Issue 25 by The Swarthmore Review

W A

R T

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SEPTEMBER 2019

Rome & Quito Photo Essay by Sarah Weinshel

AND... Surviving Swarthmore with Hannah Arendt Remembering David Corcoran Making Friends on Tinder

LETTER POLICY CONTRIBUTORS Abby Diebold (she/her) is. Amal Haddad (she/her) is an 8w7. She collects maps of Michigan’s upper peninsula. Chili Shi (she/her) is a second-year from Budapest, Hungary. She thinks figs are incredibly versatile. Dylan Clairmont (he/him) can’t figure out his Enneagram and it’s keeping him up at night. Grace Griego (she/her) enjoys singing, reading, writing, and eating. She also loves penguins. Jonathan Kay (he/him) peaked in highschool. Josh Geselowitz (he/him) is a junior from State College, PA who is looking for friends. Please apply via Tinder. Kat Capossela (she/her) is a junior from Boston who just learned how to cook chicken. She dreams of becoming a corporate sellout. Matthew Koucky (they/them), sophomore, can be found most often on the stretch of road between Sci and Underhill. Olivia Smith (she/her) thinks she’s an Enneagram 6, but there’s a chance she’s looking at the chart upside down.

HOW TO CONTRIBUTE Submissions of longform reporting, personal, argumentative and photo essays, book and media reviews, short stories, poems, and anything else that seems suitable can be e-mailed to Jonathan Kay, editor-in chief. Submissions will be considered from Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and will be considered anonymously, though will will not, except in rare cases, publish anonymously. Submissions should generally not go longer than 10,000 words. Contact: jkay2@swarthmore.edu

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Jonathan Kay MANAGING EDITOR Kat Capossela LAYOUT EDITOR Eva Baron FEATURES Kat Capossela

Reuben Gelley Newman (he/him) is a medieval monk. Or a secular Jew who sings chants and writes poetry. The devil’s in the details.

PERSONAL ESSAYS Shreya Chattopadhyay

Sage Tesser Rhys (he/him) is a balloon animal artist from Dallas, Texas. If he were to change his name, he’d change it to “Fun Rhys.”

FICTION & POETRY Eva Baron

Sarah Weinshel is a biology major from Minnesota who takes a lot of photos, does not write a lot of essays, and enjoys reviewing Sharples meals. Shayla Smith (she/her) is a senior from South Florida who takes everything way too personally.

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 jkay2@swarthmore.edu.

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PHOTO ESSAYS Li Dong

BOOKS Daria Mateescu MOVIES & TV Dylan Clairmont MUSIC Sage Rhys CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Tyler White

September 2019

FEATURES ◆ Hannah Arendt, Biographical Thinking, and the Kitchen

Jonathan Kay p. 4

PERSONAL ESSAYS u For David Corcoran Abby Diebold p. 8 u Subway Etiquette in New York City Kat Capossela p. 10 u Tinder for Friends Josh Geselowitz p. 11

PHOTO ESSAY u Rome & Quito, 2019 Sarah Weinshel p. 13 u Cape Town, South Africa Shayla Smith p. 18

FICTION & POETRY u My Favorite Grace Griego p. 23

REVIEWS

BOOKS ◆ Bruce Springsteen’s Autobiography

Dylan Clairmont p. 29

◆ Elif Batuman’s “The Idiot”

Amal Haddad p. 31

MUSIC u Critical Thinking, Critical Mass Reuben Gelley Newman p. 33 u The Confounding (Dis)Honesty of HTRK’s “Venus in Leo” Sage Tesser Rhys p. 36

MOVIES & TV u Pressing Pause After Killing Eve’s First Season Olivia Smith p. 38 u The OA: Race, Freeganism, and Science Fiction Matthew Koucky p. 40

u Kyoto Horror Show Chili Shi p. 28

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FEATURE

Hannah Arendt, Biographical Thinking, and the Kitchen “The Human Condition” and life at Swarthmore by Jonathan Kay

uring my freshman year, I struggled to understand exactly why I was depressed. It wasn’t any single issue so much as a claustrophobic malignity etched into every part of life on campus; my unhappiness was vague, directionless, and constant. Simple things were complicated, and easy things were hard. Part of the problem was that there was no escape. When the pressure threatened to overwhelm me, I had nowhere to go. Stress is cumulative, and over the course of the year, my daily routine—hours spent in libraries, eating at Sharples— became unbearable. So I moved to the Barn. At the time, it was what passed for Swarthmore’s “alternative” community, which mostly meant that it had a higher concentration of stick-and-pokes, smokers, and Soc-Anth majors. Having decided that summer that I liked to cook—or, at least, that I wanted to be the kind of person who liked to cook—I leapt off the meal plan and began making dinner every night. There was something vital about cooking, something unmediated by campus life or my own anxieties. Cooking wasn’t “productive.” It contributed nothing to my resumé or my aspirations of who I wanted to be. It had no place in my usual triage of academic responsibilities—but each time I chose to do it, it was a personal commitment to rediscover a life outside of work. Carrying groceries the half-block walk past the edge of Worth to the Barn took me miles from campus. My schoolwork, however, still demanded the same feverish intensity. Cooking was just another extracurricular, one on which it was hard to justify spending several hours a week when I had deadlines to meet. I started mooching off of friends’ meal swipes, became a regular at Bamboo Bistro. What started as a torrent of shopping lists and dinner dates 4

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had become a trickle by the spring. By my junior fall, I hardly cooked at all.

In “The Human Condition,” Hannah Arendt argues that our contemporary world suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between the private life of the household and the public life of politics. The same problem of confused boundaries underpinned my freshman year depression.

Cooking wasn’t “productive.” It had no place in my usual triage of academic responsibilities—but each time I chose to do it, it was a personal commitment to rediscover a life outside of work. Arendt’s central concern is the construction of a “common world” through which humans could relate to one another and themselves. Without this shared world of physical artifacts, art, and even memories, we exist in isolation, unable to relate to each other, alienated from the world. Without that relation and togetherness, we lose something fundamental to our humanity. She saw the classical Greek understanding of politics as key to maintaining this shared world. To the Greeks, politics was more than lawmaking—it was an attempt to find glory and honor through public displays of excellence, “brave

words” and “bold deeds.” For Arendt, this sort of exhibition has profound implications. Through public speech and action, she writes, “men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua [as] men.” It is in the public realm, surrounded by others, where we can discover and disclose our unique presence in a way we never can alone. Swarthmore’s campus bears several resemblances to the Greek polis. For one, it’s small enough that each student is in full view of the rest of the student body—in glory or otherwise, whether they want to be or not. Our life on campus is a public stage quite unlike the comfortable anonymity of the city and the familiarity of family. Walking to class or eating in Sharples, we’re surrounded by, and inevitably performing for, acquaintances and half-strangers, people who know our reputation but nothing else. The public realm of campus life is also marked by something akin to the Greek ethic of glory. While some of our schoolwork involves a direct performance in front of peers—seminar contributions, for example, or the mere act of being seen studying—still more of it will enter the stage of accomplishment indirectly, through academic honors, internships, and LinkedIn profiles. Work, even when done alone, thus always carries a pathology of public appearance and accomplishment. Even our involvement in athletics, clubs, or campus activism, though motivated by personal passion or pleasure, becomes a performance. The knowledge that these activities will all ultimately wind up as entries on a CV or remarks on the lips of our classmates makes it almost impossible to do these things entirely for their own sake and creates the expectation that even our leisure time and personal passions must produce something of worth. Only when I moved off campus did I realize how much fatigue such constant submersion in the public sphere of campus performance caused. During my freshman year, I worked at all hours, everywhere, and each time I answered emails on my twin mattress or did problem sets in a booth

in Sharples, I hastened the public realm’s encroachment on my private life. (It probably doesn’t help, psychologically, that the interiors of new dorms are indistinguishable from those of the College’s newer libraries—NPPR even has study booths on its first floor.) My leisure time was a mere interlude between periods of work. I wasn’t not working, I was not-working, thinking about my looming responsibilities and feeling a vague sense of guilt over neglecting them. I’d ruefully complain to friends that I “hadn’t done anything productive all day,” even on the weekend, even when there was nothing in particular I needed to be doing. The days left no particular impression outside of the progress I had made in crafting my resumé; work turned into sleep, which transitioned seamlessly back into work the next morning. What transformed simple stress into a more profound depression, however, was not the work itself but the stories I told myself about it: about my worth, about what I had to do to live a good, happy life. Ultimately, my problem was that I’d lost perspective.

The Greek obsession with politics and public glory has a specific character: biographical thinking. Arendt writes that “Who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero—his biography, in other words.” To Arendt’s Greeks, a glorious life could only be understood as a coherent narrative, a constructed timeline of events and accomplishments. Biographies, however, can be forgotten. It wasn’t enough for the brave words to be said or the bold deeds to be done. Without creating a space where they would be recognized and acknowledged, Arendt writes, politics would be fleeting, incapable of creating a common world durable and tangible enough for men to relate to and through. The Greek polis is the solution. Arendt views it as “a kind of organized remembrance” where “the most ephemeral of man-made ‘products,’ the deeds and stories which are their SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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outcome, would become imperishable.” The rebirth of the Greek political man, his glory-seeking and public performance, would drive a renewed commitment to a common world. Yet she says nothing of the manifest absurdity of the Greeks’ aspirations to eternal glory. At best, the polis could merely mitigate the impermanence of human affairs—even the most excellent of men would eventually be forgotten. More importantly, despite what Arendt believes, these memories and histories never really disclose who the individual is, only what they are. To “make sense” of a life through a constructed history of accomplishments is to reduce an individual’s living essence to a distortion, a reduction: something that can be measured, placed in categories, and weighed against the lives of others. By viewing life exclusively through the biography, we miss the more immediate disclosure of who we are in those activities that achieve nothing, bring no praise, and leave no trace.

