Spring 2009

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Neck Wear David Ingenthron THE HARVARD ADVOCATE Mat 2 board, plastic packing tape, lint, ink jet print 10.5” x 7” x 1/8”

COVER DESIGN AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY Dana Kase

TABLE OF CONTENTS CONTEST WINNERS Paul Whang Adam Scheffler Kathleen Hale

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Jenny’s Visit (Art) Theme Park (Poetry) That One About Us (Fiction)

inside cover 20 38

Neckwear The Gulag Towards a More Moving Image

46 47

Autumnal Longing For Each Other Animus

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18 19 29 40 64

FEATURES NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH ST: Richard Beck Get With the Program: Creative Writing in the Twentieth Century Running Amok brittany benjamin Made of Vice Mark Chiusano Pinhole of Light: John Updike’s Philosophy of the Self Jessica Sequeira Born Naked Allison Keeley ENVOY: Words on a Page: An Interview with Junot Díaz Anna Barnet

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The Watchmaker Lost Things

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Tracking [Our bodies are full of veins and yet] I am filling the creases

ART David Ingenthron Sohin Hwang Isidore Bethel, Mary Potter, and Thompson Potter Aznavur Dustmamatov Kayla Escobedo

FICTION Courtney Bowman Spencer Strub POETRY Liza Flum Sharon Wang Olga Moskvina

In the Fall 2008 Issue, Nick Shearer’s submission of Angry Boy was erroneously omitted from the listed contents of the Fall 2008 DVD supplement. The list of the DVD’s contents should have read as follows: Track 1 Track 2 Track 3 Track 4 Track 5 Track 6 Track 7

Do Rivers Xanadu Token Hunchback Marilyn Marilyn Angry Boy Goodbye Bear Nettalk

Animation HD Claymation 16mm Animation HD Animation

David Rice Alex Berman Tim Reckart Enzo Camacho Nick Shearer Andrew Wesman David Rice

The Harvard Advocate sincerely regrets the error.

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Art

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

business

The Harvard Advocate www.theharvardadvocate.com

Editorial Board 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

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

Peter Brooks John DeStefano

LESLIE DUNTON-DOWNER

A. Whitney Ellsworth

jonathan Galassi

Lev Grossman

Angela Mariani

Daniel Max

CELIA MCGEE

Thomas A. Stewart

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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, Taro Kuriyama, Kenneth Li*, Keri Mabry, Iya Megre*, Arielle Pensler*, Geraldine Prasuhn, Logan Pritchard, Anna Raginskaya, David Tao*, Daniel Thorn, Caroline Williams, Natalie Wong, Millicent Younger, Lillian Yu.

design

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

features

Anna Barnet, Richard Beck, Brittany Benjamin, Sanders Bernstein*, Emily Chertoff*, Mark Chiusano, Rebecca Cooper, Ben Cosgrove, Alexandra 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, 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.

TECHNOLOGY

Ben Berman, Jeff Feldman*, Kevin McNamara*, Mark VanMiddlesworth.* *The Harvard Advocate congratulates its newest members.

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 can be directed to the individual emails above or to contact@theharvardadvocate.com.

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 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 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 depends upon 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 Get With the Program: Creative Writing in the Twentieth Century Richard Beck

In 1964, two years after the publication of his debut novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey left California on a cross-country road trip. He took recording equipment, hallucinogenic drugs, and a dozen friends. Kesey drove east in part to escape the loneliness of novel writing, but he was also putting both physical and symbolic space between himself and the creative writing program at Stanford, from which he had graduated in 1962. He took his education with him, though: the Merry Pranksters drove a school bus.

There is a provocative irony in the fact that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—one of the twentieth century’s loudest anti-institutional novels—was written for class credit. That irony, Mark McGurl writes in his book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, lies at the heart of the last half-century of American fiction.

McGurl’s argument that the advent of creative writing “stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history” is an important one, and it is going to be controversial. The first graduate-level creative writing program began in 1936, and there are now more than three-hundred of them scattered throughout the country, with four hundred additional degrees offered to undergraduates. Admissions are competitive; as McGurl writes, students love creative writing “suspiciously much.” The estimated success rate for creative writing graduates—that is, how many actually go on to write for a living—is roughly one percent. (It is ninety percent for medical school graduates.) Each year, thousands of students voluntarily put themselves in debt for what amounts to a slightly modified extension of their college education. It is hard to imagine what the country’s literature would look like without it.

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*** Anyone can write alone for free on weeknights; what creative writing students go broke for is the workshop. We think of writing as a private struggle, but that is now out of date. Creative writing is both social and theatrical. Seated at a large seminar table with a dozen peers, students receive advice, respond, debate the wording of a particular line, all under the parental gaze of the creative writing instructor. McGurl writes that the workshop’s sociability is alternately “supportive and savage.”

Like colleges, creative writing programs always present themselves as nurturing communities, but students know that every word and attitude is subject to brutal scrutiny. Their teachers have been happy to dish it out. Flannery O’Connor believed that teaching was a negative exercise: “We can learn how not to write.”

O’Connor graduated from the country’s most prestigious writing program, which was also the first. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop began in 1936, and it was a long time in the making. The clearest point of origin for creative writing as an academic discipline is Wendell Barrett’s course in Advanced English Composition, which he began giving at Harvard in 1884. Students who had previously been asked to compose themes on given topics—

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“Can the immortality of the soul be proved,” say—were now asked to write daily assignments on whatever they wanted, the only criteria being “that the subject shall be a matter of observation during the day when it is written . . . and that the style shall be fluent and agreeable.” With his Vandyke beard, walking stick, and spats, Barrett was not only a teacher of creative expression but also a charismatic model of creative being. By its second year, his course was attracting one hundred and fifty students.

Barrett described his class as an “educational experiment,” and within thirty years his formulation could be found at the heart of the progressive movement in American education. In 1894, a thirty-five year old philosophy professor named John Dewey arrived at the University of Chicago. The Pullman Strike, which was taking place at the time, brought him into contact with the social scientist Jane Addams. One of the goals of Addams’ social settlement Hull-House, founded in 1889, was to help prepare the poorest members of Chicago’s rapidly expanding immigrant communities for life as Americans. Addams frequently found that the ideas they generated for guest lecturers and other educational programs were more useful than her own. Hull-House

became a model for collaboration and pluralism that would resonate throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

By 1894, Hull-House was resonating with Dewey as well. “There is an image of a school growing up in my mind all the time,” he wrote. “A school where some actual & literal constructive activity shall be the centre & source of the whole thing.” Two years later, Dewey founded his own educational experiment, the University Elementary School of the University of Chicago, which would eventually become the still-famous Laboratory School. The children there did not learn anything that they did not also do. They cooked lunch, for example, which provided an occasion for teaching arithmetic by requiring students to weigh and measure ingredients, and they also built little smelters and worked with iron. One of the consequences of Dewey’s experiments was the conceptual marriage of learning and doing, and his ideas on education, in slightly modified versions, are how creative writing programs explain and justify themselves.

They are literature laboratories, and stories are experiments in creativity.

It wasn’t until the decades following World War II, when the student populations of American universities began to resemble the ethnically diverse residents of Hull-House, that creative writing really found its place. In 1946, the President’s Commission on Higher Education advocated a radically expanded public role for the university in American life. The GI Bill sent millions to college, presenting universities with what Paul Buck would describe in General Education in a Free Society as an “unimaginably varied” set of tasks: “How can general education be so adapted to different ages and, above all, differing abilities and outlooks, that it can appeal deeply to each?”

Creative writing, with its emphasis on ways of knowing instead of bodies of knowledge, was part of the answer, and it was folded into the expanding multi-versity.

Across the American cultural landscape, the value of creativity was appreciating. Throughout the 1950s, a C.I.A.-funded organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom organized exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist art

throughout the Western bloc of Europe, where they were intended to dazzle the nearby Soviets.

The painter-cowboy Jackson Pollock, a drunken monument to the very idea of the lone hero-artist, led the charge. We think of the 50s as the great era of American conformity, but no other decade did more to make individual artistic expression a specifically American value. By 1961, creativity had secured its place as a public good; Raymond Williams wrote that “No word in English carries a more consistently positive reference than ‘creative.’” He was right (and still might be). In the 1960s, the number of graduate writing programs multiplied by ten. *** Paul Engle was a poet, editor, and translator, but he is mostly remembered for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he ran for twenty-four years. He believed that “good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.” Others have had doubts about “made.” Flannery O’Connor wrote that “the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift.” That’s not very encouraging, and it gets worse. Philip Roth, who taught at Iowa in the 60s, believed that one of the creative writing instructor’s responsibilities is to “discourage those without talent.” In the most radical critiques, the creative writing program actually smothers talent rather than encouraging it. What the Iowa Workshop lacks in creativity, the leftist novelist and one-time lover of Simone de Beauvoir Nelson Algren wrote, it makes up in “quietivity.” Like many people who worry that creative writing programs are useless or even harmful, Algren taught at a creative writing program. (He is also rumored to have lost some $35,000 playing poker in his spare time on the Iowa plains.)

Throughout the last half-century, two American writers have embodied Engle’s equation for good fiction: Ernest Hemingway (made) and William Faulkner (born). The Des Moines Register once published a photograph of Engle typing away with a whip curled within easy reach, and one imagines that when he used the whip it was to make students write more like Hemingway. One creative writing commonplace is “Show, don’t tell,” and Hemingway, whose characters seem to

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live by the even simpler motto, “Don’t tell—drink,” is the patron saint of well-disciplined fiction. No genre fits creative writing as well as the minimalist short story—in large part because it is possible to cover the whole thing in a two hour seminar— and Hemingway lore has it that he once wrote a complete short story with only six words: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never used.” While Hemingway never enrolled in college, he believed that the best way to improve was to put in the hours, to simply go away and write. He sent himself away to a kind of MFA in miniature in 1921, taking private tutorials in Paris from Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein. (Frank Conroy once called his own MFA experience “sort of a Fascist version” of the Lost Generation’s European heyday.)

Even as the Program era was turning out accomplished minimalists like Raymond Carver, however, it was also preserving the Faulknerian impetus to let loose. With less than one full year of post-secondary education, Faulkner was the ideal model of self-realized individual talent, and his legacy is at the heart of another Program era cliché: “Find your voice.” As identity politics began to take shape in the 60s and 70s, a flood of previously underrepresented ethnic, racial, and social voices began to make themselves heard. Philip Roth was one of them; his Portnoy’s Complaint, an electrified current of neurotic sexual hysteria, ends by wordlessly asserting its protagonist’s voice: “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!!”

Roth was yelling on behalf of Jewish maleness, but other groups took inspiration from his example.

In 1975, Anchor Books published AIIIEEEE!–An Anthology of Asian-American Writers.

A writer can find too much of his voice.

Thomas Wolfe, who studied playwriting at Harvard before beginning to produce enormous autobiographical novels in 1929, described himself in the University of North Carolina yearbook as a “young Shakespeare,” and also a “genius.” The Hemingway-Faulkner dialectic 6

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usually finds a more comfortable middle ground, resulting in what McGurl calls “fine writing,” the lively but not overbearing prose of John Updike, among others. It is precisely the tasteful brilliance of Updike’s style that made him a kind of father figure to an entire generation of Program writers.

Fine writing is the quintessential Program style, and Updike is the quintessential fine writer. It’s funny that he never attended a program himself.

Another quintessential Program writer who never actually enrolled in one is Joyce Carol Oates, who now teaches creative writing at Princeton.

Updike is frequently called “prolific.” He has no idea. Oates has published thirty-six novels, with three more on the way in the next year or so. There are also thirty-three collections of short stories, as well as eight more novels written under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, three written as Lauren Kelly, and eight novellas. Twelve volumes of essays and criticism, eight plays, and ten books of poetry. When she was first discovering her own poetic voice, she once produced twenty-eight poems—“some of them rather long,” according to her biographer—in one day. In 1982, Oates

published her fifteenth novel, which James Wolcott reviewed with an article titled “Stop Me Before I Write Again: Six Hundred More Pages by Joyce Carol Oates.” She seems to write like other people blog.

Writing is easy for Oates—some think too easy.

“The novels of most so-called serious writers are usually exercises of craft and care,” writes Wolcott, before going on to describe A Bloodsmoor Romance as “word-goop.” The term “genre-fiction,” always a pejorative in a serious literary setting, sometimes hovers around Oates’ name. Isn’t it supposed to be difficult, even for geniuses?

The idea that creativity stops being creative if it happens too regularly: now there’s something to make people uncomfortable with creative writing programs. Oates, who has turned out not just a large body of work but an extraordinarily varied body of work, is like her own private Iowa, and she helps to dismantle the myth that the production of art is anything other than a completely predictable human activity. It’s what keeps critics in business: there will always be something to write about.

This is not to say that the name on the spine doesn’t matter—as McGurl writes, Oates’ output is “inimitable”—but just that individual and institution are not mutually exclusive terms.

Kesey would have told you otherwise, but think how many teachers have used Cuckoo’s Nest to lure adolescent rebels back into the educational fold. After his merry trip east and a stint in jail, Kesey returned to the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon. In 1987, he went back to his alma mater to teach creative writing.

Applicants to creative writing programs offer to institutionalize themselves in exchange for the chance to flower out as individuals. All institutions of higher education now make this promise, to a greater or lesser extent: You can be whatever you want. Nothing is closed to you. Growing up, I was told so often that I was unique, that I could choose any career path, that the opportunity began to look more like an assignment. Colleges do not just open the door to self-realization. They make you walk through it. As an undergraduate, I have been told more times than I can count that my college learning experience is not limited to the books I read and the essays I write, but sometimes that has

sounded like a pretty attractive college learning experience. Engle once dreamed that he was an inmate, and that Iowa was a concentration camp.

That may be a little melodramatic, but McGurl’s insight is to see what Engle’s anxiety has done to American fiction in the last half-century.

Again and again, postwar novelists have written institutional allegories, thinly veiled retellings of their own MFA days. “No sooner did American institutions (in many cases begrudgingly) open their doors to outsiders of various kinds,” McGurl writes, “than these newly minted insiders often wanted to get back out, if only in a spiritual sense.”

It’s why we have the campus novel, the usually satiric portrait of university life; writers like to remind themselves of the possibility of outside, that they can transcend the university that hands them a paycheck. And yet the reality of institutionalized creative writing—with its deadlines, workshops, and departmental meetings—does not melt away and disappear in the face of publication, and vague dreams of freedom haunt postwar fiction.

“Hardly Big Nurse,” Kesey wrote of his Stanford creative writing seminar. “But hardly City Lights Bookstore up the freeway,” either.

Some are worried by the fact that creative writing happens at a university, but they are missing the point. The issue is what doesn’t happen at a university, and the answer is, “increasingly little.” In 1959, George Stoddard, then the dean of the New York University School of education, observed that “slowly we are becoming a nation of college alumni, as we are already one of high school graduates.” That process continues today. Some of those college alumni will produce the next half-century of great fiction, but it’s impossible to predict which ones.

Likewise, an MFA only promises that you’ll write well, not that you’ll make it onto future syllabi.

“Not even in America,” wrote John Barth, “can one major in Towering Literary Artistry.”

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Tracking Liza Flum

Crocus, dark bulb starting a slim leaf, you hide your blade at your stomach.

Soon it will ease into dirt, a small tongue to kiss silt. A cut.

Love, I don’t have a grip on tenderness— those ruffed crests of pampas grass crush in my hands. I test red blades beneath: they slit gills along my fingers. I travel from red edge to feathers, is this tender? I can’t be sure. I saw a goose swoop up. She left like an adze wedged into wooden clouds. I stood, rooted. We decided to accept our luck, the way a mare lowers her nose over a fence, parts shuttered lips: Here’s her overbite.

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She clicks at slipped apples, her teeth close around fruit precisely as calipers; although leaves are tapping against apples, and thrumming like bells through white fields.

Now this morning, after rain, when streets gleam like syrup, you are the woman who stretches, tipping her chin back. Outside, dark arrows pass at the window. Birds sound a quiver of distances.

Inside the room, light girds our two bodies like wire in a cloisonnĂŠ bowl, glazed and separate enamels.

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The Watchmaker Courtney Bowman

If it were my house, I would have opened the pantry and said something to the effect of, “make yourselves some soup.” But it was not my house and not my child, so I cooked up Mac-n-Cheese as instructed. I could tell it was not Kraft by the thickness of the noodles and the banal hue of the cheese sauce. Mrs. Wilkey had made the macaroni herself, which I was very grateful for but obligated to decline. I am not 25 any longer, and my metabolism isn’t what it used to be. It is now the metabolism of a 28 year-old post-sexual woman of some scholarship.

I think partly Mrs. Wilkey chose Mac-nCheese because the noodles are soft and therefore do not require knives or other such perilous devices, though this is all subjective based on your perception of the fork. When she left me to baby-sit Billy for the night she said, “All you have to do for dinner, Ms. Covington, is heat up the Mac-n-Cheese. Don’t use the oven if you don’t feel comfortable with it; the microwave will do.

Everything is child-locked except the silverware drawer, which is all-ages-locked on account of Grandma. I’ve left some forks out for you and Billy.” Which means that even if I wanted to give Billy some ice-cream, I would not be able to. I understand her reasoning—Grandma Wilkey cannot be depended on to behave in a rational predictable manner. I’m just saying that, besides rendering ice-cream an impossibility, also I need a spoon to mix honey into my coffee.

Mr. And Mrs. Wilkey had a fundraiser to go to for their church. It was the first time they had asked me to baby-sit, as I was Billy’s tutor, not his babysitter, and had actually never stayed with a child past the hour of 5 pm, after which, for all I know, they turn into pumpkins. This remark, of 10

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course, is a whimsy of mine, as children do not have the physical capabilities to transform into vegetables. I may not teach Billy biology, but I know some about it. I teach him History, Social Studies, Math and English, though perhaps not as extensively as I would like. Billy’s curriculum is a special case because Mrs. Wilkey has him on the Accelerated Christian Education home-school program, which means she gets to pick all the texts.

Obviously, we read the Bible for English. I’m not making a judgment on that. But when I was in fifth grade, we read the Bible and a few classics, among them such greats as John Steinbeck and William Shakespeare. Mrs. Wilkey teaches him in science and religion and I have no knowledge of what either course consists of nor would I tell you my opinion if I did know, that being her own private business.

However, when I was in fifth grade, we read a chapter on evolutionary biology so we could choose ourselves whether it was true.

I was not home-schooled. I went to school in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where my father was a sociology professor and my mother was a benefit to those around her. My father used to say he was the last liberal in the state. My mother and I were apolitical. I think she was actually conservative, but feared that political differences would cause indigestion at the dinner table. She kept quiet about her opinions and let him have his. I didn’t have many opinions. I did have concerns—I certainly wasn’t nihilistic or an advocate of any other French philosophy, popular as they were at the time. It was and remains to this day my belief that every man should look out for himself.

We all have a lot of personal choices to make that no politician is going to hold our hand through.

Get married or stay single; have kids or help the kids already had; teach at public school or home school an evangelical boy who is oblivious to the outside world; make a lot more money teaching at public school or make the right choice; white toast or wheat toast. These are choices that we all make everyday. Have you ever called the president to help you make them? No. He is a very busy man.

We are all very busy men and women.

I sat down with Billy to eat, even though only one of us was eating.

“Would you like to lead the prayer?” He asked.

Billy assumes everyone is a Southern Baptist like himself because he lives in a vacuum. He is a very religious boy, in a mystical way. He genuflects at intersections among other natural replications of the cross. If he is not able to genuflect (say, we are in a car driving downtown, and there are many intersections along the way, and genuflecting every second is a safety hazard in that it distracts the driver who is sensitive to motion in the rearview mirror), he lowers his head and crosses himself.

I have never seen Mrs. Wilkey and definitely never seen Mr. Wilkey genuflect. I believe Billy got it from a YouTube video. Mrs. Wilkey does not know he watches YouTube videos, but she would not mind, I don’t think, if she knew Billy exclusively watches taped church services from developing countries.

“I do not know the prayer, Billy. Why don’t you lead?” I said. Billy lowered his head and closed his eyes with his hand out to me. I took it.

“We thank you,” he recited slowly, “Father God, Lord of all Creation, for these and all our many blessings that are sent from heaven above, and we will never forget who is our true provider.

Amen.”

It sounded as if the prayer hadn’t been ingrained in his tongue’s muscle. That’s how slow he said it. Though really it must have been by now, which means that his projecting at a speed of two syllables per second was deliberate. I did know the prayer. I had heard it many times at the houses of my girl friends growing up, and actually once before in this very household. My first day tutoring Billy I heard it. The Wilkeys had asked me over for dinner and I had not by that time adopted my present ideology which is never stay

for dinner at the Wilkeys’. Mrs. Wilkey cooked steamed vegetables, roasted potatoes and chicken breasts, which was all very lovely. Mr. Wilkey led the prayer, all in one breath.

