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NOVEMBER 2019
Temporary Homes Photo Essay by Li Dong
AND... Lessons Learned from Charli XCX The Impossibility of Black Space Ralph Thayer’s Unintentional Poetry
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Contributors Alex Kingsley (she/her) is a writer, performer, stand-up comedian, and accordion maestro. You can see her stand-up and more of her work at alexjkingsley.wordpress.com. Ari Liloia (he/him) has brown hair, blue eyes, and a big smile.
Letter Policy Letters are welcome from all readers. We will not ever publish letters anonymously and we reserve the right to edit all letters for length and clarity without contacting the letter writer. Letters generally should run no longer than 1,000 words. They should be sent to jkay2@swarthmore.edu.
Bayliss Wagner (she/her) regrets her affinity for turtlenecks. Bess Markel (she/her) doesn’t know what her bio should be. Chase Smith (they/them) is a sophomore and their favorite animal is a fox. Cyndi Lai (she/her) likes girls, spaghetti. Elisabeth Miller (she/her) is majoring in English and history. Her hobbies include defending Taylor Swift and recommending podcasts that her friends never listen to. Emmett Pinsky (they/them) just finished their undergrad degree in English and American studies from T*fts university. They now live and work in New York and hope you know that all of this is in jest but is also really, really not. Eric Chen studies English literature and is attempting to graduate next spring. Eva Baron is a sophomore who really only wears stripes and wishes Sharples would serve french toast sticks more often. Inna Kimbrough (she/her) is a junior art/cogsci double major. She is staunchly pro-Sonic Youth’s “Diamond Sea” being 19 minutes long (and absolutely never any shorter). Li Dong (she/her) knows a lot about very few things. She’s scared of serious people, birds, and silence. Quincy Ponvert’s (he/him) will smile at your dog, but he won’t smile at you. Sofia Sears (she/they) is a freshman and and makes hyper-specific queer playlists in her free time. Tiffany Jones (she/her) is a self-growth enthusiast. Tristan Alston (he/him) is a sophomore studying peace and conflict and environmental studies who hopes to continue combining his passion for environmental justice and photography to address the intersection of structural racism and climate change. Tyler White, born and raised in Portland, Oregon, is an advocate, critic and humanist seeking to always understand the intersections of identity, society, and history. An environmental studies and political science major, White hopes to center the voices of the most vulnerable in hopes of crafting policy to combat climate change. Outside of the demands of an active schedule, White loves music, writing, trying new food, taking photos and the occasional run. 2
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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 we 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 SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER Tyler White FEATURES Kat Capossela PERSONAL ESSAYS Shreya Chattopadhyay PHOTO ESSAYS Li Dong FICTION & POETRY Eva Baron BOOKS Daria Mateescu MOVIES & TV Dylan Clairmont MUSIC Sage Rhys CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Lee Cohen
November 2019
Features Caught in the Middle: Lessons Learned from Charli XCX
Bayliss Wagner p. 4
Personal Essays On Moving Over 2,800 Miles Away From What Once Was
Tiffany Jones p. 7
The Impossibility of Black Space
Tyler White p. 10
REVIEWS
Books Ralph Thayer: Change of Seasons
Eric Chen p. 37
At a Loss for Words: A Review of Roget’s Thesaurus, 3rd ed.
Quincy Ponvert p. 39
Eighth Grade Dance
Elisabeth Miller p. 12
Photo Essays Temporary Homes The Return to Silence Stonington
Li Dong p. 14 Tristan Alston p. 18
Now That I Have This Plant, What Do I Do With It Memory of a Father Collection of Poetry Wildflowers
Mermaidens: A Tasting Menu of Witch Rock Inna Kimbrough p. 41
Best Ambient 2019
Ari Liloia p. 43
Bess Markel p. 23
Fiction & Poetry
Music
Sofia Sears p. 27 Eva Baron p. 30
Movies & TV “Same Dad, Different Moms”: The Moral Sentiments of Playboys and “Hustlers”
Cyndi Lai p. 46
“Good Omens”: Is it Gay? Alex Kingsley p. 49
Emmett Pinsky p. 32 Chase Smith p. 35 SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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FEATURE Caught in the Middle: Lessons Learned from Charli Charli XCX’s beautiful irony and contradictions
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n eighth grade, I made that essential leap of middle-school identity formation: declaring war against the Top 40 and hoarding “obscure” artists that no one else is allowed to like. Charli XCX was a central part of that process. A friend who spent her free time making playlists with names like “flowers & stargazing” and “ugh” had introduced her to me. Her debut album True Romance (2013), a synth-pop-punk hybrid whose cover depicts her wearing ripped black jeans and hugging her knees to her chest, made her an ideal addition to my list of artists because it was 1) self-consciously emo, 2) about romantic experiences I had never had, and thus 3) far cooler than I was. I bought it on vinyl (the record player was another critical part of this identity formation, naturally), closed my bedroom door, and blasted it so loud my parents yelled at me from the living room to turn it off. Along with other artists I accumulated, she made me feel like my sense of difference from “popular” or “normal” peers was a potential personality trait instead of just a neurosis — a point of potential pride instead of shame and embarrassment. It’s ironic, then, that at a Charli show six years after I first listened to her, I felt that I was too conventional instead of too different. In a sea of purple highlights, dramatic, thick, black eyeliner, and more mesh clothing than I’d seen in one place since 2006, I found myself entirely out of place in the
True Romance (2013) was 1) self-consciously emo, 2) about romantic experiences I had never had, and thus 3) far cooler than I was. 4
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small, general-admission Philly concert venue. It was clear that this concert had a large presence from bonafide ‘Angels,’ her vocally LGBT-predominant and affirming fan base that is ferociously supportive of her music and her collaborators on social media. The line to buy merchandise for the show’s opener, nonbinary artist Dorian Electra, extended from the lobby into the main stage area. Some of the audience members were in drag, some with hair dyed bright colors, others with elaborate costumes. Glittery face stickers and metallic blue leggings distinguished those who aimed to emulate the electropop vibes of her most recent music, in particular her album Charli, released on Sep. 19. My outfit, a white tank top and cargo pants that I had taken an hour to choose, embarrassed me in comparison. It seemed so transparently copied from current trends, so lacking of any sense of identity. I was certain that the drag queen wearing a transparent top and 5-inch pumps to my left probably had more personality in one painted toe than I had in my entire body. There’s no way you can put on a highlighter-yellow wig, plastic top and checkered pumps if you aren’t pretty damn confident. Even the Plaid Flannel Dudes (present at every small concert venue on the East Coast) looked more sure of themselves than I felt. It turns out, however, that my feeling of being caught uncomfortably between the conventional and the iconoclastic was fitting for this show. Since I started listening to her, Charli has moved from the fringes into a more precarious position. She is “one of the few artists who has a foothold on both mainstream Top 40 world and the more left-of-center underground world,” as she recently told “Pitchfork”. She made her name writing and featuring in chart-toppers like Icona Pop’s #1 hit “I Love It” and Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” and she’s recorded some of her own hits as well, such as “Boom Clap,” which was part of the original soundtrack for “The
Fault in Our Stars”. However, the majority of her thirteen collaborators on “Charli” (13 collaborators! On 15 tracks!) and her previous album Pop 2 (2017) are both decidedly ‘unorthodox’ and extremely active in the LGBT community, like rappers Brooke Candy and Big Freedia and pop singer Kim Petras. An important exception is Troye Sivan, who has become a trailblazer for gay artists in the ‘mainstream’ world. The songs on her album reflect this conflict, as she bounces between club tracks, ballads, and out-of-leftfield mixes like “Gone,” “Click,” and “Shake It,” which feature sound effects that have been described by critics as everything from “monster trucks having sex” to “someone furiously clanging on boiler room pipes.” She is open, too, about how she is conflicted and often indecisive as she navigates this apparent paradox. In “Pitchfork”’s cover story, she says she asks herself in times of anxiety, “‘Am I making art that’s right for me? Why am I still signed to a major label? Do I still care about charts? Should I still care about charts?’” At the show, my friend and I managed to squeeze into the second row of the pit. When the twinkling, robotic chimes of intro track “Next Level Charli” came on as lights onstage blinked to the beats, my excitement at being there with a friend whose love of her is equal to if not greater than mine started to shake away my doubts about whether I belonged in a crowd of bonafide ‘Angels.’ it seemed like everyone seemed to be in the same state of wonder that I was, as we stood shoulder to shoulder, shouting every lyric. The crowd went wild over “Track 10,” one of the weirdest and most brilliant pop songs in the game right now, complete with underwater bubbling noises and robotic squeals. Charli chose to play it over the original version, the radio-friendly “Blame It on Your Love (ft. Lizzo),” choosing a fan favorite over a hit. Releasing two versions of the same song is something only
“Gone” is so successful because, like many of her songs, it makes an isolating and sad experience into something strangely upbeat. Charli XCX would do. That’s indecisiveness for you. As she moved from her blow-the-roof-off-energetic songs “Next Level Charli” and “Click” to the tender ballad “I Don’t Wanna Know,” she reminded the audience of another way in which she navigates paradox. She is boisterously confident, sometimes to the point of arrogance — like near the end of the set, she announced, “I’m Charli XCX, and I am one of the best pop stars in the world.” But her songwriting is also often intensely self-conscious, with lyrics like “Hate myself, I really love you” and “Are my friends really friends now, or all they are far gone?” It reminded me of a risky Instagram post from this August, in which she wrote, “Sometimes I wake up and I love myself. Sometimes I wake up and I fucking hate myself. Sometimes I feel confident; inside and out. Sometimes I think I deserve to be a ‘bigger’ artist.” One of her most powerful performances in the show was her collab with queer icon Christine and the Queens, “Gone.” “Pitchfork” called it “the most potent song of the album” in a laudatory review, and for good reason; a line like “I feel so unstable/fucking hate these people” isn’t what you’d typically hear in the pre-chorus of a rave track that leaves the listener feeling more dancy than detached. With a booming, stomp-your-feet rhythm and unexpected dance break at the end, the song transforms a painful admission about anxiety and alienation into an anthem for everyone
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who feels left out at the party. “Gone” is so successful because, like many of her songs, it makes an isolating and sad experience into something strangely upbeat. It’s why I listen to both her party songs and her ballads as a pop-averse college student, and I suspect it’s why other people who hate pop as much as I do also love Charli XCX as much as I do. Her unapologetic self-assurance, though not present in every song, takes me out of myself a bit (my sister teases me for “only listening to
With booming, stomp-your-feet rhythm, the song transforms a painful admission about anxiety and alienation into an anthem for everyone who feels left out at the party. sad music”) and reliably gets me pumped up even when I’m feeling anxious or sad. Litanies from her blustering, menbe-damned second album Sucker (2014) would remain in my head during high school track races, drowning out my nerves, and now, when I run to escape stress instead of to win, Charli eases me into a running mood with its blend of emotional lyrics and energetic beats. I also love that some of her most vulnerable songs are dance songs, even for a crowd of alt kids. Near the end of the set, as Jay Park’s verse in “Unlock It” started playing, Charli walked off the stage and into the crowd. She wobbled slightly, smiling goofily as she climbed onto a hidden pedestal in the front of the pit. I watched as the fans around her reached out to touch her and she leaned forward to reach them. Even though two muscled
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crew members were holding her by the waist, it looked as if the crowd were surrounding her, holding her up on their shoulders, reaching out their hands to steady her if she fell. The entire crowd — Flannel Dudes and drag queens alike — mimicked her, arms waving back-forth, back-forth to the chorus of the song, energy pulsing to the tempo. I stopped thinking about what the people behind me were thinking and raised my hands in the air with one of my best friends, who, despite being a member of the LGBT community, felt just as out-of-place as I did. In the same way that Charli seemed to be drawing strength from her friend Chris, as they both belt the chorus of “Gone” in sync, I felt that I was able to fully realize my sense of unbelonging and let it go while I was with my friend and the rest of the crowd during the concert. Like Charli, we’re all paradoxes and misfits in one way or another, and perfect union with those around us is both unattainable and undesirable. Becoming comfortable in that space of uncertainty has certainly worked out for Charli and her music, as far as I’m concerned. In a social media post that came less than a month after her post about wanting to be a “bigger artist,” Charli seemed to have resolved her discontent with her in-between position: “I’ve come to a point where I feel truly happy in my unique space,” she wrote in an Instagram caption on Sep. 13. Despite her statement, I don’t trust that Charli will cease to be indecisive or ambitious. But for a moment, she appreciated her fans and the space she creates for them. When I listen to her album, I remember those few minutes during “Unlock It” and “Gone,” when I felt a sense of ease and oneness, as if the pulsating music had filled the gaps between myself and the other concertgoers. Maybe those moments are all we can hope for, when we can sing together about feeling left out, and when we can forget, just for a few minutes, why we felt that way in the first place. u
PERSONAL ESSAYS PERSONAL ESSAY
On Moving Over 2,800 Miles Away from What Once Was by Tiffany Jones
“I
feel very far away from everything that was,” reads a text message from my phone, sent out at 3:50 PM from a too-bright, too-narrow coffee shop, delivered to a group chat with friends back home around Portland, Oregon. I haven’t spoken to them since I left the PDX airport late into the night to come to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. I haven’t felt compelled to speak to them. I haven’t consciously missed them, wanted to reach out, check-in, or catch up. Meanwhile, fellow first-year students participate in these rituals with ease—speaking to friends through Facetime, texting in animated group chats as if things have not changed, and spamming social media with constant updates. I watch this, and I don’t think about the way things were at home a year ago, six months ago, or even three months ago. I watch this, and I don’t think about how I wish to feel the gentle breeze of my friends’ wide open-mouthed laughter only once more before it’s forgotten altogether. I watch this, I watch this, I watch this, and I don’t think about anything at all. I feel very far away from everything that was. Sent 3:50 PM. You are. Received 3:51 PM. H’s quick reply catches onto a spot between my trachea and lungs that I forgot existed. Catches, tugs, holds. Pausing, I am. I am far away. For a moment, my memories leave me stranded. Gone is the knowledge of where I am, where I have come from, and everywhere I have ever touched.
