The Claw Magazine Volume 2.1: Fall 2009

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fall 2009 vol 2 no 1

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Editors-in-Chief Alice Haelyun Nam ’11 Max Allan McClure ’11

Associate Editors Irys Placida Kornbluth ’11 Alex Michael Mayyasi ’11

Senior Editor Charlie Aaron Mintz ’10

Art & Design Editor Claire Warwick Lorentzen ’10

Associate Design Editors Sophia Catherine Carter-Kahn ’13 Justin Eli Calles ’13

Sara Sisun ’09

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contents 4

Editoral Statement

EVENTS

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Best of the Bubble

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Review: Roach Coaches Joshua Brent Freedman

Review: Little Bird of Heaven Sophia Catherine Carter-Kahn

Talk of the Quad

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Doing Right By Wrong Daniel MaxVirtheim

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In Defense of Decadence Nicole Eta Demby

Lauren Elizabeth Bell ’11

10 Cold & Timid Souls

Zachary Russell Warma

Primary Sources

28 Interview with

William T. Vollman Max Allan McClure

32 Letter from Roberto Bolaño Jorge Ruffinelli

Play to San Francisco Jane Elizabeth Reynolds

17 Thanksgiving

Austin Michael Zumbro

35 Papa, New York, 1953

Lindsay Erin Sellers

Essays

37 Human Rights’ Twin Truths

Abbas Milani

38 Voodoo Math

12 Memories of My Melancholy Writers: Profile of Jorge Ruffinelli Alice Haelyun Nam

Fiction & POETRY

35 The Clinch Mountain Boys

features

18 From Persia to Iran: Photographs from the Revolution 22 TJDJ or the Fall of Nortec Irys Placida Kornbluth Max Allan McClure 26 Charity Fashion Show

Max James Rounds

tribute 41 100 Years of Wallace Stegner 42 About the Claw 3

It may be cynical to come right out and say it, but even if this magazine contains heretofore unseen writing by internationally prominent figures, creative works from unusually talented members of the Stanford community, etc., no amount of chestpounding on our part is going to make you turn to another page (page thirty-three, for instance, where we have put a large picture of a skeletal trout). Marketing alone is not enough. No, the thing these days is segmented marketing.

For this reason, we have decided to target the most sentimental member of the Stanford readership: the Fuzzie. The Fuzzie is a strange creature, susceptible to the charms of print journalism, and with this in mind, we, the new editors-in-chief of The Claw, have conducted an extensive study of the subspecies. It is our hope that this research will lay the foundation for future scholarship on this fascinating archetype.

We present you with our respective lists: Stuff Fuzzies Like.

Alice:

1. The COHO 2. The Bookstore Café 3. Coupa Café 4. Kopa Café 5. Mourning the loss of Moonbeams 6. Wine 7. Cheese 8. Kairos Wine and Cheese 9. Co-ops 10. French House 11. French House Café Night 12. British spellings 13. The Oxford comma 14. Studying abroad at Oxford 15. The idea of Latin America 16. The idea of Africa 17. Europe 18. Asians 19. Castro 20. Fidel Castro 21. Pretending to hate capitalism 22. The Castro 23. Gay people 24. Annie Leibovitz 25. Andy Warhol

Max: 26. Skinny jeans 27. Snail mail 28. Moleskine notebooks 29. Fingerless gloves 30. Cardigans, blazers, and other forms of outerwear that are not sweatshirts 31. Spectacles 32. Leather messenger bags 33. Fixies 34. Not IHUM 35. Not math 36. Wearing a keffiyeh from Urban Outfitters 37. Smoking hookah 38. Smoking other things 39. Ratatat 40. Ratatat remixes 41. Cummings Art Building 42. Cantor Arts Center 43. The idea of Y2E2 44. Macs 45. The New York Times 46. Insisting the humanities are useful 47. Complaining 48. Irony

And with additional input from our senior and art & design editors:

Claire:

Charlie:

1. The idea of this list

1. Two-part questions

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1. Citrus 2. Wicker?

SOC 118: Social Movements and Collective Action

Douglas John McAdam Why social movements arise, who participates in them, the obstacles they face, the tactics they choose, and how to gauge movement success or failure. Theory and empirical research.

Application of concepts and methods to social movements such as civil rights, environmental justice, antiglobalization, and anti-war.

GER:DBSocSci; Units: 5

MUSIC SO Percussion

Roman Amphitheater, Jerash, Jordan

Alice Haelyun Nam ’11, Genevieve Heckel, UVA ’11

Best of the Bubble events.stanford.edu

CLASSES Complit 142: Literature Of The Americas

Roland Greene & Ramón Saldivar The intellectual and aesthetic problems of interAmerican literature conceived as an entirety.

Emphasis is on continuities and crises relevant to North, Central, and South American literatures.

Issues such as the encounters between world views, the emergence of creole and racially mixed populations, slavery, the New World voice, myths of America as paradise or utopia, the coming of modernism, 20th-century avant gardes, and distinctive modern episodes such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, magical realism, and Noigandres in comparative perspective.

GER:DBHum, GER:ECAmerCul; Units: 5 Drama 103: Beginning Improvising

Daniel Klein The improvisational theater techniques that teach spontaneity, cooperation, team building, and rapid problem solving, emphasizing common sense, attention to reality, and helping your partner. Based on TheatreSports

by Keith Johnstone.

Readings, papers, and attendance at performances of improvisational theater.

Limited enrollment.

Units: 3

explorecourses.stanford.edu

PHIL 81: Philosophy and Literature

R Lanier Anderson & Joshua Landy Introduction to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Issues may include authorship, selfhood, truth and fiction, the importance of literary form to philosophical works, and the ethical significance of literary works.

Texts include philosophical analyses of literature, works of imaginative literature, and works of both philosophical and literary significance. Authors may include Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Borges, Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas, Pavel, and Pippin.

GER:DBHum; Units: 4-5 POLISCI 114S: International Security in a Changing World

Martha Crenshaw & Scott D Sagan The major international and regional security problems in the modern world.

Interdisciplinary faculty lecture on the political and technical issues involved in nuclear proliferation, terrorism and homeland security, civil wars and insurgencies, and future great power rivalries.

GER:DBSocSci; Units: 5 RELIGST 212: Chuang Tzu

Lee H Yearley The Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi) in its original setting and as understood by its spiritual progeny.

Limited enrollment.

GER:DBHum; Units: 5

The dynamic young quartet SO Percussion will return with an all-Steve Reich (winner of a 2009 Pulitzer Prize) program featuring the U.S. premiere of his new Mallet Quartet, commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts.

Admission: $40/$46 (Adult); $10 (Stanford student). Saturday, January 9, 2010. 8:00 PM. Dinkelspiel Auditorium.

A Chinese Home with Kronos Quartet and Wu Man, pipa

The Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet reunites with long-time collaborator Wu Man, a virtuoso of the Chinese pipa, in a powerful reflection on cultural tradition and transition. A Chinese Home was inspired by the extraordinary story of Yin Yu Tang, an elegant, 300-year-old house from a southeastern Chinese village that was dismantled piece-by-piece at the turn of the millennium and rebuilt at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Drawing on Yin Yu Tang’s potent metaphors of displacement and migration, rebirth and rebuilding, the work is a musical and dramatic “construction” in its own right, exploring China’s evolving identity through contributions by multiple composers, enhanced with live staging and video elements by acclaimed stage and film director Chen Shi-Zheng. Admission: $34– 60 (Adult); $10 (Stanford Student); $31–57 (Other Student); $17–30 (Youth Under 18).

Saturday, January 16, 2010. 8:00 PM. Memorial Auditorium.

ART Sixty Figure Drawings by Frank Lobdell

Cantor Arts Center presents “Frank Lobdell Figure Drawings,” an exhibition of approximately 60 figure drawings in ink, pencil, crayon, and wash. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the show, with essays by Robert Flynn Johnson, curator emeritus of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), and Bruce Guenther, chief curator and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Portland Art Museum, plus a foreword

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by Faberman. The catalogue and drawings are based on a more comprehensive exhibition of Lobdell’s paintings and works on paper organized

by FAMSF in 2003. Unlike the previous exhibition, this show includes several figure drawings by Lobdell’s former sketching partners Diebenkorn and Bischoff, illustrating how each artist approached the figure in a unique way.

“Frank Lobdell Figure Drawings” is organized by Anne Kohs & Associates. November 11, 2009 – February 21, 2010. Cantor Arts Center.

DANCE Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company Bay Area Debut

Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company—the critically-acclaimed new ballet company founded in 2007 by choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and Lourdes Lopez—makes its

Bay Area debut in a co-presentation with San Francisco Performances and UC Davis’s Robert & Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. Admission: $26-$60 (Adult); $10 (Stanford student). Friday, January 22, 2010. 8:00 PM. Memorial Auditorium.

LECTURES Ethics@Noon presents “This Little Kidney Went to Market: The Ethics of Organ Selling”

Debra Satz (Philosophy / Director, Center for Ethics in Society). Satz is currently working on two main projects. The first concerns the basis for and nature of the state’s obligation to provide an education to its citizens, and the second concerns the relationship between markets and social altruism. She also has a strong interest in global justice. Friday,

Sophia Catherine Carter-Kahn ’13

Watching Joyce Carol Oates’s Lane Lecture, the author speaking in her clipped and distinctly East Coast voice, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for one young audience member who asked if the “controversial content” of Ms. Oates’s books had ever led to trouble. Lifting a single eyebrow, Oates did respond, but not without commenting on the poor girl’s word choice and heavy accent: “This is America,” she said. Her slightly sarcastic answers that night mimicked the tone behind Oates’s most recent, and fifty-fifth, novel, Little Bird of Heaven: while still conveying Oates’s message with eloquence, they nevertheless had the self-conscious air of the premeditated and scholarly – and even a touch of the cruel.

The new work, a hefty 442 pages, follows the intertwined fates of two children in Sparta, a fictional, smotheringly small town in New York. The murder of seedily glamorous Zoe Kruller draws the dissimilar duo together, irrevocably connected by the one event that they wish they could escape.

The first, Krista, is a pale, blonde girl-child hopelessly lost in blind devotion for her father, a gruff man suspected of Zoe’s murder. Her suspicious and resentful mother, acting as a perhaps too-easy villain, tries unsuccessfully to sway her daughter’s affection. Krista’s recounting of events, the first half of the novel, is an authentic combination of belief and suspicion, a discourse on the lies our parents tell us and the lies we tell ourselves about them.

Aaron, Zoe’s son, is her opposite:

J.C.O. LV

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a mixed-race, lower-class boy, he is forced into an unwilling relationship with Krista’s family when his own father, an alcoholic, also becomes a suspect in Zoe’s murder. He protects himself from this tragedy, and from his resulting anomia, by retreating behind a tougher alter ego named “Krull” when he needs to be sharp or brutal – while being bullied at school, or when processing the disintegration of his family.

These two are stuck in the purgatory reserved for children who know too much. Neither old enough to play a real part in the events destroying their families nor young enough to shut their eyes and pretend nothing’s wrong, they are doomed to repeat the sins of their parents. Adulthood and innocence, trust and shame, passion and violence are confused in their topsy-turvy world. And, as a consequence, the novel is marked by the characters’ inability to say what they mean: the adults cannot clear their names of suspicion, the children cannot define their relationships. This propensity for frustrating vagaries and stilted expression comes out literally in Aaron’s learning disability. Unable to move beyond the murder because he can’t even talk about it, Aaron stifles the memories that surface from time to time with a simple and stubborn refusal to think about it. The only voice that does speak with clarity and cohesion is the narrator, an older and wiser Krista, looking back at the events as an adult.

Oates’s style is beautiful and flowing, even if the slow pacing and repetition can be a bit difficult to adjust to at first. Her use of metaphor and endless sentences somehow pull us into the dreamy world of memory in which we view all of the

January 8, 2010. 12:00 PM. Building 110, 1st Floor Seminar room.

Ethics@Noon presents “The Ethics of Contested Identities: The Case of Taiwan”

Melissa Brown (Anthropology).

Brown specializes in social theory and anthropology of China and Taiwan. Her major fields of interest include universal processes of social and cultural change, especially evolutionary models, ethnic identity, migration. She has ongoing collaborative research examining (1) the impact of industrialization on the Chinese countryside, especially women’s labor, (2) cultural evolutionary mathematical models success in predicting historical marital changes in Taiwan, and (3) demography of Taiwan and China. Friday, January 15, 2010. 12:00 PM. Building 110, 1st Floor Seminar room.

events of the book. During the climactic moment of Krista’s narration, trapped in a hotel room with police surrounding the door, Krista is entranced by the “brilliant dazzling light that was aimed against us from outside, a harsh blinding light, a whitetinged luminescent white, a white you might mistake for the purest star-light, illuminating and consecrating all that it touched even as it meant oblivion, annihilation, extinction.”

Although this level of detailed observation and analysis might be a little extraordinary for a barely adolescent and terrified young girl, Oates makes us believe in her shocked depiction of a world falling apart in the most frantic moment of Krista’s childhood. However, the author is unable to shake a sense of deliberation and selfawareness that pervades her work. Her style is certainly not casual or conversational – even the conversations themselves seem a little too perfectly imperfect, a little too planned out. This is not exactly a detriment, but I wonder whether a more raw and less crafted version of the novel might add to the blunt power of the events she describes.

Still, the strength of this work lies in Oates’s flawed and entrancing characters, whose attempts to deal with the uncontainable events in their lives hold a sort of sad fascination. While Bird centers on a murder, the book is not a mystery or detective story. The revelation of the true killer’s identity, when it finally happens, seems anticlimactic and almost unimportant to the rest of the plot. At its core, the book is a revealing discussion of the tangled nature of familial relationships and the inescapable hold of the past, narrated from a few steps away.

Rise of the Roach Coach Joshua Brent Freedman ’11

A famous example would be the 53rd and 6th halal gyros stand in New York City. (Doodle

by Iman Fayek ’13)

The Fat Darrell consists of chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, French fries, and marinara sauce combined on a bun.

(Doodle by Iman Fayek ’13)

If there’s one thing Stanford lacks, it’s good, cheap food.

As a hungry and sometimes-active college student, I am repeatedly foiled in my attempts to find a satisfying meal that doesn’t put too much stress on my already pained college student wallet.

