Issue 3

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Skywriting Photo essay by Marjani Nairne

Also inside A history of last spring My summer at Abercrombie & Fitch The planning of Philadelphia

CONTRIBUTORS Nyantee Asherman ‘15 is a sociology/ anthropology major who is hoping to go into graphic communications and is unfortunately from Jersey.

Lydia Bailey ‘16 is a native New Yorker studying English and music.

Yenny Cheung ‘16 is from Hong Kong (and she loves her hometown!). She is an engineering major and environmental studies minor, admires art and music, and co-founded a new acapella group, Offbeat, at Swarthmore.

Anna Gonzales ‘16 is from Denver, Colorado, and studies English and art history so that she can serve Starbucks lattes with a side of culture later in life.

Nathaniel Graf ‘16 is a biology major from Garnet Valley, Pennsylvania. He’s been involved to various degrees in Mountain Justice, Swat InterActs, QTC, the fencing team, and entirely too many other things to a lesser extent.

Ian Hoffman ‘15 is a champion troubadour from Berkeley, California.

Tiffany Kim ‘16 hails from the best city in the whoooole world (Los Angeles) and has been described by turn as “aggressively friendly,” “a little belligerent,” and (by one particularly Midwestern person) “contrary.”

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 swarthmoreview@gmail.com.

How to contribute We solicit pieces from writers, though we will also accept submissions of long-form reporting, personal, argumentative and photo essays, book and movie reviews, short stories, poems, and anything else that seems suitable. Submissions will be considered from Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and will be considered anonymously, though we will not, except in rare cases, publish anonymously. Submissions should generally not go longer than 10,000 words. We are also looking for editors and staffers of all kind—staff writers, graphic designers, artists, web designers, section editors.

Contact: swarthmoreview@gmail.com. Feel free to contact individual editors as well.

Izzy Kornblatt ‘16 is from Northampton, Massachusetts, and is considering majoring in philosophy.

EDITORS IN CHIEF ANNA GONZALES IZZY KORNBLATT

Koby Levin ‘15 is a comparative lit major from the suburbs of Detroit.

Patrick Ross ‘15 studies storytelling for the stage and the page. Elder with phoenix feather core, fourteen-and-a-half inches, unyielding.

Maria Vieytez ‘16 wants a tattoo, but can’t decide which e.e. cummings quotation is best.

In the meantime, she writes on her skin and puts up with the “INK POISONING!” people.

Joyce Wu ‘15 is a linguistics major and an English literature minor. Many of her friends don’t know this.

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S W A R T H M O R E

Founded 2012 | Vol. 2 No. 1

MIKE LUMETTA Z.L. ZHOU

PUBLISHER KOBY LEVIN

GRAPHICS EDITORS NYANTEE ASHERMAN YENNY CHEUNG

POETRY EDITORS SARA BLAZEVIC

EDITOR AT LARGE KOBY LEVIN

Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com

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

“He soon acquired that forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.”

Gabriel García Marquez, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”

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‘The spring of our discontent’ September 2013

Arts

by Koby Levin

Reflections on last spring

What really happened last spring?

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REPORT

COMMENT

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BOOKS

Looking in a mirror 31 Tao Lin’s uncomfortable new novel

by Tiffany Kim

Don’t let the issues brought up last spring go away

by Joyce Wu

Planning Phila. 33 The man who planned modern Philadelphia gets some recognition

by Izzy Kornblatt

6 Fight back Why exactly activism is necessary at Swarthmore

by Nathaniel Graf

Recommended reading from Nyantee Asherman

Having sex at Swarthmore

by Anna Gonzales

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POEMS

LETTERS: Razi Shaban challenges Terry Eagleton on Marxism 4

Skywriting

Photo essay by Marjani Nairne

Departing 7

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by Ian Hoffman

in which the dream becomes the nightmare 23

by Maria Vieytez

Drawings by Nyantee Asherman and Yenny Cheung

by Patrick Ross

ILLUSTRATIONS

PERSONAL ESSAY

FICTION

A hand on the doorknob

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The myth of hookup culture, deconstructed

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My summer at Abercrombie & Fitch 28

by Lydia Bailey

We’re looking for contributors.

Contact any of the editors or email swarthmoreview@gmail.com

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LETTERS Missing the Marx: a response to Terry Eagleton

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n the conclusion of his “Literary Theory: An Introduction,” Terry Eagleton describes the role of “literary theorists, critics and teachers” as not so much purveyors of doctrine as custodians of a discourse. Their task is to preserve this discourse, extend and elaborate it as necessary, defend it from other forms of discourse, initiate newcomers into it and determine whether or not they have successfully mastered it.

In his April interview with the Review (“Terry Eagleton on socialism in tough times...,” 13), Eagleton engaged the Swarthmore student body in Marxist discourse, attempting to offer an alternate perspective.

Eagleton has a knack for clear, precise writing—my first encounter with him was his cogent unravelling of what he termed Lacan’s “notoriously sybilline style.” However, in his interview, he touched on a range of Marxist concepts without providing proper context, without trying to initiate a newcomer. This essay aims to do just that: offer a clear, accessible introduction to some of the concepts underlying Eagleton’s interview.

In his response to Izzy Kornblatt’s first question, if we can “separate the exploitation that’s gone on in capitalism from the system itself,” Eagleton responds that “in the technical Marxist sense, then capitalism is intrinsically, inherently exploitative, in that it deprives the workers some of what is theirs by right.” This is true, but hardly scratches the surface. Most of Marx’s thousand-plus page “Capital” is devoted to trying to unravel just how this exploitation takes place.

For Marx, the process of production of value is central to understanding the functioning of capital. The capitalist, he says, pays the price of labor and receives in exchange the right to use a worker’s labor for a length of time. This time Marx divides into two sections: the first of these is necessary

C orrec tion s

Please send corrections to swarthmoreview@gmail.com.

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labor, during which the worker produces a value that is equal to the value of his labor.

The capitalist receives a product that is worth what he paid the worker—it is as if he bought the product from the laborer.

However, after this point comes the period of surplus labor, during which the laborer creates value for the capitalist without receiving anything in return. This, then, is unpaid labor, received by squeezing extra work into the labor-time the capitalist has purchased.

The ratio between the necessary labor and the surplus labor expended by a laborer is termed by Marx “the degree of exploitation of labor-power by capital.” This ratio can be altered by a variety of means, including lengthening the working day or the automation of labor, with the ultimate goal of the capital being to extract as much surpluslabor as possible from the worker. This relationship of exploitation, or gaining by the capitalist of free labor from the worker, is “the specific nature of the capital-relation.”

That is, capitalism is “essentially the command over unpaid labor.”

Following the discussion of exploitation, Eagleton begins to discuss American foreign policy with regards to the Boston marathon bombings. It is worth noting that Marx dedicates an entire chapter of his first volume of “Capital” to “The Modern Theory of Colonization.” This conclusion to his first volume outlines one of the first models of modern globalization, and also (if you’re curious) manages to condense a decent summary of Marx’s model of capital (“not something new about the colonies, but, in the colonies, the truth about capitalist relations in the mother country”). The capitalist, with “the power of the mother country” behind him, uses force when possible to begin the process of capitalization: “manufacturing wage-laborers in the colonies.”1 By separating people from the means of production—that is, by seizing the means of production—a capitalist class creates a captive population of producers. The “cancerous affliction” of the United States, at the time of “Capital’”s publication (1867),2

was its “resistance to the establishment of capital” caused by the abundance of public land. Because anyone could quit a job and become self-employed and self-sustaining, the US could not maintain a steady supply of wage-laborers. In conclusion of his discussion of the Americas, Marx leaves us on a positive note: “Capitalistic production advances there with gigantic strides, although the lowering of wages and dependence of the wage-laborer has by no means yet proceeded so far as to reach the normal European level.”

What relevance does this have to the Boston bombings, you may ask, and to a Marxian understanding of American foreign policy? The process of “systematic colonization” outlined by Marx is the very conception of the evils of American foreign policy that Eagleton is pointing to—Eagleton cites, for example, the American overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende. Indeed, the model articulated by Marx describes specifically the systematic exploitation— “the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil,” from the means of production—that is the hallmark of the spread of capitalism.

Regarding the state of Marxism today, Eagleton is not alone in his development of Marx’s thought. Many prominent philosophers and political scientists today continue to explore what a Marxian society would look like today. David Harvey, for example, recently published “The Enigma of Capital,” a reading of Marx dedicated to making clear the structures behind and solutions to the recent financial crises. Many prominent philosophers, including Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Jean‐Luc Nancy, Slavoj Žižek, and Terry Eagleton himself, convene regularly to envision a Marxist future from a shifting present.

To me, the benefit of studying Marx is not a continued fantasy of a utopian society. Rather, I appreciate Marx’s goals and methods: to attempt to understand clearly and deeply how and why we do what we do. This, to me, is Marx’s most powerful legacy—his prescient understanding of the underpinnings of capitalism aside—and it is this pursuit of clarity that I hope readers can take away from a second take on a man long dead.

Razi Shaban ‘16

[C]apital is not a thing,” Marx argues, “but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.”

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The version of “Capital” I cite is the authoritative Ben Fowkes translation (Random House, 1977).

COMMENT RUN WITH IT Don’t let the issues brought up last spring go away

by Joyce Wu

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A group of students didn’t just wake up on the morning of May 3 and decide to march on Parrish without justification.

Similarly, the Board of Managers meeting that same weekend was not taken over on a whim.

People who believe that have not thought critically about the protesters’ motivations. And according to our own President Rebecca Chopp in a speech she gave in October of 2012, “critical thinking … is the heart and soul of a liberal arts education.”

Yet the reactions of so many people on this liberal arts college campus have suggested a distinct lack of critical thought.

In her May 15 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, entitled “My Top-Notch Illiberal Arts Education,” Danielle Charette ’14 expressed her desire for Swarthmore to be “a place where ideas are freely exchanged.”

(I refer to this op-ed not to single Charette out, as I believe that she has already gotten a disproportionate amount of attention in regard to this issue, but merely because this was the most obvious concrete example of the type of reaction I am referring to.)

I honestly cannot fathom how opening up a meeting that was originally going to be dominated by a few voices to many more, how holding public event after public event, how having a campus-wide Collection, could hinder dialogue. That certainly was not our intention; after all, we eventually produced a list of demands of administrators, the faculty, and the student body. We were not protesting simply to seek attention; we sought attention to begin to create change.

I recognize, though, that in our society, how you say something can matter more than what you’re saying.

That puts last semester’s protesters in a bind.

It feels like we tried talking “reasonably,” the way we are so often encouraged to do here as disciples in the art of of civil discourse, and then when that didn’t work, we turned to more drastic measures—which still didn’t lead to satisfactory action.

That’s all right, though. Just as “the spring of our discontent” started long before the 2013 round of snow melting and flowers budding, so does it continue into now, even as crunchy leaves begin to pile up on campus paths.

What I encourage now is empathy, which I hope will finally lead to sufficient change-making. To those who dismissed last semester’s Swarthmore review

Photo by Zein Nakhoda, courtesy of Gabe Benjamin

t’s interesting to think about what different people mean when they talk about “the events of last spring.”

To me, they start in February, with the Greek life referenda (which I started), which catalyzed the sexual assault accountability movement (in which I was peripherally involved), which was in turn part of a larger coalition that most significantly also included members of Mountain Justice and of the Intercultural Center community (including me).

But in order to really understand last spring, we must understand what led up to it.

The Greek life referendum is easy enough to track: dissatisfaction with the state of Greek life on this campus came to a head with the rise of Kappa Alpha Theta. The sexual assault accountability movement, too, is not difficult to make sense of: the administration mishandled cases of sexual assault and sexual assault reporting, and students eventually got fed up enough that they filed complaints with the federal government.

The protests, Board of Managers meeting takeover, and the ensuing events, though?

Well, my own recollection of these events is fairly coherent, but feedback I’ve gotten from those less involved points to confusion on a lot of people’s parts.

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events as the product of “radicals” ’ idle hands, to those who have told me that they hope things won’t be “as crazy” this semester, to those who wish we would just shut up: please listen to us retroactively. It’s not too late. Go back and look through Swat Overlaps, which did a wonderful job of documenting what went on last spring. Even if you might not agree with all of the issues we brought up—because there was certainly a wide range—perhaps there is just one that resonates with you.

Take that one. Run with it. u

FIGHT BACK Why exactly activism is necessary at Swat

by Nathan Graf

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t is hoped that those who suffer will speak: for any interpretation of liberation theology must be radically ruptured by the claims and cries of those who suffer. Any reflection on God- the God who creates, redeems, and liberates history- must today be interrupted by God who freely chooses to be with the victims of history.”

The above is a quote from President Rebecca Chopp in the introduction to her book “The Praxis of Suffering.” I interpret the culminating events in the Spring of Discontent as a manifestation of exactly this—those who are suffering speaking out. Also implicit here is a reason why that expression of suffering is good. That is, simply, that it can I interpret hopefully be acknowledged and steps to ameliorate it can be taken. I’ve seen the events some of those efforts made, but not OF Last nearly enough. In fact, there has been a and to me, fairly incomprehenSPRING AS tragic, sible, amount of resistance to the proTHIS: those tests on the part of the senior administration at Swarthmore. According to a who are Wall Street Journal op-ed by Danielle President Chopp referred to suffering Charette, students’ takeover of the board meetspeaking ing as “outrageous.” The communications office published a flowery piece out. summarizing the final events littered with words with positive and optimistic connotations and closed the comments section. Appeals have been made through a variety of mediums that we find a more peaceful way to build community and have a constructive dialog, which just postpones real 6

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action and ignores the fact that this dialogue has been happening for decades already.

These issues would be merely annoying if the senior administration had actually taken seriously the endeavor to craft a radical emancipatory institution out of Swarthmore, but they’ve fallen far short of that. I’ll spare you the time of reporting the myriad of shortcomings for now. Assuming best intentions, I read their falling short as a difficulty in balancing the degree of student input that they have and the amount of action that they take. At times, such as the teach-ins, they stayed almost entirely hands-off—somewhat understandably as we’d been harshly critical of their previous attempts to craft their versions of community dialogues.

Unfortunately, this left sleep-deprived students in reading week with about 12 hours to pull together an effective way to pull the entire Swarthmore community into the dialogues of anti-oppression and the final result fell far short of that. On the other hand, they’ve also gone forward with their own programming and initiatives without seeking adequate (or any) student input, and at times have simply gone against student input. Examples include the discussion President Chopp and Tim Burke held during alumni weekend without seeking student input or representation, the installation of cameras around the IC in spite of IC students repeatedly asking that they not do so, and the hiring of Margolis Healy and Associates. My recommendation to the administration is to seek student input and then act on that input, quite simply. We really do have a lot of thoughts, and if we were willing to go to the lengths that we did to express ourselves last year, I’m quite sure that many of us would be quite happy to simply have a meeting and exchange ideas. A few have even happened already. These meetings themselves have gone quite well when taken independently, but the actual implementation and follow up on the ideas expressed in them has been extremely lacking. (I did believe that we’d come to an agreement not to install cameras and to have a comprehensive page laying out the administrative power structure for the school, but it doesn’t seem to have come out that way.)

I’d guess at this point many students and others are wondering why activists wouldn’t express themselves through the committee system. It is already in place and meant for exactly that purpose—to give voice and power to students in crafting this institution. Unfortunately, that tactic has already been tried four years ago when the IC/BCC coalition worked to represent themselves and their ideas in the committees. As it has been explained to me, they were systematically worn down in process and red tape in the very oppressive and disempowering committee struc-

ture. Many committees serve more as rubber stamps than decision-making spaces. At this point, as activists have given up on expressing themselves through institutional channels, that leaves protest available to right the wrongs at this school.

The draft of the Diversity and Inclusion Implementation Committee’s report had a lot of nice elements in it; for example I commend what seems to be a thorough effort to increase diversity amongst the faculty to me at first reading, but it definitely lacked in certain areas. One particular flaw is that the report doesn’t include much more than a throwaway flowery sentence referring to the opportunities we have as a diverse community to address actually helping to create a diverse student body.

This is in particular contrast to our substantial lack in diversity of several types in the student body, including the fact that only five percent of the class of 2017 identifies as African American (this does not count those who identify as multiracial). This is especially interesting after StuCo’s concession to SASS in 1969 that Swarthmore enroll 100 black students within three years and 150 black students within six years of that time. After 43 years, Swarthmore was at 152 black students (counting multiracial students) last year. Another thing that hasn’t been addressed is our demand for increased institutional support for the IC, BCC, RA team, DART, and SMART. There was an email last year explicitly stating support for students of various oppressed identities. I’d suggest providing funding is a fairly simple way to start to actually do that. I’ll spare you the remainder of my thoughts on all of the places the report and administration have fallen short, but they largely follow along similar lines.

It is vitally important in these dialogues to remember that none of this oppression is new.

Swarthmore has a long history of oppression, culminating in particularly egregious acts that spark waves of protest and demands of the administration that are forgotten as people graduate and forget. Then the cycle repeats repeats again. For example, one of the more recent big waves was in 1998 after, according to a fact sheet distributed at the time, “piles of a substance initially believed (by smell and appearance) to be vomit with additional material resembling feces covered with candy sprinkles were found in five locations [in the IC].” This sparked rallies and protests with many of the same demands that we have now. Unfortunately, those demands were never met (obviously) and we’re stuck doing the same thing again now. I, for one, would really, really like to make this the last time we have to go through this cycle for a while. We may graduate, but our successors will repeat the same story again if Swarthmore cannot successfully make itself a less oppressive institution. But for now, we

enter the Fall of Discontent.

