Issue 19

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JANUARY 2018

Adulthood loading....

Photo essay by Max Hernandez

ALSO A ranking of rats A rumination on bruises A reflection on Cuba

CONTRIBUTORS

Sophia Abraham-Raveson is a senior English major with a concentration in Africana Studies at Haverford.

Lately, she’s been thinking a lot about Chad Michael Murray; she hopes he’s faring well.

Letter policy

Nick Barton is a senior at Swarthmore College.

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 swatreview@ gmail.com

Kenny Bransdorf is a junior from New Jersey who claims to be a writer yet for some reason can’t write a good bio.

Grant Brown is a freshman from Bellevue, Nebraska.

He ponders philosophical conundrums which annoy my friends.

Kat Capossela is a freshman from Boston. She likes apple cinnamon candles and wishes she had more time to read.

How to contribute

Cecily Chen is a sophomore studying English and Art History.

Submissions of longform reporting, personal, argumentative and photo essays, book and media reviews, short stories, poems, and anything else that seems suitable can be e-mailed to Samantha Herron, editor-in chief.

Submissions will be considered from Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and will be considered anonymously, though will will not, except in rare cases, publish anonymously. Submissions should generally not go longer than 10,000 words.

Abby Diebold is a sophomore from Portland, Oregon.

She is better than average at FantasySCOTUS. Willa Glickman is a senior studying English. If she didn’t say hi it’s because she wasn’t wearing her glasses.

Max Hernandez is a member of the class of 2017 and has cold sweats at night about student loans.

Jonathan Kay and his son are in a car accident.

The father dies instantly, and the son is taken to the nearest hospital. The doctor comes in and exclaims “I can’t operate on this boy.” “Why not?” the nurse asks.

“Because he’s my son,” the doctor responds. How is this possible?

Contact: sherron1@swarthmore.edu, cgerstm1@swarthmore.edu

Joe Mariani is a junior studying history. He is seeing a fortune teller while his psychiatrist is on vacation.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF SAMANTHA HERRON

Killian McGinnis is a junior from Baltimore, MD. Her interests include singing, active listening, and long walks in the Crum.

MANAGING COLETTE GERSTMANN

Kathy Nguyen is a first year with a talent for being everywhere at once. She has touched Daniel Caesar’s hand twice.

FEATURES ISABEL CRISTO PERSONAL ESSAYS WILLA GLICKMAN

Alessandra Occhiolini likes yellow words and living life like a mountain goat. She graduated in ‘17 and has been homesick for Crum Meadow ever since.

PHOTO ESSAYS KYUNGCHAN MIN

Hailing from the Midwest, Alyssa Ogle is a gal with a keen interest in photography and hopes you derive some itty bit of aesthetic pleasure from her photos.

Gilbert Orbea is a junior from Fairview, New Jersey.

He enjoys poetry, loves tres leches cake, and is majoring in political science and economics without all the pretentiousness (really).

Alexis Riddick is a sophomore from the actual city of Philadelphia (i.e. not the suburbs). She spends her spare time avoiding people and responsibilities.

Anna Weber is a junior at Swarthmore, currently studying testimonial literature with a focus on sexual assault survivor testimonies. She’s rooting for Trixie Mattel to win Season 3 of Rupaul’s AllStars (if she wins this is a testament to Anna calling it).

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FICTION & POETRY COLETTE GERSTMANN BOOKS LEO ELLIOT Design © 2017 the Swarthmore Phoenix. All content © 2017 by its listed author unless otherwise noted.

The “R” logo is based on the font Layer Cake by Luzia Prado. The “Review” logo is based on the font Soraya by Pactrice Scott. Printed at Bartash Printing, Philadelphia, PA. Please recycle this magazine.

Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com

MOVIES & TV JONATHAN KAY MUSIC GABRIEL MEYER-LEE CONTIBUTING EDITOR JOE MARIANI

“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.”

Edgar Allen Poe

ARTS BOOKS January 2018

The Struggle is Over 36 On Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “Autumn”

by Willa Glickman

FICTION & POETRY

FEATURE

A compendium of animated rats 4 Rodents, media, and the moral order

by Nick Barton

I Am, Or A Pizza Party

by Sophia Abraham-Raveson

The Lake

by Kenny Bransdorf

Three Poems

PERSONAL ESSAYS

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by Killian McGinnis

33 35

by Alessandra Occhiolini

A Love Letter to My Scars 11

by Abby Diebold

A Mal Tiempo Buena Cara 12

by Gilbert Orbea

by Alexis Riddick

PHOTO ESSAYS

Fabric Museum and Workshop

Young, In Want Of A God 39 Searching for tranquility, Seven Storeys up

by Joe Mariani

Giving Godhead 41

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MOVIES “Blade Runner 2049” 43

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Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House 500 Rum

by Max Hernandez

by Alyssa Ogle

EDITORS’ PICKS

“Kawaii for Men”

A Tale of Two Phillies 14

plus, photo essay

A look back on William Golding

by Grant Brown

Literary imagination and sexual violence in Dylan Krieger’s poetry

by Anna Weber

Permanence Lessons 9

Adulthood loading...

“The Spire” 38

A sequel that surprises

by Jonathan Kay

Nick Zedd, 40 Years Later 45 On PhilaMOCA’s film retrospective

by Cecily Chen

MUSIC Introducing: Yaeji 47 The artist dominating the NYC Underground

by Kathy Nguyen

How the Old Taylor Died 48

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On why she can’t come to the phone right now

by Kat Capossela

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FEATURE

A COMPENDIUM OF ANIMATED RATS

by Nick Barton

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have seen a high school student win a competition for ‘best rat face.’ I have seen people skulk to avoid the stomping feet of larger personalities. I have seen (more than once) college students scavenge through garbage cans and feed upon the turkey wraps, pizza crusts, and whole ham sandwiches deposited within. As they pull their haul from the refuse, they thank their cohabitees for their gracious donations to the muroid nation. What I mean is that rats are among us.

In Western society the appeal of the rat is that it is unpopular. Europeans did not forget that tens of millions died by the plague carried on the backs of black rats. In Florence, there was a period when three of every five citizens succumbed to bubonic sepsis. Perhaps as retribution, the afflicted culture has made these creatures a shorthand for the bottoms of hierarchies, figures like snitches (“he ratted on us”) and disparaged political opponents (a recent presidential candidate was nicknamed ‘el rato’ by his opposition). The character of the rat is that of the ostracized, the hidden, the despised, the unsavory, and the vice-riddled. And as with all gutter-dwellers, there is a certain invitation: when one cannot insist that one is a lion at heart, or an eagle, or a golden retriever—anything beloved, appreciated, recognized—there is always the rat.

Rat-as-character is the subject here, and the moral schemes suggested by the manner of portrayal in our popular culture. Collected here are dramatized rats, playing roles that make them instructors of the moral organization of the world. And nowhere is this organization more transparently articulated than in the world of the child’s animated film. Here, ranked according to their ability to educate us on that moral order, is a thoroughly immersive ranking of animated rats.

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8.

FAT CAT BURGLAR

also find other recurring qualities of the rat character here, including gluttony (Fat Cat is improbably spheroid), a faux-reverential attitude toward more socially powerful characters (he refers to Sheen’s Dex as “the great Dex Dogtective”), and a conscience that is twisted by his unlovability. Fat Cat Burglar knows that what he is doing is wrong, but he apparently sees no other way to “be loved.”

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RATSO

LARRY KASANOFF’S FOODFIGHT (2012) Voiced by Harvey Fierstein “Foodfight” is better categorized not as a film but as an experiment in taste. It cannot entertain in any traditional sense, offering only alternatively dull and appalling animation. Fat Cat Burglar is underwritten but visually arresting. He is Chuck-E-Cheese by way of a hairy balloon. He appears only briefly, squaring off against Charlie Sheen’s protagonist, Dex Dogtective, but he delivers a memorable line of dialogue, courtesy of Tony Award-winning playwright and actor Harvey Fierstein. When Dex dispatches Fat Cat Burglar and his ‘hairless hamster’ accomplices, we are left with the appeal: “I just want to be loved—is that so wrong?”

“Foodfight,” because it appears almost totally bereft of self-awareness, is well-suited to give us the pure form of the rat in culture. Fat Cat is despised, and tries to call upon our sympathies on that ground. We

ROBERT C. RAMIREZ’S THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER TO THE RESCUE (1997) Voiced by Andy Milder Blanky: You’ve obviously never been abandoned.

Ratso: What’re you guys talking about?

You guys wouldn’t know from abandoned!

If you wanna stare abandonment in the face, spend a little time in this hairy rat’s shoes. Abandonment is my middle name!

Ya enter a room, and nine times outta ten Photos courtesy of Wikia

there are screams, and people are throwing things and calling for the terminator!

Toaster: Exterminator.

“The Brave Little Toaster to the Rescue”: a film about a college student whose thesis is threatened by a virus from a supercomputer named Wittgenstein. Shocking but true. Coming to the rescue are a troop of verbal appliances, who also save injured lab animals from being sold off in the B plot. Among those animals is Ratso, who announces the theme of abandonment.

Throughout the film he is the skeptic, warning the titular appliance that abandonment by one’s loved ones is part of life. But because we get no sign that Ratso was loved in the first place, we are invited to wonder what exactly abandonment means to him.

Maybe being revolting and being abandoned are identical for Ratso, and so to be a rat is to be ontologically abandoned and automatically unloved. But as the forsaken computer Wittgenstein (appropriately) demonstrates, there is no essential quality of the abandoned: though he is obsolete, Wittgenstein becomes an installation in a museum where the humans appreciate him. Ratso also finds a sense of belonging in his friendship with toaster and company.

If this resolution seems too easy, it is worth remembering that this is “The Brave Little Toaster”: the ‘reality’ of abandonment cannot be easily broached. What would Ratso’s

fate have been if he hadn’t lucked into the Brave Little Toaster’s company? What will his fate be if he ever makes it to a retirement home

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ROSCURO

SAM FELL AND ROBERT STEVENHAGEN’S THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX (2008) Voiced by Dustin Hoffman Yes, Botticelli is the rat par excellence in “The Tale of Despereaux”—Nosferatu transformed from metaphorical to literal rat. But he is a thin character, who’s stuck repeating the bare thesis that “a rat is a rat; it

Banner photo courtesy of Huffington Post. Roscuro photo courtesy of Super Tran

doesn’t really matter where you come from.”

Dustin Hoffman’s Roscuro clinches the spot as the more nuanced vermin. At the film’s start he is a rat in name only: none of his personality traits are rat-specific. For example: It is only when he lands in a bowl of soup and sends the Princess’s mother into cardiac arrest that he must confront the horror that is his body. Sigourney Weaver’s narrator asks the viewer “What would you do if your own name was a bad word?,” Roscuro makes it his mission to apologize to the princess for involuntary regicide, but the attempted apology is botched when the Princess (Emma Watson) recognizes Roscuro as her mother’s killer and begins screaming and hurling candelabras at him. In the best moment of the film, Roscuro looks at his reflection in a copper kettle as Weaver narrates: “When your heart breaks, it can grow back crooked.” Roscuro adopts the mantle of the rat (as Botticelli says, “There are rats, and there are rats”) and decides to feed the princess to Botticelli’s mischief. At the film’s climax, Princess Pea is bound up Lilliputian-style and the rats are moving in to eat her alive. But, as in “The Brave Little Toaster to the Rescue,” the rat identity is proven to be inessential. Roscuro turns on Botticelli and destroys him, saving the princess with the mouse Despereaux’s help. To be a rat, argues “The Tale of Despereaux,” is a choice. You need not be confounded by your nature—it isn’t there.

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5.

HEAD RATTE

are mythically bad. Heidi’s Song is perhaps best described as ‘commercial folk,’ where talking animals and dance numbers exist alongside the harsh moral absolutes of fairy tales. And only out of such absolutes can we get the fantasy of the eternal rat, endlessly delectating in its own rejection and offensiveness.

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REMY

ROBERT TAYLOR’S HEIDI’S SONG (1982) Voiced by Sammy Davis Junior Head Ratte earns distinction for his three-minute swing number “Ode to a Rat.” The song has a film-redeeming performance from the Emmy-winning entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. and some of the best animation to come out of the Hanna-Barbera studio. The singing and imagery introduce us to the pleasures of indulging in filth and sleaze—whatever offends the beautiful (the film’s protagonist, Heidi, is a button-faced Suiss with an affinity for infant animals).

After being locked in a cellar for keeping kittens, Heidi tries to make friends with the rats surrounding her. “I promise you,” Heidi says, “if I ever get home to the mountains, you can come and visit me. Would you like that?” The rats are eating up Heidi’s pablum when Head Ratte explodes into the scene and justifies the movie’s existence with a raucous jam. As the music cues up, Head Ratte sets the cross-species divide straight: “Can’t you understand she’s a people? She’s the enemy! And we’re rats! Rats! RATS! Ya got that?” Rats brandish their legs like Rockettes and slink around in zoot suit-fedoras as Head Ratte sings. In one sequence, the rats twist their tails in a one-off allusion to the rat king. Heidi looks on in fear as Head Ratte exudes abstracted rodential depravity and sings: “Unless your style is so vile that you cause a sensation / How can you make that rat hall of fame?” “Heidi’s Song” took its story from the ultra-popular 1881 book “Heidi” by Johanna Spyri, which it follows loosely, and which trades in the idyllic alpine transparency of nineteenth-century Swiss literature. This aesthetic informs the film’s moral scheme, in which redemption is unexplored as a possibility and the rats 6

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BRAD BIRD AND JAN PINKAVA’S RATATOUILLE (2007) Voiced by Patton Oswalt “Ratatouille” was the middle sibling of the 2006-2008 rat-cinema brood. Those three years saw the release of three rodent-centric films by three different studios: DreamWorks had “Flushed Away” (2006), Disney-Pixar had “Ratatouille” (2007), and Universal Pictures had the already enumerated “The Tale of Despereaux” (2008).

Among them, only “Ratatouille” won widespread critical acclaim (it received the 2008 Academy Award for Best Animated Film), and “Ratatouille” is indeed the slickest and most cohesive of the films. But with accessibility comes certain sacrifices: The star of “Ratatouille” is well adjusted, and cutely animated. What makes Remy a great rat is not only how he struggles with how he is perceived, but how he lives out his conviction that one’s identity is determined by what one produces. “A cook makes, a thief takes; you are not a thief,” Remy’s conscience tells him as he eyes a baguette. It is not Remy’s conflict with his filthiness or ugliness that motivates him, but his commitment to human morality and the idea of meaningful labor. He wants to use his talent to cook, and this sets him apart from his garbage-eating family (whether eating refuse really constitutes ‘stealing’ is artfully dodged by the film’s script—the audience is left feeling it might as well be). Still, Remy retains the classic misfit arc: like Roscuro he has

a three-act development as a protagonist who 1) doesn’t want to follow the expectations of rats, 2) is mistreated by humans and embraces the antagonistic qualities of the rat, and 3) ultimately sides with a higher good amenable to the audience (excellence, in this case). Ratatouille uses this progression as an undergirding for a discussion of the nature of talent. It is never guaranteed (Gusteau’s useless son Linguini is a critique of any necessary hereditary talent), but if it is present, as in Remy, it will shine through.

The film concludes with the aphorism “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” A rat like Remy can defy his history and earn recognition through his talent because he is not defined by his origin, and because talent can arise independent of origin. “Your only limit is your soul,” Chef Gusteau tells Remy. It is the novel use of rat-hood to explore society’s relationship with the artist that gets Remy a place on the list. But the relationship between creating and stealing is not as self-evident as the film supposes. As touching as the story is, we remain skeptical of Remy’s soul’s affinity for moral cues, and remember that man’s animosity for the rat is founded on more than their scavenging. Although, as Remy says, “nature is change,” histories have ways of fighting back when they are denied.

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MANNY THE RAT

CHARLES SWENSON AND FRED WOLF’S THE MOUSE AND THE CHILD (1977) Voiced by Peter Ustinov Our last outright villain is Manny the Rat, voiced by renowned actor Peter Ustinov (winner of two Academy Awards, three Emmys, and a Grammy). “The Mouse and his Child” is based on Russel Hoban’s novel of the same name, and it retains the book’s cerebral themes (the titular characters are toy mice who desire to become ‘self

Head Ratte photo courtesy of Cartoon Research. Remy photo courtesy of Disney. Manny photo courtesy of UCLA

winding’). The opening sees father and son mouse making friends in the prelapsarian idyll of a toyshop, but soon the two have taken a literal fall (off the toy counter) and are swept into the rat-infested outdoors.

They are found by Manny, boss rat and owner of a casino powered by enslaved mechanical toys. When father and son mouse escape the casino, Manny sets out to recapture them. His character is tied to the particularity of his body. Manny has his teeth, two precious fangs: “I have my plans, I have my plans: an empire, built on these! The sharpest teeth in the dump!” He is evil but not inevitably so —Ustinov’s performance draws cruelty out of Manny’s suffering. And from this cruelty comes terror, as Manny enacts one of the most disturbing murders in all of children’s film esoterica. At the end of the second act, as the mice are reuniting with ‘mother elephant’ from the toyshop, Manny intervenes by brutally bludgeoning father and son mouse to death with a rock, even as the kid mouse cries “momma” to the on looking elephant. The rat recoils when he sees what he has done, raising his claws to his face and collapsing backwards in shock. Manny is a murderer with a conscience, unable (for a moment) to confront what he has done.