I have not called my mother. It is not something that we do. Brief text exchanges between my mother, my brother, and me are the only evidence of existing familial connec-
tions, and other than that, one would never infer from my silent rather than talkative hours that I even have a family back home. What does it mean to not hear each other’s voices, see each other’s faces, to crave the soothing sound of a consoling mother, the challenging eyebrows of an older brother, yet to not reach out for this? The last time I called my mother resurfaces: I attempted to take the ACT senior year of high school. I had already taken the SAT early junior year, achieved a score that I was satisfied with, though an urge remained to prove my ability to achieve an even better score on the ACT. I had taken multiple practice exams, scored highly, and felt extremely prepared for a test that depended solely on speed and confidence—two things with which I believed myself well equipped.
We are a unit, bounded by shared experience and unmatched familiarity. Wherever I walk, run, fly, they come too. I arrived, and with eyes scanning a half-bubbled-in column of answers in the second of four sections, I left. I rose briskly from my desk and walked out of the strange classroom, the thick quiet air following me too closely. There, I stood in a school I did not attend, a school designated for upper middle-class white and Asian students, surrounded by massive walls of glass, light pouring in on me from every angle, alone, a brick coated in guilt and shame swinging heavy in my chest. I called my mother. I wished no longer to dwell on the repercussions of a stupid, trivial exam. What is SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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it good for anyway? She answered as quickly as I called, and her voice swept into my chest and lifted the weight of the brick up. I felt as if I could not speak, as if I were so entirely weak and vulnerable that I needed her to just feel what I was feeling, but she couldn’t see me, and we weren’t together, so I tried to make out the word, “Mom-” already my voice broke in humiliation. I couldn’t do it. A simple task of sitting down with a pencil and calculator and filling in empty spaces, and I couldn’t do it. In that moment I was a newborn baby. She was the only person I had, the sole creator, giver, of my life, and I searched for her skin to be held against. Soon after, entering the parking lot, her familiar white car approached. I have not called my mother because I am scared I will remember how much I miss her. It’s always been us — my mother, my brother, and me against the world, it’s always been us, and I try to forget that it has been, I try to convince myself that I am in this alone, that being here is only part of my journey in life, that it only affects me, that I am the center of my universe, but I am not. Guilt and shame fill me, cascade unnaturally up and down, up and down, up and down my ribcage, because reliance and dependence on others means asking for help, and I want desperately to not need help. The truth is that my mother and my brother follow me here. I cannot separate myself from them. We are a unit, bounded by shared experience and unmatched familiarity. Wherever I walk, run, fly, they come too.
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Texts from my mother: “Hope you’re eating! And getting enough sleep” “It’s almost the end of your shift!” “Next care package is coming soon” “You breaking out from stress? Different foods? Not enough sleep?” “When you come home you eat good okay? Every night”
What if I can’t feel my friends and my family anymore? I wonder, Do they feel me still? “The gravitational force between any two objects is never, really, ever zero.” My young, bright, energetic professor echoes this into a room too large for our class, spacious enough that it makes us feel truly insignificant in and of ourselves in relation to the entire Earth, solar system, galaxy, universe, but we try to listen anyway. After all, how can we be insignificant if we have endless reciprocal gravitational force? She speaks in astronomical riddles, enshrouds the plain word, we are never really insignificant if we are together, regardless of how we feel in this void of a room covered by screens. If we are together. If there are over 2,800 miles between my friends and my family that I’ve left behind in Oregon, and if my best mile time was seven minutes and thirty seconds, then a 12 yearold me could run to them, run back to everything I’ve ever known, run back into a city with people, places, things I’ve
always known in just over 21,000 minutes, or 350 hours, run to them and be safe once again, fall so easily back into it all, fall so easily back into who I was—now only a voice distorted by delicate, whispering wind. The muscles of my feet cramp, tighten and convulse, beg for me to come back home. Run there. Please. I tell them that I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
A phantom scent. I’m walking into the cafeteria of the elementary school I’m placed at for education fieldwork. I smell the kind of food they prepare for kindergarteners through fifth graders— burgers, corn dogs, crinkled french fries, bean and cheese burritos. I smell the ketchup-stained tables and crumb-scattered floor. I recognize the giggles, the memorized handshakes, and the innocent secrets among my students at home who probably have begun their math homework already as to allow more time for origami butterflies later. The children call my name, grab onto me and pull me by the arm, lead me to their tables, show me how they peel the fried skin off the corn dog first and then eat the hot dog inside. An immediate feeling of relief and calmness has spread over me. Except I look up from my careful footsteps in a school I’ve never visited before, and nobody is there. Nobody is there at all. I stand there for a moment, a wobbling, blinking mess of confusion. Only the empty cafeteria, dressed with color, looks back at me. We don’t say anything to each other.
Sunday, September 29, 2019: Today I saw a photograph of myself and who I called my closest friend at home. We stood together with peers and teachers, adorned in our royal blue graduation caps and gowns—smiling, glowing, brilliant, with everything ahead of us. We felt that we had yet to be released into the endless trajectory of life, life, life, whatever that meant to us, whatever that means to anyone, so these smiles wore us honestly and without fear, striking in their presence, but not overbearing, and we were happy, waiting, with everything ahead of us. With everything ahead of us.
My life in Oregon is no longer present. It is a distant memory that washes away with the moving sky. Sometimes at night I can smell the grass and the trees. Sometimes in the morning I hear my mother preparing breakfast. I see my family and my friends in my dreams, and I wonder if they are real. I reach to them and caress their faces, cheeks soft and dampened by the distance between us now. I feel you, I say but don’t say. When I awake, my fingertips shake, wet with their tears.
Everybody at Swarthmore talks about the trees in the fall. A beautiful maple tree sits by the tennis courts I seldom
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play at. The tree is all orange, its many groupings of leaves yet to fall thick, lush, and vibrant. It is large, grand, a vast cushion of some sort, and, really, all orange. I imagine each orange leaf has a different story, grown closely together by circumstance and deciding to remain until the right time comes for departure. As I wonder how they know when to let themselves detach, drift carefully down to the earth, I see a cluster of leaves shake loose with the gentle breeze and join its companions below. Untroubled are the leaves that know when to be free. Another hopeful glance at this tree, and I know that if I fell from the sky and landed here I would be happy. I ask those who voice their pleasant surprise towards the picturesque fall here if they know about the trees in Oregon. I ask this as if it’s a secret, or a glance into a wealth of knowledge, or a pot of gold on the other side of the country. I want to tell them about the greens, the abundant and rich greens named cedar, fir, pine, birch, and oak, that lay over the countless mountains like a cloak, surround rivers, lakes, the ocean, consistent and plentiful as if they were painted-on wallpaper, but the right words never seem to find me.
Each day away from home hurts a little more and a little less. As I form new communities defined by the continued parts of myself here, I am pulling together two ends of a bridge that are perhaps meant to fit together. But this pulling is painful, and often I am on the cusp of relief, allowing chips of brick to scratch up against my soft skin, daydreaming about simply letting it all go, fall onto me heavily and all at once as an avalanche would. Allowing opposite ends of the bridge to diverge is a dangerous and sweet temptation I
do not embrace. I try to remember that bridges like this take time and need support, and I try to remember that people like me take time and need support. For many of us, communication with our parents, our loved ones, or our friends back home does not arrive guarded by reluctancy and fear. For me, and maybe a handful of others, it is a darkly clouded door we do not want to open. It is scary to speak to those who know who we have been, it is scary to confront the reflection of ourselves in our loved ones’ eyes and see it not match up to who we are now, an unrecognizable cluster of experiences grown apart from home, and it is scary to drag these realizations into a space we must be conscious of.
