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When the FBI spied on Swarthmore
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CONTRIBUTORS Nyantee Asherman ’15 is an art major who is considering comic book school. Daniel Block ’16 is a political science and history major from Westchester county. Yenny Cheung ’16 is a computer science major from Hong Kong. She misses the food there every second.
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 ikornbl1 or agonzal4 or pqueen1, all @swarthmore. edu.
Kimaya Diggs ’15 loves music, language, and the sun. Medha Ghosh is a sophomore at Bryn Mawr College studying global health and South Asia. Anna Gonzales ’16 has decided to switch from pre-Starbucks studies to investigating the intersection between Instagram form and cloud appreciation. Brian Johnson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Izzy Kornblatt ’16 misses high school. Marina Martinez ’16 hails from Rhode Island and can do a pull-up, unassisted.
How to contribute We solicit pieces from writers, though we will also accept submissions of long-form reporting, personal, argumentative and photo essays, book and movie reviews, short stories, poems, and anything else that seems suitable. Submissions will be considered from Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and will be considered anonymously, though we will not, except in rare cases, publish anonymously. Submissions should generally not go longer than 10,000 words. Contact: ikornbl1 or agonzal4 or pqueen1, all @swarthmore. edu.
Noah Morrison ’17 is a New York City-based photographer who focuses mainly on street scenes, subway life, and developing identities.
EDITORS IN CHIEF ANNA GONZALES IZZY KORNBLATT PHILIP QUEEN
Isabel Newlin ’13 grew up in Oberlin, OH, and finished college in December. She now lives iin New York and works for a wine importer.
REPORTING MARINA MARTINEZ
Jerry Qin ’17 is a 90s CWA (Chinese with Attitude) raised in western China. He grew up on the border, specifically the border between Walnut and West Covina, currently majoring in a$$-kicking and minoring in love. Noel Quiñones ’15 is an award winning Puerto Rican-American writer, lyricist, and educator; currently studying abroad in London, he has recently been booked for readings throughout the country. His work has appeared in the Adroit Journal, the Decades Review, and on TEDxSwarthmore. Thomas Ruan is a sophomore from Hong Kong. He’s a cat person, but he’s not weird about it or anything. 2
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POETRY MIKE LUMETTA VICTORIA STITT Z.L. ZHOU
S W A R T H M O R E
Founded 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 3
BOOKS PHILIP HARRIS PERSONAL ESSAYS LILIANA FRANKEL PHOTO RAZI SHABAN ART NYANTEE ASHERMAN YENNY CHEUNG
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 editor@swarthmorephoenix.com. Printed at Bartash Printing, Philadelphia, PA. Please recycle this magazine.
“Time spent with cats is never wasted.” Sigmund Freud
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survei llance
March 2014
Arts BOOKS
LETTER
How Philip Queen got Lydia Bailey’s essay all wrong 4
The big sleep 33
MOVIES
To Americana 36 Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” by Jerry Qin
spied on Swarthmore by Marina Martinez
FICTION
Jonathan Crary predicts capitalism’s next victim by Thomas Ruan
When the FBI
by Ashlen Sepulveda
The Carwash by Kimaya Diggs
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On March 8, 1971, a group of activists stole more than 1,000 documents from an FBI office in Media, PA, and found evidence of spying at Swarthmore. Forty years later, we have the full story.
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IN TRANSIT
Recommended viewing from Brian Johnson 37
MUSIC
Brown Gurls 39 The fruits of the internet generation by Medha Ghosh Citydwellers in motion / photo essay by Noah Morrison
Editors’ Picks 38
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Brief arts recommendations PERSONAL ESSAYS ILLUSTRATIONS
Cover by Nyantee Asherman Drawing by Yenny Cheung 23
POEMS
Star: 32
by Noel Quiñones
The Death of Rukhin 35 by Isabel Newlin
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LETTERS Premature judgement from Philip Queen on A&F essay
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hen reading Lydia Bailey’s September 2013 essay “My summer at Abercrombie & Fitch” I found myself somehow simultaneously engrossed, laughing nervously and wishing I could meet this mystery writer who somehow was so similar to me. As someone who has also experienced the odd social culture of the Abercrombie & Fitch/Hollister Co. mass corporation, I too could empathize with her experience of feeling like “James Bond trying to blend in with a bunch of terrorists.” Unlike Bailey, I’d known that I was going to work at Hollister Co. since I was approximately sixteen. As a teenager, I’d always tried to conform to the social norms of southern California and had loved the idea of working at one of my favorite stores. Little did I know that working at Hollister would only strengthen the “otherness” that both Bailey and I felt while working at these image-obsessed, fetishized institutions. I found Queen’s response and interpretation of Bailey’s essay (Letters, November 2013) incredibly mystifying. Bailey wrote this essay as a humorous social critique on her personal experience working at one of the most controversial brands in America. And yet her every word and casual remark is dissected and placed on display by Philip
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Queen, who decidedly has determined that Bailey is a perpetually shallow individual. I believe that it is ridiculous that Queen, who so adamantly argues that Bailey is “perpetuating the need to value oneself primarily on his or her physical qualities” is in complete contradiction to the true message of her personal essay, which in fact is that she came to understand how the people around her who seemed to promote this view were actually just as alienated from it as she was. Making assumptions about people based on how they dress is the complete opposite point that Bailey is in fact making in her essay. It baffles me that Queen could actually conceive his argument through her comedic, personal writing. Bailey scrupulously observes her co-workers clothing and lifestyle, which are so different than her own, while simultaneously fearing that they are reciprocating the judgment. She says, “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.” She feels out of place, which I and many others have felt working in such an image-based, shallow environment. When Queen sarcastically says, “Were they not humans before? Do double chins
and crossed eyes make you more human? Do symmetrical features make you less? Since when can we judge someone’s worth based on their physical attractiveness?” when referring to Bailey’s discovery of Polaroid pictures of her fellow floor models, I had to stop reading for a moment, for his arguments are so weak. I am not sure about Queen, but I believe that imperfection is what makes us human, and therefore revealing imperfections makes people seem more human. It is simply a visceral reaction, which Bailey very obviously expresses. Bailey is surprised by their willingness to not be perfect and its revelation of their humanity, not their ugliness. How he misconstrued that, I do not know. When Bailey’s manager says, “Oh you go to Swarthmore? I don’t really see you there…,” I don’t see Queen making personal judgments about the manager’s personality and character based on a simple, honest observation, as he is so quick to do with Bailey’s personal reflections about her co-workers. Queen also misconstrues Bailey’s argument around the symbol of the flannel. He says that she identifies the flannel as “cool” in one instance and “hippie” in the other. But Bailey’s subtly expressed symbolic point is that through wearing the same styles, groups of people who view each other as separate actually are not so different. Bailey argues that in such a superficial and fetishized institution it is hard to fight against the social pressure to conform and to judge others on their appearance. As she points out, the irony of this is that all of the employees of Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister are normal, awkward, unique people who ALL conform to the job and to the environment. I believe that Queen was thoroughly confounded by Bailey’s message, and therefore decided to take it out on her “chunky hipster glasses” and flannels, which ironically he wears on a daily basis. In fact, Bailey once pointed out to me that they own the same L.L. Bean men’s flannel. Ashlen Sepulveda ’17
REPORT
When the FBI spied on Swarthmore by Marina Martinez
The 1971 Media FBI office break-in, reenacted in a recent documentary
On March 8, 1971, a group of activists picked the lock of an FBI office on the second floor of the County Court Apartments in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole more than 1,000 documents. A few weeks later, Swarthmore student Martha Shirk, who was the editor of the Phoenix, opened her mailbox in Parrish to find a plain brown envelope containing stolen FBI files detailing spying on Swarthmore’s own campus. A letter accompanying the envelope said, “Dear Swarthmore Phoenix, The enclosed materials are copies of materials taken from the Media FBI office >>> SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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on March 8, 1971. We thought that you would be interested in receiving them. This is the last mailing you will receive from the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI.” Said Shirk, “I was both thrilled to have been sent the stolen files, and scared.”
enrolled at the college. One file, obtained by Shirk and the Phoenix around April 13, named Senior Secretary to the Registrar Marjorie Webb as an “established informant.” In the file, Webb was described to have relayed information to the FBI about a student named Jacqueline Reuss, who was the daughter of then-Congressman Henry Reuss. Congressman Reuss was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. Of the files mailed directly to the Phoenix, Shirk said they were the most insightful of any files they gained access to. They revealed five years of spying on Swarthmore campus, including that Webb relayed to the FBI the registration information of all
ophy for three years and a well-known activist on campus. An unnamed “Boston informant” had given the FBI evidence that Bennett might have connections to two Brandeis students, Susan Saxe and Katherine Power, who were wanted in connection with a bank robbery. Bennett had taught at Brandeis from 1963 until 1966. The file detailed the involvement of Henry Peirsol, a security officer at Swarthmore, who lived near Bennett and provided the FBI with information on his family and his activities. The Phoenix contacted Peirsol upon reading the files, but Peirsol refused to comment: In the April 2, 1971 issue of the Swarthmore
warthmore College, which had a history of anti-war activism and The FBI office in Media, PA leftist politics, was on spring break when the first news stories about the documents surfaced. Once back black students enrolled at Swarthmore in on campus, the Phoenix began report1969. ing the story as it related to Swarthmore Also included in the documents mailed using published documents and interto the Phoenix were, Shirk said, license views with administrators and students. plate numbers of cars around campus The Phoenix first had access to many of and accumulated information on three the stolen files thanks to an organization Swarthmore students who had ties to the called Resist, which mailed them the files. National Caucus of Labor Committees. Resist, based in Cambridge, MA, had Finally, the files included a memo from J. been founded in 1967 with the purpose of Edgar Hoover himself, stating, “College promoting unions dedicated to resisting administrations across the land must the draft. The documents that Shirk and unite in placing order on their individual the Phoenix obtained from Resist recampuses as the top priority item.” vealed that the FBI had placed informants A file which the Phoenix printed wordwithin and around campus who reported for-word on April 2, 1971, titled ‘Uniton everything from the home activities ed States Government Memorandum,’ of suspected ‘radical’ professors to the documented FBI surveillance of Daniel number of African-American students Bennett, associate professor of Philos-
Phoenix, Peirsol is quoted as saying, “I’m not going to say a thing. Not a word… There’s no comment whatsoever, no matter who calls.” Equally implicated in the file was Judy Feiy, the chief switchboard operator at Swarthmore, who reported on Bennett’s ‘radical’ actions. These actions included holding “Philosophy [discussion] groups on the topics of political and social Philosophy which are supposedly open to the public and this action has not been approved by the school administration…” said the document, United States Government Memorandum, in the April 2, 1971 Phoenix. According to the document, Feiy also agreed to “furnish pertinent information regarding any long distance
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ollowing the break-in of the Media FBI office, copies of the records were distributed to several senators, congressmen and major newspapers on March 22, 1971. In a letter accompanying the files, an anonymous organization called the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI claimed responsibility for the theft. The letter detailed the intent of the Citizens’ Commission to unearth “the extent, of illegal practices by the FBI, such as eavesdropping, entrapment, and the use of provocateurs and informants [sic],” as it was printed in the April 2, 1971 Phoenix. The documents stolen from the Media FBI office contained information on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s extensive surveillance program, and in particular the obsessive measures taken to scrutinize civil rights movements, Black Power groups, and even Black student groups on college campuses. As the documents showed, some of the surveillance took place directly on Swarthmore’s campus. Spies at Swarthmore
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telephone calls made by Bennett.” At the time of the memorandum, Bennett was reported as having made no such phone calls. Feiy denied the charges and said she was shocked, telling the Washington Post, “That could cost me my job. It would be a breach of ethics. I would never do that” (Swarthmore Phoenix, April 2, 1971). The Swarthmore Chief of Police, William Weidner, also informed on Bennett. Weidner reported to the FBI on a printing press in Bennett’s garage that had printed a leaflet supporting the Black Panthers organization. He also mentioned that “hippie types” were often hanging around the garage. Ironically, the little information the FBI had on Bennett turned out to be mostly wrong. In a March newspaper interview, Bennett was unsurprised about his surveillance, characterizing it as an example of the FBI’s incompetence. While Peirsol reported Bennett to have one car, Bennett said he had two. The document reported him having two children, yet he only had one. Bennett also expressed confusion that the FBI had not simply questioned him in person rather than resorting to spying, saying in an interview with the Philadelphia Bulletin, “I never did anything that was not open to everybody… I would have told them more than this if they wanted to know it.” Radical philosophy at Swarthmore
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ennett was likely unsurprised about the surveillance because he was an outspoken and politically active leftist. While no evidence ever surfaced linking him to the two Brandeis University students, he brought Philadelphia Black Panther leader Reggie Schell to Swarthmore in October of 1970 without the permission of the Swarthmore administration, which the FBI noted in their files. During the 1970 school year, Bennett also held a weekly lecture, Philosophy 10, which discussed liberal politics and socialist reform of society. Former Swarthmore student Joe Horowitz wrote in 1971 in the education magazine Change, “The weekly Phil 10 lecture, held in a room so stuffed with people and dogs that it seemed more like an arena than a lecture hall, was a major campus social event, a contest in which the participants vied with one another for attention and notoriety. Informality and lack of decorum resulted in a sense of shared experience, of instruction without condescension.”