The film is not over, though, and father and son mouse (reconstructed by a muskrat) ultimately defeat Manny, obliterating his front teeth with a medallion and relieving him of his figurative capacity for violence. Defanged, he shares a smile with son mouse as his victim forgives him. Relieved of his rat-hood, Manny is able to join son mouse and the other animals in kinship.

So resolves Manny. But there is one other scene we must mention if we are to fully investigate Manny’s character and the rat’s role in culture. When Manny finds himself at a woodland critters’ play, he begins soliloquizing: “Have not a rat pride? Have not a rat honor? When you prick us, do we not bleed?” He makes his point on persecution by quoting Shylock in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” unleashing a whole history of racism upon the discerning viewer. We must mention that propagandists have dispatched the rat, as a token of the bad, as a tool for the creation of the racial other. When Sigourney Weaver asked us in “The Tale of Despereaux,” “What would you do if your own name was a bad word?”, that question was not necessarily hypothetical. There are as many roles for the rat as there are hierarchies, ranging from the unjust (as in race) to the insoluble (as in soul).

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TEMPLETON

CHARLES A. NICHOLS AND IWAO TAKAMOTO’S CHARLOTTE’S WEB (1973) Voiced by Paul Lynde Templeton, from E.B. White’s novel “Charlotte’s Web,” was a beloved rat. He is passing out of memory now, as older generations depart and the book falls out of vogue, but I suspect that there was a time when no rat was as widely known and deeply cherished as Templeton. Was this because of, or in spite of, his rat-ness? In the novel it is said that “[t]he rat has no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feelings, no friendliness, no anything.” We know the answer to our question because there is nothing to Templeton but his rat-ness. He is true to all the above condemnations: his first response to every request is “What’s in it for me?” Templeton appeals in two ways. First, he is a relief to those who feel a strong sense of duty. He gives these disciplined people the chance to imagine what a load-off selfishness would be. What a release it is to say yes to the feeling “I wish I had to do nothing for anyone!” For Templeton, the only ‘good’ worth pursuing is his own “high living.”

Secondly, there is an appeal not only in rejecting care for others, but also in making that rejection extravagant and festive. Templeton is supremely gluttonous, and the film adaptation gives him his own extended musical number showcasing this character trait (which is in keeping with Hanna-Barbera studios’ apparent fixation on vileness as a counterbalance to the opaque wholesomeness of their protagonists). After glutting himself at the fairground, Templeton waxes: “What a night! Never have I seen such leavings. Everything well ripened, seasoned with the passage of time and the heat of the day. Oh it was rich my friends, rich!” He

Templeton photo courtesy of Getty Images. Nicodemus photo courtesy of Wikia

doesn’t care that the things he delights in revolt those around him—he might even take pleasure in their disgust, though the book and film never make that clear. To E.B. White and the artists behind the film, he is a rat first and last, for whom a redemptive arc would be unnecessary, as well as incomprehensible. His importance in the plot does not reflect a prescriptive affirmation or condemnation from his creators.

The story has a political worldview: sometimes rats are important to the heroes, not because they care to be, but because they have skills which can be put to good use through bribes of first dibs at the slop trough. Voicing Templeton is Paul Lynde (billed highly in the film, between the actors for Charlotte and Wilbur), and he gives the rat an air of self-directed wheedling and constitutional self-satisfaction that one imagines would be impossible to rack out of him. There is a typology in the moral universe of Charlotte’s Web. When E.B. White writes “a rat is a rat,” its meaning is not the same as when Boticelli says the same to Roscuro. In Charlotte’s Web, a rat would never conceive of being something else, so the statement cannot be experienced as restrictive. We come once again to the issue of rat-essence. Like “Heidi’s Song,” “Charlotte’s Web” gives no advice to the rat who sees their own life as a problem beyond how to scare the next Heidi or scarf down the next discarded fruit rind. Plunging into one’s own rat-ness, does one find Templeton, Head Ratte, and opaqueness, or does one find Remy, Roscuro, and a life that appears as a problem?

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NICODEMUS

DON BLUTH’S THE SECRET OF NIMH (1982) Voiced by Derek Jacobi In “The Secret of Nimh,” the rat Nicodemus is a philosopher-king. Before the events of the film, he and his clan were SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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who appear to themselves as a problem (the others would not listen). Depending on whom you ask, the rat is either the impossibility of acceptance or the opportunity for redemption. Is it the former, the latter, or

experimented upon by the National Institute of Mental Health and transformed into intelligent, literate rodents. In a harrowing sequence we see rats and mice escaping, some being blown to their deaths as they flee through the ventilation system. Once free, they form a political community operating out from under a farmer’s rose bush.

There are rat council meetings, competing personalities, rhetorical appeals (one is reminded of Gustav Doré’s wood engraving “The Council of Rats”) and above them all there is Nicodemus, with light spilling out of his eyes like he’s tumescent with wisdom.

Director Don Bluth leaves the particulars of the rat society inscrutable—”The Secret of Nimh” is more concerned with the aesthetic and mystical than with the ethical. E.g., the plot hinges on a magical amulet that has no place being in the film except that it gives occasion for some spectacular animation at the finale. The rats do have a motivating ethical purpose, however. They long (like Remy in “Ratatouille”) to find a way to live not just for but by themselves. Their plan, according to Nicodemus, is “to live without stealing, of course.” The rose-bush society is powered by electricity siphoned from the farmer. The ethics involved receive no more development, but the Rats of Nimh distinguish themselves from Remy by being interested in creating a self-sufficient ideal community—that is the highest good of the intelligent rat-public. Nicodemus himself is as thoroughgoing a trope as Dumbledore, King Hamlet, or any other patrician who dies so the audience can know goodness is reproduced, rather than extinguished, after 8

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the death of the great leader. Because “The Secret of Nimh” is most concerned with the aesthetics of its characters, Nicodemus’ strongest quality is his appearance, which is rendered with supreme carbuncularity and dignity. In the second shot of the film we see Nicodemus’ ancient, long nailed hands as he writes in his journal. He is careful, graceful, and the words that appear on the page are shot through with the same light that lives in his body. With him the rat has overcome the offensiveness of its body to become something more in this late stage of development and intelligence. Like the human elder, Nicodemus is clothed in the honors of old age, raising him up as beauty passes away as a possibility (if beauty ever were possible for the rat, it doesn’t matter now). Venerable tufts constitute his face. In his brow’s circumflexion there is the infinite care of the benevolent patriarch.

Nicodemus, as we said earlier, is destroyed—crushed under debris while helping the protagonist. He was the wisest and most excellent of rats, but he ultimately had no place being in the world. When he calls out to Mrs. Frisby at the film’s climax, speaking through the amulet, he has become disembodied wisdom; he exists only as an echo, and that echo is on its way out. In our world, too, we still hear the echo, through the possibility of a Nicodemus has passed.

No one among us knows what we thought he knew. The knowing father dies when we leave the world of children’s films, and now the mischief is in a chorus of searching squeaks. And what do they want to know?

We can only address one type of rat: those

To all vermin accused of essence, whether you are choosing to reject or choosing to anneal, my thoughts are with you, you abandoned, greedy, hungry, scampering, hiding, ugly, steely, hard-nosed, tenacious survivors. some combination? How can we know if a rat is irredeemable? In stories, we can see if there is hope simply by whoever is doing the telling (cf. Hanna-Barbera, the champion of doomed essences). Can we perform the same reflection for ourselves, and ask who is telling our story? To all vermin accused of essence, whether you are choosing to reject or choosing to anneal, my thoughts are with you, you abandoned, greedy, hungry, scampering, hiding, ugly, steely, hard-nosed, tenacious survivors. You live on in the cracks and gutters. No one yet knows what to say to you. If I did, I would say it to myself, and make some crack in the problem that my life appears to me to be. Do we resign ourselves, with a slight emendation to Kafka: “Character can change, but not ours”? Or do we keep trying to find out, through the experiment of persevering, what our character will end up becoming? I will see you in the sewers.

Photo courtesy of Bug Zapper Pest Control

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PERSONAL ESSAYS Permanence Lessons

by Alessandra Occhiolini

W

hen I walked down Valencia sidewalks this fall I tried to teach myself lessons in permanence. I was unsure which parts of me had made it in the move back to San Francisco. I could see that my library had arrived in book-rate boxes, a blessing to us academic types, but unsure that I could read anything the same way anymore.

Uncertainty craves instruction. I would walk down from my apartment through the Mission to a deli where I would eat a lox eggs and onion scramble. On my way, I would look at all the flowers for sale.

The nicest were in front of Bi-Rite Market near Dolores Park. Back in early fall the display was overflowing with sunflowers and fashionably ugly scraggles of green and orange and purple.

I never bought them. They cost more money than my dinner and I was trying to prove myself practical. I needed to prove something to myself then: I even changed the sheets on my bed without having had sex on them. So I would keep walking down Valencia, switch over to Mission.

On Mission, I would stop in front of the sidewalk displays piled with persimmons.

I learned this fall that there are many types of persimmons. The hard small ones may be sliced into cereal or eaten like an apple but they make my tongue feel chalky and thick. The oblong soft ones are the finest of all fruits, and must be kept until they ripen into a caramel-sweet pool of sludge that you suck out of their deepening orange casing. When you get to sucking them, you’ll find a harder sort of sectioned flesh at the center that must be pulled at with the teeth. After I had to take a leave from work, too sick to get out of bed, I had tens of ripening persimmons in the apartment, and lived for days just sucking and teething at their sweetness. It wasn’t until I saw a specialist in November that I learned that persimmons were one of the

absolute worst things I could be eating.

Beside these piles of persimmons on Mission were more sunflowers, huge and unruly with a real sort of exuberance where the Bi-Rite ones had only a studied art. Sunflowers and daffodils are my favorite flowers, maybe because there’s something so unabashed about them. Though the flowers were always for sale, sometimes for less than my dinner, the beauty of them was that I was going to resist their allure. I was not going to take them home. The seeming restraint of this exercise appealed to me in a way that was more beautiful than the sunflowers themselves, a way that was hard to explain. I knew that I would not buy the flowers, and I knew

that I would not spend another fall here in San Francisco. It was too expensive, I said, but really I didn’t love it hard enough.

What did I love? I loved the impermanence of my walks. I wrote down a list in my notebook, Temporary Beautiful Things. I was working fourteen or more hours a day, six days a week on the greatest job of my life, the West coast tour of “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.” The show was a spectacular 24-hour extravaganza in which performer Taylor Mac sang a song from each decade of American history while both celebrating and deconstructing its content and context in turn. I was exhausted but too caught up in the magic of each day to realize just

At the Curran Theater. Photo by the author SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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how badly. At work, I would take logistical notes about flying giant inflatable penis balloons around the Curran Theatre. A few days later I’d be dressed up in sequins and hot pants, helping our performers toss the 25-foot dick from the balcony to the mezzanine to the orchestra. Onstage, Taylor Mac took on the history of America’s songbook, teasing out our appropriations, our war-mongering, our racism, our queer-bashing, our joy. From stage left, I managed the ensemble cues, occasionally running out onstage to bring Taylor a

Dishes piled in the sink and I tried to parse my mess into something exuberant. prop, or to keep the audience members who Taylor called onto the stage from sitting too close to the footlights. Starstruck, the lucky few on stage with Taylor would lean back into the heat of the lights, nearly burning their hair off. I thought they were fools, but I too was leaning in too close to the bright lights, risking flame.

I came in hours before my call, even if I’d barely slept. I knew the show would end and so I wanted to live every bit of it harder. Early morning I’d be down in the green room, alone with my tea from the coffee table and extra costume or prop work. Taylor called the entire show a “radical faerie realness ritual,” which at first seemed like a wonderful combination of words—later I realized that Taylor actually meant for the show to be a ritual in every six-hour performance, a ritual of the kind that queer radical faeries practice all the time without a stage. I held onto the word “ritual.” It was a better word than “performance.” Anthropologists decree that rituals take place within a liminal space, a place of transformation, magic, and danger. No one can live in the liminal space, because it’s impossible to maintain the necessary energy. If you stay too long, it destroys you.

Theatre is always a ritual, but I’d never felt its edges so strongly before. When I got home at two in the morning I would thumb through my copy of Euripides’ “Bacchae.” “The Bacchae” begins as a story of return: Dionysus is returning to his birthplace, Thebes, to demand tribute and recognition. In the process, his band of followers and the women of Thebes trans10

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form the city into a sexy, ritualistic mess.

Intoxicated with transformation, the Bacchic revelers run to the woods, hunting and suckling animals in turn. They are so free, so powerful, that they grow too close to the divine. They are consumed by the will of Dionysus, eventually tearing apart their own children without recognition. Intoxication transforms them, but complete intoxication with the divine is clearly dangerous.

At work, I could feel that I was growing too intoxicated with ritual but I didn’t want to care. I was literally dizzied: I was on so much pain medication to keep going during the run of 24-Decades that sometimes I felt like I could float outside myself. The surreal quality of the show did little to steady me. I was only cast further and further into the divine. One day, we rehearsed our acrobats for Taylor’s take on “Home on the Range.” The acrobats would fall into each other’s arms, lift each other high, move slowly as if in a dream. And as if in a dream, I walked out of the theatre and called someone I love.

“Hi,” I said, wondering where I was. “I want to support you like my acrobats support each other when they dance to ‘Home on the Range.’”

“Are you high?” Eliza asked me.

“Maybe,” I said, “but I mean it.”

I

wrote another list, Returning Beautiful Things. I thought about fall in Philadelphia. I took more and more pills. I pushed through more shows, lay in bed on my equity Monday too tired to put the sheets back on my bed once I washed them. Dishes piled in the sink and I tried to parse my mess into something exuberant. But I was near the part of the Bacchic frenzy where the women collapse. I did not anticipate the collapse of my body.

How strange! I was learning then that I was a better English major than theatre artist, that I understood the curves of narrative in a skin-to-skin way. And still, I did not see disaster coming. I did not see the revelers come back to reality. I did not see what my refusal to leave the liminal space would cost me. Somehow, the collapse of my body came as a complete surprise.

“Some god shakes your house / ruin arrives / ruin does not leave,” Anne Carson writes in “Antigonick.” She is speaking of Oedipus and Thebes. Thebes seems unable to escape ruin, and I could sympathize as I lay in the ruin, sheetless. I had been in ruin before, but I hadn’t know how to speak the language of this most unforgiving of countries. This past spring, my ex-girlfriend

left me as I was going into cancer testing.

At the time I called the desertion a betrayal of biblical proportions despite both my relief to be loosed from her and my fairly dubious knowledge of the good book. This fall when I could not rise from my bed, my pain grew into meaning and towards the language of epic tragedy, a language that I studied for four years but only understood in totality this November.

What have I learned about tragedy? The language of tragedy is the language of falling without hope of being caught. Even the survivors blind themselves, falling away from curiosity and perception. The fascinating thing about the fall of Oedipus is that he falls away from a world that he has polluted since birth: there has never been an Eden for Oedipus. The Western conception of falling is so wrapped up in Eve and the original fall that there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about our bodies, their sins, and paradise.

We assume that Eden existed purely, and might have lasted forever. We assume our bodies will always be healthy. When the Edenic collapses, when our bodies collapse, we look for the sins that we have been hiding in our chests. But Oedipus!

Oedipus falls from his own polluted city, which is always vulnerable to collapse. My body, like Thebes, was no Eden. Like all bodies, it arrived with collapse patterned from within.

They say that Eve may have eaten a pomegranate like Persephone and not an

My body, like all bodies, arrived with collapse patterned from within. apple, or maybe a fig. I can’t eat figs anymore—too many seeds. If I were to say what Eve ate to fall I would say a persimmon. I’d say that Eve sucked a persimmon from its skin because it tasted so sweet, teethed at the center. And I’d say that that sweetness intoxicated her, that she didn’t notice she was falling from the assumption of paradise until she was covering herself with fig leaves in shame. I guess I think that Eve didn’t see any of this shit coming. She didn’t speak the right language of tragedy.

What did the “Oedipus Rex” make of persimmons? I don’t know, I think Oedipus and his line would suck at the fruit

while they could. There is no permanence to Thebes, but there is certainty in ruin.

My permanence lessons grew confused.

Why not buy the flowers and at least keep them until they wilted? If the certainty is collapse, is an affair with impermanence resistance or the original sin? I was too busy falling for a while to figure out the answers. But then I got a call that was all about falling.

“I want to support you like your acrobats supported each other,” Eliza would say to me as I lay in bed, and I would close my eyes and think of sunflowers and glitter and gabapentin and the hours I’d spent at work worried about him, and I wondered if anyone had ever realized the solution to falling without end is simply learning acrobatics. I hadn’t realized that though my body was patterned for ruin, my heart was still an acrobat, ready to catch and be caught on an epic scale.