I try to remember that bridges like this take time and need support, and I try to remember that people like me take time and need support. I see my loved ones back home as reflections of myself, and it is with comfort that I keep myself away from who I was before I came here. I am not alone in this. Perhaps we think that if we ignore our past selves, they won’t haunt us, they won’t come to get us, and they won’t exist as vividly as they do under our new masquerades of self. But it is simply untruthful to think that who we have been does not inexorably define who we may be. We cannot hide from who we were even if that’s the easy thing to do; we must open the door to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves— sincerely, sincerely, sincerely. u
PERSONAL ESSAY
The Impossibility of Black Space by Tyler White
F
or as long as I can remember, I have been black. This may seem like an objectively obvious statement. It is. But being aware of my blackness is the chief influence on how I show up, take up and relinquish space. Who I am is constant. I exist. Yet in a white supremacist structure, my identity’s history is erased, so I find ways to colorfully bring life to my ancestors’ stories. Because they could not read, be educated, or learn, I will create a language deserving of their sacrifice and transformative for the marginalization of others. Somewhere between my first conscious memory and now, I made up my mind about who I would become. Much of this 10
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newly created Tyler was premeditated, influenced, constructed. The first time my space was interrupted, I was a five year old at Providence Montessori School. In the halls of this private preschool for kids ages three to seven, there were few brown people: two brown boys and one brown teacher. Everyone else seemed to disappear into the majority—wide mouthed, smiling faces of whites and tans and peaches. Everything that wasn’t black. In that space, I was the rambunctious, black boy who could not seem to keep their body tamed or sit ‘criss cross applesauce in: 3… 2… 1… ” Younger than everyone else, with special circumstances al-
lowing me to begin schooling merely a few weeks after turning three, I struggled to meet the parameters of the classroom space that my teachers demanded. Be quiet. Calm your body. Do not speak too much. Listen and do not respond. Of course, I was not the only one. But the unique amount of melanin in my skin and
My body had become indecent and aggressive, and I had become the antagonist. From that moment on, no space was mine.
the social criminalization of black men and boys made me an easy target. At parent teacher conferences, the lovely Ms. Jean addressed my parents—yes, both of them, I know it comes as a surprise, an entire black family unit, thriving and sending their small toddler to a private school—“I think Tyler is having some problems. He never seems to sit down and his choice of words are… not what we would like to hear.” In this space, I was the perpetrator. As a small child my inability to conform to the statutes of the classroom were of issue. I was a child who could not sit down and could follow directions with an attention span of twenty seconds, twenty three at most. My teacher, with the support of an entire society built solely on the survival of whiteness above all, robbed me of my childhood wonder. My body had become indecent and aggressive, and I had become the antagonist. From that moment on, no space was mine. Space is a constant adaptation of self to fit the distinct circumstances of the environment. For blacks, we are always fitting in the holes and cracked windows made out of subjugation and
inferiority with our authentic black selves. There is no space in this country that is authentically black. Even Historic Black Colleges and Universities were established out of desperation and segregation from white society. Our bodies, in their various forms, have been fetishized, sexualized and prevented from having any purity or self-definition. Even in the acceptance of ourselves, we are subjected to the scrutiny of history, the capitalization of modern society, and the unnerving veneration of counter culture. In the face of cultural appropriation, the current vulturing of black traditions for capitalist consumerism portrays a greater example of the control whites are imbued with to dictate what is socially acceptable and when. Each moment shared between two blacks—family, friends, partners—are made on the pretense of common annexation, of shared strife. Our coming-of-age ceremonies are conversations on how not to die at the hands of those sworn to protect, and even at the hands of our fellow persons of color, who have been conditioned to hate and survive in disenfranchisement. Our pomp and circumstance is how to alter ourselves to fit the white mold. Our first job is a test, that few pass, of how to de-escalate and negate black stereotypes. Our first child is the greatest gift and greatest fear; with them is also born the haunting notion that in the middle of the night, we will receive a call that our angel’s soul has been washed clean from this earth. Our retirement is an asthmatic breath of potential relief in a beautiful solace. From the classroom to today. No space is mine. Every space I enter is a changing of the guards, a swift change in delivery, a means of surviving. Still I am safe and secure in who I am. My mind is the only space my teacher could not take from me. In the space that is not society, I am free to be myself. I am my own teacher. There is no authority higher or lower than the self. There is a relearning. A deep and critical analysis of everything I was taught—to now understand that I exist. Not as an addendum, a special course, a specific lesson plan in honor of my history month, not some recognition of history. My blackness is valid. It is not a memorial to the fallen demigods of co-opted white pacification—be non-violent like Martin, when you killed him—it is living, evolving and growing. To my readers, to my fellow black people, find yours. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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PERSONAL ESSAY
Eighth Grade Dance by Elisabeth Miller
I
have not been home in what feels like a long time. Part of this is my own doing. The thought of spending last summer boxed in by cornfields and surrounded by familiar faces who didn’t register the changes in mine felt too suffocating to consider, so I went to the unfamiliar town in Virginia my father now calls home. His new town is bigger than the one I grew up in, and it presents its southerness through kind accents, judging stares, and flags on every block. The streets are busier, the energy is louder, and the people are harder to read. In some ways, though, it reminds me very much of home. Small towns, no matter where they fall on the spectrum of small towns, all have the same patterns. The people all move slowly, talk loudly, and live their lives as replicas of everyone who came before them. One night, when the eerie similarities between this place and my home had begun to mount, my father and I went to dinner at one of his favorite restaurants. It was a sports bar; the kind where groups of men with dirty fingernails crammed into booths next to tired parents and screaming toddlers. I saw a group of girls huddled together in the entryway, anxiously looking out the window at the passing cars and the clouds that threatened rain at any moment. They couldn’t have been older than fourteen, and they were wearing formal dresses. They rubbed their eyes carefully in an effort to not smudge the thick layers of eyeshadow and mascara that coated their lids. One girl slipped in her heels and nearly collided with the hostess’s podium, but she caught herself and attempted to hide the shame in her cheeks. I watched as the girls pulled out their phones and took selfies, and I eavesdropped on their conversations about what boy they
It’s a rite of passage. The eighth grade dance means you’re going to high school, which means you’re almost a woman and will probably have sex soon or something. 12
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But he doesn’t ask you to dance, so this beautiful daydream becomes nothing more than that. They never ask you to dance, and the eighth grade dance is never quite what you want it to be. wanted to dance with that night (Kayla wanted Josh to ask her but she would also settle for Ben, that is, if Megan didn’t still have a crush on Ben). They were going to a dance. But not just any dance — it was the coveted eighth grade dance. When I was in eighth grade I wanted to buy these silver strappy sparkly wonderful heels from Payless. They were the kind that smelled of cheap plastic and wouldn’t last for more than a season, but that I lusted over more than anything I had ever lusted over before. In the end I went with nude heels because they went with everything and my mother reasoned that I would be able to wear them again. And I would wear them again for high school graduation, but I wouldn’t be any better at walking in them. The eighth grade dance was sacred to me and my friends. It’s a rite of passage. The eighth grade dance means you’re going to high school, which means you’re almost a woman and will probably have sex soon or something. You wait for it for years, looking at the photos of the older girls wearing dresses from Kohl’s that they’d had to sew straps on to follow the dress code. Then finally you get your own dress from Kohl’s, and you fidget in the new strapless bra you bought just for this occasion, and you fluff your hair before the pictures and hope you look just like the girls who danced before you. And at the dance you stare at the boy who sat next to you in science class and you pray he asks you to dance. Because once he asks you to dance that will be the beginning of something magical and wonderful. You will start dating and he will be your first kiss, the first penis you look at (the Tum-
blr posts that your friends passed around at sleepovers don’t count), and the first person you ever love. You will break up right before college, because you need time to see other people and figure out what you want, and besides, high school love doesn’t really count anyways. And you’ll go through a dramatic montage of men with whom you have passionate sex, but who just can’t compete with your first, the boy who asked you to dance in eighth grade. So you’re full of longing and hope when you reconnect and fall back in love, but you’re not surprised, because you knew from the moment you sat off to the side waiting for him to ask to you to dance in eighth grade that he was the only one for you. But he doesn’t ask you to dance, so this beautiful daydream becomes nothing more than that. They never ask you to dance, and the eighth grade dance is never quite what you want it to be. Because you still feel the same. Nothing is different or better. You try to dance with your friends, but everyone is too self-conscious. You stand off to the side with your friends and sway to the music. Every now and then someone makes a comment that you should all go out and actually dance, because that’s what you saw the eighth graders do last year, and they were beautiful. But you don’t feel like them. You lug around your bodies and hide behind your dresses from Kohls in hopes that in a few months everything will have settled and you will feel like a beautiful girl in high school. And besides, dancing in heels is hard, and your strapless bra threatens to slink down your abdomen. At the end of the night, when the parking lot becomes lined with cars of impatient parents ready to cart their children home, you walk out with your friends, shivering
In the pictures from our eighth grade dance, you can see the longing in our postures, how badly we wanted to shed those awkward bodies and become something beautiful. Our lives revolved around waiting. I don’t really think the waiting ever stopped. because you refused to bring a jacket. You didn’t want it to cover your dress. You prepare yourself for the sleepover that you’ve been waiting for for years, the one where you all sit in a circle and gossip about dresses and boys you like and girls you don’t. And you’ll all pretend you had a much better time than you really did. As I watched that group of girls climb into someone’s mom’s minivan, I studied their sparkly dresses and too-high heels and freshly manicured nails. I wished them happiness and luck and fun, at the dance and after. The eighth grade dance was a turning point for me and my friends. After that, everything became much bigger, but
not in the ways I expected. I cried over a boy in eighth grade because I told him I liked him and he didn’t feel the same way. I cried over a boy in college because he touched me after I said no. After that night, your lives begin to splinter, as different problems choose different girls, and you lose that one thing you all held dear, that one mile marker that signified womanhood and beauty and innocence all in one. It’s gone in one night. Or maybe it’s not gone because it never really existed. Maybe you were duped into thinking it meant anything more than wearing a sparkly dress and your mother’s eyeshadow. My friends and I had this theory that we would become pretty our junior year of high school. We’d seen it happen to the girls above us countless times, and we were ready for our turn. In the pictures from our eighth grade dance, you can see the longing in our postures, how badly we wanted to shed those awkward bodies and become something beautiful. Our lives revolved around waiting. I don’t really think the waiting ever stopped. When our junior year came and went, we needed something else to wait for and to occupy our time with. But we didn’t know what else was worth waiting for, so we just kept hoping for some unnamed feeling to strike us and allow us to release the breath we’d been holding since we were thirteen. I don’t speak to many of my friends from then anymore. I don’t know if they’ve stopped waiting and stopped holding their breath, but I haven’t. I watched those girls drive away and thought about following for half a second. I thought about pulling out my old pictures from my eighth grade dance, the ones I thought I looked fat in and refused to let my mother post on Facebook. I remembered how I felt as I scrolled through the photos after the dance. I wasn’t impressed with my dress or hair or makeup, and I didn’t look like the older girls from years before. But I was hopeful that one day I would finally feel like one of the beautiful older girls. I didn’t pull out the photos though. Instead, I thought about how disappointed my younger self would be that nearly seven years later, she would still be waiting for something. u
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Temporary Homes by Li Dong
M 14
y dad once said to me that the house I lived in was not my home because we don’t own it. My senior year of high school, I moved twice and lived in three different buildings. In the first two places, I felt unsafe countless times because of other tenants in the building. There was nothing we could do about it except move. Dad was right.
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I’ve lived in New York City for the past 14 years. When I’m asked where home is, I answer “Brooklyn.” But when I’m holding onto my dad as he drives us through the open roads in China on a cheap motorbike, and the sunset is in colors I don’t know the names of, I think to myself: “I’d like to come home more often.”
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Swarthmore felt like home quicker than New York City did. It’s less chaotic, and I’m happier here —not always, but nothing is always. Even when it did feel like home, it broke my heart and nearly broke me too
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because my worst memories were triggered here. The thing with broken hearts is that they heal, and hell at Swarthmore looks a lot better than it does anywhere else I’ve lived.
