times through mechanics and, prominently on the first page, as error in idiomatic recall (“They were always keeping the wolf from the door, if that is the expression”). He joins a wealth of literary collage and memory-centric literature (Vila-Matas’s Montano’s “Malady,” Borges’s “Shakespeare’s Memory,” Umberto Eco’s “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” to name a few), bibliographic wet dreams that forget where life lets off and literature picks up, with plots never not working as metaphors, dreamscapes inseparable from reality. Thanks to his autobiographical precept, Shields avoids many of gimmicky shortcomings of other works, and, thank Jesus, avoids amnesia entirely (is there anything worse?). The relationship of memory and mental weakness remains, however, as Shields offers tales of stuttering, his own linguistic limitations, and the unique viewpoint this affords him as a writer.

Shields’s great strength in blurring the line between short story and autobiography rests in his ability to convey a semblance of universality through the remote particularity of his own experiences. Such is the challenge of any author, of course, but in particular for a genre-bender like Shields. Life and autobiographical writing, not unlike death, reflect something that is exclusively one’s own, something the confessor seeks to understand through the self via the other (in this case the readership).

Shields includes a great section about how perception of a work of art forever alters the work—calling into question the existence and relevance of intention— and how, without perception, the work doesn’t seem to exist (think a reversal of the double-slit experiment where the wave function doesn’t collapse upon perception but only exists therein). Shields embraces the inseparability of the writer from the finished product, and “How Literature Saved My Life” reads like a movie with a boom mic in clear view and a director calling the shots, audibly, overdubbed atop the film dialogue and score. “And, action.”

“And, cut. Let’s try it again from where the mother walks in, but instead of looking up at her, maybe look at the clock?”

In Julia Haslett’s “An Encounter with Simone Weil” (as underrated as a documentary can be, and itself a genre-bending work), an ancillary crew films the real crew filming shots for the documentary from a balcony overlooking the street below, a

choice, I would wager, intended to mirror the postmodern inner workings of Weil’s thought. The climax of the documentary occurs during a deadly serious interview between Haslett and an actor portraying Simone Weil, where the actor seems to become the Christian ascetic, and Haslett cannot separate reality from fiction. Chip Kidd’s cover art for “How Literature Saved My Life” shows a skyscraper and four people, three of them pressed up against their office windows looking at one sitting on the edge of a landing, feet dangling over the street a hundred stories below reading a book, seemingly aware of his being watched, aware of his appearance to his audience. While watching Haslett’s documentary feels like watching a movie watch itself, Shields’s book reads like an author reading himself, blurring the line between short story and autobiography, between fact and fiction, resulting in a structured confusion that I can’t help but believe Shields intended to create all along. u

Defense

by Yumi Shiroma His hand on my ankle I’m packed like snow, blankets curled above. My fingers are ice.

Typing is freeze. Burning my lips I remember that time I set my skin aflame with cheap beer, then later bent to drink water like glass from the silver of the bathroom sink. I dreamed of throating apples, one by one down the hole.

I think I thought I’d grown over this. I go lovely and bored so easy. I want to publish my notebooks but I do not want to confess to you. “They called me the onion girl.” You strip off your skins and they weep.

Flesh to God, woman to lens, these blankets down my face. My face the wrong wrong face. My hands that did the gripping wrong even in the dark. Carolyn told him stop touching but that didn’t mean he stopped.

Mary is cracking with hate, she is throwing her body against the walls to crack it like an egg.

And I tell you I was crushed, bent in a housecat’s jaw.

I want to publish my notebooks but I do not want to confess. I want to publish my notebooks I am peeling pages off my skin. Run the film in reverse and you can see me put my armor back on. First, the gooseflesh; surrender’s white flags; the colored clothes; then all dazzle and hard.

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MOVIES The Tarantino Effect REVIEW

These movies just keep getting worse

by Izzy Kornblatt

Q

uentin Tarantino, the great breaker of cinematic conventions, the impaler of cliché, the transgressor of boundaries (of taste, mostly, though also of genre), has himself recently become rather conventional. As if all four-plus hours of “Kill Bill” were not enough, he has now essentially remade that movie—twice: first there was “Inglorious Basterds,” which sets “Kill Bill” during the Holocaust, and now “Django Unchained,” which sets it in the slavery-ridden pre-Civil War south. A formula is in effect here, a very simple one, actually, but most critics haven’t noticed.

