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A southern perspective
Photo Essay by Kyungchan Min
CONTRIBUTORS Celine Anderson is a Sophomore. She has a coupla’ dreams. Jasmine Anouna is a junior. Daniel Bidikov is a sophomore without a favorite food. He remembers names, but never faces. Thomas Corbani is a senior studying French, but who cares? They like to flirt, party, and look at people, and invite you to join them in the barn for any or all of these. Isabel Cristo is a Junior Special Major in Peace & Conflict Studies. She would like to apologize for the egregiously high number of editors from New York City at this magazine, of which she is one. Matthew Eisenberg is a junior at Penn studying marketing and psychology. He records music under the name “Returning the Vacuum,” but don’t ask him why. Maddy Feldman is a fourth-year studying Sociology and Educational Studies. Her breakfast order is a cinnamon raisin bagel and green tea. Colette Gerstmann is a junior studying English and Art History. She’s not afraid to tell you that she doesn’t know how to drive. Ian Holloway is a Senior and a double major in Linguistics and Chinese. From Brooklyn, NY, he enjoys travelling and hopes to move to China after graduation. 前⼈栽树，后 ⼈乘凉。
Letter policy Letters are welcome from all readers. We will not ever publish letters anonymously and we reserve the right to edit all letters for length and clarity without contacting the letter writer. Letters generally should run no longer than 1,000 words. They should be sent to nbattel1@swarthmore.edu.
How to contribute We solicit pieces from writers, though we will also accept submissions of long-form reporting, personal, argumentative and photo essays, book and movie reviews, short stories, poems, and anything else that seems suitable. Submissions will be considered from Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and will be considered anonymously, though we will not, except in rare cases, publish anonymously. Submissions should generally not go longer than 10,000 words. Contact: nbattel1@swarthmore.edu, cgerstm1@swarthmore.edu
Madeleine King studies International Studies and Global Environmental Change and Sustainability, and won Survivor: Johns Hopkins last winter. Sona Kumar is a senior majoring in Psychology and minoring in English. Her favorite animals are snails and her cat.
EDITOR IN CHIEF NORA BATTELLE
POETRY COLETTE GERSTMANN
Xavier Gerard Lee is a senior studying comparative literature. He enjoys the finer things in life, like black coffee, black T-shirts and black comedy.
MANAGING EDITOR COLETTE GERSTMANN
Colin McLeish is a junior studying English Literature and Biology. He enjoys romantic evenings and long walks to reset the wifi router.
BOOKS LEO ELLIOT
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS TOM CORBANI ISABEL CRISTO IAN HOLLOWAY BRANDON TORRES
Kyungchan Min is a junior studying Anthropology and Film. When you run into him, make sure to say hi!
ILLUSTRATIONS JAKE VANDERVLOED
Alessandra Occhiolini is a senior from California. She likes liminal spaces, Jessica Lange, and lemon meringue pie.
MUSIC SAM HERRON
Noah Rosenberg is a junior at Swarthmore. He is majoring in Physics and Math and spends his time questioning why. Emily Simon is a woman in her final year at Bowdoin College. She is Jewish but also Catholic as far as material culture counts. She would like to say something about the freedom of information/lack thereof, critical thought and free discourse. Abhinav Tiku is currently a junior studying History and Film & Media Studies. He’s a traveler trying to find where to stop, and in his spare time, he loves eating potatoes of really any kind. Helen Wang is a senior Honors major Economics and minor in English Literature. She enjoys reading Warsan Shire on the beach and perfecting her mushroom gnocchi recipe.
COPY EDITOR VERONICA DOUGLIN
PHOTO ESSAYS NOAH MORRISON S W A R T H M O R E
Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com Founded 2012 | Vol. 4, No. 3
Design © 2016 the Swarthmore Phoenix. All content © 2016 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.
“When comes the season of decay, they both decide/ Upon sweet, husky cats to be the household pride” Charles Baudelaire, The Cat
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Arts
FEATURE
At the wedding, in the photobooth
BOOKS
‘The Girls’ 22
by Daniel Bidikov with illustrations by Jake Vandervloed
‘Small Bombs’ 23
North by northeast
On Emma Cline’s summer hit by Alessandra Occhiolini A review of the 2016 novel by Celine Anderson
Locks and Keys 25
Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel by Colin McLeish
MUSIC
Back to 2000 26
On Hilary Duff and self-reliance by Colette Gerstmann
Questioning conflict art Isabel Cristo takes a hard look at the Brooklyn Museum’s summer exhibition
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Panorama festival 29
A quieter (and better) music festival by Matthew Eisenberg
A look back at ‘Survivor’s’ impact by Maddie King
Animals in LA 31
‘BoJack’ impresses with season three by Abhinav Tiku
FICTION AND POETRY
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by Xaview Lee
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Cassiopeia Essay
Be queer
by Emily Simon
Three works of poetry
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by Thomas Corbani
TELEVISION AND MOVIES
And now—season 33 30
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johanna / are you ashamed of me
‘Freetown Sound’ 27
Dev Hynes returns, better than ever by Ian Holloway
Noah Rosenberg on hiking the Appalachian trail
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by Jasmine Anouna, Maddy Feldman, and Helen Wang
LETTERS OF REC Brief recommendations from our editors on books, music, and more
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PHOTO ESSAY
a southern perspective
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The Lobster 33
Where bleak meets compelling by Sona Kumar by Kyungchan Min
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Feature
War on Display On the ethics of conflict art
Opening night of ‘This Place’ at the Brooklyn Museum
by Isabel Cristo
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ad you visited the Brooklyn Museum sometime between February 12th and June 5th, and had you turned left into the West wing of the museum’s fourth floor, past an austere label on the wall declaring that you had entered an exhibit called “This Place”, the first thing you would have seen was Jeff Wall’s “Daybreak, on an Olive Farm in the Negev, Israel”. The photograph, blown up to fill
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the wall, shows four men, bundled in blankets on the ground of a desert landscape, while a bleak-looking building glows in the distance behind them. Had you looked closer at the wall text of the photograph, you would have learned that the men on the ground were Bedouin farmers and that the building in the distance was a prison, and you would have learned that Wall’s impetus for the photo was that he was “struck by the contrast of the bright colors of the men’s blankets against the dull colors behind them.”
If you had gone to “This Place” you would have learned all these things but not much else. If you did not already know who Bedouins are, why they would be sleeping on the ground, or who is kept in that prison, you likely would have left with those same questions. I suppose, in this way, Wall’s piece is then a sort of brilliant introduction to an exhibit that uses as its premise a highly contested and deeply controversial conflict zone, but struggles to leave its visitors with much more than a further appreciation for contrasts of bright colors against Photo courtesy of this-place.org
dull backgrounds. It may have been meant as a rumination on “otherness” and “dissonance”, but I have returned to “This Place” three times since the start of the summer and the only meaning I can find in it thus far is as an entry point into a larger and vastly more uncomfortable conversation about how we aestheticize trauma.
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he exhibition is the brainchild of Frederic Brenner, a French photographer who made his career photographing Jewish communities in the diaspora. For “This Place”, Brenner solicited the talents of 11 other internationally acclaimed photographers, inviting them to spend several weeks in Israel and the West Bank, and to create works which view the region “as place and metaphor”, according to the exhibit catalogue. Notably, none of the photographers are natives of Israel or Palestine, a choice Brenner says was intentional; in the catalogue he writes, “I wanted to find collaborators who were not embedded in the daily conflicts and dialectics of Israeli and Palestinian life, and who could look without complacency but with compassion.” The outsider-as-impartial model of art-making is neither without precedent, nor without problematic colonialist undertones, and unfortunately, what Brenner may have meant as advantageous neutrality comes off instead as ignorance. Surely, this impression was largely due to the startling lack of any contextual information in the exhibit, which meant that I simply did not trust the photographers to know what they were seeing, let alone what I should be taking away from their work. When Martin Koller snapped a photograph of a destroyed shop front on a derelict street in Hebron, did he think to himself, “Wow, look what ‘the conflict’ has done to this place which was once an economic hub, and a bustling urban center” or did he know about the road blockades, the curfews, the checkpoints, the harassment, and the displacement that caused that shop to close, allowing for his neatly composed image to be made? Will a viewer come away from that image lamenting the unfortunate repercussions of “the conflict”, or will they know that that closed shop is part of a highly methodical, state-led strategy to put pressure on Palestinian families to leave Hebron as the illegal settlements within the city limits continue to expand, and mourn it as such? Will they know that the ladder propped up against the building is there so that families can climb onto their roofs, through their windows, and into their
homes because their front doors have been bolted shut and their movement is so heavily restricted? When Thomas Struth presents his image of a Mizrahi family in their home, did he mean only to convey “the resilience of kinship” as his artist’s statement suggested, or did he understand anything about the position of double jeopardy that those communities face as Arab Jews? Did Jeff Wall know that the prison behind his “starkly contrasting colors” held political prisoners? It may be that these artists did their research, and knew all this and more. If they did, they did not demonstrate that knowledge in any of the wall texts accompanying the 100+ images, nor in the 200-page exhibit book. Or, it may be that I am asking too much of the artists, who after all, are artists and not college students or ethicists who compulsively dissect sociohistorical innuendo wherever it may be found. So, what then are the ethics involved in maneuvering the admittedly shaky ground between artistic effect and documentation when shooting sights of trauma and conflict? In the case of “This Place”, this question looms with several added complications, but also with several constraints. First, much of “This Place” focuses its attention quite literally on the land of the region, chiefly privileging the aesthetic configuration of that land over its symbolic contents: Fazal Sheikh’s gorgeous aerial photos of the Negev Desert featured not a single reference to the conflict, but treated the earth as a sight of line and shape to stunning effect; Stephen Shore and Frederic Brenner made sweeping, emotive landscapes, often with basilicas or structures included but with no hint as to their significance; and Jungjin Lee’s “Unnamed Roads” series was the most blatant in this regard, depicting the ghostly silhouettes of trees, industrial rooms, hills, all in completely unidentifiable spaces.
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n short, these are beautiful photographs did nothing to deserve the lofty aim expressed in Brenner’s exhibit statement: “only through the language of artists, une parole poetique, could we hope to leave behind a dual perspective where prejudice and cynicism prevail.” If this is the case, then those artists are not these artists, and I can’t help but feel as though this statement, taken together with the photographers’ positions as foreigners and their preoccupation with the earth, smacks of some kind of “common ground” (ha) argument, as though to say “let’s stop this senseless human conflict, which only exists
as an appendage to this otherwise neutral ground”. This “why can’t we all just get along” vibe is a means of disregarding the questions of responsibility, accountability, power, and (perhaps most importantly) policy that are pivotal to the endurance of the occupation and the conflict. Even when symbols of the occupation— or even just the communities belonging in Israel and Palestine— are included, the photographs do nothing to further our understanding of those symbols or people as anything other than nameless, tokenized objects of oppression. They say, “look, the separation barrier is still there” and “look, this man is at a checkpoint,” as if simply proving the existence of the occupation is enough of a statement. Maybe it would have been if Frederic Brenner was not telling me at every turn to “look past the conflict” and “go beyond the polarizing narratives”. I’m trying, but what is more polarizing than a separation wall?