Philosophy 10, which was usually in solidarity with the Black minority at Swarthmore, clashed with the Swarthmore Afro-American Students’ Society (SASS) when SASS asked for their own cultural center. The Philosophy 10 instructors organized a meeting of the entire student body and claimed that the demands were “chauvinistic” and that members of SASS were in pursuit of “community control.” This controversy caused a deep divide in Swarthmore politics, particularly because Black students were already so marginalized on campus. Shirk recalls that there was very little contact between Black and White students. During these years, several articles and op-eds in the Phoenix indicated that SASS often did not receive communication about events or speakers that would be pertinent to their organization, and they were excluded from the organization of major events, even those concerning Black students on campus. Bennett was one of at least three other Swarthmore faculty members, including Uwe Henke, also of the philosophy department, who were in support of the Philadelphia Labor Committee, a Marxist labor organization that would later morph into the right-wing US Labor Party. “The political discussion at Swarthmore was dominated by a radical offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) called the National Caucus of Labor Committees (referred to as NCLC or the Labor Committee), which had a lot of junior faculty involvement,” Shirk said. According to Shirk, the Labor Committee was not well regarded on many college campuses, but faculty endorsement of the organization at Swarthmore made it a more appealing option for left-leaning students. A surveillance document from September 24, 1970, described an FBI informant sitting in on a meeting of the Philadelphia Labor Committee. The file reported meeting participants, including Bennett and Henke, “sitting around discussing the coming Black Panther Party Conference and smoking marijuana.” Additionally, it noted that meeting attendants considered themselves “intellectual revolutionaries” but were not personally interested in organization or activism. Upon President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in May 1970, Bennett was part of a group of Swarthmore students and professors who formed a Marxist-Hegelian movement called Holism.
The movement opposed current academic tenets and called instead for action in the world. Bennett was also the driving force behind a mostly socialist newspaper called Tensor, which sought to connect education and science with socialist organization. The publication was built on the controversial idea that education should serve the primary purpose of forming a working-class force that would aid in solving society’s concrete problems. The newspaper only lasted a short time, but was probably printed in the press in Bennett’s garage noted by the FBI. In May of 1970, such an overwhelming number of students attended mass meetings in response to Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia that the school was forced to suspend classes. The Philosophy 10 lectures were cited by many as a huge factor in the expansion of the socialist attitude on campus. In fall of the next year, Bennett attempted to continue the Holism movement via two courses, “Metaphysics” and “Social and Political Philosophy,” but after only a month, he and his students cut ties over differing politics. Most of the students involved left Swarthmore and began their own movement, while Bennett also left the school for the small town of Marcus Hook, PA. FBI surveillance of Black students
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erhaps the most significant piece of information in the stolen files were the orders from Hoover to begin an immediate investigation on every Black student group at every college in the country. Three 1968 reports in the files were interested in obtaining racial informants, stating, “all officers must now give serious and penetrative thought to methods of obtaining maximum productivity from the ghetto informants developed by each individual office.” A file dated August 12, 1968, contained instructions to seek “all indications of efforts by suspected black extremist organizations.” The same file had a list of six Black community groups, pegged as locations for “ghetto informants” to gather information and nine restaurants or bars where there was suspected “militant Negro” activity. Another report contained the names of members of SASS, along with twelve other Black student organizations at schools such as Penn and Dickinson, that the FBI was watching to “determine the size, aims, purposes, activities, leadership, key activists, and extremist interest or influence in these groups.” (Swarthmore SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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Phoenix, April 9, 1971.) Another student group targeted was Harvard’s Afro-American Student Union (AASU). On April 15, 1971, a member of the union came forward stating that an FBI agent had asked them to serve as an informant on AASU activity. The FBI files even contained a list of all 34 Black Swarthmore students, dated May 1969. The dates of departure and arrival to and from campus of many of these students were included in the file. Several active SASS members had asterisks next to their names, and two names were preceded by the word “neg?” The Assistant Dean of Students, David Closson, acknowledged in a Phoenix interview that it must have been “fairly easy” for the FBI to gain access to a list of students at Swarthmore via the Cygnet. Webb’s complicity as an informant likely made this even easier. The FBI was particularly interested in SASS because members of SASS had occupied the Admissions Office in 1969 in response to a controversial report written by Dean Fred Hargadon about African American students on campus. The report was put on reserve at the library and presented negative and subjective statements about SASS, insinuating “military separatist inclinations” and branding some potential black students as “risk” students. Moreover, the report provided information on financial aid, parents’ occupations and incomes, grades and SAT scores of Black students at the college, and although the students were not named, only 47 Black students attended the college. SASS requested that the report be removed, but Hargadon did not consent. On October 16, therefore, SASS contacted Admissions with the endorsement of Student Council with four demands: to remove the report from circulation, to form a Black Interest Committee, to form a committee to hire a Black Assistant Dean of Admissions, and lastly to collaborate with Admissions to recruit and enroll Black students. When no action was taken, they occupied the Admissions office, covering the windows and locking the doors. 500 students boycotted class the day following the occupation, and classes were suspended for nearly a week. Some students initiated hunger strikes. At the end of the week, the college president, Courtney Smith, died of a heart attack in his office. SASS immediately vacated the Admissions office, leaving it in perfect condition, and issued the following 8
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One of the objectives was to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles... to get the point across [that] there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.” statement: “In deference to the untimely death of the President, the Swarthmore Afro-American Students’ Society is vacating the Admissions Office. We sincerely believe that the death of any human being, whether he be the good President of a college or a black person trapped in our country’s ghettos, is a tragedy. At this time we are calling for a moratorium of dialogue, in order that this unfortunate event be given the college’s complete attention. However, we remain strong in our conviction that the legitimate grievances we have voiced to the college remain unresolved and we are dedicated to attaining a satisfactory resolution in the future.” An atmosphere of distrust
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ou didn’t know who might be watching you,” Shirk said of the mood at Swarthmore upon discovery of the files. “I was appalled by the participation of College employees in the FBI’s spying, and alarmed that the FBI also seemed to have recruited students to inform on student political groups, though none of those informants was named. The revelations fostered an atmosphere of distrust.” In fact, this environment was one of the FBI’s main goals. A file in those given to the Phoenix, entitled “New Left Notes,” expanded on the objective to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and … to get the point across [that] there is an FBI Agent behind every mailbox.” This was not the first time the FBI had overstepped boundaries on Swarthmore property. At 2 a.m. on a Thursday night
in October 1970, 16 Swarthmore students living in a house at 1001 Baltimore Pike were awakened by FBI agents pointing guns at their faces and ordering them to get up. The agents refused to show the students a search warrant or to call a lawyer, and the students were grouped in the living room while up to thirty agents ransacked the house, smashing a hole in the third floor ceiling. Some agents refused to leave the room while girls got dressed. The hostages were interrogated about Saxe and Powers, the former Brandeis students who would also erroneously be tied to Bennett. Beyond asking about the wanted women, the agents were especially interested in a poster of Lenin, some radical leaflets, and political books in the apartment. When the agents left, the students found that their phone line had been cut. The response of President Robert D. Cross ’47 was mainly one of powerlessness: while he could ask police to consult the deans before coming to campus, he could not stop them (Swarthmore Phoenix, October 13, 1970). Despite strongly divergent opinions by students in regards to liberalism, socalled radical politics, and the role of the FBI, the general reaction of the student body was outrage at the complicity within the administration with FBI surveillance. The president’s reaction ultimately served mainly to reinforce this opinion. Cross stated that “Any faculty, students or staff who divulge confidential information [to the FBI] risk dismissal.” While Cross began an investigation of the staff members implicated in the documents, he said that the investigation would be slow because he had to “find out what the dimensions of the situation are.” (Swarthmore Phoenix, April 2, 1971.) The Department of Justice had recognized the files as legitimate as early as March 25th, but President Cross stated that he would not pursue further action until the FBI verified the validity of the documents. Feiy, switchboard operator, and Webb, secretary to the registrar, continued working at Swarthmore. The Phoenix’s reporting on the surveillance garnered an onslaught of op-eds in the Swarthmore community. The first, titled “A Question of Freedom,” observed that “distrust has made Swarthmore a discomforting place.” However, another, “Open Letter: Who’s Paranoid?” described the “crisis in liberalism” as a disintegration of the liberal party into two basic roles, one “anti-humanistic” and the other “reduced to virtual inactivity.”
The article referenced the FBI raid on the 1001 house the year before as an example of the College’s political immobility, saying, “The Swarthmore administration made it clear that its stand on issues of surveillance was no stand at all. It effectively stated that it would do nothing significant to prevent further busts such as 1001.” The article supported the “true political, sociological and educational significance” of Holism, Philosophy 10, and Tensor while attacking Swarthmore for its pretense of being a liberal institution despite remaining silent or apathetic on relevant political issues (Swarthmore Phoenix, April 2, 1971). Students were not the only ones to notice Swarthmore’s coverage of the surveillance. “After we published articles about the documents, [two] FBI agents visited me and demanded I turn over the copies I had been sent,” said Shirk. “The Citizens’ Commission had asked us to make copies of the copies of stolen files and to destroy the ones we had been sent. I had no idea if I would be committing a crime by doing so, but I did it. When [the] FBI agents questioned me after the next Phoenix article appeared, I could say honestly that I no longer had the files I had been sent… I had no desire to help the FBI track down people who I thought had done a service to our country.” Over 40 years later, most of the burglars of the FBI office have come forward. Intriguingly, Shirk believes that one of the three burglars who has not revealed their identity must have been a Swarthmore professor. She went on to say that the burglars chose Swarthmore campus as a meeting point after the break-in, and there is evidence that there was a failed attempt to recruit “a philosophy professor” as a burglar. This professor, says Shirk, may have been Bennett or another left-leaning philosophy professor at the time named Richard “Richie” Schuldenfrei. We may never know for sure whether or not a Swarthmore professor was one of the three unidentified burglars, but it is incontrovertible that Swarthmore played a huge role in the politics of the time. FBI informants spied on professors working for radical organizations and even on students who were doing nothing political at all. Said Shirk, “The files documented a massive spying campaign on American colleges and a total disregard for individual’s right to privacy. They showed that the FBI was out of control, answerable to no one.” u
FICTION
The Carwash by Kimaya Diggs
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y mama always told me “never immortalize your tits.” She used to be a nude model back at the university when she was young, and now every time she goes to work in the art department archives, she has to pass down a corridor of drawings of her breasts in their prime. She says it irks her to no end that no one ever told her that the underwires in her bra would make the girls sag so much. I thought about it when I got the boudoir pictures done, but I figured I could just throw them away when my girls started their relationship with gravity. When my boyfriend Anthony went on a business trip to Milan I thought I’d maybe take a risk and get some pictures done for him to take with. I slipped three of them into the outer pocket of his suitcase as he kissed me goodbye. I think the pictures were really classy. I wasn’t ever showing it all. In one of them I was wearing a really nice teddy that Anthony had never seen—I was saving it as a surprise for when he got home so he would remember it from the pictures. It would be like a fantasy come true. In another I was completely naked, but I had my legs crossed, and my hair down, covering me up where it mattered. And then in the last one I got to try out the pose that’s always on gentlemen’s calendars—lying on my back with my legs up against the wall. I even got knee socks for that one. I thought they were really cute. I knew he would love them. He loved when I took risks. He said a self-confident, daring woman turned him on like nothing else. You know when you want to make the person you love really really know how much you love them, but it’s a big risk to take? I was that scared to get the pictures done. I felt that scared the first time I said I love you to Anthony. He didn’t say it back to me for a couple months and I worried to no end, but he’s always been shy. I went to the carwash that night, the night I said I love you to him and he said nothing back, or maybe made some awkward cover-up noises. I have always loved carwashes. After my dad left, my mom often drove through the carwash on our way home from school. We’d sit through the torrents of suds and the beating of the water and she’d cry silently in the front seat, her shoulders shaking when she breathed in as quietly as she could. She always thought I didn’t notice, but I did. For her, the carwash was sad, but for me, it was different. My skin would feel electrified in the close, cushioned bubble of the car, and as we drove out into the light, everything seemed brighter.
