Issue 11

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SEPTEMBER 2015

Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life

by Nora Kerrich Plus Izzy Kornblatt: Why can’t Swarthmore hire better architects? • Blake Oetting on what to listen to this fall

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CONTRIBUTORS Nora Battelle is a junior from New York City studying English and French.

Leo Elliot is a sophomore from Brooklyn, New York. He is pretty Undecided about his area of study, but is banking on the option of a wild special major if need be.

Ian Holloway is a junior from Brooklyn, New York studying linguistics and Chinese.

Nora Kerrich is a curmudgeonly senior who has great style and aspires to be a failure worth knowing.

Izzy Kornblatt is a senior with an interest in architecture and development.

Noah Morrison is a junior Middle Eastern studies major from New York City. He enjoys house music, selfies, and long walks on the beach (Parrish Beach).

Blake Oetting is a sophomore from Iowa City, Iowa. He is studying art history and math and enjoys fried potatoes.

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, nbattel1@swarthmore.edu, lfranke1@swarthmore.edu.

Olivia Ortiz is a senior from Canton, Georgia, and studies mathematics and environmental studies. She prefers tea to most things.

EDITOR IN CHIEF ANNA GONZALES

PHOTO ESSAYS NOAH MORRISON

Cecilia Paasche ‘16 is a native New Yorker majoring in neuroscience. She has two sisters, two dogs, and an endless appetite for novels.

MANAGING EDITORS LILIANA FRANKEL NORA BATTELLE

POETRY VICTORIA STITT Z.L. ZHOU

Alex Pears is a junior at the University of Michigan’s Art and Design School. She’s into printmaking, beekeeping, and Guy Fieri.

COPY PRIYA DIETERICH

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS TOM CORBANI ISABEL CRISTO LEO ELLIOT IAN HOLLOWAY

ART STEVE SEKULA

Victoria Stitt ’16 is a comparative literature major from Philadelphia.

Maria Vieytez is a senior from Long Island, New York studying English with an emphasis in Creative Writing.

Rose Wunrow is suddenly a senior in college, studying English, history, and French and trying not to question her life choices, especially the decision to dye her hair blue. As always, she owes everything to her parents and her brother, and sends them infinite love and gratitude.

BOOKS PHILIP HARRIS

S W A R T H M O R E

EDITOR AT LARGE IZZY KORNBLATT

MOVIES & TV RACHEL YANG

Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com Founded 2012 | Vol. 4, No. 1

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.

“Cats are delicate creatures and they are subject to a great many ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

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PHOTO ESSAY

September 2015 ESSAY

Arts BOOKS

My last summer in New York

On Harper Lee 23

by Noah Morrison

Going back to Maycomb

by Cecilia Paasche

‘Mislaid’ 25 Nell Zink’s newest offering

by Leo Elliot

TELEVISION

TV reimagined 27 ‘Sense8’ shatters conventions

by Nyantee Asherman

Why can’t Swarthmore build buildings like this?

Tame Impala’s new album

by Ian Holloway

POETRY: 3 poems

FICTION

The new season fails to deliver

by Alex Pears

Yes, they’re changing 31

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by Izzy Kornblatt

‘Orange’ falls down 28

MUSIC

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5169346227 by Victoria Stitt Going to Eastvale

by Nora Battelle

Camp

by Olivia Ortiz

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Swimming Lessons

by Rose Wunrow

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universe 5 by Maria Vieytez

Fall albums 32 What to look out for

by Blake Oetting

ART

Hybridity of the woman genius 34 A new Frida Kahlo exhibition

by Nora Kerrich

We’re looking for contributors.

No academic writing, please.

Contact agonzal4, lfranke1, or nbattel1

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ESSAY

Architecture without imagination

Why Swarthmore should invest in better design

by Izzy Kornblatt

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t Haverford, students now live in two low-slung stone buildings designed by the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. To enter, you ascend a small grassy slope to the dorms’ second level and then cross a set of bridges over walkways cut below. Within, the scale immediately becomes intimate and almost anti-institutional: narrow hallways with oak floors lead to interior courtyards—a miniature world inside the already miniaturized world of college.

Whatever you think of Williams and Tsien, who also designed the new Barnes Foundation in Center City, you can’t deny that their work is imaginative. Thanks to their willingness to experiment with materials, symbols, and building forms, entering the new dorms at Haverford is a distinct experience: a reinterpretation of “coming home” in the context of campus life. Dorms do not have to feel vaguely like prisons, these buildings suggest: like the best houses, they can evoke a sense of domesticity and embody a set of values.

Why can’t Swarthmore do that well?

Our recent buildings, including the new Danawell connector dorm, don’t compare.

To be fair, they are by no means incompetently designed or offensive. The problem is that they are too inoffensive. They have contemporary glass, but not too much.

They don’t copy historical detailing, but they also don’t introduce any memorable detailing of their own. In terms of the plan and the sequencing of spaces, they

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are unsurprising: no one who passes through them stops to think about the architecture (as they now do at Haverford).

Take Danawell. The plan is pretty standard, with student rooms off a double-loaded corridor. I like that the corridor opens out to Crum-side lounges, but it didn’t take a great architect to think of that. (More interesting is the Haverford dorms’ arrangement, where student rooms run around the perimeter while social spaces occupy the center of each floor around the courtyards, creating intimate living rooms.) Danawell’s irregular window spacing is supposed to read as contemporary, but that kind of patterning has become so cliche in new residential buildings that it is virtually guaranteed not to catch anyone’s eye. The exterior concrete and gray metal panels suggest that the building is supposed to fit someone’s notion of campus harmony—to be contextual. The architectural context here is the drab concrete block of Dana and Hallowell, two cheaply built 1960s dorms by the weak Philadelphia architect Vincent Kling. Why defer to such buildings and the sorry image of dorm living they project?

The Matchbox fitness center—which was built sustainably and with a low budget—is somewhat better, especially with the landscaping taking shape. Its architects, from the up-and-coming Philadelphia firm Digsau, are creative and willing to experiment. But the building is still a little too contextual. Its stone base is supposed to tie it into the campus, its central band of glass signifies contempo-

rariness, and its third-level red paneling blends with the red roofs of the nearby athletic buildings. The architects are said to have wanted the building to be a bit like a tree in the fall: with an earthy base, a transparent middle section, and a canopy above. That’s a nice thought (I guess), but it has no bearing on how ordinary people see the building. To the rest of us, the building reads not as an inspired sculpture but as yet another new building that mixes the cliches of contemporary architecture with the materials and forms of its neighbors. It doesn’t seem to want a visual identity of its own.

This kind of “respectable contextualism,” common in today’s architecture, relies on a simplistic notion of architectural context. When contemporary architects simply recycle the building materials and rough exterior forms of nearby buildings, they ignore the symbolism and narratives those forms and materials come together to produce in the original. It’s not about the materials and forms themselves but about the role they play in a larger whole.

In the cases of many of Swarthmore’s older buildings, that whole is much more rich and complex than the college’s current architects seem to appreciate. Parrish Hall’s oversized mansard rooflines, much like those of Philadelphia City Hall, suggest a rejection of the traditional Quaker plain style exemplified in Haverford’s early buildings for a kind of exaggerated Europeanness: French symbols inflated into iconography in American industrial culture. The distinctive Second Empire style projects confidence and an aspiration toward a sophistication associated with the elites of France as well as the rising federal government style of the post-Civil War years. The building’s axial connection to the train station down the hill acknowledges the importance of the train in the 19th-century: visitors were to ascend Magill Walk, Parrish’s grandeur steadily unfolding above them.

Or consider the dark and gothic Worth and Clothier. Collegiate Gothic architecture became popular in America in the late 19th century as a way of dramatizing the role of the university in public life.

Clothier’s architects, Karcher & Smith, gave the building an ecclesiastical character complete with the medieval tower and hammer-beamed hall of the chapels that were traditionally central to church-affiliated universities. They drew on medieval

Kim and Tritton dormitories at Haverford: Top and bottom left: they are entered via paths that rise and then cross a set of concrete bridges. Bottom right: the hallways feel domestic thanks to soft lighting, intimate scale, and generous finishes (including oak floors).

architecture to suggest the image of the university and its knowledge as embattled bastions of light and clarity in a dark world—the university confers on itself a heroic importance by suggesting that the Dark Ages are still not so far removed.1 Modern buildings can be equally rich.

Our Lang Music Building, by the talented Philadelphia School architects Mitchell/ Photos courtesy of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects

Giurgola, eschews explicit historical symbolism (as was the custom in modernism) but it is nonetheless full of drama. On the exterior, its array of windows denote the specific functions of each part of the building, from concert hall to small practice rooms. Its low-slung main entrance and side entrances leading directly to the music practice rooms suggest a Quaker

modesty, but once you step down and pass through a bank of doors you encounter a multi-story atrium both grand in scale and intimate in material (dark parquet wood). The entrance to the concert hall repeats this sequence: you step down, pass through a small vestibule, and then suddenly encounter the sharply sloping rows of seats down to the stage and beSWARTHMORE REVIEW

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Some schools are doing it right: Top: Temple University plans to build a new library designed by the Scandinavian firm Snøhetta at the center of its main North Philadelphia campus. Below: Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center was designed by Fumihiko Maki, a Japanese architect who has done work all over the world.

hind it, a floor-to-ceiling window out into the Crum Woods beyond. I’ve never seen another concert hall like it.2

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here is nothing wrong with deferring to very good historical buildings.

But in order to succeed, that deference has to be based in an understanding of how the historical buildings work—not just the observation, say, that this one is concrete or that one has a bell tower.

There is some precedent for successful contextualism at Swarthmore. In the 1980s, renowned Philadelphia architects Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour renovated Clothier Hall into the Tarble Stu-

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dent Center. Their concept of creating a smaller building within the old open hall is unobtrusive and respectful of the Collegiate Gothic form: it creates room for the functions of a modern student center while preserving the feeling of being in a larger space. The side hallways provide a glimpse up to the wooden roof supports, and the sounds of events occurring above float down. The architects deliberately kept the building’s dark wooden entrance doors in order to create a sense of surprise for visitors when they encounter the student center inside. Gothic architects who mixed a cold medieval exterior with interior places for learning would have been proud. (Of course, today’s Tarble is

not without its problems, like the lack of natural light on much of the first level.)

But there is such a thing as too much deference. Deference is just one of many valid architectural strategies, and Swarthmore’s campus should reflect that. The justification for taking deference too far often has to do with “Quaker values,” a phrase which can rapidly lose its meaning in the hands of some people. No doubt modesty is a legitimate Quaker value, but creativity doesn’t imply excess or vanity.

And historically that has not been lost on Quakers. Quakers played a major role in the industrial culture of 19th-century Philadelphia, out of which grew some of the first authentically American architecture. It was a Quaker group that commissioned Guild House, one of the first postmodern buildings. And just a few years ago, the Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting built a new meetinghouse topped with a “skyspace” by the light artist James Turrell. The building itself is appropriately modest, but the experience of entering it and seeing the roof pull back and open up to the sky is extraordinary.

Swarthmore has built a lot of fine buildings, but it has missed opportunities to build really great ones. The architecture firms it has worked with have often been local and fairly conservative. There is, of course, nothing wrong with supporting local talent. Historically, Philadelphia’s best architects have been instrumental in the development of contemporary architecture—but over the years Swarthmore has failed to hire them (with the exception of Venturi), going instead for firms that take fewer risks. Swarthmore has no buildings by Frank Furness, the late-19th century architect who fused European styles and industrial technology to create a spectacular and distinctly American architecture, and no buildings by Louis Kahn, a modernist who is now widely recognized as among the most important architects of the 20th century. While Kahn designed buildings at Penn and Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore opted instead for his much less talented contemporary Vincent Kling—who gave us Dana, Hallowell, and McCabe (among others).

Today Philadelphia has no architects of Kahn’s stature, but it has some original and inventive firms—most notably Kieran Timberlake, which has done good work at Penn and Yale. Unfortunately, Swarthmore passed them up for the planned new biology building. Instead, a college committee chose the firm Ballinger, which specializes in tasteful brick-or-stone-andPhotos courtesy of Temple University, Japan Architecture + Urbanism

glass higher education buildings. All of them basically look the same.

