AND Demand to come first: reflections on faking orgasms S
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Theater of Women
Photo Essay by Alina van Ryzen
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CONTRIBUTORS
Letter policy
Beatriz Grace Baker is a senior. Kara Bledsoe is a MSLIS graduate student at the Pratt Institute and works in content development for ITHAKA (the people who design and sell JSTOR, you’re welcome). Sarah Branch is a senior. Ben Charo is a junior and will be studying tropical marine biology and conservation in the Turks and Caicos next semester. The thought that this adventure might come across as a glorified vacation has crossed his mind. Briana Cox is a senior studying Cognitive Science and Japanese. She loves writing, Japanese snack foods, and horror movies from the 1980s. Leo Elliot is a Junior political science major who is currently working through a complicated relationship with “free time.” Ditiya Ferdous is a senior. Liliana Frankel ‘18 is taking a year off right now. Louisa Grenham is a sophomore from Brooklyn, NY planning to study soc/anth and gen sex. She is specializing in refusing to smile at men when she walks down the street. Evan Grennon is a junior studying Arabic and Philosophy. He recently deactivated his tinder after his bio — “im p into po-mo” — shockingly didn’t get the traction he was expecting. Samantha Herron is a Capricorn, a tap dancer, and a generous lover. Margaret C. Hughes is a senior majoring in English Literature with a Creative Writing concentration. She can count sheep in two Yorkshire dialects.
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
Keton Kakkar’19 is from East Egg, NY. Intrigued by theories of interpretation and communication, he intends to double major in English literature and computer science. Heidi Kalloo is a junior.
EDITOR IN CHIEF NORA BATTELLE
LAYOUT EDITOR TOM CORBANI
Nikki Miller’16 is a scorpio majoring in Psychology with a minor in Religion. Her hobbies include dog spotting, cooking and throwing shade.
MANAGING EDITOR COLETTE GERSTMANN
Gabriel Meyer-Lee’19 is studying Engineering and Cognitive Science. In his free time not occupied with Leslie KnopeJoe Biden fan fiction, he writes Arts pieces for Swarthmore publications.
BOOKS LEO ELLIOT
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ISABEL CRISTO IAN HOLLOWAY BRANDON TORRES
MUSIC SAM HERRON
COPY EDITOR VERONICA DOUGLIN
Joe Mariani’19 likes history. He used to play golf all the time but he never got good at it.
Moeko Noda is a senior studying Comparative Literature. She likes to eat raisins, strawberry jam, or both at the same time.
PHOTO ESSAYS NOAH MORRISON
Tiyé Pulley is a sophomore. Alina van Ryzin is a senior at Bryn Mawr College majoring in Urban Studies with a minor in fine arts photography. Sophie Song’20 is from China but spent her past four years in Massachusetts. She spends way too much money buying coffee from Hobbs.
POETRY COLETTE GERSTMANN S W A R T H M O R E
Brandon Torres is a junior studying English/Education, with no choice but to go through with it at this point. Anna Weber is a sophomore double majoring in English Literature and Peace and Conflict Studies. She wants to send you a friendly reminder (something Toni Morrison taught her) and it is that you are your best thing. Daniela Wertheimer is a senior from Phoenix, AZ majoring in sociology and anthropology and minoring in interpretation theory and spanish. She got back from Cuba three months ago and just can’t seem to shut up about it! Bobby Zipp is an aspiring Fit Dad CEO. ™
Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com Founded 2012 | Issue 15
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.
“For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.” Virginia Woolf, The Waves
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Arts ART
‘Bring your own body’ 25
March 2016 PERSONAL ESSAY
On Bryn Mawrs’ queer art exhibit by Samanth Herron
FEATURE
Food, home, diaspora by Keton Kakkar
Internet, Meme,
Election
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The Library 28
Carla Hayden takes over the LoC by Kara Bledsoe
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by Moeko Noda with illustrations by Ditiya Ferdous
‘LaRose’ 30
An intergenerational search for justice by Anna Weber
Daniela Wertheimer on pre-election developments in Internet culture
Creep
by Heidi Kalloo
A review of Miéville’s new sci-fi novel by Leo Elliot
TELEVISION & MOVIES
‘RuPaul’ 34
A slice of old school 6 Joe Mariani looks into the history of Renatos
Three poems Spoon
‘This Census-Taker’ 32
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by Margaret Hughes
On Elena Ferrante 26 A question of appropriation by Liliana Frankel
FICTION AND POETRY
Koala Pregnancy
BOOKS
On the Emmy-winning epic by Nikki Miller
Glover returns 35
20 Essay
by Sarah Branch with: POETRY IN TRANSLATION
Replete with gulps of thirst
by Salah Bousrif translation by Evan Grennon
A review of his new show, ‘Atlanta’ by Nikki Miller
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Fracturing narratives 37 On ‘Easy’ and ‘High Maintenance’ by Sophie Song
Faking Orgasms Reflections by Louisa Grenham Art by Beatriz Grace Baker
‘Moonlight’ 38
Jenkin’s impressive sophomore effort by Gabriel Meyer-Lee
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MUSIC
The creative process 40
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A discussion on making music by Tiyé Pulley
A new Bon Iver 42 On the album ‘22, A Million’ by Ben Charo
Lady Gaga’s ‘Joanne’ 43 PHOTO ESSAY
by Alina van Ryzen
The star returns to her roots by Brandon Torres
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
MARCH 2016
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FEATURE
Jasper John’s ‘American Flag, ‘1954-55’
Internet, Meme,
Election by Daniela Wertheimer
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y the time this article is published, we will know who holds the office of the President of the United States. We will know, through this vector of governance, the fate of abortion, civil liberties, immigrants and refugees, the welfare state, the military, the Supreme Court and much more. Some of us will also know the fates of our friends and families and perhaps ourselves, too. The development of what has been an absurd and often terrifying election cycle will have come to some sort of end. But what the 2016 election has engendered at Swarthmore and outside of its small bubble is as real as the implications of either a Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump presidency. We are faced with the major threat of change in policy in the form of a continuation of Obama’s policies with some
changes or a complete upheaval of every facet of American liberal democracy, that is sure. But a cultural shift has also already begun to take place. One place we can see this in a new Internet culture with a new attitude toward the utility of memes as carriers of the spectrum of human emotion: humor, fear, anger, humiliation, happiness, pride, and so on. By focusing on the Internet and on memes, I do not want to invalidate or downgrade any other approaches or topics in which I could have situated my analysis and historicizing about this election. I just feel best-equipped to level with and explore Swarthmore, and its attitude toward the 2016 election, through these digitally-centered means. Through my cursory, subjective, and lived research I’ve found that the Internet, and memes more specifically, are both medium and expression—they offer themselves as a platform, and also generate with-
in themselves a culture of themselves. Like a conversation with a friend, a professor, a parent or a sibling, memes are generative; they provide a space in which to deal with the emotions reflected in and produced by the 2016 election, and one certainly worth our attention, if not for its prevalence, then for their power. Doing research for this article was an easy and enjoyable routine. That is to say, it wasn’t really research at all, but a more critical version of an exercise I already take up every week. I did what I usually do on a Sunday: I sat back in one of Swarthmore’s libraries, threw pride to the wind and shamelessly surfed the Internet for all my hard-working peers to see. Encountering meme after meme, throwing likes on them, finding corners of the Internet dedicated to the meta-analyses of Internet culture that are birthed, mocked, and validated all at once. This week, the task was in service of Photo courtesy of MoMA
recording the institutional memory of Swarthmore College during the leadup to the 2016 election, as told through memes. What I found was much richer than just the trove of memes created, posted, and/ or reposted by Swarthmore students. I discovered, instead,a political-cultural-emotional story, as told through memes, but also through comment threads, Facebook events, debates, student publications and even the occasional email. The question I am left with is: is the meme, the Facebook debate, etc. an effective mode of political and cultural engagement? This essay is the story of my journey from one Swarthmore Dank Memes page to the next (to the next), then to the URL world at large—from the pages of the LA Times to the Wikipedia articles covering “Donald Trump Memes” and, finally, back to Swarthmore. I want to determine what uniting politics with the Internet says about our community and what our Internet products might reflect back on us. The story of Swarthmore political attitudes on the Internet traces back as far as anyone currently on campus can remember, and for years before that. But for convenience and brevity’s sake, I will begin this year. On September 12, 2016, the Daily Gazette published an op-ed entitled “The Admissions Office Doesn’t Care About Your Values.” The author’s erroneous, offensive and dangerous claim that Swarthmore students on financial aid should be grateful to and thank full-tuition paying peers was nearly unanimously decried by students of many political backgrounds. In the wake of this article, comment sections grew long, Facebook threads lengthy and IRL discussions and gatherings occurred. After days of intense discussion and debate, the DG issued a retraction article, “We Fucked Up.” More backlash and plenty of hurt ensued, often developing on Facebook or elsewhere online. The article and associated backlash, better known as #Jensongate, found a fresh battle ground within days: the very popular “Swarthmore Dank Memes” Facebook group. The author of the original “Admissions Office” piece was also the original administrator of Swarthmore Dank Memes Facebook group, having control over membership, content, and general administration. Cue the coup that switched administration to a recent alum and the name to “Swarthmore College Dankest Memes Society.” The pinned post at the top of the page clarifies the group’s purpose, not for the sake of expressing “purpose”, but instead, it
seems, in reaction to the events of #Jensongate—as a statement against: As the new admin of this group, I promise to make this a safe space for everyone. Now im not promising you might not get offeneded [sic], ie if you tell me arthur memes are danker than spongebob memes, i might have to take you to the yard real quick, but I am promising there will be no racist, homophobic, transphobic, mysogynistic [sic], body-shaming, ableist, etc, discriminatory (you get the picture) content allowed under any circumstances. nor will there be any annoying friends of friends of friends of equally annoying british kids allowed. as the creator of this group said, this space is for funny images to be shared and laughed at as a community. together, we can make Swat memes dank again!!
“Together, we can make Swat memes dank again!!” is a direct reference to Donald Trump’s now famous campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” a challenge that Trump has promised to take up himself, and all by himself. It is also part of a larger Internet joke/meme that encourages us to make anything (insert-your-wordhere) “again.” The meme is fairly ubiquitous, but carries special meaning more locally. In the Swarthmore College Dankest Memes society, the words are given ironic revitalization— they are a reaction against, perhaps, an antagonist in our own community. The ownership of this shared Swarthmore space (a meme Facebook group) by someone who had affronted a large swath of the student population was, as we learned, an unacceptable infiltration of the hateful Trumpian politic into an imperfect but generally anti-Trump community. And worse yet, their admin-ing had made Swat memes un-dank! This seems silly, but it’s serious. The Swarthmore College Dankest Memes Society’s rebirth, at least nominally, as a space free of racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, body-shaming, ableist, discriminatory content, signals a desire amongst the Swarthmore meme-consuming public for memes that exclude jokes that are dehumanizing or otherwise offensive. In rejecting and parting with the old page for its association with its administrator, Swarthmore marks its political understanding of itself, which it generates through content posting and consumption. This Internet space creates and sets precedents for campus culture.
This rhetorical line is also replicated in the “Swat Danker Memes Society,” another meme page offshoot post-#Jensongate: “No racist, classist, queerphobic, transphobic, sexist or otherwise discriminatory memes will be approved. And if your humor is based only on those things, please go find new humor or join the old Dank Meme Society.” Again, we encounter a forceful message: if you aren’t down with inclusivity, you are not welcome, and you are certainly not fit to oversee, administer to or otherwise lead us. Swarthmore students have flocked to these pages, despite or perhaps because of the new mandates of admins, coming in with 650 to around 800 members. This reflects, I believe, the politics of our school; while Swarthmore is hardly a “liberal paradise,” the campus is politically fairly leftwing. The ripple-effect reaction to the DG article—and, importantly, where we saw these effects (the Web)—tells us something important about our community that is bigger than politics. It tells us that, at least amongst these 650 to 800 members, albeit with exceptions, there are cultural standards for treating one another, and one that directly opposes the values espoused in the article, or in the words, campaign and potential presidency of evil and abhorrent Donald Trump. The meme pages, then, have deployed memes in a way that endows them with great social meaning, at least within the Swarthmore bubble. The images, words, and other content that are classified as “memes” are an important vehicle by which we express and engage what “community” means to us. If an individual meme has the power to “ … give certain pictures second, third, fourth and fifth lives,” according to Arpad Kovacs, an art curator at the Getty Museum who was interviewed in a piece in the LA Times on the meme culture of the presidential election, then these individual memes are a microcosm of a much larger system by which we revive ourselves and begin anew, or reaffirm what and who we are. The meme page saga of 2016 is probably forgettable. The article that spurred its inception and the political climate in which it has been created (and which it creates) will not be. In 2016, we feel, emote and empathize through our memes, and maybe we end up in a better world because of it. Or maybe a worse one. November 8 will give us a sense of what our Internet lives have meant and what they will look like as time marches, inevitably, on. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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FEATURE
Renato Pizza: A “Piece of Old School”
by Joe Mariani with pictures by Bobby Zipp
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hile mom and pop hardware shops, pharmacies, and retail outlets have nearly all been replaced in the last 30 years by impersonal big box stores, or, even worse, Amazon.com, small family owned restaurants still abound. Though these restaurants are independently owned, many are remarkably similar. Across America you will find the same types of people running these restaurants, serving nearly the same food, with the same types of people eating there. The borough of Swarthmore, though exceptional in many ways, does not deviate from this trend of
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American life. The ville is home to a veritable smorgasbord of independently operated restaurants, the oldest of which is Renato Pizza. Renato Pizza was founded in 1985. Before Renato’s, a restaurant named Park Avenue Pizza operated at the spot for several years, and before that, there was a music store. The original Renato only owned and operated the pizzeria which bears his name for six months. It was bought out by the current owner, Nick Canakis, that same year, but the original Renato continued to work there until 1995. He then made a major career switch and now works at Renato Spenato landscaping in Aston, Pennsylvania. Canakis bought the building in 1991, and
rents out the apartments upstairs. Canakis, with his white apron and easy smile, looks the part of the stereotypical pizzeria owner. When we sat down to do our interview, I asked him if I could record him. He joked, “Now, you don’t work for the CIA or anything, right?” Canakis has an impressive resume, having worked in the restaurant business for 52 years. He started out as a busboy and dishwasher at a diner in Philadelphia, where he eventually worked his way up to chef. Using the experience he gained at the diner, he opened a 24 hour pizza place in Center City, Philadelphia. He decided to move to the suburbs with his wife and young son in 1985, purchasing Renato’s. The place instantly became a fixture of Swarthmore life. A Philadelphia Inquirer article from 1990 described a typical Saturday night in the Ville: nearly a hundred youth were gathered in and around the pizza shop. To keep them in line? A police car with an officer shouting “get off the street.” The store renovation in 1994 significantly changed the interior of the store. The original storefront was smaller than it is now and had different posters decorating the wall. The cactus in the window of the store is original — it started out as a baby in ‘85. Over the years, Canakis has expanded the menu to, in his words, “over twenty flavors of Pizza.” Canakis used to own several other pizza places in the suburbs, but has since sold them and is now semi-retired. His son, Peter Canakis, is now in charge and his wife also works at the store. Peter has
an overwhelmingly genial nature and often greets customers by name and asks them details about their lives, as does his father Nick. It is a family operation, even for the employees that are not actually kin. Many employees have lived in Swarthmore and have worked in the store for years. “Very long term people — we are like family. A lot of these guys I remember when they came in here when they were little kids,” said Nick Canakis. Nick Canakis counts successful entrepreneurs and state senators among his former employees. A former delivery driver and Swarthmore grad, Jagath Wanninayake, founded a software company called Clarix Technologies and is now a millionaire. Some of Nick’s former employees continue to send him Christmas cards and visit him in the shop. One former employee, a college alumnus, had visited Canakis earlier in the day before I talked to him. He had his daughter, who was touring Swarthmore, with him Peter Giacopanello is a longtime employee of the pizzeria. He has worked at Renato’s on and off for 14 years and lives in the apartment above the storefront. He started working here as a Junior at Strath Haven High School. It took him three weeks of pestering the owners to get a job — the Canakis’ employed diversion tactics, telling him different people were the owner. When asked what’s changed over the years, Giacopanello said not much. But he sees a positive side to that. “I think that’s what makes Renato’s great — this place is a piece
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“Tim is currently the main delivery driver for Renato’s. Tall, bearded, quiet, and sardonic, he can be found in the summers sitting outside on the sidewalk reading inbetween deliveries. I once saw him reading Robert Nozick, ‘Anarchy, State and Utopia.’” 8