Going into town isn’t ideal since Palo Alto doesn’t do anything unless there’s a double-digit price tag attached; on campus, Stanford fails to attract the type of vendor that makes quick, fast, tasty, food – food that maintains part of its appeal because it can only be served in a place with zero available seating.

This has been particularly noticeable since the one restaurant that had any of these qualities was displaced at the end of last year. In its absence, the next most relevant eatery on campus is the Treehouse, which is such pandemonium during the lunch hour that we can easily see there’s a bigger demand for reasonably priced cuisine than on-campus eateries are currently supplying. It seems, however, that an alternative source for this demand might already exist in a mobile form: food trucks, such as the one parked behind Tresidder on Santa Teresa Ave. that I fortuitously stumbled upon yesterday.

I have the sinking feeling that this truck has been around for a long time and I just haven’t known about it — which probably says something about how often other students like myself frequent the truck versus queuing up at the Treehouse.

Food trucks are widely popular at other college campuses for the same reason that college towns (Palo Alto, unfortunately, is not among these, even though the main street is called “University”) feature so many low-cost, highly delicious food options: college students love cheap food. We are a breed of hungry, health-unconscious, cash-strapped food consumers: the perfect targets for the type of food that can be made in an automobile. The most notable examples of this cheap food supply-and-demand equilibrium are the Grease Trucks at Rutgers in my home state of New Jersey: a parking lot full of trucks doling out gyros and Fat Darrells to a steady stream of student customers.

There’s something to be said against the unhealthy aspects of a horde of Grease Trucks, but the Asian food truck on Santa Teresa seems to avoid most potential criticism. The dishes are not only cheap – $4.50 for most vegetarian dishes, $5 for chicken, $6 for seafood – but also fairly healthy. Everything has ample protein in it (the veggie pad thai I ordered had plenty of tofu, which is plenty more than I expected), and nothing they serve is gasping for air in a sea of grease.

Food trucks have been around campus since 2001, when Chen Vo, an MIT graduate, brought the concept with him to Silicon Valley, although this particular truck is still the only one I’ve seen. A forum on Chowhound does indicate that there are other taco trucks near the construction sites on campus, but there are far more people around other parts of Stanford — wouldn’t it make sense to bring these food trucks to the rest of the campus community? More generally, why aren’t there more food trucks in and around the center of Stanford at lunchtime?

My first guess was that the university strictly regulated food trucks, but according to a 2006 document about eateries on campus, there are no such restrictions. The report does suggest, however, that regulation may become an issue in the future because on-campus eateries view the trucks — which pay no rent and have minimal operational overhead — as unfair competition.

At the same time, this section of the document highlights the entire reason on-campus food options should be, and could be, improved by food trucks: because Stanford is so expansive and isolated, on-campus eateries face essentially no competition from outside vendors. Only the food trucks provide a level of competition that prohibits on-campus eateries from driving up their prices.

The reasoning behind the lack of food trucks, then, is not entirely clear, and I, for one, hope to see more of them soon. I can only assume all of my hungry, health-unconscious, somewhat-active fellow students searching for a cheap and tasty meal feel the same.

After 22 years, the Thai Café in the basement of Building 420 moved to make room for a new MRI facility.

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/657285

This piece originally appeared in different form on the Unofficial Stanford Blog (tusb. stanford.edu)

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Talk of t Doing Right By Wrong Daniel Max Virtheim ’11

The more that I live and work at this venerable institution, the more I am awed by the degree to which my peers want to positively change the world. I think this is an admirable endeavor. Yet I find myself wondering how such enterprising, creative people could possibly ignore the single most effective way to achieve change: the evil way.

We will never fulfill our true potential as students, or even as human beings, until we learn to value the wrong as much as the right.

The most obvious approach here is, of course, arson. This tried and true method has the dual benefit of causing mental pain and distress while simultaneously leaving a visual scar on the land. Plus, fire is objectively cool. But any infant can haphazardly knock a candle over: it takes real vision and initiative to take a more imaginative tack.

We should be shocked, therefore, to realize how little this university has brought its energies to bear on the complex problems of doing harm on a global scale - this in a university that seems content to direct any number of resources toward the good. Step on our campus, and you’ll immediately be overwhelmed by the pungent stench of lovingkindness. On one side we have the hordes of eager young sheep flocking to the Program in Human Biology, which, as an institution, doesn’t even try conceal the fact that it’s one vast conspiracy to make the world a healthier, happier place. Look further and you’ll come upon the Center for Ethics in Society: you will never find a more wretched hive of righteousness and benevolence. The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law? You can tell someone first moaned this title in an orgasm of altruism. Even the sciences find themselves encroached upon by 8 the claw

the latent spirit of good will. Witness the emphasis of the Department of Mechanical Engineering on designing better prostheses, shunts, and the like, all at the expense of the once-glorious fields of torture devices and execution apparatus. Likewise, how long has it been since our chemistry department, or any, for that matter, produced anything quite as destructive as nerve gas?

Yet, hope remains. Our campus is ripe for reform. Where today I see undergraduates eager to spend their summers doing research for NGOs, tomorrow I will see graduates ready to train the terrorists of the future. Where today I see a whole cohort of Stanford students righteously indignant at the manner in which Earth is letting itself succumb to Global Warming, tomorrow I will see that same cohort working together to exacerbate the problem.

Let us not speak only in vague, fantastical terms. If we want change, we will have to provide opportunities for students to integrate their academic studies with their career aspirations. In place of the honors program in Feminist Studies, can you not see a competitive summer fellowship in Applied Misogyny? In place of the concentration in curing and preventing infectious disease, can you not see a concentration in creating and spreading infection disease? Fire the Comparative Literature faculty and use the funds to create the nation’s first Department of Evil. The program would offer undergraduate curricula in Evil Theory, Evil Design, Terror, Pain, Violence, and Schadenfreude (this last one would be an honors program open exclusively to students with a high GPA and certified psychopathic tendencies). The Department of Economics can stay as it is.

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In Defense of Decadence Nicole Eta Demby ’10

What does bourgeois environmentalism have to do with chocolate laxatives? According to the Lacanian philosopher, Slavoj “the Elvis of Cultural Theory” Zizek: everything.

Ethics, claims Zizek, used to be a question of moderation. One could indulge in rich foods, alcohol, and other pleasurable-but-harmful substances, as long as one didn’t indulge too much. As that old proponent of virtuous living Aristotle said, “it is best to rise from life like a banquet – neither thirsty nor drunken.”

Zizek argues that our contemporary ethics have since changed. We can consume without moderation because we have fundamentally changed the products we consume by divesting them of their harmful elements. Sugar-free everything, decaf coffee, non-alcoholic ultralight beer, all enable us to consume as much as we want without worrying about adverse consequences.

For Zizek, the vice divested of its venom is epitomized by a particular product: the chocolate laxative. The counteraction to constipation-inducing chocolate is more chocolate. We have turned everything into its own antidote.

This new decadence has a unsettling implication: every action must entail another. Unlike the old ethics, whereby every indulgence was a singular action performed in moderation, this new ethics initiates an endless proliferation of consumption. In an age when global warming is putting our planet in serious peril, this pattern of consumption is particularly devastating. We’ve forgotten how to limit ourselves because we have no need to; we can consume endlessly as long as we can counter-consume. I want to limit my sugar consumption, so I buy Diet Coke. Since I don’t have to worry about

sugar, I drink a lot of it. I don’t feel bad about all the waste I’m producing because I recycle the cans (that in turn will be made into more cans of Diet Coke). Likewise, I feel bad about all the gas I’ve guzzled in my lifetime, so I buy a Prius. The next time I’m debating whether to drive or bike, I don’t feel any qualms about taking my more efficient car. Our contemporary environmentalism is like the chocolate laxative: it encourages consumption as the solution, when consumption itself is the problem.

This new ethics of consumption doesn’t just undermine the environment.

It is driving us crazy. Never mind that the benign products are rarely as good as the originals they’ve replaced – does anyone actually enjoy Natty Light? – thereby diminishing whatever pleasure we derive from them. Even when we enjoy the real thing, we are distracted in the moment of pleasure, laden with anxiety about our capacity to complete some future counteraction that will effectively negate it. We fetishize these real pleasures, turning them into indulgences associated with tremendous guilt. I run into my friend outside the library and he’s holding a Naked Juice Green Machine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I’m supposed to get together with my other friend for drinks after work but we can’t meet until eight because he is at yoga. He texts me, “I need to be good before I can be bad.” We convince ourselves that the net total of our pleasure must equal zero. This framework of pleasurelessness requires neurotic micromanagement of our actions, rendering true pleasure impossible.

Meanwhile, in a masochistic turn, we convince ourselves we enjoy the process of atonement. Sure, running on a treadmill for 45 minutes releases endorphins, but how 9

many people would get themselves to the gym as readily as they would eat a piece of chocolate cake if health was no concern? To confuse the satisfaction of working out with the pleasure of eating chocolate cake is to mar the distinction between the benefits of hard work and the pleasure of true decadence.

What we need is a new old decadence, one not based on consumption but on real, undistracted pleasure in the singular moment of our enjoyment. We need to stop replacing the things that truly give us pleasure with guilt-atonement and benign simulacra. We need to stop seeing pleasure as indulgence because indulgence implies guilt, and guilt necessitates atonement.

But we need to go beyond a return to the ethics of moderation. We need to change our consumptive patterns and shed the psychological complexes that

accompany them, complexes that lead us to obsessively calculate the moral weight of our own pleasure. Shedding these complexes will not lead to gluttony and excess because the new decadence won’t be defined by a drive towards conspicuous consumption. It will be based on what we intuitively understand about pleasure: pleasurable things are most pleasurable when enjoyed occasionally, but fully.

Rather than moderation driving pleasure, pleasure will drive moderation.

Because our pleasure will be contingent on enjoyment in the moment, rather than cycles of action and counteraction, this new decadence will actually decrease consumption. This pleasure will not be simulacral nor will it be aestheticized and fetishistic. We need to relearn how to experience real pleasure in order to end the desirous, unsatisfying unpleasure of our consumptive ways.

Through true pleasure, we can diminish our excessive desire for more. Only then can we begin to consume less, and enjoy more.

Cold and Timid Souls: An Ode to Failure Zachary Russell Warma ’11 In the ill-formed opinion of this stubborn member of the Fourth Estate, for Stanford University to ever have more than a snowball’s chance in hell of truly rivaling Harvard or Princeton, there must occur at the Farm a wholehearted embrace of the prospect of failure and the terrible beauty of all its accompanying lessons. Before I am run out of town, please allow me to explain.

Understandably, the Farm is more than happy to market a hand-selected lineup of alumni for the dual purpose of KoolAid distribution and worldwide branding.

Eric Schmidt of Google, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and golf icon Tiger Woods – these, and others, are emblematic of the career paths and accomplishments we so longingly desire to emulate. Stanford is progress, innovation, and, above all, success. What we don’t talk about at the Farm is our collective 10 the claw

dirty little secret – the soft underbelly of our overly energetic façade: our morbid relationship with inadequacy, failure, and the dreaded idea of coming up short.

From a purely historical standpoint, this is a quizzical development. Stanford has had a deep relationship with failure from the beginning. Leland Stanford, the patriarch of this university, was drummed out of politics under the specter of rampant corruption, and, upon his death, Leland’s ill-gotten assets were largely tied up by the feds. His wife, the iron-willed Jane Lathrop, succumbed to poisoning before witnessing her great failure.

No more than nine months after she kicked the can did the massive library, gymnasium, and museum additions that went up on Jane’s watch come literally crashing down in the infamous 1906 Earthquake. And let us not forget the namesake for the Farm’s great phallus, Herbert Clark Hoover. As Stanford’s

only presidential graduate, Hoover doesn’t exactly carry the most distinguished track record, though Hooverville is a wonderful holdover from a slightly more sober and impoverished time in this nation’s history.

In spite of our rich tradition of crashing and burning, Stanford students seem to run like the dickens away from the gruesome specter of failure. Blame it, perhaps, on our upbringing. Although we might have been the intellectual, social, and/or athletic gold standard in high school, here at the Farm we find ourselves in a sea of 6000 overachievers, each with resumes that would make most high school counselors weep tears of joy. This results, however, in a culture of overdeveloped self-consciousness, of looking over our shoulders and judging ourselves in context to those around us. Every September, a right of passage at Stanford is to hear whispered in the hallways of freshmen dorms the common refrains of Am I smart enough? Did admissions make a mistake with me? Will other people like me? Am I honestly good enough to be a Stanford student?

The highly potent response to our fear of failure is the insidious “track system.” Stanford likes to trump up the individuality of its students, the potential to engage in extensive personal innovation, blah, blah, blah – but when you have been at the Farm long enough to interact with students of all ages, it becomes painfully clear that the paths we follow have already been hewed by countless generations of Cardinal faithful. Labels, particularly at Stanford, really carry only a minimal level of credence, but when you see the Chi Theta Chi Bando, the chirpy Poli Sci sorority sister, or the scheming student government pricks organically replicated each year, the rather narrow scope of Stanford student life becomes magnified all too clearly.

Though there is absolutely nothing wrong with particular personalities being drawn to similar interests over the course of multiple generations, the track system fails to encourage innovation or wholesale changes. Why try and potentially fail at a grand scheme, as half baked as it may seem, when you can join a pre-existing student group with five of your friends, run it by senior year, and call it a day? With a copious amount of attractive, low-hanging fruit, we have become a risk-averse community.

Aspiring I-bankers may be the exception – but who doesn’t like rolling the dice with

other p e o p l e’s fortunes?

One side effect of this mechanized process is a Farmwide moratorium on open ambition.

We eschew the blatant blood-sporting rivalry of the Eastern seaboard in favor of a more wholesome vision of excellence and success. In this oddly anti-Hobbesian environment, outwardly ambitious and headstrong individuals are rightfully written off and castigated for their crimes of pride and vanity while the rest of us are free to pursue our interests and desires in a sun-drenched paradise. Unfortunately, this is little more than a pleasant fiction conjured up to help us hide the truth about our classmates and ourselves. To make it to the Farm, you must not lack for tenacity or drive. End of story. But if this is the case, then how is it that we find ourselves with a campus of brilliant individuals who are unwilling to talk of ambition, dreams, and exalted visions? How can a student body suckled on the notions of achievement relegate those who are unabashedly strong willed to a peripheral no-man’s land?