These love-acrobatics called me back to being twenty and training for a summer in movement theatre. It was perhaps the happiest time of my life. I was in love with Philadelphia and a man who would watch

the river with me. We were obsessed with accessing joyous emotion through exhaustive movement, and both bought a book called “The Acrobat of the Heart.”

I don’t think he ever read it, but I read it over and over. It was about what the body knows, and about letting the body teach the heart. And though I didn’t know it then, it was a manual for collapse.

A lesson in permanence: disaster arrives, and even our bodies collapse into impermanent membranes. But the acrobatics of the heart! These backflips intervene. My body contains its own collapse, but yours does too. What it also contains is your acrobatic heart, full of loves that remain. The universal language of the body can be spoken in the land of ruin just as easily as in paradise, for the two states coexist. A radical permanence principle, as proposed by Alessandra: a broken body is just a healthy body that has physically comprehended its impermanence. What I know now is that the body understands narratives that the brain can’t grasp until they have run their course. My body saw the collapse

A Love Letter to My Scars

by Abby Diebold

W

hen I was a kid, all I wanted to do was climb trees. I would get to school and pull up my raggedy old basketball shorts—hand-medowns from my brother that frequently fell far past my knees—and give a guided tour of the bruises and scars that covered my twiggy legs. This one is from the big maple in the park, I would say. This one’s from the pine in my backyard.

As I grew older, and taller, so did the trees. I traded in my basketball shorts for skinny jeans with tears exposing scab-covered knees. I monologued proudly about the messy patchwork of cuts around my ankles, the kind that only comes from running barefoot through overgrown grass, and the massive blue-and-black number on my thigh from an untimely collision with a soccer ball. The bruises and cuts were different, but their meaning was the same. The marks on my legs were a map to somewhere deep inside me, more real than my words could ever be. I wore my

abrasions, my imperfections, as badges of honor. Look at what my body can do.

And then I watched the scars and bruises change, from a constant chorus of can to an unending drone of can’t. The biology was the same, blood flowing to different levels of skin, forming lines and blotches and mountains and valleys – yet they were so, so different.

The bruises on my knees from days spent kneeling on the cold, unforgiving floor of the bathroom, willing myself to disappear.

Stretch marks around my hips like badges of shame. Cuts on my wrists, no longer the erratic marks of nature but neat, orderly – a superficial form of control over chaos.

The pinprick holes and bruising of blood tests. Leg scrapes from drunken falls, falls I was too blacked out to remember, falls I numbed myself against. My own blood under my fingernails. Bruises around my collarbone and thighs from him, from the same pattern of panic, submission, pain.

The marks faded. My body is no longer a book, a blank page on which the words of my pain are written in letters made of scrapes and scratches, to be perused at lei-

without the interlocutor of Thebes, without all these bullshit metaphors. The flowers don’t matter, it’s the feeling of padding down Valencia that does. The persimmons don’t matter, it’s how sweet they tasted.

A final permanence lesson: your body is your bone-house. It may betray you, but it cannot desert you until you evacuate fully. For each betrayal it hoards golden things in turn, loves that live inside you after the flowers wilt. What lasts in you, when the flowers die and you can’t eat the fruits you desire? I close my eyes and I am with Eliza in the thunderstorm, I am being caught again and again, I am down by the Schuylkill smoking a cigar with a beautiful boy, I am trying to do a real backflip, I am onstage with Taylor Mac, I am running up a hill in North Adams day after day until I become a god.

I

’m not sure, but as I try to talk about all these lasting things, as they rise to the tip of my tongue, I think they taste persimmon-sweet. u

PERSONAL ESSAY

sure. But the wounds remain, and while they can no longer be seen, they can be felt. I will never forget how loudly, how fervently, my entire body screamed, I can’t.

I can’t do this anymore.

I used to love my bruises, not because they showed I had succeeded but because they showed I had tried.

I worked as hard as I could to silence it, to drown the pain, to cover the wounds in enough layers of dressing so I would not see them bleeding, to simply make it all stop. The scars and bruises became irremovable can’ts, marks of battles lost in a war that I did not have the energy to try SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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to win.

I used to love my bruises, not because they showed that I had succeeded, but because they showed that I had tried. I would laugh as I showed the dark island on my hip, eyes twinkling as I recounted the tale of an epic plummet off a slippery branch from ten feet up. I was not ashamed to have fallen from the tree; I was proud to have been in the tree in the first place. I became afraid of my bruises when I lost my sense of strength, my sense of self. I was not a person with blemishes – I was the blemishes, the failures, the falls from slippery branches from ten feet up. I could not see the girl who had climbed the tree, the girl who still got up in the morning, who kept fighting. I was just the girl who had fallen from the tree. I was just the bruises.

What I felt, in those darkest moments, was an overwhelming sense of shame. I wore only long-sleeved shirts for months – I did not want anyone to see the souvenirs of my pain displayed on my arms,

taunting me from my own skin. You can’t beat me. You can hide me, but I’m still here. I dreaded showering, changing, any activity where I was forced to confront the new patterns forming over my flesh.

In my abrasions, I saw pain, and because I saw pain, I saw weakness. I could not prevent myself from hurting, from being hurt, even from hurting myself, so what good was I? I refused to see pain as anything but fault. I refused to see the scars as belonging to both the girl who had fallen from the tree, and the girl who had climbed it. I could not imagine myself being anything but weak.

We are all blemished; to be blemished is simply to be. I will always carry with me abrasions, both visible and not. Some will be easy to explain, some will not; some will bring pride, while others bring that same gnawing, crippling sense of shame. Some have new names: “trauma” and “triggers” and lists of symptoms that form checklists

A Mal Tiempo Buena Cara

by Gilbert Orbea

L

ife is a cheesecake, Gilbert.

That was what my grand-aunt Mayda said as she savored a slice on a Monday night in Havana. Yes, I’m starting this piece with one of those enigmatic quotes you hear, the kind used to start a piece while the reader groans because they know you’ll reveal the significance of it at the end.

I was 15 the last time I visited Cuba. Six years later, I had enough disposable income and just enough maturity to book a flight back to Cuba on my own. My course on Cuban literature, history, and politics had instilled a constant state of unrest in me—I had to go back. I had to see things I didn’t appreciate as a teenager, spend time with family I might never see again, and just be on that island. Cubans, like many Latinos, have an insatiable desire to reconnect with their roots—even if they were born and raised in northern New Jersey.

I thought the trip would be nothing more than booking a flight to see some family.

But upon hearing I was going back, my mother warned me that I would come to 12

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regret it. Initially, it seemed like she meant this in a monetary sense: I would have to pay to rent a car, supposedly; I would have to pay for the baggage, and the visa, and to use the bathrooms. My parents began to complain daily about the small ways the Cuban government screws over Amer-

My mother warned me that I would come to regret going back. icans. I’d have to exchange American dollars for CUC, which is taxed at 13%, while other currencies are not. I’d have to pay more for everything because I was an extranjero, or foreigner. I was told to pay for every meal when I went out with my family and offer to buy them groceries or clothing, because any amount of help makes a big difference. My ticket was just over $300 round-trip from Newark, which ended up being a meaningless number compared to what I would spend once I arrived. But behind my mother’s warning was a sense that the dollar amount of the

in the newest edition of the DSM. But every mark, every blemish, is a reminder of my humanity, of the daily struggle that is a side effect of existence.

As I age, so do my bruises. They grow, or shrink, or evolve, from black to blue to sickly yellow, from red ridges to white streaks thin as strands of hair. I don’t show them off, the way I did when I was young, but I try not to hide them, either. There are many days I wish I did not have to see them, to live with them, days when I wish I could explain them away as easily as a fall from a tree. Ultimately, however, they hold an important message that I carry with me. To have wounds is to have something to bruise. To have pains in your legs and a weight in your heart and an ache in your spirit is to be constantly, constantly reminded that you have legs, and a heart, and a spirit; they are undeniable, unquietable, irremovable reminders that you are here. u

PERSONAL ESSAY

trip would not be what I would come to regret most. The costs were much more than anticipated—they were far-reaching and emotional.

That was my first lesson: a trip to Cuba costs a lot more than you think it does when you have family on the island.

It costs your family the burden of remembering the hardships they endured just to survive, like when my mother was warned by her father to get out, whatever it took. It costs you the sadness of knowing you are going with an economic privilege unthinkable to the Cuban pueblo, as I learned after paying for family members’ meals and groceries and taxi rides. It felt both right to help relieve them of some economic burden and wrong that they should deal with it in the first place. It costs you the pain of juggling your desire to reunite with a land you claim through blood, with the oftentimes intense sadness of seeing how things are over there, politically and economically. It’s almost impossible to go without feeling a sense both of regret and intense attachment.

The day before I got on the plane, my mother said she regretted not booking a seat on the flight with me. A Cuban is dis-

gusted, yet pulled in, by their homeland.

They are disgusted by the sense that going to Cuba funnels dollars to the government, instead of the people. My parents suggested I give a little to every individual I could, because 1 CUC, or 25 Cuban pesos, goes a long way. When I could I ate at private, family-run paladares, which operate like serving food out of the kitchen in your home. My mother and father resent the fact that many of their family members and friends have been denied the chance to leave the country, even to temporarily visit us in the States. But regardless of these grievances, my parents, and I as a Cuban-American, and maybe even all Cubans and all Cuban-Americans still feel something special about being in

Cuba. It feels right, in a way this essay can’t elaborate.

S

oon after purchasing my ticket, I read a piece on the allure of Havana and Cuba to Westerners. I can practically see the bus of English people, taking photos of the dirty streets and eating $15 meals to another performance of “Chan Chan.” They were everywhere, and it was repulsive to me. And yet I couldn’t shake that I too, despite being Cuban-American, was pulled to the island by that same godforsaken allure; the allure of unmaintained buildings in Havana with people trying to earn a tourist dollar, farms with children drinking sugar water for breakfast a mere hundred kilometers out from Havana.

Despite knowing that this was the truth— that Cuba is a repressive state with lots of hardship is fact—something deep inside of me, unknowingly, was falling for the same, sick desire to see the decay and suffering that brings tourists by the hundreds of thousands to what was once called the “Paris of the Caribbean.” To paraphrase an analysis of “Dirty Havana Trilogy,” a novel by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, the gross, depraved aspects of ‘ruined’ Havana exist as much because of the country’s need to maintain this image in order to fulfill the tourist’s desire as it does from its political and economic failures.

I went to Old Havana, and Fusterlandia, and ate lots of delicious food, and saw the Revolutionary Plaza. Was I any better than a tourist? Or was I a tourist with just

Only in Cuba do you realize how notCuban you are—and how Cuban they are.

“We Are Still in Combat.” Photo by Gilbert Orbea

a bit more stake in what people were going through? Even though I checked a bag in with 50 pounds of cooking ingredients, clothes, and medicines for my family, I wasn’t sure. Every time I gave a dollar to someone who would draw me on the street or sell me some ice cream, I felt like a messianic figure. The extranjero gets all 24 flavors of ice cream to choose from at Coppelia (the national ice cream parlor) when you pay with CUC, the tourist currency; you get three flavors if you’re a Cuban paying with pesos. It was fundamentally unfair and remains unfair to Cubans. To my father, Cuba’s government has gotten away with one of the world’s longest lasting apartheids of the rich and the poor—which translates to the tourist and the Cuban citizen.

There are two entirely different worlds on that island, and they’re roughly split up by where you’re from and how deep your pockets go. Fortunately for me—to the misfortune of all Cubans—I had the right passport and, comparatively, deep pockets. But when you’re surrounded with that juxtaposition, you’ll never let go and enjoy yourself as much as you want to. It’s impossible. You can’t pay for the plates of grown adults for a week at the age of 21 and not feel repulsed that they cannot do the same. I was unable to comprehend how they got by financially, their SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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dual currencies, or their inability to find eggs and potatoes being sold. And it felt wrong, all the time—to be Cuban-American and yet very, very detached from it all. It felt as if I was cheating my family, to say I was Cuban while I did things almost no Cuban can do. I very casually claimed my ancestry without understanding and respect for what it really entails.

That was my second lesson: no matter how much I think I am Cuban, only in Cuba do you realize how not-Cuban you are—and how Cuban they are.

B

ut never mistake the Cuban spirit for one that is easily put down.

These are, after all, the same people that stared the United States in the face with a disturbing readiness to go to nuclear war. This is the same pueblo that survived the Special Period and an economic blockade by the most powerful country in the history of the world—not even the Soviet Union could do that. This is the same country that has lived off of American cars from the 1950s and Russian Ladas for nearly 58 years and counting. The Cuban nation has maintained a constant, lively sense of humor and a willingness to be one of the greatest social experiments the world has ever seen. The Cuban people are warm, kind, and compassionate; they are the hardest working people you will ever meet in your life, if my mother and father are any indication; they will spread themselves thin to give you what

they do not normally have; they have an enduring sense of optimism and pride in the adjective cubano. It suggests hope, resilience, opportunity, and an everlasting gaze towards the future. I am so happy to say I am a Cuban-American. Ask any Cuban what they think about the island and they’ll almost always respond with a comment on its remarkable presence on the world stage despite its size and population. It’s a source of pride for all of us.

Mayda, my grand-aunt, likes to call herself la abuela de la canción, or The Grandmother of Songs. She loves cheesecake. One day during my trip, she recalled a time she walked several kilometers just to find a piece of cheesecake in Havana, to savor it during a particularly strong craving. She never explained what made life resemble cheesecake. But her story of traveling kilometers for a slice is telling; if life is cheesecake, her journey for a slice affirms the truth that Cubans live life to the fullest. They do whatever it takes to savor every drop of joy it contains. That’s the most beautiful aspect of the Cuban people, despite the hardships. They become U.S. senators, or establish a Communist government 90 miles from Miami, or become the Grandmother of Songs, or have one of the best and cheapest healthcare systems in the world. They laugh and dance and sing and cry to their own drum, because they can and because they should. I made sure to get my grand-aunt as many pieces of cheesecake as I possibly could during

A Tale of Two Phillies

by Alexis Riddick

I

’m from Philly. Yes, I go to school pretty close to home. No, I don’t go home that often. Yes, I’m obsessed with Wawa. Now that I’ve cleared up the basic information, I have a confession to make.

I’m not from Philly. At least, I never considered myself a person from a singular entity called “Philly” until going to a college where people came from other places.

Back home, when people asked where I was from, I would probably say something like “North Philly, but I live in the Northeast now.” If the person asking was from North Philly themselves, or was fa-

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miliar with North Philly neighborhoods, I would be more specific and say “I’m from Allegheny originally, and I lived not too far from Hunting Park for a few years, but now I live in the Northeast, near Cottman and Frankford.”

Anyone from Philly or with close family members and friends who are from Philly can attest to this fact: we speak about Philly in terms of its multiplicities.

We don’t reference our regions as regions of one city or one “Philly,” but we consider them different “Phillies.” For example, if you’ve been reading this essay, you’ll notice that I’ve said I’m from “North Philly” and not from “the northern part of Philly.”

I’ve only just started my Introduction to

my week there—because she deserved it.

M

y greatest and only hope is that I can one day travel to Cuba by simply booking a flight. I don’t want it to evoke memories of hunger and having to leave your homeland in my parents, while they simultaneously yearn for their patria. I don’t want to go and be lifted up and given all the options as an extranjero while Cuban citizens cannot find basic groceries. I don’t want to go and see a ruined Havana, a facade of decay, for the delight of tourists or myself. I don’t want to feel the incredibly uncomfortable pull within myself, as a Cuban-American, of inevitably feeling like a tourist in a space that should feel like home. I want to see my family and their economic situation improve. I want to see every Cuban’s life be as fulfilling as possible, and for them to forever maintain that liveliness, generosity, and easygoing attitude. Basically, I want everyone to be able to have a slice of cheesecake if they want one.

This, however, isn’t possible for the time being. I don’t know when it will be. Until that time, every $300 ticket to Havana entails a lot more than packing a bag. It entails soul searching, a realization of your economic and political privilege at home, and a reminder to be grateful and eternally dedicated to helping others. Trips to Cuba are never simple. u

PERSONAL ESSAY

Linguistics course, but I feel confident in my knowledge that semantics are important. I feel like the fact that we reference the regions of Philly as different “Phillies” is indicative of how drastically different those “Phillies” are. And how segregated.

The Philly in which someone lives determines a lot about the way they live.

Differences between neighborhoods can range from demographics to which businesses operate there to investments in infrastructure (for example, my grandmother’s North Philly streets have been stripped for years and have yet to be replaced, but the renovations of Love Park in Center City are going smoothly). Those who live within the city are used to catch-

ing the sub (the Broad Street Line) or the el (the Market Frankford Line), while my upper-middle class suburban folks who like to latch onto the popularity of the city and claim it as their own tend to take the Regional Rail. Where do you get your coffee from? Starbucks (which operates mostly in Center City and South Philly), Wawa (especially populous in the Northeast), or Dunkin Donuts (which, to my pleasant surprise operates everywhere)?