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lay in bed alone on the first night and wondered what Anthony was doing. I was hoping he would come back with a nice new tailored suit for himself and maybe a little tan. Maybe he’d find a dress for me, but he probably wouldn’t buy it, just photograph the hell out of it and laugh when I got mad at him for not buying the perfect size 6. He used to do that every time he went on a business trip, find something I’d like and photograph it but not buy it. He’d laugh like a hyena about it until the day I sat him down and told him that girls like to SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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own pretty things, not just see pictures of pretty things. After that, he started to bring me presents from his trips, but he’d still bring me a photo of a pretty dress, or a lapis lazuli bracelet, laughing, “I almost got you this one too!” From his trip to Ghana, I was hoping for a beaded bangle. From China, I begged him for a silk scarf. From Italy, I was hoping he would come back with a beautiful ring, maybe gold, burnished to a nice matte finish, with an antique diamond, princess-cut in the center, little brown threads of imperfections running through it willy-nilly. Maybe some nice old-fashioned cutwork on the band. I knew exactly how it would be. He would reach into his pocket and pull out a black velvet box, and I would gasp, bringing a hand to my mouth as the corners of my eyes pricked with tears. I’d play shy and suck on one of my fingers in a childish nervous way that smacked of innocent sex appeal. I’d notice him notice and take it out of my mouth just in time for him to slide on my antique diamond. It would be both romantic and sensual. Not too mushy that the story would make people gag, but sexy enough that there would be an element of mystery around the proposal. Anthony would say how beautiful I looked, but then remember how I was sexy, too, and cut off his sentence without finishing, and everyone would raise their eyebrows at one another and wonder. I drifted off in these dreams every night.
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hile Anthony was gone, I passed the ten days by cleaning like my life depended on it, and planning my engagement night. I got all the things I needed to make a perfect meal, and it ended on a chocolate dessert, because chocolate’s an aphrodisiac, and if I was going to be licking my fingers and all, I had to be in the mood. I started going crazy. I vacuumed everything. I even vacuumed the car. I went to the carwash three times that week. It was something I did when Anthony wasn’t around. From the beginning it’s exciting: the automatic teller takes your five-dollar bill, and you drive into the small, dark box. Slowly, the mechanical arms of the machine rise up and coat your car in a whispery mist of water. It beads up and rolls slowly down the windshield. Then soap obscures your view of the world beyond the garage door, and the magic begins. Inside a
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warm, white space, the hum of machinery and precise engineering whir around you. The car vibrates as the undercarriage is sprayed. More water mist. Then the giant rolls of orange and blue rags stir in their previously unnoticed corners. You can’t see them—the windows are still soapy, but you feel their stirrings. They advance, slowly, and then the first swipe against the car takes your breath away. Their power increases with every rotation and you find your heart rate rising as they circle you, lovingly undulating. It is a dark, sacred place, the tinted glass letting in barely any light. Then a hard rinse, a soft rinse, and a nearly silent misting of wax for that stunning sheen, and the red light turns green, instructing you to leave. It’s always hard.
“H
ow do you know for sure?” My mother looked at me over her cup of tea, skeptical. A small, framed photo of my father stood on the piano, peeking out from behind a yellow vase. She always hid her pictures of him when I went over because she didn’t want me to think she was pathetic for missing him. “I just do, he basically told me he’s coming back with a ring, Mama,” “What exactly did he say?” “He said I’d like what he’s bringing me from Italy more than I’d like any other gift he’s ever brought me.” My cheeks hurt from smiling. She sucked her breath in sharply, as she raised her eyebrows, impressed. “ That, sweetheart, is definite.”
I
woke up three minutes before the alarm went off. 7:27 a.m. I sat straight up in bed and slammed my head against the little edge that sticks out of the headboard. Stars swirled before my eyes. I could almost feel Anthony in my arms. Within ten minutes I had a bagel on the dashboard and the radio blaring as I backed out of the driveway, nearly hitting the mailbox. Just before turning onto the freeway, though, I hesitated, then turned right. The carwash stood before me, its faded pink and green lettering inviting. I slid a crisp bill into the machine and waited. The anticipation was agonizing. The hairs on my arms stood on end. In spite of the morning chill, clammy sweat covered my palms. It was getting hard to breathe. The mechanical arms stirred in their bearings, and my breath stopped as they approached. The first mist of water
threw me into sensory overload. The car shook as the rags twirled into a feverish dance. The final mist of wax was as silent as a prayer. When the little sign told me to drive out, I didn’t move until the car behind me started honking. The sunlight outside of the darkly tinted box was blinding.
I
saw him at the baggage claim, tall and lean in an Italian jacket, talking on his cell phone. He hung up as he saw me approaching. He lifted me up and kissed me sweetly, and the butterflies in my stomach flew straight to the palms of my hands like they always do. I spotted his bag first and tried to pull it off the carousel, but my hands were still tingling and wouldn’t close around the handle. Once he had it on the ground, I peeked into the front pocket for the pictures I had put there. They were gone. Perfect. He had looked at them. We bickered about the car radio, the same way we always had, but I let him have his music because he had just come home. I was shy after not seeing him for ten days. “How was Italy?” “Good, really good. Yeah. Listen, sweetie, what are your plans for tonight? Do you want to go out?” “I already started making dinner for us to have at home,” “What are you making?” “Balsamic chicken. We should stay in, you’ll like it” “Perfect. We’re definitely staying in,” he grinned brightly. I glanced at him briefly, then back at the road. He didn’t seem too disappointed. “ Tell me about the trip, did you do anything besides work?”
A
nthony was asleep on the couch while dinner was warming. I had just finished unpacking his suitcase. The photos weren’t anywhere. I was tingling with excitement. I knew that I would find them in his briefcase once he unlocked it for me to file his papers. I woke him up and waited at the table. I had in the earrings he gave me for our first anniversary, the dark blue dress he said he couldn’t resist me in, and even a bit of mascara. The Gershwins were playing softly in the candlelit room. I was ready to do some finger-licking. I was ready to be engaged. I was nervous. I was terrified. But I was ready. Anthony loved his chicken. He said I had done it perfectly. I blushed and
beamed. We laughed over wine. Right before dessert, I brought out the teddy from the photoshoot. He didn’t seem to recognize it. “Anthony, do you remember this one?” I asked, holding it against my body. He shook his head. “From the pictures! The pictures of me that I sent with you!” Finally I saw some recognition in his face, but he still shook his head. “Honey,” he began seriously, and my heart faltered. “I really didn’t want to have to talk about this.” He sighed heavily, setting down his napkin and pinching the bridge of his nose. “You shouldn’t have taken those photos. Who got to see you naked? The photographer! What if he goes home and—” he glanced around the room as if looking for eavesdroppers. “What if he masturbates to those pictures?” My heart fell to the soles of my feet. “It was a lady photographer. I thought you’d like them.” “I really gave you credit for more…class,” he said, adjusting his tie seriously. This was like a blow across the face, unwarranted. “What if someone saw them in my suitcase?” “But I thought you would keep The contemporary artist William Wray’s “Car Wash” them to yourself and enjoy them while we were apart.” head to toe like a lightly plucked cord. “I tore them up and threw them away “I still have a surprise for you,” he said, in Milan. In the trashcan in the lobby, a finger laid on the box’s lid. I could only so the pieces wouldn’t be in my room.” nod. He looked at me. Tears flooded my eyes as my face grew “Oh,” I said quietly. My voice kind of burning hot. My stomach flipped. stuck in my throat, so I cleared it. “Oh,” “I didn’t want you to be lonesome,” I I said again, louder. I made no move managed to whisper. I closed my eyes to to get up. The perfectly fluffy chocolate keep the tears from spilling. I wanted to mousse began to deflate, forgotten, in sink into the earth, I wanted to dissolve the kitchen. My engagement night could into the sea. still be redeemed. I briefly considered I thought of the pictures, the ones I saying no to his proposal. Maybe telling had to spend months working up the him I would get back to him later would courage to get. The ones I carefully sting even more. picked, the ones I wrapped in smooth, He got out of his chair and came to shiny blue paper before slipping them in squat by mine. He was squatting. I didn’t his suitcase. see why he couldn’t just kneel. It would I shifted to make my hair fall over my probably be easier on the crotch of his face. Oblivious to my mortification, or pants, and more romantic. Why did maybe ignoring it because he never knew he need to squat? He had already put a what to do with my tears, he reached into damper on the whole occasion. I wished his pocket. He set a black velvet box on he would just kneel. the table. At that moment, I realized my He handed me the box. body was shaking. Only slightly, but with “Open it,” he urged. Although I had great persistence. I was vibrating from imagined him opening the box for me,
and displaying my diamond to my wondering, tearful eyes, I understood that to have me open the box was to demonstrate how he thought of me as an equal. I opened the box. Inside, on a seemingly endlessly dark bed of thick black velvet lay an antique diamond, run through with brown lines, brilliant-cut, set in a disc of filigreed gold. Anthony lifted it from its resting place and shifted my hair to the side as he stood and walked behind me to fasten it around my neck. The tablecloth blurred in my vision. The flames of the candles grew brighter as I stared. The brightness gave way to a peaceful dark when I closed my eyes. In my mind, I was in the car wash, suds sliding down the sloped windshield, dissolving the knot in my throat. I wanted to stay there forever. It was calming, being washed by the tears of someone greater than me, that’s what it felt like. My troubles were nothing compared to these torrents of tears. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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IN TRANSIT photo essay by Noah Morrison
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by Daniel Block, Anna Gonzales, and Izzy Kornblatt
Near the end of fall, while we were working late together on the Phoenix, the three of us discovered that we had something at once embarrassing and amusing in common. Each of us, during our senior year of high school, had written an essay about unrequited love, and each of us had turned in these essays to our English teachers. We shared them with each other at first for fun, before we realized that together, these pieces evoke exactly what it felt like to be a teenager and to be in love—the drama, the nerves, the joy, and most of all, the intensity of emotion, the conviction that everything that happened to us was either the end of the world or the greatest thing ever to occur. We hope that you read these essays and that you not only laugh at our first attempts at flirting, dating, and being in love, but that among these attempts you recognize a part of your own high school self.
Anna Gonzales
Spine Author’s note: In the winter of my senior year, my English teacher assigned us an essay entitled “Revising Life.” The product was supposed to give substance to that title and to imagine the possibilities of a situation or relationship had we done something differently or said something else. The boy who this essay is about sprang instantly to my mind. I found myself unable to write about anything else. I gambled that my teacher would appreciate a piece about sweaty, ephemeral teenage love and sex (the latter of which was forbidden and, if you were caught, was punishable by suspension or expulsion from my school). I’ve left the piece in its original form.
