Commencement 2009

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TABLE OF CONTENTS COMMENCEMENT 2009

ART James Powers Aurora Andrews Aurora Andrews Aurora Andrews Sabrina Chou Enzo Camacho and Amy Lien Kayla Escobedo Aurora Andrews Aurora Andrews

20 24 25 28 36 44 50 60 61

Carpenter Center, Fifth Floor; Night Jeopardy New Cat Potatoes STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE, 2009 A Preemptive Maneuver Primitive: the story of a whale girl 6 Train Travis, Evan, and CJ

3 14 42 54 62 68

FEATURES NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH STREET: Twilight of the Libraries Sanders Bernstein How the Avant-Garde Got Popular (Or Not) Richard Beck Nō Catharsis Allison Keeley The Rejection of the Regionalists: Wyeth, Wood and the New Americans Emily Chertoff Four Ways of Seeing: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet Jessica Sequeira ENVOY: Letter from Exurbia Ben Cosgrove

9 26 46

Saturation Snowbound (excerpt) The Complete Strangers (excerpt)

22 23 35 43

Photeine How the Water Spinifex Fire Disorder/Rabbit

FICTION Dwight Livingstone Curtis Kyle McAuley Jesse Barron POETRY Michael Stynes Margaret Ross Margaret Ross Abram Kaplan

ILLUSTRATIONS BY AMY LIEN COVER BY SABRINA CHOU, AMY LIEN, AND LEEANN SUEN

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ART Emma Banay, Nicole Bass*, Ruben Davis, Elyssa Jakim, Dana Kase, Amy Lien*, Paul Katz*, Rebecca Lieberman, Anna Murphy, Julene Paul, Thalassa Raasch, Anna Raginskaya, Julia Renaud*, Madeleine Schwartz, Michael Stynes*.

BUSINESS Ankur Agrawal, Ben Berman, Sanders Bernstein, Giselle Cheung, Diane Choi, Ruben Davis, Eyal Dechter*, Liya Eijvertinya, Amy Heberle*, Catherine Humphreville, Andrew Izaguirre, Olivia Jampol, Frances Jin, Paul Katz*, Kenneth Li, Jeff Lee, Keri Mabry, Iya Megre, Arielle Pensler, Geraldine Prasuhn*, Logan Pritchard, Anna Raginskaya, David Tao, Daniel Thorn, Caroline Williams, Natalie Wong, Millicent Younger, Lillian Yu.

The Harvard Advocate www.theharvardadvocate.com

Editorial Board

DESIGN Sabrina Chou*, Dana Kase, Charleton Lamb, Rebecca Lieberman, Amy Lien*, Joseph Morcos, Anna Murphy, Lauren Packard, LeeAnn Suen*, Joe Vitti.

President Sanders bernstein Publisher Millicent younger Art Editor Dana Kase Business Manager natalie wong Design Editors anna murphy

Lauren packard Features Editor Anna barnet Fiction Editor carolyn gaebler Poetry Editor david wallace Online Editor ben berman Art Pegasi Abram kaplan jessica sequeira Literary Pegasi ryan meehan

Adam palay Dionysi rebecca cooper

charleton lamb Circulation Manager anna raginskaya Publicity Manager jeffrey lee Librarian linda liu Alumni Relations Manager lillian yu

FEATURES Anna Barnet, Richard Beck*, Brittany Benjamin, Sanders Bernstein, Emily Chertoff, Mark Chiusano, Rebecca Cooper, Ben Cosgrove, Alexander Fabry*, Marta Figlerowicz*, Allison Keeley*, Anna Polonyi, Madeleine Schwartz, Kevin Seitz, Jessica Sequeira, Daniel Wenger*.

FICTION Katie Banks, Jesse Barron*, Sanders Bernstein, Emily Chertoff, William Eck, Marta Figlerowicz*, Carolyn Gaebler, Justin Keenan, Seph Kramer, Michal Labik, Charleton Lamb, Max Larkin, Henry Lichtblau, Linda Liu, Teddy Martin, Ryan Meehan, Alex Ratner, Juliet Samuel*, Matthew Spellberg*, David Wallace, April Wang*, Daniel Wenger*, Scott Zuccarino.

POETRY Matthew Aucoin, Nicole Bass*, Alexander Berman, Courtney Bowman, William Eck, Ted Gioia, Chris Johnson-Roberson, Abram Kaplan, Jennifer Nicole Kurdyla, James Leaf, Celeste Monke*, Adam Palay, Margaret Ross*, Michael Stynes*, David Wallace, Daniel Wenger*, Mike Zuckerman.

Board of Trustees Chairman Chairman Emeritus Vice-Chairman President Vice-President and Treasurer Secretary

James Atlas Louis Begley Douglas McIntyre Susan Morrison Austin Wilkie

TECHNOLOGY Ben Berman, Jeff Feldman, Kevin McNamara, Mark VanMiddlesworth. *The Harvard Advocate congratulates its graduating seniors

Charles Atkinson

The Harvard Advocate will anonymously consider all submissions of art, features, ficiton, and poetry. Submissions may be emailed to art@theharvardadvocate. com, features@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 can be directed to the individual emails above or to contact@theharvardadvocate.com.

Peter Brooks

John DeStefano

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A. Whitney Ellsworth jonathan Galassi

Lev Grossman

Angela Mariani

Daniel Max celia mcgee

Thomas A. Stewart

Jean StRouse

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Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nation’s oldest continually published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from the Advocate house at 21 South Street, 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 foreign 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, but price and availability varies depending on the issue. Please inquire by writing to contact@ theharvardadvocate.com. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of The Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2009 by the Editors and Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.

NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH STREET Twilight of the Libraries Sanders Bernstein

In a famous episode of the television show, The Twilight Zone, Henry Bemis, “a bookish little man whose passion is the printed page but who is conspired against by…a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of the clock,” miraculously survives a nuclear blast. The lone survivor, he despairs until he discovers that the entire book collection of the public library has been saved as well. Finally, the bibliophile can truly pursue his passion, uninterrupted by anything or anyone, with, as he declares “all the time I need, and all the time I want.” However, after arranging all of the books that he intends to read into perfectly ordered stacks, and situating himself on the steps of the library to begin his literary fete, his glasses slip from his nose and shatter on the stone. Within his grasp are all of the books that he could ever want to read, and yet, his access to them has been denied by a cruel quirk of fate. He can feel the texture of the books’ cover but cannot see what is inside of them. He knows they are there, but can never enter them, can never experience the magic of exploring their hidden worlds.

With this terrible knowledge written large across his face, the camera zooms out, reducing Henry Bemis to just another heap on the library’s steps.

The narrator delivers his inevitable verdict: “Mr. Henry Bemis [is] in the Twilight Zone.”

We are all in the Twilight Zone, we just haven’t realized it yet. Or so, essentially, writes Robert Darnton, Harvard University’s Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, in his recent article in The New York Review of Books, “Google and the Future of Books.” According to Darnton, we are all like Henry Bemis, except,

rather than having our glasses accidentally break from a tumble, they have been filched by the soft, moisturized hands of Larry Page and Sergei Brin and then ruthlessly and systematically comminuted beneath their canvas Adidas.

Darnton alleges that Google, though it has managed to digitize a staggering number of books over the past four years, making accessible to the users of the internet works previously languishing in the backrooms of University libraries, as the result of new plans in the wake of a recent copyright lawsuit, will now be the main obstacle to universal access of these materials.

Darnton has a problem with the monetization of the library. In particular, he is deeply suspicious of Google’s potential monopoly of access to digital books. The fact that Google is a publicly traded company and must answer to the powers of profit and not just the altruistic gods of knowledge or the reasonable voice of the people is a real sticking point for him. That Google has no obligation (beyond its self-imposed promise “of broad access to the Books by the public, including institutions of higher education”) to society at large—that its first allegiance is to its shareholders—is reason for alarm. As Darnton asserts, Libraries exist to promote a public good: “the encouragement of learning,” learning “Free To All.” Businesses exist in order to make money for their shareholders—and a good thing, too, for the public good depends on a profitable economy. Yet if we permit the commercialization of the content of COMMENCEMENT 2009

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our libraries, there is no getting around a fundamental contradiction.

The class action suit leveled against Google in the fall of 2005 for its digitization of copyrighted texts ended in a settlement (pending a New York district court’s approval) that gives Google the digital copyright to all out-of-print books and to any copyrighted book whose author chooses to opt in. Because the suit was a class action, no potential competitor in the digital book trade can make headway in digitizing copyrighted book unless it goes to individual copyright holders one by one or is confronted with a class action suit of its own. So, to mount a real challenge to Google’s dominance would take an incredible amount of time, during which Google could easily move to head off its wouldbe rival. Furthermore, as Darnton points out, the revenue sharing agreement of the settlement (giving Google 37 percent of the profit and the holder of the copyright 63 percent) effectively allows Google to charge as high prices as it wishes with few checks and balances. Google will have no real competition and no real price ceiling, a combination rife with the potential for consumer exploitation.

The settlement has caused a general uproar.

Jeffrey Toobin was perhaps the first to raise the alarm, warning about the possibility of a monopoly in a February 2007 article in The New Yorker, nearly two years before the deal was reached. It was followed by a wave of articles about the Google digitization project altering the publishing landscape. The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, virtually every intellectually reputable paper had something to say. But the pre-settlement debate paled before the veritable storm of criticism ensued when the deal was actually reached. An editorial in The Boston Globe questioned whether the new deal was a “goldmine of ideas—or theft?” And, while even Google’s opponents cannot deny that the books search is providing unprecedented access to a previously unimaginable number of books, they appear to be fortifying themselves for a long legal battle. Objections are being filed from all sides before the window for such action ends on

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September 4. Consumer Watchdog and Internet Archives have both objected to the settlement on antitrust grounds. And it is not a question of whether others will contest the ruling, only of when.

Distrustful of the pursuit of profit, Darnton too believes that Google will, as a corporation, inevitably choose private good over public benefit. Despite the definite public benefits the project has already created (for example, access to one million books in the public domain) and will create in the future (free access to the database from one terminal in every public library in the United States) all of which Darnton does acknowledge, Google’s digitization drive is something to bewail rather than ballyhoo.

Darnton mourns what could have been, “We could have created a National Digital Library— the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. It is too late now.”

However, the question Darnton never asks is would the “twenty-first-century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria” necessarily be a good thing? Would it be free of the ulterior, or rather, in Google’s case, explicit extra-epistemophilic motives?

Throughout history, storehouses of knowledge have never been built with entirely pure intentions. Ulterior motives have always lurked amidst the stacks. In the Abbasid Caliphate’s famed House of Wisdom, where the learning of Ancient Rome and Greece was protected from the political chaos of those lands, where alKhwarizmi invented algebra (and his name gave us the word “algorithm”), Muslims appropriated the knowledge of conquered India, turning the Hindu number system into Arabic numerals.

Now considered the first public library, the library of San Marco, founded by Cosimo de’ Medici in 1444, was created as power publicity, as a means of instituting the Medici’s dominance in Florence. It was a vehicle of what Dutch historian Johan Huizinga calls a “cruel publicity,” an attempt to move from the medieval ostentation of private wealth into the modern power practice of influencing the civic realm.

Even the Library of Alexandria was not born out of benevolence. Ptolemy Soter starved out

Athens until it relinquished its knowledge and enabled him to build the greatest library ever, a repository of humanity’s cultural production that would endow his Alexandria with the wisdom of the ages. While scholars from throughout the world were allowed to come and study at the library, texts were not to be shared with other countries. The Ptolemies banned the exportation of papyrus and confiscated many a scroll from Alexandria’s visitors.

In modern times, libraries retain their hidden agenda. France’s Bibliothèque Nationale served to consolidate the rule of the people during the French Revolution when, beneath the banner of knowledge, it confiscated all of the private collections of the First and Second estates. John Dewey’s project (through his decimal system and his company, The Library Bureau, which peddled library equipment) was to make libraries efficient and, in turn, transform its frequenters into efficient beings. The public libraries of America were not simply wells from which Americans could drink as deeply as they wished but served to baptize new waves of immigrants, acting as headquarters of cultural assimilation.

From their midst, social workers would venture forth, armed with books promoting American values that they would distribute to the children of the tenements.

Furthermore, access has always been limited to even the most embracing institutions of knowledge. In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose where the library holds what seems to be all knowledge, the librarian Jorge de Burgos restricts access, going to such lengths as murder, and even burning down the library, to prevent anyone from reading Aristotle’s book on comedy. Similarly, even the most voluminous of libraries have been selective in their circulation.

At the New York Public Library, whose motto, as Darnton reverentially invokes, is “Free for All,” minorities were made to feel unwelcome for most of the 20th century. Who can forget the protagonist of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain looking at the library’s steps and deciding not to enter its hallowed halls because “everyone, all the white people inside, would know that he was not used to great buildings, or to many books, and they would look at him with pity?” Today, at the libraries of academic

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institutions, like the one at Harvard over which Darnton presides, dedicated to open and liberal discourse, one needs to have a university identification card to gain access to the stacks, or otherwise must undergo the mind numbing trial of bureaucratic paperwork.

And, of course, inside the libraries, there remain bureaucratic layers to navigate. In Oxford’s Bodleian Library, no one is allowed to remove books from the shelves except for the librarians; all scholars are at their mercy. In France’s Bibliothèque Nationale, the same is true.

Where in history has there been unmediated access to knowledge? Even Google does not promise this. One searches Google according to an algorithm of its engineers devising. Why would the fact of power melt away now, just because we’ve changed mediums from the physical to the digital?

Eben Moglen, a Professor of Law at Columbia University and a leading proponent of “free culture,” makes a powerful case that the digitization of the world does change things and profoundly so. What Google has done and

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what it is doing is in no way comparable to the accumulation by libraries of old, not because of its scale, but because the very nature of the object being assembled, the book, has transformed. For all of history, books were objects—things you could hold, touch, taste, even, if you wanted to—that had a certain cost to reproduce.

The digital books of today no longer have physical lives. Moglen declares in his 2003 “(dot) Communist Manifesto,” “The dominant goods in the system of production—the articles of cultural consumption that are both commodities sold and instructions to the worker on what and how to buy—along with all other forms of culture and knowledge now have zero marginal cost.”

To reproduce a digital text, all you have to do is press “download” and now you have a copy. Or, if it’s on your hard drive already, a left click and a selection of the command “copy” or “duplicate” will suffice. With just your right index finger, you can now have two digital copies of King Lear where just a millisecond before you owned only one.

In light of the ease of replication Moglen has a list of demands. They are sevenfold:

1. Abolition of all forms of private property in ideas.

2. Withdrawal of all exclusive licenses, privileges and rights to use of electromagnetic spectrum. Nullification of all conveyances of permanent title to electromagnetic frequencies.

3. Development of electromagnetic spectrum infrastructure that implements every person’s equal right to communicate.

4. Common social development of computer programs and all other forms of software, including genetic information, as public goods.

5. Full respect for freedom of speech, including all forms of technical speech.

6. Protection for the integrity of creative works.

7. Free and equal access to all publiclyproduced information and all educational material used in all branches of the public education system.

While Google complies with six of these precepts, it flagrantly violates the first, and that is the desire held dearest to Moglen’s heart. The fact that post-settlement Google clings to the copyright, even though it is legally mandated to do so, is downright immoral: “when everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty and utility—reaping all the human value of every increase of knowledge—at the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude.”

The library that Google assembles via its Book Search is not this hyperleap forward, as Darnton, despite his suspicions of commerce, believes to be the case. Moglen would not deny that Google’s prodigious digital translation is a tremendous step forward for human knowledge, but Google’s “library” model remains mired in the material realm. In its refusal to share all information, to allow the reader unfettered access to its archives (though, of course, unfettered still means mediated by its algorithm), it denies the reader what is rightfully his. Google Book Search still operates as if it were dealing with physical forms.

