Fall 2007

TABLE OF CONTENTS FEATURES 3

12 22 45

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Notes From 21 South Street: On the Afterlife of Atrocity An Interview With Film Director Robert Thalheim Moira Weigel Talk of the Town: Conversation and Bloomsbury A lexander Fabry Pop Music for Desert Islands Richard Beck A Star is Born: Busby Berkeley’s Kaleidoscopic Politics Garrett Morgan Envoy: Our Man at Harvard Norman Mailer (1923-2007)

Fiction 7 34 50 58

The The The The

Medicine Man Jesse Barron Many Modifications of Mildred Chung Stephen Narain Curdled Cat David Rice Road to Damascus Endria Richardson

Poetry 11 18 33 54

The Word Moto La Cacciata For A.R.J.

Caroline Schopp Chris Van Buren Chris Van Buren Michael Stynes

Art 13 20 21 24 25 28 29 32

Untitled Paul Whang Mimesis 19 Emma Bloomfield As You Will Emma Bloomfield Untitled (Photographs From the Easter Parade) Rebecca Lieberman Conservation of Mass Emma Bloomfield Impossible Sculpture Emma Bloomfield Tea and Sympathy Martabel Wasserman Emergency Art Historian Kit KIDDO

Cover Design by Alexandra Blinky Hays

Art

Nicole Bass, Ruben Davis*, Evan Hanlon, Alexandra Blinky Hays, Rebecca Lieberman, Amy Lien, Thalassa Raasch*, Michael Sanchez, Jen Saura, John Speyer, Michael Stynes, Martabel Wasserman.

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The Harvard Advocate Editorial Board President Gregory Scruggs Publisher GARRETT MORGAN Art Editor Evan Hanlon Fiction Editor MARTA FIGLEROWICZ Poetry Editor GABRIEL ROCHA Features Editor GRACE TIAO Design Editors LEEANN SUEN RACHEL WHITAKER Business Manager LIYA EIJVERTINYA Literary Pegasi RICHARD BECK

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OLIVIA JAMPOL Circulation Manager PAUL KATZ Online Editor EYAL DECHTER Alumni Relations Manager Millicent Younger Publicity Manager ALIZA AUFRICHTIG Librarian AYTEN TARTICI

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

James Atlas Louis Begley Douglas McIntyre Susan Morrison Austin Wilkie Charles Atkinson

Peter Brooks

John DeStefano

A. Whitney Ellsworth jonathan Galassi

Lev Grossman

David Kuhn

Angela Mariani

Daniel Max Frederick Seidel Thomas A. Stewart

Jean Strouse

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Sanders Bernstein*, Alwa Cooper, Ruben Davis*, Eyal Dechter, Megan Dempsey, Liya Eijvertinya, Natalie Evans, Alexandra Gutierrez, Evan Hanlon, Alexandra Blinky Hays*, Amy Heberle, Olivia Jampol, Paul Katz, Erin Miles*, Garrett Morgan, Claire-Marie Murphy, Seth Myers, Geraldine Prasuhn, Logan Pritchard*, Gregory Scruggs, Mike Segal*, Caroline Williams*, Emily Walker*, Millicent Younger.

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Avis Bohlen, Ekaterina Botchkina, Eva Catenaccio, Alexandra Blinky Hays*, Rebecca Lieberman, Amy Lien, Lauren Packard*, LeeAnn Suen, Rachel Whitaker.

features

Anna Barnet, Richard Beck, Alexander Fabry, Marta Figlerowicz*, Kim Gittleson, Alexandra Gutierrez, Evan Hanlon, Judith Huang*, Ryder Kessler, Gregory Scruggs, Daniel Wenger*.

fiction

Aliza Aufrichtig, Jesse Barron, Sanders Bernstein, Samuel Bjork, Britt Caputo, Alexis Deane, Thomas Dolinger, Marta Figlerowicz, Carolyn Gaebler*, Daniel Howell, Laura Kolbe, Max Larkin*, Henry Ian Lichtblau, Linda Liu, Garrett Morgan, Juliet Samuel, Matthew Spellberg, Marya Spence, David Thoreson, April Wang, David Wallace*, Daniel Wenger.

poetry

Nicole Bass, Courtney Bowman*, John Davies, Judith Huang, Tim Hwang, Carmen James, Will Jeffrey*, Olga Kamensky, Celeste Monke, Lauren Nikodemos, Joseph Quinn, Gabriel Rocha, Margaret Ross, Gregory Scruggs, Michael Stynes, Ayten Tartici, David Wallace*, Daniel Wenger*, Chris Van Buren, Mike Zuckerman.

Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nation’s oldest continually published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from the Advocate house at 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not The Harvard Advocate. While primarily an undergraduate publication, The Harvard Advocate will anonymously consider all submissions of art, features, fiction, and poetry. Potential contributors should be aware that submissions policies are set year by year and are subject to change. For current submission policies, please send a query with a self-addressed stamped envelope or consult the website at www.theharvardadvocate.com. Domestic subscription rates are $25 for one year (4 issues), $45 for two years (8 issues), $60 for three years (12 issues). For institutions and foreign addresses, the rates are $30 for one year (4 issues), $55 for two years (8 issues), $75 for three years (12 issues). Payable by cash or check made out to The Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase, but price and availability varies depending on the issue. Please inquire by writing to contact@ theharvardadvocate.com. Recent issues and a history of the magazine can be found on our website. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of The Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2007 by the Editors and Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.

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Notes from 21 South Street

on the afterlife of atrocity an interview with film director robert thalheim

moira weigel Young German director Robert Thalheim’s vita reads like every film-school student’s daydream. He shot his first feature, NETTO (2005) on a shoestring budget as the final project for a second year seminar at the German Academy of Film and Television. A tragicomedy depicting a dysfunctional family in postreunification Berlin, NETTO picked up a number of prestigious European film awards, among them a “Best Feature Film Debut” from the German Film Critics Circle. Following its success, Thalheim obtained funding to shoot the screenplay that was his thesis and attracted several impressive collaborators: legendary director Hans Christian Schmid, X-Film Verleih (the production company behind RUN LOLA RUN) and Warner Brothers Pictures.

The product was AM ENDE KOMMEN TOURISTEN (2007), an understated, yet deeply moving, portrait of a young German performing his year of mandated community service in Osciewim—a small town in the Polish countryside, better known to the world by its German name, “Auschwitz.” In addition to positive reviews in multiple national presses, the film received the award for “Un certain regard” at Cannes, while its star, the young Berliner Alexander Fehling, nabbed the award for Best Actor at the Munich Film Festival.

Thalheim has referred to his first film, NETTO, as a project of merely “regional” interest. In some sense it is.

Itsnarrativescopeismodest,focusedontherelationship between an unemployed father and his estranged son. The social problems it represents, while perhaps common to a number of former Communist countries, are similarly embedded in their particular locale: the not-quite-gentrified neighborhoods of eastern Berlin.

AM ENDE KOMMEN TOURISTEN is an the harvard advocate

achievement of a somewhat different scale. The German title­—which is taken from the most recent (2002) volume by Berlin poet Björn Kuhligk and means literally “In the end come tourists”—conveys a sense of foreboding, an apocalyptic note not quite captured in the English translation, “And Along Come Tourists . . .”

Yet,takingonthelegacyofperhapsthemosttraumatic rupture in the history of Western civilization, Thalheim manages to animate and inhabit the finely textured, individual, local stories, which provide his lens onto theseeventsofincomprehensiblemagnitude.Doingso, he produces a powerful reflection, whose authenticity is not compromised by ceding to clichés familiar from blockbuster Holocaust films or the discourse of “masteringthepast”(Vergangenheitsüberwältigung).

The Harvard Advocate sat down for an interview with Thalheim at Café Eisenstein in Berlin.

Could you explain the plot of the film?

The story is about a young German, Sven, who is unsure about his future, decides he wants to do community service [Zivildienst] abroad and then ends up, more or less unwittingly, in Auschwitz. At first he hardly knows where to start—his only connection to the place is his high school history class. Otherwise all there is for him in Auschwitz is a foreign language and a boring little Polish town and a museum. But then Svenencounterstwopeoplewhodrawhimintothelife of the town and into its past. The first is Krzeminski, a former inmate of the concentration camp; the other is a young Polish woman, Anna, with whom Sven falls in love.

To what extent is the film inspired by your own 3

experiences doing civil service in Auschwitz?

A great deal. That’s when I got to know the place and its fascinating contradictions. On the one hand, you feel the pull of ordinary life and go clubbing at night; and on the other hand, you pass barbed wire everyday and are all of a sudden reminded of the horrific past. I have always been very excited by the idea of telling a story before that backdrop. Certain experiences that I had with the former inmates, who really lived in the place, also influenced me in making the film. When I was there, there were five former inmates who actually still lived in Auschwitz. The question of how that could happen, how you could decide to remain in such a place forever, has interested me ever since then.

There are other similarities between my experience and the film as well. When I was there, there was a punk band in Oswiecim [like the one in the film]. I also got to know many young women who wanted to escape, like Anna does. In different ways, all that material flowed in.

