Winter 2013

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE The Harvard Advocate

ORIGIN | WINTER 2013 | $12

Winter 2013

Vol. 148 No.2

ART Kiara Barrow, Brad Bolman, Camille Coppola, Julian Gewirtz, Mattie Kahn, Kristie La, Avery Leonard, Nicolas Schwalbe, Zoe Weinberg, Nora Wilkinson. business Edward de Fouchier, Skyler Hicks, Joy Lee, Dae Lim, David Manella, Jaron Mercer, Tobi Tikolo, Krithika Varagur, Caroline Vernick. design Alex Chen, Alejandra Dean, Kayla Escobedo, Oliver Luo, Eric Macomber, Joseph Morcos, Sam Richman, Sally Scopa, Michael Segel, Lora Stoianova, Lila Strominger, Ned Whitman, Jeannie Sui Wonders.

The Harvard Advocate www.theharvardadvocate.com

Editorial Board President Publisher Art Editor Business Manager Design Editors

Features Editor Fiction Editor Poetry Editor Technology Editor Blog Editor Pegasi

Dionysi

ALEXANDER J.B. WELLS STEPHANIE NEWMAN CAMILLE COPPOLA DAVID MANELLA SALLY SCOPA MICHAEL SEGEL ERIC BREWSTER PATRICK LAUPPE TYLER RICHARD ERIC ARZOIAN VICTORIA BAENA WENDY CHEN KEVIN HONG VICTORIA BAENA ZOË HITZIG SARAH HOPKINSON Circulation & Brad BOLMAN Publicity Managers INDIANA SERESIN Librarian KEVIN STONE Alumni Relations Manager JULIAN LUCAS Community Outreach ANNE MARIE CREIGHTON

Board of Trustees Chairman James Atlas Chairman Emeritus Louis Begley Vice-Chairman Douglas McIntyre President Susan Morrison Vice-President Austin Wilkie and Treasurer Secretary Charles Atkinson Peter Brooks

EMILY CHERTOFF

John DeStefano

LESLIE DUNTON-DOWNER

jonathan Galassi

Lev Grossman

Angela Mariani

D.T. Max

CELIA MCGEE

Thomas A. Stewart

Jean STROUSE

features Victoria Baena, Eric R. Brewster, Katherine Damm, Rumur Dowling, Lily Karlin, Georgina Parfitt, Indiana Seresin, Georgia Stasinopoulos, Ezra Huang Stoller, My Ngoc To, Alexander Traub, Alexander J. B. Wells, Warner James Wood. fiction Liza Batkin, Victoria Black, Brad Bolman, Ricky Fegelman, Anna Hagen, Patrick Lauppe, Charlotte Lieberman, Julian Lucas, Joe Masterman, Wanjiku Mungai, Ben Sobel, Georgia Stasinopoulos, Kevin Stone, Alexander J.B. Wells. poetry Hana Bajramovic, Samantha Berstler, Wendy Chen, Anne Marie Creighton, Robbie Eginton, Ricky Fegelman, Reina Gattuso, Julian Gewirtz, Roxanna Haghighat, Zoë Hitzig, Kevin Hong, Sarah Hopkinson, Ben Lorenz, Stephanie Newman, Tyler Richard, Colton Valentine, Joshua Wilson, Lara Zysman.

TECHNOLOGY Eric Arzoian, Eric Burdette, Louis Cid, Dan Cole, Brian Feldman, Rafic Melhem, Michael Segel, Michael Shayan, Grace Sun.

The Harvard Advocate will anonymously consider all submissions of art, fiction, and poetry. Submissions may be emailed to art@theharvardadvocate.com, fiction@theharvardadvocate.com, or poetry@theharvardadvocate.com. Submissions may also be mailed to 21 South St., Cambridge, MA 02138. All submissions should be original work that has not been previously published. If you wish to have your submission returned to you, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Questions about submissions may be directed to the individual board editor emails above or to contact@theharvardadvocate.com.

Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nation’s oldest continuously published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from 21 South St., Cambridge, MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not The Harvard Advocate. Domestic subscription rates are $35 for one year (4 issues), $60 for two years (8 issues), $90 for three years (12 issues). For institutions and international addresses, the rates are $45 for one year (4 issues), $75 for two years (8 issues), $110 for three years (12 issues). Payable by cash or check made out to The Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase at www.theharvardadvocate.com. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of The Harvard Advocate.

Copyright 2013 by the Editors and Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.

The Harvard Advocate 1

CONTENT S

For editors’ introduction, interviews with contributors, and other supplementary features, see The Harvard Advocate’s new blog, Notes from 21 South Street, at theadvocateblog.net

ART 3 6 10 11 14 42

Arc Diane Fair Trade (Casey Kaplan, B4) Ad Intium Brood Ellen’s Gift

Keoni Correa Danny Bredar Dis Magazine Tom Thayer Oliver Luo Iris Häussler

FEATURES 12 16 22 27 54

In Transit Warner James Wood Origins Geraldine Brooks Interview with Martin Amis Harvard Advocate Staff 10,000 Chairs of Harvard D.T. Max Headwaters Ben Cosgrove

FICTION 8 33 46 50 57

The Writer Pieces of a Man Ways of Looking and Feeling The Tour Two Stories from Garden of Sorrows

POETRY

Ben Loory Jesse Nee-Vogelman Clancy Martin Katherine Damm John Hughes

4 Virgil’s Aeneid, Translation of Book I. 1-34 19 [for soul is this] 26 One on One

David Ferry Stephanie Newman Dan Chiasson

Cover Art: Finbarr O’Reilly 2

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Keoni Correa Arc (2012) Digital photo 30” x 20”

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Virgil’s Aeneid Translation of Book I. 1-34 DAVID FERRY

I sing of arms and the man whom fate had sent To exile from the shores of Troy to be The first to come to Lavinium and the coasts Of Italy, and who, because of Juno’s Savage implacable rage, was battered by storms At sea, and from the heavens above, and also Tempests of war, until at last he might Build there his city and bring his gods to Latium, From which would come the Alban Fathers and The lofty walls of Rome. Muse, tell me The cause why Juno the queen of heaven was so Aggrieved by what offence against her power, To send this virtuous faithful hero out To perform so many labors, confront such dangers?

Can anger like this be, in immortal hearts?

There was an ancient city known as Carthage (Settled by men from Tyre), across the sea And opposite to Italy and the mouth Of the Tiber river; very rich, and fierce, Experienced in warfare. Juno, they say, Loved Carthage more than any other place In the whole wide world, more even than Samos.

Here’s where she kept her chariot and her armor.

It was her fierce desire, if fate permitted, that Carthage should be chief city of the world.

But she had heard that there would come a people, Engendered of Trojan blood, who would some day Throw down the Tyrian citadel, a people Proud in warfare, rulers of many realms, Destined to bring down Libya. Thus it was That the Parcae’s turning wheel foretold the story.

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Fearful of this and remembering the old War she had waged at Troy for her dear Greeks, And remembering too her sorrow and her rage Because of Paris’s insult to her beauty, Remembering her hatred of his people, And the honors paid to ravished Ganymede – For all these causes her purpose was to keep The Trojan remnant who’d survived the Greeks And pitiless Achilles far from Latium, On turbulent waters wandering, year after year, Driven by fates across the many seas.

So formidable the task of founding Rome.

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Danny Bredar Diane (2012) Diptych—scans of the front (above) and back (opposite) of a printout of a digital photograph of a photograph c. 1979 Dimensions variable 6

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The Harvard Advocate 7

The Writer BEN LOORY

Once there was a man who wanted to write, but he didn’t know how to do it.

You just figure out the story and sit down and write it, everyone said. It’s easy!

So the man sat down and tried and tried, but for some reason it didn’t seem to work.

What’s the story? he said. How do you know? How do you know what it is?

Then one day the man saw on the news that a famous writer was in town. He was giving a reading at the local bookstore.

I’ll go ask him! said the man.

At the reading that night, the man sat and listened politely while the famous writer read. And afterward, he raised his hand.

I would like to be a writer, he said. But for some reason, I just can’t do it. I’m having trouble with the story part. I don’t understand how you know what it is. How do you know what to write?

The famous writer sat there and looked at him.

Well, he said, it’s easy. You start at the beginning, and let it unfold. When you get to the end, walk away.

Okay, said the man, and went home to his desk. He sat there and stared at the page.

But what’s the beginning? he said in frustration. None of this makes any sense!

That night the man drove to the next town over, where the famous writer was doing another reading.

But how do you know what the beginning is? he yelled, when the writer had finally closed his book.

The writer sat there and looked at him.

Look, he said. You listen. You sit very still, and listen to your heart. When your heart speaks, you start taking dictation.

So the man went home and grabbed some paper. He sharpened his pencil and sat down at his desk. He closed his eyes and took a breath, and listened to the inside of himself.

He stayed like that for a long, long time, but nothing at all ever happened. He waited and waited for his heart to speak.

This is stupid, he finally said. I’m going walking.

So the man stood up and walked out the door. He walked down the path to the road. And then he just kept walking on. He never once looked back.

He walked and walked across the town, and then across the state. And then he just wandered aimlessly.

Sometimes he traveled freight.

He lived that way for many, many years. He went everywhere, met people, did things. He was always busy; he had no time to stop and think. It never even dawned on him to sleep.

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But then one night the man was in a bar, and he saw the famous writer in the back. The writer was laughing and drinking with friends.

The man stayed there and watched them all night.

And when the writer left, the man followed him discreetly—from a distance, like a detective on TV. And when the writer turned into his fancy hotel, the man watched for a light to go on from the street.

Late that night, the man broke into the writer’s room, and stood over his bed in the dark. He looked at the writer lying there before him.

Then he knelt and pressed an ear to his heart.

He listened and listened to the writer’s heart all night, and then, in the morning, he rose.

You lie, he whispered.

And the writer smiled.

Well, he said, now you know.

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Dis Magazine Fair Trade (Casey Kaplan, B4) (2012) Pregnant Woman at Time Interrupted, I Turn to Clock (Yellow), and Sausage Chasing Rock by Geoffrey Farmersize Casey Kaplan, Frieze London 2012 12” x 16” 10 WINTER 2013

Tom Thayer Ad Intium (2012) Cardboard, string, wood, wire, and aluminum attached to painting on cloth Private collection 48� x 72�

The Harvard Advocate 11

In Transit WARNER JAMES WOOD

In Mongolia, only the women are permitted to In Swaziland, I sleep upon the couch of the conconsume the sheep’s testicles. sulate’s assistant. “We do not walk unaccompanied,” she says. “Call the guard when you leave.”

In Paris, on the river Seine, a gondolier rower asks In Dublin, on Bloomsday, tourists wake early to an American girl, “voulez vous m’épouser?” walk the path of Ulysses.

“My what?” says the girl.

In Hong Kong, I ride a yacht with my boss’s friend.

In Barcelona, a couple makes love atop a rock for- In Botswana, shoeless children pet my hair. I mation jutting into the sea. When a big one rolls think, “Someone, take a picture.” I think, “Who in, splashing with force over the couple, the wom- among you has a camera?” In Paris, a street peran removes her hands from the man’s back and former trains his dog to hold the hat in its mouth. says, “Enough! Enough!”

In route to Switzerland, on an open-seated plane, In Shanghai, suited men on the People’s Walk of- an obese man offers his mints to the British womfer passersby a “lady’s massage.” “You can choose an squeezed between. “Are you generous to me the girl,” they say. “You can even see her first.” because I see you as a human being?” she asks.

“Because I sat beside you willingly?” “What?” he In London, the night before the Olympics, a man says, withdrawing the mints. In a hostel in Berlin, in a pub trips but catches himself on the table of a British traveler hears me coming.”Thank God,” a beautiful woman. “Good thing I’m brilliant,” he he says, “someone here speaks English.” says.

In Munich, I eat three bratwursts a day and hide In Edinburgh, I let a room in a flat shared by Frans liter steins in my backpack. In Johannesburg, a and Fergus. “Meet Fergus,” says Frans, holding Zulu woman helps me navigate the city in cambis. him in the air. “Fergus is a gay cat.”

“No,” she says when we arrive at Union Station, “no money, please.” In Edinburgh, bankers can’t In Blue Ridge, Georgia, boys in trucks throw eggs breathe on the first day of July. “You could get a at the cars of fags. sun tan in this,” one says. In Mongolia, a child

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tells his mother he does not want anything to eat.

“Good,” she says, “we don’t have any.” In a South African housing project, above a shit-stained toilet, a sign reads: “Tswana and Xhosa only; Zulu must use downstairs.” In Blue Ridge, I play a game with old classmates. “What to do when” is the category. “There’s a black-out?” reads the card. An old friend thinks a moment, then says, “Lock him up.”

In Paris, a woman’s reading is interrupted by photography. By the fourth time somebody asks, she says, “What do I look like?” In Dublin, on Bloomsday, the football game is on and no one answers the emergency call in the lift. In Edinburgh, a stranger equally as drenched as I strikes up a conversation. He tells me he has leukemia in the manner I tell him I attend Harvard. “It’s a school in Boston,” I say, “yes, Boston in Massachusetts ... no,” I say, “no, not Boston University—another one.” In a small town in the German Alps, I find only authentic Pizzerias. In New York, a tourist is late for a show, but her suitcase

still must be opened for security. When the show releases, the man in coat check says, “It looks like somebody moved in here.” In Edinburgh, a young child amuses himself by watching his own legs walk. In London, the day before the Olympics, tourists fill the public gardens and wait for something exciting to start. In Paris, at a crosswalk, I wait between a blind man in a tailored suit and a squatter asking for change. The blind man turns to the squatter, staring instead at me, and says, “What’s your excuse?” In Edinburgh, returning home from drinks with the coworkers, I ask Frans if life ever stops feeling like a men’s locker room. “Oh, love,” he says, “locker rooms can be so nice.”

In Blue Ridge, on the floor of my childhood room, I tell myself, “I have been so many places.”

Incanting, over and again: “I lead a life of such interest.”

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Oliver Luo Brood (2011–2012) Video uploaded to Vimeo Canvas stop motion 2 minutes, 47 seconds

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The Harvard Advocate 15

Origins GERALDINE BROOKS

Sometimes, when the weather is mild, I move my writing life outside, to an old cane chair under the boughs of an apple tree that was old before I was born. Not far away, but unaware of me, a muskrat browses in the grasses by the brook. Redwinged blackbirds swoop across the water and a goldfinch, like a drop of distilled sunshine, darts through the glossy branches of an ilex.

The muskrat, the birds and the holly tree are natives here. I am not. Only my dog, a liver-and-tan Kelpie, is a fellow exotic. Ten years ago, I plucked him from a sheep paddock in rural Australia and set him down in another hemisphere. He is insouciant about this, as befits his hardy kind.

So while his warm flanks twitch in a doggie doze, it falls to me to reflect on what it means to live so far from our place of origin, so far, indeed, that the cold winds of a Sydney July have been replaced by the soft and buttery summer air of Martha’s Vineyard. I cannot explain to my Kelpie that the Indo-European root of the word “home” is “haunt.” Nor can I explain to him how and why it is that I am haunted by absence and distance, by dissonance and difference, even if the alien corn that we will eat for dinner tonight is a sweeter variety than the starchy cobs of my Aussie childhood.

Nothing is as sweet in the end as country and parents, ever.

Even if, far away, you live in a fertile place.

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Odysseus said that. Or rather, Homer did. I know next to nothing about Homer—who he was, how he lived—yet I feel he knows my heart. Separated by three thousand years, by gender and culture and geographic space, this ancient shadow is able to put words to the feelings that I have on a sunny day on a little island, as I think of the larger island that is my native home—that sits, like Ithaca, “low and away, the farthest out to sea,” where the ribs of warm sandstone push up through thin, eucalyptus-scented soils.

