Issue 10

S

W

A

R T

H

M

O

R E

APRIL 2015

Please be seated

Photo essay by Mckinley Bleskachek AND An interview with Bill McKibben Spring break in Ferguson A manic pixie dream adventure

CONTRIBUTORS Nyantee Asherman is a senior and an art and sociology major who,in an ideal world ,would be an illustrator but would also be rich.

Daniel Bidikov is a freshman from Long Island, New York, studying comparative literature and German.

Mckinley Bleskachek is a junior.

Jesse Bossingham ’16 studies honors political science, economics, and pre-medicine. He has written reviews exclusively about comedy and death.

Briana Cox is a sophomore from Tullahoma, Tennessee (you’ve never heard of it) studying cognitive science and Japanese.

Isabel Cristo is a freshman.

Priya Dieterich is a freshman from Brooklyn, NY, studying Education and some other stuff, who finds the pressure of writing a witty bio entirely overwhelming.

Gabriella Ekens is a sophomore comparative literature/ film double major who writes about cartoons for AnimeNewsNetwork.com.

Liliana Frankel ’17 is from Yardley, PA. Twice she has found eggplants in surprising places; the first was floating down a canal, and the second was lying in the middle of a grimy Philadelphia sidewalk.

Anna Gonzales is a junior from Denver, Colorado, studying English and gender and sexuality studies.

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 agonzal4@swarthmore.edu.

How to contribute We solicit pieces from writers, 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 rare cases, publish anonymously. Submissions should generally not go longer than 10,000 words.

Contact: agonzal4@swarthmore.edu.

Max Hernandez-Webster is a sophomore.

Sam Herron is a freshman from Miami, Florida, studying education and sociology and anthropology, who spends most of her time watching cute dog videos on the Internet.

FOUNDER IZZY KORNBLATT

Danny Hirschel-Burns graduated in 2014, majoring in peace and conflict studies and minoring in history.

He now works for a human rights foundation in Washington, DC.

EDITOR IN CHIEF ANNA GONZALES

Lindsay Holcomb is a junior from New York who majors in political science and Spanish.

MANAGING EDITORS LILIANA FRANKEL NORA BATTELLE

Chris Malafronti is a freshman.

Uriel Medina Espino is a junior from McComb, Mississippi studying political science and Spanish.

COPY PRIYA DIETERICH

Patrick Ross is a senior studying theater and English. He writes drama and fiction and has an interest in strong, bureaucratic females with questionable moralities.

Steve Sekula is a sophomore from Bucks County PA majoring in computer science and art.

ART NYANTEE ASHERMAN STEVE SEKULA S W A R T H M O R E

Julian Turner is a freshman from Nashville, Tennessee co-authoring his first book, “Ebonomics: The Economics of Today’s Hip Hop Republic.”

Lily Tyson is a sophomore.

Joyce H. Wu is a senior who is excited about graduating, but less excited about what lies between now and graduation.

Sophia Zaia is a freshman from Austin, Texas who has not declared her major. She lives in a quint but next year she is living in a single.

Founded 2012 | Vol. 3, No. 4

FICTION PATRICK ROSS PHOTO ESSAY NOAH MORRISON POETRY COLETTE GERSTMANN MIKE LUMETTA Z.L. ZHOU CONTRIBUTING EDITORS TOM CORBANI ISABEL CRISTO LEO ELLIOT IAN HOLLOWAY XAVIER LEE

Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com Design © 2015 the Swarthmore Phoenix. All content © 2015 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. Printed at Bartash Printing, Philadelphia, PA. Please recycle this magazine.

“‘I meant,’ said Ipslore bitterly, ‘what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?’ Death thought about it. CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE.” — Terry Pratchett

PROFILE S

W

A

R T

H

M

O

R E

April 2015

Arts BOOKS

PHOTO ESSAY

Please be seated

Hem, hem 46

Rocking his way through life

TELEVISION

On Dave Toland’s past in the army, his family, and his thoughts on Swarthmore

In defense of Dolores Umbridge

by Patrick Ross

A distinct world 51

31

On Fox’s new series, ‘Empire’

by Julian Turner

by Mckinley Bleskachek

Steven Universe 52 Unbreakable? 54

‘Kimmy Schmidt’ has a ways to go

by Lily Tyson

MUSIC

What hip hop needs right now 56

On Kendrick Lamar’s latest offering

by Max Hernandez-Webster

Am I teenager-ing enough? 58

by Lindsay Holcomb FEATURE

ESSAYS

The hero we need and deserve

by Gabriella Ekens

4

On Ayotzinapa

Spring break in Ferguson 16 Reflections by Priya Dieterich Whither the utopian consensus? 22 A love letter to Swarthmore’s community by Danny HirschelBurns This is a Thinkpiece™ too 27 A response to ‘In college and hiding from scary ideas’ by Isabel Cristo

On The Brooklyn Indie Music Journey

by Sam Herron PERSONAL ESSAY

Sufjan’s best album yet?

61

jp

On ‘Carrie and Lowell,’ Stevens reconciles himself to life

by Jesse Bossingham

36

by Anna Gonzales

8

by Uriel Medina Espino

ALSO IN FEATURES It’s about power 7 An interview with Bill McKibben

by Sophia Zaia Etymonline 10 What is Doug Harper’s big idea?

by Liliana Frankel

ART

I hate myself and want to die of laughter 63 On the value of self-deprecation in comedy

by Daniel Bidikov ILLUSTRATIONS Steve Sekula 57 Nyantee Asherman 42, 62 Mckinley Bleskacheck Cover photos

FICTION: Two short stories & microfiction

This is Eric at the end by Briana Cox 41

How to get on to a really high bed by Allison King 43 Microfiction from seven writers 45

POETRY: Four works

66

With pieces by

Kimaya Diggs Leah Gallant Christopher Malafronti Joyce Wu

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

3

PROFILE

Lace up your combat boots, dye your hair blue, and rock your way through life

by Lindsay Holcomb

Dave Toland during a recent warm day in the Scott Ampitheater.

The last time Dave Toland went to the airport, he was immediately plucked from the security line and subjected to a full body search by the gloved hands of a wary TSA agent. Stares of apprehension followed him as he held up the line, submitting to a special kind of probing reserved only for those whose appearances deem them threatening enough to warrant enhanced security protocol. Dave Toland has 97 tattoos, several piercings, and a short mohawk gelled into a razor-like ridge that peaks one inch above his scalp. >>> 4

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

Photos by Bobby Zipp for the Swarthmore Review

He loves to drive motorcycles and, for all intents and purposes, looks like the quintessential member of a biker gang. What the TSA agent who so aggressively singled Toland out that day did not know, however, is that Dave Toland is an incredibly modest Environmental Services Technician at Swarthmore College who spent 10 years as one of the most accomplished snipers in the U.S. Army Airborne Ranger division, and that if there was a legitimate security threat, Toland would probably be the person on the line most equipped to thwart it.

“I fit that whole stereotype,” Toland says.

“But people make false assumptions about other people’s appearances all the time. I’m just me. I’m just a family guy.”

These days, the forty-year-old Toland is a soft-spoken father of three who spends his days quietly performing his janitorial duties at the college. The action, the excitement, and the challenges of military life are behind him.

“Day to day life now is pretty much silly,” Toland said. “You go to work. People complain and they have no idea.”

Between 1992 and 2002, Toland was based out of Fort Benning, Georgia, but he spent time in Portugal, Germany, Panama, and Colombia. He and his sniper partner won the Eastern U.S. Sniper Competition after Toland shot three rounds through a quarter at 800 yards out, and he represented the U.S. Army at the European Sniper Competition in Regensburg, Germany.

Throughout his ten years of service, Toland spent most of his time on active duty stalking members of drug cartels who were hiding in the jungles of Colombia and Panama. He and his sniper partner were part of a “high-speed unit,” that could be sent anywhere in the world in under 18 hours, and they typically spent no more than five days at a time in any given place. Toland is quiet about the harsher details of his work in the military, but explained that being in the jungle was “cool” because he learned what barks to eat in order to survive and how to make sure that monkeys did not steal his canteen.

Such a description is typical of the way in which Toland describes his time in the military. He has an unwavering tranquility and humble apathy in his accounts of his service, refusing to sensationalize or glamorize a single detail. This stalwart attitude helped Toland advance through the ranks of the army. Before leaving his sniper unit in 2002, Toland had reached the rank of Sergeant First Class.

“My whole philosophy was ‘I’m tough this is who I am,’” Toland said of a time do-

ing cold weather training near the Canadian border when he got frostbite throughout his entire body. “There was no complaining. I was a squad leader, a team leader, a platoon sergeant, and a sniper team leader.

It was tough, but there was always that respect. It was the same way I am here. It’s either my way or the Army’s way, and my way is much better.”

At the college, Toland is the daytime EVS foreman. He is a crew leader and something of a general, whose troops report to him daily with respectful deference. As he walks around campus, he is greeted everywhere he goes. Choruses of “Hi Dave” echo throughout the halls in which he works, testaments to a unique approachability that so contrasts his severe exterior.

Toland first came to Swarthmore in 2008 after six years working as a janitor at Springfield High School. Swarthmore was a compelling work environment for Toland—a man who spends his free time getting tattoos and piercings—because he

Toland spent most of his time on active duty stalking members of drug cartels hiding in the jungles of Colombia and Panama. felt that his alternative appearance would be accepted.

“I came here first because I wanted to make money for my kids college tuition,” Toland said. “But I also loved the overall self-expression of the place. No one is the same here.”

Toland feels that at Swarthmore his individuality is not only accepted but celebrated. This is meaningful for him, coming from a conservative background where his rougher aesthetic was not always embraced.

Toland grew up in Upper Chichester, Pennsylvania, 30 minutes by car from Swarthmore’s campus. His parents, who still live there, are of a more traditional mindset than the individuals Toland feels that he connects with at Swarthmore.

“It was always regular haircuts, church every Sunday,” Toland said. “And then I went to the service and everything was the same, structured. You had to have your hair

a certain way, look a certain way, and I kind of saw tattoos as my out.”

When Toland’s father discovered his son’s first tattoo a few weeks before Toland began basic training in Fort Benning, Georgia, he chased him around, furious. Toland had decided to get a tattoo of a heart that said “Mom and Dad” on his arm as a physical reminder of their bond that he hoped to carry with him through deployment. The sentiment of this message was lost on his parents, however, who continue to hate tattoos to this day despite the fact that Toland’s body has become something of a canvas for permanent ink.

“They all have meaning except for one,” Toland explained. “I’m running out of room, though.”

Toland’s skin is an homage to all that is significant in his life. He has images of his children and his wife, but the tattoo that is most important to him is the tattoo he received with the rest of the members of his special unit in the army while he was serving in Fort Benning, Georgia. The tattoo, which simply says “Warriors,” serves as a memento of the name which the unit gave themselves. For Toland, the tattoo is a way of remembering and honoring all of the men that he served with.

“That was like a bond, a real bond,” Toland said. “I don’t know if I’ll have a bond like that again.”

Toland has remained close with most of the men with whom he served. His sniper partner is now a state trooper in Pennsylvania, and he and Toland are still close friends. Nevertheless, in the first month of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Toland lost 24 friends that he served alongside with in his unite. Later, more of Toland’s friends were killed on duty in Afghanistan.

This was an incredibly hard period for Toland. He got out of the army 11 days before the U.S. invaded Iraq, and it was difficult to conceptualize the role that fate might have played in determining the trajectory of his life.

“I had totally lost my edge,” Toland said.

“I didn’t care before. Nothing ever bothered me, but now I had kids, and they were more important.”

Toland found it difficult to focus on his military duties when he had three young children growing up in a world he sees as increasingly menacing. On September 11th, 2001, Toland was holding his daughter in his arms when he heard about the first plane striking the World Trade Center.

That night, he watched President George W. Bush declare to the nation, “If you are wearing a military uniform, you are going SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

5

to war.” Because Toland was still actively enlisted in the army at this time, this call to arms was particularly meaningful. He remembers when a patch with the American flag was sewn onto the right shoulder of his uniform to indicate that the country was at war. He was caught between his roles of soldier and father, knowing that soon the U.S. would be engaged in full combat, while at the same time fearing for the futures of his children whom he worried would grow up in a world where terrorism was a real threat.

Ultimately, Dave felt that the best decision for him was to be with his children during this trying time, and in 2002, he left the army and began work at Springfield High School.

The memories that Toland has of September 11th and his friends who perished in Iraq and Afghanistan remained inked on Toland’s consciousness to this day. In the fall of 2012, Toland was cleaning a building

Toland specifically sought out the Swarthmore community for its reputation of tolerance and acceptance. on campus with another EVS technician, who was also a veteran of the U.S. Army, when they found an American flag, crumpled up, at the bottom of a trashcan. Toland was angry and saddened by the display, feeling that it was indicative of a certain level of intolerance that he was not used to at Swarthmore. He felt that his experience in the military, as well as the experiences of all of men and women that he knew in the military, were being disrespected. He knew that it was not a pernicious attack against him personally, but he saw it as an unwarranted attack against a symbol embodying his beliefs about and his experiences with military service. Symbolism—as would be expected for a man with over 90 tattoos—is immensely important for Toland.

To express his dismay, Toland wrote an article in the Phoenix, making a plea to students to consider how they handle the American flag. In the article, he describes how to properly dispose of a flag and offers 6

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

to do the deed for anyone who needs help.

“Needless to say, I was extremely pissed off and angry,” he writes, regarding his reaction to discovering the flag. “All I could think of were the men and women who fought and died defending our flag, the symbol of this great country. For me to see it thrown in a trash can was truly a slap in the face.”

Toland was shocked to find that in response to the article, he received 748 emails, attacking him for what he had written. While he knew he was expressing an unpopular opinion, he was not expecting such an overwhelmingly harsh response from a community of which Toland did— and still does—believe he was a part.

Throughout the article, Toland uses the phrase “Fellow Swatties” to address his readers, an indication of the fact that Toland genuinely conceives of himself as a “Swattie.” Working as an EVS foreman is more than a job for him as it in many ways serves an entree into a community that he loves and specifically sought out for its reputation of tolerance and acceptance.

Nevertheless, Toland believes that over the time he has been here, while most of Swarthmore’s culture has stayed the same, some aspects have definitely changed.

When Toland first came to Swarthmore, he worked the night shift from midnight to eight thirty in the morning. According to Toland, the only other people he would see during these late hours were students streaking through the halls on campus or students walking around with bongs.

Today, Toland believes that the unorthodox traditions of the past have been muted somewhat and replaced by a student body that adheres more strongly to conventionality.

“You could not imagine the difference between 2008 and now,” Toland said. “Definitely a different culture. A little bit of the sense of free spirit is gone.”

Despite what he sees as a loss of some of the more liberal “self-expression” of the past, Toland has developed an incredibly romantic vision of Swarthmore during his time here and has made the school an immense part of his life. Through Learning for Life, which pairs Swarthmore students and staff to collaborate on projects in which they are mutually interested, Toland has worked with students to write poetry and is currently in the process of writing a play, which will be performed next fall.

His children engage in various afterschool programs on campus, he participated in the Imagination Project where members of the Swarthmore community wrote personal

messages on headshots that were hung in the Science Center, and he was married on campus last fall.

Toland chose to get married in the amphitheater because the place holds special meaning for him. During his 4:00 AM lunch breaks, when he working the night shift, Toland would perch himself on the top step of the amphitheater and write poetry in the light of dawn. Reflecting on this experience, Toland believes that the unconventional dichotomy of his mohawked, tattooed, and war-hardened self crafting delicate prose in the isolation of nature is emblematic of the contradictions of his identity and his experience at Swarthmore.

“I wanted to go to college, my parents wanted me to go to college, my grandparents wanted me to go to college, but I wanted to join the army more,” Toland said. “It’s cool. It’s like now I get the college experience.”

Nevertheless, Toland recognizes that his experience is unique. Many of his colleagues do not feel the way that he does about the college or about the opportunities offered, and they do not feel as accepted as Toland does amongst the students.

“There’s definitely this idea like ‘The students don’t even look at you, they don’t even talk to you,’” Toland explained. “But everybody says ‘Hi’ to me.”

Toland believes that his success at Swarthmore has been due to the fact that he has viewed the college as a place to truly express himself from the first moment he got on campus. He has tried to actively avoid suppression of any part of his being, and he thinks that that is what has made his time at Swarthmore so enjoyable. He speaks with pride about the connections he has made to administrators on campus, particularly Diane Anderson, Dean of Academic Affairs at the college, whom he sees as something of a mentor. Above all, Toland is happy to have had the opportunity to change people’s conceptions of the person behind the biker aesthetic and to be able to hopefully make an impact in student’s lives and celebrate their individuality.

In 2012, as a part of a digital storytelling exercise organized by Learning for Life, Toland wrote a few lines advising Swarthmore students on the way in which they should go about their lives at the college and beyond.

“My advice: don’t ever change to try and please anyone else. Be yourself and let people get to know the real you,” Toland wrote.

“So lace up your oxblood Dr. Martens, dye your hair blue, and rock your way through life.”u

FEATURES

“It isn’t about data and science, it’s about power” An interview with Bill McKibben Interviewed by Sophia Zaia

“I

t’s the gap between changing light bulbs and changing the system that’s powering our destruction.”

Bill McKibben drew this distinction in his op-ed “A Call to Arms,” published in Rolling Stone in May 2014, which invited the masses to the People’s Climate March last September. This philosophy seems to define McKibben’s climate justice activism—after leading a five-day march through Vermont to demand action from politicians on global warming with his campaign Step It Up 2007, he founded 350.org, which his personal website calls “the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement.” 350.org has mentored student-led divestment campaigns across the globe, with the vision that divestment will foster the political and social stigma towards fossil fuel companies necessary to completely change the way we power our lives.

On March 26th, Bill McKibben joined Swarthmore Mountain Justice and trainers from the Earth Quaker Action Team for a rally for divestment in Upper Tarble. McKibben’s excitement over the strength of support for divestment at Swarthmore was palpable. Although he has since been named “probably America’s most important environmentalist” by the Boston Globe, McKibben did not become politicized as a climate activist until after the publication of his first book on climate change, “The End of Nature,” in 1989. As McKibben stated in an interview with the New Yorker: “People did read it, but that turns out not to be how change works.

It took me a long time to realize that the scientists had won the argument but were going to lose the fight, because it isn’t about data and science, it’s about power.”

Due to the brevity and business of his visit to Swarthmore, I was not able to

interview Bill in person, but he responded to my questions by email.

Is there a certain moment, event or time in your life that encapsulates your inspiration to commit to the fight for climate justice? Was a specific occurrence particularly politicizing for you?

Well, many—but once I was in Bangladesh doing some reporting on climate change there, and they were having a huge outbreak of dengue fever—which of course is spreading fast as the climate warms. I was spending a lot of time in the slums so eventually I got bit by the wrong mosquito, and got it myself—I was as sick as I’ve ever been, but I didn’t die because I was strong and healthy going in. but a lot of folks did die, and I reflected hard on the fact that the 180 million people who live there, their carbon footprint can barely be calculated. It’s so small it’s practically a rounding error in the global calculations.

That helped convince me to go beyond writing and start movement-building.

In your speech at Swarthmore on March 26th you mentioned how you had originally believed that to convince politicians to take action on climate you just needed to form the best scientific arguments. Then you realized that politicians and big oil were not interested in listening. Can you describe the evolution of the climate fight from your first involvement until now? What changes have you seen in the arguments and most convincing tactics employed by both climate activists and the opposition?

There’s finally a movement—which is very good news. Without it, the environmental lobbyists and so forth stand no chance. But if we can build it big enough to change the zeitgeist around this issue, then the politics will follow, just as they

did with, say, gay marriage. The other side understands this, which is why they pour huge amounts of money into the fight.

Money is what they have, and usually that’s enough to win—but sometimes movements can get big enough to match it.

The climate movement has received the critique of consisting of primarily white, privileged people, a sort of “elitist” activism. How would you respond to this accusation?

Doesn’t seem true to me. When I look at the pictures of the 20,000 or some demonstrations and rallies that have been associated with 350.org, in every country but North Korea, most of the people involved in this fight are poor, black, brown, Asian, and young. Which makes sense, since that describes most of the people on earth.

In addition, recent years have seen the emergence of formidable leadership among indigenous people around the planet. They’re some of the allies I like working with best.

What gives you the most hope for a sustainable future on earth? What is our most important tool as we attempt to transition to a sustainable way of inhabiting the earth? Or is it too late?

The rise of movements is our big hope—as they get larger, I get more optimistic. Though it must be said, we waited a long time to get started, and it’s possible we’ll never catch up with the deteriorating planet.

Guest question from Madeleine Feldman: What were you like in middle school?

I didn’t much like junior high, and I was awfully glad when it was over. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

7

FEATURES

On Ayotzinapa

What can we do to bend the moral arc towards justice?

by Uriel Medina Espino

“M

exico is not so far away...it’s also here,” warned Clemente Rodríguez Moreno, whose son had survived a municipal police ambush in Iguala, Mexico, where 43 student-teachers were forcibly disappeared. Clemente’s comment rings true in many regards, especially amid the Black Lives Matter Movement, which is drawing attention to the disproportionately higher killing of Black people in the U.S at the hands of police officers. But his comment was also aimed at other very direct ways the U.S. is connected to the current political and social crisis in Mexico.

On April 8th, Clemente, joined by Anayeli Guerrero de la Cruz and Felipe de la Cruz Sandoval, all relatives of victims, made a stop as panelists at Haverford College on their way to a mass march in New York on April 26. But before discussing the event, a recap of the events on September 26 and what has ensued to contextualize the transnational journey of “Caravana 43,” a caravan of relatives of the attack’s victims.

On September 26, about 100 student-teachers from the Ayotzinapa Normal School in rural Guerrero arrived in Iguala.

They were to protest education reforms and raise funds to attend a commemorative demonstration in Mexico City of Tlatelolco, a massacre of student protestors

8

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

in 1968. Peaceful protests and other civic demonstrations are routine to students of Normal schools like the one in Ayotzinapa (no strangers to police brutality), as the schools were born, in part, out of the necessity to teach the history of class struggle in Mexico. Clemente suggests this mission has ensured under-financement, except for during the Lazaro Cárdenas regime (19341940), because “un pueblo educado, es un pueblo libre”—an educated community is a free community. These schools are meant to train teachers who serve the poorest urban and rural parts of Mexico. Clemente cited Article 3 of the Constitution, which states education (including Normal schools) to be a free right, as proof that the government’s underfunding of Normal schools is illegal and unethical.

Dozens of students fled the attack in Iguala. Two died from the initial shooting.

Other non-students (a journalist, a soccer player and bystander) died during a second shooting from an unmarked car drive-by at the same site hours later. Of the 43 missing students, many are already feared dead, as the buses they traveled on were heavily impacted by gunshots, with witnesses reporting there was a lot of blood inside the third bus. Government investigations claimed that the police turned all student-teachers over to the Knights Templar Cartel, and three men, now in custody, allegedly incinerated all the bodies in a ditch for 15 hours, dumping the remains in garbage

bags along a river. However, this finding is largely rejected because three men can’t burn 43 bodies in 15 hours, and a fire that large would definitely cause alarm amidst the community searching for the victims.

A Nobel Prize-winning Argentine forensics team has rejected the government-produced remains as being the students’ bodies. Further, the relatives claim a cell-phone signal search of a student’s phone showed it was now on a military base — and this was after the government denied an military involvement, a claim they’ve since retracted.

An entire movement has been built around finding out the truth, and this tragedy has duly become the face of public unrest behind the over 26,000 missing since the beginning of the War on Drugs in 2006.

Anayeli, Felipe, and Clemente were one out of three caravans traveling first across Mexico and then the U.S. Their task was to give insight to the movement’s goals and promote general awareness surrounding the issue. The heartbreaking stories they shared evoked a lot of different emotions — shock, grief, fury. Shock because of the audacity behind such a large disappearance, despite how commonplace these occurrences are. Grief from the massive loss of not just any life, but that of those who were to dedicated to helping, educating, and empowering those most in need. And fury, naturally, because of the government’s increasing culpability and the bold-faced lies they’ve doled out instead of

The parents of the kidnapped Mexican student-teachers, traveling the US to raise awareness and call for justice, came to Philadelphia in early April.

holding themselves accountable. Anayeli shared how the student-teachers’ families have taken residence at the school because travel is difficult from their humble communities in rural Guerrero, yet they wish to be present at a moment’s notice in case any new information is discovered.

She also shared her righteous frustration over the indolence of the government, who have resorted to telling the relatives “supérense”—to move on—but questions if they would be so willing to move on if it were the politicos’ own children. Felipe, a street vendor, described his son’s dreams of becoming an agronomist to teach communities to sustain themselves. Since other students like his son were robbed of the opportunity to study, Felipe says, we should appreciate what we have, put it to good use, and remember the sacrifices our parents might have endured for us to be where we are.

However, before the centrality of the conversation on Mexico’s case turned into “otherizing” the issue and thus characterizing the tragedy as isolated or a symptom of a defunct Mexico, Clemente warned the audience not to sit too comfortably because “Mexico is here, too.” Mexico is here when an unarmed Black person dies in the hands an officer who is ultimately acquitted.

Mexico is here when youths protesting in Mexico City hold a sign that says “From Ayotzinapa to Ferguson.” Mexico is here when U.S. government money via the Mérida Initiative (the U.S. anti-drug policy plan for Mexico) funds an increasingly militarized police force in Mexico, under the aim of fighting drug cartels, but the arms Photo courtesy of Luna Ixchel

instead end up in the hands of drug cartels or are used against innocent civilians, as was the case in Iguala.

With Clemente’s associative claim in mind: when we discuss worldly issues in our classrooms, dining halls or rooms, how often do we analyze our potential roles?

Obviously, we as U.S. residents and/or citizens can have a role in alleviating this massive human-rights atrocity, or else the caravan would not be traveling to disperse their message. What can we do, particularly as college students, to demand the appearance of these student-teacher’s bodies, and to ensure the moral arc does bend towards justice (to paraphrase Dr. King) in this case? The panelists were adamant when emphasizing our status as college students, highlighting not only that we are the very future of our world, but also that we have infinitely more resources than did the disappeared students. This access to resources shouldn’t be taken for granted and we should use it to help advance these causes.

One way is vote if you can, keeping in mind that our legislators help draft gun and drug policies—both which, as previously discussed, currently augment the massive human rights violations taking place in Mexico. Another potentially impactful way to take action is to write to your legislators as often as possible, to influence policy opinions and get this interconnectivity into our lawmakers’ conversations. We need to rethink the prohibitionist policy around drugs and the policies that enforce such policies like the Mérida Initiative, which have disastrous effects like

further splintering the drug cartels and thus causing increased fighting for territory and money. The concentration on drugs has also caused cartels to diversify their portfolio because of a dent in drug profits (they existed, after all, to make money in the intersection of a shortage of economic opportunity and the opportunity to smuggle drugs to the U.S. for black market money) and thus have turned to increased extortion and kidnapping for ransom. We should also not ignore the social impact of engaging in these conversations with friends so as to raise awareness and thus widen the potential number of agents for change. Ultimately, the panelists stressed: “no desaprovechen la oportunidad”— don’t take the opportunity for granted. In the context of that night, this advice was directed not only to our future potential with the opportunities available to us, but taking advantage of our current power as American college students to effect change today.

We clearly have an interest in ensuring this change on our end, because we too can see, within our country, the effects of police brutality, and the social unrest that follows when it remains unaccountable. What is also concerning is that the cartel violence has long spilled across the border, to the extent that cartels have mapped out turfs in the U.S. and engage in violence stateside, too, in ever increasing numbers. That’s part of what Clemente must have meant when he warned that should the U.S. ignore this impending crisis not only next door, but here too, that it’ll have to “deal with the consequences.” u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

9

FEATURES

Etymonline.com

etymonline.com ( /ˌɛtəˈmɒnˌlaɪn/) n. So-called Online Etymology Dictionary, “a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English,” founded 2001. Simple, maybe retro graphic design in dark red and two shades of tan holds constant throughout the entire site (including ads) as if its webmaster, Doug Harper, is worried that someone might charge him extra to print in full color. Users can choose to pore through the entries letter by letter, as in a traditional reference text, or do a word search; a successful search, say, for “etymonline.com”, will return not only a corresponding entry, but also every entry whose body includes the search term. The resulting displays follow a sort of recursive logic.1 It is usually interesting and oftentimes necessary to read through the whole chain of search results in order to approach a full understanding.