Arendt writes that while the Greeks revered politics, they disdained labor, which they understood as any work necessary to sustain life: growing food, for example, or maintaining a home. Whereas politics occupies the public realm, labor is a fundamentally private activity; unlike public performances of excellence, our biological needs for food or health are experienced by us alone, and cannot themselves be communicated to others. Labor, therefore, is not itself a tangible, durable product, nor does it produce an achievement worthy of inclusion in a biography of public glory. This means it contributes little to the common world Arendt hopes to construct, and so she joins the Greeks in giving politics pride of place in human affairs. By doing so, however, she risks overlooking labor’s power: its ability to return us to a more vital way of living

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than that of the biographical. Labor (as conceived by Arendt) has little place in the life of an on-campus Swarthmore student. Most of our basic biological needs—securing and preparing food, maintaining a home—are taken care of by near or total strangers. The household, however, is defined as much by labor as labor is defined by the household. Our estrangement from labor thus denies us one of the best means we have of asserting a private realm for ourselves, independent of the campus stage. This, as much as anything, is what makes our submersion in the political realm so constant and oppressive. If the politics of the public realm encourages biographical thinking, then the labor of the household encourages what might be called “biological” thinking. Where the biographical seeks coherence in a life, the biological sees life as a collection of ephemeral, self-sufficient moments whose connection is either provisional or nonexistent. Labor focuses not on eternal glory but simply on the modest but endless task of satisfying our physical needs. At one point, Arendt defines actuality as those activities which “exhaust their full meaning in the performance itself ” rather than pursuing an ultimate goal. “It is from the experience of this full actuality that the paradoxical ‘end in itself ’ derives its full meaning,” she writes, “for in these instances of action and speech the end (telos) is not pursued but lies in the activity itself.” In other words, the significance of these self-consuming pursuits is not the aspiration to excellence or glory—it is nothing more than their very reality, which does not rely on a realm of appearances for its worth. Labor is the quintessential activity of actuality. Tilling soil, washing dishes, and sweeping the floor leave no lasting trace of themselves in either physical objects or biographical memory, and therefore defy any attempt at seeking accomplishment. Arendt believes that political action, at its best, has this same ephemeral character. But even in her idealized history

of the Greek polis, political action was one and the same with striving for achievement, the “passionate drive to show one’s self in measuring up against others.” In practice, glory hinges on biographical thinking, and any public realm that takes it as its inspiration accepts a corresponding obsession with achievement and productivity. That obsession easily distracts us from the self that serves as an end in itself—who we are rather than what we are. By contrast, the modesty of biological rhythms, so far removed from accomplishment and praise, encourages us to return to a more vital, immediate idea of self. Whereas action is inherently a force of reification and narrative-building, labor is, at its purest, ephemeral and narrative-defying. As Arendt writes, The ‘blessing or the joy’ of labor is the human way to experience the sheer bliss of being alive which we share with all living creatures, and it is even the only way men, too, can remain and swing contentedly in nature’s prescribed cycle, toiling and resting, laboring and consuming, with the same happy and purposeless regularity with which day and night and life and death follow each other… The blessing of life as a whole, inherent in labor, can never be found in work and should not be mistaken for the inevitably brief spell of relief and joy which follows accomplishment and attends achievement.

If we lose our connection to this joy, we lose something just as fundamental to our humanity as our ability to relate to others. The human condition is to understand our life as a story with a beginning and an end even as we rejoice in the space between the lines: our fleeting, thoroughly unproductive life. As long as graduate schools and job applications—and the muscle memory of high school—loom large in the imaginations of Swarthmore students, striving for achievement will never go away. The important thing, then, is not to forget our life outside of the stories we make of our experience

here, or the life we’re living within them. The sensible desire to plan for our future all too easily reifies it, creating an obsession with what remains only

The human condition is to understand our life as a story with a beginning an end even as we rejoice in the space between the lines: our fleeting, thoroughly unproductive life. an imagined biography. In an important sense, the “me” of twenty years from now, the person for whom I’m making so many of my decisions today, is not really me. All that connects us is a name. Just like my labors, my self—this self, now—is something that is constantly disappearing, used up in its own performance, moment after moment. When I let go of my ideas of what I am, I can finally discover who I am. My resumé is not my life. If I forget the biological self, I risk placing too much stock in my own fantasies. A good place to start might be the household: cooking dinner, taking out the trash, and accomplishing nothing.

I’m making a salad: lettuce, red cabbage, carrots, pumpkin seeds, and a basil-lime vinaigrette. My inbox is filling up with notifications and my to-do list has a half dozen things that I meant to get to today. For the moment, however, my only concern is chopping. An hour later, the plates are clean and drying. Nothing remains of my meal except a pleasant fullness. Tomorrow can wait. u

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PERSONAL ESSAYS P ER S ONA L E SS AY

For David Corcoran by Abby Diebold

his article was not supposed to be a personal essay. It was originally supposed to be a features article about bad pizza. My co-reviewer, Lexi, and I had a list from the last page of the Yelp reviews—one star pizza restaurants in Philadelphia. We had braved two of them, taking careful notes in several categories, a TLC’s “Four Weddings” model of rating: ambience, service, crust, sauce, cheese. Lexi was gluten free, which was going to be a funny side anecdote to the story. She pulled gooey strings of cheese, grease pooling on its congealed surface, off of sickeningly sweet tomato sauce, while I poked at the crust with a plastic spork, noting the irregularity of the crumb and the bake of the bottom. This, in our minds, would have been funny. Food reviews are supposed to be gourmet, their writers reminiscent of the villainous reviewer in Ratatouille: pretentious, mustachioed, probably French. We were subverting the narrative, taking our talents to the people, performing formality on a college budget. Perhaps we would fieldwork our way into universal truths about the nature of eating. Perhaps we would make broad claims about the racism and classism inherent in this project, considering the fact that all of the bad pizza places we visited were in the 19149, one of the least white, least wealthy parts of Philadelphia. Perhaps we would just suffer through some bad pizza, have a laugh, and forget about the whole thing.

My uncle was the food reviewer for The New York Times for a decade. During that time, he ate 500 meals and wrote 240 reviews (none of which are about bad pizza—I checked). He reviewed some of the best restaurants in a city renowned for its culinary scene. He didn’t strike me as someone who was qualified to do that job. Not that he was unqualified, per se, but he had never to my knowledge watched an episode of Top Chef, which 8

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I knew to be the beacon of culinary analysis. Perhaps more than that, though, he wasn’t pretentious. He wasn’t (at least, not recently) mustachioed. He wasn’t French. His mother’s lore-ridden family recipe was for Hamburger Noodle Casserole, a dish that could be one of those recipes autogenerated by a bot trained exclusively from 1950s cookbooks—pasta, cheddar cheese, and beef cooked in a Le Creuset (delicious, and a little horrifying). Apparently, being a food reviewer just requires an open

mind, a sense of humor, and levity (he wanted for neither). I only remember going out to eat with him once, about five years ago, at a hipster small plates restaurant, called Small-

He was unpretentious, despite hus success, full of youthful exuberance and an adventurous spirit well past the age when he should have been resigned to bridge games in central Florida.

dinner. The power was out everywhere, so they couldn’t serve us. Instead, we sat and drank wine at a table in the back corner and had Cocco’s Pizza (which is not too bad pizza, but is certainly not great pizza) delivered from their location in Folsom, nearly three miles away. At no point did he stop smiling, laughing, telling stories about his career, noting that this would be something we would remember years later. It is. My uncle died at the beginning of August. He was 72 years old. He had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia a few months before. He married Bonnie, his partner through a decade of bonito granola and farm stand corn and

wares, a few blocks from our house in Portland. It was the first time I had met his new partner, Bonnie, who remains to this day the spunkiest woman I know. The main courses were small plates, served on an eclectic mix of dishware, all sort of weird, which was fine because you only had to eat about a bite and a half of each thing before the plate was gone. For dessert, he eagerly ordered a parfait-inspired situation, featuring frozen yogurt (which I was excited about) and bonito granola (which I was also excited about, because I didn’t know what it was). Bonito, as it turns out, is a small fish in the tuna family. It does not make good granola—this we were all in agreement about. He mentioned it years later, laughing on the porch as we ate corn from the farm stand and homemade gazpacho. We had to break the news that Smallwares, for obvious reasons, had closed.

The last time I saw him was in December 2017. He came to Swarthmore to give a talk on his journalism career, making the eight-hour drive from Cambridge through what be-

The power was out everywhere, so they couldn’t serve us. Instead, we sat and drank wine at a table in the back corner and had Cocco’s Pizza. At no point did he stop smiling, laughing, telling stories about his career, noting that this would be something we would remember years later. It is. came one of the worst snowstorms of the season. He was lighthearted about the whole thing—the power went out, his slideshow wasn’t working, I showed the entire audience a picture of him as a four-year-old. We went to the Inn for

power outage pizza, in his hospital room, a fedora hiding his thinning hair. A few days before, he had been told his cancer was untreatable, and he moved from the hospital into hospice care. He died at his new home in New Mexico. That day, the Mets beat the Marlins, moving to four games out of the wild card spot. I doubt he was eating bad pizza (I doubt he was eating much, at that point). And yet it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had been. He was unpretentious, despite his success, full of youthful exuberance and an adventurous spirit well past the age when he should have been resigned to bridge games in central Florida. He worked until just a few months before he died, and even then was only in what he laughingly dubbed “partial retirement.” He approached everything the way he approached his food reviews: with light, laughter, an open mind, and an open heart. I think of him when the Mets win (which is sometimes) and when the Mets lose (which is often), but mostly I can’t help but smile when I eat a slice of really, really bad pizza. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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Why Are People Shoving Me? Subway etiquette in New York City by Kat Capossela Fort Greene is all dog tails, baby strollers, and running shoes. When you cross paths with another human along the Brooklyn neighborhood’s tree-lined sidewalks, you exchange smiles and, on special occasions, a “good morning.” It’s the proper way to engage with a Fort Greenian. And as a 20-year-old who’s never bought her own groceries before, this peaceful introduction to New York City was comforting. Robins tweeted warm welcomes to me and my father upon our sunny, mid-day arrival. A few hours later, he drove back home to Boston, disappearing through a summery arch of green, and I delighted in the thought of spending my summer here. Unfortunately, that dream dissolved soon after. I hadn’t left my neighborhood yet. I was greeted by an uncomfortably warm stench that fit somewhere between week-old pee and rotting trash as I descended into the black hole that was Lafayette Station. With each step, the light behind me—and my rosy understanding of the city—grew dimmer. Gone were the blue skies and green freedom of my newfound neighborhood. Instead, I was fully engulfed by thick air and creepily lit tunnels. I held my briefcase a little tighter and kept on. It was 8:15 a.m., the peak of the morning rush hour, and I had made the mistake of believing I could eat my yogurt on the subway ride to my first day of work. Instead, I was quick-

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ly sandwiched between dozens of other New York commuters and found myself breathing in the frazzled hair of the woman in front of me. Even when I managed to body myself out of the mass crushed into the train car, I was swept up in a swarm of moving bodies with an agenda of its own. I’d never experienced the sheer volume and aggression of the subway crowd back in Boston, which only gets rowdy during Red Sox games. I felt disillusioned and ill-equipped. Welcome to New York, I guess. I’ll spare you some of the more gruesome details of my botched navigation (which involved two unnecessary transfers, three hard shoves, and a few tears) and instead confirm the happy ending of arriving to my first day of work on time. Dazed, confused, and hungry, but on time. For a few days after this initial introduction to the New York commute experience, I thought it was just a bad coincidence. A fluke. A perfect storm. After a week in, however, I soon understood the subway had nothing to offer but discomfort. Room to breath? Not a thing. A place to sit? No chance. How about a friendly smile? Fuhgeddaboutit. This was not Government Center anymore. If you meet eyes with a fellow sardine—an infrequent occurrence—it’s usually in the form of a glare-scowl. God forbid, if you accidentally touch hands on the sweaty, metal pole—that will save your

life, by the way, when the car driver decides to whip around a corner—they might even growl at you. One of the more strange groupthink phenomena I’ve witnessed is how no one is unsettled by instances that are undoubtedly unsettling. A woman steps onto the subway wearing a tail larger than her leg, and no one glances up