Did you also have a close relationship with one of the former prisoners?

Yes. It was not exactly like in the film—I wasn’t bullied into driving him to physical therapy or anything like that. But it was an important task of ours to organize talks [Zeitzeugengespräche] with the former prisoners and to maintain contact with them.

With one of them I would drive into the mountains about once a month and hike for three hours. That was something that had nothing to do with the camp but, rather, was about staying in touch with him, supporting him. Really, we became very close.

Did you find this as difficult as Sven does in the beginning of the film?

Of course it’s a difficult thing. But because there was already a history of young Germans coming to the place, I actually encountered a great deal of openness.

Perhaps the generation before me experienced difficulties like Sven’s—they had to overcome the first inhibitions. But many of the former prisoners saw us as representatives of a new Germany, a better Germany, rather than representatives of the former perpetrators.

One other interesting thing I experienced with the 4

formerprisonerswasthattheyhadacertainfascination with German culture.

An idea so unimaginable to us is not contradictory for them. They had come to know German culture before the historical rupture [Zivilisationsbruch] of Auschwitz.

They had learned German at school and read Goethe. They could still recite whole poems. At that time they had an entirely different image of German culture—difficult to reconcile with the inhuman treatment they had received at the hands of Germans.

To give a concrete example: there was a former prisoner who always drove to talks he gave in a Mercedes. That was his absolute favorite car: a gigantic Mercedes from the 70s. The Germans would be waiting for the former Auschwitz inmate and he’d drive up in his Mercedes! He didn’t see that as a contradiction whatsoever.

To move beyond the biographical—I found the title of the film very powerful. Could you talk about the ambivalent character of tourism at the former concentration camp?

The concept of tourism at Auschwitz is something so full of contradictions that I cannot really commit myself to one position or another.

If you go there today with your head full of the iconic, horrible black and white photos, at first you are going to be shocked. First thing, you’ll see an enormous parking lot with buses; go a little further, and there are all the postcard booths; push your way through to the cash registers; and then at some point you’ll come to the ARBEIT MACHT FREI [Work willsetyoufree]gateandseepeoplefilmingandtaking pictures of one another in front of it. The impression that all this creates is rather barbaric. On the other hand, of course you want people to come and look at Auschwitz. And if people are going to come, they are going to have to take a tour bus there and eat at some point and somehow go to the bathroom. There has to be a tourist infrastructure.

The title is so nice precisely for that reason: it clearly embodies this ambivalence. The fact that this historical event has gradually been wrenched so far away from us that we have begun to perceive it as an object of sightseeing is regrettable, because that process distances us from historical realities. But there is also something positive about the fact that we are no fall 2007

longer trapped in this horrific past.

Ifoundthesceneswherethesurvivorsleadconversations withtouristvisitorsverymoving.Weretheyimprovised, orweretheywrittenoutinadvance?Weretheybasedon conversations that you yourself witnessed?

Almost everything you see in the film was written out in the script—with a few exceptions.

For instance, there is one scene where schoolchildren are asked to describe their feelings upon visiting the museum by writing their reactions on index cards. Those children actually went the day before and saw the museum and spoke about their impressions.

But most of the scenes were written out quite precisely in advance. For instance, the scene where Krzeminski shows a group of visiting schoolchildren his tattoo is based on a scene I actually experienced.

One student asked, “Can we see your number?” and then was disappointed when he saw that it had faded.

And the former prisoner said, “I didn’t get it touched up” [ich hab’ ihn nicht erneuern lassen]. Sometimes it really is that way—such naïve questions. In these moments you see how great the distance is. But I think that that, too, has a certain ambivalence about

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it. On the one hand, you think, Okay, how insensitive can these kids be? On the other, to ask something like “Can I see your tattoo?” is a very direct, honest way of trying to confront the past. The kid that asked that question will definitely go home with a very strong impression, which he won’t forget.

Could you talk a bit about the aesthetic of the film? How you wanted it to look, to what extent it was informed by your experiences there on location?

From the very beginning I knew that I wanted to shoot with a simple handheld camera and in a documentary style, concentrating on the central actors. I certainly did not want to instrumentalize the place by aestheticizing its images. I also did not want to show the usual perspectives, the ones that everyone is already familiar with from documentaries—long, slow tracking shot to the gate, with classical music.

Those images are manipulated to produce emotion.

I tend to be more interested by the perspective on the place held by people who live there every day—who go swimming and then suddenly see one of the watchtowers, or who go on a bike ride and then stumble upon barbed wire. This sense of stark contrast strongly informed my aesthetic concept.

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Iunderstandthat—likeStevenSpielberg(whenhewas shooting Schindler’s List)—you were refused a permit to shoot at Auschwitz. How did that affect your creative process?

To be frank, it was pretty discouraging at first. I had wanted to shoot certain scenes on location—for instance, I would have liked to shoot the residence where the former prisoners lived, in the officers’ headquarters [Kommandantur] between the camp fence and the crematorium. That’s where they really stayed. And I would have liked to document it. So I was sad about that. But about other things I was actually thankful in retrospect. The exhibition of suitcases, for example, we ended up having to recreate, and I am happy about the fact that we didn’t really stand in front of the real suitcases and expose them to lights and everything—that we preserved a greater sense of respect before the place.

I am sympathetic to the policy of the museum— the fact that the say it is a giant cemetery and should not become a background to all sorts of films.

I find the suitcases very interesting on a symbolic level—and particularly the question that they introduce regarding the value of reparation versus conservation. Could you talk about that a little bit?

The question of repairing versus conserving interested me too. The “real” background is this: Since two or three years ago there has existed a Department of Conservation in Auschwitz, with a lot of money from abroad, for scientists to conserve the place, following the most current scientific methods.

The museum rationalizes this because in the past manythingsweredestroyed—peopleworkingatthe museum were acting with good intentions and much heart but incorrectly, from a scientific perspective.

At a symbolic level, this introduces a great difficulty. For us, the belated successors to this past [dieNachgeborenen],itisimportantthatitissomehow conserved. We say, we want to preserve it, we must not let it fade away. But for Kzeminski, for someone who has experienced that, it is a real experience—an open wound. He is still suffering from these traumas and still feels guilty in a certain sense.

Have you shown the film in Poland or to a Polish audience?

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Not yet. The official premiere is going to be at a festival in Warsaw. I am really looking forward to it. At the Film Festival in Munich I showed the film at the Polish consulate and there were many very moving and very good reactions. I had been afraid beforehand because during shooting and the development phase, I had already received a lot of criticism.

What kind of criticism?

Oh, many things. I received a lot of criticism over the character of the wannabe rock star, who really likes playing music and does not much like going to work. I find him a cool type, in spite of everything—and there’s one of him in every small town in Germany. But immediately people started saying, Aha, you Germans think that we Poles don’t work properly, that we simply play music the whole day. The character was immediately taken as representative of the whole country.

On the other hand, the film was obviously received very warmly in Cannes. Do you think that it makes a different impression on a French audience than on a Polish or American or German one?

I’m looking forward to finding out. I have the impression that there’s a lot of variability in the reactions. In France I heard some criticisms. For instance, a review in the [French newspaper] Libération said the film did not properly make use of the drama that it had at its disposal—with a former concentration camp inmate, a young German. That one could do much more with that, so to speak.

Sure, all the ingredients for a big melodrama are present: The young German confesses to Kzeminski that his grandfather was in the SS and then both cry, etc. However, I think the film was so well received in Germany precisely because it opens up spaces of inquiry in a different way than these melodramas of which there already so many. It does not proscribe what the viewer has to feel, rather it creates a portrait for the viewer to evaluate on his her own.

AM ENDE KOMMEN TOURISTEN had its U.S. premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on November 1.

fall 2007

THE MEDICINE MAN

Clarence wanted to go bet on some dogs. “You don’t know the first thing about dog racing,” I told him, which was true.

“What’s there to know? You pick a hound and you put your money on him.” Clarence was always doing things like that, calling a dog a hound or marriage the plunge.

“Come on,” he said. “It’ll be good for us. And I can tell that the ladies want some lady time, right?”

Clarence meant my older sister Sherrie (his wife), and my mother, who were clearing up the lunch things from the table.

“Go on, Adam,” said Sherrie. I got the keys to our Ford and followed Clarence out the door, not sure exactly what it was that we were supposed to be doing, but having my suspicions—Sherrie knew that I looked down on Clarence (I believe my words to her last winter had been, You are fucking up your life, or something to that effect), and she was trying to ease us into a friendship. What Sherrie didn’t know was that I was taken with him, in my own way, because he was a good storyteller, full of truth about a world that I was too young to believe in. We got in the car and drove out of Portsmouth on I-95.

Clarence worked at the Target in Somersworth, loading and unloading boxes. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a pack of cigarettes in the pocket. He had a handsome face, black hair, and a long, expressive mouth. From the passenger seat he turned to me and said, “Should I finish my story?” Clarence had been telling me about a man he’d met a few weeks back. He said he hadn’t told the harvard advocate

jesse barron

anyone about him, not even my sister. I said, “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

“Right. So I’m driving to work the other day.