Each of these movies has been widely and rather breathlessly acclaimed. And the latter two have now been nominated for a combined 13 Oscars, both for best picture, and both, even more concerningly, for best original screenplay. So it is unsurprising that Tarantino says he is now planning a movie called “Killer Crow” about a troupe of black American World War II soldiers who go off on, of all things, a killing spree.

What, exactly, is Tarantino’s formula?

First: a typical scene or sequence brings together two enemy parties, who carefully, in long conversations, feel each other out and pussyfoot around one another, and the tension builds, and finally something sets off a tremendous bout of violence. It turns out just about everyone is armed to the teeth, and psychotically sadistic. Blood spurts implausibly, and often in slow motion. Things, and/or people, explode. Creatively horrifying wounds are given rather too much screen time, as are excrutiangly slow deaths. Second: the larger plot is one of simple revenge: a wronged party—Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill,” the Jewish soldiers and theater-owner in “Basterds,” a freed slave in “Django,”—goes about participating in such scenes, never losing focus on revenge. Often these heroes—I suppose they can be called that—are the only survivors of the individual tension-then-

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violence sequences; certainly they are the only, or among the few, surviving characters at the movie’s end.

One disinterested observation I would like to make about this formula is that it is awfully similar to the formula used by another highly regarded filmmaker: the eleven-year-old me. I may have lacked Tarantino’s skill with dialogue and building tension, and certainly I lacked his extravagant budgets, but I more than made up for it in violent zeal. My movies, too, featured slow motion blood spurting (my mom got upset about the ketchup stains on my shirt), and slow deaths, and imaginative weaponry. But above all what unites the younger me and the recent Tarantino is our attitude toward story: a mere hassle on the way to more gore, more killing.

Tarantino is interested in in his characters only insofar as he can have them kill each other, just as I was. That may explain our joint enthusiasm for the revenge story: it is awfully convenient, requiring no sustained inquiry into feeling or thinking. It provides a ready emotion to explain violence; it allows for a very cheap sense of vindication. And Tarantino reliably refuses to give his vengeful characters suggestive traits or inner lives of any sort or to entertain the radical notion that revenge, in particular cruel, murderous revenge, might not always be so fulfilling; as such, his movies are strictly revenge fantasies, as opposed to revenge stories. And what is a revenge fantasy, really, but a juvenile excuse to imagine violence without consequences?

Indeed, juvenile is the right word for these movies. Such basic requirements of storytelling as authentic character and dramatic plausibility have been all but discarded. Why is this tolerated and even encouraged? Because of the final element in Tarantino’s formula: ironic, allusive, knowing self-consciousness. Tarantino constantly winks at his audience with his little references, his moments of cleverness, constantly signaling them to feel

Django Unchained written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

superior to his story: they are in the know.

The violence serves not only as a release of tension within the story, but also as a release from the story itself, because it is so deliberately over-the-top, so ridiculous. This is why the claim that Tarantino movies normalize or encourage real-life violence is so wrong: the violence is intentionally and obviously unreal, the sort of thing that could only happen in a Quentin Tarantino movie. This knowingness, which pervades all his recent movies, is what allows critics and his cultish fan base to claim him as some kind of postmodern savant (in the New Republic, to take just one example, Tom Carson writes of Tarantino’s “self-conscious genius”).

I might dub the result of the whole formula—the tension-then-violence revenge story plus ironic knowingness— the Tarantino effect. The Tarantino effect, which can be found in many other movies (and books, for that matter) as well, is when clever self-consciousness allows the audience to place itself respectably above rather juvenile entertainment, even as that juvenile entertainment remains the heart of the thing, the reason it is entertaining: the self-consciousness makes the juvenile respectable while the juvenile makes the self-consciousness watchable. Tarantino gets to have it both ways, to put himself above his juvenility and still indulge in it. A good analogy for this kind of thing comes from the theorist Roland Barthes’s “Mythologies”: “If I am in a car and I look at the scenery through the window, I can at will focus on the scenery or on the window-pane. At one moment I grasp the presence of the glass and the distance of the landscape; at another, on the contrary, the transparency of the glass and the depth of the landscape; but the result of this alternation is constant: the glass is at once

Ilustration by Nyantee Asherman ‘15

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Juvenile is the right word for these movies. Such basic requirements of storytelling as authentic character and dramatic plausibility have been all but discarded. present and empty to me, and the landscape unreal and full.” “Unreal and full”: that exactly describes Tarantino’s juvenility; just as his self-consciousness is “present but empty.” That is the problem. Self-consciousness is not an adequate replacement for real storytelling and it does not absolve juvenility—I can tell you I know I’m acting immature but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m acting immature. Too often self-consciousness is mistaken for moral seriousness or for intelligence (indeed, for “genius”). The ultimate reason that these movies are so unsatisfying, so forgettable, so shallow, even so boring (as anyone who has suffered through all of “Kill Bill” can surely attest), is that Tarantino has abandoned the craft of storytelling and seems unable to replace it with anything of substance.