And finally, to any first years or other people who weren’t involved in these events while they were unfolding reading this piece: I first apologize for the relative lack of clarity that this must have. Second, I very strongly encourage you to find someone to explain these events to you. One of the more difficult parts of going through the ebb and flow of protests has been the relative lack of institutional memory in the student body. Learn what happened, and tell that story to the class of 2018 next year, and so forth. If you don’t know whom to ask, I would be personally absolutely thrilled to tell the tale to all 389 of you. u

Departing

by Ian Hoffman For JM and DR The water curdles, delicate as milk, around this buoyancy of fiberglass, this shell, these polished oars laid in their locks, and where they brush the bay, it folds like silk.

Behind the scene, dawn breaks in one great mass.

The boys about to man stand on the dock.

Barefoot, the spandex riding their chests tight, they shiver slightly, and the coxswain calls.

His cracking voice vibrates a dictum note then echoes off the slums, just out of sight, past brick-walled tenements awaiting mauls.

The boys arise and pack into the boat.

They push off slowly, anchorless, above nothing but insubstantial blue. They stroke across the water, each one lost inside a place of unforgiving, self-same love.

The air is cool, the dawn is fully broke; They taste a chill upon their mouths and hides.

They slice a semaphore straight on the blue, a growing wake, and they’re the arrowhead; then muscle by some tankers, upping spray, boats coming in as they’re attacking through the wakes that foam around them as they thread their needle to the headwater, where they turn around and draw the pattern tight by rowing towards the pier with all their might.

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ESSAY

‘The spring of our discontent’: a chronicle

Students and former Dean Alina Wong show solidarity on May 3 after the door of the Intercultural Center was urinated on after Pub Nite.

by Koby Levin

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aturday, August 25, 2012 12:44:06 PM From: “Maya Marzouk” <mmarzou1@swarthmore.edu> To: “SQU Board List” <squboard@sccs. swarthmore.edu> Wait—I thought the sorority thing was shot down pretty definitively last year.

Why is this happening? Are we happy this is happening??

Maya Marzouk was more upset than she seemed. Before e-mailing the SQU Board, 8

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she had told Joyce Wu in a Facebook chat that she would leave the school if a sorority was established. Much later, unbound by graduation from student group diplomacy and at a safe remove from the spring and from Swarthmore, she told me “when you put a bunch of girls together and give them permission to be mean to other girls it doesn’t end very well … that doesn’t belong at Swarthmore.” Still, her message to the Swarthmore Queer Union listserv, no polemic, touched a nerve. It generated, in turn, a major dustup on the Swarthmore Queer Union listserv and a petition for a referendum against the sorority that rapidly received the required

155 signatures before being quashed by the administration. Accounts of the quashing vary, but it is agreed that the order came down from Dean of Students Elizabeth Braun herself in the name of Title IX. That this was like calling up a long-estranged parent when you need a sitter would only become clear the following spring, after more petitions and more dustups.

Causality as a rule is galactically complicated. Where Marzouk’s email fits in the causal chain of this story is for a historian to begin to say, and a moot point here. For different reasons, that email is a good place to start, because it marks the start of a transformation in Marzouk Photo courtesy of Ryan Greenlaw

herself that is synechdochic, poignant, and utterly worth our attention. Less than two semesters after typing the teeth-grittingly contained message above, Marzouk stood in front of 300-some peers, professors, and staff people and said that she had been raped on campus, and where was her support you do-gooders when it was most desperately needed, and where is it now for those who need it?

Our many masks come with many muzzles. That these change with our company reveals more than it achieves.

The grapevine is very dense: the best kept secret is not what was said or done, but who has heard, which has the odd effect of making private speech public and public speech unthinkable, at least on matters of direct import to the campus and hence to the audience. Add to that the difficulty of introducing even the concept of rape to a place where harmony is assumed, and it’s clear why speaking out as Marzouk did, as the campus did, was a turning of the inside out. Of course it made national news. The result appears to be institutional change for the better, but it is clear now that the grownups will need help maintaining it.

And so we must remember the eruption of last spring, especially in the silence that will follow it.

What follow are some memories of last spring, mine and others’. They form an incomplete picture. I have revisited mine so many times that they have become encrusted with interpretation, but I hold out hope that they can be of some use to students later.

February 13, 14, 15 By the time I walked into Joyce Wu’s room, a staff editorial calling for a referendum on the whole of Greek life1 was on its way to the printer. The Phoenix, Swarthmore’s print newspaper, had published an editorial on the same topic the semester before, and the editorial board decided to reconsider the issue.

I was a managing editor at the time. It was my habit to stop by Willets to visit friends after work at the Phoenix, which is how I wound up in Joyce’s room the night before the Greek life editorial was to be published, telling her what she could expect to find in the paper the next morning. She must have remembered her conversations with Marzouk and

the Title IX-induced demise of the first petition. She new that a new petition could be protected from a similar fate only by taking on the sorority and the fraternities—a prima facie exhausting task given the bizarre entrenchment of the things institutionally in North America (and only North America). The way our conversation actually went, as she remembers it: “You came into my room and were like, ‘yo, the Phoenix is writing this editorial’, and I was like ‘hey! I’ll start a petition right now.’”2 By mid-morning the next day, there was a petition to go with the editorial. Two days later, it had the signatures needed to initiate a referendum—155. This show of support is by far the most reliable measure of the reaction to the petition—155 people (eventually 197) thought it was a good idea. In somewhat distant second comes the fact that no fraternity or sorority member would speak to the press that week, lending credence to rumors of a gag order and the sort of reactions a gag order is made to contain.

Sunday, February 17 Joyce has emailed the petition signatories, invited them to accompany her to an open student council meeting on Sunday night. A handful, perhaps 20, show up. This kind of attendance is an event; we gave no notice of our coming. More chairs must be brought. Our concern, whatever it is, is placed at the top of the agenda. So, says the president, would anyone like to start? We are silent. Signing a petition is not the same as standing up for something.

All eyes are on Joyce. She did not expect this, or perhaps had hoped to avoid it.

But no choice now. For a moment she is flustered, laughing a little, organizing her words … and her face is all flinty precision, the look of someone on a script they have done battle for.

The signatories were too loose an association to be leaderless. Given the organizing principle of Joyce, the meeting can proceed, and does. It is decided that the petition, which by student council law would have to be voted upon within two weeks of its submission, will be withheld.

It is agreed that more discussion is needed.

Discussions on Social Culture—Joyce “The first meeting was the one in

Somewhere along the way “Greek letter organization” became “Greek life.”

It’s fun to imagine someone imagining a Platonic republic in which the noble rulers of the party benevolently allow the weak, the socially incompetent, the non-conforming, the unathletic—the GDIs—to get some ass.

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Kohlberg. It was originally supposed to be a planning meeting, for people who wanted to plan the discussions, but then 60 people showed up. And so the discussion planning meeting itself turned into a discussion. Afterwards, people were like ‘that was good but everyone was just airing their grievances.’ There weren’t a lot of concrete solutions proposed or anything because everyone wanted to talk about it, and everyone had a lot of things to say.”

And then we get a second discussion in the works, right? This time supposedly with an administrator moderating.

“So that’s when I go and have a meeting with Greek leadership by myself. It was supposed to be an actual planning planning session for the next discussion. I wanted an administrator to moderate it, or just not a student, and they were very very not for that idea.”

What was it, eight on one?

“Ten on one. I was sitting at one end of the table, and then it was all the rest of them. I was definitely really intimidated.

This I think was after the first TFM article though, so the meeting started off with Ashley Gochoco [of Kappa Alpha Theta] apologizing to me.”

That article …

“The article was called “Swarthmore GDI’s Try to Referendum Greek Life Away.” It talked about how I’m really intolerant and anti-American, and I got called a chink and a communist and stuff like that in the comments … Anyway, it was hard for us to make decisions when all ten of them didn’t want a dean at the next talk and I found myself saying, well, maybe we shouldn’t have a dean there.

Backtracking. But then afterwards, I talked to Dean Carlene Burrell McRae. And that was how we ended up going to those two separate planning meetings with Dean Carlene and having her sort of moderate the next discussion.”

So you won, then. How did the Greek people feel about having to meet with a dean?

“I don’t think I learned. Anyway, I was kind of dissatisfied with the whole process, and after the meeting I was even less satisfied. I was very frustrated with the way it had gone. Oh, right, and that was supposed to be one of three meetings.

They were supposed to have themes.”

But this is where the decision was made

2 Disclaimer: Joyce was Chief Copy Editor at the Phoenix when this conversation happened. Copy Editors are not at all involved in the staff editorial process (though they do check it for grammar once it’s done).

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to cut the talks off. Was a message sent to the Greek people saying ‘alright, we’re giving up on this, here’s why’?

“The ‘Discussion on Social Culture’ took place on March 1st, and that was either a week or two weeks before spring break. Dean Carlene in her lets-not-rushthings way was saying we should think of a timeline for the discussions, and things just kind of petered out. I sent an email to the Greek life leaders after the first discussion on social culture to talk about it, and I received very little response, and I began to feel that I was running to whole show, and that I had hit the ball into everybody’s court but no one was hitting it back to me. At this point, I was getting very emotionally fatigued, and really didn’t feel like chasing people down all the time.”

And then you started a new petition that split the old one into six parts.

“I solicited suggestions from the people who had signed the original petition and got a good few responses. What I had been hearing all along was “it’s so extreme to get rid of Greek life,” let’s think of other options. So I asked for alternate solutions, put them into a new petition, launched the petition, and immediately got backlash for being even more divisive. I was like, this is confusing, I’m proposing solutions that don’t involve getting rid of you now.”

Why this backlash?

“It doesn’t make logical sense, but it makes emotional sense. When the first petition was launched there was this huge wave of anger from members of the Greek organization. And when the second petition was launched they saw it as a further onslaught instead of as a retreat.

David Hill [DU, graduated] wrote me this really angry email saying ‘I don’t think I can work with you anymore, I had been willing to, but now that you launched this new petition I don’t think your word is good, and you’re not having discussions with us...’ And so I wrote back like I’m sorry you feel that way, but launching a new petition is not mutually exclusive of discussion. I’m just providing another option. And he never got back to me. I said things in a similar vein to the other Greek leaders who I had been working with said this is why I’m doing this, here are the new questions—talk to me.”

And did they?

“No. That was when relations fell apart.”

What relations were coherent enough to make disintegration metaphorically accurate had been maintained entirely

by Joyce. A group of her friends and sympathizers, me included, attended the discussions out of solidarity and interest, but we seldom spoke up. Maybe we thought that airing our radical views would only scare members of Greek life from the table, that in checking ourselves we were contributing to the cause. It’s plausible enough—someone may even have said it out loud when we huddled together after a discussion to share the brilliant ripostes we had so prudently withheld. Which is to say that the Greek life discussions were useless; no one bought in. The Quaker collection, whose very tenets do not allow for the engagement of two parties, is no instrument of political mediation, though it would prove its worth later in the spring. And in fact no one meant for it to be used that way. No one expected that two political parties of equal conviction— and nobody else—would show up for the discussions, and that what was really needed was a sharply moderated, perhaps televised debate in the fanciful mold of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom; that, in short, this was a campaign in its larval stages.

The opponents: a heavily entrenched incumbent (Greek life) preparing to ride out the storm that would be as tumultuous as a small, motivated group of dissenters could make it. The starting gun: the submission by Joyce of the new petition, this time with six questions of varying detriment to the status quo. There were two weeks until the vote. Joyce had gone to an organizing workshop with her roommate, Hope Brinn, and they brought back a strategy to the cabal, as we called it: Energize the “apathetic majority”; don’t let anyone ignore what’s going on. In small meetings at night in empty classrooms we settled on our media, posters and chalkings. We would wallpaper campus for a week or so then add a chalk floor in the days before the referendum. The posters would set a polemical tone. One said

As it turns out, there is something dreadful and almost physically difficult about putting up flyers that you know a lot of people will disagree with and maybe hate or be hurt by. There is no hedging on printed text, especially not printed text in red letters: if someone sees you putting a flyer up you are pegged to those words, to their tone and polemicism, which even if you know they’re right is socially terrifying for someone stuck in the post-adolescenceand-way-way-pre-self-actualization stage where the cosmic approbation of the

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“Crimes by the fraternities go unreported at Swarthmore. Their victims are afraid of reprisal by the fraternities, which exercise physical and social intimidation.”

The posters bore our logo, an emphatic VOTE YES. Some text on each one was highlighted in red. Hope printed 1,000 copies.

March 25 to April 9—Hope “Putting up the flyers was physically exhausting. I was putting up flyers in every bathroom stall on campus. So there was that piece. I did it at night because I didn’t want to have to interact with people as I was doing it.3 I just didn’t really want people screaming at me. I was prepared to deal with that, but I just didn’t want to.

I put up flyers in McCabe when people were looking, but that was okay. Most people just didn’t say anything, the vast majority of people. Some people said this looks great and some people clearly hated it. But then the next day pretty much all the flyers are down. And Myrt Westphal [Dean’s office, retired] sent out that wonderful email saying the rules can’t be evenly enforced, the rules are designed to be unevenly enforced. She said the flyers have been removed, and sure, we don’t usually enforce this rule about needing to have your name on things, but that’s because the rules are meant to be unevenly enforced. She basically told David Hill he could remove them, though she didn’t recommend it. So then we put our name on everything, but they continued to rip them down, and we continued to put them back up.

“That was going on for a week, and then I met with Myrt and she basically was like oh, i’m sorry, you were right, and then sent out another B.S. email that didn’t actually say that I was right at all, not even a little bit. The posters continued coming down every single day, and we continued putting them up, every single day.

“Then there were the chalkings. The idea was to put in chalk the reasons you were voting “yes” [against Greek life]. We posted the chalking policy so everyone was aware. The first morning—none of them were graphic, like Amanda’s [Epstein] was the most graphic it said ‘I never felt mistreated as a woman until I went into

project of your life is measured by the number of people who seem to like you, with equal weight given to your parents and to the acquaintance you only sort of liked who has purportedly been talking shit about you because you put up some posters. Which is how someone whose bedtime is usually 11:30 might find himself creeping through his dorm at 4 a.m. putting posters in bathroom stalls and jumping out of his skin when the central air turns on.

the frats. Think its a coincidence? It’s a culture.’ There was nothing really graphic or emotionally scarring. There were significant claims, but we were completely within the chalking policies. They were kind of vague—‘things that are offensive may be washed away,’ or something like that. And so then the next morning Vic Brady [president of student council, graduated] was washing them away.

Anything that said rape was erased. And even very benign ones—like one that said ‘If I had known about the frat culture on campus I wouldn’t have even applied’— were erased. Anything that said DU was washed away. Vic said the chalkings were targeted, and that it was anonymous, even though in the chalking policy it states explicitly that they can be anonymous.”

And there was something about tour groups, right?

“Right. Something about how he had talked to Myrt and said these need to be washed away because they are going to make guests feel uncomfortable. Myrt claimed she didn’t tell him that he could but she didn’t tell him that he couldn’t, either. Cause I met with her that day, after they were getting washed away. And that was kind of when everything started, when I met with Myrt, because there were also these accusations against the administration that had been chalked, and she said to me I’ve worked here for 23 years and I haven’t heard these accusations of administrative mishandling of sexual assault! And I said well you remember my incident from December [she was harrassed by another student], several administrators really mishandled my case, and the thing was that the person who I was supposed to report that mishandling to was the one who really mishandled my case in the first place, and I really didn’t feel like I had anyone to go to. So I told her that that’s maybe why she hadn’t heard about it. And she just went, ‘oh,’ and never followed up, never asked any questions, never did a thing about it, and that’s when I realized that she really really didn’t care. That was when I was like ‘wow, the administration doesn’t care about me, actively doesn’t care about me at all.”

And that leads in to the infamous second night of chalking …

“Mia [Ferguson] and I started chalking and we were talking about the sexual assault stuff. Mia had just told me she was sexually assaulted a couple of days before, so were talking about it and we were just furious with Myrt, saying they care about the word “rape” but they don’t care about

real rape and they just want to cover everything up for the tour groups. So we said we’re going to chalk everywhere on campus so they can’t get rid of it in time for the early morning tour groups. And we wrote everything about sexual assault that had happened to us and also other things that students had asked us to write because they didn’t want to come out and write it themselves—they didn’t want to be seen chalking. Watu [Watufani Poe, graduated] had taken pictures of everything being washed away and posted it on facebook which started a lot of discussion. We were out there for two plus hours.

“We were really angry, chalking things everywhere, and then this staff member came up to us and said ‘are you aware of the cover-ups, too.’ We thought we were going to get in trouble but he was totally on board. He said, ‘are you aware of the cover-ups, too’, and he started talking about how the administration had literally been destroying evidence of sexual assault.

And then he just walked away, and Mia and I didn’t know what to do or say. So we kept on chalking.

“Around 11 p.m. I wrote about my lovely incident in DU, set it down in front of McCabe, wrote that and then I walked away—probably a couple of people saw.

