The Claw Magazine Volume 2.2: Spring 2010

1

the claw

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

Associate Editor Alison Fiona Dame-Boyle ’11

Senior Editor Charlie Aaron Mintz ’10

Senior Art & Design Editor Claire Warwick Lorentzen ’10

Senior Design Editors Justin Eli Calles ’13 Sophie Catherine Carter-Kahn ’13

Faraz Hossein-Babaei M.S. ’10

2 the claw

contents 4 Editorial Statement EVENTS 5 Best of the Bubble Talk of the Quad 8 An Analytic Assessment of the French Pysche Through Their Writing Tools Alison Fiona Dame-Boyle 10 Language-Related Bitchings and Related Merriments Ellen Jean Huet 11 Thanks, Jerome, High School Wouldn’t Have Been the Same Without You James Patrick Leonard Kozey Fiction & POETRY 35 I Wanted Her (to tell me things) Joy Jean Henry 36 Cleanng My Walls Charlie Aaron Mintz 37 Party On Rachel Elizabeth Hamburg Essays 38 CoverGirl Doesn’t Cover Boys Eric Nigel Tran 42 About the Claw

Kendra Lyn Allenby ’10

features 14 Bosnia Revisited Alex Michael Mayyasi 20 Growing Back the Farm Hannah Miller Rich primary sources 24 Science is a Noisy, Continous Parliament: An Interview with Richard Powers Sophie Catherine Carter-Kahn and Max Allan McClure 29 The Secret Lives of Moors Priscilla Mihae Mann

32 An ASSU Senator’s Farewell Speech (and drinking game) P. Cuddly

3

Build Your Own Stanford-Themed Manifesto Editorial Statement DENOUNCE STATUS QUO (Choose from list) – CoHo smells bad – iPhone won’t run multiple applications – Working class is divided, oppressed – There are no cute girls in CS – Races condemned to one hundred years of solitude do not have a second opportunity on earth

BRIEFLY MENTION PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS TO CHANGE STATUS QUO: (Choose from list)

WHY DID THEY FAIL?

Mechanism of history

– Computers?

– The FroSoCo War for Independence (1892) – Some hippie thing – P. Egley Doogle, Candidate for Woodside Comptroller – Identification of signaling pathway that connects insulin to FOXO transcription factors and SIRT deacetylases – Foucalt, probs

Whoring

FREUD/MARX/SPRINGSTEEN REFERENCE

IDEOLOGICAL PILLARS (Choose from list) – Saving the whales – Fraîche – No, really, please don’t tread on me – Not such goofballs now, eh?

– Die Luft der Freiheit weht – Equality, Liberty, the other one – Stellaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

PROPOSED ACTIONS (Choose from list) – Save the whales – OK, you, Biff? You take team A. I take team B. We split up at the top of the hill and take them from the left and the right, the old pincer movement. At the bottom? Croquet.

– Literary magazine – Ponzi scheme – Know this guy – Remove battery, then place in blender – And like young lions we ran after Death, its dark pelt blotched with pale crosses as it escaped down the vast violet living and throbbing sky

SHIT LIST (Choose from list) – The New York Times – The Washington Post – Ted Kennedy – Jane Fonda – Barbra Streisand – Bill Belichick – The whales

PREDICTIONS OF STATEMENT’S EFFECT

(write your own)

Sorry, Too Ambitious. Go Directly To Jail. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200.

4 the claw

Best of the Bubble

Kathryn Cashel Pyne ’12

events.stanford.edu fountainhop.com

PERFORMANCE SPARK OF BEING

Dave Douglas (composer) and Bill Morrison (filmmaker) with Keystone Saturday, April 24, 2010. 8:00 pm.

Memorial Auditorium. Two master innovators – jazz trumpeter/composer Dave Douglas and experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison – combine the screening of film with live musical performance (by Douglas’ electric band Keystone).

The new work, commissioned by Lively Arts and making its world premiere in this performance, incorporates archival visual elements and newly developed sound components.

Admission: $10 (Stanford student). dj session

David Harrington Thursday, April 29, 2010. 8:00 pm.

CoHo. David Harrington, Kronos Quartet violinist and musical omnivore, DJs a listening party at the Stanford Coffee House from his wild and eclectic CD collection. Free and open to the public. delusion

Laurie Anderson Wednesday, May 5, 2010. 8:00 pm.

Memorial Auditorium.

Anderson explores sound and stories in a series of short plays. Using her inventions in vocal

processing, signature violin pieces, and lush sonic landscapes, Anderson creates and inhabits imaginary worlds that become mental movies. Conceived as a ninety-minute technodrama, the new work combines technology, mystery and contemporary short stories in a unique new art form. $10 (Stanford student).

SPEAKERS POET/ESSAYIST

W.S.

DIPIERO

Wednesday, April 21, 7:00 pm. Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460). poet edward hirsch

Monday, April 26, 8:00 pm. Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center. Part of Lane Lecture Series.

Peter Gleick on Coming Conflicts Over Fresh Water

Tuesday, April 27, 2010. 3:30 pm.

McCaw Hall, Arrillaga Alumni Center.

Dr. Peter Gleick, the 2010 Sant Lecturer in Earth Systems and one of the world’s leading thinkers on the global water challenges facing us, will discuss the role of population, climate change, and 20th century thinking on the coming conflicts over water. Gleick will talk about the state of the world’s water, the growing threat of climate change, oldstyle thinking about water management and use, the risks of international and subnational conflicts over this precious resource, and new solutions and the way to a sustainable path for water.

feng shui expert deborah gee

taylor ricketts: Seeing the Forest for the Bees: Pollination Subsidies from Forests to Farmers

Tuesday, April 27, 2010. 12:00 pm.

Kissick Auditorium. According to Feng Shui philosophy, your home can help shape your destiny. Deborah Gee (as seen on PBS) will reveal Feng Shui strategy for “Successful Living:” how to arrange a home by using design, placement, color, home furnishings such as mirrors, plants, etc. to improve health, family and romantic relationships, children’s development, and career.

Thursday, May 20, 2010. 4:00 pm.

Braun Auditorium, Mudd Chemistry Building. Taylor Ricketts, (Ph.D., Stanford; Director, Conservation Science Program, World Wildlife Fund) is co-founder of the Natural Capital Project, a partnership among Stanford, WWF, and The Nature Conservancy to map ecosystem services, estimate their value, and use this information to inform and finance conservation investments.

5

Tzvetan Todorov: Reflections on the Fall of the Wall

Monday, May 3, 2010. 5:00 pm. Stanford Humanities Center. Tzvetan Todorov is a philosopher, theorist, and literary critic. He is member of many scholarly organizations and recipient of numerous prizes, including the Prix Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1991), the Spinoza (2004), and the Prince of Asturias (2008). Another lecture, “The Exemplary Life of Germaine Tillion” will be on May 5 at 5:00 pm at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Gideon Rosen: Immanuel Kant Lecture Series

Wednesday, May 5, 2010. 5:30 pm.

William R. Hewlett Teaching Center. The topic is the moral significance of pressure.

We are normally responsible for what we do, but when we must deliberate and act under duress or in response to powerful

social and situational “forces” of certain kinds, our responsibility is mitigated.

The aim of the lectures is to explore this phenomenon through an examination of real cases.

EVENTS CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF THE NOVEL CONFERENCE

Saturday, April 24, 2010. Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460). This conference will frame a variety of ways that leading critics in cinema studies, narrative theory, and literary criticism can work across the threshold between novel and film: the two dominant systems of narrative in modernity. Rather than a series of papers that address this topic from one bird’s-eye perspective, the conference aims to bring out different pressure-points, sites of intersection and

critical questions which can be generated by thinking about reading, visuality, and narrative in relation to, or against, one another. Conference presenters: Lauren Berlant (Chicago), Edward Branigan (UC Santa Barbara), Scott Bukatman (Stanford), Homay King (Bryn Mawr), Jean Ma (Stanford), D.A. Miller (UC Berkeley), Karla Oeler (Emory), Sean O’Sullivan (Ohio State), Garrett Stewart (Iowa); sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Novel. charity fashion show

Saturday, May 15, 2010. 8:00 pm. Roble Field. This event is a keystone, award -nominated fashion show that is regarded as a must-see fashion event for the West Coast. Proceeds go to internationally renowned, Bay Area-based, micro-finance non-profit, Kiva. Admission: $35, with a $10 discount for Stanford affiliates.

Gabriel Rabello Benarros ’11 6 the claw

Anna Celene Garbier ’12 7

Talk of t An Analytic Assessment of the French Psyche Through Their Writing Tools Alison Fiona Dame-Boyle ’11 The French keyboard, objectively speaking, is stupid.

It is not that I mind the switch of “A” and “Q” or “Z” and “W” – though it didn’t help with typing that first overpriced-Internet-café-deliriouslyjetlagged email home reassuring my parents that I had arrived across the Atlantic safely. I understand that different languages may have different patterns of letter use. Ze Frainch can have zair AZERTY keyboards, and eat zem too, or something. Cultural diversity, oui s’il vous plaît!

But the punctuation? Nonsense.

No-sense.

Assuming that characters for which one has to shift are, generally speaking, used less commonly, the French would seem to prefer giant run-on sentences, liberally sprinkled with commas, such as that one. As one must shift to get a period or a question mark or a number, there is no place for simple declarative phrases (or numerical figures), but sureness, parenthetical asides, and modifying independent clauses should abound!!

At least, it seems stupid until one begins to understand the French psyche, their very âme (soul).

8 the claw

As Gertrude Stein, that stumpy over-generalizer who never read French texts, once wrote: French is a spoken – not a written – language.

The French keyboard aims to capture that ephemeral and yet eternal vivacity of the spoken word! (Even writing about it in English I am drawn into their labyrinth. Oh, that I did not need to shift for that exclamation point or these parentheses!)

They do not need periods as much because they do not need to finish their thoughts as frequently; French conversation often consists of a series of beautiful implications. Everyone is intelligent enough to deduce the final piece, and so the obvious need not be spoken aloud. The statements that do make it to the end of their originating idea – usually, but not exclusively, on the incompetency of other drivers and especially cyclists, or the subtle flavor notes of the wine, or the stupidity of politicians – are emphatic enough that they warrant an exclamation point.

The ease of access to parentheses, and the distance between the open parenthesis and close parenthesis, is a bit more confusing, but is soon revealed, to the acute observer, to be a

the

Quad

holdover from their Gallic hardheaded roots, representing the inability of the tribes of France to fully unite to combat the invading Romans. Vestiges of their more Latinate, passionate roots can be found in the glorification of accented letters over such unforgiving, factual things as numbers.

Finally, a look at the placement of their currency symbols reveals a charming disregard for material things and perhaps even a nationalistic, antiEU sentiment. One must perform some computer mumbo-jumbo to get to €, the symbol for the euro. The French, despite their lauded fashion sense, do not focus on prices enough to write about them frequently. They understand that it is how the clothes make you feel – and look – that really matters. At least, they are not so gauche (gauche) to admit that the price matters to anyone else. However, when the currency in France was the franc, one only had to write “F,” a simple operation. Now that the EU

has foisted its (quickly tanking, thanks Greece) currency upon France, they are rebelling in a subtle, literary way, in keeping with their pen-is-mightierthan-the sword attitude, a tradition they’ve upheld since finding they’re not so good on the sword side.