The buildings of the city feel larger than life, and it’s hard to feel at home when you are just as in awe as the tourists, and your small body is just another body to avoid running into on busy streets. It only feels like my city and my home when I step off the R train I’ve been taking for years to
step into a building that hosts a company 14-year-old me would’ve never thought she’d one day work for. The city feels like home when 19-year-old me realizes she would never be the person that she is if the metropolis hadn’t torn her apart yet seduced her with its promises time and time again. u
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The Return to Silence: A Message on Climate Urgency by Tristan Alston
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limate change is not new. Throughout the course of history, anthropogenic change has constructed and destroyed societies, exploiting and displacing certain communities for the benefit of others. For hundreds of years, men have time and time again imposed environmental and social changes on indigenous people around the world, each of which created a change in climate for the dispossessed. What is new, however, is the perceived stake of this particular climate change: the white, colonial, and capitalistic system that has been responsible for centuries of destruction is now facing its own repercussions, and those who have enjoyed its luxuries are facing the potential loss of the stability, comfort and consumption to which they have become accustomed. In the face of these truths, we must be cautious of the rhetorics of urgency we are forming and critical of the ways in which we appropriate the fear of others to preserve our own lifestyles—lifestyles that have directly harmed those whose warranted fear we continue to express as our own.
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In the context of environmentalism, urgency serves a very specific—albeit often unintentional—function. It perpetuates a Western and neoliberal understanding of sustainability, and ignores the continuous struggles that accompany indigeneity. It imposes technological, energy-focused solutions onto social issues of distribution and displaces natives in the name of conservation. The common rhetoric of urgency illuminates the fact that, in the wake of rising global temperatures, we are terrified we will be forced to change the way we live our lives. In order to fuel this narrative of urgency, we appropriate the fear of those who had their way of life altered or destroyed long before atmospheric carbon became a concern. We speak of droughts with bottled water in our hands, stress the dangers of heat waves from air-conditioned conference rooms, and address the horrors of forest fires from weather-sealed homes miles from harm’s way.
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Amidst the powerful images and messages that surfaced during the recent Global Climatew Strike—the inspiring collaboration and unification of people across generations, races and political lines—I also saw the dangers of this appropriation. Thousands of caring and thoughtful individuals came together for an energetic protest of government inaction and neglect, and thousands of caring and thoughtful individuals returned back to their lives of comfort the very next day. Back to silence. Without acknowledging what we are so afraid of losing—without truly recognizing the ways in which our urgency is collectively egocentric and willfully incomplete—we will continue to see ourselves as victims of corruption rather than active participants in its perpetuation. So, I challenge us all to reflect inward and ask ourselves in an honest and critical manner: who and what are we fighting for, and what are we truly willing to give up? u
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Stonington by Bess Markel
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his summer, I traveled to Stonington, Maine with my mom, sister, and grandparents. Stonington is a working harbor town with a population of 1,032, most of whom either fish lobster or are related to people who fish lobster. It is essentially in the middle of nowhere. The only reason we had ever heard of it was because an old friend of my grandpa used to live there. The friend and his wife had long passed away, but their kids spent every summer together in Stonington and my grandparents wanted to go back and visit.
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I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was a tiny town with not much going on. I brought five books, expecting I was going to be incredibly bored incredibly quickly. However, as soon as I got out of the car and saw the water, I was immediately captured. I spent most of the trip exploring different shores, wading out in high tide, and climbing slippery rocks to get the best shots I could.
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I spent the rest of the vacation trying to capture that feeling through photographs, though I’m still not sure I have. I never touched the books I brought, but I found a different narrative in the surroundings of Stonington. u
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FICTION&POETRY CREATIVE NON-FICTION
Now That I Have This Plant, What Do I Do With It by Sofia Sears Questions from the American Orchid Society’s FAQ Page
Where do I cut the spike?
B
egin at the neck of the thing. Thick and green like a decomposing thumb; feel out the skin. Let yourself touch, gently, make a slow gesture back and forth. This limb under your fingertips may feel unnecessary. But the body is the spike. You can’t cut it, you can’t remove an element from the periodic table because you feel like it. This would be a declawing. This would be a removal of what
scares you, what most resembles a death wish, much as you may think it looks more like a diseased leg. (Spikes only regrow on the moth orchid. Leave it on.)
How do I water my orchid? At a summer internship, I was in charge of the office orchid. Orchid-wrangling: a question mark on my resumé. I replaced its sluggish water, tilted it towards sunlight, sprayed its leaves with nutrients, gave it what it needed, let the sink stream into the soil once a week. The plant preoccupied me, its posture strained and elusive, how it spoke in a lust-shiny tongue but never said a word. Alone in the summer, in a city an ocean away from home, I tended to myself. I saw hor-
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ror movies alone, sat in the dark and drank cheap wine, left my clothes unwashed for days, longed to outsmart my own fear. In those weeks, I read Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. Orlean tracked the plant through its cruelty, excavated the orchid obsession and modern-day orchidelirium. In the Victorian era, orchids mesmerized wealthy white men into dangerous journeys and orchid-hunting in South America became another streak of imperialism awash in beauty-hunger. Nowadays orchids mostly stay inside, that history of wilderness made compact and ripped from the earth itself. The pastime of orchid-hunting, only open to men, to the wealthiest and highest of the Victorian bourgeoisie. What a thing, to encase the jungle and say it’s something you’ve discovered. To steal beauty from land not your own, to believe in your entitlement to such grandeur. To blame the flower. (Too much water and the soil will break. The plant will rot.)
What a thing, to encase the jungle and say it’s something you’ve discovered. To steal beauty from land not your own, to believe in your entitlement to such grandeur. To blame the flower. How do I feed my orchid? In Greek mythology, Orchis is an attempted rapist. At a bacchanal, he tries to assault a priestess of Dionysus, and the Bacchanalians proceed to hack him into pieces. Unhinged with grief, his father begs the gods to resurrect his son, and instead they transform him into a flower. Here is the orchid, a threshold between punishment and sublimity, not quite a death sentence. The orchid is still alive, though, even after the man himself is gone, even after the brutalizer dissolves. He is never held witness to his own brutality; instead, he gets to forget while his outline stays to watch us try to move on. That flower which captivates people into clubs and special societies, a flower that must be handled tenderly, like a newborn child with a pillowy cleft in their head. A wound borne by men demands tribute, apparently, and so we tousle its burnt hair, face, its squelchy grey heart, dye it purple, give it a pot in a corner and face it towards the sun. In that way, you always remember it. In that way you make this violence livable, no matter how it tells you stories of all the ways it knows to invade, intrude, dismember, no matter how an orchid belches its hurt; doused in enough sweet-scent, anything looks like a flower after a while. (Give it just enough to live on.) Where in the house can I grow my orchid? Watch a girl-child grow, her brownish skin and all that 28
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hair too long for her string-beaned body. Put her in the edge of the room, angled close enough to the sun to see but never beyond. Tell her to get used to corners, to the periphery. Make it warm and damp, a starved palm. She tells herself to grow in this one slit of universe, a pocket like a thinned eyebrow. You want her to misunderstand the wilderness she has inherited; the purple blood dyeing her flowers only dye, only ornamental, not a lineage of pulsing, arterial hunger. Let her learn all the names for “girl,” words like tourniquets or lightyears, bitten-up mouths, heart-throated vileness. When her roots begin to stretch, bend them inwards. Tidy her into her infant-sized pot. Stare at her inside this terrarium, at how exotic and lush she can be without moving at all, how she photosynthesizes your gaze. (You can make the flower fit into any box you give it. Restraint is inherited; it will learn how to be cruel to itself, and you can sit to watch.)
Restraint is inherited; it will learn how to be cruel to itself, and you can sit to watch. Why won’t my orchid rebloom? In the essay collection The White Album, Joan Didion mentions a greenhouse full of orchids in Malibu that she and her family used to frequent. The growers even named one of his hybrids after Didion’s daughter, Quintana. Didion
haunts Malibu and it her; like an orchid-hunter, I track her words all over the coastline. This boy and I drove up the coast, searched out that greenhouse together. We spent fifty dollars on orchids we hadn’t meant to buy. I had to write down my credit card number, wasted my minimum-wage teenage job money on some surly long-necked flowers. He made me dumb like that. He spoke of his ex-girlfriend without malice, and I sort of disliked him for it. Goodness beams out of some people and I live in red flags, the antithesis to leaving-flowers-where-you’ve-found-them. He would sing those orchids goodnight; I would let them die from my own indifference. We drank strawberry lemonade by the sea, the flowers sulking in the heat of his car, our eyes turned outwards. He wanted to look at me; I didn’t know how to say yes. Didion wrote, of the greenhouse, that even in the midst of such otherworldly moth-orchids she could “not take her eyes from the window.” She preferred the greenhouses to the flowers themselves in the same way that I’ve always paid more attention to the captions under paintings than the paintings themselves. Can I be the girl whose eyes don’t stray from where I’m supposed to look? (You cannot unteach containment. You cannot conjure gentleness where there has only been fear.)
Why are its leaves wrinkled and leathery? Suffragettes tore up the orchid fields in Kew Garden, England. They rioted, they demolished, they blanched at such prettiness cultivated in a noose-tight world, all that beauty calling out and never asking any questions. That white-petaled pastiche of a love letter, one I wrote myself with twenty-five bucks and pretended you composed for me. In fact, I bought one the color of raspberry sorbet for your mother; in fact, I may have authored each word crushingly alone. Now I want to do what those women did—I want to yank the petals from their limbs and rub my feet over their creaminess until they remember the dirt they’ve sprung from, how their centers are thinner than my skull.
Now I want to do what those women did—I want to yank the petals from their limbs and rub my feet over their creaminess until they remember the dirt they’ve sprung from, how their centers are thinner than my skull. What’s wrong with my orchid? There is something about me that scares most people, I say to him one night, our voices too awake in the soft late-confession light of our favorite diner. He nods, watches
the waitress behind me, her long legs and silver eyeshadow, says yeah, I think you might be right without meeting my eye. This is what I believe, but it is not what I wanted to hear. He dips one of my fries into his ketchup, knees me under the table. You’re being so obvious, I roll my eyes, but he smiles, shrugs. She’s cute, what can I say? To be cute, I think, to be a rounded, loveable word like cute, to be reduced to that, to be a soft-listening type of music, a nice thing to watch from your seat. Have you heard that there are hundreds of thousands of species of orchids, I say, and in Florida so many have been removed from their native swamps that these scientists are trying to get college students to plant over one million in a lab? I thought we loved orchids, I thought people worshipped those sensual plants, thought the Greeks believed these papery flowers could influence the sex of an unborn child. I thought they were powerful, beloved, primordial. Why would we unmake them like this, why would we saw them from their own soil? I dunno. Maybe we say we love them, but really we like ripping them out of the ground. (Your orchid remembers too much. It cannot unsee its own violence, it cannot unknow its own history. Tell it to be a good girl and not to sit like that, to spread so much of itself. Tell your orchid to grow a pair where there is an untouchable chasm. Tell it to stop being difficult, to sow an ebullience from a lifeline of anger. Tell it to live with itself, to live in this house that is not a jungle but may bear the hunger of one.) u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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PROSE
Memory of a Father by Eva Baron
I
had a dream about you last night. Because I’ve been trying to unearth that which is you, my heart has been pealing with everything you. Flesh and bones and everything. Which is to say you’ve been dancing, too. The space in between my stomach and collarbone contains only you, and you’re dancing there, young and playful and beautiful and wild. It’s the way you danced when you turned 60— how your feet crushed the wood beneath you, your fingers curling into little hooks that clawed at the air. Ferocious. Although your lips were plastered into the shape of a smile, cheeks reddening as they curved into it. You were cracking into yourself without even knowing it, and with every eager stomp, another layer of skin petaled away until you were just a skeleton. A skeleton with a beating heart I think I kind of forgot about. In my dream, I’m five again, except I’m almost as tall as you. And you’re pushing me, a gruff palm into my chest and a shove into my ribcage. But I’m level with you, and even though your hands are saying back, back, back, screaming it even, I can see that your eyes are pleading. I woke up thinking about what you had to beg for, if not out of hunger.