And then these two frat brothers and a girl came up and started reading what I had written in front of McCabe and I could hear her reading it, saying this is slander, this isn’t true, who wrote this, and I said I wrote it, this happened, and the two frat brothers were like no it didn’t, I never heard of it, no way, and then she said it was unfair for me to say that frat culture was rape culture because it was a generalization, and thats when I launched into this discussion, this anthropological discussion about what culture is and all these people, like twenty to thirty people from McCabe came out and started listening. I started explaining why I think frat culture is rape culture and how what happened to me specifically was a good indicator of what rape culture was, and you know I was kind of proud of myself but it was also an overwhelming experience because it was the first time I had really told anyone about that, let alone twenty people.

How do you think all those people saw you?

“One girl came up to me and said aren’t you afraid you’re going to trigger people.

And I said well, that’s something that can happen, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take. This is something that needs to be

said, and I don’t think the fact that people can be made upset by it is a good reason to censor myself, especially given all the silencing that is already happening.”

April 10 In one sense at least the mass mobilization strategy of SwatVoteYes was successful: more than 80 percent of the campus cast votes on Moodle, way, way more than vote for anything else. The results are worth printing in detail: 1. Do you support ceasing Delta Upsilon’s and Kappa Alpha Theta’s affiliations to their national chapters?

No—605 (48%) Yes—451 (36%) No Preference—169 (13%) No Answer—43 (3%) 2. Do you support admitting students of all genders to sororities and fraternities?

Yes—668 (53%) No—446 (35%) No Preference—113 (9%) No Answer—41 (3%) 3. Do you support making fraternity houses into substance-free spaces?

No—838 (65%) Yes—224 (19%) No Preference—152 (12%) No Answer—34 (3%) 4. Do you support merging all sororities and fraternities into one campus building?

No—682 (54%) Yes—382 (30%) No Preference—162 (13%) No Answer—42 (3%) 5. Do you support having no campus buildings expressly for the purpose of housing Greek organizations?

No—655 (52%) Yes—455 (36%) No Preference—127 (10%) No Answer—31 (2%) 6. Do you support the abolition of sororities and fraternities at Swarthmore College?

No—779 (61%) Yes—369 (29%) No Preference—89 (7%) No Answer—31 (2%) There was some post-referendum grousing about the second question, which various parties held to be deceptively worded (it isn’t), but for the most part the results speak for themselves. As of last Swarthmore review

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April, the bulk of campus stood behind Greek life’s basic ways and means, and a significant minority stood against them.

It’s reasonable to think that the gap between the two would have been smaller if Hope and Mia hadn’t gone chalking a second time. Sympathy can extend only so far beyond the borders of comfort, and the walk to class on that Tuesday was harrowing. I suppose it goes without saying that this uncontrolled exposure to dark things was out of the ordinary. The first job of the upscale is to cloak the bad, and so we walk through our pleasant exurb to Target or a party without knowing which house conceals a husband hitting his wife, or behind which dorm room door a student is committing a sexual assault.

This protection was ripped away by the chalkings. Everywhere you went the words were. The voices made it difficult to think without interruption. The rain, when it came, seemed a benediction.

Of course it was no such thing for those whose experiences were chalked across campus. In the following weeks Hope and Mia, bonded and empowered by their outpouring, collected the chalked experiences formally and submitted them to the federal government as evidence that the school had violated Title IX and the Clery Act. April 17 and the Chopp emails On April 11th, Rebecca Chopp sent the school an email with the subject line “What Swarthmore Stands For”. It contained the following pointed sentence: “We need to recognize that sharp and targeted anonymous postings (of any kind, posted anywhere) are antithetical to building a community of trust and cooperation, one that values open exchange and honest reflection.” Hope cried when she read it. Beyond a baldfaced condemnation of the chalkings (a paving over of the wounds they exposed), the email contained not much else in its twelve paragraphs. It was one of several Chopp sent during the spring to assuage the campus, all of which were about equally empty. A sample: “When our community is not providing the right environment for academic and social flourishing, we must fix it. The fact that we are not perfect

and must take corrective actions can lead either to cynicism or to change.”

For a college president—who is really a brand manager, a fundraiserin-chief—the rhetoric of community is top drawer. For a college president at a left-leaning college, it’s unimpeachable.

Long a lefty ideal, community nurtures without coddling, protects without being a Rapunzel’s tower. It makes for excellent daycare. It’s operating principle: to each community member respect, and to each responsibility. But if everyone is responsible for making Swarthmore a community worth paying for, then everyone is also responsible it fails. Thus a harmful and illegal administrative framework for dealing with sexual assault conveniently becomes somehow the fault not just of administrators but of all “community members.”

This is strictly false, of course: responsibility at Swarthmore is not distributed evenly. School policy is dictated for the most part by adults on college payroll. Students hold very little sway, despite voluble consistent claims to the contrary. To deny that, as Chopp’s rhetoric of community so flagrantly does, is to obscure a basic truth about the way our “community” works (it’s a business) and to make the injurious suggestion that survivors of sexual assault, as community members, bear some responsibility for the trauma that befell them—trauma which in many cases, lest we forget, was drawn out, brushed off, and thus augmented by administrative incompetence.4 The emails are full of goals—like “a violence-free campus”—that we’d be nearer if there had been no emails.

So why send them? It would be foolish to think that Chopp intended to hurt anyone. That’s not in her job description.

No, her rhetorical convolutions were a failed attempt at what in fairness was an epic task: to placate two constituencies, college boosters and students, at a moment when actually doing what either one wanted would alienate the other. She tried to say nothing while appearing to say something, and we wish now that she had succeeded.

All of this would be much more difficult to see if it weren’t for the incredible,

Chopp’s rhetoric of community also has the sad collateral consequence of besmirching her pet project, the Institute for the Liberal Arts. One of her emails cites an article by Swarthmore professors which discusses the values promoted by the liberal arts (love of truth, honesty, etc.). It’s exactly the sort of thing one imagines the Institute would produce, but put in specious company it loses some of its moral luster.

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sandbox-level straighforwardness of what students wanted from Rebecca Chopp, the thing she worked so hard to pretend to give, which was an apology. The emails got around giving one with a pretty brilliant move, which was freely and verbosely acknowledging that something was wrong while employing the rhetoric of community to diffuse the fault. The now somewhat famous first line of the “What Swarthmore Stands For” email—“This is the spring of our discontent”—makes for an interesting case study. It accomplishes its basic goal easily, roping everyone in with the “our,” but it’s also going for pomp, weightiness. As it happens, the line is adapted from the opening line of Shakespeare’s Richard III, “Now is the Winter of our Discontent,” which if you think about it is a double negative, and actually heralds good times, though whoever is saying the words is apparently unable to muster much exuberance.

Chopp’s single negative version5 lacks the complexity of Shakespeare’s (not that big a deal, I guess), but it seemed appropriate at a dark and Historical-feeling time on campus, and it had the advantage of allowing the enterprising reader to laugh that our discontent had indeed been sprung upon the administration, and so it stuck in spite of its ulterior motives.

As it happens, the “spring of our discontent” email also contained an invitation to a “conversation” with Dean Braun and President Chopp in the Science Center commons, which was the occasion for a less well recorded but much more outrageous non-apology. There was a massive turnout, 300 people by my count, all whom packed into the Science Center, some grabbing folding chairs, at least as many standing. I thought I saw someone literally hanging from the rafters; certainly people had climbed up to the second floor to watch. We were told that this would be an open format event, something like a Quaker collection. It opened with a moment of silence, which seemed like a pretty klutzy symbol until Marzouk stood up and shattered what silence had lingered, though even amongst all that noise when someone stood up and asked for President Chopp to apologize she stood up and didn’t. u

5 Well, not really her version. “Now is spring of our discontent” was used a few weeks before Chopp’s email as the headline of a mopey article on wisfarmer.com about unseasonably cold temperatures in Wisconsin, and it had been used in other places, too.

REPORT

Having sex at Swarthmore The myth of hookup culture, deconstructed

by Anna Gonzales

“F

ifty-four! Ok, that’s not ninety, but still, that’s respectable,” Eve declares, setting down the napkin on which she’s written down the names of every single person she’d kissed at Swarthmore. We’re having brunch in Sharples on a Sunday morning towards the end of spring semester, and I wouldn’t believe Eve’s estimate—ninety people— until she had actually made a list.

The list included people with whom she’d actually hooked up or had sex, but also plenty of straight female or gay male friends whom she’d jokingly pecked on particularly wild, drunken nights in the basement of Olde Club or on the dance floor at Paces or the frats. Eve’s typically

Photo courtesy of the Huffington Post

Swarthmorean intelligence and talent, combined with a tremendously outgoing personality, results in an overwhelming magnetism, which probably contributed to her rapid sexual success during her freshman year.

But the names—and the wild nights— had stopped accumulating since Eve had started seriously dating Adam, who’s moving across Sharples toward our window table now.

Eve seems comfortable and settled with her boyfriend. The pair are almost domestic in their easy intimacy, sharing food off a singular Sharples tray or fetching each other glasses of juice. Catching sight of Eve rushing to class, clutching an extra coffee for Adam from the Science Center, or glimpsing the two of them in the dining hall, her clad in one of his

slightly-too-big t-shirts, you would never guess the truth about the rest of Eve’s year.

Indeed, for a large portion of her time at Swarthmore so far, Eve epitomized the uniquely collegiate freedom to hook up or have sex with no strings attached. But now, with a serious boyfriend, Eve also represents the sect of Swarthmore students who are in committed, long-term relationships: she’s “Swat married,” as some students term certain long-standing couples. How did she, the girl who kissed 54 people and used to hate relationships, end up like this?

I

n high school, David excelled in all of the categories by which one measures teenage success. Bound for an elite college, he lead his school’s newspaper as

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editor-in-chief and racked up AP credits and debate trophies, but he also served as the senior class president, a position typically reserved for jocks, homecoming kings, and other high school royalty.

Weekends in his hometown, an affluent suburb of New York City, found David cruising from one house party to another, hooking up in his friends’ basements.

Near the end of last summer, David packed his car, cued up his “Going to College” playlist, and drove to Swarthmore, where he expected more of the same success. Everyone in David’s family talked endlessly about college and how amazing it would be. His parents, both high-powered corporate lawyers, met at an elite small liberal arts college much like Swarthmore, and spoke about college as though it was “the end-all-and-be-all of their existence,” as David put it. A steady pop-culture diet of movies, books, and music portrayed college to David “as this giant party orgy,” though he knew, headed off to Swarthmore, that things would be slightly more tame.

Still, he expected to both work and play hard (within a few minutes around David, it’s clear that he’s smart and ambitious, and he says he doesn’t enjoy his down time unless he feels like he’s earned it through hard work). A year from leaving for college, David thought he would have hooked up with at least a couple of different people, either seriously or casually. He didn’t expect, David explained, “a sex-filled rager,” but, as he drove down through New York to Pennsylvania, LCD Soundsystem and Nicki Minaj blasting through the speakers, wondering what college would be like, David definitely thought there would be action.

But he was sorely mistaken.

“You know, when I compare my expectations for how freshman year of college was supposed to go to how it actually went, it’s truly amazing how ignorant I was,” David reflected. “And I really shouldn’t have been that ignorant, in retrospect. I’m not a stupid person, and I’m usually pretty good at foreseeing how events go, but I was completely off the mark.”

He isn’t even sure that the one event that could remotely be construed as a hookup—making out with a girl in Sharples on the night of Halloween—actually happened.

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pen relationship. The words were nothing more than a joke to Allison—something you might choose

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as your relationship status on Facebook with your best friend from high school, not something people actually did. They were never words she thought would apply to herself.

Allison and her boyfriend, Ian, who started dating during their senior year of high school, had fallen more and more in love over the course of the year. After graduation, they faced the question of whether or not to stay together as they began college. They were headed to schools several hours apart on the east coast, and neither had means of transportation beyond trains. Both wanted to lead full lives and have a complete college experience, which they saw as including random hookups with people at their respective schools. But they also still loved each other, and didn’t want to break up.

So they chose to be in an open relationship.

There would be rules: Allison and Ian had to tell each other about the people they hooked up with—not the details, but the basic facts—and they weren’t going to date anyone else. If they found themselves growing too attached to someone else, or drifting apart from each other, they would become exclusive again.

Finally, there would be no jealousy.

Allison and Ian reasoned that they were both too intelligent, and that their relationship was too strong, to be affected by jealousy. After all, the hookups would be meaningless, and the two were secure in their love for each other, so there would be no reason for envy.

For summer reading, Allison and Ian both perused the acclaimed guide to open relationships and polyamory, “The Ethical Slut,” which explained that the entire idea of monogamy was based on a starvation-economy model. Love, the book proclaimed, was not something to be rationed or limited—it didn’t run out—but instead could be extended to a theoretically boundless number of people, as long as everyone was honest about their feelings and actions. The couple both considered themselves liberal and sex-positive, and an open relationship fit with this ethos.

“After we read the book and started our open relationship, we felt like we were enlightened or free in this intoxicating new way,” Allison told me. “We had sort of unburdened ourselves of this kind of close-minded, conservative, old-fashioned relationship model.” It seemed like nothing could go wrong.

T

his summer, a piece by Kate Taylor in the New York Times, entitled “Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too,” went viral. The article was the culmination of months of research by Taylor, who interviewed female students at the University of Pennsylvania about a shocking new phenomenon: casual sex, sought out by women.

“It is by now pretty well understood that traditional dating in college has mostly gone the way of the landline, replaced by ‘hooking up,’ ” Taylor wrote.

“Until recently, those who studied the rise of hookup culture had generally assumed that it was driven by men, and that women were reluctant participants, more interested in romance than in casual sexual encounters. But there is an increasing realization that young women are propelling it, too.”

Taylor’s fellow journalists, including some at The New York Times, but also those writing for Slate, The New Republic, Salon, Jezebel, Mother Jones, and even Cosmo, ripped the article and its author apart. Most were offended or bewildered by the tone of shock at the fact that women could enjoy and even initiate casual sex themselves, and charged Taylor with disguising a flashy, shallow trend piece as legitimate journalism. Jezebel labelled the article a “pearl-clutching alert,” intended to alert readers about the “ambitious sluts” overtaking college campuses.

Perhaps most problematic for many was the article’s conclusion, a story of sexual assault, which many saw as a cautionary tale directed at women actively taking part in the supposed hookup culture phenomenon. In a piece for Cosmo, a female undergrad at Penn who was interviewed but not quoted in the Taylor piece questioned Taylor’s understanding not only of campus culture related to dating and sex but also of consent, and suggested that the author had engaged in victim-blaming.

Taylor’s piece painted a picture of college students as largely emotionless bundles of hormones, running amok, texting each other for random sex, and ripping each other’s clothes off. But for me, the article left too many questions unanswered. Besides its conclusion that casual sex sought out by women was negative for female self-esteem and safety, I knew too many peers who didn’t fit Taylor’s model of hookup culture at all.

What about women like Mary, who hooked up plenty and then settled down

into old-school dating? What about the students like Allison, who were trying open relationships? And what about boys (male voices were totally absent from Taylor’s piece) who, for no apparent reason, found themselves completely excluded from hookup culture, like David?

And what about the fact that “hookup culture,” as portrayed by Taylor and concerned writers like Ross Douthat of the New York Times, apparently doesn’t even exist? That is, the fact that students these days are having no more sex in college than their parents did in the 80’s, and might even be having less? While there have certainly been changes in sexual behavior over the last 20 or so years, a new paper publicized by the American Sociological Association found “no evidence that would support the proposition that there is a new or pervasive ‘hookup culture’ among college students.”

Martin Monto and Anna Carey, who co-authored the paper, found that students attending college from 2002 to 2010 weren’t having sex more frequently than students who attended college in the late 80’s-early 90’s, nor were they changing partners more frequently than before. The younger students, in fact, were even less likely to have sex once or more a week. All that had changed in terms of the culture surrounding sex and dating was that students were more likely to have sex with a casual date, friend, or “pickup,” as the paper put it.

Actually, Monto and Carey pointed out, the most significant change was in the scholarly and journalistic narrative surrounding hookup culture. From 2000 to 2006, the researchers wrote, the words “hookup culture” appeared in “only a handful” of scholarly articles. But from 2007 to 2013, hookup culture cropped up over 80 times in articles from six databases of scholarly publications, suggesting that the hype may be fueled by media bloviating and shoddy scholarship rather than by actual on-campus behavior.

The truth about sex on campus seemed more complicated to me than Taylor’s depiction, both due to the above statistics and after speaking to three students, Mary, David, and Allison, who all took different approaches to sex and dating at Swarthmore over the past year. There are undoubtedly countless more experiences not represented here, but the stories of these three students certainly help to complicate and add nuance to Taylor’s narrative.

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warthmore welcomes its new students to campus each year with a substance-free week of bonding and otherwise-orienting activities. This time period—termed “dry week”—is also one of the only weeks in the school year during which students can get in serious trouble for consuming alcohol or other drugs. The prohibitionary period ends at 6 p.m. on the Sunday before classes begin. New and returning students typically gather outside to watch “The Graduate” on Parrish beach, then spend the rest of the night celebrating the start of the semester, and arrive to classes the next morning happily hungover (though this year’s dry week was extended a further day, and the “Graduate” screening was pushed a week further).