But then let your attention be drawn to the right-hand side of the keyboard, to the dollar sign. No shift, no alt or control-shift, or whatever other commands you can think of, needed. There it sits, easily accessible: the French people’s shy cry of love to us Americans across the Atlantic. We may see this great enmity existing between the two countries, but I’d like to propose that on every keyboard made they send out a white flag, nay—a tribute! They just don’t know how else to say it.

Well, froggies, je vous aime (I love you) would have sufficed, but on behalf of the United States, I accept your tentative outreach.

Fin (the end)

9

Language-Related Bitchings and General Merriment Ellen Jean Huet ’11 here.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves

We’ll assume you’re a good student.

You’ve toiled under the proverbial sun.

You’ve probably sustained some sort of injury of dedication, maybe from a sport, maybe from something less adrenal, like a furious chess match (eye strain is serious concern). Your work was great, and you heard the accompanying praise: You’re terrific.

Fantastic. Awesome. Wonderful.

Sublime. Tremendous. Fabulous. You deserve a gold star.

Or at least you believe you do.

But you’re just being greedy with those adjectives. Terrific? Your work wasn’t terrific – the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was terrific in the way it, quite literally, inspired terror. Woolly mammoths and sonic booms are tremendous, not that essay you wrote on The Great Gatsby – I don’t give a damn what your teacher told you. Mt. Fuji is awesome, the miracle of human flight is wonderful, and heavenly angels and that special brownie are equally deserving of being called sublime. But if your newest political science class doesn’t directly emulate the whimsies of fantasy, don’t call it fantastic. Your high-heeled boots are not fabulous unless they arise from fabled origins so as to be considered mythical and unbelievable. Was the concert incredible? Are you sure? Can you 10 the claw

believe it? You really shouldn’t be able to. And don’t you dare call anything indescribable.

Stanford’s a happy place – insufferably so. The perpetually happy students that lurk cheerfully in unsuspected corners are horrendous precisely because they believe they are bearers of joy. Sunshine comes out of their asses, they’re taking the most amazing classes, and they’re pursuing ridiculously awesome honors thesis research in an exotic land. They remain blissfully unaware that their wellintentioned hyperboles are slowly chipping away at the lesser-known and more intriguing definitions of some of the campus’ favorite feeling-so-greatso-high-on-life words.

In all fairness, these praise-worthy adjectives certainly mean what we usually use them for: they emphasize the extremity of a noun, usually with a positive connotation. But the beauty of the English language, with its vast vocabulary, is that we have words for the stupidest and most specific things.

The French language doesn’t even have a word for “shallow” – they have to make do with the equivalent of “not deep.” English, on the other hand, has a word specifically for that universal mistake when we completely mishear song lyrics: a mondegreen. You know Bruce isn’t singing “wrapped up like a douche” but actually “revved up like

a deuce?” I didn’t either. But there’s a word for it. So why erode a word’s unique meaning by reducing it to a “gold star” sound bite of admiration?

The point is, the poignancy of the perfect word shouldn’t be tampered with in an attempt to brag about your summer internship. “Awesome” is an awesome word, so respect it – use it for the times when your jaw drops and you pee your pants a little in fear, OK? Fabulous.

Thanks, Jerome, High School Wouldn’t Have Been the Same Without You James Patrick Leonard Kozey ’11 In case you’ve been living under the same rock that, until recently, hid J.D. Salinger, you’ll be aware that selfsame author has died. Passing away at 91 years of age, Salinger’s longevity serves as “proof ” of the benefits of homeopathy and ingesting one’s own urine. No one really knows though, since those details – as with most of the more prurient ones in his life – are all hearsay. Nothing draws more attention than a desire to avoid it. Now that he’s dead, everyone possessing any connection to the man, no matter how tenuous, has seen fit to say his or her piece. In death, Salinger has cemented his status as the white(r) Michael Jackson of the literati.

I can’t claim to have met the man. Hell, the closest I ever came

in physical proximity was my college visit to Dartmouth as a high school junior. If things had gone differently, I might have been one in the long string of Dartmouth kids who attempted to find his house, only to be misled by protective locals. An excellent initiation rite, if you ask me – the perfect Ivy League snipe hunt. But I can say that, for a time, I knew so much of The Catcher in the Rye by heart that I could have passed as any of the would-be celebrity murderers who carried around a copy and claimed it as inspiration. The first semester of my freshman year of high school I was Holden Caulfield in my school’s fall play.

To be fair, I was one of two Holdens. Our director had, in getting 11

her masters from somewhere, been exposed to the idea of “reader’s theater:” productions in which, technically, all the words spoken aloud onstage came straight from the book. The conceit was ingenious for two practical reasons: (1) we could dodge copyright complaints since, after all, we were “just performing a public, staged reading” and receiving “suggested donations” at the door, and (2) we had to get our goddamned lines right, or we’d be much more transparently breaking the law.

The problem was that The Catcher in the Rye rests almost solely on Holden’s inner monologue. Though a lot of it got pushed around to the rest of the cast (I know, it was an odd sort of show) we had a Holden whose job was to give a presence to that internal voice. That was “Internal Holden” in the script. Then there was the Holden who moved through the world: the Holden who got kicked of school, who kissed girls, who got drunk, who had prostitutes sit on his lap—“External

12 the claw

Holden.” That was me, and that was how I learned, early on, a lot of the lessons I would forget by the time they could have helped me.

It was through acting out his words that I had my first (staged) fight; I still wonder if the kid who played Percy, whose responsibility was to beat up “External Holden,” is still alive. His name was Nathan. It was Salinger (and his book) that also taught me how to make out with girls (neck with them, I guess, would be the word he preferred). Kissing scenes were a big deal back then. That was why my co-lead Chris was pissed, even though he got to be “H” in the script, and I was relegated to “h” (H-thesmaller as I liked to think of it). There was even a pre-rehearsal meeting to practice the make outs – me and one of the girls – even though we’d tried the same thing in a darkened movie theater a few months back, neither of us really understanding what was going wrong. The arm rest? The overly sophisticated art film we were watching? This time there was no supposed romance between me and “Sally” – we brought in toothpaste and everything.

Salinger taught me a bit about “real” romance as well. It was in the pages of my script that a girl first spelled out her “feelings” for me – a senior who we all found, inexplicably in hindsight, to be attractive. She was seated to my left (I think) and she leaned over and began circling letters on the pages I was reading. They were far enough apart it took me some time to decipher the pattern: (i) (l)(i)(k)(e) (u). There might have been a heart, but that I can’t even pretend to remember.

Later I’d help her pass Algebra II so she could graduate (we were both taking it, though I was 14 and she was...not).

Too bad I took so long to realize that her circled letters were a cover for the boyfriends other than myself. She was the first (and last) time I’d misuse the word: “love.” She’s married now, and I’m very glad it’s not to me.

I met “Phoebe” too. The kid sister who embodied all the things we all should look for. I like to think that Salinger would approve of the fact that I fell in love with her first, and later I’d get to use that word, “love,” again, and rightly. She’s married now too, and all I am is glad for her.

And Salinger let me pretend to be drunk. No method there, just straight

pretense – being dizzy and slurring my words. I’d learn I was less wrong than I thought – you just can’t turn the damn thing off.

People came to the show. They clapped and laughed at the right times.

I think I made more people than just my mother cry. And I was older.

A lot of people out there met Salinger, or Jerome, or Jerry. And a lot of people who hadn’t kept hoping they would have the chance. I suppose I always wanted him to emerge from his self-imposed exile, but not for me.

For his own sake. So he could see how much he meant to so many people.

I’d spent months walking, line by line, scene by scene, through his book, and it had shown me things.

Too often I forget that. Too often I grow and forget that five, six years ago I should already have known what I am learning now. Because Holden would have. Because before Salinger retreated into himself, he showed the world itself. Perhaps something had to fall victim.

Too bad it had to be him.

13

FEATURES

Damaged building in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina

BOSNIA REVISITED The ICTY through the eyes of Allen Weiner, former U.S. legal counsel to The Hague

Alex Michael Mayyasi ’11 and the editors of The Claw Photos by Amer Handan ’11

14 the claw

STANFORD, California I. The New Nuremberg In the summer of 2008, Serbian security forces arrested a Belgrade spiritual healer calling himself Dr. Dragan David Dabić. To most who knew him, Dabić’s run-in with the law came as a surprise; other than his topknot, bushy beard, and alliterative name, Dabić was notable only for his New-Agey columns on bioenergy and sperm-rejuvenation therapy, as The New York Times would later report. But to Serbian officials, this self-styled alternative medicine guru – whose real name was Radovan Karadžić – was also the orchestrator of the largest massacre in Europe since World War II: the genocide of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

On July 30, 2008, after 13 years in hiding as a fugitive from international law, Karadžić was extradited to The Hague, Netherlands – the de facto capital of the United Nations – ­­where he would be forced to stand trial before the first international criminal tribunal since Nuremberg: the ICTY. The day after his extradition, the LA Times duly noted, “Arrival of Karadžić puts tribunal back in spotlight.”

The ICTY, or International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, had been established in 1993 by the UN Security council for a singular purpose: to investigate and prosecute “serious violations of international humanitarian law” perpetrated during the War in Slovenia, the Croatian War of Independence, and the Bosnian War – referred to as the three Yugoslav Wars.

As Karadžić prepared to mount his defense against 11 counts of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity from the Bosnian War, the Western media hailed his pending trial as a triumph for the ICTY and international justice. The New York Times headline read, “Karadžić arrest lends credibility to international tribunals,” while The Telegraph quipped “Radovan Karadžić arrest ‘like capturing Osama bin Laden.’”

Not since Nuremberg had a court of

The Hague been so effective in bringing war criminals to international justice, indicting and arraigning no less than 159 suspects. In his article for The Wall Street Journal, “War-Crimes Courts Build Reputation for Efficacy,” Charles Forelle wrote that the ICTY offered “one clear lesson: Most of the time, international courts do get their man.”

But not everyone looked so favorably upon the ICTY’s accomplishments. Tracy Wilkinson of The LA Times wrote, “The fact that it took 13 years to apprehend Karadžić tempers the celebration and raises new challenges for the much-criticized court.”

She added, “The tribunal will be hardpressed to prevent the proceedings from turning into the type of unwieldy and ultimately inconclusive spectacle that was the hallmark of the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia.” Meanwhile, when news of Karadžić’s capture first reached Belgrade, 15,000 Serbians arrived at the capital to protest his arrest. “Karadžić is a hero,” one nationalist supporter told The New York Times, “because he defended Serb lives during the terrible wars of the 1990s. Everyone knows that the war crimes tribunal in The Hague was designed to try Serbs while the war criminals who killed Serbs are set free.”

Halfway across the world, in Palo Alto, California, the media flurry surrounding Karadžić’s upcoming trial was of special interest to a man named Allen Weiner. As the Co-Director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law and Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation, Weiner’s interest in the ICTY was partly academic. But unlike his colleagues, Weiner’s connection to the tribunal was also personal. From 1996 to 2001, prior to joining the faculty of Stanford Law School, Weiner had made his name at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague, where he had served as Legal Counselor and U.S. representative to the ICTY. His post did not require him to act as a prosecutor for the tribunal, but rather as the middleman

between the U.S. and ICTY, negotiating the release of sensitive U.S. intelligence and representing American witnesses on the stand.

“It was a wonderful time to be in that position,” he says, his voice rising slightly. As a young lawyer, Weiner was able to pursue what he believed was a “powerfully just cause of holding perpetrators of terrible crimes criminally accountable.” But it would not have been quite the dream job, he says, had his objectives not been quite so in step with American interests.