Home. Haunt. I sit in my garden and look across to the house I have now: a house the first beams of which were cut and shaped a century before the white history of Australia even began. When I run my hand over that rough-textured oak, I imagine the hand that planed it—the hand of a grist miller, himself an exotic transplant, the second or third in a line of English settlers who had come to this place drawn by the power of rushing water.

If any home is haunted, this one should be.

In 1665, the very first miller, Benjamin Church, bought the land from the native people of the place, the Wampanoag. He dammed the wild brook they called the Tiasquam, and set his grindstones turning. In so doing, he destroyed the herring run that had fed the Wampanoag each spring, when the fish known as “the silver of the ocean” poured upstream to spawn.

Benjamin Church dammed the brook.

It is just one sentence in a long story. The story of human alteration to the natural world. It happened on the Tiasquam brook in Martha’s Vineyard, as it happened in uncountable places.

As it happens now, in the Amazon, in Africa, in Western Australia, Tasmania, the Alaskan Arctic and innumerable corners of the world. A choice, a change, and the planet that is our only home reels and buckles under the accumulated strain.

Often, this story has also compassed stories of dispossession, in which the needs of the newcomers and their industry disrupted the imperatives of the native people. As Benjamin Church built his mill in 1665, an English neighbor fenced pasture for his imported livestock, and the Wampanoag were no longer free to hunt the deer and waterfowl that sustained them. Another settler set his hard-hoofed beasts loose to trample the clam beds, and a band of Wampanoag went hungry that night.

War followed, as war always has followed such acts of dispossession. In 1675, the Wampanoag on the mainland rose up against the English colonists. Benjamin Church, grist miller no longer, became a captain in the English army.

His principal foe was the Wampanoag leader, Metacom. For six months, Metacom had the English on the run, destroying a dozen settlements.

The colonial enterprise in New England teetered. It was Church, the former miller, who devised a way to turn the tide of battle. He enlisted Indians at odds with Metacom to teach the English their guerrilla tactics. On a humid summer day in 1676, Church led the force that trapped Metacom and shot him dead. He regarded Metacom’s dead body and declared him “a doleful, great, naked, dirty beast.” He ordered the corpse drawn and quartered and had the quarters hung from four trees. Church kept the head, which he sold in Plymouth, at a day of Thanksgiving, for thirty shillings. It was placed on a tall pole to overlook the feast.

Everyone knows the story of the first Plymouth Thanksgiving in 1621. Metacom’s father, Massasoit, attended that one, offering help and friendship to the hapless, half-starved English Puritans.

Few know the story of the Plymouth Thanksgiving of 1676, presided over by Massasoit’s son’s decapitated, rotting head. We like that earlier story

much better. Let’s not do black armband history.

Pass the turkey. Let’s we forget.

But I can’t forget. Though Benjamin Church’s mill was torn down, this land bears his imprint.

The Tiasquam brook remains dammed, the herring absent. And the grindstone is still here, set as a doorstep at the entrance to my house. Five feet in diameter, a foot and a half thick. When my foot lands on its notched ridges, words from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem echo in my head:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell …

Benjamin Church’s mill was built a hundred years before the Industrial Revolution that dismayed Hopkins. But it industrialized this landscape. And now I live where he lived, in an American home on Indian land, haunted by ghosts who lived and died unaware that my land, my homeplace, even existed.

I did not mean to become part of this story, to know, so intimately, all this history so very far removed, and yet so sadly similar to my own.

Metacom has much in common, after all, with Pemulwuy in Sydney or Yagan in Perth, guerrilla resisters whose heads also ended up on display—Pemulwuy’s pickled in spirits and Yagan’s shrunken and smoked. But that’s black armband history, too, and, as a schoolgirl in 1960s Sydney, I did not learn it. In those days, I could not have told you that the home I lived in stood upon Eora land. I learned these things not in school, but later, as a newspaper reporter, covering Aboriginal land rights battles and the efflorescence of indigenous art. I was, in a way, a foreign correspondent, venturing into an alien culture without even leaving my own shore. That reporting led on to a job as an actual foreign correspondent, and so I became an accidental exile. I meant to leave Australia for just a year. But way leads on to way. Like Odysseus, I went to war—although as a writer, not a warrior—and then found my homeward journey diverted by quests and siren songs.

What was to have been my brief foreign fling has become, by unplanned stages, my life.

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In dictionaries, definitions of home are various. It is both “a place of origin, a starting position” and “a goal or destination.” It may also be “an environment offering security and happiness” or “the place where something is discovered, founded, developed or promoted. A source.” My “place of origin” was an ordinary Australian suburban childhood of the sixties, and though it led to a “destination” elsewhere, it was the place of discovery and a source of conviction about our responsibility to our only home, this fragile and beleaguered planet.

I have said that I live now on the banks of a little river that was dammed in 1665. When I first left Australia in 1982, a greater river, a larger dam, was very much on my mind. That river was the Franklin, in south-west Tasmania. A river wild from source to mouth, already a precious rarity in the smeared, bleared post-industrial world. Yet a river whose wildness was in clear and present danger. Works were already proceeding for a dam that would flood a pristine wilderness to yield just 180 megawatts of power.

I had started covering the Franklin controversy as a journalist in 1980. In February of 1981 I rafted part of its length, on assignment for my newspaper. It was, at the time, the hardest and scariest thing I had ever done. I was not what you would call an outdoorsy type. To paraphrase Woody Allen: I was at two with nature. Until I started covering environmental issues, I’d never gone bushwalking or slept one night in a tent, much less steered my own small rubber raft over heaving white water. That first night on the river, having carried gear all day up and down a

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sheer, slippery, rain-lashed mountainside, I lay wet, aching and apprehensive, wondering what mad ambition had led me to sign up for this. But that Franklin trip changed me, profoundly. As I believe wilderness experience changes everyone. Because it puts us in our place. The human place, which our species inhabited for most of its evolutionary life. The place that shaped our psyches and made us who we are. The place where nature is big, and we are small. We have reversed this ratio only in the last couple of hundred years. An evolutionary nanosecond. The pace of our headlong rush from a wilderness existence through an agrarian life to urbanization is staggering and exponential. In the USA, in just two hundred years, the percentage of people living in cities has jumped from less than four per cent to eighty per cent. By 2008, half the world’s population was living in cities. Every week, a million more individuals move to join them. The bodies and the minds we inhabit were designed for a very different world from the one we now occupy. As far as we know, no organism has ever been part of such an experiment in evolutionary biology as we as a species are now undertaking— adapted for one life yet living another. We are, in a way, already space travelers. We have left our place of origin behind and ventured into an alien world. And we don’t yet know what effects this sudden hurtle into strangeness will ultimately have on the human body, the human psyche.

(This piece was adapted from Geraldine Brooks’s 2011 Boyer Lectures, presented by the Australian Broadcasting Commission.)

[for soul is this] STEPHANIE NEWMAN

Sanctuary, I am light within your innermost organ: whitened is the heart you assign to me, and I assume its shape with ease.

Breath comes to one from another, for soul is this remnant of expulsion shriveled on body’s outskirts until elongating it rears up: guest ready to love like only the shapeless can. This air is everywhere.

These faces shape themselves from light swallowed by water.

I feel river in my under-skull, tissue rinsed by currents eddying around nerves. Turn your eyes, apparitions stream from them. * Generations of me rush to the shores where, touched, your loss sinks below lines of bodies falling, strapped, feet tied in bunches, where the hurling

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sounds reach me here, where safety has gained remeaning unentirely.

I do not know these sounds or their origin, only that my life has spent itself searching for black clouds thick under skin, explosions boiling sky, poisons mixed like wild colors of sunset, intoxicating freedom: I am running, and when I hit the confines of white-blinded skull, I make these sounds. * There are no sounds these bodies make, there is the great flush cleansing their eyes and sterilizing their pink mouths, there are rocks buried that no one saw: these are the currencies of river’s gamblings, the game water plays with the sun: let us trade blindness for mineral abrasion,

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let us guess at the formulas this world reactively rearranged: numbers, bonds flowing like lips between rage and desire. We can unite, I will pour myself on top of you, river, and you will suffocate under ignition. * I would not trade myself for anything.

Time, your inflation was the mistake: you submitted to the forceful massage, now you swell at speeds that distort my explanation. I am your container, I nourish you, and I will turn away in times of anguish. Do not desire me— desire is your premonition of loss.

Speed from me, child: I am the river as light unarches.

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Interview with Martin Amis HARVARD ADVOCATE STAFF

On October 25, 2012, The Harvard Advocate conducted an original interview with English novelist and critic Martin Amis. Amis has published numerous novels and collections of non-fiction, including The Rachel Papers, Money, and London Fields. His most recent book, Lionel Asbo: State of England, was released earlier this year.

The following is a transcript of that conversation.

encouraged everywhere you go. The literary novel is not real fame.

It’s part of the job. If it were a profession in which you worked behind the scenes and became what you did invisibly, then that would be very nice in a way, but I have to compete for attention with millions of other sources of interest. So it’s sort of just part of the job. But some things about it are nice. It doesn’t really affect your daily life and in England there’s certainly no question of becoming like Lionel where you’re recognized and

And it becomes a bit of a public furor in terms of how the press responds to these things ...

A lot of your writing is really about combating the mindlessness of the celebrity culture. What do you think then (particularly given your relationship to the late Christopher Hitchens) of the corollary which is the public intellectual—do you feel like there’s a sense of obligation or a moral * imperative to be able to comment on politics and talk about, you know, terrorism and the current Your recent book Lionel Asbo: State of En- elections? Do you think that’s a role you occupy? gland features Lionel Asbo, who is embraced and thrown into the press machine almost arbitrarily.

Well I suppose that for intellectual men that’s This theme of the contemporary celebrity is some- what you are—you lose the temptation and thing that you’ve dealt with quite frequently. I’m not the obligation to comment on what you see wondering about your own celebrity status—what around you. He certainly liked conflict and I find I does it mean for you to have become such a public have not so much a taste for that. But I do surprise celebrity figure? myself sometimes by having some.

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Well it’s different in America. In England you’re not supposed to comment on these things. Your status there is more of a pact indulged. But here, where the role of the novelist is not resented, there seems to be fair comment and you’re not condemned for sort of joining in these debates.

In general do you feel like you have more freedom in America? You’ve spent a lot of time in the States, because your father was lecturing at Princeton, for example, and it’s figured in a lot of your fiction. How is the author positioned differently in America, do you think?

Well they certainly are, yes. And I think there’s a straightforward explanation for that. I think that America’s a young country that came together two and half centuries ago, and was curious to know whether it was a real country or just a collection of immigrants. And subconsciously understood that writers would play a role in telling them what America was. In England—there’s never been any questions about what England is.

It’s the country of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Its history is so much longer than that of America and all those questions have long been settled, if indeed they were ever asked.

Your most recent novel is subtitled “A State of England.” Would you consider it in the same tradition as that of Chaucer and Shakespeare, or do you see as kind of a redefinition of what England is?

Well it still is and always will be the country of Shakespeare. That’s its greatest distinction. But it’s certainly come a long way from then, let’s put it that way. And it’s in the process of a long decline. I don’t see any way of pretending that’s not true. And decline would take various forms, and one of them is triviality.

I’m interested in going back to what you said about youth and the particularly the youth of America. You seem to really value innocence and freshness and fresh experience. And you’ve spoken in previous interviews about the “mental rabble of the wised-up world.” In that sense, how do you see the world in terms of its youth or innocence or its cynicism or not—do you feel that we can ever go back to that state of innocence?

You can’t recapture lost innocence. And I don’t see any means of doing that. It would be silly to try, I think. But that doesn’t mean that one embraces pessimism. I just read Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why

Violence has Declined, and it does change the picture and makes it very difficult for people who say that we are launched on a descent and, in fact, all the indicators are that the world has become more self-controlled, more civilized, more empathetic than it’s ever been before—despite the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century. All the indicators are down.

To go off tangentially, from this idea of youth, you once said in an interview that every adolescent is a writer. This can be reflected in increased workshops and in creative writing programs across the country. Do you have any thoughts about the cultivation of writers? Should it be a collective activity? Should some people not become writers?

Well, it can’t be a cooperative activity. Writing is about solitude. To be a writer you have to not only have an enormous appetite for solitude, but you have to be in some sense most alive when alone. I think that’s why, for instance, dramatic arts is probably much lower-level than fiction and poetry—because it is collaborative. I couldn’t imagine any compromise on having total say.

The novelist is in a godlike relation to what he creates. He’s omnipotent, omniscient —he’s autocratic. But I think any show of interesting writing—above all, reading is one of those—can only be a good thing. And it’s interesting, in Steven Pinker’s book, one of the reasons for the decline in violence over the last several centuries is the invention of printing and the rise of the novel.

And he says that the mass reading public does in fact learn to find perspective and a protective where he doesn’t much like. But that’s what fiction must to some extent do, it’s still empathy, because you’re asking the readers to see things from a different point of view.

Related to your own literary education, what did you read when young and when you were in college?

I read comic books until disgracefully late in my teenage years. I came to reading in my late teens. And, you know, you read and you read and every now and then you pick up a writer and you think, this writer is talking to me in a way the The Harvard Advocate 23

others aren’t. And that happened to me with Saul Bellow, most memorably, and that’s what I hope happens when younger readers pick me up. That they will think, here is someone who seems to speak to me more easily than the others. And I will want to read everything they write. And that kind of particular bond of the reader.

You’ve been called “fiction’s angriest writer,” with parallels ranging from James Joyce to Tom Wolfe. What novelistic function do you see in this anger, as well as in the comedy that also comes up in your novels—in general, the hyperbolic language so ubiquitous in your writing?

The word function, it doesn’t—a novel begins in a kind of dream like state. You have an idea of what it’s going to be. And then it becomes a huge sort of wrestling match to make that happen. You draw conclusions from what you’ve already written, but in the actual process you don’t think in those terms. You just say it again and again, every sentence, in your head, until it sounds right, and you do that for every paragraph and for every page. Once the idea takes, it becomes a question of craft and hard work.

Could you talk some more about your thinking process as you begin a novel, its gestation stages, and then how you move from that to the final product?

The key is that a novel has to begin with some strange frisson, a shiver or throb, and you think, “This is a novel I can write,” and you do need to have that. And it’s a very peculiar feeling. And then it can be sort of hardly anything. It could be derisory what this premonitory shiver gives you. Maybe just a situation, maybe just a single character. Then you start writing and see what happens. And usually you have an idea of the beginning, an idea of the end, and an idea of something that happens mid-way through. And that’s probably all you’ve got as you start. So it’s a journey without a map but with a kind of destination. And then it’s a huge exercise in trial and error and multiple decisions, multiple decisions on every page, until you get close to your kind of platonic ideal of what the novel could have been when it first struck you. But it’s an incremental 24 WINTER 2013

process. It’s brick upon brick.

To what you extent do you find that autobiographical elements play into this process of crafting a novel? To what extent is an autobiographical element, for example, part of that initial shiver?

Some novelists do go quite close to life, Philip Roth as well as Saul Bellow. But if you put a real character in a novel they will look very strange, out of place. What you have to do is change the person so that they fit the novel. I put Christopher Hitchens in a novel, my last one, and he went in quite easily, but I had to give him a toss a few times, I had to change what had to be changed.