It makes you wonder: if I was bleeding from my eyes and begging for my life, would the New York subwaygoers leave me to die?

from their phone. A man begins shrieking the word of God in a silent car, and no one even cranks up their headphone volume. It makes you wonder: if I was bleeding from my eyes,and begging for my life, would the New York subwaygoers leave me to die? I am lost as to why all New Yorkers take their commute as an invitation for anarchy. The lifeless tombs of the subway, and the city streets, are crowded, no doubt. But is there really no room for common courtesy, either? Just a few days ago, as I passed a subway goer, I said, “Excuse me,” as one does. To my shock, she turned to me wide-eyed and said, “That’s the first time I’ve heard that in months.” A few days before that, an older woman was struggling to lift her suitcase up the grimy steps of the subway. Dozens of people passed her, not even attentive enough to send a sympathetic gaze her way. She, too, was more stunned than grateful when I offered to help. Before my New York debut, my boyfriend, who grew up

in Queens, advised me to always look angry while traveling between home and work. “Otherwise, you’ll look vulnerable and someone will take advantage of you,” he warned. Then and now, I believe this to be an extreme safety tactic, but I notice it in the eyes of all those around me. Perhaps this air of hostility is simply a product of survival. Large cities tend to host high crime rates, so it’s better to be angry than sorry. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the city’s excitement for aggression. New York draws folks injected with ambition and ego, with long-hour work days and a baby to rush home to, whereas my biggest woe was how to roast a chicken. Or maybe it’s an identity issue. If someone of a different gender, race, or age than I had offered to carry the older woman’s suitcase, would she have mistaken their intentions? It’s probably all of the above. None of this is to say that all New Yorkers are heartless individualists. There have been a few brief, wondrous moments of kindness, like a commuter complementing the book I was paging through or a buttoned-up man giving up his seat for a pig-tailed girl. So I suppose it’s about knowing when to replace your scowl with a smile—and vice versa. It’s about being street smart, not just street mean. Most of my frustration comes from a culture shock that, like most folks here, I probably will adapt to. In fact, I intend to return to the city of subway rats next summer, if able. The abundance of gems like 90 percent-off vintage boutiques or family-run Pakistani cafes cannot be found anywhere else in this country. And at the end of it all, when I reflect on my aggregate experience in the comfort of my dilapidated, shared studio in the beautiful Fort Greene, I think they’re worth the sweaty poles and occasional shove. u

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Tinder for Friends Learning how to be an adult in San Francisco by Josh Geselowitz

his past summer was the first time I considered myself an adult. Growing up in the central Pennsylvania town State College and then moving to Swarthmore meant I had never spent too much time outside of my beloved state—never longer than two consecutive weeks, actually. Unsurprisingly, moving across the country to work in a psychology lab in San Francisco for three months was no small change for me. Granted, I’ve lived with people before, I’ve worked jobs before (even doing research), and have no trouble packing light or dealing with jetlag. Nonetheless, I wasn’t fully prepared for what awaited me on the West Coast. What proved to be the most taxing adjustment for me was a loss of community. All my life, I’ve lived less than five min-

utes away from most of my friends. This was not the case in San Francisco. Upon my arrival, I barely knew anyone. Even after a few weeks in, when I started to form a community at work, many social events weren’t feasible due to the size of the city; I couldn’t expect friends who had to commute two hours from Eastbay or an hour and a half from Palo Alto to be able to hang out on any given Tuesday night. And with busy, often hectic schedules at work, events had to be planned days in advance. So what was I to do? Being in a new place, I wanted to spend my summer exploring and seeing what it was like to actually live in a city. But in the early weeks of my program, with whom was I to explore? The initial recommendations for what to do in the city presented me with a pair of probSWARTHMORE REVIEW

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lems. Firstly, almost all the recommendations for things to do were 21 plus. Whether it was a bar (obviously), a cool concert venue, or even an avante garde play, you needed an ID to get in. Even if I was 21 or had a decent fake, I still didn’t have the money with my measly intern salary to be going out regularly in the most expensive city in America. With an empty wallet, no fake, and no neighbors I could call friends, I turned to Tinder. What exactly was I looking for? A relationship, a friend, a hookup? All I knew was that I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted people with whom to go to museums or hole-in-the-wall restaurants. I wanted busy Saturday schedules. Most of all, I wanted to know that I could find friendship far away from home. This need for companionship was only heightened by my self consciousness. As a semi-fledged adult who’s still not always comfortable going to certain events or places alone, I craved company. I wanted to go to all the art museums in the city but I didn’t want to be staring at Calder’s mobiles slowly twirling at SFMOMA alone.

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If I was looking for companionship, then why Tinder, traditionally a hook-up app, and not some other, friend-based app? I knew of few apps for meeting strangers other than Tinder, the most popular, but even if I knew of some great

What exactly was I looking for? A relationship, a friend, a hookup? All I knew was that I didn’t want to be alone.

alternative, I’m still not sure I’d use it for another reason: shame. This shame may represent a personal character flaw, but something about using a friend making app just seemed wrong to me. I’d always been able to make friends before, so why do I need an app explicitly for friend making? It felt below me. Almost all the single people I know use Tinder, but I don’t know anyone who at least openly admits to using a friend making app. This may seem counterintuitive, given that I needed to make friends—and was using Tinder for that purpose—but it just seemed almost embarrassing to me to use a friend making app. So, I ended up going on a handful of dates. We saw the Warhol’s of SFMOMA and the Ed Hardy exhibit at the de Young. We watched dogs prance through Alta Plaza Park, flower children roller skating performances, and middle aged men play 1890’s rules baseball. I got to see parts of the city I wouldn’t have otherwise and mostly enjoyed myself. That all being said, the dates were not without some awkwardness. Even when things were smooth there was an inherent awkwardness in potentially mismatched intentions. Some people I went on dates with were genuinely looking for a long term relationship, and knowing all I wanted was to hang out in a park for an afternoon made me feel a little guilty. This guilt wasn’t eased by the fact I never saw anyone a second time. Still, I have no regrets. I never felt self conscious on the dates. They allowed me to avoid my fears and provided solace from the anxiety that I couldn’t survive in a new city alone. Those early weekends when I was out by myself, scrolling through Snapchats and Instagram posts from friends hanging out across the coast, I was doubtful I’d be able to make it in SF. Just being with someone, regardless of the context, assuaged much of this anxiety. They gave me confidence. Ultimately, everything turned out fine, but I couldn’t help but wish there had been some other structure in place for me to meet people. If I’m in a similar situation next summer, I don’t know what I’ll do. I might try to find local organizations like a book club, a bocce league, or even a synagogue. If I fail to find community in any of these, would I turn back to Tinder? Probably. I don’t have too many solutions in mind, but as cool as the internet is, I don’t think an app—whether for dating or for friend finding—is the answer. I don’t want to sound like an angry Boomer complaining about modern technology. But at least this time, for this 20-something, it feels like there should be a better way. u

Rome and Quito, 2019 Photo Essay by Sarah Weinshel

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he streets behind the camera are silent. The motorcycles and cars do not honk and whir. The sellers on the sidewalk do not advertise their fruits and snacks, and we cannot overhear the conversations of the crowds squeezing onto trams, trains, and buses. A street packed with people sitting on barriers and benches on an early spring evening looks quiet, calm, and empty when the ground is cropped out of the frame and only the building facades make the shot.

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The streets behind the camera take on new smells. Bright white walls with electric blue skies smell fresh in photographs, bags of trash unseen in doorways. Peeling paint smells dusty and decaying, overpowering flowering plants around the corner. The pungent raw fish and empanadas and fresh picked fruit dull down when they just look like small spots below a looming building.

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I love the lies of street photography. Buildings become fantasies, unrealistic and unlivable dreams of beautifully decaying old apartments with a balcony overlooking a square in Rome. Peeks down hilly streets with mountains looming behind in Quito seem much more idyllic when looking at a print or screen instead of trudging up them. It is impossible to realistically capture an experience, to realistically capture the smell of dust and the whirring of cars. Now, whenever I look at old photographs, the memories are imprinted with new sensations. With the feeling of the sharp edge of the photo paper pressing into the pads of my fingers, the careful avoidance of ruining the perfect sheen of the drying ink. With the warmth of my laptop sitting on my legs, the clack of keys as I click from photo to photo manifest in the pixels. u

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Cape Town, South Africa by Shayla Smith

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FICTION&POETRY FICTION

My Favorite by Grace Griego

Ugly. Mary slammed together glue, red and pink glitter, and a variety of cut out hearts onto a red card and flashed a big smile. She wiped the sweat from her brow and admired her masterpiece, leaving glitter smeared across her forehead. She dusted off her overalls and worked up the courage to approach Max. Max was surrounded by his friends, but recess was almost over and this was her chance. Mary shook her head and marched over to him. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Max!” She managed to squeak out. Max looked her over, up and down, and gave her an awkward half smile in return. “Uh, thanks,” he said. Mary giggled to herself, and the bell rang. She raced back to the classroom and with each step she took, her heart soared a little higher. After Mrs. Evans began to lecture the class on geography, Mary quickly became bored and asked to go to the bathroom. Mrs. Evans sighed but gave her the bathroom key, and Mary went on her way. She skipped towards the bathroom but heard Max’s voice coming from nearby the water fountains. In a giddy panic, she hid around the corner and tried to make out what he was saying. “That’s so gross!” a boy’s voice rang out. “I know, I mean talk about bad luck. Out of all of the girls in our class, it had to be Mary who asked you to be your Valentine,” another boy said. “God, I know. She’s nice and all, but Mary’s really ugly,” Max said. They all laughed and walked back to the classroom. Mary said nothing. She continued her walk to the bathroom at a

significantly slower pace. She dragged her feet on the dirty white floor and looked up at the mirror. She stared at her reflection. It stared back at her.