At the time of Weiner’s appointment in 1996, international justice had only recently become US policy. Throughout the 80’s, Weiner recounts, there had been “a lot of work going on” in New York and the United Nations toward the creation of an International Criminal Tribunal “but there wasn’t much enthusiasm.”

“There were discussions, there were drafts – that went nowhere,” Weiner says.

It was Yugoslavia’s increasingly obvious parallels with the last great European crisis that broke the stalemate in the early 90’s.

“This idea that had been going nowhere in New York was suddenly animated by the atrocities that were taking place in Yugoslavia,” Weiner reflects. “I really think that it was images from the former of Yugoslavia, in particular some of the concentration camps that were so reminiscent of the second World War,” that convinced the UN Security Council “to move from atrocity to response.”

Since the outcome of the Holocaust and Japanese occupation had been the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Weiner claims that it was “easy to focus the imagination on the idea of a new Tribunal.”

On May 25th 1993, two years after Yugoslavia, under pressure from ethnic nationalists, fractured into six warring republics, the United Nations Security Council voted on a compromise: the creation of a temporary tribunal that would prosecute the atrocities taking place in Yugoslavia and serve as an eventual de facto experiment for the feasibility of a permanent court. The {features} 15

official title given to this provisional tribunal was the “International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991.” The name was quickly shortened to the more wieldy “International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,” and the ICTY was born.

II. A Change of Course: From Deterrence to Reconciliation Upon the establishment of the ICTY in 1993, the Yugoslav Wars were not yet over. According to Weiner, the tribunal hoped that fear of retribution would prevent further atrocities. “I think there was genuine hope when the Tribunal was created that it would serve a deterrent function,” he says. But the violence in Yugoslavia worsened in spite of the new criminal court. “You have to remember,” Weiner says, “the worst atrocity that took place in the war in the former Yugoslavia – the Srebrenica massacre – happened in 1995, after some of the people who were involved in that atrocity were already indicted by the ICTY.” The genocide at Srebrenica was testament to the staggering tragedy of the Bosnian War, which began when Serbia and Croatia – countries with strong ethnic identities – secretly agreed to divide their neighbor Bosnia between them in 1991. The nascent, multi-ethnic state of Bosnia, composed of Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosniacs, found itself engulfed in a civil war fueled by its neighbors.

The war produced atrocities on all sides. The ICTY indicted Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims alike, but Karadžić’s agenda of “ethnic cleansing” made him the most notorious war criminal of the Bosnian War. As the first president of the Republika Srpska, the Serbian entity in the Bosnian War, Radovan Karadžić simultaneously fought Croatian and Bosniac forces while massacring nonSerbs in territories he viewed to be rightfully and historically Serbian. Two years after the ICTY had been established, 16 the claw

Radovan Karadžić ordered Serbian forces to systematically seize more than 8,000 Bosniac men within the UN safe-zone of Srebrenica and transport the captives to nearby fields and warehouses. After the first rounds of machine gun fire, most victims were merely injured, and it would be hours until the Serbian paramilitary force known as the Scorpions returned to kill the survivors. Meanwhile, Karadžić ordered tens of thousands of Bosniac women and children to be forcibly removed from the Srebrenica territory, thus “ethnically cleansing” the city of threats to Serbian land claims. The UNmandated presence of several hundred Dutch peacekeepers had not prevented the tragedy, and neither had the ICTY. It was then that the tribunal accepted its failure to save lives, Weiner says, focusing instead on its ability to help survivors.

“There was a really powerful belief,” he says, “that if the ICTY were able to hold the worst perpetrators of crimes accountable, it would enable victims groups to see that it was not everyone in that whole other group who’s evil and bad, but just those particular actors.” The ICTY hoped that this process, known as the “individuation of guilt,” would enable victims “to start to deal with other members of that group who were not guilty.”

The tribunal also recognized the importance of documenting the atrocities that had taken place. “A historical record can be an important element in creating the political conditions enabling a wartorn society to move forward,” Weiner says.

But the task was daunting. Unlike the Nazis, who meticulously recorded their activities (much to the benefit of the Nuremberg Trials), the warring nations of former Yugoslavia took steps to hide the evidence of their crimes.

Most troublingly, Weiner points out, the tribunal had difficulty proving a massacre of massive proportions had taken place at Srebrenica. “After burying all the people they killed in these mass killing fields,” he says grimly, the perpetrators of Srebrenica “realized they needed to hide the evidence. So they dug up the bodies

with backhoes and dump trucks and scattered them in little secondary grave sites all over Bosnia.”

Without the evidence, the ICTY was hampered in refuting Serbia’s claim that Srebrenica was nothing more than perverse propaganda designed to ostracize Bosnian Serbs. “For a long time after Srebrenica, eight to ten thousand people were missing but there were no bodies,” Weiner says, “so the Serbs basically denied a terrible atrocity had taken place.

‘We don’t believe ten thousand people were killed,’ they insisted, asking ‘Where are the bodies?’”

What the ICTY did not anticipate, he warns, was that the people of former Yugoslavia would be unwilling to assist the court in its investigations. “This is one of the huge problems that the Court faced,” Weiner says. “It just assumed the countries of the former Yugoslavia would accept its legitimacy.” In 1994, just a year after its founding, the ICTY issued “a couple of indictments and sent them off to Bosnia,” under the assumption that “Bosnian Serbs in particular would comply with these arrest warrants.” The court was unprepared for the backlash.

“They didn’t realize that they’d be viewed essentially as a hostile force among Bosnian Serbs, Serbians, Bosnian Croats, and Croatians as well, and they were ill-equipped to deal with that,” Weiner says. “There was tremendous ignorance or misinformation in Yugoslavia about the ICTY,” Weiner says. “The only people who were talking about the ICTY in Yugoslavia were people who were critical of it – describing it as biased, as an instrument or tool of the West to manipulate domestic politics to humiliate the Serbs in particular – and it took the ICTY a long time to realize that this was a huge problem.”

As a result of the antagonism toward the tribunal on the ground, “the West saw the active support of the ICTY as inconsistent with the peace-building and state-building process that NATO was engaged in.” But without cooperation from Yugoslavians, the ICTY was utterly reliant on Western support. “It depended on the West for information and for

money,” Weiner says. “It had no police force, it had no capacity to enforce its orders on the ground, and it depended on Western military forces for things like search warrants and arrests.”

Unfortunately for the ICTY, “there wasn’t much support in operational terms for the ICTY by NATO” in the early years of the tribunal. Even after a US-led intervention coerced Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia into signing the Dayton Accords in 1995, a culture of impunity still reigned. The Western military coalition had outlined a strict timetable and limited mandate for its intervention in Bosnia; President Clinton, in particular, had promised not to get America bogged down in Bosnia, and, in an election year, was disinclined to break his promise. Despite Bosnia’s apparent struggles, he forced Bosnia’s post-war elections through on schedule, leading to the entrenchment of the very extremists originally responsible for the

conflict. Even with 50,000 troops on the ground and an agreement in place to support the ICTY, suspected war criminal Slobodan Milošević remained in office, and the president of the Republika Srpksa was still Bosnia’s greatest war criminal: Radovan Karadžić.

Still, the end of the Yugoslav Wars marked a turning point for the ICTY. “When NATO and Washington and Paris and Berlin and London realized that what was good for the ICTY was also good for their foreign policy objectives in the former Yugoslavia, then we started to see the deployment of real diplomatic and military coercion.”

Beginning in 1996, the year Weiner first reported to his post at The Hague, the U.S. government began to use its intelligence to find where the victims of Srebrenica had been interred. From 1996 to 2000, 21 mass graves were eventually exhumed, revealing the lengths to which Serbian forces had gone

to cover up the atrocities. The scattering process had meant that body parts from the same person could often be found in more than one gravesite, complicating identification. Still, it was obvious that the victims were executed, rather than killed in combat: many of the bodies still wore blindfolds, and their hands were tied with cloth, string and wire.

This, Weiner believes, was one of the court’s “great successes.” “The introduction of the evidence showing that the massacre occurred made it much harder for anyone to deny the atrocity.” Weiner also points out that the Court “finally realized it needed to do more to help people in the region understand more about what the Court did, what it was, and what its mission was,” he says. “In 1999, the ICTY established an outreach program and actually established field offices in the former Yugoslavia to disseminate accurate information about the Court.”

A mosque, Catholic church, and Orthodox church in Bosanka Krupa

{features} 17

Modern construction in Sarajevo

III. Bosnia Legal Although Weiner now serves as the Co-Director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law, he is not afraid to show irreverence toward the legal discourse surrounding international justice. “The whole question of humanitarian intervention or the responsibility to protect is a subject that is written about really, really extensively in international law jurisprudence.

I sometimes cannot tell whether the literature is more voluminous or more repetitive, because people keep making the same arguments.”

Weiner has no faith that the recognition of a right of humanitarian intervention would itself change the likelihood that states will use military force to put a halt to atrocities like those that took place during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. “You could have a doctrine authorizing humanitarian intervention, and you still wouldn’t see US marines in Sudan,” he says. “My view is that the focus on the responsibility to protect or the right of humanitarian intervention mistakenly locates the central questions in a legal context.”

He argues that the conversation should instead center on the “instrumental advantages” of international courts. “There was a time 18 the claw

when the justice issue was irrelevant,” Weiner says, “In the transitions from authoritarianism in Chile and Argentina in the late 1970’s, it was understood that you would trade off justice for peace.

Justice was not really very much of a factor. And even if we sometimes now see a conflict between justice and peace, the ICTY has really elevated the role of justice and ensured that we always have to have some strategy for taking justice into account in these mass atrocity and conflict resolution situations.

“The success of the ICTY in terms of demonstrating that an international court like this could function created tremendous momentum for the tribunals that were created afterwards – the Rwanda Tribunal, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, and ultimately the international criminal court in The Hague. The fact that we now have a permanent international criminal court in The Hague I think is a direct result of the success of the ICTY.” Yet for a law professor, especially the former US legal counsel to The Hague, Weiner remains very humble in thinking about what law can accomplish.

“The tribunal was founded,” he says, “in part to create the impression that we were doing something without having to do everything.” He adds, “But

it remains unclear how effective judicial processes can be in trying to create a new basis for new relations either within in a society or between countries that have suffered something as terrible as genocide.”

Karadžić’s Republika Srpska still endures as one of two autonomous members of a weak and de-centralized Bosnian government. Although Bosnia’s pro-Western government, which eked out a 2008 victory over Serbian nationalists by half a percentage point, promised to work with the West, Republika Srpska has systematically sabotaged reform, and even hinted at secession. The resulting political paralysis has impeded economic recovery and the return of refugees. The economic crisis only exacerbated Bosnia’s woes. Unemployment, as officially reported, loomed above 40% in 2009.

But on March 31st 2010, the Serbian Parliament voted to formally apologize to Bosnia for the Srebrenica massacre.

The vote was not unanimous. Reuters reported, “For some parliamentarians, the resolution was unjust for ignoring war crimes against Serbs,” while others protested that the resolution “stopped short of calling the killings ‘genocide.’”

It was only after 13 hours of debate that the measure narrowly passed.

Weiner reflects, “I think there is a way in which we tend to over-legalize or see law as a really powerful tool for addressing these problems, but the truth is that law is not an especially powerful tool. It’s a tool and it can serve functions, but in the international system in particular, it has a modest role to play. We like it because it’s didactic, it’s black and white, it involves norms, it’s psychologically powerful, but if we really want to think about relations between Serbia and Bosnia, it is a fair question whether or not solutions other than legal solutions are the ones that need to be emphasized.” Still, Weiner is pragmatic: “In the realm of human rights, I don’t think the fact that you can’t achieve your maximalist objectives means it’s hypocritical or cynical to take those steps that you can.”