At 6 p.m. that Sunday night last year, Eve and her roommate went out for their first time in college. The pair ran into a few people Eve knew from her athletic team, and the group banded together to find alcohol, ending up in a freshman boy’s dorm room in David Kemp. Eve met plenty of boys, including the one with whom she would later hook up that night (she stole a beer from his fridge when he wasn’t in his room, and the two began flirting when he discovered the theft).

The rest of the night is something of a blur: Eve and her fellow freshmen went back and forth between the two fraternities and Worth Courtyard, playing drinking games. Eve remembers being “miraculously good” at beer pong, sinking the final cup alongside the boy whose beer she’d stolen earlier. The two went back to the boy’s room together and hooked up, and the next morning Eve snuck out at 7 a.m. to get ready for class without saying goodbye (though the two remain on good terms).

The next few weeks passed in much the same way. Eve believes she hooked up with someone new nearly every night she went out. At the beginning of her freshman year, Eve saw Swarthmore as a thrilling whirlwind, the two fraternities an enormous, bustling social center, full of people she didn’t know yet.

Eve grew up in a picturesque liberal college town in New England, attending a Catholic all-girls’ school. She was a model student up until her junior year of high school, when she realized that she could party every night and completely neglect her schoolwork but still succeed.

Drugs and alcohol flowed freely in her town from students at the college and

their local suppliers. Her parents, both professors, were none the wiser. During senior year, Eve continued the pattern of sneaking out every night and notching straight A’s in her classes. Though she had a serious boyfriend throughout her junior and senior year, the two were on and off, and the second half of Eve’s high school years was replete with hookups and casual sex.

Heading off to college, Eve’s expectations for social life and hooking up at Swarthmore were relatively low. She wanted to party, but was worried that the social scene would be essentially nonexistent, with “a bunch of nerds” barricading themselves in their dorm rooms and refusing to go out. But after the first few nights, she admitted she had been wrong.

After a few weeks, things calmed down to the point when Eve only went out and drank and hooked up once or twice a week. She found “a happy medium,” combining academic and athletic success with a moderate amount of going out and partying.

The hookups weren’t moderate, though.

While Eve had something of a steady hookup throughout the fall semester, the two were on and off in terms of exclusivity and Eve had plenty of other opportunities of which she took advantage.

“It seemed like there were so many attractive people to hook up with,” she remembers. “It was all just kind of everyone finding their footing and getting their wild hormones out of their system.”

As fall semester went on, Eve stopped taking calls and answering texts from her high school ex-boyfriend, and realized she had been in varying types of traditional, relationship-type arrangements for several years. “I was like, when did that happen?” Eve said. “That’s not how my life needs to be—I don’t need to be always either chasing someone or with someone.”

Eve loved being functionally single and relished her freedom to hook up with whoever she wanted. “I thought relationships were stupid, especially at this age,” she said. Observing her classmates in long-term or long-distance relationships, Eve recalled, she would judge them: “I’d be like, these people are so stupid. They’re missing out on so much.” She wanted to be as independent as possible, and refused to consider dating anyone seriously.

obody on his hall wanted to go out on David’s first night of college, so he ventured out alone.

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A year later, he doesn’t remember much about that first night. He walked down to the fraternities and to Worth Courtyard and had a few beers, met freshmen he hadn’t seen before, and chatted with a few acquaintances from orientation.

Around midnight, David walked back to his room, moderately tipsy, and went to bed alone.

David’s social life settled into a comforting routine at Swarthmore. On Thursdays, he attended pub nite, where he would play King’s Cup and get steadily drunk with his group of friends, who he described as all budding alcoholics (with the exception of himself). The group would dance with their fellow pub nite goers towards the end of the night, or

David was in for a shock: over brunch, his friends recounted what he had done the night before, “in what can only be described as an incredibly painful experience,” he said. hang out afterwards and order pizza, or head right to bed. David liked pub nite because it reminded him of the house parties from his high school days—he wasn’t there to get completely wasted, but to get casually drunk and hang out with friends. David enjoyed all of the talking and interaction, and found it relaxing at the end of a long week of schoolwork and extracurricular toiling.

Most Friday nights found David and a few friends getting high, and on Saturdays he would make his way to Olde Club, Paces, and the fraternities—wherever the biggest parties were going on.

These kinds of parties were less of David’s scene—while there were places for people to get drunk and mingle, David described the rest of such events as “sweaty bodies in a dark room shoving up against each other” and “not my style.” He usually spent only a couple of hours out on Saturday night, performing what he termed 16

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“the awkward white boy” dance in a circle with his friends.

The morning after the Halloween party, typically the fall semester’s biggest social event, David rolled out of bed and shuffled to Sharples, planning to nurse his hangover with orange juice and a phoenix sandwich. He was in for a shock: over brunch, his friends recounted what he had done the night before, “in what can only be described as an incredibly painful experience,” David said.

David remembered part of the night— pregaming the dance with his friends, arriving at Sharples, feeling astounded by all of the people he’d never seen before and by the creativity of the costumes— but the part where he had hooked up or made out with a girl he vaguely knew from a class was completely absent from his memory. David couldn’t even really say what had happened.

A

llison remembers the night that dry week ended fondly. She and a few friends she’d made during the first week of school began drinking right around 6, flitting from dorm rooms to the fraternities to Worth courtyard throughout the night. Allison happily recalls wearing a summery dress, having a beer in her hand nearly the entire night, and meeting countless new people, all of whom were overwhelmingly friendly and seemed genuinely interested in her thoughts on Swarthmore so far. There was also a quick, fun, meaningless makeout with a boy she’d thought was cute for all of Orientation Week, and some promising flirting with another boy who she met that night and then talked to for over an hour.

Thanks to her open relationship, Allison felt none of the guilt she would have experienced had she been exclusive with Ian, and she also didn’t preoccupy herself with thoughts of the other boys.

It didn’t really matter to her if it worked out with the boy from Worth courtyard or not—she had Ian. Around 2 or 3 in the morning, as all of the parties emptied out and students across campus fell into bed to catch a few hours of sleep before their first day of classes, Allison walked herself home.

Allison fully embraced all that Swarthmore’s social scene had to offer: on Thursday and Saturday nights, Allison would drink and go out with a few of her friends, and she never went to bed alone unless she wanted to. A quick review of her Facebook pictures show Allison and

her friends, red cups in hand, smiling and pinning bedsheets for a toga party, smiling in flannels and jean shorts for the Hootenanny, smiling at Pub Nite, smiling in their Halloween costumes.

Allison talks about these first months almost incredulously, still, as though she can’t believe she found such social and sexual successes. Obviously, she did more than party: Allison found the work challenging but not overwhelming, and was rewarded for long nights in McCabe with academic success. She also achieved at her chosen extracurriculars (she asked me not to name these in the interest of maintaining her anonymity). When Allison went home for fall break and for Thanksgiving, she told everyone that she loved Swarthmore and that she felt she’d picked the perfect school, and she was telling the truth.

As freshman year continued, Allison felt somewhat intellectually superior (at least in one sense) to her classmates, whom she saw as either shackled to their high school relationships, unable to have nearly as much fun, or as somewhat sad, filling their weekends with empty hookups. She thought she had everything figured out, able to have all of the advantages of hookup culture and a steady relationship with none of the downsides.

She could go out and hook up as much as she wanted, and then crawl back into her dorm room bed and talk to Ian until she fell asleep, knowing that when she called, he would always pick up the phone.

E

ve noticed Adam in her nighttime chem lab almost immediately. As the semester went on, Eve tried to flirt with him nearly every day, but Adam shot her down every single time. Over Thanksgiving break, the two randomly started texting, and drunkenly, semi-jokingly confessed their attraction to each other. The rejection and ambiguity of their relationship only further intrigued her. Eve began to look forward to chem lab. She was shocked by her feelings for him, telling her friends, Oh my god, I’m so attracted to this guy in my lab and I don’t know why. I don’t even know him.

The first time the two hooked up was on a particularly riotous night across the Swarthmore campus. Olde Club, Paces, and both fraternity formals were shut down by the police around 11:30 p.m., and students choked the paths back to their dormitories, having successfully blown off the last bit of steam before finals. Adam and Eve had gone to a party

together that night, but hadn’t spoken for most of the night. Still, Eve showed up in Adam’s room at the end of the night, and they had sex.

Eve woke up slightly hungover, totally alone. Adam had left for an early morning meeting, but he’d left Eve a water bottle and a jacket (it was raining outside). Touched, she was reading the sticky notes he’d left, directing her to take the items, when he walked in.

Unfortunately, everything was horribly awkward. They tried hooking up again, but both were preoccupied by thoughts of all the work they had to do to prepare for finals, and it went nowhere. Eve was relieved when she finally left Adam’s dorm room, and decided she wanted nothing more to do with him.

Unlike the rest of Eve’s hookups, though, Adam didn’t disappear from her life after that night. For some reason, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. They stayed up talking until five in the morning over winter break, and Eve realized that he was one of the most interesting people she’d ever spoken to. Back from winter break, they hooked up a few more times and Adam floated the idea of a relationship. But Eve didn’t like anyone enough to give up her freedom.

T

hings hadn’t played out exactly as David had envisioned as he had prepared for college, especially in the arena of hooking up and sex. When I spoke to him on the phone this summer, David told me that he wasn’t sure that disappointed was the right word, but that he would use it anyway.

Within a month or a month and a half of being at Swarthmore, though, David was able to readjust his expectations, and the feeling of disappointment went away.

I asked him why he thought he hadn’t been as successful with hooking up in college as he was back at home.

“That is a fantastic question, and it is a question I ask myself once a week or so,” David answered. “Why was college not like that? To be perfectly honest, I haven’t really been able to figure it out, but I do have a couple of theories.” David’s theories were telling in terms of how he views the functioning of hookup culture, both at Swarthmore and as a supposed generational phenomenon.

Primarily, David thinks that his underachievement in terms of hooking up can be chalked up to the formula for success in college. “In high school, hooking up and stuff like that was much less based

on your ability to confidently grind up on someone and more on your ability to make conversation,” David postulated. He defines himself as a talker, a writer, and a speaker. “When the format is based on you making conversation and flirting is more than, ‘Hey, do you want to dance?

I have muscles,’ I certainly do better,” David said.

Confidence was a recurring topic in our conversations, and David seemed to view it as the key ingredient for sexual and romantic achievement. He broke down the recipe for success as follows: “A lot of it has to do with confidence—your confidence in your ability to go in and pick up a girl, combined with how good you look, how good your quote-unquote ‘game’ is, how lucky you are, and how little shame you have.” David explained that lack of shame, to him, meant the absence of the fear of getting turned down.

David often wonders about this element of hooking up, because he sees himself as a very confident person. “And I’ve been told I’m a very confident person, and more than sometimes I’m told that my confidence borders on arrogance,” he added. But for whatever reason, this confidence, which pervades David’s academic and extracurricular work, does not translate to hooking up.

More than anything, David hates failing, and since he has the luxury of not facing failure in the rest of his life, he simply cannot prepare himself to deal with the possibility of romantic or sexual failure. “I know that’s not a good thing, but it’s not something I can really change,” David reflected. “So I think that’s what hookup culture really is.”

David talked for a while longer about how he had entered Swarthmore already a finished person, the product of his small, tightly-knit high school environment, about how this person didn’t completely mesh with Swarthmore’s culture surrounding sex and dating, and about luck as factors in why he hasn’t found as much success. Finally, he concluded that he didn’t quite have a conclusion. “Really, I don’t know. It could be anything. It’s only the end of freshman year,” he said.

A

round dusk on one of the first truly warm days of spring, several passersby spotted a girl sitting on the bench outside her dormitory, sobbing into her cell phone. It was Allison, breaking up with Ian, though he begged her to stay with him.

The two had survived Thanksgiving

and Christmas with each others’ families (Allison’s parents “worship at the altar of Fox News and swear allegiance to Ronald Reagan,” while Ian has four wild younger siblings, both conditions of home life that make family time stressful), each other’s birthdays, Valentine’s Day, and their one-year anniversary, but they ultimately would not make it through freshman year.

Despite the fact that they’d invested countless hours in traveling to see each other and in communicating when they were apart (I thought it was interesting that she put it in such utilitarian terms), Allison ultimately decided to end the relationship for a variety of reasons. She hesitated when I asked her to go into more detail, beyond admitting that there had been some violation of the terms of the open relationship and that she had become emotionally close with one of her hookups to the point that it affected her feelings for Ian. Additionally, Allison believed that freshman year at Swarthmore had genuinely changed her, intellectually, socially, and emotionally, to the point which she and Ian, who had failed to integrate as successfully at his college, weren’t meant to be together anymore in such a clear way as before.

Does Allison still subscribe to the gospel of the Ethical Slut, despite the fact that her open relationship failed?

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I definitely think that there’s value in not forcing yourself to be monogamous with someone if you don’t want to be, but I’m not as strict anymore on the idea that being in an open relationship is the only way to be honest and actually free of repressive, stifling conventions.”

Ultimately, Allison sees honesty and communication at the core of the demise of her open relationship. “Unless you really communicate about the rules and are honest with yourself and how you feel about your partner and other people the whole time, it just won’t work out,” she said.

Allison cautioned that open relationships aren’t for everyone. “I definitely thought that I was too smart and rational to ever get jealous,” she said. “But I really overestimated my own emotional maturity.” She and Ian had both engaged in “stalker-like” behavior over social media, looking up each other’s hookups on Facebook. “We both got paranoid and would stress out when we saw each other texting or whatever. It was horrible,” AlSwarthmore review

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lison recounted.

The stigma of being in an open relationship was also extremely difficult for Allison to deal with. “I’m kind of private, but I felt like everyone suddenly knew about the open thing and thought it was okay to ask me really really personal questions, and treat me like some rare special breed of non-monogamous animal,” Allison said.

She added that some of her friends thought she was being flaky, and that a few of them tried to slut-shame her into either becoming exclusive with Ian or breaking up with him. While she was secure in her decision to be open with Ian, many of her friends questioned her decision.

“Everyone wanted to fit me into their little script—it really threw people off and freaked them out that I wasn’t single and just floating around hooking up all the time, but I also wasn’t in an exclusive relationship,” she said. “Fuck that. As long as you’re not hurting anyone, you should be able to make whatever choices you want.”

T

he day before Valentine’s Day, Eve and Adam had lunch together with their friends, then walked towards the science center, talking normally. Eve was shocked by the way she felt when they parted, suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that she had serious feelings for Adam. A few minutes later, Adam reappeared and told Eve he thought they should hang out, and she knew that he felt exactly the same way.

Except for going to class, the two essentially spent the next four days together, staying up and talking until the sun rose four nights in a row. On the second night, Adam told Eve he was in love with her, and on the fourth night, she said it back. The two have been inseparable since that night, and, several weeks into sophomore year, are still going strong.

I asked if Eve ever felt like she was missing out on anything due to being in a long-term relationship, or if she missed the freedom to hook up as much as she wanted.

“Not really,” she answered. “The rewards are much, much, much greater, and that’s also because we have a really good relationship, we have really good sex, and we can talk about anything. There’s not any part of the equation I’m missing out on.”

Eve admitted that, occasionally, she “very superficially” felt as though she was 18

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missing out when she met or talked to someone attractive. This was sometimes difficult, especially over a long summer of being apart. “It sucked, but it didn’t really suck, because at the end of the day, I knew what I was going home to and it was exponentially better,” Eve explained.

Her philosophy on relationships has changed as well. “I hated relationships until this relationship,” Eve said. She still thinks that some people are wasting their time with long-distance or long-term commitments, but now believes that it varies from person to person.

“If you find someone who you would rather be with than hook up with anyone else, then that means you’re not wasting your time,” Eve concluded.

I

mmediately after the breakup, Allison went on what she called “a rebound rampage,” hooking up with at least two people every weekend through the rest of the spring. Summer continued in much the same fashion. Faced with the wreckage of what she had thought was an essentially perfect relationship, Allison couldn’t imagine allowing herself to get emotionally involved with someone again, and started to question whether she had been in love with Ian in the first place.

A few days after moving back in at Swarthmore for her sophomore year, Allison was unpacking and found the shoebox where she’d kept sentimental items from her relationship with Ian. The box contained a receipt from the restaurant where they’d had an anniversary dinner, a baby picture of Ian, pins from art museums they’d visited together, and the countless mixed CDs and letters Ian had sent her.

Allison hadn’t thought about Ian in a focused way for months (they had agreed not to speak until they both felt they were ready for a normal friendship). She had books to buy, boxes to unpack, and countless meetings to attend, like most Swarthmore students at the beginning of the year. Still, she sank down on the bed and sifted through the items in the box.

At the bottom was a tattered postcard that Ian had sent her. He’d bought it at the museum they’d gone to on their first date, then sent it to her months and months later. The front depicted a man standing on his head at the South Pole.

I’d stand on my head at the South Pole to spend a minute with you, Ian had written. Luckily, I don’t have to.

Allison started crying. Despite the fact

that she didn’t want to get back together with Ian, Allison felt a yearning all of a sudden for her old relationship, for the comfort and ease, for the person always waiting on the other end of the phone.