I
hadn’t talked to you in years when you called me last summer. I sat down in my darkened living room and waited for everything I once felt for you to come crashing over me. And yet, listening to your voice creak over the phone (you needed me, were using me as usual) in the purple-domed dusk of Denver, the heat of August, missing everyone, I didn’t miss you at all. I felt nothing. *** Most of my memories of you from back then have faded. Two years is a long time in a place that compounds school and life and everything, crams the entire adolescent experience, parentless, into four years, where boys like you come without a single hair on their face and after a summer return, suddenly erupted into manhood, burnished and tall as statues of Greek gods, with perfect, unmoving hair and marbled forearms. But I remembered a few things. *** I bent to the fake, plasticky wood of my desk every night starting in late summer when we came back. I wrote dreamy journal entries and awful poetry alone in the room while my roommate copied Chinese characters somewhere else. The clenched stomach of waiting for you to talk to me—for my phone to shake angrily against the desk or for the noise of the computer meaning you were there—that feeling never diminished, though it became clear from our conversations that you wanted only to discuss another girl. Once, you told me you had a list of songs with her name on it. I guessed the exact song you were listening to at that moment and then listened to that song over and over and always thought of you and tried to make the lyrics about us. They didn’t fit. It was a lucky guess and the song meant nothing. *** In the dark of the classroom, the projector
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light flickering on our faces, pencils moving softly and the teacher’s voice smoothing and becoming natural, soothing, rocking us to a half-awake state, I was incredibly aware of your body next to mine, or later your eyes on my back. You were not afraid to cross what I felt was a gulf of a foot between us. In the cavernous, private-seeming lobby of the art building, you asked me to sit next to you on the ruined couch and began to mockingly seduce me. Every time you patted the couch next to you I saw possibility. The day I wore golden corduroy pants you moved your hand on my inner thigh as a joke. You tortured me and enjoyed it and in a perverse way, so did I. When you left, I sat there a moment, dazed by the still-warm, alive air where your body had been. *** For the whole fall, I lay in bed at night imagining how much I would give up to you, reasoning and bargaining with my nearly untouched, innocent self. I confessed everything to you and in my psychodramas you felt the same way. The imagining stopped there, the moment of our confession remaining as pure as my imaginary self. In the day, I felt an anxious, tight intensity of emotion but at night that was filtered through, absorbed into waves of desire rolling off my body, targeted at the slice of your stomach I’d seen once, you sprawled on my desk. I knew you were just out of reach of these near-physical ripplings of the air. In my tiny room, with no standing space, on the bottom bunk of a rocking, ship-like bed, my brain floated outside of my body, everything expanded, thoughts of you sank into my brow, feathery on my eyelids, and I drifted into dreamless sleep. *** We were walking, always walking, caught in that weird place of transition between buildings, unmoored, unanchored, just the two of us. Being alone, truly alone, not momentarily, uninterrupted by others, made you confessional, honest, and sweet in the broadening
Illustration by Yenny Cheung darkness, dipping your head, your eyes brown that I finally trusted. I could listen without needing to respond, us both caught in our own rhythms between the brick buildings or on our way to the post office. I mailed letters that fall, remembered people’s birthdays and sent them scribbled cards. In that quiet room of creaking floors and heaving wooden benches, iron-wound and bolted, you waited and stayed serious, quiet in the rain, how I liked you best. *** Afterward, instead of long, lounging, late-summer couch conversations, everything went cold. I couldn’t wait out rainy Saturdays in my room talking to you because you didn’t talk to me, at all, ever. I remember--with the sharp twist of a painful memory—an awkward conversation about your soccer team, because there was nothing else for us to talk about. It wasn’t then but later that I felt I’d hardly known you at all. I saw you every day in class and had nothing to offer to you anymore. Or rather I had offered you something—everything—and you didn’t want it. It was less awkward and more dead. One day, behind me, I heard you sniffling, heard the rasp of your nose on your muscular hand, and turned in my swivel chair, proffering an ugly purple tissue box. You crossed your arms, leaned back in your chair, and, not looking at me, shook your upturned head.
*** I still felt for you. A few days later, in the dining hall before grace was said I stood in my own heady atmosphere, swimming in the sea of faces and darting bodies, trying to be lost. Through the thicket of knees, winter scum and dead bits of leaf, your form suddenly floated above all of it. I thought I’d fallen through a hole that had opened up in the green and white tiles. Before you, no emotion had stirred a physical feeling in me. After that, feelings for anyone were marked by that hot, sick, swooping sensation. Only with you did my nerves and small veins flood with cold shame. *** I carried the numb memory of that coldness with me through the fall and I’m unsure of when I actually gave up. Finally, after the heavy shudder of the plane that carried me two thousand miles away to blue lightning on the plains at night, away from full moons tangled in maple leaves, unto white sheets, white snow, everything that mounted riotously subsided. I saw a photo of you in a nice sweater in a sleek gray room in the city, with girls in confident blue party dresses. Something cemented and looking at your photographic likeness rippling on my screen I accepted that you had moved on and it was over. Actually, there wasn’t really anything for you to move on from, which I didn’t accept until a while after that moment. SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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*** For two years—one fall to the next, and then to the next, I never saw you. Usually when trying to avoid someone in my mind, I find that they suddenly appear from behind every building. But you disappeared and never came to school anymore. One morning I woke up and felt nothing. From then on your absence had no presence for me. Wracked with the agony of loving anyone else, I consoled myself with the fact that the same thing would happen. I would wake up one morning and feel blank. *** And then the phone call. And then the conversations. And then I saw you, from afar, but into the mix came the momentary thrill of you coming over to talk to me, of me fumbling my package of gum to give you a piece, hands numbing as I tried to spread a bagel with butter at breakfast in the dining hall and talk to you at the same time. I felt everything accelerating towards what would inevitably happen. I tried to feel something else—everything I’d felt before—the inevitable romance of that nighttime, late-summer, under-tree conversation, the start of something again. You were huddled, knees to your chest, freezing cold. Because I felt invincible in the sense that you’d never fall for anything I did, I did anything. Mostly I lied, trying to mold what you thought of me, the memory you held, into a purely physical idea. I wanted, more than anything, to feel for you again in that painful, unrequited way. That simple, pure, quantifiable suffering. Remembering, it felt uncomplicated. I wanted you. You didn’t want me. What could be easier than that? *** Suddenly, in the deep freeze of our sweat turning to ice, there was a new place of transition. I traveled over the hard ground alone to meet you and this time, there was no talking. *** “Epicurus believed that there were essential and non-essential needs in life. Essential: food and sleep.” The teacher counting the needs on her scary, bony fingers. Everyone’s heads bent to the desks, writing her words. “Non-essential: sex.” Your eyes above everyone else’s bowed, vulnerable chicken necks. *** You physically marked me—the carpet left the base of my spine rubbed raw and it has now healed slightly, scabbed over. Every time I meet 24
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you that happens. And yet you have left nothing emotional on me. Afterwards, when you leave, I sit in the dark alone and wait an acceptable amount of time to leave and feel nothing. With you I am trying to forget the other people who now make my body tighten and draw emotion sideways, liquid down my face before I sleep, who return to me in dream all ribcages and collarbones, mouths full of the frost-stirred stars they now are, dreams of coal-cracking fires and hiding in the sand. With you, nothing interrupts that perfect blackness of forgetting, the moments of thinking of nothing else, though eventually it ends. I’ve realized I can’t fill that space through burying myself in you, through deriving new flesh memories. At some point I must stop and remember. With you, what I’d really like to do is create new things to remember, new memories to fill my head and replace everything else. For some reason it’s still forced and your face (I can’t picture your face, the way it used to swim out of my closed reddened eyelids into my brain), your face is not what I see at night. These, here, of you, are forced fragments of memory. *** I sought you, one might say seduced you, out of the need to fulfill how I used to feel. I thought I needed now to be validated, desired, confirmed by you who had once rejected me. More than anything, I’d like to feel something towards you other than the fleeting thrill of the illicit. I’d like unrequited love for you to fill the attic room. Perhaps I could bring myself to that clean storm of tears. But there is nothing. u Fun fact: I got an A on the paper. Also, we had to read these aloud in front of our class. The boy who I wrote this about sat roughly ten feet away from me on the other side of the table and realized during the fourth paragraph that it was about him. I didn’t look at him the whole time and, when the bell rang, bolted. Everyone else in the class (and, soon, the rest of the small school), was sort of intrigued but not really surprised that I’d turned in an essay about having meaningless sex. A lot of other complicated things happened later, but what matters is that after graduation, he took me aside and told me he wished that we’d had had our time together and that he had just been scared. A month later, we were both in Rome for one night together. We walked around the city until the early hours of the morning, holding hands and retelling our relationship. We did not kiss then or when we said goodbye. But it was enough to pretend we were together for one night, and finally put my feelings to rest.
Daniel Block
Not Mr. Darcy Author’s note: If I had read Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” under typical conditions, I am sure I would have disliked it. It is exactly the type of novel I would have dismissed as being boring and overly romantic. But I did not read “Pride and Prejudice” in ordinary conditions. Instead, the novel coincided with what was, for me, a significant moment: my first relationship. As you are about to see, that relationship was an experience for which I was completely unprepared. It was shaky from its inception and ultimately collapsed. In the immediate aftermath of its failure, I was left with strange emotions. I felt as if my way of thinking had been impacted, but I could not understand how. It was under these circumstances that my senior year English class was given our final assignment for “Pride and Prejudice.” Instead of writing an academic essay, we were provided with a series of creative writing prompts to choose from. One was, “Write a personal essay about your experience reading ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ ” I couldn’t resist. What follows then, is both the tale of that relationship and my attempt to make sense of what I went through. I have left it in its original form. Some details were changed (including the name of the girl) to protect identities. But overall, it stays true to what happened- or at least my perception of it. For as you will find, I am the epitome of the biased narrator. Two years and a second relationship have passed since I wrote this story, and my views on dating and romance have certainly evolved from what is portrayed (and indeed, when I reread it, parts make me cringe). But I think it still reflects a part of who I am. Or, at the very least, I think it’s entertaining to read. I hope you agree.
I
am not a ladies’ man. In all honesty, that is an understatement. I am the anti-ladies’ man. I am, as my friends say, “noxious to relationships.” For whatever reason, I cannot interact with women. Don’t get me wrong, I have a number of talents. I’m a good public speaker, and I do well in school. But understanding girls is impossible. I can navigate a calculus test or a history paper with ease. But talking to women is like crossing a minefield. To be fair, my entire experience involving the opposite sex is with two girls. The first came in the form of a two week long passionate affair. When I was in kindergarten. The second (and more meaningful) relationship came as I read Jane Austen’s classic, “Pride and Prejudice.” It came with a girl whom I had known for quite some time. But this isn’t about her. It’s about what I learned by knowing her, by being with her, and by not being with her. It’s a story about what romance isn’t. It’s a story about failing to be Mr. Darcy. This is a story about being in a fairytale, and hating it. It is a story about mixed feelings. It is a story about shame and pride, self-loathing and narcissism, imprisonment and freedom. This is a story about reading a love story. But let me be clear; this is not a love story.
I
t is a truth universally acknowledged that any attractive girl is in want of a nice boyfriend. I wish I could be above the shallow impulses of adolescence, but I am no exception. At the beginning of my senior year, I had a grand total of three female friends. One had been nicknamed TFD, or “the female dude,” by my male friends. You don’t date a TFD. Another was the girlfriend of a male friend, which made her undatable. Stacy was the final female friend. Stacy and I have had quite the history. From when we were freshman till today, we would spend inordinate amounts of time in each other’s company, and people would ask us if we were dating, or together. We would always reply, “nope, we’re just friends.” That about summarized our relationship until senior year. We have had a long history of being “just friends.” My first exposure to “Pride and Prejudice” came through Stacy. It was sometime during junior year. “Hey Stacy.” “What?” “How’d you do on that history test?” “91. What did you get? A 98.” “Oh yeah.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re Mr. Darcy.” “I’m who?” “You’ve never read ‘Pride and Prejudice’?” SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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“Nope.” “Okay then, never mind.” “He’s a character?” “Don’t worry about it.” “Okay.” I never looked up who he was, partially out of apathy, but mostly because I hated romance novels, and I was pretty sure that any book that Stacy liked must have been a romance novel. I’ve never really tried to explain why I hate romance novels. I’ve never really had to. It’s always been implied that I am the kind of person who does not enjoy long, sappy stories about true love and all that crap. But when I think about it, the reason I hate romance novels is I think they’re all lies. They are long, dull, boldface lies that convince people to believe in bullshit. They confuse chance encounters with fate, and superficial flirting with love at first sight. Thus, when I found out we would be reading “Pride and Prejudice” in AP English, I was not particularly happy. Stacy, by contrast was thrilled. “It’s the best book ever, Dan.” “I doubt that, Stacy.” “You haven’t even read it yet.” “I’ve also never been to a Waffle House, but I think I can say with certainty that it’s not a fine dining establishment.” “You are Mr. Darcy.” “Well, at least I’ll get to find out who that is.” She blushed. “You’ll have to tell me if I’m like Elizabeth.”