And just as I’m passing that hotel that looks like a castle, I see there’s someone hitching, waiting for a lift. I pull over and it’s him, the one I told you about, this fucking medicine man. Of course, I don’t know he’s a medicine man just yet, but so he is.

“And this guy’s huge. I mean he’s about seven feet tall and he’s got on his feathers and these leather tassels and the whole nine yards. His face looks like a statue. I can smell him, too. He smells like cooking spices and earth, you know? Real rich. I tell him I’m only going as far as Somersworth, and he says that’s where he’s going, too. So I tell him to get in and we start going.

“Anyway, I’m wearing my bronze hoop, the sacred hoop that I always have around my neck.

And this medicine man really takes a liking to it, because it is a real sacred hoop that I got from this Indian in Utah.” It was true, Clarence always wore a thick bronze hoop on a long silver chain. I stole a glance at his throat: The necklace wasn’t there.

“So then, in perfect English, the guy asks me if he can possess my hoop! That’s his word, possess.

“Now I really like this thing, so I tell him no. I tell him it’s a good luck token and it symbolizes the infinite golden hoop of the universe: you know, just the facts. He nods at me and says, ‘Yes.’ We’re at the exit before Somersworth, so he asks to get out.

Just when I get the car stopped he starts adjusting his feathers real deliberately.

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“Then he puts his hand on my chest, over the hoop, and says a blessing in Spanish or whatever it was. And all of a sudden I feel like all the blood in my body is rushing to my heart—I’m just heating up all over. It feels so good it almost hurts, you know?

After a few seconds he takes his hand away and smiles at me, this really generous kind of smile.

“Something about it makes me fill up with love for him and I take the hoop off my neck and clasp it on his neck. (You may have noticed I’m not wearing the hoop today. Could be in another hemisphere by now, for all I know.) Then the guy thanks me, gets out, and sets up his things to start hitching again—who knows, maybe back to his tribe in South America. I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

“That’s an interesting story,” I said.

“I think so too,” he said. “I think so too.” He put his hands over his face, then ran them through his hair. “You know, your sister thinks you’re too ritzy for me.” I said it back to myself: ritzy.

It got quiet for a few moments. Clarence gave his thigh a squeeze with his hand and looked out the window at the late afternoon, where the trees were dying and the light was dying.

Just then, something darted out in front of the

8

headlights and I stamped the brakes on, hard.

“Woah, woah! Easy!” Clarence shouted, but it was too late.

I grew up in a blue-shingled house in Strawbery Banke, a block from the river and three from the cemetery. I was born in October; I mark time by autumns. Every change in my life has been set against the smell of dying leaves and the lambent geography of late-fall light on the cracked pavement of Portsmouth.

“I have something to tell you,” Sherrie said to me last November. “Let’s walk.” I looked at my mom, who was putting her hair up with a butterfly pin.

“Go on,” she said, and smiled. The smile told me there was a secret I was about to find out. This was one year ago, eight months before the wedding.

Sherrie and I walked toward the cemetery that we had passed every day on our way to school, and at which we had stopped on most afternoons of our childhood. We know the names and dates on every single stone, because we had turned it into a competition when we were little.

The cemetery is bounded by a wrought iron fence, with a revolving wrought iron door—the innovation of some industrious colonist to keep the

fall 2007

dogs out and the ghosts in. On the far side three homes stand overlooking the plot, and you can smell the river if you face east.

When we reached the gate, Sherrie spun through and I climbed over. She smoothed her skirt against the same breeze that was rocking all the fallen leaves to sleep. Something about the swift, unaware motion of her hands against the fabric of the skirt: it was the kind of thing she hadn’t always done, and it filled me with love and curiosity that my sister was a girl and I was a boy. I was seventeen.

“Margret Andrews,” she said.

“Easy. 1686.”

“And?” “Departed this life in the tenth month of her age,” I recited. I sat down with my back against Margret’s stone. Sherrie lay across me with her head on my thigh. “So,” I said.

“So,” she said, but differently. Then she sat up to face me. “I have three things to tell you,” she said. “Three big things.” My heart jumped. She told me she was declining her place at UMASS, buying an apartment in Strawbery Banke, getting married in the summer. It seemed like a big deal at the time that Clarence was seven years older than her, but what I was really thinking was that he was

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eleven years older than me.

Even so, it was as if her life was stopping dead in its tracks. I had always imagined escaping from Portsmouth and living in the same city as Sherrie.

Now I would be leaving her behind when I started school in the fall.

“You’re giving up?” I said.

“I’m in love.”

“Fuck,” I said mildly. That night it took me a while to fall asleep.

Winter came. I began my last semester of high school, which is to say, my last semester of living with my sister. Clarence came over more frequently. The leaves fell.

During a snowstorm in February, Clarence and Sherrie and me were sitting around the living room watching TV when Clarence said he had something to show us.

“Stay here,” he said, “I’ll get it,” and ran out to his car.

“What is it?” I asked Sherrie when we were alone.

“Don’t know,” she said.

We opened the window curtains all the way, we could see the snowflakes falling like cotton, lashed by the wind that came up off the river. Clarence had made us a fire, we could smell the smoke.

Sherrie took an almond from a dish on the table.

“Ready?” she said.

She threw it up in a perfect arc and I caught it in my mouth.

“You know what this reminds me of?” I said.

“Yeah, of course I do.”

Then a snowball thumped against the window and we looked outside. It was Clarence, with three brand-new sleds. “Come on, brothers and sisters!” he shouted. We spent the rest of the afternoon sailing down the steep banks of the river and across its frozen surface. Once, Clarence and Sherrie went down in the same sled together and wound up at the bottom, one on top of the other. When my sister got up he pulled her down again by the legs. She folded into him, laughing and covering his face with snow and kisses. From the top of the hill, where I was watching, the river looked like a white fur coat.

I shouted out that I was coming down and by the time I reached the bottom they were up again, 9

coming towards me, carrying that one sled between them. On the way home I missed my sister, even though I was walking right beside her.

“Let’s get out and see what the hell what was,” Clarence said. We came around the back of the Ford and found the dog we’d hit covered in black bloody fur. His stomach had been ripped open and his tail was bent around the wrong way, because of the angle we’d hit him at. Maybe he’d realized what was happening at the last minute and taken a few hopeful steps toward the side of the road before he felt the warm headlights pinning him, saw the grille and fender coming at him too fast, raised his eyes up, braced himself.

He still had some clean fur on his jaw and on the far side of his belly, some of which we would later have to peel off the front of the Ford.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“Yes sir,” said Clarence, then got down on his knees and began to collect the dog up in his arms.

Blood drenched his shirt. I wanted to help but I was a thousand miles away.

“You okay?” he said.

“Yeah. It’s so strange, though, isn’t it? It’s meaningful—we were driving to some stupid dog race and now we’ve killed this dog. I mean how do you interpret it?” I expected that Clarence, who believed a medicine man could hitch through New Hampshire, would put it all together. Instead, he said, “I interpret it as a dead animal. I think that’s what the dog would say, anyway, if you could ask him.”

I came back to myself a little, enough to help my brother-in-law carry the dog to the side of the road, then pull the car over and slide him onto the back seat. I asked Clarence whether he’d bring the dog back to life if he had the power to do it. It was a childish question but I was feeling as much like a child as an eighteen-year-old could feel. Clarence put his hand on the back of my neck, said no, drove us back to Portsmouth. In the car we made an agreement.

It was almost eight, there was no one else around when we parked the Ford across from the cemetery. We had no shovels, but we knew somehow that going back to the house to get them would brush the intimacy off the evening, leaving us back where we started.

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And anyway the dog was small. All the blood had gone out of him and his ribs were crumpled like broken matchsticks. The hole didn’t have to be big—just two feet deep and three feet wide.

We started to dig, Clarence’s larger and more powerful hands taking up big chunks of earth, my own hands pulling the ground up a little at a time.

We went at an even pace, which made the whole ceremony mean something. An hour went by in silence, our hands turned black.

At last, Clarence said, “Okay. Let’s put him in.”

From the back seat of the Ford we eased the dog into our arms, and I closed the eyelids with my fingers. Then we laid him in the hole. It was the kind of thing I would have done with my brother if I’d had a brother growing up. I made a promise to myself to have a child, then to have another.

“Let’s cover him up,” I said. I reached down and took up some dirt, but when I went to put it in Clarence stopped my hand. “Wait,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and took out a piece of metal. It was the sacred hoop. “Look.”

“Jesus!” I said. “You mean there was no medicine man? You really had me going.”

“No medicine man,” he said. “I’ve never even picked up a hitcher in my whole life.” He breathed in deep the smell of the open ground.

“Why’d you make up that whole story, then?”

I said.

“I was only . . . I was only imagining another way my life could be.” Clarence bent over the grave and placed the hoop on the muzzle of the dog.