While Allison, like Eve, has successfully taken advantage of the freedoms offered to her by what Kate Taylor would call “hookup culture,” traditional dating has far from disappeared from her life or her mind. Additionally, Allison doesn’t view sexual and romantic behavior as a binary choice: having casual sexual interactions and being open to the possibility of a more committed, serious relationship are not mutually exclusive in her mind.

“It all depends on the person, on how much I like them, on whether or not we want the same thing for dating or a relationship—there are a ton of factors,” Allison said. “It also depends on where I am in my life, whether I want to spend my Saturday nights grinding on a rando or if I want to stay in and cuddle with someone and watch a movie.”

Since she feels that everyone wants different types of relationships at different points in their lives, Allison is wary of broad categorizations about sexual and romantic behavior such as those found in Taylor’s article.

“You can’t just interview a couple of Penn students and then make generalizations about ‘hookup culture’ or ‘millennials’ or whatever other overtired buzzword you want to whip out that day,” Allison said. “Without a really well-designed, statistically correct survey, you can’t draw conclusions how people are behaving sexually or what they’re thinking about how they want to conduct their romantic relationships.”

“I

n my life at Swarthmore in general, yes, I’m happy,” David told me at the end of our final interview this summer. He was happy with his friends, his professors, and his more leisurely pursuits. In terms of sex, while he wasn’t completely satisfied, he didn’t lose sleep over it or let anxiety about it consume his thoughts.

About a week later, at the very end of summer, David attended a small house party in his hometown. He and a high school ex-girlfriend had been exchanging flirtatious text messages over the summer, and she was at the party. The two ended up alone together, Janelle Monae’s song “Q.U.E.E.N.” thumping through the basement walls. For the first time in a long time, David made the first move. u

Skywriting photo essay by Marjani Nairne

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in which the dream becomes the nightmare

by Maria Vieytez iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve stacked your promises next to my bed, not by size or weight or date, but by sound: on nights when iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m angry, on nights when i knock them down, is it your sigh that i hear? the groan of your car? or is it the sound of our knees bumping warm under layers of wool? my favorite, the one on top: your teeth clicking sweetly in sleep, your jaw creaking like an old house, not yet haunted.

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FICTION

A hand on the doorknob

by Patrick Ross

T

he kettle screams at you from across the kitchen. You rise and approach the stove, the familiar scent of propane escaping from its dilapidated pipes. Just a hint of it, hovering on the line between “get it checked out” and “choose not to notice.” You choose not to notice, and turn the knob. The fire dies, and your eyes blink with heavy sleep.

Bed soon, tea first: decaf. Probably that Chinese blend you like. From the restaurant, they give it to you with your order.

It’s sort of halfway between black and green. You get the teabag from the cupboard, rummaging through Twinings and Red Rose, finding the unlabeled one with the Chinese characters, and you wonder what they say. Probably “tea.”

While you pour hot water into a chipped old mug, there is a noise in the living room, something between a scratch and a thump, followed promptly by a meow from your aging cat. You tell him to be quiet, and get distracted by the beautiful leaves of light brown tea spiraling in your water. Your desire to drink it slightly outweighs your desire for aesthetic pleasure, so you give the mug a shake, and the color deepens.

A deep breath, in your nose and out your mouth, the way your grandmother took them after a cigarette. And, finally, a sip of tea: nope, nope, fuck, way too hot.

You blow on it, forming a pinprick of an “o” with your mouth, because for some reason you think that makes your breath slightly cooler. You look at your cell phone while you blow, and you have a new email.

It’s another newsletter from the political organization your sister pressured you to subscribe to last Christmas. The subject line of this one is “Women Matter: Help Us Help Emily.” You delete it.

The tea is finally cool, and you take a sip. You decide to empty the kettle in the morning, and turn off the light in the kitchen. Your cat is cuddling with a paisley sofa cushion, his tail whipping the air.

“Hey, Pickles,” you say to him as you pass 24

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through the room, and he lazily raises his head an inch above the pillow to acknowledge your presence. “Bedtime,” you say.

“Whatever,” he says with his eyes. A sip of tea and a smile, and you wander down the hall toward the bedroom. You set your mug atop the wooden armoire, and open the bottom drawer to retrieve some pajamas: blue flannel pants and a t-shirt from a 5K you ran last year. Blinking hard with sleep, you close the bedroom door, flick the lights off, and slide into bed.

Oh, the glorious feeling of lying down, flat on your back in your own bed. Your spine curls into the folds of your mattress, the stress of today almost melting away.

The pillow feels cool against the back of your head. You curl the blankets around you, the sheets all tangled up in the duvet cover, and they are cool too. With a lazy yawn, you realize you haven’t brushed your teeth. Well... whatever. You blink again, and sleep rushes over you.

Y

ou sit up sharply in bed. The sound of your heavy breath echoes in the silence of the room. Suddenly, the feeling of anxiety and imminent terror. Someone is outside your door. You can sense it, somehow, a hand on the doorknob, the potential energy of an intruder coursing through the wood. You don’t move; any slight movement would make a sound. You’re probably just being paranoid. Surely you would have heard someone entering your house? You have alarms, a whole security system—well, had. You accidentally tripped the alarm every time you left the house in a rush. It had been too annoying, so you nixed the subscription. What a brilliant fucking idea that was.

Okay, deep breath. You’re probably fine.

Your sister was paranoid like this. When you shared a bedroom when you were seven and she was five, she always woke you up by knocking on the bottom of your bed. She would whisper your name from the bottom bunk in low, terrified tones, telling you there was a monster at the door. Go to sleep, Sarah, you’d mumble, and drift back off. But the dark circles

under her eyes next morning told you that she hadn’t gotten back to sleep as easily as you had.

You try to hold your breath as you listen for any sort of noise. Are they breathing?

You can’t hear it if they are. You shut your eyes and just listen, actively listen, do nothing but listen. The central heat vent produces a low, constant hum, and your heart thuds against your ribcage. Beat, beat, beat, beat. You stifle your breath, but you cannot hear anyone outside the door.

You’ve got no physical evidence to go by. It’s just a feeling, a sort of creeping suspicion that you’re not alone, and it’s growing stronger every minute. You remember when your dad died and your mom started feeling his ghost around her.

She bought several books on supernatural encounters from the New Age & Spirituality section of Barnes & Noble. In those stories, all the widows were absolutely certain that the weird sensation was the spirit of their departed husband. They all “just knew” that it was him, like your mom “just knew” it was your dad. You don’t “just know” the someone who is touching your doorknob. You just know it’s someone.

Still no noise, though, not even from Pickles. Oh, God, what if they’ve killed your cat? What if they’ve killed Pickles to stop him from mewling a wail of warning?

How will you explain that to your niece?

She’ll be devastated. She’ll stop coming to visit.

Okay, you’ve got to do something about this. You sure as hell can’t just go back to sleep, you’ll toss and turn all night. You dare to move for the first time since you woke up, just a slow turn of your head over your right shoulder to glance at your alarm clock. It’s a bit blurry in the dark, but the first number is pretty clearly a 3.

The other two, you aren’t sure about.

Should you call the cops? You don’t actually have proof that anyone’s there.

How would you explain that one to the police? It would be so embarrassing if they came into your house only to find your cat on the couch and you on your bed, with not a murderer in sight. Plus, if there is

someone out there, they would hear the phone call. But still... the strangest feeling of overwhelming dread...

You realize with a wave of self-loathing that you haven’t locked your bedroom door. On one hand, why would you, you live alone—on the other, you wish you had Sarah’s paranoia. She always locked the bedroom door, much to your mother’s dismay. On February 9, 1986—you remember this date with fury—that locked door prevented your mom from silently waking you to watch Halley’s Comet with her. You swore then that you would never forgive Sarah, and while you’ve otherwise forgotten that episode, a bitter bit of bile still bubbles up when you remember.

You should get up and lock the door as quietly as you can. Whoever is standing out there with a hand on your doorknob could come in at any second. They could be wielding a weapon, a gun or a knife or, worse, they might not have a weapon, and then they would have to bludgeon you to death with your lamp or your chipped tea mug. If they want to hurt you, you realize, they’ll come right in and do it. You need to lock the door before they figure out you’re awake.

But your floor makes so much noise. It’s got to be over fifty years old like the rest of the house, and the wooden floorboards creak when you walk across them. How are you going to make the journey from bed to door without the intruder hearing you, opening the door and shooting you?

You remember a principle you learned in high school physics class, one of the only things you learned from your teacher, who was a devout Muslim and spent most of your lessons discussing how Allah’s law relates to Newton’s. But you remember the one thing: it was something about ice skaters falling through the ice. There was an equation with weight, or maybe mass (whichever one stays the same on the moon), and surface area and gravity.

Weight spreads out over a bigger surface area... Yes! There was a word problem, with two twins who weigh the same, but one’s got it all in muscle and one’s got it all in fat. So the fat one, since he’s got more surface area, he’s actually safer, because the weight is spread out more.

You’ve just got to spread out your weight, that’ll decrease the force on your feet and make less noise on the floorboards. Okay, you can do that. You’ll lower yourself onto the ground somehow, on your pillows, maybe. You slowly, very slowly, pull your body away from your pillows, careful not to make a sound. You

Illustration by Yenny Cheung pick one up, and of course there is the rasp of flesh touching cloth. You bite your lip, but press onward, and pick the pillow slowly up over your head. It grazes the top of your head as it passes, producing a much quieter but still audible brush. With what would be a sigh of anxious anticipation if you weren’t holding your breath, you place the pillow on the floor.

One down. A few, though, would make this work better, so you undergo the same painstaking process two more times. You look down at the ground, three pillows waiting for you to use them as your steed.

One with a floral pillowcase you inherited from Nana. One with a bright blue pillowcase that you bought half off at Kohl’s.

One without a pillowcase, because it fell off during a riotous threesome, and you are both too lazy and too proud of that fact to put it back on. You meticulously remove yourself from beneath your blankets, and swing your legs over the edge of the bed. Slowly, you slide onto the pillows, and as the weight of your body leaves the mattress, your bed gives an ominous creak— No! No! You had overlooked that. Of Swarthmore review

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course, yes, your bed usually creaks when you add or subtract weight from it. You freeze in mid-swing, and stare straight ahead at the window. Please don’t have heard, please. You can feel the grip on the doorknob getting tighter, the presence of the unghostly intruder strengthening.

They know I’m awake, you realize with a chill.

Okay, you say to yourself, almost out loud. If they’re trying to kill me, which is the worst case scenario, they would probably prefer me to be asleep for it. Nice and easy. Pour the poison in the ear, that old trick. If you’re awake, you’re more of a threat... but that might be reason to kill you sooner. You wait for a full minute, you watch the alarm clock tick from 3:44 to 3:45 and then to 3:46, just to be sure. No change, no intrusion, no murder. You slide onward, out of bed and onto the ground, your cheek pressed up against the threesome pillow, your head turned toward the door.

Slowly, so slowly, you crawl across your bedroom floor. If you were in the Aesop fable about the tortoise and the hare, you still would have lost the race. But haste makes waste, your grandmother always said—and that’s certainly the case here.

Inch by inch, you crawl across the ground, without a single creak emanating from the aging floorboards. You are beyond thrilled that your limited knowledge of high school physics came in handy, and make a note to tell someone about it.

There it is. The door. Five feet away from you, separated by a not-so-thick plank of wood, stands whoever this intruder might be. It dawns on you how stupid you are being. If this person opens the door, they’ve got you right where they want you, lying on the floor in front of them. You need to complete the mission immediately, lock the door and keep yourself safe. You realize with a pang that, if you stand up, your weight will push against the ground and it might squeak. Instead of standing, you reach up toward the door, fearfully aware that you extremely close to your would-be killer.

And, God, if you could sense them touching the doorknob from in your bed, surely they could sense you now, your hand just inches away from the lock?

Any second now they might open the door. Terror courses through you, boiling your blood. You quickly twist the lock, and it shuts with a loud CLICK. Oh, no.

The click is still resonating in the otherwise-silence, entering the ambience with the heater and your heart. Oh, no, no, no, 26

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You stare at the door.

Whoever’s out there doesn’t say anything, and they don’t try the knob just to see if it’s really locked. no, no. How could you forget that the lock would make a noise? Mother of God. This was a mistake. If the creaking of the bed told the intruder “I am awake,” the clicking of the lock told them “I know you’re there, and I’m scared.” You fucked up big time. They know. They know.

You stare at the door. Whoever’s out there doesn’t say anything, and they don’t try the knob just to see if it’s really locked.

You, at least, would have checked. You feel their anger, seething through the door.

Their hand is on the knob, their energy pulsating through, and it’s not happy energy. You’ve foiled their plans, at least a little bit, held them off for now. But now you’ve made the first move, a defensive play against your assailant. You hope it was worthwhile: it’s an okay lock, but not industry standard or anything like that.

It’ll hold up against a petty criminal, but anyone with a smattering of lockpicking knowledge will have it open in minutes.

What do you do now? You’re trapped in here, and the intruder knows you’re fighting against them. You have no weapons to wield, only the bludgeons that they might have used: the lamp and the chipped tea mug. Well, maybe not—you cross to your closet, no longer afraid of making noise, since they know you know, and you open the door. You move aside a rainbow of identical sweaters and look for anything remotely threatening. A piggy bank, which is about as effective as the mug but with the added weight of six and a half dollars in coins. A marigold didgeridoo with painted kangaroos is about the most dangerous thing you keep in there, a souvenir from a business trip to Australia.

You never did learn how to play it, and it hangs around in your closet collecting dust. Maybe you’ll kill a man with it tonight. You can see the headlines now: “RESIDENT CLOBBERS INTRUDER WITH ABORIGINAL INSTRUMENT.” You sigh, and close the closet door.

If you can’t fight, you’ll have to take

flight. You’re only on the first floor of the house, you’ll have to jump out the window and run for cover. The intruder is still there—their anger is escalating—but maybe you can make it through the window and far away before they realize and try to break the door down. But where will you go? Preferably not far. The idea of running screaming through the streets of your town while a potential murderer chases after you is, for some reason, unappealing. You’ll have to beg your neighbor, Mark, for sanctuary.

Your cell phone is charging on the nightstand. You open it up and go straight to your contacts list, scrolling down to “M” for Mark Cho. Send Message. You type frantically: MARK! help! burglar! Cant talk.

PLEASE BE HOME NEED TO GET OUT ASAP You hit Send and wait, breath bated. It’s just after 4:00 a.m., though, so you doubt very much that Mark is awake. You’ll call him and wake him up, but stay silent.

Mark, unlike 911, will get your text and know what’s happening.

You press the button and dial his cell number. Ring. A harrowing beat. Ring.

Beat. Ring. Repeat. You get his voicemail: “Hi, you’ve reached Mark Cho. Sorry I can’t—.” You hang up, and call again.

Come on, Mark, come on, pick up. Finally, after eleven attempts, the ringing stops.

“Hello?” Mark says, his voice full of sleep. You don’t respond, but you take two deep breaths into the receiver. “Hello?” he asks again, his voice getting louder and more anxious. You hang up—whoever’s outside cannot know that you’ve called for help. Please, Mark, check your texts...

The little speech bubble appears that indicates Mark is typing. Relief overcomes you as quickly as terror did. You stare anxiously at the phone, waiting, waiting for the response to come. It does: WTF?? Yes come over. Need me 2 call the cops?

The intruder’s energy is still trickling through the door. They are standing there, holding the doorknob, waiting. What for?

You type back a hasty reply: Yes. Coming now.

You glance anxiously at the window, and swallow. The screen will be a bitch to take off, but then you’re home free. You open the window slowly at first, but it creaks just like your floorboards, so you throw caution to the wind and jerk it open.

The cool night air washes your face with surprising effectiveness. You are hit with a breeze full of hope, a reminder that there

is a whole world out there beyond your tiny bedroom, and a promise that you will be free. You take a deep breath of the air, and you fumble dumbly with the screen connectors.

You’ve never actually been able to take the screen off. The connector is this weird screw thing, but it doesn’t actually screw the screen in. It only loosens it. So you twist that, and the screen gets looser, but stays rooted on the track. You push against it tentatively, but it doesn’t fall out.

You might need a wrench or something to actually remove the screen properly.

Fuck it, you’re desperate. You cross to the closet and retrieve your didgeridoo. You can’t play the damn thing, but you might as well use it. You wield it absurdly and aim for the window. With a silent scream, you plunge your lance into the screen, and puncture it. You spin the didgeridoo in circles like you are churning butter, making the hole in the window screen larger and wider. You’ve entirely abandoned the attempt to be silent, which is convenient; the breaking window makes the sound of a gut-wrenching grate.

You discard the didgeridoo on your bed, and spare a glance towards the door.

Why, why, why can you feel them grasping the doorknob? You climb through the window, you fall for a second or two, and you drown in the fresh air. You wish you had put on a sweatshirt or something, but you didn’t have time. Surely the intruder heard you smashing the window and is coming for you even now. You orient yourself, having never exited through the window before, and make a mad dash for Mark’s. You run through your backyard, the grass moist and cold on your bare feet.

The sensation quickly turns to sharp pain as you reach Mark’s gravel driveway, and then to slight discomfort as you ascend his wooden steps. You knock.

“What the fuck is going on?” Mark asks as he opens the front door. “Someone broke into your house?”