In 2003, W. Miller, of Florida Atlantic University, noted:

“Other aspects of this site include a multitude of humorous and frivolous biographical information, a discussion forum

[now defunct], and an area in which sponsors can post a graphic, brief narrative in return for a $10, six-month sponsorship

of a single word (an opportunity almost no one [now what looks to be almost everyone!] has taken). This free online source

is not a substitute for OED or published etymological dictionaries, but it is a good supplement to them.”

Doug Harper b. 1960, Greater Philadelphia area. Writer, Chester County Historical Society. Holds an undergraduate degree in history. Has worked as the copy editor for a local newspaper for some time now. Maintains blog “The Sciolist.”2 Maintains a wife and two kids. Best known for creating etymonline.com. Now that the discussion forum is defunct, you can contact him by email, byronic106@yahoo. etymology dictionary Alphabetical compilation of word derivatives and histories. A specialty item, since provisional etymologies are available in regular dictionary definitions. When Harper created etymonline.com, the only etymology dictionaries on the Internet limited themselves to silly-sounding words that seemed to demand an explanation. Harper believes that an etymology dictionary should also record mundanities if it is to be trusted as sound. etymology Functionally useless and self-referential field of study which deals with the “facts of the origin and development of a word” (etymonline.com). The confluence of several disciplines within the humanities—English, history, anthropology. Exemplifies the humanities’ general tendency toward speculation. Not to be confused with entomology (study of bugs) or etiology (study of causalities). dictionary Alphabetical compilation of word definitions, usually with brief notes as to their synonyms, antonyms, derivatives, family-members, and usage. Each definition should clarify the word’s meaning without making recursive connections; in fact, “definition” comes from the Latin for “to completely bound or limit.” usage dictionary Alphabetical compilation of words, phrases, and idioms and corresponding explanations of their proper pronunciations and functions in society. A practical, if prescriptive, resource; maybe the ideological opposite of etymonline.com.3 The recursive logic is mirrored here, but this is journalism — maybe a text for reference, but never a reference text.

Sciolist: an archaic word for someone who pretends knowledge.

3 “What a word means to your present audience is far more worth knowing than what it meant to Keats or Milton. Better to know the people you’re writing for and talking to than any amount of etymology,” says Doug Harper, paraphrasing an argument he found in “Fowler’s Modern English Usage:” But are these last two kinds of knowing — knowing people, and knowing their linguistic history — really opposites?

1 2

Who Did This?

So-called Liliana Frankel. My “humorous and frivolous biographical information” can be found on the Review’s inside cover.

10

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

Think about what it means to learn the constellations: (word: etymology :: constellation: myth)

1. The referent: When you glance up at the night sky, you find it vast, uninterpretable. It just is.

2. The word: The humans who lived before you in this hemisphere, some of whom had much better imaginations than you, approximated a pattern from this mess and gave it a name to make it easier to remember.

Possibilities: Knowing the myth of Cassiopeia could enter you into a deeper understanding of the humans who first divined her figure, and maybe even of human nature.

If the story becomes important to you, it could also help you remember the M-shape of Cassiopeia and the family of constellations—her daughter, Andromeda, her son-inlaw, Perseus, and her husband, Cepheus—that surround her. Learning stories like this will make you fascinating to children, and give you an easy way to get them curious about science. You yourself might become very curious about the actual stars and go on to learn, for instance, that what we can see of them are light rays traveling towards us from the deep past. But this kind of history, natural history, can’t be found in the myth of Cassiopeia—you have to look for it elsewhere. Likewise, etymologies almost never do anything to explain their referents.

3. The etymology: Cassiopeia (so the myth tells us) was a boastful Ethiopian queen banished to the stars when her pride angered Poseidon. As further punishment, Poseidon had Cassiopeia’s daughter, Andromeda, tied to a rock as bait for a sea monster. From her perch in the sky Cassiopeia could see everything but had no way to intervene. Luckily, Andromeda was saved by the hero Perseus, who later made her his wife.

SEARCH: “auspicious”

Words to do with “left”: • sinister

Words to do with “right”: • •

Figure 1.

“Learning stories like this will make you fascinating to children.”

Yemen Benjamin

Figure 2.

“Family of constellations”

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

11

B

efore James Somers wrote this piece, he was just like me (and maybe you)—stuck using the built-in dictionary app on his Macbook to look up words. To use this dictionary, in his eyes, is to submit oneself to the tyranny of the mediocre. “It’s criminal,” he laments. “[The dictionary] is the place where all the words live and the writing’s no good ... There’s no play, no delight in the language.” Somers’s search for a better dictionary took him first to a John McPhee piece in the New Yorker, and from there to Noah Webster’s “An American Dictionary of the English Language” (1913 edition). To hear him tell it, this book is a revelation. Somers loves Webster’s colorful writing and tastefully chosen exemplars. He notes that his definitions, the work of one creative mind, are at once “less certain … [and] more complete” than the ones in the Macbook dictionary, compiled by a team of scholars. “Knowing that [the right dictionary is] there for you [empowers you to] start looking up more words,” explains Somers. “And you develop an affection for even ... the plainest most everyday words, because you see them treated with ... respect.”

Perhaps the problem has more to do with the boundaries of existing words themselves than the ways they are defined, and we’d be better off reforming our language than our dictionaries. A character in a Borges story explores “the possibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary of concepts which would not be synonyms

3.

or periphrases of those which make up our everyday language, ‘but rather ideal objects created according to convention and essentially designed to satisfy poetic needs.’” Since this suggestion is mostly a joke and no better ones have been proposed, Somers’ advice—to be discerning when choosing a dictionary—seems worth putting into action. But upon encountering it, I realized that the dictionary qualities Somers praises—interesting writing, good examples, humility, scope—were already familiar to me (despite my formal reliance on the Macbook app) from my longtime use of etymonline.com. The Online Etymology Dictionary isn’t even a dictionary in the sense Somers means, just a collection of word origins and histories, but these were what inspired my affection. An obvious question presented itself to me— why had I never considered the origin and history of the site itself?

I opened a new tab and scrolled to the bottom of the Online Etymology Dictionary homepage, which was full of unclicked links. Who did this? I was astonished! Doug Harper was a veritable Webster—a suburban American man with little formal training, working from home and in solitude. What’s more, he seemed to live in biking distance. Ignoring the warnings listed under Why I probably haven’t answered your email, I wrote to him, and within 20 minutes I had a response.

Doug Harper is fond of Swarthmore, even though he respectfully “tend[s] to

avoid colleges because...etymonline is... evidence that in rare cases you actually don't need the sheepskin to make a noise.”

He doesn’t see the Webster comparison, preferring to model himself after Californian architect Simon Rodia, but dwells often on “the dictionary-ness of [etymonline.com]...and the paralysis of where I've gotten with it.”

It got big, but I didn't. I still pretend to putter like a monk in darkness on an illuminated book no one but me ever sees. That works for me. But then I find people using it everywhere for things I never dreamed. Like the guy who built a model railroad in his basement and one day woke up to find people moving passengers and freight on it at profit and loss.

Harper started etymonline.com as one of several hobby websites, when the Internet was still young and not considered that reliable a source of information. He taught himself web design by visiting sites whose presentation he admired and hitting “View Source,” an internet function which displays the raw code. Harper’s tastes are practical. “I took my sense of design right from typography. Robert Bringhurst's “Elements of Typographic Style” is sufficient as a Bible. HTML was easy, natural, instinctive. Maybe that's because I'd been building newspaper pages (with hot wax and an exacto knife) for 10 years already.”

Figure 3. Simon Rodia’s “Watts Towers” “[Rodia] was an outsider who had no business doing that and he didn’t let any of that stop him from doing it. He did it where he was, alone, at night (or do I imagine that?), with what he had to hand.

The credentialed people came along later and called it naive art or what you will.

He had a vision and he persisted in doing that one thing with all his spirit and intellect and craft till he got too old to do it. I don’t believe he ever would have thought in terms of the word ‘completed.’

He used scrap and broken and discarded everyday things. Children brought him shinies, and he made them into it. He was not ‘trying’ to make art or anything else.

He was doing what was in him to do.” — Doug Harper

12

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

A

ccording to “Debates in the Digital Humanities,” one of the field’s founding (and still evolving) seminal texts,

If these claims are true (and they say you shouldn’t believe everything you read online, which is where I found them, laid free for public consumption), I should be

humbled and somewhat frightened that I first heard of the digital humanities only a few months ago. If they aren’t true (or are still unsubstantiated) this quote is pretentious. Or maybe this is another instance of recursive logic, and lots of practicing digital humanists—graphic designers and etymology dictionary makers and modern artists—are just poets who don’t know it.

My best friend from home is a modern artist. She studies fibers and is learning how to weave, knit, crochet, and embroider. When we spoke on the phone the other day, she was psyched to hear about the existence of the digital humanities.

She told me she’d been reading about the connections between knitting and coding, and from there thinking seriously about the connections between science and art. Because knitting is associated with

4.

5.

Figure 4. “Stump Speech,” 2011, Whitney Anne Trettien, incoming Professor of Digital Humanities at UNC Chapel Hill.

her voice with reverberations or harmonic tones. Hsu believes that the assumed power behind discussing a recent paper in front of an audience rests with an old-fashioned faith in the permanence of text, and is also a reflection of a white, heterosexual male experience in which the act of speaking is equated with that of being heard. The app is designed to turn the reading of a paper or critique into a performative calland-response, where the audience should consider what is said with the intention of creating a useful answer. I found this image on her website. She had uploaded her PowerPoint there after Re: Humanities in case it might be of use to the public.

the digital humanities community has a “special potential and responsibility to assist humanities advocacy” because of its expertise in “making creative use of digital technology to advance humanities research and teaching”. In a moment of crisis, the digital humanities contributes to the sustenance of academic life as we know it, even as (and perhaps because) it upends academic life as we know it.

For her doctoral work, Trettien created this stump from the abandoned old books at a thrift-store-turned-art-museum. She also compiled the text of all the books in a digital format, and implanted the stump with a computer device which can answer passerby’s texted questions with relevant lines from its bark.

Figure 5. “Paperphone” interface, 2015, Wendy Hsu, digital humanist, in partnership with Jonathan Zorn, experimental musician.

Hsu gave an academic presentation at Re: Humanities, the Tri-Co’s digital humanities conference, using this app, which she created to challenge the conceit of academic presentations. At various points during her talk, she relied on Paperphone to distort

Figure 6. “Binary knitting,” 2015, Victoria Schenck, fiber artist.

My friend Vic knitted this scarf using binary code to spell out the message “Boys and Girls Learn Differently” 5 times. Is she a digital humanist? Her medium references

women, and coding with men, they are rarely taught together. However, the logic and craft of knitting seems transferable to the logic and craft of coding—at least, according to one study, knowing one really well could help one learn the other. She asked me for an article to read about the digital humanities. I promised her I would send some along as soon as we hung up.

I warned her that the material I’d found was heavy, and too wrapped in theory to always make sense. What I meant was that I’d barely understood anything from what I’d read, and was nervous that she wouldn’t find it useful.

“Don’t worry, I can handle it,” she asserted, chuckling. I thought about how I must sound, assuming that the papers Swarthmore had helped me access would prove themselves impenetrable to her.

6.

the digital world, but it’s not actually digital, and the field of fiber art is not a humanity unless you define the world in the 15c. sense of “concerned with human culture” (etymonline.com).

Still, she makes digital, humanistic things.

For Vic, the act of creation is central, while critiquing or informing are secondary goals. What of Hsu and Trettien? Are they artists as well as critics and scholars?

Or is all their thinking just an overwrought way to move towards what Vic does naturally?

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

13

B

efore Whitney Trettien gave her keynote address at the Re: Humanities conference, she urged the audience, many of whom were live-tweeting the event, to be mindful of whose voices they amplified. As Hsu’s work proves, some academics in the field are very concerned with the politics of representation and inclusion, and they care about making their work accessible. Yet these same academics can sometimes seem hopelessly out of touch. You can browse the hashtag #rehum15 to acquaint yourself with both sides of the spectrum. To get started, here are some tweets from Swarthmore professor of history Tim Burke: #rehum15 “What would DH [digital humanities] look like if we took a more playful approach to our work?” YES PLEASE Okay...but then: #rehum15 A skeptical thought: if there was a critically-thinking ethically-sensitive app, would that be just another erotic subculture?

Here’s where I thought of Doug Harper: #rehum15 @whitneytrettien “I didn’t learn HTML in a classroom, I learned it by looking at the source code of sites I liked.”

While many digital humanists recognize that not all sectors of the global population have enjoyed equal access to computers, and that (as Vic pointed out) the teaching of computer skills is often a gendered process, they still tend to idealize the Internet as a sort of pure democracy. Theoretically, the Internet works as a creative sharing medium where anyone could potentially write and publish. However, Doug Harper isn’t inspired by the product-of-an-ideal-futuristic-democratic-space interpretation of his work. He avoids casual web-browsing and often feels cynical about creativity in the digital age. His son, he told me, has a really good eye for pictures, but was discouraged from pursuing photography by the wealth of existing good content available on websites like DeviantArt.

Professor Rachel Buurma, who was one of the faculty liaisons for Re: Humanities, warned me that a lot of the web explorers she knows like to narrate the history of the Internet as a decline, moving gradually away from its “early utopian promise.” But Harper’s nostalgia is for a different, older utopia, a time before the Internet even existed: “A small and focused pool of authors created the idea of ‘the reading public’ and taught it how to be one. Also, since you probably paid a few bucks for [whatever you were reading], and didn’t have another [option] just a click away, you had some incentive to stick with the book until you had given it a fair chance...There is breathtakingly good writing all over the internet, needles in a haystack of schlock – and it’s all free; but who makes money off doing it? Thornton Wilder had to sell a manuscript to one editor; nowadays, he’d have to find a million clicks and sell ads to offshore betting casinos.”

Money has been an issue for Harper at various points since he began etymonline. com, but never so much so that he hasn’t been able to work. It’s possible that his own societal position doesn’t leave him a natural ally to revolutionary interpretations of the Internet’s potential. Disavowing this framework also seems to have left Harper without a good way to measure his own success. He doesn’t really believe that the cream will float to the top, so the appreciation of his work by random strangers on the Internet, which others might perceive as newfangled kind of fame, power or influence, is hard for him to read as validation. “It got big, but I didn’t.” In another email exchange about his inspirations, which include the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (“one of...the gods of etymonline”), Harper gave me a clue that would help to explain this feeling further. “Between you and me5,” he wrote, “[etymonline.com is] not a dictionary. It’s a labyrinth. An imaginary labyrinth with real minotaurs in it. To function as a labyrinth it must be perfect as a dictionary. So I never stop trying to perfect it.”

As it turned out, he was referencing a

specific Borges story, a rewriting of the Greek myth of the Minotaur from the Minotaur’s point of view. When I wrote back to ask him to elaborate, he said: Yes, [“The House of Asterion”] is the most direct and personal thread...But there are others. “The Library of Babel” is mirrored in [etymonline]. “The Garden of Forking Paths” is another version.

“Borges and I” is “Etymonline and I.” When I consider what I am trying to do in relation to the Oxford English Dictionary, the best image that comes to mind is “Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote.’” And the devil sitting on my shoulder recites “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

I was 0/6 on these story references, but luckily, this email reached me on the first really beautiful spring day, when I was happy to leave all my real work inside and read up on the beach for a few hours.4

F

indings (in no particular order): “Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote’” is, in liberal arts terms, a story about positionality—the glowing, somewhat argumentative obituary of a fictional French writer (Pierre Menard) who undertook the task of writing “Don Quixote,” complete with semi-ancient Spanish and contemporary references. He began the endeavor by attempting to become more like its original author, Miguel de Cervantes, but “to somehow be Cervantes and arrive at the “Quixote” seemed to him less arduous—that is, less interesting—than to continue to be Pierre Menard and arrive at the “Quixote” through the experiences of Pierre Menard.” Although Menard died without finishing his rendition, the author of the obituary believes that the chapters he produced (exact duplicates of the original text) should be considered an amazing literary achievement because of Menard’s improbable identity and lack of direct personal connections to the society of Cervantes. The author also notes that Menard’s visible work is just the tip of the iceberg, the product of a great deal of research and revision. He recalls a letter from Menard which proposed that “every man should be capable of every idea, and I understand that in the future, he will be.”5

4 Later that week, I found that he had updated one of the biographical/About pages on etymonline.com with a summary of the lines which follow, so I think they are safe to share here.

5 At one point, Harper claimed to me (somewhat unbelievably) that he had “gone through” the O.E.D., the multi-thousand page inspiration for his Pierre Menard project, several times. However, he doesn’t seem aware that most of the literary examples which accompany and expand upon its definitions were crowd-sourced.

Simon Winchester, a travel journalist, wrote an interesting nonfiction account of the interactions between one major contributor and the publication’s chief editor.

After corresponding for decades, the editor finally arranged to meet this accomplished amateur lexicographer in person, only to find that he was actually a murderer interned in a nearby insane asylum.)

14

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

“The House of Asterion” explains the perspective of the Minotaur,6 Asterion, who is an extremely proud and lonely prince (in the original Greek myth, the Minotaur’s mother was a queen). Aware that he’s unique, but seemingly not that he’s perceived as a monster, Asterion claims that he chooses to stay within his labyrinth so that townspeople outside won’t be shamed by his noble countenance. He occupies himself during the endless hours indoors by playing games, of which his favorite is an imaginary tour that he gives to his imaginary doppelganger. Explaining the world he lives in brings him closer to the fantasy that it was he who created it.

“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is a story about a transnational gang of academics who decide to compile a set of encyclopedias documenting a fictional utopian world (Tlön). One of the phenomena that would exist in this world, “hrönir,” relates directly to my experience of etymonline. com. “Hrönir” are objects which only exist because they have been looked for.

“Hrönir” can come into being when two people are looking for the same lost object (they both find it). Similarly, when someone is looking for something as-yet-undefined, a related object called an “ur” might appear, spontaneously created to satisfy the need. But the physical presence of both these kinds of objects is tenuous, and they sometimes have flaws that original, intentional objects would not possess.

Here is Doug Harper talking about the early days of the Internet: “Those who were using it also were creating it. It felt like the natural thing to do—add to the corpus of fun or useful stuff online. If you found something missing, and you were capable, you did it yourself. You could learn basic HTML in about an hour by looking at the construction of other sites and fiddling with it ... This isn’t altruism: I made things online so I could use them. I made etymonline partly because I wanted a reliable place online to store research.

If I searched for certain information and no one had made a website about it, sometimes I started one. I was filling the gaps: under my name are web sites on slavery in the Northern states of the

U.S., the 1860 electoral vote, an exposure of spurious quotations attributed to the Founders, and, somewhere, a line-by-line explanation of why “The Holiday Season” is the stupidest Christmas song ever.”

I wasn’t as grabbed by the other Borges stories (“The Library of Babel”, “Borges and I,” “The Garden of Forking Paths”) that Harper recommended me. Suffice it to say that the themes are of mirrors and multiple selves, informatics, and intellectual quests. You should still check them out if you have time.

W

hen I was done reading, I felt certain that Doug Harper’s lonely feeling was an iteration of the same confusion I’d felt when considering the work of #rehum15’s keynote speakers. Is compiling information a creative process? Is it art? Does it deserve to be called art, when knowledge is power and so much of the best and most purely intended art is a challenge of power? “I am a solo operation,” Harper wrote me. “I couldn’t do this with anyone else unless it was a clone. It’s too personal; it’s obsession channeled into useful work, which I pretend to myself is art.”

W

hen I first found out that Doug Harper lived nearby, I was excited by the prospect that we could meet up. I imagined writing a profile of him like the ones I admire in national publications, an actual biographical sketch of someone not yet known to my campus.

But he didn’t want to meet up. He didn’t even want to talk in real-time. I grew uncomfortable. My mind jumped to scenarios like the one in Simon Winchester’s book, where the protagonist’s brilliant correspondent turns out to be a madman.

Why wouldn’t he talk to me? What was he hiding?

Another reason for my discomfort was my suspicion that there was no way to arrive at a workable understanding of Harper by reading his monologic emails.

In many ways, his letters just expanded upon the character he’d already made accessible through his website. I wanted to access the communicative part of him, observe how he related to people. If we couldn’t have a legitimate exchange, how

would I know how he operated in context?

(I was assuming that any reality constructed by just one person (especially a person who spends so much time working alone) would be inherently separate from the realities I’m familiar with. Has anyone ever told you that some part of your experience isn’t real—that it’s just in your head? I am invested in this dichotomy.)

In his third email, Harper asked me some personal questions—things that would have seemed innocuous if we’d been face-to-face (What do you study?

What have you been reading lately? Do you go by Lily, or Liliana?) but which I had a hard time trusting from a faceless stranger on the web. I let a month pass without answering. But when he didn’t contact me unsolicited, I returned to our emails, deciding that his strangeness was both harmless and interesting to me.

Replying to his question about reading was what got us talking about books, and from there, his head-context started to make sense. To understand Harper the way he wanted, I had to engage not with his spoken persona, but with the ideas and worlds which most interest him. It was a cool way to communicate, singular in my experience but no less real.

I asked Doug Harper if it ever made him feel lonely to focus his energies on such a specific task, expanding his vocabulary to a point where he might have almost no company in his knowledge of certain words. In my experience, obscure words can be kind of sad to learn. Often they are quite precise and would do an efficient job of communicating their referent, but they are not widely understood.

If you want to use them, you will have to explain yourself, thus eliminating the efficiency that made them appealing in the first place.

Harper assured me that his loneliness was more existential and not particularly augmented by his choice of work. In fact, “I feel less lonely,” he said, “because I know now that people can be entertained by the stories within words. You know who I relate to more than ever now, is Thoreau.

Out in the woods really LOOKING at the everyday trees and weeds and birds. The dictionary—mine or anyone’s—is a forest, a landscape (an ‘ecosphere’ to use the hideous modern word). I’ve moved there.

Out of the grid, into the wild.” u

The Minotaur was a monster living in a labyrinth on the island of Crete in Ancient Greece. Every few years, the king of Athens had to pay a tribute to the king of Crete to avoid war, which involved sending fourteen Athenian boys and girls to the Minotaur’s labyrinth to be eaten. Theseus, a hero and the prince of Athens, ended this brutal practice by volunteering as tribute and slaying the Minotaur himself. He was able to find his way out of the labyrinth with the help of the Cretan princess, Ariadne, who fell in love with him at first sight and smuggled him a ball of thread to track his steps through the maze.

6

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

15

ESSAYS

What is Ferguson really like?

Reflections on Ferguson Alternative Spring Break

by Priya Dieterich

A

fter seven months of anxiously following the events in Ferguson— alternately through frustratingly biased media coverage and grainy protest livestreams—I found myself in a car on my way to Missouri, to take part in the first week of the five-week Ferguson Alternative Spring Break program. Much of that week was spent walking around the streets of Ferguson with a group of 20 or so other bright-eyed college students in matching white ASB T-shirts. The media jumped on our presence as a fresh and exciting story after so many months of reporting on the movement. Every day there was at least one reporter asking to talk to us, and I did speak to a few of them, though not without misgivings. I was apprehensive about letting these reporters put my face and voice on the story of Ferguson, which really isn’t mine to tell, and I was uncomfortable with the way many of them framed it, as good-samaritan college kids demonstrating their goodness by “giving up” their spring breaks to come clean up Ferguson.

I worried about the dangerous possibility of a white-savior-type story (although only about half of the participants were white,

16

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

we are all privileged in that we are college students, so the savior complex could’ve been projected onto any of us). But as Charles, our wonderful program director, said when he encouraged us to speak to a pair of Yahoo news reporters whom he knew fairly well, “Your faces as allies will cause people to trust you. It’s sad but it’s true.” And he’s right. Mainstream journalists should trust the stories of Ferguson residents, we should listen to and amplify their voices on a national stage, but that isn’t happening now (if it ever was). Some of us follow developments on Twitter, or through some alternative radical media sources, which are both platforms for more authentic voices from the movement, but the mainstream media doesn’t generally demonstrate an interest in the stories of those living the reality in Ferguson. They’re looking for clickbait, quick quotes, and viral-able snippets of video, all of which are easier to find if you look for drama rather than for truth. If they would listen to me, I would do my best to use that platform to deliver the message that Ferguson residents were just regular citizens trying to survive and thrive in a normal town in the U.S. (normal in its adherence to a centuries-long history of white supremacy and anti-blackness)

and that the protest movement there is comprised of passionate and committed individuals acting out of love.

That is largely my intention in writing this essay. It’s been difficult to write and, just like with talking to the media, I have been apprehensive about it. I am afraid to say the wrong thing, to misrepresent any part of the situation, to dramatize something inappropriately, or to present myself as some sort of expert on Ferguson. With Charles’ words in my head, I am writing this to relay the messages I received and lessons I learned in Ferguson to other outsiders, in the hopes that it may help others find productive ways to engage in, or at least understand, the movement.

The best I can hope for is that hearing this account might encourage people both to listen more carefully to the stories coming directly from the movement in Ferguson and to become involved in the national movement. The Bay Area Solidarity Action Team, a group formed late last year for white people to quickly, effectively, and powerfully respond to the action call from Ferguson, has posted its working “Protocol and Principles for White People Working to Support the Black Liberation Movement” online, which reads “We will collaborate through complex, emergent

“Hands Up Don’t Shoot Quilt” by Heidi Lung, on display at the Ferguson Public Library.

and “imperfect” situations. We will not let the white culture of perfectionism get in the way of us taking bold action.” If you take something from this essay, from my story of some time in Ferguson, I hope it is an encouragement to fight that tendency towards crippling perfectionism and move towards action.

F

erguson Alternative Spring Break was originally conceived of by Charles Wade of Operation Help or Hush, an organization that he co-founded with Tasha Burton, a Ferguson native, with the mission of connecting social media activism and activism on the streets. Local leaders and organizers in Ferguson, as well as the national organization Break Away, which runs spring break service trips around the country, joined up to support Charles’s endeavor, and not long after that I was checking into a Days Inn hotel just outside Ferguson and waiting for Charles to give us our marching orders. In all

Photo by Priya Dieterich

honesty, I didn’t know what I had signed up to do. Because the organizers were largely local to St. Louis (though Charles is a New York transplant, he has been in Ferguson since last August), I had faith that we would be doing something useful while we there, but I wasn’t sure what it would entail.

The first few days were devoted to voter registration, before the deadline to register to vote in the upcoming city council elections. This gave us a chance to walk around residential parts of Ferguson and neighboring municipalities and speak to residents. The residents whose doors I knocked on were largely were already registered, but often were unaware of the upcoming election, and eager to sign up to receiving more information about the candidates. The city council members have control over both the municipal court system and the police department in Ferguson, so their potential for effecting change is large. On April 7th, Ferguson voters

turned out in record numbers and elected two new black candidates who, along with the one standing black city councilman, will comprise the first ever 50 percent black city council for Ferguson’s 70 percent black population.

This election was another in a series of small but meaningful changes we’re seeing in Ferguson as a result of the sustained efforts of the protest family these past months. I borrow this phrase “protest family” from the Ferguson protestors and organizers themselves, who I’m sure have taken it from earlier social justice movements. This language, and the spirit that it carries, is handed down from elders to youth working in the movement. My first night in Ferguson, we met a few members of this family, including a 16 year old kid who had been exposed to the worst of the police retaliation—arrest, harassment, physical violence—at protests, but was still jittery with his enthusiasm for the fight.

His young boundless energy was compleSWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

17

mented by the steady, grounded passion of the older folks we met, among them a woman affectionately referred to as Mama Cat, who has been cooking (delicious) food for the protestors for months and generally fills the role of movement grandmother. She spoke to us about how her parents had taken her out to march during the Civil Rights Movement, when she was barely more than a toddler, and how, on the heels of those victories, her own generation had “partied” and forgotten to keep the pressure on. Now we’ve lost so much ground, so much momentum, that’s it’s taking a hell of a fight to restart the dialogue around race in this country. That, she said, was why she would continue to take care of all of the protesters as if they were her children. Because her generation had dropped the ball, and now she has to support our generation while we pick it back up. Every time Mama Cat came to hang out with the ASB group, we lapped up her advice like kittens. One night, she came to our hotel from a Ferguson city council meeting, at which she’d struck up a casual conversation with a police officer.