Above us the sky was turning from purple to black, the distorting shimmer of a coming rainstorm whipped the air up somewhere not far off. Sometimes two cars would come at once, in opposite directions. Sometimes there was no one for a minute or two.

I didn’t look at Clarence and he didn’t look at me; we couldn’t take our eyes off the wet black animal beneath us. I was trying so, so hard to take in what my brother Clarence knew and put it away with the things I knew myself. Then, we threw on the earth.

fall 2007

the word

caroline schopp

clean the word, last year turned sour the stench clung clean the word with your thumbs and a white cloth, bathe it in pear soft oils plant it in black silt by the riverbank dad cleans the word, two cut breasts from the limp drake, holds them in the sun, a piece of shot dad cleans the word, grips the torn skin slides the knife through saves a tuft of speckle I clean the knife with the hose hide near the shed the down blows north in the wind the dog licks the last clots and scent from the grass I tell her, kennel

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Talk of the Town: Conversation and Bloomsbury

The average person speaks 16,000 words a day, nearly six million words a year, and a third of a billion words over the course of a life. A running transcript of one’s monologues, dialogues, diatribes, chats, exchanges, murmurs, and nothings contributing to that tally would quickly overflow volumes, shelves, even rooms. Written out, the volume of talk each day in America would equal the volumes in the Library of Congress; the transcripts collected over a month would fill every library in the country.

Contained in this capacious encyclopedia of babel are the records of supermarket transactions, a telemarketer’s scripted sentences, weather-talk and idle gossip, the ubiquitous chit and replying chat; yet also engraved on the imaginary bible-paper leaves of my ever-expanding logorrheic chronicle are the dinner-table conversations, coffee-house discussions, heart-to-hearts and tête-à-têtes.

Conversation inhabits a peculiar position between frivolity and profundity. Talk fills up the empty spaces in our lives, seeping into the cracks of vacant time. Like whistling in the dark to dispel the night, it comforts against loneliness.

(How many people talk of nothing but themselves only to soothe their insecurities?) Most talk on the circumstances of daily routine instantaneously sinks into the oblivion of memory. And yet, conversation is also a space for the meeting of souls and the search of truth. We feel that by talking we somehow unravel the kinked tangles of a question, or in a flash come to understand that they can be cut away like the knot of Gordias. Conversation is at once a pleasant diversion and something capable of carrying extreme importance. Who 12

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hasn’t yearned in the midst of idle chat to reach that conversational state where we feel we’ve said something important and true?

Yet whether frivolous or profound, conversation is ultimately enjoyable. As Samuel Johnson said, “There is in this world no real delight (excepting those of sensuality), but exchange of ideas in conversation.”

Dr. Johnson is counted among the greatest conversationalists of an era whose origins rest on dialogue. Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and Enlightenment ideals owed much to both Johnson’s broadsheet The Rambler and the jumbled conversation of the popular coffee and teahouses Johnson frequented. In an age based on the frenzied exchange of words, Johnson—a lexicographer and master of words himself—was among the most celebrated voices. “Mr. Johnson’s conversation was to the talk of other men like Titian’s painting compared to Hudson’s [a minor English portrait painter],” wrote William Hogarth.

James Boswell, the constant companion of Johnson, recalled of his friend: “His conversation was, perhaps, more admirable than even his writings, however excellent.” Boswell’s Life of Johnson is full of accounts of Johnson’s conversations—in many ways the book is itself one long conversation between Boswell and Johnson—yet it omits one spectacularly failed dinner party at which no spark of conversation broke the dismal silence.

In the second volume of The Common Reader— the title itself a reference to Johnson’s exaltation of the “common reader” who, “uncorrupted by fall 2007

literary prejudices” must finally “decide all claim to poetical honors”—Virginia Woolf recreates the unsuccessful party. “Nobody spoke. Everybody waited for Dr. Johnson to begin. There, indeed, they showed their fatal ignorance, for if there was one thing that Dr. Johnson never did, it was to begin. Somebody had always to start a topic before he consented to pursue it or to demolish it. Now he waited in silence to be challenged. But he waited in vain. Nobody spoke. Nobody dared speak . . . Dr. Johnson sank into silent abstraction and sat with his back to the piano gazing at the fire.” For those familiar with Johnson’s figure, the silence seems incongruous; for almost whenever we read about Johnson we hear of what he said.

Boswell once “complained of having dined at a splendid table without hearing one sentence of conversation worthy of being remembered,” to which Johnson replied, “Sir, there seldom is any such conversation.” Yet that scarce conversation is

prized, remembered, and recorded; and that scarce conversationalist who seems to leave behind as a trail these sorts of conversations is remembered and mythologized.

This description of the failed dinner bears an uncanny resemblance to Woolf’s account of another awkward pause among the friends who would later become the Bloomsbury group, Woolf’s own literary circle. “They came in hesitatingly, selfeffacingly, and folded themselves up quietly [in] corners of sofas. For a long time they said nothing.

None of our old conversational openings seemed to do . . . Yet the silence was difficult, not dull. It seemed as if the standard of what was worth saying had risen so high that it was better not to break it unworthily. We sat and looked at the ground.” The “silent abstraction” of Johnson seems intimately connected to the description of Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, or Saxon Sidney-Turner folding their long tweeded limbs into the worn armchairs of

Illustration by Amy Lien

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Gordon Square. But unlike Johnson’s dinner, the gestation of this pregnant silence was only a prelude to the conversation. “Then at last Vanessa [Virginia’s sister], having said, perhaps, that she had been to some picture show, incautiously used the word ‘beauty.’ At that, one of the young men would lift his head slowly and say, ‘It depends what you mean by beauty.’ At once all our ears were pricked. It was if the bull had at last been turned into the ring.”

I was, for an afternoon last summer, at a small country farmhouse called Charleston Farmhouse, where members of the Bloomsbury group used to spend summers and later lived year-round. A kind lady, straight and sharp, though nearing old age, gave a tour of the house, which was nestled among the rolling chalkdowns of East Sussex.

Her patterned skirt matched the jubilant prints and painted decorations added to the house by Bloomsbury artists, and as we entered the sitting room her mouth turned into an odd half-smile.

“What I wouldn’t have given to have been a fly on this wall during their conversations! To have heard their wonderful talk each evening,” she said.

These imagined conversations are treasured as if

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Lytton Strachey’s peculiarly accented voice—all biographers mention this accent, though none can describe it—was still echoing off the papered walls of the sitting room. These conversations are seen as somehow terribly important, meaningful and insightful: to have overheard them would not only have meant observing brilliant talk, but also seeing something of artistic and literary creation.

It is not only in viewing the past, however, that these conversations are imbued with special significance. In her essay “Old Bloomsbury,” presented to friends at an informal “Memoir Club,” Virginia Woolf describes the parties she and her sister held at their Gordon Square house. “These Thursday evening parties, were, as far as I am concerned, the germ from which sprang all that has since come to be called—in newspapers, in novels, in Germany, in France—even, I daresay, in Turkey and Timbuktu—by the name of Bloomsbury.

They deserve to be recorded and described. Yet how difficult—how impossible. Talk—even the talk which had such tremendous results upon the lives and characters of the two Miss Stephens [Virginia and Vanessa]—even talk of this interest and importance is as elusive as smoke. If flies up the chimney and is gone.”

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How can you document the ephemeral? Woolf herself doesn’t even try: In A Room of One’s Own, while describing a lunch party she attended at King’s College, Cambridge, Woolf acknowledges that brilliant things were said, but devotes her narrative attention primarily to intricate description of the food on her plate and secondly to her private thoughts. She describes conversations impressionistically, describing not what was said but the manner of saying: “Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson again; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.” For Woolf, the very possibility of mimetically recording a conversation seems slightly absurd. Even those writers—I am thinking mainly of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy— who are best at capturing the exchange of dialogue as it bounces around the parlour always seem to miss something: the barbed exchanges between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are brilliant but hardly strike one as examples of real speech. It seems futile to try to capture and, more importantly, to convey the flow of talk around a lively dinner table: the interjections, the lulls, the simultaneous sentences.

The field of conversation analysis has an intricate notational system that encodes in a transcript the human subtleties of conversation, the half-stutters, tonal changes, pauses, and laughs. The irony is that only a skilled practitioner can make any sense of the resulting tangle of symbols. Though Woolf abandonsanyattemptatdepictingexactlywhatwas said, let alone any of the information encoded by theconversationanalyst,shemanagestopowerfully convey the experience of a conversation. Woolf in this sense is, like other members of the Bloomsbury group, heavily influenced by the post-impressionist painters, who founded a realism of another sort, based not on the exactness of reproduction but rather on the faithfulness to experience. In a key section of To The Lighthouse, the longest scene in the book, Woolf describes a dinner party given by the Ramseys. Re-reading that passage, I was the harvard advocate

swirled around the room, carried from end to end of the table on the hum of voices, catching scraps of inconsequential talk here and there (“Did you find your letters?” “Ellen, please, another plate of soup.”), and yet I was completely subsumed by the atmosphere. As a friend put it to me: Woolf creates the force field of a conversation, the vectored swirls and eddies that describe the way it feels to be there, but not the exact content of what was said. Mrs. Ramsey is ultimately the conductor of this fluid mix of voices at her table; “the whole effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her.”