Within Moglen’s idealistic yet compelling worldview Google’s post-settlement project becomes more then just a thing of which to be wary—it is an outright violation of the proper order of the digital universe. To return to the position of poor Harry Bemis, for Moglen, rather than having our glasses broken, all of our books were snatched up while our backs were turned.

We found the public library with all of its riches and just as we were about to set ourselves down to enjoy this bounty, we discover that it is all gone. We can still see perfectly clearly, but the books themselves have vanished, taken from us by the long hand of Google. Or, if they’re still on the steps, we can no longer feel them, we can no longer find them. They have been stolen from our grasp by Google’s potent black magic.

In the Middle Ages, the frontispieces of books were inscribed with curses directed toward potential book thieves. The curses were varied and elaborate, indicative of just how highly these books were prized: “If anyone dares to carry this book off, either secretly or publicly, may he hang by the throat as ravens pick out his eyes,” “For him that stealeth from this library, let [the book] change into a serpent into his hand and rend him. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails, and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of hell consume him,” “He who steals or sells this book, let him die the death, let him be fried in a pan, let the falling sickness and fever seize him, and let him be broken on a wheel and hanged, Amen.” Chained to altars and stone pillars, the book was protected so vigilantly, by physical and spiritual forces both, not simply because of the knowledge it contained, but also its very corporal existence was immensely valuable. A book was worth, quite literally, a fortune. It was a rare and unique treasure.

The digital volume, however, has no aura, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s term. It is no more than straight knowledge, purely a means of access into the author’s world. It is infinitely reproducible. There is no cult surrounding its object. There is no object for a cult to worship: just 0s and 1s creating an image on a screen. If the experience of the internet can be defined as

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the solitary, private exploration of a social, public sphere, then the book is at its essence is the prototype of the internet: the private experience of a virtual world in conversation with a myriad other worlds.

It might not be a revolutionary claim, that the bodiless book is the Internet before the Internet (innumerable others have done so using Jorge Luís Borges’s “Library of Babel” as an illustrative example), but it makes for an easy way to conceive of the problem of ownership with which both Darnton and Moglen wrestle. No one owns the Internet. While individuals or corporations may lay claim to a website address, or many addresses, as a whole, it is outside of the realm of any single interest. To own something implies control and no one has managed to truly control the Internet. The Chinese government has tried over and over again, but it is impossible to assert autocratic force. Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, Lycos are highways but it is always possible to take the back roads. The Internet is too big and individual experience is too unique to completely control either, to be able to own either.

It is inevitable that Google’s black magic

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monopoly will fall, not because another great competitor will emerge to challenge it, but rather, because millions of competitors already exist. The innumerable Henry Bemises all have a magic of their own. Armed with the ability to copy and share files, it is a real possibility that they could destabilize Google’s predicted dominance. By virtue of their powers, peerto-peer networks could become the sites of knowledge circulation, just as they became the vehicles of music and video traffic and undercut those respective industries. Rather than a great new digital library, we might instead see the locus of knowledge shift to the fringes. Google will find its power diluted as biblio-Napsters surface as Google’s stockpiles are replicated and disseminated throughout the World Wide Web. The power dynamic of the library will not disappear; it never will. Its ulterior motives will not be exorcised. However, if the library goes, the particular type of power dynamic it propagates cannot help but go too. If book traffic is not organized around a center that can be controlled by a singular force, then, while power dynamics do not disappear completely, the possibility of a coherent, sinister manifestation is muddled by the masses. There are simply too many actors with too many disparate interests.

Men and women at their computers already fight against Google Library’s hegemony, some even unknowingly, undermining its monopoly as they share book files, as they copy texts, as they circumvent and occasionally steal from the giant who staked its hold on the ancient idea of Alexandria. The end to that dream is unavoidable. The power of the book declares that Google Book Search must face its predestined curse. It is what is written. And, as Google Books dies, a death that has already begun as piracy becomes typical practice, the Henry Bemises of the world salvage the great library’s contents in preparation for the day when we finally will be able to read them.

Saturation

Dwight Livingstone Curtis

Two men, both shirtless, each holding an axe, and one, a gnarled saw, waded through waist-deep water toward a two-story house that emerged, strained, heavy with each waterlogged board and each rusted nail that pinned it together, from the soggy earth. When they reached the doorway of the house, the first man laid his hand flat against the front door. With effort, he pressed against the damp wood, and from the exposed upper hinge a shriek, the spoiled union of iron and air, echoed shrilly down an empty street, piercing the soft surfaces of damp wood and bouncing freely off the dark, swirling surface of the river.

The water had been rising, now, for seven days.

On the first morning, without a sound, the cattle in the fields had begun to walk away from the river. For three days they walked, slowly, heavily, as cows do, each purposeful step crumpling the grass and pressing down the wet soil beneath it, leaving an ever-growing half moon of pockmarked earth behind. The townspeople noticed the cows before they noticed the rising water.

On the fourth day, the mill reversed direction.

The water, thick and dark, had risen above the axle of the wooden wheel, and when the swirling surface water overpowered the quiet channel below, the wheel slowed, and creaked, and began to turn again in reverse, snapping gears and mutilating machinery. Then, when the sullen current licked a final splash up over the churning woodwork, it groaned to a stop, and everything was quiet.

On the fifth day, the doctor could be seen piling armloads of damp clothing into the back of an old horse cart. Next to the cart, his wife and

her four daughters, all barefoot and muddy up to their ankles, stared upward without speaking.

They watched for rain, but there was none to be seen, only clouds, and crows. Most flew west, with the current, but some could be seen returning, circling and watching the river as it sucked up the land and pulled anxiously at the lowest boards of houses. When the doctor’s wife drove his horse toward the road, the women clinging tightly to the dripping cargo, the wheels of the cart left grooves as deep as a man’s hand in the black ground.

On the sixth day the water turned salty. Now, bits of splintered board could be seen drifting down the river, passing through the sunken windows of riverside sheds and picking up thick tangles of weeds. The water, now spilling through doorways and puddling in dirty circles on the floors of empty houses, had washed away the grooves of a dozen horse carts, and twenty miles west, along the river, hungry donkeys dragged hungry families through thick mud, toward desperate hopes of dry inns and warm meals. The cattle, which had been migrating steadily, ignored by humans, for almost a week, huddled on a hill two miles from the muddy bank of the river, chewing mouthfuls of muddy grass and blinking dumbly at the flat sky.

Single-story houses, which had once housed small families, looms, and coal stoves, now lilted against the current, until one by one they collapsed gently into the murky water. Only the drunks and their whores still walked among the heavy, stained structures, checking bedrooms for gold and kitchens for wine. In the daytime, they huddled together on the side of the hill above town, where the cows had once stood, and where COMMENCEMENT 2009

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small piles of scrap wood now sat in piles, some of it lashed together in futile rafts, most of it loose and damp. They drank from bottles and crossed themselves under the grey sky. Half of the town lay underwater; the other half, void of life, leaned quietly under its damp empty weight.

The two men, holding their tools high above their heads, waded through the doorway and into a small room, filled to the mantle with water, and from the mantle to the ceiling with thick, wet air. The surface of a table drifted slowly on the water, propelled toward the far wall by the rippling progress of the two bodies. When one of the men swung the head of his axe down onto a corner of the table, it dipped effortlessly down into the black water, lifting another dripping leg into the air. The leg looked grey in the grey light, and it was lined with veins of green. The man shifted his weight, lifting an obscured foot to brace against the corner of the table, and when he pulled the axe from the wood it bobbed back up into the air, sending ripples bouncing in patterns off the walls and the bare chests.

Against the far wall the men stepped carefully up a wooden staircase. As they rose out of the water, green weeds clung to the belt loops of dark brown pants, and dark dripping leather of cracked boots curled down to expose white ankles streaked with straight black hair. Their heads disappeared, followed by the tops of their pants, their ankles, the soles of their cracked boots, and then they were gone, creaking across the floor above the empty room.

In the single room, into which the men emerged part by part, a single body sat as still as petrified wood on a wooden chair. It was the body of an old man, with small tufts of white hair growing from his sagging ears, clothed in a dirty white shirt and brown linen trousers. Its eyes were half open, as still as marbles stuck in mud, and the men ignored it as they moved about the room, testing the softness of the wood of a small bureau, now a square dining table, now a painted cradle, now a small end table, on which a Bible lay, coverless. The wood was damp but hard, and they took to it with the axes, snapping the legs from the larger table and splintering the flat

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boards and hitting at the bureau with overhand swings until it lay crushed in a pile on the floor.

They took apart the crib with their hands, and this wood, protected by the white paint, made loud snapping noises as they bent and broke its spokes.

When all but the end table lay in a pile by one wall, behind the seated body, the men lay down their axes and stood, breathing heavily, by the only window in the room. Through it, they watched the river move quietly through town. Crows stood on the branches of trees, and now and then one or two would take flight and drift over the black water to another tree to stand on another branch.

There were no sounds for a quarter of an hour, during which the river rose imperceptibly.

Both men had coils of wet yellow twine in each of their pockets. They knotted the wood together in bundles, and when the third bundle was taut one of the men moved over to the small end table. The Bible felt damp and heavy. Inside, the inked letters were swollen. He touched the top of the table again, and then motioned for the other man, who brought his axe and took to it with dull swings. The man with the Bible carried it over to the seated body. The floor in front of the chair was dry, and he placed the heavy book at a reverent angle in front of the feet. Each man then took two bundles, wedging the tools between the twine and the splintered boards, and they stepped carefully back down the stairwell, disappearing part by part, leaving behind, among piles of splinters and small dirty puddles, only the still body in its chair and the wet book.

They had not known that he was alive. The following morning his eyes drifted down to gaze at the Bible. It had swollen slightly since the previous afternoon when the men had come into the house to take the furniture for futile rafts.

During the night, one of the puddles left in the center of the room by the men had trickled across the floorboards, snaking past sawdust deposits until it touched up against one corner of the book, where it was quickly absorbed by the already damp pages. Now, in the grey light leaking through the window—although it had been cloudy for weeks, there was a certain heightened color in the room when the sun ought to have been shining in—he

watched the book grow.

His name was Levi. Like the cattle, he had known about the flood, sensed it, before the young and active townspeople. It had been coming for months, perhaps always, and when his bones began to crystallize he knew that this was how it would end, still, petrified, in the rising water.

At first it was his fingers. As a boy he had thrown stones and flicked insects, as all boys do, and as a young man he had run nervous fingertips over the laces of corsets. But when he grew older his bones hardened and began to scrape against one another, until his wife and sister began to feed him, dragging a spoon roughly over the coarse white hair on his chin to catch the droplets of broth that ran down from his lips.

When he stopped eating, after his knees froze and his fingers closed permanently around the arms of his chair, his jaw, too, grew coarse and chipped inside, and his last few words had sent sounds like crunching gravel tearing through his skull.

And, as his bones rusted like the hinges of old doors he began to notice the moistness in the air, the dampening of noises in their wooden house and the sheen on his sister’s forehead as she pleaded with him to eat.

‘I do not need food,’ he had thought to himself; ‘hunger will not kill me, as it will them.’ He had waited patiently as the air thickened in his room, and when the cattle left he was the happiest he had been in weeks. They would all leave, now, he thought, and when his wife came into his room, weeping, followed later by his sister, to talk in loud sobs about the flood, he had been happy that he could not speak, and hoped that they would not draw out their departure.

When the water finally crossed their hearth the women had already packed their bundles of moldy clothing into the broken oxcart and foraged what dry foods and fresh water remained in the house and the looted storerooms of their neighbors. He wished for the women to leave, to forget to kiss the damp skin of his forehead and not to promise him that they would return with a boat and food, not to try to carry his rigid body somewhere dryer to die. He had pretended to be dead, closing his eyes and slowing his breathing for hours until the

small purple snakes that always clouded his vision had filled the room. And then his wife had come upstairs to kiss him guiltily and hold his hand, weeping quietly, while his vision cleared.

They had left dry food in jars beside his chair.

The first time that men came upstairs, he had pretended to be dead, and they took all of the food in wet brown sacks that they tied shut with twine and carried over their shoulders. That was when the men still wore shirts, when some decent women still lingered, when it was still a sinful thing to go into another man’s bedroom, to stare at a rigid body and be glad it was not one’s own. He did not need to eat; he felt his end at hand, and with each tired beat of his heart, his crystalline body clenched tighter at the tunnels of watery blood that snaked through it. The day after the men came for the last of the furniture, blue mold began to creep up the walls.

For two days he sat still, awake, no longer sleeping or blinking. Each hour brought new growth to the walls, which smelled sour, and though Levi could not turn his head to look out the window, he heard and smelled the flood.

There were fish now, in the room below him, 1/4-page Vertical.REV 11/4/08 1:27 PM Page 1 giant ocean fish, with stiff fins on their backs and thick red gills. As they swam, he listened to the

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ripples echo off the walls in the ever shrinking cavern between the water and the ceiling. ‘There are only a few inches of air left beneath me,’ he told himself, and through the window he could smell sea turtles and hear the dipping flight of pelicans.

The nails that held the walls together smelled like rust. With the first effort he had made since moving to the chair, and with what he knew would be the final shift of bone on bone in his crystalline body, he let his head drop slightly until he was staring straight at the swollen book on the floor in front of him. As his vertebrae shifted, they made the sound of stones colliding, and he blinked with the sharp pain of friction.

Then, still again, he felt the last of his unfixed joints fuse into place, as brittle now as a sprung and forgotten bear trap, crimson with rust, no longer metal, ancient latticed powder of no use to nature.

‘I will not drown, either,’ he told himself, for he felt, too, that he had ceased to breathe. The only motion in the room, in which dilated time made a puppet-show of mold and rust, was the growth of the blue streaks on the walls, and the

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steady crowning of the book that sat wet on the wet floor.

What lasted? Bone would outlive muscle.

What of fingernails? He stared at the book. How long would language persevere, and when would it be forgotten? He thought of human bodies, and then of other animals, and then plants.

Wood was no better than flesh or bone, or tusk, or tooth. No living thing would outlast stone; nothing that had been nourished by sunlight or that had coursed with blood would be any more than dust when cool pebbles still lay quietly in piles on mountaintops. Was life itself the fatal flaw, the dooming touch? What was bone, or muscle?

‘God has grown tired of men,’ Levi thought, as he listened to the barnacles bite slowly and tightly into the floorboards of his kitchen.

Later, he noticed the first black swirl trickle out of the round pile of pages, into the puddle that surrounded it. Slowly, the ink was sucked out of the book, and the water darkened, then the wood beneath it. ‘If I could move,’ thought Levi, ‘I would taste that water.’ The water was dark, and the pages, which had swollen and melted together, had grown lighter, inkless, like a slab of butter.

At a certain moment, consciousness itself crystallized into mere architecture. When the water finally rose carefully over the last step, it entered the room slowly, in a thin, rounded film.

It rolled over exposed nails and joined in quick asymmetrical embraces with the puddles that stood in ruts, and when it arrived at the old book the clean mound dissolved without resistance in creamy swirls. Levi, too, succumbed quickly to the rising water, and his powdered bones and paper skin swirled about the room, mere pigments, coloring the water as it overtook the blue mold and sucked up the splinters.

The following morning, nothing could be seen of the town. Forty miles west, in a similar town, distant cousins and flushed innkeepers ate candlelit dinners on sturdy tables, while their cattle, with a sudden sense of purpose, blinked dumbly at the hills that rose up against the grey horizon.

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How the Avant-Garde Got Popular (Or Not) Richard Beck

In 1930, after receiving dozens of letters complaining about their “ultra-modern” radio broadcasts, the British Broadcasting Company published a set of listening instructions in Radio Times: Listen as carefully at home as you do in a theatre or concert hall. You can’t get the best out of a programme if your mind is wandering, or if you are playing bridge or reading, give it your full attention. Try turning out the lights so that your eye is not caught by familiar objects in the room. Your imagination will be twice as vivid.

If you only listen with half an ear you haven’t got a quarter of a right to criticize.