Max Allan McClure ’11 {features} 19

Photographs by Hannah Miller Rich ’12

“Working in the garden allows me to create something tangible with my hands. This helps me maintain a balance with the largely intangible products of working with my mind at school.”

—Nick Wenner

In the fall of 2009, students and faculty submitted a proposal to establish the “Stanford Student Farm,” a two-tothree-acre farm on Stanford’s campus set aside for agricultural education and research. The Stanford Farm Project came together to encourage Provost Etchemendy and the Stanford Land Use and Environmental Planning Office to pass the proposal, hoping to give the community a sense of ownership for and connection to the potential farm. The students photographed here played a major role in this effort.

20 the claw

“I have found that gardening brings people together in a wonderful way. I have found that simply connecting each day with the earth’s dirt as a means of survival holds the possibility for healing.”

—Lucy Litvak

{features} 21

“I always meet the nicest folks in the garden. I hope to find more and more people in the garden. That is what I would like to see change: more and more farmers, more and more young farmers.� —Briana Swette

22 the claw

“I farm because the moments working on a field or in a garden are the times when I have overcome the separation and distance between me and my food…I am connecting directly with the land around me, taking part and working with it. It is more than a walk in the woods, although that is nice too.”

—Briana Swette

{features} 23

PRIMARY SOURCES

Science is a noisy, continuous parliament An interview with Richard Powers Sophie Catherine Carter-Kahn ’13 and Max Allan McClure ’11

Angela Lok Yee Huang ’13

24 the claw

Richard Powers looks like Stephen King, speaks like John Malkovich, and thinks like Leonardo da Vinci. The last comparison, as you might expect, is by far the most salient: Powers is a true polymath, a member of a breed that largely went out with the Renaissance. His interdisciplinary genius is more and more recognized these days – he won the National Book Award for The Echo Maker, he was a MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences… (to begin a list of his honors is inevitably to understate his accomplishments) – and he’s achieved this through the surprisingly uncommon method of simply writing stories about science.

“Simply,” however, is a little misleading – the ramifications of technological process are rarely straightforward in Powers’ work. Nearly all of his books deal with the branching philosophical consequences of some particularly knotty scientific discovery.

The Echo Maker, for instance, deals with the attempted treatment of Mark Schluter, who, after a car accident, develops Capgras syndrome – a psychological disorder in which the patient believes that one or more of their loved ones have been replaced by exact replicas. Others of his novels have dealt with hidden references in the genetic code (The Gold Bug Variations), or programmable consciousness (Galatea 2.2) or the psychological basis of happiness (Generosity).

But even if Powers writes fiction about science, it makes no sense to call his work “science fiction.” It’s telling that Powers has also set himself to producing some of the more philosophically interesting science reporting of our time. (Notably, he was one of the first humans to have his genome sequenced – revealing in the process that he has both the “novelty-seeking” gene and most of the indicators for obesity,

though he is as far away from obesity as a healthy man can be.) His ongoing project appears to be the legitimizing of cuttingedge science – including speculative science – as a topic not only suitable, but necessary for non-genre literature.

It was at least partially in this role as interdisciplinary diplomat that Richard Powers was invited to be Stanford’s 200910 Stein Visiting Writer, and the author’s conversance with a remarkably wide variety of fields became even more apparent in person than on the page. Interviewing him in the Lane Reading Room, it was obvious that the man speaks in paragraphs, or possibly essays. His casual register is spectacularly articulate, and draws on everything from a knowledge of biostatistics to existentialist theory. He is also – and while this may seem irrelevant, it should give some sense of what it is to interview him – quite tall.

Max McClure: Clearly, now you’re a writer first, but how much of a science background do you have?

at the University of Illinois. I got the sense that maybe my temperament was more suited to studying literature, because it’s about being human. And then, after two years in a Master’s program, I felt the same sense of claustrophobia and specialization again. I ended up programming computers for a living – it was my most saleable ability.

biochemistry lab on campus.

Richard Powers: When I was a kid, I assumed I’d end up a scientist, professionally – my only question was which science. I had interests in oceanography, paleontology, chemistry, astronomy, I developed obsessions with different fields, and by the time I finished high school, I decided to enter college as a physics major. I was interested in the big-picture story, the grand synthesis, so I studied physics. But the divergence of specialties made me claustrophobic. I had a generalist view of how things worked and connected, and, eventually, I came under the influence of a very impressive, powerful figure in the literature program

I started writing books about two years later. In writing, I could revisit those roads not taken, my lives put on hold.

I’ve lived vicariously in at least two to three books at a time as a scientist, as a physician, a game theoretician. A career in writing is a career about connection between specialties.

M: And you’ve been working in a

P: In Aaron Straight’s biochemistry lab, yes.

M: Has that changed your perception of science at all?

P: I had some amount of lab experience as a student – I worked in an acoustical physics lab – but I left lab work 38 years ago, and the technology of lab life has changed in three decades. This is an explosive moment for biochemistry in general and genomics in particular.

There are new tools, new procedures, everything is becoming fast, easy, and affordable. Anywhere you look there’s something to discover. It’s exhilarating, watching them stake out a claim in new and unknown lands, but it’s also helped {primary sources} 25

me remember the repetitive, laborious quality of day-to-day science. This return to experimentalism as a worldview is important to me, I think.

M: A lot of people outside science see it as sort of a black box, where objective discoveries just come out of it. I was wondering if working in a biology lab, particularly, where there’s a large fudge factor, has damaged your view of how science actually works. Does it make you view it as more subjective, or Kuhnian?

P: I had a degree of skepticism going into this experience from the number of scientific studies I’ve read, just by thinking about the inferential aspect of scientific decisions. That insight was confirmed playfully and good-naturedly in the lab. That is, when you’re looking at 30 images of tagged fluorescence and you have five people in a lab, you have a normal distribution right there – that statistical, subjective component is already there. But what amazed me is there is also a degree to which a certain amount of care and self-examination can compensate for this turbulent, complex system. Large-scale, complex math is a wonderful dance between impression and repeatability, fact and interpretation.

What you arrive at can never be called an absolute knowledge of what’s happening – but the fact that we can produce plausible, replicable, consistent models of the world is impressive.

I’m not a naïve realist, I’m not a materialist, I’m not a super-science-skeptic – I’m more of an ethnographer – I like to see how humans pursue what’s interesting to them. It’s important to know that there’s human drama and interpretation at the point of precise measurement. Science is not some other, privileged domain where the human disappears. It’s always a human, complicated story, as driven by human hopes and fears as any novel or story that engages with the world.

M: Where would you place yourself in terms of other postmodernist authors whose writing is structurally informed by 26 the claw

science, like Pynchon or DeLillo?

P: Well, you have to go on a bookby-book comparison basis. I’m doing something different – I’ve relinquished the desire to produce a world where there is no authority, and the human is another kind of artifact that’s been dropped into this world it can’t get a handle on. I believe all these things are true, but I’ve been trying to recapture some moral centers – an image of humans as not entirely lost in a seething vortex. I’m trying to write fiction where some things do circulate, and we have at least partial knowledge. I’m reconstituting venues for negotiating consensual moral practices.

The tragedy of humankind is that the brain thinks it’s a soul. And one approach is to run with the bleakest, most nihilistic interpretation – “This was just evolution, there is no meaning” – but I think the glass-half-full view is more fascinating and interesting – “You think it’s a soul, how astonishing.”

M: There is another similarity between you and some of the postmodernists – you play with language in your writing.

Mark, for instance, in The Echo Maker, ends up using language with more regard for its sound than its meaning.

P: Well, his language becomes unstuck, which is in the tradition of postmodernism with roots in poststructuralism. The idea is that we’re always inhibited by language – language always stands between us and knowing.

We are in a prisonhouse of language, or, to put it another way: we make a map of the world with language, but every attempt to translate the world onto this map distorts the world. And this map is all we get. But, again, to take the glasshalf-full approach, this unstable, slipping quality makes language a potential source of meaning in its own right. A map has been shaped by the place it represents – even if it’s not the world, it is a result of the world as it is. Language may, in fact, be almost as interesting as the world it represents, and more accurate than you

believe. It isn’t an arbitrary phenomenon – there is likely some underlying physical basis for language.

M: Do you mean that in the same way as, say, the Doppler effect, where the distortion of the wave frequency is actually giving you more information than a “correct” signal?

P: There is some of that – the signal extractable from the noise. But I mean this more in the sense that language is a barrier, but also a tunnel. Its chief virtue is that we become aware of ourselves. Every representation we make of the world encodes a representation of ourselves. We are experiencing constant reciprocity, which is meaningful even if it’s not accurate.

M: Another topic The Echo Maker deals with is cognitive behavioral therapy, which The New Yorker recently had an article on,1 suggesting it was more of an “indoctrination” into the cult of American optimism than an actual therapy. CBT is pretty ambiguous in The Echo Maker, but I was wondering, since you are something of an optimist – P: Am I an optimist?

M: Not like a cult, or in the “everything is sunny” sense, but you do seem hopeful about the human mind.

P: Well, people’s persistence after brain injury, for instance, is a testimony to the plasticity of the brain and the narrative of the self. Mark’s new construction of the world is as usable as anyone’s. In fact, his Capgras delusion is so usable that it begins to destabilize his sister when he says, “You can’t call yourself my sister anymore.” The self is engaged in an ongoing improvisation. This is all illusory – the brain can be damaged – but the brain continues producing new explanations and telling some story that is sufficient for it to garner a stable image of the world.

I’m very skeptical of optimism generally, 1 Louis Menand, “Head Case,” The New Yorker, March 1, 2010.

though. The book is not a case history of people who triumphed. It’s meant to present a view of the self as being tenuous – the idea that the only thing that is not desirable, but obtainable, for the brain is to master the conditions of existence. But does that mean it descends into postmodern fragmentary despair? No. There’s the Woody Allen joke, about the man whose brother thinks he’s a chicken. Psychiatrist asks why the man is tolerating this, and the punchline is “because we need the eggs.”2 “We need the eggs” is my general view of the human condition. It’s more important to find social meaning and human meaning that gets us through the night, rather than to hold up the finger and deny the validity of those structures. Denying them would imply some God’s-eye view, or a priori knowledge. As long as we all have improvisation, that’s meaningful.

M: How does this subjectivist view apply to science?

P: Science is a system of perpetual, dynamic, reciprocal negotiation among a multitude of subsystems – it’s not monolithic. There is no final integration. Science is a noisy, continuous parliament. So, how do you negotiate between competing entities?

That’s where the common denominator between science and literature comes in. When you have five guys looking at fluorescence, they’re negotiating. They’re adjudicating the data acquisition process and integrating what are not necessarily commensurable views of the world. And in a novel, people who have independent views of the world bump against each other – choices push them into new and turbulent and unsolvable situations.

None of the characters agree with each other, but characters don’t just say, “I’m crazy,” either. Life is a messy negotiation, 2 As told in Allen’s Annie Hall, the joke goes: “This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc,my brother’s crazy, he thinks he’s a chicken,’ and the doctor says, ‘Well why don’t you turn him in?’

And the guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’”

and so is science. Fiction allows us to see that reciprocity. The very debate confirms my view.

M: It’s the old survey that asked if you thought the nation was divided or undivided, and the results came back split down the middle.