I

say “abandoned” because Tarantino has in fact made some pretty good movies.

His first big one, “Reservoir Dogs,” may be a better concept than a movie, and in it Tarantino’s taste for sadism is already quite apparent, but it is clever and well crafted. My favorite of his movies is still the classic “Pulp Fiction,” his second big one, which is similarly clever and more complex: its many low-level LA criminals cross paths in rather ingenious and surprising ways—some of the scenes are great; and, in his long, careful monologues, Tarantino even showed a certain interest in his characters’ inner lives, or at least in their tortured attempts to connect to one another. That movie is full of violence and references, but the violence feels authen-

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tic to the characters’ world, a real part of the story; and the references feel minor, a small byproduct of the director’s sensibility, naturally pushed aside by the current of the story. There is nothing deep or powerful in “Pulp Fiction”—it is, as Anthony Lane put it, “cinema as fast food”—but there’s nothing wrong with that. Movies seem to lend themselves to lightish entertainment, and so “Pulp Fiction” has good company in the form of such movies as Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed.”

There is a further problem with “Inglorious Basterds” and “Django Unchained”: the historical content. I am reminded of Theodor Adorno’s famous comment that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Of course, and as Adorno later conceded, great art can and should respond to tragedies; and a movie like Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful,” much of which takes place in a concentration camp, can tell us something deeply true about human commitment and about the face of evil. Still, it is easy to understand the gist of Adorno’s sentiment: levity of any sort seems like it should kept far from tragedy, particularly tragedies of such tremendous magnitude as the Holocaust or slavery.

What is troubling about Tarantino’s movies is that they grab onto these tragedies as grounds to launch their fundamentally unserious, exaggerated revenge stories.

Tarantino is not racist or anti-Semitic; it is just that the cavalier anything-goes meaningless violence he so adores does not belong in the same movie as slavery. Since he is so uninterested in actually exploring slavery or the Holocaust, those settings in the end serve only to allow and encourage the audience to cheer for the onscreen vengeance. (I have heard it argued that “Inglorious Basterds” is in fact out to criticize its audience for this, but why provoke such a response only to formally censure it? And anyway the evidence for this is flimsy at best; and certainly it does not explain “Django.”)

A.O. Scott, writing in the New York Times, calls “Django” “ethically serious,” claiming that by having a black man play the role of avenger, Tarantino is battling cultural norms: “the sanctification and romanticization of revenge have been central to the ideology of white supremacy.” (Tarantino made similar claims in an interview.) That last part may be true, but now that white supremacy is no longer the dominant ideology, what is so daring about having a black man be the avenger?

No one these days believes that revenge is only for white men, so “Django” is hardly

making an important statement; it is only reflecting the dominant ideology of its time. And anyway, there’s nothing “ethically serious” about a revenge fantasy, no matter whose side it takes. What is finally so unsettling to the thinking viewer is the implicit suggestion that Django or the Jews in “Basterds” are in fact no worse than their oppressors, since in Tarantino’s world everyone is united by their tremendous excitability to violence: the Jews torture Nazis; Django tortures slave-owners.

(That their sadism “feels” justified is simply Tarantino’s cheap use of a historical tragedy playing its part.) In the world of the revenge fantasy there are not really any moral distinctions, and so violence is meaningless. In other settings this might just be silly but here it is deeply disturbing, for was there ever more meaningful violence than during the Holocaust or during slavery?

jango” opens with its best scene. Two slave traders are shepherding a group of mistreated slaves through a forest in the middle of the night when they encounter a slightly too-friendly dentist, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), who rides in a sinister cart with a large tooth on a spring on its top. This being a Tarantino scene, it is then only a matter of time before the slave traders are killed and tortured; still, the tension between the dentist and the traders builds very well, and the tooth is a nice touch. Soon we learn that Schultz is in fact a bounty hunter on government business: he is looking for a slave, Django (Jamie Foxx), who can help him identify some of his next targets. (Was that actually legal back then?) Sure enough, Django is among the traders’ slaves; and after the killing is done and the other slaves freed, Django sets off with Schultz. The two become quite the team. Schultz is an abolitionist at heart, and he treats Django well, training him in the ways of bounty hunting, paying him for his help; together they kill off a great many cruel slavers (and Klan members).