“Yeah, I think so,” you say, still breathing heavily from your sprint. You walk into the living room, and Mark shuts the door behind you.

“What do you mean, you think so?” he asks. He sits down in a wooden chair, so you follow suit. “Did you not see them?”

“Well, no,” you admit. “But I could tell they were there.” You’re not really sure how to explain the sensation. You aren’t certain yourself how you knew. “You know that feeling? Like you’re being watched?”

Mark nods. “It was like that, but... but I was asleep, and it was so strong that it

woke me up. The feeling.”

Mark laughs a silent laugh through his nose. “Well, I did call the cops when I got your text,” he says.

“Thank you,” you reply.

“Don’t mention it.” He gets up and heads toward the kitchen. “You want some cookies?”

Cookies. If anything can fix this terrible night, it’s some of Mark’s baked goods.

“Yes, God, please,” you say, and follow him into the kitchen. You beam when you see them: a perfect platter of chocolate chip.

Mark puts three on a plate for you, and you murmur thanks as you bite into one, feeling slightly more reassured about the whole predicament.

“T

here’s no one in your house,” the gruff police officer says to you, as he meets you on Mark’s lawn.

“Just a cat on the couch.”

“Really? Nobody?” you ask. The officer shakes his head. You are relieved, grateful that your terrors were unfounded. But you’re also humiliated that you caused such a scene for no good reason, and that you managed to get Mark and the police involved while you were at it. “I guess it was just all in my head, huh?” You chuckle nervously.

The cop grunts, “I guess it was. Your bedroom door was locked from the inside, so that was suspicious. Easy enough to force open, though, you’ve got a lousy lock. Then I saw your window all broken through. I assume you locked the door yourself?”

“Yeah,” you say, warm embarrassment flooding your face. Good thing it’s dark out. “Nobody in their either, then?”

“Nobody in there either.” You stutter a word of thanks. The policeman nods and adds, “Have a good night,” and leaves you standing with Mark on his lawn.

“Jesus, Mark, I’m sorry about this,” you say, as the police car drives off, but he waves your apology away.

“Don’t mention it, really,” he says with a smile. “Go get some rest, though. Seems like you really need it.” You smile back, and he retreats into his home. You’re alone again.

You ridiculous human being. You were so sure there was someone in your house, standing with a hand on the doorknob.

But why? You had no proof. You didn’t see or hear anyone. It was all a feeling, a strange sensation.

You open your door, a sense of shame still hanging loosely about you. You enter the house, and laugh out loud when you

see that Pickles has not moved an inch.

You were so sure he had been killed by the intruder waiting at your door, but there he lies, still on the couch, still sleeping on cushion, still staring at you as you pass by.

“Good night for real,” you say.

You make your way quickly through the hall, anxious to jump back into bed.

You stop short as you touch your hand to the doorknob outside your bedroom, and you play with the knob for a moment.

It is bronze, a little rusty and could use a shine. You twist it and it squeaks. You try to send a sensation through the knob, into your room. Maybe, if the emotion is passionate enough, it will send through, a sort of metallically-conducted telepathy.

Or maybe not. Maybe you are just really, really paranoid. It’s probably that. Oh, no.

You’re turning into your sister.

You open the door and instantly shiver, and cross to your window to shut it. The screen is still broken open, and the bedroom is chillier than you prefer it to be.

You pick up your pillows from the ground, stepping accidentally on the didgeridoo.

You crawl into bed, seeking refuge in the warmth of your covers. That lovely feeling again. It’s not the same as getting into bed after a long day of work, where your body finally relaxes after continuous hours of stress. This is different. You’re not feeling the comfort physically so much as emotionally. There is something remarkably comforting about a bed, especially one’s own. You cuddle up with the threesome pillow, and you finally feel safe.

It is quiet in your room. The central heat vent hums, and your heart rate is finally starting to decrease. Beat, rest, beat, rest.

There is another heartbeat, though, another heart pounding in another chest behind you. Are you being paranoid again? You take a moment—blink, breathe. The heart is still there, still beating, and fast. Beat, beat, beat.

Someone is there. Behind you.

You hear the sound of metal scraping against metal, and horror surges through you once more. You sit up sharply in bed, your eyes enormous and full of fear. I am standing over you, my keen knife glinting in the moonlight that streams through your broken window.

“Good night for real,” I say. You gasp a plea, my hand grasps your hair, and jerks your head back hard. The chill of steel licks at your throat. At first, it feels like a mere papercut, but your blood flows quickly and beautifully from the wound.

You try to scream. u

Swarthmore review

SEPTEMBER 2013

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PERSONAL ESSAY

My summer at Abercrombie & Fitch

by Lydia Bailey

T

he job hunt was not going well, and like any good New Yorker, I blamed the actors. The city is full of them.

Would-be, wanna-be and even some soon-to-be celebrities, taking all the decent jobs that should rightfully have gone to me. But nonetheless I dropped off a resumé at every store I passed. I was willing to work anywhere, from Bergdorf ’s to bodegas, as long as it paid. But seven days later, I still had no offers, and anxiety began to set in. What if nobody would hire me? What if I never had the chance to prove that I could sell socks, or kit-kat bars, or electric corkscrews? What if I was destined to be broke forever?

Then, as I walked wearily down the steaming pavement, a spicy, musky scent wafted towards me, and I realized there was one place I still had not tried.

I glanced up at the huge, dark building.

Abercrombie & Fitch.

“No,” I thought to myself. “No, this is where I draw the line”.

To me, a snooty New Yorker in chunky glasses and black skinnies, the thought of working in A&F was downright insulting.

“Just think. The suburban brats. The logo-crazed tourists. The top-40 playlist!”

I grimaced at the very thought.

But the horrors of Selena Gomez aside, there are more than just superficial reasons to object. With its borderline pornographic ad campaigns, the brand has been the subject of scandal after scandal.

Over the last few years, the public has heard about A&F executive management’s preference for white people, wealthy people, and most incredibly, popular people. Really—just this summer, CEO Mike Jeffries was criticized for his 2007 claim that the A&F clothing line is designed exclusively for “the cool and popular kids.” He went on to say that kids who do not fit in certain sizes “can’t belong” at A&F. These comments sparked a moral outrage which prompted a hugely successful Facebook campaign, culminating in a protest outside the store. Their 28

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Illustration by Nyantee Asherman moral outrage was shared by teens across the country and really, almost any sane human being who heard about it. In an era (and a city) where eating disorders prevail, Jeffries’s idea that some people “can’t belong” because of their body type is inarguably perverse.

This seemed like a pretty good excuse to keep walking straight past Abercrombie and hope that some other potential employer called me back soon. I’m not afraid of the cool kids, I thought to myself. I’m just ethically superior to them.

This sounded remarkably similar to the mantras of my middle school days, when I was re-enacting a Harry Potter duel on the side-lines of gym class.

But staring into the dark abyss of coolkid (and possibly bad-person) territory, I knew I didn’t have a choice. It was Ab-

ercrombie or an empty wallet. So out of pure necessity, I did two things I’m very good at: I swallowed my fear, and I shut up my conscience.

W

hen I finally found the resolve to look up, I was startled. Eight inches from my face was the Ken-doll style crotch of a ten-foot tall bronze statue. This astounding nude male is the perfectly chiseled image of a Grecian athlete, and he is located directly in the center of the first of the four floors of A&F—just in front of the three floor mural, which depicts semi-nude men wriggling up and down ropes in what appears to be either a fire station or a prep-school gym class. On either side of this spectacle, book-keeper ladders allow access to the highest stacks of hoodies. Blinking, I

tried to take in what lay before me. And then I felt the fateful tap on my shoulder.

“Hey! I was just wondering if you live in the city!”

My eyes widened and then narrowed with suspicion at the gorgeous teenager asking me.

“And if you’ve ever considered working at A&F!” As I stumbled around for the right words, a voice in my head was muttering to me urgently and all too clearly: Be normal, Lydia, it whispered. Be cool. You can do this. Meanwhile, the employee explained that the store was hiring floor models. I wasn’t exactly sure what this meant, but I played along.

Now let me explain something to you.

I’m almost athletic and almost tall. But I am no runway-strutting alien child. But I walked out of Abercrombie & Fitch with my first—and only—interview of the summer.

My interview was scheduled for Tuesday, so a few days after my visit to the store, I walked back to 56th Street and turned the corner to find a dark and mysterious location known only as “Seven Twenty.” In the lobby, the doorman sent me up to the fifth floor. As I waited in the elevator, I wondered what I would see on the other side of the door. A “Grease”style gang of football players? A firing squad of cheerleaders? An orgy?

Moments later, the door opened into the glowy grey world of corporate. And it pretty much looked like any other office.

I went to the front desk to sign in, and the (stunning) secretary directed me to a large grey arm chair. The only things that gave away the office was the beautifulness of the people, the fact that they were wearing jeans instead of suits, and the posters that flanked my seat. The photos, filtered to the brand’s signature black and white, featured sultry models dripping with shiny beads of some liquid.

It wasn’t clear to me what the liquid was.

I squinted at it suspiciously for a moment and decided on either sweat or salt water.

After a few moments, I was called back to a group interview with a few other candidates (and yes, two were aspiring actresses). In the first part of the interview, Jack, who was tall and gorgeous in a tight flannel, explained exactly what the floor model’s role is: “to project the brand.” This means a different thing in every A&F location, but in the flagship, it generally means standing on the sales floor for a five- to ten-hour shift and praying nobody asks you for help. The

only really substantive part of the job is learning the official Abercrombie tag lines.

“Okay,” said Jack. “Repeat after me: Hey! How’s it goin’!”

“Hey! How’s it goin’?” said me and the other girls in unison.

“Great,” said Jack, “now one at a time, please.”

We went down the line, each pronouncing the prescribed words a little differently. I did mine with a big smile and a hand on my hip like I was posing for a picture with Anthony Weiner.

Goodbye dignity.

Go into any Abercrombie in the world—from Fifth Avenue to your local shopping mall—and these are the words that you’ll hear. The tag lines are a key element of what I later discovered to be the meticulous, calculated and often downright anal specificities of A&F’s branding.

It only took one day on the job to understand that the policies designed to project a casual image are enforced rigidly. After a two-hour training session, where I was advised to stand up straight and tilt my chin down when I smile, I was instructed to go to “Wash and Wear” and request my sizes in the season’s “look”: a white lace dress, a blue buttondown, and the day’s prescribed accessories. No “funky hipster frames” allowed.

Through the window at the station, I could see endless rows of identical white lace dresses and slim-cut plaid shirts. I picked up my size, changed, and was assigned to my location as a greeter at the second floor staircase.

As soon as I was out on the floor, one of my many managers began making corrections.

“Take your hair down, and your watch off…There, that’s better! Okay, now as for your shirt…”

I learned that the blue button-down was to be tied around my waist with the collar folded under, the front buttons open, the cuff buttons closed, and the sleeves rolled two and a half times each.

No more, no less. The knot of the sleeves should sit just above my right hip. Because, you know, someone might notice.

After adjusting my outfit, he went on to explain my task: to stand at the top of the stairs and greet everyone who comes onto the floor. Counting on my fingers, I rattled off the acceptable tag line alternatives: what’s up, what’s going on, how’s it going. I practiced my new chin-tilted smile.

“Oh and feel free to move around your

zone or dance in place, OK?” And then with a wink and a friendly pat on the shoulder, my manager strutted off into the steamy darkness of women’s swim, and I was left to face the crowds alone.

My first day greeting, I was terrified that my inner nerdiness would be discovered. They know, I thought to myself.

They know I don’t belong here. And who knew what they might do to me if they found out about my “funky hipster frames.” In my head, me working in Abercrombie & Fitch was like James Bond trying to blend in with a bunch of terrorists. Or Sterling Archer pretending to be a KGB agent. Or Gru selling cupcakes at the mall.

My attempts to channel a popular kid were hindered by not only nature but nurture. I went to a hippie high school with an emphasis on flannel and patching your own corduroys. I had never so much as seen a cheerleader, so my impersonation drew primarily on Taylor Swift lyrics and episodes of “Full House.”

Trying my hardest not to slip into my childhood lisp, I brushed my hair out of my face with a little flick and pronounced the words over and over again: Hey, how’s it going!

Over the course of the next five hours, I greeted hundreds, maybe thousands of people. I was asked all kinds of questions, but these four facts will answer most of them: Yes, I do work here. I don’t say hi to strangers for free.

No, we do not sell speedos. This is New York, not Cala Bassa.

Probably I still would not date you if you wore Nantucket red shorts.

And no, we don’t carry that one furlined parka you saw online last winter right now, because, um, it’s June. We also will not have it in July. Or August. Maybe not ever.

Other than explaining these issues, my main activity was helping tourists pick out gifts. In my first day alone, I helped clueless men choose presents for countless wives and daughters, several girlfriends and even one mistress.

Seriously—a foreign man once told me he needed help finding two gifts: one for his wife, and one for his lover.

Five hours later, at the end of my first shift, I had memorized the playlist. My feet hurt, and I was stumbling over my words. “Hey, how’s it going?” came out a feeble “Hey, how’s it…” with undertones of “God help me.” When I was finally dismissed, I changed back into my street Swarthmore review

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clothes and stumbled out of the store, my mind numb and the scent of Fierce clinging to me.

The next morning, I was working the opening shift. The front doors were locked, so I turned the corner to corporate, where I knocked on a mysterious black iron door without a knob or a handle. After about a minute, I raised my hand to knock again, but just then the door opened. A man checked my ID and nodded silently, like I was trying to get into some sinister VIP club.

I walked up four flights of stairs to punch in. I was on the floor a full hour before the doors opened, and it was eerily bright and quiet. Impact team members, who are responsible for handling the stock rooms, keeping up store maintenance, and running size checks, were busily sorting through piles of misplaced clothing, re-folding and re-stacking according to size. They measured the distance between each pile and the edge of the table, keeping an even and precise two inches. They carried around huge spray bottles full of cologne and spritzed each stack of clothing.

Meanwhile, I, almost completely useless, tried to hide from my manager.

Once I was discovered, he asked me to check the potted plants for trash, which, unbelievably, I found. Seriously think about that—there are people every day who look around to make sure no one’s watching, bend down, and stuff their gum wrappers and deli receipts into the roots of fake plants. Lucky for them, it is so dark that no one is likely to notice.

Another day of greeting passed, and then another, until I could see 20/20 in the dim light and hear perfectly over the music. Through the cloud of cologne, I could smell Nuts4Nuts rolling by outside.

One morning, after about a week of work, I was dispatched to the first floor.

This was like getting a promotion, because usually high-ranking employees are invited downstairs. It is reserved for the aspiring models and actors, people with agents and auditions and go-sees. But when one of these super-humans locks in a shoot or a show, a lowly part-timer gets to come down. Though many more customers walk through the first floor, it is much lighter work.

I was stationed at the “moose bar,” which (sadly) is not stocked with liquor, but with tees and tanks. Above it, a huge moose head is suspended, complete with glass eyes and real antlers. On one of my sojourns to the first floor, this time work30

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ing at the denim bar, two European men came up to me and actually attempted to order drinks. I just smiled at them.

“I wish!” But seriously, I thought to myself. I wish.

This wishing continued as my managers nagged, but my co-workers helped me to cope. When we weren’t either a) trying desperately to look busy or b) whining, we often cast bets on secret shoppers.

Secret shoppers, as our managers had explained to us with breathy anxiety, were sent in by corporate to evaluate store performance, zone by zone. To get a perfect score, they must be greeted within fifteen seconds of arriving on a floor. They must find the presentation of the hoodies and t-shirts up to snuff.

Paranoia about secret shoppers ran deep among managers, and so trying to pick out the spies was gratifying work.

Perhaps the happiest moment of my Abercrombie career was the time I found the selfies. You see, the highest ranked models are assigned to stand by the front door and take polaroids with the customers. So when I found two snapshots tucked away underneath a perfume display, I expected disheartening flawlessness. But when I flipped over the two pictures, I saw not perfect symmetry but a tangle of features, with multiple chins and crossed eyes, shot from the classic selfie angle. Oh my God, I thought to myself, they might actually be humans.

But even with these small glimmers of amusement, work was, like any other hourly job, routine and repetitive, with the same structure in every shift, the same moment two and a half hours in when you realize you have two and a half hours to go. And the same people telling you the same things: Secret shoppers.

Dance in place. Keep your chin down.

Every day, 20 minutes before opening, a “model meeting” is held. A manager checks the details of our outfits, buttoning the guys’ collars and rolling cuffs.

“What size jeans are you wearing, Tom?” the manager asked one of the models. “They look short.”

“34/34. The biggest we make,” he responded with a smirk.

“Well, you know we don’t make clothes for beluga whales!” she retorted, and everyone laughed. Why am I laughing? I wondered. Am I being brainwashed?

And there were, in fact, moments when I thought I really could become what I was pretending to be. After all, I hadn’t been detected yet. What if I abandoned my chunky glasses all together? What if I

started wearing polos? What if I lost ten pounds?

“Okay guys. Get out there and stay pretty.”