With my freshman and sophomore years analogous to those grainy films of pre-Wright-Brothers planes crashing comically into hillsides, I have seen firsthand the wonderful power of failure.

Spending a year attempting to form a new student organization, and then watching it burn down before me, was both humbling and excruciating, and helped me make sense of a place that I had long been struggling to come to grips with.

Stanford University most certainly should not be a place where all you learn is how to pursue a profession, where you are inculcated with the skills to blindly accept the norm as it is presented by those at the top of the pecking order. This institution, and its wonderful, crazed student body, needs to have the ambition and capacity to dream and pursue expansive challenges, to have the chutzpah to achieve that shred of victory, and perhaps, even, to fail. And if we do miss our mark, all of us should abide by the words of His Dudeness, Teddy Roosevelt: “At least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

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FEATURES

Cecilia Xi Yang ’09

MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WRITERS Professor Jorge Ruffinelli remembers a life of literature Alice Haelyun Nam ’11 12 the claw

STANFORD, California.

I. The South American Years Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

– One Hundred Years of Solitude

When Jorge Ruffinelli came home one afternoon in 1971, his wife informed him that a man named Gabriel García Márquez had just called from Barcelona. Ruffinelli was 28 years old; he had not yet been exiled from Uruguay and was working at a Montevideobased magazine called Marcha. Since an international call to Barcelona would have cost his month’s salary, Ruffinelli instead wrote García Márquez a letter inquiring into the nature of the call. When at last they spoke, García Márquez told Ruffinelli that he should not have been so embarrassed to call collect.

“Of course I would have called collect,” Ruffinelli chortles, “if I had known there was such a thing.”

Thirty-eight years later, Ruffinelli now teaches literature at Stanford University as Professor of Iberian and Latin American Studies. Yet age and tenure do not seem to have suppressed his energy or keen humor.

His egg-shaped glasses lend him a gnomelike mien as he goes about campus, wooing visiting professors, arranging festivals, and cracking jokes with his students. But though his humor can be trenchant, it is never unkind. “What is the only multinational owned by Latin Americans?” he once asked in class. It was a serious question, but when no one responded immediately, he chuckled.

“Narcotics.”

Twice the department chair of ILAC (until this year, designated the department of Spanish and Portuguese), Ruffinelli has also directed the Center for Latin American Studies on two occasions. But if you were to ask Ruffinelli about his career, he would, in all likelihood, tell an anecdote about his close friends – who happen to be the great writers and filmmakers of Latin America. Numbered among them is the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. García Márquez was born in Aracata, a banana town in the north of Colombia where he was raised by his grandfather, a former colonel in the War of a Thousand Days, and his grandmother,

a superstitious woman well-versed in old magic and folklore. By García Márquez’s account, they were bewitching storytellers, and their grandson inherited their narrative talent, imbuing his own stories with their influence. In 1967, he published a novel that he professed had been inspired by the “reality and nostalgia” of his hometown. The book was translated into English under the title One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Although García Márquez was already known as a giant of Latin American literature, One Hundred Years of Solitude catapulted him into literary immortality.

At the time of its publication, the novel received stunning reviews: William Kennedy famously wrote in the New York Times that it was “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Chronicling a fictional town in the jungles of Colombia, the novel follows seven generations of the Buendía family – from Colonel Aureliano, who fights thirty-two wars and loses them all, to Aureliano Babilonia, whose neglect upon the death of his lover causes his infant son to be eaten by ants. When the Nobel Committee awarded García Márquez the Literature Prize in 1982, they declared that his writings captured a “cosmos in which the human heart and the combined forces of history, time and again, burst the bounds of chaos.” To this day, One Hundred Years of Solitude remains the best-selling Spanishlanguage novel in history.

But when García Márquez phoned Ruffinelli from Barcelona thirty-eight years ago in 1971, it was to ask for a favor.

Copies of his book The Eyes of the Blue Dog had surfaced in Argentina and Uruguay without his authorization, and he hoped to foil the black market edition by publishing a letter to his readers in Marcha. Based in Montevideo, Marcha was Latin America’s premier magazine for serious journalism and fiction. Though he was only twenty-eight years old, Ruffinelli was “el jefe” of Marcha’s literary section, managing submissions from respected writers, including William Faulkner. With Ruffinelli’s permission, García Márquez published a letter in Marcha, encouraging his readers to steal copies of the pirated edition from bookstores and libraries.

“For as the Spanish saying goes,” Ruffinelli explains, “un ladrón que roba a ladrón tiene siete años de perdón” – a thief who steals from a thief has seven years of pardon.

“I still have a copy of the book,” he smiles.

“The illegal edition, that is.”

In 1971, the year Ruffinelli first

discovered the novelty of calling collect, the market for Latin American literature was undergoing an astonishing transformation.

Beginning in the 1960s, Latin American writers began to sign with European publishing houses, most notably in Barcelona.

These publishers seized the opportunity to promote this crop of talented but obscure young writers, orchestrating what would become the publishing phenomenon of the century. The readership that was created had no bounds; housewives in Toronto and Beirut read One Hundred Years of Solitude alongside professors at Yale and Oxford.

This widespread fame brought awards of all kinds; the English translation of Hopscotch, by the ex-pat Argentine Julio Cortázar, won the U.S. National Book Award; and Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes married a movie star and became ambassador to France. Writers from Latin America were no longer thirdclass, third-world writers; they had become international celebrities, and there was no shortage of talent to feed the insatiable demand. Fittingly, this phenomenon became known in Latin America as the “Boom.”

But there are no great writers without great critics to make them so. As Latin Americans themselves, Ruffinelli and his colleagues were in no danger of exoticizing the material, and they became the first generation of critics to create lasting discourse around the Boom. Penning over 500 articles and 13 books, Ruffinelli defined much of the conventional wisdom behind the authors; in particular, he offered what have since become classic explanations of how the Boom revolutionized the art of storytelling. García Márquez’s innovation, Ruffinelli explains, lay in his use of magical realism – the telling of miraculous events as part of the everyday. After all – and this was García Márquez’s great discovery – our desires, our dreams, and our myths are also part of our reality. Not all novelists of the Boom, however, were magical realists.

Ruffinelli cites the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, who experimented instead with narrative structure such as simultaneous dialogue, weaving up to sixteen conversations on a single page. Although the term “magical realism” would eventually become a catch-all for literature from Latin America, Ruffinelli emphasizes that it was only a technique used by select authors.

At the height of the Boom’s popularity, a chance encounter prompted Ruffinelli to leave his position at Marcha and begin a career in academia. In 1973, Argentina had just emerged from a century {features} 13

of dictatorship, and the famed Argentine literary critic Noé Jitrik was on his way home from Paris to teach under the new government. Before flying to Buenos Aires, Jitrik stopped in Montevideo, where he ran into Ruffinelli at a bookstore. The two men were acquaintances, and Jitrik invited Ruffinelli on the spot to join him as his adjunct professor for one year at the University of Buenos Aires.

With no background in teaching, Ruffinelli admits that he was nervous about his new job. Seven hundred students enrolled in Jitrik’s course on Contemporary Latin American Literature, and the largest lecture hall at the University of Buenos Aires could not accommodate them all. Even Ruffinelli, the adjunct professor of the class, found himself sitting on the floor during Jitrik’s lectures. At the end of the school year in December, Ruffinelli and Jitrik administered individual oral examinations in a 24-hour marathon that began at eight in the morning.

“It was quite an experience for a first-time teacher,” Ruffinelli says, half ruefully, half fondly.

This “boom” in the classroom would have been unthinkable under dictatorship – but while Argentina enjoyed the freedoms of civilian government, Uruguay was sliding into a decade of oppression. Far from home in Buenos Aires, Ruffinelli was heartbroken to learn that the Uruguayan President had dissolved Congress, suspended the constitution, and invited the military to assume control of country. Since he was hesitant to return home to a military regime, Ruffinelli accepted an invitation to teach the following year at the University of Veracruz in Xalapas, Mexico. García Márquez was also living in Mexico at the time, and Ruffinelli was often a guest at the writer’s home.

Only a few months after moving to Mexico, Ruffinelli received news that a warrant had been issued in Uruguay for his arrest. Shortly before departing from Uruguay to teach in Buenos Aires, Ruffinelli had served as one of three judges presiding over Marcha’s annual fiction contest. The winner was Nelson Marra’s The Bodyguard, which depicted an army official who recounts the crimes he has carried out in the government’s name.

The military government did not share Marcha’s appreciation for fine literature. Claiming that the story used foul language and promoted criminal activity, the government arrested Marra and the three judges who had remained in Uruguay. They were tried and sentenced by military tribunal; 14 the claw

Marra received four years in prison, and the judges served six months before escaping the country. Intellectuals across Latin American protested the trial, and The New York Review of Books printed an open letter from the Mexican critic Mauricio Schoijet. “If the North American press and television would show the same concern,” Schoijet wrote, “for what happens south of their borders as they do for what happens in the Soviet Union, we Latin Americans would have reason for believing in their sincerity.”

“Mexico was very good to me,” Ruffinelli says many year later in the comfort of his office. And it was. Aware of his warrant in Uruguay, the University of Veracruz extended his fellowship for twelve more years, and when the Uruguayan government refused to renew his passport, Mexico issued him a series of six-month visas so that he could remain. Ruffinelli smiles. “They would have let me stay forever.”

II. The Mexican Years “How many birds have you killed in your lifetime, Justina?”

“Many, Susana.”

“And you never felt sad?”

“I did, Susana.”

“Then, what are you waiting for to die?”

“I’m waiting for Death, Susana.”

– Pedro Páramo

Ruffinelli understands his life in terms of cycles. The Uruguayan-Argentinean cycle ended in 1974. For the next thirteen years at the University of Veracruz, Ruffinelli lived in self-imposed exile, teaching in the School of Humanities and directing the Center for Linguistic and Literary Research.

Despite his academic pursuits, Ruffinelli never forgot Marcha, which had been dismantled by the Uruguayan government after Marra’s arrest. In conjunction with the Center for Linguistic and Literary Research, he founded Texto Crítico, a literary journal devoted to what would eventually become his life’s work: collecting and cultivating the highest level of critical discourse on Latin American literature.

It was during his thirteen-year exile that Ruffinelli befriended a Mexican writer by the name of Juan Rulfo. Ruffinelli lived in Xalapas, three hundred and thirty-three kilometers south of the capital, where Rulfo worked at the National Indigenous Institute.

The two men would often meet for lunch at a cafetería near Rulfo’s office whenever

Ruffinelli came into Mexico City.

Although the Boom was characterized by tremendous output from Latin American writers, Rulfo wrote only two, slender books that totaled just over 300 pages: one, a collection of short stories called The Burning Plain, and the other, a novel called entitled Pedro Páramo. Published in 1955, Pedro Páramo tells the story of a young man who, upon the death of his mother, returns to the town where he was born to find the father he never knew. The townspeople are friendly at first, inviting him into their homes and telling him stories of his father, but as he descends into the village he discovers their horrible secret: they are dead.

García Márquez called it the most beautiful story ever written in the Spanish language.

Before he began to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, he memorized long passages until he could recite the entire novel by heart, confessing that he wished he’d written the book himself.

Scholars from both Iberia and Latin America claimed that Rulfo was a definitive genius of the Spanish language, rivaled only, perhaps, by Cervantes, but to the chagrin of the literary community, Rulfo never published another book after Pedro Páramo.

Instead, he chose to pursue other arts. Until his death in 1988, Rulfo worked in the National Indigenous Center in Mexico City, publishing stunning photographs of native Mexican cultures. According to Ruffinelli, he was also a connoisseur of classical music.

Yet Rulfo deflected the fame that his many talents brought him, insisting on living modestly. Although journalists and critics hounded Rulfo for the rest of his life, he never relented, “guarding his silence,” as Ruffinelli says, more than any other novelist of his generation. “I loved Rulfo very much,” Ruffinelli continues, “because he was always true to himself – muy auténtico.” Ruffinelli, as the editor-in-chief of Texto Crítico at the University of Veracruz, could easily have capitalized on his friendship with the elusive author, but he saw no reason to harvest quotes from his friend.

“I admired his silence,” he says.

In 1976, Ruffinelli and Rulfo both attended the wedding of their mutual friend Augusto Monterroso, yet another celebrated writer of the Boom. Rulfo was notoriously shy, and there were hundreds of guests in attendance. After about an hour, Ruffinelli was ready to leave the party, but when he told Rulfo goodbye, Rulfo begged him to wait and began to gather his things. “I’m going

Gabriel García Márquez (left), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Jorge Ruffinelli on the ruins of Palenque, Mexico, 1978.

with you,” he said.

“He didn’t want to leave alone,” Ruffinelli laughs, “because he didn’t know how to say goodbye.” So Ruffinelli waited for Rulfo, and the two men fled the party together. As Rulfo drove Ruffinelli back to Mexico City, he asked if Ruffinelli would like some coffee.

Ruffinelli agreed, and Rulfo stopped at the first cafetería they saw. Although Rulfo could be uncommunicative, he was always talkative with Ruffinelli. They spoke for some time before Ruffinelli asked if they should continue on their way. Rulfo agreed, and the two men returned to the road.

“But you do want another coffee?”

Rulfo asked soon after they started driving.

“Bueno, sí,” Ruffinelli replied, and they stopped at another cafetería.

And then another.

Thirty-three years later in 2009, Ruffinelli cannot remember how many cafeterías they visited that afternoon.

Ruffinelli enjoyed Rulfo’s company immensely, but Rulfo was a busy man, and Ruffinelli did not want to waste his time. It was a while before he realized that Rulfo was trying to draw out their conversation. Rulfo had made it clear to other journalists that he had no interest in talking about his writing, but Ruffinelli began to suspect that Rulfo had something he wanted to say, and for the first time, Ruffinelli dared to ask him about Pedro Páramo. Rulfo obliged, speaking at length about his brother, who, he explained was “muy mentiroso” – a big liar – and the inspiration for the title character. As Rulfo spoke, Ruffinelli began to take notes on the napkins lying on the table.

It was the only interview Ruffinelli

Jorge Ruffinelli

ever held with Juan Rulfo.

There was a time when night after night I could hear the sounds of a fiesta. I could hear the noise clear out at the Media Luna.

I would walk into town to see what the uproar was about, and this is what I would see: just what we are seeing now. Nothing.