All this holds together well as a story and is thus fairly engaging, though it is typically shallow. At what could have been one of the movie’s best moments, Schultz takes Django to buy clothes, and Django, astonished that he can get whatever he wants, emerges with some sort of absurd royal-blue colonial corset complete with frilly white scarflike thing. This suggests a revealing of character, a moment of storytelling, and in a better movie, one in

“D

which characters were developed, that is exactly what it would be; but because there are no other such moments it just plays for laughs. Or, actually, there may be one other moment a bit like it: it comes when Django cannot bring himself to shoot a father who’s walking with his son. Schultz turns to Django and explains to him that the father is a criminal, and thus does not deserve sympathy, and then goes ahead and Django shoots him, and the moral issue is dropped. What is striking about this is not just that the issue is dismissed so easily but that the scene is not very good: it lacks a sense of human doubt or lingering guilt, a realness. Tarantino may in fact not be quite so skilled at dealing with authentic emotions and morality, and that may be why he so painstakingly avoids them.

Tarantino characters are well known for talking a great deal, but rare is a Tarantino character who is truly expressive.

So far the Tarantino formula has been pretty much in effect—the tension-thenviolence sequences, the theme of revenge, the self-conscious echoes of spaghetti westerns; but only around a third of the way through the movie does it go all-out.

Django and Dr. Schultz decide to rescue Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from a plantation owned by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Candie, we learn, has the chilling pastime of training “mandingo fighters” (slaves trained to fight other slaves to the death), so Django and Schultz decide to pose as mandingo buyers, so they can buy or pretend to buy an expensive fighter and then offhandedly ask to have Broomhilda thrown into the

deal so as not to raise suspicions. No, that does not really make sense. Why not just have Schultz make an offer directly for Broomhilda? Why insist a very expensive fighter? Why such an elaborate routine?

Well, because anything simpler wouldn’t offer the same opportunity for tensionbuilding and bloodshed of all kinds. This way the deceit builds slowly, and along the way we get to watch the horrifying conclusion of a mandingo fight and an old fighter get torn apart by hungry dogs, to name just the most memorable violent moments.

And then just as the deal is poised to go through, Candie’s house slave Stephen (an admittedly very good Samuel L. Jackson) tells his master he thinks something’s up. Candie explodes into a rage and says Schultz must pay $12,000 for Broomhilda or he will kill her. This, too, seems rather implausible: why is Candie so bothered?

Even given that Schultz wanted Broomhilda more than the fighter, he would presumably pay for both, since a contract had been drawn up and the bounty hunter was not about to break the law; a death threat seems over the top. Needless to say, a great deal of violence ensues. Spoiler alert: pretty much everyone dies.

I may not have mentioned that “Django” is nearly three hours. Well it is, and the going is tough. The moderately entertaining first 40 minutes soon give way to an increasingly predictable and so increasingly boring, increasingly violent and so increasingly uncomfortable following two hours. The story is so flimsy and implausible it may as well not exist. (I began wistfully to think back to the complexity of

“Pulp Fiction.”) Django is a total nonentity. Schultz talks more but is uninteresting; Waltz was better in “Basterds.” Predictably, there is nothing to their friendship. DiCaprio plays up Candie, but his sadism is so unsubtle and so obviously his only trait that he, too, loses our interest after just a few minutes onscreen. Indeed, all of the characters are entirely established within their first few minutes onscreen: after that they are fixed and dreary and nothing like real people. As if to make up for this, the violence keeps increasing in hysterical pitch and unreality. At one point during what seems like the climactic shootout Django uses a dead body as a shield of sorts and every time it’s hit with a bullet, which is far too many times, it spurts an absurd fountain of blood. And here, at last, we have reached the inevitable conclusion of the Tarantino formula: juvenility exhausted: the walls of Candie’s mansion are literally painted red with blood. We have long since stopped caring. But it turns out that relief, which had seemed so close, is not yet in sight: there is even more. Django is rechained and hung upside down in some cruel contraption; then someone almost cuts off his testicles. He is sent to work in a mine, but escapes and returns to kill more of Candie’s men, and his sister; and to shoot the house slave Stephen in the kneecap; and finally to blow up Candie’s house. In the midst of all this Quentin Tarantino himself makes an appearance, sporting an Australian accent. His screen time is rather limited, though, because soon after he quite literally explodes. It is a fitting image. u

RECOMMENDED VIEWING | NORA KERRICH Gummo

(1997) written and directed by Harmony Korine

Don’t watch this movie if you like cats.