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warthmore should hire the best local firms, but it should also not be afraid to look further afield for more varied and more diverse talent. Our regional peers certainly aren’t. Temple is building a dramatic new library at the heart of its campus by the Scandinavian firm Snøhetta; Penn has a simple and elegant wood-and-glass academic building by Fumihiko Maki (Japan), and recently hired England’s Norman Foster for a new hospital building. Williams and Tsien (New York) have done buildings for both Haverford and Penn. Princeton has a building by Los Angeles’ Frank Gehry.

Indeed, Swarthmore’s best contemporary buildings, David Kemp and Alice Paul halls, were done by the thoughtful Boston architect William Rawn.

Saving money is often cited as a reason for sticking with lower profile architects.

But design makes up a small percentage of a project’s total budget, and an increase

in design cost can more than pay for itself: a little design creativity can save millions in construction costs down the line. At Haverford, Williams and Tsien reused site fill (rather than paying to ship it off somewhere) to create the hill through which the dorms’ upper levels are accessed. That in turn made both floors wheelchair accessible, eliminating the need for interior stairs and elevators and allowing the architects to invest in great materials, including white oak floors. (Our new dorm has wall-to-wall carpet and linoleum-type tile, per usual.)

The entire project was completed under budget.

Indeed, many architects spend lavishly without great results. I find Kohlberg Hall and the unified Science Center, both designed by the late Margaret Helfand, a little bit overwrought. No doubt Helfand thought seriously and intelligently about the Swarthmore campus—more so than many others—and her buildings have real strengths, like their many comfortable informal meeting spots. But in their pursuit of a refined aesthetic, they try too

hard. They have custom furniture, dramatic staircases, dark wood paneling on the interior walls and ceilings, different kinds of costly stone cladding, distinctive windows, controlled outdoor gardens.

Kohlberg has taken on the slight feel of a dated 1980s office building. The Science Center’s oversize details, like the artist-designed metal clock in the atrium and exaggerated stone gutters, feel precious and nervous.

Tighter cost control around those kinds of things would have made the building better, not worse. Indeed, some of the best contemporary architects—including Williams and Tsien—have perfected various forms of practical minimalism that would fit Swarthmore’s campus well. The Clark Institute, a museum near Williams College, recently opened a new pavilion and exterior court by the architect Tadao Ando. Like much of Ando’s work, it is a formal composition of glass and concrete that explores the distinction between solid and void and between interior and exterior. Its concrete walls frame the Massachusetts landscape and sharply contrast

Great buildings don’t have to be complicated: Tadao Ando’s new entrance pavilion at the Clark Institute museum near Williams College in Western Massachusetts Photo by Jeff Goldberg, Esto

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with the museum’s original neo-Classical building. Despite its simplicity and conventional materials—or maybe in part because of them—Ando’s pavilion may be the best new building in Massachusetts.

Going forward, the college should develop a better process for selecting architects. Penn, which has an exceptional track record with recent buildings, has a university architect who oversees its building program. Temple has now followed suit. That might not be feasible or necessary for a small school like Swarthmore, but we could at least take a step in that direction by expanding the role specialists in art and architecture (faculty members, administrators, and even some students) have in architect selection. I have little personal experience with Swarthmore’s current process, but what I’ve heard from people who do is that it often involves committees made up mostly of people who don’t know much about architecture.

I remember speaking last year to several members of a committee that is looking at the design of student gathering places, including Tarble. Both thought that the existing student center was designed to be “temporary” (nope), and had no idea it won considerable recognition when it opened. Others involved in that design process have suggested that the Venturi interior be ripped out to recreate a grand hall in Clothier—an expensive and pointless proposition that ignores the historical fact that the building never worked with a great hall in the first place, which is of course why it ended up as a student center. It would be better to leave architectural decisions to people with a real knowledge of architecture. After a firm is selected, it can work closely with a given school constituency to meet their needs.

And we could do a better job telling the stories of the historic buildings we already have. The college should install exterior signage indicating the years buildings were completed and their architects, and it should maintain a web page with more in-depth information. The Friends Historical Library has valuable and well-kept records of the design and construction of most campus buildings—maybe some of those could be digitized and put online.

These suggestions may sound easy to implement, but I’m not sure that’s reason for optimism. Doing something serious to improve the quality of design would require a not-insignificant change in the college’s culture. After all, architecture has a way of reflecting values—good and bad.

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Haverford’s new dorms feel like homes, and they come out of a culture of putting students first: Tsien and Williams say they modified their design considerably in order to make every room a single after students told them that was their priority.

Three years of personal experience with Swarthmore’s administration and of watching it handle controversial campus issues give me the impression that such thoughtfulness and such willingness to experiment are unlikely here. Despite the efforts of

some hardworking people, Swarthmore has a culture of sticking to old ways of doing things. And until that changes, we won’t get any great buildings. u

cf. George Howe, cited in “Learning from Las Vegas” (Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour), 114.

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I would like to thank George E. Thomas for suggesting additions to this section of the piece.

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8 architects Swarthmore should consider hiring Rafael Moneo — More than pretty much any other contemporary Western architect, Moneo creates buildings that are complete experiences, not just conventional spaces rendered with distinctive styling. He creates thoughtful and dramatic spatial sequences that fit and dignify the activities of the buildings’ users, from travelers at the Atocha train station in Spain (1988) to worshippers at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles (2002). More recently he designed a large multifunction building at Columbia University that bridges the divide between campus and neighborhood and draws visitors up through a series of elegant transitional spaces to a cafe high above the surrounding streets.

David Adjaye — Often working with a dark palette of metal and concrete, Adjaye creates forms that are simple and stark in a very British way. But they are also fun, unexpected, and often adorned with surprising finishes and details. His new National Museum of African American History and Culture, now under construction on the National Mall in Washington, promises to be by far the best contemporary building in Washington. It consists of a series of horizontal slabs that widen as they rise, as if they were growing from the building’s base. They appear powerful and heavy, but will be clad in a thin bronze-like screen that will add exactly the sense of lightness the mall needs.

(The screen will be patterned with ornamental designs based on traditional iron grilles found in some Southern African American communities.)

Yoshio Taniguchi — Taniguchi has perfected a confident minimalism that is neither boring nor pretentious. The Toyota Museum of Art in Toyota, Japan (1995), is an extraordinarily simple composition of stone, water, and metal formed into dynamic volumes punctuated by striking voids. Taniguchi’s one prominent work in America was a large renovation of MoMA completed in the early 2000s that turned a hodgepodge of buildings into a unified and quietly dignified museum. It generously opens to the streets and connects the museum’s many levels and galleries together and to the outside. And it somehow manages to project a sense of tranquility even when the museum is packed.

Jeanne Gang — Gang has a way of finding unique and unexpected solutions to ordinary design problems, and then translating them into expressive architectural elements. Her work is a strong antidote both to unnecessary showboat “starchitecture” (like the new PATH World Trade Center station) and bland contextualism. In the best Chicago tradition, she reinterpreted the contemporary skyscraper with her 84-story Aqua tower (2009). Its curving balconies wrap around the building, and change shape on each floor as if shaped by the city’s famous winds.

Kieran Timberlake — Philadelphia’s best architecture firm does thoughtful and sensitive work, often involving additions or alterations to architecturally significant buildings. In the tradition of the Philadelphia School of architecture the 1960s and 70s, the firm uses an understanding of a place’s scale and history to create buildings that are both distinctive and respectful.

Their recent addition to the historic Rodeph Shalom synagogue on Philadelphia’s North Broad Street is a case study in effective contextualism, as is their Dilworth Park in front of Philadelphia’s City Hall.

Yoshio Taniguchi’s Toyota Municipal Art Museum in Japan

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA) — Sejima and Nishizawa constantly question and reimagine the standard design strategies architects use with different kinds of buildings. When they designed a campus center for a school in Switzerland (2010), they separated its distinct spaces not with walls but with curving slopes in the floor: the building follows students’ patterns of use, their moving about and settling and resettling. Indeed, in many of their buildings unconventional form is driven by an unconventional approach to the building program. The result is buildings that are almost self-consciously contemporary and experimental, but without arrogance or showmanship.

Henry Myerberg — New York architect Henry Myerberg has spent years thinking about the evolution and social role of libraries. He hasn’t done high profile work of the sort many other architects on this list specialize in; instead, he has pursued smaller projects that have afforded him opportunities to think creatively. His Rhys Carpenter Library at Bryn Mawr (1997) is a welcoming and innovative space that seems to have anticipated the growing importance of libraries as social and learning hubs.

Joshua Prince-Ramus (REX) — Rather than hide or bury the tensions and difficulties that arise in any complex building project, Prince-Ramus, like his mentor Rem Koolhaas, brings them to the occupant’s attention and uses them to give his buildings force and energy. Most of his work is not conventionally beautiful: it challenges you to understand how it works and why it looks the way it does. At the Seattle Public Library, which he and Koolhaas designed together, the exterior angular glass planes bulge outward, drawing attention to (rather than distracting from) the hulking office building feel of the surrounding area and expressing the tension of trying to fit the many variegated functions of a library under one roof.

Photos courtesy of LarrySpeck.com, SPF Architects

Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles

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My last summer in New York photo essay by Noah Morrison

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Summertime in New York City is always a disjointed experience. I have lived in Lower Manhattan my entire life, besides the time I’ve spent at Swarthmore. Yet, I have come back the last two summers to a place that feels markedly changed. The city has been continuously shifting around me. Only in absence have I noticed how the subtleties of life in New York are central to my self-definition as “New Yorker.” I hope this photo essay, or rather an attempt to explain alienation in a place I have called home since birth, can thread these concepts together. —N.M.

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FICTION: Two short stories

Going to Eastvale

by Nora Battelle

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hey didn’t go to back to Eastvale much, which Elsa explained by pointing out that it was outside the city and returning would entail driving a car (which they didn’t have). But she rented one for this occasion: an occasion, she told herself, a rented car marks an occasion.

The kids were teenagers now, their legs long and thin instead of short and stubby as they kicked at the seats. She noted almost with disappointment, because she wasn’t in a rush, but also a little surprised pride, that she didn’t get lost on her way.

Elsa frequently got lost when she drove, because she didn’t drive often and would tense up when she did.

First, she drove them to the general store, where she bought a picnic.

“Do you remember it? You used to like running after the cat.”

Jenny, the younger child, couldn’t remember, but James did and laughed at her, which resulted in her calling him a cat and chasing him instead.

They didn’t seem much older than the last visit to Eastvale; 16 could still tease, 13 still chase. But of course they were: Elsa remembered their legs, kicking, in the car.

There didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go in the town after the general store, which meant they went and sat outside the car for half an hour, mostly quiet. Elsa didn’t want to arrive at the cemetery early, and of course she didn’t, she admitted to herself, want to go at all. She didn’t want to wonder if she’d keep arriving here, or feel guilty that every time she’d come with two children. She didn’t want to see Jenny’s face solemn, or James’s in tears.

But of course she knew it was absurd to keep waiting, since she had already waited a year and a half. The first six months she was waiting on her mom. She knew it was strange to wait so long with your dad stashed in the crematorium, but she thought it was worse to take him back to Eastvale without mom. The only Polish words her children knew translated to “leave me alone,” cross-generational evidence of the yells Mom and Dad had thrown at one another from across the house; but once they retired, they never left the house without one another.

A year after her mother’s death, it became clear to Elsa that she was unable to organize a ceremony, and that no one else was going to do it.

Probably she should pack the kids back into the car and drive to the cemetery. She would rather walk. But it wasn’t a question of distance.

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It was more that she knew it would be her biggest mistake of all to carry the two boxes of ashes in her arms. What if she dropped them? That would be unforgivable, and the kids would stand staring and unhelpful in horror. Jenny especially would be devastated by this final abandonment of decorum.

So Elsa packed them all into the car and they drove to the cemetery. A very gentle, respectful man asked them to follow him with broad gestures. Elsa left the kids outside while she went into the little lodge, consulted with the man seated there, and then followed the original gentle man outside to a corner of the cemetery. The plushy green April earth was scarred with a big dark hole.