But that was quite rare for me. I think little segments of your life, you consult­—you come to a character and you say, “Who is this like?” You fixate on someone you have known, maybe not at all well, for how they look, and someone else for how they talk, and you cannibalize your acquaintances and friends and people you just pass on the street, and you cobble them together that way. But it can be a help to have a real-life model, although I wouldn’t—the thing about fiction is freedom, and a real person will make demands of you that aren’t really right for fiction where you’ve got to be free.

In terms of fiction and the novel in contemporary culture, do you have any thoughts on what now is the place of the novel? Do you think it could play a different role than it has in the past?

And where could it be going? What new directions could the novel be taking?

Well, I wouldn’t know about them because I don’t read my youngers. And the only contemporaries I read are pretty much my friends. Because to read the latest book by the 25-year-old sensation seems to me a very uneconomical way of using your time. I would say that the novel has responded to modernity, to the most recent stretch of modernity, by becoming much more streamlined and dynamic. Because the pace of history seems to speed up and seems just as important to us, whether or not it actually has. And things are moving too fast now for the kind of long essays, the meditative novel that was popu-

lar couple of generations ago. Life is too fast for that now and novelists, being modern people, have resorted to that. I imagine the novel wil go on getting streamlined. The arrow of propulsion will get sharper.

Speaking of the arrow of propulsion, do you feel like you’re getting sharper and sharper?

It’s a tradeoff. Your musical abilities get more limited by your craft gets better and you know what goes where. You can modulate and you can ... this concept of earning what you write becomes clearer to you: you can’t just put the words on the page without going through a process that involves pleasure and also some pain. And you have to write it, you can’t just state it. So the technical side gets easier. The inspirational side gets more difficult.

You did say once in an interview about your father, that there’s a fear that older writers can have of younger writers, a fear that the younger writers might have a better sense of the contemporary – Well, yes, I think that’s inevitable and maybe as a result you will set your stuff in the recent past. It would be very undignified to try to keep up with the new. You have to let it go at a certain point and say, I do what I do, and I’m not going to just go and find out what everyone’s up to, stick

to your own milieu, your own area.

We’ve talked about young writers and older writers. You wrote some of your first novels when you were in your 20s—how would you contrast your first novels to what you’re doing now?

Well I can’t read my early stuff ... I mean, I can see it’s lively and all that, it’s surprising but technically it’s embarrassing. The novels of mine that I like most are the most recent ones.

Over the past few years you’ve talked a lot about growing old, about mortality, and about the distastefulness in that. And yet more recently, after the death of your dear friend Christopher Hitchens, you’ve spoken more about the gift of life. How would you say your philosophy on life has evolved over the past few years?

Well, as I said when you arrive, when you start communing with yourself in your teenage years, you start to keep notes and diaries and become self-aware, and the world looks like a—you’re saying hello to the world. And then after a certain point in your life you find that you’re beginning to say goodbye. And that has a certain kind of poignancy and things do look precious when you’re absolutely sure that you’re not going to be around for that much longer. They say that age gives nothing back ... but I think it does.

The Harvard Advocate 25

One on One DAN CHIASSON

It is the nature of this game to want possession then to want to give it up to get it back so you can give it up again.

Nobody stops to ponder the ball, the way John Keats pondered a cue ball’s “roundness, smoothness, volubility”: its joy in being hit.

Imagine the score is tied, and I take the ball away In order to sketch it, or incorporate it Into some kind of quasi-tribal dance routine…

I thought we had agreed to play. I thought you said We’d play and play all day, beating and being beaten, Taking turns at losing, learning its advantages for a young man’s character, then changing fates.

What kind of game is this, your going away forever, sending word, years later, that you’d died?

26 WINTER 2013

10,000 Chairs of Harvard D.T. MAX

This story was originally written for a national magazine at the turn of the century but never printed. In the intervening fifteen years, regrettably if inevitably, some of the participants have died, elders being the repository of communal memory. I have made no note of this fact, nor of any other events of the past decade and a half. The article is printed here, all but unchanged, a sort of literary bogman—or like the Advocate itself.

– D.T. Max ’83 One clement spring evening in 1997, one hundred alumni of The Harvard Advocate gathered at the brownstone apartment of George Plimpton (’48) to honor the magazine, at 131 the oldest continuously published college publication in the country. The honorary chairman was Arthur Schlesinger (’38). The bold-faced guests were Norman Mailer (’43) and Conan O’Brien (’86).

The cheeses were from France, the tulips and forsythia hand-picked at the flower market and the single-malt scotch (’86) a gift from Macallan’s.

The atmosphere was at once intimidating and intimate.

When it came time to put the arm on, James Atlas (’71), the president of the magazine’s trustees, got up before the assembled writers, editors, journalists, academics, and lawyers and business people. In his bow tie and Brooks Brothers suit the

noted biographer looked like the embodiment of the Advocate we all hoped we held in our hearts.

Speaking softly without notes, he went over the talent nurtured by the magazine and talked at length about an institution in peril. Mother Advocate— so called because both the Lampoon, the campus humor magazine, and the Crimson, the campus daily, are its offshoots—was in danger. The paint of Advocate House was peeling. The roof was leaking. The windows kept getting broken. Homeless people had been making the House their home.

And, Atlas added, it had now been two years since someone—no one knew who—had stolen the President’s Chair.

Many organizations at Harvard have such chairs, heavy oak thrones of indeterminate but impressive age. The presiding officer drags them out of the corner and sits in them during meetings.

Harvard’s throne chairs function as reminders of the legitimacy of the organization, its venerability, and, by extension, the status of those who are associated with it. Considerable prestige attaches to the few organizations—the older publications and final clubs—that have chairs of their own. Consequently, these furnishings also frequently disappear. Harvard’s clubs and publications have been stealing each other’s curios and insignia furniture for generations. But the Advocate throne chair hadn’t turned up in the Lampoon clubhouse’s liThe Harvard Advocate 27

brary, where the Crimson throne chair is chained like Segismundo, nor in the empty sanctum of the Crimson. No graduating senior left it behind in his or her dorm room. Slowly, the undergraduates, then Atlas, now the rest of us, had to realize the truth. This hadn’t been a prank but a theft.

The Advocate President’s Chair had in fact been stolen.

Harvard, like the great British universities it was modeled on, is awash in such playful arcana and rituals of the sort known only to initiates and tour guides. A great many, for some reason, involve chairs. The man many wrongly take for John Harvard sits in a stone chair in the Yard, while the more fortunate among professors who gain tenure are said to occupy chairs. There is the Holyoke chair, the five-hundred-year-old three-sided chair of Welsh origin that the president of the university sits in for graduation exercises. A man known only as Old Jones the Bellringer cut three chairs out of the hundredyear-old Class Day tree in Harvard Yard when it was cut down in 1913; they are now kept in Harvard’s archives and shown to potential donors. In 1967 the Lampoon commissioned a president’s chair built on-site in its castle-like clubhouse, too big to fit through the door. It is the largest chair in Massachusetts.

Because of its odd history, those of us involved with the Advocate by necessity held the President’s Chair to be less a reminder of greatness or assertion of privilege than an incentive to achievement. Within the universe of Harvard, the Advocate leads a precarious existence. Like Broadway theatre, it never really flourishes or dies. It has assumed different functions as the publications it gave birth to have pushed it aside.

A wonderful description of The Advocate was written by one of the magazine’s officers on the occasion of the publication’s centenary. The Advocate, he wrote, “has been a record of football scores, a caterer to old, pecunious Cambridge ladies; a monger of intra-mural scandal; a register of literary tastes which have often lagged twenty years behind the fact; a club ... a myth; a great organic zilch that often exists more vividly in the minds of its editors than on the newsstands.” The Advocate has published a lot of good poetry over the years, and somewhat less good fiction. But Harvard is an immensely patient institution. It is 28 WINTER 2013

often enough for the magazine simply to exist.

“We must maintain its pages for the next T.S. Eliot or Robert Lowell,” Archie Epps, Harvard’s dean in charge of student organizations, told me.

But when I began looking for the chair, though I had been on the Advocate, I had no idea what it looked like. And neither did anyone else. It was the heart and soul of The Advocate. But was it carved? Did it have our motto on it, “Dulce est Periculum” (Sweet is danger)? “Now that you say throne chair I can kind of see it sitting over there in the light by the French windows,” my classmate Christopher Caldwell (’83) said. We could both remember quite well beer, parties and a squat ugly meeting room with all of us sitting around a large table smoking clove cigarettes considering submissions. This was a powerful feeling, to be twenty and passing judgment on another twenty-year-old’s talent. Schlesinger and Mailer, editors in the ’30s and ’40s respectively, drew blanks too. They couldn’t swear there was a chair. Even Atlas, our best rememberer, embroidered it with baroque gargoyles in The Great Pretender, his coming-of-age novel. How apt that title now seemed. Memory and nostalgia seemed at odds. Was this willed forgetfulness part of the nonchalance those who participate in Harvard’s clubs often assume? The Advocate was, before anything else, a branch of Boston Brahmin culture, a culture in which it was fraught to acknowledge privilege.

Initially, in 1995, when the students of the Advocate informed the Harvard Police of the disappearance of the throne chair, the administration assumed it was a prank. Pranks are, as matter of university policy, ordinarily not a police matter.

And they did not reopen the case when the chair stayed missing. When I first spoke to Dean Epps, four years after the incident, he was still confident the chair would turn up. He had a theory of what might have happened: the chair had fallen prey to “the ghosts.” Academic ghosts are educated drifters, often former students who have never quite separated from student life. They are in every college town, locally burnt-out cases.

By day Harvard’s ghosts hang out in the Square, mostly in the open space in front of Au Bon Pain.

They do not behave like other street people, though some are homeless. They try to get into

the school’s libraries, classes, and afternoon teas.

At night the ghosts leave their cardboard houses, their newspaper sleeping bags, or their Central Square apartments and walk the empty streets.

They go through the trash cans full of newspapers and magazines and dumpsters full of old furniture and broken appliances and food the college leaves behind. Epps thought that one of the ghosts might have become interested in the Advocate and carried off our chair prematurely.

But as Epps knew, Harvard outlives its ghost, and one day it would get its own back.

With my coaxing, the undergraduate editors of the Advocate began to recover some details about the events of spring ’95. Initially, when the chair had been stolen, they had pooled their resources to buy a replacement at a Charles Street antique store. Now they were embarrassed about this; the gesture or the replacement had felt off.

They remembered too that Advocate House had been broken into not just once, but a half-dozen times in succession. The chair had been stolen first. Next, an intruder had taken some plaques with the names of past editors and a stereo. Then he or she had returned and used an ice chopper to pry off an old oak mantelpiece. Rattled, the undergraduates decided to stake out the building. For two weeks they took turns hiding in the computer room with the lights off, armed with butcher knives they’d borrowed from the college cafeterias. But each time they left, a new break-in occurred. A boom box meant to replace the stereo was taken. Another time the thief came back in to wipe away a sooty handprint left behind.

Whoever was breaking in was clearly nearby, with a good view of the premises, an obsessive personality, and maybe even a sense of play.

That’s when the name of a ghost I’ll call Dennis came up. Everyone at Harvard knew Dennis.

Although not a graduate, he is the school’s greatest fan. He gives to the alumni fund. He attends lectures. He reads the Lampoon, the Crimson and the Advocate, even the Gazette, the university’s official publication. He is said to memorize the Freshman register. During the late ’80s–early ’90s Dennis was like an honorary member of the Crimson, and, to a lesser extent, the Advocate.

He made suggestions for articles and wrote notes in the magazine’s comment book. He slept in the sanctum of the Crimson and in the entryway of

the Advocate. The ghost’s relationship with undergraduate life usually comes to an unhappy end, often after the school intervenes. The Crimson threw him out. The University barred him.

He found a sunken grate behind the University Lutheran Church just a few feet from the magazine’s clubhouse, where he made his presence known to the Advocate editors by calling the authorities to complain whenever there was a party. The undergraduates suspected Dennis at the time. “We knew he had means, opportunity and motive,” says Chicu Reddy, then an Advocate editor. The editors say they told the campus police, who disregarded the information.

Things have not gone well for Dennis lately.

In recent years, the Lutheran Church has fenced off his bedroom. Even Au Bon Pain has banned him. With some difficulty I found his squat, down a staircase behind the church. It looked like a newspaper morgue, but there were no signs of the chair, the plaques or the mantelpiece. I left a note. Then one cool midnight near the Advocate I saw a gray blanket with a Harvard mug next to it and knew I had found him. Harvard alumni of the mid ’80s–’90s recall Dennis as manic. Now he had grown bitter. “A university,” he said, coming out of his blanket and propping himself up on one arm and lighting up a St. Moritz cigarette, “is where a man comes to do his best work.

Jeremy Knowles said that.” How could he, when the university, the town, and the undergraduates had all turned against him? When I asked if he knew what had happened to the chair, he told me I had to stop thinking like an undergraduate.

Later he emailed me from an account he accesses at a public library to give me his theory of the theft: “As you must be poignantly aware the accession of students to Harvard in recent decades has included many from non Harvard backgrounds who have gone on to nouveau wealth.

These presumably would not be the culprits.

However for everyday Sam Walton’s whose background includes some Arky High School (relentless razorbacks!) it could add a touch of “settled” authority to a background otherwise bereft of any particular merit other than a few billion.”

Early this year, I spoke to Detective Sergeant Richard Mederos of the Harvard Police Department to tell him a parent of a Harvard student The Harvard Advocate 29

had reportedly just run into the Advocate President’s chair at a flea market in Malden, five miles from Harvard Square, and was going to give it back. Mederos was pleased and amazed. He had been the detective who responded to the Advocate editor’s report of the theft. He had dusted for fingerprints, found none, and, I had thought, pretty much lost interest. This was not the case.

“Sometimes you find a case you’re just dying to solve,” he said, “but this one just led nowhere.”

He invited me to come by. He is a man of ordinary height, in good shape, around forty. In the gray pants and tweed jacket he usually wears, he could pass for a Harvard administrator, if not for the Glock strapped to his hip. Having had to ignore the disappearance of the chair when it looked like a prank, he was eager to get at it as a crime. “It’s a horse of a different color now, Danny,” he said. He pulled the file with his original notes, and we got into his car. Our destination was an antique store in the nearby town of Somerville. I had already spoken to the Harvard parent who found the chair to arrange the handover, and also to a woman who had a stand at a Malden flea market. She said she and her husband had bought the chair from the Somerville store in summer 1996 at an antiques fair. They had paid $325 for it and put it out on their sales floor with a price of $2,000. For more than two years there it had sat, among the plaster of Paris pottery and reproductions of antiques. “Lots of people took pictures of themselves in it,” she remembered, “but no one bought it.” She said she had no idea the chair was stolen property. The Somerville store told her they’d been stuck with it for a while too. They’d had it out on the sidewalk in front of another of their stores in nearby Everett chained by its cross-piece. They could have bought it no later than mid ’95, shortly after the theft. The Somerville store was presided over by a man named Dave. Antique stores are supposed to keep transaction logs. That ledger might show us who had taken the chair.

Mederos pulled up the car a half block away from the store, and we got out. Car doors shut.

We both had our notebooks ready. I found myself copying his slow roll toward the door. The store was an East Village-style kitsch shop, a wonderland of lava lamps, plastic Elvises, and life-sized Laurel and Hardy statues. “Tacky,” Mederos said 30 WINTER 2013

under his breath as he walked in. He identified himself to a man who was seated and on the phone and showed him his badge. (He is a sworn deputy of Middlesex County, where Somerville is located.) “I’m trying to get some information on a piece of stolen Harvard property,” he began.

The man, young, with a light blonde beard and a sweatshirt on, barely looked up. Mederos stayed nice: “I’m not here to give anyone a problem,” he said. He asked about the log. “You’re gonna have to talk to Dave,” the man said. “Buddy,” Mederos said, leaning in so far I thought he was going to hang up the phone for the guy, “No one’s here to jack you up. I’m just looking for the log.” “You’re gonna have to talk to Dave,” the man insisted.