“Gummo” is a movie that is not intended as mass entertainment and relies heavily on its shock value for emotional punch. It is definitely one of my favorite films, but mostly due to the fact that I am disturbed each time I watch it. I have difficulty knowing if it is my desensitization to violent words and actions that makes this film watchable and re-watchable for me, but it is certainly not for the faint-of-heart or for thrill-seekers.

These are the stories of Xenia, Ohio following a devastating tornado, stitched together in a narrative as nihilistic as the characters. The movie pans out in several vignettes, some a combination of AV film, polaroids, or 8mm film with narration, including silent footage of the destruction of the town, others standard scenes in 35mm. Perhaps the most interesting motif throughout these captured moments is that in the longer narrative vignettes the violence of words and actions escalate to a climax, then the next scene begins without the conflict resolved, leaving the viewer unsatisfied and uncomfortable.

Korine’s writing is impressive. The petty banter between acquaintances and kinsmen throughout the film increases its disturbing quality. The viewer feel as if they are voyeurs, or exploitative journalists looking for the strangest people within a dismal population. These characters provide little to no empathy for me as a viewer, except towards the end of the movie when certain characters experience brief moments of childish joy.

If you’re considering watching this film I’d recommend watching one of Korine’s tamer or shorter works beforehand. Watch “Kids” (1995), for which Korine wrote the screenplay, which is an upsetting movie in its own right, but it doesn’t include the jolting and confusing narrative that makes “Gummo” such an intense movie. Watch Korine’s short film “Snowballs” (2011), which has a very similar visual and narrative tone to Gummo but doesn’t require nearly an hour and a half of your attention. Watch Die Antwoord’s music video for “Umshini Wam,” which Korine directed and contains his characteristic dialogue sequences and his visual style. Look out for Korine’s first foray into mainstream cinema with “Spring Breakers” (2013), starring some post-Disney actresses looking to expand their acting repertoire.

“Gummo” is a test of a viewer’s patience and stomach: it will probably change the way you think about cinema and entertainment in movie. u Swarthmore review

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The Good, the Bad, and the Reference A phenomenon goes too far

ESSAY

by Philip Harris

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he line between good and bad art is a fine one, by now much faded, scuffed, in places obliterated. Works good and bad keep to their respective sides; great art routinely crosses, pushing the highbrow into the low, the vulgar into the couth. The poet Hesiod urged deference to Zeus and an awareness of the hearth’s tendency to light up any semen crusted to one’s inner thigh. Writers Thomas Pynchon and Francois Rabelais both indulge in the scatalogical; Michael Chabon and Italo Calvino elevate dime-store sci-fi. Alexander Pope was an expert on the stylistically bad: in “The Art of Sinking in Poetry,” he identifies and catalogues failures of verse. But as Hugh Kenner notes, in his own poetry Pope uses every one of the techniques he derides; he ridicules a metaphor from the pen of one Nathaniel Lee then expands it into seventy lines of his own masterpiece, “The Rape of the Lock.” While other poets were crafting dense poems of (technically) immaculate verse, Pope discovered the flexibility of the bad. He recognized that it is often the perfectly-crafted, artisan-grade vessel that sinks, whereas its slightly comical, perhaps ungainly, perforated counterpart floats.

“The Dunciad” is a mock-epic: Homer as if authored by a dunce. And it floats.

To make a comparison without implying an analogue: Quentin Tarantino. Love him or hate him, Tarantino is at work transmuting the bad into the good, pulp into prose. Like Pope, Tarantino takes the forms of the “dunce”—Blaxploitation revenge films, Japanese splatterhouse, Italuploitation westerns—and crafts masterpieces, or, at least, crafts films a hell of a lot better than “Zombi 2” or “Goke: Bodysnatcher from Hell.” Of course, Tarantino lacks Pope’s judgment and occasionally emulates the bad too well. He rightly considers his Grindhouse segment “Death Proof ” to be the weakest film in his oeuvre; “Death Proof ” doesn’t just reference exploitation films, it is an exploitation film.