Operating under the direction of Edward Clark, the BBC had been doing its best to

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bring the musical avant garde to the masses, programming brutal dodecaphonic operas alongside stand-up comedians and patriotic marches. Lord Reith, who had founded the BBC after replying to an ad in The Morning Post, believed that audiences would accept new musical works with “comparatively little effort.”

He was wrong. Complaints continued to pour in, and before long the BBC was lashing out.

“Many of you have not even begun to master the art of listening,” a programming director wrote in Radio Times. “You have not even begun to try.” In 1936, the BBC gave up the fight. Tonality returned to the airwaves.

The situation is not much different today.

As David Stubbs notes in his new book Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don’t Get Stockhausen, avant-garde and experimental music remain cultural punch-lines. Starting somewhere around 1907, when Arnold Schoenberg began to overhaul Western tonality in 1907, compositional music completely

abandoned the theoretical anchors that had grounded it for centuries. It is impossible to overstate just how radical a break this was. The composer Anton Webern was not exaggerating when he gloated over tonality’s corpse: “We broke its neck.”

Twentieth-century modernism had other casualties, though, including the visible world in visual art. In the space of about fifty years, representation completely broke down. By the 1950s, Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists had made New York—not Paris— the cultural capital of the West, and today their paintings bring in tens of millions of dollars.

They are dorm room posters. Stubbs’ question is a really good one: “Why has avant-garde music failed to attain the audience, the cachet, the legitimacy of its visual equivalent?”

Fear of Music is an intelligent book, but it doesn’t deliver on the promise of its subtitle, and part of the reason is Stubbs’ idea of what qualifies as an equivalent avant-garde. The visual arts had seen impressionist painters rubbing at the textures of representation throughout the late nineteenth century, but it wasn’t until Picasso

that the structures began to crumble. Once you look at a woman and see an arrangement of geometries, you are no longer simply seeing the woman. You are seeing your own seeing, and from Picasso to Pollock seeing itself became the proper subject of painting. In 1958, the artist and critic Allan Kaprow wrote that Pollock had made it possible for painting to confront the senses— and therefore life—directly. Not to see things.

Just to see.

Modernist music was after directness as well, but not through any new abstraction.

Western music was abstract already, which was an important element of its status. Musical mimesis—flute trills for bird calls, for example— was lowbrow, and composers who did use the devices of program music usually ended up defending themselves. Beethoven insisted that his Pastoral symphony was not programmatic: “it is more an expression of feelings rather than a tone-painting.” This doesn’t prevent us from hearing the brook in the second movement, which Beethoven titled “By the Brook,” but it shows us how music in the West made a hierarchy of itself.

What modernism ended in music was the idea that music consisted of organized pitches, tones vibrating at particular frequencies that could be written down and then performed by any musician capable of reading the language.

In 1913, the painter and composer Luigi Russolo laid out the new criterion: “[Music] comes ever closer to the noise-sound.” Russolo believed that the best model for modern listening was the battlefield, a place where the ear is much more privileged than it is in daily life. “From noise,” he wrote, “the different calibers of grenades and shrapnels can be known even before they explode…There is no movement or activity that is not revealed by noise.” Decades later, John Cage would agree: “It had been clear from the beginning that what was needed was a music based on noise, on noise’s lawlessness.”

Lawlessness is a good word for it. When we talk about sounds, we are talking about the domesticated part of the audible world.

Sounds have names. They can be controlled by the people who hear them. They are often

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nice to listen to. Noises, though, only refer to themselves, and they are what we would rather not be hearing. Until the end of the nineteenth century, “musical” meant pitched sounds produced by certain kinds of instruments harmonizing with one another in certain ways.

What modernism built was a much bigger tent of musical sounds—it let the noises in.

Looking to replicate war in the concert hall, Russolo designed and built his own instruments.

None of his originals survived, but his diagrams show large wooden boxes with a metal cylinder on the side. One of them was called “the roarer.”

Another one was “the scraper.” The moans, whirrs, skronks, and thuds that came out of them would have been impossible to write down using traditional notation, but what helped noise along in the first half of the twentieth century was the quickly increasing sophistication of recording technology. The phonograph and the studio opened up the very textures of sound itself to composition, and they also cut out the middleman—the performer—allowing composers to exercise complete control over the music they wrote. For all the talk of “revolution” and “opening up” that accompanies the musical avant garde, the composers themselves were often domineering types. A musician in rehearsal once asked Karlheinz Stockhausen, who claimed to have visited the star Sirius, “How will I know when I am playing in the rhythm of the universe?” “I will tell you,” he replied.

The final triumph of noise in music was announced by silence. John Cage’s most widely known and most radical composition is 4’33”, in which the performer sits at the instrument mute and motionless for the period of time identified by the title. (There are at least six recordings available. I got mine on iTunes, with Wayne Marshall at the piano. It’s a good performance.)

Of course, the world is never completely silent, and so what Cage’s piece highlights are the ambient sounds in the concert hall, which turns out to be a noisy place even when people are doing their best to be quiet. Whether 4’33” opens your ears to the music of everyday life is a matter of taste. What’s simply fact, though,

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is that for the first time the idea of music had been inflated to encompass the whole sphere of audible phenomena. All noises became sounds.

Noise has created a lot of confusion among music historians, and it partially explains why Stubbs gets his equivalences wrong. For roughly five hundred years, the history and development of Western music had been charted along the lines of tonality. Instrumentation, industry, and aesthetics all played important roles, but the ever-changing list of permissible tones and harmonic progressions is what made it possible to connect Palestrina to Handel to Bach to Mozart to Beethoven to Schubert to Wagner to Strauss to Schoenberg. Cage broke that causal chain for good, and so a lot of people thinking and writing about the development of music in the last-half century really aren’t sure what it is they mean by “development” (you can count me in with that group). Developing, yes, but with respect to what?

Institutions can help to make these histories make sense. Stubbs, who is British, opens Fear of Music in the Tate Modern, instinctively—if not explicitly—recognizing that modern art would be completely impossible without the museums that house it. People on weekend trips to New York don’t go to de Kooning’s Woman 1. They go to MoMA, where they will pay their respects—or make quiet, cautious criticisms—to whatever the curators have put on display. As Stubbs writes, the crowds wandering Britain’s second most popular tourist destination (the British Museum wins by about one million visitors per year) look “rapt with boredom.” And still they come by the thousands. The Tate is what lends the works in its collection their cultural power. It is appropriately housed in a former power plant.

The modern museum era began in 1929, when Abby Rockefeller, Lillie Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan—“the adamantine ladies,” as they came to be known among New York society circles—thought up the Museum of Modern Art. It opened on November 7th, nine days after the stock market crash. It moved from place to place in its early years, but in 1940 MoMA secured its

position as the authority on modern art with an enormously successful Picasso retrospective, the first ever in the U.S. By the end of World War II, it was generally recognized as an enormous success.

By that point the museum had also begun to collect a large number of works by Abstract Expressionist painters: Gorky, Calder, Stella, Motherwell, Gottlieb. In 1944, it sold off some nineteenth century paintings in order to buy Pollocks. The meteoric celebrity of these avantgarde painters looks surprising until you realize just who was working on their behalf. It was Alfred Barr, the director of Museum Collections at MoMA (as well as its first president) who persuaded the publisher Henry Luce to put Jackson Pollock in the pages of Life magazine.

The profile, with its full-page photos of Pollock straddling the canvas, paint flying off his brush in electrified currents, turned him into a culture hero: America’s manly painter-cowboy.

The connection between modern art and a healthy American virility is everywhere in this period of time. One book on American museums, written in 1948, addressed the “problem” of modern art in this way:

How easy it is to see why a forwardlooking period like ours should have an immense interest in its own image as projected by modern art. The term applies to all the products of the modern period, good and bad. (To be sure, when they are very bad, we simply do not classify them as art, just as we do not think of mentally or morally defective persons as ‘Americans,’ although, by nationality, they are that.)

As if the financial and cultural support of the world’s most powerful modern art museum were not help enough, avant-garde visual art was also heavily promoted by the US government. As the Cold War intensified, the CIA and State Department developed a vast cultural propaganda operation that Alfred Barr described as “benevolent propaganda for foreign intelligentsia.” The centerpiece of this campaign was the Congress for Cultural Freedom. As Frances Stonor Saunders writes in the book The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, the CCF became involved in

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almost every sphere of American arts and letters: “journals, books, conferences, seminars, art exhibitions, concerts, awards.” It is missing the point to ask who was involved with the CCF because everybody was involved with the CCF. In the span of a few years, the government successfully weaponized American art.

One of the campaign’s goals was to cement the link between artistic freedom and American ideology. At the 1952 opening of “Masterpieces of Twentieth-Century Painting,” a CIA-funded exhibition in Paris, James Johnson Sweeney said, “On display will be masterpieces that could not have been created nor whose exhibition would be allowed by such totalitarian regimes as Nazi Germany or present-day Soviet Russia.”

The show exhibited works by European painters like Matisse, Cezanne, and Kandinsky, but everything on display was owned by American individuals and institutions. The implications were clear: the cultural center of the West was no longer Paris. It was New York. With Pollock’s primal works at the leading edge, the American assault on European sensibilities was a huge success. Some European viewers were not so much impressed as terrified. “This strength, displayed in the frenzy of a total freedom, seems a really dangerous tide,” one Barcelona critic wrote. “Our own abstract painters, all the ‘informal’ European artists, seem pygmies before the disturbing power of these unchained giants.” Sweeney argued that modern art, with its thrashing individualism, “is useless for the dictator’s propaganda.” It turned out to be just great for the President’s.

Music had its own role to play in the American culture campaign. (It may have been a Cold War, but as Saunders notes, it was a total war.) The Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century festival had a musical segment as well, and more than seventy twentieth-century composers saw their work performed there: Berg, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Debussy, Mahler, Bartók, Poulenc, Copland. Much of the CCF’s musical programming was organized by Nicolas Nabokov, a handsome Russian émigre who circulated freely among friends, wives, and political agendas. Nabokov had been working

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for the government since 1945, when, as an employee in the music wing of the Information Control Division, he was told to “establish good psychological and cultural weapons with which to destroy Nazism.” It was a line of work that suited him, and he handled the transition from Nazis to Reds with ease. In 1954, he organized the International Conference of Twentieth Century Music in Rome, with a heavy emphasis on atonal composition. But while similar festivals of visual art generally drew enthusiastic reactions from audiences and critics, the music was not so warmly received. “We were deferential,” Susan Sontag wrote. “We knew we were supposed to appreciate ugly music.”

It is hard to imagine Susan Sontag talking about Mark Rothko with such dismissive condescension, but she is hardly the only cultural figure to talk down to experimental music. Norman Mailer once stumbled into a performance by the free jazz musician Sun Ra and his “Arkestra.” Sun Ra, working in a wellestablished tradition of black music which has been identified as “afro-futurism,” regularly claimed to have visited the planet Saturn. Stubbs and others have written eloquently about Ra’s radical brand of musical freedom, but Mailer credited the concert only with clearing out his head cold. He then called the music “strangely horrible,” which is even more damning than just “horrible.”

What Sontag and Mailer needed was an institution that could make sense of what they were hearing. The bad luck for them— and especially for composers—was that the American musical avant-gardists were almost all post-war figures, and this is exactly when the power and influence of the symphony orchestra began to wane. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, orchestras have struggled with increasing desperation to maintain funding and relevance, but these mostly cosmetic efforts have failed. In the mid-nineties, London’s Royal Philharmonic announced big plans to update their image. An article in The Independent reported that concerts would include a video screen with close-up images of the conductor’s face, “drama, lasers, and maybe a camera

right down the clarinet.” What the spokesman doesn’t mention was any plan to change the music, which is nothing new. By the end of the nineteenth century, symphony orchestras had already settled on programming that heavily favored Classical and Romantic composers like Mozart and Beethoven. Most major orchestras today make some concession to twentieth century experimental music, but those works are very rarely the centerpiece of a given performance.

Many symphonies give off the impression of wishing that the last sixty years had simply never happened.

It was a different story in the nineteenth century. The orchestra as we know it today began to take shape in 1842, when the New York and Vienna Philharmonics were founded. Before then, the majority of orchestras were basically house bands, funded by and held accountable to monarchs and aristocrats. As the aristocracy crumbled in the wake of industrialization, however, orchestras became civic institutions, and they grew right along with the cities that provided the money. By the turn of the century, the best orchestras were internationally famous institutions. It became possible to distinguish between two groups playing the same piece.

People talked about “the Philadelphia sound.”

Fame and funding invested famous orchestras with the power to direct musical taste. In The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, the critic Alex Ross evocatively depicts the respect accorded to famous composers by European audiences. In Vienna, Gustav Mahler could not walk down the street without cab drivers whispering excitedly to their passengers, and when Richard Wagner conducted the first complete performance of his massive Ring cycle, the audience included emperors from two continents. The celebrity status of classical musicians was an American phenomenon as well. When the celebrated tenor Enrico Caruso was arrested for groping the wife of a baseball player in New York’s Central Park Zoo, it made front pages around the country. Caruso said that a monkey did it.

Like MoMA does today, orchestras at the turn of the century helped audiences to make sense

of a hundred years of instrumental music. That the orchestra was not equipped to make sense of the post-war musical avant garde has as much to do with unfortunate timing as anything else.

Institutions succeed by cultivating relationships with the right group of individuals. Beethoven, Wagner, Strauss—these people needed orchestras, and orchestras have been needing them ever since. Likewise, Pollock and Rothko are foundations of the modern art museum.

The real question isn’t why orchestras failed to embrace John Cage. That’s easy: they were already committed to the nineteenth century composers who had made them famous. John Cage was opposed to that kind of music in every possible way. It is hard to let go of a first love.

The real question is what MoMA will do when the Abstract Expressionists fall out of favor, which they inevitably will. Institutions have many virtues, but agility is not one of them, and already there are fractures in the world of contemporary art. Visual artists looking to get rich and famous don’t go to MoMA anymore; they hit the road, showing and selling at the dozens of bi-annual art festivals that have scattered themselves around the globe in the past decade. These festivals occasionally find their way into the news cycle if an artist sells for enough money, but they have not produced anything close to a household name. You need muscle to get into the history books. Stubbs thinks it’s strange that avant-garde music isn’t widely popular, but that’s not strange at all. Avant garde arts are confrontational, difficult, obscure, and deliberately opposed to the currents of mainstream taste. The real anomaly is the popularity of abstract visual art.

As grand as Rothko’s luminous color fields may be, they didn’t do it alone. They had institutions to back them up.

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Carpenter Center, Fifth Floor; Night James Powers Oil on Canvas 10’ x 2.5’ 22

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Photeine Michael Stynes

I love you, which is a metaphor for the clear fuel your eyes have. The screen has to be moral to be transparent, your neck being behind you, like a person. It opens as if I am always about to intend an act, that it does is grace; I could go into the field with both of my hands and the field slightly on them, like the scent of metal or seeing a face with no tense.

I would be coincident with a hologram, the accident of it being like a color as if hands are colored. I promise to surveil you because the image is what is beautiful.

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How the Water Margaret Ross

how Water heals the passage of whatever breaks through it. And quickly. It heals the passage and the break immediately. Corrects flesh or vegetable. Heals indiscriminately.

The fish’s memory corrects each second cleanly. Erases it. That means ‘abides by the water.’ So the school is the space between fish surrounding it.

So the mind clears. So it polishes a single principle. So salmon and trout run, so the schooled fish synchronize. That way their passage continues the water. Or furthers it.

Schools of wrasses that consume hosts’ parasites. Called, ‘cleaning them.’ Healing the fish by reduction. Or, further, wrass mimics that erase the distinction. Consume host and parasite. And indiscriminately.

The water heals the fish it bears indiscriminately. It corrects them so it clears. how No, no, there are no others. The lid wrinkles and breaks. The light shuffles down towards, no, we are the crystal veins and bones and have no vision. The sea vegetables loll their limp strands uselessly. A line draws no border. The small muscles school here, curl and flexing.