Are you used to seeing mostly Black and brown people, or mostly white people with the occasional family of color? Are your schools well-funded, poorly-funded, or—as a result of the School District of Philadelphia budget crisis of 2013—shut down? The answers to the more demographic-based questions will change and already are in the process of changing because of gentrification (gotta love it, am I right?), but the segregation remains, simply with new boundaries. And even within regions, strong variations exist. For example, there’s the white, hipster, upper-class part of South Philly (home to South Street: think Jim’s Steaks, Philly AIDS Thrift, etc.)

and the part with more people of color, and more low-income people (which is actually called Southwest Philly). It’s hard to ignore how the ways in which neighborhoods are created is influenced by race and socioeconomic class. Why do we have a Southwest, a Northwest, and a West Philly—all regions with large Black populations— not have a Southeast or East Philly? How was the map drawn?

How are these decisions decided upon?

And how do those decisions contribute to the stereotypes placed upon those regions and their inhabitants?

I

’ve always found it interesting how people make meaning, or more specifically, make assumptions. “Philly” can mean many different things, and it all depends on the person asking and listening, and it’s the same for North Philly or Northeast Philly, or any other “Philly.”

I used to get frustrated every time I watched the news because the only time I would hear about “North Philly” was when someone got shot, or some fight broke out, or some arrests were made (and

it still upsets me, it’s just that I don’t watch the news as much anymore). Does crime happen there? Yes, just like it happens everywhere else. Crime happens in the Northeast too, but the funny thing is that those stories aren’t reported on as much.

And when they are, it’s always “Mayfair”

The Philly in which someone lives determines a lot about they way they live. or “Tacony,” in specific neighborhoods, not the monolithic “Northeast.” Case in point, you won’t hear anyone say the Northeast is dangerous. You might hear someone say an old man was beaten up in Mayfair, but the Northeast’s reputation for being “safe” is still intact. The major difference between these two regions?

North Philly is predominantly Black, and

Joyce’s - Queen of Soul Food on West Allegheny Ave. Photo from Google images

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Northeast Philly is predominantly white.

Words like “safe” and “dangerous,” “quiet” and “loud,” “peaceful” and my personal favorite, “sketchy” (basically a less harsh alternative to “ghetto”) are entrenched in anti-Blackness.

T

his is all to say that I find it both funny and troubling when people think of Philly as a diverse, inclusive safe haven. I can totally understand why they do though: the city has a majority-minority population, and this is especially impressive for students of color who hail from predominantly white areas. But this doesn’t mean that people of color are any less marginalized, nor any less segregated.

Philadelphia is the perfect case study for the ways in which systemic oppression operates in covert ways. And it’s no different from most Northern cities and regions, both historically and currently. I remember a few years back reading an article about how schools and school districts in the state of New York are more segregated than most other districts nationwide.

And I remember thinking “Well, that’s odd. New York is really diverse, isn’t it?”

Of course, that was before I actually met people from various boroughs and saw that the way they spoke about the distinctions between those boroughs, and neighborhoods within those boroughs, sounds similar to the distinctions I’ve been bringing up about the small city of Philadelphia.

So, I want to bring us back to that point

I made earlier, about how the notions of “safety” and what it means for a place

Words like “safe” and “dangerous,” “quiet” and “loud” are entrenched in anti-Blackness. to “unsafe” is linked to anti-Blackness.

Contrary to “popular” (read: racist) belief, I’ve never felt more unsafe or unwelcome than when I moved into my current neighborhood, which is majority white and in a higher income bracket than my previous neighborhoods. I remember the time my brother came inside the house after playing basketball in the driveway with his friends. They had a hoop set up that they moved whenever cars came down the road. Unlike the dorms we have at Swarthmore, driveways don’t have quiet hours. So when my brother came in saying that an older white woman had threatened to call the cops on them if they kept “making noise,” I was a bit shocked.

This happened in 2016, which was had some of the highest numbers of police brutality cases. So that’s all I could think about when he relayed that message, and the fact that this sixteen-year-old kid is already being linked to and threatened

The author’s elementary school, closed in 2013.

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with the criminal (in)justice system.

I want to conclude by saying that I’m not passing judgment on anyone who is in love with Philly. I love this city, too. But stuff like the Liberty Bell, or the overpriced cafes, or the “cleanliness” or “safety” of the Regional Rail does not enchant me. These are the touristy, “safe” parts of the city. In some ways, I had an amazing childhood, and I lived most of it in my “unsafe” North Philly neighborhoods. So when I think of the areas and the moments that I love the most, it’s from those “unsafe” North Philly neighborhoods. I love the corner store by my old house that used to make the best hoagies and sandwiches. The owners gave us free candy on Halloween, and would always talk to us and ask how we were doing.

I’m enthralled by the hair store near my grandmother’s house that has jojoba oil, duckbill clips, plastic caps, and my other natural hair needs for affordable prices.

I reminisce about the Widener branch of the Free Library, near Lehigh Avenue.

My mom, my brother and I learned how to make something the instructor called “taco salad” there at one of their cooking classes. The young librarian, Crystal, used to recommend me books. My family and I would check out some of their DVDs and have movie night at the house, sometimes complete with popcorn or other crunchy snacks we had in the house. This, no, these are the Phillies I love. These are where I’m from. u

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My images reflect a drive to capture unexpected angles, unconventional framing, and overlooked spots.

FICTION&POETRY I Am, Or A Pizza Party

FICTION

by Sophia Abraham-Raveson

T

he sun was so strong this morning that the sweet peppers needed an extra hour of watering, which is why I was late. I hurriedly biked over to the neighboring Tetzlan community—I had to be constantly reminded that people used the term “neighbors” much more loosely in rural southwest Colorado than in the congested suburbs where I grew up—and looked around for the sweat lodge. I started wandering toward a teepee-like structure when Joe called out my name.

“Oh, hey, Joe! Did I miss it?” I replied.

“Miss what?” he asked, making no move to get up from the patch of dirt he was laying on.

“The sweat lodge…Sara told me to come over at noon.”

“Right, yeah, it hasn’t started yet. You can go inside the tent if you want, see if Tomás needs help setting up.”

“Oh, okay, are you gonna head in too?”

I asked.

“Nah, I’ll meet you all in there in a little while,” Joe replied.

I made no effort to calculate what “a little while” might look like, and instead lifted up the bottom of my striped t-shirt to wipe the sweat off my forehead before heading into the tent.

“No Dianna today?” Tomás asked as I walked into the teepee. He was assembling a pile of flat rocks in the center of the canvas flooring.

“No, she stayed on the farm to finish my animal chores. She really wanted me to be able to come here. She keeps talking about how amazing this was for her,” I said.

“Yes, Dianna comes often. We love having her. I’m sure she’s making you feel right at home over there.”

“Oh, yeah, she’s helping me figure things out, like how to milk the goats and feed the chickens and all that. Do you need any help setting up?”

“Sure, thank you. You can grab some of the stones out there and start carrying them in, if they’re not too heavy.”

“Don’t worry, after three weeks of car-

rying five-gallon buckets of water, wheelbarrows full of compost, coolers of vegetables, I think I’m up to the challenge,” I said, starting to smile.

“Ha, they really work you girls hard over there,” Tomás said as we walked out of the teepee. “Maybe you should come over here more often. These boys aren’t really good for much that involves standing.”

He smiled at me warmly while nodding toward the now-sleeping Joe. “How long have you been at Tetzlan?”

I asked as we started piling up the stones.

“I was born here. My dad founded this whole community. We see a lot of these young people from all over come and go, but this is the only home I’ve ever known.”

About thirty minutes later, or maybe

Suddenly every pair of eyes was ready to absorb me. I had somehow missed the instructions for this activity. it was an hour, we were all sitting in the teepee: it was time. The air in the tent smelled musty, or maybe it was the people inside of it. I wondered what it would do to someone to inhale steaming mold for a few hours. I hoped it would at least set me back enough that I could take a day off from milking the goats. Three head-butts from Redwing was about all I could take this week.

“Zamira, it’s your turn,” Tomás said, and suddenly every pair of eyes was ready to absorb me. I had somehow missed the instructions for this activity.

“Oh, uh, today, I am thinking about my mom, and I guess I’m searching for clarity

and communication—” “No, it’s your turn to put your herbs on the hot stones.”

“Oh, right, sorry,” I replied, walking up to the stones. My jean shorts felt shorter than I remembered as I leaned down to offer the sprigs of spearmint I had cut from the lower garden.

“And please remember, you may step outside at any point. This ceremony is sacred, but so is your body; everyone’s body responds differently, listen to that. We will now begin.”

It is day one, and it is party time. The people walking toward me have dust evaporating from their bodies; they are a sea of flowy florals and tie-dye and there are still more people climbing out of the van. I call out to Dianna to let someone know our guests have arrived, and I realize the dead frog is still next to my shoe. I don’t want to kick it aside with my sandaled feet, so I walk away. I’m sure they could use my help with the pizza making.

“Hey Zamira, could you chop the hot peppers?” my new boss Jack asks me.

I grab the ziploc bag of peppers and a knife and start chopping. After a few minutes, I realize my fingers are numb—the hot peppers seem to be frozen. I put the pepper down to revitalize my fingers.

“No, see, if you hold the knife like this, you can chop much faster,” Jack says, demonstrating for me. “Just a hot tip.”

“Thanks,” I say, taking the knife back.

When I finish cutting up the peppers and placing them on the pizzas, I am alone in the outdoor kitchen. The Tetzlan community members are just a few feet away.

They are mingling.

I am hiding.

“Zamira, why don’t you bring one of those out here?” Jack calls to me. “What’s a pizza party without the pizza?”

I cannot hide anymore; I bring him the pizza. And now I am at the pizza party. I turn from group to group, trying to find a way into the conversation. There is selling SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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things at the farmer’s market and where to hike and how to grow weed and transitioning from banjo to guitar, but mostly there is noises and pauses and staring into space or into the pizza oven.

“Hey, I’m Sara,” the taller blonde girl says, or maybe she inhales every cloud in one breath. The noise of the party fills the dry red air between the mountains, expanding outward without any trees to stop it.

“Nice to meet you, I’m Zamira,” I remember to say.

“Rain,” the shorter girl with the dyedblack hair says. She is looking over at Sara and smiling, as if this is all an inside joke between the two of them.

“Oh, is it supposed to rain tonight?” I ask.

“No, that’s my name,” Rain says, as though no part of her could ever be angry.

“But we are going to the Rainbow Festival, soon I think,” Sara says. “Have you ever been?” Sara is wearing wide-legged flowy pants pulled up to her belly-button and Rain is wearing a short-sleeved dress covered in tiny daisies.

“Oh, no, what’s that? Is it near here?”

Rain laughs, still looking at Sara.

“It’s all over, really. Wherever you find it,” Sara says.

I can’t think of anything to say.

“It’s so nice to be around other girls. It’s just the two of us over at Tetzlan,” Sara says, suddenly holding my hands in hers.

I don’t move my hands but avoid direct eye contact—her gaze feels familiar and unsettling. It’s so nice to be around other girls. “Oh yeah, I’ve noticed. And the guys all seem to have the same name.”

Sara lets out a spacey laugh. “Maybe later you could show me—” Sara drops my hands as one of the goats walks up to her and starts nudging her leg.

“Oh, she’s so sweet! What’s her name?”

“Oh, uh, I think that’s Willow? Or Maple? I just got here last night,” I reply, but Sara’s focus is now on Mystery Goat, and Rain is bent down playing with the two of them. I walk away to see where I can fit myself. There’s a spot at the table between Joe and Joe. “Hey, I’m Zamira,” I say.

“Hey,” Joe says, looking at me as if just by sitting down I’ve done something remarkable. “How are you liking it here?”

“Well I just got here last night, so I’m still figuring things out. It’s so beautiful here though,” I say, looking up at the mountains around us.

“Oh yeah, you should really come visit us over at Tetzlan sometime. We do a 32

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sweat lodge once a week, on Sundays. It’s a beautiful thing. You gotta experience it at least once. Changed my life.”

“What is that?”

“This spiritual thing, it’s been around for centuries, or longer. You sit in this tent with steam and smoking sage, and you’re with people, with each other, and with yourself, and you just sweat. But you feel this thing, and you smell it, and you breathe it, it’s amazing.”

“I don’t know, I’m already having trouble breathing here,” I say.

“What?” he says, confused.

“Probably the altitude,” I say.

The sun is starting to set, but the mountains block the view. The sky is just a warm, shining, gray. Joe looks at me, or looks through me.

“Where are you from?” Joe says.

“New York,” I say.

“The city?”

“No, just north of the city.” I grab a piece of watermelon from a bowl. “Where are you from?”

“Oh, you know,” he replies. “Everywhere, nowhere, somewhere in between.”

I look around to see if there’s any other conversation I can join. Dianna is nowhere to be seen.

Soon the pizza is nearly finished and everyone is sitting around the fire. I sit down on an upturned log and listen to the music they’ve started playing. I recognize the Hare Krishna mantra they are singing from the musical “Hair.” I consider singing along, but decide not to. They seem more spiritually invested in this song than I could ever pretend to be. Whoever’s playing guitar doesn’t seem to know more than one chord. Sara has a small drum between her legs.

When the song changes I tune back in and hear Joe singing hypnotically. The melody is hard to make out, but still it sounds familiar. I listen closer to the lyrics and realize that it is a Jack Johnson song. I get up to go help with the dishes.

Dianna’s standing at the outdoor sink next to piles of plates, cutting boards, forks, knives, glasses.

“Need any help?” I ask.

“There’s only one sponge,” she responds.

“You can dry though, if you want.”

I walk to the sink. “Did you talk to Joe?” I ask. “He’s pretty wacky.” I grab a dishrag and start drying the plates as she hands them to me.

“Which one is that again?”

“You know, longish brown hair, loose tie-dye shirt…honestly I don’t know,” I say and we both laugh a little.

“How’s your first day at the farm going?” Dianna asks.

“I don’t know, it still doesn’t feel real. I kind of can’t believe I’m here. The people from Tetzlan do seem really cool, I just, I’ve never been around people like that before. People who don’t seem rooted, whose stories aren’t grounded.”

“Hmm,” Dianna hums, scrubbing at a sheet pan. It seems there’s some crusted sauce she can’t get off.

“I don’t feel like I’ve gotten to know this place at all though. It’s really nice that Jack wanted to throw a party for me, but I barely even know where the bathroom is yet,” I say.

“Well yeah, you just got here. I know you still have to adjust. But really, this place is kinda cool. Jack is a serious downer but it’s beautiful here, and everyone else is great.

I play my ukulele to the goats sometimes, they seem to like that. I’ve been working here for about six months now, and yeah sometimes Jack makes me crazy or the nothing around us makes me scream but mostly I’m here, and I wanna be. I don’t know, I think you’ll have a good time once you get used to the rhythm of things,” Dianna says. “How long are you planning on

The Jack Johnson song is still playing, or maybe it’s something else. Devoid of melody, everything sounds pretty much the same. staying?”

“Just for a few months, hopefully enough time to give me some idea of what I want to do with my life. I just couldn’t live at home after graduation. I needed to do something to know that I was independent, capable. I’ll save some money here, then figure out where I wanna be. I just don’t know anything about farming, really.

Hopefully I’ll get the hang of it.”

“Don’t worry, you will.” She’s still scrubbing at that pan.

“Do you want me to try?”

“Try what?” she looks confused.

“Scrubbing the pan? I thought you

might want a break.”

She takes the drying rag from me and I take her sponge. I use the rough green side to get at the sauce. It really is caked on there.

“I think I’m gonna go grab my ukulele and join them out there, wanna come?”

Dianna asks.

“Oh, I think I better finish these dishes.”

“You sure? They’re almost done.”

“Yeah, maybe I’ll come out a little later,” I say.

Dianna smiles and climbs over the low gate that supposedly guards the outdoor kitchen from the goats. I let the hot water run over the pan, rinsing the soap away.

The Jack Johnson song is still playing, or maybe it’s something else. Devoid of melody, everything sounds pretty much the same.

I hopped off my bike and the goats ran up to greet me, or to try to escape with me. I bent down to pet Sundance, the baby goat, and then Maple started nuzzling her head against my shoulder.

“How was the sweat lodge?” Dianna asked enthusiastically, walking up just behind them.

“It was really something. Not like anything I’ve ever done,” I said as Dianna listened patiently. “When it ended, we all walked into the river and washed ourselves off and drank the clean water and it felt okay to laugh again. We didn’t talk really but we could be together and finally really breathe,” I said, taking in our farm air, smelling the differences.

“Isn’t it life-changing? I felt like a different person after my first time,” Dianna

replied with a thoughtful smile.

“Maybe,” I said absent-mindedly as Redwing walked up to me, ready to charge.

“No, Red,” I said, petting her head gently.

Red looked up at me, not seeming to know how to respond. Then she turned away from me, running over to fight with Willow. I sat and watched how Willow, even with no horns, seemed to hold her own. They kept butting their heads together, Redwing trying to latch onto Willow with her curved horns. They leapt up on their hind legs, using their forelegs to smack each other. It was always hard to tell if these fights were violent or just play.