A
round a month into my relationship with Stacy, we started “Pride and Prejudice,” and I found, to my surprise, that it was not the sappy romance novel I expected it to be. I appreciated the satire, and the fact that most of Austen’s characters were comedic in nature. But however interested I was in the book, Stacy was even more interested in what I thought of the book. “Do you like it?” she would ask. “Yes.” She seemed to be overjoyed. “It’s so good, Dan. Do you like Mr. Darcy?” I had read up through his “she is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me” passage. “He’s a king.” “Of course you think he’s a king. He’s you.” She paused. Then, blushing, she asked, “Do you like Lizzy?” In truth, I hadn’t read enough about Lizzy to make a determination one way or another. But I knew Stacy fancied herself Lizzy. So I answered responsibly. “Oh yes.”
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She smiled. “I knew you would.” ating is a relative term these days. And when Stacy and I dated, the terms of our relationship were unclear. As is to be expected, this led to difficulty. For example, we got into a fight one day when I told her I would be going out with my friends on Friday. “Hey, so tomorrow me and the guys are going out for food. Do you mind?” I threw in the “Do you mind?” as a courtesy, because Stacy had grown accustomed to our lengthy conversations, or “dates,” on Friday night. I thought it might be a welcome change to spend it with a different group of people. I figured she might feel the same way. As it would turn out, I was wrong. “Well, I mean, I guess that’s okay.” I don’t know much about women, but I know that a statement like “I guess that’s okay” tends to means the exact opposite. “You guess?” “Well, I mean, I kind of thought that was our time.” “Our time?” “Dan, we’ve talked the last four Fridays for like, four hours, I’d say that counts as our time.” “Sorry, I didn’t know it was something official.” “What, do I need to spell it out for you? Do I need to slap a label on it for you to recognize patterns?” “Stacy, I never said that-” “Do you want me to text you every week to remind you that on Fridays, we go out to dinner, or we see a movie, or we have a conversation? Should I email you?” “Stacy, shut up. I’m sorry I violated our ‘sacred’ time by scheduling a guy trip. Do you want me to cancel it?” “No, it’s fine.” “You just made it seem like it’s not fine.” “Dan, it’s fine.” “Stacy, you just yelled at me about how oblivious I am, and how stupid I was to schedule something. Clearly, it’s not ‘fine.’” “Dan, just go out tomorrow.” I sighed. I wasn’t exactly sure what I did that was wrong, or if I did anything wrong to begin with. “Okay,” I said. As much as I love ambiguity in my literature, I hate it in my life. Being in a relationship is one of the worst experiences one can endure. Relationships are all about committing yourself to another person, which, for a busy guy like me, is something I don’t really want to do to begin with. With Stacy, the issue was magnified. Having a relationship that “is complicated” makes your life, well, complicated.
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ver the next week or two, I watched as Elizabeth Bennett ran through the mud to care for her sister, and as she rejected a power-point proposal from Mr. Collins. The story teetered back and forth between raw emotion, and logic, as if Austen was unable to decide which was superior. I also teetered back and forth. On the one hand, I was succeeding by every metric of my age group. I was with an attractive girl, after all. On the other hand, I was, when I really thought about it, unhappy. Perhaps I couldn’t recognize it then, but it was a debate, in many ways, between romanticism and Neo-classicism, just like the novel I was reading. I hated the complication, and I yearned for my more hassle-free life. But I felt pressure to stay with her and follow the path that all teenage boys are supposed to follow. In the end, I choose the former. Stacy and I broke up just as Mr. Darcy first proposed to Elizabeth. I won’t go into the details of the breakup, other than to say that, at first, the conversation was quick and simple; both of us had had enough. We decided we worked better as “just friends,” and that it would be better for both of us if we went back to that way of life. I felt a little bit like Elizabeth, rejecting Darcy in spite of his wealth, and in spite of the truth universally acknowledged.
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drove home that night expecting to feel free and exhilarated. I blasted rock and roll as I drove off, figuring it would suit my mood. But as I approached the entrance to 684, I noticed my car was running low on fuel. I pulled into the nearest gas station to fill up, and got out of the car. It was twenty eight degrees out. I put in my credit card, only to find, to my surprise, that the gas station was closed. I got back into my car, and drove down further, pulling into another, only to find that it too, was closed. Then a third, that in spite of its “open 24/7” pledge, was closed. I started home. “If I run out of gas, it would be something fun to talk about with Stacy,” I thought, before remembering what had just happened between us. I thought about the breakup, and how my friends would react. A few would be supportive, the rest would get angry at me. I had, after all, just spat in the face of a fine opportunity. Why did I do that? What on earth had compelled me to do that? Was I not a high school senior? Is this not what being a teenage guy is all about? “But Stacy was annoying,” I thought. “She and I were just fundamentally different people. She’d use terms like, ‘okey dokey,’ things
that I would inflict physical pain on myself to avoid saying. She was legally blonde, and perhaps most egregiously, a tax on my time.” I was debating myself. I was again torn. Could I genuinely miss this girl who had done nothing but pester me for two months? Was it me, or was it society that told me I should be upset? My car told me I had zero miles left as I exited the highway. I was literally running on empty. I ran out of gas just as I pulled into one of the two stations in my town. But as I walked up to the pump, I realized that, for the fourth time that night, I had pulled into a gas station that was not open. The gas station across the street was open. I called my dad, and asked him to bring the gas canister so I could fill up my car. He did, and drove off angry I had to wake him up to come help me with gas. I pulled into the open station to fill my car up all the way. It was 11:30 p.m. on the day after Christmas, but for whatever reason, the gas station was still playing Christmas music. And as the gas flowed into my car, I thought about what I had been through the last three weeks. I thought about Stacy, and I felt sick. I wanted to keel over in face of the absurdity of the system of dating. And I bet Jane Austen felt the same way. “Pride and Prejudice” was, after all, a work of satire, that made joke after joke after joke about the strange system of courtship that the ladies and gentlemen of middle-class England had to go through. I thought about Darcy, and how he needed to craft a proposal that struck the correct balance between emotion and reason for Elizabeth to say yes. Never mind her feelings. He struggled with the system too. Click. I was done fueling. I put the pump away, got in my car, and finally made it home. I climbed into bed immediately thereafter. “Loneliness,” I thought, “isn’t overrated.”
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wo weeks later, I was at my friend Tom’s birthday party. It was an all-guys affair, save Tom’s girlfriend, who spent most of the night alone to avoid the masculine festivities. It was a night of soda and Skyrim, of Magic cards and weird jokes. My kind of affair. But I couldn’t help but sulk in the corner of the couch as everyone around me enjoyed themselves. As the night wound down, Tom came up to me. “You okay, Dan?” “I’m fine.” Friends, real friends, have an ability to tell when you are lying. “You can’t still possibly be thinking about SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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that, can you?” I paused and looked down. “Why am I so angry, Tom? I wanted this to end.” “You remember what life is like without women.” It was true. I had forgotten what life was like without women. I had forgotten, perhaps, why all girls are in want of boys in the first place. Tom stood up. He looked out his apartment window into the streets of the Bronx. Occasionally you could see a car fly down the streets of Fordham. He then faced me. “Dating someone is like a drug, Dan. It’s addictive, they absorb all your time, and quitting is damn near impossible without going through a great deal of pain. And Stacy, Dan, Stacy was the worst kind of drug, because she didn’t even make you happy. No, she made you miserable. You were miserable when you were with her, and now you’re miserable that you’re not with her. All she was was addictive.” “And Dan,” he finished, “You’ve always been a guy who is above the influence. You just don’t have time for that.”
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he next night, I finished “Pride and Prejudice.” I watched as Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, Jane and Mr. Bingly, and virtually every other character in the novel had a happy ending. It was like a fairytale. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy went on to live happily ever after. I finished, and put down my book. It was 2:00 a.m., and I was exhausted. I wanted nothing more than to climb into bed and fall asleep. Mostly, I didn’t want to think about the end of “Pride and Prejudice” and Stacy. But I couldn’t help it. I sat on the floor of my room, and I wondered. I wondered about what Tom had said. I wondered what it was about Elizabeth and Darcy that made them so happy together. I picked up my book again, and skimmed the last chapter again. Elizabeth and Darcy were happy because they were compatible. They were both proud, intelligent people surrounded by a sea of comedic characters. It was them against the world. I realized that Stacy was wrong. She was wrong about me. She was wrong about “us.” She was wrong about herself. I was not Mr. Darcy, or at least I wasn’t the secret romantic who is humbled by Elizabeth that she thought I was. Stacy was not Elizabeth. And we weren’t surrounded by a sea of people who were, in practice, humorous caricatures. I climbed into bed, and at long last, closed my eyes and went to sleep, finally relieved of the burden of being a character in a fairytale. 28
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few weeks after Stacy and I broke up, I got a text that I hoped I never would receive. “Can we talk?” “Why?” I texted back. “I don’t know. I just feel like there’s still a lot of weird feelings between us, and that not enough was said when we broke up.” I didn’t want to talk to Stacy anymore. Life had returned to the way it was. I had my life back, and I could once again do what I wanted with my time. But I was open to it if it meant she might finally leave me alone. We met that afternoon in the library. “Hey,” I said. “Hey,” she replied. We sat in silence for a few minutes. “So, you wanted to talk?” She opened her mouth, but hesitated. “I guess, I just felt like we both needed to say some final things,” she finally managed. “Well?” “I don’t know, Dan, you make me sad.” “How?” “Because we didn’t work.” I laughed. “Why does that make you sad? I’d think you’d be happier now that we aren’t together.” She paused again. “It’s just, I think I’ll always have feelings for you.” I knew this was coming. Stacy had a new boyfriend, but I still could sense that at some point, she would profess her feelings for me again. But I was done. “Well, Stacy,” I said, “I’ll be honest. My romantic attractions to you are completely and totally gone.” We sat in silence again. A minute passed, then two, then five. We continued to sit, not speaking, for what seemed to be eternity. “You really mean to say you have no more feelings for me?” she said. “Mr. Darcy’s affections and wishes may have been unchanged. But I guess I’m not Mr. Darcy.” She paused. “I hate men.” “I hate women.” “I hate you.” “I hate you.” “I wish I could smack some sense into you.” I laughed. “What sense, Stacy, what sense?” “How to talk to girls. Seriously, dating you was like dating a twelve year old.” We paused again. I let the rude nature of her comment sink in, and then replied, “I don’t think you could ever teach me that. That’s something I think I’ll have to learn on my own. I’ll figure it out. I just have to meet the right person.” “And who on earth, Dan, do you think that would be?” “Not you.”