I
’ve never known where my flesh ends. Once, when we were in Long Island, Pap tossed me into the pool, and I felt my skin burst against a porcelain wall. It didn’t, though, and when I sank, I saw his face in the water once I opened my eyes. Chlorine stinging what’s often so vacuous. Bursting out, I could see through my wet eyelashes that he smiled. “Your clothes are all wet.” “I saw you just now,” a gasp. “I saw your face in the pool.” “You’re crazy.” He let out a breath that could’ve been 30
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a chuckle, but his face was molded into hardened grain. “Come on, get out.” My clothes bubbled beneath me, swelling as a jellyfish would as it pulses through the sea. Maybe I was meant to be dragged down again by the weight of my shirt, meant to see his face swaying like an apparition, begging for something I couldn’t even begin to offer. But he smothered me in a towel as soon as I got out, rubbing my eyes vigorously. He was humming, too—it wasn’t more than a whisper, and
music. The first time my friend Oliver heard Pap whistle, he was wearing a Power Rangers costume. “Do you like those guys?” Pap asked after Oliver clambered into the car. “Yeah, I guess,” he shrugged. He kept his eyes down on his hands, smaller than mine even though we were both eight. “And their theme song,” Pap stole a look at Oliver in his mirror. It seeped into the car before I recognized it, rolling over the seats, reminiscent of a fog in autumn. Consuming our ears, a whistle, and Oliver’s eyes the size of dinner plates. Once Pap stopped, Oliver managed, “You know it?” And he didn’t answer, at least not right away, but later gave Oliver a smile with only his eyes through the car mirror.
You were cracking into yourself without even knowing it, and with every eager stomp, another layer of skin petaled away until you were just a skeleton.
W
I heard it when I forced myself to. A slow sighing, a resignation into his hands that grasped at my hair through a towel. The song he was humming was one only a shadow of myself could remember, a lullaby he’d murmur into my ears when I was younger. He’d cradle me with his arms and a voice that dipped into stutters when he reached an uncomfortable syllable, for he was singing in my mother’s tongue rather than his own. It was something Mamma taught him, a vaggvisa, and he drilled that into my head, gently, like little hummingbirds twirling my hair. He looked at me for too long, hands frozen at my shoulders. A silence we could both name softened onto us. “Do you want lunch?” And all I did was nod.
I
n the car, though, Pap whistled. There was nothing subdued about how his lips formed an O with its belly bursting. You could hear him as you would birds in the morning, dawn spreading its wings with their chirps. He’d whistle songs from the movie we last watched, or the video game I last played, or what the radio insisted was good
hy’d you smile, even though you knew you’d have to stop whistling? Even though you heard the song once, barely knew it, ingrained within you only the insistent go of the chorus? You drove to the woods that night to take pictures with me, and I remember the frost gathering like bees to a lily after rain showers. I know we weren’t talking, but I have so many memories of this moment, of so many moments like it, that they all melt together, become a watercolor. It’s a portrait of mixed-up, beat-up love, and in it, we’re walking, shoes cracking under the sound of gravel. You found a clearing—slight, unnoticeable, and you paused, smelling the air that chilled our nostrils. The camera hanging across your neck as flowers would sprout from flesh. “This is beautiful,” praise, quiet praise, “Look at this.” You returned to a whisper instead of a bellow, instead of anger, that wild elephant. Burrs deepened themselves onto tree trunks, rotted ivy planted itself into bark, and you found it all beautiful, like bones in dirt. You took me down the path later, sun beginning to spill onto the water and its small golden waves. Even though it was winter, it warmed us, and instead of taking out your camera, you just looked and let me look. And we shared each other’s eyes—outward, inward, then outward again and towards the boundless sea. I think that you’re the reason my flesh doesn’t end, can’t end. My skin is a part of you, like any monster, and I can’t tear it away. The face in the water is just as much mine as it is yours, made of the same bone. When you took me home to Mamma that night, I thought of the hug you gave me before I left the car and how you whistled as you drove. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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POETRY
Collection of Poetry by Emmett Pinsky
Gallery People I am a knees hugged to chest at 7:30 am in the passenger seat type of calm, you driving against the sun and me getting better at layering white paint over our mouths without leaving the divot under your lip untouched, a mistake, and with fresh coats all we can do is drive and remember how Greg told me gallery people get good at cover-ups because it’s easy to forget a well-spackled hole and the gallery people get good at forgetting, too, while they roll on coats until the walls are thicker than the space they make and the gallery people, who still believe in beginnings, they don’t notice what they’ve done until facing frames kiss and dried specks dust the gear shift, you brush them off in the Astoria Visitors’ Center parking lot where mothers stare at our caked faces like they’ve never met a gallery before but we stretch our legs, anyway, before getting back in the car, heavy with paint, framed mostly by windshield. u
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Jaw Bone Dad asks if I want to see her bones, bleachvarnished enamel-slathered, kept quietly in attic corner; a Ziploc-bagged family fossil. I thought she had been buried in the backyard. Thought the apricot tree entropy had long ago led her last atoms away from their center. But Dad shows me the hinges of her jaw and how they still work. It took weeks and a trip under the house to find her (cats prefer to die unwatched). He must have washed the bones himself in our side yard, all cement and wood rot and drying machine. I picture it like this: It is raining ribs, and ribs alone. Dad imagines she is still there, watching him take her apart. Her already-rotting flesh welcomes the force of Dad’s hands, gloved and shaking. He weeps, apologizes out loud, strokes each patch of fur before peeling it off. He soaks her bones in acid, vinegar, chlorine polishes her ribs like Mom does our silverware. With offerings but no altar, Dad closes his eyes, washes his hands. Unwatched, he asks the apricot tree if bones weep for their center, long gone. Or, if they welcome the shaking force, a kind of postmortem entropy. u
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1007/2304/8618 The summer after I made your past my project I swam in the ocean for the first time and, like you, I felt no pain. Felt not the sun, but its light reflected off the water. In weightlessness, I thought of you. Summer tells me you took a bath (she knows this, of course, because there would have been no reason for you to drain the tub, of course, she searched for a note, and found only still water ) and drank a glass of red wine. Dad says the dead dream of us so I wanted to apologize for that; for making your life mine, for whispering dreams of bathwater.
Reach down, won’t you? and shift a chair toward the light. u
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POETRY
wildflowers by Chase Smith
my grandmother once told me, “dandelions bloom for the hopeless,” before reaching down towards the spring-hued grass and grabbing one of the little creatures. i remember her delicacy, her gentleness, as the sun pierced through her glasses and onto her hands. “you see, this used to glow a beautiful yellow just a few weeks ago, but now it seems as though it’s ready to move on.” i nodded as she took a breath of the brisk, mid-morning air and blew. the seedlings caught the breeze and danced akin to floating december snowflakes. “if just one seed lands and another dandelion grows, one of your deepest wishes will come true.” “what did you wish for?” my child-like innocence at the time birthed from her a laugh that reminded me of a lion. “i can’t tell you. it’s a secret.” i always wonder what she wished for that day, but a part of me knows she didn’t wish for anything. she couldn’t bear the guilt of wasting a dandelion wish on longevity or material goods -she pitied those broken flowers for being chained to the earth, forced to smell the grotesque, wild breath of humans.
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and i don’t blame her. while the floral souls radiate the sun and their seeds sketch constellations in autumn air how could she ask to live longer when life is impermanent? i was taught of this human selfishness— of entitlement, of clumsiness, of carelessness, of ignorance— humans will do human things and that means we will rip dandelions from their stems and blow, and blow, and blow. i ask myself what i have done to deserve the hand i’ve been dealt, to be blessed with opportunity, but cursed with isolation. it’s an obsession that singes my throat, even as i grab a sun from its meadow and see myself ready to waste away with the whispers of my love, awaiting the day to make another’s prayer become reality. i remember the day i found myself clutching a dandelion of my own— he smelled of lemongrass and glowed so brightly that yellow became a burnt-orange— he was like autumn. but i am in anguish. my throat has swelled, my breathing halted, as my thoughts sting like swarming hornets and set aflame the flowerets we planted after tranquil storms. i see now why my grandmother wouldn’t share her wish— how could you wish for something you don’t need at the cost of someone you love.
i remember the day the world heard my wails, felt my agony, and presented to me a dandelion that could silence my pain and love me enough to convince me that life is worth living.
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BOOKS REVIEW
Ralph Thayer: Change of Seasons by Eric Chen
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or Russian formalist Roman Jakobson, literature is an “organized violence committed on ordinary speech.” Nowhere is this violence more visible than in a poem and its run over (enjambed) lines, where our eyes are repeatedly and systematically asked to skip to the next line, often in the middle of what would otherwise be an atomic, flowing thought. Enjambment can thus create a jarring, irregular rhythm, turning the mundane into the lyrical. Ralph Thayer’s use of enjambment in his poem “About the Weather…” reflects his inner turmoil as he’s annually hounded by the thermodynamically sensitive constituents of his institution. This turmoil, caused by the rapid changes in weather in what he refers to as the “swing season,” is not purely interior—it is itself a microcosm for the accelerating and irreversible damage being done to our environment.