And then Sundance ran between them and it was over and then I was just sitting and not watching much at all. u

The Lake

FICTION

by Kenny Bransdorf Content Warning for description of suicide

T

he fog hung thick in the air, ghostly curtains drawn over the early morning darkness. Charon looked on, struggling to make out the man she was meeting. No sign of him yet. She took a drag on her dying cigarette, casting an eerie light against the walls of fog that surrounded her. To her increasing discomfort, it seemed that the mist was closing in, reaching its wispy tendrils out for a caress.

“Hello there.”

Charon turned sharply and drew her gun in one smooth motion, crushing her cigarette between her gritted teeth. The man gazing down the barrel smiled sheepishly, raising his hands in surrender.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said lightly but earnestly, “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you,” Charon said, keeping her gun between his eyes.

“I am truly sorry, it won’t happen again.”

She sighed, holstering her weapon. “All right. Where’s this boat?”

The man’s eyes lit up. “Follow me.”

He ambled down to the bank of the lakeshore, hopping down with an ease that belied his elderly body. Charon followed cautiously, her hand resting instinctively on the cold leatherbound grip of her gun. The man had his arms locked around

a small boulder that leaned stubbornly against the wall of the embankment, his face twisted with exertion. Finally he gave up, gasping for air. He smiled the same sheepish smile through the apparent pain.

“When I was a young man this rock was nothing to me, I didn’t give it a second

To her increasing discomfort, it seemed that the mist was closing in, reaching its wispy tendrils out for a caress. thought… age takes away a lot of things, but it does give perspective. A worthy trade, in my opinion.”

“If you say so,” Charon said, half-listening.

The man hesitated. “I’m sorry, I know this wasn’t part of our agreement, but… could you help me with this?”

The back of Charon’s neck burned with irritation. She dismissed the man with a curt wave of her hand and braced herself against the rock. It was heavier than she expected, but she was able to move it with moderate effort. It rolled away reluctantly, lodging itself in a small sand dune.

Before them lay the boat, a small wooden fishing vessel nestled in the dark, its once deep watery blue hue chipped and faded by time.

“There she is,” the man said, choking up, “Can you take the oars? I can handle her myself.”

Charon lifted the oars gingerly, as if this would reduce the chances of getting splinters. They were not especially heavy but quite awkward to hold, which did not help her mood. She looked up to see that the old man was already nearing the edge of the lake, water lapping at his ankles as he pushed the boat.

“Take your time! I need to rest a bit anyway,” he called out.

Charon walked over briskly, trying to hide the difficulty of hefting the oars behind barely contained rage. When she arrived at the boat, the man took the oars and placed them in the rowlocks.

“Thank you so much. I can row us out,” SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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he said.

They climbed into the boat, Charon facing the water and the man facing the shore. The old craft groaned and rocked under their sudden weight, sending ripples through the shallow waters, but soon steadied itself. The man dipped the blades of the oars into the lake and gently swept them toward the stern, thrusting the boat further out. The fog grew thicker as they went, clinging to their clothes for fleeting moments before wistfully releasing them, only to latch on again. There was not a sound besides the hypnotic lullaby of the oars smoothly carving the water, sighing sweet splashing melodies that could push the mind far adrift.

“I’m sorry about the fog,” the man said, breaking her from her reverie. “It is beautiful in its own way, but it does not compare to the sunrise. From here, on the lake, you can see the sun blaze in its full glory.

To see the sun rise here is to see the ascension of a god.”

“In my experience, claims like that only lead to disappointment.”

“Perhaps, if this fog does not clear up.

But if it does…you will never forget that sight.”

An icy breeze rolled over them, prompting Charon to pull her regrettably light jacket tighter to her body. The old man closed his eyes as it passed, inhaling deeply and breaking into a smile.

“Do you smell that?” he asked.

Charon shook her head.

“The scent of pine, carried from the forest that surrounds this lake. I always stop to take it in,” he said, his voice faltering.

“My love and I spent so much time here, I could smell the pines in her hair…now all I have are memories on the wind.”

They glided on in silence for a while.

The man’s brow furrowed and he stopped rowing, letting the oars rest at his sides.

The fog was no thinner than before, settling around them in a heavy blanket of grey.

“We’re here,” the man said, checking his watch. “The sun will rise in a few minutes.

Perhaps we are out of luck.”

“That’s a shame,” Charon said, a note of sincerity in her voice.

“Oh well…life does not always give.

More often it takes. It’s a lesson I can’t seem to learn,” he said with a laugh like crinkling paper.

“It’s not an easy lesson.”

“Ah, so you know…I was not so wise at your age. It took many years for me to see, and by then it was too late,” the man said, gazing down into the depths, “My love and I came out to this lake every day in the 34

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summers. Carefree days of fishing, swimming in the warm sun. Her laugh was my music. How graceful she was when she cut through the water, her body was born for it. And when night fell upon us, we would lie in this boat and talk for hours under the stars…what a mind she had, the most beautiful mind.

“But summer had to come to an end.

She fell ill…very ill. We were not wealthy, and her sickness was expensive. Every doctor told us the same thing, that we had no options but to wait for the inevitable. It was a cruel disease. A slow killer. Soon she was in constant agony. She couldn’t sleep, barely ate a thing. She was almost always in tears, until one day she ran out. Her eyes…I couldn’t bear to see them. Once so joyful, so bright… now empty. That was the day she asked me…

“She asked me to let her die. Please, let

The fog grew thicker as they went, clinging to their clothes for fleeting moments before wistfully releasing them, only to latch on again. it end. Living is torment. Let me die. That’s what she said to me. I was…I wouldn’t hear it. I told her that she had to hold on to hope, that there was always a chance the doctors were wrong, that if anyone could beat this it was her. I pleaded for her life.

But her spirit was broken. I couldn’t, no, I refused to see it then, but she had nothing left. She told me that she wanted to use what little money we had to travel to Oregon. There was a doctor there who had a solution… she assured me it would be painless, that it was entirely ethical, and most importantly, that this is what she wanted.

“But I didn’t want to lose her. And I certainly didn’t want to lead her to her death.

So selfish…I became angry with her. I told her she was delirious from the pain, that she needed to be stronger. I scorned her for wanting to take the coward’s way out.

Yet I could not see the cowardice in myself, the fear that drove me to rip away her agency. She did not speak to me for days.

And then one morning…a morning like this, actually…I awoke to see that she was

gone. The front door was ajar, swinging to and fro in the wind. I scrambled out to the edge of the lake, where the boat had been, but it was gone too. I called my friend and asked to borrow his boat, and with it we sailed out to all corners of the lake. We searched the shore for any signs, but there were none. We scoured the waters, but all we found was this boat. Sitting placidly here in the center of the lake. My love was nowhere in sight.

“We never recovered the body. She must have tied weights to herself so she wouldn’t rise back up to the surface. I’ve come back to this lake every year since, resolving to reunite with her. But every time I have lost my courage. I…I can’t do it myself.”

“So you’re asking me,” Charon said.

“Please. I know you must think so little of me. That I don’t deserve such mercy.

But I beg you. My life without her…it is hollow, incomplete, meaningless. She was everything, and she was taken from me.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. You already paid me,” Charon said, “How do you want me to do it?”

He locked eyes with her. “Hold me under. I’ve tried this before but every time I feel the water start to come in, I panic and come up for air. Don’t let me.”

Charon’s eyes hardened. “I won’t.”

The man closed his eyes. “Thank you.”

He swung one leg, then the other over the side of the boat, lowering himself into the water slowly. Now only his head was visible, the rest of his body submerged in the black murk of the lake. He looked up at Charon, meeting her eyes for the final time.

“I’m ready,” he said.

Charon knelt down in the boat and placed her hand on the back of the man’s head. She pushed the man’s face down into the water. Bubbles rose to and popped softly on the surface. Time slowed to an unbearable pace, each second teetering at the brink before finally falling away, gone forever. She felt the head stir, then thrash, but her hold was strong. Hundreds of bubbles surged up like a swarm of bees, dying as quickly as they were born. Within moments the stream began to thin, until only a few were left, feebly breaking the surface.

And then there were no more. Charon felt his body go limp and start to sink. She was struck by the impulse to hold on, but she stifled it angrily. She let go.

Charon withdrew her hand from the water, staring at it without recognition. The fog was impenetrable, a shroud that engulfed all. u

Three Poems

POETRY

by Killian McGinnis my teeth are cinder blocks. my tongue, a leather leash wraps itself around my doubt, wringing out the richness of my words. i inhale deep, but still, low hums come out as squeaks; without realizing it, i am swallowing my own voice. u

the silences fester deep within me in the soft, apologetic crevices of my inner thighs, hushed groans and loud cries of what i thought was ecstasy at the time. the silences cradle me, swaddle me in misremembered memories past selves dipped in the slick paint of his wanting his misguided attempts to love me, keep me transformed over time hoping i wouldn’t notice, yet still i wept at my foolishness whenever he claimed to love me too much. the silences implode with every word i speak that goes unheard fold further into me as i fight through burning tears to release. the most dangerous silences are those held in ignorance, those that make you seek another’s universe in a lonely pursuit for wholeness, made lonelier by its mutuality. u

This habit of fearing you You sit on the bed arms and legs posed as questions So I come to you because it is familiar to be wrapped up in you It is a rhythm my heart and body know well; this invitation, a test of my love, which catches in my throat, uncertain of its right to exist cowed into submission by your ever-present chorus: You’re faking; Love me more This time will not be like the last we promise as our tongues trip over the words. u

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BOOKS The Struggle Is Over: Karl Ove Knausgard Lives in the Present in “Autumn”

REVIEW

by Willa Glickman

T

hough Karl Ove Knausgaard invites endless discussion, there remains something inexplicable about the appeal of his work. When “My Struggle,” a six-volume account of the day-to-day mundanity of Knausgaard’s life, came to the attention of the English-speaking world after being translated from Norwegian in 2012, reviewers were rapturous but often confused by their rapture.

Though one can summon erudite justifications as to why it is meaningful to deAutumn

by Karl Ove Knausgard Penguin Press, 2017 238 pages | $19.87 (Hardcover)

vote 3,600 pages to minutely cataloguing one’s fairly regular life, none are quite airtight enough to squash the insistent question of the uninitiated: who cares? I, at least, care to spend thousands of pages with Knausgaard because “My Struggle” works as a reading experience, even when it seems like it shouldn’t. As James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, in what could serve as the books’ most accurate blurb, “Even when I was bored, I was interested.”

However, love that defies obvious reason is often accompanied by a nagging fear of having been taken in – a fear that, if realized, can lead to the uniquely bitter rage of the devotee disillusioned with their cult. It was this feeling of anger that I experienced at the beginning of nearly every short essay in Knausgaard’s recent book “Autumn,” a compendium of reflections on what one is tempted to describe as everyday objects for simplicity’s sake, but are more accurately just termed nouns: “Rubber Boots,” “Thermos Flasks,” and “Oil Tankers,” but also “Silence,” “Flaubert,” and “Badgers.” The book is the first in a four-part series and is framed as a letter to Knausgaard’s unborn fourth child. It is intended to be a partial guide to 36

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A snippet of the cover art for “Autum”

earthly experience, though he admits, “of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living.”

The feeling that the book is primarily for his own sake was one I found hard to shake as I read lines like these at the beginning of the chapter “Telephone,” in which he ruminates on a 1970s rotary phone: It was made up of two parts, the first being a faintly curved tube which widened into a sort of hemisphere at either end, the latter perforated by little holes in the discs covering them. One of the hemispheres was pressed against the ear, inside it was a receiver from which issued the voice of the person one was calling, the other one was held in front of the mouth, since it

contained a microphone that picked up one’s own voice and transmitted it. The second part of the telephone was the actual apparatus, connected to the handset by a spiral cord. The apparatus customarily stood on a table, and was dominated by a rotary dial with a hole for each of the ten digits made to fit the index finger…

The description continues for almost a full page. The book’s device of introducing the world to a baby can momentarily lull the reader into excusing this kind of eye-glazing explanation before she remembers that in fact she is an adult, and is entitled to higher standards as to what makes something interesting. In any case, I question why a baby would need to have a handset described as “a faintly curved tube which widen[s] into a sort of Photo coutesy of NPR

hemisphere at either end” but would feel comfortable with the term “rotary dial.” It is possible, in an irate mood, to see Knausgaard as having invented a new genre of explicit mansplaining—he is writing to an audience who supposedly has no knowledge of the world, which allows him the position of being an expert on everything.

A major theme of the book is the idea that in adulthood we are no longer present to our experiences and allow them to slip by without our notice, and a bit of this fresheyed-look-at-a-thermos-type description helps to convey that idea, but it occurs far too often, and always less effectively than when Knausgaard actually comments on a topic. When in “Wasps” he describes feeling humiliated by the small size of wasps who are preventing him from painting a fence, I am engaged in his world, but when he explains that “the body of a wasp is divided into two parts” all I can think is, yeah, I know.

However, if I started the essays with a moment of panic that I, along with the prevailing literary community, had been hoodwinked into taking the unfiltered diary of a loquacious Norwegian for genius, by the end of each piece, I often found myself feeling moved. The chapters tend to start slowly and broadly, as Knausgaard finds his bearings in a topic (to marshall one final unkind example, from “Beds”: “With its four legs and its flat, soft, surface, the bed gently accommodates one of our most basic needs: it is good to lie down in bed, and good to sleep there through the night”). However, they tend to sharpen and accelerate towards a final anecdote or insight, which, if not uniformly compelling, are almost all thought-provoking, and generally involve finding beauty in the ordinary in a sudden, stunning flash.

My favorite essay was the very first one—a reflection on apples that begins with a meandering consideration of the thicknesses of fruit skins but comes to be about countering inherited Lutheran self-denial and trying to impart a sense of the bounty and pleasure of the world to his children. In the final lines, Knausgaard and his family come across a wild apple tree during a trip to the beach: “The children were as astonished as I was, apple trees are supposed to grow in gardens, not wild out in the forest.

Can we eat them, they asked. I said yes, go ahead, take as many as you want. In a sudden glimpse, as full as joy as it was of sorrow, I understood what freedom is.”

The book can seem like a collection of scraps left over from “My Struggle”—a few extra thoughts he hadn’t managed to expunge in his magnum opus, contrary to

his conclusion in the final volume that he had unleashed everything within himself and was now “no longer an author”—but this means that “Autumn” shares many of the qualities that make “My Struggle” so successful. It shifts easily between essayistic and descriptive modes, it immerses you fully in a setting, it communicates Knausgaard as a character intimately and effectively. But it also has meaningful differences from “My Struggle,” and when considered as a whole I find that it makes up more than a sum of its parts.

“Being present” is a trite phrase, but Knausgaard takes it to a radical place—he is interested in participating in the present to the extent that the boundaries between the self and the world become unclear.

The most obvious departure by “Autumn” from the earlier work is that the Knausgaard it portrays is much more self-assured and content. It would be going too far to call him “cheerful”—even his joy is serious—but he seems largely released from the insecurities and hungers that fuel “My Struggle.” Though the project may not have cured him of his desire to write, it does seem to have allowed him to shrug off the emotional ties that kept him mired in the past. “My previous life seems more and more distant,” he writes. “I am no longer preoccupied with my childhood. Not interested in my student years, my twenties.” It seems impossible that “Knausgaard” and “not preoccupied with childhood” could ever be contained in the same sentence, but apparently interest in the past is an exhaustible resource. He has also been released from ambition, which seems not unrelated to having achieved success, but which he attributes simply to aging. In an essay that I found painfully relatable but also encouraging, he describes

how the “forward-looking gaze” of youth, which is “constantly confronted with the limitations of one’s character, constantly coming up against a sense of stagnation” has, for him, been replaced by acceptance of his limitations but also an awareness that simply by being alive, one constantly accrues a type of practical knowledge and understanding that makes life richer. Free of past and future, Knausgaard is able to finally participate fully in the present.

“Being present” is a trite phrase, but Knausgaard takes it to a radical place—he is interested in participating in the present to the extent that the boundaries between the self and the world become unclear. He is consistently concerned with the human tendency towards categorization and separation, our insistence on assigning identities to ourselves and others. He writes: “Identity is being one thing and not the other. In nature there are no frames, all things and phenomena merge into one another, the earth is round, the universe is infinite and time is eternal.” The book can be read as Knausgaard offering his opinion on objects—using the environment as a canvas on which he can further display his personality—but it is equally possible to understand it as a description of the ways in which interactions with objects have shaped him, and how the self is always a loose collection of experiences. In “Fingers,” an essay about disembodiment and how we construct an understanding of ourselves as being whole, Knausgaard writes: Others, then, exist inside us, side by side with the person we are to ourselves, and since anything like partitions or walls is foreign to the world of thought and emotion, it is not unreasonable to imagine that all these various entities—which include not only people, but trees, tables, bicycles, houses, plains, lakes, cats, cups, telephones and electric torches, to take only those examples that sprang to my mind first—are also part of our personality, are also part of who we are…

This relaxed attitude towards the self in “Autumn” may seem like an act of penitence in response to the accusations of narcissism leveled at “My Struggle,” but perhaps it brings attention to something that was present in “My Struggle” all along: Knausgaard’s insistence on giving a description of eating a bowl of cornflakes equal weight to a discussion of his emotional state as an indication that the self is never distinct from or more important than the world it inhabits.