“I wouldn’t normally talk to one of them,” she said to those of us who were gathered around her, some literally at her feet, “but my mama always said ‘you draw more bees with honey than you do with vinegar.’” She said she had decided to act on her belief that we all need to make a better effort to understand each other. Apparently, the cop had exchanged words with Mama Cat about how disgraceful John Shaw, who had stepped down from his position as city manager earlier that day, was and then told her “If you like what you heard today, wait ’til tomorrow. Something even better is coming.” The next day, police chief Thomas Jackson also resigned his position.

While we were there, it was hard to miss the feeling that dominos were starting to fall in Ferguson. Progress in government overhaul and systematic change is slow, and requires protestors and organizers to keep the pressure on for the long haul, but you can see it happening. The important thing is to take each small victory as motivation to keep pushing, not a justification for leaning back. Incremental change in Ferguson means it’s possible to rebuild that city into one where police brutality and state-sanctioned racism don’t loom over citizens as daily threats on their life, and rebuilding Ferguson is a sign to the country and the world that the seemingly insurmountable challenge of fighting, and eliminating, deep-seated institutional racism is both necessary and possible.

18

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

O

n our second night there, I was up late in my hotel room checking Twitter when I saw the news that two police officers had been shot at a protest by the police station. With everyone sleeping around me, I scrolled through tweets from the people on the ground until it seemed like I’d gotten all the information there was to get just then. It was eery to read about it online—just like I would if I was at home—and know that this was happening just a few minutes away from me. In the morning, we watched the news while we ate breakfast, anxiously listening for anything they had found about the shooter, carefully watching the way the story was being spun, listening for the narrative of violent and irrational protesters that the movement has always worked hard to reject. When Charles came into the room, he shut off the news

The truth is we need movements as strong as Ferguson’s all around the country, and all of these local movements need all kinds of people. and called us all together to talk. He told us we wouldn’t be going out that day, that we would instead stay in the hotel for the morning and work on the logistics and planning of the community polling project we wanted to launch. He said he’d had an agreement with the Ferguson police that they wouldn’t bother the ASB students, but that he didn’t trust them to honor that agreement in light of the shootings.

He told us frankly and honestly that, in particular, he didn’t trust them to leave the young black men in our group alone. He was responsible for us and he’d decided we would stay in.

We spent a few hours of brainstorming and trying to organize ourselves, not doing a phenomenal job of the latter. Charles came back at lunch time and told us he’d changed his mind. It was clear that he had been conflicted and troubled about his decision that morning. We would go out in

the afternoon for two reasons: First, it was important that we send the message to our families and communities back home that Ferguson is a safe and normal community, that the continued presence of protesters did not make it dangerous. Keeping us inside meant there was something out there we needed to be protected from. Second, he pointed out that all the residents of Ferguson were living their lives that day, because they had to. They were going to work and school and they would be out in the stores and the streets. Even if there was any reason to stay inside, it was a privilege we would have that they would not, and Charles refused to prioritize our safety over that of the residents. Though he gave us the option to stay in if we felt personally unsafe, he would take those willing out.

We all went.

We spent the afternoon walking around residential areas and the main commercial strip, asking for people to tell us what they were feeling, how they’d been affected, and what they wanted from the city. I visited stores on West Florissant, the main commercial strip in Ferguson, and listened to stories from business owners, employees, and customers about the last few months and what they thought Ferguson needed. There was a woman getting her hair braided who told me about the hell her family had been through dealing with traffic violations in the municipal court system, and suggested that the city needs to give all that money back if it wants to make amends with its citizens, and there was her hairdresser, who looked around her empty shop and lamented in broken English about the total drop in business she’d experienced since August; there was a different hair salon owner who thought it was most important to get young people off the streets, who blamed their “loitering” for the bad reputation that the area was getting and blamed their parents for making them into people who act this way; there was a boy about my age skateboarding in circles around the Family Dollar parking lot, who approached us eagerly and, when we asked what he’d like to see the city doing for its people, spoke dreamily and sincerely about a street fair or block party where the cops and the community intermingled and hung out together to build up trust.

I couldn’t piece together a cohesive narrative from the stories I heard. Something that I sometimes forget in my fury at the media’s unwillingness to tell a real story of how systemic racism and violent

A mural on a boarded-up building on West Florissant.

Photo courtesy of Harris Chowdary

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

19

Another mural on West Florissant.

inequality plays out in cities like Ferguson is this: it’s fucking hard to tell this story.

(That’s not to say I’m letting reporters off the hook for failing to do it, for not even trying, or for actively trying to remove racism from the narrative.) Being there for a week certainly didn’t give me enough information to coherently describe the variety of goals and concerns that Ferguson residents have about their city. One thing I can say to people who want to know what’s happening in Ferguson is this: listen carefully, listen critically, and look for ways to hear the voices of the protestors and organizers themselves (there’s no denying that Twitter, Tumblr, livestreams, and other social media sources have been crucial to disseminating accurate information about the protests and events in Ferguson). But the other piece of advice I would give is not to fixate too closely on knowing what’s happening in Ferguson. Even a highly curated Twitter feed will not bring you some ultimate truth about the state of affairs there, only a constellation of experiences and opinions. And it’s easy, as an outsiders, to sit and watch the livestreams and try to feel like you’re there, to get angry and maybe share your anger with your friends, and then to stop short of doing anything because you still feel too disconnected or 20

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

uninformed. The truth is we need movements as strong as Ferguson’s all around the country, and all of those local movements need all kinds of people—some in the streets, some behind the scenes. When some ASB students voiced their hesitation over stepping up in the movement because of their disconnection from the community, or because of their whiteness, the Ferguson protest family threw it back at us and said “You are part of this movement.

We should all care about someone’s child lying dead in the streets.” This isn’t to say everyone should try to be a movement leader, or the face of protests. The message is that there is a place for everyone in the protest family, you just have to put in the energy.

W

hen Rosa Clemente came to speak at Swarthmore in mid-February, she talked about the Black Lives Matter movement as something that we will look back on with as much respect and reverence as we do the Civil Rights Movement. She told the audience, very matter-of-factly: If you’re not a part of it now, you’re gonna look back in 50 years and wonder what the hell you were doing. I had, at that point, already heard of the Ferguson ASB trip,

and dismissed it as somehow too wild an idea. The simplicity with which Clemente laid down her challenge to us made me reconsider. I turned to my friend Leo and told him about ASB and we decided on the spot that we would go. When we came back from the trip, people kept asking us how it had gone, and each time I deflected (“It was interesting...overwhelming...”) because I couldn’t articulate all the thoughts I was having about the trip, and didn’t want to give people off-hand, totalizing characterizations of Ferguson based on my fairly minimal experience there. But I am thankful for Clemente’s not-so-subtle nudging, because it was important that I was there.

To clarify, I don’t believe it was important that I, myself, went to Ferguson. As an individual, I didn’t make an impact on what is happening or will happen there.

I do believe that it was important that people went, and I am glad to have been one of those people. The aggregate effect of some 200 students, from all over the country, each spending a week in Ferguson this spring has a lot of potential. For one thing, it sends a message of care to the people of Ferguson. I was honestly surprised by how many of the people I spoke to ended our conversations by saying “Thank you guys Photo by Priya Dieterich

The Mike Brown memorial on Canfield Drive, the street where he was shot.

for coming, it means a lot.” (In light of the way the media had jumped on and then largely abandoned Ferguson, I expected cynicism and hesitation from them, not a warm welcome.) For another, it makes us into conduits for delivering positive messages about the residents and the movement in Ferguson. Each of us met real residents of Ferguson, saw them as people instead of as a spectacle, and can now turn to the people in our school and home communities and tell them what Ferguson is really like. And the answer is this: Ferguson is unremarkable. The residential parts of Ferguson look unremarkable, like virtually any other suburban area you could find around the country. West Florissant looks like a regular suburban commercial strip, apart from the occasional wreckage from fires that occurred last August. The remarkable thing about Ferguson isn’t what it looks like, or the conditions of poverty that it is subject to.

The remarkable thing about Ferguson is the people who stood up and fought back in August, and have had the energy to Photo courtesy of Harris Chowdary

keep the movement alive all these months.

This, I believe, is important to remember while we observe the action in Ferguson from afar. The injustices that have played out there are not unusual, the resistance is. This means two things: First, that we should respect and honor the people who fought to bring these issues to light and who are still organizing and protesting to keep the pressure on the system; second, that we need to push just as hard in all our own communities, to shed light on—and then fix—the issues of government-sanctioned racism and police brutality.

One night in Ferguson, after a well-intentioned but largely unproductive workshop on privilege and oppression, we met as a group to share reflections on the day. Each of us talked about why we had come, and most answers were a variation on “I had to,” or “How could I not?”. I didn’t have a fully-formed idea of why I was there at the time, and I’m not sure I do now. In retrospect, I realize that part of what made me go was the feeling of dissatisfaction both with the level of activism

around Black Lives Matter on Swat’s campus and with my own level of participation in the movement as a whole. I didn’t know what to do and I wanted more to do, wanted more to happen. Since I got back from break, that feeling has only grown.

I think some part of me (a part I didn’t acknowledge or voice until now) hoped that being in Ferguson would crystalize and clarify what needed to be done, that I would come back with motivation and purpose and a neatly-organized activist todo list. Of course, just being in Ferguson didn’t do that. It gave me all the inspiration in the world, but that doesn’t mean I slid into working with activist groups in Philly, or engaging with other Swatties about on-campus activism. It didn’t break me of the “perfectionism” that has kept me from being as useful as I could be. That’s still on me, and that’s still on all of us. u Thank you to Leo Elliot and Nora Kerrich, who both participated in Ferguson ASB with me, and helped me greatly in writing this essay.

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

21

Whither the utopian consensus?

A love letter to the Swarthmore community

by Danny Hirschel-Burns

T

he night before my graduation this past June, I sat with a dozen fellow seniors on Papazian roof. I had a mild case of strep throat, but with the end of my time at Swarthmore looming, I felt the need to stay and conjure up a few more memories, a bit more sentiment. I think we all wanted that, but found there was no way to summarize our thoughts about the last four years satisfactorily. The dawning realization that it was all coming to an end, that there were no more memories to be made, left me, and I imagine everyone else, somewhat empty.

I only felt this way because I had thoroughly enjoyed my time at Swarthmore.

It exposed me to a totally new world from the one I knew in suburban Michigan. I had become a considerably different, and I believe better, person because of Swarthmore. I was not alone in that experience.

Everyone on the roof that night expressed positive feelings about their college years, even if many were also ready to move onto the next chapter of their lives. Perhaps it’s natural that at the end of a shared experience, individuals think positively about what they’ve been through together.

But I suspect what we were feeling that night was genuine. We had had amazing experiences at Swarthmore, and we would miss our friends, our classes, and everything else that those who have gone to Swarthmore intuitively understand.

What stands out from that night, though, was that our feelings about Swarthmore’s future were just as unified as our feelings about our own pasts. We all agreed that Swarthmore, as an institution, was in decline. Those after us would not enjoy Swarthmore the way we did.

T

his essay was born out of frustration. The last year and a half of my college career had seen seemingly every possible issue erupt in oft vicious, campus-wide debate. Beginning in the socalled “spring of our discontent” in 2013, 22

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

Swarthmore was getting in the New York Times almost every week, and rarely for favorable reasons. It seemed at times that no one on campus trusted any student they disagreed with, let alone the administration. Cleavages I had never known existed now seemed permanent. The turmoil had torn numerous friendships, including some of mine, irreparably apart.

But the question I couldn’t answer, and I hadn’t seen anyone else answer, was why all these issues appeared at once. How could the descent to chaos be so rapid, and the community so broken? In other words, what happened at Swarthmore?

Allow me to return to the night before graduation and the seniors assembled there with me. Why did we all believe in such a pessimistic prognosis for our beloved Swarthmore? One explanation is that Swarthmore doesn’t only lead to personal or intellectual growth, but to a progressive accumulation of knowledge about the college’s nuances that expose its rough edges.

The first step for incoming Swarthmore students is learning the formal processes that allow them to take advantage of the college’s services and amenities. Students must learn, for example, how to register for classes, find campus jobs, and receive medical care. However, it’s the informal processes that come to define Swarthmore for its student body. By informal processes, I mean the information that is mostly inaccessible to outsiders. Learning each dorm’s social character, which professors you should go to for help, the personalities of administrators, and other similar tidbits are some of the pieces of knowledge most important at Swarthmore.

Having them, and sharing them with others, is what makes people part of the community.

However, it is this accumulation of social knowledge that can embitter upperclassmen. When students arrive at Swarthmore, they likely have a very rosy picture of the college. The excitement of getting into an elite college, the prospect of the seemingly limitless opportunities provided by the college experience itself,

and Swarthmore’s beautiful campus rarely fail to make an impact. However, Swarthmore cannot possibly maintain such a high standard for four years. As students become more involved in clubs, sports, and academic departments, they begin to encounter problems. The more expectations rise, the more difficulties students encounter over time, and the more it seems that the college is deeply rotten. Surely not all Swarthmore students throughout history have come to be so pessimistic about the college on the eve of

The atmosphere at Swarthmore in my last year and a half was inordinately turbulent. The politics of internal debates were quite often revolutionary. graduation, but I’d wager, especially in my class, it’s not an uncommon experience.

However, to dismiss the feelings of those of us gathered on Papazian as no more than a psycho-social phenomena contingent on time spent at Swarthmore would be to ignore the rather extraordinary developments of our final year and a half. While my short time at Swarthmore doesn’t provide much of a standard for comparison, I think it’s fair to describe the atmosphere at Swarthmore in my last year and a half as inordinately turbulent.

The politics of internal debates were quite often revolutionary. Not only did individuals disagree, but some came to doubt that Swarthmore, as an idea, was worth salvaging. Without either an overthrow of the system, or alternatively, the absolute silencing of the opposition, progress was

not possible.

Most individuals at Swarthmore didn’t fall into either camp, but what’s remarkable is that these opinions, usually confined to the radical fringes, came to permeate moderate discourse. It is certainly possible to assign blame to significant portions of campus for this disconcerting occurrence, but many have already done so, and I believe the approach to be somewhat misguided (I will say that in the chaos, genuine efforts to work across divides and implement positive changes have gone unrecognized). Analyses that see individual dispositions as the root causes of conflict fail to accept that a series of events that shook our faith in one another was the result of forces bigger than Swarthmore. Without stripping all agency from Swarthmore’s individuals, it is still possible to understand what has happened at Swarthmore as the perhaps inevitable manifestations of changes that originated deep within Swarthmore’s own history and the history of American higher education.

S

warthmore’s internal cleavages are messy, and to outsiders fairly opaque. There are many sources of tension, which spring from competing narratives of identity and ideology. The divides are by no means clear-cut. As any good Swarthmore student will tell you, everyone holds multiple identities, many of which are situation-dependent, and consequently the lines between groups shift and conflict individual Swatties.

The flashpoints that these groups have clashed around include debates around how the college should manage sexual assault; the existence and form of the fraternities and sorority; the place race, gender, sexuality, and class have on campus; the role of students in social and academic life; and whether the college should divest from fossil fuel companies. So while most college debates are about the format and functioning of the college’s institutions, broader narratives play their role in shaping the limits of on-campus debate.

The student body is itself conflicted, and has a few different currents. The far left tends to advocate for further protections for minorities and a college administration that intervenes decisively on the side of social justice causes. Then there’s “the center” at Swarthmore, which is, as one campus magazine put it, “left of liberal.” This group would be the radical fringe most other places in America, but on campus it’s a bit more status quo. And

then there’s the conservative liberals and moderate conservatives who represent the smallest group. They’re generally big fans of the status quo and not of identity politics. While on the whole the percentage of these groups probably held steady throughout my time at Swarthmore, pretty much everyone I’ve seen when I’ve gone back has told me that the current freshmen are more conservative than most. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was more than a coincidence, but it’s too early to tell if the college is seeking more conventional students.

There are some rough generalizations that can be made about the makeup of

Regardless of where students fall politically, they can probably agree that they have a lot less faith in the administration than they did two years ago. each camp. For example, the conservative camp is likely to be wealthier and whiter than the far left. There’s probably also a correlation between being farther to the right and being an athlete or a member of Greek life. On the other end of the spectrum, there are more students of color and LGBTQ folks. Swarthmore’s such a small place that many people move across these divides with ease, but it would also be a mistake to ignore that identities often divide us as much as they unite us.

A major tension that’s risen to the fore since the spring of our discontent is between students and administrators.

Overall, the student body considers itself more progressive than the administration, but the administration sees itself as the vanguard of Quaker values. Students hold a wide range of opinions of the administration, from wishing they would more proactively crack down on discriminatory behavior to wishing they’d not cede so much ground to the far left. Regardless of where students fall politically, they can probably agree that they have a lot

less faith in the administration than they did two years ago. Having not been privy to internal conversations, I don’t want to speculate too much on how the administration feels about students, but in my experience the student body widely views them as increasingly less trusting of students.

The faculty is pretty liberal at Swarthmore, and recently many professors have signed up in support of Mountain Justice’s divestment campaign. However, I’ve gotten the sense that while the faculty often believes in moving the college in a more progressive direction, they often find student activism to be short-sighted.

W

hen I arrived at Swarthmore as a freshman, I was surprised to learn that, for the most part, there were no rules. As long as you didn’t set off the fire alarm or smoke indoors (the two are somewhat related), the school would leave you alone. Buildings were almost never locked and alcohol flowed freely. Social life was governed by norms, not written rules, and students were left to self-regulate.

Even instances of egregious behavior went unpunished. Freshman year, I heard a story relayed by a jovial public safety officer. An intoxicated student had disrobed himself and begun running around campus. When public safety approached, he made a beeline for a flagpole, wrapping his arms and legs around its base.

A standoff ensued, because, as the public safety officer deadpanned, “I wasn’t going to touch him.”

Administrators left students to their own devices, relying on student institutions to govern social life. When it occurred, administrative intervention was only designed to reinstate the harmony the student body could not achieve through self-regulation. The reticence to draw students into conflict with administrators had many positive effects. At times, however, this approach proved problematic, as Professor of History Tim Burke noted in an article for Philly Magazine, “From the very smallest scale to the largest scale, the college does have a long history of finding a way through that won’t leave half the people in any room feeling like they lost… It means, for one, we tend to defer difficult decisions.”

The emphasis placed on the power of dialogue and social norms meant that students felt an increased sense of obligation toward themselves and each other. Professors and administrators could largely trust SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

23

students to do the right thing. Conflict was remedied not through separation, but through engendering mutual understanding and collective deliberation. It was freedom with responsibility, but largely without punishment when that responsibility was not taken seriously. For my first two years, and many before that, Swarthmore operated on a utopian consensus.

D

ialogue is a useful tool for both forcing individuals to reflect on their own beliefs and presenting a gauge of public opinion, but its utility wanes when multiple beliefs cannot be reconciled. As a form of dispute resolution, it can simultaneously smooth disagreements and submerge differences.

When these differences remain opposed and unaddressed, they tend to fester. It is at these moments that decisions need to be made, and rulings need to be handed down. Swarthmore has always done an excellent job of stretching the positive qualities of dialogue to their absolute limits, but never quite figured out how to adjudicate when dialogue failed.

The sexual assault crisis was precisely one of those moments where dialogue could not succeed. And even though it was blindingly obvious to any neutral observer, Swarthmore was unable to shift its policies quickly enough to meet student demand. There’s plenty of blame to go around. It could have been handled much better than it was. Dialogue and collections could have been used by administrators to candidly admit missteps instead of covering them up with meaningless platitudes.

(An important aside: sexual assault wasn’t the only problem that was not fully remedied. As much as it might pain us to admit it, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia existed and continue to exist on Swarthmore’s campus. While I, and I think many other straight, white males on campus, probably weren’t aware of the extent of these issues prior to the spring of our discontent (and thus contributed to the problem on some level), it should also be said that Swarthmore has a history of struggling with these issues, and often unsuccessfully. From the Black students’ sit-in in 1969 to the repeated urination on the Intercultural Center door in 2013, identities and how the college has dealt with them have long been at the heart of Swarthmore’s contentious politics.)

Nonetheless, pinning the failings on a few bad apples in the administration

24

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

distracts from the bureaucratic inertia that administrators were dealing with in the spring of 2013. Swarthmore had never in living memory seriously intervened in the lives of its students, and sexual assault complaints, their urgency amplified by national media attention, demanded decisive action.

What this action might look like posed a whole new set of problems. To what degree should administrators seek to intrude in student social life? What form should intervention take? Legally, what actions were expected? Should the response to sexual assault be purely reactive? If not, what did prevention look like? And most importantly, how could any action taken still fit within the framework of Swarthmore’s proud Quaker tradition?

The fact that sexual assault on college campuses has been termed a “national crisis” demonstrates the entrenchment of the bureaucratic processes that have proved so problematic.

W

hen explaining the developments of the last two years, Swarthmore’s own history is only part of the story. Swarthmore’s trajectory has also been directed by trends in American higher education. We like to think of Swarthmore as existing in a “bubble,” and while it’s true that the college has retained some unique belief systems and patterns of behavior, we also shouldn’t ignore the weight of outside influences. The college has increasingly had to peg its modus operandi to that of its peer institutions as liberal arts colleges become more selective and compete over the same students. Many of Swarthmore’s administrators also gained experience at other liberal arts schools (under Rebecca Chopp there was an influx of ex-Colgate administrators), leading to a general

homogenization and standardization of the liberal arts experience. Therefore, Swarthmore successes and failures need to not only be placed in the context of its internal history, but also in the ebbs and flows of the American liberal arts.

The liberal arts today are facing a dual challenge. As tuition costs climb rapidly upward, students and parents have come to expect more from institutions of higher education. Colleges are also facing increasing scrutiny and regulation from the federal government. Colleges across the country have responded by creating bloated administrations to better manage these new demands.

Even if this is the right move in the long term, it has failed in the short term on the most obvious juncture of the bi-directional pressure: sexual assault. From above, the Department of Education has played an active role in the last two years in investigating colleges on their judicial processes, and even the White House has stepped in with the “It’s On Us” awareness campaign. From below, the “Know Your IX” campaign and other activist movements, have sought to hold colleges responsible for their bungling of sexual assault cases and work toward improved practices.

The fact that sexual assault on college campuses has been termed a “national crisis” demonstrates not only the scale of the problem, but also the entrenchment of the bureaucratic processes that have proved so problematic. Grinnell’s inability to handle sexual assault cases on its campus bears some similarity to Swarthmore’s experience. Like Swarthmore, Grinnell is a small liberal arts school renowned for its academics and left-wing politics, and also like Swarthmore, Grinnell has a history of resolving problems through dialogue. However, much of today’s far left sees dialogue as perfunctory political theater that transforms radical demands into meaningless talk. Accordingly, some students at Swarthmore have suggested that it is this dynamic that is responsible for the resistance to change sexual assault policies.

However, as the Huffington Post article on Grinnell unearths, there’s something else going on. For administrators, the increased scrutiny on the legality of their actions and the potential for lawsuits necessitate treading very carefully. The situation is particularly tricky because enforcing federal laws on sexual assault at colleges creates a legal grey area where colleges have an unclear degree of autono-

my on how to handle sexual assault cases.

The natural response to this uncertainty, and the high stakes involved, is to hide behind lawyers and release as little information to the public as possible. And while following what is believed to be the letter of the law will likely lead to improved mechanisms for handling sexual assault, the secrecy that this entails cannot satisfy the demands for transparency made by student activists.

Without supervision, colleges across the United States utterly failed to act in an acceptable manner on sexual assault cases. However, increased federal intervention is no panacea. A legal culture increases accountability but can create its own set of perverse incentives. Now, any major changes in handling sexual assault after colleges have fallen in line with Department of Education deadlines will signal past mistakes and open avenues for lawsuits. Increased enforcement may be better overall, but it will also back colleges into corners, and we’d better hope they’re the right corners.

The increasing regulation of administrations’ behavior is also leading to a rift between administrators, faculty, and students. Again, sexual assault is a flashpoint.

Many students have accused Swarthmore fraternity members of committing disproportionately high numbers of sexual assaults (according to the Guardian, fraternity members are responsible for 300 percent more rapes than average nationwide), which led to a referendum on the existence of the fraternities in the fall of 2013. However, because of privacy restrictions, there’s no way to corroborate the allegations. Swarthmore administrators likely know whether this is true or not, but releasing personal information on individual cases is illegal.

Information on sexual assault statistics, for example, is a form of privileged knowledge, the dynamic at the heart of a lot of the mistrust between students and administrators. By privileged knowledge, I mean knowledge that multiple groups seek, but only some can access. So when changes to campus rules are made, whether to sexual assault, housing, or alcohol policies, students will always want answers about the rationale, and administrators often have no ability to give students what they want.

Privileged knowledge is partially a result of legal restrictions, but we ignore the cultural aspect at our own peril.

Every community, sub-community, and sub-sub-community has beliefs, patterns

of behavior, and codes for interaction that will be largely hidden from outsiders.

Making generalizations and assumptions about communities of which we are not members is often necessary but rarely prudent.

College communities, particularly liberal arts schools, are frequent victims of this knowledge gap. On one end, there are conservatives that see liberal arts schools as signaling the downfall of American moral civilization. But then there are also people like Jonathan Chait, who argued that “PC culture,” or the aggressive hounding of all those that don’t fit into a narrow conception of left-wing identity politics, is so pervasive on college campuses that it squeezes out all other brands of liberalism. Now, Swarthmore may not be the perfect microcosm of all liberal arts colleges, but I can safely say from my experience that Chait isn’t wrong that this is something that exists. But he’s also entirely wrong to think that this is the hegemonic brand of left-wing thought and action. Simply, Swarthmore, like every college, has a wide spectrum of political thought among students, and ideologies are constantly struggling with each other and being reformed.

If we go further down the privileged knowledge rabbit hole, we get back to Swarthmore and the tension between students and administrators. The crux of the issue is this: both sub-communities have modes of thinking, doing, and interacting that are imperceptible to the other side.

And because students and administrators have to work together, there is always the desire to more fully understand the Other than is legally or culturally possible.

I

n the fall of 2013, I went to a town hall-style meeting with Dean of Diversity, Inclusion and Community Development Lili Rodriguez, Assistant Director of Student Activities, Leadership, and Greek Life Mike Elias, and Director of Public Safety Mike Hill on changes to alcohol and party policies. It didn’t go well.

Most of the students there were worried that any crackdown on underage drinking would encourage binge drinking and broadly lead to an adversarial relationship between students, administrators, and Public Safety (for those who don’t know or don’t remember, when I started college, Public Safety was mostly there to protect Swarthmore students from the police).

Rodriguez, Elias, and Hill were, to varying degrees, dismissive of Swarthmore’s previous party policy as irrespon-

sible and legally questionable. However, when pressed on the benefits to student safety that these changes would bring, the answers were extremely underwhelming.

Like most of the other students there, I was pretty pissed off. Near the end, I asked incredulously what had changed, and why the school couldn’t break the law.

It took me a little while to realize the impossible position Rodriguez, Elias, and Hill were in, which was then compounded by my question. There is no way any administrator could publicly comment on their own past legal conduct. Transparency may be an ideal to aspire to, but in some situations there are outcomes that multiple parties support that can only be achieved through the mutual withholding of information. However, these outcomes, like Swarthmore’s previous alcohol policy,

Sexual assault was a collective failure, both moral and institutional, but the ramifications of such a deep rupture go far beyond reformatting CJCs. are highly unstable. Think about it from a game-theory perspective: when there is not enough information to evaluate whether the other side is holding up their side of the bargain, mistrust will likely result. In turn, this makes protests more likely, and the status quo is likely to fall apart.

This is precisely what has happened at Swarthmore.