The gentleman started scooping the displaced earth on top of the two boxes. Elsa was angled her face away from the gentleman. He was looking respectfully at the hole, so he couldn’t see her anyway, but Elsa didn’t like that he was there at all.

“Does anyone want to say a few words?”

The kids looked at Elsa, who looked at the churned earth and said, “That’s all right. Would you be able to leave us?” She wondered what she would have said at a ceremony, and felt relieved that she didn’t have to answer herself.

Elsa’s mind moved very quickly through possibilities. Sometimes, she just let the possibilities all hang there, simultaneous and unreal. But she was also good at deciding against herself and denying the possibilities her mind provided.

The gentleman left.

This is when she had planned for the picnic. She sent the kids back to the car for the food. They disappeared, and she sat down, settling into the view: the pit freshly filled. There was a cluster of brambles that looked like it might stretch from the iron fence off to the right and cover the mass in green. But that could take a million years. She corrected herself: maybe ten years. Ten years since she had last been here. Ten years since her parents sold the old house and started spending their weekends as well as their weekdays at the apartment, closer to the hospital and mom’s favorite department store. Ten years since Jenny was three, and James six.

It looked different here now. Then, the cemetery was quaint and only a little dreadful, in the way every part of a summer town is. James had proudly read the headstones, and Elsa hadn’t felt serious as she corrected his mistakes. Another ten years, maybe the brambles would hide this grave.

The children returned. Elsa’s face was very still, the way it looked when she was hurt by James’s drug use and had to burst into anger because otherwise she would disappear. So each of them took one of her sides and leaned on her shoulders as

they ate, even though they were old enough that they usually took their own space. Their chewing sounds were loud over the quiet of the empty green Eastvale cemetery.

When they talked a little, the words seemed far away and very abstract to Elsa.

Jenny wandered away to pull a few flowers out of a bouquet someone had left on a fresh, clean grave marked with the year 1957. Elsa watched her tuck them behind her ear and read the names on the stones, while James watched the rippling tucks around Elsa’s eyes. Eventually, Jenny walked back and laid one flower on the fresh grave.

Elsa picked up the flower and brushed the grave flatter with her palm before replacing it. She felt the compulsion of ceremony in Jenny’s flowers.

And she felt sorry she couldn’t do this that way.

Mom loved ceremony. But Dad didn’t care.

He used to pull her braids so tight each morning that her scalp pinched, but she was quiet, because she didn’t want to scare him out of walking her to school. She knew he hated seeing the other parents, didn’t like to talk to them in his sticky accent, would rather spend his nights alone in his lab. It was his gift to her that she was his ceremony, but he could barely give it.

Probably he would have preferred just the three of them here. Mom would have been mad. But you can’t please everyone.

Elsa considered when the gentleman would come back. She wanted to be gone by then. She didn’t like the gentle way he looked at the boxes as he lowered them into the soil, as if in the act of burying them he took some claim on her parents’ bodies. But she felt immobile, and thought that the longer they stayed, the more she made up for the emptiness of the graveyard, for the past ten years that had changed it so much, and the coming ten years. Today might be enough.

“We should come back more often,” James commented just then. He was looking at Elsa’s face and he had tears rolling down his own. Elsa grabbed him and clutched him to her chest; she couldn’t look at him, but she could hold him.

“Ok.” Jenny snuck her head under Elsa’s other arm.

Elsa liked the feeling of the two of them there, and felt even more immobile than before. She would never get up from here, she continued to think, even as her arms felt sore around the kids’ broad, grown-up backs.

They could come back more often.

Elsa was concerned that James defined himself through absence and through loss, through a missing father, an uprooted mother, and through a short-stopped pair of hearts; she scrunched his t-shirt up in her hand.

They shouldn’t come back, not for a long time.

She loved her kids.

If James wanted to come back more, they would. But it wasn’t so good for them here, especially for her, especially for James.

She wouldn’t be able to decide while they were sitting in front of the grave, the fresh moist wound. There was another spot, to the right. She was glad the two of them would be together when they brought her to that spot. They would be without her, but they would be together without her.

She didn’t like to imagine either of them doing it alone. How could they not fail themselves?

She felt her criticisms like little gnat bites on her neck. “What are your values, Mom? Another pile of shit at every holiday isn’t going to buy my approval, not even the kids’ approval.”

It was important to Elsa that she was a mother, and so her mother’s doubts about her rules and choices and concerns, her disregard and her laughter, were an attack. This feeling of siege had made her very critical of her mom.

She felt her criticisms like little gnat bites on her neck: “Another sweater from Bloomingdales, Mom? You don’t need it, you can’t afford it.”

“How could you let them watch ‘Sex and the City’? Jenny is six! You’re losing touch with reality.”

“What are your values, Mom? Another pile of shit at every holiday isn’t going to buy my approval, not even the kids’ approval.”

It did buy the kids’ approval. They loved her.

She would have poured out the blood from her veins for them, not just the money in her purse, and Elsa knew it. It had worried her. She didn’t know if she had as much to give. She didn’t feel abundant.

They should leave. She felt in her still feet an urge to leave. But the weight of the kids in her arms held her there, again, and she couldn’t move.

She was waiting for green to grow up over the fresh-scarred earth, for it to pack hard and flat like the other graves, for her mother to hold her arm and her father to hold her hands while she mourned, as they always had before. She had always worn black when she mourned with them.

Mom wouldn’t have accepted anything else. She wrapped a black shawl so quickly.

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and James a black jacket and straight slacks. They would have wondered if they were getting their backsides dirty in the mud and then later would have realized how futile their worry was when they could never bear to wear their blacks again.

Jenny would have looked especially pale and ghostlike. James would have looked especially dim and distant. And she herself would have disappeared, into a dark rain that would descend across the fresh grave, watering it so that it sprung up flowers then and there.

She kissed each of the sharp outlines of her children’s’ heads and then extricated her arms.

She asked them to wait as she walked back to the lodge, where she purchased three bulbs and read the instructions for planting them. She wasn’t sure what sort of flower this was — she didn’t know about plants, and she worried about that briefly, but she concluded that a cemetery would only sell bulbs appropriate for death.

She borrowed a little gardening shovel. The fresh grave was already soft and upturned, and didn’t need its earth to be broken up.

The children planted the bulbs at the instruction of Elsa, taken from the book in the cemetery lodge. All in a line the flowers would grow. Elsa wondered if this was the appropriate time of year 18

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to plant.

“Should we go?” Jenny asked. They were wiping their soil-covered hands down their jeans. Elsa didn’t feel very strongly even now that it was the appropriate time to leave, but she considered that there probably wouldn’t be another moment where she felt it would be more the time. She considered that she could move her limbs and both her children were standing up, and she realized they should return to the car and drive home, now.

But she didn’t like leaving Eastvale with nothing. They had finished their picnic and the car felt very bare. She would buy the local honey, which her father had drizzled over his grapefruit so regularly that her children had started drizzling it over their toast. They returned to the general store.

As they left this time, for the car and for the city and for home, she felt a strange temptation she labeled juvenile to drop the honey on the ground, where the jar would crack and ooze and the honey would roll away. She didn’t, because the kids were there and would have been alarmed; their hearts, she thought, would have ached.

So instead she wrapped up the honey in its own bag. Over and over again she wrapped it, and she Photo courtesy of spitalfieldslife.wordpress.com

set it on the passenger seat beside her.

In the city, she put the honey in the cupboard with the other condiments, and whenever she laid out the table for breakfast, usually only on the weekend, she put out the honey.

Several years later, Elsa ran into a friend of her mom’s, and the friend was deeply hurt that there hadn’t been a ceremony, for Mom or for Dad or even one for the two of them together. “We wanted to mourn her. Her friends did. We can only pray our children won’t do what you’ve done with this. Just made a mess and botched it!”

Elsa felt a sharp guilt plunge through her body, but she looked at the friend and she explained herself this way: “Your children will do exactly what they can do, Genevieve. And eventually so will mine.” one for the two of them together. “We wanted to mourn her, her friends did. We can only pray our

children won’t do what you’ve done with this, just made a mess and botched it!”

Elsa felt a sharp guilt plunge through her body, but she looked at the friend and she explained herself this way: “Your children will do exactly what they can do, Genevieve. And eventually so will mine.”1 u

Really, Elsa agreed with Genevieve that she had botched it, somewhat. But Elsa realized how much more she could have botched it: with ashes spilt across the road, or at least the honey bottle cracked.

She had an acute sense of the absurd, and knew that it would have been recklessly satisfying to botch things all the way. Because she liked to dissect her many strands of guilt, and often only wrapped herself up in them further, this thought could have made her feel very guilty, for her failure to succeed fully or fail fully. But because her obscure success took the place of total failure through an effort motivated by her children, and by her fierce love for them, and also through a will to survive, she forgave herself.

1

Camp

by Olivia Ortiz

T

he hadeda ibises are watching from the roof—watching the sun rise, watching the clouds roll off the mountain in front of the house, watching people through the windows as they prepare their coffees, teas, and other breakfast beginnings. On this side of the Lesser Ocean, it’s late summer. Sometimes the way that the sun’s light catches the leaves here reminds me of my parents’ home on the other side of the sea, and how the clematis vining up the porch would leave their spindly centers come autumn when the petals fell, but the vining clematis are across the ocean. The ibises caw mercilessly.

You are the first of my housemates to walk into the kitchen, perhaps woken by the ibises’ calls. You are bed-headed and announce, I feel nervous. I feel nervous because it smells like camp today, like today I’m leaving for camp.

You turn the stove on. Slowly, I ask, Why is going to camp nervous?

You stare at the pan as it heats, eventually saying, I didn’t like camp when I was a kid. The lake, the cabins, the bonfires and ghost stories. I didn’t like them then.

I laugh at you over my cup of tea. Do you remember why? I ask, but you shake your head.

You finish cooking—hash browns and eggs, coffee and toast—and sit across the table from me. We eat in silence, and others trickle into the kitchen, through the living room, out the door, and to the other side of the gate to begin their days. Before I follow them, I say, Tell me if anything comes of your nervous-camp feeling, okay? I like how the

words sound together.

I

n class I make a list of the ingredients for a camp: a bus towards a lesser of the Great Lakes with a sleeping bag and a fishing rod, with old bait hooks on a hat and a packaged granola bar in a back pocket living in a creaky wooden cabin on bunk beds and swimming in a glacial pond canoes and hiking bonfires with marshmallows to make s’mores, mosquitoes and gnats in puddles, games of tag at dusk and ghost stories until dawn singing spending days weaving God’s Eyes on used popsicle sticks with itchy acrylic yarn and braiding friendship bracelets from embroidery floss (at the beginning) making friends (at the end) leaving friends. (at the beginning) making friends (at the end) leaving friends.

I

remember camping once with my family. In Michigan, the northern edge of the Lower Peninsula.

We saw the Sleeping Bear Dune, which is widely known to be the resting place of the Mother Bear1 forever waiting for her cubs to cross Lake Michigan after escaping a raging fire on the banks of Wisconsin. She waited summer after spring after winter

1Former resident of the Mother City of Eastern Cape, South Africa.

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after fall after summer for her cubs to rise from Lake Michigan until she herself grew old and became blanketed in sand.

The Great Spirit, recognizing her pain, made the cubs into the North and South Manitou Islands. I remember looking at the Mother Bear under her dune, wind whipping off the lake and sending sand into my eyes. Does she consider the lake her home, after watching it for so long, or does she long for her forest on the coast of Wisconsin?

A

fter dinner, you tell me you napped on campus that afternoon, and you dreamt you were at camp. The camp you went to as a child? I ask.

No, well, not quite, you say, but it felt the same.

The lake looked the same, the buildings were in the right places.

What was different?

It was empty, you say. Even I wasn’t there in the dream. I was somewhere, watching.

Watching—?

Watching the Canada geese flying. Watching the little boats tied to the dock rock in the little waves.

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Watching the leaves fall from the very top of a tree to the very bottom as the branches wave in the breeze.

But it was deserted.

Yes, you say. Entirely empty.

You pause and stare at the lemon tree outside as though still watching in your dream. The minute moon of day hangs in the distance. I sip my tea.