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of old-school.” Giacopanello’s gotten to know the college a lot over the years. “I learned how to play beer pong at DU.” He’s befriended many college students and he says this is one of his favorite parts of the job: “I wouldn’t mind owning this pizza shop.” He said over the years foot traffic has declined, which he attributes to there being fewer families with children living in Swarthmore. On the positive side, Giacopanello also said the college kids have become nicer. Giacopanello has had to fulfill some strange orders over the years. In the summers, the college used to host a summer sports camp called Future Stars. One Saturday night, towards 11 o’clock, an order was put in for 50 milkshakes to be delivered to ML. Giacopanello had to sit on the back of pick-up truck holding the milkshakes, all the way to the dorm, and handed out the milkshakes one by one. Jose, one of the pizza makers, has worked at the store for seven years. He works at the store 6 days a week, usually in the afternoons and night. He bragged that he doesn’t have trouble keeping up with the pace of pizza production. When he recently had to fulfill an order of 80 pizzas, it only took him an hour. I asked Peter what he thought of Donald Trump. He said, “I think he’s getting more orange as the election goes on.” Moments after I said this, Kevin, a Swarthmore resident and Renato’s regular, came in and handed Peter a printed out Wall Street Journal article. The title was, “Should Christians Vote For Trump?” Giacopanello had a joke ready, meant to ruffle Kevin’s feathers. “Hey Kevin, when people say that they have more money than God, what’s that number?” Kevin did not like the joke. Peter Canakis noted that Renato’s does not endorse any Presidential candidate. Renato’s is not immune to the events of the world. Shortly after the joke, the 4 o’clock shift came in. One employee, Matt Coste, came to work wearing a navy Hillary For Prison t-shirt. He has worked at Renato’s for seven years, and lived in Swarthmore his whole life. He says not much has changed about Renato, though he says the town’s gotten a lot more empty. “I sort of feel like the community is fractured now. There’s just less people.” While most the employees are in their 20s and 30s, some are younger. Ra’Shawn Nickens, a soft-spoken young man from Chester, has worked at the pizza joint for a year and a half. When I asked how he was hired, he simply said “I was just in the right place at the right time.” When asked to describe Renato’s in one word, Nickens said, “welcoming.” Another young employee, Sam Harper, has worked at Renato’s for three years. He attends Delaware County Community College, where he’s studying psychology. His most memorable experience was an 11 o’clock order for four black and white milkshakes, made from Willets during the blizzard last year which shut down traffic in the Ville. The shakes were faithfully delivered. Shea Kelly has worked at Renato for 12 years. He graduated in the same high school class as Giacopanello. He’s currently student teaching English at Upper Darby High School. He says if he had to choose, his favorite author would be Kurt Vonnegut. He says he didn’t have an opinion about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he did take issue with what he perceived as the balladeer selling out. “I do have strong feelings about him being in those [Victoria Secret and Cadillac] commercials. I think it was blasphemy against his anti-establishment image.” Kelly, who has been coming to
Renato’s since he was born, explained that it was an integral part of Swarthmore life: “This place is an institution.” Tim is currently the main delivery driver for Renato’s. Tall, bearded, quiet, and sardonic, he can be found in the summers sitting outside on the sidewalk reading in-between deliveries. I once saw him reading Robert Nozick, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” I asked if he was a libertarian. He said yes, but that he was not voting for Gary Johnson. When I asked what he thought of Swarthmore students, he said simply, “some of them are assholes, most of them are alright.” I asked him what made his job hard. He said “my job is not hard.” Tim has anxiety about the advent of self-driving cars; he thinks he will have to acquire a new set of skills. I had to coax all of Tim’s answers out of him, but he’s not always quiet. Sam, the young, bright-eyed youth of the otherwise mellow band of Swarthmore nighttime employees, showed me a video of Tim screaming and dancing in a celebratory manner after a winning shot during a Philadelphia Seventy Sixers game that was on the television in the pizzeria. Tim saw Sam showing me this video, and he said, “This is the surveillance state we are living under.” He stood up and hid in the back. I followed him and squeezed a few more stories out of him. Once he had to deliver twenty-five cannolis to a college student, who picked them up in a bathrobe. Sam mentioned that Tim once got his car stolen during a delivery, but Tim refused to give details. I had to go to Shea for another story about Tim. There was once a Swarthmore student who habitually treated Tim very poorly. He would call in orders very often and it would take Tim several calls to get him to come outside, and he would never tip. After a particularly egregious episode, Tim lost his temper and called the student a monster for treating him so poorly. The student responded poorly to this and walked to Renato’s to complain. When he crossed the threshold of the Pizzeria, Shea, having heard Tim’s side of the story, greeted the student by saying, “Here comes the monster.” The student realized the extent of his transgressions, and apologized instead of complaining. This is not the worst a Renato’s delivery driver has ever been treated. Once, in the summer of 2004, a delivery driver was beaten up badly by a customer. After returning from the hospital, the employee thought he would become rich from a civil settlement, and spent hours with a calculator plotting what he was gonna do with the money. No civil suit ever came of it, though, and the man had to go back to delivering pizzas. Until the early 2000s, employees would deliver directly to student’s rooms. Before the advent of cell phones, students had landlines in their rooms. When a student would order, they would have to give their extension number, and the delivery drivers could come into the buildings. Renato’s seems to be moving slowly but gracefully into the twenty-first century. This year it got a website. When asked about its rival, Swarthmore Pizza, the owner said.“We’ve never had a problem with Swarthmore Pizza. They’ve always been honorable to us and we’ve always been fair with them. I want everyone to succeed.” He is not worried about Domino’s either. “We’ve been here since ‘85. We’ve got the locals behind us.” It seems that whatever happens to this country, whatever impossible, unthinkable things happen, whatever racist, sexist, buffoon is in the White House, Renato’s will remain, for awhile at least, serving the people of Swarthmore hoagies and onion rings and cheesesteaks and, of course, pizza. u
“Kelly, who has been coming to Renato’s since he was born, explained that it was an integral part of Swarthmore life: ‘This place is an institution.’”
Jose Barrios, a seven year employee of Renato Pizza. SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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ESSAY
Demand to come first Reflections on faking orgasms
by Louisa Grenham with art by Beatriz Grace Baker
“D
on’t worry, you’re a girl. You can never be bad at sex.” This is how the charade began. This is the sentence that lead to years of faking my orgasms in sexual encounters with men. This was the sentence to end all orgasms. It came about in a conversation with a boy who was two years older and to my thirteen-year old brain, all the wiser. He told me that only boys had to try in bed, and that it was a big deal if they tried and didn’t succeed. It was a source of a lot of pressure, he told me, and I would never have to worry about it. He said I was lucky. In that moment, I did feel lucky. All those movies and TV shows where the characters lamented about being bad in bed suddenly did not apply to me. But this statement didn’t mean I would never have bad sex. Quite the contrary. It meant that if I let a
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guy do what he wanted to me, he would have an orgasm. That’s what would constitute as “good at sex”. That was the message slowly carved into me: I equated “good at sex,” and later, “good sex” with the male orgasm.
I
understood the act of sex as two people trying to please the other, trying to make each other feel good. The objective was for a man to reach orgasm. This narrow focus convinced me that male orgasm happened no matter what, and that the female orgasm was a much rarer occurrence that required more effort, more care, and more amazing, magic sex talent than the male orgasm. The male orgasm was a goldfish in plastic bag you won for whacka-mole while the female orgasm was the fucking Lochness monster. You’d heard of
it, you’d seen videos that looked like it, you even came close to seeing it one time, but in the end, you knew it was a myth. And that’s what my sexual experiences with men and my own orgasm boiled down to. I was told that Nessie was a bitch who would never show her face, no matter how hard anyone tried. And really, if she took that much effort, she probably didn’t exist to begin with. What the fuck did I know about her anyway? I began to see the absence of my orgasm as my fault. The question was never about what could be done differently for me to reach orgasm, because the sex wasn’t the thing that needed to change. If sex that pleased him didn’t also please me, it was my problem. It was my stupid clitoris that was at fault for not exploding with pleasure after 8 minutes of semi-rhythmic thrusting.
Because who wouldn’t orgasm from that, right? Thus began the cycle of sexual guilt that found its way into every one of my sexual encounters with men. Because coupled with my prissy clitoris that couldn’t just orgasm out of thin air was the idea that men really had a lot riding on being good at sex. I was naive and young enough to fully believe that every guy I had sex with was truly trying his best to please me. It was my stupid body that couldn’t orgasm. And in this shame and hatred of my body, of my lack of ability to summon an orgasm, I came to the benevolent conclusion of just faking one. Instead of asking for better, I’ll just give him what he wants. He really DOES want me to come after all! I’ll take a blurry picture of some branches and call it Nessie. At least he’ll be happy.
For a while, I convinced myself this was the right thing to do. I convinced myself of the fiction of my own orgasm because it made shitty sex easier to justify. What I didn’t realize is how this distanced me even further from my orgasm, from my body, and from my full participation in sex. It made the conversation of actually communicating my needs even harder to start. Once you start faking, it becomes an expectation. The boys bought into it too. And I wasn’t even that convincing. My passivity in my own sex life was never something I thought was abnormal. I faked the orgasms and succumbed to coercion and used sex as a bartering tool. These were not things I came up with on my own. I learned these practices and mimicked them because of what I had seen so many times in movies and TV shows. I thought
that was just how adult relationships functioned. It’s something we’re all too familiar with. The married couple in the sitcom are lying next to each other in bed. The woman is reading. The man says something along the lines of “do you want to…” and maybe raises his eyebrows. Que laugh track. The woman says she’s not in the mood and continues reading. The man keeps trying, maybe kisses her, saying how beautiful she is. The woman continues reading, maybe says she’ll have sex with him if he does the dishes. Que laugh track. The man excitedly agrees and throws the book away from the bed. The perfect marriage in the heart of suburbia. An exciting aspiration for us all. Time and time again we see women serve as the gatekeeper to men’s pleasure. Time and time again the message is made
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clear: sex is not about you. It is not about your orgasm. It is an age old tale about a man, his dick, and a warm place to ejaculate. That’s the future laid out for women in media. That was what we could aspire to be in our relationships. A nagging, controlling, cold housewife. Maybe she was so unbearably frigid because her husband hadn’t gone down on her since her wedding night. How about that, “Everybody Loves Raymond”? This dynamic is nothing new. This idea of women having the power in sex simply because they can allow a guy to have sex with them is an idea we’ve heard over and over again in many different contexts. But whether we’re labeled as “sluts” or “prudes”, criticism of how we choose to act in this position, of how much or to whom we spread our legs, can be used against us at any moment. This “power” women are told they have, in the end, renders us powerless because it never existed to begin with. It’s easy to see how the personal is the political in cases like abortion rights, when thousands of white men weigh in on what goes on in a woman’s uterus (most of them seem to think children grow in your stomach) but often times we avoid the subject of the political within the personal relationship, especially the heterosexual relationship. The hierarchies and assumptions of the world follow you to the bedroom, whether you like it or not. No matter how much women are told we have the power in sex and relationships because we have
the power to reject and withhold sex, we know deep down that the power dynamic hasn’t really changed. We know if this guy really wanted to, he could ignore our “no.” He could coerce us, he could threaten us, he could hurt us. He always has that power, and that fear is always present. But what happens in the bedroom is personal and therefore off-limits for criticism or analysis within a wider scope. All the sex that leaves us hollow, the sex that may have been coerced, the sex that didn’t even nudge our world let alone rock it, is seen as our personal problem, a reflection of our choices to have sex with men who don’t care or who aren’t experienced or who aren’t good. The one thing we’re told we control is constantly used against us; it’s used to justify men treating us like it’s all we’re there for. We learn this contradiction early. It’s our fault for not giving clear instructions of what and where feels good, not his fault for not asking. It’s our fault for fucking the wrong guy, not his for being a shitty guy. It’s our fault for not navigating our role as sex objects with perfect grace. We learn this contradiction in millions of different ways, but the outcome is always the same: it’s our failure as individuals, as women, as human beings. I have female friendships to thank for many things in my life. I don’t know where I would be without friendships that hold me up and keep me sane. Through these friendships I began to see my individual experiences as gendered experiences. It wasn’t until I talked openly about my
unsatisfying experiences to other women that I realized I wasn’t alone. In a world where it’s so easy to feel alone, so easy to feel crazy, having these friendships was an act of survival which turned into a means of healing. I’m not the only one who’s been coerced into sex. I’m not the only one who’s been left deeply unsatisfied by sex. I’m not the only one who’s been faking orgasms. I’m also not the only one who has stopped doing so. But only after bridging that gap between the personal and political, that gap between my body and my mind that’s so strictly enforced, did I begin to feel whole again. The fake orgasm doesn’t do you any good. It’s a quick fix to a much larger problem. We deserve good sex. We deserve to enjoy our sexual experiences. We deserve so much more than we think we do. It’s not easy to undo all the fucked up ideas we have around sex. Sometimes it’s not easy to demand better. Sometimes the words can’t even come out of your mouth. Because once you’re done faking, you have to be a real person, with real needs and wants, and a real way for those to be met. The scariest thing about not faking is that once you’re done you have to ask yourself, what do I want? After years of trying to please other people, years of alienation from my body, years of thinking sex just isn’t about me, how can I even begin to know what I want from someone else? Ceasing to fake orgasms is the first step. The real battle comes after. But at least there’s a chance to finally come first. u
PERSONAL ESSAY
Building houses A meditation on food and diaspora by Keton Kakkar
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immered mint rests on my nose as I lean over the granite countertop — palms pressed downward so as to lift me up, if only slightly. My feet flap like flippers, and I hear a soft droning sound as the portable fan turns on and whips air onto the freshly frayed batch of pasta. Tossed carelessly on the tablecloth, the sticky strands of dough curl backward as the hot air whisks away their moisture, one drop at a time. This is step four in the process of making sevia. First, the 12
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dough is formed and shaped, rolled and flattened, sliced and sieved, before finally being carried over to the drying table with a terpsichorean precision. The pasta must be dried before it can be boiled, and so while we wait, we occupy our time with other tasks. My hands run over the small, freshly cut circle of dough and clumsily attempt to crease it in half over a pinch of scallions. I wrap the shoddily sealed half-dumpling around like a ring, and a tiny hole appears in the dough. God dammit. Making chushpera isn’t difficult, but my twitch-
ing, twelve year old fingers aren’t capable of it. I glance over at Sid and see his rows of meticulously aligned, perfectly stuffed chusperae and angrily set myself back to work, moving faster and more sloppily than before. **** addy, Daddy, I call, attempting to show off my latest acquisition: St. Charles Place, the first of the pinks. I roll again, because I got doubles, and slowly begin accumulating the assets that would win me the game. A railroad
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here, and orange there . . . Kabir scrutinizes the board and begins to calculate, nervously. A quick glance at Sid tells him she’ll be of no help, and so he turns to Irene, eyeing the red that he so desperately needs. Dad strolls over, analyzing the layout of the game like Mikhail Tal in a chess match. Gently sitting down next to Kabir, he begins to arbitrate a trade that would put Kabir back in the running. Illinois for Connecticut and Pacific, and you throw in two hundred, he says to Meera. It’s better
Eventually, we dropped that too, and began thinking of ways to make money. That’s when the real fun began. that you two help each other out and both gain, then be stingy and let Keton walk all over you. With only six months separating us, Kabir and I were fiercely competitive. Who was smarter, who was tougher, who read more, who was more convincing — we’d compete to prove ourselves the best. Each game we mastered was another skill added to our repertoire; each book, another role model. We learned statesmanship from Hamilton and entrepreneurship from Carnegie. We honed our artistry through Roark and ambition through Dantes. Game after game, book after book, we’d race, until finally, there was no point. Monopoly lost our interest; its strategy too simplistic, too banal, for these overly intense preteens. We stopped playing games and started designing them, finding ways to make them more difficult, more nuanced. Eventually, we dropped that too, and began thinking of ways to make money. That’s when the real fun began. Dad! That’s not fair, I protest. You’re not even playing. His eyes alight like dancing coals, he laughs. It’s one of those deep ones: all chest and larynx. He shrugs mildly, reminding me, in the way adults do, that life is not fair and that sometimes you just have to deal with it. I pass Go and build my third house on States. This game will be mine. As Kabir cradles the dice in his left hand, with the seams of his blue corduroy pants crumpling inwards
and the sweat on his brow becoming ever slightly more present, we hear a call from upstairs. “Boys!” Mom bellowed, “Aush is almost ready.” No matter where these family reunions were or who ended up attending, there was always one constant: Aush. Initially developed as a staple for Ghenghis Khan’s armies, Aush has now become used to satiate the militia of my sixteen cousins, fourteen aunts and uncles, and two siblings. A close relative of Japanese Ramen or Vietnamese Pho, Aush branched off from the original noodle soup line in what is now Afghanistan and remained popular among the country’s small Hindu population ever since. In many ways, Aush is one of the few things my parents have left to remind them of the home they had to leave behind when they were teenagers. Receiving the finely rolled, flattened sheets of dough from Amar, I begin to cut out as many circles from it as I can, careful to maximize the ratio of circles per square unit of dough. Press and twist, press and twist. My palm pushes down hard on the cutting thing (the name of which I to this day do not know, but suffice to say, it looked like the top half of an eggshell made out of metal), and I place the circles on the baby blue and olive green striped plastic tray, which waits anxiously for Kabir to carry it over for the next stage in the process. A conglomerate of wildly disparate ingredients, all of which take time, care, and affection to turn out well, Aush is best created in assembly line fashion, with each cousin in charge of a separate, distinct task. Division of labour, as Smith would say. Jaldhi-kar, Mom lectures, grabbing the circle of dough out of my hand and deftly forming it into a chushpera. I sense the thick, savory scent of the minutely minced, ground turkey wafting up from the boiling pot. Hold the dough in your left hand; use your right to pinch the scallions into the center; crease with your left; fold with your right; wrap around your ring finger, and finito. I slowly tune Mom out, and my eyes catch hold of my aunts playing Seep, a traditional South Asian game, a variant of which the Italians call Scopa. The rules are simple enough on the surface: four players, two teams, pick up as many spades as you can (the higher the number, the more points it’s worth). Cursing in a mixture of Farsi and Pashto, Hindi and Punjabi, my aunt loses a trick, trapped by her sister into playing a series of bad moves. Jack, six, four, of spades, and an ace — twenty two points, carelessly
lost. Pay attention, Mom snaps. Take this and finish it up, we need to throw them in the pot. My eyes break from the game, but I ignore her — marching over instead to where Dad is mixing the chutney.