In both of Woolf’s mealtime conversations, the meal itself—the speckled sole and partridges at King’s College, and Mrs. Ramsey’s triumphant boeuf en daube—takes on a special solidity in contrast to the fleeting talk. As in nearly any meal, wittles, not wit, anchor the gathering. And yet part of the mythologizing of the Bloomsbury conversations was that they had no anchor, no chain limiting their scope. “We did not hesitate to talk of anything. This was literally true. You could say what you liked about art, sex, or religion; you could also talk freely and very likely dully about the ordinary doings of daily life. There was very little self-consciousness,” wrote Vanessa Bell in her memoirs. This sense of freedom is also remarked on by Vanessa’s son, Quentin Bell: “Now the character of the Misses Stephen was such that, from the first, it was taken for granted that the freedoms of Cambridge should be continued in London and thatconversationalpetticoatsshouldbediscarded.”

It wasn’t only conversational petticoats that were discarded. The group is renowned for its convoluted, verging on incestuous, relationships. (Quentin Bell’s half sister, Angelica, for example, was the daughter of the gay artist Duncan Grant, and she later went on to marry her father’s ex-lover David Garnett). Unlike the deeply repressed sexuality of the Victorian era, the freedom of Bloomsbury sexuality lay in its openness; and beneath physical freedom lay conversational openness.

Virginia Woolf related in Old Bloomsbury the moment of realization when they discovered that they could speak freely about sex, the moment when for them the chain of Victorian mores and morals was broken: “At any moment Clive might come in and he and I should begin to argue— amicably, impersonally at first; soon we should 15

be hurling abuse at each other and pacing up and down the room. Vanessa say silent and did something mysterious with her needle or her scissors. I talked, egotistically, excitedly, about my own affairs no doubt. Suddenly the door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress. ‘Semen?’ he said. Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation.”

At its origin, the word conversation carried sexual innuendo. Like the double meaning of intercourse, conversation was at once tame and explicit, connoting not just talk but also other uses of the mouth. Gloucester says in Richard III of the recently deceased Hastings:

So smooth he daub’d his vice with show of virtue, That, his apparent open guilt omitted, I mean his conversation with Shore’s wife, He lived from all attainder of suspect.

This, of course, is not the innocent side of conversation with Shore’s wife. Daniel Defoe also makes use of this pun in The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. When Moll, “twelve year a whore, five times a wife (and once to her own brother),” says, “We had a great deal of close conversation that night, for we neither of us slept much,” no nod or wink is necessary.

Later, finding out she is in fact married to her own brother, she declares that from then on, “We shall have the honest part of conversation.”

Conversation and sex are not linked by etymology alone. Plato firmly joins the two together in his work of erotic conversation, The Symposium. For Socrates, eros lies in the use of words. Socrates, according to the accounts Plato gives,“overwhelmed and spellbound” all who heard him speak or who even heard reports of his words.

He incites a pounding heart and frenzy “greater than that of the Korybantes” in everyone who listens. Alcibiades, deeply in love with Socrates, is nevertheless spurned: “Well, there we were, gentlemen, the two of us on our own. I thought he 16

would immediately have the kind of conversation with me that lovers have with their boyfriends when they’re on their own, and I was pleased by that thought. But nothing like that happened at all.

He had the usual kind of conversation with me and went away after spending the day with me.” At the symposium, the kylixes flushed crimson again and again, the red and black orgiastic scenes painted in the bowl revealed and hidden again as wine was drunk and the cup refilled. And yet, the dialogue retains the orderly quality of Plato’s other works until the very end (when “a large group of revelers came to the front door . . . There was noise everywhere, and all order was abandoned; everyone was forced to drink vast amounts of wine”): The dialogue is a search for truth. This is not that sparkling, ecstatic, electrical type of talk, but that earthy glow at the bottom of the spine.

Quentin Bell’s description of Bloomsbury conversation seems equally apt in describing the symposium of Socrates: “By judging from those and from report, I should say that the talk was not brilliant. By that I mean that there was not much in the way of pyrotechnics, none of that launching of mots, that conscious soaring scintillation.” Rather, in both, “there was a certain high seriousness in the conversation despite its gaiety, and there was quite as much argument as gossip, and that in argument it was supposed, at all events, that the contributors were looking for truth, not victory.”

Of the Bloomsbury conversations, almost nothing remains. “Nothing is more indicative of the character of a group that its talk, nothing is more difficult to reconstruct. Even to those later conversations in which I was privileged to join, little now remains,” Bell wrote. Conversation may have been at the heart of Bloomsbury, but their legacy was what they wrote. Likewise, it was against the spirit of Johnson’s remark that Boswell took the time to write down this aphorism: “The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.”

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Paul Whang Untitled Silkscreen, acrylic, ink 12” x 24”

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moto

chris van buren

The hill road’s garrulous tongue is picaresque (gravel-voiced from too many cigarettes), wanting to entertain these deathly stoic cypresses, ablative, they stand about the place, build a whole gestalt, the postcard intuitively real —nonplussed by thrash of air. * Then, our motorcycle— ant crawling up, lion-ant snarling up the bare leg of the road, gold in our winded thoughts: heading to Certaldo, dove Bocaccio fu nato, and what is arc and narrative in asphalt? do roads know they are—more than molecules— making a middle— * It is easy to draw up a road like a coarse rope and tie it into knots we like, but passage over…

I am thinking again, laying down thoughts along the length of the road. (Can you feel then the topographer’s pencil? his borders, delimited & neatly colored, now of city, village, country, Space— the markers to declare to God and others— the syntax of these cities.)

Instead I am almost and then overlapping in the wind: particular but immense spreading my vision over what is—spreading myself over the meadows, like a bleeding perfume—(oil, sweat and thought) digressive—disinterested (like the wind? asks the wind) * 18

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I do not tell when we have missed a sign.

I know there is a greater purpose (the stars, Dante?) which we fill in—with ourselves about to be—and moved from the center by His axis-love: spinning the creation spokes into harmonic hymns and chords so wheels follow the road in bars and bars of treble clef: rhythmic and inevitable. * So my knuckles curl around the seat, afraid to buckle free They have passed from peach flesh to red flare and now whitish, burning steel— the smithy of speed: 90km/hr, the dial shouts, waving its limbs, saying beware, limits break: I could lurch from the tangent, breaking from the curving like a sudden fork in the road—inertia carrying my thoughts beyond myself— until the heart folds up like a twisted piece of metal wrapped around a cypress tree, disiecti membra poetae. * I cannot translate myself further here.

I am stopped in my tracks. but let it seep over you, reader, like wind on a motorcycle sappho said eros is like wind on a mountain but mountains do not move into a sheet of wind, (it moves around them) so reader, throw your body into this thought’s curve as we pour around it, the centrifugal truth, and do not fall off, but hold me tighter by the ribs, you ride behind me I am only writing this afterward…

NOTES

moto: It., “motorcycle”; dove Bocaccio fu nato: “where Bocaccio was born”; disiecti membra poetae: Horace, in Satire 1.4.62, discusses the “scattered limbs of the poet” Orpheus after he is torn apart by the Thracian maenads; “eros is like wind on a mountain”: Sappho, fragment 42

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(Above) Emma Bloomfield Mimesis 19 Seaweed, wet to dry to wet 11” x 5”

(Opposite) Emma Bloomfield As You Will Exhibition space, door, graphite Space 10’ x 12’ x 7’3” Door 6’11” x 2’6” 20

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Artist’s Statement On the second floor sculpture studio of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts there is an imposter architectural form that interrupts the open plan of the studio. This form was not included in the original conception of the building but was created retroactively to provide extra storage and office space.

Recently, this form has come to house a room full of tools for sculpture: scissors, glue, wire, hammers, rubber bands, pliers, tape. In order to obtain a tool you must first sign it out, and when there is no sculpture class in session the room is locked for security reasons.

On the opposite side of this architectural form there is a small space designated for student installations. At one time this space had been used as an office, so there is a door.

I remove the door and set it within the shallow recess of the space, propped against the wall. Onto the door I stencil a text: “THIS ROOM IS ALWAYS OPEN AND IS FULL OF TOOLS FOR THE TAKING TO BE RETURNED AS YOU WILL.” The screws that held the door on its hinges I return to the holes in the doorframe from which they came.

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POP MUSIC FOR DESERT ISLANDS

In the April 30, 1979 issue of The Village Voice, a music critic named Lester Bangs published an article called “The White Noise Supremacists.”

The main thrust of the piece was a denunciation of what Bangs claimed was a climate of racism that had begun to saturate New York City’s punk music scene. Giving offense, which had always been part of the agenda of punk music, became an almost ritualized practice in the 1970s. Punk musicians assumed as many offensive stances as possible: It didn’t much matter if their target was a hyper-conservative congressman hoping to protect virginity and polite speech or a liberal college professor who cherished women’s lib and political correctness. The Stooges’ guitarist, Ron Asheton, regularly took to the stage decked out in swastikas, Iron Crosses, and boots. Bangs would play soul records at a party (“so that everybody could dance”), and members of punk bands would protest, “What’re you playing all that nigger disco shit for, Lester?”