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ere is perhaps the most pressing and overarching of all my (many) grievances. “This Place” invoked the trauma and pain of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, seemingly to accomplish nothing other than to showcase the work of 12 successful photographers. I am of the opinion that making art in conflict zones is not a hopeless project, but “This Place” did not bother to engage with its premise. The exhibit was so peripheral to the conflict, so inconsequential, that the choice of location seems almost random until one remembers that attaching your work to weighty and sexy topics of international politics is a great way to ensure that a lot of well-meaning people will come to your show. For all its relevance to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jungjin Lee’s photo of trees might as well have been taken in Prospect Park across the street from my parents’ apartment, but when it is tethered to Israel and Palestine, it becomes imbued with a sense of gravity, somberness, and meaning that it did nothing to earn. In this way, the whole thing felt exploitative—of the people whose pain was invoked certainly, and also of me, the viewer. I went into the “This Place” with a hushed reverence, a readiness to respect the experiences and potential traumas that I would witness as part of a photo series about Israel and Palestine that sold itself as “a nuanced look at the site of chaos and conflict”. That respect and compassion was pulled from me, twisted and disfigured and aimed not at people in pain, but at some well-composed photos of desert hills. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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ESSAY
Be queer: re-calling the word
How a positively defined queerness can pave the way to new utopias
by Thomas Corbani
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he gay martyr is dying. It’s no secret: liberal America’s crusade to normalize alternate sexuality wrapped a band around Dan Savage’s finger and birthed Neil Patrick Harris’s family Halloween group costumes. The swathes of the country that would burn fags at the stake are shrinking as steadily as RuPaul is sucking the soul out of drag. Many of us are no longer dying of AIDS. We reeled over Pulse in part because we were shocked that in a city like Orlando somebody could want us dead. The movement for LGBTQ liberation has rightly shifted its attention to those whom progress left behind: people of color, low-income folk, trans individuals. Matthew Shepherd gave way to CeCe McDonald in our collective imagination. We classify our people along the lines of identity into smaller and smaller boxes and designate those that need our collective immediate attention. Sometimes, our focus shifts from that which we all share, beyond the essential specificities we are discussing: queerness. Outlining these boxes gives the illusion of a clear division between its contents and the outside. This is part of why many define queerness as a negative construct, i.e. as “not straight.” Similarly, queer spaces seem to be determined in opposition to the aggressions of daily life: no racism, homophobia, sexism, cissexism, classism, ableism, femmephobia etc. It seems as though queerness can only react to society’s oppressions, shield itself from what it resists, instead of rewriting the world in its own terms. Identity politics also dupe us into believing we necessarily fit a cer-
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tain bundle of terms consistently, and that our beings are exclusively determined by the weight of these labels. Speaking from personal experience, if the amount I get heckled on the street is proportional to the hours I spend grooming, feminizing myself, am I only welcome into a women and non-binary space on those days where I’ve expended enough cosmetic labor? Can I go if I forget to shave? Because it’s an umbrella-term that encompasses all alternative sexual and gender identities, the word “queer” loses its poignancy as its constituent parts wage an internal war. The value of this argument is overshadowed by the loss of a radical allyship that constitutes the core of a political queerness. We cannot define queerness in terms of the oppressions its constituents face without running the risk of quantifying it, grading a metric by which some would be more so than others. I’ve already had too many people tell me they avoid queer spaces for fear of not being “queer enough,” where queerness is accrued through visibility and hardship, for example through your publicly queer partner or the bullying you experienced in middle school. To be clear, I have no desire to discredit the momentous work of those who rely on identity politics to help specific communities, nor do I wish to question the importance of closed spaces for specific groups to find community or discuss the difficulties inherent to their position. These are wonderful and necessary facets of the contemporary left that save lives. I simply wonder whether queerness, as a distinct entity from the identities it comprises, is not more than plain exclusion. In other words, whether queerness and its spaces can be described positively as well.
To define a queer space positively is to name what it holds, to utter utopia into an ephemeral possibility. In mine, I see the joyful toothy smiles strangers greet each other with and the lipstick mark left on the mirror by a flirty narcissist. As I walk into the room, I hear a symphony of vertiginous pumps, stoic boots and anything in between pounding the floor as if to dent an archive of the evening’s transient bliss into the ground, lunar footsteps of a new kind to stir the coating of this indifferent, straight world. I shudder at the accidental touch of an elbow brushing mine or a lip scaling my shoulder, and let the electric pulse propel me over the horizon of feasibility into the stratosphere of my fantasy, where love blooms and withers in the blink of a heartbeat. I want to feel the laughter and pain of others who are unequivocally present, honest, breathing this space as they did their first gasp: moved by a need beyond their consciousness to ingest their surroundings, to be fueled by this air. This is what I imagine and try to make real. More generally, the queerness I long for is rooted in existence, not identity. It’s an outlook which guides our steps, whispers new truths into our ears, points to those small, irrelevant oddities of daily life that bring it all its worth. It’s a critical approach to the world around us, the reason we query our relationships and environment in the hopes of reaching a fairer, kinder understanding. It is our singular queerness that I spotted when I looked at you across the room and caught the glint in your eye that passed unnoticed to the straight gaze. It is that which we aspire to, yet that which we recognize. This is what we share and can build new worlds from.
The beauty of queerness rests in the change it can birth, its innumerable manifestations. Each of us is an agent to bring forth this change, to wield queerness as best we can conceive. Name your utopia. Fathom the unique fantasy you want to see and strive to make it happen. Where is it? Who’s there? What’s happening? Build the space you want to exist in, brick by brick, concretize its image. Find your friends, clinch new clothes, expedite pesky emails. Queer up the vibe. Wouldn’t that be fun? Tell me, what do you imagine? Yes, you! If you think you’re queer, you’re queer enough. We must forgo the
assumption that sexual orientation always correlates with attraction, for queerness is open to the possibility of a new, never-experienced desire which can go against an identity’s dogma. Neither does it always correlate with experiences, politics and outlook; anybody can relish in our utopia if they think, well, queerly. Because let’s be real: there are many gays who don’t give a shit about radical allyship, and straights who navigate fluidly in our circles. I want to believe in everybody’s potential to aspire. Many of us are dying, still. We must fight for those whom the system is failing,
those getting shot, incarcerated, denied appropriate health care. Let’s use identity politics wisely, namely in identifying those who need help and naming the structures that oppress them. In this, these labels remain essential. However, when you take off your work clothes and bare yourself to the moments of leisure you can afford (whether it be a coffee break or a whole night), how will you live? Will you accept the mundanity of a sad straight world, or try to remake it on your own terms? Will you shred up what’s normal and restitch it into new meaning? From the ashes we raise our havoc. u
PERSONAL ESSAYS
Marriage is a lot of work An optimistic view on the complex machinery of the love industry by Dan Bidikov with illustrations by Jake Vandervloed
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arriage may be a reservoir of joy through companionship. It might also be a narrative toward domesticity and neo-agrarian servility. Or perhaps it is an explicitly gendered means of organizing and withholding power. These all sound like reasonable if prohibitively verbose analyses of a concept so deeply entrenched
in all branches of history and theory that its particulars are often most relatably described by offensive t-shirt slogans and bad comedians. Rather than attempt a sweeping analysis of the marital union, it is more manageable—potentially more interesting, useful, novel if nothing else—to offer a perspective that is rarely considered and
as involved as it is distant: that of a photo booth attendant [1]. The modern photo booth is a deceptively simple construction. It is fifty percent computer, fifty percent assorted lighting, curtains, structural support, and seating area. My line of work, while technically a subset of the service industry, requires almost no human contact. I exist outside
[1] Also known as a photo booth operator, it refers to the person who is staffing the photo booth to ensure that photos print correctly, flash lights go off, tornados of childhood don’t cause damage, etc.
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not only the guest list of wedding attendees (a clear distinction) but also the staff list of employees: I lack the cigarette-smoking grit humor of the catering staff and zoomed out irony of the photographers. Ostensibly, though, my wage comes from the interactive service I provide. In lieu of a palpable hand shaking, customer greeting service, however, I have managed only to delineate the positive impact of the work, and its context, on the people whom it technically “serves.” For a year and change I have been under the employ of an as-of-writing nameless ad-hoc event photo booth booking company. The work comes and goes as young lovers choose whether they would like to invite a visibly disaffected college student and his robot-camera-box companion to their celebration of unity. When my friend and I arrive, we spend the five to seven hour ceremony in a corner of the restaurant/ballroom/generic scenic venue, watching a five to seven hour long line of merrymakers walk past us, twice each per snapshot. I get a meal usually and sometimes hors d’oeuvres while my associate enjoys the warmth of nearby outlets and the privileged seclusion awarded to the party’s hardworking dumping ground for second cousins and overbearing colleagues. I don’t know if I want to be married. Until recently I would have confidently said that I don’t want to get married—a
wedding is not an entirely convincing display of the love and pride that one is brought up to expect. Usually the kind of wedding that features a picture cubicle is of the especially kitschy, gaudy variety; picture bridesmaids cultishly devoted to quirky entry maneuvers and monogrammed mason jar party favors. It takes place in a wedding factory, where beautiful moments are produced like clockwork. Guests are reminded to clear out as promptly as possible so that the next batch may arrive comfortably, and everyone eats
the same thing. At times one hears the music from a concurrent wedding down the hall of the venue which, most likely, is the same music slated to play at every wedding in that building that day. And the next day. To work around the fact that some—and possibly many—weddings are not like this, I will from here on add an argumentatively useful classification: we will call this wedding an Event. There is little room for individualism at an Event. All decisions relevant to your experience—where and with whom you sit, what you eat, what music you move to— are in the hands of a distant parliament of planners, caterers, invitation makers, etc. You don’t even really get to decide what you do or think at the party (reception, gathering, celebration). The Event’s psychological impression is formed in large part by an emcee [2] who regularly propels dance-related encouragement to the crowd and offers a serving of hype along with the duck/beef plate that often goes unappreciated. He tells you how to enjoy yourself —”all the couples get out here for this next dance!”—and why—”we’re here to celebrate the togetherness of these two incredible people!”—under authoritative pretense. There is barely room for self expression, even at the level of bride and groom [3], as they have chosen to relinquish the grating responsibility of throwing what may be the most important party of their young lives to the Event staff. Events are formulaic to say the least.
[2] Sometimes spelled “M.C.” or “MC” (initialism for “Master of Ceremonies”), an emcee is most people’s wedding must-not-have. Always male and of about even racial representation, the emcee will function as a deejay (sometimes spelled “D.J.” or “DJ”) and all-purpose party kindler. [3] Or groom and groom, or marital partner and marital partner.
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That is not to take the facile position that they are lame or hard to enjoy given their beat-you-over-the-head corny conventionality. It’s also not to make the trivial suggestion that they could be “cooler” or more “interesting” to my bleeding-edge liberal arts college sensibilities. The faux-incisive commentary of the cup-inhand, body-in-corner observer is a worn out perspective to give in our time; it overcrowds the canon of relatable self-deprecation to the point of banality.
The particulars of my part at Events are important to consider in the development of my commentary. I am not a guest, binge drinking and socializing and dancing to Top 40 hits. Rather, I am useful wallpaper. I provide infrequent maintenance to a source of excess entertainment where people make superficial but ever important memories. The repetitive non-participation of my role in Event genesis has exposed me to the emergence of desirability through psychic exhaustion. People at a wedding usually enjoy the photo booth. It’s hard to say why, especially given how commonplace the process and product of snapping quirky photos of oneselves have become. My theory is that the booth removes the labor of self absorption demanded by the selfie. There is no sinister undercurrent of narcissism, as shared love replaces self love. People enter in groups and are immortalized in those groups by a central authority symbolized in foreboding black velvet pseudo-architecture. There’s no post production or even pre-printing review. It’s a communal mystery of the party experience. I’ve never actually been in a photo booth except to make sure it works, and
I’ve never actually been to an Event except to make sure the photo booth works. I have been to weddings, but only the part where you may kiss the bride [4]. But in my part as the unbiased observer I have seen people enter and exit the device in all kinds of mirth. In my time spent watching other people have a good time I have been inexplicably [5] envious of something that in abstract has no appeal to me or my ridiculous, hoity-toity conception of a free thinking adult person. My understanding of it is thus: a photo booth, as with any component of the Event’s experience, is part of a willful deference to someone who—even though there is no rigorous grounds for believing so—is qualified to make sure you are given the experience you bought a gift for, the experience that you have cultivated this relationship with two people strongly enough to deserve. The ethic of the Event is such that its participants are canned sardines of celebration which, though it may not seem so, is an extremely satisfying way to be. By subjecting to the Event’s more powerful figures, they can actually “let go” in the so-cliché-it’s-real sense.