S

exual assault was a collective failure, both moral and institutional, but the ramifications of such a deep rupture go far beyond reformatting the College Judiciary Committee; it was the step off the trail that triggered the avalanche. Like an avalanche that sweeps away everything in its path with tremendous force, the institutional inertia that the sexual assault crisis set in motion has left few of the college’s social policies untouched. Many were only tangentially related to sexual asSWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

25

sault, but the imperative to avoid another monumental scandal means necessitates a total overhaul.

Swarthmore’s avalanche, however, is happening at a snail’s pace. It is a slow revolution. Institutions and policies are experiencing fundamental change, but at such a speed that there’s apparent continuity between the events of two years ago and today.

The record of reform is mixed. On one hand, there is no doubt the college is doing a better job of handling sexual assault cases than it was two years ago. Following the initial period of denial, Swarthmore has had to get serious about radically altering its processes for dealing with campus conflicts.

On the other, some changes seem destined to harm student life. There’s a move toward freshman-only housing (just a pilot program for now), which would partially break the bond between older and younger students that I benefitted from so much.

The sort of crises, like sexual assault, which bring national attention, demand wholesale coordination and change on the part of the administration.

However, it is Swarthmore’s alcohol and party policies that represent the most harmful changes. Banning funnels, for example, was an absurd step, and obviously unnecessary for anyone who’s ever been to a Swarthmore party (or talked to someone who has, for that matter). Nonetheless, Swarthmore life will continue as usual whether or not funnels and drinking games are permitted. The decision to cease Student Activities Committee funding for parties, however, was more insidious. Now, we all know that students mostly used “DJ money” to buy alcohol, but its termination had a predictable side effect: the only students able to buy enough alcohol for dozens of people, and 26

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

thus host parties, were the fraternities. It is a cruel irony that the college, worried about increased liability brought on by sexual assault, has made the fraternities more prominent in campus social life than they ever were. One of the primary grievances of campus activists was that fraternity members disproportionately sexually assaulted others and that the fraternity houses incubated an atmosphere conducive to sexual assault.

Lamentably, few of us saw all this coming. Prior to the spring of our discontent, I, and I think many others, tended to think of most aspects of the college as segmented: housing policy was separate from party policy, which was separate from student group policy, and so forth. However, when there’s a crisis as big as sexual assault, which brings national attention, administrators can no longer afford to allow the fragmentation to continue. These sorts of crises demand wholesale coordination and change.

There are a few lessons from the events of the last two years. First, the slow revolution says a lot about the institutional ripple effects of activism and the resulting change. In chaotic environments, change can be like whack-a-mole: squashing one problem can cause others to pop up.

Institutions, especially those that serve multiple constituencies, often translate a set of demands into policies that satisfy the imperative for change without solving the original impetus for seeking change.

Second, even those with the best of intentions often get it wrong. Navigating the campus political landscape is really, really complicated, and rarely are proposed policies broadly uncontroversial. Finally, when demanding change, there is a need to see not simply through the lenses of social justice or liability-limitation, but in paradigms that acknowledge the myriad of beliefs, pressures, and influences that everyone in the community faces. This empathy has been too frequently absent from recent campus conversations. Restoring it would go a long way to healing the deep fissures that have opened up.

I

n the environment that the events of the last two years have created, Quaker values (or what are called “Quaker values” on campus) are being squeezed from both sides. For many students, they’ve come to represent a PR exercise carried out to placate student demands in the face of inevitable changes. For administrators, the slow, deliberate process of dialogue and consensus is unlikely to produce the

changes they feel are needed. The utopian consensus, and the Quaker values on which it was built, requires trust, and that trust has disappeared. Even after all the students that remember the spring of our discontent are gone (it’s only a year away), the belief that the student body and the administration are adversaries will be passed down. The next generation of students will still be picking up the pieces of the last generation’s battles. But without a knowledge of the way things were, and therefore how they could potentially be again, I fear the trust may never return.

This is not to say that the conflictual relationship between students and the administration is only the result of a big series of misunderstandings. There are real issues that people stand on different sides of. For example, in February 2014, the college brought Robert George and Cornel West to campus to attempt to heal divides. It was a total failure, even if one disregards George’s repugnant views. Both speakers spoke about intellectual disagreement, but in doing so entirely missed the point. Though there is always a place for the encouragement of civil dialogue, Swarthmore was not suffering primarily from an inability to debate in the classroom, but difficulty in accommodating competing demands on the college’s social policies. The prioritization of academic issues over social cleavages represented a major divide between the majority of students and the rest of campus.

The major knock-on effect of this fundamental disconnect is a move toward major decisions that are made without the official input of the student body. In return, students hold an overwhelmingly negative view of the administration, and many tend to see every change as the result of malicious intent. This dynamic generates not only ill-will but bad policies.

The calendar change, which has since been rolled back, was one such debacle.

The timing was dubious and the logic never fully fleshed out. In the end, seniors get to keep their senior week, but it was another moment that generated even more distrust between students, administrators, and this time, the faculty.

Where is Swarthmore headed? Looking at all the evidence available to me, I can’t help but conclude that the college is moving toward a less nurturing, more conventional future. With the large exception of the college’s performance handling sexual assault cases, the student experience is not as good now as it was when I was a freshman. There are few signs that

suggest that the decline will reverse (the new president, Valerie Smith, is a notable exception). The administration is weighed down by the new politics of liability, and as the administration’s numbers balloon, the faculty is further removed from students’ non-academic lives. Student protest was unintentionally one of the reasons for the events that led to the decline in the first place. It’s hard to imagine another large-scale protest movement on any controversial issue that doesn’t lead to the administration retreating into its shell and repeating the current cycle.

Even if I am mildly pessimistic, I think we should also be honest with ourselves: Swarthmore’s student experience is, and will remain, better than that of most other schools. This isn’t “Swarthmore exceptionalism.” It’s the recognition that the combination of liberal values, an enormous endowment, elite academics, and a low professor-to-student ratio lead to a comparatively good environment.

The task ahead of the Swarthmore community, therefore, is to influence the trajectory of the college in this new context. For administrators, this means finding room to maneuver within the bounds of liability and mentally disentangling student welfare from what is legally

prudent. Making more of an attempt to consult with students (not necessarily in terms of how decisions are made, but so that administrators have a better sense of student opinion) will aid this process. For students, this means thinking strategically about what gains are possible and approaching the administration with a degree of trust and humility. I do not mean to say that activism should never be confrontational (would there have been change on sexual assault otherwise?) or that students must implicitly trust administrators, but that students should have an idea of what tactics they choose that extends beyond moral imperatives.

Students can create positive changes through organized protest and dialogue in the future, but should weigh the costs and benefits of attracting national media attention, especially a year or two later, when that media attention is gone but the college is still reeling.

Together, students and administrators should seek to bring back a slower, deliberative decision-making process. Striving for (even if not reaching) consensus can be painful and disjointed, but it is better at accommodating myriad views. Very rarely do policies crafted by a small group of people without broad consultation,

whether they be administrators or student activists, produce the best outcome for the community. And even when the policy works as intended, the feelings of exclusion produced may amplify future differences. As I wrote earlier, there are certainly circumstances that require decisive action. Just like full direct democracy is an untenable national political system, attempting to find consensus on room assignments instead of holding the housing lottery would be a colossal waste of time.

Nonetheless, the college has moved too far away from a consensus-oriented approach. Including all sectors of campus in major decisions is unwieldy and frequently frustrating, but the alternatives are even less appealing.

I have never been prouder to be a member of a community than I have been at Swarthmore. It pains me to see how this community has shattered in the past two years. I hope that I am wrong about Swarthmore’s downward descent, and the antagonism of the last two years are the growing pains caused by breaking down the old and building up the new. But if I am right, and Swarthmore is in decline, then I at least hope that the community can find the strength to put itself back together again. u

This is a Thinkpiece™ too A response to ‘In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas’

by Isabel Cristo

M

aybe it’s no wonder that Judith Shulevitz’s op-ed, “In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas”, shot to the top of the New York Times’ “Most Emailed” list late last month.

Shulevitz’s article, which posits “hypersensitivity” on college campuses as a fundamental threat to the very premise of a well-rounded college education, represents a trendy fear, if my Facebook news feed is any indication. Hers is the most popular and most recent in a drove of like-minded thinkpieces, coming on the heels of Jonathan Chait’s NYMag criticism of college “P.C. culture,” Karen Swallow

Prior’s condemnation of trigger warnings in the Atlantic, and countless other writers, liberal and conservative alike, decrying the oppressively “overly-medicated, overly-protected” culture instituted by student activists.

For her part, Shulevitz takes aim at the concept of “safe spaces,” the idea that there should be places for learning where people are mindful of the ways that their identities and experiences shape the conversation. Following in the time-honored tradition of patronizing the current generation of young people, she uses the notion of safe spaces to make sweeping generalizations about “today’s undergraduates” being “more puerile than their predecessors” and “too overcome by their own fragility” to actually get around to

the business of learning. She writes, “This new bureaucracy may be exacerbating students’ ‘self-infantilization,’... But why are students so eager to self-infantilize?” As an Actual College Student, I found my tolerance of this framing of campus culture waning quickly. It was fun for a while to roll my eyes at 2,000-word essays by white moderates on how the youths are destroying everything good, but in the words of my hero Sally Draper, my bullshit meter reached saturation point.

To begin with, the entire article suffers from a pronounced lack of scope. As a friend of mine pointed out, the first clue of this was Shulevitz’s use of the words “troubling” and “triggering” as synonyms.

For the record, “triggering” has to do with trauma, and “troubling” has to do with SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

27

the number of “Broad City” episodes I watched yesterday instead of doing my Econ problem set. But furthermore, it is amazing to me that in the direct aftermath of the University of Oklahoma SAE racism scandal, the University of Mary Washington rugby team’s “fuck a whore” chant, and the brutal beating of a black University of Virginia student by police, someone could reasonably conclude that the real problem with college campuses is that they are on the whole too sensitive towards student safety. Shulevitz chooses to question the efficacy of rooms like one at Brown University that is “equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education cited 12 major incidents of racism in the last month and four new col-

Common in all of these articles like Shulevitz’s is a kind of wistful nostalgia for a time of free exchange and reason on college campuses. leges have been added to the list of those being federally investigated for Title IX complaints. Safe spaces are simply not the most productive place for us to be aiming our concern. And it is not as much of a leap as it is a cross-dimensional bound to claim that such a space is indicative of an entire generation of students “unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled.”

Twenty-two-year-olds being thrown helplessly around by windy counterarguments is a pretty fun mental picture, but I have a hard time believing that even Shulevitz herself believes this could actually be a reality. And her unequivocal diagnosis that safe spaces are “ bad for [the hypersensitive] and for everyone else” is grounded in a frankly ignorant understanding of what a “safe space” is and who 28

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

the “hypersensitive” are. This is Shulevitz’s description of a “safe space”: “In most cases, safe spaces are innocuous gatherings of like-minded people who agree to refrain from ridicule, criticism or what they term microaggressions—subtle displays of racial or sexual bias—so that everyone can relax enough to explore the nuances of, say, a fluid gender identity. As long as all parties consent to such restrictions, these little islands of self-restraint seem like a perfectly fine idea. But the notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe… People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it.”

Firstly, can we all agree that “ridicule” and “criticism” are not comparable forms of discourse? I’m fairly confident that every professor and student under the sun would tell you that constructive criticism is fundamental to a meaningful education. But ridicule? Since when is that ever appropriate? And from what evidence does Shulevitz glean the idea that safe spaces are made up of “like-minded people”? More importantly though, is Shulevitz honestly disagreeing that many spaces are unsafe for those who have, say, a fluid gender identity? A quick checkin with anyone who presents as gender non-conforming could probably give Shulevitz a mile of definitive proof that harassment and abuse are alive and well in most spaces. And especially given the way that the Black Lives Matter movement has brought national attention to the literal life-threatening nature of being black in public, the “implication” that many spaces are unsafe for certain people seems more like incontrovertible fact.

Although the kinds of safe spaces that Shulevitz describes at Brown are indeed present and useful in their own right, leading the article with this example mischaracterizes the rhetoric of safe spaces. Most of the time, “safe space” is just a way to create a particular kind of learning environment. A safe space simply recognizes that there are groups who have historically been silenced and marginalized, and thus that there are power dynamics at play which often challenge real

intellectual exchange taking place. A safe space is a space where people consciously try to mitigate those dynamics in order to allow for honest intellectual exchange and criticism. A safe space is one where a girl feels comfortable enough to say to a boy in the room, “I was talking, please don’t interrupt me,” or where a student of color feels like they can point out racism in a peer’s comments and be heard. The ability to freely and constructively criticize others’ ideas is exactly the point of a safe space. Establishing basic rules of respect and tolerance and compassion among a group of people is not “restrictive” and it’s not “scrubbing conversation clean of controversy,” it’s being a decent human being.

Safe spaces challenge all of us to be more reflexive in our intellectual discourse, and this, in my opinion, is really the best way to actually “broaden your horizons and sharpen your wits.”

Of course, Shulevitz’s article is predicated on a larger critique of “P.C. culture” and identity politics (à la Jonathan Chait).

For those who pray at the altar of liberal enlightenment, the current culture of sensitivity is viewed as a direct assault on principles of free speech and free exchange. The word “censorship” is thrown around a lot. And indeed, common in all these articles is a kind of wistful nostalgia for a time of free exchange and reason on college campuses. Shulevitz says, “Only a few of the students want stronger antihate-speech codes. Mostly they ask for things like mandatory training sessions and stricter enforcement of existing rules.

Still, it’s disconcerting to see students clamor for a kind of intrusive supervision that would have outraged students a few generations ago. But those were hardier souls.” She then goes on to ask, “What will they do when they hear opinions they’ve learned to shrink from? If they want to change the world, how will they learn to persuade people to join them?”

The irony of this nostalgia is that this golden era of free discourse and open-mindedness never truly existed, and this is exactly what identity politics seeks to expose. “Free exchange” is only really free and only really an actual exchange if everyone has equal access to forums of conversation and equal chances of having their voices heard and taken seriously.

Dialogue is not an end unto itself, and a constructive conversation is dependent on some initial terms. We can’t demand that everyone engage in “free exchange” while also ignoring the fact that the world works in ways that privilege some voices over

Left to right: Judith Shulevitz, Jonathan Chait, and Karen Swallow Prior, who all recently published think pieces decrying today’s student activist culture.

others. In a classroom where students of color are seriously underrepresented, for example, a phenomenon called “role encapsulation” occurs wherein an individual is seen as representing the entirety of an identity group. With that kind of pressure, the ability for those students to engage in “free exchange” is compromised.

I have a hard time knowing where to even begin with the “hardier” argument.

We current college-goers have a lot to learn from the student movements of “a few generations ago.” But it is a mistake to romanticize a time when non-white students constituted only 7 percent of the average incoming class, before Title IX, and before most colleges had any viable financial aid programs or institutionalized resources for minority students. It is downright myopic to reduce the complex politics of civil rights, feminist, and anti-war campus movements to those students simply being “hardier.” The powerful voices we heard were still all too often wrapped up in their own dynamics of power and privilege—think of the tension between black and white feminists in the 1960s. Plus, it’s plain disrespectful to the hundreds of student activists today who are doing incredible and arduous and demanding work. Perhaps the current trend towards sensitivity is exactly what Photos courtesy of Judithshulevitz.com, Gawker.com, and Tweetspeakpoetry.com

those “hardier souls” sought when they struggled through one of the most contentious and salient periods in the history of student activism (they are, after all, the ones who raised this current generation of self-infantilizing whiners).

Furthermore, what Shulevitz calls a “demand” for “intrusive supervision,” student organizers view as wielding the considerable power of the institution they attend in order to make a political statement (a statement that the university routinely ignores, by the way). Take an instance that Shulevitz herself calls on: the protesting of speakers. Bringing speakers to campus— whether for commencement speeches, guest lectures, or debates—is not a neutral move. In addition to the resume-building benefits of speaking at an elite institution and the power of having their voices heard and validated, speakers are paid for their appearances. Implicit in this transaction is a message from the university: “You will benefit from hearing this person speak.”

If enough students disagree with that message, calling for a disinvitation or otherwise protesting is the best way to express a collective political sentiment in lieu of financial resources. Of course students, like everyone, are liable to make mistakes, and sometimes an animated question-and-answer period is more appropriate than a

disinvitation. But Shulevitz doesn’t explore those complications. Instead, she simply chooses to interpret that activism as rooted in infantilization rather than empowerment, thus delegitimizing it altogether.

But protesting speakers, pointing out microaggressions, or asking a university to call out hate speech is an exercise in free speech, not an avoidance of the unfamiliar. Does anyone honestly think that what Muslim students need is to be exposed to Bill Maher’s Islamophobia at their commencement in order to “broaden their field of vision and sharpen their wits”? As much as Shulevitz and others would like to suggest that students in college are insulated from “the real world,” I think you’ll find that students of color, low-income and disabled students, women and queer students, and first-generation students are actually very familiar with the marginalizing narratives that constitute the dominant culture in this country. Mobilizing against the prospect of giving these views more of a platform is not an attempt by these students to “shield” themselves from “the unfamiliar.” It is a conscious critique of that which is overwhelmingly ubiquitous.

Therein lies the problem with the way that “political correctness” is used to describe identity politics: it implies that SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

29

being considerate and thoughtful about your own experiences and those of others is an exercise in social acceptability and politeness rather than a radical political act. But actively listening to and respecting the voices of those who have historically been ignored is a political act. It’s how we combat that history. When “sensitivity” is viewed in this way, Shulevitz and others like her are revealed to be the political old guards that they are, their warnings of an immobilized generation not much more than a plea to secure the status quo. And they need to get out of the way.

Oftentimes, I feel like labeling something or someone “politically correct” is itself a rhetorical tool used to avoid having to listen. Katherine Cross of Feministing did a beautiful job of articulating another way that we fall into this pattern of rhetorically silencing others: “We respond to prejudice in pointillist fashion: this individual said something that hurt this other individual; therefore “offense” is the best way to describe that harm. But the reality is that when we talk about something like, say, misgendering a trans woman or using her old name in public, what is happening in those situations transcends the individual offense felt by the woman in question. That is part of her experience of the event, and part of the harm, but it is not in itself a political matter. What is political, in no uncertain terms, is the way such words and ideas are the spearpoint of violence against trans women, used to justify it and all but ensure such crimes will be repeated. That is what so many transphobes on the internet deliberately access when they employ transmisogynist hate speech, and that is what takes it above the level of mere offensiveness.”

This is the missing link for many a cultural commentator—the way that identity politics allows us to complicate dualisms of the personal and the political, the individual and the collective. Shulevitz, for one, would do well to think more carefully about this connection.

Identity politics is imperfect, but not in the ways that “In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas” identifies. Firstly, as many have noted before me, the vocabulary of identity politics and safe spaces (phrases such as “preferred gender pronouns,” for example) is still, for the most part, relegated to academia and those who have access to it. This is not to say that people who are 30

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

not at college don’t think critically about issues of race and gender and class, but that any movement that seeks to address power dynamics must be cognizant of the power that comes with knowing words like “heteronormative” and “hegemony.”

Another consequence of the movement comes from its intensely high stakes— we’re talking about people’s lived experiences when we talk about identity politics, and this can be difficult to integrate into a political or academic setting that is generally dismissive of “emotions” as a legitimate intellectual exercise. Samhita Mukhopadhyay, in an essay called “Why Political Correctness is Still Politically Relevant,” writes: “[T]he rise of identity politics as an academic, political and cultural movement came with some baggage. A side effect of people feeling invisible for generations is anger. While identity politics pushed culture and politics, it also released decades of anger and animosity that previously went unexpressed in our finest educational institutions. This scared those who preferred to assume that everyone was happy in the good old days or believed that certain ideas were universally true. Of course, fear and anger had always been under the surface; it just finally had a chance to breathe.”

There are also less lofty and more banal problems with the movement. Here’s Mukhopadhyay again: “This isn’t to say that the sanctimonious overreliance on saying the right thing can’t be distracting and self-serving. Looking back at my college activism, I am slightly embarrassed by the emotional energy and time I spent judging other people’s politics and decisions. It was a natural part of growing into a political thinker and differentiating myself, but in other ways it distracted me from looking at broader issues outside my day-to-day life. Today I remain deeply invested in the project of identity politics, though frankly, people who are overly dogmatic about political identity affiliations sometimes frustrate me—probably because they remind me of myself. But those moments are rare and those voices harmless to the greater project of accountability to and inclusion of marginalized people. What I will never concede to the anti-P.C. cadre is the conflation of one of the richest, most important movements in academic, the-

oretical and American political life with the supposed policing of speech.”

As someone with five years of progressive education, I know that there are times when people employ this vocabulary primarily as a way of asserting themselves over others. I know that there are times when criticisms on the basis of identity politics are unresearched. I myself don’t agree with every single protest and every single critique, and I sometimes wish people were more careful in navigating the scale of their responses. But ultimately, I do think that the advent of identity politics does far, far more good for our intellectual discourse than it does harm.

And more often than not, even if I suspect that I genuinely disagree with a comment along those lines, I come away having to

There are lots of deeply interesting and complicated conversations we should be having about identity politics, allyship, safe spaces, and the idea of political correctness. think a little more critically about why I disagree. Like, if I were to make the claim that Shulevitz’s article draws on regressive and sexist tropes about “hysterical” and irrational women, you might roll your eyes.

But maybe you then might start thinking about the forces at work that made you shrug off that analysis. And lots of times, going through that mental process is cool and productive and makes me a better thinker. The bottom line is that there are lots of deeply interesting and complicated conversations we should be having about identity politics, allyship, safe spaces, and the idea of “political correctness.” But generally castigating this generation of students is not one of them, and neither is the alarmist claim that a handful of college kids are the biggest threat to liberalism.

Let’s keep perspective, people. u

Please be seated photo essay by Mckinley Bleskachek “Please be seated� is a series of color photographs of how people in Philadelphia relate to a shared structure in our environment.

These photos capture many everyday moments. What gives them power is the juxtaposition between the simple nature of the setting and the complex emotions expressed by the subjects.

This piece reflects my academic and personal investment in social justice. As a sociology/anthropology and educational studies major I am interested in using my art to break down the imposing structures that separate us and accentuate the common experiences, feelings, and moments that make us all human.

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

31

32

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

33

34

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

35

PERSONAL ESSAY

jp

by Anna Gonzales

I

n the first week of my first year at college, I got a phone call from a 413 area code. 413 is for western Massachusetts, where I had spent the past four years at boarding school. I was lying on the top bunk of the set of bunk beds I shared with my roommate. It was mid-afternoon on a weekday and oppressively hot outside.

I was overwhelmed and delighted by the sheer volume of free time suddenly on my hands. I remember that those first few weeks of freshman year, I spent a lot of afternoons in my dorm room feeling that vague, unsettling sense that I was expected somewhere, that I was supposed to be doing something important.

I sat up on the bed and answered the phone. Hello?

Anna. Hello. It’s Dr. Curtis calling. Dr Curtis was the head of my high school, the first woman to hold the position. She made it a point to know all of the students’ names, but I had only ever spoken to her once or twice. We treated her usually with indifference and occasionally with hatred, and sightings of her outside of school functions were celebrity events.

The senior class considered, as one of our pranks, kidnapping her dog (a yellow Labrador named Friday) and either dying his fur green or shaving our class year onto him. We went with another idea instead, but at graduation, every senior held a dog treat in his or her hand and, as we crossed the stage to receive our diplomas and shake Dr. Curtis’ hand, passed it to her. By the end of graduation, a pile of two hundred dog treats threatened to overwhelm the podium behind which she stood. In a display of what I realize now was quite clearly racism, but at the time was just something that made me vaguely uncomfortable, most of the people I know relentlessly made fun of her Colombian accent.

I had no idea why she was calling me.

We briefly exchanged pleasantries—she asked me if I was at school yet (I was), where I was (Swarthmore), how I liked it so far (it had only been a week, but it was great). Then she told me that she was calling because she had gotten a phone

36

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

call late the night before from another student, who had told her something very troubling about me.

I don’t think the reality of the whole thing really sank in at that point. The only thought I remember having was of how beautiful the paper lanterns which my roommate had hung from the ceiling were.

I think this is just a misunderstanding, I said slowly. I had made the decision to say nothing long before—I had made that decision when it had happened.

Well, this student told me something about a letter that was very inappropriate and troubling. He gave me a story, but I need you to tell me what happened.

Something I don’t remember: when I decided to just give in and tell her the actual truth. I was talking, and I could hear the keys of her computer clicking in the background of the phone, and everything was on its way to being over.

I

t was one of those late-spring storms that periodically drenched the campus. The storms would start sometime in the afternoon, while you were in class (hopefully, because that would mean that sports practice was cancelled or moved indoors and you would gain a precious couple of hours of free time), and would continue well into the night. Campus was beautiful, even in the rain, and especially afterwards. In the morning, you would wake up to what seemed like a more green world, everything more vibrant and brightened. All of the grass would still be perfectly manicured, the grounds crew having silently, invisibly cleared away any branches that may have fallen.

The student newspaper office was in the basement of one of the classroom buildings. It was one of my jobs to finish putting the copy edits for all of the articles into the final draft of the paper, which meant that I would be the last one there.

Either Mr. Palmer or Ms. Hannay would stay to help me with the process, sitting next to me reading the corrections off the lengthy sheets of paper on which we printed out the proofs while I put them into the computer. When everything was done, we would send the paper to the printer. In the office, which had huge glass

windows that were taller than me, the effect of the rain was particularly heightened in the office, and it poured from the sky and the gutters and ran down the slight inclines around the building so that you had a feeling of being on a ship or of being buried in water. Side note: He would probably have considered these last two paragraphs pointlessly descriptive.

We were on the inside spread of the paper, checking over the spellings of the seniors’s names. This last issue of the year featured a list of where everyone was going to college, surrounding a collage of pictures of all of the seniors. One of the pictures was of Mr. Palmer’s senior English class, the Cambridge Seminar. Next year was to be the twenty-fifth and final time the course would be offered. Admission to the class of ten or so students was highly competitive, because it meant not only that you would read modernist texts all year and travel to England to take classes at Cambridge over spring break, but that you were one of Mr. Palmer’s favorites.

In the various hierarchies of my high school, a teacher’s hard-earned affection was one of the prime social currencies, and worshipful cults of personality arose around certain teachers. I was unable to gain any other meaningful form of social standing for myself. I wasn’t from Greenwich or the city and I didn’t summer in the right place, which meant that I had not grown up alongside all of my classmates. And I was merely decent at those extremely preppy sports which either involve very small balls (squash, tennis, field hockey, lacrosse, golf) or no balls at all (rowing). So I made myself mean something at the school in the only way I possibly could, by taking every class with every cult persona in the faculty and shamelessly sucking up until I was adored.

I was already positioned fairly well as one of Palmer’s favorites because I was the Editor in Chief of the paper, which he advised. But I wanted more. It didn’t look as though that was going to happen, though—everyone who had made it past the first rounds of application to Cambridge had been given an interview, and I hadn’t gotten one.

Then Mr. Palmer pointed to the picture

of his class in England. It strikes me now as strange that I don’t remember what his hands looked like, anymore, nearly three years since I have seen him.

That’s going to be you. His finger on the picture. That cryptic reveal was incredibly typical of him. I was overjoyed. I was in the class! I would be spending more time with him than anyone else. I could barely speak.

I thought I wasn’t in the class, because I didn’t get an interview.

Those are for people I don’t know. I know you.

In an email to me about the class a few days later, he wrote, When I think about next year and for whom I want to be a good teacher, your face comes to mind.

I

was on the first floor of the English building, putting the finishing touches on a project for my European history class. I remember that I was enjoying the assignment, and luxuriating in being in the building when no one else was there— it was marble and wood and wonderfully quiet, all of which made me feel much more serious and intellectual than I actually was. Sometimes I would walk into the teachers’s lounge—such heavy wood and so many books—and imagine for a moment that, years later, I would work there.

When I come back to visit I still do this.

He passed by the open door.

Can we take a walk?

I looked at my project. I have to finish this. It was somewhat true. He turned around and left, silently.

A couple of minutes later, he came back in. I don’t remember ever seeing him move as quickly as he did then. What stays with me is the sense of movement, his blazer flying out behind him, his face—I don’t remember what his face looked like but I could tell that he was upset.

Are we ever going to speak again?

I don’t—I have to finish this for Euro.