P: I think this confusion means we should move away from the topdown approach, towards a bottom-up experimentalist approach. When I sit down with the blank page and put the words on it, this is me moving from the top down – I have a theme and a worldview, in the God’s-eye way of writing the novel. But an understanding of science as a reciprocal approach allows me to keep my eyes open and watch what that character is trying to tell me and let her dictate. I try to make research part of both preparation and composition, so I can be open to the possibility of thinking about and reinterpreting the results.

Sophie Carter-Kahn: Do you approach literature in the same way as you approach science, then? Are the tools of science equivalent to the tools of writing?

P: The tools of writing are the tools and effects of linguistic choice, and you can think about them in a scientific way. You can ask questions about the probable interpretative effects of voice, syntax, register on a reader. I think you can think about language through a series of techniques that writing depends on and that will create a final perspective at certain distances, rather than there being a right choice and a wrong choice.

Choices have varying effects – they’ll have a certain effect on readers within a statistical range.

M: Do you think that having your personal genome sequenced will have an overall positive effect as far as better understanding people, or yourself, at least?

P: I think we’re going to see the most significant effects of gene sequencing

in the field of pharmacogenomics. My genome, for instance, told me a lot about the likelihood of deleterious effects of certain drugs. This gives you the first step towards personalized, evidencebased prescriptions. But maybe the first effects won’t be clinical: genomics could absolutely change the way we think about ourselves. Now, a lot of people say, “I’m x” or, “I’m y,” by genetics or by blood. But this self-definition by opposition is social nonsense that will go away when we suddenly can’t identify as separate anymore – because our genes don’t separate so easily.

Still, I’m not overall positive on the idea.

We haven’t done enough thinking about who gets to see what, or who has access.

Technology always goes faster than social maturation, and we tend to just blunder through as we keep refashioning society.

Your parents were raised in a world where anybody would be shocked to have access to medical records. Now, every time I run my card, my data is seen by thousands of people. The privacy battle is lost. Now we’re arguing about who gets to see it, rather than whether it should be collected at all. As far as longterm optimism – again, I don’t know. Sir Martin Rees3 puts our odds of human extinction in this century at 50%. Maybe none of this matters.

M: Obviously we’re not at this point yet, but, as science’s predictive power increases and we know more and more things definitively, do you ever worry about losing the twist ending?

P: That’s a very interesting question – I think I can only answer it by saying that my personal genome has carried me away from simple-minded genetic determinism and towards an appreciation of the environment. The way that geneticists think is nature, then nurture, but we’d actually have to know about the environment in the largest possible sense. For a connectivist view of the environment like that, the data set is 3 The current Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom.

{primary sources} 27

Kendra Lyn Allenby ’10

orders of magnitude larger. But this is so far away. Have a look at Generosity4 - that tackles reductive determinism in the face of the environment. The question there is, how can the protagonist actually be happy? And the problem is completely unsolvable. The only place where you can begin to think about it – the only simulation you can run it in – is the 4 Generosity: an Enhancement is a novel about a perpetually happy young woman who becomes a subject of study for a geneticist who hopes to reprogram the human brain.

28 the claw

novel. Fiction will be around for a while.

S: You’ve referred to reading as a form of secular prayer – did you mean that in a meditative sense?

P: Literature’s role is one of allowing people to integrate personally. And a book may have a passive effect on a reader, leading to quiet change. Or a book may be active, and demand that the reader take action. Books can change the world – Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, for instance. This was a novel that

had a profound effect, because people responded to it emotionally, and it led Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. It had a very active effect on its readership. So, no, fiction can do all kinds of things to its readers, but the thing that it does best is raise awareness – and it can do so because it combines facts and emotions, cortex and amygdala, feel and think. When you’re done reading a successful book, for a while anyway, all the things you’ve taken for granted look a little different. If you choose to respond differently, that’s your choice.

The Secret Lives of Moors

by Priscilla Mihae Mann ’11

F

ourteen hundred ninety-two was an important year for Spain – but not only thanks to Columbus. On January 2nd, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella defeated and expelled their archnemesis Abu Abdullah Muhammad XII, the sultan of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, thus ending 781 years of Arab rule in the Iberian Peninsula.

It was a great reversal of fortune for the Arabs. Spain had been annexed to the Islamic empire since 711 C.E., when the Umayyid caliph Al-Walid I ordered his Berber subjects in Northern African to take the Iberian Peninsula from the Visigoths. Led by the general Tariq ibn-Ziyad – who infamously burned his ships upon arrival in Gibraltar and delivered a motivational speech that would have made Henry V proud – the Umayyad Berbers conquered all but the northernmost regions of the peninsula, calling their new home “Al-Andalus.”

Control of Al-Andalus cycled through five Islamic dynasties, the last being the Nasrids. Under Nasrid rule, Andalusian culture flourished, producing art and architecture with a signature mix of Islamic and native Iberian influences, symbolized above all in the legendary Alhambra palace. Up to the north, the Christians referred to their Islamic neighbors as “Moors.”

By the time Ferdinand and Isabella rode triumphantly through the Alhambra, the Nasrid dynasty had long been in decline. The Christian Spaniards immortalized the final defeat by naming a mountain pass in the Sierra Nevada

after “The Moor’s Last Sigh.” As the story goes, the disgraced Moorish emir, Abu Abdullah Muhammad XII (or, as the Spaniards called him: ‘Boabdil’) looked from the Sierra Nevada upon the Alhambra. When he cried for his lost kingdom, his mother said to him for all of history to record, “Weep like a woman for what you could not defend as a man.”

Although Boabdil and his mother never saw Spain again, the “Moors” remained behind to test their fate under the Catholic monarchs. Although Ferdinand and Isabella promptly expelled the Jews from Granada, they at first gave the Moors almost full autonomy.

Nevertheless, these Arabic-speaking, devout Muslims were not the subjects that the Inquisition had in mind. When the Moors did not make enough of an effort to voluntarily convert, Ferdinand and Isabella decided to coerce them. In 1525, they banned the practice of any religion other than Catholicism. Facing expulsion or execution, the Moors converted en masse. These newly baptized Catholics were dubbed “Moriscos” – or, “Moor-like.”

Initially, the Crown was not concerned with stamping out AlAndalusian culture, but, to the chagrin of the Inquisition, Moriscos did not fully embrace their new faith. Many continued to practice Islam in secret, praying for the day when Spain would return to Islamic control.

The Inquisition soon realized that by weakening Andalusian culture, it could force the Moriscos to assimilate. In

1567, Felipe I passed sweeping reforms that outlawed all marks of Andalusian ways of life, including the use of Arabic.

Unsurprisingly, the Moriscos rebelled.

The response from the Spanish Crown was even more extreme. When the Moriscos were defeated four years later, the Crown exiled them from Andalusia, forcing the Moriscos to resettle in the disparate regions of Spain.

This mass relocation did not put an end to the covert practice of Islam, though it did weaken the Morisco’s ties to their past. But the Moriscos were not about to let the Inquistion win. Caught between the old customs of Al-Andalus and the modern world of Christian Spain, the Moriscos devised ways of negotiating their mixed identity. When they began to forget their Arabic, the Moriscos translated their poems and stories into Spanish – but they continued to use the Arabic alphabet, in defiance of the Inquisition. So, while the writing looked like Arabic, those who could actually read the manuscripts knew that the letters formed Spanish words.

This was a risky practice; the possession of Arabic documents was punishable by death, and these manuscripts were often hidden underground or in caves, a precaution that did not encourage their preservation.

This branch of Spanish literature became known as “aljamiado,” from the Arabic word “al-jamiyya,” or “foreign,” since, as far as the Moriscos were concerned, they were writing in a foreign language: Spanish. {primary sources} 29

Many of the aljamiado manuscripts that have survived are not “literature” as such; they range from legal documents to prayer books. Those that are literary are mostly translations of Arabic stories.

But there are exceptions. The most acclaimed piece of aljamiado literature is The Song of Joseph, an epic poem based on the Quranic sura of Jacob’s favorite son, which tells of Joseph’s betrayal at the hands of his 11 brothers, his trials in Egypt, and his ascent from slavery to the right-hand of the Pharaoh – a Morisco version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. There

are only two extant manuscripts of the poem, one of which, befitting of the aljamiado ethos, was in fact found in a cave. But what distinguishes The Song of Joseph is its meter; the poem is rendered in cuaderna via, the medieval clerical meter considered the high art form of its day.

The Song of Joseph found its way into the traditional canon of Spanish literature when George Ticknor included the poem in the appendix to the first edition of History of Spanish Literature published in 1854. Since then, the poem’s fame has saved aljamiado literature from

oblivion. Cervantes also did his part to ensure that history did not forget the Moriscos. He insists throughout Don Quixote that the story was first written by a Morisco; the novel itself, Cervantes claims, is merely a Spanish translation of the original Arabic tale.

Unfortunately, the Duke of Lerma Francisco Gómez did not foresee a future of coexistence. In 1609, he convinced King Felipe III to expel the Moriscos from Spain. Of the litany of unspeakable crimes committed by the Inquisition, this was one of the worst. Thousands of Moriscos were slaughtered at sea, or

Spanish Transliteration of El poema de Yusuf, 14th folio {f. 14v} Que por laš toronjaš, la šangre iba dando.

Zaliha, cuando lo vido, toda še fue alegrando; Dezía-leš: “¿Qué fez, locaš de šin cuidado, Que por vuešaš1 manoš la šangre iba andando?”

Y ellaš, de que lo vieron, šintieron šu locura.

Dezía-leš Zaliha: “¿Qué feiš, locaš šin cordura?

Que por una višta2 šola, torrnadeš en locura.

Yo, ¿qué debía fazer a dende el tienpo que me dura?”

Dišeron laš dueñaš: “A ti te culpamoš.

Nošotroš šomoš laš erradaš, que te rrazonamoš.

Máš anteš guišaremoš qu’él te venga a tuš manoš.

De manera que šeaiš avenidoš entran-voš.”

1 2

30 the claw

puešaš vista

upon their arrival in North Africa; those that survived fled to disparate regions of Europe and the Mediterranean, never to be reunited. Thus, the Inquisition fulfilled its ambition: to erase all memory of Islamic Spain. But just in case, the Crown did send a few aljamiado manuscripts to the New World so that the church there could identify any rogue Moors who had made their way to South America.

Of course, the Inquisition could not have foreseen that the story of the Moriscos would fascinate contemporary academics. At Stanford University,

Professor Vincent Barletta of Iberian and Latin American Studies is currently building a digital library for aljamiado literature. The project, called “Alhadith,” aims to amass a comprehensive bibliography on Morisco studies and publish images of all available aljamiado manuscripts online. For those who cannot read Arabic script, Alhadith has established standards for transliteration into Latin characters.

Barletta’s interest in aljamiado literature is not political, though he acknowledges that the subversive potential of the genre. Aside from being

a tacit reminder of one of the darker moments in Spanish history, these watermarked, 500-year-old manuscripts evokes current political crises as well. Identity is a tricky subject in Spain, with Franco gone and the country’s minority languages in flux. The uptick in Muslim immigration from the Magreb and further afield will only further complicate the question of what makes Spain Spain. If aljamiado literature shows contemporary readers anything, it is that the breakdown in Spanish society was never so simple. For that, at the very least, the Moriscos are worth a long look.

(Arabic reads right to left) {f. 14r} Dio-leš rricoš comereš y vinoš ešmeradoš; Caían todaš agudaš de ditadoš, Dio šeleš šendaš toronjaš, y gamiñeteš en laš manoš,1 Tašanteš y apueštoš y muy bien atenpradoš.