Then Mrs. Wilkey gave a few words of gratitude. “Thank you for Billy,” she said, “who is the rock our house was founded on; thank you for Ms. Covington, who tutored us both about the Babylonians today; and thank you for Grandma, who is still holding out strong.” When she finished Mr. Wilkey inhaled the peas he had been poking at during her sermon and inquired about the application process of becoming a home-school tutor. Which I answered to the best of my knowledge and innovation. He informed me what he wanted Billy to receive: management skills. “Time management, self management,” he said, and I thought he said “face management,” though looking back it was probably “space management.” Every time he said “management,” he tapped the table. He syncopated his points with his hand as if each knock were a vehicle his words would need in order to pass through my ears. When he finished his oration Mrs. Wilkey added, “But more importantly, a good, Christian instinct.” More importantly. Now you will never know whether I have a personal bias toward either Mr. or Mrs. Wilkey because I prefer to keep these things professional, but I will admit that I admired that woman at that moment. She had real faith in home schooling. I was going to teach her son how to be a good person. I was petrified.

“And thank you for my lessons today,” Billy continued, as his macaroni grew cold and stiff, “for the arrival of mail, even though none was for me, and for Grandma, whom I know you will redeem with blood and not allow to suffer in hellfire.”

“Of course, not, Billy. That’s repulsive.”

“Amen.”

“Amen,” I said. He began to eat. “Why do you think your own Grandma is going to hell?”

“She’s a witch,” he said.

“No sir—what do you say in this house?”

“She’s a sorceress,” he said. Mrs. Wilkey had a rule where we weren’t supposed to say words that rhyme with coarse words. “Glass” was always “cup.” When Mr. Wilkey protested, she’d say, “It sounds bad enough to be bad.” I don’t think

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this stunted Billy’s vocabulary, because he was an excellent reader. It was merely one more reflex he had to embed in the brain among the many superstitious regulations he imposed upon himself. Billy was usually very good about this rule.

“Besides,” I said. “Grandma Wilkey is not a sorceress. She is your Grandma, and you love her very much.”

“Just because I love her doesn’t mean she’s saved,” said Billy. “Mom says a change of heart is needed.”

“Your mom did not say that about Grandma.

She meant that about criminals and such.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It sounds true to me.”

The thing about Grandma Wilkey is she is crazy. She calls herself a witch. She doesn’t walk around with a broomstick or stew up curses and concoctions but she does a whole crew of other crazy business. Billy and I like to play Mancala after math. It’s this African stone game with marbles. You try to get all the marbles in your slot before your opponent does. Mrs. Wilkey adores it because it keeps Billy from his imaginings. Billy is the type of kid that can play for hours if you just give him a garden plant or other some such. I say garden plant because one day while I was grading his homework he spent the whole hour outside, standing in the same place, right next to a potted plant. He pretended his hands were some kind of creature, jutting out the index and middle finger like limbs. I couldn’t hear him play. Just watched as he ran his fingers along the branches, making them leap from leaf to leaf. Mrs. Wilkey wishes he were more athletic. All the same, when you’re alone it’s much easier to play make-believe than football.

Billy liked to give the Mancala marbles nationalities.

So this one time while we were playing Mancala I started hearing this haunting whooo noise, like wind through a tunnel. I thought it was the washing machine, or some other like appliance broken and running with water. When I left the room to check it out, I immediately knew what it was. Grandma Wilkey. I go into 12

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her bedroom and she’s got her head on the bed, moaning into the blanket, on her knees. I said, “Grandma Wilkey—what’s wrong?” She said, “Horrible, horrible, it’s too horrible.” I said, “What’s too horrible?’” She lifted her face from the blanket and I nearly screamed. White paste was smeared all over her face—like toothpaste or something, thick and crusty as it dried—It must have been toothpaste because there were also tiny green and red streaks in it. Crest. It had rubbed off some on her blanket. “The game is poisoned, the game is poisoned!” She shrieked. “I poisoned Billy’s game!” I asked if she meant the Mancala marbles. “I poisoned the marbles! I poisoned them all!” She said. “Wash his hands before it gets him!”

I knew she had been overtaken by her condition which is crazed but I took Billy to the bathroom to wash his hands, anyway. She watched from her door. When we were done she came over and hugged him tightly, apologizing for being a witch. I told her she’s not a witch, mainly so Billy wouldn’t get ideas. “I’m a witch, I’m a witch!

I’m a damn fool witch!” She said. And that’s not the occasion but the motivation for Mrs. Wilkey locking the utensil drawer under my charge.

When I say that Grandma Wilkey is crazed I should specify that in her youth she was a communist. I found this out from Tom Tulloch, the bartender at Murphy’s Pub in town. No one’s name is Murphy and I doubt no one’s name ever was, Marion being a protestant town. “Murphy” excuses the alcohol—we didn’t bring it here, “Murphy” says. Some idolatrous Irish named Murphy did. But since it’s here, let’s have a drink.

According to Tom she was the only imprisoned woman in Marion for the entire decade of the 1950s. “According to Tom,” you should know, is a phrase synonymous with “according to the bartender who is a conspiracy theorist who would accuse a paying customer of stealing a whole box of Splenda before he even gave her the chance to say, ‘Hello my name is so-and-so pleased to meet you I take my coffee with honey.’” To his credit he has since apologized.

“I swear to you, she was red,” He said to me.

“This was when I was in elementary school in

Jackson—she was a teacher, not at my school,” he said this with his hands up, as if this detail proved his candor. “At the one nearby. She was a union activist who went to a few of the Communist meetings when it first came to Jackson. Her name was on the mailing list when it was exposed. If she had just apologized, not much would have happened, but she insisted on incriminating herself by saying she was a socialist when everyone else in Marion is either a Republican or under 18.”

“That is not true Tom,” I said. “For one, I am a Democrat.”

“That may be so, but you are a Republican Democrat. Grandma Wilkey was the first Socialist Socialist. She had to go.”

“I find your logic in the one, absurd, in the two, insufferable, and in the three, shocking.

How on this ever-reeling sphere is a single mother supposed to raise a child from prison? I assume she didn’t get her teaching position back.”

“Nope. She went north. Didn’t hear about them again until John Wilkey brought her back as a crazed. It’s a testament to his character that he didn’t send her to an institution.” But if that’s a testament to anything it’s to Mrs. Wilkey’s faith in healing, because in my opinion a man of character would take his mother on a stroll in the afternoons, or at least procure for her a taxonomical picturebook of floral arrangements.

I wish I could tell you I returned that sentiment to Tom Tulloch in an offhand quip, but it was something I came up with much later as I was brushing my teeth.

After we cleaned up dinner Billy and I went to the living room to play blocks. The blocks are actually dominoes sent from the Accelerated Christian Education mathematics department as a supplement to the textbook. We did not use the dominoes for math class. Billy used them to construct imaginary cities.

“What’s that?” I asked. Billy was stacking the dominoes three by three in a square.

“It’s my house.”

“This house?”

“No—My future house. When I am an adult.”

He continued stacking. I started stacking my own

little stack. “I’ve already made the city hall,” he said. “Make a different building.”

“And who said this is the city hall?” I asked.

“It’s five by five. All city halls are five by five.”

“This just happens to be my apartment building.”

“What’s an apartment building?”

“A building with many private rooms or apartments for different individuals.”

“Okay. Those are five by four.” Billy created rules when we played games. He had a very scientific mind, prone to classification. The problem was his was a personal science, where items and living matter behaved consistently according to the natural laws only he perceived.

I found it all impossible to predict. He once told me not to drink coffee because it quickened the heartbeat. “You only get so many heartbeats in a lifetime,” he said, as if the organ were some sort of trust fund I was about to splurge. Another time, when I told him to bring a jacket into town, he told me he never got cold. I told him that was ridiculous. He told me that cold was a figment of my imagination and if I just loosened my muscles up, I wouldn’t feel it at all.

You got the sense that once Billy created such a fact it commanded him. There was no creative contradiction, no dismantling of the law once he laid it down. The same day Grandma Wilkey accused herself of poisoning the Mancala marbles, I found Billy sitting at the living room table drawing. He was sucking at something. He’s not allowed hard candy nor gum, so I told him to spit it out. Out came three Mancala marbles.

When I asked him why he was sucking on those, when his Grandma specifically told him not to go near them, he said he wasn’t one to play with fate.

That he was supposed to get poisoned that day.

It was just like that. No fear of his Grandma, no fear of the marble. I don’t think he wanted to die.

He was just obedient to the Rules—the rules that had first set and now continued to set his seeming world in motion.

“Who lives in your future house?” I asked.

“Grandma and I.” “Where do your parents live?” He looked up at me like I had just uttered the single-most moronic remark of the century.

SPRING 2009

13

“Here. In this house.” He slapped the floor.

“Obviously.” By some distinction in his rationale it was acceptable for he and Grandma to live in a house made of dominoes yet ridiculous for his parents.

“Are you married? In your future house?”

“Yes.” I crossed my arms in a challenging manner.

“To whom?” I asked. I didn’t think Billy had ever met a girl his age.

He stopped building and exhaled in exasperation like I had just asked him which animal cow-milk comes from.

“To Grandma,” he said, flinging up his arms.

There were certain societal conventions of which Billy was unaware. Romance was one of them.

“You can’t marry your Grandma.”

“Says who?”

“Says everyone. Says the law. You have to marry someone you love. In a romantic way.” `He shrugged. “Not in this city.” He slipped a stone from his pocket and placed it in the middle of his future house.

“Why on earth did you bring that inside?

Throw that out.”

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“I need it!”

“You do not need it; this is a play game; that is a dirty rock; throw it out.”

He narrowed his eyes, seething, pressing his lips tight. For a moment I thought he was going to throw the rock at me.

Instead, he quietly put the rock down and tensed his jaw, keeping his gaze on me. “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not; for it was founded upon a rock.”

“That’s Matthew,” I said. Not to impress him.

Just to let him know I knew and was not extremely impressed, though really it always gave me shivers when he quoted. He had a way of animating scripture, of making it more physical than I believe was intended.

“And I don’t think the idea is that the house is founded on a real rock—” “Well, that’s what it says,” he said firmly. “And it’s my bath time, anyway.” I looked at my watch.

It was exactly 7:30 p.m.

“All right. You go get the water ready, I’ll pick up the blocks.” He scampered up the stairs. If it were my child, he would be taking showers by now and alone, instead of relying on the supervision of an adult. Mrs. Wilkey had specifically left me with the instructions to oversee him as he bathed.

To make sure he scrubbed his whole head of hair and the bottoms of his feet. To open up a towel as he got out so he could walk right into the warmth of it. Of course, there are many ways to raise a child.

I, for example, would raise my child to be a self-sufficient person.

As I was putting the dominoes away on the bookshelf I came across a book I hadn’t seen since my own years in elementary education. Natural Theology, a book by William Paley, which argues the case for intelligent design from natural complexities. I had to read an essay from it in grade school. I remember my father calling the school to speak to the principal when he asked me what I was learning and I told him Paley. I recall being very embarrassed about the incident, embarrassed because I liked the essay. There was something about a watch, I remember. I opened the book up.

“There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance without a contriver; order without choice—” “The bath is full.” Billy was standing in the doorway. He stood staring at me curiously.

I shut the book and put it back hastily, still a little embarrassed about my fondness for it. “What were you reading?”

“A book.”

“My chemistry book?”

I shuddered. Visibly. “Is this your chemistry book?” He nodded. “Natural Theology? I thought it was your religion book.”

“It’s my favorite book. Look at this.” He opened it up to a picture in the middle of an elephant.

The elephant’s various anatomical features were labeled: proboscis, tusks, ears. Each feature had a short explanation as to its function.

As an educated woman, I found the primary use of this text in the Wilkey household inappropriate.

As a University of Virginia educated woman, mind you, at least for two out of four years. Rest assured that I left that place out of my own volition, due to the liberal arts program being a little too liberal for my taste. I will spare you the details of that story, on account of our being people of letters, and the story being one of pornography.

I will say this: if you think it is uncomfortable and not particularly edifying to be the third wheel to a couple, imagine you are in your dorm room, reading for class, the sixth wheel to an orgy.

Be that as it may, I did learn enough at that institution to be put off by the notion of Billy’s education filtering through the lens of an 18th century theologian. I suppose I always knew that he wasn’t really taking a science course. I knew that Mrs. Wilkey felt strongly about teaching Billy science herself. I suppose because of personal time constraints she might have bundled it with religion. She spends a considerable amount of time at the Marion School for the Deaf. It was not my business what she taught Billy and whether she called “The Lord’s Prayer” “thermodynamics.” I was her employee, and as such followed her instruction. I never asked questions, and she never asked in which half of a college degree was I deficient.

When it was time for bed, Billy got down

on his knees with his elbows on the mattress. I settled into the armchair. He began to pray.

“God bless Mommy, God bless Daddy, God bless Grandma, God save Grandma, God bless Ms. Covington, God bless Grace, God bless Michael, God bless Ruth—” “Billy,” I said. “Who in the world are you blessing?” The only names that boy had been exposed to beyond this house were prefixed with the title “Dr.” He pointed to his bookshelf and there I saw not rows of books but rows of Playmobile figurines.

“Couldn’t you just say, ‘God bless my toys’ for now? And then pray for them in your head once you get in bed? For my sake?”

He considered for a moment. “I can only pray on my knees.”

“Why is that?”

“I’m not sure. Dad told me to pray on my knees. I think it’s because God can hear you best from that position.” He shrugged. “Probably something to do with the angle the knee-joints give to the rest of your body in relation to heaven.”

SPRING 2009

15

“All right. You can get out of bed and finish your prayers after I finish reading you your bedtime story. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“Which story would you like me to read?”

“The Watchmaker.” He spoke nonchalantly, tossing his eyes casually to the ceiling like they were Sunday morning hotcakes. But I caught his eyes when they darted back toward me and they were lemur-sized. Intent.

“The Paley essay? The essay in your science book, Billy?”

“No. The story of the Watchmaker. You know.

Before Genesis.” I studied him to make sure he wasn’t having me on. He was staring back, equally studious of my expression. I got the feeling he was testing me.

“Do you have a copy of the story?”

“Probably,” said Billy. “Though most people know it from memory, right? I just want the story of it. The historical part. The way it actually happened.”

I looked around his room. On his bedside table was a copy of the Bible. I flipped through it to the beginning, hoping the story would be on a piece of paper or some such, tucked inside. It was not.

“Mom usually just says it from memory.”

“Hold on.” I walked briskly to the living room.

I was pretty sure he meant the Paley essay, but it wasn’t much of a story. It was just a metaphor— no plot at all. Any kind of fiction in the traditional sense would have had to be fabricated by Mrs. Wilkey and even then I couldn’t imagine her telling some such epic of a man, let’s say, who loses his watch and must find this Watchmaker or other such unfounded nonsense. I quickly looked over the bookshelves in the living room for a novel I could distract Billy with, or maybe a picture book from his youth. I found nothing but the texts from the A.C.E. I brought the Paley book into Billy’s room.

“Okay,” I said. “The Watchmaker.” I took out my reading glasses and began to read.

“Chapter I. State of The Argument. In crossing a heath, suppose I—” I broke off for a moment. I was mildly disturbed by the prospect of posing this “argument” as a story. I had never 16

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read a story that began with a chapter that so bluntly confessed itself to be an argument. Also, it was in the first person, and this felt belligerent to me—I have no recollection of ever crossing a heath, and I certainly wouldn’t expect to come to any theological conclusions if I ever did, so please don’t impose your suppositions, Mr. Paley.

I decided to tell the story from the third person.

“In crossing a heath,” I began again, “one particular man pitched his foot against a stone.”

I glanced at Billy. His lemur eyes shone the way cats’ and does’ do in the night, glazed with fear.

I assumed he noticed my allegorical alterations.

He did not, however, protest. I continued, making more little alterations here and there where I deemed fit. “When wondering how the stone came to be there, the man decided that it had been there forever. However, in his next stride the man discovered upon the ground a watch.

When pondering to himself the origins of this mechanism, he did not conclude that the watch had always been there, as the stone had. Instead, he decided that its parts were put together for a purpose. This purpose and the mechanism had both been designed by a maker. The man decided that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer who formed it for some such purpose the man observed it to have. There was a maker who comprehended its construction and designed its use.”

Billy was now staring at the clock on his wall, rapt in awe. He was not blinking. Water pellets gathered at the bottoms of his lids and spilled over down his cheeks and still he did not blink. I was all a sudden saddened by this show of reverence. I felt a sudden that I was playing a part, performing a ruse that I did not want to take credit for any longer. I was overcome with a sense of loneliness not for myself but something inside—a loneliness of emotion, in the sense that awe seemed to be the sole emotion Billy carried with him. I did not detect delight on his face, nor mischief, nor any of the more critical shades. I don’t think Billy had ever heard a fiction. He had heard the stories of the Bible, but he was such an honest boy…if I told him my flesh were green he would see it.

“In crossing the heath, a young boy came across the same mechanism,” I said. I lowered my

eyes to the page as if I were reading it there. This was more difficult than you might expect as there were words there to confuse me. I felt Billy shift in my vision’s periphery. These alterations, he could probably tell, would be a good deal more fitting for him personally. Firstly, a bedtime story should always have a character one’s own age so you can slip in. This facilitates the dream state. Secondly, a bedtime story should never be an “argument,” which bears images of conflict and war that are upsetting enough in the light of day. “’What is this?’ The boy wondered to himself.

He picked it up and put the chain around his neck. As he walked away, his trousers began to slip, for he had been crossing that heath for quite some time with little nourishment. ‘Ah-ha!’ he said, in a moment of solitary ingenuity. He took the mechanism from around his neck and looped the chain as a belt. ‘Ah,’ he sighed, in a moment of self-satisfaction with his clever ingenuity. He opened up the watch. Behind the transparent face, he could see wheels turning, teeth gnashing, springs coiling, and weights balancing to move the pointers on the face or some such.

“I know what this is,’ the boy said gravely to himself. “A dirt counter. Counter,’ he addressed it, ‘how many dirts, would you estimate, are on this heath?’ He looked at the face of the mechanism and saw the big pointer on the ten, the littler on the two. ‘I thought as much,’ he said. ‘Twelve dirts.’ And he continued on his way, crossing the heath. The end.”

I closed the book and put it on the bedside table with a giddy flourish. I was quite pleased with my story, which remember had come to me all in one moment. Billy was no longer looking at the clock. He was now staring rather curiously and suspiciously at me.

“Was that the real Watchmaker story?” He asked.

“No. That was another version of the story.”

“Is that the version that your mom told you?”

“Yes,” I said, though I was tempted to blurt that I had made it all up spontaneously by myself.

“That is what my parents told me, when I was a girl. Do you like it?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. You can tell it to Mom next time she

tells you her version. Or you can tell that version to your kids, if you want.”

“Do I have to tell that version?”

“No. But if you liked it, you should tell it.”

“I liked the boy...but if I were the boy, I’d know it wasn’t a dirt counter.”

“Even if you had never been exposed to Time before? Think about that.”

“Yeah, I thought about that. I’d think it was a compass or something.”

“Fine. That can be your version. ‘The boy crosses a heath, finds a mechanism, calls it a compass.’ There. ‘The end. Everybody goes to sleep.’”

“Yes. The watch is a compass,” Billy said sleepily. I said goodnight. I took the book and flicked off the light and left his room. I put the book back exactly in its former place on the shelf, yet still panicked that Mrs. Wilkey would find out I had used it to tell figments. I felt as if I had stolen her milk and replaced it with paint.

This, I knew, was illogical and grotesque. I told myself my next bedtime story to Billy would be Alice In Wonderland, which was my favorite in 5th grade. And if Mrs. Wilkey found out about our little nighttime reading sessions, so be it. I am an educator.

The Wilkeys came back at around 11 pm.

Before Mrs. Wilkey even had a chance to ask me how the night went I told her firmly and politely that I could not work there anymore. Not as a baby-sitter, not as a tutor, not as anything. I told her it had nothing to do with Billy or her or her husband.

“Then what?” she asked. I told her it was because my father was very sick.

“Osteoarthritis,” I said, because I knew a bit about it having researched it one day after feeling a suspicious and unprecedented amount of hip pain.

SPRING 2009

17

Running Amok brittany benjamin

On a trip into town where he hoped to fix his shoe, Mr. Henry David Thoreau was arrested. He explained the situation; while on hiatus on Walden Pond, he had escaped various men’s attempts to “constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society,” did not pay his taxes, and in so doing, he had not “recognized the authority of the state.”

Unwilling to pay a fine, Thoreau accepted jail. His response was complacent and calm: “It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run ‘amok’ against society; but I preferred that society should run ‘amok’ against me, it being the desperate party.” And so, to jail he went—but only for a night. Emerson and Thoreau’s family settled his debt, and thus, the next morning, he “obtained his mended shoe, and returned to the woods” perfectly in time for a dinner of huckleberries.

But Thoreau’s civic martyrdom, the root of his essay “Civil Disobedience,” does not typify running “amok.” According to the definition of the phrase, it is the individual and not society who typically acts out. A Malaysian term that entered the English vernacular when western explorers descended on the area, “amok” describes a person who bolts through the streets on a frenzied rampage, “attacking with desperate resolution, rushing in a state of frenzy to the commission of indiscriminate murder.” After killing family members and strangers alike, the runner often claims a state of exhausted amnesia— ostensibly shocked at his own behavior. Western anthropologist John Carr asserts that in the 19th century, the frequency of these events was such that some Southeast Asian villages even took precautions. They armed themselves with publicly-accessible lance-like weapons.