He became much more still. I didn’t even want anything. I just thought we could have a little time together.

What did I say next? Did I say anything? Did I say, We can’t, we couldn’t? I’m sorry? Did we look at each other for a long moment? I don’t remember. But we didn’t go on a walk. He must have left. I finished the project.

C

ambridge was my second-to-last class of the day, sixth period, which meant that it was also the secondto-last class of my high school career. We

did not have assigned seats, but by that point we had all sat in our seats for so long that it would have looked incredibly strange to move. So I sat next to him, as I always did.

I was a few minutes early. Everyone was settling in when he arrived. He sat down next to me.

Hello. So low that no one could hear him but me.

I said nothing.

Hello. He tried again.

Still nothing.

Class started. Not a normal class—his farewell to us. And to twenty five years of this class, of trips to England. He read us a letter. I remember that it was beautiful and touching—or at least I am certain that it was, because I remember a number of the people in the class crying, and I know that he is an excellent writer. All I felt at that moment was the most incredible sense of anger.

When the letter reading was over, it was time for us to say our goodbyes. His wife was standing at the back of the class. I felt no anger towards her. She didn’t know, or even if she did, it wasn’t her fault. I gave her a long hug and she told me this was not it and that we would have our own goodbye later. Then I circled back to my seat at the front of the room and took from my backpack every book he had given me that year. Volumes and volumes of contemporary poetry, novels, everything. Maybe twenty books in total, given to me as birthday presents, as Christmas presents, as just-because presents, handed to me after class or arriving in my student mail. I set them on my chair. I pulled it back a little bit from the table, so that he would see them.

A

ll that I remember from the letter he had had another student give me to read the night before: Don’t be cruel. It doesn’t suit you.

I told myself I would stop at one page, back and front.

The one thing I ask is that you keep the books, and read them.

At the beginning of the year, you were a favorite for the Deerfield Cup, but you’ve become something much different in the eyes of the faculty—someone much more interesting, but certainly not the Deerfield Girl.

When I came to your room early that next morning, I still thought we could have had our time out of time.

A

ll-school meeting took place once a week. This very last one came after our very last classes of the year. There were green and white balloons tied to the arms of every chair in the senior section of the auditorium. As the meeting went on, we loosened the strings of the balloons and let them float up to the ceiling. By the end of the meeting, the ceiling was crowded with balloons bumping against each other.

In the bustle of everyone arriving and sitting down, I was alone. My friends, with whom I would usually sit, had not yet arrived. I’d left his last class, and the books, just over an hour ago. He appeared suddenly at my side. He crouched so that we were at the same level, me in my auditorium seat, him balanced on the balls of his feet.

Please, can we talk?

Go away.

Anna.

Leave.

P

acking up at the end of the year, I got rid of everything he’d given me.

The books were almost all gone.

Any scrap of his handwriting had to go, too. The journal I had kept for his class, with pages full of his spiky green writing responding to my thoughts. All of the essays I had written for him. That letter. I threw it all away, in a gesture that did not feel, to me, entirely sincere.

A

sampling of the emails he sent me that spring:

One week after we returned from England: Subject: None Message: ? jp Subject: re: Message: …?

Anna Subject: re: re: Message:

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

37

A

How are you? jp A few weeks before the end of the year: Subject: pomes pennyeach Message: If you think of your name as the subject of these poems (attached), they will make sense. jp Again, a couple of weeks before graduation: Subject: None Message: I am confused. Tonight I received in my faculty mailbox a book of poems by you dedicated to me. jp These, of course, aren’t perfect recollections. A few months into the summer, the school deleted all of my class’s email accounts and, with it, these messages, and probably many more which I don’t remember.

T

he mailroom was in the basement of the English building. I don’t remember how I found out that I had gotten a position as an editorial associate, or as Editor in Chief sometime in my junior winter, but I still remember the letter that said I would be a writer for the paper, a few weeks into my freshman year. I was thirteen years old, culture-shocked, mostly friendless, close to failing my algebra class, and fumbling my way through thirds (one level below junior varsity) field hockey practices. The letter is somewhere in a box in my room at home. That was the first time I saw his handwriting, in his signature. I remember that first triumphant feeling, the first time in high school that I thought, They want me. The number of times he would make me feel wanted over the next few years are too many to count, and I will always associate them with holding that letter in the funny half-light of the basement, with his signature, nothing really legible except for the shape of the J and the P, and green ink, always green ink.

38

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

s senior year passed, we got closer and closer. A few particularly lovely moments stand out to me, such as the afternoon when he and his wife took me away from school to see The Artist. Just me. It was a small, private-feeling theater, and we got popcorn, and we sat in silence in the silent movie. I remember him saying, afterward, That perfectly bowshaped mouth, about the actress.

Another day: when we went to the dump. They lived in Heath, one of the quiet hill towns nestled into the valley around my school, in a house full of books and art, with a barn where the English class slept over one night at the very end of fall, and an orchard where they took us apple-picking. They allowed the neighbors’s cows, fattening for slaughter at the end of the season, to roam their property. The cows were enormous and shy and ate the apples whole out of our hands.

If you lived in Heath, to get rid of your trash, you had to go to the dump. I rode in the back of their car, in the middle seat so that I could talk to both of them. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about that day, just that it was one of those many times when I felt like their child. We would crack occasional jokes about them as my surrogate parents, but we all knew we weren’t joking. Most evenings, if I wasn’t too busy, I would find them, wherever they were—on duty on a dormitory hall, or at their on-campus home, a little brown house—and we would drink tea and I’d do my work as they graded papers, in comfortable silence.

There are other moments I could point to that marked our increasing closeness.

With him: after I turned in one particularly personal essay about my aching, completely unreciprocated love for my brilliant, cold, gorgeous, irrevocably heterosexual roommate. He ushered me into the hallway outside of the newspaper office during a slow moment at layout and I confessed to him who it was about, realizing that he was the first and only person I had told, and that this made him the person to whom I was closest, the one who knew more about my life, about me, than anyone else. I didn’t worry that he would tell anyone. I trusted him, in this place where I trusted basically nobody.

Now I know that perhaps when you grow quiet in class, your mind is filled with visions of love, he wrote on the essay.

Or moments with his wife: Sometimes, on the nights that all of the editors were in the office working on the paper, either he or his wife would drive into town and pick

up pizza. I went with her. It was another rainy night. I remember that she drove her old green Subaru Outback with quiet confidence that always impressed me.

Riding in a car at boarding school was a rare treat.

She was notoriously anti-emotional— certainly had favorites too, but did not exactly invite or dispense emotional confidences. I forget how we got on the topic.

I’m not even sure the content is quite as important. She told me she had been in relationships, before him, with three gay men—one of whom had become her fiancé, and they had almost gotten married before he had confessed and then disappeared. It was a short drive to the pizza

Later, I tried to tell my friends about the conversation but couldn’t quite come up with the words for it. Or did I even try to tell them? I think it might have felt too private to even mention. parlor, so we didn’t get far into it, but I realize now how incredibly rare that confession was, especially when she proceeded to tell me how that had made her feel, made her question herself, wonder what it was about herself that made this keep happening. Later I tried to tell my friends about the conversation but couldn’t quite come up with the words for it. Or did I even try to tell them? I think it might have felt too private to even mention.

T

he morning after it happened, I opened the door of the room I was staying in at Cambridge and found a note taped to my doorframe. From the other surrogate parent: let’s go for a walk, it read. She knew Cambridge much better than I did, and took me to beautiful colleges I hadn’t yet seen. It was one of the warmest days we’d had there. We sat on a

bench outside. This is why I thought she knew: I wonder if we’ve hurt you in any way.

That’s the danger in singling you out.

Taking you to movies, giving you books, making you special. I’m sorry if we’ve hurt you. I hope we haven’t hurt you. Her hand—ten years older than his, incredibly soft—pressing mine.

No, no. You’ve made everything so special. You’ve made me—I wouldn’t be—The only thing that will hurt is leaving you and saying goodbye. That is exactly what I said, I remember that. She was crying, tears in her blue eyes, lightened with age, but this seemed to make her feel better. I resolved then not to tell anyone. I couldn’t do that to her.

She and I had a lovely spring together, the nicest time with her that I can remember. She let me join her short story elective, a few weeks into the semester, with no requirements of reading or writing. I did the readings, I wrote the stories, but I joined the class mostly because we had mutually, silently agreed that it would be nice for us to spend as much time together as possible.

I

hadn’t quite processed what had happened on the walk as we stopped for coffee and pastries on the way back to the college. Together? From the man at the register.

No. We’re not together, are we? More of a statement than a question, from him.

After the first class of the morning, passing by him on my way out of the classroom. A brief hug. Are we still friends?

Of course.

Keep me safe.

An inscription in the book he gave me at the end of the trip (he gave all of us books). The book was Invisible Cities: I’ll wait for you in the city of the Great Khan.

That was how he liked to speak and write. Cryptic shorthand.

I

have been back to my high school four times since I graduated. Once for the end of the fall athletic season when I was a freshman, once for graduation at the end of that year, once for graduation last year, and once at the end of last summer. Every time, I visit all of my favorite places, and my old classrooms, and so of course I go back to Cambridge.

His room (number 52, on the first floor) is completely different, of course.

He was sent away, forced to move off campus and stop teaching, and all of his

things went with him. The stuff of nearly thirty years of teaching. The posters on the walls, the shelves of books, his handwriting on the chalkboard are all another teacher’s now. The table and the seats are in the same place, though. When I go back, I pull out my old chair and sit down and try to remember. It used to be easier.

The most recent time that I went back, I was not even entirely certain which was the right classroom. Opening one of the books on the classroom shelves to find his name written in those boyish spikes on the inside cover stirred nothing within me.

When the school found out what had happened, they opened an investigation against him, to find out if anything similar had happened with other students. As part of this, I had to take the SEPTA to Media and meet with a woman in the Child Protective Services office there, who asked me what had happened. She focused mostly on how he had touched me—if he had ever tried anything sexual.

The thought was less repellent to me than completely ridiculous. It was never, had never been, like that. It never would have been. When the interview was over the woman said, Well, hopefully this is all over and you’ll just forget about this guy and never think of him again.

That’s intolerable to me, somehow.

C

ambridge a few days after it happened. The bright afternoon hours.

Him in his socks in the middle of the day in the hallway, apologizing to me (why are the socks what I remember?

They were white and very clean—he was always quite neat, in his denim button ups and knit ties and tweedy brown blazers).

Looking a little sunburned and frantic.

Not frantic—more as though he was going to fall apart. I sensed that I had the ability there to say something that would put him back together (I often had this sense when we spoke about it, later). Of course I forgave him. It wasn’t a big deal. He had not, actually, done anything to me. We would go back to school and we would forget all about it. That was what I wanted.

I told him not to worry. I wasn’t going to tell anyone.

I

see him all the time. I have never actually seen him, but there are an incredible number of men who look like him.

The hair, the glasses, the height, the outfit, all of it is so strikingly similar. Sometimes in museums my heart seizes, because I think that man over there looking at the

painting is him. Of course, it never is.

I’ve seen his wife once. Graduation at the beginning of last summer. Only for a second, as she emerged with the rest of the teachers from the graduation tent.

Her head was bent together with another teacher’s, the two of them talking. That was it. I don’t know if she saw me. A flash of her gray-blonde bob, and then she is gone.

F

acebook message over fall break this year from a close Swarthmore friend, visiting a friend of his at Harvard: Just met a Deerfield kid, — ? Who knew about your emm experience with a teacher.

Didn’t know it was fucking school gossip that’s awful. He said you had an “affair.”

I didn’t realize how difficult it would be as an English major to avoid anything we’d ever read together, or that this would be something I even needed to do. Freshman fall, sitting in McCabe one morning, I found myself utterly unable to read the portion of “The Wasteland” that had been assigned for my FYS that day. The words on the page blurred and slipped away, and all I could hear was his voice (he often read aloud to us in class, slowly). Those are pearls that were his eyes. My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. / Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak / What are you thinking of? What thinking?

What? / I never know what you are thinking. Think.

In these ways, he’s still with me. Occasionally I dream he calls me. I wake with my phone clenched in my hand, fingers aching.

F

rom the Cambridge Seminar Facebook group, original capitalization and punctuation, or lack thereof, retained: Initial post by David Morales-Miranda on September 6, 2012: So word on the street is Mr. Palmer disappeared (got fired) and won’t be teaching anymore. Does anyone know why?

Comment by Elisabeth Yancey at 11:51 p.m: I have no idea but it’s seriously freaking me out. I also heard Dr. Curtis made an announcement at lunch about it, telling people if they needed to they could talk to counselors or something?! This is so weird!!!

Comment by Josh Marx at 11:56 p.m: SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

39

Let’s not make this a Facebook thing.

Comment by Elisabeth Yancey on at 11:57 p.m.: Good call, just want to know what’s going on Comment by David Morales-Miranda at 11:57 p.m.: Yeah, I was just curious Comment by Ryan Heffernan at 10:13 a.m. the next day: we should talk about it. we are all here and people should know.

Comment by Josh Marx at 10:25 a.m.: You are being selfish. If the people involved wanted to have it out there and talked about they would have done it themselves. It’s not actually your place ryan.

Comment by Ryan Heffernan at 10:34 a.m.: shut the fuck up josh. there are bullshit rumors circling all around the school right now. there are random people at da [Deerfield Academy] talking shit about jp. Im saying people are gonna find out anyway they may as well hear the correct fucking story. its not like you guys were keeping your lips shut before anyway.

Comment by Josh Marx at 10:41 a.m.: I think you’re being insensitive and you have no reason to be such a dick. I agree people in this class have a right to know but broadcasting it on Facebook seems insensitive and unnecessary.

Comment by Sarah Woolf at 10:42 a.m.: please, you guys, can we keep hostility down. this is really tough to deal with and think about, for me at least, and there’s no way to fix it, but we can at least not turn on each other and distort our memories (but seriously) of DA and this class … …

Comment by Eliza Mott at 12:01 p.m., with two likes: Maybe we should all be considerate for

40

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

those who actually have had to and still have to deal with situation.

Comment by Josh Marx at 12:17 p.m.: I think included among that distinction is not talking about it in our Facebook group. Ryan, I hate to Burst your little bubble, but you’re just straight up wrong with this one.

Comment by Sarah Woolf at 12:36 p.m.: No one is ever right or wrong with this shit. Let’s just stop.

A

bout halfway through my freshman year, a New Yorker story came out about a teacher who had sexually abused students for years and years at a prestigious all-boys’ private school in the city. I offered to one of my closest friends that something somewhat similar had happened to me—nothing on this level, not at all, I was quick to clarify, but one of my teachers had sort of…had sort of what? I didn’t even know.

That’s disgusting, she said.

The thing was that that was never how I thought of it. That’s important to clarify.

It certainly upset me. Sometimes it still does. But it wasn’t because I was disgusted. It was more of a heartbreaking series of events than a disgusting one.

F

ive in the morning? Four thirty?

I was locked in a sweaty embrace with another girl in the class. All of a sudden the door opened. Light from the hallway landed on us. He stood in the doorway. I don’t know how much he had seen or heard before we could disentangle ourselves.

I just wanted to check that you were awake and that we were still going to the museum, he said to the other girl. She mumbled something affirmative. He left. I don’t know what would have happened if she had not been there with me.

S

ometimes I imagine that that morning walk never happened. Or that it happened, but in a different way. We leave from Peterhouse at a very early hour of the morning and set out for Grantchester. He says he has questions for me and I say I have them for him too. He asks me about my essay about the aforementioned irrevocably heterosexual roommate and I tell him about my struggles with the whole thing and how I still think I love

her, just her, just this one girl, and maybe one other girl, too. Then he asks me about the boy who I wrote another essay about, and I tell him about that too. Then I get to ask him my questions: why don’t he and his wife have any children? And, how did they meet and fall in love? And he tells me so much, more than he has ever told me, all of his feelings about Cambridge and his sadness that the class is over and how he feels about those non-children and the twenty five years of surrogate children.

And perhaps we hug, as was common and normal, as would be common and normal with someone you’re close with. And we get coffee and pastries and go back to the college and everything is normal.

And he does not tell me he’s had something of a crush on me, and he does not hold my hand, and he does not stop and try to kiss me between two low stone walls on our walk back. And three years from then I am not sitting here writing this. He still teaches at the school, though he is close to leaving, and sometimes we talk on the phone. More likely, we write short, funny emails to each other. His wife still talks to me, too. When I go back to visit, I always see them. We remain closer than me and my parents. They know everything. It’s very easy to imagine this, since I spent the better part of four years expecting that that was what would happen.

“T

he Book Mill: Books You Don’t Need in a Place You Can’t Find” is the slogan of the Montague Book Mill, a used bookstore in a converted mill, perched atop a river in Massachusetts that swells and almost floods in the early spring when the ice in Vermont and Maine starts melting and flowing downstream. On Sundays, he would sometimes take a school van, packed with people dying to get off campus. On one of these trips, maybe a week or two after we had gotten back from England, I went along, as I always did, and, after wandering the books by myself for a while, ran into him standing in front of the poetry shelves.

He stood extremely still, with his back to me. I realized after a moment that he was crying, silently.

You must think I’m disgusting.

I don’t, I don’t. It’s…it’s understandable.

I was standing beside him now. He held his glasses in one hand and a few worn volumes of poetry in the other.

It’s okay. I put my arm around him. u

FICTION: Two short stories & microfiction

This is Eric at the end

by Briana Cox

T

ragedies happen in the wake of miracles, as if the world can’t take too much of one thing, like it’s trying to keep its balance. The miracle, in this case, is Violet’s string quartet making it to the second round of an audition that could very well change everything. And the tragedy that will change everything is going to happen very soon.

Now, Violet is with her sister—a woman named Sarah whom she envies for reasons she can’t quite explain and will never in her life give voice to. The two of them skim wax over taut strings and practice by balancing pencils in between their thumb and little finger, too nervous to handle their bows any longer, sure that their trembling hands will snap the wood in two. They are waiting for a call.

Michael and Eric are already at the theater, scoping out the space, seeing where exactly the spotlights will hit and what parts of the stage creak too loudly under pressure. The two men joke about nerves and overly snobbish judges, discuss the origins of the term “break a leg,” because they’re music majors fresh out of college and that’s the knowledge they retained.

Eric stands at the end of the stage, his toes peeking over the edge, unaware that this will be the first in a long line of days he won’t remember.

O

ne hour after the accident, a stagehand will look at the damage done and wonder what it was like. He will wonder if sparks flew out in all directions, creating something out of a movie, something glorious—more tangible than reality. The air itself will be singed, charged and buzzing and smelling of smoke, and he will approach the mark carefully, as if some dangerous residual energy was still left there. The floor will be scarred, the imprints of rubber soles burned into the wood and peeling the varnish, and the stagehand will formulate the story in his mind, picture the gory details to tell later over drinks when he insists that he was there to see it happen.

M

ichael practices, drawing the bow over his cello too lightly for the strings to take much notice.

He says he wants to look busy, professional. When the judges walk in and see him already practicing, they’ll put that first impression down somewhere, take it to heart. Eric walks along the edge of the stage, one foot in front of the other, and talks to Violet on his cell phone, telling her to leave before the judges arrive. He steps over the wires bunched together in the corner, connected to the microphones, amps, and sound systems.

The theater is old, one that is frequently insisted to have character. It was made for booming voices and screaming instruments and crowds that could keep quiet.

The new commodities are crammed into unfit spaces, out of place but necessary.

The four of them had dreamed of playing there in college, had sat around the music center, toying with piano keys and folding sheets of old music into squares, smaller and smaller, and talking about the theater’s character. It had the rustic, genuine quality that reminded them of beat poets and subway singers, of beauty sparking up in odd places.

O

ne day later, Violet will lie across an uncomfortable couch in the hospital waiting room and think about Walt Whitman, about the line “I sing the body electric.” She will wonder about the brain, try to imagine the tiny sparks of electricity flitting over its surface, creating movements, thoughts.

She will imagine the neurons as spiraling wires like inside a light bulb, shining and warm like copper. And she will imagine that brief moment as a flash of energy and light so strong that the wires burn out, that they twist apart and fry at the ends.

V

iolet and Sarah leave as soon as they get the call, taking their instruments and making their way down the street to the subway station.

They go down the steps and past the turnstile, used to the crowds and the cool smell of damp and dirt. When their train arrives, it’s full, people so packed in that they don’t move an inch even when the car jolts to a stop and the doors slide

open.

For fifteen minutes they wait for the next train. Sarah takes out her violin and places it in the crook of her neck, playing music sharp and quick—a drinking song that turns heads and earns some smiles, some frowns. Violet stares ahead and does nothing, her jaw set and her ears going red. She thinks that perhaps this is the reason for the jealously, but she sees the lights of their train at the end of the tunnel and can feel the rumble beneath her feet and the thought is quickly abandoned.

E

ric’s family will not arrive for four days, and the rest of the quartet will feel obligated to replace them.

For four days, they will visit the hospital room with the spotted curtain running down the middle and the unknown patient on the other side. Eric will be a mass of tubes and wires and mechanical whirring, and their eyes will jerk to the heart monitor every time it falters, as it will be the only indication that something alive is underneath it all. They will play him hazy recordings of their old orchestral numbers, and they will resist the urge to pull back the thin covers and see the charred skin around Eric’s feet. When Sarah fails to do this, she will lock herself in a bathroom stall and vomit until she’s too empty for it to do any good.

T

he quartet goes through the piece two times—violins, cello, bass—the different tones weaving in and out of each other to create the melody, the high trills of the violins, the bass and cello like heartbeats warring against each other. It’s the kind of music that isn’t so much heard as it is felt, crystallizing in the marrow and moving like oxygen through the blood. The theater is breathing with it.

The judges have not yet arrived, but they fill the room with music because they can, because it may be the only chance they’ll have to do so.

At the end of their song, Eric rises to move the microphone to the corner of the stage with the rest of the equipment. It’s not needed. It obstructs his view of the audience, not enough to be a distraction but just enough to be a nuisance.

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

41

Illustration by Nyantee Asherman

42

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

The rest of them will ask questions later. They will ask the stagehand how the wiring could be so faulty. They will ask the judges how they could hold auditions in a place so unsafe. They will raise all the hell that is necessary and expected and encouraged.

Now, though, the three of them simply attend to their instruments, checking the strings and buffing out smudges on the wood. And they smell the burnt hair before the light flashes in their peripheral vision, and they look up just in time to see him crumple to the ground.

ric will wake up after eight days, and he will not remember why he is in the hospital. And he will not

E

remember much of anything else. He will be told by doctors and nurses that he was electrocuted, that the volts traveled through his body and stopped at the rubber soles of his shoes. They will tell him that his heart stopped for far too long, and it will take him days to believe them.

After learning of this multiple times, the idea will sink in and Eric will comment on how it’s like his brain is a depository for energy, that the electricity built up until it could do nothing but explode.

He will make comments about how the world seems to move too slowly, that he can see the track lines in the air as the atoms freeze in place and wear away at the world. He will see many things that aren’t

there, and the rest of the quartet and his family will keep notes on his progress and hide them from one another like evidence of some grievous intrusion.

The doctors will make no promises about recovery, and his family will make arrangements to have him moved to a care center in their home town. His hands will shake too badly to hold a bow, and this will seem like the worst facet of the situation. The day his family arrives to have him taken away for good, they will walk in and find the quartet gathered around the hospital bed, reminding Eric how to balance pencils and pens between his trembling fingers. u

How to get onto a really high bed

by Allison King

I

n middle school I spent a summer at a camp where our beds were lofted to the height of our chests but our dreams floated even higher. We would have competitions to see who could get on the bed the fastest starting from the opposite side of the room. Carol always won and I like to think that was the start of what would later become her pole vaulting career. There were a lot of ways, but the best way to get on the bed was with a running start, beginning from your roommate’s bed and sprinting, then leaping, onto your own, hopefully rewarded by the comfort of the sheets your mother had laundered just before you left for camp. The fresh laundry smell would quickly fade as the summer heat oozed through the thin cabin walls. Because the space between the floor and the bottom of the beds was so large, on nights that seemed endlessly young we would drape a blanket from the frame to the floor and create a fort. Those were my favorite nights.

When I returned home that summer I lofted my bed as a tribute to those times.

The first time my sister tried to get on the bed I had to teach her the tricks of the trade—run a few paces, bend knees, lunge and hope for the best. She underestimated the jump and cracked her nose against the frame. Not all of us were meant to pole vault.

B

efore all of this lofting, before I even began going to school, my bed used to be as close to the ground as possible because my parents were afraid I would tumble off while I slept. They bought a divider that attached to the side of my bed. And just in case that did not work, they added a second temporary bed in my room right next to my own, a bed that my grandmother would sleep in.

“What story do you want to hear tonight?” she would ask as she lay down, holding a book over her face.

I would always choose the same one, the one about the especially filial dinosaur, because that was my sister’s favorite too.

Her voice would be the last thing I heard and the sight of wrinkled hands turning a page, blurred by the mesh divider, the last sight I would see before I fell asleep.

T

here was a second way we came up with to get onto a really high bed, to be done only if there was nobody else in the room, or if you were impervious to embarrassment. You sort of bend over the bed in an L shape in an effort to get as much torso on the bed as possible, then you wiggle until the rest of your body makes it on the bed as well. This one is dangerous because it is easy to get stuck and resort to floundering. Try not to do this—you are a beautiful human being with opposable thumbs and all, capable of ascending a bed, not one who resorts to the likes of our fish friends.

Okay, I admit I used to be a master of floundering in bed. When I was in elementary school and had my own room, my grandmother would walk in to wake me up; she would open the shades, turn on the light, shake me a few times.

When I insisted on continuing to sleep she would begin dressing me. She’d slip my socks onto my feet and when it was time for my pants she would tap my waist a few times and I’d raise my butt up so that she could slip the pants on too while I wiggled comfortably into them. She would do this for me every day—socks, waist tap, pants, wiggle—all while I buried my head deeper into the pillow.

When I was dressed but still bent on sleeping, she would grab the giant stuffed animal cat that slept next to me and have it swat at me with its huge paws until I laughed and agreed to go to school.

My parents never told me that her mind was slipping. Maybe I knew all along, but it was not until middle school, when I began to wear training bras, that I really noticed. We would go through the usual morning routine: socks, waist tap, pants, huh? I would sit up to find a bra strapping my knees together and her vacant eyes staring at my bed-tousled hair.

And so I finally learned how to get out of bed and dress myself in the mornings.

T

he last way that we came up with to get onto a very high bed was also the most fun way. It would change depending on the layout of the room, but the basic idea was that you would SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

43

start by climbing on some of the smaller furniture and then ascend bigger ones like stairs until you made it close enough and high enough to the bed. At camp, Jessica’s room was the best for this, and by the end of the summer there were dusty footprints lining her dresser, the last contact we had before we would fling ourselves onto her bed. She had to stop putting her lotions and accessories on the dresser because they would always end up on the ground as soon as we launched ourselves.

I really should have taken those times as a lesson in keeping my own dresser bare. The most frightening night of my life was the night my entire bed shook and everything I had tossed haphazardly onto the dresser tumbled off and my alarm clock hit the floor with a sharp metallic ring. I opened my eyes but there was only silence and then, eventually, a small whimpering. Guides for getting off of really high beds do not exist because it is so much easier to fall than to rise. I peered out my bedroom door and stared down at my fallen grandmother, a flight of stairs separating us. She never looked as small as she did then—hunched over at the foot of the steps, legs sprawled beneath her, neck angled unnaturally close to her chest. I did not move. I wondered how such a small body falling could shake the whole house. My mother hurried past me, eyes adjusting to the hallway light.

“Go back to bed,” she urged, already calling the hospital.

No matter how many ways I knew how to get onto my bed, I could not that night.

I crawled into my sister’s bed instead.

“Her neck was bent?” she whispered.

“Was it…broken?”

“I don’t know.”

We did not hug or hold each other because that was not the way we were.

But our tears connected us as the pillow absorbed their steady stream.

S

he returned from the hospital mostly okay with only a bruise across her back. My father dug out my old divider and anchored it to her bed so she could not wander around the house unsupervised. I sent my stuffed animal cat to keep her company in her room. She would pace around in there, mumbling incoherently under her breath until the pacing tired her out and we would let down the divider and help her onto the bed. Once when I went to wake her and let down the divider, she looked back at

44

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

me with clear eyes and understanding.