**** he white bed sheet spreads across the living room floor. In the center: glass bowls with various ingredients; around the periphery: my family — with empty bowls and empty stomachs, both of which wait eagerly to be filled. Lobia, keema, chutney, podina, dain, chuspera; Kidney beans, meat, spicy sauce, mint sauce, yogurt, dumplings. It’s all about finding the right balance. I like to think one’s Aush is a reflection of one’s life at any given point in time. When you are young, you start with the basics: noodles and water. As you grow older, your life and your Aush become more colored, more flavorful: dumplings at age five, yogurt at age seven, mint sauce at ten. The closer you get to filling your bowl, the closer you are to becoming an adult, until finally, it’s no longer about which ingredients, but how much, and when. I lean to my left and take a sip of Dad’s Aush. His is all hellfire and maelstrom: a sea of spice so sharp it’s all I can do not to bite my tongue and run away. My mom’s on the other hand is cool and savory and
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Lobia, keema, chutney, podina, dain, chuspera; Kidney beans, meat, spicy sauce, mint sauce, yogurt, dumplings. It’s all about finding the right balance. sweet — with clouds of yogurt and plenty of tomatoes. Amidst the sound of gossip and argument, sitars and harmoniums, I glance upward from the white cotton bed sheet and rest my eyes on the drying table and the remaining strands of pasta, each of which needs to be chilled, hardened, and left out to dry one-too-many times before it will ever, truly, separate from its kin. u
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Margaret dressed up for Halloween
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Theater of Women
photo essay by Alina van Ryzin
These images are about people and place. How we interact with the place and how we perform in the place. The place is Bryn Mawr College – a historically women’s college in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The idea of a Bryn Mawr woman has gone through many phases, all reflections and reactions to society at large. Bryn Mawr is a stage on which the very essence of womanhood is contested. It is as political as it is personal. It is about who we are and what space we occupy.
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POETRY & FICTION Three poems
POETRY
by Margaret Hughes
Humoral Nerve Something’s pressing on the nerve that controls your face. Your person’s graced—in passing— with un-pursing (almost unchaste, almost chasing) lips turned up in less than earnest curvature, the worst waste. u
Metaphoria You wear my shirt, saying it smells like me. This is the closest I can come to giving you my skin.
You were between my legs, clumsy and lovely. “What happens now?” you said. I said I didn’t know, honestly. “But you’re the one who watches porn,” you said. Response: “I’ve only ever watched the trailers!” We laughed, and you laughed into me. I hope you like the taste of laughter: we make such sweet comedy. u
Last night I told you, “You can have my body.” This morning I wish it were true. u
Spoon by Sarah Branch What I wouldn’t give To be a utensil right now For the sterling silver To invent the arch of my back With a chill that rolled Up my sunken spine I would cup you so gingerly Within the cavities of my torso I’d drape myself over your body One form sculpting another We’d dissolve into the circuit of energy Between the solidity of my being And the fluidity of yours What I wouldn’t give To be pressed up against The human texture of your back Our legs would hinge at our pelvises And our toes would crawl Like ghosts Between the sheet And the mattress u 20
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POETRY
replete with gulps of thirst
POETRY
translation by Evan Grennon from the original Arabic by Salah Bousrif (Morocco)
1. erasure
3. childhood
impossible for the Word to become a sconce
he had whenever he felt something pierce his Ink laid down Anchor far away the harbors not wide enough nor the ranges
that paves my eye with its water strews me effaces my organs i am erased i become dust can i shudder as the earth shudders can i alter the shape of the air and the color of ash can i
an itinerant all routes from between his hands depart he brushes away time time between his hands is water
satisfy my yearning i—who am replete with gulps of thirst i will long for the impossible peradventure i will lay Anchor at the last firmament whereupon the earth will become my refuge
4. call in my hand sleep the words and between my fingers flows their susurration there, something collects my blood and my soul and alone takes me towards the brilliance of the call
2. earth earth, i think, is merely a story it does not suffice that you smell its dust or that we read the morning herbage to think that we live as we wanted. earth is a bed of dreams. Perfume i think the earth is merely a story
who bestowed upon me this call who awakened my hand and bruited the soul in those words now you may swim in the river when i sleep many times my hand envelops me with the susurrus of its dreams my body is lenient damp
my visions are calls without horizon
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The Koala Pregnancy
FICTION
by Moeko Noda with illustrations by Ditiya Ferdous
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t all began when the koalas disappeared. It was a hot summer day, and I was sitting in the ticket gate of a zoo, waiting for any customer to show up. When they shared the news that all the koalas in the zoo were missing, the staff in the zoo was amazed that these animals managed to get out. Their cages were shut up with a huge lock that would take three adult men to break. But after a quick investigation, it turned out that when the keeper fed the koalas, he was drunk with vodka and forgot to lock the door. During the investigation he was fired on the spot. But the managers still needed him to figure out where the koalas had gone. Really, where could they have gone? They were bred in a cage since they were fetuses under the careful watch of humans. After a few hours of running away it must have stopped feeling like freedom, I imagined, as I sat at my ticket booth counter; they must have lost their way, unable to go further but unable to return to their home either, hungry and clueless. Poor koalas.
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I found out about the news a few hours after management realized that the koalas were missing. The zoo was transitioning into nighttime hours, and customers were sparse. The night was humid, making me sweat in my uniform. As I was refilling the pamphlets, Misa, who sat next to me, took off her headphones and leaned over to my booth. She whispered: “You are not going to guess what they just told me. The koalas ran away. Ran away!” A family with two crying children came up to her booth, and she continued in a rush. “They want us to let the customers know that the koalas are sick and,” she let out a short snort, “watch out in case we see koalas running out of the main gate.” With that she adjusted her posture and returned to her seat. I heard her saying to the mother across the glass panel that the koalas are sick and won’t be on display today, thank you for your consideration. The father was standing a step behind, looking at his phone, as the mother struggled to hold the two crying kids in her arms. The kids were grabbing at each other’s hair, but she managed to
take the tickets Misa slipped out. The family walked away. This was part of our job besides selling tickets and sending people through the zoo’s gate. We needed to tell them if any of the animals, especially the cute, popular ones, were not in good condition. They were sometimes sick, which was most common, or they were in the indoor cage for mating season. Sometimes they were away for mating at another zoo. At other times they were under special care due to pregnancy. As far as I knew, their life seemed to center around bearing progenies. The koalas never came back. The managers and the now-fired keeper simply couldn’t find them, and neither could the police. It was as if they had disappeared, and maybe they did. I imagined the koalas climbing up their eucalyptus trees, one after another, with the babies cuddled by their mothers, and falling into a long dream. They probably disappeared because they got sucked into the dream; at least that was what I thought had happened, but I did not say that. Misa said
they must have gotten out of the zoo and ran away somehow. They must be on their way to Australia, she said. Animals sense the direction to their home, where they came from. A month after the koalas went missing I also left the zoo. I was pregnant. Lying down on my couch, waiting for my boyfriend to come back from work, I wondered whether I escaped like the koalas or was just taken into the backstage mating cage. The small apartment that my boyfriend and I picked for our new life was shabby, and the cardboard boxes were still cluttered in the corners. It was an escape, in a way, because I was out of the ticket booth at that sinking zoo. The number of visitors was dwindling each year, while I sat
there for eight hours each day, accumulating no skills. But it was also like being moved to another cage, because I got out of the ticket booth only when I was going to bear a progeny – a koala baby. When the koalas slept in the trees and dreamed of the dark wombs they came from, the only place they knew before human surveillance, it seemed that they dreamed their way into the wombs of the women in the zoo. A month after the koalas went missing, Misa found out she was pregnant after five years of marriage, four of which were spent in vicious fights with her husband, because he was reluctant to cooperate in her attempts to have children. One by one, the women in the zoo left the place. It was eerie and unanticipated. The managers were mad, but
what could they do? Females with babies must leave to be put in a safe place away from human eyes and stress. Whether the pregnancy was awaited or dreaded, it didn’t matter for the koalas. They snuggled into the womb and sent the women into the backstage cage in return for freedom. Five months pregnant, I walked into the zoo with my boyfriend for the first time. He used to come visit me during the weekends, and I used to pretend to sell him tickets. We chatted forever across the glass panel, and we never went into the gate. I hated the idea of gazing at caged animals. This particular weekend, when we got there, we found that two young girls had replaced Misa and I, two girls who would also soon get
pregnant and be sent into their backstage cages. The girl who sold us the ticket announced in a dried tone that the koalas are sick today, thank you for understanding. As she slipped out two tickets using the tip of her nails, my boyfriend looked at me like he was disappointed. I hadn’t told him about the koalas’ disappearance, so I just shrugged. We walked straight to the koala cage, because I told my boyfriend that I want-
ed to see how a zoo cage looked without animals in it. He said okay. Coming here wasn’t his idea in the first place; I woke up at midnight and announced that I needed to go to the zoo. It wasn’t a request, it was an order, so he said okay, baby, let’s go. The zoo was as deserted as it was when I left. The only people walking about in this cold winter day were two or three families and a group of boys, their skinny legs sticking out of their half
pants. They were bored by midday and were playing with PSPs in the middle of the wonderland of their childhood. No one was around when we got to the koala cage. My boyfriend and I stood in front of it, looking at the eucalyptus trees that finished their careers as food and started living as a plant of its own right. The leaves rustled in the chilly wind that blew past. I felt my baby kicking in the stomach for the first time. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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Creep
FICTION
Content Warning: The following piece discusses self harm and suicidal thoughts by Heidi Kalloo
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id you know that I am an absolute idiot, and that you have changed? In between the times you fell in love and out of love and knew me, I was able to chart this change without troubling you whatsoever. I see my body in the night against white sheets like a dark shadow there’s a pale face in the window illuminated by the porch lights my throat’s closed up with shock so I can’t scream he’s absolute stillness eyes wide watching me the darkness all around him starts to melt and move I’m frozen in the bed. When I was little I used to have escape plans, steps in my mind to play out the moment the windows break or the doorknob starts to turn. I’d hide in the hamper under the clothes. When I woke up from a nightmare I’d run to my mom’s room and get in her bed. Although sometimes I’d be paralyzed by terror laying there wide awake, drowning in the pitch lake night. The familiar objects all about my room would leak out at the edges, mutating into horrific monsters and peeping toms I didn’t see come in. Apparently I was experiencing hypnopompic hallucinations, but as a child I honestly believed there were black holes in my bedroom that allowed evil to seep through. Sometimes I thought the holes were in fact riddling my insides. Now I’m grown up so I live alone and I have nowhere to run and nobody to save me so I don’t run or scream I just lay there looking back. I can’t remember how I fell in love before, but I can guarantee with absolute certainty it won’t happen again. I’ve never been so convinced of the fact that deep romantic love is a lie we tell ourselves to fall asleep at night. What we are really falling in love with when we put all our eggs in one human basket is ourselves, and each unhappy rupture in the Band-Aid of monogamous codependency validates our own self-hatred. Falling in love is at once an act of benevolence and of masochism that after a couple turns of the wheel be-
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comes tedium. I’d like to cancel out the system and its effects entirely. These days, it’s so nice how people put themselves out there on the Internet. I am so very good at the Internet. I can find every little piece of something you left behind like I could watch you in your window at night, could crouch beside your car and beg your old dog not to bark. I’d see you at your desk through the billowing curtains and happen upon some stolen bits of knowledge, what do you wear when no one’s looking, are you sipping a gin and seltzer or drinking straight from the bottle? And the learning lights a fire in my stomach that burns up all the butterflies, drunk off a one sided lesson in your uninformed behaviours. It’s the same sentiment from the comfort of my bedroom, collecting leftovers no one expected to get glimpsed. Pilfering your high school blog, digging in the pits of your instagram, you never deleted your myspace, and you’ve been listening to jazz on the weekends. This way I can learn your whole story with my face safe behind the curtain of a computer’s unnatural illumination drawn over the black night. I can read your diary without ever entering your room. You can’t even complain because you put it out there yourself, but you won’t even have to because you’ll never realize. When I first spoke to you, and you asked me if I wanted to get drunk at Chuck E Cheese’s with you, I thought you were a joke I’d been told before. I hear the punch line reverberate in the back of my neck until I’m sick and it becomes another language I’ve been meaning to learn, and then a lullaby that keeps me up at night. I know even this feeling of temporarily understanding another person is a lie. Truthfully I do not understand you anymore than I do myself. I am the things I hate about you, and you are the things I want to be. It’s ok because maybe in reality we aren’t anything that could be expressed in a text post, an Instagram picture, a song lyric or anything at all on any sensory field I know of, technological or otherwise. We’re nothing more than an unfortunate occurrence. Like a fetus too developed to abort, neglected by its mother and grown up to rampage and murder. I don’t think we vibe together but I still
think you’re cool as shit. I’m not good at getting along with others. Someone said maybe I should try not being myself and instead be someone else for a change, as the situation calls. I’m not good at that. What I am good at: a radical honesty that makes the listener cringe and shrink away, talented maybe not with quotation or eloquence of speech, maybe at doing makeup, I don’t know, certainly pretty excellent at sucking dick. Maybe I understand now why none of you want to talk to me. To be Black is to wear your skin like a long explanatory letter to the human standing opposite you, shifting the words depending on the audience like Rorschach mutates inkblots. To be female is to be widely overlooked except in your capacity to function as a masturbatory sleeve. To be in a constant hopeless battle with suicidality is to burden everyone who lives their lives with the unfortunate happenstance of speaking your name on their lips. One day, in the indeterminate future but one of these days for certain, I will kill myself in the woods alone with a hood over my head, with my hands tied behind my back and the wrists bleeding. And my impression on the world will be marked by solitude, pious observance, perseverance until not, and irrefutably a work of art all because I say it’s so. I see my body in the night drenched in dark sweat mutating like the dark does inexplicable evasive a black shadow maybe I’ve imagined I see the impressions of the porch light has burned phosphenes so visual static disguises the face in the window his pallid features scramble against the night’s sheet wrapped like a harsh embrace holding him coarsely there’s a pale face in the window illuminated by the porch lights frozen silent I watch and I’m eager I deserve to be devoured in the night by a stranger from behind a window. Step one to making friends is don’t try to fuck them. I’m professionally dumb, I’m so dumb I can’t get up from bed in the mornings. Painfully awkward. I keep having terrible dreams. u
ART ‘Bring your own body’ REVIEW
A discussion of the Bryn Mawr exhibition, up October 21st through December 11th
by Samantha Herron
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rchives are a messy answer to a messy world. Left to their own devices, the artifacts of human life on Earth will rot. Books become musty and brittle, old CDs and vinyls scratch up, buildings and statues reduce to rubble in the wake of natural disasters. The entropy of the universe is always increasing, and mitigating this tendency toward disorder and decay requires some input of energy. The institution of archives - physical repositories for historical documents and materials - emerged at least as early as the third millennium BCE to combat this natural inclination to crumble, fade, disappear. For thousands of years and across the globe, a significant amount of labor has been directed towards not only the maintenance of old artworks and essays and stone tools and toasters and feather boas and YouTube videos, but also to the organization of those materials such that they continue to be discoverable and useful to new generations of human beings. The desire to archive is born from an anxiety: that which we do not intentionally remember will be forgotten, gone without a trace. But the archive is fraught; it has never captured all of the objects of human creation, nor has it tried. There’s not enough space (and very arguably, no reason) to hold every poem or mixtape or note scribbled on a napkin. And so archives make choices, and more often than not, those choices are dictated by patterns of power and oppression. History is not only written by the victors, as the saying goes, but also collected and stored for safekeeping by the victors. As such, the historical activity by straight, white, rich, able-bodied, cismen is well-documented, and much of the evidence of historical activity by nearly everyone else has been, to put it generously, the victim of entropy.