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The cathedral a character in Golding’s “The Spire”

REVIEW

Looking back at William Golding’s 1964 novel

by Grant Brown

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here is nothing quite like the anguish of humanity. We, the descendants of the breath of God and the dust of the Earth, have weaved a complex web out of our existence, and are frequently caught tangled in our own creation.

These conundrums of humanity are thoroughly manifest in the literary world of William Golding. Writing throughout the 20th century in Britain, Golding become a literary titan, receiving the Nobel and Booker prizes for his works. You may be familiar with him due to high school English teachers’ penchant for assigning his first novel, “The Lord of the Flies.”

The Spire

by William Golding Harcourt Brace & World, 1964 215 pages | $3.13 (Hardcover)

Golding’s stories frequently revolve around moments of strife, exploring the capacity and reliability of our individual subjectivity, and the assumptions and mythos that influence our collective cultural and political schemas. These topics, frequently seeped in contradiction and uncomfortability, are what make Golding an attractive author. Golding mastered his ability to create tales that spin these topics into a profound tapestry, glistening with a sort of awe-inspiring guttural beauty.

“The Spire” is no different. The novel centers around Jocelin, the Dean of a medieval cathedral, and his attempt to construct a colossal spire atop his house of God. This spire, a sort of second Tower of Babel, is built despite the flimsy foundations of the cathedral on which it rests.

This forms a basis for the plot and symbolism of the novel.

Dean Jocelin, in pursuit of his singular will to construct what is described as “the Bible in stone,” (p. 46) struggles with the interpersonal interactions that accompany his position. He argues about the spire frequently with Roger Mason, the organizer of the spire’s construction, and Roger’s wife Rachel, Pangall, a disabled servant, and Pangall’s wife Goody, the other members of the clergy and the church Council, and the masses of workers with decidedly un-Christian tendencies. It is through these struggles, and the precarious spire 38

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Original cover detail for “The Spire” towering above them, that Jocelin’s sanity begins to deteriorate and his narration becomes increasingly unreliable. As he continues with the construction, he is pushed deeper into a reliance on piety and a belief in a personal angel.

“The Spire” is at its best in Golding’s deployment of various literary techniques. The novel is written in stream of consciousness style, with seamless movements from first-person thoughts directly from Jocelin’s mind, to third-person observations, all the while maintaining a clear vantage from within the perspective of Jocelin. This creates a sense of anxiety and stresses the schizoid-splitting integral to Jocelin’s character. As readers, we beg, sometimes desperately, for a clarity of the facts and another look at hazy details, but alas, they are never to come. Instead, we are resigned to looking through the frantic consciousness of Jocelin, who constantly moves from profound joy, embracing his fellow cathedral residents and singing the praises of God, to extreme anger and con-

fusion, ignoring people entirely and frantically investigating his irrational worries at all costs. Setting the book aside, Jocelin pulling at your side, you yourself feel on the brink of insanity.

There is a sense that the cathedral holds all the secrets of the novel, a hidden gnosis which slowly sublimates and guides the characters towards their destinies and fantasies.

Golding, returning to a trope explored Photo courtesy of Amazon

with the island in “The Lord of the Flies,” transforms the setting of the cathedral into a dynamic character of its own right. The static stone of the cathedral breathes and sings, and the glass windows seem to purposely style the light that passes through them. There is a sense that the cathedral holds all the secrets of the novel, a hidden gnosis which slowly sublimates and guides the characters towards their destinies and fantasies. This enables Golding to use extensive description, continuously, while avoiding pedantic romanticism, as they show, in themselves, a movement of the plot. With this, the reader feels entirely im-

mersed in the space, creating a vivid mental map with imbedded sensory memory.

This allows the mere mention of a space to instantly summon not only symbolism and depth, but an aura of familiarity and being-there, providing a sense of what Jocelin will say, do, or feel, before it happens, or without it ever being said.

The beauties of “The Spire” are many, but what truly grants it the capacity to be recommended is its sense of universality.

Its scenes and characters, though clearly antiquated upon close inspection, do not resonate as ancients of a time long past.

The story’s time period is intentionally

ambiguous, and its relation the Church, an institution of immense history and tradition, grants it the ability to blend into a temporal background. Jocelin could be a priest of today, overcome with piety, attempting to construct a spire in a small European town. It is these characteristics that give it the capacity for a profound closeness, an internalization, in which the reader may learn something of their own sense of self and powers in the confounding visage of Dean Jocelin.

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Ah, To Be Young And In Want of A God Searching for tranquility in the autobiography of Thomas Merton

REVIEW

by Joe Mariani Youth seems to be the time to stumble around life, intoxicated with youth and perhaps some other things. But eventually the time comes for growing up, and going through life without any sense of purpose I think eventually starts to be unpleasant The Seven Storey Mountain

by Thomas Merton Mariner Books, 1998 496 pages | $9.08 (Soft cover)

Photo of author Thomas Merton Photo courtesy of Harry White

once childish energies dissipate. Thomas Merton certainly felt something of a spiritual hangover at the beginning of his adult life, something like a sophomore slump that never quite went away. The slow motion spiritual crisis of becoming an adult led Merton to leave his PhD program at the English department of Columbia University and become a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Kentucky. Merton outlines the winding path of this remarkable transition in his autobiography “The Seven Storey Mountain.”

Born in the middle of World War One in France, Merton was the son of two bohemian artists. His mother was an American Quaker and his father was a painter from New Zealand. His parents did not teach their children religion, though his mother would go by herself to Quaker meetings

The quiet of the dead has left a silence filled by the most sacred beliefs we can hold, and these alone tell us about what happens after death. on Sundays. Merton grew up amongst books and unfinished paintings and moved around a great deal as a very young person. Merton’s mother and father both passed away from cancer before he was a teenager. Taken in by a wealthy uncle, he lived the privileged, independent, lonely, extraordinary life of a young man with “Great Expectations” educated at boarding schools and Columbia university in the grim, decayed world of the 1930s.

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a townhouse he rented with his friends in Greenwich Village long before it became Disneylandified. Many of his stories involve hitchhiking around America wearing bluejeans, working odd jobs, and submitting poems for consideration by the editors of the New Yorker. While at Columbia, Merton was also part of a fraternity where he got a lot of experience drinking and doing the sorts of things rich young American men do for fun, like going to class hungover and getting into fights. He ran track and wrote clever articles for a school newspaper and smoked by his account fifty cigarettes a day. At first driven by the sort of keeping-up-with-theJoneses ambition that competitive high schools engender, Merton grew to feel ill at ease with his with his activities, though nothing went acutely wrong. By the time he had reached the cusp of adulthood he felt sick, lost, and began what would become a search for God. As much as the book is about one man’s conversion to a specific religious sect, it is simultaneously a reflection on the world that seems to have lost none of its accuracy or power. Merton identifies the nadir of his own personal spiritual emptiness with what he sees as an insane, inhospitable world:

health in his years as an upperclassman at Columbia, Merton dropped out of Greek life and athletics and withdrew from the world. Attempting to find a little corner of professional life where he would have plenty of time to read books and write poetry, Merton half-heartedly lead the life of an aspiring academic.

Written in a prose that combines Merton’s sensitive, poetic temperament with his commitment to monasticism the book is a motley combination of philosophical bibliography, Kerouac-style vignettes of a not-unfamiliar America, and moving, sensitive, intimate window into somebody who really believes in something with all his heart. The book has an attitude of believable earnestness with acute sense of humor. What I got most out of reading Merton was something like reading a very good self-help book or, if you don’t believe in those, perhaps something like taking a really good class first semester of college that changes the way you think about a lot of stuff.

Reflecting on his life in the monastery, Merton gives something of an existential-

ist pep talk to people of goodwill open to being convinced that what they believe matters.

“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!”

I have crossed threshold of the offices of many mental health professionals as well as a few churches and if I have been looking for anything in my “academic life,” it’s been something akin to tranquility. In part looking for tranquility is perhaps just a part of growing up for many people. Merton probably will not convince you to be religious, but he will invite you to identify your convictions as best as you can and to stand by them. First of all I think he wants to convince you that your chosen principles are one of the only things that you really have in this life.

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“And so I became the complete twentieth-century man. I now belonged to the world in which I lived. I became a true citizen of my own disgusting century: the century of poison gas and atomic bombs. A man living on the doorsill of the Apocalypse, a man with veins full of poison, living in death. Baudelaire could truly address me, then, reader: Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère . . .”

The book is in part a dizzying crash course in the history and theology of Catholicism along with matter of fact reflections on monasticism. These are both certainly odd topics for most modern readers, but they are written by a person who cannot help but display a lot of himself with his writing. As some of the details of his life in college might suggest, he was in many ways somebody who could be found at Swarthmore, living in our world. Speaking of old media’s effect on his sentiments and thinking, Merton could be describing the endless stream of what we now get on the internet. “We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension ... to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest” (p. 133). Increasingly worried about his 40

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Clip of the Signet pulp edition of Merton’s autobiography Photo courtesy of Flickr

On Fucking God

REVIEW

Literary imagination and sexual violence in “Giving Godhead”

by Anna Weber

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eferring to the title of this book review, Dylan Krieger does not mean Beyoncé when she writes of God. Rather, the god Krieger describes is fully masculine, patriarchal, sexualized, and quite often a perpetrator of sexual assault.

Therefore, readers will quickly come to realize that fucking this God is in fact going to be violent. However, what makes “Giving Godhead” (the title is an unmistakable pun about giving head to god) so powerful is its refusal to look away from violence, even if that violence is within the author’s own body. As a survivor of sexual assault, Krieger heals, cries, burns, and grieves in all sorts of ways, which may or may not be similar to other survivors; for example, after my assault, I chose to hide my own body by taking showers in the dark for months, because I wanted to erase the evidence of the crime. But, equally validly and importantly, Krieger says, “Dive the fuck in.” This book of poems is Krieger’s absurdist dive into the violent abyss of her assault and its aftermath. Using biblical verses, “Giving Godhead” twists Catholicism into sexually violent encounters that stick in the back of reader’s throats and pool sweat inside their palms. It cautions against sexual violence, but also requires the reader to fully see what that violence is. Readers must “unwind [their] inner pervert/nihilist/pyro/whatever violence” to get to know the body of Christ.

Content warning: sexual assault To start, with Krieger’s successes in “Giving Godhead”, there are both deft structural and detail-oriented feats throughout the poems. Structurally, religion as a theme provides a plethora of stories that unwind and twist in interesting ways. Krieger can use the story of Eve and the apple, but play with terms like “eating” and “rib” to invoke all sorts of sexual acts; she can dig into Jonah and his fall into the whale, but twist it again to think about “insides” and “penetration” (68). Importantly, screwing with these stories is not simply satirical or sexy; rather, Krieger highlights many connections between the submission to God and the submission that can exist in sexual relationships. For example, in “god means never having to say you’re sorry,” Krieger writes, “Your highness, prime us—for a forced/ forgiveness—archangels prying panties off—to find man’s anus.” It is from this comparison to religion that the reader can feel how sexually violent relationships “[force] forgiveness” before the violence ever happens—the ultimate sort of victim blaming. We can be set up as sinners before we even sin. We can need to be saved, repent, and thankful before we ever even get to third base. Krieger’s deft comparison exposes how power works in both religious and sexual spaces.

Additionally, Krieger puts detailed and meticulous invention on the page. Firstly, Krieger constantly uses enjambment in a

way that makes this book feel less like 82 pages and more like 200 pages. The words themselves sound as thick and heavy as the human intestines that Krieger so often describes. To highlight an example, multiple poems follow the box-like frame of “a ritual feeding // in need of meter” in which the words of the poem squish together and connect by dashes or periods, with space for breath only in the final line.

If a reader attempts to read “meat music matters—in a word: made flesh-eating— manna flush w/messianic—murder maggots dancing—down the rafters,” they will stumble and possibly choke on the words.

This sort of writing raises an interesting question: what happens to sound when words are squished together on the page?

Does it disappear? Are we still speaking the same language? Even if we slow down to make sense of the words, enjambment is another twist that makes the readers themselves fully aware of their tongue and how their tongue functions—when speaking or when giving God head.

The second detailed-oriented success in “Giving Godhead” is Krieger’s utilization of puns. Expanding on the playful structure of the book itself, she twists stories, taking a line from a biblical verse or childhood story and change its meaning ever so sexually. In “X-machine,” Krieger imagines “mary mack all dressed / in black & heart attacks.” “Sons of david,” reverber-

Photo of the author, Dylan Krieger Photo courtesy of New York Times

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ates against the sanctuary walls: “sweet carion, waiting for to bury my bones / in its belly, what throne of pro-feces.” Lastly, “scaredy creature” mixes the words “foreskin” for “foresecond” in “when only abraham, Jacob, and the angels / weren’t forsaken or worse—let’s take a foresecond and try erasing this firstborn bloodbathing” (19). All these puns ever so slightly change a story or song, as is the function of a pun. They require second glances and pull different meanings when rereading.

Linking this very delicate wordplay to Krieger’s overarching theme concerning sexual violence, these puns take words that have well-known definitions and unhinge them. Puns take something we know and trust (whether that is religion, stories, music, or relationships), but layer it. Readers soon question whether or not

their firstly found meaning was the right one. In totality, Krieger’s pun play is not just a sexy denunciation of religion, but also a strategic demonstration of the darker sides to every comfort.

However, even with these clever structures and details, “Giving Godhead” does maintain a few failures in its religiously violent quest for healing. Mainly, Krieger’s manifesto at the end of the book tells readers to “unwind […] whatever violence you’d never act out in real life but eye wildly anyway.” This statement highlights an overall danger in “Giving Godhead”: the use of real life experiences as metaphors. It becomes a slippery slope when something as tangibly and terrifyingly real as sexual violence is “played” metaphorically. To be clear, I do not mean to state that Krieger is instigating violence as in the hackneyed

argument concerning video games; for Krieger, understanding violence is how she can heal from it. She cries through it as well as delights in it. Yet, questions concerning the limitations of metaphor remain. As I chose the path of ignoring the violence that happened to me, I do not think the invention of a sexual assault metaphor that cleanly delineates the tenor and the vehicle is a simple or unemotional task. I did not want to even see assault for assault. In this way, I applaud Krieger for diving into violence. However, I wish that Krieger laid a few ground rules for metaphorical understandings of assault. Who gets to make these metaphors? Are there some comparisons that reinforce power imbalances in sexual relationships rather than expose them? In totality, Krieger is messy with metaphor and she litters the book with blank spaces of interpretation that may be less thought out than her punning skills.

But, along the way, you will also start to see how bodies work— how they revolt, pleasure, and even sink in different moments in our lives.

The evocative cover art for “Giving Godhead” 42

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In conclusion, “Giving Godhead” is a book of poems through which readers will struggle and probably question humanity’s sanity. But, along the way, you will also start to see how bodies work—how they revolt, pleasure, and even sink in different moments in our lives. In this way, this loaded book of poems taught me to look again. It functions similar to the Toni Morrison character named Sethe, who attempted to execute her children (and succeeded in killing one) in order to keep them from her former slave owner. Sethe never looked away from violence—regardless of the pain she saw in front of her.

Similarly, Krieger’s violent book of poems pins healing and violence directly next to each other and we must not look away.

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Photo courtesy of Delete Press

MOVIES & TV Humanity and Monument in “Blade Runner 2049” A reflection on the action films of the summer

by Jonathan Kay

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lade Runner—revolutionary, brilliant, utterly distinctive—left its sequel big shoes to fill. The 1982 film noir adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?” challenged audiences’ perceptions of what a science fiction film could be, exploring serious questions of humanity and artificial intelligence, pioneering an immensely influential visual style, and eventually receiving critical recognition as one of the best movies ever made.

If anything, “Blade Runner 2049” is even better.

The original’s soundtrack, a brilliant eighties synth reinterpretation of the classic film noir saxophone, encapsulates the spirit of Los Angeles in “Blade Runner”: at once dreamy and deeply uncomfortable. Director Ridley Scott, perhaps best known during the eighties as the director of iconic tv commercials like the Chanel “Blue Sky” ad spot or the “1984” Macintosh launch, developed in “Blade Runner” an aesthetic (sometimes referred to as “trash chic”) that has been broadly imitated in films, books, video games, and fashion. Rather than the glossy metropolises of most science fiction, Scott imagined a retrofitted Los Angeles simply built on top of the decay of the old city. Tall buildings crowded dirty, foggy streets and concrete ziggurats rose from the smog and tangle

Image courtesy of Variety.com

of steel below; tight shots and dim lighting made up for the era’s poor special effects by never providing an entirely clear view of the film’s backdrops. Despite the city’s supposedly massive size, the entire movie felt claustrophobic.