She looked taken aback. “Way to be a dick, Dan.” “What, Stacy. What.” “’Not you.’ Really? You’re a real charmer, aren’t you.” “I’m the dick? You just compared me to a twelve year old, and insinuated I could never meet someone who would make me happy. All I said is that you aren’t right for me, something you agree with. And I’m the dick?” I stopped. She was staring at me in disbelief, as if she could not believe I had had the audacity to say what I had said. And truth be told, I couldn’t believe I had said it either. I guess there was some stuff I needed to say after all. “I always thought you and I were meant to be together, Dan.” “No one is ever ‘meant’ to be together. There is no such thing as fate.” “You can’t just say that. What about Lizzy and Mr. Darcy? Think of all the small, random things that would have stopped them from meeting, or falling in love. Random, uncontrollable things. What if Mr. Bingley hadn’t purchased Netherfield, or had bought an estate elsewhere? What if Mr. Darcy had married Lady Catherine’s daughter before meeting Elizabeth? What if Elizabeth had never gone with the Gardiners to see Pemberly? What if the Gardiners had gone on their original tour instead?” “It’s a work of fiction, Stacy.” “But it’s true in life too, Dan. My mom went to a large university. But in one lecture class, she started talking with this random guy who sat near her in the back of the auditorium. And now he’s my father, and her husband. What if she had taken a different course, or he had taken a different course, or they had sat in different spots, or gone to different schools? It was meant to be.” “Okay,” I said, “but think about this. When my dad was a little kid, his friend was biking home from school, and he got hit by a car. Now, he’s paralyzed from the waist down. If he had left a moment later, or a moment earlier, or that car had been driving a little slower, or if he went a different way, he could still walk. Was that also ‘meant to be?’ “I hate to tell you this, but if your mother hadn’t taken that class, her life would be very different. Had Mr. Bingley bought elsewhere, or the Gardiners had not gone to Pemberly, well, then there would be no more ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ ”
W
ell, that’s my story. Or most of it. I suppose, before I finish, I ought to tell you how it all started. It was on a Tuesday night after I had fin-
ished editing and putting together the newspaper. To my surprise, I found Stacy waiting for me by my car. It was dark outside, save for the occasional glare of headlights thundering down Clinton Avenue. I could just barely make out her face. For three years our relationship had seemed to be fraught with romantic tension. But it was never as strong as it was at that particular moment. “Hi,” I said. “I like you, Daniel.” I froze. On one level, I had always known that was true. But I had absolutely no idea what to say. “You what?” I’m sure Stacy heard me, but she continued as if she didn’t. “I’ve always liked you. Pretty much since we first became friends. I just want to know if you feel the same way.” My mind was racing. I had never prepared for, or expected this. I had always assumed our relationship would continue on as it had before, fraught with tension. Did I like Stacy? Should I? Would I ever get another chance with a girl? I stood silent for a few minutes, shivering, and trying to think of what to say. Eventually, and I’m still not sure why, I resolved on a course of action. “I do.” I could just make out a smile. “Then, I guess we’re a thing.” “Yeah, I guess we are.” She stayed in front of me for a little while longer, perhaps expecting something to happen. But eventually, she turned around and walked off into the darkness. I got in my car, still in awe, and put my iPod on shuffle, and drove off. As I drove across Clinton Avenue, Lynyrd Skynrd came on, and the sound of sweet guitar riffs filled my car as I drove through stoplights and into the night. And be a simple Kind of man Or be something You love and understand. Perhaps I should have known that what I was doing was a mistake. Perhaps I should have realized that I wasn’t Mr. Darcy, and that Stacy wasn’t Elizabeth, and that I could never be in a romance novel and make it work without making myself miserable. But at that moment I didn’t care. I was too intoxicated with a wild sense of promise and opportunity and the idea that maybe, just maybe, I could be everything. u
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Izzy Kornblatt
Excerpts Selected Excerpts from Thoughts and Activities Log of Tuesday, May 29, 2012 Author’s note: When I was a junior in high school, a friend the year ahead of me wrote a column for the graduation issue of the school newspaper about the difficulty of completing his last-ever high school assignment: writing a “May thought,” a personal essay, for Ms. Archibald’s English class. He wrote that actually doing the assignment would force him to face the fact that he was finally leaving our school, Loomis Chaffee, not to return in the fall. I thought about the column almost a year later when I too was given the same assignment, in the same class, by the same teacher, and I too had trouble sitting down to get it done. So I decided to try something new. No changes have been made to what resulted, as there were already enough lies in the original to prevent anything from hitting too close to home. (I think that at the time I considered entirely true personal essays a bit passé.) 7:15 a.m.: First entry. Just awoken from dream involving two angry Southern men, stereotypical redneck types, ruddy-faced and closed-minded and already angry, and also this girl I know, by my mother, Dr. Deborah Stier. 7:29 a.m.: Desperate t-shirt search following sudden remembering of the fact that it’s “senior dress-down day,” which seems like a bit of a rip-off since aside from the t-shirt I still have to be in dress code. 7:35 a.m.: Relevant SMS text message received: “Do you have my money?” Search for money ensues, causing significant lateness to 8:30 a.m. English class. Text’s sender is the girl from my dream this morning and she will not be named in this journal because this girl is in fact the object of a very significant Dramatic Plan that I have planned for this afternoon. 7:48-8:34 a.m.: Conspicuously quiet car ride. Dr. Deborah Stier comments that today is “Topsoil Tuesday” at Agway, and yesterday was “Manure Monday.” Today’s top WSJ story: “Syria Crisis Deepens Divisions.” It’s too hot outside. The radio is off and the drone of the highway is predictable and lulling. 8:46 a.m.: Right now I’m sitting and writing this on my iPad in English class, and that very action is causing all kinds of headache-inducingly postmodern semiotic thought. What does it mean to write about and in and for the same English class? If writing is all about writing, does it have a point? And what about that guy Wittgenstein, who posited that all that exists are words? David Foster Wallace wrote about him—yes, the same DFW who wrote what we just read in English. Does that self-reference prove my point? If this line of thinking seems to you stupidly convoluted and 30
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circular, you might be onto something. 9:19 a.m.: Just had a pleasant conversation with Mr. Webster Trenchard, who’s a good guy. 9:28 a.m.: Ms. Ruthanne Marchetti will not be in until 12:30, an irritated Ms. Mary Liscinsky just told me. Then, a quick escape from Founders back into the stifling heat. 10:11 a.m.: So far this free double I have successfully avoided what I call the driftwood feeling, a feeling that has become increasingly pervasive and frightening in recent days. It’s the feeling of NOT needing to do a hundred things for fifteen different people at any given moment, of actually not really caring at all about my physics grade, of not showing up to Model T for four days straight, of awkwardly ‘helping’ the new Log editors, not sure if they really want me around or just know that I really don’t have anywhere else to be. And of being maybe just a bit too old for Loomis Chaffee. Walking across the quad in the inebriating heat I look up at Palmer dorm and for a moment it looks to me like a toy, like a set piece from a model train set, detailed but not quite full-size, what with those cutesy details and covered walkways and whatnot. The buildings here are somehow too close together, too well manicured, and so I escape out of the quad towards the gym. 10:55-11:40 a.m.: Senior Meditations. There is unfortunately little to like here, but then at the end Sirena Huang astounds with a hideously impressive and rather showy rendition of Yankee Doodle variations, and I leave in reasonably good if a bit jealous spirits. Huang’s catchy and nostalgia-inducing tune sticks in my head and keeps on playing in there for hours. It seems a fitting soundtrack for the near-end of my Loomis Chaffee career.
11:51 a.m.: Lunch. Future Student Council president Paul Lee just asked me if the t-shirt I’m wearing is a Swarthmore t-shirt. It isn’t. Presently I realize that today I was supposed to wear college apparel. Partially to blame for this misunderstanding is Annabel Hess, whose email referred to today as “senior dress-down day”... OK, not so much. It’s not her fault. I should have figured this one out on my own. 12:11 p.m.: In the past twenty minutes four more people have asked me whether this a Swarthmore t-shirt. 12:12-12:55 p.m.: Mental prep for this afternoon’s Dramatic Plan. I’m in dreadfully boring Model T class [a class on the history of the Ford Model T] and obviously I’m not paying attention.
1:20 p.m.: I’m pretty convinced at this point that the sounds coming out of Hannah’s mouth are not of a language I’ve been studying for four years, but all the evidence suggests that’s precisely what they are. Now I’m going to sweat and surreptitiously read a short story by the aforementioned David Foster Wallace. Yankee Doodle is still playing in my head. 1:36 p.m.: Good god, this class is boring. I just went to the bathroom to wash my face and the walk through Founders was surreal: there are dangerous-looking metal industrial fans everywhere and the lights in the hall are off and a man with a ponytail walked past me. Then I told Steven Wang about my Dramatic Plan. He’s extremely curious about the identity of the plan’s object. 1:38 p.m.: I’m thinking through my plan and all the emotions involved just as we inexplicably start watching a YouTube video of the Paris Ballet performing “Swan Lake.” The stunningly lithe and superhuman movements of the dancers combined with the crescendos of the SWARTHMORE REVIEW
Photo by the author
1:09 p.m.: Time for French double. Allergies acting up. It is scorchingly hot. Case in point: when I walked into my French classroom two minutes ago I nearly ran into four kids just standing leaned over a big metal industrial [fan] aimed upwards on the floor, blowing up Mike Horowicz’s shirt and making him look fat. The desks in here are even stickier than usual. I do not speak French, but apparently Hannah Shushtari does, because the presenta-
tion she’s just started giving over the obscenely loud fan sound is getting a lot of smiles and impressed nods from Ms. Sabine Giannamore. I am hoping that this typing will be mistaken for French note-taking. I feel febrile.
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classical music and all the personal stuff getting worked out in my head make the viewing cathartic and stirring and just a little bit sad. 3:39 p.m.: After a long period of nothing interesting happening, object of Dramatic Plan described the climate on the quad as “freakishly hot.” I concur. 5:46 p.m.: Another long period of nothing interesting, but now it’s Dramatic Plan time. I’ve had second thoughts too many times to count, but I now have that feeling of nervousness that you only get when you know the thing you’re nervous about is definitely going to happen. I’m hungry. Comment with regard to Dramatic Plan from Christian Bermel: “It’ll take a load off your shoulders.” From Sojin Kim: “You’re so nervous.” From Steven Wang: “Wow.” I’ve told each of these people that my plan is to “confess my love,” which is exactly what it is. I’ve also told them that it will be carried out after school, that I doubt it will end well and that since I have like four days left of high school the whole thing seems all for naught anyway and I hate the fact that it feels like such a big deal. 6:47 p.m.: Plan successfully carried out: outcome predictably not good. Relevant text message to Christian Bermel: “Unrequited.” Suddenly commencement seems terribly appealing, something I wish would happen right now, and the driftwood feeling intensifies. 7:00 p.m.: Yankee Doodle is long gone from my head.
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point of light in a vacuum of blackness. For a moment I felt terribly important and purposeful, like the captain of a great spaceship or some equivalently impressive scientific contraption, and frighteningly alone. Overhead as I walked, the fluorescent lights flickered to life, one after another, following me into the dark, towards the point of light. And outside an antidote to the heat comes in the form of inescapably heavy and apocalyptic sheets of summer thunderstorm rain and the sky blazes intermittently and the thunder is downright ominous. I have no cover but still I’m standing here writing this even as my not-Swarthmore t-shirt gets soaked. Now I’m somehow simultaneously writing and running, running to the friendly cover of the toylike walkway. Now I’m slowing to a walk, safe from the storm, considering everything that’s happened today. Soon I’ll get back into the car and leave Loomis Chaffee for good. u
Star: by Noel Quiñones
like the reason why: why the straightjacket for your mind? why the lifeguard for your thoughts?
7:36 p.m.: Reply text from Christian Bermel: “The best kind.”
why the broken feeling of holding?
7:49 p.m.: I’ve fully accepted the fact that I’m writing this in large part to distance myself from the emotions associated with Dramatic Plan. You see, this way I can keep telling myself that this or that would make an interesting journal entry or that I could use this or that clever phrase, etc. This way it’s like I’m writing about someone else and the stakes aren’t so high and even a predictably not good outcome could yield something positive in the form of some exceptionally soulful writing. You be the judge of that.
You have left me ways to trace you
9:15 p.m.: Last entry. After spending over an hour working in a science center classroom (schoolwork, I know—long story), I left down that long central corridor. All the lights were out but in the distance in front of me I could see the lit flinty blue of a heavy steel beam diagonally crossing a plate-glass window, a single
through the pieces. You, still having
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Thread by
strand by
lips
gazing upwards when we were simple, in need of each other, in need of explosion. Me, still shifting
known what they meant.
