Commencement 2012

The Harvard Advocate

Commencement 2012

Vol. 147 No.4

ART Brad Bolman, Camille Coppola, Molly Dektar*, Julian Gewirtz, Mattie Kahn, Kristie La, Avery Leonard, Rebecca Levitan*, Mary Potter*, Scott Roben*, Nicolas Schwalbe, Madeleine Schwartz*, Zoe Weinberg.

BUSINESS Ben Berman*, Sofie Brooks*, Ross Ford*, Edward de Fouchier, Skyler Hicks, Beñat Idoyaga*, Andrew Karn*, Temi Lawoyin, Dae Lim, David Manella, Jaron Mercer, Sasha Mironov, Tobi Tikolo, Caroline Vernick, Emily Xie. DESIGN Charlotte Alter*, Lucy Andersen*, Hanna Choi*, Alejandra Dean, Kayla Escobedo, Yuanjian Oliver Luo, Joseph Morcos, Sam Richman, Sally Scopa, Michael Segel, Lora Stoianova, Lila Strominger, Ned Whitman.

The Harvard Advocate www.theharvardadvocate.com

EDITORIAL BOARD President Publisher Art Editor Business Manager Design Editors

ALEXANDER J.B. WELLS STEPHANIE NEWMAN CAMILLE COPPOLA DAVID MANELLA SALLY SCOPA MICHAEL SEGEL Features Editor ERIC BREWSTER Fiction Editor PATRICK LAUPPE Poetry Editor TYLER RICHARD Technology Editor ERIC ARZOIAN Pegasi WENDY CHEN KEVIN HONG TOBI TIKOLO Dionysi SARAH HOPKINSON LARA ZYSMAN Circulation & BRAD BOLMAN Publicity Managers INDIANA SERESIN Librarian KAYLA ESCOBEDO Alumni Relations Manager JULIAN LUCAS Community Outreach ANNE MARIE CREIGHTON

BOARD OF TRUSTEES Chairman Chairman Emeritus Vice-Chairman President Vice-President and Treasurer Secretary

JAMES ATLAS LOUIS BEGLEY DOUGLAS MCINTYRE SUSAN MORRISON AUSTIN WILKIE CHARLES ATKINSON PETER BROOKS JOHN DESTEFANO LESLIE DUNTON-DOWNER JONATHAN GALASSI LEV GROSSMAN ANGELA MARIANI DANIEL MAX CELIA MCGEE THOMAS A. STEWART JEAN STROUSE

FEATURES Victoria Baena, Eric R. Brewster, Emily Chertoff*, Mark Chiusano*, Katherine Damm, Eva DeLappe*, Lily Karlin, Georgina Parfitt, Madeleine Schwartz*, Indiana Seresin, Georgia Stasinopoulos, Ezra Stoller, My Ngoc To, Alexander Traub, Alexander J. B. Wells, Warner James Wood.

FICTION Brad Bolman, Emily Chertoff*, Molly Dektar*, Eva DeLappe*, Ricky Fegelman, Erik Fredericksen*, Sofia Groopman*, Anna Hagen, Patrick Lauppe, Charlotte Lieberman, Julian Lucas, Joe Masterman*, Georgia Stasinopoulos, Kevin Stone, Alexander J.B. Wells.

POETRY Matthew Aucoin*, Hana Bajramovic, Samantha Berstler, Wendy Chen, Anne Marie Creighton, Ricky Fegelman, Erik Fredericksen*, Julian Gewirtz, Roxanna Haghighat, Zoë Hitzig, Kevin Hong, Sarah Hopkinson, Andrew Klein*, Ben Lorenz, Stephanie Newman, Tyler Richard, Joshua Wilson, Justin Wymer*, Lara Zysman.

TECHNOLOGY Eric Arzoian, Ben Berman*, Dan Cole, Brian Feldman, Jeremy Feng*, Rafic Melhem, Michael Segel. * The Harvard Advocate congratulates its graduating seniors.

The Harvard Advocate will anonymously consider all submissions of art, features, fiction, 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 may be directed to the individual emails above or to contact@theharvardadvocate.com.

Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nation’s oldest continuously published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from 21 South St, Cambridge MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not The Harvard Advocate. Domestic subscription rates are $35 for one year (4 issues), $60 for two years (8 issues), $90 for three years (12 issues).

For institutions and international addresses, the rates are $45 for one year (4 issues), $75 for two years (8 issues), $110 for three years (12 issues). Payable by cash or check made out to The Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase at www.theharvardadvocate.com. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of The Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2012 by the Editors and Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 1

The staff of The Harvard Advocate would like to dedicate this issue to the memory of Wendy Chang, Design Editor 2009-足2011.

We honor Wendy for her immeasurable artistic contribution to the magazine, as well as the humor and generosity she brought to the community at 21 South Street.

Wendy is deeply loved and dearly missed.

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ART 7 10 15 17 20 28 32 33 36 37 38 39 40

Berry Eaters Untitled (grid) 51 (asphalt triptych) 51 (asphalt triptych), continued 51 (asphalt triptych), continued The Laws of Physics Demand It (VII) On Petroclus, the Discussion of a Good Landscape Under My Wings Everything Prospers Destiny, Manifest (installation detail) Destiny, Manifest (installation detail) Back of a Head (Asta Nielson #3) Back of a Head (Thomas Mann #4) The Laws of Physics Demand (XII)

Molly Dektar Keoni Correa Scott Roben Scott Roben Scott Roben Rebecca Levitan Danny Bredar Zoë Hitzig Ingrid Pierre Ingrid Pierre Matt Saunders Matt Saunders Rebecca Levitan

FEATURES 4 11 21 44

Spring Break A King and a Mistress But no one will know Celebrating Adrienne Rich

Mark Chiusano Victoria Baena Indiana Seresin Madeleine Schwartz & Stephanie Newman

FICTION 8 “Mrs. Xia,” Part III 30 Car Parked on Quentin, Being Washed 41 Birds

Kevin Hong Mark Chiusano Vincent Craig Wright

POETRY 16 18 26 34

Winter Sketch Will Not Come Back Good Night A Hawthorn, Rooted Close to Other Guests

Erik Fredericksen Julian Gewirtz Matt Aucoin Justin Wymer

Cover by Joseph Morcos.

Illustrations by Kayla Escobedo (p. 4), Sally Scopa (p. 11), Lora Stoianova (p. 21).

Spring Break MARK CHIUSANO

The spring break of my junior year of college I spent entirely at home on Avenue R, while my mother and father were at work and my brother was at school. I was thinking Big Thoughts over that spring break: I had brought a shoulder-bag full of books home, many of them hardcover, stuffed between two pairs of jeans and my baseball glove. I wore my own jeans and my brother’s t-shirts, that week. We had become the same size, nearly exactly, leveling off around maturity. Our shoulders, in the mirror, were the same width.

That week was the week after the tsunami wave and earthquake in Japan, when three nuclear reactors suffered a partial meltdown. I had about fifteen books to read that I knew with only a small sinking feeling I wasn’t going to finish. There was a price to be paid for every book gotten through, and that price was 60 minutes for every 60 pages read—at best—meaning that each paperback stacked in my blue bag was a collection of solitary hours that I had no choice but to attempt. I had recently read an essay by Jonathan Franzen in which he said that he had come to the realization that he would read only a finite number of books in his life. He’d calculated that finite number, and at his stage in life it was a three-digit one. I hoped that mine was an order of magnitude more than that, but still, the tangibility was weighing.

My brother was a senior in high school then and it was his last for-sure baseball season, surely the last that I would be able to watch with such ease,

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considering the difficulty of making a college baseball team and the by-no-means-guaranteed proximity of our schools during the brief spring season. That week he had a game every day, so my schedule revolved shadow-like around his actions.

I took the train or drove into the city to watch him warm-up. I’d sit on the bench and talk to his coach, once my own coach, while he played. I watched him lean forward too much on first pitches, anticipating fastballs. He was hitting third that year. Sometimes he struck out and sometimes he got hits through the hole between short and third.

He had become in my absence a quite remarkable fielder.

Then at nighttime I would eat dinner with the family, go upstairs and help my brother with his calculus homework, try to concentrate on something like reading or internet television while my slowly-deafening father listened to too-loud television in the living room, wait until everyone but my mother was asleep, when we would watch “The West Wing” on my laptop at the kitchen counter, and then even she would drift off and the house would be mine, except for my father’s coughs, and every once in a while when my brother got up to go to the bathroom.

I was thinking Big Thoughts over that spring break. It felt then like one of those threshold moments, when the world asks of you what the rest of your life will look like: summer jobs, no summer jobs, graduate school applications. My computer

was slowly dying that spring break. The Genius Bar people said it was only a matter of time. It was leaking power. This turned my attention to the appalling emptiness of my bank account. I conjured up and rejected various get-rich-quick schemes. I considered an application to Kings Highway Car Service before remembering my sense of direction.

The Big Thoughts were centered around things like reading and writing, which I thought were things I had focal points of understanding for and wished that I could make everyone else see like I saw. I just needed to translate. Questions like, now what really is the experience of reading. I looked at old bookshelves that my father had built incorrectly in the last millennium and tried to relive the experience of each and every paperback. I looked at the fifteen unread ones in my blue bag and tried to absorb their knowledge and desire. I chipped away at the longer ones among them, trading clumps of time for their middle pages, forgetting, afterwards, even the characters’ names.