“Mom?” Mary called. “Mom!” “Yes, yes, darling I’m coming!” The Mother walked in, her bright red heels being the first sound to grace the kitchen floor. She wore a black and white polka dot dress that cinched around her waist, showing off her hourglass figure. Her matching golden hair was pinned up, forming small curls against her pale face. Her ruby red lips were split wide and blinding white teeth shone between them. She ran over to her daughter and picked her up by her armpits, placing sloppy kisses on the crown of her head. The little girl squealed in delight, and The Mother laughed against the golden sunrise of her daughter’s head. She set her down on the edge of the white marble countertop. “Mommy! I can’t see it!” the little girl whined. The Mother gently tapped her tiny nose that was dusted with freckles and smiled. “That’s because it’s a surprise! You don’t get to see it until it’s done.” The little girl groaned and splayed herself out on the countertop. Her bright pink dress engulfed her as though she were a piece of a cookie dropped in a glass of milk, never to be seen again. “But Mom! How much longer?” “The timer will go off when it’s ready, Mary! You just have to have a little patience.” Mary groaned, and The Mother let out a light, airy laugh. “Here, I’ll tell you what.” The Mother leaned down to be at eye level with her daughter, “You can pick out any one from my collection, and I’ll tell you all about it!” SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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The little girl began to bounce up and down on the counter, her socked feet swinging. The Mother smiled. Mary flew off the countertop like a baby bird jumping out of its mother’s nest. She raced over to the wall next to the pale green oven and looked up at the matching display shelves that hung on the white walls. Various feminine human faces hung on small hooks and stared back at her. She marched across the floor, peeking into each shelf trying to make her choice. Finally, she planted her feet in front of a little girl’s face. She had small brown eyes, a dusting of freckles, and wore a tight-lipped smile. It looked uncomfortable but undeniably pretty. The eyes looked vacantly at Mary. The Mother walked up beside Mary. “Ah,” she said. “This is the one you want to hear about?” Mary nodded her head up and down. “I like this one! It looks kind of like me!” “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” She gently took the face out of the display case and held it in her hands. “This was actually the first face I ever made.” Why don’t you give us a real smile? “I was your age when it happened. We were all placed in Mrs. Smith’s class with the rainbow carpet. Playtime had finally come around, and I raced across the room like I was a little rocketship. I pretended that I was an astronaut on a top secret mission for America! My friend, Cynthia, pretended to be an alien monster from the moon.” She laughed at the memory. “She tackled me to the ground, and I let out an absolutely horrid laugh. Really, it was terrible. It was so loud and had ugly snorts in it. My neighbor John was sitting nearby when it happened. ‘You know, you have a really ugly laugh,’ he said. I didn’t know how to respond but he kept going anyway. ‘You have really weird teeth, too, you know? Like a shark or something.’ He laughed. I turned to Cynthia for help, but she was laughing too. She had such a beautiful laugh. The kind that sounds like little bells are ringing and it takes your breath away.” The Mother sighed. She ran her fingers along the small mouth of the face. “That’s why there’s stitching here. You see?” she showed the seam to Mary. “That way, whenever I found something funny, I wouldn’t scare anyone with my horrid teeth and my ugly laugh. Not even on picture day when the photographer insisted I show my teeth. ‘Why don’t you give us a real smile?’ he asked. My lips stayed sealed in this light grin. See how gentle it is? Look, isn’t it pretty?” She pushed the face closer to her own daughter’s. Mary’s eyebrows scrunched up in the middle of her forehead as she looked up at her mother. “I don’t get it—I love your laugh!” The Mother kissed her head. “Of course you do, darling.” She put the small chubby face away and shut the glass doors. “How about another one?” Mary stopped in front of another face. This one had rosy cheeks, a sprinkling of freckles, brown eyes, and a pretty smile. But the eyes looked off. The face obviously had a smile, but the eyes did not show this. “Why does this one 24

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look so scared?” Mary asked. Calm down! The Mother opened the case gently and let out a small sigh. “I had to use this one a lot over the years. The first time I needed it was in fourth grade. My body had started to change as yours will eventually, and I had to wear a bra. The straps had started to slip off my shoulders while I worked and the boy who sat behind me in geometry, Fredrick, reached forward and snapped them. The snapping sound traveled throughout the whole classroom and I flinched, dropping my pencil. I was mortified. I remember being so mad at Fredrick. I turned right around in my seat and raised my hand to slap him, actually!” The Mother let out a small giggle.

“She bears just the right amount of embarrassment, but still appears sensible. She wears a smile to show that she’s not bothered, and it’s still pretty. But her eyes are just a little defiant.” “His words stopped me dead in my tracks, though. ‘Jesus, calm down! You look like a pig right now!’ He was right. I had started to gain weight, and I had a nasty habit of flaring my nostrils whenever I got mad. That’s when I learned you just can’t get mad about these things, you know? No one wanted to see an angry, ugly girl. That’s why I made this one.” She ran her fingers along the cheeks of the face. “She bears just the right amount of embarrassment, but still appears sensible. She wears a smile to show that she’s not bothered, and it’s still pretty. But her eyes are just a little bit defiant. Just a little bit challenging, you see?” Mary stared into the face’s eyes. The face stared back.

Mary scrunched her eyebrows again but said nothing. She got up and stepped away from the pale green display shelves. She looked over all of the faces hanging up. Some had green eyes, others have blue, a few had brown, and one even had gray. Some had small, thin lips. Others had full lips. Some looked like Mary. “Which one were you wearing when you met Dad?” She asked. The Mother picked up a face from the hook and cradled it. This one has pearly skin. Bright green eyes that sparkle like emeralds. Unnaturally white teeth. No freckles. “God, it took me ages to make this face. I had to file the teeth down just perfectly, I had to get the best shade of green for the eyes, and most of all, I had to get rid of the splatter of freckles I had on my face.” Mary lightly touched her own cheeks. “I wore this face for nine years, if you can believe that!” The Mother said. Mary kicked at the tiled floor and shifted her weight around. “Which one was your favorite one?” she asked. “My what?” “Your favorite one? Which one did you like the best out of all of these faces?” Mary looked up at The Mother expectantly. “Oh, sweetie pie, my favorite isn’t up there at all,” she cooed. “My favorite was the one I wore during the day while your father was at work.” “Okay, which one is that?” “The one where I don’t wear a face at all.” I love you. The Mother would always take off her face while her husband was away at the firm. She would hang it up on one of her cabinets and spend the day however she pleased. As long

as she got dinner on the table and all the cleaning done by the time her husband, The Father, returned, she could do whatever she wanted. This mainly consisted of singing—or at least she wanted to sing. The Mother had to work her way up to this, as her husband thought she had a terrible singing voice. The Mother started off small, humming little tunes. She would do this all day long. What The Mother didn’t know was that she had an audience. The postwoman came by at the same time every day and always heard a wonderful melodic voice. She would smile to herself every time she heard this sweet sound coming from the pale yellow house on 6th Street. Eventually, the postwoman named the singing woman Hummingbird in her head. She then began to wonder about Hummingbird: was she alone in that house? What was her name? Did she sing too, or only hum? When the humming began to sound more melancholy, the postwoman worried about Hummingbird. Was she okay? Hummingbird was humming an old crooner song while washing the dishes when she heard a ring at the front door. She took off her pale green gloves and went to answer the door. She opened the door but was met with silence for a beat. That’s when her hands flew to her face, or lack thereof. She had completely forgotten to put her face back on. Hummingbird turned to run but the postwoman reached out and grabbed her wrist. She smiled at Hummingbird.

Eventually, the postwoman named the singing woman Hummingbird in her head. She then began to wonder about Hummingbird: was she alone in that house? “So, Hummingbird, do you just hum or can you sing too?” the postwoman asked. Hummingbird smiled her first genuine smile in decades. After that, the postwoman would come in every day after delivering the mail and have tea with Hummingbird. They chatted lightly about their lives and fit into each other comfortably, like a lost mitten had finally found its other pair. Hummingbird would sing for the postwoman, and the postwoman would applaud loudly and hug her after her performance. She was so good at hugging, Hummingbird named her Koala in her head. Hummingbird learned that Koala really liked old romantic soul music and learned a special song just for her. One day, Koala came in and handed Hummingbird a small box. It was wrapped in red wrapping paper. “What’s this?” Hummingbird tore it open. It was a small toy rocket ship. “You always said you wanted to be an astronaut when you were little, and I figured I can’t bring you to the moon, but I don’t think that matters since you send me to the stars with SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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one laugh.” Hummingbird let out a loud snort-filled laugh and wrapped her arms around Koala. She smiled into her shoulder. “I have something for you too,” she whispered into her shoulder. “Do you now?” Koala giggled and kissed Hummingbird’s neck softly. Hummingbird cleared her throat and began to sing a soft, sweet melody. “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day, When it’s cold outside, I’ve got the month of May” Hummingbird and Koala began to sway in each other’s arms. “Well I guess you’d say, What can make me feel this way?” Hummingbird continued to sing softly into Koala’s ear. “My girl, my girl, my girl.. Talkin’ ‘bout my girl, my girl” “I love you,” Koala whispered into Hummingbird’s shoulder. Then the sound of a suitcase hitting the floor brought them both back down to earth. The Father had come home from work early. Nothing “Mom?” Mary lightly tapped The Mother’s shoulder. “Come on! I wanna hear about you not wearing a face!” The Mother shook herself out of old memories and turned back to Mary. She gripped the face tightly as she hung it back in place. “Now, now. There’s no use in talking about things that don’t matter—”

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“Are you wearing a face right now?” “What?” “You must be,” Mary turned away from The Mother and wrapped her arms around herself. “What do you really look like Mom?” Mary whipped around and gently grabbed The Mother’s face in her palms. The Mother sighed. “You want to hear about what happened when I did take off my face? Fine. I’ll tell you.” Mary started caressing the smooth skin of The Mother’s face. No acne. No wrinkles. No freckles. “I started wearing faces when I was young. I asked my mother just as you’ve asked me, and she helped me make the first face after the whole situation in Kindergarten. I wore faces all through elementary and most of middle school. In eighth grade, I met James. James was the new kid at school and had just moved to town so he didn’t have any friends yet. The teacher made him sit by me. He said he liked my NASA shirt. We became friends pretty fast. I would help him with his math homework, and he would sneak me into R rated movies in return.” She giggled, lost in happy memories. “No one had ever liked me before. Not in the way James did. He was incredibly kind and sweet to me. He knew just what to say to make me laugh. He offered his shoulder to cry on. I was scared of how quickly I was falling for him. He was falling fast for me, too. I still remember my first kiss. It wasn’t like how the movies say it is at all! He moved too quickly and bumped into my nose, and I’m pretty sure I bit my tongue. We both laughed it off. He was very gentle the second time around. He ran his hands along my face and

Mary looked up at the faces and stared at them. She looked at their eyes. They looked back at her.