That said, the craft of Tarantino and Pope isn’t simply effortless transmutation. They are perhaps not the artistic philanthropists we take them to be, selflessly pulling lesser 28

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forms out of the gutter, dusting them off and dressing them up. With both men, their authority is not quite their own. What is “The Dunciad” without Homer? Or “Reservoir Dogs” without Kubrick’s “The Killing” and Ringo Lam’s “City on Fire”? These works do not simply elevate the “bad,” they also mire themselves in it, referencing it, selecting the choice bits and leaving the rest, perhaps even disingenuously. We might exempt Pope from criticism. In his case his title says it all: “The Dunciad.”

We anticipate the Homer, the satire, the assumed authorship, and the dunce. We see the man behind the curtain and he nods to us. With Tarantino, however, it is Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar, and “My, what a fresh take on the western!” You’ll be astonished to hear that the general populace is not well-versed in exploitation films; thus, the obscure references tend to fly under the radar, leaving

only the novelty. By contrast, consider Cormac McCarthy’s magnum opus. At its core are “Moby Dick” and “Paradise Lost,” seminal works, references which are hard to miss. Nonetheless, their influence is subsumed, masked by laconic prose and the smell of offal. If asked what we are reading, we say “McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’!” Tarantino’s western, well, it is called “Django Unchained,” but that title is halfpurloined from the Franco Nero original.

The story too is secondhand, appropriated from ‘70s Blaxploitation westerns: the narrative is something of a chimera, with the head of “Mandingo” and the body of “Boss Nigger.” Even in its minutiae­—a score by Ennio Morricone, gratuitous Leone zooms, retro title cards, and exploitation splatter effects—it reveals itself as a geneticallyengineered film, simultaneously a westernhomage and a recipe for one.

But I digress. I am not here to roast Tarantino (I leave that to Izzy). In fact, I Image courtesy of A Year in the Academy

enjoy his films, and ultimately I think he’s harmless. The fact that his blatant homage films are lauded as intellectual and nominated for Oscars speaks more to the condition of the academy than anything else. My dissection was for illustrative, not critical, purposes. In Tarantino we see the “reference” in its most benign form. Tarantino unapologetically wears his inspirations on his sleeve; if he wants to spend the rest of his career making minority-revenge exploitation films, more power to him. What I would like to posit is that the reference is being put to more subtle and insidious ends. But first: what is the Reference?

What is its appeal? When a friend makes a reference, we sometimes scoff (“Kafkaesque indeed”); why, then, when directors reference Godard, do we fawn?

On a very basic level, references are satisfying. Take “The Matrix,” a film near overflowing with references: license-plate registration numbers that correspond to biblical passages, nods to Carroll, Orwell, and Jean Baudrillard, explicit religious analogues both Oriental and Occidental, and a dash (or more) of John Woo’s brand of Hong Kong bullet-ballet. As viewers, we love to ferret out these little details. We connect Neo’s apartment number (101) to Winston Smith’s torture chamber from “1984” (cell 101), and we enjoy a slight (and somewhat smug) rush of satisfaction: we got the reference, we are in the know.

A cynical observer might see this as a somewhat disingenuous system of mutual gratification: as we congratulate ourselves for catching a reference, we also acknowledge the obviously well-read author (as if name-dropping is any accomplishment in the Internet age). At the same time, correctly used, the reference can be a powerful tool. Were Neo’s apartment number 102, it would be an apartment, nothing more. As number 101, it is charged with all the subtext of “1984”’s torture chamber, reshaping how we read Neo’s narrative position. Used correctly, references serve as intertextual metaphors, evoking with a single phrase a novel’s worth of connotations.

We can see our collective fascination with the reference at work in the Internetage phenomenon of the “meme.” The meme as an object or text is interesting insofar as in most instances it is devoid of originality in the objective sense. Even in “Kill Bill,” Tarantino’s most explicit homage pastiche, one can tease out “the Tarantino,” those bits he did not lift from other films. Indeed, in looking at any work, be it “Blood Meridian” or “Django,” it seems we can identify two strains of influence: the reference, which

explicitly alludes to some other work, and the “original,” that which originates from within the artist. In the event that the “original” appears to be a reference, we must judge whether the reference is unintentional or dishonest (Yann Martel’s only exposure to “Max and the Cats” was through a non-existent John Updike review?). With the meme, there is only reference. As an autonomous text-object, an image of wrestler Jeep Swenson as Bane with the caption “For You!” is a non sequitur: it is only funny if we identify the image as a reference to Schumacher’s “Batman and Robin” and the caption as a poorly delivered line from “The Dark Knight Rises” now absorbed into the lexicon of Internetforum discourse.