As those behind a face, but the face blank always. So synapses glow to shed light cautiously. So we taper. So we tend towards the water dumbly. The water smoothes and tapers away from expression. So the current here seeks no exit.

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above

Jeopardy Aurora Andrews Watercolor and Pen opposite

New Cat Aurora Andrews Watercolor and Pen 26

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Snowbound (excerpt) Kyle McAuley

2.

It was chaos in the Bluffs. No one was prepared for the temperature drop and the snow, and though no one was ever prepared for the weather off the Peak, this was different. In the middle of the night, someone had gotten up out of their tent to pee and, on seeing the silent blanket of white building on the ground, trees, and cars, had shouted, “Snow!” No one had paid him any notice at the time. In the morning, the first ranger to get up just stood at the door to her cabin until the cold woke her roommate.

Tents were being dismantled and clothes torn down from clotheslines by first light, and concerned fathers and mothers were revving their vehicles’ engines to make sure they still worked. Many of them were convinced that they were caught in the middle of a system or a storm.

Of course, the rangers knew that the Peak was just shedding some precipitation, but the snow was so unexpected and the panic so general that the order to evacuate came down from regional first thing that morning—just in case some big weather did come in the next night, trapping hundreds of people beneath a wrathful Peak.

After trekking seven hours down from the ridge, Jake stood atop the Little Bluff above the campground that afternoon and surveyed the madness. Campers and vans had churned the snow into a grey paste, their windows lined with hands and eyes that had never seen the stuff before. Their engines and tires groaned louder against the mush, and the exhaust from

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their back ends choked out darker and darker.

To help people dig their cars out, rangers were handing out tagged shovels and stopping cars to collect them by the exit, but most of them had their hands full directing traffic and fielding questions. In the end, they got about a third of the shovels back.

“Shit,” Jake said. It was the first thing he had said all day. He hadn’t even shouted for Steve when he had found him gone this morning.

He had looked over the bluff and into the next saddle, but he was gone, his tracks leading up and over the hill, then disappearing amid the snow-choked rocks, and on toward the Peak. He had frozen up when he found Steve gone, and, surprised at himself, didn’t know what to do. He had to talk to someone, let someone know Steve was out there, but it would take hours for him to get a hold of someone in this mess. He didn’t like knowing (though it was true) that he was in the same boat as everyone else. And that Steve was out there with no winter gear except a pair of crampons.

He walked over to the ranger’s office, a little wooden shack with windows and a sign that said “Ranger Station” by the campground entrance, but it was empty. Everyone was out doing damage control. He peered into the unlit shack and saw a plastic bag with three shiny brass tubes tapered at the end. Instinctively he turned behind him and checked the rocks for movement. There was nothing except two squirrels chasing each other up and down a whitened tree trunk.

Beyond the entrance, two cars staggered on

through the snowy two-lane highway like dogs slipping on hardwood while a camper followed them out of the mouth of the exit. As the camper rounded the corner on to the road, its back-left tire hit a snow bank by the exit sign, jumping its the rear end about a foot into the air, knocking snow off its roof and flopping from side to side on its front two wheels. It tried to get out of the snow bank, but the back-left tire was in deep, and by the way they spat out snow every which way behind them, Jake could see that those weren’t snow tires.

Jake walked back through the empty access road up toward the long press of vacated and partly-vacated campsites. It was like they were fleeing a white plague, leaving behind possessions that might weigh them down—clotheslines left knotted up on trees, five half-visible canisters of propane by a set of wheel tracks, a dirty diaper tossed into a snowbound fire pit. From here, he could see the long line of cars backed up to the far group of campsites, the occasional honk prompting exasperated looks from the other, anxious drivers.

One site over from the propane canisters Jake saw a man struggling to start a small coupe. It looked about twenty years old, Jake thought, twenty at least, something that would have needed breaking-in in high school. Years ago, he had driven a sedan at least a decade older than this one, and whenever he thought of it, he still thought of Diane and him lying in the back seat like tired children, holding each other and then doing what they both wanted, what young lovers do, as the song would play over and over again on the half-broken tape player.

Jake wiped the memory off his lips and called over to the man. “Say!” “Try it now,” the man said. A raspy growling noise bent around the car’s hood. “Stop! Stop, stop.” The man leaned into the coupe’s innards again.

“Say, excuse me. Know where I can find a ranger?”

The man looked over from his car and a woman flopped a head of long, dirty blonde hair out the window.

“Hi there,” Jake said.

“Hey friend,” the man said. He was older, probably fifty or so, with jeans and wet cowboy boots and a bothered expression. “You stuck here, too?”

“Yeah.” Jake looked up at the top of the Peak between the trees.

“Crazy about all this snow, isn’t it? It’s just been impossible to get this thing started,” the man said. He shifted to one side expectantly.

“Yeah,” Jake paused. “Is there any place I can find a ranger?”

They both gestured over to the line of cars.

“They’re over there,” said the man.

“I know,” Jake said, “I just mean, have you seen any who aren’t helping get people out of here?”

“What?” the woman asked.

“I said, have you seen—” “No, I don’t think I have,” the man cut in.

“They’re all over there. Except, I did tell one I was having car troubles. But what do you want to talk to a ranger for? We should all just get on out of here. It’s just going to dump on us in another couple of hours, at least that’s what I heard, and I sure as shit am not going to be around when it does.”

Jake looked at the woman’s head protruding from the car window.

“So this ranger—” Jake said.

“He said he would be back with that antifreeze,” the man went on, his head twitching nervously around.

“Where’d he go?” Jake asked.

“Over to the cars with everyone else,” the woman said. She nodded her head again to the line extending like a taproot up toward the wall of the Big Bluff, after which it splintered off into fragments, each one a procession of white-capped vehicles inching nervously along the road toward the exit. “Said his name was Craig.”

“Craig?”

“Yeah I think so,” the man said, his eyes darting to the woman then back at Jake.

“Great, thanks,” Jake said, putting a hand up in farewell.

“Wait a second,” said the man, shifting over to the other side of the car by the woman. “Answer

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Potatoes Aurora Andrews Watercolor and Pen 30

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me a question, friend. Know anything about antifreeze?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Jake said.

“He means do you have any,” the woman said.

“No, I don’t have any antifreeze.”

“Are you sure? What about your car? Can’t we siphon some off?” the man asked, panic rising in his throat as he ran down his dwindling list of possible options. He was tall and lanky with tight, compact muscles, the kind you find on distance runners.

“I came in on my friend’s truck and I don’t have the key. Sorry.”

“Where’s this friend of yours?” the man asked. Jake bristled at the question even though he remembered it was he who had interrupted them.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? How can you not know?”

His voice cracked with strain.

Jake looked at the man with one eye and shifted his left foot back a step. “I think I’m going to go look for Craig.”

“Wait!” the woman said, trying to stick her head further out the window as if she were trapped in the front seat.

“Thanks very much,” Jake said.

The man walked from behind the car around to where Jake was. “Come on, buddy, I can get you into your friend’s car. We’ll get that antifreeze and I’ll give you a lift to town and you can catch the bus to wherever you want. We just gotta get out of here.”

“I can take care of myself,” said Jake. “Besides, I have to find my friend.”

“Some friend,” the woman said. “He just up and left you.”

Jake’s fist tightened. It was a mistake talking to these two. “Good luck with your antifreeze.”

“Come on, be a friend and help,” the man said.

“Thanks, but I really can’t. My friend is up on the mountain.” Jake turned and started walking, hoping to be rid of them soon. Steve didn’t have winter gear on him. The temperature at night must have been around ten degrees.

Jake heard the soft crunching of boot heels

tamping down snow.

“Up on the mountain?” the man called.

Jake kept walking.

“Your buddy’s a goner. There’s no way he made it through that shit last night.”

Anger welled in Jake’s gut. He walked faster.

Eight degrees, maybe. Too cold for September.

“You can’t just walk away like that! We’ll get you out of here. Hey! Hey, what’s your name?”

The man had caught up to Jake, who was moving slower because of his pack. It bore heavily down on his hips, and its weight tipped him off balance as he walked faster. The man was still there. Jake didn’t respond.

“I know you must be able to spare some antifreeze from your car. You can’t even drive it.

Your buddy’s not coming back with those keys.

Hey you!”

The man put his hand on Jake’s pack and pushed him to the left. Jake briefly careened on one foot, off balance, the weight of the air and ground beneath his foot giving him a sickly feeling in his stomach, and landed with that boot deep in a snow bank by the road.

“Hey hands off, asshole,” Jake said.

“Asshole? Fuck you.”

“Hey just back off.”

“Back off? Don’t tell me to back off,” the man said.

“Dean?” the woman called from just down the road. “What are you doing Dean?”

“This is ridiculous,” Jake said, and walked toward the road.

“You think you can just leave us here?” the man said.

“I have to find my friend.” Jake shot the man a look like the ones his mother used to give him when he broke a plate or locked the dog in the closet.

“Fuck your friend,” the man said, curling his lip and jutting his chin out. “You don’t even know where he is. He’s frozen up on the mountain. He’s a popsicle. Fuck him.”

Something broke inside Jake and he threw his left arm into the soft of the man’s abdomen with a grace and power neither man expected. As the man doubled over, Jake took his right arm and bent it up behind his back toward his shoulders,

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grabbing the nape of his neck and pushing down hard. A low hoarse cough came from the man below him. It sounded like the car turning over, except with the rattle of mucous and spit.

It was one movement to Jake, welling at the tips of his fingers. This was more important than finding Steve.

“Get off!” the man screeched.

“Dean!” the woman yelled.

“Fuck you,” Jake said low, and kicked the back man’s right knee, driving his face ahead toward the road. The man kicked forwards and lost his balance, ending up down on the dirty gravel. Grey brown and teal stained his hands and knees, and the rocks stung like spider bites. The man yelled in pain and surprise.

Jake responded by driving the man’s face into a pothole. It was filled with oily-looking slush, a rainbow of oil working its way around the edges with the mid-afternoon sunlight. Jake felt as if he could see himself doing it from over his shoulder. The man was gurgling under the slush. Was he drowning him? It was fluid and familiar and fast.

“What the fuck are you doing?” the woman yelled, and kicked Jake with an outstretched, flying foot to the ribs. Jake breathed sharply and let go of the man’s arm to deflect her next kick.

Suddenly, Jake heard a deep, wheezing breath and felt a pressure against his chin.

With his arm free, the man was pressing against Jake’s chest, and soon wrenched his neck free with a single, violent twist. He staggered across the road, not bothering to care about cars, and moved his arm across his dirty face like he was punching the air. “You motherfucker I’ll knock you out,” he said.

“Stop it, both of you!” she yelled, then looked at Jake. “You’re crazy!”

“Come at me from the front this time, I’ll kick your ass you pansy fuck.”

“Hey! Stop it now. Cut it out!”

Both of them turned and saw a ranger with a nightstick extended in one hand.

“Craig?” the man said. “This man—” “Shut up goddamnit,” the ranger yelled. He looked a little sheepish, but still in control. His hand tightened on his nightstick. “What the

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hell is going on here?” *** It was raining and they weren’t going anywhere today. Jake and Vanessa sat on the couch together looking lazily out the window, the water streaking down the glass in drops and streams.

“We could see a movie,” he said.

“You already said that!” she protested with a smile.

He laughed. “It’s all I can think of.”

Steve came in from his bedroom. “Hey guys,” he said and looked down at them. They were a tangle of hands and legs and feet.

“Hey,” they both replied.

“Still trying to figure out things to do indoors?”

“All he can think of is going to the movies,” Vanessa said.

Jake looked at Steve with a wide grin. Steve shrugged.

“What can I say?” Steve said, standing by the coffee table. “Jake, you’re just not the

romantic type.” Vanessa felt her stomach prickle defensively. Who was he to say? These were days when Jake still had a spark behind his eyes.

“Shut up, Steve,” Jake said, and threw a pillow.

The pillow hit Steve in the neck and shoulders, landing with a dull thud in his arms.

“What can I say?” Steve said.

Jake threw another pillow.

“Throw all you want. What can I say?”

“He’s perfectly romantic,” Vanessa said, running her hands through his hair with a satisfied grin.

Jake turned to face her. “Not too much, I hope,” he said with a grin.

“No,” she said, “just right.”

“I did find that Indian place.”

“Yes, you did find the Indian place.” She kissed him on the forehead.

Steve took this opportunity to interject. “What Indian place?”

“We were just walking around and he found it when he was looking for an ATM,” Vanessa said.

“Of course the irony of it was that I didn’t find an ATM and the place was cash-only, but that

was one of the best lunches we’ve ever had.”

“Right, but I had to pay,” Vanessa said.

“You didn’t mind,” Jake said with mischief in his voice.

“Guess not,” she said, raising her arms as if to say, “Here I am!” They both had smiles on their faces, remembering that afternoon. Outside the rain quickened and the roof seemed to bear in closer on them.

They leaned in toward each other, and Steve went over to the kitchen. It was open air, and there was plenty of space to see them kissing, but, to Steve, somehow being flanked by chest-high countertops seemed safer and more removed.

After a few minutes, Steve turned away and pretended not to see them. He called out over his shoulder, “Want to see where we’re going?”

Jake responded immediately.

“Yeah!

Definitely.”

Steve got down a book from the shelf above the kitchen table and spread its fold-out map over the sugar and salt and bread crumbs from breakfast.

“So here—come over here, lovebirds,” he said.

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Jake sighed and lurched upwards, his legs splayed in the air until he brought them down at the last second on to the floor.

“So here’s where I thought we’d put in.”

“This is where?” Jake said, “I don’t recognize the map.”

“Oh, right! This is the park around Mount Kennedy.”

“Ah. Are we trying someplace new?”

Steve looked up from the map. “Well, I didn’t think we could just go to the same place twice.”

“Hey, if it’s nice, I’d do it again.”

Steve went about explaining the hike he had planned. There was a lot of elevation gain because the trail straddled a ridge-like formation that ringed much of the mountain.

“I hear that between the ridge and the mountain the fishing is spectacular,” Steve said.

“Really?” Jake asked. Vanessa was lying on her side watching them talk. She and Erin had picked up the two best-looking men in the city that night, and she wished she hadn’t been the only one to hold on to hers. Steve had a friendly side when Jake was around.

“Yeah, apparently it’s amazing. Alpine lakes you have to bushwhack half a mile to get to. Fish just lined up against the surface.”

“Wow.” “Yeah, bring the gear,” Steve said.

“Definitely,” Jake said. “You ready to graduate to a fly rod?”

“I don’t know. Last time it was a disaster.”

“Wimp.”

“I think I’ll stick to a spinner.”

“Pussy.” Jake looked over at Vanessa sheepishly.

She started laughing that light but strident laugh of hers, making the room with the rain and the men and their eyes all shimmer.

“You two are ridiculous,” she said. “I can’t even take it.”

Jake walked over and kissed her on the forehead. “I’m going to the bathroom,” he said, running a hand along Vanessa’s back as he left.

In the bathroom, he heard them talking. About what? he wondered. It didn’t matter. Lately, he had had all the luck a young man could wish for. Good things had just started happening suddenly, and six months later, his life was

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different. Better, he thought. A better apartment with a better roommate. Better now that he had someone to hold at night. He loved holding her more than anything, their eyes flitting in each other’s vision like their first night together.

They had gone for a walk alone after breakfast that morning, down a street with flowerbeds in the windowsills. Outside the door, they were talking about something, and as he flushed their conversation murmured to a close.

Steve put the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher as Jake opened the door. Vanessa looked at Jake’s figure coming out of the bathroom, adjusting his jeans and his shirt. He looked like everything she wanted, just the way she thought of him when she closed her eyes alone at night. Just then, she had a feeling of motion inside her, her veins hardening and a shiver running to her fingers. She looked at the map on the table and crossed her arms, feeling cold all of a sudden. Jake came up behind her and kissed her on the head, sliding his left hand over hers. She knew this wasn’t how he liked to hold her, that he thought she looked funny with her arms crossed, but he did it anyway, as if to say that she was his, or that they belonged to each other, she did not know which. She looked up at him and smiled, sensing a deep remove when their eyes met. His mind was elsewhere.