stared deeply into my eyes. He asked if I was ready. I said yes and he kissed me softly. I was so happy.” The Mother stopped Mary from caressing her face and held her small hands in her own. “But then he noticed. He ran his hands along my jaw and frowned. ‘Why do you wear this?’ he asked me. I told him I had to. He shook his head and gave me light kisses along my jaw. ‘You can show me. I won’t be disappointed. I promise.’ I started to say no, but he didn’t ask this time. He just took. He tore my face off and looked at me. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. I could see the disgust in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong. ‘Nothing.’ he said. The next day in school I heard all sorts of nasty rumors about what I really looked like. James wouldn’t meet my eyes.” The Mother looked down at her lap and sighed. “...Mom?” Mary asked cautiously. “I’m fine, dear. That’s just the way things are, sweetheart,” The Mother smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes. “As you’ve heard, these faces will help you.” “But Mommy—” The sound of the oven timer cut Mary off. You’re beautiful The Mother dusted off her dress and went over to the oven to turn it off. Mary looked up at the faces and stared at them. She looked at their eyes. They looked back at her. She wrinkled her nose as the smell of charcoal and sulfur assaulted her nose. The Mother put on her red oven mitts and pulled out the tray. “Mom? I-I don’t think I want one anymore.” Mary stuttered out. “What?” The Mother breathed out a light and airy laugh. “Of course you do! You made it. Go on and look at it.” She bent down to show Mary her new face. Mary slowly started sliding back and gripped her small hands into tiny fists. “It doesn’t look anything like me,” she whispered out. It

was a face Max would like. Tears had begun to cling to her eyes and her nostrils flared. “Shhh, shhhh, Mary. Don’t cry now, come on. This one was made just for you.” The Mother attempted to calm her child and put down the new face to cool on top of the pale green oven. She reached out to her child. “No!” Mary suddenly shrieked and turned to run away. She slipped on her bright blue socks and sprawled on the clean floor, trapped in a sea of pink. The Mother sighed and stepped on her dress, keeping her down. “Mary, please stop this.” The Mother reached her hands out to cradle Mary’s face. Mary’s arms and legs swung wildly. In her violent tantrum, Mary accidentally hit The Mother. The Mother’s face flew across the room and landed on the kitchen tiles with a loud clatter. The face had shattered. The Mother stopped in place. “Mommy?” Mary looks up at her mom. “Mommy, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to I swear, I’m so sorry, Mommy I—” teardrops hit Mary’s cheek. She covered her real face with her hands and shook violently. Mary watched her mom weep. She had never seen her mother cry before and didn’t know what to do. Mary cautiously walked towards her mother, sat on her lap, pushed the hair away from her real face, and gave her a light kiss on her nose. She quieted and took her hands away from her real face. “I think you’re beautiful, Mommy.” Mary’s mom hugged her daughter tightly and wiped away her tears. Mary did the same for her. u

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POETRY

Kyoto Horror Show by Chili Shi

Things are going darkly I think I pull on the black strings of sugar stork eyes yellow with teeth. I compose this smushed smattered mess—say: remember me splayed and gunky on the sidestreet? I want neon prose blurred semi-automatic rifle I want you to shoot. My sister says you’re using me, my sister says Australian Christmases are just as good. In the stork I see infinite black Kyotos infinite muggy curb corners peopled by ninearmed men exhaling morning glories: storied glory always in The Past, that watchful saturnine eye. I’d go back and hide in the walls of acid-flowers, petals curl to snow-flurry. All poetic shape-smell too bright too jealous in fetal color: I’m alive alive alive— You gesture for me to shut up. I put my organs in the pillowcase in alphabetical order and confess my shame into purpled skin. The poem exists in self-flaying. When I zip nine skein of skins together you thank me for bringing a burrito. Sure, I say, what scary-starred altar do you pray at? Which bruised bashful god concocts your cauliflower violence? The underside of my toes bleed.

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BOOKS REVIEW

Born to Write (Like Rick Riordan Pandering to Young Adults)

BORN TO RUN by Bruce Springsteen Simon & Schuster 528 pages | $19.80 (hardcover)

Bruce Springsteen’s almost-camp autobiography

by Dylan Clairmont

ummers at Swarthmore are highly conducive to, at the very least, brushing against madness, maybe exchanging pleasantries with him, elbowing him in the jaw, and, in rare cases, deciding to suck each other off and getting way too attached afterwards. In that sense, it’s predictable. The way this madness manifests, however, can be less certain: destroying brain cells at track-functions you aren’t welcome at and certainly aren’t welcome doing poppers at, deciding to drop everything and begin your career as Swarthmore’s best undiscovered Five Below painting supply artist, reading an over-500 page autobiography from none other than old Brucey that just happened to be left around in the Barn apartment you’re staying in.

I’m not proud of the fact that I read 406 pages of an over-500 page autobiography by Bruce Springsteen. In fact, I’d go so far as saying I’m disgusted with the choice. I wish I could say I wasn’t proud of the fact that I read an over-500 page autobiography by Bruce Springsteen, but that would necessitate me having read all over-500 pages. What I can say is that I’m not proud of the fact that I read 406 pages of an over-500 page autobiography by Bruce Spring-

steen. In fact, I’d go as far as saying I’m disgusted with the choice. Nevertheless, it happened, and I’m here to report on it so you don’t have to do the belaboring task of reading all over-500 pages, or, God-forbid, listening to the audiobook narrated by, you guessed it, good old Bruce. No line better captures the tone of this book than, “I am alienating, alienated and socially homeless… I am seven years old.” By page 15 of this, again, over-500 page autobiography, Bruce has already said all that needed to be said. I will say that I find this line to be absolutely genius, and if Bruce was just a tad bit campier, I would mark him as a genius. Unfortunately, camp it is not. Bruce says this line, and many others, with complete and utter sincerity and earnestness, regardless of how absurd they sound. Another one of these one-liners that stuck out to me was when Bruce talked about his teenage horniness, a topic that was given way more time than anyone really asked for. He expresses himself, as always, with complete earnestness, when mentioning the Beatles: “In 1964, there were no more magical words in the English language (Well… maybe except ‘Yes, you can touch me there’).” Was that really necessary, Bruce? Sentences like the two I just mentioned are the backbone of this autobiography, and are what convince me that there was not actually a ghost-writer. In fact, Bruce is way too caught up in his prowess as the greatest American songwriter to ever feel as though another could do his story the justice it so greatly deserves. Whether or not that is a good thing I will leave up to you all.

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The chapter titles themselves appear to be setting up little sketch-comedy skits, but then develop with total seriousness in a way that is—almost at the expense of Bruce—comedic. I feel like this is a case where I’m laughing at Bruce rather than with him, however. With titles like “THE ITALIANS” (all caps), I’m expecting some Sopranos-style theatrics, but get left with Bruce talking way too much about how his Italian grandmother living in the living room of his childhood home had such a profound effect on the budding all-star talent of Bruce Springsteen. It takes roughly 180 pages for Bruce to actually get to the point. It is here that he describes the point at which he begins his first record, at the age of 22, and I began the journey into Bruce’s musical career. It takes another 40 pages or so for Bruce to get to the part where he’s made it. This isn’t to

No line better captures the tone of this book than, “I am alienating, alienated and socially homeless... I am seven years old.” I find this line to be absolutely genius, and if Bruce was just a tad bit campier, I would mark him as a genius.

say that Bruce should’ve jumped straight to where he was big and famous and happening, but the pompous assholeness of the fame could’ve been devoid from the first 220 pages and I would’ve been happier for him at that point. In other words, given that Bruce is writing from the perspective of God’s best new thing since the time he was birthed in the great state of New Jersey, his record deal at 22 was just an inevitable event that did not need 180 pages to play out. 30

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It is abundantly clear that Bruce is taking himself way too seriously with this project. All descriptions are laborious, fun is more or less completely absent, and it’s hard to actually relate to or connect with Bruce in any meaningful way. Rather than capturing the magic of his music, or even a more vague sense of wonder and awe of hearing from someone who made it to the point that he is now an American staple, I left this experience thanking God that I wasn’t a pretentious rock star wannabe has-been. I will say that prior to the monumental task of attempting to read all of “Born to Run,” I had listened to little of Bruce’s discography outside of the classics. The only reason I even decided to pick it up was the fact that I was on a bit of a rock kick this summer, watching every single Netflix “rockumentary” and earlier reading Patti Smith’s “Just Kids,” an autobiography that, unlike this one, I would highly recommend. I did decide that I would listen to Bruce’s discography as it developed in the book, and I am happy to say that I feel as lukewarm about his music as I do about his writing — “Spirit in the Night” is shaping up to be one of my most played songs on Spotify over the past six months, though, so that’s something. “Born to Run” is wrought with over-capitalization, way too many parentheses, and nouns-broken-up-with-hyphensthat-are-so-long-they-end-up-extending-more-than-threelines-at-once-in-a-way-that-is-so-convoluted-that-it-tooka-lot-of-planning-for-me-to-be-able-to-recreate-in-a-waythat-actually-worked. It reads like Bruce is trying to emulate the next Percy Jackson spinoff, with the only mythological God being Himself. That being said, I did get a good amount of tweet material having read “Born to Run,” and ultimately can’t say with any confidence that I would’ve spent my time doing anything better. So for that, I thank Bruce, and I wish him the best in all of his future endeavors (which hopefully will not include a part two to this thrilling anthology).

◆

REVIEW

We Have So Much Time, We Have All Night A review of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot

THE IDIOT by Elif Batuman Penguin Books 432 pages | $19.17 (hardcover)

by Amal Haddad

here is a passage in Elif Batuman’s 2017 novel “The Idiot” in which Selin, our protagonist, describes an isolated, repetitive stretch of her first winter at Harvard. “I won four pounds of cashews in a raffle,” Batuman writes. “For a couple of days I skipped lunch and dinner and just ate cashews. Every night I read until four, then slept until the alarm went off at eight. After morning classes, I slept more and then went to more classes. The days took on a lurid, nightmarish quality, like they were all part of some long unbroken thing, and even though it was disorienting and gave me a constant headache, it was also exhilarating, and I didn’t really want it to end or change.” In the novel “Conversations with Friends,” Sally Rooney’s protagonist Frances speaks of a similar feeling as she sequesters herself in the University of Dublin library, writing for hours under the fluorescent lights without pausing to eat. In Donna Tartt’s novel “The Secret History,” the narrative spins a large stretch of prose in which Richard walks back and forth between his job and unheated lodgings in a brutal Vermont winter, sick and delirious and utterly alone. These three books have little in common but for their first person narration and early collegiate setting. “The Secret History” is set in some timeless 50’s/80’s amalgamation, “The Idiot” in 1995 at the dawn of the internet, and “Conversations” in contemporary Ireland. Each has its own frame of time, but echoes how the quality of time itself seems to change when you’re young and self-serious and fixated on some slightly depressive inner life. “The Idiot,” though, stands out, certainly not in small part because I read it first in my senior year of high school and then listened to Batuman’s bizarre deadpan rendition of the audiobook a year and a half later in March and early April of my freshman spring at Swarthmore. I would go to my dull four hour shift at interlibrary loan in McCabe (from which I was recently unceremoniously fired--reader, it was my fault) and listen to Batuman’s lilting, unselfconscious narration as I shifted through warped microfiche or out of order jazz vinyls or whatever obscure book it was that some kid from University of Scranton wanted, and then I would lie in the grass on the stupid hill behind stupid Willets, or walk to Essie’s for my customary meal of spicy beef ramen, strawberry