Y fueše Zaliha a do Yusuf eštaba.

De púrpura y de šeda muy bien lo aguišaba.

Y de piedraš presiošaš muy bien lo afeitaba.

Verdugo de oro2 en šuš manoš, a la dueñaš lo invitaba.3 Ellaš, de que lo vieron, perdieron šu cordura, Tanto era de apuešto y de buena fegura, Penšaban qu’era ángel, y tornaban en locura.

Cortaban-še laš manoš y no ende habían cura.4

Estos errores del copista han sido corregido en la transliteración: mannoš verdugodero 3 lonvitaba 4 nonde abien kura 1 2

{primary sources} 31

An ASSU Senator’s farewell speech (and drinking game) On March 10th, 2010, Zachary Warma delivered his farewell address to the ASSU undergraduate senate. The selfstyled “Senator from the Upper Row” had e-mailed his “constituents” a week earlier, promising that while his speech “…may not hold a goddamned candle to Washington’s 1796 address in terms of majesty […] at least you will be drinking.” At the bottom of the e-mail, he outlined the rules for his farewell speech drinking game.

On the brink of leaving Stanford to spend a spring in Washington fetching coffee for real politicians, Mr. Warma used his last senate meeting to ensure that his opinion was reflected on the record.

Senate meetings are, apparently, open to the public, but being so infrequently attended by anyone other than the senators themselves, they take place in a room in the Nitery with little room for a gallery. By the time I arrived, slipping into the back corner of the room and popping the tab of a can of Coors, I was not alone. All along the walls, there were people gathered to hear the speech, easy to pick out by the drinks in their hands.

Clad in a suit and tie and armed with a bottle of brandy and a scroll, Senator Warma sat until he was allowed to speak. He stood on a chair and unfurled his scroll to the crowd’s amusement, and for the next five to seven minutes, all eyes were on him—his voice only interrupted with whoops of laughter, occasional winces, and the pop of beer cans.

—P. Cuddly ‘10

32 the claw

“

Esteemed colleagues (hah),

friends, and besotted members of the peanut gallery (or as I call you, my real constituency)— ‘Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.’

Samuel Langhorn Clemens’s words of endearment towards elected officials, one could proffer, adequately sums up the view held by this campus towards the Associated Students of Stanford University. As many of you know, and are no doubt reveling in, tonight is the final evening I will physically stand before you as a member of the Undergraduate Senate, for in nary three weeks I will be under the whims of the House Armed Services Committee, for an internship that will keep me away from the Stan for nearly six months.

I stand before you all today as a man suffering from, beyond his usual neuroses, a mixture of weariness, frustration, and, dare I say it, even nostalgia. It is fitting that my departure comes just as the proverbial shitstorm of the Spring Election is brewing, that annual ritual of overeager individuals trumpeting ‘changing the ASSU,’ smattering every available corner of wall space with lowbrow fliers. Though none will ever match the glory of ‘Keeping you Warma all night long.’ But I digress.

Having seen the maddening inconsistency of this 11th Undergraduate Senate, I cannot help but mildly chuckle looking back to the time before I was myself was an idealistic, schemer to be. Oy. What a year can do. Frankly, this Senate has suffered through our fair share of fuck-ups. From deciding to stop publishing weekly minutes on a website delayed for ages, to failing for four months to deal with a sticky issue of a now-former senator’s leave of absence, to allowing shrill voices of dissent from pissed off FO’s turn into blood feuds, to burning bridges with the Execs in such a way there is no goddamned hope of repair…well, you get the picture. There are some criticisms about our actions this year, least of all regarding our raging douchebaggery.

However, do not think for a moment I will give an inch to those nattering nabobs of negativism who try to ignore, trivialize, or deride the impressive accomplishments of this body. We initiated a Green Events Checklist, through the efforts of the Sustainability Subcommittee (love you Dean!) to help encourage environmentally conscious efforts on the part of student groups. We worked to ensure the O-show and Mausoleum Party, two campus traditions, were able to occur. We took on the Office of Judicial Affairs (and won, no less!) over undue and unconstitutional meddling on their part within the Board of Judicial Affairs. We have brought to the table discussions of ethics reform and free speech, two pressing issues that are frequently ignored. And most vitally, we toiled to institute measures that will see that our vibrant student culture is funded and supported over the next decades. To paraphrase the bumpers of innumerable F-350s scattered about our Heartland, ‘these colors don’t run.’

Allow me for but a moment, however, to direct my thoughts inward, to pause and reflect on my own experience serving the Stanford body politic. To the question I have been posed several times over recently – ‘did you enjoy the Senate?’ – well, to I say enjoyed the Senate is akin to saying Trotsky enjoyed the repeated bludgeons to his face with an ice pick. The ASSU has robbed me of money, sleep, sobriety on Tuesday nights, and my

Warma’s Farewell Speech Drinking Rules

sophomore year spring quarter. Over the course of both my campaign and tenure in office, I have been referred to by such titles as ‘conservative boogyman,’ ‘asshole,’ ‘douchebag,’ and the two newest additions, ‘a vocal rogue minority with a partisan political agenda,’ and, wait for it, ‘sheep herder.’ Wherever he may be (first floor corner of Old Union), God love ya Gobaud. I also managed to destroy any potential relationship with Office of Judicial Affairs, had to clean up the dumbassery of the Senate Leadership on several issues, and assisted in conducting a four-and-a-half-hour long interview process where my tequila ran out 90 minutes in.

But I must say, it hasn’t been all bad. I aided in the passage of intense legislative victories, and even honest-to-God tried, in some small ways, to make Stanford just a little bit better, be it from meeting with Dining and Housing, or working to provide access to information and contacts for students. On a less than ideal note, I referred to a colleague, after a profoundly imbecilic vote, as being a fascist. I toed the line against administrators and a somewhat anti-democratic ASSU President, and ran a big mother trucking campaign operation that may have relegated to three hours of sleep for two weeks, but handed me an experience beyond compare.

So was the Senate ‘fun’? Eh… Did I have to do it, and would my time at Stanford not have been complete without it? Oh abso-fuckinglutely. Tragically enough to admit it, the ASSU has formed a central element of my stint on the Farm. From the thrill of the fight, to meeting bizarre and absurd characters who have become some of my closest of friends, I would not trade one moment of my time in the service of an imperfect institution.

Call me what you will, (because there’s a good chance I’ve called all of you worse), but in the end, why I ran was this: even for our shortcomings and flaws and perverse sadomasochism, service in the name of the student body is a truly noble aim, one that has the capacity, if done properly, to be a force for tangible progress. And even if I merely have to crush wellintentioned stupidity, let the record reflect: It is not the critic, (or in Nikhil Joshi’s case), the sycophantic hobbit sludge merchant, who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming: but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Well Pardners, I’ll catch you later down the road. It has been a distinct pleasure serving as your Senator from the Upper Row. Doesn’t mean I’ll miss any of you in DC. Thank you.”

—Zachary Russell Warma ‘11

(It may not hold a goddamned candle to Washington’s 1796 address in terms of majesty, but hell, at least you will be drinking. Unless specified, take one sip for each occurrence.)

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

Warma curses.

Warma quotes someone.

Warma quotes the Big Lebowski.

Warma makes an obscure historical reference you hate yourself for knowing (two sips).

Warma makes use of Yiddish, obscure phrases, or archaic English.

Warma uses a phrase/nickname of his own creation.

Warma mocks the ASSU, in particular useless schmucks who he has openly disdained in mixed company/Senate Meetings/Gmail chat.

You distinctly remember Warma bitching to you about anything he mentions.

You know whom Warma holds responsible for any of the fuck ups (3 always viable options: one is related to a slum dog, one is connected to taking your foot off the gas pedal, and the other is David Gobaud).

Warma mocks a geographic region that does not match up to his beloved CA. Warma defends the ASSU (1/2 sip for every defense).

Warma calls you out directly, or references you in some fairly clear manner.

Warma makes a bad joke.

Warma makes a good joke (3 sips/ not happening).

Someone in the ASSU glares at Warma.

Warma comes off as idealistic (3 SIPS).

Warma gets cat-called from the peanut gallery.

You actually agree with Warma on a substantial point.

You like the word “nabob.”

Every time Warma questions a person’s intellectual capacities/uses any synoym of the word “stupid.”

Two words for you – “sheep herder.” {primary sources} 33

Kathryn Cashel Pyne ’12 34 the claw

FICTION

Joy Jean Henry ’10 artwork by Angela Lok Yee Huang ’13 35

T

his man is telling me he learned about the Beatles when the song “Come Together” was used in a commercial for batteries, and I am getting belligerent towards him. I know exactly what he thinks. He thinks this fact makes him an endearing oaf. But his suit is too neatly tailored, and his speech is sowing seeds of hatred in me, and this gin and tonic is making me grow larger and larger. I am a giant. I am saying crushing things.

“You know, I discovered War and Peace because someone left some Tolstoy fanfiction on the shitter,” I say.

He says, “Oh really?” or some other muttering, and doesn’t laugh or act offended which means he is either an idiot or wasn’t listening. It’s easy to be skeptical of men because I am small and mousy. When you are beautiful you can expect much more of them.

A woman who used to be my best friend is here, my ex-best friend. This is her new apartment we are warming. She is beautiful and she is walking towards us. Her beauty has always been difficult, partly because I was in love with her, and partly because it is incredibly trying to be the best friend of a beautiful woman.

When you go out together, men and women alike are just falling all over her.

You can’t blame them really, because physicality is demanding. Because it’s here now! There is an obscenity in it.

She gently takes the oaf ’s forearm.

“Nik,” she says, “this is Rebecca,” pointing to her roommate. They shake hands, and this man Nik is suddenly less aloof. His eyes go from some unfocused spot on the wall straight to their shiny profiles. Erin knows that alcohol gives me an antisocial obtuseness mixed with delusions of grandeur. She is here to save this man.

“I told Rebecca,” she says, “that we would make such a great trio, because we’re all just a little, you know, crazy!”

She tells some story, and they’re laughing, and she is winning hearts and minds.

Oh I’m sure you’re all crazy, I’m thinking, absolutely crazy.

Her over-effusiveness might make

36 the claw

Cleaning My Walls sticky trigger, making less simple green, i manage a squeeze. the chalk shocks forward, surprised by liquid into thin colored strips (it was a to-do list). my wall an eczema red. a wiping expression i use when cleaning.

Charlie Aaron Mintz ’10

me feel good too, except that it’s poison.

Erin has a way of pulling you towards her, making you her ally. She’s generous, and she wants you close. It’s not until after the party’s over, when all the lights are on and everything has a grotesque tinge that you realize you don’t know anything about her.

I pull away, head for the door.

Around me voices – little droplets of inanities – are growing into a tidal wave, and I am drowning in them.

Outside, men just a bit unkempt are smoking cigarettes on the steps, and I prod them for one.

“Thanks buddy,” I say. I light the cigarette, a small and dependable ritual for whenever I feel a panic setting in. “I have been quit for two months,” I say.

“I will probably quit and I will probably not quit.”

The cement step is cold under me, and the cigarette makes my head loose and light. I am ruminating, drunkdredging. A night when we used to live together, stumbling home, laughing.

She asking and telling me things mildly illicit, coaxed on by drunkenness – “Is he

good at going down on you?” and “He’s great for me but...” – tingling my spine because usually she was reserved and queasy about the smallest honesty, even at our closest. This made every truth like getting off for me. A shared secret gave me a heartbeat between my legs. I wanted her (to tell me things). It was all one and the same, with her, all mixed up.