With a little time to observe the clientele, one thing became obvious: almost everyone entering the store was a tourist from outside the country. While its popularity is declining in the U.S (largely because of the conflicts over body image issues), Abercrombie & Fitch is still hugely coveted overseas. From my observations, at least 95 percent of goods sold at the Fifth Ave location every day goes to shoppers from abroad. I spoke more French at this job than I did visiting Paris last winter, and I learned the equivalents of “hoodie,” “zipper,” and “logo” in about ten different languages, from Svensk to Sindhi. In this sense, I wasn’t selling clothes—I was selling America.

And America sells. Each day I worked, it became clearer and clearer how well Abercrombie’s questionable branding works. Stats posted in the break room showed that every day, up to $300,00 of merchandise was sold. This was easy for me to believe: customers brought me long lists compiled by their extended families. They had printed out photos and memorized ID numbers. They filled strollers with thousands of dollars worth of clothing as their children straggled along side, exhausted. They waited for an hour carrying as many as 50 pieces of clothing to use the fitting rooms. One day, the impact team was understaffed, and my manager sent me to the register to learn how to check people out. The long lines were held up by time-consuming transactions involving up to $4,000 worth of clothing. Another time, the lust for A&F was so strong I had to quell what was in all seriousness a near-riot over a sequined sweatshirt.

By the time I reached my last shift, all these strange things seemed normal to me. Taking pictures with 12-year-old girls and measuring the exact two inches between the edge of the display racks and the clothing. Tallying the number of winks received per hour until I was in the last hour of the last day. Finally, the moment came to punch out for the last time. I mentioned to my manager, who went to school in PA, that I was returning to Swat.

“Oh you go to Swarthmore? I don’t really see you there…”

I guess in the end he never saw my hipster frames poking out of my bag.

Mission accomplished. u

BOOKS Looking in a mirror

REVIEW

Tao Lin’s uncomfortable new novel

by Tiffany Kim

R

eading indie literature darling Tao Lin’s “Taipei” was an experience that I can only describe as “altogether too real.” The novel’s portrait of Paul, its apathetic hero, is at turns a realistically uncomfortable and an uncomfortably realistic depiction of the lives of jaded “young people.” A writer based in New York City (and a character clearly based on Lin himself), Paul lives out a hollow version of every angst-ridden teenager’s dream, his days filled with drugs, women, and “introspection.”

“Taipei” opens with a break-up, one that tells much about the sort of person that Paul is: extremely self-aware yet ineffectual in interpersonal encounters. The narrative hangs on Paul’s past, existing, and emergent romantic relationships, which, in and of itself, is not necessarily a poor way to propel the novel’s action. Rather, it is Paul’s attitude towards these romantic relationships that heighten a growing feeling of malaise—a Hamletian desperation for any sort of romantic connection that is too often undercut with social apathy and disinterest.

The other characters in the novel, unfailingly introduced with their age appended to their first names, slide in and out of focus, most of them interchangeable in their flatness. They appear occasionally, bringing with them drugs and the expectation that drugs will bring happiness. Indeed, the primary basis for most of Paul’s non-romantic relationships is the consumption of illicit substances. Drug use fuels much of the scenic action in “Taipei”—there is no social situation that Paul doesn’t feel would be better maneuvered under any sort of influence.

There is no doubt that Lin is an accomplished writer, perhaps even an accomplished novelist (which is an entirely more

specialized realm); like all good writers, Lin puts into words universally felt but rarely articulated emotions and worries. It’s the often-contrived context in which these feelings are expressed that make Taipei seem like an exercise in masturbatory reflection—Paul’s conversations and actions build on top of each other so that Lin can squeeze in a cleverly written and apparently deep sentence.

The manner in which Paul socializes— the continuous analysis of his own actions in relation to others (most of his conversations are marked with intense and detailed descriptions of his counterparts’ actions and reactions), his acknowledgement that he sees “friends as a means to girlfriends”—is both strangely jarring and depressingly familiar. The shock arises largely from the familiarity of the line of Paul’s thought, both extremely single-minded and apparently purposeless. Perfectly encapsulating this are Paul’s uneasy mental workings following an admittedly unfunny joke during a dinner with Laura, an “intriguing, attractive stranger” whom he met at a party: Laura was motionless, looking at her lap with downcast eyes, like she was waiting for Paul to finish. Paul asked if she believed him and she didn’t respond and he felt stranded and withering and asked again if she believed him, then quietly said “I honestly thought you said ‘butter.’”

He nervously moved a spoon to his lap and, aware they were both looking down, felt himself absorbing the irresolution of the butter misunderstanding as an irreversible damage.

But the thing is, everything about Paul— every awkward conversation, every winding and circuitous thought process, every methodical calculation of social behavior, even his characterization of “looking at the

Taipei

by Tao Lin VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL 256 pages | $15

Internet” as “doing things”—is entirely too familiar. Lin achieves something powerful in holding up a mirror to a generation coming of age in the era of Facebook and hashtags—it’s that the mirror is altogether too unclouded.

In the same way in which it is difficult to continuously stare at one’s own reflection (unless on some sort of illicit substance) (which Paul seems to be most of the time, which probably explains his endless ability for self-reflection), reading “Taipei” makes all the clearer the flaws and insecurities felt by many “young people.”

When you repeat a word over and over again in your head, the word begins to lose any real meaning. In the same way, when actions are repeated over and over again— as the drug use and the girlfriend chasing and the “self-reflection” is in “Taipei”—one realizes just how boring one’s life can be.

It’s awful enough to be trapped in malaise in real life—to have to encounter it in a fictional form for any longer than 100 pages is exhausting. (“Taipei” began its life as a short piece in Vice magazine entitled “Relationship Story”; it probably should have stayed in that form.) There is something uniquely depressing about the whole affair, a feeling akin to what is felt when dealing with that friend, the one with all the circular social anxiety or the one who wants a relationship for the sake of having one—you want to stay around, you want to keep empathizing (because you know how it feels and you know that you know how it feels), but at some point, you have to throw your hands up and insist on a nap. u Swarthmore review

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

REVIEW

Planning Philadelphia

Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia

by Gregory L. Heller UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS 320 pages | $40

by Izzy Kornblatt

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he usual rap on post-World War II city planners is that they ruined our cities with their highways and shopping malls, and even now we are not entirely done recovering from the damage they did. At least in my experience, this view is held not just by city-dwellers but also by many people who themselves live in suburbs, commute via highway, and do much of their shopping at malls. This is because cities have recently become fashionable again, and no one wants to admit to any affection for the suburbs.

But you cannot seriously consider the value of cities if you write off the suburbs, if you ignore the pull they exerted over several generations of Americans and the appeal they continue to hold today even for so many of their avowed critics. A serious consideration of cities needs to acknowledge the fact that the present infatuation with cities is not so different from our parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and grandparentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; with the suburbs. Of course, there is nothing wrong with simply going along with the trend and enjoying cities as much as everyone else seems to these days. The problem is that too much of the supposedly serious discussion of cities these days takes as a starting point the unquestioned assumption that cities are good and shopping malls and all they represent are just obviously inferior.

This typically leads opinion about cities down a pretty tiresome path to a set of beliefs about how cities should be developed held almost universally by people who consider themselves interested in urban planning: build parks, prioritize pedestrians

and public transit over cars, build community gardens, reclaim waterfronts, build mixed-use, mixed-income developments, build parks, attack gentrification (a little guiltily), build parks, build community centers, build parks.

None of those views are necessarily wrong. Some of them are simply practical: now that we all care about cities, what do we need to build there that people will like?

Parks, certainly, and community centers.

Others are political: despite changing demographic trends, poor people do remain concentrated in cities and we need to figure out the best ways to help them, hence gentrification relief and investment in public transit. What’s wrong is just that more needs to be said if we are going to do anything new and interesting with urban design. Urban planning needs to be about more than just density and public amenities. Urban planners now should rethink the relationships between roads and pedestrians (and that does not mean just burying all the “ugly” highways), between suburbs and cities, and between public and private spaces; and ask larger questions about the goals of planning: what does it mean, in the end, for a city to be well designed? If the fashions are always changing, as they are, how can any kind of plan be expected to be something more than simply what the most people want at any given time?

The new book “Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia,” by Gregory Heller, is a good start in pushing the discourse about cities in a good direction, if only by virtue of its subject matter. Edmund Bacon, often thought of in conjunction with New York’s Robert Moses and Boston’s Edward Logue, was a postwar city planner who, in his heyday, was one of the most important, progressive, and interesting planners in the world. (In fact, of the three, Bacon was the only actual planner.)

Bacon’s major life work was re-imagining and slowly reconstructing a decaying Center City Philadelphia. He served as the executive director of Philadelphia’s City Planning Commission from 1949 until 1970, though he remained somewhat active in city politics until the early 2000s (he died in 2005). He appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1964. Despite his former fame, Bacon is not known well now: this is just the second major book about him. The renewed interest is welcome, because any careful examination of Bacon’s work and influence, and this book in particular, very clearly give the lie to the notion that all post-war city planners cared about were highways and malls. The book challenges the conventional narra34

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tive about cities that has underpinned too much lazy, regressive, faux-1900 planning; it makes a whole shoddy fiction fall apart. This is because when you see Bacon not as an autocrat and not as a hater of the poor or of lively neighborhoods (“We’ll just pave that over with a ten-lane freeway”), but rather as a sympathetic and engaged planner who loved the city as a concept and his hometown in particular, you have to recognize the seriousness of the theoretical and practical difficulties he faced: you have to understand suburbia as a considered, not at all evil experiment in living; you have to see the radical steps taken in the 1960s in Philadelphia and elsewhere to remake public spaces and roadways as necessary and important.

Above all, you have to appreciate the pressures that the postwar era put on the city and see beyond the current fashion that has declared postwar planning and architecture “out.”

One criticism I have of the book is that Heller doesn’t do more to push that line of thought. He too often rushes to declare Bacon “ahead of his time” for his love of cities and dislike of cars, instead of even-handedly considering Bacon’s theoretical successes and failures. Bacon is indeed relevant because he had ideas about cities, but those ideas should be able to stand apart from the fact that a couple decades after Bacon retired people started moving back to Philadelphia.

Heller also dodges theoretical concerns a little bit by sometimes treating Bacon’s style as planner-implementer (Bacon often worked closely with private developers) as his most important contribution to planning. The question of how planners hired by a city can influence private development is certainly important, but it is really just practical.

From the perspective of someone interested in how the city of the future should look and function, it is not all that interesting.

till, Heller does a good job going through Bacon’s career and explaining and assessing each of his projects. His book is lucid, sympathetic, and methodical, though I would have liked to read a little more about the design of some of the largest projects Bacon worked on.

Bacon’s planning and design philosophy, which he explained in his 1967 book “Design of Cities,” is decidedly modern: Bacon, like most modern architects, thought architecture should express “the spirit of the age.”

The pared-down industrial look of modernist architecture was intended to formally recognize heavy industry and the machine as the great features of the modern era. It was time to stop hiding such things behind

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increasingly tortured classical facades and instead tie form to function. Machines, after all, are all about perfectly efficient functioning. A famous example of this is the great French architect Le Corbusier’s affection for horizontal strip windows. Since modern engineering had allowed us to build loadbearing columns instead of walls, we should express that fact with windows that clearly illustrate walls’ new purely covering, nonstructural function. A wall with a window cutting horizontally across it clearly is not holding up the building.

Bacon, along with other planners of his time, wanted to extend these ideas beyond architectural details. For example, he thought modern city planning needed to acknowledge the centrality of the car to modern life. Praising Brasília, the capital of Brazil designed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer in the 1950s, Bacon wrote that the highway, too often thought of “as comparable to plumbing facilities,” in Brasília “has come into its own as an architectural work and is an integral element in civic design.”

He was even more taken with the city’s separation of pedestrians from automobiles; he especially liked the pedestrian-only zones: “The entire roof of the Congress Building is paved with marble, and access to the balusterless pedestrian area is provided by the ramp leading from the ground below.” Bacon actually did not always or even often have much affection for highways, but the idea that cars and people should be separated, known as a Radburn principle after a famous development in New Jersey, proved to be of tremendous importance for Bacon’s work in Philadelphia.

Bacon was trained as an architect at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, one of the most important centers for modern architecture in America in the early-tomid 20th century. There, and on throughout his career, first in Flint, Michigan, and then in Philadelphia, Bacon developed relationships with some of the most important architects, planners, and thinkers of the century, including Eliel Saarinen, Louis I. Kahn, Oskar Stonorov, George Howe (architect of the first major modern skyscraper in America, Philadelphia’s PSFS tower), Constantinos Doxiadis, R. Buckminster Fuller, Vincent Kling, and Lewis Mumford. But this was no exclusive club. Bacon committed himself to making the ideas and processes behind his plans accessible to all, and to making planning a real concern for the people of Philadelphia. None of his writings are technical or even moderately difficult. In 1947, he organized the famed Better Philadelphia Exhibition on the second floor of Gimbel’s Previous page photo courtesy of USA Pics

Department Store on the east end of Market Street. The exhibition sought to explain the job of the City Planning Commission to the people of the city, and to explain the city’s growing challenges, most notably the decline of industry and tax revenues and the rising poverty rate. It also sought to present an optimistic and ambitious vision for the city’s future. “The beginning of the show built drama, taking visitors along a mysterious dark foyer,” writes Heller. “A mirror would disappear, magically replaced by a view of a panorama of a future Philadelphia.” The exhibition was a tremendous success, attracting over 385,000 visitors in its one month run.

Bacon continued to try to keep people informed about his work throughout the rest of his career, but his focus soon shifted to actual planning when he was named director of the planning commission. In the postwar era, the federal government was generous with urban renewal funds and there was extraordinary opportunity to remake cities that had been built for previous centuries.

In 1950, Center City Philadelphia was dominated by two huge above-ground train stations, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broad Street Station, and the Reading Railroad Terminal on Market Street, which sat on opposite sides of City Hall (there was also Suburban Station and 30th Street Station, which are both still in use). Automotive access to the city was not very good, and beautiful neighborhoods, such as Society Hill, were falling into disrepair. Luxurious department stores were threatened by suburban shopping malls. The Delaware riverfront was a poorly used industrial zone. Independence Hall wasn’t accorded any significance in the layout of the city. Philadelphia was in serious need of updating if it was going to be a city people wanted to live in and do well in the era of a service-based economy.

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acon tried to do just that in his two decades at the helm of the planning commission. His major projects included the revitalization of Society Hill (including the Society Hill towers), the Penn Center office building complex and the parks and plazas near it, the Gallery at Market East shopping mall and adjacent Market East regional rail station (and the Center City Commuter Connection tunnel that serves it), Independence Mall, the plaza at Penn’s Landing, housing in the far northeast area of the city, the since-reversed removal of automobiles from Chestnut Street, and several downtown highways.

It is important to understand that Bacon often did not have much final say over these

Plan courtesy of Architect Magazine

projects. As mentioned, Bacon often worked with private developers who usually bought into his general schemes but often rejected the nuts-and-bolts, particularly the more expensive ones, of his visions.

As a committed modernist, Bacon believed in the value of the planner’s having a total vision for the city. In “Design of Cities,” he presents each of his major planning projects connecting and bettering each other, together forming a reinvented downtown for the late 20th century. Center City was to be encircled by highways: to the east, the Schuylkill River Expressway; to the west, the Delaware River Expressway, to the north, the Vine Street Expressway, which would pass under the Ben Franklin Parkway; and to the south, the Crosstown Expressway,

and shops, helping to revitalize the city’s struggling department stores. East Market Street was to become a multi-level street, with pedestrian paths both above and below cars, plus regional rail and subways. Further east, a new four-block park was to be created in front of Independence Hall, lined with important corporate buildings, and connecting Franklin and Washington squares.

This park would connect via “greenways,” green park-like pedestrian pathways, east to the waterfront and southeast to a revitalized Society Hill, where new upscale modern apartment towers would contrast nicely with restored historic brick houses.

Bacon saw this revamped downtown as just the first step in a revitalization of the whole city. He thought the downtown had

Bacon’s plan for Center City Philadelphia. The site’s of most of Bacon’s projects are visible here, including the four highways enclosing Center City. City Hall is in the dark square at the center.

which was to run along South Street. The highways were to be easily crossable, and the Delaware River was to be integrated into the plan with a green riverfront path and several riverfront amenities, including what became Penn’s Landing. The Schuylkill was to be integrated as well, through the eventual construction of the Schuylkill River Park. West of City Hall, the massive Broad Street Station complex would be torn down and replaced with Penn Center, a complex of office towers set above an open-air lower level concourse with shopping and access to the subways and Suburban Station. Views of City Hall were to be preserved, and a set of new parks and plazas around the area would make the whole City Hall and Penn Center a central gathering place for the city. East of City Hall, Reading Terminal would be replaced with a new underground regional rail station connected underground to the Penn Center concourse and to a set of new buildings on Market Street housing restaurants

to come first, and then the strengthened city could move on to tackling its other issues, such as its high poverty rate, headon (which is not to say that he thought anti-poverty programs had to wait until he was done with Society Hill). He thought that a primary task for the city was making itself great again.

It is hard to say how well many of Bacon’s projects worked out, and in the cases where they clearly didn’t, to what degree Bacon’s plans are to blame.