This poem certainly uses its form to play with the concept of divisions: divisions that are not clear, divisions that should exist but are violated, etc. As the speaker struggles to reckon with the uncertainty of the “swing season,” there may be only one thing he is sure of: “There is no / clear line of demarcation between the cooling / season and the heating season.” This statement, taken alone, appears paradoxical: if there is indeed no clear line of demarcation, why the presence of enjambment, which itself operates as a line of demarcation? Thayer’s willingness to place a line of demarcation makes this a confident, emphatic
A b o u t t h e We a t h e r. . . by Ralph Thayer Gmail 2 pages | $50,424 (full tuition without room and board)
statement, yet his certainly lies only in the uncertainty of the weather: “It was ninety degrees yesterday, sixty two degrees today and will / possibly be in the mid forties by tomorrow night.” The speaker further confounds the desire for a clear division in the lines “between the cooling / season and the heating season.” Note where this line break is placed: not one word after its current position, as then it would serve as too clear a division between “the cooling season” and “the heating season.” Yet it is not one word before its current position because then “cooling season” would be an atomic unit, separated from “the heating season” by the differentiating (even if conjoining) “and.” Thus, for the speaker, the only way to destabilize this division (to claim that there is no clear one) between the two separate concepts is to sever the first through the middle (“cooling / season”). This hinders the function of “and,” preventing it from clearly differentiating two complete concepts. Thayer does use enjambment in a more straightforward manner later in the poem. “That has become less viable as the summer season / seems to stretch into / November.” The two line breaks interrupting a single sentence create an agonizing pace that exactly mirrors the encroachment of summer into November. This is another statement about borders and divisions, yet a much more prescriptive one: the speaker claims that summer should not stretch into November, as evidenced by the two line breaks between “summer” and “November,” yet the rapidly changing climate disregards all these divisions and thus does stretch into November. The stark juxtaposition between what should be and what is implicates the readers as passive, even complacent onlookers as our planet rapidly becomes uninhabitable. This poem certainly uses its form to play with the conSWARTHMORE REVIEW
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cept of divisions: divisions that are not clear, divisions that should exist but are violated, etc. But ultimately, these divisions serve to dramatize, illuminate, and challenge readers to examine the relations between the seasons. So then, what exactly does it mean to say “the cooling season” or “the heating season”? On a surface level, the cooling/heating seasons are the seasons in which the buildings must be cooled/heated to continue to be habitable. However, time and the seasons are not static and discrete; they ebb and flow into each other. We can thus equate the summer to “the season which is in the act of cooling” and winter to “the season which is in the act of heating.” We know this to be true, since after the coldest days of winter, the weather begins warming (hence “the heating season”) and after the hottest days of summer, the weather begins cooling (hence “the cooling season”). This reversal of the surface-level labels of seasons is an incredibly poetic and compact way to convey their ephemerality. The summer is not monotonically and permanently hot; it eventually cools. Through the dual meanings of “the heating season” and “the cooling seasons,” Thayer asks us to consider the instability of the seasons in relation to each other. Such instability and muddled division is partly natural, but as Thayer argues, overwhelmingly due to our continued destruction
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This reversal of the surface-level labels of seasons is an incredibly poetic and compact way to convey their ephemerality. The summer is not monotonically and permanently hot; it eventually cools. of the planet, recalling his dramatization of the “summer season / [stretching into] / November.” The seasons themselves are not set in stone, but neither is the relation between these seasons: the winters will not always cool to the same degree, and the summers will become hotter as we continue to destroy our planet. “About the Weather…” is therefore not merely about the weather. The ellipses in the title and the poem itself point towards some latent reality beneath the surface: when we talk about the weather, we actually talk about our threatened and temporary existence.
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REVIEW
At A Loss For Words A Review of Roget’s Thesaurus, 3rd Ed
Roget’s International Thesaurus 3rd. ed
by Quincy Ponvert
by Peter Mark Roget Thomas Y. Crowell Company 976 pages | $7.59 (Paperback)
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In the Sharples lost-and-found the Thursday before Fall Break, I found a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus. It was a hardcover, cloudy with gold lettering. I picked it up and brought it down to the Crumb Cafe. I’ll try to be honest with you: Holding a thesaurus is a vulgar, electrifying experience. I realized as I turned Roget’s pages that by picking up the thesaurus in place of one of the “actual” books next to it — I saw a copy of “Wuthering Heights” and something else that looked nautical — I was declaring that I didn’t need others’ content, that I had enough of my own going on that the most important thing
good writer. Perhaps I thought, when I first laid eyes on my new hardcover Roget’s, that the book could serve as a new writing companion, that I could become the kind of person with thoughts valuable and exact enough to motivate meticulous deliberation over their expression. Perhaps this is why I was so affected by my run-in with Roget’s. Scanning further, I found something poetic in these strings of synonyms. I don’t imagine it was ever the intention of Roget or the editors who followed him that we open up a thesaurus and just read it, like a book or a poem. But read this, quickly:
It’s a terrifying thought, that all I could ever express and all the ways I could ever express it could be contained in a book that was lost in Sharples for me to find. was to find the words for all that, before I could be bothered with the words of other people. This was unlike me. I felt emboldened; I felt prideful. I was addicted. DESIRE Nouns—avarice, greed, itching palm, covetousness, . . . I have never used a thesaurus, not in the strict sense. Not once have I consulted Roget’s or another collection of synonyms in search of the proper word. The idea of doing so is strange to me. In the same way that I would not carry a cookbook to every meal, I do not use a thesaurus when writing. Am I missing out by not seasoning each bowl of ramen to perfection? Am I cheating myself by settling for fuzzy descriptors of real events, or by selecting inaccurate labels for ideas I could more specifically describe? I am not a SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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INNOCENCE Adjectives—. . . guiltless, faultless, sinless, stainless, bloodless, spotless, sans peur et sans reproche, . . . unspotted, unblemished, unerring; unsullied, undefiled (see PROBITY); . . . irreproachable, irreprovable, irreprehensible; unexceptionable, unobjectionable, unimpeachable . . . Each word in the sequence adds a bit of meaning and phonic flavor to the ones before. The stanza, when finished, leaves me warm and exhilarated. I feel like I want more of the same, but I’m also led to believe that Roget has already read out to me all that could possibly be said on the subject, all the possible options. This is troubling. There must be more, no? Roget couldn’t possibly have collected all the synonyms in the English language, could he? There must be some group of people, untouched by the influence of any thesaurus and unknown to the global linguist community, who have a word the contemporary editors of Roget’s have never heard of. I find some solace in that: It’s a terrifying thought, that all I could ever express and all the ways I could ever express it could be contained in a book that was lost in Sharples for me to find. On that night, down in Crumb proper, I read little synonym-poems out to my roommate Dan until my milkshake came. He let out boyish laughs. What I felt for him in that moment was not love, or rather it was love and more. Roget, what is this?
LOVE
Nouns— . . . affection, tenderness, attachment . . . These words don’t do the feelings justice, either. Each captures a bit of an unnamed mass of emotion, but can I ask for
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There must be some combination of words that I can use to express myself exactly, that will take a snapshot of my inner state and project it into the reader’s mind with not a chance of misinterpretation. more clarity than that? Can I ask for more options? There must be some combination of words that I can use to express myself exactly, that will take a snapshot of my inner state and project it into the reader’s mind with not a chance of misinterpretation. The existence of a thesaurus implies that there is, but Roget cannot deliver. Perhaps the next edition of Roget’s, or the next version of me, will be able to name what I cannot. Until then, a thesaurus doesn’t bridge the gap. I put the book in my bag and we left. Yes, reader, I took a book from the lost-and-found that didn’t belong to me.
Confess
Verbs—acknowledge, avow, own, admit; disclose, tell, reveal, unbosom, unburden, divulge. See DISCLOSURE, PENITENCE, RITE.
If it used to belong to you, please reach out. I have a surplus of imperfect words with which to tell you why I have stolen your copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and I will not be returning it.
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MUSIC REVIEW
Mermaidens A Tasting Menu of Witch Rock by Inna Kimbrough
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ou’re walking through a thick, dark grove at dusk. Your feet are bare. Your flashlight cuts weakly through the atmosphere. Spanish moss hangs from the oaks, brushing your shoulders and stroking your hair, eventually giving way to cypresses, then mud, then dark, dark water. Your tiny boat slaloms slowly between the trees as you make your way to the middle of the lagoon, where three figures stand on a tiny island, guitars and drumsticks in hand. Mermaidens have been waiting for you. Mermaidens is a trio made up of guitarist and vocalist Gussie Larkin, bassist and vocalist Lily West, and drummer Abe Hollingsworth whose dissociative chord progressions and fabulously cryptic lyrics provide them with a uniquely witchy sound. Formed in New Zealand in 2013, their sound originally started as lo-fi, garagey, the kind of thing you’d hear in the distance on an October night walking around an uncanny valley-esque neighborhood, something to convince you that you were being followed by something inhuman, something slouching behind you in the shadows of the street. Their first album, “Undergrowth” (2016), mesmerized listeners with its Witches’ Sabbath vibe, most of the songs ending in a noisy bacchanal of guitars and wild drumming. “Perfect Body” (2017) provided listeners with a more polished sound, the shoegaze maintained vigilantly with occasional sprinkles of pop. Finally, “Look Me in the Eye” (2019) delivered unto us their cleanest sound to date while still retaining their enchanting noise. Feast on the following thoughts as you tour the spectral discography of Mermaidens’ greatest hits. “Under the Mountain II” and “Cold Skin,” two of their first hits, hit the dark nail right on the head. Ominous lyrics such as “I don’t wanna die in the shade / I’m a corpse
on the beach” and “Who are you? Why you messin’ with my mind?” are followed by glorious, shoegaze-y walls of sound saturated with a forest of fuzzy crashing instruments, cacophonous drumming and eerie guitars scratching the eardrum and lulling you into a world of foggy mountains, sigils, and circles of salt. “Undergrowth,” also from their first album, starts off like many of their songs: references to the woods, howling, dirt, and keeping your eyes peeled for… something, with a guitar gently playing a twinkly little tune until business begins. Seductive lyrics like “Keep your eyes on my eyes, follow me through the undergrowth” pull you close until the bridge— then, suddenly, crashing guitars announce the end, as if entering a cave and seeing a candle-filled pentagram, with Larkin’s ethereal voice luring you deeper in until it is too late to escape. “Dive” starts with a high-pitched, leering guitar note, stalked closely by a throbbing bassline. The lyrics, “I dive into you” conjure up images of dark pools of water and bottomless pits. Mentions of “swimming darkness” and a rasping guitar solo keep close to Mermaidens’ punky, lo-fi roots.
Seductive lyrics pull you close until the bridge—then, suddenly, crashing guitars announce the end, as if entering a cave and seeing a candle-filled pentagram, with Larkin’s ethereal voice luring you deeper... SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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Notes that sound not-quite-right, just a little off, galore. In “Sunstone,” one of the noisier, post-punkier songs off of their second album “Perfect Body,” Larkin shouts, “One hundred floating beings come down! Through the trees,” a war cry accompanied by abrasive drumming and soaring guitar. “Fade,” the echoing, finishing touch to this album, seems to call out from underwater, a siren’s song drawing you in. Sweet melodies and soft singing proclaims, “let it in!” a call to give in to possession in the most beautiful way possible. “Fade”’s cavernous feel gives way to an agonizing hiatus, one ended by the glorious release of “Look Me In the Eye.” “Look Me in the Eye” is Mermaidens’ third studio album, released in August of 2019, guaranteed to induce the delicious sensation of traipsing through the swamp at night to do a little midnight black magic. Mermaidens signatures— siren-like vocals, dark lyrics, and foreboding guitar melodies—pervade this album, while a cleaner, cheerier sound than their previous albums moves the band into a slightly altered space. Absent from this album is the glory of the noise wall that defined the group’s earlier classics such as “Cold Skin,” a feature dearly missed, but made up for by the sheer goodness of “Look Me in the Eye.” With lyrics like “your place after dark, my blood in your hands,” “Crying in the Office” prepares you for a dissociative first experience of the music to follow. It literally describes the physical setting of the album, sets the mood with a little blood ritual, kisses your brain with its blissful bassline, and sends you on your way to enjoy the rest of the album. It fades seamlessly into “Sleeptalker,” which prods along through the dreamy atmosphere Mermaidens creates with its ethereal guitar melodies, a fuzzy landscape punctuated by soft harmonies of the two vocalists. “Millenia” references “the knots in my head I have to un42
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tie,” keeping the vibe spooky and gnarled, juxtaposed with the preppy rhythm of the piece while paying homage to the grimmer roots of the group’s music. Locals—the gloriously growing fanbase of Mermaidens and I—love “I Might Disappear.” After a grim hiatus in which Mermaidens gave us no singles whatsoever, “I Might Disappear” brought life to the fans choking on the dust of the Mermaidens drought as a single released a few months before their 2019 album. With playful synthesizers and bouncing guitars and bass, it lends a spontaneous and fun sound to the album. Fun group clapping abounds. “The Cut” treks into truly discordant territory for the first time in this album, dipping back into the area of Mermaidens’ true expertise. Lyrics like “My neck is sore, been looking over my shoulder / A magic feeling takes over,” keep their elegantly unearthly vibe in check, always reminding the listener to be on guard.