“Bring Your Own Body: Transgender Between Archives and Aesthetics,” the current exhibit in Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald gallery, attempts to both remediate, contest, and put on display a particular archival absence: transgender experiences and art. Curated by Jeanne Vaccaro and Stamatina Gregory, BYOB combines sexological and historical ephemera with contemporary works by transgender artists to put forth a counternarrative to the violent erasure of transgender individuals from the annals of history. The sparsity and genre of decades-old transgender archival matter can paint a bleak picture of the past - dehumanizing diagnostic materials and anonymous mugshots of cross-dressers point to longstanding practices of shaming, pathologizing, and criminalizing transgender life. But in BYOB, these objects are only one facet of the curated total. A vibrant, embodied history of pushback is stored in disparate moments of transgender cultural production. Magazines, sculpture, storyboards, movies, and polaroids (among other visual media) collage together to challenge the meaning of historical omissions and misrepresentations. The archive’s violences are shown to not only have let an important history slip through the cracks, but also to have inspired the art on display. BYOB offers works that are diverse, vital, and intergenerational. On display in the gallery are cement sculptures by Math Bass, written text from Vaginal Davis, photo collages by Pierre Molinier, ephemera from drag queen Flawless Sabrina’s archive, and a takeaway broadside collage by Chris Vargas of midcentury trans-related news headlines, among many others. On a table sit issues of Transvestia magazine published by Virginia Prince in the 1960s and 70’s that can be read and flipped through. niv Acosta’s dick-shaped denim couches function as both art and usable furniture in
the gallery. Along the entire back wall of the exhibit is the multimedia art of Mark Aguhar, an Asian-American trans femme artist with a large Tumblr following who committed suicide in 2012, and whose work and internet presence speak to the emergence of online environments in the politics of transgender art making and archivization. Many of the works on display predate the term “transgender” and some of the artists of other works don’t use the term to describe themselves, anyway. The exhibit takes the whole range of historical and contemporary gender non-conformance to have articulated a manifold but intimately related set of aesthetics, shaped by the intersections of oppression and opposition. In spite of, and because of, the disheartening legacy of injustice against transgender bodies, a remarkable networked ancestry of resistance, agency, and self-determination emerges in the pieces collected for BYOB. The curators paid particular attention to the ways by which transgender individuals, faced with little possibility for institutional archivization, made due by other means: by creating and saving their own work, by memorializing each other, by communicating a lineage. The exhibit’s title itself, Bring Your Own Body, references an unpublished manuscript of the same name by early intersex actress and activist, Lynn Edward Harris, capturing a continuing genealogy of art and activism. In this sense, BYOB is an archive of archives, a celebration of memory-making and self-articulation against the odds. Because the universe dictates that entropy is always increasing, that what was destroyed can never be fully recovered, an archive of archives is the next best thing: BYOB puts absences on display, and asks gallery-goers to “bring your own body,” to consider the unsung fight by real, fleshy, bodily and embodied human beings to keep intact the artifacts of their own lives, and those who came before them. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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BOOKS Borrow, steal, confess On Elena Ferrante and cultural appropriation
by Liliana Frankel
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his October, the Italian journalist Claudio Gatti doxed his country’s best-known living novelist, who writes under the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. Ferrante had already commented publicly on the importance of privacy to her creative process. “I feel, thanks to this decision, that I have gained a space of my own, a space that is free, where I feel active and present,” she’d said in an interview. “To relinquish it would be very painful.” Following the English translation of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, Gatti observed that her publishers were compensating a literary translator, Anita Raja, at an improbably high rate. His exposé triangulates these receipts with other details of Raja’s finances and circumstances to prove her connection to the work. Then it attempts to justify his investigation in terms of Ferrante’s authenticity: Raja’s mother was a teacher, not a seamstress, and she wasn’t Neapolitan. She was born in Worms, Germany, into a family of Polish Jews who emigrated from Wadowice, a town west of Krakow. She spoke Italian with a strong German accent… In a letter included in Frantumaglia [Ferrante’s new collection of essays and correspondence], she warns her publisher that she will not tell the truth about herself… But by announcing that she would lie on occasion, Ferrante has in a way relinquished her right to disappear behind her books and let them live and grow while their author remained unknown.
The justification does no good, and in fact has already been smacked down by feminists, literary critics, fellow writers, Ferrante’s publishers, and the ghosts of Calvino, Borges, and Barthes. 26
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Yet if Gatti is wrong, it’s for interesting reasons. His foundational error is construing the multiple identities of Anita Raja— translator of East German feminists and political thinkers, born in Naples, raised in Rome, daughter of a Neapolitan magistrate and a Holocaust refugee, wife of an acclaimed Neapolitan novelist—as contradictions rather than complements. Adam Kirsch, a thinkpiece artist in the New York Times, even twisted Gatti’s clumsy proof of inauthenticity to argue that since Raja has no immediate claim to the working-class experiences rendered in the Neapolitan Novels, her books are “a sterling example of the power of appropriation.” But for some reason, none of Ferrante’s fans have thanked Gatti for exposing her. Kirsch thinks this proves the pettiness of the whole cultural appropriation debate. This election cycle has not spared New York Times readers a single terrible hottake, yet this, to me, was the most terrible of all. Why? I found it odious, not to mention nakedly political, that Kirsch would try to rebrand Gatti’s disregard for Ferrante’s desires as an homage to the realism of her Naples. I also felt trapped by Kirsch’s reference to cultural appropriation, to which I am generally opposed. It’s true that Ferrante’s novels seem to be a close facsimile of many lives which Raja hasn’t lived. But do the terms of the cultural appropriation debate apply here? If not, why not? And what alternate frameworks could be used to critique Ferrante’s novels while continuing to center its concerns? Kirsch’s argument seems naive given that the Neapolitan Novels are not told as an uncritical proletarian fable, but as a story-within-a-story which thematically centers the appropriative dynamics of storytelling itself. Their narrator, a writer named Elena Greco, is moved to recount her friendship with her childhood neighbor and lifelong muse Lila Cerullo when, in her sixties, Lila disappears. The two
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women’s shared history fills four volumes and deals closely with their impoverished neighborhood in postwar Naples, which Lila has never left and to which Elena periodically returns. Yet Elena’s own changing class affiliation complicates her relationship to her home, dialect, and neighbors. At the time of Lila’s disappearance, the two have been estranged for years; that is, ever since Elena decided to fictionalize her friend’s misfortunes for a best-selling novel. Ferrante’s work raises important questions about the relationship between fiction and social reality, and the potentials of each to mediate the other. Though the dragging of Anita Raja’s name through the press is unquestionably a violation, I feel excited to know that the woman who created Elena Ferrante is a translator, and by the possibilities that the paradigm of “translation” rather than “appropriation” presents for talking and writing about people unlike ourselves. Which is not to say, however, that I harbor any illusions about translation as a pure or neutral process. In her 2015 essay, “Translation as a Practice of Acceptance,” Anita Raja herself asks “What does it mean for me to translate literature?” This relationship is not one between equals— in fact, it is characterized by inequality. It requires a particular disposition: the translator must retreat so as to accept the language of the other, to allow herself to be invaded by it so as to accommodate it… The text of the other jostles the language of the translator, creating friction, producing a new text in its image and likeness. That is why translating is not transcribing but rather re-writing in a different language, in a way that remains bound to the original and yet is inventive on its own.
For Raja, it’s the source text which holds the authority in this power dynamic. The
translator, marked as feminine, must compartmentalize and subjugate her own creative desires so that her words can share the shape of a foreign body. Scholar Rebecca Falkoff highlights an opposite dynamic between Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo in her 2015 essay “To Translate Is to Betray” (which also makes prescient reference to Anita Raja). Here, Falkoff interprets the Neapolitan Novels as Elena’s translations of Lila’s story; that is, both the story of Lila’s life, and the epic text about Naples which Elena fears Lila will someday complete: The [books] betray not only by dulling Lila’s expressive force, or by rendering the experience of the neighborhood in a language with the potential to grant Elena access to a different social class, but also by their very existence, as Elena had promised Lila never to write about her.
This assertion, if accepted, complicates or even inverts the power dynamic described by Raja. In Falkoff ’s interpretation, it is Elena, no matter how tortured she may be by the task of representing her friend, who maintains power through her ability to translate Lila’s performance of life into art. What Falkoff observes could be construed as an appropriation. But to label it as such implies the facile assumption that Elena Greco is interpreting and re-presenting Lila’s life entirely from the outside. Such an argument could be made—after all, they are two grown women, separate from one another—yet the books suggest that it is more appropriate to consider them as mutual influences, each most fully understood
when the other is present for context. A friendship of this sort is a comfort to live with, but an impossible ethical puzzle to represent from the inside. Questions of ownership must be raised at every turn. While Lila is Elena’s friend, “Lila Cerullo” is a creation of Elena Greco. And that’s only the story-within-a-story; Elena Greco is furthermore a creation of Elena Ferrante, a creation of Anita Raja. If this configuration sounds impossibly layered, it’s because it’s a boiled-down theory of a fiction which chooses “show” over “tell” for thousands of pages. The Neapolitan Novels are obsessed with context, which I take as a clue for theorizing a practice of ethical translation. In order for us to understand the social contexts of both Lila and Elena, Ferrante writes us their societies on a grand scale. Minor characters are followed through the years so as to discourage readers from seeing them simply as symbols of a certain class, type, or ideology. The timespan permits no assumptions of fixity; we watch neighborhood firebrands age, struggle, flip-flop, and despair. Some die. Some adapt. And surprisingly, Elena as narrator/translator chooses to expose each of these compromises, side plots that a less frank book would omit. As Raja said in her essay, “the totality of the original text is not reproduced by a single translation, but by a series of translations: those that preceded the translation and those that will follow. And this is how it should be.” Herein lies the difference between appropriation and translation. While appropriation deploys stolen symbols without situating readers in their semantic systems of origin, translation seeks to make legible to readers what they otherwise could not
have understood. I, for example, listened to the Neapolitan Novels as an English-language audiobook during my summer internship in Washington, D.C., touring the free Smithsonians with my headphones on, swimming in symbols of my own language and culture, and simultaneously, towards a working understanding of Ferrante’s faraway worlds. If left to sit unqualified, there’s something scary about this image. After all, my swimming to Italy is just a metaphor, totally unrealized. Translation can bring us no closer to what is foreign to us. In this sense, it carries some of the same risks as cultural appropriation. Translation facilitates a mediated intimacy between reader and source, which as an uncritical outsider I might overstate or even weaponize. Yet I am also given the chance to be humble, to sit with my limitations or to push myself to a more complete understanding of Naples through further study and travel. These opportunities are a gift. As a white woman in the United States, reading in translation is a useful political exercise which reminds me that my personal norms are not “normal.” That is to say, I cannot understand the world outside of myself by simply projecting my norms onto it and reading from there. Instead, I must value the testimony of the author and interpretation of the translator, who walk me to my own borders and help me see what lies beyond. In childhood, Lila and Elena playact, co-creating narratives which cement their friendship. At one point, Lila writes a short story which astonishes Elena and inspires her for years to come. Especially as Elena moves further from the neighborhood,
The covers of Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels in their English translation
Photo courtesy of the Chicago Tribune
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taking beach vacations, attending college, and eventually moving to Florence, she fears and desires the continued influence of Lila’s written work, often pressing her to write more and to share her writing. Lila hates this. “You wanted to write novels,” she says, undermining Elena’s concept of where art stops and life begins, “I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality.” Elena’s projection onto Lila, her wish to see Lila express herself as she would, are an iteration of an outgrown empathy. Her belated solution is to write the story told in the Neapolitan Novels, a project she only begins after Lila’s disappearance. As she learns to translate her friend’s life from this void into the character we meet in her books, Elena finally puts Lila into focus, reinstating the “dissolving boundaries” which Lila has always cited as her biggest fear. Here’s Elena at the close of the series: It’s only and always the two of us who are involved, she who wants me to give her what nature and circumstances kept, I who can’t give what she demands; she who gets angry at my inadequacy and out of spite wants to reduce me to nothing, as she has done with herself, I who have written for months and months to give her a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn, calm myself.