This sort of comment might be justified in any number of ways. You could say it’s a big joke—that the only goal is to offend polite society (and too bad if you’re one of the squares who can’t laugh along).

You could put on a serious face and make the case that the only way to rob those words of their awful power is to say them as much as possible. Yet Bangs started to hear from black music fans who felt unwelcome at punk shows around the city, He began to think that “after a while, this casual, even ironic embrace of the totems of bigotry crosses over into the real poison.” And he called out a lot of musicians and people in the New York music 22

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industry—he even called himself out. (Bangs bitterly remembered the satisfaction with which he had tossed off the word “nigger” as though it were any other word in an article from earlier in his career.) He said that all of them had forgotten that a white person does not get to decide whether or not “nigger” can be robbed of its destructive power. He wanted to illustrate “one primal fact: how easily and suddenly you may find yourself imprisoned and suffocated by the very liberation from cant, dogma, and hypocrisy you thought you’d achieved.”

Twenty-eight years later, in the October 22, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, a music critic named Sasha Frere-Jones published an article called “A Paler Shade of White,” in which he mourned what he saw as an unwillingness on the part of contemporary indie-rock bands to incorporate “a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies—in other words, attributes of AfricanAmerican popular music.” He wrote that the article was prompted by an Arcade Fire concert.

The Arcade Fire is a band comprised of nine white Canadians, and their dramatic, crescendodrenched songs have won them a passionate fan base. But Frere-Jones, himself a fan of the band, found cause for worry, not celebration, in the Arcade Fire’s music. He wondered, Why do their rhythms deviate from a plain-Jane 1-2-3-4 stomp so infrequently? Why do they wail away at the top of their vocal and instrumental ranges and consistently neglect big, rumbling low notes? Why are they so white?

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of black-white musical miscegenation in the 20th century. Frere-Jones begins with “the cadence of African slave hollers” and works his way through The Beatles and Michael Jackson all the way to Dr. Dre and MTV. He describes the climate of racial hyper-sensitivity in the 80s, and he points out that what used to be an everyday element of making rock music—borrowing from or imitating other bands, both black and white—could now be derided as appropriation or even unwitting minstrelsy. He writes thoughtfully about his own uncomfortable efforts to sing, for lack of a better description, like a black person as a member of a funk band. And what are the consequences? Indierock musicians are doing what would have been unthinkable to black innovators like James Brown or The Meters. They are “retreating inward and settling for the lassitude and monotony that so many indie acts seem to confuse with authenticity and significance.”

What is remarkable about these two articles is not that they both address race in the context of pop music. Rather, it’s the differences between the writers’ reasons for taking up the issue in the first place that merit notice. Thirty years ago, Lester Bangs took up the issue of race in pop music because he saw pop as a moral arena in which somebody might become a better person or a worse one. Music—Bangs’ specialty—was treated as an opportunity to make ethical choices that would resonate outside cultural life as well as within it.

In 2007, Frere-Jones takes up race because one of his favorite sub-genres of pop music hasn’t been as exciting as it used to be. In the 1970s, critics who wrote about pop music frequently addressed ethical or social ideas in their work. They wrote about what was beyond music from within music.

Today, Frere-Jones may be moved to write about race because of something he hears in pop music, but his thought circles back, like a boomerang, to the music itself, where it feels most at home.

The shift in the intellectual focus of music criticism is not limited to these two particular critics, and Bangs wasn’t the only critic thinking so broadly in the ’70s. In 1979, Knopf published an anthology called Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, in which twenty writers answered the question, “What single rock and roll album

would you take with you to a desert island?”

Robert Christgau, the “Dean of American Rock Critics,” contributed an essay on the glam-punk band New York Dolls. Greil Marcus, who edited the anthology, was the first writer to describe rock music as an integrated stage in the progression of American art and the first writer to say that Elvis was a cultural archetype right along with Captain Ahab and Jay Gatsby. Bangs, perhaps one of the better stylists of the 20th century, wrote about Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. For once, someone had asked this group of prominent writers to indulge at length in their own ideas and affections. There could have been no better conceit around which to organize a collection of essays on rock than the desert island question. Put your expertise as an enthusiast to work, it demands. Tell us what you’ve learned in your thousands of hours of research and listening. Pick a record.

So they picked records, and they wrote up their selections with issues of canon, pleasure, and personal history in mind. Christgau, who has probably listened to more pop records than any other living person, sized up the canon and put the New York Dolls on the top of the heap: Their music synthesizes folk art’s communion and ingenuousness with the exploded forms, historical acuity, and obsessive selfconsciousness of modernism. As culture, it is radically democratic and definitively urban; as art, it is crude and sophisticated at the same time. It epitomizes why rock and roll began and why it will last.

In his essay, he makes no mention of the circumstances in which he discovered the record, nor does he write poignant descriptions of the scrapes and battered corners of his LP sleeve. He does not love the New York Dolls because they made him feel better after a breakup, nor does he love them because he spent his youth as a faithful member of the glam-punk scene. Christgau’s is a foundational interpretation of the Desert Island question: Which rock record is better than every other rock record?

Christgau’s polar opposite is John Rockwell, who picks Linda Ronstadt’s Living in the U.S.A. The love that Rockwell feels for Ronstadt and her music may be literally unconditional. It is certainly continued on page 26

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Rebecca Lieberman Untitled (Photographs from the Easter Parade, NYC) 35mm color print 8� x 12�

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Emma Bloomfield Conservation of Mass Exercise Books 5” x 5” x 3” and 5” x 5” x ½” the harvard advocate

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continued from page 23

unreflective. He picks Living in the U.S.A. not because it is Ronstadt’s best, but because it is his favorite Ronstadt record of the moment. “I would not seriously suggest that she was the most important single artist in the history of rock music,” he admits, “but she is the one I’ve been the biggest fan of.” He’s even friends with her. While Rockwell might discuss her vocal mechanics and musical presence with a kind of cold, critical objectivity, he chooses Linda Ronstadt in the first place because he loves Linda Ronstadt. If a skeptical reader and listener can’t go along with that dubious premise, then it becomes difficult to take his choice seriously. Rockwell might respond that since life on an uninhabited lump of sand is his hypothetical cross to bear, he can pick whatever he likes; and who are you to tell him otherwise? But then, why publish anything about it?

There is a middle ground between the critic’s hermetic analytical insularity and the fan’s squishy emotional indulgence, and the best essays in Stranded live in this middle ground, though they tend towards the analytical side of things.

In Bangs’s essay on Van Morrison’s album Astral Weeks, music is a new vision, a way of seeing the city in which Bangs lives that is simultaneously more painful and more honest. He calls the song “Madame George” the “album’s whirlpool.” The song’s title character is an abused drag queen whom Morrison represents “with such intense empathy that when the singer hurts him, we do too.” Young men, objects of Madame George’s love, steal his money, drink his liquor, and then leave when everything is used up. But when Bangs considers the song’s expansive empathy for a character who is more a victim of himself than anyone else, his writing leaves the confines of a vinyl disc and heads outdoors:

course, without pain. And I wonder in what scheme it was originally conceived that such action is showing human refuse the ultimate respect it deserves.

The lifeblood of Stranded is the shared conviction that great pop music has ideas about human interaction or ideas about politics or ideas about culture—in short, ideas about experience— that go beyond a simple amplification of the listener’s desires or moods and that transcend a particular fan’s encounter with a particular record.

Writing about the Rolling Stones, Simon Frith says, “If I ever stopped learning from Beggars Banquet I could still jump up and down to it and reminisce.” It’s nice to think that a record might furnish a lonely castaway with visceral musical pleasure or a reanimation of cherished memories, but Frith picks his record primarily because it can teach him things. He picks Beggars Banquet because it is wise.

That was thirty years ago. An entirely different pop universe has since produced Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs, which was published earlier this year. Under the guidance of editor Phil Freeman, who specializes in electric

But who is to say that someone who victimizes him or herself is not as worthy of total compassion as the most down and out Third World orphan in a New Yorker magazine ad?

Nah, better to step over the bodies, at least that gives them the respect they might have once deserved. Where I live, in New York (not to make more of it than it is, which is hard), everyone I know often steps over bodies which might as well be dead or dying as a matter of 26

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jazz and heavy metal, twenty new critics take to their laptops in search of that one record. As Marcus writes in the forward, pop music in 2007 is a new beast: Whatever pop music might be between the covers of this book, it isn’t lingua franca. In the fifties, young people woke up to find that, somehow, they’d been born knowing the pop language that was taking shape all around them. How was it that, for a white, teenage girl on the farm in Iowa no less than for an eightyear-old African-American boy in Tulsa, Little Richard needed no translator? That was the pop world; it isn’t any longer.

This means that the critics who appear in Marooned do not address pop music as a monolith.