At this point I stepped forward: “Do you know where the ledgers are located?” I asked. What I did wrong I’m still not sure but the man’s face changed. He had made me. “Ask Dave to call me, will you?” Mederos said, pulling us out quickly, “Here’s my card.”

Afterward, I contacted Bob Pelham, the man who had found the chair. He told me he and his wife had been filling a room in their home in nearby Melrose with Harvardiana for their daughter Maura, class of ’00, when they saw it at the Malden flea market. Pelham knew Maura would want it for one of her Harvard memories. After the Malden proprietress agreed to cut the price to $500, they made the deal. Pelham took the throne chair home in his van and Maura loved it. But she also began to wonder. The words “Harvard Advocate” were carved on the splat. A few weeks later she went back to college for the beginning of her junior year and asked a friend on the magazine if they were missing anything. The undergraduate editors weren’t sure.

What was recent to the Advocate trustees was ancient history to its undergraduate members.

But they had heard rumors of a lost chair. They called Atlas. Atlas called Pelham. Could we buy the chair back?

Pelham and I arranged to meet at the Advocate’s clubhouse. The building was dedicated with pomp in 1957, a highpoint in our storied but rickety history. The undergraduate president, A. Whitney Ellsworth (’58), who would go on to co-found the New York Review of Books, rode from the old Advocate quarters to the new clubhouse on a white horse, rented for the purpose,

with white cardboard wings. But the Advocate was never rich and its undergraduates never good housekeepers. Over the years the results were predictable. The floors warped. The windows rotted. The doors no longer locked. A smell of beer was everywhere. A ghost named Richter made the fiction room his bedroom and threatened any undergraduate who entered. Another, in a suit and tie, claiming to be an alumnus and a lawyer, cadged a key and used it for his home for a summer. $50,000 from the trustees’ coffers—the product of a Manhattan fund-raiser and a donation from a wealthy alumnus—paid to bring the building up to code and for a state-ofthe-art alarm system, although we had nothing left to steal. The Advocate House remains gritty in feel. I arrived early. In the sanctum on the second floor, there were mock-ups of the upcoming issue, empty beer bottles and dirty dishes. The replacement throne chair the undergraduates had bought in 1996 with thrusting finials and a scarlet cushion was there, looking like a theatre prop.

Pelham came in. He was our last hope. But he had the face of a deacon and spoke with Thoreauvian mildness. His ancestors had come over on the Mayflower; they had sold Harvard some of its original land. I was more likely to steal the chair than he was. I had gone back to the Somerville antiques store without Detective Sergeant Mederos and met Dave, the proprietor. Mederos and I had in fact been talking to his brotherin-law John. Dave told me that he’d bought the chair from “an older guy in grubby work clothes and a cap who drove up in a dump truck.” He added that he looked “like a picker.” Some pickers go through yard sales looking for things of value, but the kind Dave meant work the dumpsters. Dave said he’d paid $125 for the chair, asked no questions, and didn’t enter it in his log.

The man with the truck is the antique dealer’s version of the dog who ate the homework. The man could have stolen the chair, found it in the trash, bought it off a ghost, recovered it from a student’s room after the end of the school year. It was a dead end.

Together Pelham and I came up to the chair.

It sat on a long oak table, as if left there by the same mighty hand that had carved it. Its mass and heft made us proceed respectfully. In the Harvard archives I later learned that, like all Har-

vard throne chairs, it only dated from the ’10s. It was ordered in around 1919 and manufactured in an archaic arts and crafts style. It turned out to be to furniture what Ossian was to poetry, a retro fraud. But the spirit behind it was far older. On a dusty stretch of Massachusetts Avenue, ten blocks west of Harvard Square, is the Cambridge Lodge of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons. Here, not at Oxford or Cambridge as I would have thought, was the closest analogue to that strange attachment the graduate is expected to feel for his college years. Here was the original fraternity, with its male bonding, Greek letters, secret handshakes and insignia-ware. Ceremonial throne chairs were part of the ritual. The Cambridge lodge has a number of such chairs, called “oriental chairs,” to be occupied only by the “Worshipful Master.” Theirs have rounded backs. The Advocate’s has a rounded back. The Masons’ has the motto “Sit Lux et Lux Fuit” (Let there be light and there was light). The Advocate’s has “Dulce est Periculum.” The Masons’ is padded with red and green and vermilion velour cushions. The Advocate’s is bare.

Clubs were particularly active in the early years of the twentieth century, when the Advocate got its chair. The country was losing enthusiasm for immigration. Being the right sort of American was suddenly very important. This was certainly true at Harvard. Under Charles Norton Eliot, the president of Harvard for the latter half of the nineteenth century, the school had been strikingly modern, almost like an urban university.

When he took over in 1909, A. Lawrence Lowell, pulled up the drawbridge. He established quotas for Jewish students. He built the residential house system, making sure all students lived on campus. The clubs flourished, and with them, orders for insignia watch charms, beer steins, and even cigarettes. The Advocate was part of this change too, catering, as its business manager wrote in a 1919 ad solicitation to “the very best of the college men, that is the club men and their friends ... .” Lowell fitted out every freshman’s room with a hard oak captain’s chair with a slippery seat and bumpy slats for a back. (This chair, the “Harvard Chair,” is still offered to every Harvard employee on his or her twenty-fifth anniversary.) The design was nostalgic, a replica of chairs used in the nineteenth-century Commons The Harvard Advocate 31

or dining room at Harvard but made bulkier for the supposedly broader Harvard students of the present day. Lowell, of course, had his assigned chair already, the Holyoke corner chair with its oak pommels and hard wood bottom. It wasn’t until 1971 that the chair got some padding. The mother of the incoming Harvard president, Derek Bok, needlepointed a cushion with the Harvard crest on it. In 1991, he handed it on to his successor, Neil Rudenstine, who emailed me his appreciation, adding that he had “no doubt Puritanism lurks behind” the once painful tradition.

This suggestion seems right. Uncomfortable seating is as old as New England. The pilgrims on the Mayflower brought straight, high-backed chairs with them from Europe. It is impossible to fall asleep in such seating. The Puritans and their descendants had another sin on their minds too.

Kim Townsend, the author of Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others, owns a model of a throne chair from the 1910s with a tub beneath a hollowed-out seat that places a young man’s genitals in a pot of cold water. Looking at the chair next to Pelham, this carpenter with the face of a deacon, I could see the connection to

32 WINTER 2013

the dictates of the theocrats of Plymouth. It was hard to see how this chair could have witnessed any but the pleasures of the mind.

All the same our throne chair was something to behold. It had the name of the magazine and its founding year and a Pegasus, or winged horse, pulling a dictionary by a bookstrap, carved into the splat. Dave had painted the Pegasus a shiny gold, like the Maltese Falcon in reverse. There were heels on the stairs. I had asked the Fogg, one of the university’s art museums, to send over a curator from its decorative arts department. A pair of women appeared in swirling overcoats.

They may have wondered how I could be in doubt about the authenticity of a chair that had the words “Harvard Advocate 1866” carved in it, but they said nothing. This was my organization. They compared the chair with a 1969 photograph Atlas had lent me. They noted that the word “VERITAS” had been misengraved on the chair. There was the trace of a chiseled V visible beneath the A. This was also true in the photo.

--The chair, they said, was real. I could go back to my old life now. And this I did, thinking: real to whom?

Pieces of a Man JESSE NEE-VOGELMAN

Though Katherine wanted to be a woman, wanted to butterfly out bright and kaleidoscopic onto the streets fully formed, complex and multitudinous, she found herself, upon each insistent inspection of her body, solidly still a girl. She blamed her mother, a girl’s mother, a sad mother, a mother who will remain for the rest of her life postpartum. She blamed her body, a girl’s body, and her clothes, still and girlish in her closet. In the formless dresses and little blouses she saw herself, the small tender swell of her breasts, the smooth slender fall of her hips into her thighs, an unblemished line, a child’s thin lips, a child’s thin arms, the girlish curls that unfurled blonde and bouncing from her forehead, and the odd dark tuft of hair a few inches below her navel, out of place and offering futile promises of nubility. She blamed her love, a girl’s romance planned in passed notes and notebook graffiti hearts, a romance that at fourteen had felt safe, and now, at fifteen, felt safer.

And even though her house predated her by some years, Katherine still considered her home a girl’s home.

The house sat alone atop a hill, covered on one side by a small forest of dark fir trees. A winding grey scar divided the forest in two, a gravel road connecting the house to a private beach. Isolated above the forest, smoke puffing out of the cobbled chimney, the breeze carrying salt from the ocean, it was less a house than a story, a girl’s fairy tale into which some strange hand had written her.

Even before she turned fifteen, the desire to leave grew in her. She began walking, reaching places only to find them immediately foreign and strange. Her boyfriend’s home no longer held anything for her except unwanted security and uncomfortable promises. It was a place where parents discussed weddings behind closed doors and tiny lovers discovered their tiny bodies with increasing boredom and respect behind their own doors. As she lay in his bed, her boyfriend’s head on her near nonexistent breasts, she would take his hands in her own, pull strands of her hair from the band of his watch. She would look at both pairs of hands, folded neatly together, and think, these are not the hands I want to spend the rest of my life with, neither his, nor mine.

She became a girl always in transit, moving between people and friends with an abandon that confused and frightened her. She longed for some ineffable stability, dreaming hard and solid dreams, dreams of bodies and muscles and empty houses and cars driven by strong, unfamiliar hands. She dreamt of her father. Every day he drove her to school and every evening he picked her up, letting her out of the car and into the house, and she would go into the kitchen and peek out through the blinds and watch her father sit alone in the car and long for a place of her own, wondering why those moments of silent familial voyeurism seemed to her the most beautiful in the world.

At fifteen and a half her father took her to get her driver’s permit at the DMV two towns over, and when she passed the test he brought her home to find a present in the driveway, an old orange Volkswagen bus.

Feel free to leave, he told her, and smiled. Just don’t get caught.

She drove to the beach, stopping only because she could go no further. Through the windshield the sea stretched out before her. She felt the uncomfortable settling of her eyes on the horizon, the sheer size of the distant line, like thin twine that tied the world together. Dirt and small cracks in the glass speckled and tinted the ocean like a dying television set. The waves rolled thick and vicious in the edgeless distance. She pressed her hands to the worn glass. She kept her hands there. She looked at the waves and when they did not crash over her, she stepped out of the car.

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On the beach she and the Volkswagen bus stood alone. She leaned her hand on the side of the door and removed her shoes and socks, placing them next to the wheel, already submerged in sand and dust and rusting from the salty air. She curled her toes against the earth, squeezing the small fragments in the soft empty spaces of her feet, feeling the sand trickling between her toes.

She left the bus and walked towards the break. Tiny footprints followed her down towards the water. Little fossils in the sand. How small they were, pressed too shallow to possibly be her steps, to possibly have borne her weight.

Water brushed her toes. She stepped further into the ocean, submerging herself in increments, her toes, the balls of her feet, her heels, her ankles, her slender shins. The tide held her, rushing forward to embrace her and sliding back into the sea, pulling with it the loose pebbles around and under her feet. She thought about the earth bleeding away beneath her. Salt and quartz rubbed raw from underwater rocks, crushed sea shells and mollusks, decayed algae, odd bits of life ground into dust. How easy it would be to go with them, for the ocean to hold on to her feet and pull them clean from her ankles away into the sea. How easy to rip her into little pieces, joint by tiny joint rubbed away in the waves leaving only even tinier bits behind, particles of a shell joining the others broken in the sand.

How odd, she thought, to stand there, whole, and be anything at all.

The sun set. Violent reds and remote violets streaked across the darkening day. Screeching gulls became bugs swarming in the warm air. She checked her phone. Her boyfriend had called four times, her mother not at all.

At the beach in the bed of the old Volkswagen she lay down and cried and imagined herself to be her mother in bed, immobile, and infinitely far away, an adult and, like her daughter, still a little girl.

She began going to the beach every day, coasting the old Volkswagen down the hill and through the forest until she hit the sand and the bus slowed to a stop. Alone on the beach Katherine forgot herself. Every night she would undress and lie in the sand and let the surf play over her bare body, feel its cold fingers find her most intimate places. She lay there until she lost feeling in her toes and knuckles, until her skin darkened and her joints froze stiff. Then, she would rise and dress and return to her car and fall asleep, holding herself in her arms and wondering whom she was becoming.

One day she found something strange. The beach lay quiet and the surf bobbed in and out, leaving little gifts for Katherine just past the edge of the water. She picked them up and held them, bits of shell and rock and broken bottles saved from a future of sand. Walking along the swash, she saw something in the distance, a dark lump peeking out of the sand. She approached it and stopped and kept going, looking at the pinkish thing in front of her, a pinkish thing that had no place lying there on her beach, and certainly no business lying there alone.

She stood over it and poked with a piece of driftwood, turning it over and over until she finally had to admit that yes, there on her beach lay a human foot.

The foot was big. A men’s size twelve, she would have guessed. Pale blonde hair covered the top of the foot and little curly tufts puffed off the knuckles of its toes. The heel was square, its nails well manicured, cut short, and the skin looked soft and smooth despite the foot’s time in the ocean. The foot ended just above the ankle, cut clean across, and a small nub of white bone poked out of the top. She turned around, looking for some sign of the foot’s origin, a corpse or a scream, or even another foot, but the beach lay empty. She lifted her own foot, hesitated, and touched the foot with her toe. It was still warm. Behind the skin the meat of the foot pulsed red and wet, the fresh flesh almost oozing, veins almost pumping out thick rich blood so that the foot appeared alive and Katherine nearly expected it to right itself and hop away down the beach.

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She went home early that night and ate dinner with her parents for the first time in several weeks. As she stared down at her meal, a cut of pork loin, thick, pink, and juicy, which her dad had prepared just for her, she could not help but remember the foot. She could not help but see its supple flesh on her plate, the hunk of meat narrowing and elongating before her, dividing into five little toes that curled around her unused fork, begging her to pierce the fleshy ball of meat under its heel.

She excused herself and went to bed without eating, leaving her parents confused at the table. Upstairs in bed, Katherine called her boyfriend for the first time in three days.

How are you? he asked.

She hung up the phone.

He would not know how to handle the foot on the beach. He would tell her parents. He would call the police.

He would comfort her and tell her to forget the foot and to leave the beach. He would not understand it was her beach, and by extension, her foot. A sudden desire seized her, an uncontrollable urge to break open his chest and see with her own eyes what filled him. Did there exist within him worries beyond their two hands, or the occasional togetherness of their lips? Or would she find simple flesh and blood?

The next day she skipped school and returned to the beach. She worried about the foot and hoped it had disappeared, but, at the same time, Katherine was happy to have something to worry about other than herself.

But this time the foot was not alone. More body parts had washed ashore and joined the foot on the beach, all clustered together as if huddling for warmth, as if they had found each other after a long lonely voyage. A nose caught her attention first, long and thin and pinched at the bridge, pointy with wide nostrils and tiny curly hairs that stuck wiry out of the holes. The thin hairs blew gently in the sea breeze, so that it seemed as if the little discorporate nose still breathed, pushing oxygen to some unseen body. An arm lay next to it, darker in color than either the nose or the foot, speckled with brown freckles, coarse hair, but clearly feminine, slender lilting wrists, tapered forearms. She saw a chest too, a man’s chest, wide and bright, light skin and hard dark nipples, well defined abs cutting the stomach into compact sections of muscle. They all lay there splayed before her, spectral and carnal, missing pieces from missing wholes.