BOOKS The big sleep
REVIEW
Jonathan Crary predicts the next victim of capitalism
by Thomas Ruan
I
n “Digital Witness,” the first single of St. Vincent’s latest album, Annie Clark laments over a throbbing array of guitars: “What’s the point of even sleeping? / If I can’t show it, you can’t see me. / What’s the point of doing anything?” What Clark is not too subtly satirizing here is our seemingly endless need to catalogue everything online, on Facebook, 24/7:Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary VERSO 144 pages | $13
Twitter, or Tumblr. It may sound like a hackneyed point by now, but the fact still remains that social media breeds a compulsive need to share even the smallest details with our “friends.” At least when we masturbate in real life, we have the decency to do it privately. When I first heard “Digital Witness,” I was reminded of the personalised videos that Facebook made for each of its users on its tenth anniversary: here’s your first status update, here are the most popular photos you’ve uploaded since then, here are all the important memories you’ve laid bare on the internet. What I found so disturbing about these videos was the uncanny contradiction between the nostalgia they created and their manufactured quality. At first glance, your personalised video seemed so sweet and thoughtful. What became quickly apparent, though, is that even though the video had your photos and information in it, it really wasn’t about you at all. The videos were less a celebration of any individual person’s life than they were a big pat on the back for the website’s penetration into our everyday life – “Look at how deeply a part of
your existence we’ve become,” Facebook seemed to be saying, “we’ve always been with you, and we always will be.” It is this “always-on” nature of our contemporary society that Jonathan Crary’s “24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep” targets. Rather than reiterate the tired point that the modern world is experiencing a rapid disintegration of genuine interpersonal connection, Crary focuses on what he calls “24/7,” “a generalised inscription of human life into duration without breaks, defined by a principle of continuous functioning. It is a time that no longer passes, beyond clock time.” 24/7 markets and networks have existed before. What is new are the ways in which the 24/7 world is beginning to force people to conform their personal and social identities to its relentless tempo. 24/7 environments do not recognise the natural rhythms of the people that live in them. They seem social and organic, but are mechanistic, forming what Crary calls “a suspension of living.” 24/7 is an abandonment of any idea of progress; it is a “pure” capitalism that is driven only by its own reproduction. It is driven by “more,” with no regard for the fragility of human lives, or nature. In this way, 24/7 is intimately connected to an insatiable hunger for resources that disrupts the cycles and seasons of nature. 24/7 is not merely accompanied by ecological collapse, the two are complicit. If 21st century capitalism won’t stop for people, why would it stop for the rainforests of Brazil or the polar ice caps? Against all this stands sleep. Capitalism has had little trouble commodifying and commercialising many of the other necessities of human life - hunger, sexual desire, and the need to interact with others. However, “the stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from sleep.” While we sleep, we don’t buy, sell, or make anything. For an average of six and a half hours a night,
24/7 is suspended and the logic of unending capitalism is put on pause. As hard as 24/7 may try, the best it can do to sleep is stunt or diminish it. Beeping mobile devices are constantly vying for our attention, and Crary cites recent research that shows that the number of people waking themselves up in the night to check their messages is growing rapidly. In a fully 24/7 world, we wouldn’t need to take a break from the relentless process of producing and consuming. But at the end of the day, we just have to sleep. Or do we? Crary observes that scientists at the US Defense Department have been studying migratory birds to understand how their brains can withstand journeys that can last up to seven days without rest. Their goal is to change the brain chemistry in humans so that they can forgo sleep for long periods and remain productive - creating, in other words, super-soldiers who don’t need to interrupt their missions in order to sleep. It is not a jump to imagine this same kind of technology being used on civilians to create sleepless consumers, or workers. “24/7”’s horrifying vision of the future is one in which humans are fully integrated into a nonstop cycle of capitalism - one that never rests, never sleeps. One of the central images of 24/7 is a network of screens—whether on a television, computer, or smartphone—that are constantly plugged in, producing an unearthly light that is always shining in our faces. Crary’s descriptions of the overbright glare of 24/7 immediately bring to mind Michel Foucault’s discussion in “Discipline and Punish” of a Panopticon prison, wherein light is constantly shining at prisoners who never know if they are being watched or not. 24/7, in its careful uncovering of counter-histories that oppose the main narrative of progress, has quite a lot in common with Foucault’s work on disciplinary societies. However, Crary specifically emphasises that 24/7 is SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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far more insidious than anything “Discipline and Punish” proposes. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze had already pointed out that the limit of Foucault’s concept of the disciplinary society was that within it there still exist substantial periods of time in which we are not being disciplined. In everyday life, we are free to think and do as we please. What distinguishes 24/7 from the disciplinary society is that 24/7 doesn’t allow for “everyday life”—the time of discipline has extended to all hours of the clock. This is why sleep poses such a powerful challenge to it: you cannot discipline a sleeper. The political theorist Hannah Arendt proposed that a fundamental component of a productive civic life is the balance between what she called the private and public realms. It is necessary to have some time to oneself, to reflect and restore, so that one can fully participate politically in the public sphere. 24/7, however, eats away at this private time. We are constantly barraged with information, and requests for more information, by devices that grow increasingly intrusive with each iteration. Crary marks the introduction of the television into households as the beginning of this trend. The more ad34
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vanced technology gets, the deeper it penetrates into our everyday life and the more attention it demands from us: TV gives way to VHS, which is then superseded by personal computers, then smartphones, Google Glass, and so forth. The irony of all this is that as new technology becomes more invasive, we become more willing to devote more of our time and energy to it. In a sense, Crary is charting just one way in which contemporary society is fulfilling Foucault’s terrifying warning of a society in which disciplinary institutions are irrelevant simply because everybody disciplines themselves. One of the main paradoxes of 24/7 is that it is when we spend time engaging with online “friends” and “communities” that we are most alone and isolated. As the drive to stay plugged in intensifies, so does our estrangement from one another. Crary stresses that the instantaneous and always-on nature of a 24/7 lifestyle makes it far more detrimental than anything we’ve encountered before. He sees blogging as the prime example of this: millions of people chattering away, with nobody really engaging with anyone else because they’re all too busy being consumed with their own thoughts. There’s no need to wait and hear what someone else has to say, because you can instantaneously spout your own opinion—a dangerous threat to “the individual patience and deference that are essential to any form of direct democracy.” Reading this with February’s controversy surrounding Robert George and Cornel West still on my mind, the immediate question arose: to what extent has 24/7 influenced the way we interact with each other here on campus? It can be comforting to think of Swarthmore as a safe haven from the ravages that Crary describes—a place of community, where people care about what others have to say. However, it’s hard not to see elements of 24/7 everywhere you look: students pulling all-nighters to write essays, texting in class, or making the performative trek to McCabe to browse Facebook somewhere outside
their dorm. I remember a tour guide telling me that the Crum woods has wifi— does anybody else find that unsettling? How about ITS requiring every computer on its network to install something creepily called Bradford Persistent Agent? While President Chopp waxes lyrical on liberal arts institutions producing a new generation of thinkers, is there also a certain sense in which they are preparing us for entry into a more properly 24/7 world? Unfortunately, Crary occasionally gets carried away by his forceful rhetoric, and in places his argument devolves into preachy romanticism. He is correct to be wary of technology, especially given unfortunate trends of techno-fetishism (think Ray Kurzweil or Larry Page) that are, just like the 24/7 society, blind to the human costs of technological advancement. However, his dismissive attitude towards the internet seems unfounded and hasty. For example, he warns us that the increasing encroachment of the internet on our daily lives—usually through the conduit of always-on smartphones—will lead to a situation where “real-life activities that do not have an online correlate begin to atrophy, or cease to be relevant.” Really? Later, he claims that any counter-cultural movement that has its roots in social media will ultimately be useless at seriously disrupting the encroachment of the 24/7 into our world. It is misguided to just whole-handedly dismiss the radical potential of turning technologies of domination against their intended purposes. Regardless, “24/7” paints a powerful image of sleep as a site of potential resistance. Despite everything, sleep still stands as a safe haven from the “shallow subjectivities” that we are constantly engaging with during the day. When we sleep, we relinquish our obsessive focus on ourselves. In its continuous insistence on its own valuelessness, sleep provides one of the most stubborn challenges to a fully 24/7 world. It models a kind of collectivity that neoliberal capitalism has increasingly tried to limit and deny. Crary rhapsodizes: “The restorative inertness of sleep counters the deathliness of all the accumulation, financialisation, and waste that have devastated anything once held in common.” In his view, the revolution will not be televised, tweeted, or reblogged—it will begin in bedrooms, peacefully and with some snoring. To sleep is, perchance, to dream of an alternative to 24/7. u
The death of Rukhin by Isabel Newlin
All he needed was a spark A little lightness to set him off. His unleavened dissidence Puffed to western encomium— Strangers who drank from his sensitive lips, So high, so far, That beautiful belligerence. In Leningrad that July The heat was intense. The agents, children of Russia, Reeled at the sight of his body Enwrapped in other bodies like a present, The skin just waiting for someone to peel it away. Crinkled and crisp, black from the heat. The agents broke off a piece of him And took it to his wife. For you, they offered, clutching their eyes. For you and no one else, Since he was never yours, But wrapped himself in other men and women Against the cold. That alone could not have shocked her. But there were other, understated reports. A figure in the window, comrade— A man clutching a purse. Somewhere in Leningrad a widower sighs For his wife’s unfinished canvas, And buys paint the next day with her rubles. In some storms, even rain lights fires. As he lay in his studio, Washed in flames, He pondered the silence Of the city at that hour. Russia, great mother of so much white ice, Had become suddenly so hot.
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MOVIES Road trip into the sunset A journey into the heartland of authentic Americana
REVIEW
Will Forte and Bruce Dern in “Nebraska”
by Jerry Qin
Nebraska
R
emember that one time when your father wanted to walk to Lincoln, Nebraska to pick up the million dollars he won from a magazine subscription company? On the one hand, you desperately want to make up for lost father-son bonding time, because in your childhood your father was too busy being a dedicated alcoholic. On the other hand, you certainly don’t appreciate your mother calling your senile father “a dumb cluck” every five seconds. So what do you do? You go on a road trip, of course. This is America. Director Alexander Payne (“About Schmidt,” “Citizen Ruth,” “The Descendants”) and first-time screenwriter Bob Nelson marry their polished sensibili-
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Dir: Alexander Payne with Will Forte, Bruce Dern, June Quibb
ties with the keen understanding that there are vast regions of America that exist between the Big Cities and the Wild West and that life unfolds there. “Nebraska,” Payne’s sixth and latest feature, is a road trip into the heartland of authentic Americana. “Nebraska” isn’t simply a comedy, a drama, or a satire; rather, like the genuine lives it depicts, it is a little bit of each. It gives something to take home, to chew on and mull over and toss around in your brain as you try to rationalize why it made such an imprint on your heart.