No one. The streets as empty as they are now.

– Pedro Páramo

Rulfo and Ruffinelli first met in 1969. At the time, Chile was hosting a congreso of writers from Latin America, Spain, and France in Viña del Mar, and Ruffinelli attended the conference on behalf of Marcha. He was a great admirer of Pedro Páramo and asked the Spanish writer Agustín {features} 15

Díaz Pacheco to introduce him to Rulfo.

The day of the congreso, Pacheco presented the two men to each other shortly before lunch. Rulfo looked at Ruffinelli, Ruffinelli at Rulfo, and since they had nothing to say to each other, they said nothing.

The following morning, Ruffinelli found Rulfo wandering the halls of the hotel around eight in the morning. Rulfo greeted him and asked him if he knew where the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti was staying. Ruffinelli knew the room number, and he escorted Rulfo to Onetti’s suite.

Onetti was awake, lying on his bed.

One of the three judges of the fiction contest that had led to Ruffinelli’s exile, Onetti was also the winner of the Premio Cervantes, the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanishspeaking world. Carlos Martinez Moreno, yet another writer, was eating at a small table in the room. Onetti’s wife had asked Moreno to take care of Onetti’s fragile health during the conference, and in honor of her request, Moreno was eating Onetti’s breakfast.

Onetti was a slender man with no interest in his food, and he was lying on his bed, reading. Like Rulfo, Onetti could be absurdly taciturn. The four men greeted each other, and Ruffinelli sat down at the table with Moreno as Rulfo went over to Onetti.

“Moreno and I conversed, but we also observed the others,” Ruffinelli recalls.

From across the room, Moreno and Ruffinelli watched as Rulfo and Onetti looked at each other for half an hour without uttering a single word. But they were not staring at each other out of boredom, like two existential caricatures. “We realized,” Ruffinelli says quietly, “that they were communicating over the silence.” Onetti and Rulfo were old friends, who each loved and recognized the genius of the other, Ruffinelli explains. And 16 the claw

so, there was no need for words. “There was only a magical silence.”

Ruffinelli pauses. “You have been asking me for anecdotes,” he smiles. “This is my anecdote.”

III. The Stanford Years Living in this desert, thought Lalo Cura as the car, with Epifanio at the wheel, left the field behind, is like living at sea. The border between Sonora and Arizona is a chain of haunted or enchanted islands. The cities and towns are boats. The desert is an endless sea. This is a good place for fish, especially deep-sea fish, not men.

– 2666

His reasons for moving from the University of Veracruz, Ruffinelli explains, were “existential.” As a student at the University of Uruguay, Ruffinelli had been a disciple of the legendary scholar Ángel Rama. Widely regarded as the most eloquent and insightful critic of his generation, Rama had been a visiting professor at Stanford, where he wrote a short essay calling Green the “Paradise of Libraries.” Ruffinelli did not forget the essay as he tried to choose between Stanford and a position at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In the end, however, it came down to the weather.

“It was not Stanford’s reputation so much as the climate that convinced me,” he smiles. In 1986, the same year Rulfo passed away, Ruffinelli accepted a position in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, now the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures.

“They even made me full professor,” he quips, “because I was not so young.”

In spite of the distance, Ruffinelli

remained close to the Latin American literary elite. Before the English-speaking world had even heard of The Savage Detectives, Ruffinelli was already an expert on its author Roberto Bolaño. Published in 1998, the novel chronicled the (mis)adventures of a fictional poetic movement called “Visceral Realism.”

For many years, Ruffinelli harbored the suspicion that a number of the characters were based on his friends from Mexico, and in 2003, he summoned the courage to write the author an e-mail. Bolaño replied, confirming Ruffinelli’s hypothesis; he had also lived in Mexico City during the seventies, a period of his life that became the inspiration for his novels. (See page 32 for the document.)

Bolaño, like Ruffinelli, lived in cycles. The details of his biography are controversial, but by all accounts, he had an uneventful childhood in Chile. His life became considerably more colorful when he moved to Mexico and began to work as a Marxist journalist. Here, the stories vary, but after living as a vagabond (and self-styled heroin addict) for decades, he finally settled in Barcelona, the cradle of the Boom, where he began to write to support his new family.

In spite of his reformation, Bolaño retained his “Bad Boy” aura by publicly mocking the literary establishments of Latin America.

He once called magical realism “shit” and ridiculed García Márquez as “a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many Presidents and Archbishops.”

Over 600 pages, long The Savage Detectives alone would have been enough to challenge the expansive novels of the Boom, but rumors began to surface that Bolaño’s magnum opus was still yet to come.

When he died in 2003, of liver failure, most resigned themselves to the disappointment that his masterpiece would never be realized.

Fortunately, they were wrong.

Bolaño never finished 2666, but the novel was close enough to completion to be published in 2004. Composed of five parts, the book follows a spectacular cast of characters as they weave their way to the city of Santa Teresa, where an unknown killer systematically murders hundreds of women. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, 2666 triggered an explosion of reviews, each trying to encapsulate the terrifying scope and beauty of the novel. Sam Anderson of New York Magazine described the book as Bolaño’s “brilliant, messy everything book”.

“His death,” Anderson wrote, “in the last moments of its creation, applies the final indeterminate Bolañesco touch: mystery, openness, imperfection—a simultaneous

promise of everything and of nothing.”

Whether Bolaño was the last heir of the Boom or the forefather of a new generation is a question that will not be resolved for another forty years, according to Ruffinelli. In the meantime, the consensus seems to be the latter. “The Boom was totalizante,” Ruffinelli explains. “García Márquez, Vargas Llosa – they all wanted to change the world with their books. But Bolaño was different. ‘With my book,’ he said, ‘I will change nothing.’”

If this is true, it did not stop the international literati from becoming enamored, if not obsessed, with 2666.

Jonathon Lethem called Bolaño a “talismanic figure in the United States” in his article for The New York Times. In 2008, the novel won the National Academic Circle of Critics Book Award, and The New Yorker declared January of 2009 a “National Reading Month” devoted to the novel.

But while the world continues to worship Bolaño’s masterpiece, not all those from Latin America have taken part in the homage. Ruffinelli points out that García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa have always refrained from commenting on younger writers, but praise from novelists of Bolaño’s generation also has been suspiciously muted. Ruffinelli confides that writers have asked him if he plans to criticize Bolaño anytime in the future. “Of course not,” Ruffinelli says.

“Everyone wants the king to fall off his throne. Bolaño is like a giant, and the rest are pigmies in his shadow.”

Bolaño might have intended to topple the Boom, but his early death ensured that the movement would outlive him; his predecessors, the patriarchs of the Boom, have continued to write and publish in the same grand style that he abhorred.

Ruffinelli does not believe that they will become “Bolañesco” anytime soon. It would be absurd, he argues, to ask them to adapt to a new era that was never theirs.

“García Márquez is like Ford,” Ruffinelli chuckles. “He is a brand. He doesn’t change.”

As for Ruffinelli, he is now involved in a “game” of figuring out which characters in Bolaño’s novels were inspired by his friends from Mexico. In early April of this year, Ruffinelli discovered that an acquaintance named Rubén Medina had been a disciple of “Infrarrealism,” the movement that Bolaño would later parody as “Visceral Realism.” Normally, Ruffinelli

dismisses such discoveries as “gossip that passes for literary criticism,” but last spring he invited Medina to Stanford, where the lucky students who took his seminar were treated to a visit from the flesh and blood incarnation of a character out of The Savage Detectives.

This opportunity will not be at Stanford forever. García Márquez turns eighty-two this year, and the heirs of the Boom are no longer so young; Bolaño would have been fifty-six if he had lived.

But while the writers and scholars of his era solidify their legacies, Ruffinelli seems to have no interest in enhancing his own. In fact, for a man of his eminence, Ruffinelli is oddly oblivious to his own reputation.

He mentions that his friends ask him why he does not return to Uruguay now that the government is stable and friendlier to writers. “It would be absurd to compete for

a position when there are so many young professors who are better than me,” he says, as though he believes this should be more obvious.

This is, perhaps, his great blessing.

He delights in telling anecdotes at the request of the younger generation, but Ruffinelli also knows the wisdom of letting go. His research for the past twenty years has turned away from the Boom: he is currently working on a survey of Latin American writers born after 1968, and he has also established himself as a foremost authority on cinema, writing the first encyclopedia of Latin American film.

“The last cycle of my life will be at Stanford,” Ruffinelli says matter-of-factly.

Sunlight pours through the enormous window, illuminating the rings of dust circling the ceiling. Ruffinelli pauses for a moment, as an insect runs across his desk and disappears under a pile o f books.

Thanksgiving I thank the moon for menstrual periods though, as a man, I am immediately made nervous by such a political choice. I’ll probably get myself in trouble with women – with whom I am already unsuccessful - despite my predilection for long walks in the moonlight. But then, that may be my problem.

Perhaps my adoration for your round, white gravity is not shared by these women. Diana, the virgin, hunted you with dogs, tore at you with teeth and spear and screamed your name in madness, all the while bleeding behind her immortal maidenhead.

Ah, me. Walking home again, alone after dinner, feeling stuffed up and bundled like tent poles. I do not have your clock-face inside me, scraping away the lining of my center. Recently I had the flu, but its madness was not nearly so clean, nor so regular.

Austin Michael Zumbro ’09

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FROM PERSIA TO IRAN: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE REVOLUTION

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On April 1st 1979, 2,508 years after the founding of the Persian Empire, the people of Iran voted by national referendum to overthrow the Shah, thus becoming an Islamic Republic under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. One month later, on May 1st 1979, Iranians took to the streets in dual celebration of Labor Day and the victory of the Iranian Revolution. A student at Tehran University secretly photographed the May 1st rallies near the university’s downtown campus. These images capture women without hijabs alongside demonstrators waving banners in support of Communism, Islamic Fundamentalism, Workers Rights, and Human Rights. As a precaution, The Claw has been asked not to reveal the identity of the photographer.

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TJDJ or THE FALL OF NORTEC The founder of a musical revolution explains the breakup of an iconic collective

Irys Placida Kornbluth ’11 Max Allan McClure ’11

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Gabriel Rabello Benarros ’11

TIJUANA, Mexico­

TJ isn’t quite the vacation paradise it once was. Stories of drug lords besieging police stations with rocket fire, or of kidnappers mailing severed fingers to the families of their victims, have overshadowed the appeal of cheap tequila and zebra-painted donkeys. A snapshot of the day’s news on March 28th, 2009: A police officer’s relative executed on Bulevar 2000 A man shot in the chest at home by intruders in Real Del Mar A motorcycle drive-by in La Presa A dope boat intercepted 35 miles south of El Rosario A “March Against Impunity” conducted along the border, including banners reading “DO NOT CROSS INTO TIJUANA BECAUSE YOU WILL BE KIDNAPPED.”

In a single day, enough has happened here to deter thousands of American tourists from crossing the border.

There are no güeros in sight. Just us – two discreetly dressed Stanford undergraduates pacing the empty streets and markets of the once-popular Centro, waiting for a DJ whose only lead has been “you’ll know who I am.”

We are waiting in front of a farmacía whose logo is a massive syringe piercing the crust of the earth. Discounted Prozac is prominently displayed. Across the street, gelled metrosexuals and uniformed janitors cross the border, passing between the grates of metal “roto-gates” manned by armed soldiers, a stone’s throw away from a betting parlor occupied by potbellied 60-year-olds in sombreros. For three hours we tentatively wander the neighborhood, asking anyone with distinctive hair or stylish clothing if his name is Roberto. A little after 6:00 PM, an inconspicuous black Corolla pulls up to the curb in front of us, piloted by a thirtysomething with a bright red emo combover. He is not, frankly, as recognizable as he suggested.

We don’t know exactly what we’ll ask him. We do know that Roberto Mendoza, AKA Panoptica, has been a newsworthy figure since the late 1980s, when he was just a teenager in a laptop garage band; we know that he’s one of the founding members of Tijuana’s Nortec Collective, that he pioneered the city’s current love affair with ranchero/techno mash-ups, that this movement has inspired

a wholesale revitalization of the Tijuana arts scene. But, to be honest, we haven’t come in with a specific line of questioning. Maybe we’ll ask something about the significance of his movement or the burgeoning success of his fellow Tijuanense artists, whose spinoff album Tijuana Sound Machine was up for a Grammy. Roberto, on the other hand, has a definite agenda for this interview.

Roberto Mendoza: Let me get you up to date on what’s going on. We’re talking about Nortec Collective, right?

Irys Kornbluth: Yeah, I mean… it doesn’t really matter…

RM: (interjecting) No. I want to talk to you about that… Because we split. There is a huge fight going on.

Between me and another guy from the Nortec Collective.

IK: Which one?

RM: Pepe.

IK: Pepe?

Max McClure: Fussible?

IK: We got the idea for this story because we saw a documentary on Pepe. It was made a couple of years ago.

RM: Well, a couple of years ago we were still together. But now, it’s very, very bad. The thing is that…I’m going to tell you the story from the beginning.

The Nortec story begins, improbably, with a loophole in the Federal Communications Commission’s regional programming regulations. Since neighboring San Diego radio stations could own only a certain number of stations in a given metropolitan area in the US, they began licensing their programming to Mexicanowned radio towers across the border. This move eventually led to the ClearChannel Goliath dominating the newly available markets, but in the meantime it exposed a generation of Tijuanense teenagers, including Roberto, to the more obscure college radio programming of the American market – latenight electronica ranging from Karlheinz Stockhausen to Tangerine Dream.

Electronic music hadn’t yet made it big in Mexico. Indie rock had already crossed the border into clubs like Iguana’s, where Roberto remembers seeing Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr., and Sonic Youth. But it was the late-millennium Electronic Dance Music

explosion – mid-80s breakbeat, electropop, industrial – that was the real revelation to Tijuanense musicians. It produced a string of border-based DJs, many of whom would later create the Nortec movement. Artefakto, one of the most influential electronic bands of the Tijuana techno movement, was originally a collaboration between Roberto and Pepe “Fussible” Mogt – the Pepe with whom things are now “very, very bad.”

“We all ended up telling ourselves the same thing,” Roberto says about Artefakto’s traditionalist electro sound. “It was not us, you know. It was more European.”

Record labels also felt the music lacked something unique – something Mexican.