Her eyes flickered to the table then back to his, so fast so as to be imperceptible, but by then his face had already moved past hers, kissing her ear and neck underneath her wide, tumbling tresses of brown-red hair.

“We could go to the covered gardens. That’s romantic,” he whispered into her ear. Noticing the silence, Jake looked up at Steve, then at Vanessa. He loosened his hand. “Did I miss something?” *** Craig, as it turned out, was less of a policeman than the nightstick made him out to be. Still, as he took their stories, he locked the one he wasn’t interviewing in his car, a brown and grey cop car that looked like a high country outfitter had gone to town on it in a body shop—high suspension,

snow tires, and four-wheel drive.

At the end of it, Craig let them both go, and told them that if he heard anything more from either of them they’d both be going down to the county jail as soon as the evacuation was done.

After that, he gave the coupe a jump from his car, which started it right up, and left the man and his girl to work on getting it out of the snow.

He didn’t offer them a shovel.

“I suppose they’ll have to dig her out,” said Craig to no one.

“You think so?” Jake said.

Craig looked at him, puzzled. “You still here?”

“I have something to ask you.”

“I already said I wouldn’t call the real cops on you.”

“Thank you, I appreciate that.”

“Then, are we done here?” Craig asked.

“Well, I was looking for you when he jumped me, actually.”

“Looking for me?”

“Well, any ranger, but—” “Any ranger?”

“No, no. You.” Craig looked confused. Jake could tell that he was on the verge of leaving without giving him another thought.

“My friend Steve is out there. Up on the Peak I mean. Or going for it. We camped last night on the ridge.” Craig’s countenance fell. Jake kept on. “Steve has the permit. When I woke up this morning, he was gone and had taken our bear bag.”

“Bear bag?” Craig asked.

“Yes, bear bag. The guy who worked at the front office was out of canisters.”

“Jason.”

“Yeah.” Jake forced a laugh and tried to speak like Craig. “He’s a talker all right.”

Craig sighed and put his hands on his hips.

“I thought we got all the stragglers off the mountain.”

“We were fairly far in,” Jake said. “Went up the eastern face.”

“Damnit.”

There was a long silence.

“Look, I’ll go with you to find him,” Jake said,

“I was up here a few months ago with Neil, if you know him. I’m an experienced climber. He can vouch for me.”

“I was brought in to relieve Neil, so no, I don’t know him.”

Jake turned a bit so Craig could see the ice axes strapped to the side of his pack.

“That’s too bad.” Jake got a suspicious look from Craig. “Still,” he said, feeling the weight of a heavy obligation on his back, “can you find my friend?”

Anger flickered in Craig’s face, and the barking voice from before returned. “We can search, and that’s all we’ll do. The copters will have to be recalled—they’ve gone back down south.

They’ll probably be up tomorrow morning, and so will we. I can’t go with you now with all these people here.”

“But you’re just one ranger. We could make it to the ridge tonight if we tried.”

“I’m not going up there without helicopters in the sky, and you don’t have a permit so you’re not going anywhere either. We leave tomorrow.

Early. I’ll wake you.”

Jake acquiesced, but in part he felt relieved just to know he had someone to help him out.

He didn’t ask for this.

He walked with Craig over by his campsite, back toward the ranger shack. It occurred to Jake to ask, “Why’d you tell him he needed antifreeze? He didn’t, did he?”

Craig laughed a deep belly laugh that was loud for a man his size. “Of course he didn’t. I just needed him out of my sight for a few hours.”

“You didn’t have time to give him a jump like just now?”

“You should have been around this morning,” Craig said. “I’ve never been screamed at by so many people in my life. It’s like they’ve never driven in snow before.”

“I bet a bunch of them haven’t. Our friend’s still stuck over there, moving that snow with his cowboy boots.” Jake couldn’t resist a small laugh.

Craig said nothing, and at the nearby fork, Jake split off with a wave and went back to Steve’s truck.

The sun was setting, and Jake looked up at the sky. It was the same soft yellow-orange as

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two days before. Cirrus clouds streaked the upper reaches with wisps of absorbent texture, like grooves in a canvas for color to run into.

They were green and yellow and red against what looked like the ceiling of heaven. Jake liked this sunset even better than their last one, and wondered whether Steve was seeing the same things he did—the same kind of fir tree, a patch of shinleaf, two young pine trees whose light green leaves had just darkened in time for this early winter. Of course, they wouldn’t be exactly the same, except for maybe the clouds, but he imagined Steve having looked at them before. The things he was noticing—they were all common in the Red Rocks, but the thought that they could help him reach Steve in his head made him look harder.

When he got back to the campsite, he opened the metal bear box by the car and took out the cooler. There wasn’t much left except for that half block of white crumbly cheese. He ate a little more than half of it, leaving the rest for his breakfast, and then ate the other apple, core and all. This time, with fewer people around, he swallowed the seeds and picked up the

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stray pieces of cheese. Afterwards, he closed up the bear box and urinated around where he had eaten. To a bear, though, all of these campgrounds must smell like human piss and food and shit, the way the wilderness smells like pine and wet rocks and snow to hikers. If a bear wanted his food, he would not hesitate to pay Jake a visit.

With that thought in his head, the bivy seemed an uncertain option for sleeping tonight, even though it would be comfortable on the snow.

Jake took his knife out of his pack, bent open the small blade, and wiggled it into the lock on the door of Steve’s pickup, forcing the lock open without snapping any of the pins. He shoved his pack inside and then got in head first, stretching out across the two seats and the center console, twisting himself into a sleeping position on his back and his side. His eyes would only close after a few hours that night, and until then, he looked through the sunroof at Orion above him, creeping into his sky on silent, pearlescent feet.

Spinifex Fire Margaret Ross

mosaic burning We burn the rings. We burn the hummocks threaded up from sand back down to it. We knit their manyed peaks into the flame, a fire beating from our hands.

Its fingered blades. The isthmic strands we grip that weave the hummock in. From heartring dead. From younger rings that age in lockstep round, proceeding. Radiate: the mice twitch burrow into run. The smoke unfurls its plane.

The fires constellate, and lifting, dredge those yawning pupils open on the sand. spinifex ring The one to one that touches in its bright makes many scurrying out to scent what good direction. To unspool out the hum. The hummock’s rustle frays the strains each pulsebeat measures. Each hurries from that feathered mouth that hisses as it preens. no no very bad and blooming the sky gluts thick and drops. The what for whom sheer wanting sprouts its limbs, appends and swells the objects in its reach.

It rises them. The hummock bursting upwards by that bright, then bustles, shines and caves. The far and farther till the air sinks up. The shadows planted down await their fated objects in the clearing.

Note: Spinifex is a grass that grows in hummucks in Australia. When the hummock ages, its inner circle collapses, resulting in a ring.

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STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE Synecdoche, 2009 Sabrina Chou Mixed media Dimensions variable COMMENCEMENT 2009

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STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE (Installation View), 2009 Sabrina Chou Mixed media Dimensions variable 42

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STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE Toolkits, 2009 Sabrina Chou Mixed media Dimensions variable COMMENCEMENT 2009

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Nō Catharsis Allison Keeley

He enters the stage with a relaxed heart, looking afar. He is an old man. And he has found a way to be graceful while old, to show his desire to be young in his footsteps. He dances. And he accepts that his legs disobey but this acceptance of tangible impermanence does not surface in his demeanor. He is an old man, who knows he is old, and tries to look young.

This is the Japanese nō representation of an old man, a layered display of aged existence. Of the three characters in nō theatre (old man, woman, and warrior), the old man is the most complex and the actor portraying him must fully understand the teachings of nō acting to be effective.

In 1400, in Japan, Zeami, the son of one of the most influential theater-owners and playwrights of the time, wrote down his family’s aesthetic secrets. In the late 1400s, one of the originators of the Japanese tea ceremony, Murata Shukō, said, “I do not like the moon without clouds.” Zeami’s teachings called for Japanese drama to follow the same approach toward human action onstage as Shukō would eventually take toward the moon. Zeami’s teachings are not about acting as the representation of a person, but of a state of existence, an imperfect one at best.

Western theatrical tradition, particularly ancient Greek theater, is also deeply rooted in the portrayal of imperfection, but of a more psychological type. Catharsis is the goal, an elusive purge of emotion from the audience. Achieving it relies on showing the consequences of an overly ambitious psyche, as characters think they have the agency to understand or alter their fate. When the limitations of the individual are ignored, and a protagonist expects to have a chance against the will of the Gods or against fate, a downfall is inevitable. Through witnessing the fall, the audience experiences the inflated sense of self onstage as a cathartic method that humbles the self offstage.

In nō theater, Buddhist influence establishes a different theatrical method. The ego that can fatally overstep its boundaries is abandoned. Instead, according to Zeami’s writings, the ultimate achievement in acting is to attain the enlightened state of the Flower, nō’s version of the elusive catharsis. Flower is a precise balance between emotion and grace, an equilibrium that abandons the ego entirely, rather than expanding it. In its most successful moments the Flower state can unveil a type of universal perfection of action to the audience, a balance not only meant for the stage, but for all human action beyond it.

Nō acting is an organic and symbiotic process. The actor gains direction from his role but also gives his own novel understanding of truth to it. There is no fatal mistake or flawed ego to reveal. There is no exact moment of catharsis. There is no need to dramatically humble the self. The old man dancing on Zeami’s stage is already aware of his flawed, disobedient body, but comfortable in his awareness. Unlike Greek protagonists, he already knows his boundaries. And he embraces them, in the same way Shukō embraces the clouds that obscure and enrich his moon.

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Disorder/Rabbit Abram Kaplan

I wore her disorder as a raincoat for the spring of tears.

I took her voice.

Shivering, I went over the insights of her diary with a pen in a fat blue book that made up for my not having a body that spring.

I wanted to be the man she loved who loved her shivering. I wanted to know what it’s like to have desire. ** I went off to find it in the desert, which is savage but where rabbits are.

And ravens, wise enough to know you have a gun when you walk across the field.

I never plowed that field.

On the low road hardly visible I took that gun to where the old car carcasses lay, thick with rabbits, & I plowed that field.

I didn’t leave a grave.

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Enzo Camacho and Amy Lien Stills from A Preemptive Maneuver Color video with sound, 6’ 40�

Vivid Luster is rarely achievable with natural hair.

We opted for synthetic.

-Vivid Luster A Preemptive Maneuver was shot en route from Tucson, Arizona, to Los Angeles, California. The video constitutes Vivid Luster's journey through life.

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The Complete Strangers (excerpt) Jesse Barron

I That night, as they did regularly on Friday evenings, James and Elizabeth made love before going to sleep.

Their bedroom, which Elizabeth had done up, was timidly, tastefully decorated. Next to the window that faced the bed hung a reproduction of a Van Gogh which Elizabeth had purchased after an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Next to it, in silver frames, their son Adam’s grammar-school efforts were arranged vertically, and a photograph of Adam standing naked with a wiffle bat in his hand stood on James’s dresser.

There was a fire place, seldom used, and an electric heater because Elizabeth was frequently cold at night. James kept a night table next to the bed, in which were birthday cards from Adam, old batteries, scraps of paper on which he sometimes wrote down his dreams (“Dad slips on the ice and I just let him fall”), and all of the other indicators a man accumulates which show what he has done and what he has failed to do.

Atop the nightstand was James’s bedside light.

He switched it off. Now the room was quiet, dark, the bed inviting and warm. Wordlessly he reached his arm across under the covers, where he knew her body would be waiting for his fingers, his hands, his legs and belly and cock. For this was the baffling wing which kept their marriage aloft—the outboard motor that growled them to harbor each night when sails ripped: no matter what happened during the day, they were in one another’s arms each night with the same passion. Of course he had desired younger women—what man his age hadn’t?—and he had, it was true, sometimes fantasized about his patients. But not the way he desired Elizabeth. And now, with his hot hands cupping her breasts and his lips against the soft, 48

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cool skin of her cheek, he was reminded once again of the complexity of the whole situation.

That, and how much he looked forward to the sex, complexity be damned.

Gently, skillfully, he kissed down her neck.

Did he think about how her body used to be, these evenings when they lay together, a man of 66 and a woman of 55, and made love? How could he avoid remembering? And it was true: he readily made pictures in his mind of his wife’s younger body, the harder belly, firmer breasts and lighter-colored nipples, the wetness between her legs which had come sooner and more completely. Yet he forced himself to be reasonable. His own body no longer worked in the efficient, forceful way that it had when he was young. That was what happened: age set in like a hard, hard frost. You watched yourself get colder and weaker, watched your once-strong limbs wrinkle and lose their agility, were kicked and beaten like a dog, until finally, towards the end, just when you couldn’t believe it would get any worse, any less bearable, it did: and that was death. Boom. Just like that.

“Lizzie,” he said. “Have you been waiting for me to come to bed?”

“I may have been,” she said. “I may have gone to sleep if you hadn’t come in when you did.” They both laughed. All of the things that were ponderously difficult in daylight -- teasing, competing, being vulnerable -- were pure ease when they were in bed together. Sex was easy between them.

“Is that so? I guess you really make the rules around here,” he said.

“Mmmm,” she murmured, and then she took him in her hand. Rather than hurry, as they had when they were younger, James and Elizabeth made love with dilatory patience, they

had learned to enjoy the details of each other’s bodies, even though, James thought, their bodies were fast becoming flabby-assed and worthless.

How nice it felt to slip himself uncovered into his wife of 28 years! They made love traditionally, with Elizabeth lying on her back and he on top of her. That way, there were no decisions to be made when they went to bed. She pressed her body into his, and with her hands she worked the skin of his back. When he bent his head to lick the impression between her collarbones, he tasted salt, and he could smell his own smell, too, coming from underneath his arms, when he turned his head, and he liked it—the salt and the sweat—because, well, he wasn’t certain why.

As a boy, in the schools he attended near his father’s air force bases, he would bathe himself meticulously; he was not one of the boys, even at nine or ten years old, who had to be reprimanded for failing to clean behind his ears. (In fact, he liked it—in the whirling sequence of homes and schools that had made of his boyhood an endless learning and relearning, it had been his body, his own, compact body, which had come to be consistent and familiar. Perhaps this was why, when he showered, he never deviated from his washing routine.) Elizabeth made a wonderful, whimpering sound; he spoke her name.

Sweat. The smell of it, the feeling of it. Flag football outside bases in Virginia, Colorado, the hot wind cold against his damp face as he rode his bicycle through blooming, fragrant fields in optimistic martial towns. Again he brought his lips to her throat, and again the saltiness exhilarated him. They began to crush into one another quicker and more closely, until, without warning, he felt the familiar feeling, the atavistic whorl in his belly which told him that it was about to be over. “Lizzie,” he said. Begging, ragged hat in eager hand, his body shivered against hers. It was happening, he could feel it, and he could feel her own orgasm gathering itself together like summer wind whipping at hot air. Here it came again, that knock-out sound!

As a young woman, she had come selfconsciously, as though surprised by the way her body responded to his. Now she was older, the shame didn’t matter. And god, that sound, that

sound. The whorl in his belly tightened, until, finally, it raveled unbearably and, just as quickly, unraveled; everything ran out of him. A moment later, Elizabeth drew her breath deep into her lungs, cried out, and fell back against the bed, her muscles loosened and her eyes closed. “Oh, baby doll,” he said.

In the bathroom afterwards, washing his face and fixing his pajamas, he felt in his hands a kind of blood-spun throb. Again they were no longer the hands of an old man, but the powerful implements of a youth, filled and animated with marvelous liquid from his old, pathetic heart.

One week later he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He received a call from Adam, who sounded concerned.