Finally, you say, But when I woke up I didn’t feel nervous anymore.

Because you had finally arrived at camp?

Because I had been to camp before, I think, you say.

W

hen I was a child, my brothers and I would pull comforters and quilts pre-dating all of our lives from the mighty hope chest seated at the base of our parents’ bed. We’d lay them one on top of the other in the living room, throw sheets over couches and tables and kitchen chairs to block out the house, and giggle in our pastel-colored tent. This was known as having a camp-out.

We used the camp-out to build a home inside a home, to build a smaller place inside one that was Image courtesy of Michelle Calkins

already (supposedly) safe, mine. A familiar place.

S

everal months later, you and I are on the other side of the Lesser Ocean, and the hadeda ibises no longer watch as we make our breakfasts, now eaten highways and state-lines apart.

On an inconsequential morning, I feel a plunge in my stomach, starting from my navel and moving outwards. The air smells less like suburb and more like lake—decomposing leaves, smoke from a fire the night before, vaguely fishy. My feet are hanging from the edge of a bed entirely not my own, and next to my glasses I find a child’s bandana.

I get out of the bunk bed and leave the cabin to see a wood-slatted mess hall, a flagpole, rows of miniature kayaks fit exclusively for those ages seven to 12. Bathing suits hang on porch banisters to dry. Fishing poles lean against the walls, close at hand when needed. There are paths made by small feet and finger-paintings made by small hands, but where are the limbs who made them and the persons to whom they belong? The only sound is that of the geese as they fly overhead, V formation.

I go to sit at the edge of the dock, where someone’s tin rowboat rocks slightly with the miniature waves of the placid lake. It’s too murky to see the roots of the cattails growing. I watch the rowboat calmly crush lily pads clinging to the dock. My sight becomes lost in the reflection of the morning sun in the lake, and I don’t hear you until the dock creaks under the weight of your step. You sit beside me. So this is camp, I say. And then, you’re not just watching it this time.

I don’t look up from the sun, but I suspect you nod in agreement.

Is this in Pennsylvania, Minnesota,—?

Michigan, the Upper Peninsula, you answer.

We have cookie cutters shaped like each Peninsula at home, I tell you. I decorate the Upper and Lower Peninsulas with sprinkles each Christmas.

Their edges always burn in the oven.

You laugh and skip a stone, and I watch as it scatters the reflection of the sun.

A

t night, you build a bonfire bigger than any I’d seen in a long, long time. We sit across from it in the darkness. The world of camp has shrunk to this fire, the log on which we sit, you and I, the fireflies flashing in and out of vision, and the smoke spiraling towards the stars, of which I see many. I catch you looking up and ask, Do you think we saw more when we were all in the Kalagadi?

About the same, you say, But now these are the Northern stars. I ask you to name a few of the constellations for me, and point-by-point you name the stars and all their formations until you’ve woven the entire sky in a tight net of words, making me wonder if the stars will be able to move across the sky as they normally do. Once you’ve named every star in sight we sit with the dwindling fire in the comfortable vacuum created by its burning.

A shooting star catches my eye, but I don’t tell you the wish.2 I realize—there’s no moon here, is there? I ask you.

You say, I read somewhere that a way to differentiate realities is by the number of moons.

So this camp is in a null-moon reality.

So this dream is in a null-moon reality, you correct me.

You’re still looking at the stars when I say, I wonder what else is missing from here?

Your eyes drift to a nearby firefly, and you respond in kind: I wonder what else is present here?

You and I are alone with the stars and the night air coming off of the lake. How did your dream end all those months ago? I ask you.

I woke up, you say. We sit in silence, watching the last of the smoke rise to meet the stars.

Y I

ou finally say, It always frightened me to leave home for the summer to go to camp. A familiar place is hard to leave when you can’t imagine what comes next. ask, What are your familiar places?

You say, My parents’ home. My college. My grandfather’s home. The house in the Mother City where the hadeda ibises fly.

I ask you if any of those feel like your home.

Yes. Definitely.

Which?

Well, together. Together they feel like home.

But they’re spread through time—the house in the Mother City will never be home again for either of us or any of our housemates.

You’re staring through the fire when you say, But it’s still a familiar place. And talking to everyone who was there makes it feel like home. Like everyone who was there with us has a little piece of

2 The Wish: to see as many stars as this, to sit in front of bonfires with lovely people, to count frogs on lily pads as often as possible.

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home in them, and together we make a home. Like a puzzle.

And talking to other people who carry other parts of other familiar places—that makes home for you?

Yes. Just that. You throw another log onto the fire to emphasize the point.

I

watch the branches sway above and think of the waves on Lake Michigan, rolling over the edges of the Manitou Islands. I say, I’m not sure my familiar places can be added to home—I don’t think my puzzle pieces fit. It’s nice that yours do.

M

aybe you just haven’t found the right way to add your familiar places together yet, you tell me. Maybe you’ll figure out soon.

Do you think so?

I think that you have the power to make a home wherever you land, and that you have the power to give and take pieces of familiar places to those around you.

We sit without speaking, listening to the fire crackle. I turn towards you and whisper, Thank you. I hope you’re right.

T

he bonfire fades, and the fireflies go to sleep for the night. You and I are alone with the stars and the night air coming off of the lake.

How did your dream end all those months ago? I ask you.

I woke up, you say.

We sit in silence, watching the last of the smoke rise to meet the stars.

I

wake in my attic with the smoke from the dying fire in my hair. The light from the window feels sterile, untouched by the woods. I brush my teeth and find dirt in the crevices of my ankles from falling in the cattails, and my fingers are stained purple from picking berries. When I notice the pile of acorns at the foot of my bed, it becomes clear to me that the null-moon reality is closer to our own than originally thought. I decide to write you a letter. It reads: What’d you think of camp? I woke with acorns on my bed, and my mind feels like a web of stars. I can still remember every one you named. It would have been nice to stay, except I think we would have missed the moon and other familiar places.

That night, and for several nights afterwards, I check to see if the moon is outside. I dream of searching for it behind tree branches and above fog-shrouded lakes but only ever finding its reflection.

In a week, I receive a reply from you on the same sheet of paper. It reads: I woke up with a cattail next to me. Camp doesn’t feel like camp without other people there, so thanks for fishing and singing and s’more-making with me. If we’d stayed, we may have found the other missing/present things.

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In the same envelope is a crude drawing of a house: fire burning in the fireplace, cake on the table, guitar in the corner, pillows on the floor. On the back, in your handwriting: Younger sister depicts ‘home,’ 2015. Seems pretty straight on, doesn’t it?

I frame the picture and write back to you: Love the picture. I think it makes where I am feel like home, even if it’s not one. Send my thanks to the artist. Things missing where I am: visible stars and an abundant supply of rooibos tea. Things present where I am: ways to communicate with people. Still struggling to understand how I woke up with bonfire smoke in my hair.

I put a dried Echinacea bloom in the folds of the envelope with a label ribboned to its stem reading “piece of familiar place”. Your reply (still on the same sheet of paper) comes with four marbles, which I understand to be an exchange in kind.3 I keep one in my pocket and hide the rest in my luggage to keep them safe. Your letter reads: Sister is flattered, and I’m in need of rooibos as well. I sometimes think that periods of time where I’m not at home—like living in the Mother City or being at camp—feel like dreams. Perhaps we should expect our dreams to feel like reality, too, even if that means reality doesn’t always have a moon.

But that night the moon is full and leans heavily on the horizon. In response to your letter I send a handful of bagged rooibos and the following: I think I had to go to an unfamiliar place to understand how my familiar ones fit together. How is the tea?

Below that, I draw a poorly-projected map of the globe cut into puzzle pieces and mark the Mother City, where I am, where my family lives, where you are, the Sleeping Bear Dune, and a handful of other places. In response, you send a photo of yourself smiling, cup of rooibos in hand. I tuck the photo into the frame of your sister’s drawing of home.

The year wanes to winter.

T

he last piece of mail I receive from you before we meet again contains a bag of honeybush tea and a packet of echinacea seeds. At the bottom of the same piece of paper we’ve been using, you’ve drawn a small moon and written: Some tea to keep you from freezing in this cold.

I’ve been thinking—we control where we land as much as seeds that have been scattered. But, like seeds, where we land, we put down roots, and things begin to feel familiar.

I make a pot of honeybush and ponder where to plant the echinacea. u

3 Each marble weighs slightly more than my hand expects it to. When I hold them up to the light, they look as though they hold pieces of sand, and I wonder whether the sand comes from the Mother City or the banks of Lake Michigan.

BOOKS Going back to Maycomb ‘Go Set a Watchman’ provokes a valuable re-examination of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

ESSAY

Harper Lee, the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” pictured in the 1960s.

by Cecilia Paasche Warning: Plot spoilers lie ahead, but then again, the plot is by far not the most important aspect of the book.

H

arper Lee’s now infamous second novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” has triggered literary upheaval by altering perceptions of a canonized masterpiece that is deeply Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

embedded in American culture. Beyond offering the rare opportunity to return to a world we had assumed only existed in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” it has revealed how people respond when a work of literature is yanked from the ranks of untouchable “classics” and thrust onto the public examination table once more.

Indeed, I myself decided not to read the book when it was announced back in February that the first draft of the beloved classic “To Kill a Mockingbird”

was going to be published, and under questionable circumstances. Many with whom I spoke shared my instinct. By questionable circumstances, I mean of course the ongoing debate over how the manuscript was found, why Harper Lee would agree to publish a second book after 55 years, and the timing of the discovery so soon after the death of Lee’s sister and protector.

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feared that it wasn’t fair to read a first draft that would inevitably influence my reading of the final. When the book was released in July and I heard that, to the shock and dismay of many, the sainted character Atticus Finch was not looking so saintly anymore, I felt validated in my impulse to leave a book like “Mockingbird” well enough alone.

I see now that I was mistaken; the challenge that “Watchman” poses to “Mockingbird” devotees is one well worth taking, and Atticus Finch deserves to be re-examined.

“W

atchman” begins on a train that is carrying 26-yearold Jean Louise Finch from her new home in New York City to her real home, the fictional yet richly drawn town of Maycomb, Alabama. Jean Louise is a fiercely independent young woman who constantly pokes and prods at the conventions of her world, without quite poking holes. The narration closely follows the direction of her thoughts,

Like many upset readers, I first experienced Atticus Finch’s betrayal in a similar wrenching manner to Jean Louise. It is a painful experience to lose the ability to admire a hero. which frequently lead to memories of being the wild child called Scout. These refreshing, dynamic sections illuminate why Lee’s editor’s suggested that she write the entire book from the perspective a child. One gets the clear sense that Jean Louise never left Scout, nor Maycomb, behind. Her transition to adulthood has not been easy, nor is it yet complete. ​Jean Louise is greeted by Henry “Hank” Clinton, her childhood playmate turned love interest, whom she could marry if she wanted to. Her relationship with Hank mirrors her feelings about 24

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home; she knows she can’t be happy with him forever, even though he is a part of her. At home in Maycomb, Jean Louise is reunited with her treasured, aging father Atticus and her formidable Aunt Alexandra. Lee paints characters masterfully and with a winking sense of humour. Many of the passages describing people and places, including the following, are repeated in “Mockingbird”: Jean Louise often wondered, but never asked, where she got her corsets. They drew up her bosom to giddy heights, pinched in her waist, flared out her rear, and managed to suggest that Alexandra’s had once been an hourglass figure.

But “Watchman” is also often inconsistent. Some people and events are allotted an excessive amount of description, while others are lacking in detail.

For example, we learn in passing the upsetting revelation that Jean Louise’s brother Jem died two years ago. The narration style also suffers inconsistencies. From time to time, Lee shifts from third person to second person, and some instances are much more graceful than others.

When it succeeds, it is done beautifully, as it was in this scene right after Aunt Alexandra tells Jean Louise that Jem had expressed concern over his sister’s apparent thoughtlessness: It was raining softly on his grave now, in the hot evening. You never said it, you never even thought it; if you’d thought it you’d have said it. You were like that. Rest well, Jem. When it does not succeed, the prose is distracting and choppy. This is Lee’s first novel and it is evident that she is experimenting with different styles of storytelling. Another example of this is the tendency of the characters in “Watchman” to deliver long monologues. Thankfully, this is a habit they do not possess in “Mockingbird.”