And all along I had nothing else to do on the dying computer but check the news from Japan.

Every time I opened my email or watched internet television the news sites began flashing with journalism and numbers from the East.

Headlines about the last fifty workers left in the nuclear reactors, battling fire and radiation, shuffling in and out, some to the hospital when they collapsed for no reason and others on the floor dry-heaving, their lungs frozen with hidden fire.

There was an invisible pollution seeping through the air, the reports said. There was the regular destruction of ocean-front towns and the shaking of skyscrapers, but also this, fifty workers chosen to remain in gas masks and white radiation suits.

Who could say that the world was not at an end?

In Freedom, Jonathan Franzen’s book, there are a couple of things that characters keep saying, but one of them that I remember is “so and so didn’t know how to live.” It’s just the way things are. “They haven’t figured out yet how to live.” This stuck with me over that spring break.

The way I read books then (still do, it’s ridiculous to refer to this in the far past tense) was to trace little things through them. Franzen was great for this kind of trace. Over the course of the book something became apparent, which was that no one knew or learned how to live.

My roommate had (still has) a whiteboard on

his desk. He always insisted on having his desk in the common room, so he could be at the center of everything. The rest of us just wanted to escape. I thought of this at home. On his whiteboard, at the top, it had a little improvised chart for how many miles he’d run on the days of the week. And, included, his goals and personal bests for various distances. 2 miles, it said, question mark? 13:30. 4 miles? 27 flat. Below that it said, “Life goals.” 1. Graduate. 2. Teach back home in California. 3. Teach abroad in Spain. 4.

Graduate school of education. 5. Principal. And then 6: Secretary of Education? Next to “abroad in Spain,” he had a questioning squiggly line, off onto a separate column. “Astrophysics?” it said, question mark?

I read a lot of journalism, a lot of book chapters, sitting on the Q train into the city. The baseball games started at 4. The sun was at a good point then, baseball-wise, not so high it hurt popflies, not gone enough to make shadows. And you could see it, when the train went over the Manhattan Bridge. There’s a moment after the East River as Chinatown disappears above you and the tunnel consumes the first cars, when you wonder if the Q could take you into the future.

Canal Street opens to its usual stench. Next stop, you tell yourself, putting the book away.

The final day I was home for spring break was the last chance I thought I’d get to see a baseball game of my brother’s. It wasn’t. I bussed home later that semester, because I didn’t know what else to do, and watched the first round of their playoffs. They won. He hit a double down the fast alley an out-of-place centerfielder and leftfielder make, on a hot day and with a quick Astroturf. Even that wasn’t the last chance. He played over the summer with a local team, the Hurricanes, with a friend of his from high school whose mother had just died, cancer. The kid was going to City College next year. He was going to make the team, god damn it.

That last spring break game, that hadn’t happened yet. The last play of the game, if I remember it right, was a roller to my brother at third.

The important thing about those is that you have to take the right step first. I mean you can shuffle on the way, but it better be damn near perfect.

We practiced these on the softball fields in the park, better after it rained, so the dirt was wet and smooth, without the possibility of bad hops. The kid who hit the chopper was quick, you could

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tell when he’d walked up to the plate. The coach of my brother’s team from the bench had made that motion with his hands, a roll of two fingers: wheels. So my brother had to move fast. You have to catch a ball like that on the right bounce. He got it on the long one, didn’t even glove it, just open-handed it, and that was all off his left foot, and then he landed on his right foot and used the torque from that landing to throw.

Now once the ball left my brother’s hands it needed to be moving at 75 miles per hour, or, because he was so close, and I’m being generous, let’s say 90 miles per hour, or 132 feet per second, to get the quick runner in time. Let’s say

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50 feet away, and the runner more than threequarters of the way to first. The throw, at that speed and distance, would hit the glove in less than .45 seconds. This was all through my head while the ball kissed my brother’s fingers, before he leveled his other foot down. Other numbers: 9.0 on the Richter scale, 72.0 sieverts of radiation doses, enough to kill a person in minutes. One book a week, 50 a year, 3,000 left. Quick quick quick, yelled the coach on the bench.

It was a smooth pick, smooth throw. The first baseman stretched and caught it. The ball got there in time, and we all went home. My brother was flush with suspense.

Molly Dektar Berry Eaters Oil on canvas panel 14” x 18”

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“Mrs. Xia,” Part III Excerpt from The Teachers, a novel KEVIN HONG

The lesson ends when Mrs. Xia writes in the little notebook. She has given one to each of her students.

Martin’s is light blue. The pages are crinkly with the impressions of her writing, the black and blue ink, as if someone spilled water on them and let them dry. Martin cranes his neck to see what she is writing on today’s page.

Bach #2: phrasing. Moving smoothly. Practice with quarter exercise.

Beeth Sonata: G Major scale. Even notes, practice 4x slow tempo. Remember 2 melodies, tonic and dominant. Duet. A scale is a destination.

Mrs. Xia then takes a roll of stickers from her bag and shows them to Martin. He picks a triceratops, and she smooths it onto the page. It means he has done well.

Of the music he is playing, Martin likes the Bach most. It starts with the right hand playing a melody by itself. When the left joins in, it plays the same melody, but lower. Somehow the two hands sound right together, even though the same moments of the melody are occurring at different times. Like when Darnell mimics Mrs. Rooney in class. Or on the Blue Line, when his train and another, rushing in opposite directions, pass each other with a collision of air. He can see into the windows of the other cars, and often he can make out a body, a face, and often the face is looking back at him.

He likes when the right hand leaps up to high G and stays there, while the left hand tries to catch it with sixteenth notes—but then rises a half-step to A-flat, and the sixteenths crumble down. Like a cat trying to catch a bird. The bass dives and the treble climbs until they form, for an instant, an interval that should sound happy but is too brief to Martin’s ears to be so. The space between his hands is like the hopeless space between earth and sky.

“So!” Mrs. Xia says, leaning in to rub his head. “Will I see you next week?”

He nods and tries to smile, but does not say anything because her face is so close. He is afraid they might exchange breaths.

“Good,” she says. “Wonderful.”

She goes to the door and opens it, and Martin feels as if a door has opened in his chest. He gets up from his bench, and does not mind her hand on his back as he moves into the hallway. The light here is a lot brighter than in the room, and he squints into the cleanness. There are several chairs lined up against the wall. Mother sits in the very first one; she has been chatting with Patricia’s mother, who sits one chair away.

(Patricia, of course, is next to her mother, head jutting forward like a pigeon’s, a thick book clutched in one hand.) Mother sees him, and as she stands, he runs into her—his heart quickens as they collide. She stumbles backward before regaining her balance, and smacks the back of his head. That hurts! she says, but he barely hears. Arms around her, he presses his face into her faded cotton shirt.

She is as beautiful as always. Her scent flies through Martin’s body. All he knows, it seems, is the odor of Mother’s cotton shirt, so worn and thin that its purple threads look white in the light. It smells like how the dust on a moth’s wings must smell.

When he embraces her, he remembers sleep, the blanket that he explores, alone, in the darkness before drifting into his dreams, and thinks of his feet sinking into the mulch of the playground after rain, and the damp leaves, knee-high, that he runs through on the way to school, ahead of her. He can hear a muffled thump coming from her belly. Eyes closed, he puts his right ear against her to hear better.

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She exchanges formalities with Mrs. Xia. Hi, Qiu, she says. How are you doing?

“Oh, quite well, quite well. You should hear Martin play his Beethoven next week! I’m thinking about entering him in a competition.”

Martin stiffens. He curls his fingers, and she reaches behind her to loosen his grasp on her clothing.

That sounds great. Perhaps, if he feels up to it.

“I think he’s ready. He’ll be competing against children a bit older, but it should be a good experience for him.”

Mother puts her hands on his shoulders, and he reluctantly lets her turn him around. He stands before Mrs. Xia, who is beaming.

“What do you think, Martin?”

He frowns. It is not that he is afraid of her, exactly, but he does not know what to say. How would she feel if he said no, he would not like to compete, he would not like to perform in front of anyone? And what could he do to avoid it—just like he could not avoid her breath in his ear, on his neck?

“I don’t know,” he says.

Mother’s hands tense up. Mrs. Xia laughs, and he feels a little relieved.

“You are so cute!” she says, and reaches to pinch his nose.

He remembers that Patricia is sitting close by, and blushes. The embarrassment is too much; he grabs Mother’s hand and pulls her toward the stairwell. She resists, and Martin lets go and stalks off as the two women draw out their goodbye.

The railing is wonderfully cold under his hand. As he hops down the first few steps, he tries to name what it is about Mrs. Xia that makes him so silent. There must be a word for what he feels. It sags in front of him like an old elephant that he cannot move, and cannot climb on top of. According to Mother, elephants remember everything; this one must be heavy with all of its memories. Its eyes are as small as pebbles, and the skin—those folds of skin like on the backs of Mrs. Xia’s hands.