When they can’t reflect on the Event’s twisted moral obligation to the proliferation of nuclear unity, they can let the campy ritual give them the interpersonal benefit that they need, even if they cannot articulate it as something that they want. Perhaps the marriage will fail, exist indefinitely in twisted miscommunication, or something worse. But the Event lives on in printer ink and vague recollection, forever a symbol of the pleasant sheen of love and togetherness that coats the fun-
damentally grotesque marital union that spawned it. If I were to be married, I cannot guarantee that it would make its way through an Event. But I encourage anyone who has the privilege of being part of an Event to do so with open arms and an empty mind. Let the groanworthy playlist and chintzy photo props be a noninvasive reminder of why you came in the first place—to bask in the energy-rich radiation of a union that is so academically complex, so poten-
tially sinister, that it does you no good to think about it. The trajectory of marriage is unpredictable. It is a grand array of interacting systems, unconsciously shaping the dynamics of social life via the atomic collisions of its participants. Its ultimate or direct goal is not easy to agree upon: it could be that the motivated End of marriage is something wonderful, or terrible, or that the institution acts without sense. Regardless, the matrimonial bond, in its inexorable dissipation of chaos and heat, spawns in its flame a self-substantiating amount of Events. The atmosphere of the Event possesses a unique conceptual emptiness, the property of being simultaneously unworthy of and above analysis. It seems to defy thoughtfulness in a way that mimics the suspension of disbelief demanded by science fiction movies. In that sense it is something like an endorphin rush or a high, a provocation of joy in the Event’s attendant. But it is also humanized and socially demanding, so while it does not explicitly produce any content in the space of your thoughts, it leaves a mark on them. The dilemma we are left with, then, is whether or not this mark is a good thing. u
[4] Again I would like to wave off the potential ignorance of my rigidly gendered terminology as second (third, fourth even) to the point.[3] Or groom and groom, or marital partner and marital partner. [5] Until now, obviously, as this is a detailed explanation.
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North by Northeast by Noah Rosenberg
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here’s a quote from Lao Tzu that reads something like, “the sage seeks to fill the belly and empty the mind.” I had never read this literally until four days into my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, when I found my way to Neel Gap, somewhere between the towns of Suches and Owltown, Georgia. Neel Gap, about 35 miles into the trail, marks the only spot on the whole 2189.1mile jaunt in which the trail actually goes through a building. It is the first sign of civilization since leaving the welcome center at Amicalola Falls State Park at the base of Springer Mountain, whose summit marks the southern terminus. The establishment at Neel Gap consists of a hiking outfitter and a hiker hostel. I ran into the outfitter around noon, after climbing down the frozen summit of Blood Mountain, looking for some food. They had a freezer full of DiGiorno Supreme pizzas and a microwave in the back. Being from New York, I’d never even known that frozen pizzas existed prior to that moment (I’d probably seen a commercial on television, but with access to brick-oven dollar pizza on every corner, it’s not something I’d given much thought to). I bought one and waited half an hour for it to heat up, shivering in the winter air and listening to the groans of my stomach. When it came out, I went outside to a picnic table where others had just finished their own Supremes, and I downed the 2160-calorie monstrosity in ten minutes. It was the most delicious pizza I’ve ever tasted, and my first fond memory of the trail. More hikers gradually gathered around at the picnic table to perform the same ritual. It is difficult to describe the experience of a long-distance trek in America (in contrast to Europe and Asia, where many hiking paths intersect far more frequently with towns and villages) without talking about food. Food dominates thought, conversation, and budget. In fact, there are really only seven topics that came up in trail conversation with frequency: food, weather, gear, food, health, water, and food. This wasn’t what I imagined when I set out on my trip. I had this image of setting 10
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out for six months on the Great American Pilgrimage, letting the scent of the morning dew fill my nostrils as I whipped out my copy of Walden and crawled out of my tent to the sight of another Instagrammable sunrise, ready to face another day of contemplation of My Life and the Big Questions. What I got instead was the scent of Citrosol as I stood for half an hour in the packaged pastry isle in Food City, picking up each brand of honey bun and perusing the nutrition facts to find the optimal balance of calories to weight to price (the answer: Duchess Grand Iced, 680 calories, $2.80 per six-pack). The idea that food brings people together is biblically old and clichéd. But I had never appreciated that notion so much as on the trail. Even the everyday act of sitting down every night on a log, surrounded by sweaty strangers, and comparing our disgusting culinary concoctions (my personal staple was instant ramen, powdered mashed potatoes, and tuna from a foil packet scooped into a tortilla and sprinkled with Cheetos) was an instant act of camaraderie, and brought a sense of community that I could look forward to at the end of a long, lonely day of walking up mountains through snow or rain or mud. Looking back on my experiences on the trail, I’m surprised at how many of them came as a direct result of food-related decisions. My first 23-mile day, just south of Hot Springs, NC, was tragically cut short by a woman parked on a dirt road offering us Guinness, who was later joined by a dozen colleagues from her 2012 thru-hike. They had driven down to cook Easter dinner for any hikers happening to pass by, and had gotten there a few days early with hot dogs and beer. Hearing this, I looked at my friend Corn Cob and we instantly agreed to camp there for the night. And so we sat that night around a bonfire, joined by only one other hiker, a 60-year-old professor of Classical Chinese named Old Fox, and twelve angels who fed us. A couple guitars came out and we were up into the wee hours of the night. The more beer went around, the less reclusive Old Fox became, and we got into a conversation about Lao Tzu, the value of education, and the best dim sum in Flushing, his former neighborhood. He reintroduced me to that idea of empty-
PERSONAL ESSAY ing the mind and filling the belly, and we proceeded to do just that, albeit somewhat unintentionally. Then there was the time a dozen of us waited around for three days to attend a free hiker breakfast courtesy of a church in Bland, Virginia (that’s actually the name of the town—you can look it up), bringing me into contact with a slice of America I’d never encountered before between the bubbles of Manhattan and Swarthmore. There were the five separate occasions when total strangers with whom I struck up conversation paid my bill or bought me drinks at restaurants without even telling me. There was the week when I walked with a man who knew dozens of wild edibles, and I’d cook a pot of foraged greens every night (far more satisfying than instant ramen, but impossible to get enough calories). And there was the zero (zero-mile day) I took in Damascus, VA at a dry hostel, where I didn’t even notice the no-beer rule because we were all too caught up in the joy of using a real kitchen, sharing food, and demolishing pints of Ben & Jerry’s. You can read Bill Bryson, Cheryl Strayed, Jon Krakauer, Jack Kerouac, or really any one of hundreds of books from the past century about the deep spiritual journeys that accompany a long physical one. There are dozens of self-published books about the Appalachian Trail released in the last five years alone. I can’t really pretend that I, a twenty-year-old straight white male (we comprise about 75 percent of hikers annually) with no particularly outstanding circumstances, have much to add to that narrative. I didn’t go in looking to solve huge life problems, and even the problems I did go in with were not magically solved by walking a lot. Instead I learned the feeling of powerlessness. I had no control of the weather, the people around me (whose armpits I slept next to every night), my health, or the physical trail itself. This was terrifying at times: on an exposed bald in a thunderstorm, in a blizzard with ten miles to go before the nearest campsite, when my throat was parched and the stream I had been watching for had run dry. But I found a comfort in it. All I needed to focus on was trying to fill my belly, and everything else seemed to fall into place. u
A Southern Perspective
photo essay by Kyungchan Min
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2016 thus far has been a turbulent year. We have seen the lives of innocent people extinguished with brutal force, without mercy—gone in an instant. We have marched in the streets, stood upon highways, and called legislators who have yet to answer the wailing cries of mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. They idly gazed on as the doors of our democracy were once more scored with the nail marks of the marginalized. And now, we have a man running for president who wishes to further solidify the sacrosanct racist systems that line the bricks of our nation. As desolate as the future may seem, I find solace in those who still hold hope and fight on. The everyday Americans who hold steadfast against the rising tides of too-ridiculous-to-be-true ideologies deserve recognition. In this photo essay, I explore the aftermath of 2016’s upheavals through strangers on the streets. Through strangers, I found indifference after loathing, love after hatred, and hope after tragedy. I hope you do too. Kyung.
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FICTION & POETRY johanna / are you ashamed of me
POETRY
Content Warning: The following poem discusses transphobia and misgendering, told from the perspective of a cisgender person, not a trans person. by Xavier Lee
Old headscarves I kept from when you still had your long locks, the ones I sort of hated until you cut them off, the ones I said not to get but you got anyways. The old you is still inside of them, in these translucent fibers smelling like eucalyptus and coconut, like my grandmother’s house in the summertime, the scent of warm light— I can still find you here, a variation, an illusion of you— although “you” still exist. I remember the day you cut your locks off, and I stood by as you took the scissors to your ends, liberation in the sinews of your skinny arms. With feigned admiration I watched the ritual, handed you the broom to sweep up the fragments of your chrysalis. You threw yourself away, discarded the broken mirror. Later that night, I dug through the trash to find what bits remained of the old you. I am in the guest room of my mother’s house, sprawled across the bed amidst what ephemera I could glean from our one-sided marriage. Old photos from disposable cameras capture the woodgrain of your bare skin, a half-steel lock for every grayed-out year; your lipsticks and reddened eyes shadow the fibers of your shorn mask. Void of light is the life of a man in ruin. I can’t help but blame you for bringing me here, but not because you hate me (No, as you said, you could never hate me) but because you needed to start loving yourself. My mother laughed at me when I told her, that earth-shattering, hurtful roar shaking our wedding 18
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photo that she kept but reluctantly on the mantle, my father’s army photo placed just before it, obscuring you in your wedding dress, leaving only me, smiling ignorant. She wasn’t shocked; she had always said there was something odd about you. “That gull strange,” she said when you came over the first time, wearing a pair of tight black jeans and an oversized tee-shirt, your red lips painted black – “She not a lady. ‘Srong with her?” I told her not to be so old-fashioned, that her antiquated values, her perception of the sexual spheres did not apply to you, that you were freer than she ever could be. She smacked me on the mouth, and even as an adult I had to bite my lip to keep my eyes from watering. She glared at her prodigal son because she didn’t know what to do with that information, could not understand your outline – I hear her howling laughter as an echo in my head, a reaction of disbelief, like when I couldn’t help but giggle at your cousin’s funeral, for a reason I never understood, finding suddenly the absurdity of existence and of death amusing in the worst moment, a time of grief and misery. You elbowed me in the gut, and my body never stopped ringing. That night she chuckled to herself and asked me what I was going to do now, in this bizarre turn of events. When I told her I would stay, I could hear the muscles in her face snap quick into a scowl. I had the first panic attack since we’ve been married the other week. I thought our marriage had cured me of my afflictions, but I’m realizing that human beings cannot save one another, that love is no panacea. I was not so broken before I met you, and now, I am realizing I am no more whole from having been with you. Do not let this hurt you, although I refuse to apologize for my honesty.