Artefakto, by now called Fussible, failed to penetrate the lucrative European market largely because, as Mendoza realized, it did not sound “other” enough.

“So at the same time,” he continues, “we heard Señor Coconut [electrolatino pioneer Uwe Schmidt] and Dandy Jack [Chilean expat DJ Martin Schopf ] doing versions of cha-cha-cha and mambo, and we said, ‘Why don’t we do something like that?’”

In search of a more Mexican sound, Pepe visited a Norteño recording studio, bringing back a number of rejected banda backing tracks – horn sections and tambora beats – and a vague notion to mash them with techno records in a style Roberto would call “Nor-tec.” The two, enthused by the concept, brought these recordings to the attention of Bostich, a mutual DJ friend.

As the story goes, the three then presented their collected work at the birthday party of a fourth artist – Hiperboreal. The response was promising. Within weeks, Bostich had a dancehall hit with “Polaris,” and Hiperboreal joined the new movement, bringing along three other DJs – Terrestre, Plankton Man, and Clorofila. Together, these DJs called themselves the Nortec Collective, and they soon put up enough money to record a thousand copies of what they dubbed the “Nortec Sampler” – a selection of their early experimentations with the cross-cultural genre. It was at this time that Roberto began to adopt his Panoptica stage persona, separating himself from his longtime collaborator Pepe “Fussible.”

RM: We went to Mexico City and knocked on some doors, some labels, and of course everybody didn’t care about it. But one guy, Camilo Lara from EMI, was dating this girl from a label in LA. And she saw the record and said, ‘What’s that?’ and Camilo explained what it

{features} 23

Irys Placida Kornbluth ’11

was. She heard it, and said ‘Can I take this?’ and she went back home to LA and talked to [founder of Island Records and Bob Marley producer] Chris Blackwell. And the guy really liked it and said, ‘You know guys, you have to sign this.’ By that time we already had a really big following here in the city.

MMc: Just through playing concerts?

RM: Yeah, and on the presentation of the first record, we invited a lot of people. It was a huge event. For Tijuana, it’s huge to have maybe like three, four thousand people. So Palm Pictures took that as a good idea to bring media from the US and some places outside the US. They flew the NY Times and the LA Times to TJ for that event. And the event was massive. It was not only the concert, but you had art installations and shirts and clothes. With the same theme – Nortec.

The media presented the Nortec ethos as nothing less than a redefinition of Tijuanense identity. This makeover encompassed everything from the kitschy matching-suits style of Los Tigres del Norte 24 the claw

– whose classic “Contrabando y Traición” the Collective would frequently sample in early shows – to the new narcochic that had grown out of Tijuana’s recent crime wave. Suddenly, the Collective’s shows were packed with young hipsters dressed semi-ironically in the Norteño buckle-bunny style. Lionized by the press, they were even chosen by President Zedillo to spin at the Mexican pavilion at the 2000 World’s Fair.

As we snake through the chaotic streets of La Revolución, Roberto apologizes for his tardiness – when he was leaving his house, he saw a car hit a young boy. While another onlooker beat up the driver, Roberto tried to call for an ambulance and bring attention to the unresponsive child.

“I hope that kid’s alright,” he says, nodding his hair away from his eyes. “You have to get help for this kid instead of fighting.”

Though his English is good, Mendoza speaks with a slight lisp and a Mexican accent, and he has a propensity for sudden explosive statements like “That’s stupid!” or “What the fuck is going on!”

These pepper his speech as we roll up to the

Transmedios Centro de Arte Multimedia, a friend’s alternative arts hub and restaurant perched on a ritzy but violence-ridden hill above the sprawling downtown.

Places like Transmedios evoke a cosmopolitan Tijuana. As we walk into the minimalist café, the bartender, a tía-like middle-aged Mexican woman, mentions that we look very Belgian. The walls are sprinkled with posters for something called Sonic Death Rabbit, and the trip-hop playing in the background rotates from French to Spanish to Russian. Tucked away in a residential barrio, Transmedios reveals another side of the Tijuana art scene – quiet, refined, and eccentric.

Roberto sits across the table from us, slouching slightly. His eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, and he seems physically worn out from spending hours mixing in the studio.

“Every time there is a band together,” he says, “there are always problems.” He sips from a tall glass of Diet Coke and releases a sigh. “By that time, we were just five producers, and everything was supposed to be won over by a democratic solution.” Mendoza tells us about the

Collective’s monthly meetings. The DJs would review each other’s work, giving each other both criticism and support. He admits that, for a while, these gatherings were a breeding ground for Nortec culture and their way of making editorial decisions about joint albums. But now he sees them as the root cause of the break-up.

“When you say, ‘I don’t like your song,’ then there will be a guy in turn who says, ‘I don’t like your song.’ I don’t think it was objective, you know. We were evolutionarily staying in the same place, and I didn’t like that.” This came to be a common sentiment among all the members, and Fussible and Clorofila saw this as a cue to take a break. Roberto saw it as a copout.

RM: For me it’s stupid, because I feel like I have this girlfriend, ‘I love you, but we need to get some time alone and then go back,’ and I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? We’re breaking up.’ There’s no ‘Then we see other people and come back to each other.’ Come on, don’t be stupid! You know it’s over, you know?

Instead, Roberto suggested that the band remain together, but release a series of solo albums entitled “Nortec Collective Presents.” Pepe nixed the idea. Slowly but unmistakably, what might have been a fairly typical band hiatus began moving in a more unusual direction. Roberto first noticed something was awry when he attempted to log into the group’s Myspace page. Even though he had designed and maintained the site for two years, his password no longer worked.

rights to produce under the title “Nortec.”

Panoptica had coined the term in the early days of the movement, and, finding that the Collective had never copyrighted their name, he says he hoped to safeguard his own musical future.

The media, however, did not see it that way. On blogs and Mexican news sites, fans referred to Roberto as a “rat” for having “stolen the Nortec name.” Fussible and the record company threatened legal action. Roberto began receiving phone calls threatening both to burn his car and kidnap his children.

Roberto claims that Pepe was doing everything in his power to win over the media. La Frontera, Tijuana’s largest daily, ran a full-page ad endorsed by Pepe that accused Roberto of being a traitor and liar.

At this point in our conversation, Roberto’s face turns very grim.

RM: That’s when I said to myself, ‘So the revolution begins. I’ll see you in court, Pepe. Fuck you.’…I always kept myself in the background, not in the spotlight, since I always tried not to be a rockstar, but just to make music, but Pepe was the one that girls go to. Whenever you talk to people they say, ‘Oh no, he’s really friendly,’ and I always say, ‘Yeah, Hitler was really friendly.’

RM: I was like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ When I talked with Pepe, he said, ‘You know what, Roberto?

I changed the password.’ And I was like, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And he said, ‘Because I am not liking what you are doing with the page.’

And I’m like, ‘What?’

S o m e w h a t startled by his comment, we look to the garden behind Transmedios, where what we believe to be a sick rooster is making an ominous wheezing noise.

Panoptica may have a tendency towards the histrionic, but the slow erasure of his legacy does have a dystopian feel to it – the band bureaucracy “disappearing” one of its founders after he strays from Nortec orthodoxy.

Roberto called the US label and discovered that he had been denied the rights to produce under the name Nortec Collective – at Pepe’s request. He was no longer on the band’s official roster. Perhaps most disturbingly, he found that the Collective’s newest project was to be released, with great fanfare, under the name “Nortec Collective Presents Bostich + Fussible.”

Looking to fight his imminent excision from the band, Roberto went immediately to Mexico City to secure his

The furor has calmed down in recent months. Roberto remained silent in the immediate aftermath of the breakup, taken aback by the intensity of the initial onslaught. More than anything, it was this reluctance to appear before a hostile press corps that both ended the feud in the public eye and decided it, definitively, in favor of Fussible. Nevertheless, Roberto is starting to stage a belated counteroffensive.

He has begun blitzing local media outlets, interviewing with Rolling Stone Mexico,

amd touring with a live band as the Nortec Panoptica Orchestra (under a legal use of the coveted Nortec name). It is only because of his all-or-nothing approach to PR that we even secured this interview.

As he puts it, Roberto is not looking to destroy his former bandmates. He respects their talent and sees the possibility of reconciliation.

But, as he puts it, “I have to put my fist on Pepe’s face first, have to beat him up. After that, I can help him up.” The man who was both his friend and collaborator for 15 years is now the object of his contempt – and not merely because of his legal machinations. Roberto sees nothing of value in the commercial direction on which Pepe has staked the Collective’s future. Latinized bubblegum pop like Fussible’s “Tijuana Makes Me Happy” “does not,” he says, “make me happy.” Somewhere in the fight, Mendoza has lost respect for the man who, by all accounts, is Nortec’s rock star.

Roberto doesn’t believe that anybody is to blame for the current dilemma, though he does attribute part of the mess to the music industry. He believes their label mishandled the group – particularly the Collective’s international rights.

The disconnect between the American and Mexican music industries made it difficult for the Collective to consistently protect their work and name, a problem that became apparent when Roberto and Fussible simultaneously claimed rights to the Nortec name in the two different countries.

In retrospect, the very loopholes that set the stage for the movement have estranged its musicians.

“Making music is great,” Roberto says. “But everything around it is bad.”

As it gets dark, we’re joined by a friend of Roberto’s named José, the man who owns and runs Transmedios. He takes us to the building’s spacious backyard with a striking view of the neon breadboard that makes up midtown. Roberto’s hands are clasped behind his back. In this backyard, the owner explains, a group of teenagers used to make bonfires out of marijuana, and yesterday, a man was shot down the street. When he heard the gunshots, José locked himself in the house for 12 hours until he felt it would be safe to go outside again.

“But it’s a good house,” he says. {features} 25

26 the claw

Photographs by Claire Warwick Lorentzen ’10 and Sammy Sadi Abusrur ’09

Sammy Sadi Absrur ’09

Charity Fashion Show Gossip Girl here.

This just in: Stanford University will host the largest fashion show on the Left Coast for the second year in a row. OMFG. As Beyoncé would say: This is a disaster. What do nerds know about fashion? Apparently, more than they should. Gossip Girl has sources confirming that last spring, the Stanford Charity Fashion Show hosted 31 designers + 1,000 attendees in one big white tent on Roble Field. Gossip Girl can’t do math, but she calculated that it was the fashion event of the year. Lancôme sponsored a photoshoot with the CFS models and doled out mascara to the lucky VIPs. Did we mention Smartwater, Monster, and Got2Be also gave out goodies?

Thanks to the corporate sugar daddies who took care of production costs, all proceeds from ticket sales went to “Doctors Without Borders.” Even if you can’t tell the difference between Gucci and GAP, Gossip Girl hopes you can still appreciate helping starving orphans. But enough about charity. What about the fashion? Department stores brands like Nanette Lepore went head-to-head with designer starlets like Tu.Tu.Blu and Mary Meyer, but Gossip Girl has sources that it was student designers Wayne Hwang and Karen Lum who stole the show. Sad you missed out? Don’t worry. Gossip Girl’s got you covered. Check out these photos from last year’s show while you count down the days until fashion returns to the Farm.

You know you love me.

XOXO, Gossip Girl.

{features} 27

PRIMARY SOURCES

scrupulously avoid the desire for results An interview with William T. Vollmann Max Allan McClure ’11

Emma Beatrice Gambier Webster ’11

28 the claw

The American literary class isn’t sure what to do about William T. Vollmann. On the one hand, he has been called one of the “twenty most talented writers under forty,” by The New Yorker, “a monster of talent, ambition, and accomplishment,” by the Los Angeles Times, and “among the eight or ten greatest novelists America has produced,” by the Washington Post. His most famous book to date is Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3000+ page book on justifiable violence, and he is currently writing a seven-novel “symbolic history” of North America that the Independent has suggested would be “one of the major accomplishments of late 20th-century literature.” He is also a sought-after war reporter who has traveled on assignment for the BBC, the LA Times, and GQ. On the other hand, you haven’t read him.

Perhaps this isn’t fair. Many who have read his work simply don’t like it. Critics profess confusion and dismay at the topics and length of his books. The New York Times has referred to Vollmann’s recurrent theme of prostitution as “an obsession that disfigures several of his novels.” He is often called “prolific” and his books “mammoth,” with the inescapable implication that these are not appropriate qualities for a major author. And nobody knows what to say about the fact that he smokes crack. Vollmann

has become something of a controversial figure as a consequence, with each of his new books (twenty-four since 1987, if you count the seven volumes of Rising Up and Rising Down as independent works) starting another literary firefight between those who find him brilliant and those who find him transgressive, or simply unreadable.

What very few know is that Vollmann just might be the nicest person alive.

My own introduction to Vollmann was The Atlas, a collection of interwoven stories and nonfiction pieces derived from his twentysomething years of globetrotting, and what struck me – what strikes anyone who reads it – was the almost inhuman intensity of his empathy. In The Atlas, gasoline-addled Inuit women rub shoulders with vacationing yuppies, Thai prostitutes, backpackers, and heroin addicts. While these characters are ruthlessly self-destructive, they are often utterly guileless.

His narrators are frequently the sorts of young men who become enamored at the drop of a hat, who ask whores to let him draw them simply because they are beautiful.

This empathy, it turns out, also extends into his interaction with his subjects: he is well known for being accommodating to a fault.

During his interviews with sex workers in San

Francisco’s Tenderloin, he began smoking crack to put his subjects at ease. This need to identify with all sides of the story is something he has been able to maintain through conversations with Afghan warlords, through watching two friends die from a Bosnian land mine he survived, and through Rising Up and Rising Down, undoubtedly the most comprehensive study of violence ever undertaken in literary history, and a project that brought him into contact with an infinite variation of mutually hostile approaches to the problem of bloodshed. He is a man who thinks about everything he does, and this awareness informs every book that he writes.

Max McClure: You’ve said that you love San Francisco, but in your books, you typically talk about the Tenderloin, and a little of the Haight – not the most picturesque aspects of San Francisco. Are you still in love with those places?

William Vollmann: Oh, yes. The unique thing about San Francisco is that, because it’s bounded by water, the various neighborhoods can’t spread out, so they have to remain quite distinct. And, say, if you’re looking for prostitution, drugs in New York City, the borders of what’s safe and the red light district, or whatever, is quite vague, whereas you can go in and out of the Tenderloin sometimes in half a block. This part is the financial district, and this part right here is skid row, or crack row or whatever. It’s strange to think that a boundary is something that is just in the mind, in the way that money is. And people respect it long enough, and suddenly the two sides of the boundary start to look substantially different. Over on this side of the street, you look down and you see some tall, skinny guys pimping out their women, and on the other side you see people going into some nice Japanese restaurant. Of course they’re aware of each other, but they don’t invade each other’s space.

theme for you?