Yet despite these precautions against the admittedly monstrous behavior of an amok individual, there existed a sort of awe for him, as well. The very word “amok” was first derived from the battle cry of the medieval Malaysian warrior, a socially-exalted figure, and the public often even viewed “amok” runners as political figures, critical voices in a despotic social milieu. As Carr explains, even political leaders took the behavior seriously; they had no choice. No ruler could ignore the amok’s ability to disrupt social order, to display political disgust. Admittedly extreme, running amok was the “ultimate veto”—one each and every Malay possessed.

Cyborg scholar Donna Haraway can perhaps help explain this social role. Haraway identifies what the Oxford English Dictionary confirms: the words “monster” and “demonstrate” share a telling etymological root. Associated with the Latin root “monere”— to warn, advise, indicate, etc.— Haraway continues: “Monsters signify.”

Signify what? Here Thoreau and Carr share a similar thought: running “amok” — a monstrous demonstration of despair.

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Made of Vice Mark Chiusano

In 1639 an Englishman known to history only as R. Willis writes an account of a morality play that he saw seventy years before. At this time morality plays are widely popular and simply constructed, portraying not flesh and blood characters but Characteristics: Willis and his contemporaries watch spellbound as Mankind, World and Youth wander a stage hindered by Vice, All-For-Money, Riot. This is Christian country—it is clear who wins in the end. But for a short time the audience is allowed to cast off its strict morals. Riot is funny, Vice is captivating. They drag their innocent charges into taverns for drink, brothels for pleasure. The attraction of evil and its comic buffoonery is exploited, allowed.

Around 1584, not long after Willis saw The Cradle of Security, William Shakespeare writes Titus Andronicus. The groundlings love it. Critics deride it. It is too bloody— outrageously so—exhibiting rape, cannibalism and madness. The most excessive violence is coordinated by Aaron the Moor, messenger and clown. He seems simply enamored of chaos, and sports a perverse sense of humor that he tosses about along with ferocious intensity. In the end he is buried alive by his detractors. But living, he is methodical in villainous planning, chaotic in his use of nonsensical force.

Watching The Dark Knight in 2008, the Joker is the focus. In truth he always has been, even in the comic books: Batman relied on force, stealth and the good old one-two, the Joker is an artist, meditatively calculating. Laughing his way through the colored pages, he deploys miniature circuses, exploding footballs, overflowing canals, mist emitting coffee mugs. Just as Aaron discloses his evil plans to the audience, we catch glimpses of the Joker’s clockwork mind ticking in museum basements, and next to tower windows, as he explains his next act.

Motive is irrelevant, madness underlies method, put your head to this gun and flip your coin to see if you live. Introduce a little anarchy.

In the end the Joker isn’t buried. He doesn’t awkwardly disappear in the face of Virtue like Willis’ specters did. In the movie we last see him swinging wonderfully from his feet, hair flying, makeup laughing. The cops are coming to take him in. It seems that the Joker, force of anti-virtue and cold violence, has laughed his last.

But perhaps that’s not what audiences want to see: the Joker’s demise is not what interests us in Batman. Like Aaron and the Vices, who drive their dusty plays, promising relevancy, the Joker is brought back and back again by reader demand. In the history of comic books, he is the first character ever to be un-killed.

SPRING 2009

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The Gulag Sohin Hwang 2D-Barcode, mobile phones with freeware barcode reader installed, website, various prints, t-shirts, balloons Video Documentation (1)1:24, (2)1:36 20

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

Large balloons with two-dimensional bar codes are installed in multiple locations in Cambridge, MA. Passers-by can take a picture of the floating bar codes using their mobile phone application which reveals the information about a location of a detention center or a public execution site in North Korea and the distance to the site. By bringing the locations typically perceived far and remote into our urban environment by means of spatially embedded hyperlinks, mobile network and computer vision, this project attempts to challenge our perception of distance and relevance.

SPRING 2009

21

Lost Things Spencer Strub

Shauna left the apartment in her flip-flops and without a sweatshirt. It was Brian’s fault.

“Come on, come on,” he said, a rolled magazine stuck in his hand like he was aiming to swat a bad cat. She cried out but he just shook his head and advanced. He never raised his voice but just walked across the room, his chin stuck to his right shoulder as he went, one eye on her and one looking behind him like a chameleon.

He only stopped when they were out the door.

He turned and looked back inside the apartment with his whole face once and then closed the door behind him.

The fog was in, thick but high. The sky looked like crumpled wax paper. Shauna was cold and pissed. She could feel herself losing control of her hands, a sudden petulant anger seizing them. She threw them towards his chest and pushed. “What the fuck? Why are you kicking me out of the house? Does Dad know what you’re doing?”

He brushed her arms away. “He’s sick again.

It’s better if you’re not around.”

“What do you mean, sick? He was fine an hour ago. Goddamn it, I was watching TV in there.”

“He’s sick. Sorry to kick you out.” Her brother apologized too much. He would dramatically roll his eyes down to the floor and rub his hands on his thighs so it looked sincere. It was his way of getting out of things, she thought.

“What the hell am I going to do?”

“Go down to the harbor for a little while.”

“I’m freezing already. Fuck. It’ll be cold as hell down there. Are you coming with me?”

“I’m going to stay here for a minute. Go down to the harbor, to the part where the tourists are. I’ll come and get you.”

“How long is this going to be? I don’t want to 22

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be sitting and freezing and smelling fried fish for the rest of the afternoon. I’m not staying out until mom gets home.”

“I don’t know how long it’s going to be. I don’t know.”

“Oh, just fuck off.”

Shauna was not going to obey her brother. So far as she knew, when puberty had arrived a few years earlier, it hardly changed his body – his upper lip sprouted a sickly little thing he detested, and he turned leaner in spite of starting plenty skinny – but it had made him an insufferable prick. At some point after the bank ate up her dad’s boat and the old man stopped parenting, Brian volunteered for the newly open role of paterfamilias and took to it with tyrannical gusto. His comfort with telling her what to do was remarkable. They were only three years apart, but he carried himself with an authoritative air, yelling at her for spending too much time outside, yelling at her for spending too much time with a boy, yelling at her for not doing her homework. He had the balls to dress her down in line at Safeway for reading gossip magazines rather than helping him unload the cart. He was worse than a parent.

She’d be fighting it until one or the other of them moved out. In the meantime, he’d keep on ordering her around, and, on occasion, driving her off the couch into the street, because her dad was sick. Like she couldn’t be in the house when he was sick.

She didn’t know and didn’t want to know what was going on with her dad or her brother anymore. Shauna just wanted to sit on the couch and ignore everyone. In that apartment, afternoon TV was the best part of most days.

Shauna didn’t go straight down the harbor.

Instead, she went out back to the dumpsters. It was pretty much the only place in the whole of the Seaside Meadows that couldn’t be seen from the road, the parking lot, or one of the windows in the apartment complex.

The dumpsters stank like something dead. The loud family in 24 had dumped the leftovers of their Sunday-evening santería in black garbage bags bound with twine, and they were putrifying in the trash. The stink filled her nostrils and tickled the back of her tongue, the hot water in her throat rising up to meet it.

She pulled a crumpled cigarette out of a ziploc bag in her pocket, licked her lower lip, and let the cigarette stick to it. It tasted like a gym locker. She had been stealing a cigarette a week from her mom’s purse for more than a year, since she turned twelve, and tried to smoke only once every two weeks in order to maintain a constant surplus. Her stash was stored under the soles of four running shoes, for lack of a better hiding place. As always, she burned her thumb when she lit the cigarette.

She held the smoke behind pursed lips. Her joints loosened and her capillaries tingled. She thought she might disappear for a while.

He had always used his solemn authority to humiliate her. When they were younger, which wasn’t actually so long ago, he casually mocked her, exploiting his slightly greater awareness of the world to keep her down. Her understanding of the world was conditioned by his lies: she had once honestly believed that sweet pickles were some sort of cooked worm, that midgets had their own religion, that there was a realm of swear words that she couldn’t hear because her ears weren’t old enough. The seaweed on the beach was still whale guts to her. Up at Clear Lake with her country cousins, he presented her with a cattail he had broken off down by the lakeside and told her it was a corn dog. She chased after him, a tree branch in her hand and downy fluff on her lips, but he was faster and bigger.

But then at least he had smiled when he manipulated her. Now he looked tired, which was all the more aggravating.

Back when she still talked to Tyler Campbell, he took her up into the hills that rose abruptly behind the town. They sat in the dirt and looked at the ocean and he put his hand under her bra. The wandering hand was no surprise – she had encountered it behind the utility shed at Cunha, and in a cypress grove at Poplar Beach, and in the back row of the shitty theatre with the pockmarked walls in Pacifica – but she was pleased by the privacy of the path he showed her. The hills behind town were treeless and scrubby, and sometimes from the passenger’s seat of her mom’s car driving in from the south she thought they looked like turds dropped on the horizon. From the summit she couldn’t see the Seaside Meadows but could see the breakers rolling in towards the parking lot on two sides, so she thought the view was good enough. She liked being alone more than her friends, who seemed to think thirteen-year-old girls could only exist in packs. Being alone up in the hills would make her feel better.

She left the Meadows through a hole in the back fence, coming out into the parking lot of the adjacent apartment complex. She walked fast to warm up and to avoid being seen. She tinkered with the lighter in her pocket as she went.

There was an indentation in the hills at the top of the first ridge, a gentle depression, flanked by pampas grass. A rotted old car had been left there years ago and an alkaline pool spread out around it, staining the cracked clay white. Some kids built bike jumps out of mounds of dirt and planks stolen from some fence somewhere. Shauna probably knew whoever it was, and she wondered whether they were BMX idiots or dirt-biking rednecks.

Less than twenty minutes had passed. She figured that Brian probably wouldn’t even go down to the harbor. He’d just wait for her to get cold. The last time he kicked her out, she waited for an hour. When she came back, he was sitting on the lip of the sink. He cradled the phone to his ear and was making plans with a girl. She hung up the phone and he yelled at her, but she laughed back at him, and he couldn’t do anything.

There were three paths away from the clearing: the one she had come by; one running parallel to

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the coast down into the brussel sprout fields to the north; and another heading further into the hills.

She took the last path, moving her feet carefully as she proceeded down the first ridge. As she traveled up the first ridge, she stopped seeing the scattered Coors cans and bags of trash that dotted the trails at the base of the hill.

In the low trough between the hills, she lost the bleating dial-tone of the foghorn. The steady cold wind off of the ocean rode too high here for her to feel it, and an unnatural warm stillness settled over her. The salt was much milder on the air, replaced by mud and the tang of the plants around her. She smelled pine and molasses coming up from the thickets that hemmed the path. She was not sure how far she had traveled, or how long. She didn’t think much of her brother.

Shauna’s mom had tried to let her in on what was going on, once. Or so she thought. A little while after Brian kicked her out of the house for the first time, she dragged Shauna across the hill on the pretense of holiday shopping. Shauna knew this was a lie before they even left. When they arrived at the mall, her mom sat silently in the car, her big scarred hands draped on the wheel and her eyes on Shauna. “I know times are hard right now,” she began, her voice taking a step up with each word.

“I know too.”

Times were hard. Their apartment was a heatless leaking wreck, they ate almost no red meat, they had no cable, and her dad was in a funk. He had never been chatty, but now he almost never spoke, smiling distantly at her when they were in the room together, occasionally letting fly a non sequitur when the conversation could least afford it. She hated him, but it was a lazy sort of hate.

She resented him for the vacuum he had become, but he was also helpless and pointless and hardly worth the trouble. Besides, she could remember how he took her on the boat, again and again, throughout her childhood, laboriously showing her how the crab traps worked as he pretended to sink them into the harbor. Nobody put that kind of time into her anymore.

Shauna’s mom faltered after her introduction, started swallowing her words. She never came 24

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down to a point. Shauna could tell that she was stepping around whatever was actually going on, but she was a little bit relieved by that. Ultimately, her mom arrived at a cliché. “We just have to stick together as a family,” she said, her voice faltering but her eyes steady. As though Shauna had a choice. She was pretty much stuck.

The second ridge was higher, steeper, and further than she had expected. Her calves and thighs strained as she pushed up it. The path was bad, all deep mud soaked by a year-round spring somewhere nearby, and she kept slipping as she clambered up. A second, better path diverged from it. She took that path for at least fifteen minutes, until she came to another ridgeline. She could no longer see the ocean.

The path made a cross, four trails diverging.

Shauna was tired and hungry and cold, even in the warm protected air. She took the direction she thought might bring her back home. She walked down the hill on unsteady feet, even as the trail narrowed down to a slender line between the hedges. As she walked, a small rivulet appeared beside the path, and then overtook it, until black water was up around her ankles and mud and silt was between her toes. Dismayed, she turned back.

But that just made things worse. Shauna grew increasingly unsure of where she was. She hadn’t noticed on the way out that the trail split into indistinguishable little deerpaths three or four times. The scrub was deeper and thicker than she remembered, and as she pushed forward a web of branches reached across her, running thin pink lines across her exposed face and arms. Her shirt and pants became mussed with the fragrant glue from the lower leaves of coyote bush, and her feet had turned black from the mud, and the light was failing.

She was lost. She started thinking of Brian again. He had put her out here.

Fuck Brian. Fuck me.

In some ways, the death of the old life was a blessing. Her father’s trips to work always marked the onset of gnawing anxiety for the whole family, never openly acknowledged but felt by everyone.

Shauna had seen her dad put on his suit for funerals up and down the coast, went to a few herself once she was old enough, and even in grade school she knew a bad storm or a mistake on deck was a possibility. That anxiety, at least, was forever gone.

And his new solitude spared her the torment of his friends. All the fishermen were briny and tatty, the small ones never slender, but scrawny; the big ones never brawny, but fat, and all of them embarrassing company. In the summer after her sixth grade, the last summer in the cottage, pungent Jack Flores became a near permanent resident. His career and ability to make rent payments ended one season and six months earlier, respectively, than her dad’s, and he charmed his way into a place on the living-room sofa. Whenever he arrived unannounced in their living room, returning empty-handed from some errant job search, Jack Flores would gather up both Shauna and Brian, one under each arm, and press their faces to his unwashed sweatshirt, laughing the whole time. They were both too old for this kind of treatment. It was embarrassing and disturbing. Shauna could take certain things from family, but not from strangers, and a bear hug from a stinking old man was one of those things. She and her brother spent most of that summer outside the house or closed in their room, leaving Jack Flores to the company of her father.

There was no room for Jack Flores at the Meadows. So sometimes, when she put her mind to it, what had happened over the past few years could seem like a blessing. But most of the time, she missed what was gone.

She could tell that she wasn’t walking on the same path she had been earlier. It fell away at a broken tree, descending straight down the hillside.

She tripped on a root and let her feet slide. She tried to slow herself with her hands thrown out, grasping at serrated blades of elephant grass, riding on her heels as she stumbled forward, but she lost control and ended up bouncing twice on her back before landing in something with thorns. She felt crucified and stupid, and she knew at least one of those feelings was just melodrama.

She picked herself out of the bush and lit another cigarette.

*** When he was done, Brian’s father curled up on the bed. Brian pulled the stained comforter up over him and perched on the edge of the bed, waiting for him to fall asleep. Then he left to find his sister.

Since his dad had lost it, Shauna seemed to have gone sour. She was angrier and more resistant, bold enough to push him when he needed her out of the house. Brian figured that was what being a teenager was like; he felt a vague guilt at having squandered his teenage years, having been acquiescent and quiet rather than rebellious.

The people he went to class with drank, smoked, popped pills, broke into places, were picked up from the youth authority at five A.M. by angry parents. He was only sixteen, he still had two good years to go, but he felt he had been pressed by circumstance to be mature. He knew he’d never act out the way Shauna did. She, on the other hand, was just beginning, and in fine form. He wished her resistance wasn’t always enacted on him, though. His mom was too exhausted and his dad too broken to rebel against, though.

Unlike Shauna, whose memory seemed very short and whose mind seemed very malleable, Brian didn’t have trouble remembering what his dad had been like before. He was never the hero fighting against the sea – he had always been wiry and twitchy, the twitching only slightly mellowed by the packed pipe he kept nearby when he wasn’t at sea. All but the most old-timey of the crabbers would arrive home stoned, passing a joint around the dock and trading crabs for decent bud. They carried some of this mellow with them, but his dad always carried a little bit too much nervous moral force to carry the mellow beyond the dock. The ones who didn’t commute in from over the hill or further lived their poverty in cheery disarray, their bungalows decorated by abalone shells and halfdrunk cans of beer. Brian’s memory worked best with smells, and the other crabbers lived in stale bachelor stink. Their cottage had always been the cleanest and the best organized, testament to the presence of his mom but also to the diligence of his dad. After coming back from the traps, rather than drinking with the crew of his boat he would come

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home and clean, each successful voyage marked by a tidy house. It was ritual behavior. Once the ship stopped going out, he abandoned the ritual.

The apartment at the Meadows was hardly worth cleaning, anyway.

She wasn’t at the harbor. It took him half an hour to confirm this. He checked the small rocky beach, the lobbies of the fancy hotel and the parking lots of the motels, the Chinese restaurant and convenience store on the town side of the highway. He walked down among the boats, watching the breakwater between the masts, seeing no one out against the surf or on any of the other floating piers. He sat for a moment, watching the bright bulbs of the squid boats queue up out in the bay past the breakwater.

In the growing dark, they looked like a string of Christmas lights. Then he returned to the search.

He cut into the seafood restaurants across from the harbor one by one, dodging the hostesses to eye the waiting areas. Most were empty. She probably wasn’t in a seafood restaurant, anyway. When their father lost his boat, the family stopped eating seafood. It enraged him – not just crab, but clams,

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rockfish, salmon, herring, anything. He stayed far away from the harbor, but even if they bought it from Safeway, he knew where it came from, from Dennis Sturgell and the rest of the Oregon boats, poaching the Farallone waters where they didn’t belong, and he let the rest of the family know at volume. Now none of them ate seafood.

He was left with almost nowhere to go. She was not at the harbor.

Brian catalogued the possibilities in his head.

She most likely had disobeyed him, had gone somewhere else, to a friend’s house or downtown somehow, or she was just hiding in a corner of the Meadows. The alternatives were endless. If she were dead, nobody would know to call the house.

She probably had no identification on her. If she was wounded in such a way that she couldn’t talk, the same applied. Or if she had been kidnapped, or crushed, or trapped, or washed out to sea. These were the things he thought of as he walked back to the apartment.

This would make sense, he thought. Another thing lost.

They had weathered two and then three bad seasons well enough, cutting out red meat and expensive Christmas gifts. Brian didn’t mind the first one. It was an El Niño year, and the storms and the swells that followed them kept their father home for most of the crab season, which Brian and Shauna loved. But the subsequent years, when the pots came back empty, he started to go weird and Brian started to feel nervous around him.

Then the bank took the boat and they moved to the Meadows and his mom’s hours got longer and longer and his dad got bottled up in the apartment and started to pickle.

It happened in a similar way each time. His dad would come bursting out of the bedroom after a day or at least a few hours spent locked in it, sobbing and lurching.

The first time his dad was sick, he broke the living room window. His mom hung a sheet where it had been. The next day a man from the owner’s came by and told her she had to fix it within two weeks or lose the security deposit and they would be evicted if it kept happening. They would lose the security deposit anyway, because the landlords would find something that hadn’t been on the original report. The family didn’t agree on much anymore, but it was a common article of faith that everybody was looking to cheat them out of the rest of their money. They even let Shauna know.

The second time his dad was sick, he knocked Brian to the floor, mostly unwittingly. Brian hit his head on the cabinet and had trouble standing back up. His dad sat next to him and cried. When Brian was able to get up, his dad still sat there, his whole self nodding back and forth like a holy man. When Brian’s mom came home from work, she considered making his dad leave forever. She asked Brian what he thought. He told her it was just an accident and that he didn’t think it would happen again. She was not entirely satisfied, and for two months changed her schedule so that she could keep them from being alone in the house with their father, especially Shauna, who they had kept mostly in the dark. But they fell behind on the rent and Brian’s dad behaved well, so she let herself forget.

He didn’t even know where to start to look for his sister.

“Brian, what did you say?”

“I can’t find Shauna.”

“What do you mean?”

“I asked her to leave when dad was having trouble. I asked her to wait down by the harbor. I didn’t find her when I went down there.”

“Where’s your father?”

“He’s asleep. I don’t want to wake him up.”

“Okay. She’s probably with her friends somewhere. Doing something.”

“I know, Mom. But she might not be –” “I’m sure she’s fine. I can’t talk anymore right now. I’ll deal with this when I get home.”

He wrote a note on the back of a bill and taped it to the front of the television. Shauna.

Went out looking for you. Be home soon. She still wasn’t at the harbor when he checked, nor was she anywhere around the Meadows. It was dark.

She was still gone. He sat on the curb outside the Meadows and held his head in his hands, thinking of how on top of it all he had managed to lose his sister. *** This is a good memory.

Shauna was eleven, Brian fourteen, before the boat went away and they moved into the Seaside Meadows. They retrieved their bikes from the leanto behind the house and rode out on the broken gravel of the driveway, down Monte Vista to Main Street. They rode on the sidewalk and were cursed at by a young man in a Chivas jersey. Old Portuguese men were sitting outside the I.D.E.S. Hall in the weak sun, watching their daughters hang banners for the Holy Ghost festival. They stopped at the old vending machine behind the feed store and bought orange sodas with dimes, sitting on the hay bales as they drank and watching the owners’ granddaughter smoke and chat with Jeff Guerra when she should have been working the register. They dropped down to Highway One and then across it, letting a jaywalker pushing a baby stroller guide them across. Then down to the coastal trail, bouncing up the coast, watching surfers ground down under the big swells. They headed south, down through the cedars until they

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had fields on their left and the ocean on their right.