They cordon off their favorite section of the culture and find out how best to situate themselves within it. This happens again and again and again.

Phil Freeman, the editor, picks a heavy metal album, Motörhead’s No Remorse, and he admits to inviting two other writers to contribute because he expected they would pick metal albums (they didn’t). Lainia Dawes describes the alienation she

faced as a black woman in Toronto’s metal scene— and then she picks the album Stoosh by Skunk Anansie, a metal band led by a black woman.

Dawes herself admits to choosing on nothing more than the basis of identity politics: “For me, Skunk Anansie’s music provided a solace for my midtwenties angst . . . I will turn to that album for . . . the comforting knowledge that yes, there are other angry, fierce, and sexy black women out there.”

Michaelangelo Matos introduces his choice, a compilation of breakbeat and jungle tracks, with this sentence: “This matters, at least to those of us who spent a few crucial years wearing ridiculous oversized outfits while driving from state to state to see DJs whose names we’d forget a week later, playing records we’d never remember, illegally in warehouses . . . while high on drugs.” (I suppose that if you are one of “those of us,” then his pick might be an obvious choice.) Matt Ashare chooses Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road because it “really does contain the building blocks for so much of what became my own personal aesthetic.”

While there are exceptions to this trend, almost all of the essays in Marooned are expressions of a vaguely territorial impulse that is similar to John Rockwell’s insane love of Linda Ronstadt. I continued on page 30

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Emma Bloomfield Impossible Sculpture Readymade maquettes, readymade white pedestal, readymade black pedestal, precisely duplicated white pedestal White Pedestal 33 ½” x 33 ½” x 41”

Artist’s Statement Just beyond the staircase on the second floor of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts you meet two maquettes that cite the building in which you stand.

One maquette stands on a large white pedestal and represents the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts within the context of the surrounding Harvard campus.

The other stands on a slightly smaller black pedestal and represents the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts itself.

To create a maquette for an impossible sculpture means to encase the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in plexiglass and to raise it on a black pedestal,

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scaled to support it.

I take as truth the rule for which the white pedestal stands. I construct a second pedestal out of plywood, precisely duplicating the white pedestal’s dimensions.

I paint the duplicated pedestal white to match. I hoist upon it the maquette of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, encased in plexiglass, standing on the slightly smaller black pedestal. The installation is allowed to stand for two days. After that, the valuable maquette standing on the black pedestal must return to its original elevation above sea level.

fall 2007

Martabel Wasserman Tea and Sympathy C-print 16� x 24�

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continued from page 27

heard this record. It changed my life. You are the spectator, but you can tag along if you like.

On one hand, this impulse makes a certain sense. There is more music to hear in 2007 than there was in 1978. There are more kinds of music in 2007 than there were in 1978. Hip-hop, to pick the most obvious example, had hardly left the South Bronx in 1978. Today, it is a musical, cultural, and economic juggernaut that wields enormous influence on a genuinely global scale.

Other genres that were tentative stabs in the dark in 1978 are now big, fleshy networks of artists, fans, websites, tours, and record labels. If pop is such an unwieldy thing, and if local hip-hop scenes like San Francisco’s hyphy movement are so insular as to be incomprehensible even to die-hard rap fans from other parts in the country, then why bother with the impossible task of generalizing? Why not pick what one knows and run with it?

Of course, a pop criticism which increasingly takes personal experience to be an acceptable kind of critical standard may also be an increasingly

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impoverished kind of criticism. Faced with an exponential proliferation of genres as well as tighter deadlines—who has time to give that album a fourth listen when eight other blogs have already posted their reviews?—critics seem to have turned towards clinical descriptions of the shifts in a given artist’s sound, a mandatory laundry list of musical influences, and a survey of an album’s lyrical content that vaguely identifies the issues at hand. They are almost neurotically aware of the differencesbetweenonebandandeveryotherband that makes similar music, as well as the differences between one album and every other album made by that band. Context is the beginning, middle, and end, and the critical obsession with context is closely tied to the economic role played by critics, who serve as a kind of advisory committee to the consumer. Here is the rationale: If I (the listener) own and enjoy a certain set of indie-rock albums that are favorably cited as influences in a review of a new band’s work, then I am going to be interested in hearing this new album. If, on the other hand,

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I am told that one of my old favorites has made a drastic turn towards a new and unfamiliar sound, then it may be time to abandon those old favorites and find a new group to bear the torch of my aesthetic preferences. Critics who write in this genre-obsessedmindset—theextremelyinfluential website Pitchfork is the best example—are writing for a set of discrete personal tastes that are constantly in the process of reinforcing themselves with each new download or purchase. It may be a narrow view, but it is also a detailed and stable view, and critics seem content to leave unfamiliar music to others. Each contemporary critic plants a metaphorical flag and fortifies his territory with contextual minutiae and an arrogant wealth of factual information. Insight is less important than a mastery of detail. Contemporary pop criticism encourages a culture in which each listener, blogger, or bylined journalist can best thrive as a tiny, iron-fisted despot.

Criticism that paid less attention to the minutiae of sound for its own sake and more attention to its ideas and arguments, however, might be able to do something productive with these hundreds of thousands of musical narratives. It might be able to discuss hip-hop, disco, folk, and techno records—all in the same breath. For example, the country music singer Miranda Lambert and the New York City rapper Ghostface Killah may not sound, walk, or dress anything like each other, but they are both extremely good at portraying and satirizing sexual jealousy. They have both been in relationships with people who betrayed them, and they both have fascinating ideas about what it means to respond to romantic betrayal. When Lambert must leave her engaged boyfriend behind in the song “Greyhound for Nowhere,” she says that his ring “don’t mean everything,” but she is still humiliated because she knows it means a lot. When an engagement ring gets stuck on the finger of Ghostface’s cheating girlfriend in “Back Like That,” he bitterly jokes, “Oh, it’s stuck? I’ll take the whole finger then.” His joke rings hollow.

No amount of returned gifts will restore his pride.

Were pop critics to start paying careful attention to Lambert and Ghostface in terms of the intellectual and emotional content of their music instead of fetishizing the sonics, they would be able to put a Texas guitar-girl in conversation with a Staten the harvard advocate

Island MC. They would find that music does not only have things to say to other, similar genres of music. They would find that music has things to say to the people who make and listen to it. There are no signs that pop critics are about to start doing this.

Here are two excerpts. The first, a brief description of the Pantera album Vulgar Display of Power written by Phil Freeman, appears in the appendix to Marooned. The second, a similar description of John Cale’s LP Vintage Violence written by Greil Marcus, is in Stranded.

Pantera, Vulgar Display of Power (Atco). Texan metal obsessed with groove and rage. Vocalist Phil Anselmo was like Henry Rollins on steroids, and guitarist Dimebag Darrell made a sound like a jigsaw cutting through sheet steel.

John Cale, Vintage Violence (Columbia). Cale came from the Velvet Underground, but he was also Welsh. Here he began with present-day urban fantasies of isolation and revenge, then drove them back a thousand years until they merged with imprisoned maidens and starving crusaders. It was as if Cale had said, Yes, fear eats the soul, but not if the soul eats it first.

The first is about the sound, about a jigsaw cutting through steel and Henry Rollins (whoever he is). The second is about medieval fear bubbling away beneath urban anxieties. There is no mention whatsoever of Cale’s sound. It’s the second that interests me, particularly its wonderful final line: “It was as if Cale had said, Yes, fear eats the soul, but not if the soul eats it first.” That final line is what critics are good for. It makes Cale’s soul audible, along with his fear. I can tell what Dimebag’s guitar sounds like on my own, thanks.

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KIDDO EAHK Mixed Media 8”x5”

Artist’s Statement

Contents:

At a symposium of Fluxus historians, we distributed fifty editions of the Emergency Art Historian Kit. We saw the project as guided by a basic question: If we take Joseph Beuys at his word that “All humans can make art,” does it follow that all humans can be art historians?

Posing an often overlooked set of questions concerning the hierarchy of art historians, artists, and art objects, our box framed its contemporary critique within the historically Fluxus format of limited edition kits.

8 cardstock photo prints

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1 set of instructions and ingredients for a critical squeeze-o-meter 1 pair of eyeglasses, reversible for the pre-modern and post-modern art historian 1 statement of purpose

fall 2007

La Cacciata

chris van buren

The hands which bring together clay with knives, scoring the back in patterned crosses, then slipping together—the burlesque Genesis— this is how the breath suddenly falls on the circumference of the bowl, and knows what its valley means—like a fog inside, blossoming in the insubstantial depth between the slopes before an old maid sun blustering up to sweep away the cobwebbed breath of thought—filling the empty organ space of the bowl, which knows that it has lost a rib, or never had one. There isn’t any companion, or multiple—but the remaining, as if before some face who is walking quietly through the garden of his uncomfortable primavera and the World and I will quarrel, Lord, which Bishop underlined in faint pencil (breathed into Herbert) and the clay begins to crack or turn away from the scarred joining surfaces & the sun rises suddenly away from night painted houses to expose an incomplete Cartography.