M: Do you feel like this has been a running

My own interview of Mr. Vollmann took place in his suburban Sacramento home, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

I arrived almost a half-hour late because of traffic, vaguely paranoid about the impression this might make. He opened the door, which displayed a small sticker reading “WARNING: ARMED DRUG DEALER INSIDE.” I explained about the traffic. Vollmann responded by offering me a finger of Laphroiag.

I apologized again, and he placed his daughter’s bearded dragon on my shoulder, which remained there, pulsating slowly, for much of the rest of the interview.

V: My work is basically about empathy, trying to see who or what “the other” is, and the more foreign to me, the more I have to work at it. So there’s always some sort of boundary. It’s a necessary component of a human relationship, of our relationship to the entire world, to our interior world, and the larger world that we exist in. And so it’s this fundamental ontological aspect of consciousness.

M: It’s very hard, it seems to me, to convincingly portray someone of another culture in either a positive or a negative light without being seen as sort of an imperialist, especially in the US. V: I guess I try to always remember that I’m ignorant about anybody who I haven’t met before, and possibly people who I have met before, and that the knowledge of ignorance is actually very, very helpful. And Thoreau says something about that, too. He says, {primary sources} 29

“How can anyone hope to get anywhere if constrained by his knowledge? He can only forget his knowledge and accept his ignorance. Then he can actually journey somewhere and learn something.” And it’s precisely when we decide in advance that we know what something is or who something is, or if we decide too soon, or too definitively, that we’re probably going to box ourselves in.

One very good example, I think, is gender.

I just finished a book about Japanese Noh drama – I was going over to Japan quite often for that, and viewing these kabuki female impersonators, spending time with transgender women, and when you think about what is a man, what is a woman, it’s very, very confusing. But most of us think we know because we see somebody in the street we’ve never met before, and one of the first things we do is say, “OK, this person is a man, or this person is a woman.” And it used to be, in turn-of-the-century Vienna, you could tell a woman from far away by her shape, because she would probably have an hourglass figure thanks to the corset and a skirt that came out kind of like a bell. But if you say, “This is how I define a woman today: someone shaped like an hourglass,” it’s preposterous.

And anything that we can say now about what defines a woman is probably going to be preposterous a hundred years from now.

That doesn’t mean that women don’t exist or that we can’t say something about who they are or what they are, but it means that we have to be cautious and deferential and try to have a rounded picture, as opposed to saying it’s definitely this and this and this.

M: Does this stem from a philosophical aversion to assigning definitions to things?

V: If I said that everything was relative, that would be a failure on my part, and if I said that everything was absolute and I could spell it out, that would be a real hubris on my part and would probably turn out to be wrong.

If someone says, “Is female circumcision wrong?” the easy answer here is, of course it’s wrong. But that’s not good enough because we can say from a standpoint of defense of children, perhaps defense of gender, it’s wrong to mutilate some girl’s body, but from a standpoint of defense of culture, it might be appropriate to do it, and we would be, as you were saying, the cultural imperialists by saying you can’t do it. Does that mean you can’t say that it’s right or wrong? I don’t think that’s what it means. I think it means that you can say we might agree to disagree depending 30 the claw

on whether we think defense of gender or defense of culture is more important. But we can say that it’s probably wrong from a standpoint of defense of gender and right from a standpoint of defense of culture, and so we have to figure out who weighs what to what extent. That’s how I look at everything.

M: Are there other writers working today or in the past that are essentially doing what you are trying to do, or what you look to?

V: Not exactly, but what Zola did was kind of interesting, his whole idea of describing lots and lots of different levels of social hierarchy through his novels. Tolstoy was very good at doing that, and there have been some photographers, like August Sander, who tried to create what he called “Citizens of the Twentieth Century,” this gallery of photos that would show a whole bunch of bakers who looked like bakers, and a whole bunch of peasants and he would capture what he thought was the definitive peasant look, and you see these things and they’re very convincing, his typologies, and, of course, they don’t apply anymore. But that’s OK. It gets back to this whole thing of what it means to not be vague in your descriptions, and as soon as you try to nail something down, unless you say, “This is how it seems to me, today, with these particular distortions and accidents and so on and so forth,” then it’s not going to be true in the long run.

M: How do you think you’ve done that in fiction?

V: I hope that, for instance, in that prostitute trilogy,1 I have accurately and lovingly described some members of the prostitute class. Some of them have been based entirely on real people, and then after a while I was able to invent my own characters. I feel like those characters have their own life and that they respect the reality that I believe I know.

M: It seems like a powerful force behind those books is the attempt to project an ideal. The protagonists are all looking for a specific woman that they cannot find, and that they keep finding substitutes for.2 Is this a commentary on the difficulty of finding definitions, or something else entirely?

1 Whores for Gloria, Butterfly Stories, and The Royal Family.

2 In each of the three books, the protagonist is a young man who tries to replace a lost love, who may or may not be imaginary, with a series of prostitutes.

V: That’s part of it, and I think it’s also part of the essential human tragedy that we come into this world, and leave it, alone, and so most of us yearn for some kind of bond with another person, and if we’re as lucky and skilled and successful as we can possibly be, it’s still not going to be perfect. And no matter how happy we feel, it’s certainly not going to be eternal. So the search for love, for friendship, for community is a necessary and, at times, desperate thing we do. It may be the most worthwhile thing we can do, but it’s never going to give us anything we can hold onto. We just have to keep trying and trying.

M: There are a lot of people who feel that the topic of prostitutes, or writing about them, implies a sort of dominance over women in a lot of the main characters. But when I read your books, it seemed like most of the characters put themselves in subordinate positions.

V: I think that all the love and sexual relationships we’re capable of are on a continuum. People often think that love and sex with a prostitute have got to be inherently different, and it’s not. It may be farther along the continuum in some ways, but if you have a sweetheart, a wife, there are going to be material things that you do for her, and there might be sexual or emotional things that she does for you, or that you do for her while not really feeling in the mood. Or, maybe you do feel in the mood, but what’s the difference between taking someone out for dinner and then going to bed with her, or buying her a wedding ring and going to bed with her, or giving her $20 and then going to bed with her? A lot of people think that, because the cash nexus is such a naked entity in the prostitute kind of relationship, there is something inherently brutal about it.

But I’ve seen so many customers who love the prostitutes that they frequent, and I’ve seen that love reciprocated. There’s a bar I used to spend a lot of time at that had some Christmas stockings with the names of the two prostitutes who used to work there a lot.

And if some stranger came to pick up the girl in his car, one of the guys would just look out and check the license plate. If she were going to nod off at the bar because she’d had too much heroin or whatever, one of the guys might run her home eventually. A lot of these guys love them, and they love them, too. And that didn’t mean the relationships weren’t often kind of sad, but, then again, that’s often true of other relationships.

M: If you don’t mind me asking, when are you going to sell out, intellectually?1 V: Either never, or else maybe I already have and we inevitably do. One of the compromises I’ve made is writing for the magazines, because it’s only by getting the press credential that I get the access, and the magazines have the money to send me to places like Iraq. But in return, the magazines will take the piece and cut it to fit based on how many ads they have that week, not based on any absolute or coherent vision of what the thing should be, so my defense has always been, if it’s something I care about, I will make sure it comes out in a book later the way I want it. But it’s not ideal.

M: Have you been able to maintain this – what seems like a pretty good level of creative control over your work – since the very beginning?

V: Yes I have, and it’s very easy to do that.

All you have to do is say, as Gandhi did, “One must scrupulously avoid the desire for results.” It’s much better to say, “Well, alright then, it’s not going to get published, I’m not going to get any money.” That’s not the point. It’s much better to let that stuff go, because if you’re really concerned with money or recognition as goods in and of themselves, you can get them in other ways - by going into public relations or being a politician or being a celebrity for the sake of being a celebrity. But as far as I’m concerned, that stuff is just a means to an end. So, I had a few offers to publish Rising Up and Rising Down before Dave2 came along, but they always insisted that the book be cut. And I was kind of sad – I was sure the book wasn’t going to be published in my lifetime, because of course I always had to say no. But I felt good about the fact I said no.

M: Do you feel like this is a Telluride/Deep Springs idea?3 I wouldn’t say that your writing is monastic in any way.

V: I don’t know whether monasticism 1 Vollmann is well known for taking massive royalty cuts in exchange for publishing his books in their unedited forms, and has done so since his first book, You Bright and Risen Angels – a 600-page book about a battle between insects and electricity.

2 Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s, who eventually published the unabridged Rising Up and Rising Down.

3 Vollmann is arguably the most prominent graduate of the all-male, monastic Deep Springs College.

applies. But I do think that one of the things that Deep Springs offers is isolation.

The way that people keep in touch with each other now, with cell phones and email and everything else, I think it’s awful. And that’s why I don’t have a cell phone and I don’t have email, because I don’t want my concentration interrupted. For me, it’s really, really wonderful not being in touch. My studio does have a phone, but my phone’s in the closet, so I can’t hear it ring. I check it every few days. The blinds are down, there’s razor wire around it, and people can bang on the fence as much as they want, I don’t pay any attention.

M: You travel an astounding amount, and, for a major author you go to a lot of exotic places. But, as far as I can tell, you don’t go to a lot of isolated places, at least in terms of the number of people that live there.

V: Well, I haven’t met very many people I don’t like. I love meeting people. The amount of variation in our human family is astounding. The difference in beliefs, in action between a Talib in Afghanistan and a Thai prostitute is mindboggling. And they’re both great. So yes, I love that aspect of my career. I feel very lucky that I could do it. It’s also nice that I can come back and slam the gate and go behind the razor wire.

M: You’ve done a very large number of things that most other people would call either astounding or crazy.4 V: Or stupid.

M: Is the appeal of danger at all related to it, or is that just incidental?

V: The unknown is an appeal, and sometimes exploring the unknown can be dangerous.

And then curiosity is an appeal. Especially when I was writing Rising Up and Rising Down, I really wanted to understand violence as best as I could, and in order to do that I had to go to places where violence was being committed. Usually, being in a dangerous situation is just a sickening feeling. It’s a feeling of fear, of trying to keep the fear under control so that you can function and 4 Some of these include rescuing child prostitutes in Thailand, reporting from wartime Bosnia and Somalia, sledding to the North Pole, and smoking crack in the Tenderloin.

get what you need to get out of the situation and get out of there. And sometimes a feeling of shame for having been so stupid as to be in this situation because really being killed in those situations would be a failure. So when I’ve been in places where people wanted to kill me, I’ve thought, why am I doing this again? It’s really not a nice feeling.

M: So now that you are in a more settled situation, with a wife and a daughter, is this something you’re still doing – going to places where danger is a possibility?

V: Yes – I went to Iraq for GQ last spring.

So far they haven’t published it because advertising revenues are down and so if they were to run the story they would have to run it very, very short. So they’re waiting.

It was quite dangerous, and my fixer, a very interesting guy, very brave, got rather tired of me. I kept saying, “Let’s go back to Kirkuk,” which, as you know, is a very dangerous place. I rolled the dice, and I was fine, and then GQ decided to send a photographer there. And this time, there was a bomb that went off, and the crowd turned against my fixer and beat him quite badly. It’s a dirty business, and the story might never run. So that’s the game.

M: I don’t mean to suggest that you have two distinct writing styles, but you have published works that are very prominently journalistic and ones that are very novelistic.

Is there a lot of cross-pollination for you, or do you have two mentalities when you write a book?

V: There’s some cross-pollination for sure, and it’s great to say, “I think that what I’m writing is this, but even though I think that’s what it is, maybe I’ll let it be a little more that,” and every time you cross those boundaries and let them blur a little bit, you’re likely to catch something real. If you’re trying to orient yourself in the woods, you triangulate. You have a point on the left and a point up ahead, and that way you’re sure that you’re going where you want to go. And I think that’s how it is too with something that you like. You start over here and you think about it over there, and if you do that, you might find it aiming over here, and you’ll be able to keep on the course you didn’t know you should have been on. {primary sources} 31

“Dear Ruffinelli:” my private correspondence (Just one letter) with roberto bolaño (The Secret History of a Uruguayan Poet) Jorge Ruffinelli Excerpted and translated by Max Allan McClure ’11 and Alice Haelyun Nam ’11 Bolaño would have liked this “Groucho Marxian” title.

The truth is, the years when Bolaño and I lived in Mexico coincide, but we were separated by 333 kilometers that made mutual acquaintance improbable.

Since I nevertheless knew several of the poets compiled by him in the anthology Naked Boys under the Rainbow of Fire (1979), I still wondered. Had I met him? And a couple of months ago, I asked him.

Roberto Bolaño, at the heels of his recent death due to hepatic shock (while he waited his turn for a liver transplant), has been regarded in obituaries as the “best living Latin American writer,” which, despite the involuntary bad “Groucho Marxian” joke, I think would have pleased Bolaño, who did not restrain himself from the most absurd and offensives opinions of that particular human species which is the “writer.”

In addition to having been one of the most extraordinary writers of the twentieth century (from the continent and beyond), author of a novel as difficult as Ulysses by James Joyce, along with a dozen of other novels that will never be “popular,” Roberto Bolaño constructed a loose-tongued public persona that caused delightful scandals every time he referred to other writers and left them hogtied.

I do not believe, however, that he was obeying a craving for publicity, as has happened with other “iconoclastic” writers.

Roberto Bolaño simply said what he thought, and after the publication of The Savage Detectives (1998) and the important prizes won by the novel, he also won a soapbox to speak from. Journalists listened to him. They were on the hunt for his sarcastic opinions.

They had not listened to him before, had not paid him any attention, but Bolaño was always that way, with a fast tongue and an unsurpassable genius.

His novels are excellent, though not “popular.” Why can’t they be popular?