I have been lying to myself for months now, lying to you, too, and it is only just to be truthful, even if the truth widens the rift which grows between us. I tried to keep a strong face, said I would stand by you on this journey, that we were now too bound together to exist as separate entities and these words seemed so meaningless, projected into space like blanks. We tried to pretend as if nothing had changed, tried to go on our little dates to that Jamaican restaurant on 47th street or to the movies on Tuesdays when the tickets were cheap. The husky woman who takes the orders one day accosted me when you went to the bathroom, scolded me, saying “Me can’t believe you’d treat that good woman this way, you no-good batty-man.” When I was silent when you came back, when I could not look you in your eyes, and you touched my cold, sweat-covered fist under the table, I flinched, felt myself retract inside, yanked my hand back. And the look of betrayal in your eyes hurt me, although I had just hurt you. I tried to keep up appearance, but the Christmas party at work came around again, and you asked about it over dinner, and I told you that it’d be best if you didn’t attend. Your lips pursed, and your eyes started to water, but you blinked hard, and when you opened your eyes, I could feel your body tense up with anger. “Are you ashamed of me, Chris?” I fell in love with a false exterior. I surrendered my spirit to a mask you had crafted to protect yourself, and as our love grew I found myself trapped in our margins, misaligned. In all of these photos it appeared that we were happy and I realize now, reexamining my rememory, it was only me who smiled. You always had a stern, proud demeanor, always prided yourself on being resilient, unwavering. But your half-grimace held depth, and I refused to look deeper, out of fear that all I had constructed,
Art courtesy of Nora Battelle
Wondrous marital walls prove as false and transparent As your crumbling façade. We tried to make it work, but I couldn’t survive in their eyes. And every night I weep For every day I lived self-beguiled. I cannot hate you for loving yourself. I still feel your hand on my fist under that table, your elbow in my gut, your voice in my mind, clouded by my mother’s laughter, my coworker’s look of grave discomfort, the image of my father’s eternal sleep, a scowl etched across his cold, bony face as his body turns over and over in its shallow grave. I am trying to use your happiness as a reason to sleep at night, to not allow misery to clutch my brain, feeling so much like your hand that it makes me seize in the night, but it is not so easy. I am finding it hard to breathe in your absence, but when you are near me, the new you, there is not enough air to breathe. Your happiness, your smile, John, is breathtaking – I have never seen you so radiant, so content, and it brings me to tears to see it, knowing that you have reached the highlight of your life, that mirrors no longer steal you away from me, that you are able to laugh and smile in photos, because what you see therein is true, not just a reconciliation. I cannot keep you anymore, and the subpoena on the floor is my proof. I was so selfish, I am so selfish, forgive me. u
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Cassiopeia by Emily Simon
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he bus driver taps the horn in a rhythm that reminds every passenger of her childhood. It is a sunny day. The clouds are small, regular, puffed. The sky is perfect blue and the cables for the tram at 59th street are taut and strong against it. Erect towers of brick and glass and limestone even appear to taper up into it. A man wakes up somewhere in the back of the bus and yells up to the front, “Hey man, it’s my stop.” The driver yells back, “I know, man.” “You didn’t wake me up!” The driver moves to the back, opens the door and lowers the ramp for the hungry man in a wheelchair. “Get out the way!” A sharp whistle. It isn’t the bus driver’s. “That’s it,” the bus driver says, “you got it.” A whistle again. “Get out the way!” The sun is warming the street and it’s ready to receive this man however he comes into it. The day is like a gift for the two of them, the unwashed man in the wheelchair and the driver who smiles all the time. There’s a proud and private understanding between them, even greater because they might not ever speak again. We’re all a bit envious, even the woman with red lips and cat-eye frames and a disgusted kind of expression. It was a scene: the yelling, the civilian blowing the whistle, the uncouth intrusion, and above all, the striking liveliness, the sparking between two strangers. We all take things so personally. The driver smiles himself back to his seat at the wheel and welcomes his new passengers. Construction all the way up 57th street, the only view outside. It might be called war, this overhaul of the city. All this demolition. It’s war and the aftermath, too. The building upwards. The reconstruction and reorder. The displacement. There’s an empty lot in the middle of it
FICTION all, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The new absence where the old building stood is made of sunlight, light displaced until now, demolition-time. The bright vacant spaces in this city don’t last long and they’re never for us to use, to live in or even to sit. It is the stately buildings that survive the times. I’ve come to 200 West 57th Street because I have business here: a tall broad building with an unremarkable facade, which takes up the whole southwest corner of 57th and Seventh. This building, like many others, houses offices for doctors and lawyers and other professionals with whom one makes appointments. I’ve come to sit on a couch in one of its offices, in a room with many books, a gestural painting, and a doctor. A room for sessions in which Doctor and patient, she and I, work together. There aren’t any rules, but there is a code, and she and I understand it. Her legs are tanned and she’s wearing a geometric pattern of sky blue and white. She’s been away for some weeks. I don’t ask where. I don’t say, “you look tan.” “How was your trip?” she asks me. And she doesn’t ask, “was it everything you hoped?” About five minutes before, a man swinging his arm while crossing the street punched me in the stomach. I laughed and laughed and knew it was like crying, that perhaps it was. I don’t say anything about this now. My doctor and I don’t talk about the city, and if we discuss happiness, security, or freedom, we don’t exactly talk about them. We choose different words. We approximate, we get as close as possible. There is always a limit. So early this same morning the cloud cover over Dublin was heavy and impenetrable. Mist was all around us. We had to fight with the handle of my suitcase, which kept twisting without cause. We alternated forcing the difficult thing up the wet road, up stairs, too. Stop/start, windingly, all the way to Houston station. I was too late for the bus so we said goodbye at the taxi stop.
My driver laughed along with a recorded prank call on the radio and apologized every time he cleared his throat. I missed check-in at the airport but they held us all at the gate for an hour after I arrived. I filmed our takeoff, up into the low-slung clouds and the origami arm of the plane finally sailing above them, the clear always-blue sky that weather doesn’t touch. I looked at pictures on my phone, read notes I’d written to myself and messages from him. I didn’t plug into the sound for the movie, but I watched it anyway. I listened to my own music. I filmed a period of turbulence and the landing, too. In my session, I explain that my trip wasn’t an extravagance after all, but a necessary—and I can’t find the word, I try and I give up. It was already too difficult to distinguish between the days and nights of the last ten days. Events were helpful: that museum visit, trad music at that pub, the traverse along the coast, through that bog. One night I couldn’t stay in bed. First I sat up and then I stood. I tied a robe around me and couldn’t move for some minutes. I waited until I knew what I wanted. I went downstairs and closed the door behind me. Struggled with the latch on the door to the backyard. I climbed up onto the picnic table and lay down on my back. I crossed my arms over my chest, I hugged myself. Clouds passed over me and they were enormous, anthropomorphic clouds. I felt such fear that I turned away from them, then looked back; and the one break in them exposed the constellation I always looked for. It was the one I could identify by name, a She. She, I couldn’t help thinking, “She.” It was almost morning when I went back to bed. I don’t know why I should tell this story. It isn’t really a story at all. The session ends after forty-five minutes and we agree on a next time. I will walk home, but I can’t declare it. I think it, proudly, the best I can do. On the street, I begin a new note:
The church and the military provide very different public services, but what they have in common is beautiful words: benediction, genuflection, conscription, ammunition. High language, language that requires an education, access to such special psychic and corporeal power. We live in a world of overlapping influences, where boundaries are regularly crossed and misplacement is inevitable. Apologetics have nothing to do with apologies. Ballistic can describe a person or a weapon, depending on context. Contrition comes from the Roman Catholic Church, though it sounds more like a military strategy or compromise. If we are ever at fault for misunderstanding or misusing our language, if we don’t say what we mean so much as we mean to say what we mean, if we are word-poor, then at least in poetry we are sinless and we try. u 20
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L’Ulivo
The Morning
by Jasmine Anouna
by Maddy Feldman
I Tuoi rami rompono cieli azzurri In curve rapide, irruenti. Tremo alla tua forza delicata Che bilancia secoli di battaglie Ma Noi non siamo come Tu— Tempo non é il nostro scultore. L’amore é nostro sole. Noi non siamo costruiti dal Tempo— Lei nasconde le nostre battaglie. L’amore é nostra tempesta. Noi non cresciamo col Tempo— I suoi numeri sono irrilevanti L’amore é nostra acqua, nostra terra. Tus ramos rompen cielos azules En curvas rápidas, impulsivas. Tiemblo enfrente a Tu fuerza delicada Que equilibra siglos de batallas
POETRY
Since you are new to town I suppose I will have to tell you that even here in your bed there is draped static netted bitter and thick like the spit on scarves pressed hard to our mouths. The wind goes hoarse. We trudge a fresh path. See, around here we measure time in icings. Last time I passed a downed maple on Elmwood and in counting its rings understood myself to be a thing thickening between storms. In high school we girls bought happiness lamps. This year I thought I’d escape it by coming south but when I pulled up found myself collecting in piles outside the doors of my parents’ house. See, they never left. And all I have is the shovels of my small hands, which know you to be another low-grade fever dream, your summer skin like snow. u
Pero Nosotros no somos como Ti— El Tiempo no es nuestro escultor. L’amor es nuestro sol. Nosotros no somos construidos por el Tiempo— Ella oculta nuestras batallas. L’amor es nuestra tormenta. Nosotros no crecemos con el Tiempo— Sus números son irrelevantes L’amor es nuestra agua, nuestra tierra. Your branches break blue skies In abrupt, impulsive bends. I tremble at Your delicate force That balances centuries’ battles. But We are not like you— Time is not our sculptor. Love is our sun.
Light Space by Helen Wang I have begun to feel that the worst crime Against my personhood Would not be to give and be stolen But to live in irreverence of my own proclivity for Your fingertips: Those that peel away my anxieties like thin wallpaper, Forge windows in this room, Let the sunbeams absolve my skin: No longer A clean, well-lighted place
We are not shaped by time— She hides our battles. Love is our storm.
Your hands: Those that hold steady, Fetch thoughts from the corners of my mind Where they have burned like dead letters, undeliverable Now, look, how sweetly they find repose between your lips
We do not grow with time— Her numbers are irrelevant Love is our water, our earth. u
Listen—in my voice there is a home So do not tend to half said things There is space here; there is time To be whole u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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BOOKS Queer desire sidelined in Emma Cline’s ‘The Girls’ REVIEW
Cline’s summer novel transcends the status of beach-read but doesn’t always do its characters justice
by Alessandra Occhiolini
E
mma Cline’s “The Girls” seems like it may have been concocted in some secret laboratory to be the literary fiction crossover hit of the summer. It’s about a barely-masked version of the Manson family, its author knows how to write understated prose that can knock your socks off, and, to top it all off, a glowing endorsement from Lena Dunham graces the back cover. Every time I’ve ducked into an airport bookstore this summer to kill time before a flight, it leered at me from the nearest shelf. So, for the ultimate in snobby questions: can a book that lines the shelves of airport bookstores alongside the latest John Grisham be a valuable contribution to American literature? This particular snob says yes. Cline’s prose is tight, her imagery glimmering yet rooted in truth. It’s no wonder she’s a Paris Review favorite: the woman can write, and, more to the point, can write girlhood in a way that feels uncomfortably true to life. Her best work exists in the early chapters, which dwell on the banality of that uncomfortable period between childhood and teenage apathy. Her narrator Evie flips through magazines, trying to discover who she is and who she might become if she follows Seventeen’s instructions and attracts a boy whose love will transform her. But Evie instead meets
Entanglement of desire and identity bleed from the past narrative into the present. 22
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Suzanne, the charismatic disciple of a local cultist. Cline literally replaces the romantic agent of transformation in the narrative with a woman and eventually drives the two toward a sexual encounter that is strange yet intimate. Yet she seems reluctant to address the relationship between the two girls as one of queer desire, a decision that seems wrapped up in the possible commercial viability of the novel as well as narrative timidity. Because the relationship is the backbone of the work, Cline’s lack of bravery in engaging with the complexity of queer identity and sexuality weakens the ending and keeps the novel from achieving its full potential and electricity. Though the best bits of the novel live in the haze of the sixties, Cline begins with Evie living in a friend’s beach house. Said friend has a son who wakes Evie up in the middle of the night as he wants to sleep over in the house with his underage girlfriend before his drug run the next morning. Before he goes to the spare bedroom to have some extra-loud sex, he asks Evie about the murders committed by the Manson-Family-like cult she briefly be-
The Girls: a novel by Emma Cline RANDOM HOUSE 355 pages | $27
longed to when she was a teenager. Evie is reticent, but luckily Cline flashes us back to her days with the cult on their farm in Petaluma. The novel shifts back and forth from the late sixties, the era of Evie’s involvement with the cult after her parent’s divorce, and present day, in which she tries to come to terms with the past and save Julian’s girlfriend Sasha from his influence. The past begins with Suzanne and is ruled by her presence throughout. Evie’s first glance of Suzanne is fleeting, but it’s shot through with jealousy and desire. Whether it’s desire to be her, or for her, we never really know. But the two feelings are woven together, indistinguishable. Suzanne is vividly drawn—you can see her witchy face, her black hair, the freedom of her movement. While encounters with boys fail to provide Evie the sense of identity and safety she desires, Evie slips into Photo courtesy of cosmopolitan.com
No matter how you look at it, Cline has written a relationship where the murderess is the initiator of queer desire. Suzanne’s life with ease. She sheds her old clothes and begins wearing Suzanne’s. She sleeps next to Suzanne in her bed. They wake entangled. And they are entangled, through admiration and desire, for ultimately Suzanne desires Evie’s relative innocence, which she will protect throughout the novel at all costs. Entanglement of desire and identity bleed from the past narrative into the present. Older Evie ends up stuck with Julian’s underage girlfriend Sasha when Julian leaves on the drug run, and Cline’s overt thematic goal here is to put Evie in a position to save Sasha from Julian’s manipulative male influence. Evie ultimately fails, but her efforts mirror the tangle that was Evie and Suzanne. Together they go to a bar, pretend to be mother and daughter, and end the evening by kissing each other on the lips. The bar interaction contains all possibilities that Cline allows for female-on-female interaction. They can
be a) mother and child, b) savior and the saved, c) sexually involved. Pick one or two of the above. It should be said that the only characters who really live on the page are Evie, her mother, and Suzanne, the women who literally embody these possibilities. The three important bodies are all confused with each other. The mother gives birth, but Suzanne also gives birth to a new Evie. The lover transforms, but so does the savior. The savior protects, but so does the mother. Only Evie seems to escape sitting with the implications of these three roles. She does not inhabit any of them fully. She floats, too aware. Perhaps that is how some readers can disengage with the intricacies of the sexual nature of Evie’s admiration for Suzanne. Evie herself disengages from Suzanne as Cline draws closer to the murders. Narrator and Cline alike seem reluctant to reconcile the Suzanne who Evie loves with Suzanne the murderess, and this reluctance stunts the narrative. I’m uncomfortable about the transformation of Suzanne from love interest to agent of senseless violence as well, but for different reasons. No matter how you look at it, Cline has written a relationship where the murderess is the initiator of queer desire. It’s not exactly a new trope, and it’s one that I’m weary of: the female body is not a house of horrors. Queer women can play other roles than the villain. Bloodlust is divorced from queer desire. Yet my discomfort with Cline’s utilization of queer desire cannot cancel out my enjoyment of the book as a whole. What
I love about this book is the details: the scene where Evie and her friend Connie press batteries to their tongues to discover what an orgasm might feel like, the moments spent flipping through magazines in search of meaning, Suzanne’s arms around Evie each night. These bits feel genuine to me, feel like stories from my own years of growing into a person. They are sickeningly familiar, as if Cline had snatched moments of my search for identity and curated them into fiction. That’s the part of the book that’s magic. The ending doesn’t function with the same ease. Still, I suppose there is something to be said for holding back. In keeping the relationship between Evie and Suzanne vague, Cline treads the line of titillation and truth with enough grace to produce a book that will sell widely. Suzanne may inhabit the narrative function of the male love interest, but her descent into madness and eventual imprisonment provides an ending that wouldn’t be out of place during the regime of morality codes in old Hollywood. The compromise leaves me disappointed, but the marketability of the resulting novel means that this book could end up in the hands of many young girls who, like Evie, are waiting to come into being and meaning, into the hands of the girls who cannot take their eyes off other girls. I just hope that they can read between the lines and engage with the moments of truth that Cline achieves, ignoring the ignominious ends of the girls in question. u
Empathy and complexity in ‘Small Bombs’ REVIEW
Is it radical to tell a nuanced story about terrorism?