Ann Goldstein, who translated Ferran-
te’s books into English, has described her own process as “quantizing” the reading experience. “By making something out of those words, I was able to escape the emotional intensity of it,” she said in a talk last fall. There’s an irony there, for it’s only through Goldstein’s work that English-language readers can be impacted at all. Nothing about the process of literary translation suggests an easy transposition; it must always be a fraught exchange. Yet it is an exchange which points continuously to its source, which is conscious of its debts, and which, if correctly handled, can enrich both the original author and her foreign readers. This is where I see potential. A discussion of cultural exchange in terms of appropriation assumes an insider and an outsider. These assumptions are usually viable, and can be useful for calling people out in everyday life. However, the label of “outsider” can also sound like an existential threat to novelists, especially if they rely excessively on their readers’ reflex to identify with characters instead of working to write characters worth identifying with. When called out, these folks would sooner slide their hurt feelings and self doubt into a New York Times Op-Ed than grapple with them the way they should. A discussion of cultural exchange in terms of translation, on the other hand, assumes the possibility of a faithful rendering in the abstract. This assumption is just
an ideal, but it might prove useful if critics began to measure writers against it. Instead of asking only whether a writer has culturally appropriated, we might appropriate the concerns of translators and ask: To whom or to what place is this work of fiction indebted? Are those people and places credited in some way in the text? Are those people consenting to their representation? Are they being given enough context? Will readers swim towards them, or by them? This is just a preliminary list of questions, and of course, there will still be writers who could care less about their answers; but perhaps changing the terms of the debate would make it harder for those folks to justify themselves with nothing more than a wave to the (human)ities, hashtag all lives—nevermind. My imagined discussion assumes reform, not revolution, as a goal. That may not go far enough for everyone. But it’s my opinion that all representation is flawed— even representation of one’s own experiences. Words are inadequate conduits of the felt truths which live and die in our hearts. Their best application, therefore, brings us closer to others, even if that also forces recognition of our own boundaries, the painful reality of our concreteness, and the final impossibility of dissolving into someone else. u
Carla Hayden > the Avengers On the Library of Congress and Carla Hayden, its first female leader and a black woman
by Kara Bledsoe
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or those of us who are not living under a rock, the recent swearing in of the new Librarian of Congress is old news. For the rest who live in ignorance of a great shift in one of this country’s oldest institutions, you’re welcome, because everything you need to (and should already) know is here. The mission of the Library of Congress is “to make resources available and useful to Congress and the American people and sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations,” [1] a lofty goal. Within this larger body are several departments (the one
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you are most familiar with is probably the Copyright Office), and the most commonly known function of the Library is its dedication to obtaining at least one copy of every book published within the United States. As a result, the Library boasts a collection of over 162 million items, only 10% of which are books, housed in roughly 838 miles of shelves. The Librarian of Congress is the captain of this massive ship, and their tasks include the typical administrative work (hiring, firing, supervising) and a mix of duties involving liaison between Congress, the Library staff, and the general public. A position initiated in January 1802 with the donation of Thomas Jefferson’s personal collection, the
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Librarian has been without exception white, male, and conservative. Unsurprising.** The first Librarian of Congress was John J. Beckley. He served as a campaign manager for Thomas Jefferson in the late 1700s and the early 1800s. As a reward for his services to the newly elected Jefferson, Beckley was named Clerk of the United States House of Representatives. And in a true display of white, male entitlement, Beckley succeeding in convincing the House to name him Librarian of Congress in addition to his role as clerk. After Beckley was the lawyer Patrick Magruder. And after Magruder was a second lawyer, George Watterston. Watterston’s time in office marked the first time the role
of clerk and the Librarian of Congress were separated. The tea for Watterston is his convenient replacement by John Silva Meehan after nearly 14 years in Washington. Apparently, George, an outspoken Whig, wasn’t a huge fan of the new president, conservative Democrat Andrew Jackson, and the feeling was mutual. Watterston’s petitions for reinstatement proved futile, but he went on to influence politics and public history other ways [2], so no harm done. Watterston’s reign gave way to John Silva Meehan, a printer and publisher. Meehan oversaw a large scale downsize of the Library’s collections and functions. Small government, I guess… The trend Meehan set in place lasted through nine presidencies, before finally being ousted by Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s pick was John Gould Stephenson. This John was a physician and soldier, so no one really knows why he got the job, but he matters because he nominated Ainsworth Rand Spofford as Chief Assistant Librarian. This proved Stephenson’s most influential act, since Spofford transitioned the Library from a private to a public institution as the next Librarian. Spofford was a journalist and a publisher. While Spofford held office, the Library began acquiring government documents and publications in addition to texts. The collections grew from 60,000 to upwards of a million items with a guiding philosophy that the United States’ identity as a free republic required an educated population to ensure its longevity and prosperity. John Russell Young, the third John to head the Library, was a journalist, author, and diplomat to China. Again, this John knew the right people, and got offered the job. After him came Herbert Putnam, who held the title of librarian before he served Congress but did so without any formal training. Putnam put the Library so far behind in cataloging, I doubt they’ve caught up yet. Archibald MacLeish, a poet and writer, instituted some bureaucratic measures to improve efficiency as the Library collections continued to expand. After that, Luther Evans left a career in political science to answer FDR’s call to the Library. Evans gets a gold star because he gave many foreign manuscripts back to their countries of origin. A task that seems far too complicated for other better resourced private institutions to manage. *cough* Smithsonian. *cough* American Museum of Natural History. *cough* Later, Daniel J. Boorstin was a historian whose conservative views on the counter culture of the 1960s and 70s didn’t make
him a popular choice for office with the liberal wing of Congress. While his politics left much to be desired, Boorstin is credited with salient critiques of human beings’ relationship to technology, specifically in the context of advertisement and publicity. James H. Billington, Carla Hayden’s direct predecessor, was more of the same. A deep mistrust of, or lack of understanding about, the rapid increase in technology and human dependence eventually clouded the career of a man well respected as a historian and scholar. What do we know to be true about each of these thirteen men? Oh right. They are all white, all male, and all conservative by modern metrics. Hear me out. Nothing is necessarily wrong with being any of those things. But as this abbreviated timeline shows, the role of libraries in social change is indisputable. Librarians, particularly those at higher levels of prestige, guide and manipulate the value placed on certain forms and quantities of knowledge. This power translates into a larger societal trend in what information is prioritized and for whom. Think back to how enslaved Africans were forbidden to learn how to read. Why? Because access to information is lauded as a luxury or worse portrayed as commodity awarded objectively only to the deserving. Most modern galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) agree that information access should be a right, and that for as along as access remains hierarchical, inequality will persist. Fortunately, the world’s slow evolution into a more just and equitable place means that a growing majority of the caretakers of history must reflect this philosophy, and the newest Librarian is an excellent example. On September 14th, Carla Hayden was sworn into office as the new Librarian of Congress. Hayden received a degree in Library and information science from University of Chicago and worked for decades in libraries across the country, including at her alma mater. She has worked at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Chicago Public Library. Most notably Hayden was a large presence during the highly publicized unrest in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s murder in 2015 [3], famously keeping the Baltimore public Library, where she served as director, open during the protests. In an interview for American Libraries Magazine, Hayden discussed the mindset behind her decision: “I knew that the libraries are community
resources. I knew that they are anchors in so many communities, in a lot of communities in Baltimore, especially challenged ones, we are the only resource. If we close, we’re sending a signal that we’re afraid or that we aren’t going to be available when times are tough. We should be open especially when times are tough. I didn’t hesitate.” [4] This stance singled her out among peers who felt that she endangered the staff and the materials within the Library, but cemented her place as a progressive professional in a field heavy with conservative infrastructure. Adding to her unique flavor of librarianship, Hayden’s professional background includes a strong dedication to modernization. Carla Hayden’s experience on various councils and boards, like the Steering Committee for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA),ª reflect a keen awareness of the importance of digital asset management and equitability in access to information. The internet and its implications for social, economic, and political equality is widely regarded as the greatest advancement in communications history, connecting individuals, institutions, and their ideas across time and space. Outreach to demographics commonly shunned by the ivory tower but bolstered by the internet, emerging technology, and improving public services, will certainly translate into society’s greater prioritization of the Library and GLAMs across the country. Fortunately, Hayden is well-versed in the ways of the digital universe, and for the first time ever, the Librarian of Congress is a recognizable public figure. Hayden’s twitter account — a mix of promotional material and behind-the-scenes content — quickly amassed a large following (handle: @libnofcongress), and her frequent selfies and instagram posts humanize a government role formerly known only by those in the profession. Hayden will certainly need that experience to parse through half-baked digital projects left dormant by her predecessor. Billington remained unapologetically behind the times. Consequently, the largest Library in the world dragged its feet along the arc of progress, mismanaging the transition to the digital age and ignoring its inevitability. In his defense, his tenure took place during the largest boom in technological advancement in history, but as a supposed leader in the field, the LoC’s relationship to tech is abysmal. Computer systems are outdated and other equipment is quickly becoming obsolete. The Twitter archive, a physical backup of potentially every tweet ever tweeted, is unorganized and unfinSWARTHMORE REVIEW
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ished, and whether the Library has a duty to preserve the evolving World Wide Web is unclear. While the Library has gotten some things right (the Library of Congress classification system is standard practice for most libraries), it struggles to remain a key influencer of the future of librarianship, losing many of its greatest innovators to blossoming digital technology projects across the world. Now more than ever before, the Library of Congress is ripe for a change, and Carla Hayden is the most stark deviation from the status quo in the history of the Library. Not only is she Black and female (a rarity in Western positions of authority), Hayden possesses a background in digital technolo-
gies and innovation for libraries and boasts a track record reflecting a strong devotion to community minded, patron-based service. As a Black woman in school to become a librarian/digital archivist and as an individual committed to social justice and equity, I am overjoyed by Hayden’s new position, and I will continue to favorite every single one of her tweets unapologetically. Even for someone who may not be Black or a woman or someone who could care less about improving the lives of their fellow human beings, this moment is still objectively historic. The first African American and the first woman to be the Librarian of Congress is the same person; your Marvel fave could never. u
Optional further reading (because I know my audience): Daniel A. Gross, ‘Carla Hayden Takes Charge of the Wold’s Largest Library’ Nicholas Fandos, ‘New Librarian of Congress Offers a History Lesson in Her Own Right’ Baynard Woods, ‘Carla Hayden: new librarian of Congress makes history, with an eye on the future’ Susan Page, ‘Carla Hayden becomes the first woman, first black to lead Library of Congress’ Lisa Peet, ‘Carla Hayden Blazes Trail as First Woman, First African American Librarian of Congress’
[1] The Library of Congress website is antiquated and objectively non-sexy, but it’s very informative. Check out www.loc.gov. [2] After leaving the Library, Watterston continued to champion the cause of the Whig party from the pages of The National Review. When he was fired, he took Library records and catalogues with him out of spite. Petty. [3] For a ‘neutral’ collection of the ‘facts’ not marred by ‘personal biases,’ read the BBC’s article from May, ‘Freddie Gray’s death in police custody - what we know.’ [4] Find the full interview in which Dr. Carla Hayden serves us radical librarian bo$$ with a healthy heap of eloquence on the side, published in May on American Libraries Magazine’s site, ‘Baltimore’s Library Stays Open During Unrest.’
Justice through the generations
REVIEW
A review of Louise Erdich’s fifteenth novel, ‘LaRose’
by Anna Weber
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five-year-old boy named Dusty sits on a spindling tree—a tree so perfect for climbing it nearly whispers instructions to him. Yet, at the same time, this tree sets the child directly into the path of a hunter’s gunshot. Landreaux was aiming for a sparkling deer in the mist of night, but instead shot his neighbor’s son. This scene takes place on page four of “LaRose,” Louise Erdrich’s fifteenth novel that has already received the Publishers Weekly Starred Pick of the Week and the Kirkus Starred Reviews. We begin in tragedy, we read through tragedy, and we end in a resolution that still contains tragedy. In a style similar to William Faulkner, Erdrich weaves family trees together to create convolutions between justice and revenge, the past and the present, life and death, indigenous people and the U.S. government, and one neighbor and another. After shooting Dusty, Landreaux and Emmaline Iron give their own five-year-old son to their neighbors, Peter and Nola Ravich, as a form of compensation. But LaRose is not just any son to the Iron family. Landreaux and Em-
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maline name their son LaRose because of their century-old Native American family tradition: one member of each generation is named LaRose. Since the first LaRose in 1839, that member has also always had healing powers. We oscillate between the times of previous LaRoses and even delve into other characters’ pasts. An entire section of “LaRose” is takes place in a past where Landreaux and his former best friend, Romeo, attempt to runaway from their Indian boarding school. Erdrich weaves together characters, family members, and time itself in this novel. But the novel mainly takes place in the present with five-year-old LaRose. The child functions as a physical bridge between the Iron and Ravich families, so much so that the families create a schedule in which LaRose spends the school months at the Ravich home and the summer months at the Iron home. Even more than a physical connector, LaRose brings his emotional healing powers to both families. He helps Maggie carry the weight of witnessing Nola’s attempted suicide. He keeps Landreaux’s secret: Landreaux “wasn’t right in the head the day [he] killed Dusty.” He fights the four boys who sexually assault Maggie. In the
LaRose by Louise Erdich HARPER / HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS 373 pages | $27.99
end, LaRose even saves both of his fathers: he stops Peter from killing Landreaux on the misinformation that Landreaux shot Dusty under the influence. Perhaps the most important of Erdrich’s achievements is her mastery of multivocality across time. Erdrich contextualizes the present with voices of the past. It is not simply Dusty’s climbing tree that inhabits his death, but rather a familial tree that winds one Native American ancestry back to its traumatic roots. Crosscutting from character to character and scene to scene, Erdrich relates how Landreaux’s kill shot stems from being forced to “fall asleep” and “turn off parts of himself ” during boarding school. It is as if the bullet winds its way backward into the barrel of the gun, then into Landreaux’s personal story, and finally into the larger destruction of Native American culture through the government-led boarding school assimilation policies. The bullet moves backward in time until it hits
the moment when Landreaux was first told to be less “Indian.” Readers also follow the path of LaRose’s healing power into the time when the first LaRose uses her powers to heal. The first LaRose and a fur trader’s assistant escape from the abusive trader. As the assistant falls ill, the first LaRose teaches the assistant to fly out of his own body and heals him with her drum. This story continues to inform the present day LaRose as he sees the ghosts of his ancestors, learns from their stories, and talks to them about Dusty’s story. As readers, we never just exist at the flower-tipped ends of LaRose’s present day story. Nor do we get to stay at the deep roots of Landreaux’s boarding school story. Rather, we jump back and forth like a beetle along the thick, seemingly impenetrable tree bark of “LaRose.” Another clever structural decision on Erdrich’s part is her intentional use of boundaries. Literally on the line that divides the reservation land (Landreaux’s home), and the U.S. government land (Peter’s home), the killing occurs barely on reservation land. This physical tension springboards further tensions between the marginalized culture, Native American culture, and the dominant culture, American culture. “The gathering and the regathering. Shapes of beings unknown merging deeply with the known. Worlds fusing. Dimensions collapsing. Two boys playing.” By framing the crime in terms of land, Erdrich complicates attempts to delineate stark distinctions between the government and indigenous people. The Ravich family lives on the U.S. government side. The Iron family lives on the reservation side. Yet, by creating a fluid adoption between two families, Erdrich forces the reader to exist outside the United States government’s demarcation of what and where it means to be a family. LaRose lives on both U.S. government land and reservation land. LaRose is in a mixed Ojibwe and white family now. Like LaRose, the reader exists in the taut gap between the demarcations given by the United States government and the demarcations expressed by generations of tribes. In terms of her writing mechanics, Erdrich also proves herself to be a poet of lists in “LaRose.” As the first LaRose goes to boarding school and experiences the microaggressions of assimilation, Erdrich encapsulates pain in a list. The first LaRose had to learn “the Declaration of Independence by heart,” “mathematics and memorized the shape of the countries on the globe,” “how to survive on bread and water, then coffee, gravy, and bread,” “how to sew with a machine,” and “how to imagine her own mouth sewed
shut. For speaking Anishinaabe.” Erdrich adds mundane after mundane until the final item wildly blows the list’s proportionality. This intense final addition allows the previous irenic items to be seen as violent in a structural manner. Such a moment of review further allows readers to see not just the first LaRose’s experience of assimilation, but also the experiences of other characters such as Landreaux, Romeo, or Emmaline. Through tuberculosis and boarding schools, reservation life and addiction, Erdrich strings us along a common thread throughout her pages: trauma. Of these other characters’ traumatic experiences, Romeo’s are the most successfully developed. We exist in his scrounging and addicted mindset as the reservation town screw-up. We watch him pilfer old garb from trash bins and present them to elders in order to steal drugs from the elders’ medicine cabinets. We follow his life back in time to the point where he was deemed a successful student, especially at math. Then, we watch his literal downfall as he positions himself to hit the ground first when Landreaux falls from their hideout underneath a bridge while sleeping. Romeo broke his leg during this fall and to the present still limps, feeling a sharp pain with every step. The reader feels loss, abandonment, addiction, and even physical pain when we read about Romeo. At the end of the novel, we follow the web of false information Romeo collects and spreads about the night Dusty was killed. But, because we dive so deeply into Romeo’s world, we lack the same deep understanding of other characters’ experiences with trauma. There are limits to managing multiple characters and multiple times, so Erdrich has to neglect certain characters if she is to make space for her multigenerational LaRoses. Landreaux is one of the characters that gets overlooked. Instead of feeling everything like Romeo, Landreaux goes numb after his runaway attempt. Readers learn that he was previously a bad boy, but his conversion into a fatherly figure is taken for granted. In addition to denying him feeling, Erdrich gives us little information about Landreaux and only describes him in so far as he relates to other characters. Erdrich’s answer to this issue has previously been to write second books that provide analyses of underrepresented characters’ lives. Father Travis, for example, has his story more thoroughly explained in Erdrich’s “The Round House.” However, this solution can be a cop out of sorts, an excuse to leave characters unexplained. LaRose himself is also used as a connect-