Her children must be small elephants, he thinks, and laughs, jumping onto the landing. At the zoo, they chase each other and wrestle, stopping often to poke their noses through the grass. He can see himself among them, in gray sweatpants and a gray shirt. But of course he would get sick. He had thrown up at the zoo.

Whatever the word is for what he feels, it is not a good word. At the bottom of the stairs, he sits on the first step and rests his chin on his hands. He would know it if he could read it in a book. It is almost apparent to him, as if he could teach it to himself by looking into Mrs. Xia’s face. At the bushy eyebrows, and the big eyes from which something has slipped.

Mother, still above, says, See you next week, Qiu, and her first steps send tremors down the stairs. Martin stands to wait for her. When she reaches the bottom, he takes her hand and leans against her thigh.

“What does it mean?” he says. “Chew?”

She laughs. Qiu? Qiu means winter. Isn’t that pretty?

“No.” Oh, Martin.

They walk out the double doors; the wind is strong and tosses Mother’s hair about her face. Winter’s not so bad, just cold. And quiet. The snow covers everything so that you can’t hear a sound. Remember when you made angels in the snow?

They cross the street, which is choked with cars awash in dull light. The sky is red, and his eyes hurt when he looks at it too long. As they descend the stairs of the Blue Line station, he blinks and can still see a red cloud hanging in his sight.

It’s coming soon, you know? Mother says. We’ll have to get ready—stack some wood, get some marshmallows. Would you like that? One thing about the winters here, they have no pity.

Martin’s stomach drops when he hears that word. As he pushes through the turnstile with both hands, he rolls the syllables in his mouth. They taste like the dry and bitter seeds of grapes. With a beep and a metallic rattle, Mother follows. He takes her hand again; together, they amble toward the outbound platform.

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Keoni Correa Untitled (grid) Graphite on paper 30” x 22” Thumbnail view

10 COMMENCEMENT 2012

A King and a Mistress VICTORIA BAENA

The caravan was burning. What would later be called a tragedy was still, for now, just a fire. With a flicker of orange and a tiny pop the paper celluloid flowers burst, sold so cheaply and aflame so easily.

These would not make it to their marketplace, the Parisian cemeteries. Django was late coming back from a gig, so his wife Florine had stayed up waiting. She distracted herself with her work.

How banal are the beginnings of disasters: a guitar discarded on a table; a hand rising fatigued to a forehead and then back to the table in a gesture never completed. A candle knocked over and a world alit.

The caravan burned—the lace curtains curling up and gone, the cast-iron stove swallowed in a bang—but Django and Florine would emerge alive though not unscathed. Important possessions were lost: a guitar, three suitcases, some rings. A small wardrobe and two charred fingers.

It was 1928 and Django Reinhardt was eighteen, married, manouche—a French gypsy. He lived in the outskirts of Paris among other Manouche, also called Romani, and he played a secondhand banjo-guitar.

Music was his livelihood and had been since he was thirteen. Musette was his preferred style: a form traditionally played by gypsies that had begun to gain currency in French dance halls beginning in the 1880s. By World War II it had become the most popular dance style in France. It also proved

attractive to those upper-class rebels itching for a way out of boxed-in waltzes and ballroom steps.

More daring Parisian élites began to turn to smaller, smokier establishments in the Latin Quarter, like Django’s on Rue Monge, where Italian Gypsy Vetese Guérino had agreed to mentor the budding young musician.

2010 marked the centenary of Reinhardt’s birth.

It was celebrated by a plaza created in his name in Paris’ 18th arrondissement, where Rue Binet intersects the Avenue de la Porte de Clignancourt— approximately at the site of the burning caravan.

Today Reinhardt is hailed as the only European to have reached the level of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. He was the European star of jazz. At the time, though, the fire in his caravan left him with severe burns on his right side from knee to waist, which would require over a year of recovery. In addition, the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand were mutilated. The doctors said he would never play guitar again.

It is more precise to call Django Reinhardt a European “king of jazz,” as Le Monde once dubbed him, than to call him a jazz star who is merely French. Reinhardt’s entrance into the Parisian music scene was due more to chance than to intent. He was born Jean Reinhardt, in his parents’ caravan in Liberchies, Belgium, the Romani patron saint Sara-la-Kâli perched on the center wall.

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The family spent some time in Paris when he was quite young, but after his father abandoned the family, the mother led him and his brother through Nice to Italy, from Corsica to Algeria, before making their way back to Paris. In this his story mirrors that of many other Romani, and of the Romani people in general, condemned to an itinerant lifestyle for nearly a millennium. They are believed to have originated in India, according to linguistic connections between the Romany and Sanskrit languages. Scholars speculated that they originally formed part of an army of lower-caste Indians, engaged to battle Muslims led by Islamic leader Mahmud of Ghazni, when he invaded India in the year 1001. Some survivors migrated westward, some to Europe, some to North Africa. Europeans, believing their origin to be Egyptian, called them “gypsies.” European folklore claimed that gypsies had forged the nails to crucify Jesus. Beginning in France in 1427, they were systematically expelled from European kingdoms, though less frequently granted special status as a people.

Historians have since traced the Reinhardt clan to eighteenth-century ancestors based in the Rhine River valley. Wanderers like the rest of the Romani, by necessity rather than by choice, his grandparents were forced westward by the Franco-Prussian War. Django Reinhardt, then, held no great patriotic pride for his adopted homeland of France. Where then to turn? Manouche poet Sarah Jayat put it succinctly in 1961, in her poem “Django”: Django Like us you have no king no set of rules but you have a mistress: Music The musician slipped out of the national musette craze without a great struggle, once his accident made those brisk dancing chords impossible. His father had been a professional player of violin, guitar, and piano, touring through Belgium to Corsica and Italy, and so the strains of these and of the accompanists’ instruments, the banjo and drums, had framed his son’s earliest memories. Django returned to this in convalescence before stumbling upon the new if remote phenomenon of American jazz. Louis Arm-

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strong’s “Dallas Blues” opened the floodgates, followed by Joe Venuti and Billy Arnold’s Novelty Jazz Band. He was particularly struck by Eddie Lang, born Salvatore Massaro in Philadelphia at the turn of the century. Lang’s pioneering guitar style, melding a flatpicking rhythm with a bluesy lead, helped to establish him as the first major jazz guitarist. It is quite likely due to him that Reinhardt abandoned the banjo, almost entirely, in exchange for the possibilities of the guitar.

Yet a substantial hurdle remained: how to reach the level of his Yankee contemporaries with three-fifths of a right hand. (Critics have never agreed as to what extent the charred fingers were usable, if at all). It was probably inevitable that a new type of music emerge from this arrangement, though its popularity was hardly a given. Jazz scholars speculate that Reinhardt began by using his two functional, curled in fingers to fret notes on the upper two strings—B and E—while he abandoned fretting notes with his burnt fingers entirely, or used them just to play chords. His left hand often muted strings that went unused. Reinhardt only rarely played standard major and minor chords, exchanging them for minor 6, major 6, and major 6/9.

A surprising variety burst forth. “Minor Swing” is a fast-paced jig with a solo characterized by string bends and pull-offs, while the classic “Nuages” (‘Clouds’ in French) shows off his digital dexterity. His phrases tended to rise and fall, ascending over E7, descending over Am6, but ending in a different way each time—improvisation changed up the patterns. Reinhardt mastered what jazz musicians call “encirclement,” approaching a specific chord tone from the chords around, creating chromatic interest for each phrase.

This was all mostly idle practice, though, at least for the first few years. Things began to change in 1931 upon a fateful meeting with violinist Stéphanie Grapelli. Grapelli was working in the cabaret scene, taking on gigs for films as a pianist when he needed the extra cash. The two began participating in informal jams together, each finding in the other an ideal complement and a companion in musical taste. With their relationship solidified, the two took their partnership to the next level, establishing the Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934. Reinhardt’s guitar and Grapelli’s violin sloughed off the need for drums, horns, or piano, which up to that point

had been a standard in jazz tunes. Instead they dreamed up la pompe—the pump—to give percussive rhythm to their songs. The two rhythm guitars played fast up-down strums followed by a longer down strum, setting a background beat for Reinhardt’s melodic yet still free-swinging phrases.

Traditional Gypsy music found its way into the Quintette, inserting chromatic runs and note embellishments played with a varying rhythm.

Mixed with African-American “hot” jazz’s elaborated chord forms, bass lines, and percussive pulse, the new “gypsy jazz”—jazz manouche in France—struck a minor then major chord in the Parisian jazz scene. Their gigs began to rack in the highest ticket prices throughout Europe: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie were among the Americans lining up to record or play with him. Reinhardt and Grappelli continued to perform together up until September 1939, when Hitler’s invasion of Poland led the two to cut short a London tour. Reinhardt returned to Paris, where he believed he would be safer at a time when Romanis were being targeted by official Nazi policy—less systematically than Jews but substantially all the same. Yet when the city fell to the Germans, Reinhardt stayed. His recordings and performances became a kind of loophole allowing him to escape “purification.”

In occupied France, jazz was officially banned.