by Celine Anderson
K
aran Mahajan’s latest novel, “The Association of Small Bombs,” humbly asks the question: Are we monkeys, or are we rats? The book examines the impact of a car bomb set off at the Lajpat Nagar market in Delhi, 1996. When the bomb goes off, brothers Tushar and Nakul are in the market with their friend, Mansoor. The explosion kills Tushar and Nakul, while Mansoor survives with a wrist injury. The novel
follows Tushar and Nakul’s parents, Vikas and Deepa, as well as Mansoor’s family. Mahajan describes the bomb with the matter of factness of Kurt Vonnegut and the bleak cartoonish-ness of Laurie Moore. “‘Where are we going?’ Mansoor was asking when an explosion ripped his sentence in two and stuffed half of it back in his mouth.” Mahajan centers the novel on survivor trauma, but “Small Bombs” is not a reductive victim story. Well researched and inquisitive, it does not exploit grief
The Association of Small Bombs by Karen Mahajan VIKING 276 pages | $27
for the sake of readership. One of the characters, Shockie, argues that when a bomb goes off people’s true natures are unraveled—they abandon their wives, loot shops, etc. The novel parallels the bomb by gradually unravelling the characters’ day-to-day motives and anxieties. SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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By showing characters’ internal conflicts, Mahajan prevents martyrization.. Throughout the book, characters reflect on the backlash of 9/11, confront Islamophobia in Delhi, draw comparisons between bombing and urban planning, and contemplate violence in brave ways. A friend of mine responded to the premise: “A nuanced story about terrorism? That’s kind of… radical, right?” He was right. At this point in time, the pulp, post 9/11 terrorism narrative (think “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” or even “Iron Man 3”) rarely touches on any humanity that the bomb droppers have nor on non-White, non-American tragedy. Not only is Mahajan’s grace and respect regarding the subject laudable; it reveals a moral value that permeates throughout. In both “Small Bombs” and Mahajan’s first book, “Family Planning,” family dynamics and individual interactions debunk the popularized orientalist depictions of India in movies like “Darjeeling Limited” or those extracted from the imagery in Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children.” Mahajan is quickly diversifying the canon of Indian literature for the American market. “Small Bombs” does not attempt to capture an entire subcontinent but instead observes and empathizes with a few people who lead fully complex lives. In this way, Mahajan is not unlike Vikas, the documentary maker and father in this story. There is a self-referential scene where Vikas attempts to expose his sons to poverty: “They live among old newspapers, Saffola cans, Nirma bottles, Kohinoor rice sacks—brands you recognize so fiercely that you don’t see them at all. That are as familiar as any other local building material: mica, quartz, sandstone. Why do the poor refuse to give an accurate picture of their suffering? Why aren’t they frowning or at least moaning? Vikas was almost upset at how much they were misrepresenting themselves. Then he felt bad for wanting them to be wretched—wasn’t his job to humanize them? He also felt bad that he knew no statistics he could rattle off to stupefy the boys.”
That passage could easily be applied to the process of writing grief—a finger 24
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pointed inward at the potential risk of exploitation and appropriation in creating a product that uses terrorism as an emotional tool. One of the ways Mahajan avoids this is by making the novel a conversation between the characters, the reader, and the author. Descriptions are often interrupted by a second-person voice who turns to the reader and says things like “After a certain point the violence in your life acquires unreality through repetition.” This seems contrived, but as a reader, it cultivated empathy and exposed the author’s own logic, making him vulnerable as well. The characters are captured in a modest and candid way. They interact with each other on two levels: the visible level, and the inner level, home to the awkwardness and apprehension that we all have. Their behavior toggles the line between gesture and sentiment. How do we act, and who do we act for? Vikas notes the discrepancy between actions and motives in a paragraph where he directly reveals the difference between his “true nature” and the nature he projects in order to gain societal acceptance: “In the afternoons Vikas would go down to the corridor and lean against the cool, hard plaster wall, feeling dizzy. When people passed by he’d rakishly bunch up his hair with one hand, cock his head to the side, and nod—his way of waving stylishly, though every time he did it he felt fake: it was not an original gesture but one he had stolen from a friend who was something of a playboy. Does everyone steal gestures? Vikas wondered.” Vikas is marginalized and resigned to interpret circumstance primarily in his own mind, as are most of the characters. There are some scenes of collective understanding or even mobilization, but none of the characters heal collectively. When Mansoor is enrolled in an American college, none of his fellow students engage in emotionally productive conversations about terrorism. Vikas, in confronting the death of his sons, becomes emotionally static and frozen. Some characters look at their misfortunes through a theological lens. Vikas, for example, wonders if the Bank of India can validate human existence, and Mansoor uses prayer to overcome his wrist pain. As awful as the bomb was, Mansoor must reconcile that the bomb has given him affection from his parents and a subject for his college admissions essay. As he puts it, “The bomb pro-
vides,” for a moment replacing his image of God with the bomb. The internal theological drama in Small Bombs can be ambitious, but not heavy handed or didactic. They read as questions or hints that provoke the reader to ponder in similar ways.
One of the characters argues that when a bomb goes off people’s true natures are unraveled It’s this same motive that asks the question: Are we monkeys or are we rats? Monkeys, for example, exist on an animal level—perhaps representing a lack of ego but not necessarily a “good” or “bad” nature. In one scene, one of the characters, Ayub, frustrated with Islamophobia in the government and resentful of the Gujarat massacre, endures a drug induced vision. Ayub imagines everyone as a monkey, including his star crossed, Hindi girlfriend, Tara. “Yes, monkeys, animals. That’s what people were when you took away the basic veneer of civilization. And he’d had a vision then of Tara, a vision of love. What was Tara but a lost monkey from a powerful family of monkeys, who’d fallen down from her tree and randomly played with a poor monkey far from its own family?”. It is not until later, when Ayub is having a moral crisis, that a swarm of rats crawl and rattle beneath his floorboards. Rats have different connotations than monkeys, perhaps representing a maliciousness and selfishness not associated with monkeys but equally constrained by fate. Mahajan juxtaposes both monkeys and rats with the characters’ morals and autonomy, inspiring the reader to compare and ask where Ayub falls. Mahajan leaves the moral standings of his characters unanswered. However, he does invite existentialism into the world of tangible problems. The characters in “Small Bombs” are able to ask “What’s it all about?” from the standpoint of people with real struggles. By doing this, Mahajan gives earthly suffering the patience and attention it warrants. “The Association of Small Bombs” is a profoundly worthwhile read. u
‘What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours’ Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel straddles the boundary between fantasy and reality
by Colin McLeish
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t just 31 years old, British author Helen Oyeyemi has already won critical acclaim. Her last book, “Boy, Snow, Bird,” a retelling of “Snow White,” earned her international recognition, and gave her audience an indication of her skill for weaving fantasy into realistic fiction. In 2013, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, and “Boy, Snow, Bird” was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2014. In March of this year, Oyeyemi published “What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours,” a collection of nine loosely but deliberately connected short stories. The stories are somewhat linked––a character from one may arrive in another, generally with a substantive contribution to the storyline rather than just a banal recasting. Each story, however, is linked thematically. A lockand-key motif is found in all nine, either literal or metaphorical: keys to a room, a house, a secret. Accordingly, the collection reads more like a unified work than a cluster of separate pieces, and so creates a multi-narrative landscape unbound by restrictions of geography or time. The collection begins with “Books and Roses,” a love story which follows the encounter of Montserrat, an orphaned girl found at the steps of a Catalonian chapel, with Señora Lucy, her wealthy future employer. The two women have mysterious histories and identical keys hanging around their necks. They realize their connection when their keys open opposite entrances to a private library. One has to concede that a certain amount of coincidence structures the plot, a trope featured throughout the collection. This concession is not to the detriment of the story—it makes it neither less believable nor less remarkable. Rather, the feeling of coincidence is a product of the fluid, imagined world Oyeyemi creates. As we navigate this world, the text unfolds on two levels. First, on the perspective of the immediate narrative: the traditional storyline. It, by convention, is insular throughout, and we ingest the text as it arrives on our plate. The other perspective, however, is expansive–, peripheral. It hovers above the text and encom-
passes the entire collection, extracting the reader’s focus from the present moment. It requires the reader to consider both the broader width and interconnection of the stories. Conscious of these storylines and their respective realities, we become more aware of the fiction, especially its transcendence of normalcy. Oyeyemi achieves this dimension through sudden divergences from the commonplace. Her fiction is cast out of both familiar and unfamiliar shapes; the collection grasps the freedom to work with reality but also to transform it altogether. Experimenting with this trend, “‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea,” the second story, investigates a fusion between the body politic and body natural: the celebrity and the man. It features a family whose young daughter idolizes a popular singer, Matyas Füst. Füst is later exposed to have ruthlessly beaten the woman with whom he cheated on his girlfriend. Following an apology delivered by song (which, surprisingly, is accepted), Matyas disappears from the public eye. He resurfaces when a notice is anonymously printed in one of the national newspapers: “R.I.P. Matyas Füst, Happy birthday Matyas Füst and good luck. Your rebirth will be a difficult one.” Oyeyemi follows, “Naturally a lot of questions were asked since Matyas Füst was alive and well.” The seduction of popular culture immortalizes Matyas’s celebrity despite his crumbling interior, a transformation which is emphasized even more by his juxtaposition to a woman so dismissed and mistreated. Retribution and reincarnation brace a story that challenges our expectations of perception, power, and sanity. Oyeyemi’s prose is playful, resonant, and, at times, ambiguous. Careful wording upends the tone of the narrative, and showcases her ability to flip the expected with the unexpected, the familiar with the perverse. The third story, “Is Your Blood as Red as This?”, follows the students of a strange puppetry school, one of whom is a ghost, and another a “wooden devil” animated in human form. However bizarre or supernatural the context, each character’s psyche and language maintain a humanistic familiarity. But no delicate situation goes untouched, and Oyeyemi’s finger rests on the proverbial trigger. During a
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What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi RIVERHEAD BOOKS 335 pages | $27
ventriloquism routine, the narrator, Radha, is introduced to a plum-colored chess piece, which suddenly chimes, twice, “Is your blood as red as this.” Wonderfully unsettling, but rich and thoughtful, her use of the unpredictable catalyzes her investigations into life, body, mind, and soul which arc over each story. Because the storyline embraces such ambiguity, traditional cues of ownership become valuable foils to contrast security and uncertainty. The title of the collection, “What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours,” is the first alignment of ownership with security. Provocative in its repetition and negation, it primes the reader for such a motif of possession to unfold in the stories. Likewise, the importance of keys furthers the emphasis on discovery rather than safekeeping. In each story, keys do not attend to guarding or protection, but are literally and figuratively the devices for opening and realization. In the collection, every lock exists to be unfastened. However, the lock-and-key motif diverges from the more simplistic theme of security suggested by the title. While a key’s purpose is to open, Oyeyemi makes no guarantee that stability will necessarily follow. Its ownership offers some security within a tumultuous narrative, but promises nothing permanent. “Books and Roses” is the first story to illustrate this duality. At the moment of climax, Montserrat finally discovers the lock for her key. Yet, the realization culminates in a failed epiphany: “She cried into her hands because she was lost: She’d carried the key to this place for so long and now that she was there she didn’t know where she was.” Moments of ambiguity juxtapose self-security and ownership, and become the material for thematic conversations on certainty and unpredictability. Dreamy, imagined, and vivid, but also conscious, beating, and mysterious, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours thoughtfully explores the dynamic between the real and the fantastical. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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MUSIC So yesterday, today On revisiting Hillary Duff’s ‘Metamorphosis
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by Colette Gerstmann