“My darling,” she said, the first time she’d spoken intelligible words in six years. “Please don’t forget me.”

By the time I recovered enough to respond, her eyes had clouded over again and there was no longer a point in trying to say anything.

I T

think everybody would be a bit safer if we all just stayed in bed.

owards the end of high school, a new bed appeared in my grandmother’s room. It sat at the foot of her old one and was half the size. When we had to feed her we would simply press a button until the top half of the bed rose to prop her up. Then, when it was time

Men you have never seen before will come into your room, sneak a sheet under you, and lift you into a cold grey bag. They will carry you away from your last bed. for her to sleep, we would press another button and the bed would fall back down.

She never left this bed until the night we gathered around her and my mother asked my sister to check her knees.

“They’re cold,” my sister’s voice cracked.

My mother nodded.

“Call the hospital,” she told me, but I was frozen next to the bed.

My sister picked up the stuffed animal cat and wrapped her arms and its furry legs around me as I cried into its shoulder.

T

here is one foolproof way to get on a bed. Start early, say, ten years early, and begin to forget things. The key is to go slowly so that the rest of the world still thinks there is hope for you.

Then begin forgetting bigger things— where the forks go, how to get home,

your grandchildren’s names. Maybe you had skills once— you were a talented violinist, the best cook in the family—none of these will matter anymore and you will forget those too. After the mind goes the body will follow easily. You’ll forget how to dress yourself, how to read, and one day somebody will carry you onto a bed.

You can stay there as long as you’d like.

As for how to get off of a bed, you will never have to worry about that. You can idle your time away on the bed until the day you close your eyes and let your knees go cold. Men you have never seen before will come into your room, sneak a sheet under you, and lift you into a cold grey bag. They will carry you away from your last bed while your grandchildren tear their eyes away. They will ask whoever is left if they can cover your face and maybe somebody will pipe up and say give me one more moment with her. They will peer over at you and you’ll cry this is not who I am, don’t you remember?

Don’t you remember when I would read to you, when I would dress you, when I would cook all of your favorite foods? But the looks they will give you will be of pity and even relief and you will be grateful when they zip the bag over your face and bring you to your permanent bed.

T

hat night I cleared out everything under my bed. I pushed the crates of winter clothes to the side and pulled the sheet off my mattress. My sister helped me stuff one side of the sheet between the mattress and the frame and let it drape down to the floor. I held the bottom corner up and we both crawled under. We sat in the dark, the wall hard against our backs and the air stale.

“Give me a moment,” my sister said, and scrambled out.

I turned on my phone’s flashlight and illuminated every dust particle we had unsettled.

She returned with the giant cat stuffed animal. We propped it against the wall and snuggled into it, wrapping one paw around each of us.

E

ven if the bed is absurdly high, even if it just screams to be jumped on, screams for you to take the challenge of trying to ascend it, I guess sometimes it is okay to ignore it all. Sometimes it is okay to take a break from the bed for a night, crawl under its skin instead, and cuddle against the slow beating of another person’s heart to remind you of your own. u

Microfiction

H

e came. He pissed many times, he slept many times. Maybe if he was lucky he fucked once or twice to allow someone else to follow in his footsteps. And then he left. Guessed what he was trapped in, kid? u —Abhinav Tiku ’18

M

ollie’s father was supposed to drive me to school one day, and when I got to his house, I ate the bagel that he had prepared for himself. It was a weird thing to do, but I have yet to regret it. u —Abigail Frank ’15

I

t’s 1987. I’m about to leave on a flight from Chicago to Pittsburgh to interview Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers) for a magazine piece. My three-year-old daughter wants to go too. I cancel the flight, and we drive through the night. An experience she was too young to remember. An experience I’ll never forget. u —Randy Frame, Director of Advancement Communications

I

t was going to be a long day. Class at 8.30am, she had spent all night grading her students’ previous exam. She needed a pick-meup, something to stay awake. The coffee pot in the department’s lounge was empty. She sighed. She didn’t even drink coffee. It was already a long day. u —Dr. Adrián Gras-Velázquez, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish

C T

offee grounds aren’t suitable fertilizer without the context of composting, chastises the memory of my high school ecology teacher. Your garden doesn’t want human breakfast. Dreaming of future harvests, I added your skin to the growing heap in my backyard. Unfortunately, before it could transform you into something useful, you became a raccoon’s midnight snack. u —Maria Aghazarian, Serials and E-Resources Specialist

hey ask me to kill Hitler. Standard time traveler request. Berlin, 1938: I stare down the scope. The Hungarian boy who will be my grandfather has not yet heard of Auschwitz. In 1946, he will hope that America does not smell of burning flesh. The cradle robs the grave. I do not fire. u —William Fedullo ’16

I

studied the ground before me and was startled at what I saw...for over forty years, the land had held the memory of the little house that once stood there.

In a field of tall grass, a perimeter of lacy plants followed the foundation. u —Kae Kalwaic Administrative Assistant for Educational Studies

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

45

BOOKS Hem, hem: In defense of Dolores Umbridge Feminist criticism of ‘Harry Potter’ largely fails to examine J.K. Rowling’s treatment of Umbridge — what are the costs of this glaring omission?

ESSAY

Imedla Staunton plays Dolores Umbridge, bureaucrat, professor, and antagonist of the fifth book in the ‘Harry Potter’ series.

by Patrick Ross TRIGGER WARNING for mentions of rape and assault.

“I

hate feminism. It is poison.” Leave it to Margaret Thatcher to be so unequivocal. The UK’s only female Prime Minister, who famously ignored issues of women’s rights and did so proudly, with pearls on. She was

46

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

an encapsulation of patriarchy and of femininity all at once, a polarizing figure who made significant strides for women in politics but who is remembered by her country as “loathsome, repulsive in almost every way.”

“Harry Potter” fans will recognize this description well in Dolores Umbridge: bureaucrat, professor, and antagonist of “Order of the Phoenix,” the series’s fifth installment. She has been described as “oh-so-very Margaret Thatcher” by

Imelda Staunton, who played her in the movies, and as “the greatest make-believe villain to come along since Hannibal Lecter,” by novelist Stephen King. Personally, I’m inclined to agree with both. Lord Voldemort, Rowling’s main antagonist, is an evil mastermind whose name people are afraid to speak. Umbridge, on the other hand, is a plain Jane with a government job and average intelligence. She is all the more fearsome because she is ordinary— and, quite possibly, because she is female.

Photo courtesy of rack.com

Much has been written about Rowling’s feminism, or lack thereof, most of it about Hermione Granger. Feminist Potter criticism largely fails to examine Dolores Umbridge, and the omission is glaring.

Umbridge has more agency than most of Rowling’s women, but since she is a villain, the novel chastises her for it.

Let us not get carried away: Umbridge is vile. In the fifth novel alone, she makes an attempt on Harry’s life, tortures him, fails to prosecute a criminal for personal gain, and releases a series of decrees that severely limit students’ personal freedoms. In “Deathly Hallows,” she chairs the Muggle-Born Registration Commission, which institutionally interrogates and imprisons wizards based on their parentage. She is indefensible. And yet I’m here to defend her.

T

he wizarding world of “Harry Potter” is vast and imaginative. Rowling imagines domestic spaces warm (the Burrow) and cold (Malfoy Manor), a vibrant international athletic scene, and a widespread wizarding war. Rowling’s world is an analogue to ours, and many of our real-world institutions have wizarding parallels. Like our real world, too, all of these institutions are operated by men.

There are, of course, powerful women all over the series. The immediate predecessor to incumbent Minister Fudge is a woman named Millicent Bagnold (whose premiership was contemporaneous with Thatcher’s), and the first female Minister served as early as 1798. There are at least seven named Hogwarts Headmistresses, most famously Dilys Derwent. None of these women serve during the course of the series, however, upholding what Tison Pugh and David L. Wallace call a “veneer of gender equity.” Fudge is ousted as Minister at the end of “Order,” and is replaced not by his chosen successor Umbridge, but first by Rufus Scrimgeour, then by Pius Thicknesse, and ultimately by Kingsley Shacklebolt (all men). Dumbledore is killed at the end of “Half-Blood Prince” and is replaced not by McGonagall, his chosen successor, but by Severus Snape.

Umbridge and McGonagall remain as deputies while the men above them come and go. Rowling gives us theoretical evidence that her women are equal to men, but fails to actually demonstrate as much in practice.

Minerva McGonagall is a competent witch and strict disciplinarian, but ultimately she follows Dumbledore’s orders.

Bellatrix Lestrange, Death Eater deputy, Illustration by Mary GrandPré, courtesy of HPLexicon.com

demonstrates a similar, but heightened, deference to her master. Not once does either woman defy her man.

Umbridge, too, is largely deferential to the Minister. This is because her power stems directly from him. McGonagall and Lestrange are prodigious witches in their own right; Umbridge is adequate at best.

She hides behind the authority of her title, describing herself as a “fully qualified Ministry official,” but she is hardly that. She is unable to undo spells cast by Hermione (age fifteen) and the Weasley twins (age seventeen), and is judged by her colleagues as an incompetent teacher.

Without Fudge and the authority he grants her, Umbridge is nothing. It is he who appoints her to teach at Hogwarts, he who promotes her to High Inquisitor, he who promotes her to Headmistress.

Each step of authority she gains comes directly from him. She must go through Fudge in order to accomplish anything, and she takes delight in doing so. The

bureaucratic process is a treasure to her, and her dependence upon Fudge is a prize that she cherishes. She is pleased to participate in patriarchy.

Unlike McGonagall or Lestrange, however, Umbridge also takes certain strides beyond what her male superior orders.

In a telling speech near the denouement of “Order,” Umbridge reveals that she dispatched Dementors to kill (or “kiss”) Harry without Fudge’s knowledge or approval. “Somebody had to act. They were all bleating about silencing you somehow... but I was the only one who actually did something about it...” She is also perfectly willing to torture Harry with the Cruciatus Curse. “What Cornelius doesn’t know won’t hurt him...” While Dementors are legally under the provision of the Ministry, Crucio is a highly illegal Unforgivable Curse, punishable by a life sentence in prison. That Umbridge would risk use of the curse to procure information for Fudge is an example both of her

slavish adherence to his wishes and of her villainous agency, her disturbing desire to have her way at all costs.

Umbridge’s acts of agency, then, are torture and attempted murder. McGonagall, on the other hand, is perfectly good because she defers wholly to Dumbledore’s wishes. Bellatrix Lestrange is also a torturer and murderer, a bad woman by most standards, but she also follows the orders of her male superior in so doing.

This makes Umbridge doubly bad: not only are her actions evil, but she takes them without permission from a man.

“Y

ou don’t need to cease to be feminine in order to do the job well,” said Thatcher, and once again Umbridge rises to the Iron Lady’s words. Like Thatcher and her pearls, Umbridge presents herself with almost overwhelming femininity. She dresses in pink from head to toe, her hair adorned with a black velvet bow. Her office is “draped in lacy covers and cloths,” and on her walls she sports “a collection of ornamental plates, each decorated with a large technicolour kitten wearing a different bow around its neck.”

In her own feminist criticism of the series, Katrin Berndt argues that the series subverts the male gaze with regard to Hermione: because Harry is not sexually attracted to Hermione, she is rendered as effectively gender-neutral. “The series never offers a detailed description of Hermione’s looks,” Berndt writes, “...the books never give any details of her height, figure, facial features or any other detail that would invite conclusions as to her actual appearance.”

Umbridge is not offered that same luxury. Rowling treats her in the way MSNBC is going to treat Hillary Clinton for the next nine years: with an absurd, unrelenting focus on physical appearance.

She is “rather squat with a broad, flabby face,” a “wide, slack mouth,” “horrible, bulging eyes,” and a “stubby, short-fingered hand.” She has a “sickly, ominous smile” and her voice is described as “poisonously sweet,” “girlish,” and “stupid.”

Her clothing is referred to as “horrible” and “luridly flowered,” and her entire appearance is incessantly likened to that of a “large, pale toad.”

Rowling offers this harsh voice, perhaps in imitation of society’s critical eye, perhaps in coalition with it. Despite Berndt’s argument, Rowling’s narrative voice is distinct; I do not think the descriptions of SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

47

Umbridge could be attributed to Harry, who wouldn’t know a brooch if it bit him on the nose. Instead, the novel itself mimics society’s oppression of women by oppressing Umbridge, judging her and abusing her. It seems as though Umbridge’s entire presence in the novel is a battle back and forth between character and author, where the character wants to be feminine and the author refuses. Umbridge has no choice but to fight back.

She does so by embellishing her own femininity, which is purely performative.

All aspects of her feminine identity are constructed, from her all-pink ensemble to her Frolicsome Feline decorations. I am reminded again of Lady Thatcher, who famously adopted a slow, masculine speech pattern when she ran for office.

Umbridge does something of the reverse, making her voice saccharine-sweet. Judith Butler writes that what is performed “on the surface of the body” may, in fact, conceal something hidden underneath.

For Umbridge, it is possible that these

Rowling, who for so long rejects Umbridge, ultimately objectifies her. The switch is startling, but even more so is the realization that Umbridge has been seeking that sexual attention all along. hidden traits are, in fact, masculine ones.

The Bem Sex Role Inventory was established by Sandra L. Bem in 1974. Bem created a list of sixty traits, identifying twenty as masculine, twenty as feminine, and twenty as androgynous. Before familiarizing myself with this list, I blindly used the test to measure Umbridge’s gender traits. It was rather unscientific, as my results are based only upon my interpretation of the character, but my friends found similar results. According 48

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

to the BSRI inventory, Dolores Umbridge is masculine first, androgynous second, and feminine last.

Masculine items which apply to Umbridge include: “aggressive,” “ambitious,” “assertive,” “dominant,” “forceful,” and “willing to take a stand,” amongst others.

The only feminine items which I believe apply are “loyal” (to the Ministry), “soft spoken” (which is arguably performed), and “feminine” itself. What this reveals, to me, is that Umbridge’s feminine performance is played against a mostly masculine personality, one which she is desperate to conceal.

Rowling’s oppression of Umbridge, then, may be due to her masculine personality as well as her feminine persona.

Perhaps the contrast is what we as a society, and Rowling as a writer, finds so repulsive. If Umbridge were perhaps more feminine, as per Bem’s inventory—if she were “tender,” “cheerful,” and “gullible,” to choose a few—perhaps the readership would hate her less.

She is, after all, universally loathed by fans. In the twelve years since she was introduced, I have not met, nor even heard of, a single person (except myself) who likes her. Rowling herself says Umbridge is “one of the characters for whom I feel purest dislike.” Harry and the Potters, a popular wizard rock band, have a song called “Stick it to Dolores.” The lyrics are straightforward: “Oh my God you look like a frog / Oh my God you look like a frog...” This chorus repeats. That the fan response is so preoccupied with Umbridge’s unattractiveness is key. It is as though the character, in her attempts to suppress a masculine personality, makes an offer of femininity, of attempted prettiness, of wanting to be liked, and the author and the reader repeatedly deny her...until the end.

The last physical description of Umbridge in “Deathly Hallows” is of “her large bosom.” Harry attacks her several sentences later, and we never see her again. It is for this reason that I find the description so intriguing; after hundreds of pages of calling her every variation on the word “ugly,” this is the final image we are left with.

“Large bosom,” as I see it, has two possible interpretations, both of which are arguably positive. The first is of maternal warmth, recalling the image of a buxom wet nurse. It is something more befitting Molly Weasley, mother of seven, who cooks and cleans. It symbolizes the image of the mother, not the government

bureaucrat.

The second interpretation, and I think the more telling one, is sexual attractiveness. To have large breasts is to be feminine, to be desirable. If Umbridge has been trying to achieve femininity, it is ultimately granted in her final moment in the series, because the narrator characterizes her bosom as “large.” Rowling, who for so long rejects Umbridge, ultimately objectifies her. The switch is startling, but

even more startling is the realization that Umbridge has been seeking that objectification, that sexual attention, all along.

T

he objectification of Umbridge only gets worse when one examines it in full context. The “large bosom” moment is Umbridge’s departure at the end of the series, but what of her departure from “Order,” where she has her largest presence? Her downfall in this book is unusual as far as Rowling’s villains are concerned. Normally, Harry Potter fights his male enemies in combat—this is true for each of the seven novels—but the female villain, evidently, calls for a female undoing. Thus it happens that Hermione, favorite of feminist critics, engineers an ending nastier than anything Harry Potter could conjure.

In the moment before, Umbridge has them cornered. Hermione, feigning feminine fragility under duress, cries out and promises to tell Umbridge everything if she stops the torture. Harry is as ignorant as the reader, but Hermione assures him that she has a plan. And so they arrive in the Forbidden Forest and meet a herd of centaurs, whom Umbridge wastes no time to insult. She calls them “filthy halfbreeds,” and then the worst of it unfolds.

“An arrow flew so close to her head that it caught at her mousy hair in passing; she let out an ear-splitting scream and threw her hands over her head, while some of the centaurs bellowed their approval and others laughed raucously. The sound of their Illustration by Mary GrandPré, courtesy of HPLexicon.com

wild neighing laughter echoing around the dimly lit clearing and the sight of their pawing hooves was extremely unnerving...‘Nooooo!’ Then she screamed very loudly...Umbridge had been seized from behind by Bane and lifted high into the air, wriggling and yelling with fright...Harry saw Umbridge being borne away through the trees by Bane. Screaming non-stop, her voice grew fainter and fainter until they could no longer hear it over the trampling of hooves surrounding them.”

Umbridge is dragged off by fifty centaurs in what is undeniably a gang rape.

The phrasing is haunting—the laughing rapists, the victim seized from behind, screaming non-stop. It is easy enough to miss when you’re young—I was ten at the time. But looking back on the text with adult eyes leaves little room for alternative.

Hermione admits, after the fact, that she brought Umbridge into the forest with the hope that the centaurs would “take her away.” She had intended sexual violence from the start. Hermione, at fifteen, is actively participating in patriarchal violence, even contributing to it, and feeling justified because of Umbridge’s villainy.

We could perhaps compare Umbridge’s downfall to the comeuppances of Rowling’s male antagonists. Immortality-obsessed Voldemort is killed by his own rebounding curse; serial memory-modifier Gilderoy Lockhart gets permanent amnesia; legacy-obsessed Cornelius Fudge slips into obscurity. Rita Skeeter, snooping gossip reporter, is blackmailed and prevented from publishing (by Hermione, of course—female hero takes down female villain). Bellatrix Lestrange, at least, is defeated in fair duel with Molly Weasley, in a triumph of good woman over bad. But Umbridge, whose defining trait is her femininity, is raped.

The reader breathes a sigh of relief when Umbridge is carried off, as does Harry—and then we give it no more thought, turning our attention toward Voldemort, the true conflict and climax.

It is only in the resolution of the novel that the dust, and disgust, is allowed to settle—as it often does in “Harry Potter,” in the hospital wing.

“Professor Umbridge was lying in a bed opposite them, gazing up at the ceiling. Dumbledore had strode alone into the Forest to rescue her from the Illustration by Mary GrandPré, courtesy of HPLexicon.com

centaurs; how he had done it—how he had emerged from the trees supporting Professor Umbridge without so much as a scratch on him—nobody knew, and Umbridge was certainly not telling.

Since she had returned to the castle she had not, as far as any of them knew, uttered a single word. Nobody really knew what was wrong with her, either.

Her usually neat mousy hair was very untidy and there were still bits of twigs and leaves in it, but otherwise she seemed to be quite unscathed.

‘Madam Pomfrey says she’s just in shock,’ whispered Hermione.

‘Sulking, more like,’ said Ginny.

‘Yeah, she shows signs of life if you do this,’ said Ron, and with his tongue he made soft clip-clopping noises. Umbridge sat bolt upright, looking around wildly.

‘Anything wrong, Professor?’ called Madam Pomfrey, poking her head around her office door.

‘No...no...’ said Umbridge, sinking back into her pillows. ‘No, I must have been dreaming...’

Hermione and Ginny muffled their laughter in the bedclothes.”

Umbridge is likely in the acute stages of rape trauma syndrome, at which point her anxiety and sensitivity would be particularly high. In the above passage, Ron intentionally triggers her, clucking his tongue to mimic the sound of centaur hooves, which she associates with her assailants in the rape that has just occurred.

The way Ron speaks indicates that this is not the first time he has done it, either.

The sharp reaction to the hoof noises is funny to the students, because to them nothing much has happened to Umbridge—and if it has, she deserves it.

Dumbledore emerges without a scratch

on him, of course, because Dumbledore is not threatened by rape. Umbridge, however, emerges with deep emotional trauma. She is scarred, but the ignorant student population perceives her as “unscathed.” She bears no signs of physical duress, and therefore must be fine. Her emotional health is entirely disregarded.

But a close reading of the passage reveals that it is in shambles. Umbridge has not spoken until this very moment; up until now, she has been silent. She does not disclose the circumstances in which Dumbledore rescued her. Her hair is messy and littered with leaves. Before Ron triggers her, she is gazing at the ceiling, in a daze. “Madam Pomfrey says she’s just in shock,” whispers Hermione. Clearly Hermione is unaware, bright witch though she is, that shock is a primary symptom in the early stages of rape trauma.

We see how deep Umbridge’s resultant stress runs one year later, in “Half-Blood Prince.” She appears in this novel for all of two sentences. Harry has just arrived at Professor Dumbledore’s funeral, and is surveying the guests: “...and then, with a worse jolt of fury, [he saw] Dolores Umbridge, an unconvincing expression of grief upon her toadlike face, a black velvet bow set atop her iron-coloured curls.

At the sight of the centaur Firenze, who was standing like a sentinel near the water’s edge, she gave a start and scurried hastily into a seat a good distance away.”

This appearance is little more than a button, a comic moment meant to demonize the character and poke fun. We must imagine, however, that Umbridge has spent the past year coping with her attack, especially given that her oncemousy brown hair has, in twelvemonth’s time, turned steel-grey. Now, on the anniversary of her attack, she is triggered again by seeing another centaur. Firenze happens to be the one centaur who did not participate in the rape, having been previously banished. Still, the physical similarity between him and the others is enough that Umbridge is frightened and moves away. Those who study rape trauma have identified “seeing a man who looks like the assailant” as a primary cause of additional stress, and it is clear that Umbridge is still suffering from a trauma-related disorder a year after the incident.

Why am I the only one who feels she SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

49

was wronged? Surely this says something about the twisted nature of society, that a rape, with all this resultant trauma, can ever be seen as just?

Umbridge is not the only character to be raped in the series. Ariana Dumbledore, sister of the headmaster, is implied to have been raped as a girl, which left her permanently catatonic. Tom Riddle Senior, father of Lord Voldemort, was fed a love potion and coerced into a marriage to which he did not consent. These two survivors garner our sympathy, and Rowling’s. But Umbridge does not.

Umbridge demonstrates that a woman can be successful, ambitious, and authoritative, while also being feminine.

However, she also demonstrates that the woman who does this will be universally reviled.

Yes, she is vile. She leaves her students with permanent traumas of their own.

She tortures, she oppresses, she attempts to kill. She has done everything to deserve the life sentence in prison which she ultimately gets; but does she deserve to be gang raped? Rowling certainly seems to imply it. All of Rowling’s antagonists get their just comeuppance, as previously outlined. The disturbing part is that Umbridge’s is punishment for her femininity, just as Voldemort’s accidental suicide is punishment for his ruthlessness. Is femininity, then, or hyperfemininity, as equally punishable as serial murder? This brings us to my final question: Margaret Thatcher, by her own account, was not a feminist. Is Dolores Umbridge?

Eliza T. Dresang, in an essay about Hermione, writes that “from a feminist point of view, it is possible for a character presented through a caricature to be 50

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

empowered in her role, while it is possible for a stereotypic character to be thus empowered only if she consciously subverts the stereotype.” Dolores Umbridge is certainly a caricature, a gross exaggeration of femininity. She is, after all, somewhat cartoonish; the physical descriptions of her, in addition to being sexist and hurtful, are laughable. Dresang argues that Hermione is a caricature (quoting Rowling, who admitted as much), but she is writing in 2002, before Umbridge’s inaugural novel.

I wonder what Dresang would say of Umbridge—is she, as a caricature, empowered in her role?

I think so. She is, after all, a high-ranking Ministry official. On Pottermore, Rowling writes that Umbridge’s “saccharine manner towards her superiors, and the ruthlessness and stealth with which she took credit for other people’s work soon gained her advancement...

Dolores managed to claw her way to the very heart of power.” She is empowered, perhaps by dubious means, but empowered nonetheless. Umbridge demonstrates that a woman can be successful, ambitious, and authoritative, while also being feminine.

However, she also demonstrates that the woman who does this will be universally reviled. Once more, I plead Baroness Thatcher, the cultural response to whom is violently negative. Umbridge has, like Thatcher before her, entered the lexicon as shorthand for the female bureaucrat, for the caricature of feminine evil. Pundits were, in 2008, quick to Photoshop Sarah Palin’s head onto Umbridge’s recognizable body. We’ll see what happens to Hillary.

If you asked Dolores Umbridge, I think she would side with Thatcher. Feminism would, to her, seem like poison.

She would refuse the label, arguing, as Thatcher reportedly did, that she “owes nothing to women’s lib.”

Despite this, she still performs a femininity. She is in touch with her feminine elements, despite her masculine gender traits. Umbridge’s struggle against her author complicates this femininity, deepens her demonstrated desires. In her 2014 biography of Umbridge, Rowling writes only about her sadism, cruelty, and schadenfreude, “her desire to control, to punish and to inflict pain, all in the name of law and order.” I had been hoping, in this anticipated installment of new writing, for a backstory that earned Umbridge a bit of sympathy. Instead, she emerged more abject than ever: unwanted, un-

loved, and undesired.

Although, as I have demonstrated, this is not entirely the case. The act of sexual intercourse implies some kind of desire, and even nonconsensual sex (read: assault) has one-directional desire flowing from assailant to victim. How fascinating, then, that the end for ugly Umbridge is to become the object of sexual desire for

not one, but fifty men. Of course, the men in question are actually centaurs, which suggests an animalistic nature of desire, or perhaps even some mindlessness.

Regardless, though, she is sexualized and desired. If you look at the rape through this twisted lens, Umbridge actually wins.

Ultimately, however, it is not fifty fictional centaurs that cede Umbridge’s sexual potential, but Rowling herself, with the description of her “large bosom” at the end of the series. It is as though, after all the effort channeled into denying Umbridge the chance to be feminine, the author grants her a dying wish—but does not do so benevolently. Rowling manages to undermine Umbridge’s agency in this moment as well, by objectifying her and drawing attention to her body. In this female villain’s final moment, the reader is paying attention not to the sheer brilliance of Umbridge’s evil, but to the size of her breasts.

All this being said, I cannot help but feel that the series is more feminist because Umbridge is in it. Perhaps it is my Dumbledorian belief that all people, even fictional villains, must have some redeeming quality to them. Umbridge is no Hermione, who advocates for the unprivileged and calls out the sexism of her male best friends. But she is a woman with agency, however evil. She is a survivor of rape. She is a masculine person who identifies as feminine, and whom society rejects as a result. She is a woman who participates in patriarchy, but who also suffers from and is oppressed by it. She is a woman with a conscience (however corrupt), a heart (however black), and a soul (however damned). u Illustration by Mary GrandPré, courtesy of HPLexicon.com

TELEVISION Can ‘Empire’ hang with today’s top shows?

Fox’s new series has begun to carve out its space in popular culture—so, is it worth watching?

REVIEW

Taraji P. Henson plays Cookie Lyon, the ex-wife of ailing rapper-turned-hip-hop-mogul Lucious Lyon, on Fox’s new series ‘Empire.’

by Julian Turner

I

t’s typical of shows in their first seasons to search for footing. It’s a precarious time when writers and producers figure out the show’s narrative confines and determine what will fly within these confines. First seasons can often be perceived as rather experimental or as trial runs (think “Seinfeld,” “Next Generation,” “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”) and, more often than not, later seasons will be virtually unrecognizable from earlier episodes. That being said, I’ve never seen a show as sure of itself in its first season as Fox’s “Empire.”