A

s Jean Louise attempts to re-enter her community, she only feels like more of an outsider. She doesn’t understand the tense political environment in Maycomb since the arrival of the NAACP and the Supreme Court rulings on segregation. This is the 1950s in the South, and while Jean Louise is full of New York ideas, she can

only grasp that the tide has shifted when her old cook and mother figure, Calpurnia, treats her like a white person, and not like Jean Louise.

The turning point and crux of the novel occurs when Jean Louise follows her father, Atticus, to a meeting of the Maycomb County City Council, a group comprised of white men trying to protect the town from desegregation. Jean Louise is broken by her father’s betrayal of the value she thought he possessed.

She is physically and emotionally ill from what she has witnessed. The father she worships and relies on as a moral compass has gone against everything Jean Louise believed he stood for. She thought of Atticus as the “watchman” of her conscience and life, and he abandoned her. The heart of the novel and its unsatisfying, hasty conclusion addresses the conflict between father and daughter as she comes to terms with this revelation.

Atticus Finch, the man who defended an innocent black man on trial for rape, the man who treats everyone with equal respect, is a segregationist and a white supremacist. He believes that the black race is backwards and should not vote, let alone integrate with the white race.

Like many upset readers, I first experienced this betrayal in a wrenching manner, similar to Jean Louise. It is painful to lose the ability to admire a literary hero, and I struggled to reconcile the character in the two books.

I then discussed the novel with Associate Professor of English and Director of the American Studies Program at Barnard College, Dr. Jennie Kassanoff.

She helped me see that while it is tempting to argue that Lee must have changed the character and that there are two distinct Atticuses, this argument is flawed and doesn’t take into account the nuance of history. For better or for worse, there is one Atticus.

Atticus’s stance as a segregationist and white supremacist who believes that white people should continue to hold exclusive power in government is not inconsistent with his acts of kindness towards black characters. He thinks of himself as their superior, a nobleman of sorts, and as he considers himself a man of honor. He views it as his responsibility to be generous and fair to them.

Atticus did defend a black man against an unjust rape charge, but that doesn’t mean he believes in equality of the races. It means he believes in a just legal

system, and in protecting those he views as defenseless.

It seems that Lee wants her readers to learn from Jean Louise’s naïveté in seeing the world divided into good and bad, into “racist” and “colorblind.” In both “Mockingbird” and “Watchman,” Jean Louise is described as colorblind, but all evidence points to the contrary.

She has no awareness of her own privilege as a white person or of the fact that she benefits from systems of oppression on which the foundation of her society is built. She believes she is progressive, that she knows better than her father and her town, but she too is complicit.

A part of her is still Scout, wishing she could climb into Atticus’s lap and escape

the harshness of reality. And yet, just as the book concludes, we catch a glimpse of understanding that suggests Jean Louise is finally growing up.

S

o where does this leave us? For one thing, we are left with a new picture of Atticus, one that is much less flattering yet more complete than the old. And this doesn’t mean that there is nothing left to learn from him. Perhaps the only way to reckon with the Atticus in “Mockingbird” after reading “Watchman” is to acknowledge his few acts of grace in a culture riddled with acts of hatred and atrocity. We should also examine the reaction of the public and ask ourselves who needs Atticus to be a

saint, a fictional white hero to place on a pedestal, and why?

As readers, we are far enough removed temporally from these novels to evaluate their moments in history objectively, and yet we are so close, considering the current state of America, that we understand the emotional impact and frustrating ambiguity. I believe that we are uniquely positioned to appreciate the value that “Go Set a Watchman” adds to “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I encourage readers to consider Harper Lee’s two drafts together and am grateful that the publication of the new novel has enabled a critical, thoughtful return to Maycomb, Alabama.u

Challenging our self-whiteousness Nell Zink’s ‘Mislaid’ starts to answer the question of what white people can say about race

by Leo Elliot

W

hen Black Lives Matter protesters Mara Jacqueline Willaford and Marissa Johnson interrupted a Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle this August, everyone was really ticked off for a set of contradictory and bad reasons. The protesters climbed onto the stage and demanded time to speak to the crowd. Bernie conceded. On stage, the pair argued that Sanders’s praise of Seattle’s progressiveness concealed continuing racial inequity in the city. Idealistic onlookers might have thought that this charged moment would open conversation about wider problems with the Sanders campaign—such as, perhaps, that his econfirst approach to race is a timeless can-kicking tactic designed to marginalize Black politics. Instead, the two women received a whirlwind chastising by the American news machine. Willaford and Johnson’s protest was lousy, the Not-Racists graciously informed us, because its tone was just too angry and its methods simply not strategic.

Borrowing from an illuminating Atlantic headline, it was A Tough Weekend for the Black Lives Matter Movement.

Beyond tone and tactic, the complaints also rang of a particular petulant exasperation that is as old and as white as the typical Sanders supporter: that because Sanders is progressive, he should not face criticism over his comments on race. In the waves of booing that began when the crowd figured out what two Black women were doing

on their stage, you could almost hear the petulant, “What? So white people can’t say anything about race?” Snarky responses aside (does “can’t” refer to a withheld permission or an underdeveloped ability?), it seems obvious that, yes, white folks should be both able and allowed to speak about race. The hard part is the qualification of that answer. We can start with guidelines.

White people have important thoughts to contribute, but not first, not last, and not too much. A better question: what can white people say about race that is productive, new, and interesting? This question is also far more difficult to answer.

Meeting these criteria and more, upstart author Nell Zink’s recently published second book, “Mislaid,” provides a start.

Zink wields a relentless sense of humor to challenge our silences, our postured certainties, and our egoistic myopias when we talk about race. With high aims and low blows, Zink generously applies this same treatment to sexuality, family, class, art, and intellectualism.

The novel begins in a boggy college town in backwater Virginia. Peggy is a freshman and burgeoning lesbian with literary aspirations at women-only Stillwater College.

Lee is a gay professor there who wields his fame as a poet to procure grants for his social and intellectual whims. Despite the established gayness of each character, they manage to fall into a passionate affair that is as confused and confusing as it sounds.

Zink’s arrhythmic and punky style startles

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the reader into discovering the alternating sincerity and impossibility of the pairing.

Their first intimacy begins on a canoe adrift in a Stillwater swamp, a setting as shaky as their relationship. Seeking to quell Peggy’s concerns about her virginity, Lee summons from some unpracticed hetero-patriarchal hole within him the following interaction: “No, I mean it,” she said. “This is a big deal. You have to promise me.”

“I promise you everything.” He kissed her. “Everything.”

He was mystified that he would say something like that to anyone—male, female, eunuch, hermaphrodite, sheep, tree. He looked her in the eyes and decided she wasn’t paying attention.

He landed the canoe and carried her into the house.

Quickly, the relationship results in Peggy’s expulsion, pregnancy, and a shotgun marriage (“Lee saw it coming. She came back from Christmas vacation looking bloated. He reflected that he had fucked her nearly every day since September.”) Moving into Lee’s home, Peggy fashions an autodidactic education out of the library that Lee owns, dinner conversation with the rotating gay intelligentsia that he hosts, and the time freed up by the sexual and romantic black hole of her life as a housewife: For a lesbian, Lee’s house was cold turkey. You could go months without seeing SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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a woman. Not that it mattered if your plan of being a pencil-thin seductress in black had unexpectedly given way to frying pancakes in a plaid bathrobe. She liked it best when there were visiting poets. They never minded if you sat near them and just listened to them talk. It was impossible to think of anything to say that might interest them, because they weren’t interested in conversations with topics.

Unsurprisingly, the union of Peggy and Lee decays, crisis ensues, and Peggy flees the household with her recently-born second child—a daughter—in tow. Seeking to disappear, blond-haired Peggy steals the identities of a Black family buried in a local graveyard. As Peggy slips away into further rural recesses, the hazy racial ideology of her setting proves her theft successful. New neighbors immediately accommodate the claimed identities, seeing racialized characteristics in the features of blond-haired Peggy and Mireille. The characters’ fair skin is treated not as a reason for suspicion but rather as a test for the acuity of the Southern Racial Eye. Zink uses this absurd set-up —the new life of white lesbian Peggy Vaillaincourt and her incidentally hetero child as the Black Meg and Karen Brown—as a springboard to elaborate her probing and uncomfortable comedic style. Focused on individual characters without removing context, Zink 26

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zeroes in on the lived process of identity-negotiation that her characters—protagonists, sidekicks and fleeting mentions alike—must pursue.

Consistently, “Mislaid” reveals this process to be deeply embarrassing, and therefore incredibly funny. Reading Zink means watching her characters naked and bumbling, their manipulations and posturing made painfully obvious. Through Lee’s eyes, we watch the colonial explorations of the elder child Byrdie in college: “He began suggesting that many community organizing projects needed help with their business models.

Then he proposed founding progressive urban communities on a sound financial footing.

He wished to use his hereditary power and influence to help others help themselves.

He was thinking of designing an interdisciplinary major that combined architecture, business administration, and social work, and then running for office. He wasn’t sure. He spent the next summer working for Habitat for Humanity in Richmond and still didn’t know. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Lee said to him. ‘My task is to discover and respond to community needs,’ Byrdie replied, seeming to presume that he would never have needs of his own.” Of all the personality-worldview relationships that Zink artfully dissects, Byrdie’s at least should be familiar to a Swarthmore student.

Zink relishes the aspirational, nervous, and often auto-erotic qualities contained in the pursuit of prestige. By the same stroke, she measures the awkward and prideful distance between individuals and their categories assigned and resented. In Zink’s world, liberatory and critical philosophies exist, but serve more to sharpen irony than to change lives. Yet, somehow, this pattern reads as tender rather than brutal. Her punchlines rarely seem to be at the direct expense of the characters. Intellectualism, or the desire of it, is dear to nearly all of the book’s protagonists. So of course Zink spends a fair amount of the book exposing the selfishness, insecurity, and blatant elitism wrapped around her characters’ Lives of The Mind. Yet the book itself vibrates throughout with a powerful sense of the importance of literature and philosophy.

The humor of the book tends to generate discomfort on behalf of and in identifica-

tion with the characters, but not dislike for them.

This discomfort felt by the reader is important in and of itself. Peggy’s identity theft (using the term in a legal and a sociological sense) is particularly stunning in the wake of the very public outing of Rachel Dolezal, former president of the Spokane NAACP chapter who apparently pretended to be Black for years. Disturbingly, it seems as if our real world can actually accommodate this cartoonified, logical extreme of cultural appropriation that Zink presents.

In some ways, the realness of Dolezal heightens the comedic effect of the book (if making our laughter more nervous).

At the same time, the whole Dolezal saga heightens the reader’s fear that the whole book must be in poor taste. What follows is a more important doubt — that the reader themself has poor taste.

But taste, a difficult and fluid quality, is exactly what the book most expertly criticizes. If the book so delightfully unveils individuals’ tactics vis-a-vis aspiration and shame, the system it destabilizes is that which ties those aspirations to the shames that they contain. The reader is made not only to doubt the book’s taste, but also their own ability to perceive tastefulness. This is the most unsettling implication of the book. And with it, we can return from the various systems at play in the book to the one we began with—race.

Zink succeeds in writing about race as a white woman because she disarms the reader’s sense of taste, forcing a reliance on different, perhaps more egalitarian, ways of relating to her characters. In particular, Zink destabilizes the readers’ relationship with political correctness, which is of course a system of taste like any other. This criticism is distinctly not the criticism of political correctness that goes, “PC culture is perpetuated by pseudo-fascist thought-police, ruining The College Experience, academia, entertainment and soon the whole world.” Zink effectively demonstrates that political correctness is an ineluctably white and privileged system—the white doppelgänger of social justice. Zink succeeds because she sincerely cares about injustice, without caring at all about political correctness. While political correctness may walk like justice and talk like justice, it is really, really not the real thing. Political correctness is about the management of white discomfort and aspirations, and it doesn’t matter. Injustice matters. Zink knows this. And that is why she wrote a good novel about race as a white person. u Photo courtesy of washingtonpost.com

TELEVISION An opulent, convention-shattering show Dissecting the thrills, artistry, and shortcomings of ‘Sense8’

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Freeya Agyeman plays Amanita, girlfriend to Jamie Clayton’s Nomi, a trans woman hacktivist and blogger, on the Netflix show ‘Sense8.’

by Nyantee Asherman

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t was the beginning of July, and I was already losing my interest in “Misfits,” the show I thought I was going to settle down with for the rest of summer.