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he end of a friendship can feel sharp inside your mouth. But when I was eight and afraid of choking, and wanted to put rhinestones on all my clothes, and asked for a boombox for my birthday, it felt like a CD shattered in a backpack on a train. When my world was like a room of paper and laughter under an anxious sky, the walls felt bound only by Elmer’s glue and female friendship, and losing a girl in my life to a misunderstanding felt like losing sanctuary to a rude wind. I lay on my back on my bed and listened to Hilary Duff sing about the things left behind after a loss. “I’m gonna keep your dreams and your old black hat.” A mishearing of the third line of the first track of her first original album, “Metamorphosis,” but it made sense to me. Her voice was sweet and big, with a tinge of hidden anger that came from the words and not the tone, an anger not meant to destroy rooms but to build them out of dust. “They look good on me, you’re never gonna get them back…at least not today.” A statement of control, a prideful smirk of revenge, followed by a loosening, a giggle unraveling the harshness—you’ll probably get them back, she was saying, just not today. For now, for a second, I’ve got your dreams, and they look good on me, and I’m going to mourn you by standing at the mirror with your dreams pulled over my body, thinking how the purple brings out my eyes. I found out eventually that the line is “I’m gonna keep your jeans and your old black hat.” A smaller claim, one less hungry for the air around and the soul inside another person, one grounded in the fibers of the breathing world, one full of real objects, hats and jeans and the dollars that buy them. I think my two understandings of the line, the older and the newer, mark me twice in time, in two pronunciations of my life. 26
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Album Cover for Hilary Duff’s 2000 album ‘Metamorphosis.’
Listening to “So Yesterday” on a whim almost twelve years later, during a summer when I felt suspended between so many imagined homes pulling cross-country on my brain, I wasn’t feeling very grounded in any kind of sturdy reality. On the train home from work each day, I thought of unpaired socks left in the corners of rooms by exes; of the eyelashes of seasonal friends, friends I’d made during past summers that had cooled and left intact no urge to keep in touch; of the teeth of grandparents I’d never touched but whose voices appeared in my dreams. I listened to “Metamorphosis” on Spotify, gazing at
the names of the tracks through the sink of my phone screen, rather than gripping a CD case in my hands and peeling off the blue-green with my eyes. Strangely, the mental mistiness of that summer occurred during a period of time when I was living with a necessary attention to real life. My thoughts were unpredictable and roving, but my body was locked into routine. I woke up early, caught my train to work, worked, caught my train home, cooked dinner for myself, cleaned, showered—and then, free and empty in the evening, felt the wild thinking, dreaming, to be a facet of my rouPhoto courtesy of vergecampus.com
tine as well. The pockets of my days were stuffed with errands: planning, budgeting, talking, preparing, buying beans, clipping my nails. Though I was full of dreaming, I would not think to take someone else’s as my clothing—I would, of course, prefer a hat, left behind by someone I’ve lost, because those are expensive, and I am moving on, and I would like some shade.
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et the rain fall down, and wake my dreams. On “Come Clean,” skating on a drumbeat, Hilary invokes a storm and shakes herself into new action. In third grade, I asked my mom what sanity meant, telling her that Hilary sings about washing it away. My mom responded, “Maybe she’s saying, ‘Let it wash away my insanity’?” But the line was “Let it wash away my sanity.” I looked it up in the booklet inside the CD case that lists all the lyrics. I liked Hilary’s inversion of the expected, her reimagining of sanity as a kind of dirt. After school, one of my friends and I listened to the song and tried to write new lyrics to the tune. But I couldn’t think of any words more thunderous. At the end of my nineteenth summer, the Pennsylvania heat careened into a rainstorm. My friends ran outside to accept the water into their skin. But I stood under the porch and stuck out only my
arms, knowing myself to be anxious about pain, figuring I’d stay comfy, touching the sharp chill through a dry shield. But, even though nothing pulled me, I found myself running toward the water, trusting the water that came from all angles, knowing it suddenly as something that could touch me without hurting me. It was so easy, easier than looking at my body in a mirror, sliding from one self to another through cold glass.
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When my instinct echoes the wisdom of my mother, it’s like two ants meeting at a spill of breadcrumbs. A consensus, a feast, the kind of guidance I am looking for. My mom tells me I deserve respect. In “Little Voice,” something just “won’t let” Hilary get back with her ex—“the little voice in her head” is telling her it won’t make her happy. I misheard this line at first as “the little voice in my hair,” a mistake that my mom’s laughter quickly corrected, but I still think of a woman shaking out a long mane, the weight of which holds a knowledge. The “little voice” comes back near the end of the album in “Inner Strength,” when Hilary insists, “Gotta find your inner strength…In the end all you’ve got is you.” This is a message that I, as a young girl, was being both pushed toward and driven from, stuck in a tug-of-war between two
images of female self-reliance, one wholesome and one dangerous. I couldn’t tell if Hilary’s claim that “You don’t need a man to make things fair” was supposed to be fun or inciting, an invitation into a rainstorm or a call to battle. This uncertainty was exciting, and I felt the energy of her words weaponize under my closed eyelids, arming me with the task of keeping myself happy. I still am not sure. I still walk between compromise and demand. I look for the hazy, frightened love of “Anywhere But Here” and the calm trust of “Love Just Is,” but I can sense danger, and I whip around, snarling the punchline of “The Math”: “If nothing adds up, tell me why I’m here!” Trying to love but trying to exist, too. While I keep trying to fit my feet into the groove that will let me balance between the two, I will continue to carry these words, sung by a woman who became famous as a teenager, who has shown me she holds wisdom in her hair, who has demanded that the world let an adolescent pop singer age and grow just like everyone else. She reminds me that I can build rooms of paper and laughter that stay standing. Can learn to try on the clothes of others without feeling a need to own their dreams. Can pick up all the things left around me after a loss, and think, how can I use this to keep knowing myself as beautiful? u
Clapback of the summer Dev Hynes’s new release as Blood Orange is a vibrant but also grounded piece of contemporary art
by Ian Holloway
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hile the world waited endlessly and anxiously for the release of Frank Ocean’s late summer release “Blonde”, another master of soulful R&B quietly put forward what has to be considered as one of the genre’s greatest releases of the year. On the intricately crafted “Freetown Sound”, released on June 28th, singer-songwriter Dev Hynes, a.k.a. Blood Orange, expounds a vibrant yet fractured portrait of his father’s hometown, the port city of Freetown, Sierra Leone. In 17 tracks, “Freetown Sound” encompasses a stirringly diverse set of sounds, instruments, and languages strung across a backdrop of a rich modern American consciousness worn down
by systemic racism and brutality. The diverse sonic influences, including gospel, soul, jazz, synthpop, and funk, contribute to an underlying fracturedness to the album that also stems from its creator’s struggle to assemble an artistic identity at the fragile intersection of being both queer and Black. The relatively saturated genre of electronic-based R&B has seen many iterations over the past five years, with Blood Orange emerging as one of the standouts for his soulful vocals and beats that evoke an era of 80s funk and disco blended with the hyper-forward electronically-created sounds of the 2010s. While Hynes’ previous two albums as Blood Orange had many moments of brilliance, “Freetown Sound” is the most effortless and coherent execution of his artistic vision. The
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album is built around songs with a similar structure: a crafty range of electronic 80s inspired beats sometimes accompanied by saxophone or other live instruments, along with vocals from several strong female personas from current eras of music (Nelly Furtado, Carly Rae Jepsen, Empress Of) and those past (Debbie Harry). On the infectious “E.V.P.”, featuring Harry’s melodically sweet voice, Hynes throws together a handful of influences: a glimmering funk backbeat and spoken monologue gives way to a soaring pop chorus with the lyric: “Feeling the comfort of sadness in a new set of surroundings”, which is often repeated in snippets throughout the album. The lyric covertly references the overarching awareness the album has of the chaotic destruction and transnational dislocation of Black, brown, and queer SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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Dev Hynes, AKA Blood Orange, often takes a backseat on the vocals in ‘Freetown Sound,’ leaving the space to be filled with female voices
identities in just the past few years. Thus, as “Freetown Sound” unfolds, it is both outward and expanding in the scope of its musical and cultural references, and yet inward and shrinking as a penetrating one-of-a-kind character study of its unique and extraordinary creator. ith Hynes many times simply playing the role of backup singer, the real authority he commands over the album comes from the production, which is interspersed with a diverse variety of spoken word samples coming from various media forms. On “Love Ya”, Ta-Nehisi Coates remarks on the policing of blackness specifically in the area of clothing: “How was I gonna cock by baseball cap? Was I gonna wear it straight, cock it to the left, cock it to the right?/ How was I gonna wear my pants?” On the same track, a woman describes, in Krio, the lingua franca of her native Sierra Leone, the destabilizing presence of militants in Freetown. Her nasal and animated voice, spoken in the idiosyncratic tones of the same language of
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Hynes’ father, blends effortlessly into the rest of the compiled musical landscape. On “Desiree”, Hynes invokes post-liberation queer culture’s iconic documentary, “Paris is Burning”, with a sample of an interview with Venus Xtravaganza, a trans woman and performer who was brutally strangled to death in NYC before the documentary was even released. These countless examples of diverse spoken word samples show the full range of creativity and ingenuity in Hynes work. In the same intersectional vein, “By Ourselves” features an excerpt from a spoken word poem titled “For Colored Girls (The Missy Elliott Poem)” by Atlanta writer Ashlee Haze, who laments feminism’s advancement of wealthy White women at the expense of trans, brown, and queer lives. In many ways “Freetown Sound” is a feminist album, evidenced by its centering of the female voice and narrative. In posts on Instagram, Hynes has called the album a “clapback”, something for “everyone told they’re not BLACK enough, too BLACK, too QUEER, not QUEER the Right way,
the underappreciated.” And with women at the focus, Hynes is able to allow a stunningly diverse array of female talent to shine forth on the album, including the creator of the album’s cover, Brooklyn-based photographer Deana Lawson. Ultimately, “Freetown Sound” is an album about the compositionality and intersectionality of identity, the idea that no human being has an entirely monolithic or non-dynamic backstory. For Hynes, that story was crafted on the airwaves of his two hometowns, the counter-culture giants of London and New York City, as well as the imagined, idolized and reconstructed inherited homeland of his father. All of this is strung against the urgent backdrop of a need for change, and a refusal to stay silent in the face of injustice. Despite the album’s status as a cerebral contemporary art piece, Hyne’s emphasis on his father’s story gives “Freetown Sound” a much needed autobiographical and personal touch, and ultimately makes the album relevant, playable, and humane. u
Photo courtesy of bellahoward.co.uk
Not Coachella East Coast™ A different kind of music festival
by Matthew Eisenberg
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lthough Panorama festival was produced by Goldenvoice, the subsidiary of entertainment goliath AEG that also puts on Coachella, Firefly, FYF, and other massive US music festivals, it was, thankfully, not Coachella East Coast™. There was a distinct lack of appropriative Native American headdresses, flower crowns, Instagram models, and Kylie Jenner. There were also far fewer festivalgoers in general even considering the limited space afforded by its Randall’s Island location. This might seem like an issue, and for Goldenvoice’s executives, perhaps it was. For my fellow attendees and me, however, this was a blessing, and one of many factors that made my experience at Panorama as enjoyable as it was. Panorama was brought to New York ostensibly to compete with Governor’s Ball, a festival held about one and a half months earlier in the same location. The two were always going to be compared, and although I cannot comment on Gov Ball, there is little doubt that Panorama won this year’s battle: Gov Ball’s final night, which was supposed to be headlined by Kanye West, was rained out, thus robbing the attendees of the festival’s biggest name. While Panorama had weather-related issues of its own, namely temperatures pushing 100° all weekend, it handled them as well as it could: there were plenty of free water refilling stations and air-conditioned tents, and two of the three big stages were under cover, allowing plenty of opportunities for the attendees to cool off. The smaller crowds I mentioned above also allowed for more space to breathe and shorter lines at the (surprisingly luxurious) bathroom trailers. Festival lineups are always going to be polarizing; nobody has the exact same taste in music. But with headliners Arcade Fire, Kendrick Lamar, and LCD Soundsystem, as well as a myriad of other big-name and up-and-coming artists, Panorama’s lineup truly had something for everyone. This caused some interesting artist juxtapositions throughout the weekend. Besides—#blackgirlmagic, FKA
REVIEW twigs and Alabama Shakes have little in common, musically or in their respective styles of performance. Following up Sufjan Stevens’ Age of Adz-era kaleidoscope of a set with Kendrick’s biting,
razor-sharp performance was the best kind of culture shock; and Run the Jewels have never sounded as intense as they did when they were preceded by Kurt Vile’s warm, hazy guitar-driven indie rock.