ing branch: to the larger themes of indigenous rights, restorative justice, and intergenerational trauma. His own personhood, and the impact of having his own body function as a system of justice, is not fully explored in “LaRose.” Giving a child of personal flesh as an act of repatriation examines the question of what role our bodies play in justice systems. LaRose, by himself, has to come to terms with physically being a bridge between the Ravich and Iron families. “You just pass me around, he said. I’m okay with it, but it gets old. Problem is, Nola, she’s gonna be too sad. It might be death if she gets too sad, Maggie told me.” The closest the reader gets to understanding how LaRose copes is learning that he is “okay with it.” When given the burdensome issues with which LaRose deals, the simplicity of this answer cracks under the weight. He simply navigates any tensions between being Nola’s favorite child and both Emmaline and Landreaux’s favorite. He simply saves Nola’s life by burying anything with which she could attempt suicide again— bleach, gun bullets, knives. He simply keeps both of his fathers alive by taking the bullets out of Peter’s gun. LaRose, simply in terms of Erdrich’s writing mechanics and structure in general, heals two families after an unspeakable death. The most striking critique of “LaRose” is the fact that this main character lacks personal reactions to his job as a healer. Even with these critiques, Erdrich does construct a beautiful commentary on systems of justice in general. The reality as Erdrich intonates in an NPR interview is that no justice system—whether punitive, restorative, or embodied—works perfectly. “I think that we have to muddle toward it. And that’s how life works. We think we have a great idea and we try to live it out. And muddling toward things is really the best we can do,” says Erdrich. No justice system fixes the grief that causes Nola to attempt suicide after her son is killed. No justice system fixes the historical trauma that the U.S. government inflicted and continues to inflict upon all native families. “We are chased into this life,” says one of the elders. “We are chased by things done to us in this life.” “That’s called trauma,” says another. Grief does not disappear even if Nola bakes ten cakes. Trauma does not fade like a deer in a misty night. As readers, we follow Erdrich’s trail of emotions and experiences through the generations of characters. We follow the past into the now. In “LaRose,” we never exist in isolation. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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‘This Census Taker’
REVIEW
China Miéville’s new sci-fi novel
Content Warning: The following piece discusses domestic violence by Leo Elliot “The Hope is So: Count Entire Nation. Subsume Under Sets. Take Accounts. Keep Estimates. Realize Interests. So Reach Our Government’s Ultimate Ends”
H
ow much can we know of a world if our only data are our unanswered questions, our inner mysteries, and our own obvious ignorance? China Miéville puts this question and others into play in his newest work of speculative fiction, “This Census-Taker.” In just over 200 pages, Miéville demonstrates a mastery of the ambiguity that makes unrealistic fiction so worthwhile. The reader is bounced between the alien and the familiar, and is never sure which should be which. This is the measure of truly challenging science fiction, and Miéville excels. The most striking feature of the work is the radical underdetermination of its world. Miéville’s book winds between the genre tropes of fantasy, science fiction, and dystopia, all of which are traditionally animated by a rich and expansive imagining of a different world. Yet the world of “This Census-Taker” is open, skeletal, and unspecified. No elaborate map roosts at the front of the book, sketching out the lay of the land, its politics, and its peoples. There is no quest, no cataclysm, no mythology, no great enemy, and no evil system. There are very few make-believe words, most of which are the names of forest creatures. These may be the inventions of the protagonist, a young boy. In fact, there are only two proper names in the book, an honor for the characters who get them. Magic exists in the book, most centrally in the crafts of the narrator’s father. The father makes and sells keys that solve problems rather than open locks. Yet this power is never explained. The range of abilities that the keys can take and the way that their power works are completely opaque to the protagonist and the reader. Most of the profound mysteries that drive the book lie outside of the temporal and geographic boundaries that restrain the boy, and inside the psychic knots that
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confound him. The protagonist lives on the hilly outskirts of a small rural town, the town itself at the margins of an unnamed metropole. The boy only knows the outside world through the myriad postcards, product manuals, and letters with which his mother teaches him to read. Long before the boy was born, his father fled from a war in some faraway land, but the boy never learns about this place. The boundaries that mark the known from the unknown are physical ones. At times, the boy’s inner life is as shadowy as those distant cities. From hiding spots in the forest, the boy often catches his father killing animals barehanded. The boy is traumatized by these scenes, horrified by the arbitrariness of his father’s violence and by the cold expression on his father’s face as he kills. But it is difficult for the young boy to summon these memories undistorted and in full detail. These memories and others are always shrouded in doubt, a problem that is amplified by the boy’s powerful and frightened imagination. In this way, the sense of unknowing that governs the novel is not hard-coded into the text, but is routed through realities of setting and circumstance. Themes of geography and social marginalization, family trauma and memory, bureaucracy and violence all play with the problem of uncertainty. Yet the possibility of certainty and stability waits just outside the narrative, enticing the reader as well as the protagonist. The eponymous census-taker brings the bureaucratic tools of verification, discovery, record, and fact to the hazy world Miéville has created, but the character does not arrive until the end of the novel. Early on, we discover that the eponymous census-taker will later take the protagonist on as a traveling intern, and that the novel is one of three books that the boy is trained to write under this tutelage. The familiar work of bureaucracy happens in the first of these books: First book is a book of numbers. It’s lists and calculations and, for efficiency, I write it using ciphers. There’s a legend I never check any more, knowing all the signs now, the single-stroke shorthands that mean kilogram and tonne, widow, printer, generation, thief,
This Census Taker by China Miéville DEL RAY 224 pages | $24
the signs for currency, shipyard, doctor, for uncertainty, the holding sign that means there’s an unknown factor here to which I’ll come back. This first book’s for everyone, though almost no one wants it or would know how to read it.
The third book is a journal or a diary, a book of secrets. “But you’ll never be sure that no one else will read them: that’s the risk and that’s how the third book works.” The second book, though, is the one that we hold in our hands: “it’s the book for telling.” The second book is for readers. “This Census-Taker,” then, makes the reader inhabit a limited region of uncertainty that exists within wider projects of knowing. Once the boy goes with the census-taker, it will become his life’s work to count and catalogue, to know the world and to be sure of what he sees. He will begin to see the world like a city bureaucrat, not a traumatized boy from the hills. But no detail of that journey is recorded in the novel, which tells the story of the boy and his family on the hill, before the census-taker comes. Where other sci-fi might follow a protagonist as they penetrate layer after layer of the sinister machinery of some dystopian governance, “This Census-Taker” hovers at the fringes of such modern terrors. The city and the town only know each other through intermittent visits of the official police, who adjudicate disagreements accumulated in each interim. And the town only knows its uphill residents by their occasional descents to market. We only know about the town because one of its sons has become a government employee, reversing the direction of this periphery-center relation. Perhaps the boy deploys the tools of a print culture against itself, trying to capture life lived at the margins of its regimes of historical record, juridical evidence, and archival truth. It is never clear whether this maneuver works, or if it is a maneuver at all. We do not know if we are reading a dissident census, or if the boy is simply taking orders.
The knots of memory that plague the book are respected and unresolved, though, rather than flattened out by bureaucratic exactitude. The boy’s family is haunted by his father’s violence, but it is never clear what violence is real and what is fabricated by the child’s imagination. In the opening pages of the book, the boy makes an escape attempt, and runs downhill and into the town. “A boy ran down a hill path screaming. The boy was I. He held his hands up in front of him as if he’d dipped them in paint and was coming to make a picture, to press them down to paper, but all there was on him was dirt. There was no blood on his palms.” The boy believes that he has just seen his father murder his mother. But the blood he feels on his hands is not there, and when he shouts what he has seen he mixes up his memory. ‘Your mum did something?’ a woman said to me, kneeling and taking my shoulders in her hands. ‘She did something to your dad? Tell us.’ She confused me. She was trying to make me meet her eye … but as she spoke I realized she was repeating what I’d told her. The boy, I, had said his mother killed his father.” Even as he writes the book, the boy continues to have two memories of this event—one where his mother is being killed, and one where she is the killer. The townsfolk feed and house the boy, and send a group to investigate. When they return, they bring the father’s explanation of the situation: the father and mother had been arguing, and the mother has now departed from the family, but nobody was killed. The murder was imagined, the townsfolk found no more blood in the house than there was on the boy’s hands. The father sends back a letter addressed to the boy, supposedly written by the mother. But the boy believes it is forged. To the boy, the disappearance of his mother has
Photo courtesy of Macmillan Digital Audio
a sense of magic to it, as if the father had used one of his keys to hide the evidence of his murder. But this magic is inexplicable, and never confirmed. With some reluctance, the townsfolk return the boy to his father. They are following the law of the land, according to their understanding. When the boy escapes again, though, the official police are far more brutal, beating him and leaving him in prison overnight before releasing the boy again to his father’s custody. How can the boy understand the violence he has seen? He has his memory, but it is fragile and inconsistent, arriving in fits and fevers. There are the townsfolk, but their concern for the boy does not overcome their hesitancy to act. They fear the law, and they fear the father himself, a foreigner with mysterious powers. How to distinguish between memory and fact? How to mediate between the belief that the boy is being honest, and the limits of custom, law, and will that prevent any intervention on his behalf? With Miéville, the ambiguities of memory and world are sharp and dangerous. It matters immediately what we can take stock of, what we can recognize as familiar, and what we must see as alien or unreal. The great pain of the novel: it truly hurts to see that we cannot fix these differences—between real and imagined, between familiar and alien—in place. This pain is a gift and a challenge, unsettling as well as compelling. Since the reader cannot master Miéville’s ambiguity, the reader must find a way to be comfortable in it, and to find meaning in it. For that, the book is a lot of fun. Yet there is some disappointment, as well, as one sifts through the fog that Miéville has left us. While the pages are well-used, the book is astoundingly short. The writing is at its best when some new revelation causes a theory you have been
constructing to fall apart, and you are thrown back into bewilderment. The tensions and dramas of the book are written in shadows, creepy and unconfirmed. Yet it often feels as though these dramas are abandoned too early, and as though more of Miéville’s mysteries should be given the space to grow large and terrifying. Perhaps this is precisely not the point of the work, but I also longed for at least some of these mysteries to bear fruit, for the truth of a situation to hit cold and hard at least once. For much of the book, I was left wanting more. For good or bad, this last point defines “This Census-Taker”—it is frustrating. If only it were true, I would be eager to say that the book’s indefiniteness offers the reader the chance to do the imaginative work, to “fill the rest in.” But Miéville’s restrained style does not let us color by the numbers. The real challenge of the book is that the reader cannot see far beyond what is immediately given, and even the exact facts of the story are unclear. Even as its details are tantalizingly withheld, though, this world appears radically different from our own. In fact, it is exactly this restraint, this unwillingness to conform to expectations, that produces the unfamiliarity. A different book might render a fantastical world in high resolution but be transparent about concrete circumstances of the world its author lives in. Miéville somehow brings us further away from home by doing less. Even yet, by a certain sensibility of movement, gesture, and mood, the characters themselves are ineluctably human. An antidote to the self-righteous dystopia you read in high school, Miéville does not represent some terrifying yet eerily possible future. The novel produces a deep, reflective anxiety by daring to inhabit the limitations, mysteries, and ignorances of its world. In the same way, it dares us to recognize the uncertainty of our own. u
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MOVIES & TELEVISION The Transformation of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Shantay you stay: how ‘Rupaul’s Drag Race’ lifted the art of drag out of obscurity into the public eye
ESSAY
The cast of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 2,” featuring many of the best drag queens from previous seasons of the show.
by Nikki Miller
M
y favorite show finally won an Emmy after being on the air for eight seasons. RuPaul Charles accepted the Emmy for Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program looking stunning in a hot pink suit with white polka dots. He won the emmy for his work on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” The show has offered a platform for hundreds of drag queens to elevate their careers. The competition reality TV program gives the contestants a variety of challenges where they must act, sing, sew, or impersonate famous figures before creating a look for the runway category of the week (an homage to ball scene). As the host of “Drag Race,” RuPaul acts as the ultimate drag mother offering the contestants blunt critiques and emotional guidance while simultaneously acting as the arbiter of the show. Since the early 90s, RuPaul Charles, a
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black gay man, has been a face and voice for members in the queer community, particularly drag queens. He has used his visibility and star power to give back to members of the queer community. This Emmy win signifies recognition of his ability to make a part of underground queer culture palatable to a mainstream audience. It is clear that the show has increased in popularity, and this is a good thing. More viewers mean a higher budget, bigger prizes, and better production value. What was once an obscure, slightly blurry, low budget production has transformed into a polished reality TV show with a huge following. RuPaul was wrong when he claimed in a recent interview, “drag will never be mainstream.” RuPaul believes drag challenges and mocks identity by subverting it whereas mainstream is about conformity. But what RuPaul fails to realize is that the commercial success of Drag Race has normalized the art form and brought it to America’s living room. “RuPaul’s Drag
Race” is the ultimate platform to lift queens out of the underground scene and into the public, legitimizing drag as a profession. This is an incredible task and should be commended; however, I worry the more recent seasons of “Drag Race” has shown a version of drag that has been repackaged for the masses. These developments are visible in “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 2,” which aired from August 25th to October 27th of this year. This season featured the best drag queens to have appeared on the show excluding those from “All Stars 1.” It also illustrates the evolution of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” from its first season to its current form. Most notably, format changes, editing choices, and revamped eliminations left dedicated fans feeling dissatisfied. The format of “All Stars 2” lacked footage of the queens preparing for their challenges and the runway. Previous seasons showed the queens in the workroom conceptualizing their look or writing material. Not only did this show the artistry and imPhoto courtesy of newnownext.com
mense thought that goes into drag, it also fleshed out the queens’ personalities. This season I desperately wanted to see Roxxxy Andrews sew her outfits: she is an amazing seamstress who makes all of her own looks. Instead, Roxxxy’s struggles through a comedy-heavy season—she was in the bottom five out of eight times—were not humanized with supporting footage of her process or strong suits. Conversely, I also missed Katya in the workroom creating her hilarious routines. On season seven, she was known for her brilliant and unique comedy as well as her crippling anxiety which surfaced in the high pressure workroom environment. Katya in “All Stars 2” was noticeably more confident and secure in her artistic choices, a personal development underplayed by the new format’s emphasis on polished, finished routines. We wanted to see her journey. Instead, the producers chose to forefront the journey of Alaska, the season’s eventual winner, though this result came as no surprise: Alaska’s victory was heavily foreshadowed by the season’s editing. Alaska dominated the competition with relative ease, arbitrarily winning a majority of the challenges and lip syncs. The judging panel continuously praised her humor and rarely gave a tough critique. During her confessionals she exuded an unshakable confidence. Alaska’s journey and crowning moment was dull compared to the vibrant and slightly insane Katya. Katya demonstrated
humanity and humility. She showed how one can battle anxiety and channel that energy into brilliant and unique performances. She was self-deprecating and relatable, in stark contrast to Alaska’s perfection and self assurance. Katya was given fewer confessionals and less screen time during her lip syncs, which influenced the viewer to place her second despite obscure judging criteria. Katya was not the editing’s only victim: the producers barely gave throwback queen Tatiana any attention, depriving her growing fan base of the opportunity to see her growth since her appearance six years ago. The predictable narrative made the show more easily accessible and relatable to a wider audience. Finally, the new elimination process led to tactical, survivor-esque drama within the show. Previous iterations of the show had the bottom queens “lip sync for their lives” with RuPaul determining the winner. “All Stars 2” had the top two queens of the week lip sync to determine who would eliminate a bottom queen. This change did not make for dynamic lip syncs, instead promoting alliances based on friendship that sheltered mediocre queens from elimination and knocked out fan favorites like Tatianna and Alyssa Edward—resulting in fan dissatisfaction. The fan base is not happy with the outcome of the season because the show no longer services its long term viewers. Alaska’s win over fan-favorite Katya sig-
nals a change in who drag race is made for. RuPaul places a lot of importance of marketability, a trait that has enabled him to have a long drag career, and lead him to crown Alaska. She represents RuPaul’s version of a drag superstar. She is quick witted, polished, and marketable; she has capitalized on her successes by releasing albums, merchandise, and apparel. Katya represents a more marginalized and quirky area of drag, which caters to a niche following. Endorsing Katya is a financial risk Rupaul is not ready to take. Despite losing some of its charm, the show’s newfound wider influence has caused its own set of quiet victories. Thanks to its wide viewership elements of old time camp are being brought into public consciousness (such as the works of John Waters), and sayings from underground queer culture like “yas,” “sickening” and “shade” have integrated mainstream slang. The show effectively makes a compromise between its original aesthetic and the necessary limitations of its large viewership. In this country’s current political climate, the show is all the more important in assuring queer and questioning folks that they have a community and family, and are loved enough to air on prime time TV. Self-acceptance remains the show’s core message, and as RuPaul remind us at the end of every episode: “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love someone else, can I get an amen up in here?” u