Perhaps this self-assuredness is a necessity. Even in a time of unprecedented minority representation on television (“Blackish,” “How To Get Away With Murder,” and, to a much lesser extent but still noteworthy, “Scandal” and “The Mindy Project”), Black shows like “Empire” must have a firm identity. There

Photo courtesy of Fox

is little leeway, no room to be shaky.

And despite this, “Empire” has been massively popular throughout its first season, averaging 15 million viewers per episode and carving out its own space in popular culture.

Produced by Lee Daniels, producer and director of “The Butler” and “Precious,” “Empire” delivers its story with a force similar to other acclaimed serials like “Downton Abbey,” “House of Cards,” and even “Breaking Bad,” which are often deemed “quality TV” and considered staples of the current Golden Age of Television. What separates “Empire,” however, is that it airs on Fox and not on one of the Golden Age’s more exclusive networks (FX, AMC, HBO or even online distributors Netflix and Amazon TV). Can “Empire” hang with the wealth of quality programming on television today? Does it contribute to TV’s Golden Age? Terrence Howard plays Lucious Lyon, former Philadelphia rapper turned hip

hop mogul (à la Jay-Z or Sean Combs) who is newly diagnosed with ALS in the midst of preparing his company, Empire Entertainment, for its IPO. With only a few years to live, Lucious begins the process of grooming his three sons in an effort to select a sole heir of the company. The plot is simple and far from original, but at its core holds a universal and accessible trope: family rivalry. And boy does “Empire” do a spectacular job of bringing this family competition to life, offering well-defined characters and an abundance of melodrama accompanied by cringe-worthy yet rewarding dialogue and surprisingly tight direction.

The Lyon sibling trio, all vying for their father’s approval and ownership of the record label, are archetypal: Hakeem, the flamboyant and troublesome up-and-coming rapper; Andre, the bougie Wharton MBA with bipolar disorder (who happens to have a white girlfriend because smart Black guys know better); and Jamal, the gay and SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

51

deeply talented singer-songwriter who has trouble demonstrating any worth to his homophobic father.

But “Empire” would be much less interesting without the presence of Cookie Lyon, Lucious’s ex-wife and cofounder of Empire Entertainment from way back in the day when they were struggling and putting out actual mixtapes. Released from a prison sentence for drug charges (she had taken the fall for Lucious some 15 years ago in order to preserve his rap career), charismatic Cookie plots to reclaim her share of the empire. In the era of Black female protagonists on television, Taraji P. Henson joins the ranks of Kerry Washington and Viola Davis, delivering a performance that makes Cookie the show’s most redeeming quality. She’s messy, but appealing.

She navigates the superficiality of the music industry while resisting the urge to abandon her humble background.

Therein lies Cookie’s charm: she keeps it real and isn’t intimidated by her mogul former husband or her privileged sons.

The world of “Empire” is distinct, simultaneously accessible and out of touch with reality.

In each episode, plenty of references to current artists and popular culture are made. Hakeem often takes aim at rappers like Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole, and there is one ridiculous scene in which Lucious apologizes over the phone to President Obama for his son’s drunken behavior that led to an iPhone video in which the son labels the president a “sellout.” The inclusion of con-

temporary media figures are all attempts to position the world of “Empire” as one that is analogous to our own, but these cultural references often end up being transparent. With all its efforts to be culturally relevant (why did we have to wait until 2015 for a show centered around hip hop??), I can’t help but conclude that too many aspects of the show are disappointingly outdated. While “Empire” successfully captures the dysfunction and dynamic competition within the Lyon family, it offers a rather skewed representation of Black culture, hip hop and the music industry at large.

In the pilot, Lucious appears on “white TV,” commenting on the state of the music industry and the role of Black artists where he essentially states that hip hop is only way for Black boys to make it out of the hood and that the Internet is killing artistry and causing the downfall of the music industry. This is probably an obligatory moment for any show dealing with the music industry, but it seems like the artistry versus Internet dichotomy belongs in 2002, not 2015. Despite the show’s valiant effort to portray him as the godfather of rap, Lucious Lyon becomes more a representation of a 90s hip hop CEO with little understanding of the industry’s trajectory.

For a more grounded depiction of hip hop as a cultural and political entity, check out Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard in Hustle & Flow.

Timbaland produces all of the original music on the show, from Jamal’s R&B

“hits” to Hakeem’s horn and snare-heavy “bangers.” I’m a big fan of Timbaland, but music evolves rapidly and he certainly isn’t the first artist I would approach if I were looking for music representative of mainstream hip hop today.

I wish I could thoroughly address the nuances of Black representation on “Empire,” of which I largely approve, but I’ll use this space to elaborate on one aspect of this representation I take issue with. The portrayal of homophobia in “Empire” in the Black community is overwhelmingly misguided. It’s become relatively standard for TV shows to have at least one gay character, but it’s trite to make that character’s sexuality a source of contention within the narrative.

“Empire” emphasizes Jamal’s sexuality and blames his father’s disapproval of him on a fiction that homophobia is somehow more pervasive in the Black community. In terms of representation, this is biggest flaw in “Empire.”

But I digress, I’m not writing to politicize “Empire” (the widespread fan base has already done so, “Empire” is one of Black Twitter’s favorite shows).

I’m writing to offer my opinions on the merits of the show. My bottom line: if you haven’t seen “Empire,” I highly recommend it. It’s not groundbreaking, but it is supremely entertaining, ambitious, and unlike anything else on TV. Most importantly, it’s effective.

Is “Empire” great TV? Probably not, but it’s overdue and deserves to stay around for a while. u

The latest superstar of the cartoon renaissance Why is ‘Steven Universe,’ the first Cartoon Network show run by a woman, suddenly so popular?

by Gabriella Ekens

D

o you like “Adventure Time” and “Legend of Korra”? Well, then, you’ve gotta check out “Steven Universe,” a new cartoon that beats out these two fan favorites in terms of both quality and progressivism. Helmed by Rebecca Sugar, the animator who storyboarded some of most acclaimed episodes of “Adventure Time” (“What was Missing,” “It Came From the Nightosphere,” “Return to the Nightosphere,” “I Remember You,” “Simon and Marcy,” etc.), it’s the first program on Cartoon Network with a

52

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

female showrunner. If you haven’t heard about “Steven Universe” already, you probably will soon. Its popularity has just reached critical mass. Word is spreading like wildfire around nerd circles that had previously been infatuated with the likes of “Gravity Falls” and “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.” It’s the latest superstar in the recent cartoon renaissance and, in my opinion, the best thing to come out of it yet.

So what’s all the hullaballoo about?

“Steven Universe” stars a superpowered young boy named Steven Universe (father: Greg Universe) who is a member of The Crystal Gems. The Crystal Gems

REVIEW

are a group of intergalactic warriors who draw their powers from special magical gemstones located on their bodies. Steven inherited magical powers from his mother, a Crystal Gem named Rose Quartz.

Now he protects the world alongside the remaining Crystal Gems: Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl.

“Steven Universe” is, at its core, a story about learning that your parents are people. When we first meet Steven, his three Germ caretakers are idealized. Pearl is the responsible one, Amethyst is the fun one, and Garnet is the strong, stoic one.

They satisfy Steven’s childish needs for structure, freedom, and balance. He relies

Steven Universe, the titular star of the show, is a young boy with superpowers and a member of a group of intergalactic warriors.

on them, and while they show love to one another, the Gems do not seem to rely on Steven for sustenance. As the show goes on, however, Steven begins to perceive the ways in which they are also damaged, flawed people. Pearl has an inferiority complex that’s gotten worse since Rose’s passing, Amethyst suffers from intense self-loathing, while Garnet struggles with her newfound role as the team’s leader.

The audience sees how the Gems have been changed by Steven’s birth, how they rely on his presence, and how Steven begins to take on a more reciprocally caring relationship with each of them. He becomes aware of them as multifaceted people rather than just extensions of his own needs.

This sort of emotional intelligence is rare for any show, and it’s especially valuable in one aimed at children. There aren’t enough shows that treat children as intelligent consumers of media, which is a shame because they’re the most intuitive, susceptible viewers out there. They haven’t yet developed the preconceptions to filter between what a show is saying and what they should believe. They swallow Photo courtesy of Cartoon Network

what they are fed, so we should take care to feed them well.

Children are routinely placed in situations that they have no language to process. How does a child navigate the experience of growing up in a broken home?

How about having an absent parent, or parents whose issues prevent them from fulfilling their duties as caretakers? These issues are too “adult” to confront directly on children’s television, even though kids need the most help with them. “Steven Universe” finds a way around this by speaking to the emotions of a situation rather than the specifics. Over the course of his adventures, Steven encounters people with abusive relationships, unprocessed grief, and abandonment issues.

Kids won’t pick up on the implications of these relationships—which include sex and intimate violence—but they get the stakes and can absorb the message that the solution is forming a family out of reciprocal, caring relationships. “Steven Universe” is about healthy versus unhealthy ways to love rather than the usual kids’ show trappings of good versus evil.

Speaking of love, “Steven Universe”

champions the still-somehow-controversial subject of queer love. Without revealing too much, there’s a prominent queer relationship at the center of the show. It’s a spoiler because you don’t realize this until around episode 50, but really it’s omnipresent. It is really clever how they managed to get around the censors.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Rebecca Sugar also storyboarded the “Adventure Time” episode “What was Missing”, in which Princess Bubblegum and Marceline are implied to have been in a relationship.

This episode was released in 2011 to controversy that resulted in the firing of Dan Rickmers, an employee at Frederator Studios who created a promotional video that treated this subtext as text. Their relationship was later confirmed by Olivia Olson, Marceline’s voice actress. On why it won’t be depicted onscreen, “Adventure Time” creator Pendleton Ward stated, “in some countries where the show airs, [homosexuality is] sort of illegal.” This tango of alternating confirmations and retractions (which extends past what I’ve outlined here) shows how much trouble people had accepting a queer relationship SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

53

on US children’s television just four years ago. Within the past few months, however, there have been multiple instances of same-sex love on “Steven Universe,” and none of them have faced media outrage.

Pearl has also demonstrated romantic interest in another femme. I say “femme” rather than “woman” because Gems do not acknowledge the gender binary. They don’t reproduce sexually and appear to be an all-female race by human standards. Ian Jones-Quartey, the supervising director of “Steven Universe,” phrases it like this: “gems are an alien species that use feminine pronouns for each other.”

“Steven Universe” is breaking new ground in its depiction of not only non-normative sexualities, but also genders.

It’s also racially diverse. While Gems are inhuman and lack ethnicity, they’re all coded nonwhite. The most obvious is Garnet, whose design is clearly inspired by afrofuturism. She’s voiced by Estelle, a British musician of Afro-Caribbean descent who is most famous in the US for her collaborations with Kanye West and David Guetta. Both Pearl and Amethyst’s voice actresses, Deedee Magno Hall and Michaela Dietz, are Asian-American.

Many other characters belong to ethnic groups that are rarely depicted on US children’s television. For example, Steven’s best friend, Connie Maheswaran, is Indian, and prominent side characters include a family of Ghanan immigrants (they run the local pizza parlor). Steven himself is most likely a POC. I especially love how willing “Steven Universe” is to display a wide variety of facial features and body shapes, particularly for its female characters. There’s so little variety to women’s appearances in popular media that anything other than white, thin, petite, and traditionally feminine often feels like a breath of fresh

air. Steven’s mother, Rose Quartz, is big and tall. Nonetheless, she’s held up as the show’s most beautiful and virtuous character.

This problem takes on another form in animation. Drawn female characters are often either extremely uniform in appearance or copies of male characters with added signifiers of femininity.

I wish that this show had been around when I was a little kid. It shows that there are many ways to be a woman, many ways to be feminine, and that the two words aren’t as synonymous as society has otherwise told me.

Think of the Disney Princesses, who are nigh-identical except for their colorations and the occasional differentiating racial characteristic. Or Minnie Mouse, who looks like Mickey in drag (has anyone ever seen them in the same room together?). Male characters are allowed to be ugly in ways that female characters simply aren’t. Could Tom and Jerry have

Truly ‘unbreakable?’

‘Kimmy Schmidt’ has a ways to go, but is still worth watching

by Lily Tyson

T

he first episode of “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” opens with four women standing around a christmas tree singing “Apocalypse, apocalypse, we caused it with our dumbness.” Everything changes when a SWAT team enters the room. The girls are led outside, 54

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

into a world that they thought had been destroyed in an apocalypse fifteen years earlier.

The rescue of the four women, dubbed the “Indiana mole women,” is shown through the lens of a viral video (which also serves as the show’s opening credits) remixing the words of the cult leader’s neighbor. He sings, “Unbreakable! They

done their slapstick antics if they were women? Attractive female characters are usually only allowed to be plastic in ways that emphasize their “assets”–think Jessica Rabbit from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”. When was the last time you saw a Disney Princess contort herself like her animal companions, who rarely bear gendered characteristics and are thus “by default” male? Historically animators have asserted and preserved the attractiveness of female characters in ways that they haven’t for male characters. This limits the expressive potential for femininity in animation, since the medium is all about stretching familiar forms as far as possible. “Steven Universe” bucks this trend by letting all of the women be, at various points, ugly and gorgeous, monstrous and familiar. (Pearl in particular has become memetic for her hilarious facial expressions.) Here, women’s bodies contort for both comedic and fearsome purposes while retaining their status as attractive, admirable, and powerful. I wish that this show had been around when I was a little kid. It shows that there are many ways to be a woman, many ways to be feminine, and that the two words aren’t as synonymous as society has told me.

If you’re at all interested in animation, portrayals of femininity on television, or just enjoyable fantasy adventures, “Steven Universe” is a must-watch.

Possibly the culmination of the current cartoon renaissance, it’s worthwhile for both children and adults. Fortunately, it’s doing spectacularly in terms of ratings, so there’s no fear of cancellation in the near future. For now, however, hop onto the hype train and begin your adventure alongside Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl… and Steven! (These are the lyrics from the theme song.) u

REVIEW alive dammit. It’s a miracle!...Those females are strong as hell...” It is incredibly catchy and worth listening to even if you have no intention of watching the show.

And, sure enough, Kimmy Schmidt (played by Ellie Kemper of “The Office”) is “strong as hell.” Instead of emerging from the bunker destroyed, she walks into the sunshine, grinning widely. After a Today

Show feature on the mole women, Kimmy is rushed out the door by a producer yelling “Thank you, victims!” behind her.

But Kimmy decides she will not return to Indiana and give in to this “victim” status.

Instead, she sets out to start a new life in New York City, taking the trope of country girl arriving in the big city to the extreme.

Sometimes, the extremes in this show did feel very extreme. Even the basic premise of the plot shocked me: the dark theme of cult life, and the presumably harrowing process of reintegration after such an experience, is presented as comedic.

How could we possibly laugh at a group of women that lived in an underground bunker for fifteen years, believing the world around them had been destroyed? How could this situation possibly be turned into a comedy?

But the over-the-top parody humor of the show can at times work as really effective social commentary. An example: how is it that the trial of Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne, Kimmy’s handsome white kidnapper, goes so poorly? Are we so stuck in our image of what type of person would abduct young girls that we reject clear cut evidence against someone we are primed to admire and trust?

At one point during the trial, Kimmy’s roommate Titus (Tituss Burgess) says, “People love hearing terrible details of news stories. One, it’s titillating like a horror movie. Two, it makes them feel like a good person because they care about a stranger. And three, it makes people feel safe because it didn’t happen to them.”

Here, Tituss points to each of the viewers watching “Kimmy Schmidt.” Why is it that we love watching crime shows and horrific news stories? Is it true that it makes us feel good because we care? Or that it makes us feel safe? Here the show makes us think, again, about the often problematic implications of the way our culture consumes media.

Ultimately, however, the space for social commentary that the show’s heavy parody provides was not enough to make the humor work for me. I needed Kimmy’s resolution to not be a victim as its sincere counterpoint. Throughout the show, I was impressed by her surprising strength.

When Jacqueline, Kimmy’s trophy-wife employer (played by Jane Krakowski, also of “30 Rock”) exclaims “What is happening to me is the worst thing that’s happened to any woman ever,” with characteristically self-centered drama, Kimmy pauses. For a second, I hoped this would be the moment where she tells the Photo courtesy of Netflix

Ellie Kemper stars as Kimmy Schmidt, the show’s hilarious, traumatized protagonist.

absurdly rich, absurdly unaware Jacqueline off. But she doesn’t. Instead, she continues to smile. I was again reminded that she is strong as hell. Instead of lashing out at this woman, who, comparatively, has had few bad things happen to her, Kimmy lets her compassion, empathy, and desire to help shine through. Sometimes we perceive strength as being able to stand up for ourselves, but in this moment, Kimmy proves that being able to act with kindness and empathy, no matter what the situation, is its own kind of strength.

While at times the show’s parodic humor was troubling and offensive, something neither Kimmy’s strength nor the underlying social commentary totally dispelled, I undeniably found much of it hilarious. Tina Fey, the creator of “Kimmy Schmidt” and the comedian behind “30 Rock,” brought much of her previous show’s time-tested humor to this new venture—at times you can almost see Liz Lemon delivering Kimmy Schmidt’s lines in your head.

Kemper doesn’t carry the show alone— she is accompanied by a strong cast of secondary characters. One, for example, is her roommate, Titus Andromedan, who moved to New York in the hopes of starring in the Lion King on Broadway, but instead spends his days dressed up as a robot in Times Square. As the show progresses, he also finds himself working

at a monster restaurant dressed as a werewolf and making his own music videos (specifically “Pinot Noir, an ode to black penis”—another song well worth looking up even if you have no intention of watching the show). Another strong character is Jacqueline Voorhees, the trophy wife who ends up employing Kimmy and eventually becoming friends with her. Although the show’s humor is at times unsettling and sometimes seems forced, the unexpected depth of these secondary characters provides it with an important and delightful element of surprise.

I am uncomfortable with the concept of “Kimmy Schmidt” as a comedy built entirely on the basis of trauma, and with some other instances of parody that at times slip from humorous to purely offensive (I’m thinking of the show’s portrayal of Vietnamese immigrant Dong). However, as I continued to watch I was impressed by the frequently nuanced subtleties of the humor—a pleasant reminder of “30 Rock.”

Critics have praised “Kimmy Schmidt” as “the first great sitcom of the streaming era,” and the “best new comedy of 2015.”

I would not praise it so far—it still has a lot to work on and consider as it moves forward. I do think, however, that “Kimmy Schmidt” is worth watching: it’s a ridiculous whirlwind ride into the land of extremes, and there’s a lot of humor waiting there. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

55

MUSIC What hip-hop needs right now Kendrick Lamar’s new album is a return to the golden age of West Coast hip-hop

by Max Hernandez-Webster

2

015’s three and a half months have been full of surprise albums, amazing collaborations, and much-needed albums/mixtapes/whatever Drake wants to call his mediocre project. Hip-hop has gotten spoiled in this first quarter of the year, which serves to reiterate how awful 2014 was for the genre. Many of its most popular artists put out nothing but features and rants (thanks Kanye), and the quality of the music was significantly worse than that of 2013. Kendrick Lamar falls into the category of artists who fans only heard on guest spots, and although they were as good as we have all learned to expect of K.Dot following 2014’s Grammy snub of “good kid, m.A.A.d city” (fuckin’ Macklemore), the majority of listeners were left unsatisfied.

The end of last year was somewhat of a tease, as Kendrick dropped the first single, Grammy-winning “i” from a then-unnamed album that he said he aimed to release before the end of the year. Although “i” was received with mixed reviews from fans who expected Kendrick to come with the same style of music that thrust him into the spotlight in 2012, the message of the song was positive, and its music video (you need to see it if you haven’t) helps to clear up lyrics that the average listener can easily miss due to K.Dot’s rapid delivery. More importantly, “i” set the stage for the style of the future album. Even though the album’s release was delayed by label issues (something that isn’t even close to new for anyone who has followed hip-hop for a long time), the presence of the Isley Brothers sample and Ron Isley in the video was exciting enough to tide a hip-hop stan like myself over with dreams of yet another classic album from Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, the Game, and others dubbed as the West’s next great rappers.

56

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

“To Pimp a Butterfly” did not disappoint. There aren’t enough words to describe how perfectly the style of the album fits in with what hip-hop needs right now. It’s original, it’s eerily personal, it’s complex, it tells a story, it’s unapologetically black after a year during which hip-hop culture and black life were infringed upon, and it deepens Kendrick Lamar as an artist. It is the perfect ending of what I see is a trilogy, including “Section.80” and “good kid, m.A.A.d city.” It transcends hip-hop in the same way as “Ready to Die,” “All Eyez On Me,” and “The Love Below.”

Maybe most importantly, it is extremely different from all of them.

The essence in question is one of a powerful black hip-hop album, told through the stories of the internal battles of Kendrick Lamar.

Before “i,” I had feared that Kendrick’s album would be his “It Was Written,” a slightly worse and stylistically identical version of his first album. Instead, it provides the lyrical diversity and storytelling ability he displayed on “GKMC,” but that isn’t the focal point of the album. Instead, “To Pimp a Butterfly” is a revival of G-Funk; it is a return to the golden age of West Coast hip-hop. Hell, Kendrick even got Snoop to rap like he used to. Thundercat’s presence on 13 tracks points to a vision that Kendrick had for the album, a certain style of product that he wanted to create, a style

ESSAY that allowed the album’s essence to shine through.

The essence in question is one of a powerful black hip-hop album, told through the stories of the internal battles of Kendrick Lamar. The best albums of this kind are often graced with the talents of other black musicians, and Kendrick’s project is no exception. Along with Thundercat, a host of others are credited on the album, like Robert Glasper, SZA, Lalah Hathaway, Flying Lotus, The Isley Brothers, George Clinton, James Fauntleroy, and Bilal.

This Soulquarians-like group of artists collectively set the stage for Kendrick on “To Pimp a Butterfly,” a setup which is effectively half of the work in making a revolutionary album like this (a parallel can be drawn to “Illmatic,” “All Eyez On Me,” or “The Low End Theory” here).

The other half comes from Kendrick, who did nothing but strengthen his claim to the throne of rap. While Buzzfeed rap fans who love categories and lists and shit like that tend to label Kendrick as a “conscious rapper,” “To Pimp a Butterfly” is composed of songs from different reaches of hip-hop and black music in general, including improvised jazz instrumentals. As Kendrick says on “Momma,” “I know everything, I know Compton / I know street shit, I know shit that’s conscious.”

Although some of the songs don’t necessarily tie directly into the mold of a black revolutionary album, every song on “To Pimp a Butterfly” has one thing in common: they all inspire a strong level of emotion within the listener. “i” and “u” specifically venture into Kendrick’s battles with depression and his struggle of maintaining his authenticity while being the celebrity that his storytelling made him. On “u” he revisits themes of increased drug use due to his emotional troubles as he raps in a slurred and drunken voice, and speaks on the guilt he felt after his friend Chad died (Lamar was on tour at the time): “Your trials

Illustration by Steve Sekula

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

57

and tribulations a burden, everyone felt it / Everyone heard it, multiple shots, corners cryin’ out / You was deserted, where was your antennas again? / Where was your presence, where was your support that you pretend?”

As much as the sad-sounding songs on the album inspire feelings of sympathy, the upbeat and inspiring tracks on the album exhibit why Kendrick referred to himself as “the closest to a preacher that these kids got,” referring to his fans. “Alright” is an amazing feelgood song, “King Kunta” is as lyrical as

Kendrick gets, and the music video shot at a Compton swap meet was vintage West Coast hip-hop. “Mortal Man” is legendary, and (spoiler alert) the Tupac interview sample at the end blew my mind. “How Much a Dollar Cost” is humbling, and “Complexion (A Zulu Love)” is important. One of my favorite parts of the album was the replacement of the studio version of “i” with a live recording, featuring Kendrick’s rant on the word “negus,” and the origin of blackness as he sees it.

“To Pimp a Butterfly” brings listeners

Am I teenager-ing enough?

Lessons from a Brooklyn Indie Music Journey gone awry

by Sam Herron

S

itting in Sharples at lunch, I mentioned that I had read a Vice Media article in which a reporter had snooped around the Playboy Mansion and taken pictures.

As someone who is only vaguely familiar with the Playboy mansion as a cultural object, I regarded it with a silent, mass-media-informed awe. The Playboy mansion, I assumed, was filled with Barbie-beautiful, perpetually scantily clad women giggling and sucking on their fingers or, like, petting Hugh Hefner in some Bacchanalian cuddle pile on a bed shaped like a heart. The mansion, in my mind, had a glittery, sweaty, mystical allure.

The Vice article, however, showed otherwise. The mansion, beyond its manicured facade, looked...very normal.

Worse than normal, almost. The pictures looked like photo attachments for a Yelp review of a shitty theme-motel. It was just some house! Maybe there were heart-shaped beds somewhere, but after scrolling through the piece, I can only guess that the Bunnies ended their night by eating cereal or watching a rerun of The Voice or calling their mom. If there is orgiastic revelry to be had in the Playboy mansion, it is presumably not the beautiful, neverending sex jamboree I had expected.

Realizing this, though, I didn’t feel

58

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

disappointed. I was robbed of a mildly attractive cultural myth, but in its place came the recognition that the world spins just as fast for everyone everywhere.

Instead of feeling bummed that the mansion isn’t a lingerie-and-down-feather-laden dreamscape, I felt relieved that people are just people and houses are just houses.

When I mentioned this article at lunch, though, I didn’t detail this emotional journey. I just used the article as evidence of Vice Media being fucking weird. The Playboy mansion photo safari is hardly the tip of the Vice iceberg (Viceberg?) when it comes to the weird, clickbait-y journalistic madness the news outlet puts out. Vice News seems like it’s powered entirely by shitty beer and pseudo-self-aware youth rebellion.

My friend Nora responded to my Vice news analysis by saying she had a celebrity crush on a Vice writer named River Donaghey. We googled him. His articles are silly—most are amusing write-ups of his ingestion of dangerous things like diarrhea-inducing gummy bears, powdered alcohol, the grossest food he could find in New York City, etc. His human guinea pig accounts are fit with overexposed pictures of the author in American Apparel hoodies and denim jackets that would be at home on any Tumblr blog. He’s very cute, in the hip, boyish, smart way.

Further Googling informed us that he was in a band—Pocket Hercules—and that said band was playing in Brooklyn

along so well; it leads them through stories and emotions and helps to put music to a movement, Kendrick’s personal doctrine aside. The album is original, catchy, and strengthens my personal belief that K.Dot could end up being a New Age, West Coast version of Andre 3000. It’s the album hip-hop needed, a masterful celebration of blackness that re-establishes Kendrick, as he claimed on the now-infamous “Control” verse, as the king of rap. u

ESSAY

on Saturday. I joked that we could go and meet River Donaghey. We laughed, but quickly realized that it would be easy.

I had plans to be in New York that day anyway for a conference. Leo and Nora both live in New York. It would only cost us a Boltbus ticket and a Saturday evening. We decided to go.

Once committed to our Brooklyn Indie Music Journey, we were hyped up.

Given our collective histories of weekly attendance at cripplingly unsatisfying frat parties, our decision to leave campus in pursuit of River Donaghey, alt-rock dreamboat, to go to Brooklyn, no less (Brooklyn’s cool, right?), seemed unshakably radical. I could feel a teen lit plot coursing through me.

I daydreamed about how awesome I would inevitably look on the subway and envisioned being infinitely out-awesomed by fellow concert goers. The night, I assumed, would include some very remarkable conversation with River Donaghey that ended with us making out (sorry, Nora!) or at the very least exchanging snapchat usernames. I was fuzzy on the details, but I fully expected our Hip New York Adventure Fantasy to be nothing short of weird and exhilarating. Barring potential public embarrassment or an unforeseen natural disaster, nothing could go wrong.

Nora looked at us and said, “The only thing stopping us is our fear.”

When we arrived in New York, we ate dinner at Leo’s house and then tried

to leave for the venue. A Google Maps search informed us that our destination entailed a longer subway ride than we had anticipated. After a brief discussion about how many Cool Points we’d lose by having Leo’s dad drive us, we asked Leo’s dad to drive us—Cool Points be damned.