They had to cut back up to the highway; it made Brian nervous to bike there, but the only people on the road were ladies carrying groceries and a CHP cruiser driving slowly on the northbound shoulder. Somehow Brian knew where to go, taking Shauna right off One onto a white gravel road. It was marked with a sign that read “Beware Trucks Entering Roadway.” They stopped at a grandiose stone gate, with “Ocean Glen” written over the top in wrought iron, a pastiche of the old ranch signs that you could still see from the highway. The gate had no fence connected to it, so they walked around it, carrying their bikes over the gopher-pocked field. They left their bikes in a ditch when they came to the point where the land fell away, climbing down the precipitious bluffs with both hands grasping the crumbling sandstone walls. When they arrived on the beach, he led her down to the water. The normal jagged rocks lay a hundred yards offshore, and the swells broke on the reef instead of the beach. In front of them there lay a protected lagoon. They waded in, the water warm because it was an El Niño year.

Shauna sat in the water and let it rise up around her shoulders.

“How did you find this place?”

“I don’t know.” *** Shauna passed through the widest hole in the fence with uncharacteristic grace. Hemmed in by thorny scrub, the trail thoroughly lost, she had no choice but to cross through the wire into the field on the other side. She went through slowly and cautiously, one bending limb at a time. She couldn’t help feeling more clever than the deer or coyotes the wire was meant to keep out. The flip-flop on her trailing foot stuck on the wire, but it fell on the right side of the fence. She took that as a good omen.

She walked along the fence on the margins of the fields. It was the right enough direction, as long as the wire was on her left. Keeping to the fence, she looked out across the expanse of corrugated earth, scanning for anyone who might hassle her about trespassing. It was hard for her to make anything out by reflected orange glow of 28

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the town’s lights, but this meant nobody could see her either.

She favored her right side as she went, a long sharp feeling having come to rest in the left leg following her long slide down the hill. It really hurt.

The murmur of sea and highway came to her, and she started walking faster. She wondered where her brother was.

When Brian saw her, he was looking in the gutters by the road, operating now on a bleak and amorphous hunch. She wasn’t in the gutter. She was walking, a few blocks up from him, and he could tell that she had seen him before he had seen her. He watched her as she walked up the street with an exaggerated limp. Her clothes were dirty and it looked like she might have been crying, but he doubted it. He stood and approached her.

When they met, Shauna looked at him and he looked back.

“How’s Dad?” He could hear in her voice the same aggrieved anger that she had displayed when he kicked her out, but it was quieter, and there was something else there that he couldn’t make out.

He didn’t answer, but nodded and smiled.

After a moment, he spoke. “Let’s go back to the Meadows.”

“Okay.”

They walked back to the apartment together, her head barely above his shoulder. Her arm brushed his.

Pinhole of Light: John Updike’s Philosophy of the Self Jessica Sequeira

In his senior year at Harvard, John Updike took a seminar with the poet Edwin Honig, in which he fell in love with the poetry of Wallace Stevens.

Reading all of Harmonium and Stevens’s Selected Poems, he threw himself into his first paper with great gusto. It was with less enthusiasm that he received his grade: a gentleman’s C+. “Honig said I tried to cover too much,” wrote Updike. “Better from narrow to broad than from broad to narrow, was the life-lesson this comedian as the letter C taught me.”

This lesson would prove lasting. With Updike’s passing in January, the literary world has seized upon the gemlike aspect of his work, his vivid and precise descriptions of specific moments that bloom like wildflowers into meditations on American life. “He took the novel onto another plane of intimacy: he took us beyond the bedroom and into the bathroom,” wrote Martin

Amis in The Guardian. Updike was, to many, a master seismologist, tracing the fine cracks in the surface of the social, revealing the tremors behind the white house and picket fence. “Religion, sex, science, urban decay, small-town life, the life of the heart, the betrayals—who can follow him?” asked Ian McEwan.

In the foothills of this intellectual Olympus, however, resided a number of slightly less enamored gods. Gore Vidal’s complaint that Updike “describes to no purpose” reflected the sentiment of many critics who saw no grander project in Updike’s minutely focused details. He was, wrote James Wood, “a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough.” The most damning praise of all came from David Foster Wallace, who once claimed that “no U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better than John

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Updike, whose rise in the 60’s and 70’s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.” Wallace hit on something profound about his subject, though his charge was meant as a criticism. Updike may indeed have been “selfabsorbed”—to him, subjectivity dominated through “secret channels,” and outer reality and the universe had a personal structure. But he was also deeply concerned with the social. By digging deeply inward and knowing himself, Updike genuinely believed that he would be better able to understand, in a metaphysical sense, those around him as well. There is, then, no contradiction between Updike’s acclaim as a genius of social description and the accusations leveled against him of solipsism. In an essay on Walt Whitman, he called it “egotheism”—the idea that “billions of consciousnesses silt history full, and every one of them the center of the universe.” ***

One April evening in 1980, Updike found himself standing alone in Shillington, Pennsylvania, the town where he had grown up, with nothing but the clothes on his back. He had come down from Boston to visit his mother, but the airport had failed to send along his luggage with his flight. So while he waited for a girl from Allentown to come down with his two bags, he decided to kill time by taking a stroll through the streets. Passing Henry’s Variety Store, Artie Hoyer’s barber shop, Grace Lutheran Church, the local elementary school, and other landmarks of his youth—some replaced, some still standing—sent him spiraling back into the past and into himself, in a curious mixture of philosophy and memory: “Dasein. The first mystery that confronts us is ‘Why me?’ The next is ‘Why here?’ Shillington was my here.” He writes: Toward the end of Philadelphia Avenue, beside the park that surrounds the town hall, I turned and looked back up the straight sidewalk in the soft evening gloom… The pavement squares, the housefronts, the remaining trees receded in silence and shadow. I loved this plain street, where for thirteen years no great harm had been allowed to befall me. I loved Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one’s own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being… If there was a meaning to existence, I was closest to it here.

This incident is retold in Self-Consciousness, the autobiography Updike published in 1989, decorated in its paperback version with a mock sepia floral print and a picture of the author as a young man. It is in this book that he comes closest to a direct expression of his philosophy of self.

Though weighty in substance, SelfConsciousness is rare in Updike’s oeuvre in being physically slim. Indeed, approaching the body of his work can be a humbling experience. Updike wrote more than fifty books over the course of his long life, spanning from fiction to nonfiction to poetry; every decade or so, he would release another massive slab of collected work.

As the years went on, he himself recognized this tendency, commenting wryly on his penchant for self-documentation and slapping titles like More Matter on his books. He wrote about everything 30

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from psoriasis to masturbation to religious struggles to golf, not to mention hundreds of reviews for The New Yorker that lay bare his literary predilections in the form of incisive commentary.

Rarely, in short, has an inner self been so welldocumented in print; Updike was the Boswell to his own Dr. Johnson in a way few men have ever been. His obsessive compulsion to exhume his personal life was driven by a near manic faith that in cataloguing every aspect of his self, he would reveal cross-linkages and undetected truths. Nor did this stop at the meticulous archiving of his own work. Both his fiction and non-fiction bear everywhere the thumbprint of the personal; every piece is—to steal a phrase from one of his characters—“aerated by the sinuous channels of experience.” His few forays into magical realism and historical fiction were responsible for rare flops, like the strained rewrite of Tristan and Isolde in Brazil.

Updike’s determination to describe in exquisite detail what he knew best as a portal to greater truths—the lesson first learned in Honig’s poetry seminar—explains his reputation as a chronicler of the mundane eccentricities of middle America.

It also accounts for his ambivalence toward social theory, which he repeatedly referred to as a “game”—an “exercise in constellation-making,” “less a pragmatic servicing of reality than the execution of a fiendishly difficult, self-imposed intelligence test.” He ends a review of Levi-Strauss’ volume The Origin of Table Manners by writing: Levi-Strauss’s ‘science of the mythology’… functions like a clock, with its calibrated ratios, axes, symmetries, and interlockings. It is beautiful like a clock, and cool like a clock—a strangely elegant heirloom from the torture-prone, fearridden jungles and plains. Its orderly revolutions and transpositions have the inverted function of not marking but arresting time, and making a haven, for their passionate analyst, from the torsion and heat of the modern age.

For Updike, truth was instead “anecdotes, narrative, the snug opaque quotidian”; while respectful of the author’s mind, the cool razor’s edge of anthropological analysis seemed to him to be missing the hot, visceral complexity of life that only personal description could capture. It lacked,

in other words, the “essential ‘I’”—without this, one could perhaps analyze life but could never really know it.

The poetry in his summary of Levi-Strauss’s frequently dry, quasi-scientific prose, then, comes as a kind of revenge. So does the ironic title he lent the piece, A Feast of Reason—ironic because, for Updike, the fleeting satisfactions of reason could never be enough. *** Shillington—where Updike was raised—was a small suburban enclave outside of Reading, small enough for him to grow intimately acquainted with the buildings and people there, which he would later describe in books like The Poorhouse Fair. The overwhelming trait that drew together the community was its Protestantism; this was a place where family values were treated with reverence and the Lord’s Prayer was recited every day at school.

Disillusionment arrived in adolescence, as Updike came to recognize the hypocrisy of his town’s Christianity. “No one believed it, believed it really,” he wrote, “not its ministers, nor its pillars like my father and his father before him.”

He noted the pews empty in the cold winter light, the withered faces of those at daily masses, and the reluctant attendance of families on Sundays, motivated more by good citizenship than true devotion. Outward displays of faith came to seem a mirage, “as fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it.” And yet: “I decided I nevertheless would believe.”

Updike buttressed this resolution in college with Chesterton, Unamuno, and Emerson—all “literary” theologians, philosophizing through stories and vivid prose rather than strict rational argument. His own essays would eventually take a similar form, and indeed he hoped that they could serve as a spiritual anchor for modern university students, just as Unamuno had for him.

But his doubts never left him. During the year he spent at Oxford’s Ruskin Drawing School, after Harvard and before going to work at The New Yorker, he recalled the “gray moments, in which my spirit could scarcely breathe.” Staring “in dumb faith” at the dusty tomes of the collected

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Aquinas at Blackwell’s bookstore on Broad Street, he thought that “surely in all this volume of verbiage there lay the saving seed, the pinhole of light.” Such religious misgivings would always haunt him, permeating deeply into the lives of his fictional characters. The first sentence of a short story entitled “Varieties of Religious Experience,” published in The Atlantic in 2002, reads, “There is no God.” Updike could not stop believing in God, however, because for him God was not something external—rather, it was inside himself. “The need for our ‘I’ to have its ‘Thou,’ something other than ourselves yet sharing our subjectivity, something amplifying it indeed to the outer rim of creation, survives all embarrassments, all silence, all refusals on either side,” he wrote. Religion was something personal, with God an extension of his own being, “a dark sphere enclosing the pinpoint of our selves.” His conception of the self had truly struck deep, even into his theology.

Since belief was for him so dependent upon the activity of the self, it constantly had to be rewoven out of experience and wonder at the world. “Theology is not a provable accumulation,

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like science, nor is it a succession of enduring monuments, like art,” he put it in a review. “It must always unravel and be reknit.” *** Updike’s unceasing desire to know himself could make him a frustrating reviewer at times.

The best critics need a tinge of bloodlust, but because Updike always reserved the possibility that the other self knew something he didn’t—could at any moment pull some thin silvery strand of brilliance out of an artist’s hat—he was reluctant to strike the killing blow. One of his fundamental rules for literary criticism, as outlined in a 1975 New Yorker piece, was to “try to understand what the author wished to do, and [t]o not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.”

Judging books by the standards of the author in this way, rather than by those of the reviewer or some objective criteria, could result in more forgiving pieces—and duller ones.

Updike feared that on his grayest days, his reviews shaded into mere plot summaries, and indeed, in comparison to many of his modern counterparts, they can come off as clawless—a

kind of verbal grout to fill in the spaces between the quotations and biographical details that provide the bulk of his pieces. At the end of his life, perhaps wearied by criticisms of banality, his style packed an added punch: “Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue as to what is going on.”

Most of the time, though, he didn’t need any literary pyrotechnics. When he got it right, as he often did, the results could be astounding in their subtlety of observation and delicacy of prose. Updike’s criticism never contained forced description, as his fiction sometimes did. It was written in a quick, vigorous tone, full of startling insights and bold thought experiments. Of Nabokov’s lectures he wrote that they are “still redolent of the classroom odors that an authorial revision might have scoured away”: Nothing one has heard or read about them has quite foretold their striking, enveloping quality of pedagogic warmth… During [long] stretches of quotation we must imagine the accent, the infectious rumbling pleasure, the theatrical power of this lecturer who, now portly and balding, was once an athlete and a participant in the Russian tradition of flamboyant oral presentation.

Elsewhere, the intonation, the twinkle, the sneer, the excited pounce are present in the prose, a liquid speaking prose effortlessly bright and prone to purl into metaphor and pun: a dazzling demonstration, for those lucky Cornell students in the remote, clean-cut Fifties, of the irresistibly artistic sensibility.

Passages like this are sensuous, full-bodied; Updike took a clear pleasure in writing them. Like all critics, he was never quite comfortable with his own profession, retaining the “nagging unease” of living off the vivid imaginations of others. For him, writing criticism was to writing fiction and poetry “as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”

But he continued to write it, and his non-fiction came to make up the bulk of his work.

This comes as no surprise. To write a review is to filter a concentrated version of the world through the lens of one’s own mind, recording the resulting impressions. It is a process of making a

shared thing personal, in order to understand and explain it better for others. Updike spent his entire life—through all of his many modes of writing— doing just that. *** The best description of Updike, encapsulating both his personality and his Roman profile, comes from the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

It must have pleased him, for it is reprinted in his finest collection of non-fiction, Hugging the Shore: “Awkwardly shielding himself with his wing, Thirsting for secrets

and weary of secrets, gaunt as a stork,

on a house of his own books, anxiously stands Updike with his noble beak”

This, in the end, is what we are left with—the image of Updike, alive in the world yet at home with his books, burning always with the noble desire to know. One widely printed eulogy depicts him as an owlish student of literature, reading the “chastely severe, time-honored classics” in his college dorm room as he leaned back in his “wooden Harvard chair,” cigarette in hand. But Updike’s introspection was always in the service of something greater, a hope that by knowing himself he could know something of the rich and various world around him. One hopes that he would have said of his life what he said after his walk through the streets of Shillington: “I had expected to be told who I was, and why, and had not been entirely disappointed.”

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Jenny’s Vist Paul Whang Acrylic ink, silkscreen on fabric 52” x 42” Opposite: Jenny’s Visit (detail) 34

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CONTEST WINNER

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[Our bodies are full of veins and yet] Sharon Wang

Our bodies are full of veins and yet we do not ever notice. The trees that came in a shower of red as we too felt the ground pushing up against us are now thrusting out and up and still we are pumped down as something else in us pushes to be out. A flock of birds growing dark on a branch are knobs of the tree, but softer, and when they startle, all at once, is it because something has flown up in our ribs and cannot move any further.

The birds are always breaking and re-gathering. They land on the same tree again and again, and we cannot even stop looking. Before the warmth began to invade, I had already felt sleep being pushed out, the thick comfort of winter moving to make way for what, that peculiar terror that comes, when, having lived for years in a house not especially loved, someone wakes up to each of the vases gone, and finds herself instead in an orchard filled with crabapple trees. What’s worse is that the trees are beautiful.

How can anyone who passes by them, singing, ignore them, those leaves thrumming into green, arching for the red buried in lips and palms, the color they cannot have until they are dying, and when your back grows with a cut I put my mouth on it. You are only the flight of blood in migration again and again and when I touch you I cannot disappear.

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THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

It is not that we grow dimmer as night comes, but that colors converge, and only then do I know that there is nothing telling me who you are—not the sharp trees behind us, not the clearness of the bricks—with their colors, the way a boy passing by the river makes shadow animals with his hands and doesn’t even know where the light is coming from.

He moves his thumb to make the wolf bite, then one creature breaks into two and they are both dancing, and when the boy goes home it’s not that he doesn’t notice the light on the trees is suddenly thicker but that he’s thinking of how the sound of the river could help him pretend to be underwater if only he closed his eyes, and each of the lights taste like nothing you or I have ever tasted. If only the light could remember voices, remember music pearling across leaves and breaking in the center of a grove of trees with bark inches rougher than any grain of our flesh, would it be as if we were there and again there, would the boy singing with his hands as he crosses the river at night know that music could never bring her back, but it can make them cry, and something might remember us, the way the grooves in the branches of the tree must remember, over and again, the dip under the weight of birds.

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TOWARDS A MORE MOVING IMAGE: FETCHING. 1. Pick two or more subjects. They must have some relation to you, however tenuous.

2. Find them in a place as they normally are.

3. Set up a camera and microphone so both apparatuses will observe as much of your subjects as possible. Begin recording.

4. Explain to your subjects what you have done. Ask them to act as they would in that particular space, at that particular time.

5. Leave, after explaining that you will return. Do not tell your subjects how long you will be gone.

6. Stay gone for an amount of time that is long enough so your subjects will have forgotten the presence of the camera at least once. Use your own discretion to determine this duration.

7. Spend your time away doing something pleasant. Think about your subjects.

8. Return and thank your subjects. Ask them to remember what they are wearing. Ask if they are available to shoot again in exactly a week.

9. Stop recording and leave. This is RECORDING NO. 1.

PROCESSING I. 1. Transcribe everything that was spoken in your recording, including your explanation of the procedure at the beginning and end.

2. If certain words or sentences are impossible to hear perfectly, mark them as such in your transcription.

3. Your transcription should take the form of a film script. This is SCRIPT NO. 1.

4. Put your transcription aside for a period of time, during which you do not think about it. This period of time will vary from person to person, but must be less than a week.

5. When you are ready, reread your transcript, taking note of sentences phrases that pique your interest.

6. Collect all of your phrases and reread them, looking for patterns and similarities between them.

7. Rearrange the phrases into some sort of narrative.

8. Delete any phrases that no longer fit your particular narrative.

9. In your new script, whoever originally spoke a sentence must speak their new, recontextualized lines. This is SCRIPT NO. 2.

RETURNING. 1. Return to the same location a week after your first recording session. Be sure to wear the same clothes you wore the week before.

2. Set up the recording equipment in the same space. Ask your subjects to sit or stand near where they spent most of their time the week before.

3. Give each of your subjects a copy of SCRIPT NO. 1. Ask them not to look at it yet.

4. Begin recording.

5. Ask your subjects to read aloud their parts as written in the script. You should read your words from a week before, too, as they are transcribed.

6. Once everyone is finished reading aloud, stop recording.

This is RECORDING NO. 2.

7. Present your subjects with SCRIPT NO. 2.

8. Give your subjects time to memorize the script.

9. Direct your actors and shoot the material like a short work of fiction.

PROCESSING II. 1. Edit your footage from SCRIPT NO. 2 into a short video, RECORDING NO. 3.

2. Combine this with RECORDINGS NO. 1 and NO. 2 at your own discretion.

3. Lift a cohesive work out of all the material your encounters with the subjects have generated.

4. Do not record anything else. If you choose to write more, the words must come from SCRIPT NO. 1.

Towards a More Moving Image Isidore Bethel, Mary Potter, and Thompson Potter Three bodies, three Sony Mini-DV cassettes, Sony DSR-PD170 camcorder, Sennheiser microphone, Manfrotto tripod, Hollywood Legends 1000-piece John Wayne jigsaw puzzle, 79 Martin Street, 86 sheets of Staples 30% recycled copy paper, variable re-presentation materials Recording No. 1: 23:24, Recording No. 2: 21:09, Recording No. 3: 5:17; Script No. 1: 24 pages, Script No. 2: 4 pages

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Recording No. 1

Recording No. 2

Recording No. 3

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Born Naked Allison Keeley

Well girls will be boys and boys will be girls It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world…

- The Kinks Jacque’s Cabaret advertises its ten-dollar cover charge on a piece of printer paper, encased in a paper-protector, and fastened to one of its double metal black doors. The show starts in five minutes and the bouncer is busy checking an ID, taking his time with the license as an older man sitting near the door collects the money. The club actually consists of two bars, one in the left corner, a straight counter with five or six stools and a flatscreen playing the Celtic’s game. From there, the bar extends to the middle of the space and branches out into a rectangular station, a peninsula that acts as a divider between the long countertop and the cabaret in the back. Small round tables are scattered in front of a modest stage with a short runway, outlined by shimmering wallpaper and strings of Christmas lights. Looking around at the steadily filling seats on this Friday night, the bartender brags a bit about the club’s current prosperity. “You should see it on Saturdays,” he yells, leaning in a bit so his voice isn’t overpowered by the opening act of the show just visible past his right shoulder. Long layers of bleached blond hair bounce and swing as a performer in sequined drag belts out Destiny Child’s “Bootylicious.” *** Jacque’s Cabaret opened in 1938 and has evolved as an establishment in the seventy-one years since, always making itself a home for nightlife in Boston, but never transforming into a version of one of the many sports bars, wine bars, cocktail lounges, and dance clubs that might be 40

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considered mainstream destinations. Currently, the nightclub confidently advertises itself as “New England’s favorite place for female impersonation 7 nights a week!” Monday: Mizery Loves Company. Tuesday: Boyz Will Be Girlz. Wednesday: Jacques’ Angels. Thursday through Saturday: Miss-Leading Ladies. The week is occasionally rounded out by a Sunday “Night of Mizery.” The schedule makes it clear that drag at Jacque’s is not gender neutral, despite the fact that it challenges gender’s boundaries, male to female entertainers dominate the stage. Jacque’s didn’t become a drag club until the 1970s, but drag as a comedic medium—with a man thinly veiling himself in women’s clothes, lifting and lilting his voice to deliver a monologue, or belting out songs onstage—was established as far earlier.