“Champ!”

“Hi, Dad,” said Adam.

“So. Mom told you what’s happening? My goddamn prostate is eating me alive.”

“What are you talking about? When did you find this out?”

“I went in for a PSA last Thursday, because my cardiologist recommended it. I am sixtysix, you see, so I am at elevated risk. Now the cardiologist, having nothing to do with my prostate, did some blood work, and the PSA came back higher than it ought to be. Four days later, here I am. They’re doing another blood work-up, then I have an MRI this afternoon. Dr. Blumenthal says he should know by Wednesday morning whether it’s wise to operate. He said it doesn’t seem to have spread, so a short surgery should take care of it.”

Adam knew his father’s medical history as a cautionary tale against which doctors annually compared the workings of his own body. But in crisis his father always chose the most clinical language possible, which led Adam to feel, when James talked about his heart problems or, now, a high PSA, as though they weren’t talking about James’s body or even Adam’s but about a third, hypothetical body, which contained cholesterol plaque rather than a heart and produced seminal fluid rather than come.

“And if it has spread,” Adam said, “what then?”

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“Well, then we’ll deal with that problem. It really is an easy surgery, you know. They remove the prostate in what are called ‘frozen sections,’ making biopsies as they go.” James had a deep and longstanding appreciation of advancements made by the medical profession, even though he himself had practiced psychology and knew nothing of the human anatomy. “If it hasn’t spread beyond the prostate itself, then they take it out and I survive.”

“Listen, dad, I’ll be on the next bus to Sweet Haven.”

“You will not come home for this. In two weeks, when I’m all better, Liz and I will come to Montreal, like we planned. That’s when I want to see you, and not before. What’s going on here is not really life-threatening surgery.”

“Are you sure? I would come down in a heartbeat.”

“I’m sure,” James said. His voice sounded confident, comfortable.

“I love you, dad. Can’t wait to see you in a few weeks.”

“Love you too, champ. Thank you for calling.”

James put the phone back in the breast pocket of his sport jacket, along with his money clip and his two-by-two-inch leather book of photographs.

It was only six in the evening, still too early to go to the bar for a drink, and so he spent an hour rearranging furniture in the small office that he’d made for himself in the back room of his house.

He switched the Matisse collage with the print of Paul Klee, then switched them back. He gave the squat Moroccan cushion a kick with the tip of his shoe, to move it further from the armchair, then sat down on the floor with his back against the wall and put his head in his hands and wept inconsolably for half an hour, brushing the tears away roughly, angrily, with the heels of his hands.

At this moment, James wanted nothing more deeply than the company of his son Adam.

How truly stupid he had been on the phone a moment ago. If he died in surgery, and Adam heard of it over the phone from Elizabeth, what then? To what end would he have prevented his only son from returning to Sweet Haven

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to see him through departure on what might be his final journey into anesthesia? Yet if he made it through alright, and really did come to Montreal in only three weeks’ time, how proud he would feel to have exhibited such bravery and composure before his wife and son!

Inside his the closet hung a full-length mirror. Now he rose and went to it and lifted up his shirt. A thicket of black and white hairs sprung into view. He had seen the diagrams in Dr. Blumenthal’s office; he knew that four inches back from the root of his penis cells were dividing maniacally at fantastic, exponential rates. Hating his body, and frightened of it, he had the urge to reach his hand through his stomach and rip the bloody red gland out with his fist. James wondered whether every sick man felt this way about the horrible organ which was the source of his affliction, and it occurred to him that surgery was simply the realization of the desire to bite off the trapped paw, to rip out the failing liver or lung or kidney and once more be uncontaminated by disease.

Inside his desk drawer, his copy of Anna Karenina waited for him. He had only made it half-way through before giving up, but he remembered a particular passage which he had been wanting to consult since first hearing the diagnosis. James took it out and flipped to page 461: He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, theywould be merciless to him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog yelping with pain.

He knew that his sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them, and instinctively he tried to do this for two days,but now he felt incapable of keeping up the unequal struggle.

This had struck James hard. He agreed with Tolstoy when he said, “His sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them,” but then he disagreed when he said, “He felt incapable of keeping up the unequal struggle.” Wasn’t everyone hiding their wounds

from everyone else? What was so goddamn unequal about it?

Even thinking rationally like this calmed him.

There were other things in his office as well which took his mind off his traitorous prostate.

For instance: the keys to Adam’s 26th birthday gift lay in the drawer next to Anna Karenina.

A strong, beautiful stallion emblazoned the head of the silver key, and in James’s garage the red 1967 Mustang awaited its hour. He’d found it online for only $19,700 – not too bad now that Elizabeth’s restaurant was doing well.

For months he’d spent afternoons with the car, redoing the paint job entirely by himself and fixing the roof and cleaning the engine. Nearly every day he considered keeping the car for himself, but a Mustang in the hands of a young man who was just starting out was a powerful thing. He wanted Adam to have it, with no strings attached, and be free.

When he came home from his walk, Elizabeth was waiting for him in the kitchen, holding a cup of coffee with two hands.

“Adam called me today,” he said. “I told him that I didn’t want him to come home.”

“I think you’re being silly,” she said, “but if that’s what you want…”

“What I’m afraid of is that when I’m in surgery they will find cancer cells on the surface,” he said. “Then I’ll wake up and hear the bad news. It sounds as though that hormone therapy is really a death sentence. He said that some people decide to do nothing, they just do ‘watchful waiting.’ There’s a euphemism if I ever heard one.”

“Either way, I will be there next to you when you wake up.”

“I think the surgery is the best thing. Radiation has too many side effects. I’m old fashioned, Liz; I said to him, ‘Let’s just go in and get it out.’”

“That’s what I would do too, honey,” she said.

“Do you want to eat something? I made a roast chicken.”

When they had eaten, and finished a bottle of wine between them, James and Elizabeth went upstairs to the bedroom. That night they made

love as though it were the last time. It would really be a shame, he thought, never to feel this way again.

On Wednesday morning Elizabeth woke him up at four and drove him to the hospital. He was hungry, because the doctors had prohibited him from eating dinner on Tuesday, and he sat upright in the passenger seat with his hands in his lap, trying to keep his breathing even.

What happened next he would remember only in shreds, in the feeling of the blue gown tied around his back and the look of the florescent lights above him when the anesthesiologist administered the shot. Then nothing. The operation would take four hours.

When he came to his mouth was dry, and he asked for a glass of water. Elizabeth was there, smiling. “Everything is fine,” she said. “They got it all.”

But everything was not fine. Though he may have been, as Dr. Blumenthal told him, a very lucky man, he had not escaped prostate cancer entirely unscathed. The in-surgery biopsies had revealed cancer cells dangerously close to the

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Primitive: the story of a whale girl Kayla Escobedo Ink and Marker 15” x 15” 52

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surface of the prostate, and the urologist had decided to remove both neurovascular bundles rather than only one, as they had discussed before the operation. James Loveland would be impotent from now on. “Both?” he said. He was still groggy from the anesthesia but his eyes sprung open and he drew a hard breath. He could barely get it out: “More water, please.

Cold water, if you have it.” But he was thinking: no, no, no, no, please, no.

What is there to do in a hospital bed, such as the one in which James found himself for three days after his surgery, when you’ve turned the lights out for the night? What is there to do if you can’t sleep? If, even when you can, your terrible dream comes back, same as it was when you were a young man? James Loveland woke at 2, 3, 4, 5 a.m., furious with himself for arriving late and missing the train. It took him a moment, whenever he woke up, to remember where he was and why he was there. It took him a moment to remember that he would never know what sex was like again. What would he

have done differently if he’d known that sixty-six was to be his unlucky year?

James tried to remember the women he’d slept with as a young man. The list with pitifully small, and he found it difficult to retrieve details -- particular beds, bodies, smells. He’d always assumed he would have more.

II In November, Adam went to visit his father. It really was an incredible inconvenience; Zoe, his girlfriend, hadn’t wanted him to come.

The taxi shivered up the driveway, crunching down leaves from the oak, elm, dogwood, beech and maple. He slammed the door and shouldered his overnight bag, then walked up the curving brick path to the front door. It was after ten in the evening. He pressed the gold button. From inside its white plastic housing on the kitchen wall, the electric doorbell rang. It had been one of Adam’s first lessons in carpentry and electronics to replace, as an eight-year-old boy, the family’s old tube-and-hammer doorbell with a speaker box.

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A moment later, light spilled from the old iron fixture beside the door. James always turned the outdoor light on first, in part because he liked to identify his guests before being identified himself, and in part because he mistakenly considered it a courtesy to blast them with light while the vestibule was still in darkness. Adam imagined him standing in his slippered feet on the cold blue tile of the vestibule, cinching his robe more tightly around his waist. “Coming!” he called from inside. More lights came on.

“Coming.” His voice was louder now, and the deadbolt burrowed into the side of the door.

Adam was determined to stay only one day. He knew that if he lingered in Sweet Have too long, he might return to Montreal and find Zoë gone.

His father’s voice called again. “Adam Sidney?”

“Hi, dad.”

It opened. “Adam!” His father’s arms had some of the old strength back, Adam could feel it when they embraced. “Boy, it’s cold out here.

Come inside. I’ll make you a drink.”

The house was cold, too, because James, to save money, refused to run the heat higher than was absolutely necessary for the survival of

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biological organisms. It seemed to Adam that a man recovering from cancer might want his house heated to a reasonable temperature in autumn, but he resolved to say nothing; it had been six years since he’d lived in Sweet Haven— it was time to let the setting on the thermostat go unremarked.

“Why don’t we visit in the kitchen,” James said. “It’s cozy in there.”

“Is mom home?”

“She’s at work. What would you like? I’m having bourbon.”

“Bourbon’s fine.”

“We have so much to talk about! Here; I know you take ice. Sit down. So, tell me what’s up.”

James pronounced “what’s up” as two separate words.

“Dad. I’m sorry we didn’t have much time together in Montreal. Is everything okay? It’s only been two months since the surgery.”

His father shifted in his seat. “That long? It feels like ages ago now.”

Neither man wanted to laugh; both laughed.

“Not ages, dad, only a little while. What do the doctors say?”

“Well Blumenthal refuses to say I’m cured, you see, he says we need to wait years to be certain. But I feel fine. Everything works almost like normal. Lizzie told you about what happened, I bet.”

“Mom didn’t tell me anything.”

“Of course she didn’t,” James said. The kitchen windows were black mirrors; Adam could see himself, holding his drink, reflected above his father’s head.

“What’s wrong? Did it spread?”

“No, no, no, no. They got it all.” His father shivered underneath his robe. It was too much for Adam: “Will you please turn the heat up, dad? If you don’t turn the fucking heat on then I’m going to leave.” Then, thinking his father might be more likely to act if he could preserve his dignity, he added: “I’m really getting cold.”

James shuffled across the room and turned the dial reluctantly to the right. In the basement, the furnace gasped. Then, rather than return to the table, he busied himself with an unnecessary inspection of the thermostat while he said,

“They took out both neurovascular bundles.

My”—he paused, looking for words, facing away from Adam—“my evening schedule has been considerably freed up.” James looked up from the thermostat. “It may take a few minutes before we get the benefit of it,” he said. “Would you like to make a fire with me? The living room can be much cozier with a good fire going.”

“Sure. Let’s make a fire.”

“We have plenty of kindling,” said James, leading the way to the living room.

When they had it burning, they sat close to the wire screen. Adam was gratified to see that his father no longer shivered. “I’m sorry, dad,” he said.

“Me too. It’s a hell of a thing.” He repeated, more to himself than to Adam: “A hell of a thing.”

“What time will mom be home?”

“She may be out late tonight,” said James. “But hey—now that you’re warm, I have something to show you. Something to give you.” He rubbed his hands together with eagerness, got up from the couch and left the room. So his own father—the father whose genes he carried—couldn’t make love. And now his mother was out at work? At 1am? Then James’s quick, slippered steps.

“This is something I’ve been working on for a long time. I know your birthday is still two weeks away, but who knows if you’ll be home for it, so tonight’s the night.” From across the room, he tossed Adam a small black box. Adam caught it in one hand. “Open it,” he said.

It was a silver key with a stallion on the head. “Come. I’ll show you what it does.” The garage was separated from the house by a small cobblestone path, which, like the driveway, lay under leaves. “Wait here,” said James, and raised up the overhead door. A shining red Mustang—probably 1966 or ’67—crouched in the dim light. “It’s for you. Isn’t it something?

I’ve been restoring it. Start it up: listen to it!”

Adam had never owned a car before. When he turned the key, it purred beautifully.

“Dad, this is incredible! I can’t believe you did this.”

James was obviously pleased. “You see?” he said. “You can go anywhere. And this way

you can come and visit me anytime you want.

If you want, that is. No buses, no planes—you just get in and go. It’s a beautiful drive through New Hampshire if you cut through the White Mountain pass.”

“I’m sure it is,” said Adam. “We’ll have to go out in it sometime.”

“I thought tomorrow we could take a drive.”

“Tomorrow I can’t; I really have to get back to Zoë. I only meant to come for a night, to make sure you were doing okay.”

If James was hurt, he hid it well. “Yes, go back, definitely. Another time. And by the way: when you do go back, give this to Zoë. She’ll like it.” It was a photograph of him as a baby, which he had seen a thousand times, blown up the size of a postcard. “You want me to give Zoë a photo of myself?”

“Trust me,” said James. “She’ll love it.”

“Dad, are you sure you feel well? If mom isn’t going to be around that much, maybe you should get someone to come in once in a while.

To clean up and all that.”

“I’m only sixty-six years old, Adam,” James said. “I’m not dead yet. So tell me more about Zoë.”

Adam told his father. It took a long time to explain everything; at four in the morning they were still going, talking and drinking together as though they were brothers. They stayed up until Elizabeth’s car came up the drive. Then they went upstairs and said goodnight, like brothers do.

Adam knew that his lover would be there for him when he got back to Montreal.

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The Rejection of the Regionalists: Wyeth, Wood, and the New Americans Emily Chertoff

In Andrew Wyeth’s winter landscapes, Pennsylvania seems to groom itself with a cold gray tongue. Down it sweeps, over wide brown plains and farms, over towns and small cities. It gentles the cows that graze in fenced-in fields, the light-eyed farmers who bring them out to pasture, and the crows that guard them both. It smoothes the wheat that covers its body like a winter fur. The state is cleaning, making ready for the spring, when the sunlight will reveal all its dirty and dusty corners without mercy.

Sometimes the wind loses interest in the middle of a stroke. Other times, it licks energetically to the bottom of the state, where it comes up against an old stone mill on a broad lot. For fifty years, this mill was Wyeth’s home.

Here the painter died on January 16 of this year, tucked in bed, as stray gusts rattled at the windowpanes.

Wyeth painted this landscape and the people and things that populate it for nearly his entire life. It was a gentle scene, and a seductive one.

His America was calm and austere, his Americans vital and strong. So why did critics so vigorously attack them both?

At the peak of his career, in the 1960s and 1970s, Wyeth’s images of Pennsylvania and Maine, where he spent summers, made him both one the most popular artists in America and one of the most disparaged. Art world insiders derided his sentimentalism and “anti-modernism” even as thousands of patrons flocked to surveys of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Boston Museum of Fine Art. The artist’s work was paradoxically controversial given its aesthetic conservatism.

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Robert Storr, now the dean of Yale’s School of Art, named the painter “our greatest living ‘kitschmeister.’” Dave Hickey called him pretentious and accused him of working in a palette of “mud and baby poop.” Intellectually, these critics were reacting to the artist’s uncritical populism. Wyeth catered to mainstream tastes, and he displayed none of the tongue-in-cheek self-awareness of the incoming postmodern artists. His art was humorless, retrograde, inferior—clearly meant for the masses.