But again: harmless. And I’ll admit, I did cherry-pick a particularly esoteric meme.

Certainly we can all relate to the sentiment evoked by the common meme-phrase “Deal with it,” regardless of context. But I am not here to attack Reddit either (though I would argue that the non sequitur vulgarity of some Internet humor has had an adverse effect on mainstream comedy films—observe: “Movie 43,” “Ted,” etc.)

What I am here to attack, or simply point to as operating unobserved, is a different, more reflexive reference: the self-reference.

It’s not breaking news that Hollywood has in recent years been inundating us with remakes. And coming soon: “Robocop,” “Godzilla,” “Mad Max,” Spike Lee’s “Oldboy” (cringe), “Point Break,” “The Crow,” “Starship Troopers,” “The Neverending Story,” “Highlander,” Zack Snyder’s “Superman,” “The Magnificent Seven” (remake of a remake), and “Logan’s Run.” Of course, there is no mystery to this phenomenon, no question of what drives sales: the selfreference. In some cases, the self-reference is minor, a throw-away (the new Bond doesn’t care if it’s shaken or stirred?!).

Other times, we almost dismiss the selfreference (“Well it was good, but it wasn’t really ‘Star Trek’”). And then there are films built upon the self-reference. A whole slew of action films (cleverly termed “Geriaction” films) has cropped up in recent years, pictures starring aged versions of your favorite 80s action heroes: “The Expendables” 1 & 2, Schwarzenegger’s “The Last Stand,” Stallone’s “Bullet in the Head,” Willis’s “A Good Day to Die Hard,” etc. Come see Arnie blow away a drug lord and follow it up with a quip about his bad back. As is the case with films like “G.I. Joe” and “Battleship” (strange to see in the digital age; who still plays Battleship?), the reference is nostalgic. No doubt our expectations are

low, in the case of “Battleship” non-existent, but would we go see “Battleship” if it were called “Pacific Battle,” or “G.I. Joe” if it were re-titled “Action Squad?” Or any of the “Geriaction” films if the aged all-stars were absent? There is some indignation, but it is often half-hearted; many cherish “Die Hard” and “Total Recall” as childhood favorites, but not to the extent that they boycott the reliably mediocre rehashes.

And thus, Hollywood continues to churn out paper-thin remakes deep-fried in CGI, a process that is increasingly being outsourced to third-world rendering farms (prompting over 500 American visual-effects artists to picket the Academy Awards this year). Of course, many moviegoers watch these films ironically, anticipating the bad; regardless of irony, money still flows. And once-beloved franchises simply become franchises.

One upcoming remake has me utterly perplexed: the reboot of Sam Raimi’s cult-classic “The Evil Dead.” The original defies expectations. Clay-mation that simultaneously evokes the macabre and “Wallace and Gromit,” strangely endearing zombies, and, of course, Bruce Campbell: all brilliant. The result is a film difficult to validate in print that nonetheless captured the hearts of many, occupying a spot on the cult-shelf alongside “Pink Flamingos” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Raimi’s response to this adulation? “It wasn’t supposed to be a comedy.” His original intent was to make a straight horror film: the gore was supposed to shock, the zombies terrify, and, I assume, we were not meant to spend the film mesmerized by Bruce Campbell’s chin. And the team behind the reboot have obliged. From the red-band trailer, 2013’s “Evil Dead” looks to be full of gore, dismemberment, and instances of bloody projectile vomiting; conspicuously absent is a soul. The original “Evil Dead” must have been sentient: it transcended its origins absent a self-aware creator. Pope transmuted the bad into the good; the team behind the reboot of “Evil Dead” is transmuting the inexplicably good-bad back into just plain bad. And the fans are left scratching their heads.

Perhaps the culture of reference is approaching escape velocity. E.L. James’s “Fifty Shades of Grey” is a Twilight “fan-fiction,” an art form once relegated to anime forums. But that’s old news: 2013 is the year of the “Wallbanger,” which has sold well over 100,000 copies. What is “Wallbanger,” you ask? Why, a “Fifty Shades of Grey” fanfiction, of course! And do feel free to hold your breath for the remake. u Swarthmore review

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MUSIC Something to Say

BEST OF

Billy Lennon picks out the best albums so far of 2013

“Open Your Heart” with its driving guitar hook and crescendo into the chorus.) “The Seeds” is another great track, with a nice combination of piano and guitar keeping it going. On the whole, the Men have released another cohesive and solid album in “New Moon.”