I swill the end of my drink, gargle it in my throat for a second just for effect and to see what kind of scene I can drum up here on the stoop. I move past thoughts, lyricizing instead, sad not enough trying want to be, train home in morning not staying, and I am not a poet, just a drunk person who has lost syntax.

There are flowers in little ceramic pots lining the steps outside her apartment. I know they belong to her.

I pull a flower and its attached clump of soil out, overturn the pot, and place the clump on top. I make my way up the steps, turning each into a piece of modern art.

“Why are you doing that?” asks one of the men. He’s standing behind me, and when I turn away from the pot I’m

working on my face is a few inches from his ass. The back pocket of his jeans has more intricate stitching than anything I’ve ever worn.

“Why are you doing that?” I say, pointing to the pocket. “Why, huh?” I say again more emphatically.

He shakes his head and squints while flicking his cigarette onto the cement.

His confusion feels satisfactory.

——— I wake up early because Erin’s cat is kneading my chest. It’s trying to suckle me. “I’m not your mother,” I tell it, but it doesn’t seem to mind. I sit up. I’m the only body strewn about the wreckage of cups and little plates and streamers. There is the intense quality of a sleeping house, and little gray bits of San Francisco morning light leaking in. I pad around, examining everything bluntly. I read the spines of books on the shelf. I open the freezer and look around for her secrets in there.

I sit and sip water, examining the view out of the back window. I feel empty and slightly ashamed, as I always do after I get drunk and allow myself to think and say pointless things. I feel like my mouth, sour and stale.

The view out of Erin’s back window is everyone else’s back window. All the houses are in a circle, and they are facing one another’s ass. My cat friend runs in psychotically, jumps on my lap again.

It’s kneading me, it wants more invisible milk. “OK,” I tell it, “have some more,” because what is it hurting me?

There was never a falling out really, just a slow retreat. Friendship is the social contract with the most loopholes, the most easy outs. She was busy, a very busy person. She was not home when I was home. Or, when she was there, someone else was too, a girl who dressed well and was friendly enough to me.

My voice would trail off when I would repeat, “Let’s get coffee,” or “Come out with me,” my little bit of pride shriveling up.

And what to do then? Ask, Please spend time with me, Please be my friend,

or a million other humiliations? After a certain age, you shouldn’t need anyone to say to you, You’re okay. That’s a private matter, the world says, don’t go around asking for it with every word you speak and every carefully crafted thing you do.

The only appropriate time to say I want you is during sex.

And so I imagined having sex with her. At night, when we were both trying to fall asleep, I would see her opening my door and crawling into my bed. She’d start undressing me and I would smile and think, the way you treat me, it doesn’t matter, because we have this secret.

I push the cat off my lap, slightly disgusted at the recollection. In the

bathroom, I rub toothpaste on my teeth with the tip of my finger, look at my face in the mirror. I think up vaguely satisfying retaliation schemes, plans confusing and absurd that will trick her into saying something genuine. Waking her up with a prolonged kiss on her neck. Holding a plastic gun to her head and saying, “Tell me something important to you.”

I grab my bag and look out the window at the street, the betters of society, sweaty people jogging and dogs sniffing patches of grass. I scribble a note on a paper towel, leave it on the table.

Thanks for the party, and letting me crash on the couch! I left you a present on the front steps.

Party On An empty avocado’s frills wake me first.

The second time, staccato hails of drills are bursting platforms from the party on the night before. I start to feel guilty.

The man who wore a floor-length red fur coat looks seedy in his t-shirt. The woman who built the glowing lilies, coffee mug in fist, stares forlorn at their silent, inert plastic leaves.

Trippers, burners, rise like trampled weeds, stare darkly in the food line, telling something, “Do your worst.”

One girl wears just a thong with “YES” scribbled up her leg in marker. She stomps her feet at us, and tries to start a song.

Rachel Elizabeth Hamburg ’10

{fiction} 37

ESSAYS

CoverGirl Doesn’t Cover Boys

by Eric Nigel Tran ’10

A

nthony Trazo is the sexual health services coordinator for Billy DeFrank, an LGBT community center in northern California, specifically in HIV/AIDS testing and counseling.

His office is unapologetically clinical.

A sign on the door says that he speaks Tagalog, another that the office is a safe space. Inside, the room is like a doctor’s office, from the bright, white lights above us to the generic blue/gray linoleum under our feet. I almost feel guilty for dragging my dirty shoes into this pristine space.

Anthony stands about 5’ 10” and is built like a tank. He has a shaved head hidden beneath a baseball cap and wears a trendy, white keffiyeh-like scarf with black checks. But, despite his macho look, he has a high-pitched voice that sounds like a blend of sugar, glitter, and rainbows.

He patiently answers me with his singsong voice when I ask pleasantries about his job (fourth year working), his past education (was an art major), his hobbies (volleyball). But our conversation deviates quickly: I am not here just to interview Anthony. I am here to ask for help.

I am an occasional amateur drag queen. I emerge a few times a year as “Bjorq,” an impersonation of Icelandic singer Bjork. I’ve made appearances at my dorms’ quarterly formal dinners and competed in my university’s annual drag ball, Genderfuk, twice. Each year, I had an outlandish outfit – a replica of Bjork’s swan dress, a mermaid-style wedding gown with a 20-lb train. Each year, I stood in the top three, chosen from a group of more than 20, almost certain that I would take the crown. And each year, my hopes were dashed as first place

38 the claw

was awarded to someone else and I was relegated to Miss Runner-Up, which is just a nice way of saying Miss NotGood-Enough.

This time, I have decided to step up my game. Until this point, I made the mistake of asking girls from my freshman dorm for make-up advice, not knowing that (1) girls often don’t know how to do make-up properly and (2) girls certainly don’t know how to do make-up for guys. Halfway through my first competition, I slipped into the bathroom for a quick check-up. Looking in the mirror, I discovered that I had unevenly distributed my foundation and the parts that I had gotten right had started to melt. Rather than looking like a glamorous queen, I looked like a leper who’d put his eye shadow on in the dark. “CoverGirl doesn’t cover boys,” Anthony admonishes me when I tell him this story.

This is why I am in Anthony’s office, surrounded by pamphlets about chlamydia and free samples of condoms, asking how high of a heel is just high enough. There is a tradition of drag mothers, experienced drag queens who mentor newbie queens (drag princesses, if you will) like me. Still, to ask someone to be your drag mother is no small deal: it requires responsibility, dedication, and large chunks of time from the mother.

For this reason, I don’t expect Anthony to be my drag mother: I have come only for advice – costume jewelry pearls of drag wisdom. Yet, before he will even agree to let me shadow him for one night, he gives me an appraising look, probably wondering if I’m worth the effort.

Anthony, when not at the Center, is a successful drag queen named

“Beyonsoy,” Beyoncé’s self-proclaimed Asian step-sister. As his drag persona, he’s won many awards, including crowd favorite at Miss Gay and Pacific Alliance, and has an official fan club with more than a hundred members. After only his first appearance as Beyonsoy, Anthony became the “it girl,” now booking gigs upwards of a year in advance. To say the least, he’s a big fish and I am a shrimp.

I fidget in my seat and the vinyl-y cushion squeaks. I notice flyers on the wall for his sometimes drag troupe, the Acts of DesperAsian. The queen on the flyer is completely done-up: she would make mannequins jealous of her flawless skin and bone structure. Her lips are pouted in the quintessential “You caught me by surprise!” pose. She is perfect.

Anthony purses his lips and nods to himself. He agrees to meet me again for hands-on training. I’m not sure whether it’s because he sees potential in me or pities my former attempts at drag, but then again, I don’t care. All I want to do is win that elusive pageant crown.

Pain is Beauty We make plans to get dolled up at the Billy DeFrank Center on Monday and head to the weekly drag night at a gay bar in my hometown, a place my queer and hippy high school friends and I revered but could never patronize. The weekend before, I prepare for my drag tutorial with Anthony. For instance, I walk around my dorm in 4” platform ankle boots. Some of my dorm-mates laugh with and/or at me as I struggle around the dorm, occasionally clumsily and painfully slipping to the ground like a baby elephant learning to walk.

(Apparently stiletto heels and freshly mopped kitchen floors do not mix well.)

A couple of them snap their fingers at me and cat-call, “Girl, those are some fierce heels.” Most don’t even notice my shoes, but look at me quizzically, wondering how I went from 5’9” to 6’1” overnight.

A few hours before I am to meet Anthony, I step into the shower. I take with me the usual accessories: shampoo, conditioner, a loofah, but also a fresh razor and shaving cream. I don’t shave often due to my inability to grow facial hair, but the dress I plan to wear later is sleeveless and short enough to be considered a long T-shirt. Therefore, though I would prefer not to, I must shave visible body hair.

I stall for a substantial amount of time, washing my hair multiple times and exfoliating every inch of my skin.

When my fingers start to prune, I take a deep breath and decide to bite the bullet.

I fill my hand with shaving cream and begin the shaving process. The initial strokes are easier than expected, though there is some resistance: it just feels like I’m scratching an itch, albeit with a razor blade. When I clear a path of skin, I rinse it with water. Without hair, the skin tingles, as if I’ve slathered it with Icy-Hot, and feels smooth to the touch.

The only comparison I can make, oddly, is a rose petal.

Shaving off inches-long hair, it turns out, requires multiple runthroughs, which requires a lot of shaving cream. Halfway through my first armpit, my bottle of Gilette putters out. I stand, razor in hand, in complete disbelief and curse my existence.

After a moment, I sigh and concede that I cannot do this without some form of help. Before I lose my nerve, I hastily wrap a towel around my waist and run back to my room, leaving shaving cream drippings in my wake. I peek my head into the room and cough at my roommate. “Hey,” I try to say nonchalantly, “could I use your shaving cream? I ran out and still have to do my legs.”

Luckily, my roommate is very

accepting, not paying attention, or good at hiding his judgments, because I make off with his bottle of shaving cream without another word. I finish the set of armpits and move to my legs, for which I put on my underwear and sit on the disability seat in the shower.

My leg hair is surprisingly thick.

As I shave, the razor makes a loud scratching noise, as if I’m sandpapering a leg made of granite. It takes me a good 20 minutes to finish my left leg and as I’m toweling off, the door, which I thought I had locked, pushes open, exposing me in my red briefs and mismatched legs.

The intruder is none other than the previous year’s Genderfuk drag pageant winner, who beat me by the slimmest of margins. He is also of Vietnamese descent, near my height, but half my weight. I could encircle the entirety of his waist with just one arm. As a boy, he already gives the twig-like girls in Vogue a run for their money. In drag, meaning six-inch stripper heels and a Tina Turner wig, he looks like the American version of a Thai Lady Boy. He, like many Asian men my age, is rather slender and soft-featured, making it easier for him to pass as a woman. Anthony, who is built, has more difficulty, and even I, an average size, struggle. I don’t fulfill a somewhat prevalent gay Asian male stereotype. I am not skinny and not without a fair amount of body hair: I cannot be a totally convincing woman. I have to win by other means: Beyonsoy, for example, impresses with her talents – kung-fu fighting while lip-synching, raving, and water-glass playing.

My rival stares at me while I, suddenly aware of my near-nudity, try naively to cover myself with my hands.

“You shave?” he accuses.

I make an indignant face. “I have a drag show tonight,” I say, but say no more, as I don’t want him to know about my plans to dethrone him.