Their first album, “Undergrowth” (2016), mesmerized listeners with its Witches’ Sabbath vibe, most of the songs ending in a noisy bacchanal of guitars and wild drumming. “She’s Running” includes lyrics like, “raise your hand to the sky, promise me forever in the back of your car,” drawing up memories of teenage shenanigans tempered by Mermaidens’ constant promise of occult overtones. The line “She’s running for her life, what more could I ask for?” recalls the classic teenage hex on an enemy, running from your spell,
the music all punctuated by drawn-out drum suspensions. Dissociative, glittering guitar adds to the dreaminess of this track, while an ominous tone creeps into the final chants of
“what more could I ask for?” “Bastard”’s simple bass leads you through all necks of the woods, the guitar solo chopping up the song like the woodsman you pass by on your walk to your swamp shack. “Best to Hate the Man” harkens back to a healthy distrust of The Man™️, glittering guitar like rain dripping off the ceiling of a cave. This song, a slow jam, harkens back to Mermaidens’ first single, “O,” a quiet, threatening guitar opening up the song without using anything overly flashy. “Priorities” ties things up, a muffled pine forest tune that ends in the harmonious voices of both vocalists. Distorted guitar finally sets in, encroaching on the sound until it is all that remains. Mermaidens is certainly working its way into more polished territory these days, but they still maintain well-timed snippets of their early lo-fi fuzz that made me first fall in love with them. Larkin’s haunting vocals will continue to lure listeners into its musical jaws. But no amount of shoegaze is ever too much shoegaze. Whatever you do, just give them a listen. Lie down at night with your good headphones, and surrender yourself for a while. Start sleepwalking. Take midnight walks in the woods. u
REVIEW
Best Ambient 2019 by Ari Liloia
THE SACRIFICIAL CODE KALI MALONE The music on “The Sacrificial Code” is as huge and serious as the pipe organ Kali Malone used to create it. To ensure the absence of any unnecessary elements from her pieces, the chord progressions in Malone’s music are determined using a numerical chart, which she references while playing, and the time between chord changes is marked off using a metronome. Despite Malone’s aggressively formalist approach to composition and recording, this music isn’t robotic or inhuman; rather, she has how to pull at your heartstrings down to a science. Any four consecutive chords on this album could be looped and embellished to create a song as iconic and affecting as Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” I can’t overstate how much this music benefits from a good listening setup; hearing this album through a decent pair of headphones or loudly on speakers is like lying in a vat of liquid that gradually changes in consistency. Even so, some of
the best moments I’ve had with this album have been when I was playing it quietly through tinny laptop speakers. When listened to in this way, it can be enriching, as if another unnecessary layer has been stripped off. It’s refreshing to hear music as intensely formalistic and focused as this in a genre so prone to excessive noodling.
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ECSTATIC COMPUTATION CATERINA BARBIERI Although press photos consistently show Barbieri surrounded by or intensely focused on her imposing machines, it feels wrong to call her a “synthesizer musician.” For me, that phrase evokes the work of the many run-of-the-mill stoners with little to no sense of quality control whose mediocre jam sessions continue to clog up bandcamp at an alarming rate. Barbieri is a composer with a style all her own, and synthesizers just happen to be her instrument of choice. The music contained on “Ecstatic Computation” is sweeping, cinematic, and has brief moments of beatific beauty (see the wordless chorus floating over mid-album breather “Arrows of Time”), but for the most part, the sawtooth-y, slightly abrasive synth timbre she favors throughout the album is left mostly unadorned. The only real “effect” I can make out is a straightforward reverb employed on about half the tracks, which themselves consist only of one or two simple melodies bouncing around each other until the track fades out. The album’s best moments come when the already minimal accoutrements are stripped away and the circuits are left to scream by themselves. During album highlight “Pinnacles of You,” the central melody never changes; rather, the emotional arc of the song is guided by gradual timbral changes in the synthesizer sound being used, which could very well have been the result of the turning of a single knob on her formidable modular setup. Barbieri’s instinct for tension and release drives the emotional arc of each individual track and the album as a whole.
Caterina Barbieri performing at Romaeuropa Festival, 2018.
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LIFETIME KLEIN I almost feel like I should give a spoiler alert before describing the music on “Lifetime.” When you buy the album through bandcamp, you receive (along with a few other digital bonus items I don’t want to spoil) a PDF containing a selfie, three photos of Kat from “Eastenders,” and a thank you note to the listener that reads like a text message from a close friend (opening sentence: “Hey guyyyyyysssss”). Like the music, it’s a heartfelt, hilarious collage. There are a fair amount of original vocal takes and instrumentation here, but they serve to embellish what I’ve always thought of as the main element of Klein’s music—samples of TV shows, sermons, pop songs, and covert recordings of her own conversations, rearranged and mutilated in such a way that it almost sounds like we’re hearing her memory of the original piece of media. On “Protect My Blood,” she tears apart what might once have been a mellow piece of classical music and staples it back together into a claustrophobic whirl of noise, garnishing it with a recording of herself and a friend laughing as a street preacher tries to convert them. One of the album’s most intense moments comes during album highlight “Honour,” where a discreet iPhone recording of a family argument is given only minimal instrumental backing and post-processing. Listening to Klein’s music is like watching a degraded VHS tape of a stranger’s home movies; the sounds she creates are totally alien, but the feelings they evoke are eerily familiar. “Lifetime” is Klein’s longest release yet, and the music benefits from the new space she gives herself to expand, seeing her experiment more with repetition, long stretches of near silence, and even conventional song structures and percussion.
AGORA/LIVE AT THE JAZZ CAFE FENNESZ After temporarily losing his studio workspace, Christrian Fennesz retreated to his apartment and made “Agora” with a laptop, a guitar, and a pair of headphones, much the same way he recorded his first few monumentally influential albums almost twenty years ago. Since then, although he’s incorporated elements of folk, noise, and modern classical into his work, his music has never been difficult to describe as “ambient.” Of all the records he’s released, however, this might be the one that falls most squarely under that umbrella descriptor. The songs here are long (the shortest still clocks in at over ten minutes) and contain layers upon layers of noise, guitar, feedback, and field recordings, evoking awe-inspiring scenes of roiling oceans and jagged mountains. “Live at the Jazz Cafe,” released a few months later, sees the same material chewed up and spat out reworked over two sidelong tracks. Of all the laptop virtuosos to have emerged in the early 2000s, Fennesz is one of the greatest, as documented on his myriad other live recordings, where he’ll improvise in between quick snippets from album tracks. Here, however, he strips back the noise and lets one or two of the many layers that make up the pieces on “Agora” breathe and drift by themselves. Although the music on these releases isn’t super trendy or reflective of what’s in vogue at the moment, the influence is still apparent in the work of more recent artists. It’s a breath of fresh air to hear one of the OG ambient kingpins returning to do what he does best. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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MOVIES & TV REVIEW
“Same Dad, Different Moms” The Moral Sentiments of Playboys and “Hustlers” by Cyndi Lai
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Content warning: sexual assault. en are not innocent. Cops are literally useless. Capitalism makes victims and voluntary perpetrators of us all. Starring Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu, “Hustlers,” a 2019 crime/dramedy film written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, has many bold statements to claim. Through a harmony of bluntness and subtlety, their resonance carries on long after the 110 minutes of glamor, empathy, and unceasing reality. The present day of the film takes place in 2014 in Dorothy’s (Constance Wu) living room, where she is in conversation with a journalist named Elizabeth (Julia Stiles).The movie unfolds in a sequence of flashbacks, narrated by Dorothy, a hardworking but unrefined stripper whose highest priority is her grandma and her independence. New to the city and eager to make friends, she meets Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), an experienced dancer at the same Manhattan club. The two women develop a steady friendship, sharing their work and personal lives, with Ramona becoming a strong mentor and mother figure to the younger and ingenuous Dorothy. Ramona just wants to give her daughter everything she could have, and she’s saving up to open her own denim swimsuit line, which would artfully be called “Swimona.” Dorothy, meanwhile, is hoping to pay off her grandma’s debt and go shopping. They make money. They remain independent. Life is a dream. Then 2008 hits. The club’s mainly Wall Street bankers clientele disappears, along with all the money. Dorothy meets a boy, falls in love, and gets pregnant. He promises to take care of her. He leaves. Dorothy is left to unemployed, single motherhood, and reluctantly returns to the strip club. Once 46
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there, she finds it largely empty of clients and dominated by Russian girls who look like models and give blowjobs for “300 dollars a pop.” The private rooms no longer have cameras, and the men have gotten more aggressive. On that first night back, Dorothy is dancing for a male
They make money. They remain independent. Life is a dream. client while he relentlessly comes on to her with comments about his dick, provoking her with “Is that all you’ve got? Don’t be a tease. Are you a tease? Feel how hard you make me. Just stroke it, come on. We’ll make each other feel good.” He offers her drugs, then money. A hundred. Two hundred. Finally, three hundred. He pulls out three bills and tosses it carelessly to his side. Dorothy is conflicted but gives in, snorts the line of coke he holds up to her on the back of his hand, and accepts his proposition. Recalling the event in present time, Dorothy says that it was only when she had gotten up that she realized he had actually given her three twenties. After the disturbing and coerced sexual exchange, Dorothy, in an afflicted state of mind, runs into Ramona, who recalls her own struggles during the past few years and, out of necessity, has turned from the dancing pole to “fishing:” finding rich men at bars, drugging them, and tricking them into spending thousands of dollars in one very forgettable night (“The MDMA makes them happy, the ketamine wipes their memory”). Dorothy joins Ramona’s scheme along with two other strippers, Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart). Mercedes’ fiance is in the process of serving a fourto five-year sentence in county prison, and Annabelle’s family threw her out when they discovered she was a stripper.