But an underground record industry continued to boom. The titles of jazz records were often tweaked to hide their origins. Luftwaffe officer Deitrich Schulz-Kohn, known as “Doktor Jazz,” was only one of many German officials to cultivate a not-so-secret admiration of Django. He helped Reinhardt secure gigs throughout Parisian clubs, sometimes bringing along his German comrades. Photographs from the time reveal a slightly jarring image of German soldiers listening enraptured to a Gypsy artist, whose compatriots were perhaps simultaneously being transported away in cattle cars. “It was really a golden age of swing in Paris,” Michael Dregni, author of the biography Django, has said in an interview, “with these gypsies living kind of this grand irony.”

While Boris Vian is best known today for his novels, the French polymath’s one consistent avocation was jazz. Born in 1920 in the well-off Parisian suburb of Ville d’Avray, Vian was involved

in the Parisian jazz scene starting in 1937, when he began to play the trumpet and joined the Hot Club de France. He later played in a band with musician Claude Abadou, serving also as conductor at Tabou on Rue Dauphine, or at Club Saint-Germain on Rue Saint-Benoît. His novels (though widely lauded today) were initially met with little enthusiasm and a lukewarm critical reception, leading him to throw himself back into the jazz scene, where he continued to play and critique.

Indeed, Vian’s literary side gave him a unique angle from which to deconstruct the allure of jazz in France. He himself was hardly a soberminded critic: he was apt to wax adoringly of Django Reinhardt among others. In one of his reviews, he wrote, “There are only a few French musicians who are of an equal class as the great American soloists. Django…is one of them.” Yet he also made an attempt to undress this mystique.

In January 1948, Vian wrote that, for the unindoctrinated masses, jazz was merely the next catchy rhythm, suitable to be paired with a dance for eagerly awaiting youth. For a certain type of child, it could be a snub in the face of more straight-laced parents. It could also, though, serve as a sort of societal metaphor. A materialization of the good life, Vian called it, with all the rules of etiquette bored into any regular cinema-goer: “champagne, whisky soda, plunging necklines, furs—and twenty handsome musicians beating out a refrain, whose words the heroine murmurs half an inch from her beloved.”

In this sense, then, jazz was no longer a counter-culture or a sub-culture. It became something to aspire to: just as Parisian élites hauled musette musicians out of their underground dance halls, the expansion of jazz unearthed a musical trend, dusted it off, and framed it prettily.

But it was more than this for some. Vian, a purist at heart, considered the noblest followers of jazz to be those who shed the social or cultural trappings surrounding it, yielding only to the sound. Reinhardt, to him, was among those seduced solely by the cascading rhythms and jangling chords of jazz, touched “by the senses, by its intelligence…but who seek to deepen, to understand, to acquaint themselves with it.” Vian admired Reinhardt as one who learned to extract from jazz its true substance, remaining faithful to it as a form, rather than as another sub-cultural trend. In this sense Reinhardt would not be the

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social warrior that some have tried to make him into, striving to re-appropriate an identity that history had so often trampled upon. Reinhardt was hardly against the popularization of the form he produced; but at the same time he tended to treat it rather myopically, in his intense fervor for the music. “Wine, women, and song,” wrote his biographer Pregni, summing up Reinhardt’s central preoccupations. There was to be no chromatic progression into music’s social ramifications.

Still, gypsy jazz can be said to frame a certain mood, urban if not national. The Paris of the thirties was beset by intrigue and uncertainty, a more measured follow-up to the glee of the twenties. This was coupled with the music scene’s tentative but eager improvisations and experiments. Gypsy jazz twisted all this together with a mix of Romani and American strains, rolling out the red carpet for another postwar trend—rock & roll. Artists from BB King to the Libertines would cite or cover Reinhardt. Some have gone so far to call him the most eminent guitarist, under the headline of “pre-rock & roll.”

If Reinhardt’s legacy is rock and all its endless permutations, the gypsy jazz form itself has trickled down to the present via different routes.

The scene today hovers between mainstream and underground, emerging for events like the centennial of Reinhardt’s birth before dipping back down once again. Saint-Ouen, where his caravan was parked, is home to several bars with jazz manouche leaking out the windows.

L’Atelier Charonne and other places around Rue Oberkampf have lent a squeakier sheen to the form, surrounded by young grungy-hip nightlife, and charging fixed prices for dinner and a show.

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On a recent Tuesday night, Rodolphe Raffalli was playing at the Piano Vache in the fifth arrondissement. An institution in the contemporary Parisian jazz guitar scene and a sworn devotee of Reinhardt, the heaviset Raffalli wore a sober expression and a ubiquitous post boy cap.

He arrived with a partner to play the percussive drum-less background that Reinhardt dreamed up. Posters blanketed the dark oak walls of the venue: “Django: 20 ans forever” or “Death in June: 30th Anniversary Tour.” Patrons shot glares at those who whispered or shifted position too loudly. After Raffalli’s first crescendo’ed arpeggio the audience broke into applause. His phrases flowed into each other, though every so often they were shaken up by an errant twang. An energetic song was followed by a more tranquil one, with a pause between, as Raffalli wiped his brow and replaced his pick, red for yellow.

The crowd was not young but not old, the average age hovering around mid-thirties. It was a crowd that knew music, or at least jazz manouche, or at least knew that this was worth knowing. There were no furs in the audience or champagne flutes; plenty of skinny jeans and dark t-shirts, however. When it was over there was that one frozen moment, as there is always when the lights switches back on, before anyone tries or wants to move. A crowd began to gather outside and cigarette smoke gathered around it.

A Subway sign flickered wanly across the street and Raffalli prepared to leave, the manouche arpeggios barely lingering as he snapped his guitar case shut.

CONTENTSco

51 (asphalt triptych) Oil on canvas, 3 panels 19” x 20” each continued on pp. 17 & 20

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Winter Sketch ERIK FREDERICKSEN

Leaf carried left. Brittle-cold grass, where I want to insert first the asphalt, first the rain thawing on the brick. Silence unfolds its loud mutterings.

Pierced by a cry. Black bird, yellowed beak. Not pierced, threaded. Bird finds the grain of the still air, slips a voice through and between the layers. First sees the layers. Soon the instant when the falling water is only what falls from branches, edge of gutter, off the leaves.

Taps on the hard grass.

New silence after this one. I plucked a smooth green needle from a low-hanging off-shoot, the branch leaning in to me as if to hear more clearly. Pulled bowstring.

The needle: flexed it between two fingers, folding it in half. Pressed it between two teeth, convex side down, flattening its slight curvature. I would have closed my eyes to do it more carefully.

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Will Not Come Back JULIAN GEWIRTZ

after Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948

The jet-drone of the river is deafening, shocked metal on sheet of black glass, the rotator a shriek of rattle-heat, power into motion, limbs blown back. High above, flock of shrikes, dark ornaments in branches leafless, bleached— a botched dividing, scrawled before winter, before freak fractals of snow, before the fracked earth shatters far beneath.

I am but factual. Higher, in the black, unblinking light of actual aircraft, of flight quiet as vectors. But up there nothing moves: is it Venus, is it some star’s last siren, the workday over, compression over, light’s factory-whistle and called up years ago I am with you flying on aluminum wings of no one’s making, black cows like rivets gridding the brown field below,

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ice sheathing spiked turf, sharp-tip, stalk, flat-feather— from soil these thousand beaks hissing. We enter an eddy of cloud, the world whitewashed away, as outside us the hum grows, pale, hard, coiled, like a goiter in a bull’s throat.

And is it in me now— muttering, all sides the heavy, engined river, a hand dark as thirst raw on my tongue, when I am numb, when I am held down, when my eyes blow open: again the nerve the startle the lurch of lift-off.

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CONTENT

20 COMMENCEMENT 2012

But no one will know INDIANA SERESIN

We are being addressed by a girl in the screen.

She has a round face and prominent cheeks and is wearing a headband to keep her fine hair in place. She folds her soft hands over and over each other as she speaks.

“Justin Bieber, make sure you have no more girlfriends. ‘Cause I’m your girlfriend,” she tells us. The title of the film is Never Say Never; this sentiment of crazy hope is clearly alight within her.

In the next frame, three prepubescent lipglossed girls sit in a row.

“I think about him, like, 99% of my life,” says the one with the pinkest mouth. Then they methodically take turns to scream, their tiny voices ringing with surges of unfiltered devotion.

Although he does not wear one himself, Justin Bieber is undoubtedly a member of the purity ring generation. Close of his fellow all-singing, all-acting, all-everything sensations—most of whom were propelled to fame by the Disney Channel child star factory—have openly (even evangelically) expressed beliefs in the importance of sexual abstinence. These convictions are invariably rooted in religion. As a proud Christian who regularly speaks of his relationship with Jesus in interviews, Bieber is no exception. And while it may appear that his views are more lenient than those of some of his peers

(“As long as it’s with someone you love,” he says), in order to speak of purity, Justin Bieber need not make a sound. His child’s face—trusting gaze, curled lashes, delicate lips—makes him the ideal symbol of chaste desire. The fetishized innocence that is so central to purity culture is more present in Justin Bieber than any other public figure. And he is the most public of them all.

A brief perusal of various sources (including thejustinbiebershrine.com, “the internet’s largest Justin Bieber website owned and run by a true Belieber”) will place Bieber’s net worth somewhere between $65 million and $105 million.