But I needed a rebound who was just as cute—equal parts superpower, urban millennial life, romance, drama, and comedy. That’s when I decided to start watching “Sense8,” because I have a rule to check out anything that appears on my newsfeed more than approximately a billion times.

The show started off slow. I had actually stumbled upon it a few months before it hit the popular news fan, but I got lost in the setup. This second time around, I realized the show’s thoughtful progression was not superfluous but necessary for mapping out a plot as busy as this: eight main characters, who live in different parts of the world, where the show is actually filmed (yes, the show’s Photo courtesy of freakpop.com

first season was filmed in Nairobi, Seoul, San Francisco, Mumbai, London, Mexico City, AND Chicago), are telepathically connected and can help each other when in danger (hint hint). Some might say that sheer grandeur isn’t a legitimate reason to commit to a show—but I don’t.

“Sense8” is one of the most opulent of the many Netflix series out right now for several reasons, mostly related to the way it has shattered so much of what we have come to expect from TV. In addition to its eight filming locations, the series stars Nomi, the first openly trans character to be written by Lana Wachowski, of the Wachowski directing sibling duo. Together they have directed “Jupiter Ascending” and the “Matrix” trilogy, among other other films, but “Sense8” is their first TV show. It takes the Wachowski’s sci-fi legacy and puts it in the context of a Netflix original series. Following in the footsteps of shows like “Orange is the New Black,” the characters in “Sense8” differ not only in gender, but economic and ethnic back-

grounds as well. As someone who won’t be going abroad anytime soon, there is something thrilling about seeing actual footage of the snow-saturated Icelandic countryside, or Seoul’s skyline. And as someone who doesn’t usually see people of color starring in hit shows, I almost fainted when I counted four.

But I knew most viewers wouldn’t be that easily floored, so lucky for you, I based my scoring system on more than the size of the show’s budget and the relative integrity of its casting. The scenery may have gotten my attention, but the artistry of the filming kept me watching.

Only the cleverest of camera tricks could near-seamlessly intertwine the stories of eight very different characters on four different continents. In one episode, two Sensates “visit” each other, meaning they can share the experiences of the other from across seas. The backdrop of their dialogue switches between the storefront of a Berlin café, wet from heavy rain, and the sunlit rooftop of a Ganesha temple in SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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Mumbai. It’s obvious that authentically intertwining the stories of the Sensates is important to the Wachowskis. They even go so far as to shoot live births when depicting the simultaneous but distinct births of each Sensate. Their approach to filming is congruous with the directors’ goals for the show (and a lofty one at that) which is to “...get at the human question of how are we the same, and how are we different,” and what affects that: “Is there a universalness to the human condition or is it all culturally formed?”

However, some rightfully argue that in an effort to emphasize the liaisons between their characters, the Wachowskis forgot to highlight any of the differences.

Though I don’t consider myself well-traveled, I’ve gone abroad enough to realize how phrases, gestures, etc. are lost in translation. But while watching the first season’s 12 episodes, rarely did I experience culture shock. I would often find it odd how many scenarios seemed completely unaffected by cultural difference.

And though the Sensates inherit each others’ talents and languages, they relate to one another mostly in English, despite nationality. It is true that this cultural fluidity could be accounted for by the fact that most of the characters spend their time in the industrial Westernized centers of the world. But I could not ignore that Capheus, the one character for whom that isn’t true (he lives in the outskirts of Nairobi) gets way less screentime than his urban, industrial peers. In their article, “‘Sense8’ and the failure of global Imagination,” Claire Light sums up my feelings when they say, “...the univer-

sality being promoted here is a universality of American ideas, American popular culture, American world views.” This explains why many of the characters are caricatures, formulaic in their constructions. Unsurprisingly, the few exceptions are the character of Nomi, whose story is inspired by Lana Wachowski’s own story and life in L.A., and the character from Berlin, whose debut episode was directed

Wachowski, as an openly transgender woman and LGBTQ activist, knows to notice the differences between people. Glimpses of this show up in the ways characters go beyond their wellworn molds. by a director from Berlin. Many of the other characters’ backgrounds rely heavily on the usual stereotypes. Just to name a few: we have Sun, an obedient Korean woman from Seoul working in a hyper-modern, corporate firm who sacrifices herself for the “honor” of her father; a smiley Kenyan man who manages to stay

full of hope despite his struggle to earn enough money for his mother’s medicine (she is sick with AIDS); Lito, a closeted, sexy, macho Mexican actor in a dramatic telenovela (played by Miguel Sylvestre, who is actually Spanish, from Spain); and Kala, an Indian woman and chemist living in Mumbai who feels pressure to marry a man she does not love.

Still, I’m not sure the Wachowskis are that ignorant. They traveled the world and admitted to having to confront their Americanness/whiteness more than once. And I think Lana Wachowski, as an openly transgender woman and LGBTQ activist, who punctuated the end of a speech she recently gave with, “to be different is ultimately to be human,” knows better than to literally forget to notice the differences between people. I like to believe the duo allowed glimpses of this consciousness to show up in the small ways the characters go beyond their well-worn molds. Will, a Chicago cop, refuses to see Black kids on the street as Other. Sun is propelled by a deep love for her parents and relinquishes her reserved demeanor for martial arts (bear with me), which she often uses to fiercely solve her own problems as well as those of her fellow Sensates. Lito, while over-dramatic at times, trades in machismo for a hardto-watch struggle with mental health and the tragedy of lost love. In the upcoming season, I believe the Wachowskis will do more to shatter the stereotypes they have built and round out their characters. If they don’t, the hit will lose its edge and join the ranks of shows like “Scrotal Recall” and that other one about the nurse who is also a man. u

Lack of character development is the new black The third season of ‘Orange is the New Black’ fails to deliver on its many identity-related subplots

by Alex Pears Trigger warning for discussions of rape, sexual assault, and transphobic violence.

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watched the first two seasons of “Orange is The New Black” in one weekend last summer, when I had The Worst Flu Ever. Perhaps it was the nauseous fog that overtook and strapped my acetaminophen-saturated eyeballs to the computer screen. Perhaps I needed

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a distraction from my hypochondriac’s mind that was convinced I was actually dying. Or perhaps it was all the lesbian sex in every other episode that appealed to (or, rather, fascinated) my little closeted-at-the-time self. Whichever it was, I pounded through the first two seasons, only pausing to crawl to the bathroom or suck on ice cubes.

But this summer, the only reason I finished the third season was because of this review. While “Orange” provides a space to confront and explore different

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identities—ones relating to womanhood, motherhood, ethnicity, religion, and gender—the overall plot lacks a central conflict, falling flat. Essentially, there isn’t really anyone to hate.

There are just too many various subplots to focus on, get attached to, and want to see through, like I did with the Alex-and-Piper-and-Suzanne romantic tension in season one, or the Red versus V power struggle in season two. Season three is made up of many smaller narratives: Norma’s Christ-like role that

Clockwise from top left: Pennsatucky (Taryn Manning), Sophia (Laverne Cox), Stella (Ruby Rose), and Piper (Taylor Schilling).

she assumes among the different inmates, Alex’s paranoia over Lolly’s apparent stalking, Daya’s decision about the postbirth plans for her child, Sophia and Mendez’s clash over their sons’ friendship, the privatization of Litchfield, and, of course, Piper’s underwear entrepreneurship.

Photos courtesy of pennlive.com, eonline.com, and businessinsider.com

While these subplots are important for creating interesting, complex narratives and character development, season three doesn’t give viewers any one narrative tension to land on. The writers were spread too thin to create a focused plot, which only led to my nights spent on Netflix scanning through the episodes

with my cursor to see a preview of what the next 42 minutes would be—which would eventually turn into the next “Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives” episode.

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important conversations about underrepresentation of minorities, gender fluidity, sexual assault, and discrimination and hate crimes against trans people. Season three of “Orange” is conscious of today’s social and cultural issues and represents a variety of identities.

Some of my favorites scenes are the ones that take place in the sewing room.

In episode six, the first time the underwear line is introduced, the first sewing scene presents some issues of identity, such as the representation of women of color in the media and advertisements.

Flipping through the lingerie magazine, Cindy asks Watson, “How many pages do you think it is before they put in the token Blackie, and how dark is she? Scale of one to… Grace Jones.” It turns out, page 11, “but she’s like a two. The bitch got blue eyes,” Cindy says. And while this whitewashing isn’t a newly discovered concept, paralleling this scene with one of Piper flipping through the same magazine and complaining about how misunderstood she is as a white woman subtly hints at the way it’s so easy to be blind to underrepresentation when you’re part of the majority. “Orange” does this in a way that is casual, nonchalant—which, I think, communicates it even more clearly.

But, there are moments—or characters—that are not quite as subtle at communicating these issues. The messiest of them all is Ruby Rose’s character, Stella.

Maybe “Orange” isn’t to blame, because Facebook newsfeeds and BuzzFeed articles primed viewers to be completely blown away by Rose’s new, androgynous character, posting articles like “People Everywhere Are Officially Losing Their Minds Over Ruby Rose.” But cut to episode six, and we’re met with Stella’s strained line delivery and awkward pseudo-flirty volleys with Piper as they sew. I wasn’t exactly losing my mind.

As Piper continues in this sewing scene, whining about the plight she faces as an upper-middle class white woman, Stella, exasperated, just sighs, “Women.”

When Piper asks Stella if she doesn’t “consider herself a member of that category,” Stella replies, “I do, but only because my options are limited.” It’s exciting to see this gender fluidity integrated into mainstream media, but, matched with Rose’s emotionless acting and Stella’s weak character development, it’s too obvious that this is the only reason Stella existed. (And, also, to provide a H0TT new face to reel in more viewers.) Again, 30

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season three integrates an important dialogue about gender identity. It’s just that the vehicle through which it does this is a little clunky.

Flashbacks to Pennsatucky’s childhood and young adulthood also give insight into the complexities of sexual assault and the aftermath that a survivor experiences. These scenes show us the way rape became more commonplace than actual sex in Pennsatucky’s life, and how, in order to cope, she became numb to the assaults, making it seem to others—like Boo—as though she didn’t necessarily do

Boo creates a plan to get revenge, based on the idea of what a survivor “should” do in response to an assault.

But survivors’ experiences are varied and intensely individual: there is no one way to feel, and there is no “right” way to react. anything to stop the rapist. While Boo’s M&M pantomime comes out of love, her response to Pennsatucky’s experience totally puts the blame onto the victim.

Boo creates a plan to get revenge, based on the idea of what a survivor “should” do in response to an assault: feel angry, “get even” with the assaulter.

Pennsatucky is hesitant, but goes along with the plan until the very last moment.

When Pennsatucky refuses to do it, Boo encourages her, saying it’ll “help you work out that rage, and that anger.” But all Pennsatucky says is, “I don’t have rage.

I’m just sad.” In this moment, we see that the way a survivor of sexual assault reacts to and processes what has happened

is a completely individual experience: there is no one way to feel, and there is no “right” way to react. Pennsatucky’s character arc brings awareness the experiences of survivors, and the importance of honoring their ways of reacting and coping with what has happened to them.

Another significant issue that “Orange” includes is that of anti-trans discrimination and hate crimes. While during the first two seasons, Sophia experiences discrimination through lack of access to hormones, it isn’t until the third season that other inmates begin rejecting her identity as a woman, using transphobic slurs, and physically attacking her. Not only is Sophia left to defend herself as officers are afraid to intervene, but when Sophia approaches Caputo about concern for her safety, he says to her, “I don’t need this right now, inmate. I’m developing a fucking ulcer.” Caputo’s attitude towards Sophia’s experience, as well as his course of action—to essentially have guards follow her around, which eventually leads to Sophia getting thrown into solitary confinement—puts the blame entirely on her. Not only does her situation show the hate and discrimination trans people experience, but also the lack of protection and respect trans people are given within the prison system.