Pocky, and Diet Coke and feel sorry for myself. In her review of “The Idiot” for NPR, Annalisa Quinn calls the book “both pointless and playful [...] like a long dream.” The prose reads like that of a sparse, fact after fact after fact short story in some up-and-coming literary magazine, but Batuman carries this on for 500 pages. It possesses some hard-to-define quality of memory—like reading your own journal, or describing your own dream back to yourself a few hours after waking up. It is an autobiographical novel, but lacks any judgement or self-deprecation. In an interview,

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Batuman speaks of writing half a draft of “The Idiot” a few years out of college and then coming back to it decades later, amused by how ashamed she had been, how desperate to distance herself from the youth of a few years previous. Returning to the manuscript as an adult, Batuman envelops us in Selin’s circular, bizarre inner life without making a value

“The Idiot” possesses some hardto-define quality of memory— like reading your own journal, or describing your own dream back to yourself a few hours after waking up. judgement or asking us to do so. In fact, she steers us away from such analysis. Selin is a daughter of Turkish immigrants, 6’1”, fascinated by language and its gaps, and unsure of what classes to take or what posters to hang on her wall during her first year at Harvard. She ends up in introductory Russian, acting out scenes from a language learning short story called “Nina in Siberia” with the object of her affection/confusion/etc., a senior named Ivan. Ivan is transparent, and something of a shithead, but Batuman would not have us for a second doubt the depths of Selin’s emotions, or laugh at her. “The Idiot” rings true in its examination of being young and self-isolating and constantly trying to narrativize your life, and of not understanding how the people around you think about the world. But what is most marvelous about the book, I think, is its sense of time. Selin has more of it

What is most marvelous about the book, I think, is its sense of time. Selin has more of it than she knows what to do with. One thing happens after another; for the first time in her life, as it goes when you are eighteen and in your first year of college, Selin’s time is her own, but unlike her busy peers, Selin elects to fill it with quite a lot of nothing.

than she knows what to do with. She sleeps, and reads Russian literature, and writes an elaborate magical realism short story. She thinks of Ivan, her linguistics class, or “Nina in Siberia” and goes for long walks in Boston in a peacoat that she buys because it reminds her of Gogol. One thing happens after another; for the first time in her life, as it goes 32

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when you are eighteen and in your first year of college, Selin’s time is her own, but unlike her busy peers, Selin elects to fill it with quite a lot of nothing. Batuman’s wielding of time as a literary device is in turn both comforting and dizzying. In the latter half of the book, when Selin has travelled to a small Hungarian village to teach English for the summer, she reflects: I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.

I thought of this quotation constantly last spring, and in retrospect it is irresistible to narrativize the way Selin does-weeks spent neglecting my readings and slacking off at my

job and listening to audiobooks in the grass. Then: the Phi Psi leak, the sit-in, the distinct feeling I had as it was all happening that I would surely never experience something like that again in my life. For most of the book, we follow Selin’s routine: Russian class every day, lunch with her friend Svetlana, taking the subway into Boston to haphazardly teach ESL, reading in her dorm. NPR is apt in calling it “pointless” and dreamlike. There are events in her life that strike us, but they are spread out between stretches of a monotonous Ivy League existence. In Hungary, Selin’s host sister says to her, “‘We have so much time. we have all night.’ It made such a strong impression on me when she said that. Just for a moment, as if in a flash of lightning, I seemed to glimpse some unseen vista stretching out before me and opening in all directions before it went dark again.” Inevitably Selin’s time grows dark, and it somehow, always, spirals out of control, though she has more power over it as an undergrad than she’s ever had or likely ever will. Rating: I still can’t f---ing believe “Less” got the Pulitzer over this.

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MUSIC REVIEW

Critical Thinking, Critical Mass Singing and researching medieval and Renaissance music by Reuben Gelley Neuman

uns exalt the Virgin Mary’s vagina. Goats fart. A thousand deaths equal a thousand orgasms. These are images from three songs we’ve sung in Critical Mass, Swarthmore’s medieval and Renaissance vocal ensemble, a student-run group coached by Assistant Professor of Music James Blasina. These songs, both sacred and secular, span from the 12th through 16th centuries, and are part of a genre of classical music popularly known as “early music.” Early music is generally defined as European music from the Renaissance (c. 1400-1600) and medieval (c. 500-1400) eras, but the term is overly broad, misleading, and even tone-deaf. Early music, like all music, comes from particular times and places: fully realized societies just as complex as our own. Calling medieval and Renaissance music “early music”

By erasing the cultural specificity of medieval music, the term “early music” reinforces its image as elitist. commits multiple erasures: first, of the cultural specificity of that music, based on era and country, and second, of all the non-European music that was created before 1600. I say created, not “written” or composed, because cultures around the world have had various relationships to musical notation and composition. What Westerners think of as “musical notation” was developed over the centuries in medieval and Renaissance Europe and is one among many systems of notation. By erasing the cultural specificity of medieval music, the term “early music” reinforces its image as elitist. It is true that early music—even more than classical music as a whole—is

an art form largely consumed and appreciated by the American and European elite. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, most of the medieval and Renaissance music that survives was written by and for the elite; only those with money could actually produce musical manuscripts. And who else had money but the crown and the church? When you think of medieval music, the first thing that comes to mind might well be the church: a procession of monks singing Gregorian chant, hitting themselves on the head (Monty Python, anyone?). We think this world was entirely dominated by men, and that this patriarchy extended to the medieval conception of God, too. Both of those beliefs are largely true, but we see a more complex picture looking at “O quam preciosa,” a chant written—for female singers— by German abbess and mystic Hildegard of Bingen (10981179). (Find a good recording on Spotify or YouTube by the medieval music group Sequentia.) Here’s medievalist Bruce Holsinger’s translation of the song’s beginning, from his book Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: “O how precious is the virginity of this virgin who has a closed gate, and whose womb holy divinity suffused with its warmth, so that a flower grew in her. / And the son of God came forth like the dawn through her secret. / Hence the tender shoot, which is her son, opened paradise through the cloister of his room. / And the son of God came forth like the dawn through her secret.” When Critical Mass sung “O quam preciosa” last semester (with sopranos and altos on the single melodic line), we treated the emphasis on the Virgin’s anatomy largely as a joke. We knew that Hildegard was an amazing figure, a powerful and complicated woman who lived for almost 80 years—that’s ancient in medieval times. During those 80 years, Hildegard wrote religious music like “O quam preciosa,” founded not one but two convents, and wrote a moraliSWARTHMORE REVIEW

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ty play in which 16 personified Virtues fight with the Devil over Anima, the human soul. She conversed with Popes and gained a vast knowledge of medicine, created her own language and preached publicly at a time when it was forbidden for women. No wonder, then, that “O quam preciosa” validates the Virgin’s female anatomy with such religious fervor. As Holsinger argues, the chant’s architectural metaphors for the womb and the vagina—the “closed gate” and the “cloister”—evoke a feminine space of worship. The nuns would have created such a space while singing the chant in Hildegard’s abbey, and Holsinger goes even further. The nuns themselves, by filling the abbey’s cloister, also fill the womb. (A cloister is a covered walkway usually forming a quadrangle attached to a church, like the one in between the Bell Tower and Upper Tarble.) They not only reenact Christ’s passage by passing through the “secret” anatomy of the Virgin, but enter in and out of “her secret”—her vagina—by repeating the chant’s refrain: “And the son of God came forth like the dawn through her secret.” Holsinger reads an erotic subtext into the nuns’ intimate singing, but however much I may joke, medieval music is not simply about sex and God. As I’ve illustrated, Hildegard and “O quam preciosa” show a world in which women had a crucial, if largely subservient, role. In addition to the Virgin Mary, medieval Christians venerated many female saints, who ranged in importance and in the ways they defined (or undermined) stereotypes. Gregorian chant also kept the hour. Monks and nuns would perform the liturgy—religious

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rites for various saints, the Virgin Mary, or Christ—at specific times from dawn to midnight. Traveling musicians like troubadours performed love songs for a wide audience, and secular music existed in many different forms, from ballads to dances. Consider the ringing of bells for reasons as diverse as a fire alarm, a joyous wedding, and a king’s coronation, and you’ll get a sense of just how musical Christian Europe was.

The chant’s architectural metaphors for the womb and the vagina—the “closed gate” and the “cloister”— evoke a feminine space of worship. But the noise was not all divine. Our next two songs carry the sounds of an animal world; we must remember that animals, both domesticated and wild, were a far more common presence in the medieval world than in our own. Goats frolic and cuckoo birds—well, cuckoo—in “Sumer is icumen in,” a 13th century round by an anonymous composer that became a symbol of British national identity. Jumping a few hundred years later to the Renaissance, boys band together in metaphorical orgasm in “Il bianco e dolce cigno” (“The white and sweet swan”), a 1538 Italian madrigal by the composer Jacques Arcadelt. (Find recordings of these songs on YouTube by the Hilliard Ensemble and the King’s Singers respectively.)

I’ll discuss these songs more briefly, but I want to emphasize that although these secular pieces can both be read erotically, they have more nuanced connotations as well. The Middle English text of “Sumer” celebrates the coming of summer joyously but also monotonously: two parts simply repeat the words, “Sing, cuckoo, now! Sing cuckoo!” Over that, the upper voices repeat text that’s roughly translated in modern English as: “Summer’s coming / The cuckoo sings loudly…The bull starts / the goat farts / merrily sings the cuckoo!…” This text enters in succession with the same melody, a round like “Frére Jacques” or “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”—except “Sumer” is the first known round in medieval Europe. It’s also one of the first known European pieces where multiple voices sing different parts, a form called polyphony. As you can tell even from that brief excerpt, “Sumer” is a raucous song full of animal vitality. Scholars note various erotic connotations of the cuckoo, from a possible meaning of “cuckold” to a use as a warning against adultery. More generally, the cuckoo was a symbol with negative connotations, and the monotonous repetition of “Sing, cuckoo, now! Sing cuckoo!” underscores the bird’s dubious reputation. But the song also contains liturgical Latin lyrics intended for

Easter. The monk who transcribed both texts in Reading Abbey in southern England thus preserved a complex secular and religious document.