We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic Foxygen JAGJAGUWAR

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New Moon The Men SACRED BONES

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he Men have three distinguishing features as a band: their variety from album to album, the frequency with which they put out albums, and their passion, which usually comes in the form of ear-deafening screams. The Men are especially known for this passion, to which anyone familiar with their 2011 and 2012 efforts, “Leave Home” and “Open Your Heart,” can surely attest. In “L.A.D.O.C.H.,” from “Leave Home,” the 30

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lead singer sounds like he’s coughing up blood when he screams into the microphone. In “Turn it Around”—and much of the rest of “Open Your Heart,” for that matter—the band’s sound is more hardcore/punk: the result is party music with an emphasis on guitar.

On their new album “New Moon,” however, the Men calm down and take a breath. The opening track, “Open the Door,” has a piano entrance that makes the listener feel like he or she just walked into a saloon. In “Half Angel Half Light,” the band returns to its more fast-paced, guitar-centered form, but the song sounds like a traditional classic rock number, driven by the vocals. (“Electric” is the exception to the rule: it could be straight off

oxygen is one of the most adorablelooking bands I have ever heard.

They also have an adorable band name. This adorability they have extends right into their music: they treat it seriously but have a sort of light-hearted approach to playing that makes them a pleasure to listen to. “No Destruction,” like most of their songs, sounds Beatlesesque. The acoustic guitar driving the song perfectly compliments the vocalist. (The song also has one of the most memorable lines I’ve heard in awhile: “There’s no need to be an asshole, you’re not in Brooklyn anymore.”) The band goes into more serious and deep territory in “On Blue Mountain”: the vocalist sings about the Bible and about “hiding feelings for you.” The song has a great bass hook that syncs up perfectly with an organ of the sort that sounds like it came from a horror film… but then the song quickly shifts to an upbeat poppy sound with highpitched background vocalists echoing the lead singer. Later, at what I almost want to call the “nadir” of the song, the singer sings a series of “yeahs” that start low and eventually end with him singing “yeah” in a crackling high voice. “San Francisco” has a cute synthesizer hook playing throughout the song and has a very memorable chorus. The vocalist shows how great his

voice is when he sings “and you, swimming upstream.” The album ends with a few more great tracks; a highlight is the title track, with a brilliant guitar hook that seems to drive the message of the album home: tackle the challenges of life and fight your inner battles, but in a lighthearted way that allows you to enjoy the journey.

genre of guitar-focused pop coming from such groups as Diiv and Wild Nothing, the Beach Fossils had to do something special to keep their place with these bands.

And they have. This album is impressively structured. The album starts out slow, and then kicks into high gear with “Careless,” which is much more punk than anything the Beach Fossils had previously done, and which starts off an excellent four-track succession: “Modern Holiday,” Taking Off,” and “Shallow” follow. “Modern Holiday” is a well-placed interlude with sounds that the Beach Fossils have never before created, and with a synth that sets the mood for the highly addictive “Taking Off,” which is a classic Beach Fossils song. The bass sets the tempo, and then a guitar comes in, and then another guitar comes in to add necessary and beautiful layering. The chorus is beautiful, with one of the Beach Fossils’ best-ever guitar sequences. Then it’s on to “Shallow,” which, like “Careless,” is driven by guitar chords that feel contained and have a lot of potential energy. Dustin Payseur’s vocals are also shown off here. Other great tracks include “Birthday” and “Caustic Cross.”

The interludes, “Modern Holiday” and “Brighter,” perfectly divide this album into a few distinct components and make it a very cohesive as a unit. The Beach Fossils have certainly delivered on “Clash the Truth.” “Beach Fossils” was just an album for people to get high to. This one actually has something to say. u

Clash the Truth Beach Fossils CAPTURED TRACKS

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he Beach Fossils’ 2010 eponymous debut saw them craft some utterly delightful summer jams with bite. “Daydream” perfectly encapsulated this feel. Like most Beach Fossils songs, many layers of guitar come in and seem to punch you right in the jaw. The tracks gave off the slight feeling of a swoon but still have a kick to them.

On “Clash The Truth,” the swooniness is largely gone, but the driving guitar is still there. The opening track seems like a response to “Druun,” the opener of the album “Oshin” by Diiv, whose lead man is a former Beach Fossil. After a phenomenal year in the world of shoegaze, a subSwarthmore review

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