festival favorites + notes on the top act per day Friday — Arcade Fire, FKA Twigs, Broken Social Scene Broken Social Scene announced a hiatus in 2011, a year after their last album release, Forgiveness Rock Record. Fortunately, that hiatus only lasted five years, as they’ve started touring again and are working on a new album. The collective played a hell of a set on the festival’s first evening, from You Forgot It in People standout “KC Accidental” to Broken Social Scene’s “Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)”. Playing on the covered Pavilion stage, BSS drew an energetic, joyful, and larger-than-expected crowd (especially considering the end of their set coincided with the beginning of Major Lazer’s on the main stage). Their set was one of my favorites of the weekend, and established the Pavilion stage as the most consistently excellent of the three. Saturday — TOKiMONSTA, Sufjan Stevens, Anderson .Paak & The Free Nationals If there was one artist over the weekend who made me think, “They will be absolutely huge once their next album comes out,” it was Anderson .Paak. He performed with boundless energy, with most of his set consisting of cuts from his newest LP, Malibu. He rapped, he sang, he danced, and, most impressively, he spent a few songs at the drum set, showing off chops I don’t think anyone knew he had. If you haven’t listened to .Paak yet, please do. And if you have, well, you know what I’m talking about. Sunday — SZA, Classixx, Run the Jewels With nothing behind them but a solid red screen and two massive, zombified hands making the usual RTJ pistol and fist, El-P and Killer Mike could have been an intimidating sight. They were effusive and jovial from the start, however, jokingly apologizing to the crowd for wearing shorts (again, it was near 100° out there) and, at one point, inviting both of their families onto the stage so everyone could say hello. Run the Jewels are expert performers, both highly skilled rappers and equally skilled hype-men, and theirs was one of the most exciting sets of the festival.
I enjoyed Panorama thoroughly. Of course, there were minor hiccups, the largest of which being that the Parlor stage, which housed many of the festival’s electronic acts, only had a capacity of 1,100. At a festival with tens of thousands of attendees, that is much too small, and resulted in more than a few ridiculously long lines. Everything else, however, was great: the food was surprisingly good, albeit overpriced, which is though to be expected at a festival; Despacio, a tent that housed a dance floor surrounded by a state of the art sound system, was exhilarating every time I went inside; and The Lab, another tent that contained many digital art installations as well as a planetarium-like projection dome, was very cool. For its first year, I thought Panorama put on an excellent show, and would definitely be interested in checking it out again. u
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MOVIES & TELEVISION On America’s favorite snakes and rats Looking back on 16 years of ‘Survivor’—and forward to the newest season
by Maddie King
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“I have no questions, only statements.”
ueled by coffee and cigarettes, this is how Sue Hawk begins her final tribal speech on the season finale of “Survivor: Borneo” (2000). She is reprising a role that started at the beginning of the season when, in the ultimate reality tv show cliché, she made it clear that she “did not come here to make friends.” Reprising, however, is the operative word here, not just because she is eliminated from the competition between the beginning of the season and this speech: over
the course of the season, Sue seems to grow and change. We learn that she hasn’t had a female friend in decades: “I’m not a very openly nice person,” she says, “I’m just frank, forward, and tell ya the way it is.” But Sue wasn’t always like this. When she was younger, she worked as a waitress, and it was only as she grew older that she became increasingly withdrawn, getting a job as a truck driver, toughening up, and coming to view vulnerability as weakness. But against all odds, Sue opens up and becomes close to a young paddleboard instructor named Kelly Wigglesworth. She’s willing to go to the final two with Kelly, even though she knows the choice to maintain this new friendship will cost
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her a million dollars. In episode 10, she breaks down, revealing the cause of her self inflicted emotional detachment. Twenty years earlier, when Sue was Kelly’s age, she lost her best friend—a moment which shaped the rest of her life. She starts to cry and says that no matter what, she’ll never do anything to lose Kelly. “Coming across Kelly, someone i can hang with, that’s [been] a long time. I ain’t gonna fuck her over, I won’t ever turn on her… We’re like sisters.” But of course, this is Survivor, and trust is not rewarded. Kelly betrays Sue, and Sue returns to old habits, reminded that vulnerability ends in heartbreak. In the season’s final episode, those voted out are given a chance to address the
Potential ‘Castaways’ at auditions for the upcoming season of ‘Survivor’
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Photo courtesy of ibtimes.com
two remaining contestants before choosing who will win the million-dollar prize. Ultimately, the old, hard version of Sue gets the last word, casting the deciding vote for Kelly’s opponent, Richard, to win the million dollars. Her speech, which compared the two finalists to snakes and rats, was instantly iconic, and ended the opening season of the show by cementing its core narrative in tragic, cut-throat betrayal. It’s hard to overstate “Survivor’s” initial cultural impact. On August 23rd, 2000, 125 million people watched at least some part of its first season finale. Castaways appeared on David Letterman and the covers of People magazine. The week Saddam Hussein was captured, a newspaper bearing the headline “The most hated man in America” referred to Johnny Fairplay, who had lied about the death of his grandmother to win a reward challenge on “Survivor.” The show introduced a whole new genre to television, and paved the way for other competition-based reality shows like “American Idol” and “The Bachelor.” But its impact extends to the broader history of television. Sure, we have “Survivor” to thank for the trashy low-budget network shows its success inspired, but “Survivor” also played a role in making room for complex stories and characters on television. In the historiography of television’s current golden age, “The Sopranos” is often accredited as the show that opened
the door for dark, challenging storytelling. Attracting an audience of 12 million every week at its peak, “The Sopranos” showed that television could pursue the same moral and philosophical complexity of film, that viewers could continue to
The show deals in a particular type of cruelty, one not forcibly injected into the plot. It is one that emerges from the characters, and especially from BoJack’s crippling insecurity and obsession with self-image. tune in even if the show’s protagonist was deeply flawed. But Tony Soprano wasn’t television’s only antihero at the turn of the millennium, and he certainly wasn’t the biggest. That honor goes to Richard Hatch, the gay New Yorker who was willing to lie, cheat, and steal to make it to the end. When Richard Hatch defeated the sweet young paddleboard instructor, Kelly Wigglesworth, for the million dollars
(with the help of Kelly’s one-time friend!), the producers worried the show would be a disaster. “He wasn’t likable. People might think he’s a villain. He’s manipulative, playing people, playing on their emotions… We thought our dreams had been vanquished,” said host and executive producer, Jeff Probst. And yet, the show became a true cultural phenomenon. Season 2, “Survivor: Australia,” was the most watched television show of the year, beating out both “Friends” and “ER.” “Survivor,” more than any show on television, showed that American audiences could handle complexity. 33 seasons and 16 years later, “Survivor’s” ratings and cultural significance have decreased, and the show has struggled to live up to its legacy. New twists and gimmicks appear in each season in an attempt to keep the show fresh and exciting year after year. But despite the decreasing “reality” of the series, the humanity of the show’s simple premise is irrepressible. Twenty people from different walks of life, living in solitude, competing for a million dollars, will always make compelling television. At its core, Survivor is about testing moral boundaries, about seeing how far normal people are willing to go. When “Season 33: Millennial vs. Gen X” premieres on September 21st, 2016, you can be sure that no amount of stunt casting will prevent the inevitable. The 20 castaways will form, and ultimately betray, bonds, and in the end, just like in Borneo, the Snake will eat the Rat. u
Hollywood is a zoo, the animals take Xanax REVIEW
Unwrapping the third season of Netflix original ‘BoJack Horseman’
by Rebecca Brill
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uring the summer I took the time to pick up a thin, orange book— George Mikes’ “English Humor for Beginners” (1980)—and read it. One curious line stuck out to me like a hairy Marxist at a yacht club: “…all humor is cruel.” I stopped, slipped in a bookmark and then unrelated to the moment, I checked if the third season for “BoJack Horseman” was up on Netflix. It was and I binge-watched it for most of the rest of the day. I’d previously sped through the first two seasons of the show with mild interest. By the end of the third, I was
not only hooked on the show’s tasteful, absurdist comedy; I also realized it validated that little line I’d read only hours previously. The eponymous protagonist is BoJack Horseman, voiced by the inimitable Will Arnett (who sounds like he swallows scalding coffee before delivering each line). He is a stallion, a washed-up sitcom star from the 90’s who reliably battles substance abuse and self-inflicted emotional harm. The setting is a cartoonish Los Angeles populated by both animals and humans, all sentient, many dumb, and mostly career carnivores, BoJack included. By the second season and against the odds, he lands
the lead in his dream project, a biopic of the race-horse Secretariat. But the third season opens with a stunning, sardonic realization: the studio has secretly replaced his acting with a CGI rendering of his likeness. Undeterred, he embarks upon an elaborate quest to nab a coveted Oscar despite not actually appearing in the film, at least in the flesh. He desperately wants to be seen as a serious actor deserving of recognition, respect, and maybe even of love. Yet scandalous situations (that typically arise from his past mistakes) force him back into the role of a callous individual. He returns to the familiarity of liquor, cigarettes, casual sex and fast food—the SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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The titular BoJack, adrift and fishbowl-helmeted in the metropolitan Pacific Ocean City, where he attends a prestigious Oscar-season film festival
clichéd merry-go-round of a B-grade, albeit wealthy existence. Real happiness eludes BoJack. Hedonistic pleasure surrounds and traps him. Pretty heavy stuff, suffice to say, if not shockingly original. It is, however, very human and surprisingly entertaining in its honest exploration of its subject. The ten episodes of season three epitomize the dramedy of “failing upward.” No matter how numerous or desperate his attempts, BoJack never seems to improve his well-being. The great peril of addiction, as it were. There’s a feeling of hopelessness in his situation that underlies the series. He’ll never finish a movie, he won’t get a role, he won’t work to maintain the relationships he takes for granted. His attempts to escape that hopelessness—because they are often ludicrous, inane stunts placed in a world with witty marmosets—engender laughter. In fact they are quite saddening at heart. Case in point: He tries to cancel a subscription to the LA Times, and after an entire episode of funny banter, his efforts reward him with some cheap manipulative therapy from a customer service rep via cell-phone. If this wasn’t an animation, this would be the most depressing show on Netflix, hands down, which doesn’t do it injustice. It’s because of the immature anima32
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tion that the mature themes are allowed to develop surreptitiously. While you’re wondering about the satirical and sincere storylines, you’ll also wonder how all the animals (and humans) have compatible genitals so as to facilitate pleasurable sexual intercourse if not actual relationships. The medium of an
The show deals in a particular type of cruelty, one not forcibly injected into the plot. It is one that emerges from the characters, and especially from BoJack’s crippling insecurity and obsession with self-image. animated sitcom belies the serious content, which in this season entail a fake abortion by a teenage dolphin pop-star and a perverted, almost Gatsby-esque bender to fix the past.