Penn Center is clearly an abomination. Its generic slab office towers, decrepit, empty plazas, and dingy underground concourse are like a parody of rote office hell. The places where people need to walk are sparse and boring; there is nothing much to do except in the underground station, where the low ceilings, labyrinthine layout, and lack of connection to the street level make spending time very unappealing. As Louis Kahn famously put it, if the plan had been submitSwarthmore review

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Top: the bland office towers of Penn Center with City Hall in the background. Middle: the blank walls of the Gallery at Market East. Bottom: The Market East regional rail station and Center City Commuter Connection tunnel at night.

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ted by a first-year architecture student, the grade it would get would be zero. But Kahn was not criticizing Bacon. The problem was that the development was controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which understandably preferred to develop in the easiest and most profitable manner than to act in the public interest. Had the original office buildings not been cheap, boring clones, had they been sited properly, and had the underground concourse been effectively connected to the street level, things may well have been quite different. After all, the concept of office towers connecting to an underground train station is not a bad one.

The story at Market East is similar. Early drawings by various architects, including the renowned designer of Swarthmore’s Lang Music Building, Romaldo Giurgola, show an effectively layered urban environment, not a depressing enclosed mall. Giurgola’s series of identical modern towers effectively frame City Hall and connect pedestrians with the street while making the bold move of not treating the street as the centerpiece of the urban landscape. The mall that was finally built and that still stands now, the Gallery at Market East, is not an architectural achievement (its blank walls leave a lot to be desired), but it has succeeded over the years at keeping shopping, particularly cheap shopping, in Center City. The mall is used by people of all income levels, unlike the much more “in” Rittenhouse Row just a few blocks away. Even better than the mall is the regional rail station it is adjacent to, Market East, which was championed by Bacon but not completed until the mid1980s. Formerly, inbound Reading regional rail trains had all stopped at Reading Terminal before heading outbound again, while inbound Penn Railroad regional trains had all stopped at Suburban station before heading out again. The two networks were entirely separate, like the Long Island Railroad and Metro-North in New York City. A new four-track tunnel, the Center City Commuter Connection, was built connecting all the Reading lines with Suburban Station, and as part of the project the new underground Market East Station replaced Reading Terminal as the major regional rail station in eastern Center City. This freed up a good deal of space for development that had previously been taken up by aboveground tracks and other related facilities.

The old Reading Terminal building was preserved, as was the still-popular market on its first floor, and is now used as part of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The whole project, while expensive, allowed for a much better-connected rail system, better-

Photos courtesy of ujmn.com, farm4.staticflickr.com, hellophiladelphia.com

used above-ground space, and a new well designed station that connects to the Gallery at Market East.

The revitalization of Society Hill is Bacon’s clearest success story purely in terms of goal accomplishment. What was once one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city is now safe, well off, connected with beautiful greenways, and overlooked by three elegant residential towers designed by the architect Ieoh Ming Pei. No cheap historical imitation architecture was employed in revitalizing the neighborhood. Bacon’s approach was innovative for its time: he restored the historic homes, tried to keep the existing feel of the neighborhood, but insisted that new construction be clearly modern in style so as to distinguish the old from the new. Less fortunately, many poor people were displaced by the selective demolition that was necessary and by the rising property values that the neighborhood’s revitalization caused. Bacon himself was not blind to this. “I knew it was cruel while I was doing it,” Heller quotes him as saying. “But think of Philadelphia if Society Hill was still the way it was. It was more important to restore this area than to maintain the low-income residents.”

The plaza at Penn’s Landing and other riverfront amenities that Bacon hoped would revitalize the Delaware River waterfront have generally not done so, mostly because of the Delaware River Expressway. Really none of Bacon’s highways are very popular.

The proposed Crosstown Expressway, which would have crossed Center City somewhere near South Street, was thankfully killed by anti-highway protests and general negative sentiment. The Vine Street Expressway, which did not fully open until 1991, is not loved by many of its neighbors, but is an important road for the city. It relieves congestion approaching the Ben Franklin Bridge and provides a fast route across the city. Bacon, Heller writes, always promoted the highways the city wanted in his capacity as director of planning, but privately he had doubts. He personally disliked cars and thought that the American infatuation with driving would pass when we ran out of petroleum. It is undoubtedly good that Bacon fought for public transit and did not put cars first in his city, but on the other hand it is also good that Philadelphia built the highways it needed in order to be a functioning modern city. Highways, as Bacon himself recognized when he wrote about Brasília, are not inherent abominations. It is the modern architect’s job to make these huge, necessary pieces of infrastructure express something, as Robert Moses did with the best of his New York parkways.

Plan courtesy of loc.gov

I think that Independence Mall generally works well. Cities need breathing room, and this park fits the historic site well: it is well proportioned, and the modern buildings that surround it are pleasantly unfashionable and unkitschy. Unfortunately the recent redesign of the mall has probably done more harm than good, as Bacon publicly complained it would. The closing of Chestnut Street to cars did not work out; Heller argues that this was because the road was never really effectively closed. A planned light rail line down the pedestrian street was never completed, and instead SEPTA used the street as a kind of bus thoroughfare, which ended up being enough like car traffic to stop the street ever really becoming pedes-

trianized. The street was reopened to traffic in the early 2000s, which is just as well, because it works just fine as a regular old street. Bacon’s housing projects in northeast Philadelphia are reportedly less than stellar, though I have never been to them.

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n 2000, Philadelphia began a significant period of population gain for the first time since 1950. The city’s population had fallen from nearly 2.1 million in 1950 to just over 1.4 million in 1999. The U.S. census estimates that by 2012 it had risen to almost 1.55 million. Consequently, the tax base is growing and city finances are looking up.

This summer, Standard & Poor’s upgraded the city’s bond rating to an A-minus, its

The Society Hill residential towers planned by Edmund Bacon and designed by I. M. Pei.

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highest level since 1979. Center City is again a 24-hour downtown, in part thanks to the efforts of Paul Levy’s Center City District, and is in the midst of another residential construction boom. A bike-share is scheduled to open next year. SEPTA ridership is up, and car ownership is down. The city’s arts scene is doing very well (though an ongoing Inquirer series is exploring whether there is enough funding for that to last).

A number of major cultural projects have recently opened or will soon open on the Parkway. New parks have appeared around the city, including the Schuylkill River Park Bacon envisioned, and more are planned or under construction. A major reworking of Penn’s Landing and the whole Delaware riverfront is in the works. This summer, Mayor Michael Nutter released a comprehensive plan to address the city’s poverty, which remains the worst of any of the ten largest cities in the country. Former Mayor John F. Street’s Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, through which the city tore down thousands of abandoned buildings, seems to be paying off. On the whole, there seems to cause for optimism about the city.

This is not to minimize the city’s serious problems: poverty, continued segregation (and attendant stigma against poor black and latino neighborhoods), schools in crisis, underfunded public transit. (At least in the last two cases, decent state funding support would go a long way in improving things.)

My point is just that the city seems able to take care of itself in a way it has not been for a long time.

Much of the major construction in Philadelphia over the past fifteen or so years has been quite good. The Kimmel Center, architect Rafael Viñoly’s grand performing arts center on South Broad Street, is an extraordinary building, despite some issues that are still being worked out. Its huge glass barrel roof and rust-colored red brick walls recall the old Broad Street and Reading Terminal train stations, and yet they flip the modern/industrial paradigm of formfollows-function on its head: the grand glass roof is purely decorative; and the result is a fascinating aesthetic experience of a city emerging from its industrial past. Frank Gehry’s underground expansion of the Philadelphia Museum of Art seems promising, though I have no idea when it’ll actually be finished. The new Barnes Foundation looks nice, though I haven’t been inside it yet. And the new Dilworth Plaza in front of City Hall, which will be completed in 2014 and will replace one of Bacon’s least fortunate public spaces, is shaping up to be one of Center City’s best parks, on par with 38

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Rittenhouse and Washington squares. The design, by the Philadelphia architecture firm KieranTimberlake along with a bunch of associates, is pretty understated but seems thoughtful and will feature what from the plans and renderings looks like a fascinating interactive, moving sculpture by Janet Echelman: five-foot-high illuminated moving curtains of water that will trace the movement of subways and trolleys below in each line’s color.

The City Planning Commission, which in recent decades had been a shell of its former self, has under Mayor Nutter undertaken some of its biggest work since Bacon’s days.

In 2011 it released “Philadelphia 2035,” a comprehensive (and by comprehensive I mean 228-page) master plan for the city, and now it is working on individual district plans for the 18 districts it has divided the city into. Several have already been adopted, including a plan by KieranTimberlake and some more associates for the central Delaware riverfront. Undoubtedly there are some good and important ideas in these plans, but beneath the excited language and rosy vision there’s a disturbing lack of ambition to them. Ed Bacon wanted to remake Philadelphia; today’s planners want to turn the plaza at Penn’s Landing into a grass lawn.

Philadelphia in 2035 looks an awful lot like Philadelphia today, but with a lot of people very excited about RENEWING and CONNECTING all of these COMMUNITIES. There are really no ambitious proposals in the plan. There should maybe be a subway line through north and northeast Phila., the planners think, but they don’t really think funding will come through for that, so... it’ll probably be an improved bus line, if it happens at all.

In that case, and in others, the lack of ambition can be easily pinned to a lack of available funds. Federal urban renewal funds are just not available like they used to be, and if the Pennsylvania legislature can’t pass the necessary legislation to fund the maintenance of SEPTA’s current system, what is the chance they’ll shell out for several new subway lines? But the larger reason for the lack of ambition, and likely also at least part of the reason for the lack of funds, is that our attitude toward urban planners has changed radically since Ed Bacon enjoyed popular support in the 1950s.

In 1961, Jane Jacobs published her famous book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” which would become the bible of a new movement in city planning. The new movement’s tenets are simple: don’t screw with neighborhoods, and give the people what they want. She understandably disliked

the neighborhood-wrecking wholesale demolition that Robert Moses advocated for in New York in order to build his highways, and was revolted by radical modern ideas like Le Corbusier’s plan for Paris which involved the replacement of hundreds of blocks of old buildings with a perfect grid of identical modern skyscrapers served by large highways. She thought supposedly great modern architects and planners had forgotten that people need to make cities their homes, and that they do so by developing neighborhoods over time in many small ways, not through large development projects.

Jacobs did not much like Bacon’s work, though she did comment positively on Philadelphia’s efforts to combine historical preservation with modern development.

Heller argues that Jacobs must not have understood Bacon very well, and there may be some truth to that, though it seems to me that their views of the city were too fundamentally opposed for her to have really liked his work even had she better understood it.

Bacon was someone who thought that you could remake cities; he saw the city as an “act of will.” Jacobs thought that neighborhoods should be left alone, and in the cases of very poor, dangerous ones, they would “unslum” over time. That view turned out to be wrong. Poor neighborhoods will certainly gentrify, but that hardly helps the poor people who originally lived there. In any case, Jacobs’s criticisms of Bacon and his colleagues stuck, and the planning profession shifted. Soon the dominant mode of planning was “New Urbanism,” a movement which essentially called for the construction of imitation-historic neighborhoods, explicitly or implicitly. New Urbanism is basically what most people who like cities these days automatically subscribe to.

Of course, not all ideas espoused by the New Urbanists are bad. Transit-oriented development, which is exactly what it sounds like, is effective especially for affordable housing. And many of Jacobs’s criticisms of the planning and architecture of her day did deserve to be taken seriously. She was right that historical preservation and respect for existing neighborhoods were lacking in Robert Moses’s vision for New York. She was right that some modern architects’ ideas of pedestrian spaces were a real mess. (See the plaza outside Boston City Hall.) She was right to emphasize that diversity of development is an essential ingredient in a great city.

She was right that massive public housing developments often did more harm than good, and she was right to point out certain uncomfortably totalitarian tendencies in

modernism. But those valid points did not need to take ambition out of planning. On a theoretical level, the New Urbanism that Jacobs ushered in is a fundamentally defeatist planning philosophy. It essentially says that the best planning we can do is to imitate what we did hundreds of years ago. There is no room in the New Urbanism for rethinking spaces, for bold experiments in living.

New Urbanism pretends that the only way to serve people’s everyday needs (accessible stores, outdoor space, places to sit, shade, etc.) are through the framework of the 19th century (plus an awkward allowance for parking garages), as though modern architects hadn’t proved that wrong decades ago.

New Urbanism reaches its disturbing logical endpoint in the English town of Poundbury, an entire faux-18th century town built since the 1990s in an apparent effort to pretend away modern life, except in the case of parking spots. (Prince Charles, known in the world of architecture for being generally ignorant about architecture but still opining frequently and publicly about it, has been one of Poundbury’s fiercest advocates.) New Urbanism bills itself as progressive, sustainable, and all the rest, but really it is conservative. It pretends that the only or best way to be progressive is to try to further social goals through that same outdated framework.

In fact, the postwar city planners who the New Urbanists despise, or at least the best of them, were the real progressives. Bacon, as he said explicitly and repeatedly throughout his career, always saw integration and freely available high-quality affordable public housing as essential to any decent city. He also was no high-handed autocrat. Even though some of his projects left people angry, Bacon made considerable effort throughout his career to get public input on his projects. He argued in his “Design of Cities” that good planning is an essentially democratic enterprise. He loved cities, he loved parks, benches, and pedestrian spaces.

He stood up for people using those spaces in all kinds of ways: in 2002 a 92-year old Ed Bacon skateboarded about 50 feet to protest John Street’s ban on skateboarding in Love Park (which Bacon had helped design almost 40 years earlier, certainly not with skateboarding in mind). He thought diverse styles were essential to living cities. He just also thought that it was permissible for the planner to have a vision, push for it, and ask people to change their routines to accommodate something radically new once in a while.

The most interesting planning and architectural work of today that I know of is being done by architects like Rem Koolhaas

(author of the book “Delirious New York”), Peter Eisenman, Rafael Moneo, Rafael Viñoly of the Kimmel Center, and Zaha Hadid, who I guess could be described as post-postmodern. The postmodernists rejected the modernists’ insistence on a straitjacketed form-follows-function aesthetic (because it really was just an aesthetic); and their sweeping desire to remake the built world.

Architects like Koolhaas and Eisenman accept many of the post-modernists’ points but retain from the modernists tremendous ambition, faith in architecture’s ability to transform experience, and a commitment to the present: we have to think about and rethink architecture as we know it now, no longer tied to function as the modernists had it, no longer tied to classical principles of design, but simply as presenting tremendous opportunity to affect how people experience the world. In one of his most interesting projects, the student center at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Koolhaas deliberately sited his building beneath an elevated rapid transit line, then insulated the building from the loud trains by building a large, structurally independent elevated tunnel to surround the tracks and trains. The result is a building that weaves and stretches around the tunnel: it is always independent from and yet intimately connected to the city’s transit system, which probably mirrors many students’ relationship with the surrounding area of Chicago.

It is a great building that could only have been built by an architect interested in the present.

Ed Bacon was similarly committed to the present. He always sought to be at the theoretical cutting edge of his field; he wanted Philadelphia to be at the center of the world of progressive urban planning, and, for a time, he succeeded. But “Philadelphia 2035” lets him down. The city deserves much better. The Parkway, Delaware waterfront, Gallery at Market East, and labyrinthine underground concourse network could all do with complete rethinkings (and that’s just in Center City). Could there be a way for a renovated Delaware Expressway to be not a barrier to the river but somehow an integral feature of new public spaces on the river?

Maybe the answer is no, the highway is just too big and loud, but that’s the sort of question that needs to be asked.

And it will be important for Philadelphia going ahead not to make itself too similar to other cities that have successfully gentrified themselves and in the process lost much of the grit and texture that made them interesting in the first place. When I first walked around Philadelphia after coming here last

RECOMMENDED READING NYANTEE ASHERMAN We Need New Names

by NoViolet Bulawayo R eagan art h ur b oo k s 304 pages | $25

This summer I was looking for a book that would require little investment and might kick-start my, well, brain, when I stumbled upon “We Need New Names” in the new authors section of Barnes and Noble. NoViolet Bulawayo is a Zimbabwean writer with a M.F.A in creative writing from Cornell University. Before “We Need New Names” was released this year, she was best known for her short story “Hitting Budapest” about a Zimbabwean children’s gang. Following the same thread, Bulawayo’s semi-autobiographical book follows Darling through her childhood adventures in a shantytown ironically named “Paradise” to her experiences as an immigrant in America, navigating and negotiating new economic, education, and value systems.

Right up my not-tryna’-think-too-hard alley, Bulawayo tackles large and varied issues such as democracy in a recently liberated country, the on-the-ground effects of land reform, nationalism, the American immigrant experience, comingof-age, nostalgia, and language and culture barriers all while giving barely any background or delving into any one topic too deeply. It helps that she delicately balances heart-breaking, semi-personal accounts with light-hearted episodes of childhood days spent getting into trouble or being dragged to church; call it anthropology lite. u

year, I was taken with how it was a city that has empty lots with murals, and doesn’t feel sparklingly clean or new or rich, and knows how to go about the business of being a great American city without falling in love with its own image of itself as a great American city, like Manhattan or Boston. In this way it is more like Chicago and Baltimore.

But New Urbanist-style clinging to the past is not the way to preserve what’s appealing about the city’s character. After all, Philadelphia did not get where it is today by being shy about planning. If the city wants to remain alive, it will have to take the gamble of change. To adapt a philosopher’s line, living cities are not finished pieces of design; they become what they are by constantly redesigning themselves. u

Swarthmore review

SEPTEMBER 2013

39