“Blade Runner” followed Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a “blade runner” tasked with tracking a group of five escaped “replicants” (or robots) hiding out in Los Angeles. Replicants, which look exactly like humans, have incredible strength but only three year lifespans. The premise seems ripe for a “Terminator”-style shoot-’emup.

Instead, the (formerly enslaved) replicants, who their creator Eldon Tyrell describes as “more human than human,” seem adrift and scared in an unfamiliar world, acutely aware of their impending deaths. By the time Deckard has joylessly eliminated the fugitives, he’s grown disenchanted with his work and fallen in love with Tyrell’s replicant secretary, Rachael, who he runs away with. “It’s too bad she won’t live,” his partner remarks, “but then again, who does?”

The original was neither an action movie nor a drama, not really. Its plot developed slowly and in unexpected ways, playing with the sci-fi trope of artificial intelligence with unusual caution up until its ambiguous end. In some ways, it was a movie best felt, not thought about.

REVIEW

The massive, distorted, industrial sound and sweeping, rich visuals of “Blade Runner: 2049” mark a thematic shift from the original. Unlike its predecessor, “2049” leaves the cramped confines of the city, taking us on a tour of “Blade Runner”’s dystopia: the massive sea wall built to contain the rising Pacific Ocean, the deserted wasteland of a radioactive Las Vegas, the massive junkyard that was San Diego, and the dead tundras of California’s Central Valley dotted with sealed greenhouses.

It all seems to reflect a civilization that gained the capability to build monuments just before it was brought to its knees.

Officer K (Ryan Gosling) is, like Deckard, a blade runner. Unlike Deckard, he’s one of a new line of replicants with human-length life spans (the Nexus 6’s of the original “Blade Runner” could live only three years) but no free will. They’re tasked with hunting down the remainders of the Nexus-8 line, which had the full life spans without the coercions to keep them in line.

On assignment, he finds a box bearing the remains of a replicant that died during a cesarean section, proving that replicants— thought barren—could bear children.

The police keep the secret closely guarded, worrying that it could shatter the fragile justification of the nearly-human replicants’ subjugation in society. “The world is built on a wall that separates kind,” K’s commanding officer Lieutenant Joshi

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(Robin Wright) tells him. “Tell either side there’s no wall, you’ve bought a war. Or a slaughter.” She orders K to track down the replicant child and kill it.

The discovery, however, catches the attention of Wallace Corporation, the new manufacturer of replicants. Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), its CEO, sees reproducing replicants as the path to a new phase of civilization: the colonization of new worlds and star systems. He sends his replicant fixer, Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), to beat K to the child and retrieve it for study.

Around this point, K begins to suspect that he’s capable of disobeying orders.

Upon discovering that some of his childhood memories are real, rather than manufactured implants, he begins wondering if he is the lost replicant child. After lying to his superiors, he tracks down the man he believes to be his father: a much older Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), who’s been hiding out alone for years in an abandoned Las Vegas. In doing so, he leads Luv right to Deckard, and she kidnaps him, leaving K for dead.

Let’s take a step back.

Like its predecessor, the principal focus of “2049” is the humanity of artificial intelligence, and, by extension, our own humanity. K lives with Joi (Ana de Armas), a “companion” AI and his only real romantic interest, who turns out to be one of the film’s more compelling (and sympathetic) characters. On the one hand, Joi—who takes the form of a hologram—is more “artificial” than K, existing in a circuit board rather than the flesh and blood of the replicants. (“Mere data makes a man: A and C and T and G, the alphabet of you,” she idly remarks to K as he scans a database of DNA. “I am only two: one and zero.”) On 44

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the other hand, she behaves much more like a human (and is far more sympathetic) than the sociopathic Wallace or the cold Lt. Joshi, displaying humor, a strong moral compass, and apparent spontaneity.

Probably the most memorable moment of the film comes when Joi brings Mariette (Mackenzie Davis), a prostitute, back to K’s apartment for him to sleep with. In a singularly unnerving display of special effects, Joi overlays her hologram body onto Mariette’s, superimposing her skin on to that of the human woman. Their bodies’ synchronization is slightly off, and Joi’s skin is slightly translucent, so it seems that two eyes - one warm, the other slightly uncomfortable - look out at an impassive K. As Mariette—Joi—embraces him, it’s hard not to look away. The scene establishes and then blurs a spectrum of humanity, from the human Mariette (her name’s resemblance to “marionette” probably isn’t a coincidence) to the replicant K to the computer subroutine Joi. Then, during Luv’s fight with Deckard and K in Las Vegas, Joi’s console (and thus her memories and personality) is destroyed. Later, a grieving K walks by an advertisement for Joi’s line of companion AIs: a nude, ten-story tall, neon Joi figure with black eyes and garish blue hair, projected into the empty space between two skyscrapers. “You look like a good Joe,” she says, crouching down to give K a slightly sinister smile. Like the scene with Mariette, we’re given an impression of overwhelming wrongness: this is not the Joi we know. We’re left wondering to what extent K’s original Joi, for all her personality, had personhood, and to what extent she was simply a software product that fulfilled K’s desires.

Joi was an artificial product, little more than a collection of code, and yet her death is actually one of the most poignant moments of the film. In part, that’s because the most dramatic moments of “2049” are more affecting than touching. Most of the drama is built on existential angst and weariness rather than the plot’s main setpieces, and the characters, particularly K, are given an almost inanimate treatment by their actors, who deliver what should be most emotional lines of dialogue in the film in a deadpan. For all its stylistic and symbolic departure from the original, “2049” seems marked by the same sensation: a wrenching feeling in your gut, one of of stark immediacy.

The scene also showcases one of the most memorable and powerful techniques of “2049”: the staging of human drama against an impersonal, monumental backdrop. The first sign of life K finds in the ghost town of Las Vegas, for example, is a pair of apiaries. The cloud of bees is an incongruous sight of life at the feet of a pair of weathered statues, hundreds of meters tall, standing in the middle of a barren patch of sand. Earlier, his search for evidence of the replicant child took place in a gigantic sandstone library of identical rows of terminals, all sharp angles and imposing shadows. Again, the “life” in the scene—evidence of the half-human, half-replicant child—seems dwarfed by its stark, lifeless surroundings.

In other scenes, life and humanity is instead represented by drama and emotional climax. In Las Vegas, K—in critical condition—is saved by the Replicant Freedom Movement (which admittedly seems to spring from nowhere) when its members take him back to their lair. He awakens in

a large, echoing room that looks a bit like a sewer. All this time, he’s believed that he is the replicant child—the chosen one that could lead the replicants to rebel against their place in society (Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff wrote a great article on the treatment of the “chosen one” trope in “2049”).

Instead, Freysa (Hiam Abbas), the Movement’s leader, tells him that the replicant child was a daughter. All at once, the momentum that’s animated K up to this point in the storyline vanishes, and he’s left looking very small in the massive room.

The movie ends with a fight between Luv and an exhausted K at the base of a massive wall in the rain and darkness. Again, wide shots of the fighting allow the colossal sea wall and the endless dark ocean to transform what should be the emotional

peak into something that feels strangely detached, the same sensation of queer disconnection that marked the scene with the colossal Joi hologram. The scene feels a lot longer than it probably is, and we’re left at its conclusion—even when K saves Deckard and delivers him to his daughter—feeling not triumph but instead a sort of gloomy finality. Each of these moments are subtle visual representations of the same tension that defines more overt treatments of the AI question in “2049.”

I can’t remember the last time a big, special effects blockbuster left me speechless.

With thirty five years of separation, “Blade Runner” and “Blade Runner: 2049” seem wildly divergent in their look, feel, cultural context, and symbolic vocabulary. At the same time, “2049” is utterly faithful to its

predecessor. Both movies offer not only a different kind of science fiction movie, but also a different kind of film. Their power comes not from some particularly insightful exploration of artificial intelligence, or any single plot point, but instead through their unique aesthetic sensibility and their willingness to subvert their audiences’ expectations.

The hallmark of speculative fiction like science fiction has always been originality and imagination. It’s odd, then, that the vast majority of the genre’s treatment in film has been formulaic and dull, intended for cheap thrills. Maybe that’s why my companion and I spent the twenty minute ride home from the theater in total silence: we weren’t expecting to be surprised.

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Forty Years Later, Nick Zedd Continues to Shock, Astonish, and Excite Nick Zedd Film Retrospective. November 9-10, PhilaMOCA

by Cecily Chen Content warning: description of necrophilia, sexual imagery

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ast November, PhilaMOCA held a long overdue film retrospective for one of the most controversial, radical, and uninhibited artists of our time. A central figure to New York City’s notorious underground art scene in the 1980s, Nick Zedd famously coined the term “Cinema of Transgression” to encapsulate the radical, aggressively in-your-face, and viscerally confrontational art that he wished to create. Declaring that the era of “boring” arthouse films had come to an end, Zedd cried out that “there will be blood, shame, pain, and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined.” In his manifesto to this movement, he ominously prophesized that “none shall emerge unscathed.”

Breaking away from the seemingly metaphysical ruminations that were subtly, if not unapproachably, explored in the avant-garde movement, Zedd was intensely interested in the corporeal and the taboo. In his films, lofty metaphors, lofty pretensions, and ethics of “circumlocution” are cast aside with disdain: the screen is filled with blood, gore, tears, cum, and sloppy strings of spit shared between lovers and foes alike. As Jonas Mekas describes, Nick Zedd produces a genre of film that is grounded in the “ungodly,” the perverse, the taboo, in a way that entraps and enthralls the audience. The camera lens is transformed under Zedd into a shrapnel, cutting into the audience.

What is most extraordinary about Zedd’s oeuvre is that, forty years later, the taboos and sins that he explores and, to an extent, glamorizes, still discomfit their audience. During the first night at the retrospective, the main lineup of films on the program come from Zedd’s earlier works from the 80s. Excerpts from “Geek Maggot Bingo,” “They Eat Scum,” and shorts such as “War is Menstrual Envy” and “Police State” promised a night of extremity, but they also drove many onlookers away.

Throughout the first half of the evening, some members of the already limited audience—there were only around a dozen people at the venue in the first place— slowly shuffled out. In the complete darkness of the makeshift theatre, only haphazardly lit by the technicolored carnival-esque display on the screen, the leaving members shifted like spectres, intensifying the hyperrealism of the films and disrupting the half-distressed, half-rapturous concentration of the room.

Their departures punctuated the evening with an awkward and arbitrary staccato, yet also amplified the silent, stony, unwavering presence of the filmmaker himself at the back of the room. Before the film program began, the director enthusiastically, if not awkwardly, mentioned how the filmmaker himself made a rare appearance in the States since his move to Mexico a few years ago. The whole room,

with more chairs than people, stirred and collectively turned around: stoic, removed, and completely still, Zedd sat there, wrapped in an elegant camel-colored trench coat that contrasted starkly with his red and orange hair. It was difficult to really see his face, not only because of the distance, but also because of his instinctively hunched back, like a predator poised for attack. Hidden between the collars of his coat and the wild sweep of his forever disheveled red hair, his pale visage remained in the shadows. Somehow, though, it was not difficult to imagine his trademark scowl: dissatisfied with the increasing banality and tameness of the art world, angry at the corruption of the state, and scornful of even his audiences, as if he already knew how many people would walk out in confusion, discomfort, and horror.

The two-hour evening dragged on slowly, yet flew by too quickly, not unlike Zedd’s films themselves. Time seemed to distort in the damp, and poorly ventilated room: everything seemed hyper-focused and overexposed. Confronted with medical footages of open-heart surgeries that were displayed side-by-side with fetish erotica with menstrual blood and Tantric symbolism, the audience’s eyes were glued to the screen, yet also hyper-aware of every beer can thrown on the floor, every wisp of winter wind that snuck through SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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the door. There was an undercurrent of extreme compulsion and morbid fascination that kept the mood in the room afloat, albeit in a stilted way. While the footage magnified upon the large screen was by no means comforting or familiar, and every second was a visual and mental challenge, the ultra-saturated colors and odd sound bites of cheesy pop songs and dialogues brimming with gallows humor created an atmosphere, a vortex, that sucked you in.

In an age inundated with endless internet media, Nick Zedd is a stark reminder of why people, dissatisfied with the confinement of their personal smartphones or laptops, still go to theatres, plays, and museums. His films are not meant to be passively observed, to be casually browsed through: they compel the audience to react, to reel back, and then to lean forward once more. Watching a Nick Zedd film reminds us that cinema is not merely about the gaze—it is a physical process that engages the entire body. Sitting through a Nick Zedd production, one may blush, guffaw, cringe, or fold one’s arm into an unconsciously self-protective poise. One may feel harrowing chills running down one’s spine, or one may feel warm from unexpected arousal. Combining the erotic with the morbid, the taboo with the kitsch, the fetishized with the clinical, the only constants in Zedd’s oeuvre are corporeality and extremity.

One prime example of Zedd’s subversive mantra is “Thrust in Me,” an eight-minute short in which Zedd plays both the parts of the man and the woman in a relationship. The short opens with a parallel storyline. The man aimlessly wanders the streets in oversized rags, effortlessly chic in a run-down fashion, but also painfully aimless. Meanwhile, his girlfriend sits in their destitute apartment, mechanically applying makeup to her glassy eyes filled with unmaskable ennui, reading Emile Durkheim’s “Suicide” on their tattered sofa. The woman phones someone

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to no response, and eventually goes into the bathroom and slits her own wrist in the bathtub. When the man returns, he relieves himself in the bathroom in more ways than one: after flushing the toilet, he notices for the first time the corpse of his girlfriend, and proceeds to masturbate and ejaculate on her stony, lifeless face. The final few minutes of the short is pieced together with close-ups of not only Zedd’s penis but also the pained ecstasy of his face as he furiously chases his orgasm, the first display of emotion in a short that was heretofore saturated with the extreme listlessness and nihilistic boredom that are usually coupled with the frustrations of younger generations in their effort to “find themselves.” An undoubtedly macabre portrayal of a generation of James Dean wannabe artists, Nick Zedd sets his short to a soundtrack of deliberately absurd pop music that carries a joyous tone in an overtly plastic and manufactured way, cynically—although with gallows humor galore—articulating his own dissatisfaction with a society so desensitized that the only way one could feel something, experience some form of joy, is at the loss of another’s life. Zedd twists and warps the typical American “self-made man” with a perverse vision of the fanatically aloof urban landscape of New York City, taunting his audience in a way that is deliberately cheap, deliberately uncouth, yet viscerally, emotionally true.

The most shocking thing about Zedd, however, is not his art, but instead his person. What might surprise most people hanging out with him after the film retrospective is how modest, self-conscious, and even timid he really is in conversation.

He speaks in a baritone with a calculated flatness, as if reading from a script, not yet familiar with the words on paper. He is tall, yet wire-thin; his chic trench coat bundled him up like a blanket. His scowl remains firmly in place, but his eyes are stoic, serious, and above all, sincere. He

looks directly into your eyes as you speak to him, absorbing every word, and speaks with frankness and earnestness that mitigate the sharpness of his cheekbones and smooth—at least momentarily—the deep-set lines between his brows. Indeed, the defining character of one of the most transgressive, visually shocking, and radically subversive filmmakers of over three decades is politeness.

After the film retrospective, the few fans that remained all stayed behind, chit-chatting with each other, lightheaded from overstimulated euphoria. When Zedd finally descended the staircase like a gaunt apparition, several people went up to him for a photo, a conversation, or an autograph. To each request, he remained stoically courteous, repeatedly refusing the offers of beer, occasionally cracking jokes and telling tidbit stories about Diamanda Galas, Lydia Lunch, William Burroughs, and Richard Hell.

Somehow it made perfect sense. Zedd observes and engages in a deceptively unassuming way, yet he absorbs, and he sees.

Underneath the glamorized filth and morbid decadence is an anger that he believes every artist needs, an anger that functions as fuel and drive, an anger that stems from seeing the world as it truly is, and people as they truly are. Nick Zedd’s cinema is transgression, but also burlesque. It is absurd, visually stimulating, and infinitely exciting theater that exalts taboo and sin, and vilifies the true enemy of the people: power. “The only hell,” Zedd spits in his manifesto, “is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you can.” In Zedd’s films, he offers us a temporary autonomous zone where sin is celebrated and debauchery is the norm. He offers us a slice of his heaven.

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Image courtesy of moviehole.net

MUSIC Introducing Yaeji

ESSAY

The rising Asian American artist who’s dominating the NYC underground

by Kathy Nguyen

O

ne dreary afternoon while diving into a hole of watching music videos on YouTube, I stumbled upon the music video for “Feel it Out” by Yaeji. Her mellow, unassuming vocals ebbed and flowed with eccentric visuals. Not to mention, she was small, original, and Asian— and yet, her presence was anything but small. I had never seen, never heard anything like it. Pineapples floated across the screen as she danced. I was transfixed. She seemed to very comfortably existing, exuding a soft-spoken confidence in her style and image. She sung and rapped in a mix of Korean and English but her sound strayed far from typical K-pop and generic house or lo-fi. Although classified as a house/electronic artist, Yaeji crosses genres, merging elements of electronic, pop, and rap into her sound. It was as if she had carved out her own space, merging elements of the Asian American experience with the New York City underground, creating her own niche of sound and style. I was hooked.