What makes a man in a dress useful for comedy has not been based necessarily on sight alone, but on its combination of physical comedy, with its undertones of stripped masculinity, and overplayed femininity. Men have always had a type of monopoly on comedy (as they have had a monopoly on nearly everything) from the times of court clowns and jesters. The trend was not bucked by drag, but instead further established by it in the 20th century. Even, if not especially, acts that used a woman’s social position as comedic content, commenting on that position in the process, were performed by men: the use of drag for the dame role, a persona particularly popular in London in the early 20th century, didn’t just entertain through the frocks an actor wore, but through the parody of a frustrated, nagging middle-aged woman. The requirement that a man play the nagging housewife, dame role, in order to make the joke laughable, was a symptom of the overarching

patriarchal nature of society. Patriarchal practice both established men as more fit for the stage and hemmed women into social roles set out for them.

And the staged display of those roles was laughed at because, under it all, it was a male impersonating a female position, providing the audience with just enough distance to enjoy the persona rather than be forced to reflect on it too deeply.

At Jacque’s the “male as female” mechanism for comedy still remains the overwhelming operating tendency. However drag and its increased visibility also offers a new type of social commentary, one that is unavoidably tied to gendered sexuality, both as a way to change social norms and as something that must react and adapt to them.

As the bartender adeptly shuffles from one side of the bar to the other, he is eager to tell the story of Jacque’s long before he stepped behind the counter, when it was a gay bar in the 1950s and 60s.

In the 60s, Boston’s gay scene was beginning to emerge and the bar became a popular destination for the gay and lesbian community. According to the bartender, the decade’s shifting social scene was accompanied by a rise in the number of police raids on gay establishments. When the police were spotted cruising around the dimly lit corner in Boston’s theatre district, Jacque’s owners would flick the club’s lights on and off. Women would hurriedly find their way to tables with men, using temporary proximity to pass them off as straight, and momentarily avoiding any trouble.

In 2009, it would be hard to pair off according to the 50s premise of a couple at Jacque’s. Not only is the bending of gender roles flaunted as men dance onstage in tight glittering dresses, high platform heels, and the occasional neon feather boa, but on the other side of the bar, there is a bar scene that seems unconcerned, if not unimpressed, by the show across the way. In contrast to the yuppy brides-to-be and birthday parties at the cabaret in back, this bar near the front is mostly serving transsexuals and transvestites. Dressed in fishnet stockings, bra-popping tops, leather skirts, and six-inch talons, they are unfazed by the cabaret behind them as they play pool, sip drinks, flirt, or occasionally glance up at the basketball game.

The divide is acute and reinforced by the clear division of space. There appear to be two mani-

festations of drag in the nightclub – drag as entertainment and drag as identity. In the first, drag seeks visibility as a form of hyper, in-your-face entertainment onstage, a constant “APPLAUSE” sign alerting the audience when to sing, when to dance, when to laugh, and when to buy another drink, based on clear cues and signals. While some of the performers themselves are transsexuals, having undergone surgery or hormone therapies, the entertainment value is not based on how well they play women, but on how transparent their performance is—so over-the-top and exaggerated, that it is clear they are men in dresses.

Drag as identity, on the other hand, is not intended for an audience, and most importantly, not meant to exaggerate or parody one gender identity. Instead, when used as a form of identity, drag, better defined here as cross-dressing, is simply a way for individuals to outwardly represent themselves in their more intimate social interactions, performances of a certain kind, but ones that are meant to be subtle, even invisible.

Drag has had many faces since its first flirtations with the burgeoning café culture of the 1960s, through Leigh Bowery’s club scenes in the 1980s, and even beyond RuPaul Charles’ foray into talk show television in the 90s, constantly evolving along a spectrum of entertainment and identity.

Among the most visible type of drag persona, the drag queen, RuPaul is arguably the world’s most famous. She most recently became host of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality TV show that searches for “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” In an interview about the show, which has been green-lighted for its second season in 2010, RuPaul said that one of the most important aspects of drag is its ability to force people to acknowledge how constructed their self-identities are, reiterating her famous statement that “we’re born naked and the rest is drag.” The statement, although simple, is surprisingly pervasive. It maintains that from the very first pink or blue blanket, everyone is in one form of drag or another. And while it implies that drag artists are aware of this truth, it simultaneously acknowledges the artists’ own complicity in the dissimulation.

Yet such inspiration to self-reflect and deconstruct is nowhere to be found at Jacque’s, in either

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display of drag, at either bar. Drag onstage is a string of performances that seem to gloss over the fact that gender roles are being parodied. Instead, there is consistent laughter at any and all sexual innuendos – heterosexual or homosexual – and a constant flow of dance moves and sexual puns.

The culture of one cabaret might not be a good measuring stick for the entire evolution of drag since its first forays into better-known clubs and cabarets, but as Mizery steps on stage, she asks who there is unlucky enough to be a “Drag Virgin.” Only a spattering of a few anxious but eager hands pop up at the front tables of the cabaret.

The small number suggests that drag has been absorbed into culture, no longer merely commenting on it from a distance.

The increased visibility of drag, in mediums of entertainment from nightclubs to television, music, and film further shows drag’s status as a part of popular culture and entertainment. Drag no longer just appears in a few nightclubs in major cities, but has made its way into more widespread and popular mediums, by way of glam rock, cinema, and even reality television. By the American Film Institute’s ratings, two of the top five funniest movies ever produced by the year 2000 involve drag.

Some Like It Hot, released over half a century ago, in 1959 and Tootsie, released in 1982, each relies on drag to complicate relationships, get laughs, and offer a seamless fix for the romantic ills of its characters. In Some Like It Hot, Jerry (Jack Lemmon) disguises as Daphne and Joe (Tony Curtis) as Josephine in order to hide from a group of hit men who are after them. While on the run, they buddy up to Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) by posing as fellow “female” band members.

And in Tootsie, Michael (Dustin Hoffman) dons a matronly outfit, transforming himself into Dorothy in order to salvage “his” male persona’s acting career. The films rely on an outside force to put their main characters into drag. But the comedy in these films is not based on watching a man don a dress, but in how the dress complicates his romantic and sexual relationships. Roger Baker, in his book, Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts, points out that the audience finds itself laughing hardest in Tootsie when Dorothy falls for a younger actress, 42

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played by Jessica Lange, because it is a relationship that falls outside the social norms of sexuality assigned to Dorothy. The audience can watch the unrequited love and laugh at its awkward manifestation, because the only thing in the way of a possible happy ending is a wig and a few frock-like dresses.

This mismatch, between the outward performance of identity and the inner, culturally instilled instincts of the heterosexual characters, is a mismatch often presupposed by mainstream audiences in relationship to drag. A film such as Tootsie operates under this understanding of gender—the premise that there is an inner self that can be expressed accurately by an outer representation, a representation that relies on clothing, posture, gestures, intonation, and makeup. In both Tootsie and Some Like It Hot, the use of drag is rooted in plot situations in which the main characters must submit themselves to “unnatural” gender roles for extended periods of time because this baseline, internal identity does not match with the identity they are forced to construct.

Interestingly, the men in these films do not feel entirely oppressed by their forced bending of gender norms and in fact discover some glee and satisfaction from their acquired roles. In Some Like It Hot, Jerry actually plays his role of Daphne for so long that he nearly embraces the relationship that it leads to, and he causes Osgood Fielding, the man who has been pursuing Daphne, to completely accept “her.” Even when Jerry reveals his identity, trying to deter discussion of their wedding, Osgood simply refutes Daphne’s excuses as to why they can’t marry. An exasperated Jerry runs out of excuses and has to use the truth. “I’m a man!” he confesses, ripping off his wig. “Well, nobody’s perfect,” concedes his faithful partner, with a shrug and a smile, suggesting that he is anything but disappointed. Jerry turns away, speechless and bewildered.

At first, the moment of Osgood’s total acceptance of the ill-concealed man sitting next to him might appear to be a type of break from the “phallocentric order” of cinema, an order established as soon as narrative film afforded society with a new dimension on which to represent life, its social and sexual relationships. In 1975, feminist critic

Laura Mulvey explained that the history of cinema revealed a consistent positioning of women as objects of visual pleasure, things to be looked at, while men were given control by being assigned the active role of the observer, both as audience members and characters on screen. Cinema does this by provoking pleasure in two ways. Firstly, it uses the camera’s angles and movements to directly provide the audience with visually pleasing images through framing and following its subjects.

Secondly, and particular to narrative film, cinema provides viewers with a point of entrance into the world onscreen, by way of identifying with a character.

The interesting commonality of these techniques of visual pleasure is that neither allows a woman to be important in and of herself, but only subscribes her worth based on the pleasure and the gaze she manages to evoke and hold from a male viewer. Osgood’s acceptance, then, is a moment in which comedy relies on the surprising, if brief, departure from the heterosexual norms that dictated the screen in the 1950s. But it does not actually break with the cinematic order that posits the man as voyeur and woman as object. Instead it establishes that Jerry’s passive acceptance of Osgood’s gaze has worked in a traditional cinematic way, establishing him as a woman so long as his man is still inspired to look.

Osgood’s final cinematic words were received on much simpler terms by critics in 1959, described as just another of the “wacky-goings on” of the film by A.H. Weiler in his review in the New York Times. The film was reviewed well largely because drag was superficially presented and accepted as a complete farce rather than a prompt for cogitation on the implications of the film’s sexual posturing. Its successful reception was largely ascribed to the fact that it was silly, wacky, and a compilation of “variations on an ancient gag,” a gag just as popular in Shakespeare’s comedies such as As You Like It and Twelfth Night. In Shakespeare’s plays, these two classic comedies and more recent films (such as Mrs. Doubtfire, The Birdcage, and Big Mama’s House), drag is presented as comedic because the men and women involved want to play by the proposed rules of gender and society but their personal circum-

stances compel them to temporarily subvert their natural and traditional norms. The humor arises because within the diegetic world of the screen, the performances they put on easily dupe their fellow band mates or costars. This facile success calls into question the stability and truth of the very genders they are forced to undermine. The plot structures of these comedies are versions of the flickering of the lights at Jacque’s and do not try to call attention to the ways in which gender can be constructed, but to the comedy that arises when the “wrong” one is assumed.

Drag found another route into more modern forms of entertainment as it trickled into mainstream nightclubs and cabarets in the 1960s, moving from lesser-known establishments in London to the more middle-class areas such as Hanover square. At the same time, drag queens and transvestites found safe arenas for nightlife of their own at events such as Fancy Dress Balls (thrown by female impersonator Chris Shaw) where they could dress in drag because the occasion called for it, not necessarily to entertain an audience.

But beyond these outlets was drag’s entrance into the “mainstream” culture of cafes and nightclubs, packaged as a type of over-the-top entertainment, an ultimately limiting one?

The attachment of drag to specific artists’ personalities and names might seem counterproductive as a tool for overcoming drag’s reliance on entertainment and performance. It is easy to isolate an individual celebrity who uses drag as an outlier, an eccentric, or just a celebrity out for more celebrity, without opening the door for generalization or larger cultural reflection. However, it seems that drag’s full, captivating social power can only be realized, when it is tied directly to the identity of the entertainer and not merely a part of the show or plot device. Through such ties, drag seems to have found yet another variation on the ancient gag of putting a man in a woman’s dress, one that can have a liberating effect, particularly when it is used to blur the lines of sexuality as well as gender, rather than allowing itself to be labeled as belonging to one sexuality.

Musical performers such as Boy George and David Bowie, during their peak of popularity in the 1980s, transformed drag into a way of render

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ing the scripted signals of a man or woman null and void. Speculation could be made as to whether the performer Boy George was a guy or a girl, gay, straight, bisexual, or asexual, but keeping the audience wondering was a potent use of drag. The artist himself believed that “when people accept Boy George, they are accepting a million things about themselves. They’re not accepting that I’m gay or straight; they’re accepting that a man can act in a different way from how they’re expected to act.” When presented as an active rejection of the labels and sexual norms assigned to either the male or female sex, drag seems fall instep with RuPaul’s hope that it inspire a deconstruction of the self.

The evolution of drag in these varied types of media shows that it can be used by entertainment as well as use entertainment to push the boundaries of gender norms, but, as a type of pure identity, drag is caught in a rather self-conscious, almost self-destructive position. If drag is meant to underscore the constructed nature of gender norms, with strong ties to theatricality and performance, then if it attempts to find status as an identity, it becomes an even more obvious construction. Boy George and RuPaul’s ultimately liberating views of the effects drag can have on identity are based on two different approaches. One, hinted at in RuPaul’s embrace of drag, looks to focus the image of gender roles, revealing them to be the constructions they are. The other approach, used by Boy George, seeks to blur the image even further, making it so unclear that it is fluid.

The final goal of either approach is to encourage acceptance of more types of identity roles, but this result is not guaranteed and when it comes to issues of sexuality that surround drag, gender roles are further complicated. For example, the transsexual and transvestite patrons at Jacque’s do not necessarily accept the idea that the self is nothing but a construct. Instead, they aim to satisfy an inner identity in the same way a man born in a male body or a woman born a female one would. Roger Baker’s history of drag defines a transsexual as someone who believes they have been born into the wrong sex. But here, on the entrance side of Jacque’s, language begins to become less and less accurate. A transsexual’s cloth44

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ing choice is technically only drag to an outside observer, because there is no disconnection between the psychological state of a transsexual and the gender role he or she follows. And it is not an impersonation, but a construction of an outer self for an inner identity, in this case the inner self dictating not just clothing and gestures, but biology as well. So while drag onstage highlights how false gender roles are - because they are based on physical traits that then dictate mannerisms, clothing, and gender roles - on the opposite side of the bar at Jacque’s, gender roles claim control over those physical traits. *** Drag at Jacque’s does not wholly dismantle gender roles, entertaining without demanding self-reflection, nor does it heed the traditionally accepted biological assignment of them. Instead, drag at Jacque’s has evolved to a point where it no longer simply looks to deconstruct what is accepted, but seeks to accept new constructions of selfidentity. In order to be accepted, identities must first be willing to show themselves and then find a willing audience, whether the spotlights are on or the bar lights flicker on and off. On both sides of Jacque’s, identities are ready and audiences are willing. And as Mizery begins the night’s revelries, she doesn’t entreat the seated men and women to second guess who or what they are, but instead asks them to “knock the liquor back,” keep their eyes on the stage and take it all in, because no matter what role is being performed onstage or across the bar, or what liquor fills the glass, Mizery promises, “the more you drink, the prettier we get.”

CONTEST WINNER

Theme Park Adam Scheffler

America tangle with me, hybrid with me and what bored surveillance footage, stored in decades of black and white?

The roar is a wound.

Top 40 songs grow from it. Grow through each finned speaker like a bad crop.

Someone taps me on the shoulder, mistaking. Was I the good lover, given over to the motions of goodness?

Screams: a blur of upside faces.

O from the cramp that many people in a line is at last we are here at last, America, climbing shaken the wooden ties, up to where sweat makes Rorschachs of the girl in front’s shirt and desire does horrible things to our body pushed and held back into the seat.

Plastered there as we summit.

Look: the skytower, the parking lot’s rows of palms and chrome. We fall for minutes into loveliness. And the downward sky is endless. Just a shade of yellow on my brain where America is nervously pressing its finger.

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Autumnal Longing For Each Other Aznavur Dustmamatov Colored pencil and black ink on paper 10.5” x 12.5” 46

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Animus Kayla Escobedo Etching 36” x 24”

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That One About Us Kathleen Hale

The cutlery disappeared on Monday. I was getting my breakfast ready the same way I always do it. Bowl, Raisin Bran, whole milk, spoon. But when the spoon part came, there weren’t any. No forks or knives either. Not in the drawers and not even in the dishwasher, and there’s always stuff in the dishwasher.

I could hear Dad swearing at Talk Radio in his bedroom, which is what he does right before he barges into the kitchen and shouts about how he can’t find something. He doesn’t actually expect me to help him look, but if I’ve got to ask him something, I have to pretend to help. Otherwise he won’t listen.

Anyway this time it was his glasses.

I figured he’d want to know about the empty drawers, so after I’d made enough noise pretending to look, all dragging the kitchen chairs and lifting up pieces of the newspaper, I said, “Dad, the cutlery’s gone.”

I didn’t think he’d heard me, but then he said, “Where’d you learn to call it that?”

“You, I think.”

He smiled. “Really?” But it wasn’t a question and he went back to digging around under the newspapers.

“Dad?” He found his glasses. “Aha! They were hiding.”

I said it louder. “Dad!” He spun around. “What? Oh.” He scratched his head. “I don’t know, Kip, use your hands. Like an Indian! That’s what they do there, I think.”

He took a deep breath. “Yes, that’s right.” He grabbed his keys.

“But the milk, Dad.” How was I supposed to eat milk like an Indian?

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CONTEST WINNER

“Don’t waste the milk!” He yelled from the door. “And don’t miss the bus!”

That night Dad brought home pizza, so of course no one said anything about the cutlery.

And the next morning there were six boxes of the plastic stuff up on the counter by the microwave.

The next day, Dad grounded me, which sucked so bad I pretty much forgot about the cutlery for the whole afternoon. But now I just don’t care at all, because yesterday I found out I’m not the only one in big time trouble this month. Drew and Ellie are grounded too. And I’ve got to find out what they did.

If we were little it’d be easy, because back then we were always together. Sometimes I think it’s Miss Allen’s fault we got split up, but sometimes I think it’s Dad’s. I mean, Miss Allen didn’t have to tell, but Dad didn’t have to get so scared and make it so we had to let him sign us all up for different activities. Drew got soccer, and he still does it.

Ellie got gymnastics, but she quit last year, which is why she’s sort of fat now. But I wasn’t good at anything because I always sat down at the ballet recitals or got too hyper at the acting camps.

When I was Catcher in summer softball I made crow noises to scare the batter, which Dad said was embarrassing for him. Once at horseback riding lessons, I fell off and almost got run over by a cantering pony. So, finally Dad gave up and let me stay home.

Drew and Ellie and me had lots more dangerous games than Snowbank Ninjas, but that’s the only one we ever almost died at, I guess, which makes it worse than all the others combined. *** The worst part was how Dad made such a thing of it, all coming to my bedroom with his

arms behind his back and telling me to meet him in the kitchen in five minutes. Usually when he grounds me, he just does it wherever he finds me.

So, of course I thought maybe he’d bought me those expensive Nikes I’d been asking for. I even slipped off my sneakers so that when I walked in, I could put on the new ones right away. But when I slid across the tiles in my socks and actually saw him, I knew I was in trouble. See, he had a chair all pulled out for me and was standing there, staring at his feet, which means he’s so mad he can’t even look at you. Not to mention that then he took a butt-load of time sitting down—all crossing his legs and taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes and sighing, before finally he went ahead and said what all grown-ups say when they’re about to bust you: “Kippy, is there anything you want to tell me?”

I’m always getting grounded but it’s never that bad because I usually don’t have any friends. But this time I was literally dying—dying—because Kate Petersen is having a slumber party next weekend and she invited ten girls including me.

Plus, there’s this girl Susan George from my bus route, and we’re not friends or anything, but I was sort of planning to hang out at her house this whole summer. She’s fine, I guess, but she smells like ham. (No one really likes her but can’t say so because she’s got LD—that’s a Learning Disability.)

Anyway, Maxwell Mann from TV said it’s going to be the hottest June in ten years, which wouldn’t be so bad except Dad never turns on the air conditioning. (He always says there’s a “breeze.”)

But see, I wasn’t so worried about Dad’s No-Air rule because the Georges just got a pool put in and I figured I could go down there when it got too hot. I knew, knew, Susan’d let me, because she’s got no friends. Plus, chlorine probably kills the ham smell she’s got.

So, yeah, my one chance to be friends with Kate Petersen, and also, basically, to have a pool, and I’m grounded for a month. This sucks balls.

At least Drew and Ellie won’t know. Our Dad has had this thing since we were kids about tattling where he pretends to be deaf unless someone’s bleeding. Otherwise he covers his ears and says,

“Tattlers help themselves” in this sing-song voice.

He only broke his own rule once. It was a really long time ago, right after Nana died and we drove up to Atlantic City for the funeral. We still have the van we took. It’s got seven seats, but that time it felt tiny. Ellie gets carsick, and so she got to sit up front with Dad, and even though Drew and I literally begged—begged—to sit in the Captain’s chairs, which are in the middle, that’s where Dad put the suitcases for some reason.