The sea bit her eyes and stung her cheeks. The water washed over her feet, still attached solidly to her ankles.

She felt her chest and her arms and her legs, all connected together. The wind swung her hair in a lilting waltz and it fell over her eyes, covering her world in curly yellow lines. But when her hands swept the strands from her face the body parts still lay there in the sand, the still pieces of men.

More body parts washed onto the shore, and more the day after that. Each day Katherine returned to the beach and watched the legs and the torsos and the ears and ankles float onto the sand and join the growing pile of limbs and flesh. She told no one, and saw her family less and less. Her father thought she was going to her boyfriend’s house, her boyfriend thought she was taking care of her mother, her mother thought Katherine had finally become like her and given up. Katherine kept up appearances, going to school, kissing her boyfriend, kissing her father, telling her mother they were both fine, her mother telling her they were not.

Every day she returned to the beach and watched the pile of loose body parts grow. By the end of the week they had filled the beach, eyes and the eyelids, buttocks and knuckles and knees and ankles strewn across the sand, thousands of limbs piled high and wide, more floating onto the shore every hour. Infinite combinations of bodies, infinite combinations of people.

She began to build. It started with a thigh, thick and muscular, strong smooth quad rising up behind the skin, which was peach and soft, covered in a soft apricot fuzz. She held the thigh in her hands, surprised by its weight, by its density, how it filled and completed the open palm of her hands. She set the thigh down away from the pile

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of body parts, and saw the small ghostly marks of her fingers, clawing white lines on the pink skin.

She chose an arm next, and then a chest, and a pair of feet and large old eyes, and knees, long dextrous fingers, thick muscled fingers with hair on the knuckles, cheeks and lips with small wrinkles around and below the mouth, unexpected attractive grooves that held her and held her, changed an arm, picked a forehead, switched the feet, now larger and clumsier, chose hair long and wild and dirty, chose a stomach, beautiful with a long rippled scar, creased knotted skin that stretched across and through its navel, which was round and shallow, picked ears, chose new ears, building and building, picking and choosing the pieces, feeling and finding more intimate places, firm buttocks, a groin, places she had felt before in the dark, but never seen, both she and her boyfriend ashamed of their small developing bodies, but in this body developing before her she felt no shame, in this body she saw only the potential of perfection, the potential of one beautiful solid body among infinite imperfect ones, the potential of a body of her own so completely not her own body, a body alluring and whole and frightening, the body of a man, sturdy and worn, wearing the signs of life, scars, wrinkles around the eyes, changed a leg again, longer, taller, stretching out and beyond her, out and beyond her busy building hands.

When she finished she realized he was older than she had expected, probably over twice her age. She took off her clothes and lay down next to him naked in the surf like she used to do at night when she was alone, and she looked at their two bodies together. She placed her feet next to his and stretched herself alongside him, feeling the curve of his thigh, the muscle of his back, the empty spots between his wide ribs, and his shoulders and neck and head, which stretched past her own head, perhaps a foot longer or more. They lay there together for some time, growing cold together in the swelling ocean, the sand and surf playing up and down their frames. She sighed and placed a hand on his chest. Its warmth surprised her, as well as the small rhythmic movement of his breast, probably caused by the pulse of the waves. She pressed her hand down hard and gripped his chest, holding as much as she could with her small hand, until another hand closed softly down on hers.

Her breath stopped. Her heart stopped. The whole of her body froze in that moment, the collapse of hand onto hand, the twining of fingers, the shared pulse of two separate hearts meeting in their palms. He stood, unfolding himself into the twilight, his long solid body taking up more space than she believed possible. For the first time Katherine became aware of their nakedness, the shame of exposure and the strange intimacy of their bare bodies together. She took him in, for the first time, as a whole, not the sum of chosen parts, but a body and a being separate from her own. She looked at his groin and covered her breasts.

I need to go, she said, and he nodded at her.

Then go.

His voice, impossible and loud, stretched out into the night like a deep siren, a primal pulse that hit her hard in her exposed chest. She did not expect that voice, that rich old hungry voice, that penetrating voice that struck deep into her heart and the back of her knees.

Then go, he had said, and she wanted to go. She wanted her home. She wanted her mother and her father and even her boyfriend. She wanted familiar arms to embrace her, not these great trunks, hard muscular arms that split from this man like tree branches, arms that could crush her small girlish body into its tiniest parts. He touched her hand and held it and pulled it away from her chest and she didn’t move. He touched her other hand and held it and pulled it away from her chest. They stood there like that as the sun fell behind the horizon until she could no longer see him, he holding her hands in front of her, like a guide pulling her forth into the night.

She stayed away from the beach for a few days, working herself back into the life she had started to leave behind. She ate at home, saw her boyfriend, expressed worry about her mother, frowned in the mirror. But even alone, just behind each action stood the man she had built on the beach. She saw him in flashes at school, caught his eyes in mirrors, saw his arms in crowds, heard his voice in the murmurs of students and shopkeepers. Then

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go, she heard him say over and over, his voice made wide and infinite in memory. Go, she thought, then go.

On the night of her sixteenth birthday she returned to the beach, the large pile of body parts looming in the distance as the bus pulled up onto the sand. There he stood, bare and beautiful. He faced the open ocean, which lapped hungrily at his feet, as if desiring to pull him back into the sea and reclaim his beautiful body as its own. She walked down the beach and stood next to him, and he smiled at her with old knowing lips, and they said nothing to each other for some time.

Aren’t you cold? she asked him.

No. Are you?

No. He held out his hand and she took it and they watched the ocean together, the waves beating and pulsing with their own hearts. The sun set. The earth darkened.

I should go, she said.

Then go, he said. And she did.

She came back every day to be with him, finding it more difficult to return home each night. They walked together along the beach, sometimes holding hands, sometimes not, sometimes talking, often silent. When they talked they rarely spoke in conversation. Rather, they took turns listening to each other. She told him about her fears and worries, about her mother and her boyfriend and her body. She asked about him, but he only told her about other things. He spoke of love and desire, of the sea and the waves, of bodies and sex and fear and yearning and hope and hopelessness. There on that beach she wondered if it were possible to speak in anything less than grand statements and fantastic truths. She wondered if there was anything that he could not explain to her with fullness and beauty.

She begins skipping school. She begins forgetting her other world, and imagines that it forgets her. Every morning she drives to the beach, each night she drives home later and later. When she arrives, he undresses her, exposing her soft body to the day. He looks at her, and she at him. With her boyfriend she always dressed quickly when they finished, turning her back as she slips on her shirt, putting on her underwear under his blankets. The man on the beach takes her in his hands, traces the lines of her body, guiding her down his chest, learning her body, the sensitive hidden spots, the inner lip of her thigh, the back of her neck, the curl of her ears, the soft spot between her navel and her groin, and the lines below that, delicate and swollen and tender and new. Her hands discover the body they built, lingering on his chest, the soft skin just below the knot of pelvic bone, moving to envelop his body with her own, possessing him with her flesh, learning for the first time the rapture of bodies.

She keeps skipping school. Her teachers call but her mother doesn’t answer and her father stays late at work. Her boyfriend calls her and she ignores him. Over time her phone rings less and less frequently, and the time between calls weighs on her, though she never answers. Why aren’t they calling? She throws her phone into the sea. On her small arms and small legs and small breasts she feels the shame that drove her to the beach, the shame she must relearn every time she enters her bus and drives home. She tells this to the man on the beach, gushing her envy of his body.

Don’t you understand? she asks him.

She takes his chest in her arms, which barely stretch around his chest, and presses her cheeks into his flesh.

I want to be like you.

He looks at her, and speaks slowly, flexing the upper palate of his mouth, his tongue, stretching the

The Harvard Advocate 37

muscles in his lips.

Then change, he says, If you want, you can change yourself.

So she does. She hunts through the old forgotten pile of body parts lying on the beach, tearing through thin legs and wide wrists, still fresh and warm, the pile moist with sweat, choosing the future pieces of herself.

Small things at first, a long pair of eyelashes, slender blue fingernails, trading away the hidden corners of her body. As she extricates herself from the pile of limbs she is surprised at which arm is hers. She turns around and the man watches her, carefully inspecting her body.

How do I look? she asks him.

She returns home, testing the changes in the shine of the faucet, her face in the downstairs windows.

Behind her transparent nose and eyes she sees her father pull up outside their house. She watches him from behind the blinds and for a moment feels like her old self, loves her boyfriend, loves her mother, upstairs crying, loves her life which she knows just needs more time, just needs a little more time. Her father gets out of the car and walks towards the house and suddenly she knows. She knows that her father will take one look at her and see it all, see the strangeness in her, or worse he won’t even recognize her, he’ll scream at her and ask, where is my daughter, who are you, where is my daughter? The door opens and closes, revealing her father, standing there looking at her. Her heart tightens.

Oh, hi honey, nice to see you. He hangs his jacket on the coat rack by the door. What are you doing here? he asks, Shouldn’t you be out?

I’m just back for a second, dad.

He smiles at her.

Well, have fun dear. Be safe.

I’m going to go check on mom, she says.

Okay, now.

Her father walks into the living room and sits down to read. She walks up the stairs and knocks on the door, which hangs ajar and swings open. Katherine stares at her mother who lays still on her side and doesn’t move despite the creak of the hinges or feet stepping across the floor. She can hear her mother breathing. Whether she is awake or simply crying in her sleep, Katherine can’t tell.

She turns to leave, and just as she reaches the door she hears something.

I understand, says her mother, why you’re never here. I’m not angry. If I were you, I would have left too.

Back in her bus, Katherine curls up in the back seat to sleep. Time passes and the sun crests the hill, providing just enough light to see by as she coasts the bus back down the hill to the beach, where her man stands waiting, watching the unending ocean.

Are you happier? he asks, not looking at her.

No, she says. But I’m less sad.

He takes her hand. As he leads her to the pile, footprints bleed out behind their feet. The two sets of prints step together, intertwining as if in conversation, like two dancers together in a great hall far away. Together they comb through the potential parts of her, choosing the body she always imagined. A body built of stolen images, a collage of limbs, a kaleidoscopic stranger. He tries to help at first, choosing large full breasts, soft flowery thighs, picking for Katherine a body she doesn’t recognize, pouty rose lips, large almond eyes, but soon Katherine’s fervor outstrips him, and she pores through the piles of hair and flesh, losing herself in her own desire for self, rejecting his offers of hourglass hips or sleek black hair for the wavy brown locks of a beautiful girl who flirted with her boyfriend in their English class, the voluptuous arms of a woman she once saw on a bus, a mismatched quilt of bodies made beautiful by the paintbrush of memory.

Days pass as she rebuilds herself, perfection takes time. After that first night at home, she has been careful

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to avoid her reflection. Ghostly ripples of skin in the water, her face in the hubcap distended and bent like a swollen kidney. She fears the new high cheekbones, the rounded nose, which she can’t stop feeling with her new, large hands. The parts of her body no longer know each other.

She hasn’t seen her parents in some time, returns home in her bus only in the dead of night to steal food. Every time she returns home she expects to see signs of panic, “Missing” posters, and crumpled tissues, or a missing placemat on the dinner table, or her boyfriend asleep on the couch, clutching his phone to his chest, waiting for a call that will never come. She imagines his familiar childish body, the round cheeks, and wide, smooth forehead. Before she even finishes dialing she regrets calling him, and each ring sounds forever in her new ears, high-pitched roiling clicks, has the phone always sounded like this?

Hello?

He sounds calm. She hears no worry in his voice, no sign that he has been crying or lonely. She listens to him breathe, small smooth streams of air, calm nose breathing, not the rough pitchy mouth sighs of despair. She hangs up the phone and closes her eyes and walks to the bathroom, relearning the way with her new hands and new legs. Tracing the lines of her house, each new sensation fills her with an alien recognition, as if her fingers are covered in wax. She opens her eyes.

To her surprise, she recognizes herself. The eyes in the mirror are not hers, nor are the cheeks, nor the hair, nor the chin, nor the skin. Yet, despite their individual foreignness, the little parts make up a face she recognizes indisputably as hers. She knows this face, she has seen it before. She always thought there would come a point where she had to choose between her new self and her old one, that her old life would fight for her, that her transformation would climax with a dramatic choice of identity. She had prepared for this. She had steeled herself against it. But the face doesn’t seem foreign. It seems friendly. She would talk to this person on the street.

If there had been a climax, it happened without her.

She leaves for the bus, returns to the beach and the man and the pile of body parts washing up on the shore.

Nothing there has changed. He stands there, waiting and watching the ocean. He sees her and his mouth twitches in recognition. His lips are the same. He takes her in his arms, which she chose. The arms are the same.

Are you happier? he asks.

No, she says, but I’m less sad. I’m less everything.

You’re more, he tells her.

She hugs his body with her new arms, holding his chest to her new breasts, large and beautiful and boring. The earth under her feet feels wet and crisp, tiny drops of water squeezed between tiny grains of sand.

You’re almost done, he says. You’re so close.

He lets her out of his arms, the arms she chose so long ago, and walks to the pile of body parts strewn along the shore. He bends over and rifles through the pile and stands up, holding something dark in his hands. He holds it out to her, large and full, a red beating heart.

This is it, she realizes. She looks at the heart as it pulses in his hand. She thinks about her old world, her home on the hill, no longer her home, her parents, no longer her parents, her boyfriend, no longer her boyfriend, her body, no longer a body at all, no longer a problem, no longer anything to her. And she thinks about her new world, her new body, her womanly body and this manly body across from her, and she takes the heart. The muscles jump in her hands, constricting in sections, beating just once.

Two seconds pass between the last beat of her first heart and the first beat of her new heart, dead. She can feel the blood course through her, new blood, new oxygen carried to new parts. She waits. He looks at her expectantly.

She feels expectant. What are they waiting for? What signal will they recognize? Nothing. She touches her hand to her neck and runs her fingers down her throat to the knotty bone in her collar down her chest to her breast, and stops, feeling the gentle subdermal pulse, like an unending tide. A heart is just a heart, a leg just a leg.

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There must be something else, she says, and runs to the pile. There must be something else.

Katherine, he yells after her.

No, she says, don’t call me that, please don’t.

She changes everything she can. She replaces herself over and over, trying six pairs of arms, fifteen different pairs of feet, but none of them fit, none of them feel right or wrong, they just feel like feet. She turns around to show the man, but his lips tighten and the muscles in his cheek contract into hard knots.

You did this, she tells him. This is your fault.

No, he says.

You’re beautiful. What am I? Beautiful, he tells her, but it no longer matters.

Then why did you make me change? she screams. Why did you make me?

As he stumbles back away from her, she is surprised at the force of her new adult arms. She is surprised by the clumsiness of his body, before so graceful, and she is surprised by the hurt she sees on his face. They look at each other and she sees the ocean behind him grow and swell, and she pushes him again deeper into the water, deeper into the waves, and he makes to move towards her, raises his arms, opens his mouth to speak, but anger burns in her new cheeks, and when a wave rises behind him she has the time for just one thought before it comes crashing down, a surprising, who is really betraying whom?, before the water crashes into his beautiful shoulders, knocking him down on his knees and into the sand.

No, not onto his knees, off of his knees. There, next to him, floating in the ocean, lay his legs, strong and muscular and disembodied. He looks at his legs, surprised to see them floating there next to him, until another wave hits, pulling his arms from his thick torso, thrashing him, dismantling him, unmaking him, ripping his surprised lips from his surprised face, stripping his eyes from his head, undoing everything that once made him a man. She is amazed how quickly it ends.