So, while season three may have won a few gold stars and its Social Justice patch, the final 15 minutes of its last episode lets you forget all that. This is, perhaps, the most bizarre part of the whole third season. The way that the inmates escape through a shoddy fence maintenance job, and then spend the last ten minutes of the episode frolicking in the nearby lake all seems unlikely and inconclusive—which, I guess, is also a way to describe the entire third season. Perhaps it signifies some type of utopia, where all of these different people facing different conflicts of identity and relationships can, for a moment, share a common experience. But, even if this ending does reflect the randomness of this entire season, it still leaves me confused and uncertain about where the characters are going in the fourth season. Maybe we’re meant to disregard them totally, as the last episode also shows a busload of new inmates entering the building.

Perhaps season four will be based on a whole new cast, one that continues to provide a space that positively reinforces constructing your own identity while also confronting the identity placed upon you. u

MUSIC Yes, they’re changing

REVIEW

Tame Impala’s ‘Currents’ radically revises and evolves the group’s sound

by Ian Holloway

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n this current electronic stage of music, where there are nearly infinite ways of manipulating and producing sound, artistic change has become something of a norm. Bands are constantly seeking to evolve their sound not only through studio dexterity, but also by tapping into anything they find sonically progressive in contemporary subgenres. For a classic example, look to Radiohead’s nearly guitarless “Kid A,” a roguishly experimental album that borrows from IDM, makes heavy use of programmed electronic sounds, and represents a profound and successful artistic change for the band. More recently, Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories” showcases the same type of successful artistic shift that is similarly grounded in the way the artists’ music is produced, relying on live instrumentation as opposed to their usual synths to convey their layered sound.

Now, in 2015, we see a shift in a somewhat inverse direction: Tame Impala, a band known for their guitar-driven psychedelic pop, have released an album that radically expands and evolves their sound, trading guitar for synths and evoking a richer and more varied sonic landscape from their previous work. Breaching the newfound territory of synthpop, “Currents” follows the model set by “Kid A” by showcasing a maturing artistic voice that is bolstered by a deliberate desire to innovate.

From the opening synth blast on “Let it Happen”, the album’s first track, it is immediately clear that Tame Impala are making an artistic statement of the desire to change. “Currents” is the first Tame Impala album mixed exclusively by frontman Kevin Parker, who showcases masterful control of his synths by having each track impeccably mastered—all sounds are hi-fi.

The album maintains a vibrant psychedelic backbone, while unabashedly absorbing influences from current music trends. A revival of 70s disco sounds run throughout, and the glitchy breakdown on “Let it

Happen” echoes the sorts of sonic tactics used by internet-inspired genres such as vaporwave. Flecks of guitar still permeate the music, albeit on a smaller scale, and Parker’s technically superb bass is present too, a pulsating anchor to his synths on tracks like “Yes I’m Changing.” Despite this highly layered and novel sound, the album never feels chaotic: there is a level of control and restraint that binds it all together.

While “Lonerism,” the band’s 2012 LP, was awash in a disposition of solitude, Parker has openly stated that part of the radical shift in instrumentation on their new album was to produce a record for dancing and bringing people together, a communal record of sorts.

The album forgoes the vocal treatment that has for so long characterized indie music.

Another noticeable change from “Lonerism” is Parker’s voice, which is more salient on “Currents,” allowing his lyrics to hit more clearly and intimately with the listener. On tracks such as “The Less I Know the Better,” self-described by Parker as “dorky, white disco-funk,” he sings with a clear and empowered vocal line, backed by same kind of vocal charisma as the 70s female divas of the same era the album so strongly emulates. Album standout “Eventually” contains one of the album’s sweetest lines in terms of vocal delivery, where in between crashes of synths, Parker sighs, “It feels like murder to put your heart through this.”

“Currents” allows the group to assign more responsibility to the voice to carry emotion, and in doing so forgo the sort of lo-fi vocal treatment that has for so long characterized indie music.

One of the most exciting things about “Currents” is the way it evokes psychedelia.

Psychedelia and pop are both incredibly versatile forms of music, and “Currents” showcases how both can be revamped generation after generation to fit current trends, while still maintaining classic elements of both genres. In this case, Parker taps into psychedelia’s ability to get into the listener’s head and simulate a feeling of distorted consciousness. Parker disorients the listener by shifting not only the pitch of his sounds but the amplitudes as well: paying close attention, one can hear instruments fluctuate up and down in volume in contrast to one another, a skillful technical maneuver on Parker’s part and an ingenious way of producing wondrously disorienting changes in sonic structure. In addition to this, several songs on the album exhibit so much internal contrast that they feel like multiple songs stitched into one.

“Reality in Motion,” for example, starts as a fairly straightforward throwback to 60s pop, and then transitions on its bridge with a key change and the arrestingly sweet line, “It made my heart run circles and overflow.” The song has an unexpected breakbeat ending, another sudden shift in structure that points to a wonderfully creative compositional process.

The change Tame Impala puts forward on “Currents” is dramatic and runs through all aspects of the album. The album’s gorgeous cover art shows a metallic ball being dragged through a mystifying, viscous, energy field, causing distorted ripples to trail outwards in a psychedelic haze.

As a fitting representation of the fluidity and instability of all things, the art reflects the idea that due to the inevitable passage of time, everything changes. Songs within the album about ending a relationship and moving on are given a whole new layer of meaning when contextualizing them within the album’s broader theme of change and personal transformation. On “Currents,” Tame Impala have honed their distinctive artistry in a self aware and ultimately wonderfully successful way, putting forth a very personal disclosure on the nature of change in the most artful way possible. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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Watch out for that good good Here’s which upcoming albums are worth listening to this fall

by Blake Oetting

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n the coming months, you’ll more than likely fall into one of many Swarthmore social tropes at one time or another, with varying degrees of irony. So whether you are an excitable freshman academic blistering with new notions of heteronormativity and social construction, a senior regrettably questioning whether knowing these buzzwords will make you any money, an athlete hyping up the #squad during warm-up, or an avid Pub Niter looking to move on past that one pregame playlist, we’ve got you covered—musically, at least. The coming months are stacked with major releases, but here are ten albums to look out for to liven up your fall semester, and to justify that Spotify premium membership.

Little Simz: “A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons” (September 18): London-based rapper Little Simz made waves with her single “Time Capsule” last year. Since then she released her debut EP “E.D.G.E.,” a new mixtape, and “Dead Body,” “A Curious Tale’s” first single. Melding the visceral ferocity of Angel Haze with a buttery North London accent, Little Simz is another interesting study in critical perception. As a beautiful female rapper, people will want her to assume certain musical foci: sexuality, money (see “Anaconda” by Nicki Minaj, “Fancy” by Igloo Australia (ha) to name a few examples)—in other words, what mainstream male-centric rap has standardized. Simz, however, has curated a distinct voice with her prior releases, weaving together thematically dynamic compositions considering youth and identity. We will hopefully hear her continuing to work in this tradition on her album, dropping tomorrow.

Swim Deep: “Mothers” (September 18) In 2013, there were countless UK neoshoegaze acts. What made Swim Deep different, though, was their interaction with classic pop melodies. This combination backed the success behind their

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debut album, “Where the Heaven Are We?” What keeps them relevant in 2015 is, however, a complete sonic shift, bolstered by the integration of 80s soul funk and electro-pop sensibilities on their forthcoming album, “Mothers.” The first three singles from “Mothers”—“To My Brother,” “Namaste,” and “Grand Affection”—stand as bold moves towards reinvention in a world where playing guitar and writing cutesy lyrics are no longer enough. While some may see “Mothers” as a sell-out, I think of it as a re-birth. Make sure you are there for labor and delivery.

Ought: “Sun Coming Down” (September 18) With in my opinion one of the best albums of 2014, “More Than Any Other Day,” already under their belt, Montreal crooners Ought will try to achieve the same resonance and beautiful songwriting on “Sun Coming Down,” dropping tomorrow. Few bands are able to really wield minimalist aesthetics effectively, coming off boring or apathetic and often both. The lead singer, Tim Darcy, however, is able to excite and sadden you without instrumental assistance, often resembling Pavement and Speedy Ortiz in his knack for performing free verse with unrelenting authenticity and emotion. The two singles released off “Sun Coming Down,” “Men for Miles” and “Beautiful Blue Sky,” may not point towards an evolution for Ought, but then again, I’m not sure I want them to change at all.

Whatever PC Music puts out first I wanted to give you mostly confirmed releases, but a few teasing TBAs never hurt anybody. PC Music, the brainchild of wunderkind producer A.G. Cook, has delivered the most innovative music of the past ten years. Hannah Diamond, QT, GFOTY, and SOPHIE are just some of the label’s manic bubblegum pop stars, buzzing with tumblr cheekiness and robotic electro production.

In an interview with Radio 1 in March, Diamond and GFOTY were noted as the two artists likely to drop the first PC label records. In the meantime though, go listen to “Pink and Blue” by Diamond or “USA”

IN SHORT

by GFOTY and revel in the mechanic staccato of their futuristic pop songs as we all wait for what they will think up next.

Or, go re-watch “Pixel Perfect” (“let’s watch a Disney channel moooooovie”) for what I think has to be the original inspiration of the whole damn label.

Kurt Vile: “b’lieve i’m going down” (September 25) One of Philadelphia’s greatest talents, Kurt Vile has serenaded stoned college kids for years ever since his 2008 debut, “Constant Hitmaker.” His last album, “Walkin On A Pretty Daze,” may substantiate that reputation more than any of his other work. On his first single off “b’lieve i’m going down,” though, he sounds pretty high himself. “Pretty Pimpin” opens with “I woke up this morning / didn’t recognize the man in the mirror / then I laughed and I said / ’oh silly me, that’s just me,’” and evolves into a beautiful stream of consciousness, miraculously composed in a distinctly relaxed, low-fi folk song. If the full-length album includes similar sonic and lyrical elements, he won’t impress because of perpetuating a successful formula but because he is able to show us something new while delivering the same Kurt Vile coolness.

Wavves: “V” (October 2) To be honest, I was already so satisfied with Wavves this year after their joint album release with Cloud Nothings in June. They are, apparently, trying to be over-achievers, releasing their fifth studio album next month. The scraggly Californian rockers effectively conflate punk, psychedelic, and even beach rock in an unexpectedly cohesive package. “Heavy Metal Detox,” “Flamezesz,” and “Way Too Much,” the album’s three released singles, all reflect these same influences and the band’s raucous personality. You know those skater boys in middle school with the Osiris sneakers who charmed with their reckless abandon? Wavves reminds me of some matured realization of that ~aesthetic~, just with a killer garage rock discography about to be fortified by another exercise in reverberating fuzzy guitar rock.

Left to right: Hannah Diamond, one of PC Music’s artists; Hinds, a Madrid pop quartet; Bishop Nehru, a New York City rapper.

Grimes: TBA (October) Tremendous speculation has surrounded Grimes’s follow-up to her 2012 monster success, “Visions.” “Oblivion” and “Genesis” catapulted Canadian electro-pop singer Claire Boucher, AKA Grimes, to indie stardom and even granted her notoriety in more macro pop circles. However, her first released material for her fourth album, “Go,” strayed too far into the radio pop realm, cheapened by a cheesy EDM chorus and lacking “Visions”’s clever lyricism, and was later scrapped. Despite this flub, her two releases since—“REALiTi” and “Entropy”—have restored my faith in Boucher’s October release. Her first two albums, “Geidi Primes” and “Halfaxa,” were wacky industrial dance records filled with erratic bass and incoherent vocals. Despite their oddities, they display Boucher’s talent for writing songs with immediately gratifying pop elements alongside production that keeps her far, far removed from Top 40 bullshit. “Visions” was a more polished, accessible version of this ambient palette.

Her next project, though, which Boucher has said will be “Beyoncé”-d in October, will, in her own words, be more percussive and much different than previous material.