“Well, your legs are gonna itch when the hair grows back,” he says as he turns around and exits the bathroom. I lock the door behind him and think, “As long as I win, I don’t really care.”

You’re going to wear that?

At the Center, Anthony flits in and out of his office like giant hummingbird. When I move in to hug him, he holds up his hands. “I’m sweaty,” he warns me. He has just come from volleyball. With a few broad sweeps of his arm, Anthony clears off several tabletops of space. Counter space is essential for getting ready for drag, he tells me.

Anthony bustles past me to retrieve more materials from his car.

I sit in a chair in his office, next to a stack of magazines, which include general gay interest (most of which have glistening, shirtless men on them, no matter what the feature stories are) and HIV-positive-centered titles. One of the covers features Ongina, an HIVpositive contestant from the reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race, a show that searches for “America’s next drag superstar.” Ongina is a full-time queen, whose talent and dedication far exceed my wildest dreams.

In our first meeting, Anthony told me that he believes a budding queen must have a role model, someone to take inspiration from and aspire to emulate. Conversely, good role models are necessary to beget more queens; drag is not nearly as popular as it was in the Stonewall Riots era. Critics ascribe this to the declining use of gay bars in favor of meeting on the internet; drag becoming something everyone is used to; gay society abandoning drag as it gains more civil rights and becomes more mainstream. In such a situation, good drag queens are necessary to inspire future queens, to wave the flag for the drag community.

In fact, Anthony derives his drag motto from RuPaul. “Be sweet” is the short part of it, though Anthony also sometimes adds “Cause there are enough bitchy drag queens out there already.”

Anthony returns to the room with a Ziplock bag the size of my torso, stretched to the seams with make-up.

“I have to shave,” he says, {essays} 39

grabbing a razor out of the bag.

“Oh, I just shaved,” I say, proudly. “I just shaved my legs and my armpits for the first time in forever.”

Anthony looks at me, curiously.

“You don’t ever have to shave your legs,” he tells me and pulls out a pair of tights.

One of drag’s best kept secrets, I learn too late, is two pairs of tights or stockings on top of one another, which at once disguises leg hair and creates a shiny, smooth leg that sparkles on stage.

My face heats up with embarrassment and I switch topics to something I understand: clothing. I pull out my dress and show it to Anthony as he walks to the bathroom to shave. He stops and gives me an incredulous stare. “What is that and why did you pull it out of a box?”

I explain to him that it’s a dress and drape it over my torso, as if seeing it partially on me could convince him of its beauty.

“I don’t know how I feel about you wearing that out,” he says, walking back to me and rubbing a corner of the dress between his thumb and his index finger.

This is the first time that someone has criticized my clothing: I make a mental note to be kinder toward my friends’ sartorial choices in the future.

He struts to the back of his office and rummages through a stack of dresses he has behind boxes of filing. (Anthony has so much drag paraphernalia that he keeps some of the bulkier stuff in his office and his car.) He removes what looks like a plain black gown from the pile and brings it to me.

Up close, I discover that the dress is a vintage Jessica McClintock, tags still intact.

It has rhinestone-encrusted straps with an open back and sparkly lines that crisscross across the entire dress, making it look like crocodile skin dipped in diamonds.

Anthony places it in my arms. “This is yours,” he says. This is the first time I’ve felt ownership of my drag: this is mine.

More is More People often define drag queens as female impersonators. To an extent this is true: the dresses, the make-up, 40 the claw

the long hair all come from things typically used by women. However, drag queens don’t just mimic “femaleness” in general; they perform the diva sub-genre of femaleness. When, for example, was the last time you saw a drag queen in jeans and a baggy t-shirt with her hair pulled back in a bun? Drag dress invokes sequins from the 1970s, Diana Ross, and Cher’s down-to-there locks and make-up that is as a subtle a brick flying through a window.

Even though Anthony likes his make-up more on the modest side, it’s a process that spans two hours on a typical night and professional-grade materials.

It also requires me to be completely reeducated.

We are standing in the Billy DeFrank Center’s bathroom, which Anthony swears has good lighting. He asks to see my foundation. I show him my bottle of CoverGirl liquid foundation.

He holds the bottle to my arm and raises his eyebrow, silently admonishing me for buying foundation that does not match my skin.

He systematically destroys my blush, lipstick, and eye shadows – essentially my entire make-up collection. He alternates between giving me looks of scorn and throwing his head back in laughter. I ask him if I should throw it all away now, but he says no. “You’ll want to look back one day and see how far you’ve come.”

For make-up, we use Anthony’s supplies, which are of far better quality.

He pulls in a chair from the lobby and spreads his materials across the chair, the two sinks, the soap dispenser, and the towel dispenser. “Counter space is key,” he tells me again.

He insists that I do things for myself: how else will I learn? But when I put his pricey foundation onto a make-up sponge, which apparently is a wasteful, amateur technique, he takes a heavier hand in my make-up application.

He turns his head every few seconds to check my progress.

“When do I know I’m done?” I ask him.

“When your real face has disappeared and everything looks

perfect!” he responds cheerily.

I am apparently too shy and hesitant with my application. When I apply foundation, I use my pinkies to apply the cream and index fingers to blend. I check with him every few seconds, afraid that I have just put on one pinky-full of foundation too much.

He is initially patient, repeating the phrase “Good!...but more.” Eventually, fed up with my snail’s pace, he purses his lips and spins me around. He empties a pool of foundation into his hand and applies palmfuls of foundation to my face. The foundation is cold in such large amounts, a contrast to Anthony’s broad, warm fingers.

“I’m sorry if I’m using too much pressure,” he says, but continues smacking my face just the same. It’s gentle enough that I don’t feel accosted, but it’s strong enough that I note to never get on Anthony’s bad side.

I take Anthony’s heavy-handed advice at face value: he wants to help me learn to put on make-up correctly.

Anthony didn’t have such help. He prepared for his first pageant almost entirely by himself. While the other contestants had incalculable amounts of practice or friends with experience, Anthony was alone backstage. As he lifted up his eyeliner to begin his makeup, the pageant’s emcee stopped him.

“That goes on last!” she screeched.

Anthony immediately dropped the offensive pencil and stuttered, “Yeah, I know that. I was just trying it out.” He still struggles with advanced things, such as applying fake eyelashes. He admits that he gets the eyelash glue everywhere, sometimes sticking his eyelids together.

After foundation, we work on lips with lipstick (the redder the lipstick the whiter your teeth look) and mauve lip liner, applied to extend past my natural lips such that I always look like I’m pouting. Anthony takes black eye shadow to my eyebrows, which are the bushiest he’s ever seen, he assures me, and darkens them until I look like Madonna when she was still a brunette.

Only after a rosy-pink blush and a tutorial on how to wash Anthony’s set

Justine Marrion Massey ’10

of six makeup brushes do we finally get to eyes. Anthony instructs me to spread silver eye shadow around my entire eye. I hesitate and tell him that my past makeup instructors told me to avoid drawing both above and below my eye, as creating such a boundary would make my Asian eyes even smaller than they already are.

He continues applying his silver eye shadow, not missing a beat. “What’s wrong with being Asian?” he asks.

I don’t have an answer for him other than a dumbstruck “Uh…” It strikes me again that as Beyonsoy, Anthony is one of the few prominent Asian Pacific Islander (API) drag queens in the SF Bay Area. One of the only other famous API queens is the current Empress of San Jose, who, in winning her title, was the only API contestant in that pageant.

Neither Anthony nor I can explain this phenomenon completely. There is an element of perhaps not having had strong API drag role models, which in turn is connected to a larger issue. When Asian men do drag, though this is an egregious, broad, sweeping generalization, they’re expected to be completely feminine. And when they don’t fulfill that expectation, they’re not as successful.

Beyonsoy and his fellow API drag queens fight against this. They’re certainly pretty and ladylike, but not all of them are stereotypically dainty or feminine.

They compensate with wild performances and larger-than-life personalities. They accept that being an Asian can mean many things in respect to drag. While they embrace and endorse fuller-figured Asian-American drag queens, they also celebrate their slim sisters.

When I tell Anthony about my rival back at school, he belly-laughs.

He says, “Good for her!” It is then that I realize that I’m not competing against my rival as the more “authentic” AsianAmerican. I am competing with him.

I lift my chin to better catch the bathroom light and apply my eye shadow, both above and below my eyes.

After make-up, I slip into the dress, which, just as Anthony had promised, drapes wonderfully. I put on my shoulder-length wig, the only drag item of mine that Anthony approves of.

Adjusting the placement of the wig, I turn to Anthony for assessment.

He looks at me thoughtfully. With his make-up completed, he looks like the fabulous Filipina girl all the girls in my high school wanted to be and all the guys wanted to be with. Pursing his lips, he reaches into his ziplock and pulls out a box with false eyelashes, roughly 2” long, ending in bright blue mini-feathers.

I wince as I remember his difficulty with eyelash and eyelash glue. As much as I want to be a complete drag queen, I

don’t particularly want to be a drag queen that looks like she is eternally winking.

But my fears are unfounded because he succeeds the first time. He next brushes the bangs to the side and adds one of his personal flower flips. He takes a step back and gasps quietly.

“You look so good,” he says, and I blush beneath my 23 layers of foundation.

He continues with platitudes, partially congratulating himself on a job well done, but mostly flattering me out of my mind.

“I am so your drag mother,” he says.

Before we leave, Anthony grabs my arm. “Have you looked at yourself?”

I haven’t yet, I admit, not really.

I look into the mirror. My wavy hair sweeps across my face; the blue flower clip above my ear echoes my bluetipped false eyelashes. My face is blemishless, my lips look like they’re perpetually pouting. Glitter dances across my cheeks and my dress sparkles in the light. I don’t look half bad.

I pull my camera out of my purse and Anthony takes it from me. He instructs me to pose with a quarter turn, hands on my hips, chin up and a smile on my face as if I were born a winner.

He snaps the picture and looks at the preview screen. Smiling, he says triumphantly, “Winner, winner, winner.” {essays} 41

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

Acknowledgements: The front cover was designed by Justin Calles ’13 as a study of the “Ork Posters!” by Chicago artist Jenny Beokrem. To admire (and purchase) Beokrem’s work, please visit www.orkposters.com.

The Claw would also like to thank the ASSU Publications Board and The Stanford Fund for their continued support.

Doodles: 11 12 13 42

Gabriel Rabello Benarros ’11 Gabriel Rabello Benarros ’11 Lindsey Catherine Toiaivao ‘13 Justine Marrion Massey ’10

Front cover: Justin Eli Calles ’13 back cover: Ariel Emily Marcy ’11 Max Allan McClure ’11 42 the claw

Derek Ouyang ’13

JUSTIN ELI CALLES FARAZ HOSSEIN-BABAEI LINDSEY TOIAIVAO

KENDRA LYN ALLENBY ANNA CELENE GARBIER AMER HANDAN

KATHRYN

IRYS PLACIDA

CASHEL PYNE

KORNBLUTH

MCCLURE

HANNAH MILLER RICH ANGELA

MAX ALLAN

LOK YEE

HUANG GABRIEL RABELLO BANARROS JUSTINE MARRION MASSEY DEREK OUYANG

ALISON FIONA DAME-BOYLEALEX MICHAEL

SOPHIE CATHERINE PRISCILLA CARTER-KAHN

MAYYASI

MAX ALLAN MCCLURE

ERIC NIGEL TRAN

MIHAE MANN JAMES PATRICK LEONARD KOZEY ELLEN JEAN HUET P. CUDDLY

43

44 the claw