She looks at the once body in the water, the pieces of a man. She runs back to the pile and claws through it, looking for the old pieces of herself, but flesh blends into flesh, hair into skin, muscle into muscle, she sees an arm she recognizes, tries to crawl to it through a sea of limbs, wet and permeated by the ocean, loses the arm in the pile, sees a nose, or is it that nose over there? or this one? and under that torso, a hand she recognizes, and she dives through the flesh and sand, and grabs for the hand and she hears a screech behind her and dives to avoid a great white bird, a seagull that swoops and flies away with a familiar hand in its beak. She searches longer, finds nothing, and finally she stops. Looking up the beach at the bus parked in the sand and the forest and the gravel path to her house, she imagines she can see her home, though she knows she cannot, and she imagines the yellow lights in the window and small blurry shadows of people moving about the rooms, setting the table for dinner, lying in bed, and walking down the stairs for dinner every day, going to work, reading.

She walks back to the ocean. She remembers the first foot on the beach, the great potential of a single foot.

She climbs into the water and stands amidst the destroyed body of the man she built. The surf pounds, throwing his limbs, grinding his flesh, now beginning to melt away. Ground into dust, broken into pieces, pulled into the sand beneath her. She floats there hoping the waves will find her, will pull her apart too, break her into pieces, but she floats there, unhappily whole, still she floats there, still she floats.

40 WINTER 2013

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41

ELLEN STANLEY, 1895–1931* Ellen was born in 1895 as the only child of the merchant Patrick Parnell (1850–1922) and his wife Sarah (1862– 1927), née Corkin.

Ellen was described as a sensitive and frail child. Unusually for the time, in 1913 she was sent to university where she studied Botany. Later, she found employment as an assistant librarian. In 1919, Ellen married Arthur Stanley (1898–1957), a pharmacist. Arthur had just inherited his father’s pharmacy, after his father had succumbed to the Spanish Flu. Their only child, Anne, was born in 1923 (Anne Kelley, † 2007). Shortly after giving birth, Ellen experienced a severe conversion disorder, at that time diagnosed as “hysterical blindness.” Whether she indeed had no physical impairment, as her doctors claimed, or whether she had suffered a stroke, as a complication of protracted labour, cannot be determined today. Two decisive circumstances arose from the situation: she became completely blind, and she was stigmatized as a mental patient with a clinically manifest neurotic disorder.

Doctors recommended that Ellen be admitted to a hospital for the insane, as they believed the newborn child exacerbated her condition. Arthur complied with the admission and took a distant cousin–Elizabeth–into the house to care for the child and the household. Elizabeth was 17 at the time. Arthur visited Ellen frequently, over time getting increasingly distressed with the situation and the environment in which Ellen was kept.

Arthur arranged for her discharge into his care in the summer of 1925. Ellen’s mother visited and helped settled her daughter in during this challenging time. On that occasion she brought Ellen a curious object: a cone, about the size of a sugarloaf. Apparently, as a child, Ellen’s mother had once observed an old woman, who lived in a nearby shack, pouring a hot liquid into a hole in the soil; she had remembered and recovered it after the woman—whom she only knew as “Old Mary”—had died. It smelled like beeswax. Ellen’s mother was convinced that Mary had practiced some form of folk medicine and hoped that the object would help Ellen somehow.

This object indeed inspired the set-up for a new activity that would occupy Ellen for years to come. The child Anne recollected her mother spending her days in her room behind drawn curtains. There was a tub in the room, filled with soft clay. Anne sometimes silently observed Ellen, wearing an apron, digging holes in the clay with her hands, pausing often, reaching deeper as if searching for something, thereby creating deep cavities. Usually once a week, it was then Elizabeth’s task to melt a huge pot of beeswax in the kitchen. The wax was strained through a piece of cloth into tin pots and carried to Ellen’s room. Elizabeth poured it into whatever cavity Ellen had created, while Ellen and sometimes Anne would just listen to the pouring, taking in the warmth and sweet smell that suffused the whole house. During the following days, Ellen would dig the solidified item out of its matrix, scrubbing it in a water filled bucket to remove residues of soft clay from the surface. Then she would playfully run her fingers along the ridges and slopes, for hours alone in her room.

To maintain the necessary supply of beeswax for Ellen’s compulsive “work,” the family simply reclaimed the same wax over and over by removing the sculptures from Ellen’s room into the kitchen and breaking them up again and again.

While Ellen settled into a life that revolved around her activity, Arthur and Elizabeth began living the life of a couple, raising Anne, and sharing bed and table. In 1929, their child James was born.

In January 1931, Ellen died of pneumonia. * “Ellen’s Gift,” extending from pages 42-45, is a project by Iris Häussler, submitted to the Art Board of The Harvard Advocate.

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Ways of Looking and Feeling CLANCY MARTIN

“You don’t have to come,” he told her.

“I don’t want to go,” she said. “I wish we didn’t have to go.”

It had been this way in their brief marriage. First she wanted to be with his children and then at the last minute she didn’t.

That was natural enough. If she had children, how would he feel?

At the front desk the clerks were surly.

“Check in is at three.”

It was an expensive hotel and he expected them to be courteous. But they were Americans and didn’t know how to behave.

His daughter and her friend had picked them up at the airport. His daughter had just dropped out of college.

He was in town to help her settle things before leaving school.

He knew that his new wife liked his daughter. The problem was that she felt that more was required of her than was required of him. It was a matter of justice.

They sat on the patio and mixed martinis for the eighteen year olds. Neither he nor his new wife drank. But as the girls liquored up they became talkative, and his wife loosened up as well.

They enjoyed the sun in their faces. Later they were all a bit sunburnt.

In the room his wife told him: “I think you wanted her to drop out. So that you could have the tuition money back.”

It was a partial refund, and he could use the money, that was true. But he had wanted his daughter to stay in college.

Later, after his wife fell asleep, an old girlfriend texted.

Haven’t heard from you. How are things?

He listened to his wife. She was snoring. He climbed out of bed and sat on the floor.

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It was one of those American hotels with enormous glass walls and concrete floors.

Things are really good, he wrote. How are you? You’re up? It’s late.

I read your last book, she wrote. You needed a better editor. I found six typos.

Then his wife woke up and found him on the floor.

“Who are you texting?”

“My daughter.”

At that very moment his daughter had in fact texted.

“You’re lying!” She screamed. “Give me your phone!”

They fought. They fought for the phone. He thought, how many middle-of-the-night fights over a cellphone are happening right now? Wrestling, biting, punching for the cellphone.

He took her wedding band and a bracelet he had given her for her birthday, stepped onto the porch, and threw them as far as he could. She took his wedding bands—he had two, one for her and one for their families—and threw them into the courtyard.

They continued to scream at one another. He packed his bag.

Security came to the room and escorted him out. He took a cab to a hotel by the airport.

The next morning he called her.

“Do you really want a divorce?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“I don’t either.”

He took a cab back to their hotel. His cab driver was an old black man who seemed to have completely given up on life. “Another shit day,” the cab driver said.

“I guess so.”

Back at the hotel the manager told him that, because of the noise the night before, they would have to leave.

“It’s not fair,” his wife said. “I’ll straighten it out,” he told her.

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He met the manager in the courtyard where they had made drinks for the girls. The flagstones needed to be swept.

“I like your flats,” he told the hotel manager. They were snakeskin. “About last night,” he began. He charmed her, and ...

When he was back upstairs, in the room, his wife told him that a bellboy had found one of the gold rings.

It was his. It had been handmade by a jeweler in the southern Himalayas. He’d sat in the man’s hut while he worked. The Tibetan jeweler sat on a red rug on the floor, with his bench, his fire and his tongs, and hammered out the golden ring. It took him less than an hour to make it, and after he had cooled it in a bucket of water he cleaned it with a silk cloth. The price was correct, and both men had been pleased with the exchange. They did not speak each other’s language, but that was not necessary for them to understand each other. They smiled at each other.

“Will you wear it?”

“Yes,” he said, and she placed it on his finger.

She lay on the bed and he went for a walk. In a little shop a few blocks from the hotel he bought her an expensive copy of a book by Naipaul. When he came back to the room, she glanced at it and said, quietly, “Thanks.” And he knew that his third marriage was over.

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The Harvard Advocate 49

The Tour KATHERINE DAMM

Even at forty years old, Leo indulged his younger brother. He stood at the kitchen counter and loaded a Hi8 tape into the Handycam that he and Charlie had found when they were packing up the basement. Leo pressed the cassette compartment back into the camera, and the metal frame set the black tape into place.

Charlie clutched a candlestick and stared into the lens with the expectant attention of a newscaster.

“Do you have to do that?” asked Leo. Charlie grinned. “Is it on?”

Leo scrutinized the miniature of the room cast in realtime on the small, flipped-out screen. It looked unfamiliar, like it belonged in the pages of a catalogue. He pressed the red button with his thumb, and REC appeared in red digital letters. “Alright, you can start whenever.”

“Hello! For the purposes of posterity, I am Charlie, Leo is filming, and this is the kitchen. Mom will not be happy that it’s a mess, but that’s probably more accurate in any case.”

The kitchen was in disarray, although it was not familiar daily clutter. Nearly everything had been pulled from the cabinets. Cans were stacked on the counter to the left of the stove and perishable items were placed on the right. On the table were plastic bins, which held pots and pans with newspaper stuffed into the gaps.

A box labelled “Very Fragile” in permanent marker held stacks of plates. The refrigerator was bare except for a bottle of milk, a mostly empty carton of eggs, and a container of lo mein from the night before.

“The style is French Country—very rustique. Note the hanging pots and pans.” Charlie gestured towards the ceiling. Although his hairline had receded slightly, his face was still boyish, and on the small screen he could pass for as young as twenty-five. “What else to say. The oven runs hot. Take five or ten minutes off of all cooking times. Maybe give a quick three-sixty, Leo.” Leo panned obligingly around the room, sweeping along the cabinets, stove and sink. The appliances had all been packed up.

“I’ll be glad someone will be cooking for mom now. Little old lady with a gas stove was starting to make me nervous. And next up we’ll make our way into the dining room.”

Leo backed out of the kitchen and turned to the swinging door, the camera coming right up to the slatted wood until the peach room burst suddenly into the frame. The dining room was a formal space, used more around holidays than any other time of the year. For the most part it lay dormant, though it took up nearly a quarter of the downstairs. It was almost completely empty, with the lacquered table and chairs sitting in the center of the room on the decarpeted floor, and the wall where the sideboard had been slightly darker.

“This is probably the least exciting room of the house. The most exciting part of it is the door to the basement, and only because the basement is a horrible place.” Leo zoomed into the stairway door as Charlie spoke. “Why don’t you give this one a three-sixty, too?”

“I did when we came in.”

As they passed the bathroom, Leo flashed the camera inside, quickly focusing on the sink knobs, which had the hot and cold reversed.

The living room was a mottle of things. The corner by the dusty-brown upright piano was crowded with cardboard boxes in various states of closure, with two packing tape dispensers and shreds of pink and clear bubble wrap littered on top. The big floral sofa was noticeably absent, replaced by a cream showpiece that the real estate agent had selected so potential buyers could better impose their own imagined rooms onto the space. The low shelves had been cleared of the frayed gardening paperbacks and their father’s old French

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textbooks to make way for a Complete Works of Shakespeare and a jar of polished stones.

The camera swung up to Charlie’s face, which still had the makeshift candlestick microphone at his lips.

“Here,” Charlie arced his free hand outwards, as though to a large audience, “we have the living room. Home of our mother’s failed attempts to make me a piano player. Successful for you, at least. But ...” He held a finger up to the camera. His audience waited. “I still remember this gem.” He set the candlestick on the piano as Leo stepped back to fit the scene into the frame. Charlie sat at the bench and swept imaginary coattails out from under himself. With dramatic wrists, he began an ungainly rendition of “The Entertainer,” furrowing his brows like a maestro. His hands leapt up between the octaves and dropped heavily onto the keys, eliding the ragtime rhythm as though stumbling and drunk.

Charlie swayed back and forth, favoring the left hand, then the right, and as he slowed the piece almost to a stop he turned to the camera and grinned. Leo, half watching over the camera and half watching through the screen, was struck. For a moment, the Charlie on the screen was a boy; maybe twelve, maybe fifteen. It drove their mother crazy the way during recitals, Charlie would turn to the camera and grin, getting up from the bench even as his hands finished the piece, like he wanted to play for the audience and be in it all at once.

Though his face had aged and rounded, the geometry of his smile had remained indelible, twenty years later.

“You’re up, Rubinstein.” Charlie approached and reached for the camera. His chest filled the frame.

Leo shook his head and withdrew the camera. “I’m alright.”

“Come on, Leo. We’re making memories.” Charlie thought for a second. “Well, we made memories. Now we’re keeping them.”

Leo snickered. “I don’t remember anything well enough, anyway.”

“That’s bullshit. You were always a thousand times better at this than me. Now give.” Charlie pulled the camcorder from where it was strapped around Leo’s hand and hefted it to his own eye. He gave Leo a small slap on the back as he approached the piano.

Leo eased himself onto the bench as though it would break and brushed his fingers lightly across the keys as if they, too, were fragile. When the first chord sounded into the room, the faint mistunings lingered in the air beside the notes. After probingly pressing the first few bars, his fingers grew reaccustomed to the keys and he began to play in earnest. He leaned into the instrument, restraining notes that seemed always on the verge of collapsing into one another. It was a complex piece, technically challenging, although Leo had always insisted that it was easier than it sounded. He stumbled twice but recovered quickly. His face and posture were labored, but the notes themselves were light and effortless.

As Leo finished the piece, the tones grew higher and faded away as if floating off the edge of the keyboard altogether. The final hammer hit the string so lightly that it was difficult to tell whether the final moment was silence or another soft resonance. He placed his hands on his thighs and looked at the piano like he could see inside it, to the action and tuning pins behind the frontboard.

“Jesus. When Mar and I have kids I hope they’re more like you than me,” said Charlie. His applause was muffled by the hand strap, and the camera filmed an erratic swing across the floor. “Take a bow.” But Leo waved his hand and retrieved the camera from his brother.

They made their way upstairs. To the left, the hall led to the master bedroom. To the right, the bedroom they had shared for their twelve overlapping years. Charlie turned left and opened the door, although both brothers remained in the doorway.

“This is our parents’ room. I probably slept here more than my own bed for the first six years of my life.”

“Eight,” corrected Leo. “Let’s just say seven, shall we? Anyway, one time I found a condom on the nightstand.” Charlie made a wry face. “Maybe we’ll erase that part of the tape. I don’t think we need to record that particular memory in the

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annals. We should get a shot of this and a shot of our room, and maybe a shot of the shed, too.”

Their own room was mostly unrecognizable. The two beds had been cleared for the night, but the room was otherwise cluttered with junk: board games, two trunks of clothes, ironing supplies, beach chairs and other accumulated artifacts of the elderly. The right bed was Leo’s, the left was Charlie’s. Both claimed to have lost their virginity in the room, though Charlie was rounding up. The shared desk, which had once held a boxy computer, was covered in sewing supplies, and a Singer sewing machine sat where the monitor had once been. The only constant was the steel blue color of the walls and the view out of the windows. The one by Charlie’s bed looked over the driveway, and the one by Leo’s looked into the garden in the backyard.

Leo filmed out of his window and followed Charlie back down the stairs.

He stepped after his brother through the screen door onto the patio and surveyed the yard through the viewfinder. The tape whirred gently as it took in the garden. Petunias leaned clumsily against the shadowbox fence and the side of the shed, which Charlie was prying open. He spoke to the camera over his shoulder.

“This is our dad’s shed. No one really uses it anymore.” After a few seconds, the screen adjusted to the shadow inside. There was just room for the two men.