The visual artistry particularly shines with a psychedelic strength during the raucous and almost stereotypical party scenes, but also during long, daringly introspective shots of the titular character, alone (such as in the alienating but catchy title sequence). It doesn’t cloak BoJack’s difficulties or trivialize them; it enhances a despair made palatable by his witticisms. He is handled as a damaged but pitiable character rather than a carnival attraction. His actions, often insensitive and selfish, don’t materialize out of nothing. The show deals in a particular type of cruelty, one not forcibly injected into the plot. It is one that emerges from the characters, and especially from BoJack’s crippling insecurity and obsession with self-image. And the characters are by far the best attributes of the show. BoJack’s core cadre of friends drive the story as much as he does: Princess Carolyn (a pink Persian cat, a workaholic talent agent and BoJack’s off-and-on sex-kitten), Diane Nguyen (a professional ghost writer turned professional ghost tweeter), her husband Mr. Peanutbutter (BoJack’s fun-loving frenemy, a famous Labrador Retriever), and Todd (a beanie-wearing, nonsensical deadbeat who lives on BoJack’s couch since before the show begins, and is arguably the closest thing Photo courtesy of slashfilm.com
BoJack has to a legitimate pal). Vicarious side characters pepper the season as well. Two of my personal favorites are Cuddlywhiskers, a Harvard educated hamster, and Tom Jumbo-Grumbo, a whale of a news anchor who is often irritated at the recurrent mishaps occurring off camera in a parody of MSNBC. The show’s literal animalistic jabs at celebrity personas are equally smile-inducing: Quentin Tarantulino (basically if Tarantino was an arachnid) and Copernicus (the feline stand-in for L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology) are but two silly Easter eggs that satirize the larger silliness of Hollywood. The most glaring indictment against such culture may be in an earlier season when the D is stolen from the famous sign, and the place officially becomes ‘Hollywoo’ for everyone. It’s never replaced.
Early on, Cuddlywhiskers offers a nugget of wisdom to both Diane and BoJack over Indian tea: “Only when you give up everything, can you begin to find a way to be happy.” For BoJack, who carries a literal horse load of emotional baggage, it seems that this is the only way forward because he has no more excuses to fall back on—a potentially frightening meditation, and not too bad for what began as just another online sitcom. It is, I’m glad to say, one of the rare shows that betters as it progresses. It abandoned the clichéd tropes that riddled the first season for a struggle of human proportions by the end of the third. It uses cruelty to color its comedy, and to lend it lingering gravitas. Of course some of the show’s staples may be misfires for some. The chuckling
puns and gags are still aplenty and usually effective. Certain subplots can wear a viewer’s patience down to zilch. And while it’s not perfect, it has definitely improved over the span of three seasons. To my delight, a fourth has been green-lighted and is set to debut next summer. I keep remembering one scene in particular from the first episode of season three. BoJack is being interviewed by Amanda Hannity, a fashionista from Manatee Fair (you can guess this jab), and out of left field, she asks, “So, what’s next for BoJack?” He responds without hesitation, eyes circular with indignation, “Whaddya mean what’s next? Why does everything have to have a next?” That, BoJack, is a cruel fact of living life. u
Love blinds in dystopian summer flick, ‘The Lobster” In a walled-in, disciplinary world, Lanthimos’ most recent offering still wants to see love as freedom
by Sona Kumar
L
ove doesn’t come easily in The Lobster. The film, released early this summer, is best viewed in a true hipster cinema, with acquaintances who are prepared to provide ironic post-viewing commentary. For the inhabitants of the dystopian world imagined in The Lobster, romance is effectively dead. Or, if not dead, then tossed to the side and allowed to slip into obscurity, a flighty notion from another era. The film manages to provide a frank commentary on the nature of love in the 21st century without pointing its finger at millennials, as it so easily might have. The Lobster centers on David (Colin Farrell), a near-sighted man who has been sent to a hotel for single people after his wife leaves him for another man. At the Hotel, David strips to his underwear and is given new clothes, though he is permitted to keep a jar of cream that eases his back pain. Before being led to his room, a maid presents him with a laundry list of rules: no smoking (lest his breath smell when kissing a new partner), no two-player sports like tennis, no half-sizes, no masturbation. The hotel manager
and her partner meet with David to remind him of the most important rule: he has 45 days to find a suitable companion, after which he will be transformed into the animal of his choosing. The issue of suitability is paramount
The film’s violent match-making might startle the viewers more if the concept of artificially shaping ourselves into something desirable weren’t familiar to anyone who has made a tinder profile. in The Lobster. Matches aren’t made between people with similar interests or values or life philosophies; instead, they are made between two people with the same arbitrary trait. One girl, for exam-
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ple, consistently has nose bleeds, and searches for a man who also has nose bleeds. The time limit on a person’s stay in the Hotel increases the pressure to find a partner, and makes room for deception. A man whose defining characteristic is his limp becomes so desperate to partner with someone that he bangs his head against the concrete edge of a swimming pool before courting the girl with nosebleeds. David similarly lies his way into a partnership with a woman whose defining feature is her heartlessness by sitting motionless and emotionless as she chokes on an olive. The film’s violent match-making might startle the viewer more if the concept of artificially shaping ourselves into something desirable weren’t familiar to anyone who has made a Tinder profile. In one of the most shocking scenes of the movie, David finds the bloodied body of his brother (who was turned into a dog years ago), murdered in cold blood by the heartless woman. Deeply affected, David can no longer maintain his façade of heartlessness—he cries. The heartless woman, outraged by his betrayal, moves to report his deception to the hotel manager, but he tranquilizes her before she can, dragging her to the room where humans are transformed into animals. This SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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The poster for ‘The Lobster’ emphasizes the film’s themes of blindness, love, and blinding love.
room is central to the world of The Lobster, but the viewer never gets to see the process carried out. While we see the outcome of a few of the transformations (a Shetland pony, an ass, a dog, a peacock), the process remains shrouded, adding a sinister layer to the desperation of the Hotel inhabitants.
romantic partnerships. Of course, David promptly falls in love with a woman (Rachel Weisz) whose eyesight is as poor as his. The forbidden love scenes in this movie involve an increasingly unsubtle secret sign language and a heated make out session in front of the leader’s oblivious parents. Both expressions of passion
Sometimes, the superficial reason we give for being with another person is just a way to make concrete the incomprehensible, overwhelming connection we have with them. The film comes into its own when David escapes the Hotel to join the Loners, a rogue community of unmatched people living in the woods. The Loners are supposed to signal freedom, but their leader (Lea Seydoux) is as strict as the hotel manager and forbids the formation of any 34
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are absurd, but there’s something familiar in the need to communicate your love and desire for another person. In The Lobster, romantic entanglements are not organic: whether you live in the Hotel or in the Loner community, your ability to form a relationship
with another person is bounded by your shared physical characteristics. Ultimately, the Loner leader discovers David and his lover’s treachery, and blinds the near-sighted woman as punishment. Realizing that their special connection has been destroyed, David and the now-blind woman try to figure out other traits that have in common--to no avail (he doesn’t like blackberries, she doesn’t speak any German). From within this relentless attempt to rediscover common ground, an inkling of sincerity emerges. Sometimes, the superficial reason we give for being with another person is just a way to make concrete the incomprehensible, overwhelming connection we have with them. It seems that The Lobster’s final message is that love blinds, permanently, violently. The film’s ending is sinister and seems hopeless, but, at the same time, it’s a reminder that love (real, blinding love) is freedom. And there’s nothing tragic about that. u Photo courtesy of utbgeek.com
LETTERS OF REC Brief recommendations of books, television, movies, and more from our editors
Music: ‘Princess’ by Abra Atlanta-based artist Abra, (Instagram @darkwaveduchess), signed to Awful Records and known for her unique interpretation of icy, downtempo R&B, has released her new EP, “Princess” out July 15. The 6-track EP, produced by Abra herself and recorded in a closet studio in her home, showcases a commanding, albeit still maturing, craft. On standouts like “Crybaby” and “Thinking of U”, Abra glides quickly and effortlessly from mumbled low melodies to quiet speech to full out belting, all while maintaining a surprisingly aloof vocal charisma. “If you wanna roll the dice on me ok/ If you think you can afford it, come play” she teases on “Vegas”, while a zigzagging drum machine crashes tantalizingly in the background. While rough around the edges in some spots, “Princess” provides enough sonic thrill to show what makes this rising star so delightful to follow. —Ian Holloway, Contributing Editor Book: ‘Some Hope: a trilogy’ by Edward St. Aubyn I read these three books (published in the US as one volume) the summer of 2015, and definitely spent some time crying on the SEPTA in the process. St.
Aubyn’s story, largely autobiographical, is harrowing. We read about the abuse he is subject to as a child; we read through the tortured mind of a heroin addict; we listen to a voice that often feels truely hopeless. And yet, as the title of the trilogy suggests, the novels are hopeful, a tale of survival; they are beautiful, and acerbic, and achingly smart. And so my reccomendation comes with the caveat of a trigger warning for abuse and drug use, but also a wholehearted belief that reading these books helped me both understand and be understanding. —Nora Battelle, Editor in Chief Book: ‘All about Love’ by bell hooks Over the summer I read “All About Love” by bell hooks, a book that I recommend to literally everyone. It is wise, intimate, accessible, and convincing, arguing for a grand-scale reevaluation of what we take “love” to mean. It reshaped the way I think about all relationships, whether with family, friends, partners, strangers, or myself, and urged me to reconsider how I approach them. Mingling considerations of history and theory with personal anecdotes, hooks demands that we all raise our expectations of how we
care for each other, and, inseparably, how we care for ourselves. —Colette Gestmann, Managing Editor Music: ‘Emotion’ by Carly Rae Jepsen Carly Rae Jepsen’s unapologetic position as a contemporary pop queen is what makes EMOTION and its SIDE B such an enticing project. The coherence in tone, theme and execution across the album gives the listener the impression that Jepsen truly loves her genre. EMOTION is neither an alternative artist’s vision that’s been forced into a more marketable genre nor a disjunct compilation of contributions from major producers, writers and musicians. Instead, we hear Jepsen the individual navigating her own emotions, through their complexity and inconsistency. I love especially how different tracks clash in their attitudes to a problem, say how on “Boy Problems” she giddily shrugs at her relationship issues whereas in “Cry” these very qualms lead to her despair. There’s something so human about these contrasts, the ways in which our own emotions change based on our company, surroundings, or whim. —Thomas Corbani, Contributing Editor
Carly Rae Jepsen has really changed up her look since the early days of her stardom as North America’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ sweetheart!
Photo courtesy of cosmopolitan.com
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