Woody (Bruce Dern) is a lifelong alcoholic and a Korean War veteran who is in the early stages of dementia. Having received a magazine subscription ad in the mail with his name on it, Woody believes himself to be the winner of a $1 million sweepstake and insists on walking from his home in Billings, MT, to Lincoln, NB, to collect his prize winnings. Woody finds a companion in David (Will Forte), his youngest son, who drudges on every day selling electronics in Billings after a recent breakup with his girlfriend. David indulges his old man in his fantasy and reminds us all of the enduring patience and love that a son can have for his father. Along the way, Woody’s wife Kate (June Squibb), whose graveyard soliloquy rant bests that of SNL on any night, and
Woody’s “hot shot” TV anchor son tag along for an awkward family reunion in Hawthorne, NB, where Kate and Woody first met and married. Shot in pristine widescreen blackand-white by talented cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, “Nebraska” raises the bar with images of elegant, but seemingly ordinary, beauty. Long shots of empty Hawthorne accentuate the width of the roads and the vast span of the fields, a stark contrast to the minuteness of the character’s lives. And, in a sense, the insignificance of all human lives. The desolate streets outside the
empty small-town taverns are pampered with delicate care, each strand of light from street lamps adjusted to perfection, and every plain-spoken line a work of poetry. Payne really took his time with this one, and it paid off. Dern, who won the best actor award at the Cannes Films Festival this year for his portrayal of the stubbornly innocuous Woody, gives his finest performance yet on the silver screen. Over beer one night at the local tavern, David decides to confront his father about his drinking problem: “You are always drunk, Dad, always have been,” says Forte, hoping to
spur a bit of reflection from his father. After a short pause, Dern replies, “If you were married to your mother, you would be too.” “Nebraska” takes a rather dreary view of aging, but suggests that some mixture of self-delusion and caring for children can at least make the last years tolerable. For Woody, it’s not about the money, or the things it can buy; it’s about acknowledgment and a yearning to be wanted, to be admired, and to be someone special. That desire, subtly sustained by Dern throughout the movie, is something we can all relate to. u
Debauchery and the Dow
RECOMMENDATION
“The Wolf of Wall Street” is full of sex, drugs, and block trades
by Brian Johnson
I
don’t often watch movies when they are in distribution, but this summer I managed to catch “The Wolf of Wall Street” with some friends. I had heard about the controversy surrounding the film; namely, that Scorsese had included a record number of f-bombs in the movie and that it glorified drug use. This only made me want to watch the movie more, and I’m glad I did. This is an excellent film, and Leonardo DiCaprio gives an Oscar-worthy performance as Jordan Belfort, who made more money than he could ever spend by selling penny stock to suckers and by engaging in a number of illegal trading practices. Thankfully Scorsese censors nothing in this film. The incessant foul language is part of the frank realism of the movie, as is the graphic depiction of people actually enjoying elicit drugs, sex, and all the luxuries and carnal delights available to people of great wealth. The film is devoid of any sentimentality or condemnation of Belfort’s behavior. Instead, it faithfully reproduces the testosterone-laden, sex-filled and drug-fueled environment of Wall Street in the 1990s. Who knew brokers lived such wild lives? The behavior is so extreme that it made me want to check out Belfort’s autobiography, the basis of the screenplay, to see if Scorsese took any liberties or exaggerated anything. Somehow I doubt he did. Despite the realistic feel of the movie,
Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
Scorsese has DiCaprio break the convention of realism on occasion and give monologues directly to the camera. He does so with such swagger and panache that it brings the viewer directly into the film. He talks to the viewer as to a compatriot, inviting the viewer to become a participant, not just an observer. He seems to be asking the audience (well, perhaps only the men in the audience), “Wouldn’t you have done exactly the same thing?” And I think this is the point of the whole movie. It is not the condemnation of one man’s questionable behavior; it is the frank exposure
of a world hidden from all but those who inhabit it, and although it does not justify Belfort’s reprehensible behavior, it makes it fully comprehensible. And did I mention that the movie is very, very funny? For those who are uncomfortable with foul language or graphic depictions of sexual orgies, stay way. I’m surprised this film did not garner an NC-17 rating; clearly, Scorsese and the studio knew how to avoid that rating of death. But if you are up for a wild ride, or if you are a fan of either Scorsese or DiCaprio, this film is definitely worth your time. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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EDITORS’ PICKS
Brief recommendations of books, music, movies and more from our editors Short story: ‘The Nose’ by Nikolai Gogol Imagine! A Collegiate Assessor losing his nose! It just doesn’t happen! But that’s exactly what happens in this story by Russia’s finest humorist. The absurd tale follows a nose as it travels from a barber’s morning loaf of bread into the river Neva, and then suddenly through the echelons of the government service until it outranks its original owner. Major Kovalyov, the owner, goes to great lengths to track his fleshy appendage down, simply because its indecorous for a man to go around without a nose when he is accepted into the houses of ladies of good position. The narrator finds these events just as absurd as the reader does, and provides nothing in the way of explanation of the events. This story, nearly 200 years old now, is masterfully written, deeply satirical, and sidesplitting throughout. A Russian classic, it has sadly escaped America’s consciousness because it doesn’t have the names ‘Tolstoy’ or ‘Dostoevsky’ attached to it. I guarantee, however, that “The Nose” will be the most enjoyable story about a disembodied facial feature you’ll read this year. -Philip Queen, Editor in Chief Non-fiction: ‘Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence’ by Geoff Dyer
“Out of Sheer Rage” began as a sober biography of D.H. Lawrence. It quickly became a book about putting off the writing of a sober biography of D.H. Lawrence. The result of Dyer’s acrobatic procrastination is an international gonzo tour of Lawrencian landmarks interspersed with biographical tangents that come at Lawrence in incisively oblique ways. Whether he’s writing about jazz, World War I, or Tarkovsky, Dyer has a tendency to appropriate his material in order to write about his favorite subject: himself. However, those aspects that occasionally hamper his writing—his recursive indecision and his simultaneously self-deprecating and egotistic immaturity—here so satisfyingly parallel D.H. Lawrence’s 38
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own neuroses that what results is holographic: tip it one way and it’s about Dyer, the other and it’s about Lawrence. It should be said as well that Dyer is no intellectual lightweight. His populist tone is the rhetorical Trojan horse with which he smuggles in his poignant meditations on the nature of place and what it means to “belong,” while casually referencing Marx and Rilke. At the very least, it’s the only biography of Lawrence wherein the author takes LSD and engages in public indecency on an Italian nude beach. -Philip Harris, Books Editor American classic: ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison There have been plenty of great books written by real-life revolutionaries, but I’ve never read one as pure and convincing as this fictional account of a community organizer in Depression-era Harlem. Rather than writing to glorify a political agenda, Ralph Ellison describes the inefficiency, hypocrisy and greed which eventually unravel his narrator’s work. In this sense, the story is more of a tragedy than a call to arms. The narrator chronicles his own failings and doubts with an uncomfortable sort of sincerity. However, that’s the freedom of the genre—Ellison, never setting out to build a cult of personality, has created a Man. For this reason, his struggles really resonate. The book is its own kind of political statement. More than 60 years after its publication, “Invisible Man” remains depressingly relevant to understanding race relations in America. It is a powerful reminder of how far we still have to go, but it also reminded me that fiction can be the straightest path to truth. -Liliana Frankel, Personal Essays Editor Album: ‘San Fermin’ by San Fermin Spain, fireworks and the Running of the Bulls—that’s what I think when I hear the name San Fermin. Mostly, I think “Festival!”—which makes San Fermin’s debut eponymous album all the more
intriguing, because it’s a composition distinctly lacking in festivity. Written/ composed by Ellis Ludwig-Leone, who studied at Yale, “San Fermin” is Baroque Pop taken to new heights of sobriety and bizarreness. Consider: half of the album is instrumental tracks. Consider: there’s only one song faster than 120 BPM (one singularly, deliriously catchy song about realizing that you don’t love him but maybe you will eventually). Consider: the album has a preoccupation with waking up and not falling asleep. Consider: the male singer has a voice that makes me want to melt into my bedsheets and never get up again. Why is it so good? Why does the title fit? What’s so compelling about this emotional self-indulgent wallowing? I don’t know. I don’t know times three. My best guess is that, at this point in my sophomore career, I desperately need this. “Oh, darling, I’ve been so miserable,” sings the female singer, “I can’t describe.” Buy this album; listen to it make incomprehensible sense. -Z.L. Zhou, Poetry Editor Television show: ‘House of Cards’ This summer, just like every other one of the underpaid, overworked D.C. interns sweating on each other in the Metro and eyeing one another’s Senate badges, I binge-watched Season One of “House of Cards” with that perfect combination of desperation and satisfaction which I haven’t felt since receiving all four seasons of “The O.C.” on DVD for my fourteenth birthday. Congressman and high-functioning sociopath Frank Underwood’s delicious Southern drawl (delivered with relish by Kevin Spacey), Rooney Mara’s much hotter little sister, Kate, as a fiery journalist, Robin Wright’s terrifying inaccessibility and chiseled biceps, the Shakespearean backstabbing and intrigue (as critics have pointed out, Spacey undoubtedly draws on his performance as the equally slick, psychotic Richard III to fill these shoes) … There are too many amazing elements of this show to write about here, and they all come together perfectly, overlaid with shots of Washington’s monuments in a rich, oily color palette. Season Two premiered on Valen-
tine’s Day, with Spacey returned to all his rib-licking, back-stabbing glory. While the show’s dialogue can be melodramatic and Underwood’s political machinations lag at times (though Swarthmore political science students gobble this up), “House
of Cards” is, for the most part, just as thrilling and trenchant as ever. Like the serious but still sexy older brother to ABC’s trashier, splashier “Scandal,” it cuts to the heart of Washington’s political drama, pushing D.C.’s Congressional
characters to their logical extremes. The show at once mocks our fascination with these antics and embraces it, and is only a slightly guilty pleasure. I’ll hand over my Netflix login to anyone willing to watch. -Anna Gonzales, Editor in Chief
MUSIC Four young brown women
RECOMMENDATION
...that you should be listening to
by Medha Ghosh
O
ur generation has become infamously known as the “Internet Generation.” Although we tend to get a negative reputation for our tech-savvy ways, a lot of good has come out of it too. One example is that of the platform the Internet has given to musicians of underrepresented, marginalized communities. Although still not accessible to many, the worldwide web has been able to connect thousands, if not millions, of musicians and music bloggers of various identities to one another, allowing them to freely express themselves and share their thoughts and ideas with one another in an arguably safe space. Here are four very talented young female musicians of color who are taking charge of the Internet in amazing ways:
A
second-generation Ethiopian immigrant, Kelela Mizanekristos’s music is a taste of the future. Pitchfork’s interview with her showed how Kelela felt both inside and outside of her own culture, an in-betweenness that has great effect in her own music—a combination of R&B and future-thinking electronics. Kelela was raised in Rockville, Maryland, by parents who emigrated to the U.S. from Ethiopia in the 1970s. She told Pitchfork, “I’ve grown up feeling very American but being constantly othered by people—there’s internalized racism and feeling weird about being second-gen.” Kelela recently released her debut mixtape “Cut 4 Me” and was featured in Solange’s compilation album, “Saint Heron.”
F
KA Twigs, currently based in London, was born in Gloucestershire to a part-Spanish mother and a Jamaican father. Between her hauntingly beautiful music and ethereal music videos (which she mainly directs herself), it is impossible to not feel enamored by this multifaceted artist. Fader wrote an article entitled “How FKA Twigs is Pushing Female Sexuality Beyond Miley Cyrus and Sinead,” appreciating Twigs for “blowing her own sexualized female body up widescreen, mess[ing] with its proportions, reveal[ing] unexpected contradictions within it.” With her mix of soul, trip-hop, R&B, dreamy pop tunes and impressive baby hairs, FKA Twigs should be every weird brown girl’s new inspiration.
F
atima Al Qadiri is a New York-based Kuwaiti musician and visual artist who was born and brought up in Senegal. Performing and exhibiting at places like the MoMA PS1, Tate Modern, and Art Dubai, Al Qadiri has taken the modern art world by storm. Interview Magazine comments
on the visuals Fatima created for her EP “Genre-Specific Xperience” as influenced by social issues of religion, technology, and the isolation the Internet creates. Her diverse upbringing does not fail to influence her music as she takes you on a tropical, futuristic, modernized trip through space with her sounds. Come and enjoy the ride.
J
unglepussy hails from Brooklyn and just her tweets (@JUNGLEPUSSY) are enough to make you bow down to the greatness of this female rapper. When discussing the origins of her name with Milk Made, she stated, “There’s Pussy Riot, there’s The Pussycat Dolls, and then there are guys with names like Dick Cheney— I’m like, ‘So you can be called Dick, but I can’t be called Junglepussy?” She credits a great deal of her rising fame to the incredible power of social media—even Erykah Badu has posted one of her videos on Facebook, and she’s also had the chance to share the stage with rapper Lil’ Kim. Only 22 years old, Junglepussy has a whole lot more to show this once white man’s world. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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