“Everything was packed up a long time ago,” Charlie continued, “but you can tell where things used to be.” He indicated the pegboard above the workbench, where thick black marker made swollen tool outlines. Under some pegs, the varnish of the board had been sanded away to erase the outline of a discarded implement, and a new shape had been drawn on the pale matte surface. Leo’s throat tightened with dust and he turned from the camera to cough.

“Our mom tells a story that she knew he was going to die after he waterproofed the house, because he left his tools in the wheelbarrow outside overnight.”

Leo spoke over his hand, “Not that he should have been doing that in the first place. He wasn’t even supposed to go jogging.”

Charlie smiled and shrugged, the combination of gestures familiar to the story. He went on. “This also happens to be the site of my first kiss.”

“I thought your first kiss was with Anna at Jack Feld’s house.”

“That was my first kiss on the mouth. Lisa Campbell gave me a peck on the cheek here when she was waiting for her mom to pick her up after the safari party. The minx.” Charlie held his face coy until it fell once again into a grin. He looked around the small space. “Unless our cameraman has anything to add, I think that might conclude the tour.”

Leo said he would take a shot of the facade and stepped back into the light.

He turned the camera on the house itself, tracing the white clapboard and pausing on the windows.

Pulling the zoom lever to the right, he looked at the screen, seeing what was visible from the outside.

The whitebacked curtains of his parents’ bedroom hung at the edges of their glass. He panned over to his own room, where the corner of the closet appeared in the bottom left pane. Each waver of the hand was amplified, and the windows rocked in and out of the frame. He couldn’t tell whether the clothes in the closet were really discernible or if he were inventing collared shirts in the pixels. He panned to the kitchen window, bright and orange, through to the window on the opposite wall that faced outwards to the street.

Charlie went into the house, his body appearing in the kitchen window onscreen and disappearing again.

The living room light clicked on, faint against the bright day, and the muffled, awkward tones of the piano sounded into the yard.

The camcorder showed little. Just beyond the siding were the rooms Leo and Charlie had toured, larger than the painted wood belied from the outside. He tried to place the contents of the rooms, imagining what the screen would show in the absence of the exterior walls. In the cutaway, there would be his parents’

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bed, its back to the camera. His and Charlie’s beds sat across a thin dividing wall, the furniture placed as in a massive dollhouse. Removing the walls altogether, the three beds alone would sit straight in a row, the leftmost one doubled in size, ludicrously suspended above the grass. If he included the sofa bed that they pulled out for guests, that would appear on the ground below, perpendicular to the three.

Next he tried just the doors, placing them as he panned from left to right and then up. The doors between the living and dining room, the bathroom and the hall, and the one from the kitchen to the driveway were perpendicular to Leo. The others faced flatly towards him. The upstairs doors had all the same brass knobs, although the ones to the bathrooms would be brighter with use.

The three toilets of the house, one on the first floor, two on the second, sat on their pipes like stems. The sinks and showerheads did, too. He began to populate the space with the furniture as it was inside: the desks and dressers, the clothes hampers, rugs lying remarkably flat in the air, framed pictures and shelves fixed to invisible walls. He tried just the knicknacks, sitting against the blue sky like black stars, but it was too unfeasible to place them all and he went back to the bigger furniture. He continued until everything was there except the walls and the floors, though it was difficult to hold the full image in his mind. As he built one room, another would slip into abstraction.

He added the frame like a ribcage, the bones of the house. His father, who read blueprints the way some men read the newspaper, would have known the exact placement of the studs. The house had looked identical to the others on the block before his parents had moved in, but no one would guess that anymore.

When Leo looked up from the camera, the clapboard seemed unnaturally opaque and hard. He turned the camera towards his face and waved at the lens, though he was not sure his fingers made it into the frame.

He pressed the red button and the REC disappeared, though the screen still played the view through the lens.

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Headwaters BEN COSGROVE

Sometime last spring, I was driving through northern Minnesota when the road I was on passed over a small waterway. It was an unremarkable little brook lazily worming through the forest, but a sign on the shoulder identified it as the “Mississippi River.� I pulled over and reversed back to the bridge in an extended double-take. There it was, though. The mightiest vein of the continent.

From here it would grow dramatically as it moved southward and its tributaries flooded in from across the country, giving life to Minneapolis, St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, and countless settlements in between. But up here in Paul Bunyan country, it was just an unmajestic trickle. It was oddly thrilling to see so mighty a river in such an undeveloped and vulnerable state, almost like walking in on a head of state without his clothes on. Without much further reflection I drove on, inflated by a sense of having been granted a window into the inner life of the Mississippi River, a feeling that I knew it better than most because I had seen it like this.

I grew up in central New England and have no great ties to the Mississippi, so several months later it seemed like it might be a meaningful pilgrimage to visit the headwaters of my region’s primary river.

I would travel up to the border of New Hampshire and Quebec, where rain- and melt-water collect in the four Connecticut Lakes before taking the form

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of the Connecticut River and flowing 407 miles south to the ocean, plummeting a total of 2,660 vertical feet toward the center of the earth in the process.

The four lakes are numbered in what has always seemed to me a reverse of the logical order. The true headwaters of the river are at the tiny Fourth Connecticut Lake, at the very tip of New Hampshire. When water overflows its banks, it collects just below in the Third Connecticut Lake, then the Second Connecticut Lake, then finally the First Connecticut Lake. I drove up to the Third on New Years Day of this year. It was brilliantly sunny and bitterly cold. The tops of the lakes were frozen solid and covered in a foot or so of powder. I looked west across the lake from the road, towards the small inlet where water from the Fourth must have been trickling in beneath the ice.

One day all this water would be compelled from this stillness, by something as banal as gravity, to roll and tumble over itself for hundreds of miles, over dams and under bridges, gathering in places and racing violently in others. It would be joined by the White and the Chicopee and become mighty indeed by the time it passed under I-95.

Little by little, all of it would fall away, cleaving Vermont from New Hampshire before bisecting Massachusetts, then Connecticut, to empty into and become part of Long Island Sound.

I was struck, however, by the realization that the water in front of me now had nothing to do with any of that yet. It could tell me nothing of New England, or even of the Connecticut River.

It didn’t know anything. It wasn’t “waiting” to go somewhere. It was just water. I felt strangely disappointed and more than a little ridiculous.

We tend to ascribe a lot of metaphysical significance to waterways. Not only do they make possible our settlements and show us the easiest paths from point to point, but there’s also something about the idea of one unbroken chain of water unifying a whole region that feels important to us. We read ourselves into places, we retrofit them with our personalities, we make something of them that they perhaps are not.

This alone is what makes them places and not just geography. The Connecticut, like the Mississippi, after all, is just water, helplessly doing what gravity demands of it. We are the ones who

make it anything else. I knew, just as anyone with a map might know, the path it would all take. I knew the rivers it would meet, I knew the towns that had been made possible by the very predictability of its route. The water, obviously, could not know or care about any of this.

I was sorry to lose the feeling that I had seen these great rivers at their purest and most naked.

I wanted to think that I would be able to see something elemental here, not only the germ at the core of the idea of the Connecticut River, but maybe even at the core of the idea of New England. The fact is that the Fourth Connecticut Lake will stop mattering to the fate of the river the instant the water moves down to the Third Lake. It will fall millimeters south, and then it’s not part of the lake anymore. It’s only water, and it will wander dumbly for hundreds of miles until at last it meets the ocean.

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Two Stories from Garden of Sorrows JOHN HUGHES

In researching the life of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam for one of the stories in my second book, Someone Else, I came across the name of one of his wife’s friends, Anna Ivanovna Kuznechikaya. It’s an unusual name and I wondered for a time if it was in fact real. “Kuznechik” is the Russian word for grasshopper, and means, literally, “little smith”; grasshoppers, the language quaintly suggests, are just such tiny smiths, working away with hammer and anvil as their profession demands. It would be interesting, I thought, to take each man apart into his animals and then come to a thorough agreement with them. Because what an astonishing hierarchy there is among animals, and the truth is, as Elias Canetti has remarked, we see them according to how we stole their qualities.

To live in a place without its language exposes the animals of which each man is composed. Later, still researching the same book, I was sitting in a bar in St Petersburg in a frightful cacophony of barks and grunts and growls, and it was as if, like a man deaf to my own tongue, I could see what to those for whom the tongue was eloquent was invisible, the secret animal life of this still red and steaming-from-the-forge civilised world. Without language it’s as if a film is removed from the eyes—the film applied on banishment from Paradise—and the whole of the social world appears suddenly in its true guise, clad like the Emperor in his new clothes.

That’s what I saw. And it made me think that rather than break a man up into his animals (which is the natural origin of all fables), it might be interesting to write a new kind of fable in which the original impulse was reversed, in which each animal was broken up into its human qualities, the human it might become. To write reverse fables (a reversal entirely suited to the antipodean context of their composition), in which various Australian animals are transformed into specific human types because of what they do. The very flux at the beginning of things, inchoate nature, the world in a state of formation; Australia: the garden and the inferno. New World stories—as I hope you’ll see—two of which follow here.

– J. H. The Making of Sorrow Kaos had never harmed another creature. He was born with all the food he needed already in his stomach. But sometimes food is not enough. And nature is never happy with happiness. So Kaos was about to learn.

Like all the crocodiles who lurked in the ooze among the mangroves of the tidal estuaries, Kaos enjoyed the rare distinction of being able to live on both land and water. He was afraid of nothing: he had never known a crocodile to die, and was himself a hundred years old and almost ten metres in length. Occasionally, in the long wet, he would ferry dingoes across the swollen waters. Even ten of these dogs standing nose to tail could not cover his massive armour back. He would often be seen basking on the mud banks, his enormous fourth tooth protruding up beyond his closed mouth, a source of beauty, not of terror, perfect like carved ivory.

When the sun had heated his cold blood through to fire, Kaos would toboggan down the slippery river bank, his flattened tail plashing him out to the middle depths where he would submerge everything but his eyes and grizzled snout and float for hours, watching the sun pass through the sky and the animals who would smile and call to him as they came down to the water’s edge to drink and chat and cool off the day. Life, he thought, was

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enough to make you caw like a crow. If not for one small problem.

Every day, when the sun was nearing its zenith in the sky, and Kaos felt too drowsy to escape its heat, he would lie with mouth agape, cooling as the heat outflowed. Then in a wailful choir swarms of small gnats whorled in the warm convections of the airy current and clustered sharply on his tongue, almost choking the poor crocodile who would cough and sneeze until his snout was clear and all the calm of his daily sunbath had vanished with his tormentors. He had tried for years to thwart these tiny torturers, he had even hung a cobweb from his teeth, but to no avail. He might as well trap the light.

Then one day a spurwinged plover alighted on a branch above the crocodile’s head and called to him in her voice that could wake the stones. “I’ve been watching you for weeks,” she called as softly as she could, the words sending rustles through the leaves. “I can help you.”

Kaos raised his enormous gaping snout towards the tiny bird and spluttered insects as he spoke. “How can you help me?” he asked ironically. “Look how big I am.”

The plover darted down from the tree. Before the crocodile could speak again, she was hopping about on his tongue, gobbling up midges and gnats with her sharp little beak and startling the rest into a mist of flight. Kaos began to quiver with delight. The tiny bird was tickling his tongue as she danced.

“Alright,” he gasped, struggling to keep his mouth from closing against his body’s shudder. “You’ve made your point. You can help me if you want.”

The tiny plover hopped out of the darkness of the crocodile’s mouth and smiled at him with contentment, her yellow wattles wobbling as she stilled. “You’ve got yourself a deal,” she said. “My only condition is that you must promise me never to close your mouth while I’m inside it. I have to see the sky.”

“You have your promise.” Kaos smiled. He couldn’t rid his mind of the pleasure the tiny bird had given him.

The thought of lying undisturbed in the sunlight while the plover hopped about in his mouth, the sharp points of her claws endlessly pricking his tongue, was almost too much to bear.

For the next two weeks in the middle of each day the tiny bird would fly into the crocodile’s mouth and feed to her heart’s content while Kaos pressed himself tight against the warm earth and rubbed his stomach and sighed with lazy pleasure. If, occasionally, he tired of gaping and, forgetting himself, accidentally closed his jaws, the plover would remind her host of her presence by jabbing his bony palate with her spurwing. She had, after all, nothing to fear but the closing of the sky.

But, one fateful afternoon, jabbing Kaos with her spurwing, the bird tried to fly out before his mouth had fully opened and cut her breast against his tooth. She rebuked him noisily for the mishap but flew off unconcerned to her nest where she rested until the bleeding stopped. She didn’t look back to see the change that had come like night over the giant crocodile. For unknown to her, the daylight world had disappeared for Kaos. His head was whirling and his body shuddered uncontrollably. The taste of the plover’s blood upon his tongue had made the crocodile mad.

For the first time in a hundred years he began to eat. First the mud in which he wallowed, then rocks and sand and blades of grass and tiny shrubs and flowers, he mauled great chunks out of the trunks of trees with a ravenousness terrible to behold and a sound that chilled the blood, and he began to look at the other animals in a way that made their legs tremble. But nothing would satisfy this strange new desire, nothing would fill the emptiness he discovered in the taste of the small bird’s blood. He had to devour her, all of her, or he would die.

The next morning was unbearable. The sun seemed to take forever to climb the sky. Then he heard it, the shrill cry that announced the approach of his tiny friend. It was almost impossible, but the crocodile managed to behave exactly as he always did. He opened his mouth to gape. As the insects swept in between his teeth, so too did the bird. The hopping on his tongue no longer tickled the giant crocodile, but the pain it brought filled him with a longing so sharp it made him want to weep and pray that it would last forever. It lasted but a second.

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The terrible jaws locked like a jagged trap around the helpless little bird who spiked and spiked them with her spurs, more frenzied with every stab. The crocodile crashed into the river. Twisting again and again like a coil around his body, he drowned the poor bird and swallowed her whole. When he rose to the surface, exhausted and fulfilled, he was too delirious to notice the mad rush of animals who fled the river bank. Kaos had become a monster.

That night, when the tiny plover did not return to her nest, her mate flew to the river’s edge to discover what had happened. He listened to the terrified whisperings of brolgas and kangaroos, wombats and dingoes, dugong and shy barramundi, and learnt that his mate had been eaten by the gentlest creature of all, the giant crocodile.

He refused to believe his ears. But as the night wore on he understood that his unhatched chicks would never see their mother. With great heaviness of heart, as if his sorrow were a rock that he had swallowed, he moved his leaden wings and flew back to his lonely nest where he warmed the three small eggs with his tears.

All through the night, even in his fitful sleep, he saw the eggs. But when he woke, the eggs he saw in his nest were not the eggs he’d seen in dream. He realised then that his heart would not rest again until he found those eggs of sleep.

For weeks he searched the nests of every creature he knew but no egg corresponded to those he’d seen in his sleep. When he had all but given up hope, he caught sight of the crocodile hiding in the estuarine murk, his eyes fixed on a wombat squelching unsuspectingly towards him. The plover was seized by a terrible desire to do something he knew not what, and in his frustration shrieked out a warning to the bumbling creature who lumbered back to his burrow with the speed terror alone can bestow. Kaos looked up at the bird, whose wattles still burned iridescent with fear, and smiled, opening his giant mouth as he sank back into the ooze. Only then did the plover realise he hadn’t seen the eggs of the monster beneath him.

Everyone knew where the crocodile lived. It had been the most popular place on the river before he had tasted the blood of his friend. The spurwing found his eggs tucked away in their dank lair beneath the riverbank and the moment he saw them he knew what he had to do. For they were indeed the eggs of sleep. The sight of them brought the whole dream flooding back.