So Drew and I were sitting in the way back because of Ellie and the stupid bags, and what happened was Drew asked if I wanted to play this game where he got to punch me if I touched him.

I told him it sounded pretty boring, but he said he’d give me 15 dollars if I won, so, like an idiot I shook on it. Then Drew scooted closer and closer to me until I was pressed up against the window and couldn’t go any more over. Of course he scooted a little bit more and our legs were touching, which he said counted and punched me really hard in the arm. He did that for the whole car trip, so of course I started to cry after a while. Just tears, though. None of us made sob noises when we were kids because Dad’d either tell us to stop playing some fun game, or he’d say “don’t tattle”, and if any of us heard him say that, we’d beat up whoever’d tried to get his attention.

So anyway, I waited until Drew fell asleep against his window and then I reached over and slammed him really hard in the balls. And of course then he started crying just tears and stomping his feet and slapping the seat in front of him. I laughed so hard even though I was technically also crying, but then Drew pulled it together and said, “That counted as touching, Anus,” and the game started all over again.

By the time we got to the hotel, I had a big time bruise, and the next morning when we were getting ready for the funeral it looked even worse.

My dress didn’t have any sleeves and of course Dad wanted to know what’d happened. So, I told him, which is technically tattling, but instead of playing deaf, Dad made the really angry face where he puts his top and bottom teeth right on top of each other, and chased Drew all around the hotel. I didn’t see it because I locked myself in the bathroom, but Ellie went into the hallway to

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watch, and she said that when Dad caught Drew, he held him down and slapped him once really hard on the forehead. Ellie also said that Dad farted and made Drew smell it, which at first I didn’t believe because, for starters, I was pretty sure that Drew and Ellie and me were the only three people in the world to know about Fart Fights, but also Dad was a grown-up, and at the time I didn’t think that adults could fart. I mean, I was only five or six, so I still thought that grownups were born big and boring. I didn’t get that they were just us with time added on.

Anyway, like I said, I didn’t believe Ellie. But then she swore on Mom, which meant a lot back then, and I wasn’t so sure. I tattled every day for, like, weeks after that to try and see if Dad’d do it again, but the minute we got home from the funeral, he went back to being deaf. *** I didn’t even know that you could check where people’d gone on the internet. Or, I guess I did know, but I didn’t know Dad knew. Turns out he’s like, this total computer genius, which sucks balls because I was at sites like lustylibrary.com

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and sensualstories.net. And not only does my own Dad know, but now I’m grounded because of it, and the parental controls for my sign-in name are insane. I can’t go anywhere except boring news sites and nickelodeon.com.

It’s not like I was reading the stories to learn how to do it. Sometimes I think about what it’d be like to freeze time and take a boy’s clothes off, but I’m not a slut or something. I just think erotic literature is way better than what they tell us at school. Plus it’s really creative. Way more creative than My Side of the Mountain, which we had to read this year in homeroom.

The school thinks no one finds out about it until sixth grade, so every Wednesday we have to listen to Ms. K talk about Judy—this plastic mannequin whose chest is sliced open so you can see the reproductive stuff. Ms. K is always talking about “penises” and “vaginas.” Everybody hates it. Online they never call them that, even though those are the parts they’re always talking about. My favorite words for boy’s parts are Purple Python, Gusher (which is technically for a girl’s thing, but sometimes they use it for boy’s), Artistic Cauliflower (that’s from a Finnish site, and I only like it as a joke) and Dick (which is a normal word). But my favorite is Schlong.

I don’t like most of the online words for girl’s privates, probably because I’m not a lesbian (I don’t even like sports that much, and one time, Dad made me cut my hair short, and it looked terrible). But yeah, stuff like “Cookie” and “Cooter” and “Beaver” are gross. The British sites call it a Cunny, which is like Cunt, which I don’t like. Once, in this story called “Victoria Goes to Camp”, they called it a “Poozle”, which was funny but not in a good way. Anyway, when I’ve got to call it something, like, if I knock it on the kitchen table when I’m sliding around in my socks, or a baseball hits it, and I’ve got to tell Dad or Mrs. Pelech, who’s the school nurse—or if I’ve got to answer one of Ms. K’s stupid questions—I just always call it Crotch. But I don’t think about girl’s parts, really. Unless it’s during scoliosis checks and Kate Petersen’s got her bathing suit on. But that’s just because she’s got actual boobs already and I want to know if she’s also got a lot of pubic hair.

My favorite author right now is jscackman709, who’s a writer for banginbookpage.org. That’s a non-registered site, which means you don’t have to click a button that says you’re eighteen, and so there can’t be any words like “cock”. That’s why jscackman calls them “cacks” in his stories, which is funny at first, but you get used to it. He mostly writes about incest, which means Dad saw I was reading stuff called “Playtime With Mother,” “I Love You in that Different Kind of Way,” and “Seductress of Hope.” They’re not that obvious I guess, but there was also stuff like, “Cousin Catherine’s Cunny,” and “I Recently Had Intercourse With My Sister, and Liked It.” So he definitely knows. I’m so embarrassed I could barf.

I mean, it’s not like I don’t know incest is gross, but you can just pretend the people in the stories are boyfriend-girlfriend instead of cousins. It’s really easy to do, but it’s the kind of thing you can’t explain that you do. Especially not to your Dad. *** Maxwell Mann wasn’t kidding when he said the thing about June. It’s only the first week and already I’ve got to walk around in my Speedo (with tank-tops you can see my nipples, which’re sort of pointy. Drew once called them weasel snouts and I kicked him in the balls. That was the last time I did that, though, because instead of hitting me back or chasing me he called me a bitch).

That’s what the Speedo is for: to flatten out my “budding breasts”, which is what Ms. K calls them. I don’t get to wear a bra yet. Dad says I don’t need one, and Ellie doesn’t let me into her room.

Well, technically I’ve been in there a bunch of times. And gone through all her underwear and stuff. Her boobs aren’t big or anything, but like I said, she’s kind of fat right now, so of course none of her bras fit.

Anyway, today was my first day grounded, and so after Dad left for work I went into his room and looked for secret letters and drugs and stuff in his drawers. Danny Kemp from my bus said he found pornographic pictures with his father’s socks. But Dad only had some golf tees and sci-fi paperbacks.

There were the birthday cards from Mom, but I’d

already read those a bunch of times.

I thought I was the only one home this morning (I even sang in the bathroom and stuff, which is embarrassing now to think about), but when I left Dad’s room there was Ellie in her pajamas, playing with the thermostat in the hallway. This always happens, where I think Ellie’s gone somewhere and then all of a sudden she’ll come out of her room.

“Oh, hey,” I said, “I didn’t know you were here.”

Anyway, of course she ignored me. Ellie’s gotten really stuck up since she turned fourteen.

She doesn’t talk to me or Dad, like, at all anymore.

She’s still nice to Drew, though. I mean, yesterday I saw her mowing the lawn, which is technically Drew’s job. Plus her and him walk to school together, and since high school starts earlier than middle school, I hear them talking and sometimes even laughing on their way up the driveway.

I don’t think it’s fair that they get to be closer in age. I told Dad once that I was mad about it, but he thought I was joking and called me Cutie Pumpkin. I don’t even know what that means.

“You’re not supposed to put the air on,” I told Ellie. Sometimes I get so mad at her, and then I say something that makes me want to cry right after I say it. “Dad said.” Yeah, like that.

I tried again. “I mean, besides, you could just change into short sleeves.”

She punched a button and the whole house started to buzz.

“Well, I bet Dad won’t care, actually, ‘cause it’s really hot.” I smiled. “Like, the hottest summer since forever.”

Ellie looked at me and rolled her eyes, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“Want to put the sprinkler under the trampoline later?”

“Nope.”

“Yeah, me neither, actually,” I said. “Hey, I’m grounded.”

Ellie yawned. “Yep.” “Who told?”

“You’re always grounded, Kippy.”

“Yeah.” I like it when she says my name. “But this time it’s for a whole month.”

She tilted her head to the side. “Weird.”

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Something about the way she said it made it sound nice, like we were friends. “Me too.” “’You too’ what?”

She rolled her eyes. Whenever Ellie’s nice you know she’s going to be mean right after. “I’m grounded, Idiot. For a month” “For June?”

“Um, yeah.” She was being sarcastic. Like I didn’t know that June counted as a month.

“No, I meant ‘are you grounded for the same month as me?’” But of course she was already walking back into her room. “Ellie!” I tried to follow her a little without making her mad.

“Ellie, Dad told me to tell you that someone stole the cutlery.” This wasn’t true, but I just wanted to keep talking for some reason. “So, in case you were wondering, there’s plastic stuff on the counter.”

She slammed her door. Not in the regular way, but hard, like I’d said something wrong. *** Ellie didn’t used to be such a snot. When we were little, her and Drew and me played together all the time. We even had this game called the Butt-Butt Game where we’d get on the swings and take turns kicking Ellie in the butt. She won’t even let me hug her now unless it’s a holiday. But back then I could hug her and kick her as hard as I wanted. She and I used to share a room, too, and we’d have nighttime talks about my secret crush on my third grade teacher, Mr. Lauwasser. I wanted to get stabbed on top of the hill at school so that he’d run up and rescue me. I told Ellie about it once.

“It’s stupid if he doesn’t get you before you get stabbed,” she said.

“No.” I pinched my stomach hard to practice what it’d feel like. “That part’s important.”

“How come?”

“He’d have to carry me.” That was my big fantasy—getting carried by a boy.

“But what if he wasn’t out at recess when it happened, and one of the other teachers carried you instead?” It was a really good question, but I pretended that it wasn’t.

“It wouldn’t happen like that.” I told her.

She smiled. “You’re weird, Kippy.”

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“I know,” I said. I’ve always loved it when she says my name.

Anyway, then Dad decided that Drew needed “boy space” and put a bathroom in the basement so Drew could live down there. And then Ellie wanted her own room too, so, I had to move into Drew’s old room. It was okay for a while. Ellie and me still did bathroom stuff together, and at night she’d knock on the wall, which is something she and I used to do with Drew—that Shave and a Haircut thing—and I’d knock back the Two Bits. I don’t know when everything started to get bad, but there was one time where Ellie came into the bathroom after I took a shower and said I was using her towel.

“You don’t have a towel,” I said. The only towels in the bathroom were our beach towels. They had stuff on them like sunsets or Mexican patterns or the dancing Raisinettes. We’d had them since we were kids.

“Yeah I do.” She was really angry. “That one’s mine and that one’s yours.” I realized I was using a big all-white towel I’d never even seen before.

“Fine I’ll use that one, geeze.”

“Whatever. Keep it.” She started putting all her make-up and stuff into drawers, like I might try to steal it or something. “You’re always using my stuff.” This wasn’t true at all. I only use Ellie’s stuff when she’s not home.

“Sorry.” I tried to think of how to fix it. “You can have the Rainbow Brite towel.” Ellie used to love the Rainbow Brite towel.

“You’ve used that one too.” She started plucking her eyebrows. “It’s gross to share towels.” You know what’s gross? I wanted to say, That bleeding pimple on your neck. That’s gross. “Ew, are you gonna pee or something?” She asked.

“No. I’m just”—I was actually just standing there. But if I didn’t say something quick I was going to cry. “I’m waiting to use the sink.”

“Because if you need to pee, I’ll leave.”

“I don’t!” I wanted to rip off the towel and throw it at her. But then I’d be naked.

“You’re looking at the toilet like you want to pee in it.” This would have been funny if she hadn’t talked about the next thing: “Remember how you used to always pee your pants? And once Dad caught you trying to bury your overalls in the

yard?”

Yeah, I think that’s when things got bad. *** After Ellie went back into her room I tried to figure out how to turn the air conditioning back off. I couldn’t find the Off button, though, so, I just pressed the up arrow until the numbers said 88—which is what it was outside—and went to make myself some macaroni. It was too hot upstairs to eat it, so I went down into the basement.

Drew was down there playing Mortal Kombat, which I’m no good at. I wish he’d been playing Super Mario Brothers 3, but he never plays that anymore. He says it’s too easy.

“Hey, why aren’t you at Mike’s?” I was so excited to see him.

“Why would I be at Mike’s?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I put the bowl of macaroni on the steps and went to sit next to him on the futon. “’Cause you usually are.”

“Nope, not at Mike’s. Want to play?”

I did, but I suck big time unless I get to be Sub Zero, who’s actually called Noob Saibot now, and even then I still suck. Anyway, Drew’s always Sub Zero. “No thanks,” I said. I went to go get my macaroni.

Drew yawned. “Don’t get any on the carpet,” he said. “Dad makes me vacuum it myself.”

“Okay,” I said. “I won’t.” I ate a little bit. “Oh, hey, Drew, want to hear a joke?”

“Sure.”

“So, once there was a little boy who really wanted to shower with his parents, but they wouldn’t let him.”

“You’ve told me this one.”

“Nuh-uh, I haven’t.”

“Yeah, it’s the snake-in-grass one. It’s sick.

You’ve got a sick mind, Anus.”

“Oh.” I pushed my initials into the carpet with my toe, K.H.K. Kippy Hamilton Kelly. Hamilton was Dad’s dad’s name. Of course I hate it. “Well, did you know Ellie’s grounded?”

“Yeah.” I was so jealous. I bet he and Ellie talked all about it on their way to school. “She’s being a bitch,” he said, which made me feel a little better.

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s probably got her period

or something.”

Drew raised his eyebrows. “Jealous?”

“No!” I didn’t tell him that I’d already had mine.

The game said, “Finish Him!” And Drew did this really cool spin kick and killed Shang Tsung, the evil Oriental guy, which is really hard because Shang Tsung can morph and do the flaming skull eruption.

“Dad grounded me too,” Drew said.

I was so excited that I choked a little on my macaroni. “Why?” “Because he’s an asshole.”

“Yeah, but why?”

“None of your business.” He was smiling.

“I’m grounded too,” I said. “I’ll tell you if you tell me.”

“You’re always grounded.”

“Yeah, but this time it’s for a month.” He didn’t say anything. “Come on, Drew! Tell me.” I was whining. I couldn’t help it.

“Nope,” he said. “But I’ll let you be Sub Zero if you play with me.”

I should have just done it and let him beat me, but instead I asked if he wanted to play Mario instead. By the time I changed my mind back Drew didn’t want to play anymore. I was about to say How about the trampoline? But then Drew got up and put his hand in front of the wall. “Hey, who turned the heat on?”

I felt like a total idiot. “Oh, shoot.”

“Anus!” He reached over and pushed me really soft.

“I’m sorry!” I said, but I was smiling. He was being so nice.

“Well, go turn it off.”

I froze. I wish so hard I’d paid attention when Dad showed us how to use the thermostat. Then Drew wouldn’t have had to go upstairs, and maybe then he’d have gone outside with me, or at least let me sit downstairs and watch him play some more.

But I had to tell the truth, because otherwise Dad would get angry and then everything’d be worse.

So, I ruined it and said, “I don’t know how.”

It sucks how sometimes you know exactly what you said to ruin something, but there’s still no way to fix it and just be okay. So you have to wait for things to be fun again, which is always up to the

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other person and sometimes it takes a really long time. Sometimes it takes a whole day. *** Dad left for a business trip this morning. So Mrs. Galanis is coming over at noon and six every night this week to make us lunch and dinner. Dad pays her to do that whenever he goes away.

“She might come at other times too,” Dad said.

“But I’m not going to divulge those hours to you.”

He kissed us all on the face—even Ellie, who pulls away every time and hurts his feelings. “Just remember that you’re all grounded. And don’t do anything stupid.”

Dad went into Ellie’s room last night after he tucked me in. I listened through the wall and so I heard him tell her to go with him this weekend to Atlanta. At first he was all serious and angry about it. He told Ellie she had to come. But then Ellie said, “No!” a bunch of times and Dad quieted down a little. Serves him right for being nicer to her even though I’m the one who helps him find his stuff every morning.

“Dad!” Ellie yelled. “I’m not coming. You can’t make me come.”

“But El, it’ll be so fun,” Dad said. He was trying to make it like it was her decision. He does this all the time. Usually that’s when I cave because I start to feel bad for him. “The two of us hanging out in Atlanta. That’s a big city, baby!”

“Yeah right.” Ellie did her mean laugh. “You’ll be gone all day. At least at home I won’t be by myself. God! You’re such a hypocrite!”

“But there will be a pool,” Dad said quietly. I wanted to kill Ellie. She gets all the good stuff and she’s still a snot.

“I don’t care!” Ellie said, and then she did this thing where she talks all slow and loud. “I’m.

Not. Going!” Yeah, like that. It was quiet for a while, which mean they were staring at each other. That’s when they do when they fight. Dad holds his mouth tight and Ellie puts her hands on her hips and raises her eyebrows. Then all of a sudden Dad said something so soft I could barely hear it, and it was quiet again.

“Dad, I won’t,” Ellie said. “I promise.” She sounded completely different. Like maybe she was holding his shoulder or petting his hair. “I 54

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promise.”

When we were little, Dad used to pay Mrs. Galanis to spend the night with us, too. Back then I had really bad nightmares, which meant when Mrs. Galanis was around, I couldn’t go sleep in Dad’s room if I got scared. Ellie and I still shared a room back then and everything, but she doesn’t make any noise when she sleeps, which was sometimes scary to wake up to, like she was dead or something. So, whenever Dad went away and I had a nightmare, I’d go to Drew’s room and he’d get his sleeping bag off the top shelf of his closet and roll it out for me.

I actually liked sleeping in Drew’s room way better than sleeping in Dad’s. But it was one of those things I could only do if Dad was on a business trip, because otherwise Drew’d say, “Isn’t Dad home?” Well, he never actually said that, I was just afraid he would. What Drew would really say was: “What was it about?” And after I told him he’d go, “That’s way less scary than the one about Mom,” which always made me feel better.

The one about Mom was Drew’s favorite. “The Nightmare of All Nightmares,” he said. It was this dream where I found Mom’s dead body in the yard and I kissed her on the face a bunch of times to try and wake her up. I always had dreams about Mom and she was always a zombie or a ghost or a vampire or something. But in The Nightmare of All Nightmares, she was frozen. So, my lips stuck to her like when that kid licks the pole in “A Christmas Story”, except when I finally got the guts up to pull my own lips off, I couldn’t. That’s when I realized I’d have to be there, kissing her forever.

I remember I heard that if you think about something right before you go to sleep, that’s what you’re going to dream about. And so I always thought about Drew and Ellie as hard as I could. I figured if I could dream about them, then at least I wouldn’t be by myself when things got scary. It didn’t work really. I mean, sometimes Drew and Ellie’d be in the dream part, but when the actual nightmare happened, it was just me and all the different monster versions of Mom. But see, I wanted them there so bad that I thought maybe if I pretended they’d been there, then it’d be real

or something. So I made up a nightmare where Drew, Ellie and me were running away from a murderer and told it to Drew one night when I went in to sleep on his floor. He didn’t really say anything about it, so I tried it the next night, and then a few more times. “It was that one about us again,” I’d whisper seriously, acting all scared.

Drew’d just nod, though, and go back to sleep like it wasn’t a big deal. Then one time, after I’d told it, like, four times, Drew got kind of angry and said, “That’s not even a nightmare, Kip,” and after that, I went back to telling him the real ones. *** Mrs. Galanis made tacos tonight and told us to eat “quick quick!” because she had to get to her cousin’s house before seven. So, Drew, Ellie and I got to eat standing up by the counter while she did dishes. Ellie’s a vegetarian now, so she was eating a cheese tortilla from the microwave.

“Somebody got dressed up,” Drew said. He was talking about Ellie because she had a lot of makeup on. I giggled because I thought Ellie might be embarrassed. She doesn’t know my nervous laugh, though, so of course she got snotty.

“You’re the one wearing a Speedo,” she told me.

“So?” I tried to pull it down a little so it covered my butt more. Ellie’s really good at saying stuff that makes you feel naked.

“You’ve got shit on your face,” Ellie whispered and looked away. It was true, but she could’ve just called it salsa. She didn’t have to be so mean.

Drew bit into his taco and some beef fell out the other end. “Shit.”

Mrs. Galanis turned around and started going crazy, all grabbing stuff to mop up the little bit of beef Drew spilled. She’s nervous all the time and shakes. Plus she always wears silk shirts, which doesn’t make any sense since they show every shake she does.

“No, no, it’s fine, Mrs. G,” Drew said. “I got it.” He mopped up the beef with his sock, which just made Mrs. Galanis crazier. She got down on her knees and started pulling Drew’s sock off so he had to hop around and still try to balance the paper plate in the other hand.

“Hey,” I said. “Do you guys know what happened to all the cutlery?”

“Who calls it cutlery?” Drew asked. He was still jumping.

“I don’t know.” I really didn’t remember.

Just like I don’t know who told me to call it an Indelible Marker instead of a Sharpie. “Dad?” “I’m pretty sure Dad calls it silverware, Anus, like everyone else.”

“Who gives a shit where it is?” Ellie said all of a sudden. “It’s not like we need it right this second. We’re eating tacos, for God’s sake.”

“Geeze, I was only asking. I just thought you’d like to know that someone stole all of it. Right out of our own house.” I licked some beef juice off my taco. “And anyway, cutlery’s just what it’s called, okay? And for your information, Elenor, that’s called a quesadilla.” I always think of stuff like that too late.