He has a lot of money, but in Bieber’s kingdom money is only part of the story. The internet is a place where presence is currency, currency that can be measured and compared. There are tools for doing this and one of them—perhaps the most prominent of these “measures of prominence”—is a social media index called Klout.

Klout measures the influence of an individual’s online presence using a three-pronged model that is as vague as you would imagine it to be: True Reach: How many people you influence.

Amplification: How much you influence them.

Network Impact: The influence of your network.

Anyone with even the faintest trace of an online identity can choose to discover their score, a THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 21

number on a scale from one (the Facebook user only friends with him- or herself) to one hundred (Justin Bieber). With his perfect score, Bieber sails past Barack Obama and Lady Gaga and Paolo Coehlo, who, thanks to a wealth of Twitter followers, trails behind him in second place.

Before Klout and its peers, presence and influence were not quantifiable. Now they are, and Bieber is raking in armfuls of both. Offer “Justin Bieber” to the Google search engine, and it will yield 575 million pages. He is an unparalleled force when it comes to influencing the future senators, schoolteachers, homemakers, and homeless of America, poised as they now are at the malleable ages of approximately three to fifteen.

Jeffery Leving must have known this as he arranged for the quiet withdrawal of twenty-yearold Mariah Yeater’s paternity case against then sixteen-year-old Bieber. Leving, who served as Yeater’s attorney as she accused Bieber of impregnating her in a backstage bathroom at the Los Angeles Staples Center, must have been aware of his client’s impact on the hearts and minds of millions of wild-eyed Beliebers and their nervous parents worldwide. Sighs of relief no doubt resonated in homes across the nation when Yeater announced her decision to drop the court case against Bieber and pursue a DNA test in private.

In a statement made to MTV News following the withdrawal, Leving reiterated his unwavering belief that the test would prove Yeater’s claim to be true. Then he added: “But hopefully whether it’s positive or negative, no one will know.”

In 1995, Denny Pattyn was agitated. He saw his country as deteriorating before his eyes, crumbling as a result of the peculiarly American fixation on sexual promiscuity that was spawned by the sexual revolution of the ’60s. Teenage girls were having their lives ruined by unwanted pregnancy and the trauma of abortion. STDs were seeping through America’s pores, pulsing in its blood. These were things he’d been witnessing for years. But only now did Denny Pattyn considered that he—father, ordained minister, friend of Rick Santorum—might be the one to put an end to them. And thus the Silver Ring Thing was born.

Today, the Silver Ring Thing has placed 200,000 rings on teenage fingers. It is based out of a large church in the Pittsburgh suburbs

and runs on a mix of volunteers, paid staff, and prayer. Touring across the country, it has put on almost 1,000 live events involving speeches, skits, loud music and flaming barrels. It produces pamphlets and videos. Before Obama’s termination of funding for abstinence-only education programs, it received over $1 million in federal grants. Despite the termination, SRT is still thriving today, thanks to state-level funding and private donations.

High school sex education in the United States generally falls under two categories: comprehensive programs, which encourage abstinence while simultaneously providing information about sexual health and pregnancy; and abstinence-only programs, which prescribe abstinence as the only acceptable approach to sex for teenagers and which suffered a decline following the withdrawal of federal funding in 2008.

However, this was by no means a bad thing for the teen abstinence industry. With high schools suddenly rendered unequipped to turn teenagers away from intercourse, organizations like the Silver Ring Thing found themselves necessary in a way they had never dreamed before.

And how preferable to a mere high school class these movements, with their reassuringly tangible emblems and rituals, have turned out to be. The Silver Ring Thing and its contemporaries have revolutionized the idea of abstinence by commoditizing it. Under these campaigns, abstinence has been transformed from a private personal commitment to something that can be flaunted and experienced with friends. This is the reason why the Silver Ring Thing is so popular: its orchestrators understand the components of teenage life and have designed their program accordingly.

These orchestrators know that possessions are important. Possessions are signifiers of status and style and can be crucial for navigating the high school social arena. Hence the Silver Ring Thing revolves around an object, the very materiality of which is emphasised by that crucial word in the organization’s title: Thing. They also recognize that many SRT participants come from conservative, Christian, small-town backgrounds, where marriage is an indicator of maturity and responsibility and is prized and looked forward to by those standing on the cusp of adulthood. The ring, with its glimmering prophesy of impending

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marriage, is one more step over that cusp.

Teenage abstinence movements are folkloric in nature: they rely on ceremony and symbol.

The Silver Ring Thing’s touring event is a carnival of thumping music, laser lighting, live performance, and fire that unfolds over a demanding two to four hours. It is notably different from the sombre sermons and high school classes that are the normal vehicles for the abstinence message.

At first it’s exciting. There’s cheering and whooping and well-loved SRT slogans (“Sex is great— in the context of marriage!”) being screamed into a microphone that reverberates across the church hall.

As the SRT show draws to a close, the climax of the ceremony takes place: the purchase of the ring, sold for $20 despite its propensity to turn your finger green. Having made this most momentous of transactions, new ring-wearers solidify their commitment by choosing an accountability partner, receiving an Abstinence Bible, and (most likely) buying an assortment of other SRT merchandise.

And now they are ready to leave, securely branded with purity.

One of the most common criticisms of the purity ring movement emerges from the fact that some wearers of the ring have a known tendency to define sex in distinctly inventive ways. The movement itself does little to curb this: at no point in the SRT ritual do the organizers specify what sex is, and thus participants are left with the opportunity to feel free to indulge in oral and anal sex as their purity rings remain snug on their sweaty fingers.

Hypocrites, the detractors shout. But in doing so they are missing the point of the Silver Ring Thing and its fellow campaigns of abstinence.

When asked by a BBC reporter what he considered to be sexually permissible, Denny Pattyn replied: “Well we believe, you know, anything that has, anything that you cover up is covered up for a reason and that should not be, you know, used by a member of the opposite sex. That’s the best way to describe it.”

Dr Peter Bearman was an author of an investigation conducted by researchers from Columbia and Yale that delved beneath the surface of both high school sex education and abstinence movements. The survey found that 88% of those who

pledge abstinence until marriage end up breaking their vows. Examining the context in which these transgressions occurred, he came to the following conclusion: “The sex that they have is much more likely to be hidden. It’s likely to be hidden from their parents. It’s likely to be hidden from their peers. And if they live in a small community, it’s quite likely to be hidden from their doctor.”

The current theme of the SRT’s live tour is “Image is Everything.” At first this might seem a strange message to be broadcasting to teenagers wishing to live a purer, simpler, and holier life.

But if you stop and think about the very core of the Silver Ring Thing, the aptness of this slogan soon becomes apparent. If a teenager chooses to be abstinent, a ring is only going to do so much to help her stay true to her vow. But, if she is pretty and popular and smart and girlish and sexy and demure and all the other things teenage girls are supposed to be, her decision to wear the ring will do well to give abstinence a good name. Perhaps other rings will pop up in her high school; perhaps her boyfriend will wear one, and the metal will clink together as they chastely hold hands, walking down the corridor for everyone to see.

Amy Pattyn, wife of Denny and co-founder of the SRT, is a devout believer in image. “We’re talking about these kids being set apart, being different, you know, being holy, being pure, it’s not just about completely abstaining from sex, it’s about how you carry yourself, it’s about how you dress, how you feel about yourself, how you value your body that God created.” Abstinence, as it is portrayed by the SRT and its contemporaries, is nothing if not image-based. And image, according to the SRT et al., is everything.

On March 1, 2012, Justin Bieber turned 18, prompting the onset of a climate of uncertainty surrounding his status as an icon. He has always been sold as a boy-star, a cherub, an effeminate and asexual child, and the countless individuals and corporations who capitalize on his existence are right to be worried. Of course, they must have foreseen this. The teenage sensations of the Disney Channel generation are, as the internet rich lists make clear, among the most profitable breeds of celebrity. But they are also the quickest to decay. So far Bieber has retained the delicate, girlish features and innocent expression that pro-

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voke people to gasp “He’s seventeen!” in delighted astonishment.

Mariah’s Yeater’s paternity case brought Bieber’s lucrative period of innocence to the brink of a premature end. Whether the allegations were true or not is really irrelevant; simply the suggestion of Bieber as a sexualized being would have compelled most parents to reconsider the purchase of that third Justin poster for their little girl’s walls.

It’s true that Bieber, with his celebrity friends and suddenly purity-ring-free girlfriend and rumored $100 million fortune, might be a little less pure than most parents would like to think.

But, just like a fan fabricates a sexual encounter with the object of her desire, so too do children and adults alike cling to the purity illusion. They flaunt their rings and gaze into Justin’s eyes, focusing in on the image until the reality is something no one ever has to know.

dry cleaning -­ tailoring -­ shoe repair (617) 547-­1595 47 Mt. Auburn St Cambridge, MA 02138

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M-­F: 9am -­ 7pm Sa: 9am -­ 6pm Closed Sunday

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Good Night MATT AUCOIN

Walking from where eternity starts eyes ahead you circle it how brief in noon did you bend to the eyeworn field washed with the dirt of sunlight, hold your breath as if to harden, ungleam, end into leaf, but you did not and sniffed the burngold air you stained, and passed on, leaving the field attentive, opener, as if it were suddenly the absence complementing a gone body and the snow starts shh

Fremd bin ich eingezogen, Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus A pace, a tread which says we will get nowhere but continue, a hymn living in the church of its tone, wandering, to fall exhausted into God’s lap

Nun ist die Welt so trübe, Der Weg gehüllt in Schnee.