But the objections to Wyeth’s work were not just academic. Often they were visceral and emotional. This seems odd; after all, the artist was only painting sparse landscapes and meticulous portraits in a clear and expressive realist style. Yet however strange the debate over his art seems, it had been rehearsed (albeit at a lower intensity) a half-dozen times over the past fifty years. The same argument surfaced every time a “regionalist” artist achieved widespread success.

To be called a regionalist is either to be slandered or to be praised, depending on whom you ask. Detractors take the genre’s name for what it is. They often argue that regionalists are close-minded and lack the creative vision of their more radical, cosmopolitan counterparts.

Supporters claim that regionalists do the United States a service by providing it with images of itself. Either way, the regionalist label, which has been in use since the late 20s, generally applies to artists whose work depicts a rural part of the country in an accessible, placeconscious way. When written with a capital “r,” it refers more specifically to Midwestern artists

working between the two world wars. As the vagueness of both terms suggests, “regionalism” is less a clearly defined category than a means of signifying that a certain sort of debate has taken place over an artist’s work. The conflict it refers to is, on its surface, nothing more than an artworld iteration of urban-rural tensions.

But with Wyeth, it was more intense. He made the city critics howl. They were not just dismissive; they seemed to be uncomfortable. There was something about the paintings that made them anxious. The artist’s works possessed some hidden and powerful reactionary force—a force that was driving audiences crazy. Some commentators attributed their own unsettled feelings to the artist’s simple-minded sentimentalism. Others slammed him for producing representational art in an age of abstraction.

Few critics talked about the people Wyeth painted—and here, they may have missed the source of their own unease. The artist’s most famous and most frequent models are not “native” New Englanders. They are not recent arrivals like Italians or Mexicans or Jews. They are not former slaves or Native Americans. They are Nordic and German immigrants and their descendents. Some of them were forced out of their native lands by demographic pressures; others fled a blasted Europe in the middle decades of the 20th century. They were hardly welcome here even by Wyeth’s time. In the United States, the World Wars had taken the form “not simply [of] a struggle against Germany, but also [of] a fight against things German,” as the historian Stephen Gross puts it. Decades later, many Americans still distrusted Teutonic and Teutonic-looking newcomers.

Yet there they were, on canvas after canvas.

Christina Olson, Siri Erickson, Helga Testorf, Karl and Anna Kuerner—a spread of pale, wide brows, golden hair, rosy cheeks, glittering light eyes. Their figures seem to fade into his bleak landscapes, into the wind, the brown earth, the clear gray sky. To the artist, these people were “truly wholesome” and “fresh, really American.” To city-dwellers, they were alien, and frightening—foreign, but better suited to the land than they were.

Wyeth was confronting the beaux-monde with a hardier, more perfect race of American. The city folk just couldn’t look them in the face.

Fifty years before the critic Peter Schjeldahl called Wyeth’s Helga pictures “as threatening to your sense of self as a quilted pot holder,” Grant Wood was painting the German woman’s distant cousins. The Iowan took up the brush at a young age, not long after his family moved from Anamosa to the suburbs of Cedar Rapids.

Though he left it in 1901, at the age of 10, Wood would always claim that the tiny farming town formed him as an artist. Certainly his later paintings bear out this statement: from 1930 on, the artist almost exclusively depicted rural landscapes, small towns, farms—and, of course, the hardworking, upright people who populated all three.

But Anamosa was the last thing in his mind during what he later termed his “bohemian” period. From about the time of his family’s move to the city to his 40th birthday, Wood began to gather strength as a painter. He also made what in retrospect seem like a series of half-hearted

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Grant Wood, Plaid Sweater (1931) attempts to escape the physical and moral orbit of the rural Midwest. He moved to Chicago in 1913, and spent the next four years as a sometimesstudent at the Art Institute. After his return to Cedar Rapids, he was able to save enough money from sporadic teaching and design jobs to embark on a series of trips to Paris. Inevitably, he returned from these excursions talking, acting, and dressing like a denizen of the Left Bank and painting like a minor Impressionist. Eventually, however, Wood settled back down in his Iowa town for good. He began more and more often to paint the people and places he had seen since childhood.

Wood was just bohemian enough for the people of Cedar Rapids. The townsfolk didn’t 58

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quite approve of Braque, or Matisse, or that Picasso fellow—and certainly not those oddballs over in New York—but Wood seemed just about right for an artist, at least to them. He kept strange hours, couldn’t manage his own money, and was probably too creative for his own good— but wasn’t he harmless, really? He taught their middle-schoolers and designed the stained glass window for the Veteran’s Memorial building. His early paintings hung in hundreds of homes and businesses across the state. True, that moustache and goatee he wore after his first European trip were a little much, but he shaved them off pretty quick. All told, Wood was the kind of artist they could really like. He didn’t stir things up or challenge their values too much, but he brought

Andrew Wyeth, Cape Coat (1982) a bit of color to the place. So as long as he continued to meet their expectations, his fellow citizens would support him with commissions and patronage. A little market sprang up in the area for original Grant Woods.

The artist returned their favor in the 1930s with what would be called his Regionalist canvases.

By the start of the decade, he had completely abandoned his earlier pseudo-modernism and dedicated himself to painting meticulous, gently caricatured visions of the Iowans and their landscape. These works were both stylistic and thematic breakthroughs. Not only had Wood engineered a new realism from American folk art and mural-painting traditions and Northern Renaissance portraiture; he was giving rural

subject matter a substantial artistic treatment.

His innovations were important enough to earn gallery space for his work in Chicago and in the East. Through his paintings, city-dwellers finally had a chance to meet their country neighbors.

But what the urbanites saw may have been disconcerting. If they were expecting people who looked or lived like they did, they were wrong. Wood’s landscapes are cartoonish, rounded, sinuous. His buildings stand rigidly upright. But his Iowans fall somewhere between the two, somewhere oddly inhuman. Their noses and chins are rotund, their eyes dark and moist, their necks stiff, their lips tucked into little lines of rectitude. Their limbs are rounded, but their motions and gaits are jerky, angular, stylized.

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Although they should be of the town—most of them were the descendents of German and Nordic immigrants who had arrived in the area just decades earlier—visually, they bridge the town and the land. They are not fully of the built environment, although it is an environment of their own construction. Over time, they have grown into the American Midwest, until they are more than natives. They are natural features.

Few people in the East felt so comfortable in their own cities.

Unsurprisingly, Wood’s Regionalist works were criticized for the same retrograde qualities as Wyeth’s later ones. While some modernists praised the painter for American Gothic, which they saw as a critique of rural values, the rest of his work elicited their ire. Formalists ripped him apart for what The New Republic’s James Sweeney described as a lack of “sensibility to color,” a “feeble sense of modeling,” and “insensitively stylized forms”—in other words, for failing to meet the criteria of orthodox modernism. Those who judged him on his own terms as a vernacular realist were just as harsh.

His Iowa was too curvaceous, too alluring, and too far removed from what critics assumed were the realities of the Depression. Lincoln Kirstein accused him of painting with a “simple-minded mannerism” that at times sent his figures into “fat toy territory.” Even Thomas Craven, a proRegionalist, accused him of a “frivolity” that damped his attempts at expression. Wood’s popular reception was enthusiastic, particularly in the Midwest, but the opinion of the urban art elite was consistently, aggresively negative.

However, Wood’s real or imagined shortcomings as a creator didn’t warrant the vehement responses of his detractors. Boring, conservative, insufficiently innovative, or overly imaginative paintings might be expected to produce indifference or mild distaste, not outrage. There was something else about Wood’s work that was making critics downright antsy. Something lurking in the Iowa landscape.

Over round hills and fields sewn with wheat, it comes—a relative the city folk can’t recognize, a countryman to whom they can’t relate. A new sort of American. Wholesome, strong, and completely comfortable in the land—far more comfortable than they were among the skyscrapers and subway cars.

In Wyeth’s work, this figure finally drifted into view.

The first time the painter saw the Prussianborn Helga Testorf walking down a snowstrewn Pennsylvania road, he was enchanted.

Immediately he noticed “all her German qualities,” qualities Karl and Anna Kuerner also possessed: “her strong, determined stride, that Loden coat, the braided blond hair.” He asked her to pose; she agreed. She became his “most perfect model,” and his most frequent. From 1971 to 1985, Wyeth secretly painted and drew 246 images of Testorf. There was Helga in the forest, Helga at home, Helga walking, melting into the landscape as if she could become a part of it. And Helga naked—on a stool, in a sauna, on her knees or her back in bed. Betsy Wyeth later told reporters she was unaware that Testorf had modeled for her husband. Andrew Wyeth claimed their relationship had never been

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physical.

The art world exploded at the news of the series upon its sale to a single collector in 1986.

The paintings’ scandal threatened to completely erase the public memory of the rest of Wyeth’s work. TIME ran a story on the collection and suggested that the artist and his wife had craftily manipulated reports about the series to inflate the value of his other paintings. Insiders, at least, did not need to be convinced that the pictures were tawdry. The Metropolitan Museum of Art declined to show the paintings, even though it was offered access to the entire collection.

The New York Times’ Roberta Smith called the eventual National Gallery exhibition “a theme show with all the sentimentality and sensationalism—and even the element of softcore pornography—of an afternoon soap.” Most critics bore similar feelings, and expressed them just as strongly. The general art world opinion of Wyeth had fallen even further.

But what did these viewers find particularly offensive about the Helga pictures? It couldn’t be the implied affair between the artist and his model, nor the scandal that surrounded its revelation—both are commonplace in art history.

The paintings are just as technically competent as Wyeth’s other works. They are just as spooky, just as kitschy. What, then, was the matter?

Helga herself was the source of the critics’ unease. She is the apex of Wyeth’s Teutonic fixation, its symbol and best representative. Her thick brow, flat face, blonde hair, blue eyes— that Loden coat, that straight and solid bearing!

She is a pure Prussian, the product of good Germanic stock—and strangely military. This, Wyeth would tell us, is the face of America. A “wholesome” and “fresh” face. But it was already familiar to most viewers, and not so wholesome to some of them. How did the city-dwellers feel when they learned that the new American, their country neighbor, their superior, their potential replacement, was Aryan?

Americans yearning for “a lost agrarian past,” as The Washington Post put it. They presented their audiences with a new sort of rural person—a hardy breed well-suited to the land.

In Wyeth, however, the “breed” takes on an overt racial character. The progressive American art scene may not have been ready to accept a painter who fetishized the same qualities that had preoccupied Nazi eugenicists. They were qualities that had haunted many of the art worlders, or their parents and families, in a time so different it could have been another life. They were qualities over which, in a sense, Americans once went to war.

But strangely—perversely—Wyeth’s fame and popularity have grown over time. By now, Wood has been reduced to a single, indelible image: American Gothic, much parodied and much discussed. His fellow regionalist, however, is considered the greatest American artist of the twentieth century in some circles. His paintings are exhibited across the country. Even the notoriously Wyeth-averse Museum of Modern Art displays Christina’s World. And the news of his death has propelled another burst of interest in his paintings and legacy.

This time, the critics have been more generous.

Robert Storr has acknowledged Wyeth’s “great energy and conviction.” Others have claimed him as a closet innovator. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Kathleen Foster has called him “a different voice of modernism.” She curated a posthumous exhibition of the painter’s work that went up in late January. Other shows have opened in Tennessee and Maine. With more time to plan, other, larger retrospectives will debut—public demand for the artist is high.

Once again, Americans will come face to face with Helgas and Siris and Olsons and Kuerners.

Urbanites and city critics will have another chance to look them in the eyes.

Critics were uncomfortable with Grant Wood’s paintings, but they were far more troubled by Wyeth’s. They had reason to be.

Both artists appealed with their paintings to

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6 Train Aurora Andrews Watercolor and Pen 62

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Travis, Evan, and CJ Aurora Andrews Watercolor and Pen COMMENCEMENT 2009

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Four Ways of Seeing: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet Jessica Sequeira

1.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009 The book as it came to me was drab, bound in pale green cloth and devoid of all markings save for its title printed in gold: The Book of Disquiet. That starkness of labeling was its first appeal. The second was the rhythmic name of its author, written on the inside flap, falling drop-like as water when recited—Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa. The strange resonance between his middle name and my last was a trivial comfort, but an attractive one.

It sustained me through the unsettling pages, from the very moment I opened to page one (a convenient place) and began.

To begin—a tremulous thing in the case of Pessoa. Now thought of as a definitive part of the Portuguese literary canon and one of the greatest poets of existential malaise of the twentieth century, Pessoa was once considered a minor figure, known mostly for founding the modernist literary journal Orpheu. Following his death in 1935, however, his sister shocked scholars by revealing the existence of a trunk containing over twenty-thousand of his documents— poems, plays, essays, even horoscopes—mostly unfinished and all but indecipherable. The subsequent frenzy of academic attempts to arrange the hundreds of disorganized journal entries into something linear could conceivably have assumed countless forms. It is entirely possible that my copy of Pessoa’s text places later entries at the front of the book, so that instead of edging toward death, his insights crawl toward natality.

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too defies a narrative arc. Pessoa presents his reader with the despairing and fragmentary diary of an assistant book-keeper who has resigned himself to never leaving his street, choosing instead to dwell in his mind. “With the soul’s equivalent of a wry smile,” he writes, “I calmly confront the prospect that my life will consist of nothing more than being shut up forever in Rua dos Douradores, in this office, surrounded by these people.” But the peculiar quality of “forever” is that it has neither a beginning nor an end. The entries—brilliant in their philosophical reflections though they are—thus retain a kind of sameness, existing outside the normal relationship of cause and effect. I could have started from page 38 or 217 with just as much reason or sense.

One final matter complicates this strange, non-linear text. Though it is born of Pessoa’s mind, he himself does not claim authorship.

The writer of the diary, according to Pessoa, is instead one Bernardo Soares, a tall hunched man with a penchant for cheap tobacco, whom he encounters on the upper floor of a Lisbon café. Soares is one of Pessoa’s literary personalities, which he calls “heteronyms”— alternate personae with different biographies and philosophies, all coexisting within his fertile imagination, of whom we today count more than seventy-two. In his work they interact, reading one another’s writings, producing critiques, even penning obituaries. A poignant addition, for if imaginary characters seem to me easily created, then their deaths are all the more painful, a first killing of consciousness that precedes their second demise when, inevitably, the page is turned.

2.

Leningrad, Russia, 1948 The book I requested has finally arrived. I can still see the messenger scurrying away over the new snow. Cowards that they are, they wrapped it in black paper—as if that will keep away any eyes that care to see! In any case, I will write this review. I will do so in spite of myself, because I have no wish to and because nobody cares a thing for my pitiful attempts at opposition anyway. If this sounds like a contradiction, that is because it

is, but my review will be about Fernando Pessoa and thus contradiction is entirely the point.

Pessoa’s works are plump with oppositions, rife with challenges. Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis—those other, famous characters of his—remain offstage in this particular book; but Soares is a lonely man, and so he seeks the chatter of contradiction within himself. Reality, without reason, appears one way for him as he sits in his office, completely another when he is caught in a rainstorm a few pages later.

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Naturally, this will be a difficult pill to swallow for complacent stomachs. Contradiction is rarely defended so brazenly and consciously, and these reversals disregard completely all desire for the false consolation of a single truth. Recall the ferocity with which our illustrious critic Shklovsky loathed Rozanov for this exact point, writing that Fallen Leaves represented “a totally new genre, an extraordinary act of betrayal. Social and topical essays, presented as autonomous fragments, contradict each other at every point.”

But—a betrayal of what? Somebody feels a certain way one day, a different way the next. Or even two different ways at the same time. Hegel, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky—and I dare you to say that they are not great—all had contradiction at the very heart of their work. To propose a contradiction is to scoop out the ground from the static, to provide the necessary opposite to bring the world to completion.

Let us see if we cannot provide a little proof.

From my window overlooking the Nevsky Prospekt, I see an officer stamping out a cigarette under his boot heel in the rusty dawn. Through

his uniform his belly betrays the bulge of the well-fed—a disappointment, considering all the intelligent ones go hungry these days. But for the purposes of my little thought experiment, he has brains enough. Say I were to call him up to the tiny flat where I live alone, ask his permission to share some of these ideas with which I spend so much time. I see him here, listening carefully. If he agrees with me, then fine, my point is verified.