“You think you’re so fucking smart,” Ellie said.

“Talking like that. Cutlery. Like a fucking 90 year old woman.”

“Mouth!” Mrs. Galanis yelled up from the floor. We all looked down at her. It took us a few minutes to figure out she was talking about Ellie saying a swear word.

Ellie rolled her eyes. “You don’t need a fork for this,” she said. She was staring at her plate and her cheeks were red like she was embarrassed about something. “That’s all I’m saying.”

Mrs. Galanis jumped up and started waving Drew’s sock around. “What!” She yelled. “You need a fork?” She shook one of the boxes on the counter. “There. Lots of forks.” She said and stomped off into the laundry room.

I looked at Ellie who was smiling at her quesadilla.

“I have fifteen minutes! Fifteen minutes until I leave for my cousin’s!” Mrs. Galanis screamed.

That’s then we all burst out laughing, the quiet kind that hurts because you’re holding back the noise. *** Like I said, Snowbank Ninjas wasn’t bad at all if you think about the other kinds of games we played. For a while there was this one called Car Chase where Drew and Ellie’d hide behind the bushes at the end of the yard, and I’d have to run

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across the street whenever they said GO. The trick was to time it so that it was just when the car was about to whiz past, but not too late, so that I didn’t die. I usually closed my eyes. Anyway, we had to stop that one when they sent me out running in front of a police car.

Snowbank Ninjas was our winter game. See, our driveway goes downhill but the yard stays flat so that when you walk down the driveway, the yard part gets more and more above your head.

When you walk to the very edge of the front yard it becomes the top of a stonewall that is above the street. We weren’t supposed to go that far when we were little because Dad said we’d fall into traffic (maybe like, two cars went by our house an hour). So we always did Snowbank Ninjas at the part of the yard by the Weeping Willow so Dad couldn’t see.

Anyway, we’d take the kid shovels (those are the plastic ones. Dad never let us use his because he said we’d kill ourselves), and we’d take all the snow around the tree and build a snow wall on top of the actual one. Once it was tall enough to climb and slanty enough so we could slide on it, we’d get the spoons from the kitchen and start the game, which was to lie on our bellies and race up the snow wall without using our legs. The loser got held over the edge of the wall by their feet.

The road’s curvy and icy, and we’re in the country so no one comes here unless they live here— which is only us, really, and some old people. So we never got caught until Miss Allen, who was going, like, a hundred miles an hour down our street. She said she was on her way to teach piano, which is a lie. I mean, yeah, Miss Allen’s a piano teacher, but like I said, only old people live by us, and old people don’t take piano lessons, kids do. Also, Drew, Ellie and me thought she was intoxicated because her face was so red (but that could have just been from the screaming).

Anyway, the trick was to use the spoon part of the spoon, but that part was always harder to stick into the snow, so like an idiot I usually gave up and tried to pull myself with the handle, which makes you slide back. So, Drew got up the snow bank first, and won, and then Ellie won second, and then they got to hold me down the snow wall.

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the snow bank is slanted, so I was on my stomach against the snow the whole time. But the snow wall was as high as our house, which is one and a half stories, and like always, Drew and Ellie screamed and pretended a car was coming, which made it pretty scary.

Then it happened: Ellie, who’d just gotten new gloves without the grip fingers, accidentally let go of me; Drew was still holding my foot, so he almost fell down too, because, even though I was the youngest, I was wearing a snowsuit, which made me pretty heavy. Ellie couldn’t reach my foot, and Drew couldn’t get it because he was still trying to hold onto the other one, so Drew had to try and hang on while Ellie got on her stomach to pass me spoons.

“Stick the spoon part in, Kip!” Ellie yelled.

“Not the handle!”

But then one of the spoons broke in half and the other one fell on the street and I started all crying with my face against the snow and my foot in Drew’s hand. Ellie, who was brave back then from getting kicked so much, took off her gloves and climbed down next to me. My head was down by her ankles, but I could see that she’d dug her fingers into the snow and they’d turned bright red.

“Drew, help!” Ellie screamed. I tried to hold my body stiff and still even though my face was freezing off, but I got so dizzy looking down at the pavement like that, that I started shrieking, which made them stop fighting and try to make me quit so Dad wouldn’t hear.

“Okay, okay, shut up, Kip.” Drew said. “El, give Kip a foot to hold onto. Kip, I’m gonna climb down to you and then me and Ellie’re gonna throw you over.”

“Don’t throw me!” I sobbed, but I reached up to hold onto Ellie. Drew climbed down, still holding my foot, and I actually swung around just fine, and for a few seconds, Ellie was holding on okay at the top. Drew’d even gotten a foot grip on the snow bank and was just about to push me up by my butt. But then he started slipping because he didn’t have his boots on. He tried to grab onto me to save himself, and I grabbed onto Ellie, and all of us went crashing into the street.

That part wasn’t so bad. I scraped my face a

lot on the ice at the bottom, but I didn’t die like I thought I would. When we stood up and looked at each other we started cracking up, and then Drew and Ellie hugged me really hard between them, which would have been great if they hadn’t smushed my chapped face against their buttons.

Anyway, that’s when Miss Allen came speeding around the corner.

The thing about the way they plow the streets here is that the snow doesn’t go off the road, it just makes walls on both sides of the street that make it so there’s only room for one car. So, see, there was no where to go when we saw her, and no way to make her stop, and if Drew hadn’t been so smart that day, we definitely would’ve all died.

“Flat against the snow, Idiots!” Drew yelled, and we jumped against it like cicadas on a wall— our arms all stretched out above us, and our hands dug in, trying to hold ourselves skinny against the snow. I sucked in my stomach when I heard Miss Allen’s horn, and felt this big wind go up our coats when she whizzed past. She ran over the spoon I dropped, which was Mom’s, but Ellie and me got lucky—not like Drew, who had bruises for months from Miss Allen’s door handle slid across his butt.

You’d think she would’ve been glad she didn’t crush us, but she was totally upset, all red and screaming, “Where are your parents?”—like we would ever even tell her that after she practically tried to kill us. But then Dad ran out into the yard and was calling for us, and it wasn’t like we could hide him from her.

We ducked down behind the Weeping Willow to watch them. I couldn’t hear any of the actual words, only how Miss Allen was talking really quickly and angrily, with Dad all interrupting her to say short and serious things.

Then all of a sudden we could hear exactly what he was saying, which is never a good thing.

“Where are my children!” Dad screamed.

Of course we thought we were in trouble, and so we ran to Dad to tell our side. When I saw him, I kind of wished I’d gotten a little hurt or something, so that he couldn’t be mad at us. He pushed Miss Allen out of the way and ran at us fast. He looked crazy, but instead of hitting us or yelling he just grabbed each of our shoulders, like

he was counting us, and whispered, “inside, my darlings. Inside.”

Miss Allen kept talking, but was a little quieter about wanting Dad’s attention. She kept reaching out to touch him and then putting a piece of hair behind her ear instead. “All I’m saying,” she said, all chasing after us, whining like a little kid. “All I’m saying is they’re your kids, and”—she stopped talking when she saw that Dad was about to slam the door.

We followed him into the TV room, still thinking, I guess, that he might be angry. He sat down on the couch in the TV room and rubbed his eyes underneath his glasses—these could be angry things or tired things, we didn’t know. So we just sort of stood in front of him, all dripping on the carpet.

“Sorry Dad,” Ellie whispered. She was always the first to apologize for anything. Dad cracked his knuckles and started tapping his foot, which made the change in his pockets jingle. “Are you really mad?” She asked, but Dad still didn’t say anything.

I started sobbing. “Please don’t be mad at us!”

I went and climbed on Dad’s lap and even though I was making his work clothes wet he didn’t say anything. He pulled the sleeve of his sweater over his hand and wiped snot off my face. His mouth was really tight when he reached out for Ellie. He looked scary, then, but she sat down and her and me let him hug us tight on his lap.

“Should we take our boots off?” Drew asked, even though he wasn’t wearing any. Dad just stuck his face into my hair and breathed.

Dad has this joke he does where he hobbles and says: ‘I’m an old man, kids, an old man without the mental strength to deal with your antics’, like a grandpa. It isn’t very funny—it never was—but I wanted so bad for him to say it right then.

“Dad,” Drew said, “I know you’re always saying that ‘next time’ you’re gonna call the PTA and get us into ‘age appropriate activities’, but I really don’t think this should count, because, see,” Drew put his hands in his pockets, “See, I think it was Miss Allen’s fault, Dad.” “Yeah, Daddy,” I said. I pulled on his ear to get his attention. He wouldn’t look at any of us.

“Miss Allen had intoxication.”

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“Intoxicat-ed,” Ellie whispered.

Dad squeezed us tight.

“She had intoxicated,” I said impatientely and tried to push him out of my hair. His breath on my ear was making me feel funny.

He pulled all the way away from both me and Ellie, which made me feel guilty, and put his hands in his lap. “I couldn’t have done anything to stop it,” he whispered, and his face got wrinkly—not like an old man, but like one of those fancy dogs whose face is folded like a stack of bath towels.

“Dad,” Ellie said. “Dad, don’t be sad, please.”

Dad put his face in his hands again and started shaking.

“Dad?” I tried to pull his hands away but he just dug his face harder into his palms.

“Daddy?”

That’s when the noises started. Sob noises. Big wet, sob noises coming out of our own Dad. “He’s crying,” Ellie whispered.

Drew took a step back and kicked his shoes off.

“Hey Dad it’s okay, I’ll clean up, you don’t have to do anything.” He got down on his knees and

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started pulling on Ellie’s boots.

“We won’t play there anymore,” Ellie said.

“We promise.”

“Yeah Dad, we promise,” I said.

Drew’d lined up all the boots by the fireplace.

Mine were on the end, and one was propped funny by some matches and as soon as Drew stood it up, it would fall and knock over Ellie’s. Drew just kept lining them up again, which made me want to cry for some reason.

“You could even call the PTA if you want,” Ellie said. “There’s a whole list of school activities in my Thursday Folder.”

I thought about going up to my room and grabbing my Trapper Keeper, because I had my Thursday Folder too, but just then Dad took his hands off his face. His glasses were fogged but there were tears coming down behind them, and his face was all wet and streaky and stained red. He looked ugly, like a baby that’s about to scream.

“Clean his glasses,” Drew whispered. I didn’t want to, but I reached up for them anyway. Dad pushed my hand away really slow. His mouth was a line again, but it was shaking. He motioned at Drew to stop it with the boots. “It’s fine,” he said.

His voice was low and wet.

“Dad, really, I’ll do soccer, I will.”

“Gymnastics,” Ellie blurted out. Her and Drew looked at me. I sat down on my hands. I didn’t want to promise those things. But I was scared Dad might stick his face into my hair again.

“Susan George’s brother goes to space camp,” I said.

“That’s only two weeks out of the year, Anus,” Drew said.

“Well, Ellie’s doing gymnastics even though she has Motion Sickness.”

“At least I can do a real cartwheel,” Ellie said.

“Probably not without barfing on yourself!”

Then Dad stood up and smoothed out his tie.

His pants were wet on the front from my snowsuit.

It looked like he’d had an accident. “I’m going to my room,” he said, and left us.

It was quiet after he left. Bad quiet. I tried to make it better by sticking my tongue out at Ellie, but she just ignored me and started getting off her snow stuff, which Drew put on the bricks next to

her boots, which’d fallen for the last time a few minutes before that. My fingers were too small to do zippers, so after he’d undressed, Drew came over and zipped me out. “Try not to get the carpet wet,” he said, even though it was already totally soaked. We stood there in our underwear staring at each other a few minutes and then decided to wait in our rooms. We decided Dad’d forgotten to send us there.

It took almost 30 minutes for anything to happen. But then Dad got on the phone, first with the builders, talking about putting a shower and toilet in our basement, and then with some moms from the school directory, asking about “appropriate activities for eight, eleven and twelve year-olds.” Moms from school were always telling Dad what to do with us, but he never asked them for help until right then.

“It’s my fault.” I whispered. Ellie shook her all-wet face and said, “I should have worn the good gloves.” We didn’t say anything about Dad crying in the TV room.

After a while, Dad started making Fish Stix in the kitchen, but he didn’t call out “Dinner” and so Ellie and me just sat on her bed for a while, not talking or anything. It wasn’t like we were saying goodbye right then, even though that’s what it seems like now. I just don’t think we were ready to leave yet.

“We’ll leave when the clock says six,” Ellie said, and I nodded. After a while, we knocked on the wall to see what Drew was doing.

Shave, and, a, hair, cut? We asked.

Two. Bits. *** After Mrs. Galanis threw away all the taco mix and mopped the beef and washed Drew’s sock, I changed into sweatpants and Dad’s sloppy-joeeating-contest t-shirt (which I’m not technically supposed to wear because it’s his favorite one from college) and went to watch TV. There was supposed to be a Fresh Prince marathon, but I must have read it wrong, because there was just baseball. So I decided to drink some milk on the roof and then maybe see if Drew wanted to play Mortal Kombat.

You can get on the roof if you go through Ellie’s

window, which used to be both of our window.

Dad and us used to go out there with a blanket to watch fireworks every fourth of July. It’s not scary because pretty much the whole house is ranchstyle, which means the roof is flat. But of course Ellie’s in her room all the time, so if I want to go on the roof I have to climb the tree outside the TV room, which is hard to do if you’ve got a glass in your hand. After a while you get used to it, though. The trick is to have long toes and go barefoot so that you can hold on with your feet.

Anyway, it took like, two seconds to get up there. That’s when I heard someone coughing.

“Drew?” I whispered. I heard him say some swear words.

“Go away!” He yelled. I couldn’t see him, but he was totally sitting on the slanted part of the roof

by Dad’s room, I could tell. So, I started walking there. I took a sip of my milk so it’d be harder to spill. “It’s my house too,” I yelled.

Drew was wearing his soccer sweatshirt, sitting all hunched over right where I guessed he’d be.

“You smell like butt-crack,” I said, even though it was more like a skunk. He had a lighter in his hand. “Are you smoking?”

He sighed like he was fed up. “Yes, Kippy. I was smoking.”

“Sor-ry if I care about you or something,” I said.

“Cigarettes give you cancer. Like. Like—” “Like Mom.” Actually I was going to say, Like Smokey The Bear, but then I realized that was wrong. “Yeah.”

“It’s not that kind of smoking.” He pulled his hood up over his head.

“Oh.” I thought of the D.A.R.E guy Ms. K brought in. “You mean, like, Drugs?”

“Yes, like drugs.”

“Ew.” I picked some tar off the roof. “Can I try it?”

He looked at me like he was really grossed out.

“No!” “Well, what is it, like, Crack or something? Are you smoking Crack?”

Drew giggled. “No, Anus.”

“Yeah right.” I said it like I’d been joking and went to sit next to him. “So, is that what you’re grounded for?”

“Can I have some of your milk?” He poked the

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side of my glass with his lighter.

“If I can play with your lighter,” I said. We passed them to each other.

Drew took a sip so big I would have yelled if he hadn’t been about to tell me something cool.

“Okay so yeah.” He put the glass between his feet and pulled his sweatshirt off. “Dad found my weed and grounded me.” He looked at me.

“Weed is marijuana.”

“I know!” I couldn’t light the lighter and thought maybe it was broken.

“You better not say anything, Kippy,” Drew said. He took my thumb rolled it down the wheel thing so hard I thought my skin would come off.

It lit. “I’d get in major trouble. Dad said he’d send me to boarding school if I did it again.”

If Drew left I’d literally die—just die. I tried to sound casual. “I’m not an idiot,” I said. I ran my fingers through the flame like Drew does with the dining room candles. “What did Dad do when he found it?” I was trying not to sound like I hadn’t burned myself, which I had.

“The bastard made me flush it down the toilet.”

Drew took another sip and just about finished my milk.

“How’d you get more, then?” I lit my lighter some more, trying to make him jealous.

“He didn’t find it all.” Drew had a milk mustache. He pulled a plastic baggie out of his pocket. It smelled really bad. “Don’t worry, Anus.

You’re not allowed to have any.”

“Why?” I was pretending to be upset.

“Because I said so.” Drew stuck his nose into the bag. “Go crack Ellie’s window a little,” he said. “We’ll lure her out.”

I shuffled over down the roof to Ellie’s room and waved at her through the window. She rolled her eyes and went back to painting her nails. I pushed the window up and waved at her again through the screen.

“Shut the fucking window!” She said. But I just giggled and sat down around the corner where she couldn’t see me. I knew she wouldn’t get up and shut it herself. When I came back Drew had a cigarette in his mouth.

“Hey—” “It’s a joint,” Drew said.

“Yeah I know,” I lied. “I was just saying ‘hey’.”

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“Oh, well, hey, then.” He sat down. The joint went up and down when he talked. “Want to light it for me?”

I tried to be cool about it but it still took a few tries.

“Thanks,” Drew handed me back my milk. I finished it and put the glass on the chimney with all the other ones. “So, what’re you grounded for, Kippy?”

I ignored him. “Hey, how’s Ellie going to know to come out?”

“Ellie is familiar with the smell,” he said.

“Come on, Kip, fess up. I told you.”

It made me mad thinking of the two of them smoking marijuana together. I tried to smile and think of a joke to make, but it felt like holding my breath so I said what I wanted to say instead: “Why don’t you guys like me?”

“Are you crying?” Drew bent over and tried to look at my face.

“No!” The worst kinds of sob noises are the ones that come out when you’re trying to keep them in. Anyway, that’s what started happening. I smacked Drew’s hand away from my arm and felt bad about it after, like, a millisecond. “It’s just that you and Ellie and me used to be such good friends and now just you and her are friends.”

He rolled his eyes.

“No! You’re wrong. We were friends, and now we’re not because Miss Allen almost ran us over and then everything got bad. It’s true!” I was really crying now. I pounded on the side of the dormer window, which Ellie probably couldn’t even hear because she had the music so loud.

“And she hates me and I hate it!”

“Ellie’s just gonna shut her window and not come out if you don’t stop it.”

I choked on my own spit and coughed a little.

“She doesn’t hate you, Anus.” Drew banged me on the back. “She’s just mad.”

“See!” I screamed. “She talks to you and not me.”

“No, Kippy,” Drew was getting sort of mad.

“She doesn’t talk to me. I just go to school with her.” He took his arm away. “And I’m not gonna tell you about it because she’d be pissed if she knew that I know, but it’s really bad, okay? Really fucking bad. And I’m pretty sure Dad found out

about it and that’s why she’s grounded.”

I wiped my face off with Drew’s sweatshirt and tried to get it together. “Is she a slut or something?”

Drew yanked his sweatshirt back. “No! Sick.”

He made a face. “Hell no.”

“If I tell you what I’m grounded for, will you tell me about Ellie?”

He shrugged.

“Will you?”

He shrugged, but he didn’t look angry anymore.

“Say it!”

“Fine,” Drew said. “I’ll tell you. But you can’t ever tell her you know. Ever. Promise?” I nodded. “Swear to God?” “I bet you don’t make Ellie swear on anything,” I said. “I bet she just says she won’t tell and you tell her.”

“It’s the only way I know you’ll keep your mouth shut!”

“Drew!” I whined. “I’m not a baby!”

Drew started picking tar off the roof. I was ruining something.

“I’m grounded because Dad checked where I was going online.” I blurted it out before I could stop myself.

“What?” He didn’t get it. “Sick. Were you looking at porn or something?” I made a face like he was the sick one. “What, then?”

“I was reading.” I couldn’t stop or Drew’d never trust me again. “I was reading erotic literature.”

He just stared. “Not porn. Erotic literature. It’s different.”

“Sex stories?”

I nodded, totally embarrassed. But Drew started cracking up. “Oh my God.” He choked he was laughing so hard. “You were reading, like a total dork, and Dad grounded you.” I nodded.

“Kippy, that is the best fucking thing I have ever heard.”

I smiled. I wanted to hug him for being so nice.

“Now you tell me,” I said. Drew stopped laughing and looked over at Ellie’s window. “Drew! You said.”

“Fine.” He put the marijuana joint between his fingers. “Quiet, though. And no laughing, ‘cause it’s not funny.” He reached his arm around

me. “Remember Melissa?” His breath was hot and smelly. I nodded. Melissa was Ellie’s best friend since, like, 7th grade. They did gymnastics together. “Well,” he said. “Melissa told everyone Ellie’s a lesbian.” I pulled back and made a face like No! “Yeah, I know, right?” Drew pulled me back against his face. “She—” “So, you told everyone it wasn’t true, right?”

“It was only the girls talking about it, and Ellie would’ve gone nuts if I knew.” (If people were calling me a lesbian, I’d want Drew to beat them up, but I didn’t say anything because I don’t get how high school works.) “Melissa said that Ellie tried to kiss her.”

“Did she?”

“I don’t know, who cares?”

“Right.”

“After that the gymnastics girls wouldn’t change in the locker room with Ellie, and Melissa told the coach it was because Ellie stared at them.

So then the coach said Ellie had to change somewhere else.”

“And that’s why Dad grounded her?” This seemed really bad, even for Dad. “No! I’m getting there, okay? Dad doesn’t even know any of that stuff.”

I thought somebody should tell him, but I didn’t say so. “So that’s why Ellie quit?’

“Exactly. And then people stopped talking to her at school. They wouldn’t even sit at her table during lunch, so all the other tables were packed and Ellie sat all alone at her own big table.”