In the snow, in the woods, with not much moon, there are no shades of sound but terraces of it, precise as how glass shatters, and the wanderer’s steps, having been absent forever, speak. An overtone of the fact of this heartbeat is a melody like a faithful translation of past hope into the inevitable present pulse which goes nowhere and is true enough as to seem never to have started, always to have measured its minor syllable, a dragged foot long, through the snowreadied field which waited for it, the road like an abandoned attempt at exactly this. And the thought takes shape

Ich kann zu meiner Reise Nicht wählen mit der Zeit The way even this steamed mercuryline of song was long constructed by the cold, by the drying white throat of silence which oriented, at your steps, toward the hot black pupil of you. And what you give words to had just been said un-translated, I cannot pick the time, then you were propelled up to speak

Muß selbst den Weg mir weisen In dieser Dunkelheit 26 COMMENCEMENT 2012

But the way is already found and you sing to show the darkness a perfect darkness. Which does not lighten but keeps you a breath’s length from the world, where speech is. But farther, from the distance of music or the eye’s blackshone core, it is all unreal enough to be gray. But you find nothing. You dip yourself in brighter black so you will be lost and the same hand which mouths your words before you pour the hearthsmoke of breath into them will plot unfeeling the path you will feel.

Und auf den weißen Matten Who hunted the deer whose tracks hunt and predict you

Was soll ich länger weilen, Daß man mich trieb hinaus?

Here there is no away to be driven. For passing your hand through the tones around black as through shades of water you pass through black again, so that black comes to be only where you walk from and where, you keep remembering, you are going. The farmhouse is an accident, the gold of its eyes glancing away and going out, a face, did you call for it? You cannot fix its gaze.

That the modulation from minor to major is the most painful one. Achieved by wincing into surplus a pool which accumulated, unnoticed, to brimming, nightlong. The listener’s face is loose, open, and the eyes blacken and wet to match the dark or breathe in it, the cheeks hang around the set jaw of the minor third. And it expands and the listener cracks into an instant of smile, that shatter and diminuendo of ache, one streak of exiled sunlight. How much he smiles through. The pool spills.

Will dich im Traum nicht stören, War Schad an deiner Ruh I could not disturb your dreaming you will not hear my steps The door touches the frame and makes dark and I wake and start wandering and I write, above, good night, no, there is no above night, I write good night out of night’s ink on night’s fabric so you will know I thought of you, no so my breath pads the black

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Rebecca Levitan The Laws of Physics Demand It (VII) Silkscreen ink on linen 41” x 166”

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Car Parked on Quentin, Being Washed MARK CHIUSANO

On the morning of the funeral the Castanzo family woke up at nine, and took their turns in the shower.

Mr. Costanzo went first, because he had woken up earliest. Wake up the boys, Mrs. Costanzo whispered, while she took off her faded t-shirt and bra. Mr. Costanzo didn’t look at her bare back, although some mornings he did. She went into the shower. Mr. Costanzo went into the boys’ old room and put a hand on each of their heads.

Lorris had come home from college, an hour before Jamison got off work in the city. Mr. Costanzo had waited there on 34th Street, off Seventh Avenue, watching for the MegaBus to come in. Then he and Lorris had left the car parked and walked into the corner coffee shop. Lorris bought his father a cup and a croissant, with a five from his wallet. Lorris drank a cup of tea himself, something Mr. Costanzo had never seen him do before. When Jamison arrived he called and Mr. Costanzo told him to meet them in the coffee shop. It was a dark little room, empty except for people using the bathroom before getting on a bus, or passengers carrying heavy bags looking for a bottle of water or directions afterwards. The three of them sat at a window table and watched the charter buses slowly empty and leave. Then they went outside to drive back to Brooklyn.

The room, facing the avenue, was quiet in the morning. Jamison woke first, although Lorris had been up before. He wasn’t used to sleeping at home again. He always took some days to get accustomed to new beds, the new sounds of people breathing, of the walls and creaking pipes. It had taken him a long time to fall asleep with his brother’s breathing. Sleep ok, said Mr. Costanzo. The pullout bed was close enough to the real bed that he could lean in between both of them. Lorris nodded, and Jamison groaned. He rolled over and reached to the nightstand for his glasses.

Mrs. Costanzo was the last one to get dressed. She had spent a long time picking between the dark navies and black blouses that she had in the closet. Mr. Costanzo was already downstairs, in a suit, looking at his watch and sipping coffee with the boys. Each of them took a mug. We should leave, Mr. Costanzo yelled up. You wait a minute, Mrs. Costanzo answered. She was talking to herself in the mirror. She wasn’t trying on blouses anymore, just looking.

The whole avenue was blocked off. There hadn’t been any notices, nothing hung on trees or bus stop poles, but everyone had known to park their cars on the sidestreets. Mr. Costanzo led them off to where the car was on Kimball, reached around and opened the passenger’s-side door. Lorris and Jamison squeezed their legs into the back. Jamison fingered the broken handhold above his head. We need gas, said Mr. Costanzo. We’re fine, Mrs. Costanzo said. There were other people getting into their cars on the side streets. Mr. Costanzo stopped at the stop sign. The house next door to them was still empty and quiet.

There were flowers on the sidewalk.

It was very difficult to find a parking spot. Mr. Costanzo circled the church lot twice. Lorris remembered having youth baseball awards nights here, all the kids from the different teams in their different colors.

Lorris’s favorite had been yellow, the one year when they let him pitch. He’d been on the son’s team that year, they’d both played outfield together. They’d been in the same school until ninth grade. As they passed the entrance hopelessly for a third time, Lorris was struck suddenly by the memory of one of those awards ceremonies, early in the summer, a lazy blue tinge to the night. Four ice cream trucks had been double-parked on the street fighting for customers. Someone finally came out of the gates to tell them

30 COMMENCEMENT 2012

to turn the jingles off. You couldn’t hear the league commissioner. Lorris had gotten the Most Improved award, he remembered. For God’s sake, Mrs. Costanzo said. I’ll try Avenue V, said Mr. Costanzo. As they passed Avenue R and the front of the church they saw the long line of firemen walking slowly in through the front doors. They all had their dress uniforms on. They walked down the double yellow line, in the middle of the closed street.

Good Shepherd was not a big church, though it wasn’t a small one. It wasn’t particularly well decorated.

There was a large skylight stained-glass window up over the altar, that was supposed to be the crowning work of art, but looked strangely geometrical and out of place. Mrs. Costanzo had once felt strongly that the boys go to church. Her mother had been like that. But it began to feel less and less important. Just the year before one of the deacons was accused of improper sexual conduct. I knew it, Lorris had crowed, over the phone. He had already been at college. The bastard always used to look at me funny. Mr. Costanzo had put an end to such jokes quickly. It’s not seemly, he said. The small bronze font for holy water at the front of the church was almost empty, and the ground was squeaky and damp around it, when the Costanzos crossed themselves. They sat in the back row, because it had been so difficult parking. Lorris had only seen a coffin once before. The new priest, from some foreign country, stood up.

Later, at the house, everyone said what a nice service it had been. The wife was nodding too quickly, her chin jutting out too far. People had said such nice things, Lorris heard someone say. He heard someone say, almost excitedly, I didn’t know he went to Brooklyn Tech! The Calder family was all there, showing the new family the ropes. No one played wiffleball on the corner of 35th and R, where the green sign was, the Fire Captain Jonathon K. Calder memorial corner. I didn’t know his firehouse had been so close to the World Trade Center, a woman near Lorris gasped. Make it through that and then. Eventually the wife went with Mrs. Costanzo next door, where they put the food that wouldn’t fit in their fridge into the Costanzo’s. Then she sat on the couch next to Mrs. Costanzo. They talked about when their children used to play in the living room right there. Remember Legos, Mrs. Costanzo said. Oh, she said. Mr. Costanzo came in the door with his hands in his pockets looking for them. He stood in front of the couch. He suddenly didn’t know what to do.

That night, after they’d changed out of their good clothes, the ones they’d had in closets in plastic bags, they sat down to watch television. Mr. Costanzo had been on the couch there since dinner. He hadn’t done the dishes. There wasn’t enough room for all of them on the couch, so Jamison lay on his stomach on the floor. He was laughing at the sitcoms. After the news, Lorris got up and put his shoes on. Just a walk, he said.