Kathy Yaeji Lee, professionally known as Yaeji, was born in 1993 in Queens, New York. After she turned five, she spent a lot of time moving around during her childhood, first to Long Island, then to Atlanta. In third grade, Yaeji’s parents feared the pervasive influence of American culture on her upbringing, moving her to Seoul, South Korea for a while to ensure she could speak Korean and banning her from listening to American pop. Growing up, Yaeji was inundated with a mix of influences and challenges experienced by many in the Asian American diaspora. In an interview with Vogue magazine, she mentions her experiences feeling like an “outsider” wherever she lived, both in America and in South Korea. Of her time in Atlanta, where she was one of the very few Asians in her community, she admits, “I went through a lot of hardships, being the only one who looked like me.” And yet, even when her family moved to Seoul, Yaeji admitted feeling like a foreigner there as well.

This incessant sense of “foreignness,”

this personal struggle with identity, runs as a common thread among many Asian American experiences, especially among first generation Americans. Being a first generation Asian American myself, I feel that growing up there’s a disconnect between one’s heritage and cultural roots.

Being Asian American felt like a battle of choosing between two identities that never seem to fit quite right. It was a matter of existing in two worlds, but belonging to neither. I could never be American enough or Asian enough; this is a sentiment Yaeji welcomes and expresses through her style and art.

Eventually, Yaeji moved back to the States, enrolling in the Fine Arts program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, she joined the college radio station and began to unearth her own identity, discovering the underground electronic music scene. She began, as many artists do, on SoundCloud. Yaeji spent time in college occasionally skipping classes to produce beats, experimenting and learning about DJing, and posting her music online. Despite this newfound passion, she admitts she felt hesitant about pursuing music as a career post-graduation. Ultimately, and much to her parents’ reluctance, she moved to Brooklyn after graduating, immersing herself in a subversive underground community and ex-

Yaeji, courtesy of allkpop

ploring her style of music and visual art.

She went to eclectic DJ shows and worked with agencies that promoted people of color and queer women artists. It was there, in New York City, that Yaeji found release, that she began to cultivate her own sound that blurs both cultural and musical lines.

Yaeji released two EPs in 2017, working with the newly formed music company GODMODE. Her self-titled EP and her more recent one, “EP2”, established her artistic brand, embodying the amorphousness of Asian American culture. Despite singing and rapping in barely a soft murmur, her voice entices attention and demands presence. It’s dreamy, hazy, radical. Yaeji contrasts her heavy bass and club beats with airy vocals, occasionally using Auto-Tune and layering her voice to create an echo effect. Her breathy tone combined with her mellow electronic rhythms create such a singular sound, one of smooth allure and subtle intensity. Her transcendent beats by themselves almost have an air of loneliness, making the listener feel as though their slipping into Yaeji’s private, innermost thoughts.

And Yaeji does exactly that in her understated lyrics—she allows listeners into a sincerely honest part of herself. She flows so effortlessly between English and Korean you barely notice the transitions at times.

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sings about uncertainty, identity, and her experiences with depression and anxiety.

She masks her vulnerable and emotionally-driven lyrics in Korean, a language she prefers because of its “percussive texture” and pleasing cadence. In her song “Drink I’m Sippin’ On,” which has amassed upwards of four million views on YouTube, she expresses her difficulty in finding validation of her identity. She repeats, “That’s not it / No, that’s not it,” in a loop, emphasizing a sense of tension and confusion.

The lyrics convey those same feelings of never fitting in that she described of her childhood—the feeling of struggling to claim an identity.

Yaeji’s rise in prominence in the past year is not only breaking ground for multimedia art forms but also making space for female Asian American artists in a music scene dominated by white cis men.

A multitude of challenges bar Asian musicians from reaching success in the American music industry, and even more so for

female-identifying Asian artists.

These challenges are set forth by cultural expectations, societal stereotypes, the absence of Asians in mainstream media, all of which hinder Asian women from even attempting to pursue the arts in the first place. Yaeji’s voice is part of a growing collective of Asian artists pushing for greater recognition, and her increasing popularity is a source of empowerment for many female Asian artists. Yaeji worked with 88rising, a management and production company focused on promoting East

Asian artists worldwide, and their rapid success has been bringing more Asian creators into the Western scene. While their success is a far cry from universal acknowledgement of Asian artists, it’s a crucial development for Asian inclusivity in the American music industry. Yaeji herself recognizes the intersectionality of her identity and the power of her influence on younger female Asian artists. She confessed to Vogue magazine, “There’s nothing better than hearing a girl after my show say, ‘I love that there’s someone who looks like me doing this.’ ” That same thought, that same sense of connection and pride ran through my head the first time I discovered her music video. Her distinct style and cultural grounding continues to elevate her and act as a source of inspiration for all young female Asian artists who are listening. u

The old Taylor wasn’t killed, she committed suicide

by Kat Capossela

V

ery few people can boast about having a satisfactory middle school experience. Most of us rather forget the foggy space between the blissful innocence of elementary school and the adolescent angst of high school. Purple braces, newly sprouted acne, the life-or-death drama, your first “boyfriend.” No, thank you. For my 12-year-old self, perhaps the most painful part of those neverending three years was the lack of communication between me and everyone else. Parents did not “get me,” peers were too absorbed in their iPhone 3Gs to bother. I could not even articulate my unjustified whirlwind of emotions to myself. So when I hopped off the bus from a rough day, slipped off my Uggs and North Face, I had someone else articulate my heart-racing infatuation for the boy in algebra class for me. And her name was Taylor Swift.

Critics aside, Taylor Swift was undoubtedly one of the most powerful voices of my generation. In the early 2000s, she was the artist who everyone adored: young girls turned to her for refuge from the traumas and turmoils of adolescence; parents appreciated her adherence to the classic “role model” type; critics commended her simple and precise songwriting chops and melodies. Taylor was a star whose problems were just like ours. She did not sing about the allure of money, raunchy sex, or

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reckless partying like many of her Top 40 peers. She sung about her truths—which often resulted in offending the occasional ex-boyfriend—but brought an entire generation more in touch with themselves.

Starting as a curly-haired country artist with a guitar and a dream, Taylor built herself an empire and placed herself at the helm. She wrote and produced her own chart-topping songs, always maintaining an aura of honesty and purity. She romanticized real experiences like crushing on the boy next door, entering high school, the sting of catty gossip. She turned seemingly mundane events into unornamented and powerful lyrics like “But in your life, you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team” and “Someday I’ll be living in a big, old city and all you’re ever gonna be is mean.” And, especially as a middle schooler, I felt less small knowing that these were universal and significant experiences. Taylor Swift, too, was just a awkward and slightly uncomfortable young girl trying to figure it all out.

But, like all young folks, Taylor changed with time. Perhaps the first major pivot was with her release of “Red,” her fourth studio album, in which she sounds more like an adult than like a kid fumbling through puberty. For one, she enlisted the help of producer Max Martin, known for cranking out top hits for global pop stars, for the first time. The duo created her most pop-sounding material at the time: “We

REVIEW

Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” her first number one hit, as well as the dubstep-y “I Knew You Were Trouble.” and beat-heavy “22.” Her lyrics were stripped of the youthful innocence of her previous albums “Fearless” and “Speak Now” and replaced by a matured view of love that was both empowering and haunting. In “Red,” Taylor stopped chasing cute boys, grew some teeth, and flexed her newfound confidence. America’s sweetheart was growing up. In arguably her most masterful narrative to date, “All Too Well”, she sings, “You call me up again just to break me like a promise / So casually cruel in the name of being honest.” In “State of Grace”: “We are alone with our changing minds / we fall in love ‘til it hurts or bleeds or fades in time.”

More mature, yes, but still rooted in her sense of honesty and tastefulness. Three albums in, Taylor’s craftsmanship proved to still serve as type of shelter for her fans, young and old.

And the industry recognized her rarity. She was the youngest person to win a Grammy for Album of the Year, the only woman and fifth person to win it twice, and the first person to have four albums sell one million copies in a week—just in the United States. She was a ten-time Grammy-winning powerhouse. With every album, she recreated herself with slight pivots, always adhering to her lovely, Polaroid-loving persona. Sure, everyone held their breath when she made the official Yaeji, courtesy of @chesterburrrd

switch from country to pop two years later.

But the transition was more of a natural, almost overdue, adjustment than a complete image makeover. Taylor had already shed a lot of the innocent country girl act in “Red,” and in the following album, “1989,” she accepted that pop was the direction that was best for growth. And because her music remained timeless and refreshingly confident, her fans always remained faithful. Our girl was growing up in all the right ways.

Even through the catastrophe with Kanye West, it was expected that Taylor would come out on top. As one New York Times critic noted, “For almost a decade, Taylor Swift has been waging, and winning, a war, smiling all the while.” Taylor Swift does not lose. However, instead of standing her ground like she did through all the other slight controversies—like mocking critics who called her a serial dater or defending herself for writing about real life experiences—she fled. Taylor went MIA for an entire year. Fans and critics alike became desperate to understand her mental state after such a blow to her image, making the anticipation for her most recent album, “reputation,” quite grueling.

When she finally dropped the record’s first single, “Look What You Made Me Do,” in August, Taylor assured the world she was out of the woods. It was her most angry and vengeful song to date. She proclaimed her old self dead, vowing to haunt the dreams of her enemies, blaming an unnamed culprit (Kanye) for her downfall. Such a hateful tune seemed out of place next to Taylor’s previous songs wholesomely dedicated to the trials and torments of growing up. It was hard. Vengeful. Taylor wasn’t smiling anymore. Yet amidst the shocking aggression, traces of Taylor’s witty sass lingered, in lyrics like “Honey, I rose up from the dead / I do it all the time” and “I’ll be the actress starring in your bad dreams.”

It was playfully cruel. Catchy, even. And it resulted from the worst scandal she’s ever endured, so the song might have been deservingly harsh—I thought.

Until two months later. When the release of “reputation” finally arrived, many of the loveable and trustworthy aspects of the old Taylor had evaporated. (I mean, she did warn us.) In her place was an artist with one too many songs that fit better under Ariana Grande or Katy Perry’s repertoire than her own. In “reputation,” Taylor sings of intoxication, potentially cheating on her boyfriend, and the cruel, cruel world in which we live. In “I Did Something Bad,” she semi-raps, “This is how the world works / You gotta leave before you get left.”

Taylor Swift in the the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video Courtesy of Billboard

She swears off forgiveness in “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” She compares love to drugs and tripping in “Don’t Blame Me.” She moans about turning into a bad girl in “So It Goes.” Over a decade into her career, America’s sweetheart turned hard.

Gone was the smiling woman at the top of the pop food chain. By the release of “reputation,” Taylor admitted defeat in more ways than one.

Now, few people expect a Disney star to stay a Disney star forever. Miley, Selena, and Demi all ditched the kiddish stardom from which they first emerged. Their fans have learned to accept parts of their new personas, forgive the often messy path they took to get there. But Taylor was never operating on their level. She was never expected to have a Britney-esque meltdown.

She was removed from the often cheap, often appropriative, pop they create and never sought to impress through overt sexualization. Prior to “reputation,” Taylor was maturing on her own wavelength, one still true to her talent and morals. And I think that is the most disappointing aspect of it all: we knew Taylor was growing up, but on much of “reputation” she seems to have succumbed to the ranks of singers overpowered by production and sex appeal. She let the framework of contemporary pop guide her rather than play by her own rules.

And because of that, the album seems more like an artificial and dishonest jump

than a natural transition to new realms as seen on her prior records. It almost seems like she’s playing catch up, desperately throwing in adult content and painfully repetitive choruses to be more like her peers on the iTunes Top 100. At points, Taylor gasps for the crisp wit she’s so accustomed to. In “Delicate,” shes tries (and fails) to be casually cool: “Dive bar on the east side, where you at?”; “Is it chill that you’re in my head?” In “Don’t Blame Me,” she sounds like 2010-era Ke$ha: “My drug is my baby / I’ll be using for the rest of my life”; “Toying with them older guys / just playthings for me to use.” Did Taylor just give up on word craftsmanship? Where are the hauntingly personal narratives?

The Odyssey-length tearjerkers? Many of the tracks on “reputation” paint with a broad, plain stroke, one most often seen in the verses of bubblegum pop that she had previously steered away from. Her strength always lay in dense chronicles of love and her refreshingly unique melodies, but such eloquent intimacy is largely lacking in her most recent record. That is not to say the album as a whole is bad; it just is not what made her a great.

Some of the tracks are reminiscent of classic Taylor, however. “I Did Something Bad” and “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” are true to her clean gibes against the naïve men that attempted to meddle with her, reminding them of who is on top and plans to stay there. “Call It What You Want” romanticizes taking refuge in a boyfriend; “Delicate” portrays the difficulties of maneuvering around a newfound love, and “New Year’s Day” is reminiscent of her softer days, in which the production is just her and the piano. In these, Taylor’s voice shines in a way the pubescent country girl’s could not. She is still in control, but in a different way than before.

Taylor still is and will always be an impressive musician. “reputation” is just jarring because she is playing on someone else’s terms. Perhaps her change suggests that even the strongest of our pop stars can falter by constant critique from the press, her co-celebrities, and even her own fans.

She hinted at the spotlight shining too bright in “Lucky One,” but it’s sad to see the queen of pop willingly hand over the throne by reinventing part of herself into someone so generic. Few would care if she wrote about alcohol and sex while adhering to the bar she set so high for herself, but, unfortunately, much of “reputation” seems cheap in comparison to her more grounded albums before it. u

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EDIT ORS’ PICKS Colette Gerstmann recommends the Fabric Workshop and Museum Stop by the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philly if you would like to spend an hour with beautiful, unnerving, entrancing fiber artworks. These works are narrative quilts and nightmarish bed sheets, curtains of flowers and belts of guns. There are not a lot of descriptive plaques hanging around, so you can walk, watch, gaze, pace, and just think without reading. Right now there’s an exhibit called “Process and Practice: 40 Years of Experimentation” that puts on display the past few decades of art made by the Workshop’s artists in residency, and it’s open ‘til March. The Museum is free and open every day, and I think there’s something to be said for places where art isn’t just displayed but also made.

Willa Glickman recommends “Kawaii for Men” If, on a dreary day, you find yourself in the mood to be transported to a world both of whimsy and crassness, look no farther than “Kawaii for Men,” a project of the Queens-based Korean-American rapper Rekstizzy. In the short episodes of the series (available on YouTube), Rek travels around NYC with the goal of introducing tough men to “The Kawaii”—a Japanese word referring to a (largely feminine) culture of cuteness. “I’m talking about cute animals, Hello Kitty, giving a small child a high five,” Rek explains in the first episode. “It’s time for the guys to admit that there’s cute stuff out here.”

In a typical episode, Rek might go to a frozen yogurt store in the company of an Instagram artist who makes pictures out of food, buy an outfit for a small dog, or go visit his mom. Rek is polite to his most mild-mannered guests, but sometimes appears catatonically bored and will occasionally offer an interviewee a gift of pornographic DVDs bought moments earlier from a street corner. Though the show initially seems like casual entertainment, it easily veers into the surreal, and determining the precise object of its satire is complex. When Rek, sipping on a canned melon drink with a deadpan expression, interviews a woman who makes “cat art” for Tumblr, is the joke on her and kawaii (or the ways in which kawaii can be used as a tool to exotify/infantilize Asianness) or is it on a brand of masculinity that is too fragile to admit that a cat can be cute? Yet whether you come for a consideration of race and gender or for recommendations on where to get snacks shaped like koalas, Kawaii for Men is sure to please.

Kyungchan Min recommends Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House If you’re looking for some heavenly noodles, take a seat at Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House on 11th and Race. Since it’s cash only, remember to hit the atm along the way. Ask for the tea, and sip it for a minute as you decide on the bowl of noodles that you want (I’m a fan of the egg & vegetable shaved noodle soup). Even during the busiest hours, your noodle soup will be on your table faster than you expect. Don’t be afraid to dig right into the steaming soup, as it will taste better hot. Remember, slurping isn’t rude.

Samantha Herron recommends 500 Rum Card games, in general, are good. Long, friendly conversation is one of humanity’s greatest daily feats, I’d say, and to have one over a game of cards is all the better. The card game, like a meal or drinks or televised sports, is less the provider of conversational content than of conversational occasion.

Card games provide a microcosmic central drama to which chitchat returns when other conversation peters out, and assures that the social setting will trudge on for at least as long as it takes someone to win. Some card games are better for this purpose than others. Best suited, in my opinion, is 500 Rum. 500 Rum is easy—the goal is to accrue points (500 of them, over the course of many rounds) by putting down matched numbered sets or sequences of same-suit cards. There is no betting or trick-taking, no poker hands or chips. It’s impossible to tell whether a win is more due to luck or to skill, and so you can drink many beers over the course of the game and not do any worse. Best of all, games of Rum 500 can go on for some time, with breaks between short rounds providing room enough for conversation to seep through and settle down for a cozy night in.

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JANUARY 2018 SWARTHMORE REVIEW

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

JANUARY 2018 51