They find themselves in a free market, where the game is rigged, and the people who have made it are the ones who knew not to play by the rules. Ramona’s scheme is a protest against the same corruption and criminality that the cliche
They collectively give themselves up to a seductive self-justification: these Wall Street guys are thieves; they will be stealing from the thieves; the account will now be balanced, all evils merely negated. of the invisible hand has often exploited to justify lawless profiteering. Knowing that they can’t dance forever, the girls each go through their own process of reluctance, deliberation, and rationalization, until they collectively give themselves up to a seductive self-justification: these Wall Street guys are thieves; they will be stealing from the thieves; the account will now be balanced, all evils merely negated. They do not steal from the hardworking American people. They steal from men. What the girls do—drugging and stealing—is unquestionably illegal, but they take precautions, only calling clients they’ve met with before, who they know are already mainlining coke and also have wives at home. They count on these men not calling the cops. They know what these men know: that spending thousands of
dollars at a strip club in one night is something they would do anyways. Things run smoothly until Doug. Doug is a decent man, unlike the men they have encountered thus far, and a single dad who just got out of a long marriage. He calls Dorothy after they fished him in order to ask her to return the money she took. They had maxed out his company credit line, which caused his firm to launch an investigation that eventually resulted in him losing his job. Even though Dorothy feels ashamed, Ramona forces her to hang up the phone. When Doug eventually calls the cops to report that he had been drugged at a strip club, the detective laughs and hangs up on him before he is able to tell his whole story. Doug calls again so that he can finish his appeal, and the cops finally plan a sting operation investigating the plausibility of this strip club scheme. When Elizabeth interviews that same detective later on, he ironically says, “Men don’t like to admit what happened to them. You know… being victimized by a woman.” Somehow, he says this without empathy, just discomfort. In the preceding scene, we see him laughing with his co-workers at the precinct about the story of an architect who “spent fourteen grand at a strip club and went back for more.” The cops are spooked by these stories and jokingly agree among themselves to not go to strip clubs anymore. While the plot of “Hustlers” was undoubtedly alluring, it was the relationships that felt the most sincere. In a memorable first interaction on the balcony of the club’s building, for example, Ramona, seeing that Dorothy does not have a coat on, seats the younger woman between her legs and cov-
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ers them both in her fur coat. Her initial regality—sitting alone, smoking a cigarette against the glamorous backdrop of a city at night, dressed in a diamond one piece—is transformed into an easy and genuine warmth. During their “hustles,” the girls would introduce the others as their sisters—“same dad, different moms.” It is a spectacle—a white woman, a black woman, a Hispanic woman, an Asian woman, being literal sisters. But how that single word, “sisters,” resonates in distinction to the ready alternative of “friends.” Family is everyone. It is this fundamental mindset of extreme humanity held by Ramona that provides the driving energy of the film. As their fishing business expanded, tensions arise between Ramona and Dorothy; Dorothy wants to be safe—no criminals, no addicts, nobody gets hurt. Ramona puts her trust in girls who are obviously careless, as well as criminal and addicts. Her big heart carries the plot all the way through to its glorious ruins. Coming in with expectations of a more laid back plot, the flashback structure always alluded to a looming disaster, so that despite the more lighthearted beginnings of the film, the foresight of the fallout was unnecessarily explicit. Similar to the temporal structure of “How to Get Away with Murder,” the flashbacks slowly catch up to an unraveling modern day, and the knowing of the present impacts the way one gets to experience the past. This interviewer element is a creative tribute to Jessica Tressler, the author of the New York Times article on which the film was based. Additionally, it brings in an unrelated party who holds the separate pieces to the whole puzzle, analogous to what Adam Smith would
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potentially have referred to as an impartial spectator. Our interviewer thus provides a mirror by which the audience gets to reflect upon, and ultimately judge, the actions of our characters—their moral standards and strayings. At one point, Elizabeth interrupts the flashback of a soft
During their “hustles,” the girls would introduce the others as their sisters. . . But how that single word, “sisters,” resonates in distinction to the ready altnerative of “friends.” Family is everyone. Christmas filler scene with, “Let’s get back to the drugging.” Aware of the uneven and comparatively high moral ground upon which the interviewer was judging her past actions, Dorothy reverses their roles. “Elizabeth, did you grow up with money?” No affirmation or denial; Elizabeth was, as she describes it, “comfortable.” “What did your parents do?” They were just normal people; her dad was a journalist, her mom, a psychiatrist. “Where did you go to school?” Brown, for undergraduate. “And what would you do for a thousand dollars?” Elizabeth is surprised by the directness of the question and is about to respond, but Dorothy cuts her off. “Of course, the answer depends on what you already have, and what you need.” u
REVIEW
“Good Omens”: Is It Gay? by Alex Kingsley
Y
ou ever look at something and say, “Hey, is that gay?” You ever find yourself craving representation in media to the point where you are willing to read into every little line to prove to yourself that this character is someone you can identify with? You ever do that? I do. Often. And I just kind of took it for granted until a friend of mine said, “Hey, there’s this movie I think you’d really like. It’s super gay.” Only when I watched this movie did I realize how conditioned I was to expect heterosexuals in media; I was shocked when they actually used the word gay. I was shocked when multiple characters were queer.* I realized that often when we say something is “super gay,” what we really mean (because it is what we expect) is that there is just enough queer subtext that we can read into it. Rarely are we treated to something that is explicitly queer, but oh how deeply do we crave it. I believe this yearning for representation (from all sides of the LGBT community) is a large part of the reason why
the screen adaption of “Good Omens” gained such a huge following immediately after its release. At this point, you’ve probably heard of “Good Omens,” whether you’ve seen the whole series twice or you just heard about it because that Christian group petitioned the wrong company to take it down. Which is crazy to me because about a year ago, when the first preview for the series came out, I was over the moon while no one around me knew what I was talking about. For anyone who doesn’t know, “Good Omens” is a religious satire novel written in 1990 by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett that tells the story of a demon and an angel, Crowley and Aziraphale, who team up to prevent Armageddon. During the six thousand years the two spend as the respective representatives of Hell and Heaven on Earth, they unintentionally develop a deep affection for both humanity and each other. Aziraphale is at first reluctant when Crowley asks him to team up to go against God’s will—since the Armageddon, he believes, must be part of His Divine
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Plan—but in the end, both find that their desire to preserve the human race overrides any loyalty that they once held. The novels take all the dichotomies on which Christianity is based—right and wrong, good and evil—and calls them into question. Ever since its release, the novel has had a dedicated following, mostly because of the lovable protagonists and their forbidden friendship. (Or is it forbidden love? We’ll discuss.) Gaiman and Pratchett planned on a screen adaptation for a while and often discussed it, but after Pratchett’s death, Gaiman vowed it would never happen because he wouldn’t adapt it without his co-author. A few years ago, however, a letter Pratchett wrote near his death was discovered instructing Gaiman to carry on the production of an adaptation of their shared novel without him. Thus the screen adaptation you can now find on Amazon was born, not only to slake the desire of fans of the novel, but as a love letter to the late author. My theory is that this is one of the reasons the show follows the book so precisely, and that every single detail is excruciatingly well thought out: the whole show honors Terry. My family has been making fun of me for how absolutely obsessed I have been with this show since it came out. But can you blame me? How many cherished favorite books actually get a really decent screen adaption that not only stays faithful to but adds to the original book? And this show is well thought out. I do not exaggerate when I say I could write another entire essay just on how the cinematography is used to repeat the image of angel wings in, like, every scene. But that’s not what I’m writing this essay about.
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While there are many aspects of the book and series I absolutely love, there was one aspect I never really thought much about until The Discourse started online: Queerness. There are a lot of people on the internet with a lot of strong views on this, and I’m going to attempt to sum them all up and throw in my own answer to the eternal question: how gay is “Good Omens,” really? Most people reading queerness into the show fall into two camps: a) those who read it as simply gay, and b) those who propose the idea that both of these characters are asexual and genderfluid (as they are non-human). It is important to note that Gaiman has stated that he is fine with fans discussing these identities, but has stated firmly that it is not part of the canon because these are “human labels” that these inhuman characters would not identify with. That being said, a significant part of the text and series implies otherwise. This contradiction gets at a core tension of queerness in media today: how much representation can we claim when a creator says that it isn’t there? How much representation should we be able to ask of creators in media? At what point does queer-coding equal actual representation, and at what point does it become queer-baiting? Let’s start with the text itself. Anyone who has read the book probably remembers the oft-quoted snippet regarding Aziraphale’s sexuality: “Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide.” Funny? Yes. Problematic? Maybe. It was the nineties. The book continues to say, “angels are sexless unless they specifically make an effort.”
I’m willing to give Gaiman and Pratchett a pass here because the term “asexual” was not widely used to describe people when the book was published in 1990, so “sexless” was probably the closest term they could use that people would have understood to mean, “not interested in sex.” So Aziraphale’s actual sexuality is ambiguous, but we know that he seems gay. That’s a step above queer-coding, I think. The show leans into Aziraphale’s apparent gayness in a big way. We also have historical coding. For example, the show references Aziraphale learned the gavotte at a “discreet gentleman’s club.” “Gentleman’s Clubs” were gay meeting spots. St. James Park, where the novel notes that Aziraphale and Crowley regularly meet, was a gay meeting spot. They had an illicit meeting in a gazebo, for Christ’s sake! Not to mention the multiple jokes about other characters thinking that they’re a gay couple. So while he may be sexless, he still seems to be very involved in gay culture. What about the moment where Aziraphale calls himself “the southern pansy?” Can he really be tossing around that slur if he doesn’t identify with it? As an angel who’s so obsessed with doing the right thing, he’s probably not going to be casually homophobic. Even if he isn’t gay because that’s a human label he doesn’t conform to, he certainly seems to identify with it.
How much representation can we claim when a creator says that it isn’t there? How much representation should we be able to ask of creators in media? At what point does queer-coding equal actual representation, and at what point does it become queerbaiting? Also, being asexual and gay is a thing, so just because Aziraphale seems strongly aligned with gay culture doesn’t mean he’s not still ace. As an ace person, this was huge. Just the idea that these characters were in a loving relationship without sex is so rare to see that we aces collectively freaked out. With the exception of Todd Chavez from “BoJack Horseman” (a character I am grateful for every day), I cannot think of a single character in a popular television show that is openly asexual. Sure, it would be nice to have characters that were asexual because they are human and some humans are asexual, but characters who are asexual because they are ethereal beings is still a step closer to the representation I want to be seeing. I hear a lot of people saying, “Don’t call these characters gay! It’s not fair to ace people!” Given that neither ace people nor gay people get enough representation, however, I don’t
really see why we should be wasting our energy fighting each other over it when we could put that energy into writing media with the representation that we want to see. But instead of arguing about which answer is true, I’d rather propose my own idea, my “if I were in the room with Gaiman and Pratchett here’s what I would have thrown into the conversation.”** What if sexuality and romantic attraction was part of Aziraphale and Crowley’s defiance? Wouldn’t giving these character human sexualities (even if that sexuality was asexuality) be another degree in their rebellion? Wouldn’t that be the most human thing they could do, to bask in the corporeal? Better yet, what if their deviation from the norm of supernatural creatures not feeling sexual or romantic attraction is what spurs them on to question the Divine Plan in the first place? These are the questions that kept me up at night all summer, and the questions that made my family say “Please for the love of god stop talking about ‘Good Omens’ and watch a real show like ‘Fleabag.’” Mostly, this is why I’m so annoyed at Gaiman for stating so firmly that human labels don’t apply to these characters. Not because I feel he has some duty to make his characters queer (they are, after all, his characters) but because I feel there is so much juicy discussion to be had about queerness and asexuality regarding these characters, and he is very pointedly Not Engaging. “Good Omens” means so much to many queer people. I just wish, like I wish about many shows and books with queer-coding, that all of this was made explicit. I want some representation, god damn it! And if I can’t find it here, I’ll look for it somewhere else. Better yet, I’ll write it myself.*** People throw around terms like “cheated” and “queer-baiting” all the time, especially when it comes to “Good Omens.” I wouldn’t say that. I would say “missed opportunity” at my harshest, but mostly I’m just glad that these characters that have meant so much to me for years now also mean so much to queer people around the world. So! What does any of this mean? Why delve into the sexuality and gender identity of a character who isn’t even real? Well, because it matters. It matters to queer people. These are the kinds of discussions that queer media consumers are having every day, and I want media creators to be having these same discussions. Yes, we’ve made some excellent strides in terms of representation of the past few years. But we could do better. And it all starts with recognizing what queer people want from media and how shockingly easy it is to give it to them. Our bar is too low, gays. We need to be asking more of content creators and we need to be asking for it now. u
1. The movie was Victor/Victoria. Would recommend. 2. Actually I would have thrown a lot of things into the conversation. Mainly that the sex scene between Anathema and Newt is totally unnecessary. 3. Literally every character I write is gay. SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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