It was still light out, and warm. It would almost be summer. Lorris walked up Avenue R, towards Flatbush. He didn’t even have a sweatshirt on. There were no spaces between the houses here. They grew into each other on both sides. Most of them were painted red. Lorris wondered if someone had planned them out beforehand, or if they shot up in perfect rows. On Quentin Avenue, in front of the supermarket, a man was washing his car. It was white and perfectly polished. He probably hadn’t had it for long. He was scrubbing with a thick sponge. Lorris watched him twist the material in his hand. There was a bucket of water on the ground next to him, the water sloshing against the edges. The hose next to the sidewalk was leaking and getting Lorris’s shoes wet. The man worked over the same point on the car for a long time, and then he leaned his forehead on the hood and kept pressing, not looking. He stayed there for a long time with his head pressed and his arms stopped and the muscles in his legs relaxed behind him.

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Danny Bredar On Patroclus, A Discussion of the Good Landscape Oil on canvas 72” x 120”

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Zoë Hitzig Under My Wings Everything Prospers Banned library book on American history, six other unwanted books, electrical tape.

17” x 17” x 29”

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A Hawthorn, Rooted Close to Other Guests JUSTIN WYMER

This is not nature—the way pain interrupts its answers, ashen awl-tipped limbs waving and brushing themselves, chill crushes carried across the ravine; and a wing of their broken flutter, that desiccated battle-din, is hooked by a frosty steam, and it balds.

Though the awls are hollow-point—the ungraspable locusts having left behind veins of shadowy larvae inside them.

And the hollowed-out scent of cold rain. And suddenly—a corridor of ropy light twines round the stems and

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fills those absent bodies with steamy voices they cannot share, cannot reveal, retaining a skin that shields unerringly—And so the sudden remains only as an answer the stilled silk flowers prod-up to reach on this dog’s grave (what symmetry can gather itself entire, in the open air?)—a calm tended to by the wrinkled spines of shucked chestnuts.

I would invoke the radiance of the mirror uncovering itself inside the glistering jetsam-spread of leaves, or the receding waves of these flowers, fathering the dusk into them.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 35

36 COMMENCEMENT 2012

Ingrid Pierre Destiny, Manifest (installation detail) Mixed media Dimensions variable

(opposite) Ingrid Pierre Destiny, Manifest (installation detail) Mixed media Dimensions variable

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 37

Matt Saunders Back of a Head (Asta Nielsen) #3 Unique silver gelatin print 58” x 40” 38 COMMENCEMENT 2012

Matt Saunders Back of a Head (Thomas Mann) #4 Unique silver gelatin print 58” x 40” THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 39

Rebecca Levitan The Laws of Physics Demand It (XII) Silkscreen ink on linen 16” x 25”

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Birds

VINCENT CRAIG WRIGHT

When I was little the way the shine on the hood of a cool car blinded me made me feel like something was on its way. All I had to do was be ready. And I tried. For a long time I held fast, tightened my fists in my pockets and walked on when someone called my name.

But then I thought I was the shine and the moving toward who knows what and my blood felt like water.

I was a power chord.

I knew the names of birds.

I had the book.

So while Ronnie-Ann watched porn I’d sit with her and figure out what was flying around out there.

“I’m the one told you about them birds, Buster,” she said, folded so deep in the cushions of the couch I couldn’t tell what was her arm and what was her leg.

“You told me about birds?”

And we’d start in.

What it got down to is she blamed me for not being able to see meaning in things like birds and books about birds any more. She blamed me she was watching porn. * At first she’d comment on the story and how sex might affect things.

Then she stopped bringing home movies with any story, just sex scenes piled up one after another.

Before long she said, “This shit’s wearing off, too,” and I hoped it would take something different instead of something more. * It was true she told me about birds.

“You can learn a lot from them,” she said the first time I found the book she’d won in a school raffle.

“I wanted to win a bike,” she said.

“Can you learn to fly?” I asked and she didn’t get pissed in any part of her I could tell.

“There’s lots of ways to watch things,” she said.

I told her a robin’s a robin, a wren, wren, hawk, hawk, and all. I didn’t need to know the sub-species and whatnot, didn’t need to know where they winter.

“It’s nice,” she said.

So I figured birds, and what they say about birds in a book might as well mean something to me. I couldn’t think of anything else she’d use the word “nice” about like she meant it.

So I told her how it didn’t seem like the kind of thing she’d be into, how she used “nice” when she was talking about the birds and the book about the birds.

And that didn’t go over.

“You can fuck up anything. Know that, Buster?”

Of course I knew that. She did too. “That helps a lot,” I told her.

Outside an Oriole was dropping down the little leftover cactus from when the landlord redid the front to what he said was sustainable.

Ronnie-Ann said, “I can be talking about how you’re fucking up this bird thing, just this bird thing, and

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 41

mean right now, not be talking about anything in the world to do with fucking up our lives or whatever you think you’re fucking up this time.”

When we first got together (one time I called it dating and Ronnie-Ann said, “We didn’t date,” and another time I called it going out and Ronnie-Ann said, “We didn’t go out,”) she’d say things like, “taking it too fast,” or, “too serious,” or, “personal,” even.

Sometimes she’d say you never know what tomorrow brings and I couldn’t help thinking she meant tomorrow might bring somebody she liked more than me.

Never did though and one day she didn’t talk like that.

And it felt like we were together.

The Oriole flew away when the mail lady with her big calves and chewing gum came smiling up with a handful of nothing we wanted to open.

That felt a little normal, junk mail, and I wondered who was normal and what made them that way.

I put the bird book back on the shelf between her sixth-grade scrapbook and eighth-grade yearbook and went outside.

The Oriole flew off. I worked that word around my mouth. Oriole.

Made me think of the cookie and eating the middles and putting them back together a different thing.

When I was a kid Mom’d eat burgers that way, the patty first then try and put everything back together.

Once, at Tommy’s Café, Dad said why don’t she just get the hamburger steak special.

She didn’t answer. They’d been through this before and that wasn’t what it was about.

Even I knew that.

“Your mama does a lot of fucked up shit, boy,” he said, his fork loud on his plate.

There was something my dad had in his voice when he made those jokes one day I figured out RonnieAnn had, a sad sound when they think they’re happy but can’t help certain things they do or say and the way they do and say them.

After I started the book it wasn’t long I was telling her stuff about feather markings and nests and flying patterns and not long after that she got tired of it. Not the birds but me having something to say about them.

“That all you think about?” she asked.

I told her she sounded like my dad and she stared at me until her phone started ringing then looked at me and said, “Well there,” and that was that.

So I talked less about birds but kept watching for something until one day I tried telling Ronnie-Ann, “It gets harder to believe,” I said, nodding out the window at the Oriole.

“Birds flying ain’t hard to believe, Buster. Been doing it all my life. It’s what birds do. Makes them birds matter of fact.”

“Yeah, but ever try it?”

“No, Buster, I ain’t no motherfucking bird.”

“I think it takes more than we think.”

“I don’t think about it. For all I know they barely make it, but they do. Never seen a bird couldn’t make it.”

“And that don’t seem like a miracle?”

“Sure, Buster. That’s what it seems like, a miracle birds fly. And know what else, that dogs bark and fucking fish swim. Ever think about that? How a fish holds its breath. Goddamn secret of life right there swimming around a fucking pond.”

I was a million miles away and she looked at me that way then walked out flapping her arms.

I told her from the other room about how I hit a Robin with a rock when I was nine. I couldn’t tell if she was listening but I told her how I didn’t think it possible I could do anything that meant so much in the world, but did, and I could tell the bird sensed the rock and made a move to fly right before it hit her and the whole world stopped. She wouldn’t move. I ran inside for Mom who got so mad I couldn’t look and said bury it in the back yard but I couldn’t stand the thought so I took the shovel and threw her little body in the woods.

Everything I did back then already seemed like a memory I told Ronnie-Ann and she came back in with me, standing there, looking at me for who I could’ve been.

42 COMMENCEMENT 2012

“You ever wish you could go back in time?” I asked.

She stood there a minute, then said, “I did.”

I waited for her to tell me about that but she walked off again like she thought of something else.

I got the bird book but left it closed. * That night we started partying and the television was on whatever and she was playing dj with her CDs and dancing like crazy people in old movies and laughing like that until she saw the bird book on the table.

At first she flipped through looking at me and smiling like I ought to know about what but she suddenly stopped at some page.

She turned the book in her hands.

She said, “Know how people say their whole life flashed by? I did that. Watched my whole life go by. I was there again.”

“When?” Was all I knew to say.

“I mean I wasn’t watching what I’d done I was doing those things again.”

“Were you drowning or something?”

“Do I look drowned to you?”

I started to answer and she said, “Don’t be a smart ass, Buster.”

“What’s the picture?” I asked her.

She let the book down slowly until it hung there from one hand but I still couldn’t make it out.

“When I was eleven my dad tried to kill us.”

“What do you mean baby?”

“I never told you.”

“What happened?”

“He got me out of bed one night and carried me to the garage. I didn’t know if we were going somewhere or I was dreaming.”

“Where was your mom?”

“Sleeping. She was always sleeping. He ran the hose from the exhaust into the window and we sat there.

He put on music that must’ve meant something to him and at some point I started living everything again.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah. But he fucked that up too. The hose come off and we woke up the next morning, me on the couch, him sitting at the kitchen table, smoking and watching the smoke like one more thing getting away from him.”

“Your mom never knew?”

“She’s the one told me what happened.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“It felt more like I had to live through things too many times though. Before we got in the car, while we were in there, then everything after, so I don’t much want to go back in time again. You don’t get to change anything anyhow.”