“But why was Melissa so mean all of a sudden?”

“She’s a total twat, that’s why.”

“But why didn’t you sit with Ellie at lunch?”

“We have different lunch periods.”

“But why didn’t you switch?”

He shook me. “I’m only one man, okay? And you know Ellie, she’s impossible.” It was true and I nodded. Drew sighed. “So, Ellie started skipping.”

“She skipped?”

“Yeah, everything. Study hall, lunch, even class sometimes. Everything.”

“Like, a lot?”

“Yeah, ‘like, a lot.’”

I really wished I hadn’t promised not to tell,

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because this sort of stuff would make me really cool on the bus. “So, that’s why she’s grounded,” I said.

“No, Anus!” Drew let go to smack me on the back of the head. “Shut up, okay?” He pulled me back against him and said in this voice that was out of breath because it shook: “She was in the basement. Someone found her down there.

Cutting herself with razor blades. And they told.”

I almost screamed. Almost. “How do you know?”

“Because the guidance counselor called me in to ask about it. ‘Is there anything going on at home that’d make your sister want to carve curses into her forearms.’” He shook his head and took his arm back to put the drugs back in his mouth.

“Here I’ll do it.” I reached over and set the end of the joint on fire. “And that’s why she’s grounded?”

“Yes, Anus. That is why Ellie’s grounded.”

I couldn’t believe it. I thought my sister was the coolest girl in school. She was mean and wore underwire bras and had a best friend—she was never even embarrassed when she had makeup on or when we caught her looking at herself in the mirror. It scared me, because I’d always thought that having a dead Mom meant kids aren’t ever technically allowed to hate you, and now all of a sudden I wasn’t so sure.

“But Drew?” I wrote my initials in the tar with the bottom of the lighter. “You think she’s still doing it?” I wrote Drew’s down too. And then Ellie’s. “What she’s grounded for?” I wrapped all three together with a big circle.

Drew threw a rock at the driveway. “No,” he said.

“But how do you know?”

“Hey don’t worry okay?” He looked so cool.

“I made a deal with her that if she mows the lawn this summer, I’ll do her laundry for life.”

I didn’t get it. “So?” “So, there’s no blood, Dipshit.”

“Oh.” Drew shrugged like he was admitting something. “Plus, Dad threw out all the sharp stuff in the house.” He threw another rock at the driveway. “So, it’s not like she’d really have 62

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anything to do it with anyway.”

“Dad threw out the cutlery?”

Drew nudged me in a nice way. “Stop it, no one calls it that,” he said.

I thought about the Raisin Bran on Monday.

“Why the spoons, though?”

“God damnit, Kippy, I don’t know!” Drew sighed. “Maybe he thought it’d be weird if he got rid of everything but the spoons.” He picked a mosquito bite off his foot. “And I can’t believe that’s the only thing you noticed. He was at it all night finding stuff. He threw away your entire fucking key collection.”

For some reason I didn’t care. “Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t notice.” All I could think was how everyone else’d done stuff to help—all of a sudden I thought maybe I’d go to Melissa’s gymnastic things and put butter in the chalk bucket so she’d slip and die on the uneven bars. But then I wondered if wanting to kill the people who’d hurt Ellie was the wrong way to make things better. It’s what I’d want if I were her, but maybe Dad and Drew were right. Maybe trying to love somebody just meant wanting them not to die. Anyway, it was too much to figure out right then. There was really only one thing to say: “What a big fat stupid bit—“ Drew knocked me in the chest with his elbow.

“I think I hear something.” Ellie’s radio went off.

“We got her,” Drew giggled, and shook me like I’d helped him win something.

I heard Ellie stomp around a little inside her room—just heavy, though, not pissed or anything—and then her screen went up, like, bam. She stuck the top part of herself out and twisted to look at us.

“Oh. My. God.” She said. Just like that, all slow.

“Hi Ellie,” Drew said.

“Hi Ellie,” I said. Drew and me started cracking up.

“Hi weirdos.” Ellie put a hand on the roof pull herself out. She wasn’t smiling, but she looked like she was about to. I started shaking like Mrs. Galanis—like I’d had two Pepsis instead of just milk. That’s how excited I was.

I am filling the creases Olga Moskvina

I am filling the creases on your neck and your palms, from which sand once rose, as from the creases of a sidewalk where a parched wind wrestles. The unfolding of your back revels in its grace as though it were a sickness, or falling leaves curling around a current of air. My hands falling on yours, my hands on your unfolding back, especially on your unfolding back, become poplar leaves. That I cannot hide in a crease your smile makes in your cheek is my one regret as I let my eyes shut out the light: unseen, it will dissolve the gentle weight of distances. I know how to stop and start at the brim.

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ENVOY Words on a Page: An Interview with Junot Díaz Anna Barnet

When Junot Díaz walks into his apartment, stacks of books topple over and welcome him like pets. The “to-read” pile just inside the door—several stacks wide and several deep, with the tallest reaching about hip height—has collapsed in one corner. After picking up the books, the author, who has been an omnivorous reader since he was a child, lays the latest addition on top, capping it with a history book on World War II that had been waiting for him in the lobby.

Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last year for his debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a multi-lingual, multi-generational story of Dominican fukú, a curse with a death grip even after the family of the eponymous Oscar has moved to the United States. His prose demonstrates his love of language and an acute sense of how it works—and how it can be pushed, threading hip hop vernacular and Spanish slang in sentences that spit as they sing. Traveling through a multitude of different milieux, the novel circles its protagonist with a fierce centrifugal force even as it encompasses an enormous number of footnotes. Though his first book, Drown, a collection of ten short stories that cohere into a nearly novel-esque whole, was a highly acclaimed best-seller, the release of Oscar Wao, his second book, eleven years later has made Díaz one of the world’s most celebrated authors living in the United States.

Sitting in his living room with views of Cambridge rooftops and towers all around, Díaz is clad in a black hoodie, jeans and his signature dark-rimmed glasses. The sweatshirt is embellished with a pin given to him by a student of his at MIT, where he was recently granted tenure. The pin is the size of a quarter, depicting a lion in a top hat. “A Dandy Lion. . . Terrible,” he shook his head as the cashier in the Harvard Book Store asked about it earlier in the day, cheerfully bemoaning the visual pun.

Looking at the books around us in the apartment,

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Díaz warns readers of Oscar Wao, with its allusive qualities and encyclopedic erudition in everything from island politics to B-movies, “The book obsessions of the novel have only a little to do with my own obsessions. I think that I read more about falconry when I was in sixth grade than I did science fiction.”

After moving to the United States with his family at the age of six, he learned how to read and began to tear through books. While still wrangling with English (learning to speak the language? “That fucking sucked”), the written word became his ally.

“I just read everything. I think that for me it was just such a comforting rhythm. Words on a page. Me reading those words on a page.”

Though later on his own writing would be a site where the translated life was confronted in all of its complexity, in the beginning he says, “I found reading to be such a great respite from the daily pain in the ass process of immigration. It was a place I could live in language without feeling my deficits.

There’s nobody in a book that can tell whether you’re pronouncing the words right or not.”

“A typical hyper-lexic kid,” he read compulsively, in particular spending a lot of time with biographies and nature books—“You know, those kid biographies: The Lives of Great Men. And it was all men. And they were all white. They should have been more honest: the Lives of Great White Men.” “I was obsessed with the United States wilderness,” he continues, self-mockingly enumerating their titles, “The Desert, The Grand Canyon…The Sea Islands of the Carolinas,” in the faux-soothing tones of advertisements promoting vacation spots.

“I think there was a part of me that was seeking an answer to the question who am I? How did a Dominican kid leave his island and come to New Jersey? And what is this place? I think a part of me was reading so compulsively because I thought that maybe there would be some code in one of those

books that would explain not only explain this new place but would explain me. What I discovered is that there is no answer. . . It was the process that provided me with what I was looking for. There’s a great quote, which is about Gilgamesh, ‘the quest itself proves the futility of the quest.’”

His two principal linguistic registers (“this kind of crazy Caribbean language and music” and “this sort of African-American-infused American vernacular”) grind against each other along with the many other voices he ventriloquizes in his writing. Much has been made of his ability to stretch languages and idioms by putting them together, an ability that Díaz says is, at its root, the product of a certain shamelessness.

“Shame more than anything interrupts your ability to learn. If you feel shame when people mock you or look crazy at you’re less likely to practice it. One of the things that’s helped me is that I have a particular amount of shamelessness around these different idioms that I love. I’ve grown up with hip hop my whole life but I’ve never felt any shame of misusing the language that I grew up with. I feel no shame using this discourse which is basically my English jammed against things that would be anathema in the larger hip hop culture, you know, mashing all the intellectual nonsense that I learned in graduate school with it. . . .

“It takes so much more energy keeping these things apart.”

Emphasizing the difference between the daily multilingual practice of a community and its reconstruction on a page, he maintains, “One lives in English organically and then one has to represent it artificially.

“The artifact of the fiction requires an enormous amount of work. There’s stuff that exists perfectly normal life in conversation—no one cares if you fuck something up, it’s felicitous, people enjoy it—it doesn’t have to be necessarily literary, but, yes, [writing is] an enormous amount of work, an enormous kind of stupid work, which means that there’s a lot of just the basic experiment of adding a drop, tasting, nope, adding a drop tasting it, nope.

That’s a pain in the ass, you know; my students know all about that, my students run through a million models to get to the right thing.”

The translation of the book from Spanish-speckled English into English-inflected Spanish required its own experiments (though, he argues, “If you think about it, it’s a piece of cake”): “What’s really driving the book is code switching. I can’t control all the

other languages but I can certainly control English and Spanish, so that all I needed to find with the Spanish translation was find an entirely different code to switch. So what we did was we translated the entire book into Spanish and then went through the entire book matching English and Spanish looking for a set of codes in English that worked really, really well in Spanish to preserve that sort of multilingual madness. For example, the word ‘feeling’ is an English word that’s very, very common in Spanish and it means something completely different. If you say someone came at you with feeling it speaks of a deep sincerity, but it has a very particular cool resonance in Spanish.” He adds that you can never go wrong with a word like “cool.”

As for those translations into languages which he can’t control, he says simply, “In translation signal noise is a given.” He gestures towards the bookshelves to our left, “If you look up here, at least 10% of these books are in translation. . . In the U.S. we have the lowest rate of reading in translation of any country in the industrialized world. And yet there’s more complaints, or more reservations around translations than anywhere else.”

Ultimately, “I think the more that you actually spend a translated life, the more you realize that it’s a minimal charge to be able to engage yourself in another world.”

And, in fact, though Díaz began reading as soon as he came to the U.S., attempting to find some sort of life logic in the pages of books, it wasn’t until he was much older that he began to write. When he was growing up, his brother came down with a brutal form of Leukemia (“It was a big part of my childhood,” he says. “He’s fine, he’s in remission, but he spent ten years in chemo. That’s a fucking long time, man.)

In an attempt to communicate his world to his brother, he wrote twenty to thirty page letters to him during his long stays in the hospital.

“A part of the way I stayed connected to my brother was writing these enormous, ridiculous letters about what was going on about our lives, about the neighborhood, and in some ways my complete love of reading had prepared me for the moment that my brother’s illness provided, which was an excuse to now participate in the form I loved so much. So that’s how I started actually, writing letters to someone in a hospital.”

(He no longer maintains his art by writing letters, though, “I’m as much a traitor as the next person,

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I’ve given up the form…You should see I have boxes of the letters I wrote and the letters I received when I was in college. My god! I can tell the loves because of the stacks of letters. We wrote each other like crazy.”)

His family continues to be a strong presence in his writing. The fantastical elements of magic realism have been one of the most widely recognized aspects of Latin American literary canon, evolving in more recent years into the Macondo vs. McOndo debate.

Seemingly counter-intuitively, the moment in which magic realism is most present in Oscar Wao is also the part most derived from real life; towards the end of the novel, a mystical mongoose comes to Oscar’s aid, a creature which Díaz explains comes directly from family lore.

“My mother got lost when she was young in a coffee plantation (my father used to grow coffee) and she was lost for like three days and everyone thought she died and by the third day they just went and bought fucking—I mean, it shows you the difference, if a child were lost for three days today, we would still have hope, we would still be looking, but in the DR they were like ‘Three days? ’That kid’s fucking dead man’—they went out and bought funeral clothes, they were going to bury this little outfit and then my mother shows up. And my mother tells this story and she was like I had gotten lost and was just desperate and this mongoose came up and was like ‘you lost?’ ‘Well, I’m tired right now but I’ll come back tomorrow and lead you out.’ So he did and my mother arrived home the next day.”

Given the presence of magical mongoose in Oscar Wao, one might think that they are some sort of national animal, a kind of mascot, in the Dominican Republic, yet Díaz says, “Most Dominicans don’t even know we have mongooses. . . . If I can claim any fame, it’s singlehandedly reminding the pueblo dominicano that we have mongooses.”

The brutalities of the thirty-year tyranny of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, which pervade the action and atmosphere of the novel are another outgrowth of Díaz’s family life. “I was deeply allergic to the kind of insane fascistic militaristic craziness that was present in my family through my father’s military ethos that came directly from the Trujillo regime.

“It was nothing personal. It doesn’t make a difference what your opinion is if the house is on fire, the house is on fire. Probably the only thing we’re [Junot and his siblings] all completely in agreement

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on is that that family structure was just toxic. And everyone had very different reactions to it. My older sister ran away. My brother checked out. My little brother went and idolized the absent man and he joined the military. The effects are everywhere. And even my sister who ran away married a military guy; she spent years in a military base in Berlin.”

The extremities of evil in the novel, in particular those presented by the dictatorial regime, are at times distilled and allegorized according to science fiction and comic book archetypes as Trujillo is put in apposition with Sauron in Lord of the Rings, for one.

Originally, Díaz wanted to include actual images from comic books in Oscar Wao, making these ties and the narrator’s interdisciplinary wanderings all the more palpable. But in execution, the postmodern project failed: “It was not working. It was just garbage.

It was like eight or nine kinds of bad. It felt forced; it felt pretentious. And your mind is like, dude what you’re trying to build is like a jet engine, but what we have here is like a go-cart. It’s a go-cart.”

He describes a plan for the first page that was meant to the open with an image of the apocalypse from Katsuhiro Otomo’s famous manga Akira, rays of destruction extending to the leaf’s limit and folding over to the next side to point to the Dominican Republic. I ask if the comic book panels he had in mind were all found or if he had drawn some by hand. “Darling,” he says, “if I could draw, I wouldn’t be in this business.”

It is in large part the social function of visual art, he explains, that appeals to him. “I’m sorry, but look at that painting someone sent me,” he says, gesturing to a painting, sitting across the room unhung. Red, beige, blue, it demands attention with its bright hues and dynamic, cartoon-like shapes—brown bald stylized figures with triangle teeth, a grey creature with blue on its head, a blue line through the middle to the painting.

“Somebody saw me at a reading in Seattle and just fucking sent to me. And, I’m sorry, but that’s kind of a cool painting. . . The thing is that for me writing is so personal and so deep and so private. This is so social, you know.”

Díaz describes the immediacy with which visual art can be shared in contrast to the delayed reaction time engendered by writing. If you give a book to someone, they walk away with it alone and then come back later, sometimes delaying weeks.

“There’s something pre-modern about writing. It’s not so much that I’m waiting for a response as I want

to be involved with that person and have my art form some sort of community with them. With this, someone walks in: instantaneous. I love that we’re in a community there.”

As if to prove the point, he logs onto Facebook, where we watch a video a friend posted on his wall. In fact, of the favored artists he mentions— Tony Capellan, Jacob Holdt, Pipilotti Rist, Piero Manzoni—many work with video. Perhaps given the cinematic preoccupations evident in the novel this comes as no surprise, even with Díaz’s warning of the differences between Oscar’s taste and his own.

I ask about film and look over at the DVDs beside the television. Some of the DVD boxes are still shrinked-wrapped because “I keep losing them, so then I have to keep buying them,” which is to say he keeps lending them to friends, so then he has to keep buying them. While the selection is not all about the apocalypse—he recommends the Japanese film Ping Pong, calling it “One of the greatest fucking movies I’ve ever seen,” the presence is strong, as is further evidence of his love of the social nature of art. Above the TV set is a cartoon, marker on paper, that his friend Petey just rolled in and put up one day; it has hung there ever since.

In the DVD pile there is an old British miniseries

called UFO; Threads, a BBC documentary from the 80s about the atomic destruction of England (“fucking terrifying even today”); Planet Terror;The Last Days; Appleseed; The Last Blood.

“This is just a small selection,” he reminds me as a lists them. A central theme in his work, made clear by his description of layout from Akira with which he had wanted to begin Oscar Wao and the reverberations of the now invisible image of destruction extent in the text of the novel itself, is manifested here as well: dude’s obsessed with the apocalypse.

“I’ve been fucking fucked in the head by the apocalyptic eighties.

“Look, I was fucking generation bomb. It’s the most hidden thing. what separates me from my students is not the fact that they’re eighteen and even their cells are new—you guys just fucking glow with your newness—and the fact that I don’t know any of your music or any of your culture, part of it is that the apocalypse was fucking real, man. I mean part of why The Watchmen the movie the doesn’t work is that Alan Moore in the comic book didn’t have to do anything to convince people that the end of the world was this far away.” He illustrates the extreme proximity of the end that he felt with the inflection of his voice and two almost touching fingers.

“We’re deeply apocalyptic now but it’s not on the skin in the same way.”

As a self-described sensitive eleven-year-old, watching the news at night outline where the atomic blasts would hit—and seeing his town in New Jersey in the black—it’s no surprise that with every movie, every TV show, everything touching on the apocalypse, it started to eat at him. “The whole world was tearing itself to pieces; South Africa was in place; the entire economy was dumping. And that really fucking fucked me up, so I’ve been trying to write something about the end of the world.

“I’ve got to do something to channel this apocalyptic madness of mine.”

Díaz is currently doing just that, reviving work on a book he has described as his Black Akira novel. He began work on it before Oscar, which rose from its ashes in the wake of 9/11.

For the moment, though, he is off to see some friends, who have been calling him over the course of the past hour, taking advantage of the little time he has in Cambridge these days.

And so, with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, the door closes.

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SPECIAL THANKS The Harvard Advocate wishes to thank the following generous individuals for their support of our activities during the 2008-2009 academic year. Their gifts have made possible the replacement of obsolete media and design equipment, the creation of a new and improved web presence, and repairs and improvements to our historic Harvard Square Building. However, we still hope for assistance in digitizing our back catalogue so that our rich legacy can be available to all. We are committed to bringing The Harvard Advocate into the digital age and embracing new media in our quest for excellence. The inclusion of the first Advocate DVD in the Fall 2008 issue as well as the continued development of our new website are testaments to this commitment. The future publication of the nation’s oldest continuously published literary magazine depends on your contributions; pleaes consider supporting us at any level.

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PATRONS Louis Begley Ted Greenberg Sarah Baffler Hrdy James Family Charitable Foundation Meryl Natchez P. David Ondaatje Remnick Group BENEFACTORS Jonathon E. Freedman Maxwell N. Krohn DONORS Peter and Tina Barnet, Andrea Blaugrund, Bruce A. Boucher, Norris Darrell, Jr., Heather Evans, Lewis P. Jones, Billy N. Joyner, Richard Nalley, Walter Patrick, Eve Herzog Robbins, Paul Rodman, Frances Suen FRIENDS Rebecca Abrams, David L. Auerbach, Lily L. Brown, Lawrence Clouse, Edward J. Coltman, Robert Cumming, Caroline G. Darst, Steven Dell, Frank P. Davidson, Lorraine T. Fowler, Bobbie Gates, Nancy Hannaford Greer, Miles H. Grody, Chad Heap, Jessica R. Henderson, Mayme K. Hostetter, Rex Jackson, Frederick A. Jacobi, John Keene, Gil Ker, Crafowrd N. Kirkpatrick, Day Lee, Richard Lowry, Anne S. Miner, Anita Patterson, Charles R. Peck, Vernon R. Proctor, Family Ross, Gregory Scruggs, Donald Silberger, Richard Simonian, Richard M. Smoley, Daniel A. Stolz, Peter A. Tcherepnine, Alexander Traverso, Nancy Treuhold, Emery M. Younger 68

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Contributors’ Notes

ANNA BARNET is in love with Mr. Gotato Head. RICHARD BECK is on point like a unicorn. brittany benjamin knows CPR. ISIDORE BETHEL has no interest whatsoever in fake watches, stealing their time. COURTNEY BOWMAN’s blood is the main ingredient in magic. MARK CHIUSANO turned two with no one on first. AZNAVUR DUSTMAMATOV wrote his last letter 136 days ago. KAYLA ESCOBEDO keeps on truckin’.

LIZA FLUM ‘10 likes oak. KATHLEEN HALE has the heart of a t-rex. DAVID INGENTHRON :) part monkey. ALLISON KEELEY is owed a pair of sunglasses. OLGA MOSKVINA is a student of Symbolism and a lover of good trees. ADAM SCHEFFLER is a first-year graduate student in English. JESSICA SEQUEIRA is basking in the quotidian. SPENCER STRUB hates yogurt soda. SHARON WANG is waiting for the whales to come. PAUL WHANG is in Korea whattheproductions.com.

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