While “Sumer” may be nearly as famous as a medieval song can be today, “Il bianco e dolce cigno” was a 16th century “pop hit” that’s now mainly heard in high school choirs. Notably, the manuscript would have been read by people literate not only in English and Latin, but music, as well. The reader of the Reading Rota, as the manuscript is called, had to decipher a new form of musical notation and follow the complex instructions for singing a round. This triple literacy would have been a marker of class and education (likely in a monastery), but if “Sumer” was a folk melody before the monk transcribed it, perhaps it also transcended class boundaries. Either way, it’s pretty amazing that such a manuscript survives today with such prominence, a treasured item in the British Library. The round was sung in the opening ceremony of the 1972 Olympics in Munich, and it’s still taught to British schoolchildren today. While “Sumer” may be nearly as famous as a medieval song can be today, “Il bianco e dolce cigno,” the Italian madrigal, was a 16th-century “pop hit” that’s now mainly heard in high school choirs. Madrigals, a genre of secular, polyphonic music popular throughout Renaissance Europe, were largely sung by the nobility. A typical playful madrigal relating to love, “Il bianco” compares a dying swan’s lament to the happy demise of the lover who “dies a thousand deaths” (read: has a thousand orgasms). But as the scholar Andrew Dell-Antonio argues in an illuminating blog post on “The Avid Listener,” a madrigal like “Il bianco” might be about bromance, not just sex. “Bromance” is an anachronistic term, perhaps, but the phenomenon is the same: instead of bros watching football, bros of a certain class in Renaissance Europe sang madrigals. You can read more about the complexity of “Il bianco” in Dell-Antonio’s blog post, but his main takeaway is that “bromantic madrigal-song helped to reaffirm the social cohesion of elite men.” Today, the gender imbalance of madrigal performers has definitely changed, but I wonder if, today, singing madrigals—along with other “early music” repertoire— still helps to reaffirm “the social cohesion” of a cultural elite. I’m part of that elite, and I was one of those kids at a private high school singing madrigals. That’s how I came to be part of Critical Mass, and, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I absolutely love it. But I would be wasting my privilege if I simply sang pieces like “Sumer” and “Il bianco” without learning their complex historical contexts, which I’ve done both on my own and in classes with Professor Blasina. Next time you joke about Gregorian chant, I hope you have some context, too.

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REVIEW

The Confounding (Dis)Honesty of HTRK’s “Venus in Leo” by Sage Tesser Rhys

hile I, like many others, was enjoying my “hot girl summer,” Melbourne-based band HTRK released their latest album “Venus in Leo” in the Australian winter. I figured “Venus in Leo” would echo the conceptual albums that preceded it, “Work (Work, Work)” and “Psychic 9-to-5,” with similarly clever, obtuse, and moaning vocals, and I wasn’t disappointed. I’ve begun to suspect, however, that these trademark sounds of HTRK, though they still pervade “Venus in Leo,” substitute for a vulnerability no longer present in the music. At first listen, I couldn’t grasp the mystical analogy which pervades the album: references to astrological fate (“Venus in Leo”), arbitrary spouts of hope (“New Year’s Eve”), and predestined self-sabotage (“Venus in Leo,” “New Year’s Day”). Only in reading the few interviews available, for example, did I understand that the naïveté in “New Year’s Day” is actually supposed to be about vocalist Jonnine Standish being sixteen years old (“And I feel so high, it’s so silly, I was 16/ And I get fucked up on New Year’s Eve”), and not just an analogy for the naïveté that comes from drug-induced states. Part of the problem was that the album itself seemed unable to decide what it wanted to say. Standish’s references

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to cosmetic imperfections and physical malleability in “Mentions” (“The intimacy of makeup counters/ There’s not

At first listen, I couldn’t grasp the mystical analogy which pervades the album: references to astrological fate, arbitrary spouts of hope, and predestined self-sabotage. enough products and powders you can put on me…/ How you gonna fill unfillable?”) echo those of HTRK’s previous album, “Psychic 9-to-5” (“You’ve been lied to for years/ It’s OK/ You can know get the body you deserve/ The body of your dreams” from “The Body You Deserve”), but both seem at odds with the attitude of inescapable destiny suggested by the rest of the album’s astrological theme. Looking back, however, I’m kicking myself for trying to construct such a constrained narrative. HTRK seem to have a well-defined vision for what actually constitutes HTRK: “It’s as if you’re making a body oil... It’s got these drops of humour, drops of sadness, drops of sex,” notes Standish in the band’s interview with “The Face,” for example. This characterization does not exclude a more aimless sort of expression. When I listened to the album again without over-analyzing everything, the disordered sequencing of the stories in “Venus in Leo” suddenly wove into a sophisticated narrative. Standish opens the album with “Into the Drama,” in which she asks why she “seem[s] to fall/Into it all.../Into the drama?”, introducing what will become a recurring theme throughout the album: cyclical patterns of love and devastation. This album sounds dirtier than HTRK’s previous two releases, but while one would think that switching the sensual bass of “Work (Work, Work)” for “Venuis in Leo”’s springy, beadlike synth tracks would create a lighter emotional tone, the sulky lyrics of “You Know How to Make me Happy,” “Dream Symbol,” and a cover of Missy Elliott’s “Hit Em Wit Da Hee” show otherwise. One explanation is that the emotions plaguing Standish and guitarist Nigel Yang are

difficult enough to confront that they compose songs opposite in sound to their actual troubles: pleasantly textured, non-abrasive, and even seductive. To make sense of these troubling emotions, Standish continuously refers to herself as being affected by the “Venus in Leo,” a description of the planet Venus’s effect on a person’s astrological house (a time and location-dependent category that contains characteristics of a person, such as romantic attraction, ambitions, and happiness). Described in a seemingly contradictory manner of being one of two steadfast partners who cannot stand the thought of over-settling or waning interest on either side, the Venus in Leo is almost more in love with the process of becoming loved than she is with being consistently adored. On the one hand, these harsh ascriptions parallel the recurring self-sabotage described in several songs, such as “Mentions,” in which Standish knows this affection being shown to her is not satisfying because it lacks immediate gratification and doesn’t lead to much worth waiting for (“Even with your soft obsession/ It’s not enough attention for me/ Even with another mention/ You should’ve made a difference by now”). On the other hand, Standish lacks the most vital component of the Venus in Leo: ignorance of their plight. While the narrative is clear that Standish continues to fall madly in love before quickly being disappointed, her self-awareness (made clear by starting the album with questions of why she keeps encountering drama) should make her more likely to avoid such catastrophic romances. So why, then, would the band opt to use an analogy that presents their flaws as permanent? At first, I thought Venus in Leo was just a clever theme applied to the cyclical encounter of Yang and Standish with self-sabotage, lack of fulfilment, and self-consciousness. Then I heard an interview with Standish in which she said that “It’s not that we’re making the music that we want to

hear—it’s that we know when we’re making a HTRK song.” Her words suggest that HTRK is more concerned with fitting a stylistic archetype than creating confessional songs. If the band’s recurring conflicts are not guaranteed to be honest, how are listeners supposed to trust the plight described in their songs? While artists certainly are not required to present any of their personal conflicts in their work, lyrics explicitly describing unfulfillment suggest that the artist is describing problems from their own experience—it would be odd for an artist to appropriate a plight they know nothing about. Listening to “New Year’s Day,” one of the standout tracks, seems to exemplify this mistrust the band is creating: the familiar simple synth and guitar lines envelop Standish’s voice singing about a Jimmy who’s “out on bail without a comment to say,” a line much more likely to appear in an awkward country song than the discography of a band whose formula Standish describes as similar to making body oil. With all of this left to parse, I can only think of the postscript on Le Labo’s description of their fine body lotions which reads, “For better results, have someone else apply it on you.” This is a perfect analogy for the expectations from HTRK, who embraced their ability to sexualise songs just as well as private industry does with commodities on their 2014 EP “Body Lotion.” While HTRK has always had sexuality at the core of its songs (debut album “Marry Me Tonight” shows this in gems “Rent Boy” and “Panties”), they have largely left carnal themes outside of their music, but retained their sensual sound. However, it now seems that HTRK has subverted the trust created by their intimate themes. For a listener who might not notice the disparate qualities between the lyrical content and the band’s delivery, maybe “Venus in Leo” will bring solace. Perhaps HTRK set out to make an album which is best enjoyed when surrendered to, in which case, “Venus in Leo” is a success.

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MOVIES & TV REVIEW

Pressing Pause After Killing Eve’s First Season by Olivia Smith

hile crawling from the depths of a spiralling third season of “Riverdale” and slowing to a stop after the second season of “Big Little Lies,” I was recommended “Killing Eve,” BBC’s new thriller series written and created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Lo and behold, its first season, out on Hulu this past winter, offered me a new respite from my summer at Swarthmore, where I spent a considerable amount of time holed up in McCabe’s third floor mind-numbing microfilm corner. The second season of “Killing Eve” began airing May of this year, so, though I am a bit behind the curve, I give you my season one thoughts, praises, critiques and questions just in time for Hulu’s release of season two, which is scheduled for this December. Unlike the aforementioned shows, “Killing Eve’”s pace

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and unique plot construction did not drive me to binge consume the series. Each episode, with constant changes in location and introductions to new characters, requires a level of interest that kept me from throwing away episodes one after another. Though it focuses on an MI6-adjacent office, “Killing Eve” is nothing like the monotonous, cop-glorifying crime shows that tend to hang in a dizzying balance of constant crime and a low stakes status quo. On the contrary, the show beautifully builds a world where Eve Polastri, played by Sandra Oh, sees her mundane, routine life completely warp and collapse around her, eventually to re-form into a deeply personal hunt involving herself and Villanelle, a young bombshell of an assassin played by Jodie Comer. Villanelle, a twenty-something professional killer living it

up in Paris, gets just as much screen time as Eve as we watch her volatile yet bubbly personality unfold with each new kill. Gallivanting across the continent on assignments, Villanelle performs dark deeds only to return home as her same youthful and carefree self. Her childlike personality is skillfully performed and often highlighted by scenes with children; they seem to be the only characters who can truly connect with Villanelle. Even as viewers, we fall into fits of deception each time she doles out hints of displayed vulnerability; we end up rounding out the end of season one still unclear on exactly how and why she does what she does. Through both Eve and Villanelle, the show critiques workplace dynamics as well as misconceptions of violence. Eve spends the entire first episode convincing her male colleagues that her theories about the mythological Villanelle are worth pursuing. Meanwhile, Villanelle breaks all our expectations of a violent killer by almost always using her soft, innocent appearance to apprehend her targets. It is clear from the start that Villanelle, while violent and empty of remorse, is herself subject to violence under the threatening eye of her handler and the covert group that keeps her on their payroll. Though she appears to be lathered in effortless luxury, the show makes us understand that her violence does not take place in a vacuum, that Villanelle has much less power than she likes to let on. Eventually, we realize that some of her more rebellious choices may cost her, and worse yet, that she is trapped in a cycle that perhaps only Eve can bring to an end. Eve and Villanelle’s relationship builds initially by way of intelligence-gathering on both sides, and through display of mirrored actions and parallel behavior, the show’s creators draw unavoidable similarities between the two women. Out of a combination of fear and fascination, both develop an interest in one another as people, not simply as a suspect