Perhaps because of their themes, because 32 the claw

of their stories and characters, which were recycled from the intellectual scene he had inhabited in Chile, in Mexico, wherever he went. I doubt that the reader foreign to the “guilty pleasure” of trying to recognize the real people within the characters of all these romans à clef (essentially) would experience the joy of recognition (what the Greeks called anagnorisis) and the delight of seeing Bolaño write with such imagination and self-assurance about his acquaintances, friends or enemies. It would have been one thing had he put himself on pedestal, but the “Arturo Belano” of The Savage Detectives, his self-portrait, is as comic and subject to ridicule as any other character. Bolaño did not take himself seriously, and even during his illness and his wait for a transplant, he would often be motivated by some expressive turn of phrase quite unexpected given the drama of someone suffering a loss of health that could cost him his life.

In The Savage Detectives, there is a long episode that, like nearly all of them, is based on actual fact. During the oppressive occupation of UNAM’s facilities (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) by the army in 1968, only one person remained trapped and hidden for uncountable days, and they never found her. She was a Uruguayan poet. Her story was famous, and I myself knew Alcira and would go to see her when I visited my friends in the College of Philosophy and Letters.

Alcira was friendly and lovable, and when she learned that I was Uruguayan like her, she did not leave my side and would give me her mimeographed poems, which she always carried with her, as presents. I learned of her story afterwards. Alcira had arrived in Mexico without money, without contacts, and fallen like a skydiver in the University of Mexico.

The director of Philosophy and Letters, Dr. Guerra, took pity on her, and began to give her small and modest jobs, paying her a small remuneration out of his own pocket. Alcira was an intellectually trained woman, if a little

loopy, a Cortázar cronopio. Because of this, when the Department of French discovered that she knew the language, they gave her translations to do. She must have translated Mallarmé and Rimbaud, I suppose. What kept her hidden in the bathrooms of the college in ’68 made her heroic.

But Alcira’s most notable characteristic was her lack of several front teeth, the reason why every time she addressed someone, she used a book (or her own poems) to hide the deficiency. They say there was a collection among the students and professors to pay for her dental repair.

Alcira never went through with it.

Roberto Bolaño dedicated a chapter of The Savage Detectives and a complete novel (Amulet, 1999) to Alcira as a character, but the detail of her missing teeth is only mentioned in Amulet. For this reason, and also to express my solidarity with him against the ravages of his illness, I wrote him on May 24 of this year. I said to him, among other things, that I considered The Savage Detectives one of the greatest novels of our era. And I asked him if he had known Alcira personally, owing to the aforementioned discrepancy between The Savage Detectives and Amulet. I also told him Alcira Scaffo had returned to Montevideo and had died – as a Uruguayan friend who knew everyone and everything told me. This was Bolaño’s reply, the first of June 2003, with a curious combination of good humor and sadness.

Jorge Ruffinelli is Professor of ILAC (Iberian and Latin American Studies) and Editor of Nuevo Texto Crítico, Stanford’s journal of Latin American literature and culture. He is completing the first Encyclopedia of Latin American Cinema, for which he has written around two thousand articles.

His current work also includes a book of interpretation and survey of the most recent Spanish American prose published by writers born after 1968.

Un fuerte abrazo E-mail from Roberto Bolaño to Jorge Ruffinelli

Querido Ruffinelli:

Dear Ruffinelli:

No, en México no nos conocimos, pero algunas cosas tuyas alcancé a leer cuando aún vivía allí. Recuerdo a Donoso Pareja, a Espinasa, en cambio, no, vaya, ni siquiera sé quién es. A Alcira por supuesto que la conocí, de hecho ella pasó un par de temporadas viviendo en casa de mi madre, tal como lo cuento en Amuleto, en realidad, casi todo lo que aparece en esa novela se atiene a la realidad. A Alcira debí conocerla en 1970 y la última vez que la vi fue, probablemente, en el 76. No tenía idea de su muerte. De hecho, un joven escritor chileno llamado Matías Ellicker viajó hasta Uruguay, de esto hará un par de años o año y medio, dispuesto a encontrar sus huellas, y conoció a su hermana, quien le dijo que Alcira estaba internada en un manicomio. Te agradezco tu carta, tan generosa como exagerada. Mi salud, en efecto, no es buena (aunque mis reservas estratégicas son dignas de un general ruso), y cartas como la tuya contribuyen a levantar el ánimo al menos durante cinco minutos, lo que, bien mirado, no está nada mal.

No, we never met in Mexico, but I was able to read some of your things when I was still living there. I remember Donoso Pareja, as for Espinasa, on the other hand, no, well, I don’t even know who she is. Alcira I knew of course, in fact she spent a couple of seasons living in my mother’s house, just as I tell it in Amulet, really, almost everything that appears in that novel adheres to reality. I must have met Alcira in 1970 and the last time I saw her was probably in 76. I didn’t know about her death. In fact, a young Chilean writer named Matías Ellicker traveled to Uruguay, it’ll be a couple of years or a year and a half now, intent on following her trail, and he met her sister, who told him Alcira had been admitted to an asylum.

I appreciate your letter, as generous as it is exaggerated.

My health, in effect, is not good (although my strategic reserves are worthy of a Russian general), and letters like yours help lift my spirits for at least five minutes, which, all things considered, is not at all bad.

Recibe un fuerte abrazo.

Bolaño

Sending you a big hug.

Bolaño

Cecilia Xi Yang ’09

{primary sources} 33

FICTION

THE CLINCH MOUNTAIN BOYS PLAY TO SAN FRANCISCO Jane Elizabeth Reynolds ’10

34 the claw

Lauren Elizabeth Bell ’11

T

` he Ralph Stanley himself stood at the center of the Clinch Mountain Boys, looking very much like a mole unearthed by curious children. He stood very still in his black suit, his hands clasped in front of him, leaning only slightly towards the microphone to sing and returning to his resting pose when it was not his turn. From the audience, the wave of his white hair seemed to blend into his face, and he was fragile among his big-bellied accompanists.

Papa, New York, 1953

There were a few other Stanleys in the band — a son and a grandson. People came, though, to see Ralph Stanley. ­­

You look so dapper in the photo I found Pushed into the side of my grandmother’s drawer.

Strange that she would shove her father into A dresser like that, letting your yellowed skin get Scratched by hairbrush bristles and brooch backs.

In your sharp suit and slicked side part, You deserve a silver frame, polished regularly, On a grand piano that is just for show.

His audience overfilled the valley and rose up along the dusty hillsides of Speedway Meadow, in the middle of San Francisco.

Because the festival was free, they were all mostly young. And because the music was bluegrass, they were all mostly hip white kids or second-generation hippies. They were dressed the way their parents would have dressed to see a free concert back when, and they came with the same intentions: to make their own incomprehensible generation.

You’re beside the woman I was named After. I never met either of you. (You died The day I was born, and we celebrate it Every year.) Her penciled black brows match her Hair and lips, and your eyes and lapels.

Your stare and stiff mouth imply this photo is a Nuisance! You need to get back to business!

And her hair is Danish pastries and you picked The pearls that hang so cold on her chest.

It’s a headshot but I just know She is standing on her toes.

Ralph Stanley began with “O Death,” a song he had popularized with his rendition for the soundtrack of a well-known film. The first quivering syllable thrilled the young men in checkered shirts, who nudged the other young men in checkered shirts standing next to them and said “Yes! It’s O Death!” A girl pressed her hands together below her chin and bounced up and down. The song, in Ralph Stanley’s famous version of it, is stark and dignified. The Clinch Mountain Boys waited in silence while the old man sang.

They say you made a fortune in real estate, Liked to copy Van Gogh’s on the weekends, Got your shoes shined every day of your life, And spoiled beautiful children.

Now you live with folded handkerchiefs, Nestled between splinters, a relic of The story I was never told.

I would have sat on your lap and Never borrowed your money, and I think You would have loved me very much.

Lindsay Erin Sellers ’10

O Death, please consider my age Please don’t take me at this stage Dance music from one of the other concert stages crept in at the pauses. Near the back of the audience people turned their heads to look at the dancers at the foot of the other platform.

like a man would on such a nice day.

When the second song was over Ralph asked the audience for requests, but he seemed not The youngest Stanley sang the next song with to hear many, and none that particularly all the band backing him. It was little-known interested him. The only distinct voice was a but very pretty traditional. The young call for the song “Angel Band,” another from Stanley was a robust man and he swayed and the popular movie soundtrack. Ralph said, played the guitar while he sang. His voice “I’m sorry, I don’t have the words to that one had the same full quality as his grandfather’s, with me! Awful sorry about that!” He instead but he missed the sweet spots of some notes. chose to sing an old favorite of his own. The Ralph Stanley stood still during the song girls in the audience turned and whispered with his hands together and smiled vaguely, to each other, “Isn’t he such a cute old man!”

Afterward, behind the stage, Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys laid their instruments down on the foreign leaves of the eucalyptus tree. Ralph Stanley put his hand on his grandson’s big shoulder and said, “Don’t look so beat up. You did fine.”

“I just got—they just threw me off. But thank you, sir.”

Later that night, when the Ralph Stanley had long ago been shuttled off in the long, black security sedan, his grandson and {fiction} 35

another, middle-aged Clinch Mountain Boy were still inside Molly Malone’s. The younger man had gotten significantly drunk. He imagined that the bartender was confused about what a couple of businessmen were doing out on a Sunday.

“You know, fuck that fuckin’ movie. Yeah, and you know—fuck him too.”

“Hey now, don’t get rude. You’re drunk.”

“Man, I know you know it too. Old man’s fuckin’ us all over.”

They were sitting up at the bar, where the bartender was wiping glasses out with a rag. The bartender was also young and wore thick-rimmed retro glasses and tight, tapering jeans. He and the other man at the bar were both watching TV. “Would you stop thinking about the god

damn show today? Let it go.”

“No sir!—Hey, excuse me!” The bartender brought over another pint. Young Stanley trailed him down the bar with his eyes and said, “It’s every fuckin’ show is all fag kids who saw the goddam movie.”

“You know, I didn’t hear what you’re talking about. You were right on.”

“No.” “You played good.”

“Not for them.” He put his forehead on his arms, hunched over the bar, and remembered the first time he’d sung a harmony with his grandfather and the sweet understanding he felt then, and every time.

“You know Ralph Stanley was small time.”

“Now you shut up.”

“Hey! Hey man, I love him. He’s my fuckin’ grandfather—I respect him, but he’s selling me out.”

“Now you shut up. That man pulled himself—he pulled bluegrass music—up out the grave practically. He saved your goddamn job.”

“He didn’t save shit he sold us all out. If I was him I’d rather sing for three good ol’ boys than a thousand goddamned fags.”

“You say that now, you little shit.”

The young Stanley drained his glass and refused to respond. He had decided to let it die, though it made him terribly sad to lose an argument.

Lauren Malia Palumbi ’11

36 the claw

ESSAYS

Human Rights’ Twin Truths

by Abbas Milani

I

n late October 1978, when I was arrested as an opponent of the Shah in Iran, Jimmy Carter was still a presidential candidate. “The Committee” where I was initially taken – and where I spent the first six months of my yearlong incarceration – had by then an infamous reputation as an urban inferno, where “Apollo” referred not to the New Frontier of science, but to a new nadir of inhumanity. There was no water-boarding in those days, but even in this shameful litany of human ingenuity for pain, Apollo, I was told, was the worst. It was one technique from a long list of tortures – flogging, cigarette burning, crucifixion, sleep depravation, hook-hanging, needles pushed under finger-nails, genital electric shock. A helmet was placed on the head of the tortured victims, creating a powerful reverberation of their primal screams of pain, deafening them with the sounds of their own suffering. It was also meant to underscore the prisoners’ utter isolation – no one but you, it implied, will even hear the sounds of your pain. Turning prisoners into defenseless, atomized, isolated individuals, Hannah Arendt taught us, is the ultimate goal of every warden.

By the time I arrived at the “Committee” much of this machinery of torture had stopped in anxious anticipation of Carter’s presidential victory. Occasional beatings by the guards and threats of execution or life in prison hurled at us by interrogators were all we got. And of course, there was solitary confinement—a torture of the soul, where the passage of every minute weighs heavy on the mind. Cells were three and a half steps by four; no windows, no lights; dates and occasional slogans scratched on the walls were the only signs of past human habitation. The rug bore marks of past festering wounds, powerful reminders of the infamy of those who had inflected the pain and of the heroism of those had suffered it in silence. There was no soap in the communal bathroom, where you

were taken, blindfolded, only two times a day, and then only after knocking on the cell-door and after waiting for the guards’ good grace. There were also no eating utensils – a security precaution, they said, lest suicide tempt the prisoners.

And then one day a bar of cheap soap appeared in the bathroom; and at night, plastic spoons were distributed with the food. A few days later, the rugs were changed, and now instead of odors of human suffering, a smell of plastic wafted in the air. Torture stopped altogether. In my third night at the “Committee,” I was taken to the infirmary with high fever and pneumonia – results of Tehran’s unusually cold winter that year and the fact that we were each given two threadbare blankets to be used as pillow, cover and bedding. As my blindfold was lifted by the guard inside the room, I first smelled and then saw a heap of bandages bloodied and stained by the infected wounds of torture victims – a scene worthy of Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell and the last reminder of the torture in the “Committee.” Finally, on the day an orange was served with our meager, rat-infested food, we knew who had won the election in America. We called the changes in prison omens not of democracy but “Jimmocracy.” We knew Carter’s human rights policies were changing the Iranian political landscape, and life in prison, particularly where political prisoners were held, was invariably a good barometer of democracy in a society. We soon had visitors from Amnesty International and the International Red Cross, and within a year, nearly all of the almost four thousand political prisoners were “pardoned” by the Shah.

For scholars, concepts and ideas in politics and international relations are often mere abstractions – at best subject to the rigors of empiricism, and more often a “mummified reality,” bereft of any existential flavor, the passive object of distant contemplation and categorization.

Only “reified” realities can lend themselves to the rigors of numbers and models, of

equations and graphs. But invariably, these concepts have a human dimension, a way they translate into, or transform the lives of individuals. It is as perilous to ignore this dimension as it is to try and quantify it – human suffering and joy, as Jeremy Bentham learned, are ineffably hard to measure and codify.

At one time during his term in office, Carter had an approval rating of nineteen, far lower than Nixon after Watergate. But in my life, and the lives of hundreds like me in Iran, and thousands around the world, his human rights policies sometimes saved our lives, and always spared us much agony. It even saved the torturers, forcing them to walk away from their own darker angels.