Glover returns with ‘Atlanta’
REVIEW
Existential reflections and surreal comedy characterize the new project
by Briana Cox
D
onald Glover has proven himself to be a multifaceted artist over the years. In his stand-up comedy special “Weirdo,” he began by apologizing to the audience for deviating from the quirky nerd-comedy they’d come to associate him with after his stint as a “30 Rock” writer and his portrayal of pop culture geek Troy Barnes in “Community.” For those of us who follow his rap career as Childish Gambino, the use of more vulgar language was no surprise, but his stand-up’s relative light-heartedness could also come as a shock to anyone accustomed to the reflective and serious nature of his later musical career. Glover often comes across as a man
torn between over-the-top comedy and more subdued and serious storytelling. His new television series “Atlanta,” aired on FX, is the closest he’s come to a reconciliation of these two seemingly disparate parts of his artistic sensibilities. The show takes place in Atlanta and follows Earnest Marks—played by Glover—a technically homeless twenty-something trying to scrape together enough cash to support himself, his sometimes-girlfriend, and their young daughter, by managing the growing rap career of his cousin Alfred, aka Paper Boi. Alfred’s roommate and oneman entourage Darius rounds out the cast of main characters. Though it’s tempting to call “Atlanta” a dramedy and simply leave it at that, its first season has become increas-
ingly more difficult to classify. Glover’s initial pitch of “Atlanta” as “‘Twin Peaks,’ but with rappers” seemed utterly out-of-place during the first handful of episodes. But as Glover’s gotten more and more comfortable with the characters and world of “Atlanta,” he’s also gotten more and more comfortable with incorporating the genre-defying, surrealistic elements that set the show apart from standard television fare. “Atlanta” does more than show a colorful cast of characters making their way in the world. “Atlanta” strives for a kind of authenticity not often seen in the current television lineup, and this is both a benefit and a curse. The colors are muted. The dialogue is quiet. The relationships depicted seem genuine in their imperfections, and there are no unreSWARTHMORE REVIEW
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alistically happy or unrealistically villainous characters. The conflicts depicted, both internal and external, are sometimes heartbreakingly realistic: questions about what it means to be famous or what it means to be poor or what it means to be black, depictions of people barely scraping by, trying to stay afloat for the sake of their loved ones more than for themselves, and the different ways they deal with their stations in life. However, the authenticity goes beyond content and into the creation of the show itself. “Atlanta” is an artistic project throughand-through, a project that Donald Glover wanted to make and was seemingly given free reign over—weird dialogue, cringe comedy, and honest reflections on heavy subjects such as class, race, and individual identity included. Hiro Murai, frequent collaborator on Childish Gambino’s music videos and the director of most of the season one episodes, also contributes to the overall sense of artistry that Atlanta evokes with his very atypical-for-television camera angles and wide shots that give the city of Atlanta itself a distinct presence and feel. For anyone looking for a little more direction in their TV shows about up-andcoming musicians, Glover’s existential reflections about the nature of life may be a turn-off. The basic plot synopsis hardly encompasses what the show is actually about. Atlanta isn’t as much a show with a plot as
much as it is a show with a set of themes. This is not a rags-to-riches story. Fame and the pursuit of it are talked about and analyzed as concepts but are hardly used as more than a backdrop against which the writing can pursue larger thematic questions. Paper Boi’s music, the supposed driving force of the plot, is heard only a handful of times outside of the first episode, to the point where it seems like the show is actively trying to ensure that the audience never hears it. Alfred’s performances are only shown in short clips, if they’re shown at all, and that’s in episodes where his career as a rapper is mentioned at all. The “trying to make it in the rap world” plot, though it acts as a backbone for the plot synopsis to rest on, very deliberately goes almost nowhere, and any progress made is quickly drowned out by multiple episodes of stagnation on that front. The lack of a quickly progressing plot in “Atlanta,” potentially a negative, is mitigated by the sheer strangeness of the world Glover slowly crafts from episode to episode. These characters inhabit a world that is just ever so slightly off-kilter. The universe created by Glover is rooted in cold, hard reality—with all the hardships and existential questions that that implies—while simultaneously being just different enough to leave the audience wondering what is real and what is merely fantasy, what is pos-
sible and what is impossible. It is that question that keeps the series intriguing even in its quieter moments. Adding to the consistently off-kilter nature of the world of “Atlanta” is the variation within the surreal elements. It has possible-but-odd occurrences: an awkward bus conversation with a stranger, or a child going to school in white-face for no explained reason. It has elements that aren’t accurate to the reality we know yet not wholly strange in of themselves: Justin Bieber being black, or the show’s BET stand-in having PBS-style talk shows with increasingly more offbeat commercial breaks. And then it features things that are wholly fantastic—an invisible car, for instance. It all comes together to create the sense that the audience doesn’t truly understand the world the characters are inhabiting, despite its initial familiarity. Perhaps the subtle surrealism is what makes the harshly realistic elements of poverty and the exploitative nature of fame and wealth all the more sobering. Even in a fictional world where bends in reality are possible, the bleaker parts of life are still dispiritingly the same. It would be a disservice to “Atlanta,” however, to imply that it is entirely depressing. The surreal elements juxtaposed against the bleaker parts of reality are often a source for comedy in conjunction with huge amounts of painfully awkward char-
An evocative poster for ‘Atlanta’ portrays key characters of the show with peaches in their mouths.
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Photo courtesy of etonline.com
acter interactions. Glover has already proven very talented at juxtaposition in his rap career—sandwiching philosophical lines, almost embarrassing in their honesty, in between much more common, often profanity-laden language. This kind of tonal whiplash is quickly becoming a defining point of Glover’s writing, best exemplified in “Atlanta” within fan-favorite stoner Darius, who’s prone to making oddly profound statements at unexpected times. There is a risk of this dialogue style becoming playedout or gimmicky, and it is easy to criticize unrealistically contemplative or poetic di-
alogue; but Glover reigns it in by directly pointing out the strangeness. Paper Boi only gets a few seconds into a soliloquy on the nature of fame and the exploitation inherent in rap music before the token millennial YouTuber makes a comment about how deep it is, grounding the conversation back in reality and adding to the hilarity of the situation. “Atlanta” is funny despite and because of the surreal strangeness of the script. And it is an intelligent commentary on poverty and exploitation despite and because of this strangeness as well. It is slow moving
and full of somewhat-alienating existential musing, and it wears those features on its sleeve as a source of laughs. Its genuineness makes it almost impossible to accuse it of trying too hard to be weird or trying too hard to make a point about difficult topics. It’s just Donald Glover being Donald Glover, trying to find a way to blend the crass and the philosophical and the humorous into something honest and cohesive. Whether or not he has succeeded in doing so is up to the audience, but he has literally created a world of possibility in Atlanta that I always look forward to delving into. u
‘Easy’ and ‘High Maintenance’
REVIEW
Concise reflections on disjointed modern cityscapes
by Sophie Song
R
eleased on Netflix September 22nd, 2016, the series “Easy” portrays the lives of a diverse group of people facing the different challenges of urban life. Each episode, lasting about half an hour, tells an independent story of hardship followed by a seemingly happy resolution. The episodes of “Easy”, though not related to each other in plot, present a common theme and sometimes reuse the same characters. They tackle complicated human relationships by depicting the rise of a conflict and how it is settled. Examples of these conflicts include tension between couples, the need to escape from a boring office job, and drama between colleagues: they are emphatically normal problems. There are times when these problems resolve. For instance, a pregnant woman decides to support her husband in his illegal brewery business and a frustrated couple succeed in having enjoyable sex. Though life seems to resume after a dramatic conflict, the issues sometimes remain. In an episode called “Controlada” (episode four), a husband becomes jealous when his wife’s ex-boyfriend stays over in their house and constantly mocks him. When the ex-boyfriend suddenly vanishes one morning, the couple’s life seems to return to normal. However, the husband remains unaware that his wife had sex with her ex the previous night under less-than consensual (in fact, scarily coercive) circumstances. More underlying issues also remain unexamined in the relationship:
throughout the episode, the woman begins to notice the dullness of their lives at the prompting of her ex. “Easy,” here and elsewhere, sheds light on different types of conflict, their resolutions, and the often incomplete or complicated nature of those resolutions. Similarly, the HBO series “High Maintenance” consists of episodes that are not continuous in plot but are loosely connected. A drug dealer, who is referred to as “the guy,” delivers drugs to different households and interacts with his customers in each episode. One thirty-minute episode usually consists of two or three delivery stories. They all follow a similar pattern: background information on the drug-purchasing protagonists kicks the episode off, the guy delivers to his clients, conversations occur during transactions, and shenanigans occur after the purchase. Then the episode switches to a second storyline following characters who are connected with the first buyers in some way. For instance, in episode two, “Vegan Cinderella,” the first and second buyers are next door neighbors. In other episodes, the buyers are connected through similar personalities. “The guy” becomes the person who connects each scene and storyline, allowing very different people to be understood together. A macho, heterosexual man appears in the same episode with a gay man who is controlled by his female roommate. Though their characteristics differ greatly, they both pretend to be someone else around certain people. The macho man puts on a British accent for “the guy” and Max, the gay cus-
tomer, although a hyper-obedient figure, secretly abhors his roommate. Interestingly, “the guy” is no ordinary drug dealer: he has a keen understanding of human nature that allows him to assess and react to any situation. He does not care only about money. For instance, “the guy” offers a homeless man a place to shower after recognizing that the man has lied about showering in a cheap gym nearby. He tells a college girl who wants to buy his drugs immediately that he follows a code while conducting business. After one of his female buyers invites him to a birthday party, he detects her husband’s resentment towards him coming and does not show up. He wins his customers’ trust and maintains it because of the person he is. The two shows resemble each other thematically by focusing on human interactions. “High Maintenance” allows one protagonist to walk into the lives of different people. The straight-forward chronological development and a clear cause-and-effect relationship make the episodes easy to follow. The audience, following the journeys of “the guy,” observes a wide range of people with different lifestyles who come from different socioeconomic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. The audience can find bits and pieces of themselves in the characters that “the guy” runs into. Similarly, “Easy” zooms in on human interactions through conflict. Each episode shows how a conflict between the main protagonists arises and settles. These conflicts, such as fights between couples, needing to break free from familial traditions, and the jealousy stirred SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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Left: Each episode of ‘Easy’ focuses on a different set of characters. Right: ‘High Maintenance’ centers around a weed dealer’s interactions with various clients.
up by one’s other half can resonate with the audience easily. Through the portrayal of relationships, both series appeal to an audience who can find itself in the shoes of these characters. From another perspective, these series are also reactions to “binge watching.” They liberate an audience which is in need of leisure activities but cannot afford the time or energy to follow up on an entire show of twenty-something episodes. Because the episodes are loosely connected,
stand-alone pieces, they liberate people from committing to hundreds of hours of watching. One does not necessarily have to start from the first episode to understand the whole series. In a world where time is a luxury, these short and succinct episodes prove efficient. “High Maintenance” consists of six thirty-minute episodes and one season of “Easy” has eight thirty-minute episodes. One can easily watch one episode of “High Maintenance” or “Easy” during a lunch break or to tem-
‘Moonlight’ embraces silence Barry Jenkins’s second film transcends the coming of age genre
by Gabriel Myer-Lee
“M
oonlight” is only screening in a small number of theaters, including just a single theater in Philadelphia, the Ritz East. It would be far from a convenient trip for any Swarthmore student but, without exception, a trip worth making. The film, the second from director Barry Jenkins, is an adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play, “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.” McCraney’s play is important to understanding “Moonlight” because the play is semi-autobiographical. McCraney, like his protagonist Chiron, is a gay black man who grew up in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood in the 80’s. Jenkins was ac-
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tually also growing up in Liberty City at the time, and both men share another aspect of their life with Chiron: their mothers were caught up in the crack epidemic that was sweeping the city at the time. As such, the story McCraney and Jenkins have crafted is a deeply personal one, a quality that is emphatically conveyed throughout the film. There are some vestiges of the structure of the play still visible in the film. The film is divided into three acts, following the protagonist Chiron as a child, a teenager, and a young man. Additionally, the film has a relatively small core cast, primarily focusing on five characters. Despite the origins of “Moonlight,” the film has clearly grown past the play it was based on. The cinematography and soundtrack provide an inte-
porarily take one’s mind off of something. Overall, “Easy” and “High Maintenance” represent a rising trend that caters to modern viewers through independent and concise episodes. Not only are the topics of the show audience-friendly due to their realism; they also force the audience to examine the complexity of human interactions and push the viewers out from their comfort zones in a stress-free format, without the commitment to long hours of viewing. u
ESSAY
gral backbone to the drama of the film. “Moonlight” is inseparable from several facets of Chiron and McCraney’s intersecting identities. The film’s blackness is undeniable; every character in the film is black. Similarly, while not the sole focus of the film, Chiron’s queerness is woven throughout the story so that it is never far out of the audience’s minds. Chiron’s Miami upbringing is another aspect of his identity so saturated in “Moonlight” that the film would be unrecognizable without Chiron’s relationship with water and the beautifully evocative South Florida imagery which accompanies it. As “Moonlight” follows Chiron from childhood through young adulthood, Chiron’s progression is featured heavily within the loose story line of the Photos courtesy of imdb.com (left) and hbo.com (right)
film. To characterize the film based on the progression, however — to label it a “coming-of-age film” — is to both mislead the audience and to limit the depth of meaning contained in the film. Framing the discussion of “Moonlight” around the concept of the coming-of-age film is misleading primarily in the sense that it implies that the film is really about growing up or that it attempts commentary on the universal human experience of becoming an adult. Jenkins and McCraney very clearly make no such general statements. Discussion within this frame is limiting in the sense that it sets up an interpretation of the film as being “about Chiron growing up,” which strips the film of not only the richness of the other characters, but neglects how much of the film is dedicated to examining, not who Chiron is becoming, but who he is, or where he’s from. The case against discussing “Moonlight” as a coming-of-age story can be extended to the framing of the film in terms of any one of Chiron’s identities. “Moonlight” doesn’t only avoid making broad, universal statements about growing up. In fact, the film makes no overt general statements about race or queerness or Miami either. To characterize the film in terms of any one of the facets of the protagonist’s identity or the general trend of the plot is misleading because it attempts to forcibly draw some kind of contrived social message out of a deeply personal narrative. These characterizations draw the viewer’s attention to some particular aspect of the film, distracting from its true beauty, leaving the viewer unable to see the whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Drugs and water, gay
love and blackness, all of the aspects of “Moonlight” have a delicate interplay enacted by captivating camerawork and adept acting across the board. To view the film through the lens of one particular aspect is to deny the film the complexity characters for whom those aspects are merely a cross section. “Moonlight” really has the barest skeleton of a plot. The film also has very sparse dialogue, with one of Chiron’s most visible personality traits being his extreme quietness. The soundtrack is not overwhelming and the most memorable shots — beautiful as they may have been — were simply composed, featuring a limited range of colors and only one or two characters. What drove “Moonlight” was its characters. Although the core cast was small, each member of that cast was full of life but also full of contradictions. These contradictions are not forced, however, but incredibly human. The arc of the story is really the arc of each character’s personal growth and the growth of their relationships. The actors of “Moonlight” certainly deserve credit for their work. Mahershala Ali, who plays Juan, a dealer in Chiron’s neighborhood, and Naomie Harris, who plays Paula, Chiron’s mother, both had phenomenal performances which brought a powerful level of emotional depth to the adults in Chiron’s life. Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes, the three actors who played Chiron, each invoked a distinct era of Chiron, but each was instantly recognizable as the same individual. All of them succeeded in conveying a complexity of personality with extraordinarily few words. The film also would not have been the film
it is without the performances of all three actors who played Kevin, Chiron’s friend, as well as Janelle Monáe’s portrayal of Teresa, who was married to Juan. Considering that the characters named above constitute all five of the primary characters, it can certainly be said that “Moonlight” is a film built upon a foundation of good acting. The powerful characters of “Moonlight” allow the audience to step into their lives, to glimpse into Chiron’s world and, occasionally, his mind. This kind of powerful empathy the film provokes is probably what led Jenkins, who is straight, to adapt McCraney’s script into this film. It is also probably what has led “Moonlight” to a series of highly favorable reviews and success on the festival circuit. Make no mistake, this film earned its praise and publicity, and if it ends up with several major film awards, they will be well deserved. As “Moonlight” continues to gain in presence, however, it is important for the audiences it reaches to maintain awareness of its deeply personal and semi-autobiographical nature. While the film is far from universal, For those who do see themselves represented in “Moonlight,” the characters it offers are refreshing in that they are not trapped within the confines of Hollywood’s traditional portrayals of gay or black characters. For those who don’t see themselves represented in the film, “Moonlight” is still powerful, moving and, quite simply, incredibly good cinema. It is important, however, to remember that the pain you see played out on screen was most likely someone’s real pain, or many people’s real pain, and what was 110 minutes of moving film for you may have been someone else’s childhood trauma. u
Barry Jenkins’s ‘Moonlight” has drawn critical acclaim despite its limited release for its deeply personal character driven cinematography.