One by one he carried the eggs away and around them built a nest just like his own. His task completed, he called out to the lazy monster: “Hey, Kaos,” he shrilled. “Come over here, I’ve got something to show you.”

“What is it?” the crocodile asked, interested but also irritated at being disturbed. “This better be good. I’m getting hungry again.”

“How fortunate,” shrieked the tiny bird as he watched the giant shape rise and approach, its mouth gaping in a cavernous yawn. “What have you eaten today?”

Kaos had gorged on the flesh of every animal that had crossed his path in the three days since that first glorious taste of blood, but nothing had aroused in him the same ecstasy as his longing for the tiny bird and its ultimate satisfaction. He would eat, sometimes all day, and still feel empty. It troubled him. Because there was in this emptiness an intimation of dissatisfaction without end: that he might eat the whole earth and still feel the same.

Yet he loved this empty feeling even so. His interest kindled as his shadow drowned the tiny bird. Maybe now he would find fulfilment at last.

“Everything,” he whispered menacingly, “except another bird like you.”

“Not so fast,” the plover darted and stammered as the crocodile’s jaws closed around the space that had just been him. “It’s not me you want to eat.” He hovered thrillingly above the glaucous snout. “It’s those eggs. They’re no good to me anymore. I want you to have them as a gift, to show there’s no hard feeling between us. Be my—” Before the tiny bird had finished speaking the crocodile was at the eggs, his tail thrashing wildly in the awful frenzy of his feeding.

“Wait!” the plover shrieked, reeling with what he had done. He hadn’t expected to deceive the crocodile so

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easily. It was a terrible sight. “Those aren’t my eggs, they’re yours.”

The final egg cracked open in the giant’s mouth and fell to the ground. Inside its shattered shell a tiny crocodile writhed in silence like a worm, but for a thread of sinew sliced neatly in two by the hapless jaws of its father, clamped shut now in shock, and the horror of disbelief. “What have you done to me?” Kaos wailed as the tiny bird flew off into the giant sky.

The crocodile began to weep, quietly at first, with large tears that seemed to take hours to form beneath his eyes, swelling like dew drops on his craggy snout and dimpling the earth as they fell, then wild and thunderous and full of rage, a tempest of tears that lashed the land and frothed and welled into an almighty flood devouring the armoured beast who sank beneath the torrent of himself and choked upon his grief.

Nothing is sheltered from fate.

As the waters subsided, frightened birds and animals peered down nervously from treetops and rock ledges to behold an upright form in robes of pitch, a tiny wattle of white at the throat, and shoes of glaucous leather, emerging from the mud.

Kaos had become the first man, and in his eye was a tear that would never dry.

The Origin of Exile Alcestis loved flying. Without visible motion of her wings she could glide for hours on the currents of air that flowed above the southern seas. To begin with, she had no need to fly. After all, it was an effort to leave the ground. But it wasn’t a matter of need. She could have lived forever on her tiny water-locked home, drinking the rainwater pooled in rock dimples, and gorging endlessly on the great stains of squid which seemed to run like ink from the shallow weed. She could have done all this without having to fly a single hour. And it would have been much safer. But Alcestis wasn’t interested in safety, nor did she worry about death. All that concerned her was flight. She couldn’t get it out of her mind. Even when asleep she watched herself, a solitary bird, fluid above the grey-green water, drifting on a stream of air. And when she woke she had no choice but to join her image, which fell from the sky and sailed beneath her as she flew, like a bloodstain on the water’s murky surface, her shadow and her mate.

At first it was enough to circle like this all day, flowing but somehow never falling, as if the wind dissolved gravity. But as time passed her flights took her further from home, away over the sea, until one morning she just kept flying and flew for days, and would have soared like this forever, had not she spied another isle of rock, larger than her own, over which the air stopped and dropped her through the hole of its stillness. A fine rain was falling, falling in the way night falls, like a damp mist of darkening light. The sky the palest gray, mauve almost, the colour of veins beneath the flesh, thin cloud wrinkled by morning light within. From where she had landed Alcestis could see a larger landmass beyond the terracotta sea, while at her feet the rocks were covered with barnacled shells, steaming breath as if the watery soft-bodied creatures out of which they became had only just left, and in a blink the liquid sea itself might return, wisps of mist rising and seeping back into the air above the line of dawn-surfaced chestnut-covered hills that were her horizon. Alcestis the albatross had discovered the beauty of travel. From that moment she could no longer say which rock was her home, her life only real on the wings in between.

To Alcestis it was ideal, to fly for the sake of flying. But over time her migrations became more essential. In the beginning it was solely within herself. Whatever island she was on, she couldn’t chase the other from her mind nor rest until she felt its rocky skin cold and wet beneath her webbed feet once again, when the problem would reverse itself, and longing for the other pulled her up into the sky again. It was almost as if the islands knew this

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about themselves, had anticipated somehow in their very forms the way they would be seen by the albatross and thus were in themselves already comparisons, so powerful was the magnet of their push and pull. But gradually it grew to more than longing for a home. Alcestis fell in love, not with one bird but with two, on either side of the sea, and the problem was she loved them equally. Yet neither knew of the rival for his love and each believed Alcestis belonged to him alone.

One evening, landing on her larger home, her love for the mate she was about to see expanding with the distance she had flown, she was perturbed to find not an answering joy but a look of sadness on his tubular face.

“What happened?” she asked, nuzzling his feathers with her beak and enfolding him in her wing.

“Nothing,” he recoiled, as if from the touch of a ghost. “How can you love me and stay away so long?”

“Is that it?” she sighed with relief. She had never been able to understand his jealousy but had learned how to lie well enough to quell it. “Is that all that’s worrying you? You know I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have to. But mother needs me, what can I do?”

“I’ll come with you, then.”

“No!” Alcestis barked with more urgency than she intended. It wasn’t just that she had another mate. She couldn’t bear the thought of flying with another. But how could she explain that to him? That she loved drifting above the open sea in solitude, with only her shadow stretched across the icy waves beneath. “You know that’s impossible. She thinks I care only for her. She’s old. Let her at least die happy. We’ve got a whole lifetime.”

“I know,” he said, the smile returning to his face. She had told him what he wanted to hear. The selfishness of her imagined mother was exactly his own. “It’s just so hard, that’s all. Every time you go, I think it’s the last.”

“What do I have to do?” she asked in mock dismay, her affection glowing warmly underneath.

“Well, there is one thing ... ” The thought had just come to him, but the more he considered it, the better it seemed. “I’d like to pluck your feathers.”

“What?”

‘Not all of them,’ he continued. “Just the black ones.”

“But why?” Alcestis asked, still hoping it was a joke.

“A memento ... to prove your love,” he lied. The other males in the colony had begun to ridicule him about Alcestis, and not just her long absences. They were all white and looked upon her black wings as ugly. This was the perfect opportunity to make her more like him. “You said you’d do anything.”

“Is that really what you want?” She could see now that he was serious, and though his desire troubled her, it was still better than his endless complaints about their failure to produce any offspring of their own. He blamed her ceaseless flight.

“It will be a sign.”

And with that he began to strip greedily the short black feathers from her wings. He would have plucked them bare had Alcestis not cried “Enough!” and flapped madly off into the sky. It wasn’t the physical pain that upset her. She could cope with that. The loss of her feathers hurt her somewhere else. She couldn’t say exactly where, but it felt, with every quill ripped free, not that she had been made lighter, but that she had grown strangely earth-bound, as if he were nailing her to the rock. She had to break away. Her joy was so great when at last she found herself sailing the high currents of air she didn’t notice the imbalance in her wings. Ahead, mountains stretched away, their towering peaks an unearthly treasure of distance. Alcestis was flying, she was free, and that was enough. The feathers would grow back.

She realised that in flying there was something tidal, an ebb and flow, a simultaneous pull backwards and forwards, stretched out in time like the sea. But there was also something cleansing, a surge, only this time, a thing in air, she was both water and land, the point at which they meet, of two alien elements made for and from each other—time and space, past and future, and her, propelled by heart-fire a thousand feet in air, the bent

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horizon of them all. Up here, she thought, strangely still, it was the continents themselves that seemed in motion, held aloft like great balloons by the fire beneath, as if she had been looking down for a very long time, a geologic time, with a patience that knows eternity and is as cloud passing and the land beneath drifting in and out of view.

Imagine, she thought, sitting still for such a time. Imagine such patience! Everything flowing in circles—air, crust, magnetic fields—and down there, the convection currents of those small foul hearts.

After many days, she saw at last the island of her birth and flushed at the prospect of seeing her first mate again.

She had all but forgotten her experience across the sea as she landed cackling beside him, rubbing his beak with her own and dancing him round with the tips of her wings.

“What happened to you?” he cried in horror when he saw the stubbled patches of her beautiful wings.

“What do you mean?” Alcestis replied, overcome once again with that strange déjà vu, as if somehow the question this time was trying to fix her to the rock.

“Your wing,” he pointed with his own. “It’s awful.”

“Oh that,” she remembered finally, circling her mind frantically for a cause. “The sun ... I flew too close ... and they burned. Don’t worry, they’ll grow back in no time. You’re still happy to see me, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he wavered, the word like a mask. “But that’s just my point, what I’ve been telling you all along. It’s too dangerous for you to fly so far. Why do you have to go?”

“Oh, that again, how many times do I have to say?” Alcestis laughed, happy he’d forgotten her damaged wing and returned to his usual refrain. “My father’s too old to fly back, you know that. The journey would kill him. I have to see him somehow. You don’t begrudge me that, do you?”

“No, of course not.” Though he did. “It’s just that I worry about you. Look what you’ve done to your wing. Every time you go, how do I know you won’t have an accident, how do I know it’s not the last? I’m coming with you.”

“No! I’ve told you how jealous he gets. I’m his only daughter. It won’t go on much longer, I promise.”

“But what about me?”

“Don’t worry,” Alcestis cooed, snuggling close. Until they behaved like little chicks, she was never certain she had won. “What can I do to cheer you up?”

“Anything?” His eyes widened.

“Whatever you want.” As if she might grant all boundless wish.

He broke from the weight of his lover’s wings and looked at the birds around him. Alcestis was beautiful, he knew that, but she had grown different, and the difference disturbed him. “I don’t want much,” his voice hesitant.

“Just some feathers. Something to remember you by when you’re not here.”

“But why my feathers?” The fear again.

“Because they’re so beautiful.” It wasn’t a lie. “They’ll grow back, just like you said.”

Before she had time to protest he began to pluck, rapidly from her back and breast, but only removing the white. And he would have stolen half her covering to get the proportions right had Alcestis not flapped madly into the air and escaped without a word. One side of her body was now almost completely bare and she could feel the cold as she flew. For the first time in her life the joy of flight had been tainted. It was only momentary, she soon recovered from her shivering and consoled herself with the thought that her feathers would grow back, but she couldn’t expel the taint completely. Still, she was flying. Compared to that, what else was there?

For the next few months Alcestis found the joy of her expectation crushed by the ineluctable jealousy of her mates. It was always the same. She would sight one of the rocky islands and land with great excitement to be met, not with equal excitement in return, but a smile that did little to hide the bitterness beneath. Then, always the same conversation, the same accusations, same promises in return, and the same end: the stripping of yet more of her feathers. Her body simply couldn’t keep up. One had cleared her enormous wings down to the tiny black flight feathers while the other, to keep her markings balanced, had even plucked her white tail bare. With each

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new visit she made it was harder to fly away. Not because the desire had died—if anything it was now even more acute—but it was simply becoming physically impossible. Yet there was nothing she could do. She had to be where she was not. She simply couldn’t stop.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered weakly. She could no longer tell her partners apart, their demands like their actions the same, and she had no idea to whom it was she made her final promise. “Of course I’ll be back. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

Her body had given up the battle. There was no longer a single feather left on her raw and goosepimpled skin.

She didn’t know to which home she was flying and it gave her too much pain to think. It took all her strength and concentration just to heave herself into the air. Whereas, fully-feathered, the currents had been like a mountain slope down which she slid, miraculously never losing height, now featherless, the air seemed full of holes through which she fell whenever she stopped flapping. Even the sky had turned against her, she thought. To fly she had to work like every other bird. The tips of her wings began to chill, even with the work. Featherless, so high above the clouds, it wasn’t long before tiny buds of ice blossomed on her stomach and back.

“It’s so cold,” she shivered. “Why didn’t I notice it before? It seemed the most beautiful place in the world ... ” Her beak froze shut as the ice sealed like a glass cocoon around her. By the time she fell through the clouds she had become like a giant snowflake, almost impossible to see through the solid milky mist. As she reached the surface of the sea there wasn’t even a shadow to pierce. She sank to the rocky floor and came to rest, motionless as the days. Months, years passed. Utter tranquillity, yes and no unsplit, thought and silence woven together like a healed wound. Then the ice began to melt and break free of its stony roots and waft the warm currents upwards to the light. It drifted for days, melting faster now, current-carved, taking its human shape from the sea, the bird like a heart inside it now, which melting flapped its naked wings, and flapping gave the wanderer life.

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SPECIAL THANKS The Harvard Advocate wishes to thank the following generous individuals for their support of our activities during the 2012-2013 academic year. They have made possible the Advocate’s commitment to publishing the best literature and art that the Harvard campus offers, four times each year. The contributions of the following individuals have not only supported the printing of our magazine, but also our mission to promote the arts on campus. Last year, our building at 21 South Street hosted a wide array of literary and artistic events. Dan Chiasson, David Ferry, D.T. Max, and Paul Muldoon—to name only a few—visited, spoke, and read; local musicians played the blues in the Sanctum. We thank our new friend Finbarr O’Reilly for contributing the cover photo, and our designers Alex Chen, Eric Macomber, Lora Stoianova, and Jeannie Sui Wonders for the features illustrations. The photo of Martin Amis comes courtesy of Isabel Fonseca.

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contributors’ notes DAN CHIASSON’s fifth book, Bicentennial: Poems and Plays, will appear in early 2014 from Knopf. BEN LOORY’s fables and tales have appeared in The New Yorker, on NPR’s This American Life, and live at Selected Shorts. His book Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day was published by Penguin in 2011. CLANCY MARTIN is a 2011-2012 Guggenheim Fellow, a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, and author of the novel How to Sell and the book-length philosophical essay Love, Lies and Marriage. KATHERINE DAMM keeps a diary. GERALDINE BROOKS’s novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. JESSE NEE-VOGELMAN has a few questions for Jose Canseco. IRIS HÄUSSLER You Do Not Return From the Place that doesn’t exist. Because OLIVER LUO has kindly asked for it. DAVID FERRY just won the National Book Award for his book Bewilderment. TOM THAYER: “The wolf that understands the lamb is lost, will die of hunger, will not have understood the lamb, will have been wrong about the wolf—and almost everything remains for it to learn about being” – Henri Michaux. KEONI CORREA just can’t be sure. STEPHANIE NEWMAN would like to dedicate her poem to her grandmother, Daisy Peterdi. D. T. MAX is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of two books, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace and The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery. His work last appeared in The Harvard Advocate in 1983. WARNER JAMES WOOD seeks a new life in the traveling circus. BEN COSGROVE is a composer, pianist, and multi-instrumentalist. DANNY BREDAR is flinging a fat slow-motion. DIS MAGAZINE: “If photos of my nipples give a little smile to others, that is my duty. In exchange, I get to enjoy the luxuries of being an actress”– Bai Ling. FINBARR O’REILLY is a primate, and 2013 Nieman Fellow. JOHN HUGHES is the author of three books and the recipient of numerous Australian writing prizes. His fourth book, The Garden of Sorrows, will be published

by UWA Press in October 2013.