But let us pretend he is more skeptical. “Come, sir,” he simpers, fiddling uncomfortably with his jacket. “Surely no rational man can truly believe that contradiction is quite adequate, theoretically?”

Since this statement is itself a contradiction—quod erat demonstrandum!

How much of this do I truly believe? Is contradiction so important that where it does not exist, we must invent it? I often feel that what I have written myself is merely artificial provocation, contradiction for its own sake. But one must pass the time somehow. There is no alternative to that.

3.

Vienna, Austria, 1993 The book first came to my attention on account of a tattered copy of the morning newspaper in the visitors’ ward, which I picked up and pretended to read as I watched the patients. With their hair combed and tucked behind their ears, hands on their laps and smiles hanging from their lips, they sat like small children waiting for mothers, sisters, uncles. Yesterday they fought for control of the remote, and tomorrow they will quarrel over seats in the cafeteria. But at this particular moment they were quiet, fixing their cuffs and rubbing their faces to check their shaves. This behavior is to be expected. Psychologists have noted a particular fastidiousness and resignation to one’s surroundings among the most hopeless, marked by a preoccupation with the tiniest details (Hirsch and Meitzel, 1985, “Picturing Death Row”).

I held the newspaper open to page C2 and C3 as a pure ruse so as not to draw attention, but a photo on the page caught my eye. It was a black and white portrait of that disturbed Russian author of Truth and Artifice, who, in following his theory to its logical end, sought the contradiction of life itself by

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his own hand. He left behind no note. But tucked away in paragraph four of the accompanying retrospective was a glancing reference to the book, one of the few things found on his desk. It is widely understood that one’s final possessions provide the most accurate representation of a person’s desired projection of self (Mirsky, 1990, “Objects and Endings”); and so, cognizant of a hidden significance to the elusive author, I walked over to the institutional library, where a never-stamped copy fortunately still occupied its expected place on the shelf.

Opening the pages to this fascinating case study of Pessoa’s heteronym, I recalled the query of a colleague of mine, who questioned why, if writers can have alter egos, the critic’s mind should be limited to only one point of view (Gould, 1989, “The Poetics of Perception”). In a world composed of so many viewpoints, in which existence is necessarily fragmented. It would thus be inaccurate of the critic to assume only one voice. In fact, scientists now understand that an overly strong sense of subjectivity can lead to neurosis and depression (Finnegan, 1992, “Negative sites of self-assertion on the limbic-pituitary axis”).

The major psychiatric breakthrough of the twentieth century came in the realization that what was traditionally considered pathological, the shattering of perception found in victims of dissociative identity disorder, in fact allows for a clearer, more comprehensive experience of reality.

Writers began to develop literary alter egos: Pound had Mauberley, Rilke had Malte Laurids Brigge, Valéry had Monsieur Teste. But Pessoa outstripped them all in the sheer number and detail of his alternate selves. He even impersonated a therapist, writing to old teachers and schoolmates to ask for their opinions on his patient “Fernando Pessoa” in an attempt to learn what they truly thought of him.

A bell sounds through the building, signaling patient curfew. I smile at the librarian and check out the book. Then the bell sounds again, nearly masking the approaching footfalls of the two wardens coming to wheel me away, serene, back to my room.

4.

Cambridge, England, 1956 The book revealed itself to me on a park bench, in the public gardens, where it lay half concealed in the shadows of a linden tree casting down its leaf prints in sharp relief. There it was, and there was my body slicing lengthwise through the light (thin here in a sunny patch, textured golden nearer the flower beds), as I moved at a steady pace over the gravel paths toward its presence. I made no sudden gestures, fearing it would disappear if I showed any effort. To reach deliberately for something is to lose it, to close oneself to the possibilities of being. The poet must relinquish desire, submerging himself in complete indifference, so that life may catch him unawares, all the more intense for its suddenness.

This idea too came to me from the outside. It came from the book itself, and now I am projecting it backwards in time to fit my discovery, in which I moved more purposefully toward those pages (ducking a ball, dodging a running child) than I care to admit. But now that I am safe here in this café, tucked into a corner with the book and a halfeaten pastry and the steam from my cup tumbling upwards, I can reflect. Soares calls his philosophy an “aesthetics of indifference,” a letting go of being so that images may flicker by him, lit briefly by the sun like the backs of salmon as they surge seaward through the mind. Perhaps consciousness will one day be quantified, made the subject of scientific study, but for now it exists only as rich unknown spaces.

I fail at the task Soares has set, though. I cannot be indifferent. My preferences continue to order the world, despite myself. Before my lips touch this cup I know that the coffee will be bitter; this knowledge informs my perception of the drink before the first sip. Nor is language effortless. My poems win accolades for their studied lyricism; I search through cabinets, shuffle through drawers, reaching for the right words. For Soares, love wearies, action dissipates, thinking confuses. But I cannot allow life to merely flow its way past.

Tousled as the strands of life are, various as its characters may be, I must go out—capture it—share its fractured loveliness with those around me.

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ENVOY Letter from Exurbia Ben Cosgrove

I grew up at the intersection of two states and two highways, right at the westernmost point of Essex County, Massachusetts’ tumor-like northeastern extremity, where it begins to bulge up into New Hampshire. Officially, Methuen, MA was spawned around 1725 and grew to legitimacy during the industrial revolution when workers from the mills in Lawrence and Lowell spread into the town, but it really only came into its own with the development of the interstate system. This set Methuen at the allimportant place where I-495, Boston’s outer ring, reunites with I-93 bombing straight up from the city, before the two divide again to shoot off to coastal Maine and northern New Hampshire, respectively. MA-213, a four-laner completely contained within Methuen’s borders, connects the two.

Though technically the 93/495 junction occurs just south of town in a byzantine interchange within the limits of Andover, Methuen arguably feels its effects more. Andover might have its vast swathes of hiking trails, Phillips Academy and a cute little Main St to help form its identity, but Methuen is a community that has defined itself by few things outside its relationship to these major roads. In the last several decades, the biggest thing to hit the town (actually, now a city: since the mid-90s, its official title, and I’m not making this up, has been “The City Known as the Town of Methuen”) has been an enormous consumer complex erected along the concrete banks of 213, whose influence has since caused strip-mall development to spread slowly out from the spot like an oil spill. The Methuen one sees from the highway looks like Las Vegas.

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The clear intention was to prey upon the passing motorists, luring them from a driving-induced stupor with glittery promises of McDonalds and movie theaters.

It’s not an easy thing to do, unless the drivers aren’t really on their game. Travel for another two minutes in virtually any direction and you hit Tax Free Salem, New Hampshire (as it is exclusively referred to on local TV and radio spots) where literally all of the same amenities are available for five percent less. Methuen’s commercial scene doesn’t appear to have been hindered by this fact, due in some measure to the fact that we locals never leave town, even to avoid the natural pitfalls of living in famously tax-happy Massachusetts.

This is perhaps the weirdest manifestation of Methuen’s relationship to its roads. With minimal traffic on 93, residents can get to Boston in less than 45 minutes and we can get to Manchester in about 20. But we remain profoundly uninfluenced by either city, and even as geographically claustrophobic high schoolers, we rarely travel to either one. Rather than the patriarchal relationship a major city is supposed to have with its suburbs, Boston was to most of us a distant entity, something for special occasions.

You could get there easily, sure, but why bother?

Methuen High positively teemed with Red Sox paraphernalia and dropped R’s, but there was rarely any question of where our true allegiances lay. Boston may have been nearby, but make no mistake—we lived here and Bostonians lived there. I could have casually flicked something out of my window and hit New Hampshire, but

even it was hardly ever mentioned.

Occasionally, this isolation was expressed to unsettling degrees. The town that borders us (by way, incidentally, of a not-insignificantly sized border) to the west is Dracut, MA, our perennial Thanksgiving football rival. As we shivered in their metal visitor-side bleachers during my senior year, my friend turned to me and said, “You know, this is probably the second time in my life I’ve come to Dracut.” Slowly those around us came to realize that they had never really seen fit to cross over the western boundary of the city either. It’s not like there was anything too special in Dracut—since we had more or less everything we needed in our own town, why would anyone have bothered? His revelation was more or less laughed off, as if he had noted how remarkable it was that no one on the field was naked.

Methuen and the vast number of communities like it, though, are just one example of a paradox that’s relatively unique to this time, namely how connectedness can breed disconnect. Maybe it’s because we can get places so easily that there’s

no thrill in getting there. We could drive south on 495 an hour or two towards the towns around Worcester, but the odds of their chain stores, suburban landscape, and commercial byways outshining our own are hardly great enough to justify the gas that would be spent on the journey.

Similarly, the residents of those places could come here, but they don’t, for the exact same reasons. Methuen’s success, like that of so many other highway towns, is predicated on the idea that its aggressively outspoken commercialism can be fed in part by people who have to pass by us on their way to someplace else—the mountains or the ocean or the city.

But in reality, it’s mostly there for the residents.

There isn’t too much in Methuen the passing traveler couldn’t get by continuing another 45 minutes to Boston or another 30 to Manchester, and for someone in the process of blasting up or down Route 93, that’s a pretty inconsequential amount of time. But for the people who live there, its shopping plazas, its huge grocery stores, the ready availability of all the various prepackaged ingredients of self-sufficiency all make it so that there’s never any urgent reason to go somewhere else. Even, say, to Dracut.

It has become what is known as an exurb or bedroom community, a place whose distance from larger urban centers—not too close, not too far—effectively relieves it of any responsibility to anyone but the people who live inside its borders. Exurbs developed due to the increased irrelevance of distance affected by advances in transportation and technology. Some of them began life as rural communities that suddenly found themselves within striking distance of an urban center; others as outlying suburbs who became so inundated with highways and Burger Kings and Wal-Marts that the looming presence and once-glittery promise of the major city began to matter less and less to the residents of these towns. The communities in these two categories thereby got lowered and elevated, respectively, to more or less equal levels of autonomy.

What’s scary is that exurbia isn’t just a

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geographic phenomenon. As happened with human transportation, ease of information flow has made the retrieval of knowledge into a series of direct lines rather than roundabout paths. The internet and similar technologies draw people together in many ways, but in very significant others they encourage withdrawal from the sorts of everyday inconveniences and accidents that can often further human or personal development. Since no one needs to root through an enormous dictionary anymore when they need to quickly look up one word, the number of people who stumble across new ones in the process is surely smaller. On a larger scale, since information can be accessed with such speed and specificity, there are fewer opportunities for the researcher to occasion upon something totally irrelevant that could throw their work in an entirely new direction— or even to remember what they find. This is to say nothing of the internet’s flattening effects— nothing delocalizes like a culture-wide devotion to a delocalized network. 1 It may be that the human default, especially when thrown into an uncomfortable environment, is always to turn to whatever it knows to be reliable and steady—most often, this is oneself. And these days, the increasing degree to which a very personal brand of comfort and familiarity can be readily accessed from anywhere in the world makes it all the easier for someone to become a human exurb, wellconnected to numerous (if homogeneous) means of self-sufficiency but unknowingly rendered complacent and damaged by the resultant autonomy this affords. Just as many formerly

suburban communities now rely less and less on the cities they were once developed to serve, connectedness can make islands of people, too: to verify this, just watch someone text back and forth with their friend from across the room. I personally know someone who freely admits to communicating with her next-door neighbor far more frequently via chat on facebook.com than in person. It almost makes a lifelong failure to visit a neighboring town look forgivable by comparison.

All of this blurring of the line between interaction and isolation has effectively made it so that any geographic discrepancies are only as significant as you want them to be. You can talk online to a person three feet away from you and also enjoy the same degree of interaction with someone on the other side of the planet. Your social world can be more or less unchanged by distance or absence—it all depends on personal inclination. This odd mixture of connection and self-containment has been manifested in particularly interesting ways in the culture of internet cafés, where one can pay for the privilege of sitting in a room crowded with people, most of whom are hunched over a laptop with headphones clamped around their skulls, steeped in their own universe. It may be that there’s something that makes this an objectively more social experience than doing the same thing in the privacy of your home, but it’s hard to pinpoint what that may be.

Are situations like this are really anything more than groups of people seeking some illusion of community? Just enough of one so that, simply

1 To be fair, there are several serious arguments against the idea of the internet and telecommunications as delocalizing forces, but these tend to be pretty shaky. The most salient, by Graham and Marvin (1996), suggests that telecommunications actually increase a demand for transportation on the grounds that those who do commute now tend to live farther from the city, that reduced traffic from commuters makes roadways more appealing to other drivers, and that (again, I’m not making this up) the time saved by not commuting to work can now go towards shopping or vacation trips. Whether or not this is true and the epic and far-reaching shopping journeys apparently so often undertaken by telecommuters do in fact keep suburbanites in a perpetual state of transit, the article doesn’t seem to argue much against the increased fragility of locality—on the contrary, it seems to corroborate that idea.

That is to say, these cross-country consumers are clearly not grounded in any unique geographic community.

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by virtue of their physical proximity to other people, they can feel like members of society without being required to leave their bubble?

It’s possible that as the realities we participate in while plugged in at a Starbucks become less and less distinguishable from our real lives, that uncomfortable disconnect between your physical and mental surroundings—who you’re around vs. who you’re engaging with—will diffuse and vanish altogether.

In his 1989 book The Lost Continent, an account of a startlingly comprehensive road tour of America, the travel writer and humorist Bill Bryson had this to say about my corner of Massachusetts (in which he landed, significantly, on his way somewhere else): Boston is a big city and its outer suburbs dribble on and on, all the way up to New Hampshire. So, late in the evening, without any clear idea of how I got there, I found myself in one of those

placeless places that sprout up along the junctions of interstate highways —purplishly lit islands of motels, gas stations, shopping centers, and fast food places—so brightly lit they must be visible from outer space. This one was somewhere in the region of Haverhill.

There are millions of us now, products of these “placeless places” whether or not we’re always conscious of it. But we’ve been presented with a variety of means to make it so that doesn’t really matter. Immediately after the above quote, Bryson deals with the loneliness of his situation by soaking up the fluorescent familiarity of a Denny’s restaurant (still there, incidentally) and checking into a Motel 6. As all the little things—the iPods, cell phones, chain stores, and soundproof cars—make it easier and more acceptable to create and sustain your own private environment, it could be that as a result it’s less important for the larger, external setting, the physical community, to remain distinct from other ones like it.

It works the other way, too—as the resonant capacity of one’s personal bubble tends to vary directly with the sterility of the world outside of it, there’s nowhere the tendency to create these bubbles has taken a firmer hold than in the placeless places. We’ve learned, in the context of an external environment that is always growing to look more and more like everywhere else, to distinguish ourselves by asserting greater control over the design of our immediate, personal surroundings. It may be that the best way to deal with placelessness is simply to wrap yourself in a world of your own, and never have we been better equipped to do so.

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CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

AURORA ANDREWS loves springtime. JESSE BARON only communicates by fax. RICH BECK is old. Google can’t SANDERS BERNSTEIN. ENZO CAMACHO, AMY LIEN, and Terry Winters at Matthew Marks Gallery. EMILY CHERTOFF, P.I. SABRINA CHOU is the synecdoche of STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE. BEN COSGROVE is walking inland, inland. DWIGHT LIVINGSTONE CURTIS, stage left, walks into a bar with a priest. KAYLA ESCOBEDO loves jimmy corrigan and has a website: www.kaylascomix. weebly.com. ABRAM KAPLAN is **** for good reason. ALLISON KEELEY now knows the way. KYLE MCAULEY is less of a policeman than the nightstick makes him out to be. MARGARET ROSS and the antlion, also ghost crabs. JESSICA SEQUEIRA is there with buckets to catch the words. MICHAEL STYNES “It’s a boo--”.

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