I am fine with hearing a “new Grimes”—I just hope that doesn’t involve an abandonment of what is central to her sound, the same elements which keep us coming back.

Photos courtesy of pcmusic.info, momandpopmusic.com, and missinfo.tv

!!!: “As If” (October 16) My senior year in high school, !!! (pronounced “chk chk chk”) came to Iowa City’s Mission Creek Festival and made those farmers dance like they never have before (and in ways I didn’t want them to, but that’s a “me” problem). Their baselines, dripping with funk and psychedelia, and simple, infectious vocal structures make for one great party. On their jaunt through my hometown, they were touring their most recent album, “Thr!!!er,” a winning kaleidoscopic disco revival. We have heard two singles from “As If ”: “Sick Ass Moon” and “Freedom! 15,” which both provided more “Saturday Night Fever”-y dance material. Often compared to Cut Copy, I associate them more with Chromeo, circa “Fancy Footwork,” where having a good time is the chief objective and garnering artsy street cred follows but is dependably received.

Bishop Nehru: TBA (TBA) Bishop Nehru, the New York City rap prodigy, has had an amazing twelve months. A year ago he released a collaborative album—“NehruvianDOOM”—with DOOM, and this May, he dropped an eight track album-previewing EP: “Nehruvia: The Nehruvian EP.” This latter release revealed two things: one, the (likely) name of the album and two, that his debut will be the first installation of a powerhouse

career, one characterized by witty and deft lyricism and wisdom beyond his years.

Nehru, like so many in this new wave of rappers, raps fast. What that does most often is curate a party track where listeners’ dancing precludes careful listening. Nehru, however, ensures his poetic craftsmanship is the highlight of his releases, opting for a more somber, reflective prose and baseline. If you don’t catch his release this fall, though, don’t worry: you’ll undoubtedly have another chance.

Hinds: Leave Me Alone (January 8) All of these releases will be fantastic, but the band I am most excited about is Madrid quartet Hinds. Full of youthful exuberance, their low-fi guitar pop gets you grooving, but their simple anecdotal lyrics about love will make you do a double-take. They have released two demos, “Demo” and “Barn,” and two singles as of 9/8, “Chili Town” and “Garden,” off the album set to drop this fall. In a similar vein to Mac Demarco and Honeyblood, lead singers Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote are able to meld heartbreak with resolution (see “Bamboo”). There is a ubiquitous positivity to their work, an embracing of risks even when they don’t pay off, a unity in their individual contributions, and, on my end, a burgeoning desire to hear more and more, and literally just to meet them and freak out. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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Nada vale mas que las risa y el desprecio - Es fuerza reir y a abaundonarse. ser creul y ligero There is nothing more precious than laughter and scorn - It is strength to laugh and lose oneself. to be cruel and light. - Frida Kahlo

T

he special exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden on Frida Kahlo’s life as an artist and her relationship to horticulture is divided into three spaces. The first space is in the main conservatory, where the curators have drawn together many of the plants that Kahlo kept in her garden at La Casa Azul in Mexico City. The garden includes many plants native to Mexico, as well as plants that Kahlo and Diego Rivera collected from other climates and countries.

The second space is in the botanical garden’s dimly lit Art Gallery, which has fourteen of Kahlo’s works on display. The works are a small study in Kahlo’s range of work—from self-portraits, to still lifes, to surreal landscapes, the common 36

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thread throughout these works is that of botanical themes. Finally, the third space that exists as a part of the exhibit is slightly more ephemeral. The botanical garden has curated months upon months of events throughout the exhibit’s run, from evenings with projections by Jenny Holzer, to regular traditional Mexican dance and musical performances, periodic screenings of Mexican films, and programs surrounding Octavio Paz’s poetry. At the end of October there will be several special events surrounding Día de Muertos. It is clear that the curation of this event is thorough and attentive to creating a picture of the arts and culture of Mexico, through the visibility of Frida Kahlo, the artist.

The theme that curators return to in the informational plaques at the exhibit is hybridity, which can be found both in botany and horticulture practices and as a motif throughout Kahlo’s painting career. The exhibit in the greenhouse is well referenced, giving in depth information about many different plants that

Kahlo and Rivera cultivated at La Casa Azul. There is a great deal of information about plants that are native to Mexico in their garden as well as imported plants.

Kahlo’s artwork is flush with hybrids: her head and a deer’s body, human figures smoothed into plant life, veins of leaves filled with blood. In her published diary there is a drawing of a two-headed Matador with a woman’s body. The Matador was a mythic figure that fascinated the surrealists at the time, though Kahlo had an uncertain tie to the surrealist school of art. To the right of the matador is a woman’s figure on a pedestal. The woman is losing an arm and a hand and the image is accompanied by the words “Yo soy la DESINTEGRACIÓN...” In order to create a hybrid, two or more forms must relinquish themselves to a new form. Change is the only guarantee.

Kahlo often turned her own body into a hybrid of sorts, when she was put into a cast following one of her many surgeries she would paint it, often with abstract designs, flowers, and the hammer All photos and photo illustrations created by Nora Kerrich

and sickle of the Communist Party, of which she was a member intermittently throughout her life.

However, the exhibit failed to capture the full and complicated nature of hybridity in Kahlo’s life and work -- as well as in Mexican history -- by failing to provide information about Kahlo’s sexuality and Mexico’s ethnohistory.

In addition to a muted portrayal of the volatile relationship between Kahlo and Rivera, there is little mentioning of Kahlo’s bisexuality, a perfect example of hybridity. I only remember one plaque outside the painting exhibit that alluded to Kahlo’s affairs with women as well as men. This was a missed opportunity to make visible Kahlo’s queerness and thus create space for the humanization and celebration of bisexual artists unapologetically. Ironically, the art exhibit displays one of her more homoerotic paintings, “Two Nudes in a Forest (The Earth Itself),” which was meant as a gift for her lover Delores del Rio. All photos and photo illustrations created by Nora Kerrich

Touching briefly on the issue of Mexican ethnicity and heritage, there were several informational plaques that made reference to the hybridity of ethnicity and race in Mexico, but these plaques only observed the meeting of indigenous groups with white Spanish Europeans.

Kahlo’s selfdetermination through selfportraiture remains dangerous and subversive.

There was no reference to the presence of Mexicans of African descent, despite there being strong Afro-Mexican culture and heritage in Mexico historically and contemporarily. This constitutes the

erasure and sanitizing of the complex ethnic and national history of Mexico’s mestizaje. Hybridity is not contingent on a dualistic definition, and this lapse of information is not only historically inaccurate, but it also makes silent the African “Third Root” of Mexico, as named by scholar María de la Luz Martínez Montiel.

A goal of curating or presenting a person’s artwork and life through any lens should be working critically to humanize them. Giving a cultural icon like Frida Kahlo space to exist in contradictions and genius makes her more accessible to the general public and maintains that she can be a hero for a litany of budding artists without hiding integral parts of her personal history and cultural context.

Perhaps the most touching moments of my visit to the exhibit were intermittently encountering a Mexican family dressed in traditional indigenous clothing attending the exhibit. The two children explored the corners of the room SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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Kahlo’s “Dos desnudos en un bosue (La tierra misma)” or “Two Nudes in a Forest (The Earth Itself).”

with a recreated tiered La Casa Azul pyramid, talking quietly to each other as they cautiously touched leaves and the blue walls of the recreated La Casa Azul.

I saw them again in the courtyard watching the celebration of Mexican heritage with performances by dance groups as well as an all-female Mariachi band, Flor de Toloache. There was a large crowd during both of these performances, with all eyes on some traditions of Mexican culture holding space at an institution like the New York Botanical Garden.

This family was repping their heritage at an exhibition celebrating Kahlo’s work as an artist and horticultural curator in her own right. These moments demonstrate the continued need for culturally relevant public education. In addition to creating more public space dedicated to artists like Kahlo, creating humanizing contexts for their work is of great importance. How can we best allow cultural icons, especially the women geniuses, to 38

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be imperfect while we humanize them?

Since attending the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden, whenever I glance at a woman gazing at her reflection in a mirror or refraction in her front-facing cell phone camera, I return to Kahlo. On the train, in a public restroom, in the darkened reflections of large store windows, women seek themselves out habitually. There is a chin-up, eyes-down rotation to the practice of regarding herself, almost instinctive, and along several angles it mimics poses in many of Kahlo’s self-portraits. I try to remember that a self-portrait is born of the artist staring at herself like that, rather than the artist considering a model.

I honor self-portraiture, contemporary and Kahlo’s, as self-determination for women and those between or beyond genders.

Kahlo’s self-determination through self-portraiture remains dangerous and subversive. Her unabashed depiction

of her love, politics, or pain, physical and emotional, draws us to her center.

Perhaps we empathize or sympathize with challenging depictions of miscarriage or disability or infatuation, but the interaction is on Kahlo’s terms. Whether her paintings are copied onto refrigerator magnets or painted onto shoes, it is her gaze and her genius we encounter. It often shifts the ground beneath us.

I don’t remember the first time I saw a Frida Kahlo painting, perhaps it was in an elementary school classroom, or in a book at the public library of my hometown. However, I do remember the sensation of simultaneously realizing that she was not beautiful as beauty had been instructed to me, and hoping that we might be sisters somehow, with our matching dark hair between eyebrows, along arms, feathering the cupid’s bow.

Ever since then Kahlo has been a genius to me. u

Image courtesy of Vogue Mexico

POETRY: THREE WORKS

Swimming Lessons

by Rose Wunrow

5169346227

by Victoria Stitt

your number is etched in my mind in case I drink one too many shots of whiskey, tequila, a bottle of wine. when I call you’ll harshly push out a ‘hello,’ dragging the o. but you’ll listen to me slur mundane observations of the drunk and high fuck ups around me. close your eyes, wish you could wrap your arms under the fold in my legs, take me to the car and I’ll drunkenly suck on your fingers whatever love is tucked in your nail beds unfolding behind my eyelids the front of my head pounding, sunlight filtering through to punish me for night time deeds. hide under the sheets, find the nape in your neck, press my lips heavily, pull a blade tucked in my underwear, slice the tender skin under your ear, sweetly staining the sheets emptying your body. laying my head happily on my pillow. my heart a bit less heavy with you always under me. u

I remember the pool where I first learned to swim.

Blue as the dark and wider than dream. I do not know if they threw me in. I do not remember if they said, “You cannot breathe water. You weren’t born fish.” – but I remember, last December, gasping under a vast dark sky, thinking I cannot go on like fish.

I remember, in biology, pumping a sheep’s lung full of water until it burst. What do you do when you try to sustain yourself on someone who reminds you of an absence of air?

Try to bail out your breathless vitals. Wish you had learned the signs, or at least remembered them – but all I remember is how blue was the pool, how helpless it made me feel how strange it is to think swimming comes more natural than drowning. u

universe 5

by Maria Vieytez

and if i were to slice open what i know, first a butter knife to the window-head, a spatula to the printer, a cuss word to the rabbit in your yard, first the butter knife slicing open the butter knife, and the metal like a puddle of skin on the table, maybe it would be your cheekbones dripping asymmetrical against the window and it would be me laughing at that other version of you, you smacking yourself ghost-drunk and notice-wanting against the glass, i think it would be night like a lover’s thumb circling my mouth, and then the knife, and then the slice, and i would go from know to nothing, i would go from poem to pummeled, swollen ugly like mishandled fruit, if i were to write it, and i mean really, really write it, it would slant you, you’d be earth, i’d be paper and you’d be earth and the skin would be glinting on the table, everything open like that, everything remarked upon and irrevocably unremarkable, and you, you’d say something like This is what i expected, THIS is what i THOUGHT I KNEW about you, i knew you could truth it if you tried, i knew it, and i’d be sitting on my hands to keep warm in that place, i’d be sitting and you’d be standing, if i could stand it i’d slice your lip right down the middle and laugh at all the purple gleaming, i’d take a picture of us open like that, open finally, there’d be no verbs, there’d be no dictionary dressing itself in my pupil-mirror, only the air like a dented fork in your kitchen, my kitchen or your kitchen, and the rabbit between us to remind everyone what we’d shared. u

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