We parked on the side of Myrtle Avenue, under the L line, a few blocks away from our target. The street was sparsely populated and dotted with delis and a Dunkin’ Donuts. A woman with an eye-patch, leather jacket, and shih tzu on a leash stood outside of a nearby laundromat. I was psyched. We were obviously in a place where crazy shit went down. After walking to the the address, we followed a group of White People Who Looked Like Us into a nondescript apartment complex, up a tight staircase, and past a group of floppy-haired, mustachioed boys shrouded in smoke.

We arrived at the venue: a loft apartment turned concert space mysteriously named David Blaine’s The Steakhouse.

We each paid the $5 entrance fee to some bearded guys sitting in a kitchen with a cash box. After one of them assured us, “David Blaine will bless you in the afterlife,” we ventured further into a dimly lit open area filled with beer-sipping 20-somethings in skinny jeans. At David Blaine’s, hipsterism still exists in its purest form. Denim, flannel, cigarettes, and scruffy facial hair abounded. I actually heard someone say the words “fixed-gear bike.” In general, everyone looked roughly like Conor Oberst circa 2007.

The loft was remarkably well-disguised as a music venue. But, given that the locale is an apartment where people actually live, the space was fit with the furnishings appropriate to the fairy-tale counterculture boys I assumed inhabited it: worn-in leather couches, half-empty bottles of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shampoo and bags of cat litter in the bathroom, a barrage of thrift-shopsourced tchotchkes. We had arrived in indie wonderland.

The venue looked exactly as I had imagined it would but I felt no different there than I felt elsewhere. I was midTeen Adventure Fantasy and completely unprepared for my own indifference.

I think I expected Ezra Koenig to pop out, hand me a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and congratulate me for being cool. He didn’t. I kept saying, “This is the craziest thing ever!” but it wasn’t. I felt at ease! Is it really an adventure if I feel so comfortable? I kept my enthusiasm up with the

knowledge that I would soon meet River Donaghey. And it was going to be memorable, god dammit.

We walked downstairs to where the bands would play. There he was. River Donaghey, man of the hour. Having dedicated the prior 36 hours of emotional and mental energy to this random Vice writer, seeing him in the flesh felt akin to seeing a celebrity. The fate of My Life as John Green Book Plot rested on his cute, indie rocker shoulders.

We stood in the crowd, mere feet away from River. At the time, I hadn’t listened to any of Pocket Hercules’s music.

Back in Sharples, listening over the din

The mythology of youth affords its members a unique freedom, a stupidity, a sexiness, an invincibility. It is both heartbreaking and relieving to watch these myths crumble. of lunch rush to the Pocket Hercules BandCamp, phone speakers pressed to his ear, Leo had said that he thought they “sounded like shitty Weezer.”

But then they started playing. They weren’t shitty or Weezer-like. I was dumbfounded. Pocket Hercules’s sound is bright and catchy. The songs were short, highly singable, and energetic. I alternated between bouncing up and down on my toes and doing a casual nodding thing that seemed to be en vogue. River looked cool. He had a lovely voice and a confident stage presence. He said funny things in between songs. At one point, I made what I thought was very excellent and highly extended eye contact with him, but it is undoubtedly more likely that he was just abstractly staring in my direction—Nora thought his gaze was for her as well. But, for the sake of my girlish, determined, and adventure-seeking heart, I felt absolutely sure that River Donaghey and I had had a Very Special

Moment.

Even before we had left for New York, I couldn’t wait to tell people that I had made a pilgrimage to a strange apartment in search of the Vice writer frontman of a very bad garage band (How quirky of me! How daring! How ironic and funny!) but the problem was that Pocket Hercules was great. I felt my attempt at cool irony fade into genuine fangirling. I was almost disappointed.

When the band finished, the crowd cheered briefly, and the band members began to pack up their equipment. Nora, Leo, and I turned to each other to make a game plan. I was elected spokesperson.

We decided it would be best to explain everything from the beginning. In our collective understanding of the situation, there were only two very polar possible endings to this story: either River would think we were super amazing and hilarious, or River would think we were weird and scary. We did not consider the possibility that anything besides those two situations could occur.

Nora and Leo thought we should go get drinks before we made contact with River, but I was ready to bite the bullet.

I had been waiting for this adventure climax all night and I needed to do it.

He was standing three feet away from us, drinking a beer. It was our chance.

I dragged Nora over and tapped River on the shoulder. He turned. I said “River Donaghey.” He raised his eyebrows and said, “Yes.” I explained Nora’s crush situation and the Googling and the decision-making and the revelation that Pocket Hercules was pretty fucking good.

He laughed. He told us we were boosting his ego or something. Leo took a very unattractive picture of Nora and me with River. River told us to stick around, enjoy the rest of the show.

That was it. We hadn’t anticipated him being this very appropriate amount of flattered. It wasn’t terrible or great or life-altering in any respect. It was good. It was fine. I felt dizzy.

I was stunned by the climax of anti-climax. My Saturday night had all of the ingredients for an adolescent dream escapade, but nothing exceptional happened. I left David Blaine’s feeling the same as I had when I walked in: like a normal, well-adjusted college student. I remembered the Playboy mansion that is just a house and the Bunnies who are just people.

It is so easy to feel, as a White American 19 year old, that I’m not teenagSWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

59

The members of Pocket Hercules (River Donaghey, pictured in bathtub).

er-ing enough. The mythology of youth affords its members a unique freedom, a stupidity, a sexiness, an invincibility. I’m 19—my life should be a music video, a romance novel, a house party. I should be skinny and thrilling and drunk. My days should look like filtered Instagram photos of underground music venues or be draped in red velvet comforters made special for heart-shaped beds.

It is both heartbreaking and remarkably relieving to watch these myths crumble. In the few short of days of knowing that River Donaghey existed, I had managed to Manic-Pixie-DreamBoy-ify him into a representative of some glamorous youth narrative I thought I was missing out on. I forgot that David Blaine’s The Steakhouse and the Playboy mansion and Bonnaroo and The Ohio State University and the city of Los Angeles and Twitter and One Direction are all filled with nothing but people who are 60

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

just people. People who need sleep and eat Cheetos and binge-watch House of Cards. People who are bound by the laws of gravity and capitalism and the rules of social etiquette and their own mortality.

I instantly felt silly for having mentally held River responsible for imbuing my life with ersatz teenage meaning.

At the end of the concert, Leo, Nora, and I ascended a ladder to the roof. If I am to believe what every movie, TV show, or social media upload featuring a rooftop tells me (which, given the evening’s events, I do not), rooftops are supposed to have some abstract symbolic significance. This would be the point in the night where we have a heartfelt conversation or look up at the stars and say something of deep philosophical importance. Maybe it would end in a group hug or dramatic confession.

None of that happened. We just sat there in a friendly but meaningless

silence. Leo peed in a corner. Nora checked her snapchats. I scrolled through a Buzzfeed list of cute dog gifs. When we got too cold, we clumsily climbed back down the ladder and left the building for the subway.

The impossible vision of a neon-lit young adulthood is hard to shake. My alternate daydream life timeline still looks like a sparkly montage of pretty, endlessly fascinating people making out in basements and going on roadtrips in vintage-cool station wagons. But back in reality, where America is packed dense with infinite me’s and infinite River Donagheys and infinite Playboy Bunnies, I’m comforted that no one’s existence is suited to 24-hour MTV coverage. My adventure was, by necessity, paved with people who are just people.

At least, that’s what I tell myself when River won’t answer my follow-up e-mail. u Photo courtesy of Julian Master

Reconciling himself to life

REVIEW

Sufjan Steven’s newest album, ‘Carrie and Lowell,’ is his best offering yet

by Jesse Bossingham

S

ufjan Stevens has always sung about uncertainty. He fears seeming disingenuous, as suggested by the choir entreating, “Are you writing from the heart?” on “Illinoise” (2005). During “Seven Swans” (2004), he chants “I will try” six times, begging the audience for tolerance of his limited abilities. Hell, “The Age of Adz” (2010), for all its creative acoustics, is an album charting the path of a breakup, with all the anxieties it brings. On “Carrie and Lowell,” Stevens’s most recent album, his uncertainty has taken a new shape. Opening “Death with Dignity,” he sings: “Spirit of my silence, I can hear you / But I’m afraid to be near you / And I don’t know where to begin.”

He isn’t concerned with his ability or his genuineness. His themes have moved beyond intriguing narratives to deal with issues of life and death. His music is full with the interweaving of the personal and the profound, still uncertain, but making it clear that his limitations do not come from a lack of confidence. He meets the challenge for an established artist of “developing” by fusing together the strengths of all of his previous work, from the narrative thrust of “Illinoise” and “Michigan,” to the spirituality of “Seven Swans,” to some of the sonic inventiveness of “The Age of Adz.” The “spirit of my silence” is Stevens’s mother, a drug addict who suffered from schizophrenia and left Stevens until the last years of her life. Her sudden death from stomach cancer in 2012 is the jumping-off point for the album. He has described the process: “In writing about [her death] on this album, I was in pursuit of meaning, of justice, of reconciliation.”

To do so, he travels through his memories, from childhood, to her deathbed, to the self-destructive months following her passing, with each song coming from the final thought of the previous piece. He is not always successful in finding answers, but it is unreasonable to expect him to be.

These questions are the “big ones,” and he tackles them with aplomb, opening up the stripped-down folk of 2004’s “Seven Swans” by focusing the sonic experimentation from his other work and using his

lyrics to tackle personal challenges with universal legibility.

The song “Eugene” captures all of these elements. It flows through memory, beginning with a family trip to Eugene.

Stevens remembers a swimming lesson that, in his typical fashion, doubles as a baptism. From here, the song moves into the spiritual realm, to “the bed near your death, and all the machines that made a mess” and Stevens’s mother dies. “What’s left is only bittersweet / For the rest of my life, admitting the best is behind me

Exploring these dark themes means the album is less cheerful than his previous work.

But somehow, the album avoids becoming a slog through misery. / Now I’m drunk and afraid, wishing the world would go away / What’s the point of singing songs / If they’ll never even hear you?” a beautiful inversion of the song’s refrain: “I just wanted to be near you.” In under three minutes, Stevens moves from nostalgia, to humor, to faith, to loss and loneliness, all expressed over effortless guitar picking.

Stevens’s interweaving of the transcendent and profane goes beyond a swimming pool baptism. He struggles with alcoholism and drugs, but acknowledges the failure of the material to address his pain. As he struggles against suicide in “The Only Thing,” he states “The only reason why I continue at all / Faith in reason, I wasted my life playing dumb.”

His release comes from “Blind faith, God’s grace, nothing else left to impart,” even while elsewhere he acknowledges that he prays “to what I cannot see.” This is deeply

personal faith, and it moves beyond the use of the biblical parables and allusions inserted into his past work to speak to the power of acknowledging forces beyond the scope of human understanding that bring meaning to the world. Stevens does not view his faith as an abstract aspect of his life, something to think about on Sundays or to mine for stories. It is an active force, shaping and changing him, offering him support and challenging his actions.

The second to last song, “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross,” focuses on the human tension between “getting drunk to get laid” and meeting the eye of his God “in the shadow of the cross,” but also avoiding being “drug to hell in the valley of the Dalles / like my mother.” His faith differentiates him from his mother, but also complicates his desire for a release from his struggles. It is his release and his guilt, a tension he cannot resolve.

Exploring these dark themes means the album is less cheerful than his previous work. There’s no jaunty sing-along like “Decatur” from “Illinoise.” “You checked your texts while I masturbated,” he sings on “All of Me Wants All of You,” and this juxtaposition is the blackly humorous opening before the song turns to the emptiness of a one-night stand. But somehow, the album avoids becoming a slog through misery. Stevens makes the darkest moments feel full of life. “The Fourth of July” is a back-and-forth with his mother as she dies, and though it repeats “We’re all going to die,” it also captures a deathbed reconciliation, with his mother asking “Why do you cry? / Make the most of your life, while it is rife / While it is light.” Stevens takes this to heart. On the lead single, “Should Have Known Better,” we hear one of the few conclusions of the album: “Nothing can be changed / The past is still the past / The bridge to nowhere.” While his past experience must be explored if he is to move forward, Stevens reconciles himself to life.

“Carrie and Lowell” is the best album of Sufjan Stevens’s career, an improvement and development of his previous work in every way. He brings a personal narrative into the universal, transforming his painful journey into one of hope while making his journey feel vividly real. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

61

Illustration by Nyantee Asherman 62

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

ART I hate myself and want to die of laughter On the very bad and potentially good of self-deprecation in stand-up comedy

by Daniel Bidikov

A)

a brief outline of my problems with some, not all, stand-up (and specifically stand-up) comedy.

The mechanisms of humor are as complicated as their products—jokes—are simple. There are a handful of cultural and biological reasons behind every involuntary spasm of laughter, many of which I don’t really understand. I’d bet that most stand-up comedians don’t either. It’s probably on purpose—I can’t imagine it’s easy or satisfying to work hard at a career if you spend free time actively deconstructing it. But it shows a lack of forethought nonetheless, and this often ends up being the basis for debate between comedians and their critics. These kinds of disputes, ones over particularly controversial jokes, happen frequently and publicly enough that it should become clear by observation why they happen. Ostensibly, the content is found offensive and the offended party expresses their concern with the messenger, and the messenger’s public. But I’d argue that the notion of offense is less black and white than a group objecting to a perceived attack on its sensibilities. And, though it’s hard to believe now, comedy may produce even scarier negative externalities than offense.

That’s not to excuse the endorsement of hurtful and hateful offense in comedy as a sign of realness, of jokeness. It’s something that happens often and yet is rarely adequately refuted. Take the case of critically acclaimed mega-assholes like Howard Stern and Lisa Lampanelli. They steadfastly present a joke as a formal truth that their audience can—or cannot—choose to “take,” rather than a culturally contingent image based on a collective idea of social order. This misrepresents the comedian’s craft, offering and defending a strain of mislabeled “comedy” that affirms familiar relations of authority instead of challenging them. More often than not, these missteps prompt visible and potentially ca-

reer-ruining public reaction. People reach consensus about the badness, the badness’s propagators fall out of vogue, life goes on.

I mention these kinds of performers not to quickly establish common moral ground before I say some shit you might not agree with, but to more effectively move to an explanation of why what’s commonly conceived of as a “nicer” alternative may not be as great as it seems.

In the interest of keeping information

Smart Comedians use the non-butt parts of their bodies in conjunction with stories of failure to bring an accepted social position up for review, reassuring the audience. organized I’ll call this alternative Smart Comedy, and hold on to the label for later.

They appeal to audiences who are looking for more than physical comedy or ridiculous gags—audiences that, by the perfect alignment of schooling and smugness, have found themselves in the target demographic of High Culture. It’s the opposite of Howard Stern’s mindless parade of sex toys or some cable guy’s amplified mouth farting. The jokes are carefully written and can take some time to sink in. Also important is that the vanguards of Smart Comedy are thoughtful enough not to offend (though, being only human, they still do). Some popular examples of Smart Comedians include people like Louis C.K., Sarah Silverman, etc. I’ll mostly refer to Louis’s work here, not because I have it out

ESSAY

for him in particular—though it’ll read that way at times—but because I want to avoid getting bogged down in evidence. In general, these comedians are “offensive” only in the old-fashioned way. They say “fuck” all the time in contexts that fit every English part of speech but, while it bothers a few grandparents, it doesn’t stir real controversy. Sometimes their references to their bodies sound like “lower,” physical comedy. But they talk about their genitals for the sake of an intellectual agenda. Their commentary is harsh but (seemingly) harmless, and it’s not hard to see why: if anything it is progressive and productive, questioning an existing system that’s guilty of upholding byzantine rules and traps its subjects in social structures that fall quickly to humorous criticism. They rarely use problematic language and deploy a lot of upward-pointed criticism. The concern I’d like to raise isn’t with specific content— these comedians practice comedy that’s pretty well varied among popular comedians and even pretty funny—but more with the content’s implications. My Big Issue is with the ideal that the content proposes.

This popular and under-criticized mode of stand-up joke telling relies on turning towards the relatability of self-deprecation to pitch a (possibly genuine, probably manufactured) sense of earnest. Smart Comedians use the non-butt parts of their bodies (Louis, notably, will use his stomach) in conjunction with stories of failure to bring an accepted social position up for review. This reassures the audience that what they have learned to see as flaws are really tricks of bad lighting, shown as we look at ourselves in the context of the peers we think are perfect. Insecurities like sexual failure, body image and social anxiety become something to embrace and work with, rather than to work around. Where deformity used to be laughed at, it can now be laughed with. Imagine Louis C.K. as he grabs his belly and shaking it around on stage—it’s grotesque, sure, but it’s also perfectly normal. What he (and the group) does with the body is done with society as SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

63

Hari Kondabolu, possibly the savior-elect of American stand-up comedy.

well, as issues of ignorance are explained as a discomfort that is possible to live with and almost embrace while keeping a desire to change.

This kind of humor is on the surface forward-thinking and thought-provoking. The audience reconsiders their assumptions and may even start adopting different, less harmful attitudes towards its circumstances. Through self-deprecation we can work toward a healthy self-awareness. A public comfortably exposed to this kind of humor is one that’s ready to evaluate the preoccupations behind much of its negative thought and replace them with ones that hold up even under the scrutiny of the comedic lens (climate change, world hunger). What a crowd used to consider a source of painful shame is now less important and grave. They have already undergone cathartic relief via laughter and solidarity of shared comedic interest, they have already exhaled their bodily and basic shame. Now the public can focus on something else, something more…serious, maybe? It’s not exactly clear what the audience should start to care about after 64

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

they leave the show. The comedian either hasn’t thought that far ahead or doesn’t want someone else to do so. Self-deprecating comedy as practiced by its champions breeds intense awareness and thus a lot of insecurity. But it also soothes and massages, by offering the reminder that even though we’re the screwed up jerks at the butt of every joke, we’re the screwed up jerks at the butt of every joke together.

There’s a cultish “forgetfulness” that lets us ignore the difficult position that this obsession with laughing at ourselves puts us in.

So the approach of Smart Comedians is sometimes so deeply entrenched in its foundations of relatable “middleness” that it misses its own point—you don’t learn anything about yourself or anyone else, you just joke about and cheer on whatever you already know. It reeks of smug insincerity and is perpetuated by the “human” desire to fit in. If you think you’re out of shape or ignorant about something it’s fine, because the fact that you can admit it proves that you’re aware of it, and the fact that you’re aware of it proves that you aren’t a stupid asshole. Congratulations,

the joke tricks you into thinking, you’ve made it into the bizarrely elite sect of the self-proclaimed un-elite, the band of average—if well educated—Joes and Josephines who vote Democrat just because they feel like they have to, and who have uncovered the secret that it feels better to laugh our problems off than to explain them away. Under the ideal of Smart Comedians, we all join the enlightened ranks of the simultaneously self-hating and self-loving jokesters. One day we will all have learned to really savor every fart.

In place of real social criticism is a sense of pride in collective social shittiness, an absurdly high value put on complaining, and a projection of a paradoxically populist superiority. The audience has been separated from the non-audience, and so have their anxieties. A clear dichotomy forms between Our problems (“real ones”) and Their problems (issues that the members of the dubiously “regular” elite have already resolved via creation and consumption of stand-up routines). Less than solved, Our Problems have been moved— moved onto some poor soul who hasn’t Photo courtesy of Hari Kondabolu

seen enough paid comedy specials.

That’s what I think is dangerous, for our stand-up and for our prevailing attitude.

The coolest and most fun way to be is not to appreciate your flaws, but to inflate your opinion of yourself and your friends just because you can identify and laugh at them.

B)

a hopefully convincing justification for my decision to endorse Hari Kondabolu as the savior-elect of American stand-up (and specifically stand-up) comedy.

“Hari Kondabolu,” Wikipedia opens, “is an American stand-up comic.”

A lot of my recent interactions with Wikipedia continue to be shaped by my experiences in middle school, where I learned that use of the site is immoral and categorically wrong and will result in Severe Academic Penalties. That’s why a basic and factual claim like this ends up feeling modal, uncertain: “I can’t really say for sure,” Wikipedia tells me, “but I think Hari Kondabolu might be an American stand-up comic?”

His work certainly looks and sounds like that of a stand-up comic, with him on stage and holding a microphone. It even sounds like the work of the Smart Comedians that I just went on decrying—he doesn’t burp the alphabet or make fun of accents—but there’s still something different about it. It’s hard to visualize the difference between Kondabolu and his contemporaries with an example. An analogous relationships sort of exists in comedic media (think Jon Stewart and John Oliver, Kondabolu fitting in roughly with Oliver), but not specifically in stand-up.

It’s difficult to understand exactly what the big deal is by looking at other, similarly big deals, but it’ll prove more manageable to analyze his work by actually looking at it.

There are two variations of a bit that I’ve seen in which Kondabolu walks the audience through an encounter with a homeless man in Seattle. The comedic discord is that rather than requesting food or change, the stranger pleads for a Vitamin Water. In his earlier run through the material, Kondabolu recounts the indecision over which flavor of juice to choose based on the metaphorical implications of their marketing names (“Power,” “Balance,” etc.). Through the story the audience gets an idea of who Hari is—compassionate and smart, if not totally confident. It sounds not so different from the characters played by his colleagues, but there is one big differences.

Unlike his colleagues, he opts to express

his potentially universalizable insecurity without talking much about himself or forcing his body and presence into his stories. While others worship their lack of knowledge, Kondabolu performs the deficiency and lets it be open for criticism, lets the audience assign their own value and meaning to it. In this way, he ignores the typical vehicles by which most comedians exhibit and flaunt their failings. It doesn’t always make his content funnier—sometimes it’s not funny at all, and there’s room for improvement in his high moments— but it often makes it more interesting and, as we’ll see, more innovative.

Kondabolu has performed this material more than once. In another take, he omits the part of the story in which he is shopping for energy drinks and instead

Kondabolu looks like the early Weezer fan he was, and carries himself like someone who was forced to grow into his social discomfort in high school. quickly builds a joke using the setting of the performance somewhere in the United Kingdom. The joke, paraphrased and stripped of context, is that he can tell that the homeless man isn’t British, because a colonial legacy has made the vagabond’s accent so valuable that he would have certainly been employed.

Hari Kondabolu’s material has revolved around issues of race and colonialism since the outset of his professional career, though maybe more comfortably in more recent times. I doubt that he would mind the title of “activist,” but unlike some of his socially conscious contemporaries who tout the label almost obnoxiously, Kondabolu doesn’t seem preoccupied with what the audience will “get” out of his performance. Comedy is, rather than a “funny” way to feed a stuck-in-the-mud audience their medicine, a platform to effectively circumvent the obstacle of respectability and the expectation of self-righteous didacticism. As Kondabolu’s joke goes,

for him to be overly occupied with issues of race in America is to be “obsessed with swimming while drowning,” rather than some high minded and tedious social obligation for consciously self-identifying career Activists.

Something like racism, he communicates, is a similar kind of flaw as Louis C.K.’s beer belly. Through his stories, he can grab it and shake it around in a similar way. But unlike the gut that society used to force on people who we would mark as overweight, racist tendencies remain an Our problem rather than becoming a Their problem. They refuse to be moved, and remain to be resolved. Hari Kondabolu separates himself from his peers because he’s aware of this, using this understanding to write material that is funny and not comfortably numbing. His commentary is incisive without relying on tropes of relatability. While other comedians’ routines show them realizing and coming to terms with the fact that nobody’s perfect, Kondabolu directs his attention towards the post-perfect society.

When Kondabolu is on stage, he wears something like a tee shirt and a hoodie, shows off blocky sideburns and slouches a little. He looks like what I always imagined the earliest Weezer fans—a claim to fame that he actually holds—are doomed to forever resemble. He carries himself like someone who was forced to grow into his social discomfort in high school. And it’s a discomfort that developed differently from C.K.’s or Silverman’s, likely in part due to the color of his skin as well as his temperament and sense of intellectual purpose.

His education (which is from Bowdoin and currently being, in his words, “wasted”) comes across in the way he forms his thoughts, the issues he chooses to address and the consideration of his material’s mission. The point is that for whatever reason, or combination of reasons, he’s different.

Here the uncertainty of Wikipedia’s claim gives it an extra layer of truth—Hari Kondabolu is something vaguely like an American stand-up comic, operating under the same constraints of format and building on the same tradition of genre.

He realizes, thinks about, and works around a lot of contemporary stand-up comedy’s misgivings. His goal is not to make you appreciate major social ills, nor to make you hate everyone else for complicitly upholding them. He doesn’t paint himself as a saint or a an everyman; he doesn’t even paint himself. Just assume he’s as much of a piece of shit as you are and, if you want, laugh. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

65

POETRY: FOUR WORKS

Smoke Break

Resurrection of Hearst (All was Life, Vigor, and Prosperity)

by Leah Gallant

by Joyce Wu

i. orange point in hand, cold wall at back. circumspect glances at edge-lit windows. body still, untouched by empty footprints and fickle wind. ii.

& the curators/lunatics rolled back the slab & Behold the Bull was back & he went to the mine saying the geese we used to raise principally for the feathers to make feather beds & he went to the phone saying a Saxon word meaning a thicket or cluster of trees

firefly ash winks at snow, sizzles dark. iii. the push off, the stumble forth, the rasp of key in door. pins and needles and sudden, unwanted warmth. iv. time to break out the slipping smile, coming as easily as it goes. v. always striving for a frozen moment, but water runs beneath the inconstant ice. u

& he went to the newspaper saying Will you be mine Oh will you be mine Oh & he went to the ATM seeing a blinking sign saying BURRITOS & TACOS TO GO & O How He Hungered & so he went to the pizza parlor but there was no pizza left & so he stowed his hands like a notebook furled his face like a sail & he went to the ground

66

APRIL 2015

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

saying a Saxon word meaning a thicket or cluster of trees saying his name saying some racist things that are not fit to print saying will you be mine O will you be mine oh & so the curators/lunatics saying & in everything public he evinced a public spirit assembled their low stools covered their mirrors & tore their shirts clean off their right breasts burning the bootstrap he’d hoisted unsnapped & unstretched (how it hid his Grecian heel how he started off rich) burning sage burning frankincense then myrrh burning a boat the size of a house made of paper burning / bronzecasting fifty white magnolias symbolic of purity (or the spate of southern belles he fucked or deflowered) burning a bra Ha actually a corset Phoebe was a feminist Ha Ha Ha & the whalebone gave off smoke & the heady heaving smell of a city under siege u

Spaghetti Letters

by Chris Malafronti

I recall Slurping tongues clicking And feeding

knuckles cracking smacking cheeks and cheekbones

fading grace and fingertips tracing your face remember the depth of your woolen socks gripping your feet The taste of cherrychappedlips on frosty breath leave me breathless left me breathing into your chest just south west of your heart beating your heart beating like it was supposed to thank you for the chance to speak with spaghetti letters Slurping at the tip of the tongue through clenched teeth and squinted eyes Shut tight against the stiff reality it was hard sitting in the front seat of your car telling you Half-formed sentences fought for relentlessly My heart beating my heart beating me up Now and again again and again Blunder bound my tongue wound so hard to make a sound Resorting to fidgeting hands

stand break silence like joints Resorting to eye contact reaction our speech unspoken Resorting to glass sliding doors and mirrorsrear-viewing, antique, makeup alike We never were discriminatory just democratic with our prejudice When left alone with each other’s gaze we picked and supposed chose what we wanted to see in each other we found comfort and were at odds with

Fingertips pressing back pressure producing prodding pointing fingertips tracing faces gracing cheeks caressing carefully expressing tangled words looping in and out of smalls of backs I recall

the hum under the hood the leafless tree the black asphalt the lung stinging air and the spaghetti letters

Lying Half-cooked on the floor u

you are shopping

by Kimaya Diggs

In the morning I rise and put on my dress.

I wish the zipper wasn’t so hard to reach. Who would design a dress whose zipper begins just one strain shy of my fingers’ easy reach?

It makes me so tired ten minutes after waking I’m at the kitchen table cup of tea in my strangely shaking hand.

There’s the kitchen window I do not know where you are, and I picture you in some vaguely unusual setting, the mall you never go to the mall unless you absolutely have to and even so, never alone.

My ghost watches your ghost.

Maybe they brush and in our bodies you and I both blink and look around u

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

APRIL 2015

67