Photo courtesy of bet.com
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MUSIC The process On the making of a mixtape
article and art by Tiyé Pulley
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n September 21st, 2016, I released “The Way Out EP,” my first full official mixtape, exclusively on Soundcloud. I’ve been rapping for several years, but only started performing a year and half ago and recording music a year ago. Other than solo work, I also perform in two bands, GoodGoodNotBad and Origin Story. For a long time, writing, rapping, and even freestyling have come easily to me… but actually creating music? That takes work. Writing a chorus? Constructing a rhyme scheme? Perfecting a flow? And that’s not even on the production end of things. It bothers me when people assume that making rap music is easy. They assume you just find a producer with some beats, hop on the microphone and spit a few bars, autotune a hook, mumble a chorus and boom! Next viral trap sensation. Really, a lot of hard work goes into making rap music, however bad the lyr-
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ESSAY
ics may be or how hasty the production might sound. I started working on my debut mixtape amidst the finals week of Spring ‘16, my second semester as a freshman, several days before my last paper was due. Struggling with the weight of procrastination and a fortuitously timed bout of anxiety and depression, I sat in Hobbs Coffee and probably producing a sentence per hour as I chugged cold brew like water. While pretending to write, I skimmed Soundcloud for free beats (living the struggling rapper stereotype). I’d recently been checking out some instrumentals by bergs~, a producer from the Philly indie scene who my cousin had introduced me to. bergs~ invited me to download his latest beat tape and to rap over as many of the tracks as I liked. I’ve been an instrumental hip-hop head since I first heard Japanese producer Nujabes’ beats in the anime “Samurai Champloo.” I can play him or Dilla or Madlib on rotation for hours, just listen-
ing to meddling loops and bopping to the rhythm. But to rap over a beat, I need music that speaks to me, that tells its own story even without the words. bergs~’s instrumentals immediately struck a chord with me. They come from a dark intersection of weirdo trap and lo-fi boom bap, contrasting crunchy drums with lush synths and heavily distorted samples. As an equally devoted fan to the bubblegum trap stylings of Burberry Perry and the stuttering soul-hop of Knxwledge, I found that bergs~ bridged the gap between these aesthetically opposite ends of the rap spectrum. So I began to write—first as a means to justify my all-too-real procrastination, then as necessity. Words flung out of my head, dense rhyme schemes unfolding onto a notebook, scrawling madly as a loose conceptual vision started to gain more and more ground. The snail’s pace of the paper had turned into a speed race to put lyrics on the page, looping the instrumentals on repeat as I threw myself into the music. The last track of the mixtape, in fact, was the first to be written down. I heard the dark piano at the beginning of the instrumental, the notes seeming to spiral out of control before the beat
On Friday November 11, as Tiyé performed at Swarthmore College’s music venue Olde Club, he requested that women, queer, trans and non-binary people, and people of color move to the front of the audience, and all others move back. He is now under investigation for violating student conduct policy. drops into a grainy, heavy bassline—and the first words tumbled out: “Negativity rhymes with creativity/it’s the synergy of the simile that creates an unhappy me.” I’d already voiced some of the frustrations that came with making this project. The majority of the mixtape was written during that grueling finals week when my mental state was at its worst. But I wrote some of the best bars I’ve ever written. My creative process was fueled by negative energy. It was only after enduring intense emotional trauma, or depression, or anxiety, that I could produce content that I actually found meaningful. I used the music to lift myself out of the abyss, but I couldn’t get to the music without having walked through the abyss first. There were a few tracks that weren’t written in this state—it’s noticeable on early cuts like “I Feel Like Goku” and “Fusion Dance” that I was channeling a positive energy, inspired by an incredible boost of self-confidence and a fulfilling,
meaningful romantic relationship. The first half of the tape acts as a kind of foil to the second half, an affirmation of my happiness tempered by an exploration of the worst depths of my depression. “This is the life that I was supposed to live” is followed by “there’s gotta be a way out” only a few tracks later. Even though I wrote most of the lyrics in late May, recording didn’t begin until early August. BooG, a rapper and producer affiliated with the New York rap collective Street Trash Panther (STP), is a friend of mine from high school. I’d recorded several tracks in his bedroom studio before, but never a full project. We’d done several local shows over the summer together, and agreed that a link up was necessary. All seven tracks were recorded in a single four-hour session; several were one-takes. BooG recorded his feature verse on “Falling” several weeks later. The studio session, despite being relatively short, was not easy by any means. I’d spent the last several months practicing, editing, and even performing songs to get a feel of how I wanted to deliver the lyrics on the actual recordings. Where did I want the adlibs? What inflection was I going to use on the interlude? How was my flow going to switch up? While some of this comes intuitively, rappers think about and work on all of these things. Breath control was also a huge factor on this mixtape more so than many of my other releases, mostly because I use rapid fire flows on the latter half of the tape. “Way Out” was especially a challenge—“Hit em with the soldering gun/
‘The Way Out’ album cover
staple together I’m ordering fun/ hateful whatever forget about grudge.” I took an already fast tempo and squeezed in multisyllabic rhymes in a way that doesn’t really leave room for breath. However, this was intentional. As I’m trying to find “the Way Out,” as I’m trying to find myself in my art, I don’t have time to breathe or relax or fall back into a comfortable chorus; I’m just vomiting words until I reach a bit of lyrical gold. The mixtape is pretty devoid of catchy hooks, and this isn’t without purpose. I was fueled by a need to produce content, to just spit bar after bar and get it all out. “The Way Out” is a therapy session. I didn’t concern myself with what the listener wanted to hear or what I thought would be palatable. I let loose my unfiltered creative vision. BooG finished production in about a month, by which time I was already back at Swarthmore for the fall semester. The album artwork came from a series of digital drawings I did that were inspired by the mixtape. After discussing with several friends, I decided to also have a release party for the project, a first listen after I dropped it online. The release was a success: a crowd of about 40 people gathered in the big room of WSRN to listen to and vibe with my art. And that’s honestly all I wanted from this project. It’s been steadily gaining steam on Soundcloud, and I’m using the success of this project to launch another tape, which should be dropping in a couple months. But to have people, many of whom I don’t even personally know, come and experience my work? That’s what keeps me wanting to produce. That’s what breaks the self-destructive cycle of a negative production process. That’s my Way Out. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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‘22, A Million’
Bon Iver’s new album showcases a departure from his earlier work
by Ben Charo
A
t a press conference held in his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Justin Vernon told reporters his favorite song on “22, A Million” was “10, dEAThbReasT.” Most people I’ve talked to about the album like this song the least. It begins with a muffled, indistinct percussion loop that seems to be spinning out of control. Electronic samples dart in and out of the sonic texture unpredictably and without any ultimate resolution. It’s an unstable piece of work and a far cry from any of the music on “Bon Iver,” Vernon’s sophomore effort. Many will miss the gentler and more organic sound of this record, an album which evoked the naturally beautiful and personally significant settings Vernon hoped to musically capture. Listeners who give even a cursory glance to the album art and tracklist of “22, A Million” will easily be able to tell something has changed in Vernon’s approach. The painted natural scene and place-based song titles of “Bon Iver” have been replaced by a dense, inscrutable set of seemingly arbitrary numbers and symbols. In the intermittent five years since “Bon Iver,” Justin Vernon’s been busy. He’s worked with multiple indie bands, Kanye West, and toured with Bon Iver extensively. His explosive fame and subsequently overbooked schedule apparently had destructive effects. According to Trever Hagen, a musicologist and close friend of his, the “spectacular upheaval of life after these albums provoked an inner storm, a mental sickness of anxiety for Justin…” It is this anxiety which fuels the album, its more jarring electronic sound signature not only an expression of angst and frustration but also a reactionary departure from the folk sound Vernon is known for. As he puts it, “being sad is okay, [but] wallowing in it and circling the same cycles feels boring… making things bombastic and also new and explosive [was the goal]… shouting more was more of the zone.” This change is most immediately evident in listening to Vernon’s voice, which dynamically oscillates between its most synthetically distorted and its most exposed. Though Justin Vernon’s impressionistic approach to songwriting (and his ethereal-
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ly indistinct voice) has always made a lyrical understanding of Bon Iver’s work difficult, “22, A Million” is a particularly tough nut to crack. Neither song titles nor album artwork nor Bon Iver’s typically anti-narrative style of songwriting offer immediate help. It’s often difficult to tell whether the band’s lyrical choices constitute evocative word salad or carefully chosen commentaries. The same could easily be said of the symbols and numbers which define the album’s visual portions. Are the four underscores before and five underscores after the “45” in song “___45____” significant? What about the number “22” or the presence of seemingly anti-Christian iconography? When asked at his press concert, Vernon’s response on symbols was, “This sounds like a lie, it probably is, but it’s not supposed to mean anything.” This dualistic answer encompasses much of the guiding creative spirit of “22, a Million.” Take the number “22.” Though an apparently arbitrary choice, twenty-two holds particular significance for Justin Vernon, representing (for him) the parallel processes of inward-directed self-analysis and self-contextualization within the world at large (as explained by Trever Hagen). Twenty-two symbolizes a relationship with the internal and the external. This number is paired with a million in the album title, a value which represents all of the people and forces contained by the external world. Obviously the meaning of these numbers is defined by their personal significance to Vernon. Similar case-studies abound: the image of telephone pole-like upside down crosses on the album cover was born out of a mushroom trip but also reflects a theme of religious soul-searching highlighted by such tracks as “666upsidedowncross” and “33-‘GOD’;” the number “715” is Vernon’s hometown area code; more playfully, the circle in “8(circle)” is simply a commentary on the two circles which constitute the number eight. Bon Iver uses the quintessentially subjective nature of symbolism to explicate his search for meaning in a post-fame existential crisis. Having been cast into a seemingly nebulous world of music without reason, Vernon seeks to rediscover purpose while his life is seemingly guided by success and without the familiar land-
REVIEW
Bon Iver uses the quintessentially subjective nature of symbolism to explicate his search for meaning in a postfame existential crisis. marks of home. “These will just be places to me now,” he remarks on “33-‘GOD’,” a commentary on his internal priority shift. Predictably, this focal issue is most directly addressed in the bookending tracks of the album. “22 (oversoon)” is a rumination on internal strife (“where you gonna look for confirmation?/ And if it’s ever gonna happen?”); the underlying electronic hook echoing “2,2,2…” as the listener wonders whether “it might be over soon” implies fear or relief (hint: both). In contrast, “0000 million” is a reconciliatory acceptance of the inherent ambiguity finding meaning entails and the elements of life seemingly outside Vernon’s control. While he reflectively muses that it “Must’ve been forces/that took me on them wild courses,” Vernon finds resolution in “them closest” who “give meaning” to his life. Friends and family, not spirituality nor place, represent the linchpin that now grounds Justin Vernon. Those looking for older versions of Bon Iver will have a hard time finding them here, but “22, A Million” is worth a listen. Songs like “10 deathbreast” won’t lull you to sleep at night but constitute interesting listens that reward those more willing to dig deeper into Bon Iver’s lyrical and structural choices. Vernon’s decision to make music through combining diverse, sometimes dissonant sampled moments can at times feel cacophonous and lacking in directional motion, but it also creates moments of more ephemeral beauty. Plus tracks like “8(circle)” should satiate the desire for Vernon’s gorgeous, more unadulterated voice. This is an engaging work of art that rewards with continued listening. u
‘Joanne’
REVIEW
Lady Gaga returns to her roots in a sincere new album
by Brandon Torres
A
lmost three years after her last studio album “ARTPOP”, Lady Gaga returns to the pop music scene with the release of her fifth studio album “Joanne”. Like her releases before, Lady Gaga’s “Joanne” offers a new sound and feel that distinguishes it from her past work--“It’s folk, it’s dance, it’s pop, it’s funk. Some of my vocal jazz influence also flies in there too, there’s some rock n’ roll influence,” she says in her Good Morning America interview. Like Gaga’s new iconic pink cowgirl hat, “Joanne” holds a certain country undertone that presents itself but does not dominate the music. More than any of her previous albums, “Joanne” makes full use of Gaga’s forceful vocals which, after her performances at the Super Bowl and the Grammy’s, no one can deny. Whether it’s her powerful yells in “Perfect Illusion” or her warm, inviting singing in “Come To Mama,” Gaga reminds us to continue loving who we are and the peo-
ple we surround ourselves with. Though Gaga has worked with collective- and self- love as themes in “Born This Way” and “ARTPOP”, “Joanne” differs slightly in that it is a personal piece rather than a conceptual one. The name of the album and title track “Joanne” is a memorial to the her father’s sister who died at age 19 to lupus, an autoimmune disease. It was a death that stayed with the Germonatta family for years; Lady Gaga’s given name Stefani Joanne Germanotta pays tribute to it. Yet, while the title track “Joanne” holds a tinge of sadness as Gaga sings “Girl, where do you think you’re going?”, the expression is much more about her love for Joanne, most clearly expressed in her words “And I can love even if I can’t see you anymore.” “Joanne”, the track, takes the solemn subject of lost loved ones and finds love even here. While the title track “Joanne” is a very personal piece specific to Lady Gaga’s own family history, the rest of the album emphasizes a strong sense of collective love.
Album art for the new release reflects the country inspired and stripped down quality of the music.
Photo courtesy of slantmagazine.com
In a BBC Breakfast interview, she states, “I think I always have had a, I hope, a thoughtful view of what I needed to put into the world. I just don’t know that I was expressing it the way that I want to now. What I care about the most now is… how can I use this opportunity to heal people.” “Joanne” achieves this healing in two of the best songs on the album, namely “Come To Mama” and “Hey Girl.” Gaga starts “Hey Mama” by singing, “Everybody’s got to love each other” with a steady beat that evolves into a whole symphony of different instruments. She calls out our own vulnerability as humans and asks that we “Come to Mama” when we’re hurt, letting us know that she’ll “be there for you.” “Hey Girl” brings the funk to “Joanne”, featuring Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine singing, “Hey girl, hey girl, we can make it easy if we lift each other!” This emphasis on love and friendship between these two female artists makes “Hey Girl” one of the best tracks on the album. Just as prevalent as this shared collective love in “Joanne” is Gaga’s continued legacy of self-love. She begins the album with “Diamond Heart,” yelling “I’m not flawless but I got a diamond heart!” and later in “Sinner’s Prayer,” she tells us, “Hear my sinner’s prayer, I am what I am.” Unapologetically, Gaga reminds us that this is who she is, both as a person and as an artist, and in doing so, encourages us to do the same. As she said in her Good Morning America interview, this is her brand of pop. That is, in both the lyrics and the production of “Joanne,” there is a driving force focused on individuality and a love and appreciation of oneself. Powered by the raw talent of Gaga’s vocals, the collective and self love that is evoked in “Joanne” makes it an empowering and exceptional experience to listen to from start to finish. With its country, rock n’ roll, and funk influences, “Joanne” is still essentially a pop album with a distinguished sound to it that differentiates it from what the current pop music scene offers. Album after album, Gaga has demonstrated an ability to continue to grow as an artist and experiment with new styles. She will continue to dominate the music world. I, as well as everyone else, am and should be ready for this new era of “Joanne.” u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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