“If you could go back and none of it happened?”

“How would we know?”

“I guess we wouldn’t,” I said, and, “Maybe that’s all we ever do. Keep going back.”

“Feels that way huh.”

And somehow we had moved to talking about us and how it takes us getting fucked up because we are so fucked up.

I looked at the picture there about to fall from her hand. A robin.

“I can’t go back now,” she said.

“Maybe later,” I told her and I knew we do it all the time, come back to a now that ain’t nothing but a now and another now and another.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 43

Portrait of Adrienne C. Rich, The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

44 COMMENCEMENT 2012

Celebrating Adrienne Rich 1929-2012

MADELEINE SCHWARTZ & STEPHANIE NEWMAN

Elegies of writers often tend toward the bombastic, but it would not be an exaggeration to call Adrienne Rich one of the poets who mattered most to the twentieth century. Dedicated to poetry as a form of urgent discourse and committed to prioritizing a vision for women, Rich pushed the boundaries of both her poetry and her activism.

Rich was born in 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of a former concert pianist and a doctor whose “very Victorian, pre-Raphaelite library” she devoured. Although she won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets’ Prize as an undergraduate, she did not immediately pursue her poetry as a professional, publishing only one follow-up volume while starting a family with her husband, an economics professor. When she published again in 1963, her poetry had become more vibrant and complex, beginning her tendency toward freer verse and livelier spirit that would only increase throughout her long career. Both a participant in the women’s movement of the 1970s and one of its chroniclers, she captured in her poetry the kind of stifled rage that pushed feminism to its peak. The issues of American intervention, the future of the arts, and the public role of the self formed a backbone for much of her later writing.

At Harvard, Rich studied English. She became friends with fellow undergraduates Donald Hall and Robert Bly, with whom she double-dated. But Harvard was not totally welcoming—as a woman, Rich could not enter the Lamont Poetry Room or become a member of the Advocate. “From 1947 to 1951, when I graduated,” she would later write, “I never saw a single woman on a lecture platform, or in front of a class, except when a woman graduate student gave a paper on a special topic. The ‘great men’ talked of other ‘great men,’ of the nature of Man, the history of Mankind, the future of Man; and never again was I to experience from a teacher the kind of prodding, the insistence that my best could be even better, that I had known in high school. Women students were simply not taken very seriously. Harvard’s message to women was an elite mystification: we were, of course, part of Mankind; we were special, achieving women, or we would not have been there; but of course our real goal was to marry—if possible, a Harvard graduate.”

A sense of restraint is visible in her early poems, three of which are reprinted on the following pages from their original Advocate publication in 1950-51. Much of the writing is quiet and formal; it seems to echo Rich’s early influences, such as Robert Frost. Her verse, though evocative and lithe, is marked by a controlled and formal precision. As he praised her poems as “gently and modestly dressed,” Auden just as graciously noted in his introduction to the Yale Younger Poets’ Prize that her pieces “respect their elders but are not cowed by them.” Rich was consciously attempting to fit her voice into the model that had been given to her.

Yet Rich’s early poems are striking in their urge to discover what lies beyond the limits. Each line pulses with the recognition that something does lie beyond: a “whisper of a shade,” a “live thing” shivering, an uneasy moth exploring the “edge of light.” Her pressurized pentameter holds an energy that will eventually burst in her later poems, propelling her style beyond its metrical container. Rich’s Advocate poems are harbingers of her career to come.

Years later, when Rich wrote “Twenty-One Love Poems,” an expansive series describing her relationship with another woman, the same voice appears to move more freely. The female of Rich’s poetry is no longer confined to her dark room. Instead, she asserts her identity, walks an astonishing spectrum of pleasure and pain, and stands in life’s direct path. The uneasy moth near the night-lamp is gone, replaced by a narrator who is ready to declare: “I choose to be a figure in that light.”

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 45

Three Early Poems by Adrienne Rich From The Harvard Advocate, 1950-1951

Night The motes that still disturbed her lidded calm Were these: the tick and whisper of a shade Against the sill; a cobweb-film that hung Aslant a corner moulding, too elusive For any but the gaze of straitened eyes; The nimbus of the night-lamp, where a moth Uneasily explored the edge of light Through hours of fractured darkness. She alone Knew that the room contained these things; she lay Hearing the almost imperceptible sound (As if a live thing shivered behind the curtains) Watching the thread that frayed in gusts of air More delicate than her breathing, or by night Sharing a moth’s perplexity at light Too frail to drive out dark: minutiae Held in the vise of sense about to die.

December 1950

The Prisoners Enclosed in this disturbing mutual wood, Wounded alike by thorns of the same tree, We seek in hopeless war each others’ blood Though suffering in one identity.

Each to the other prey, and huntsman known, Still driven together, lonelier than alone Strange mating of the loser and the lost!

With faces stiff as mourners, we intrude Forever on the one we turn from most, Each wandering in a double solitude.

The unpurged ghosts of passion bound to pride, Who wake in isolation, side by side.

December 1950

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The House at the Cascades All changed now through neglect. The steps dismantled By infantries of ants, by roots and storms, The pillars tugged by vines, the porte-cochere A passageway for winds, the solemn porches Warped into caricatures.

We came at evening After the rain, when every drunken leaf Was straining, swelling in a riot of green.

Only the house was dying in all that life, As if a triumph of emerald energy Had fixed its mouth upon the walls and stones.

The tamest shrub remembered anarchy And joined in appetite with the demagogue weed That springs where order falls; together there They stormed the defenseless handiwork of man Whose empire wars against him when he turns A moment from the yoke. So, turning back, He sees his rooftree fall to furious green, His yard despoiled, and out of innocent noon The insect-cloud like thunder on the land.

April 1951

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 47

SPECIAL THANKS The Harvard Advocate wishes to thank the following generous individuals for their support of our activities during the 2011-2012 academic year. They have made possible the Advocate’s commitment to publishing the best literature and art that the Harvard campus offers, four times each year. The contributions of the following individuals have not only supported the printing of our magazine, but also our mission to promote the arts on campus. Last year, our building at 21 South Street hosted a wide array of literary and artistic events. Daniel Bosch, John Lithgow, and Ben Loory—to name only a few—visited, spoke, and read; local musicians played the blues in the Sanctum. Our new Community Outreach Program has helped expand the Advocate’s presence in our neighborhood and the broader Cambridge and Boston area. Our members have continued to faciliate the creative writing curriculum of a second- and third-grade classroom at the William Blackstone Elementary School in the South End in Boston.

Your contributions have supported the creation of our new website (www.theharvardadvocate.com), including features like video hosting and online subscribing. We are dedicated to improving and extending our web presence by expanding the breadth of the back catalog of issues available for purchasing and viewing online. However, digital development can be costly and, as we pursue this project of digital expansion, your contributions to The Harvard Advocate are more valuable than ever.

Please consider supporting The Harvard Advocate!

PATRONS David L. Klein Foundation, Andrew B. Cogan, John Ebey, David Self, Anonymous BENEFACTORS The Meehan Family, H. Greg Moore, Glenn Schwetz, Anonymous DONORS Anonymous (2) FRIENDS Mary Ellen Burns, Ann Eldridge, Jamie and Bobbie Gates, Walt Hunter, Robert Johnston, Taro Kuriyama, Markus Law, Anthony Pino, Gregory Scruggs, Emery Younger All gifts to The Harvard Advocate endowment fund are fully tax deductible according to 501(c)(3) nonprofit donation guidelines. Gifts will be acknowledged in the four issues following receipt according to the giving categories of Patron ($1000 and over), Benefactor ($500 and over), Donor ($200 and over), and Friend ($50-$199). Contributors will receive a complimentary year’s subscription to the magazine.

Checks should be made out to “Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.” Envelopes may be mailed to 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Please email contact@theharvardadvocate.com with any inquiries regarding gifts to The Harvard Advocate. Thank you for helping support Mother Advocate.

48 COMMENCEMENT 2012

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES Victoria Baena is wondering why.

Indiana Seresin, because true love awaits.

Mark Chiusano: best qualified to be some kind of quiet blackmailer.

Madeleine Schwartz, currently MIA. Stephanie Newman at the airport.

Molly Dektar doesn’t want to lose touch.

Kevin Hong is proud to be an IBMer. Vincent Craig Wright lives in Ashland, Oregon, where he is the Fiction Writer at Southern Oregon University.

He has published one book of stories, Redemption Center (Bear Star Press), and has current work in the magazine Sleet. His band, Cast of Clowns, is releasing its first recording in May. Erik Fredericksen and C/Z. Keoni Correa is wondering what to do now with all these paint swatches.

Julian Gewirtz will miss you guys.

Justin Wymer would prefer that they get the silverfish.

Matt Aucoin, whoda thunkit?

Ingrid Pierre said goodbye to her Southern Gospel church.

Rebecca Levitan has cherished her time on The Harvard Advocate.

Matt Saunders, back again.

Danny Bredar laksdhfaslkdfjads;aksldn;dsa Scott Roben knows it backwards.

Zoë Hitzig is detecting exoplanets with the naked eye.