In an otherwise fearful, dangerous rivalry, the need for each to comprehend the other psychologically is romanticized and mystified to levels that give me pause. and a target. This feels atypical for Villanelle, who pays little attention to her marks outside of the kill itself. When the two finally meet face to face, due to the balanced exposition of each character individually, I find myself actually comfortable with Villanelle. I end up believing her when she ensures that she will not physically harm Eve, though not because I know that Villanelle is good at heart, but rather that she enjoys the game too much. Similar to series like “You,” the Netflix original that is told from the personality of a stalker-murderer, “Killing Eve” has allowed me to better understand the villain’s perspective. Whether or not this is a

good thing is yet to be resolved. As Eve and Villanelle dig deeper, their searches start to become intensely sexualized. Villanelle buys clothes for Eve; Eve is accused of ‘getting off ’ on the chase, where she is no doubt all at once both the pursuer and the escapee. In an otherwise fearful, dangerous rivalry, the need for each to comprehend the other psychologically is romanticized and mystified to levels that give me pause as their paths cross with increasing frequency. I shiver again as I think about the names of both women: Eve indubitably holds a loose tie to her biblical archetype, and Villanelle, perhaps equivalent to the villainous snake, indeed proves herself a woman of many identities and disguises. As Eve’s work becomes more and more demanding, she is pulled farther away from her less than supportive husband, Niko, and closer still to the fantastical assassin. Is Eve being tempted by Villanelle’s forbidden fruit? I see these growing hints of sexual attraction mixed with fear and violence as ending one of two ways: either their dark relationship will escalate, resolving in a partnership wrought with violence and abuse, or Eve will continue to call bullshit on Villanelle’s attempts to cut into her emotional core, leaving Villanelle with little room to escape. What I glean from these options is sadly not optimistic, though I must remember it is always easier to be the contrarian. It would be inappropriate for the show to weave romance into the realm of terror and violence; Villanelle practically waterboards Eve, after all. Furthermore, it would be in poor taste to celebrate a lesbian relationship crafted this SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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way, when clearly in a version where Villanelle were instead either male or at least more masculine, viewers would be up in arms in an instant. Violence is no better, no purer, in a

Violence is no better, no purer, in a feminine mask, and it would be an abuse to claim as such. feminine mask, and it would be an abuse to claim as such. So far, the creators have done a good job at keeping onscreen, physical violence from being at the show’s forefront, instead centering the psychological groundwork and charac-

ter history behind it. As long as viewers are able to maintain a separation between Villanelle’s hunt and Eve’s motivation to get inside the assassin’s head, there is hope yet. The season closes with Villanelle disappeared, cut down, and more vulnerable than ever. Eve has found herself practically on her own again in her search, as the assassin network has proven to run deeper than we could have ever imagined. Stakes have risen to new heights; both women have next to nothing to lose as they enter the next season. I love a good cliffhanger as much as the next person, though I fear that, like many series do at this point, “Killing Eve” may begin to test our willingness to suspend disbelief in the coming episodes, while also straining our attempts to separate the sensual from the violently seductive. u

REVIEW

The OA: Race, Freeganism, and Science Fiction by Matthew Koucky CW: opioid addiction, death, school shooting, medical malpractice, colonial violence

hen people ask me what “The OA” is about, I never know how much detail to go into. I’m pretty sure part of it is an allegory for the opioid epidemic, except that there’s an actual death from oxycodone overdose. It also has a school shooter plotline that isn’t directly tied to the troubled teenage white boy plotline. One character’s parents are divided over his gender transition, while nobody seems to directly bother him about it at school (though he is isolated and stared at). Another character struggles with being the son of a single, immigrant, unemployed, alcoholic mother who simultaneously expects him to have a better life than her but doesn’t want him to ever leave her. He’s a gay lacrosse player. A character who doesn’t get that much screen time in the first season becomes one of the most loveable yet tragic characters by the second season. The OA (short for Original Angel), also known as Prairie Johnson, grew up as Nina Azarova, the daughter of a Russian oligarch. At age six she was rendered blind after drowning and being resuscitated. She was then sent to a school for the visually impaired in America. Shortly after arriving in the US, the Voi—a mysterious Russian crime syndicate—kill her father. Abel and Nancy Johnson, two frail suburbanites, adopt Nina, who they name Prairie. As an adult, she gets abducted by Hap—a man who purportedly researches 40

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people who have gone through near-death experiences, or “N.D.E.’s” as he says. In Hap’s lab, she and four other people die and come back to life hundreds of times as part of his experiments. Eventually, they learn that death is a window into another dimension, then they learn a series of movements to go through it (and that they need exactly five people to do these together). But before they can escape, Hap—no longer needing all five subjects to travel to the other dimension— releases The OA near a major city, where she reunites with her parents as Prairie. The first season follows Prairie as she teaches her group of outcasts—a middle-aged high-school teacher named Betty (but who goes by BBA) and four high school boys—what she learned in captivity—and reveals what caused her to be no longer blind (a restoration the series makes very clear was neither something she wanted nor something that improved her life in any significant way)—culminating in Prairie’s final death, during which her outcasts help her enter the other dimension. Half of the second season takes place there, where The OA is Nina Azarova—Prairie if she had never died and her father had never been killed. Nina is a rich woman, protected by her wealth and her boyfriend—Pierre Ruskin, a kind of mix between Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. Nothing, however, can protect The OA from Hap—in this dimension a psychiatrist—who has managed to gather his five subjects in a trial studying collective hallucination, a foolproof way to discredit any of their claims against him.

The second season also follows the people Prairie left behind—the five outcasts, now having to struggle with whether or not to believe Prairie’s story, and if anything they’d done had even worked—and a private detective who teams up with Nina Azarova and a gamer (played by Zendaya) to unlock the sinister workings of Pierre Ruskin and find a missing undocumented Vietnamese teenager. Everyone’s actions (good and bad) in The OA are a product of cultural and social systems. Although people might do horrible things—Prairie’s parents keep her locked up in their house, but only because they love her and only because doctors say she’s experiencing psychosis; BBA takes the four boys (and a friend of theirs) from their families, and a boy dies in her care, but it’s alright because they’re trying to find the OA and unlock the secrets of the universe—they all

Although people might do horrible things, they all come from a place of trying to do “the right thing,” or from trusting in other people, systems, and myths. come from a place of trying to do “the right thing,” or from trusting in other people, systems, and myths. Even Hap, the main villain of the series, is a product of the culture— he relies on scientific history to justify putting inquiry over morals, comparing Galileo’s wrongful imprisonment by the church to what might happen were the state to find out what he is doing. One hole in all this social storytelling is the trial itself. Where the rest of the show sees events and attitudes as clear products of combining social forces, Hap’s selection seems to actually be “purely scientific.” Supposedly, Hap has a single criterion for selection—having died and come back to

life—but while his subjects are of different genders, classes, and cultural backgrounds, they all happen to be white. The show never interrogates this, despite mirroring colonial medical experiments like those at Tuskegee and those that took place in American Indigenous communities into the 1990’s—which held people against their will and subjected them to supposedly-scientific forms of torture. The show fails to factor racial oppression into scientific malpractice, when the two are inextricably linked. This is not to say that the show needed to have depicted colonial violence directly, but it is to say that it sometimes falls into the same trap as The Handmaids Tale: what if colonization, but with white people? An ability to accurately analyze certain kinds of oppression while ignoring other sources of oppression or systems of values is something that haunts the show. There’s a point in Season Two where two of the boys are debating whether or not to try to find The OA, which they know will result in their death (at least in this universe). One—the “troubled white boy”—believes without a doubt that it is the right thing to do, while the other—a part-Filipino kid (nicknamed “French,” because his mother moved to the US from France and the writers of this show are really good at naming people)—has reservations. The white boy’s reason for going is that he wants his life to “mean something,” whereas French’s reason for not wanting to go is that he wants his mother and siblings, who he’s been caring for his whole life, to not die or at least not to get more depressed than they already are. The troubled kid thinks it’s because French doesn’t want to lose his full-ride to a university. Eventually, French comes around to “his senses” and goes with the rest of the group to find The OA. To be honest, this moment felt a lot like that part in Rent where Mimi sings a song to Roger (a recovering heroin addict) about how he should crappé the diem and do some heroin with her and then all their friends start to sing along SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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and then Mimi has a near-death-experience. The idea of life having meaning beyond obligations to others seems, to me at least, a very selfish idea (and obviously one that benefits people who have the privilege to shirk filial responsibilities for journeys of self-discovery). Like Rent, this series is made for the leisure class.

Despite its flaws, “The OA” is a surprising, even beautiful show. It at least tries to find a balance between characters’ origins, their sociopolitical identities, and their selves. Despite its flaws, “The OA” is a surprising, even beautiful show. It’s a show with a female hero, and it’s about teenage boys learning to be tender (which can, at times, get sickening). The visuals are gorgeous and fantastic but never unbelievable. One of the most memorable plotlines is about a middle-aged woman and her quest to find purpose and love herself, the kind of plotline often restricted to Lifetime movies. It’s one of the first shows with a trans character that manages to not make being trans his only characterization, as it attempts to do with all sorts of struggles boys encounter in high school. Even if the show fails sometimes (for example, pushing past characterization to get to “the plot”), it at least tries to find a balance between characters’ origins, their sociopolitical identities, and their selves. I can understand why people who love the show have started #SaveTheOA, a grassroots (???) movement to get

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Netflix to put “The OA” back into production after it was suddenly cancelled this summer, though nobody can reasonably say it’s either good enough or revolutionary enough to warrant this kind of response (and I certainly can’t imagine this much noise being made about a series that isn’t made by and for people with a lot of time/energy/capital on their hands). The second season is a brilliant set-up for a third season; it introduced new characters, built up still-unresolved mystery and suspense in a new universe, and ended on a cliff-hanger—with characters from the first and second universes of the show meeting in a third. Videos have circulated of groups of crazed fans doing “the movements”—the method of travel OA and her fellow research subjects developed—in Times Square, in front of Netflix headquarters, and other locations in an attempt to resurrect the show. One woman has gone on hunger strike. The solution to every problem in “The OA” is to trust in the right individuals. When this trust comes in conflict with people’s material safety or their connection to their community—a risk more commonly taken on by working class people of color—the show acts like the only reasonable course of action is to continue to trust in “the right individuals,” to go along with their plans and their highest ideals. Quite honestly, “The OA” feels exactly like something you would expect two Georgetown grads to write at a freegan retreat. It knows what class is, but it doesn’t understand when it matters. Rating: 4 expired meatballs out of 9 past-date spaghetti sauce jars; cautious recommendation, with at least 1.5 points taken off for the second season starting with racist “immigrant can actually speak English but doesn’t because they want to be accommodated for” myth. u

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Issue 25

Articles inside

Hannah Arendt, Biographical Thinking, and the Kitchen