But then some say, with considerable evidence to support their claim, that Carter’s human rights policies, and his confusing approach to implementing them, particularly in Iran, caused the Islamic Revolution. They say, and they are right in saying it, that the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini to power was the first domino to fall in the rise of radical Islam. America, they say, has interests, not friends, and seeks profits, not values. In a book I am finishing about the Shah and the causes of the 1979 revolution, Carter is shown to bear a heavy responsibility for “losing Iran.” But on that cold winter night as the fragrant aroma of orange wafted in the air, when for the first time after forty days I was given an extra blanket to fight the cold, and an orange to eat, I could only think of the letter I would one day write to Carter thanking him for his humanity and decency.

Abbas Milani is the Moghadam Director Iranian Studies at Stanford University where he is also a Research Fellow at Hoover. His last book, Eminent Persians, a two-volume study of the Iranian elite before the revolution, was recently published

by Syracuse University Press.

37

Benjamin Stefan Hersh ’10

Voodoo Math

How statistical shortcomings led to the failure of securitized credit derivatives

by Max James Rounds ’09

O

n April 2, 2007, New Century Financial Corporation, a major subprime mortgage lender, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, introducing the word ‘subprime’ into the popular English lexicon. New Century’s failure was one of the early signs that something was horribly wrong with the US housing market. Over the next two years, the problems with American real estate would eventually claim (in one form or another) Countrywide Financial Corporation, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, and countless other smaller institutions

Much of the reason for the demise of these corporations centered on the devaluation of financial products known as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), two 38 the claw

investments that gained popularity beginning in 2000. These two products were essentially pools of (often subprime) home loans that investors could buy in return for a piece of the monthly payments. The borrowers of subprime mortgages were, in most cases, at a high risk of default. Because banks were nervous about recouping their investment, borrowers were obligated to pay higher interest rates on their mortgages, making MBS, and CDOs lucrative investments.

However, this also meant that subprime mortgages were extremely risky. Indeed, when the value of these investments plummeted in 2009, the institutions that owned them became insolvent or were taken over immediately prior to insolvency.

A year after the financial crisis began, I was having dinner with my father when he asked me a question about subprime mortgages, MBS and CDOs. He was trying to understand how it had ever

seemed like a good idea to package extremely risky mortgages and sell them to investors.

In response, I focused on what I perceived to be the cornerstone of the appeal of MBS and CDOs: correlation.

From the standpoint of subprime mortgages, correlation represents the tendency of borrowers to default at the same time. As long as the correlation of default among these homeowners is relatively small, the high mortgage payments compensate for the high risk of default. The danger with such an approach, however, is that the correlation among defaults can increase, ensuring that lenders do not recoup a substantial portion of their investment.

I told my father that these products came to life in a time when defaults were relatively uncorrelated, and that given the assumption that this behavior would continue into the future, MBS and CDOs were great investments that offered investors

a higher rate of return and allowed those otherwise unable to own a home a chance to grab a piece of the American Dream for themselves. As borrowers began to default in ever-greater numbers, however, the assumption of uncorrelated defaults failed, and the products showed their inherent riskiness as they precipitated the global financial crisis.

But how did Wall Street come to make this mistake in the first place? Before we can answer this question, we must first better understand the concepts and problems of modern investing.

The Asset Allocation Problem

Consider the problem of any investor in the stock market: for a portfolio of risky assets (typically stocks), how can I maximize the return on my money for a given level of risk that I am willing to take?

This problem was first addressed by Harry Markowitz in 1952 and later expanded by William Sharpe in 1964; together their writings form the basis of a field known as modern portfolio theory. Markowitz and Sharpe’s solution depended on three parameters: the average return on a stock, the volatility of that return, and the correlation of that return to another stock.

In statistics, a parameter is a “description” of a numeric population.

For example, mean, median, and standard deviation are all statistical parameters.

However, we almost never know the true value of parameters – we can only guess using statistics. The first parameter in question, average return, is the ratio of money gained or lost relative to the amount of money invested. If I put $100 in the bank and I earn $5 in interest over one year, my rate of return is 5%. While the average return on a stock is a reasonably intuitive concept, the volatility and correlation are much less so and warrant further explanation.

Intuitively, volatility is the distance of the actual returns (those that appear in the real world) from the returns that we predicted. Formally, it is the standard deviation of the return of an asset. It is commonly used as a measure of risk; the greater volatility, the less sure an investor can be about his asset’s performance. For those seeking to minimize their risk, one approach is to minimize the volatility of the expected return of their investments.

The third parameter, correlation, measures the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two variables.

For example, if the share price of Google and Apple tend to rise and fall together, these two variables exhibit a positive correlation.

Conversely, if the share price of Dell tends to fall when the share price of Apple rises, these two stocks exhibit a negative correlation.

Correlations always lie between -1 and 1, a perfectly negative and perfectly positive correlation, respectively. It is important to keep in mind, however, that correlation does not imply anything about the degree of the movements. For instance, if a Toyota Camry loses 10% each year in value and a Volkswagen Beetle loses 15%, their correlation will be 1 in spite of the fact that the cars lose value at different rates.

The power of the solution devised

by Markowitz and Sharpe can be illustrated through a simple diversification example.

Suppose you are offered a choice of investment portfolios: only gold, only the stock market (proxied by the S&P 500), or some mix of the two. Using the year 2006 as an example, a portfolio of just the S&P 500 had an average annualized daily return of 11.7%, while a portfolio of just gold returned an average of 20.4%. While gold outperformed the stock market, it had its own drawback: risk. The average annualized daily volatility of the S&P 500 portfolio returns was 9.9%. Gold, in contrast, exhibited a volatility of 23.9%.

So while gold performed about twice as well as the stock market, it was over twice as risky.

Diversification shows its teeth once we look at the performance of portfolios of both assets combined. During the year 2006, the returns of the S&P 500 and gold had a correlation of only 0.16, implying that they had a weak relationship. With this in mind, we could have achieved portfolios with the characteristics of the figure below:

So why haven’t financial advisers lost their jobs and left asset allocation to computers?

Unfortunately, the previous calculations were done with the benefit of hindsight. It is much more difficult (some might say impossible) to find statistics that accurately describe the future behavior of a stock given past observations. In order to do this, we need more sophisticated statistical tools.

Suppose you want to estimate the return on the S&P 500 in 2010. One option is to estimate the return using data from the past year. For example, from May 4, 2008 to May 4, 2009, the S&P 500 had an average annualized daily return of -34%.

But how sure can we be that this statistic will accurately predict the return in 2010?

In order to determine the reliability of our estimate, we could construct a confidence interval. For instance, a 95% confidence interval implies that we can say “with 95% confidence” that the true average return lies within the interval. Consequently, the smaller the interval, the more certain we can be about our estimate. In this spirit, the 95% confidence interval of data from 2008 is -122% to 55%. In other words, we can say with 95% confidence that the return in 2009 on the S&P 500 will lie between -122% to 55%. This is a fairly useless result.

To improve our estimation, we could use more data in order to reduce the width of the confidence interval. Extending the window of data back five years provides a 95% confidence interval of -22% to 19%.

This estimate is more reliable, but would you bet your child’s college education or your retirement on these numbers?

We could include even more data to increase the reliability of our estimate, but here we arrive at the great paradox of The dashed region describes the portfolios that have both a higher return and a lower volatility than the S&P 500.

These particular mixes of the S&P 500 and gold offer the investor the best of both worlds, earning more money with less risk. In particular, Portfolio A, a mix of 90% market and 10% gold, had a return of 12.6% and a volatility of only 9.6% (versus the S&P 500, which had a return of 11.7% and volatility of 9.9%). This was possible because of the correlation between gold and the S&P 500: when two assets have a weak or negative correlation, their randomness tends to “cancel out,” allowing for decreased risk.

{essays} 39

investing. As the amount of data increases, the width of the confidence interval decreases, thus increasing the reliability of the statistic. However, adding more data points usually entails adding more, but irrelevant data points. Does the average return in 1999 really help us predict the average return in 2009? This is one of the key problems of estimating parameters from financial time series: there is a reliability/relevance tradeoff.

As we include more data, we become more certain about a statistic that is less useful.

Moreover, we have relied this entire time on the underlying assumption that the world is static. In order to use these estimation procedures, we must first assume the type of randomness remains constant. If we were flipping a weighted coin, such an assumption would be reasonable; an unfair quarter is the same in every toss. Estimating the parameters of a stock, however, is akin to estimating the odds of the coin when those odds change with each flip. The underlying style of the randomness of the stock market is constantly shifting. Each day, world news changes the return, volatility, and correlation of each stock, often making the estimation of its parameters an exercise in futility.

The Punch Line: Parameter Estimation As It Pertains to Derivatives

The 2008 financial crisis has given financial instruments known as derivatives a bad name. What are they exactly? Derivatives are investments whose value depends on the price of other financial products. Derivative pricing models often rely on parameters to determine their worth just as the solution to the asset allocation problem requires the returns, volatilities, and correlations of the assets within. The derivatives that have consistently made the news during the current financial crisis include mortgagebacked securities (MBS) and collateralized default obligations (CDOs); the value of these two investments is determined by a pool of mortgages that pay out interest, much like a bond. These products function in a similar fashion to a portfolio of stocks, but instead of the correlation between asset returns, loan portfolios must take into account the correlation of default risk.

These pools of mortgages attempt 40 the claw

to diversify away the risk of default. For instance, if one loan defaults in a pool of 100, there are still 99 loans left. With this in mind, MBS and collateralized debt obligations can be excellent investments, assuming only a few of the underlying mortgages default.

The tendency of loans to default together is referred to as their default correlation, and it functions just like the correlation between gold and the S&P 500. If the default correlations in a pool of mortgages rise, the investor may see many more than just one or two mortgages go under, which in turn would vastly decrease the value of the MBS and CDOs holding those loans. As a result, without accurate estimates of default correlations, investors will stand to lose vast sums of money.

The consequences of rising default correlations can be dire for a pool of loans.

Unlike a stock, a loan entails that investors either get their money back (no default) or do not get any money (default). Rising default correlations thus imply that it is becoming more and more likely that a lender loses his investment. For example, assume you loan 10 friends $1,000 each. Say that when you make the loan, times are good, your friends have steady jobs, and you are not worried about their ability to repay you. One might say your friends have a low correlation of default, as what makes one friend default (unexpected injury, for instance) will not cause the others to do so as well. Now, say the economy worsens. Perhaps several of your friends lose their jobs. As a lender, you are now in danger of losing your money, since a few your friends may not be able to pay you back. In the end, you might only get $6000 out of the original $10,000. The tendency of your friends to default together is characterized by a rise in their default correlations. Imagine, however, that you were still using the assumption of low default correlations to assess your own financial situation. You would be sorely misinformed.

Furthermore, once you realized your error, it would already be too late. No one would want to buy the risky loans from you under so much uncertainty. This is exactly the situation in which holders of MBS and CDOs found themselves as the real estate market began to worsen in late 2006 and early 2007.

It is therefore extremely important for the accurate pricing of a pool of mortgages to obtain accurate default correlations. Like volatility, correlation is not directly observable. There are no daily correlation figures we can derive and then

average. Instead, an investor trying to get a sense of the correlation between two sources of randomness must look at a time series and make an inference. This works moderately well with two stocks since there are daily prices that are readily available. With the likelihood of default, however, this can be extremely daunting. A mortgage has never defaulted until it defaults, and thus for an individual mortgage, there is no time series of defaults that can produce a correlation metric.

Conclusion

In many ways, the popularity of MBS and CDOs, beginning in 2000, precipitated the demand for subprime mortgages, only to be crushed by rising defaults eight years later. They were sold on the assumption of low default correlations and higher returns than bonds of supposedly comparable risk. At the time MBS and CDOs were created, assumptions of low default correlations very well may have been accurate; however, as the adjustablerate subprime mortgages underlying them reset to higher rates, defaults became much more correlated, and the value of the credit derivatives declined to almost nothing.

The disaster that ensued has prompted a massive re-evaluation of credit models, default models, and correlation estimation algorithms. In more recent research, the phrase non-parametric estimate comes up again and again as an approach to deriving useful information from data without some of the massive pitfalls that arise from direct parameter estimation techniques.

Despite this, the use of past data to predict future events will always have its limits.

In the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a famous quantitative trader: “Co-association between securities is not measurable using correlation. Anything that relies on correlation is charlatanism.�

TRIBUTE

100 Years of Wallace Stegner His friends said he looked like God ought to look, and perhaps not since Eden was first sketched in Genesis has an author been so sternly rhapsodic about the land.

Standing Above the Clouds, 2005

He called the West “the geography of hope,” despite many misgivings, and he dreamed of a day when Westerners would fashion “a society to match the scenery.”

From “Stegner’s Complaint”

by Timothy Egan, The New York Times February 18, 2009

Standing Above the Rain, 2005

Photographs from Summer in Yellowstone

by Matthew Frederick Campbell, M.S. 2010

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As our former editor-in-chief once said: if The New Yorker and The Atlantic had a bastard child, it would be The Claw. We hope one day this will be true. Until then, we are a student publication that supports and showcases Stanford’s rich culture in politics, humanities, and the arts. In this spirit, we publish investigative reporting, columns, essays, fiction, fine art, doodles, and everything in between. To see all the content in this issue and more, please visit our website: theclawmagazine.com. If you are interested in learning more or becoming involved with The Claw please e-mail: theclawmagazine@gmail.com.

— The Claw staff

Doodles: 5 8 16 25 29 31 32 40 40 42

KGBanjo • Max Allan McClure ’11 Max McClure’s Soul • Iman Fayek ’13 Tree • Lauren Malia Palumbi ’11 Amy Carried 90% Of Her Body Weight On Her Lower Half • Ashley Dayoung Chang ’13 Ignominious • Iman Fayek ’13 You Kiss Your Mother With That Mouth? • Max Allan McClure ’11 Mallardroit • Iman Fayek ’13 ’lobal Politics • Max Allan McClure ’11 Actually, My Name’s Steve • Iman Fayek ’13 The Joke Finally Gets Old • Iman Fayek ’13 — titles by Lindsey Catherine Toiaivao ’13

Front cover: Gabriel Rabello Benarros ’11 back cover: Max Allan McClure ’11 and Ariel Emily Marcy ’11 42 the claw

Tripp Edgar Leavitt ’11

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44 the claw