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THE MANY MODIFICATIONS OF MILDRED CHUNG

So she’s been standing there, Mildred, backarched, legs-weak, staring at the little pixelated guy across Queens Boulevard flash from amber to white, white to amber, amber back to white. Every time she breathes, a cloud of dense, white smoke appears, settles in mid-air for about two seconds, and then vaporizes altogether. Mildred does this over and over again, spellbound half of the time by the little pixelated guy, the rest of the time, by the ludicrous haze of cars passing by her. Silly as it seems, it’s not even the cars Mildred’s looking at. Rather, it’s in their license plates that she hopes she can spot some evidence that certain hopelessly far-flung places truly exist—Idaho,Saskatchewan,Utah,anyplacesignified by an evergreen tree, a turtle or a blue jay. It’s hardly surprising, however, that all Mildred sees on this crowded boulevard are those familiar blue and white license plates, Lady Liberty’s crown at the top, New York stamped firmly at the bottom, assorted numbers and letters blurring into one another, impossible to read.

It’s safe assume that none of these people with destinations is giving Mildred a second look. For sixteen years, Mildred Chung never gets a second look. And the black coat running from the nape of her neck down to her ankles, both hands buried deep in her pockets, doesn’t help Mildred’s cause much.

Neither does the brown scarf tucked beneath her chin, intricately coiled like one of those fantastic anacondas. But if Mildred did strip off her coat, her scarf, her gloves, just for a minute, these passengers would find a body clamoring for attention: Coke bottle spectacles resisting the nonexistent bridge of her button nose, static black bob clinging to a generously plum-shaped face, feet crammed into oversized gray and white sneakers. Yet all Mildred gives to the world this minute is what’s sticking out 34

stephen narain

of her hat—two big floppy ears, both beginning to freeze, the color of watermelons.

Maybe she wears her deformities too well, Mildred. Maybe the world around her is spinning too fast. Whatever the reason, Mildred feels frozen. She isn’t sure when to proceed. Mildred Chung is never sure when to proceed unless there’s an identifiable proof, of course, an equation, something, anything logical. So when Mildred almost gets knocked down by a green scooter just now trying to cross the street, she doesn’t know who to blame, but she figures if Jesus is indeed the center of everything, he’s a good place to start. And little by little, Mildred discovers that there’s a kind of comfort in this blame game, that the blame game makes things easier. Ditching school for the first time in her life, Mildred blames Jesus.

For her life up to now more generally, she blames Jesus. When she opens the door of the tattoo place, imagining some stranger thrusting a ring of metal through her flesh, she blames Jesus.

And when, involuntarily, Mildred mumbles “Veronica” to the squat, muscular woman asking her for her name, she blames this, too, on Jesus.

“Veronica?”

“Veronica,” Mildred repeats a little bit louder, trying to make sense of the lie on her tongue.

But it doesn’t make sense, and when the woman looks Mildred from top to bottom, asking her old she is, Mildred fishes as deep as she can for the truth, but comes up empty.

“19,” Mildred says firmly, smiling because smiling is the best one can do in these circumstances, she decides.

“You in school?”

“St. John’s,” a wider smile now. “Particle physics,” for the heck of it.

The woman looks up briefly, apathetically, from fall 2007

her crossword puzzle, stares Mildred from top to bottom once more, and arches an impressive right eyebrow at Mildred’s last comment. And Mildred, mind wandering to Peter’s three lies in the Garden of Gethsemane, thinks that “particle physics” may have been overreaching at best. She wonders if there’s a rooster in South Queens about to cock-a-doodle-doo any second now.

Because the woman, who reveals her name is Karma, was not born yesterday. In fact, she was born in 1947 in Sherman Oaks, California. She knows Mildred’s type. For what it’s worth, she’s practically made a career on Mildred’s type. Yet even after thirty years working here, Karma still manages to empathize with this nomadic adolescent bunch running away from something, running to some place, running for someone, not altogether knowing exactly where they’re going at all. Karma remembers herself running too, running first to Berkeley for education, then to China for God, and then back to her parents’ house—broke—realizing that the Revolution, well, wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. It was that winter, the winter of 1969, when Karma’s world began its initial slouch toward Bethlehem. She moved to New York, got her first piercing. On her right nipple, ambitiously. She was twenty-one.

She looked, in those days, much like this girl standing before her—beautifully gawky, limbs as if in open warfare with the rest of her body. Karma’s eyes move down to Mildred’s t-shirt, a picture of Einstein in the center, the shirt tucked into the saddest pair of stonewashed jeans. Einstein is all puffy hair and contented smile. It is the kind of smile God gives you when you change the world, Karma believes.

“Alright,” Karma says. She returns to her crossword puzzle, points the tip of her pencil to the wall. “Slow day today. Everything’s behind you. Take a look, and when you’re ready, give me a . . .”

But Mildred’s eyes are already fixed on all the piercings laid out on the wall across the room. She doesn’t even notice when Karma goes to attend to the young couple that have just walked in. Mildred can’t see how beautiful these two are, the girl with the glass blue eyes, the lanky man at her side. Mildred is too busy studying each piercing strung across two rows, flanked on either end by tattoo templates— complicatedcalligraphy,ableedingheartwithCupid’s arrow through its core, a veiled Madonna gazing wistfully into nowhere. The first line of piercings is the harvard advocate

tame—perfect little globes, symmetrical, none over a few millimeters in diameter. The top line, though, has no rhyme or reason: double piercings, arrow head piercings, piercings shaped like horseshoes, striped piercings, boomerang bulbs, neon spheres, flat black disks. All equally painful.

Mildred spots what she wants. For the first time in a long time, she makes her mind up resolutely.

She allows her fingers to trace the cold grooves of the metal bullet on the first row and goes to sit down.

It is only now, when she turns around, that Mildred gets a better glimpse of the place. The walls are a vomity shade of yellow. Near the entrance is an oversized print of the Yangtze River, next to another print of a bright red hammer and sickle. There’s a Buddha statue, too: fat and happy, some gold coins in a dish at its girth, and Mildred gets the feeling immediately that this isn’t where she imagined her grand conversion to take place. There should have been, at least, (a) leather, (b) the smell of iodine, (c) a guy named Rusty (fifty, hairy), swearing at himself, tugging at a wife-beater that’s seen better days. This is what a tattoo place should be like.

Mildred doesn’t know that she read the Yellow Pages too fast, however, and that “Ovid’s Tattoos” is actually “Ovid’s Tattoos and Transcendental Meditation” complete with the sad motto “Keeping Bodies and Souls Jive Since ’65.” She doesn’t know that, in the room next to this, twenty or so men and women, taken straight from a United Colors of Benetton ad, are squat in the lotus position, one man catatonic, another woman holding in a fart.

“Channel the energy . . . Feel the energy,” stuck on instant reply, a sound twittering in the air too quiet for Mildred really to hear.

But Mildred would not be able hear these chanting hippies despite her best efforts, their steady chorus too dull to get to their targeted pseudo-nirvana. You can’t get to nirvana in Queens anyway. There’s not enough time.

Lorraine, the girl with the glass blue eyes, is too loud. Karma asked her a simple question: “Whadya like, sweetie?” Her answer was this: a rambling, tragicomic account of her life in Hoboken to her imminent graduation from St. John’s Law. And she’s a strange one, this one: “Heretofore” is like the best adverb. Ever. She gets her jokes at dinner parties: How many lawyers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Don’t know. How many can you afford? She has an 35

agenda: One day we’ll have kids, right honey? But junior partner first. Junior partner, now. Kids, later.

For fifteen minutes, Lorraine rails on like this. The lanky guy at her side, poor soul, keeps nodding in affirmation.

“And then, you know, Ben and I wanted to know what to get . . . because there are so many options. You can go the family route. We were thinking I could get his paternal grandmother—she lived until 108, you know, oldest woman in Santorini—and Ben can do the same for me. People always have names tattooed on their arm. And sometimes you judge them for it or even think less of them. But it’s really a huge commitment. Right, honey? A commitment?”

“Right. Commitment.”

“Butthentheirnamesweretoolong:Papadoukalis.

Can you imagine fitting Papadoukalis on my arm?” and she raises her arm, the total circumference of a twig. “That would hurt . . . and besides, the whole name on your arm thing: very trailer-park-in-Alabama . . . And then if we divorced . . .”

The stringy guy looks up to the heavens. Karma is clicking the top of her pen up and down neurotically, gripping the side of the counter now. Her face is getting red. When Karma leaves, she knows she will go home to a quiet apartment, make some tea, maybe read a book. When he leaves, he’ll still be engaged to this babbling mass of caffeine. “. . . which would never happen, now would it, honey? It’s awkward. There’s a name on your arm.

You have to look at in the shower or in the gym or right before you go to bed and you don’t wanna look at it. You know: it’s there. Whadya gonna do? And so, long story short—aren’t you sweet for listening? . . .

Honey, isn’t she sweet for listening?”

Lorraine, now, is too busy unzipping her purse to see Karma flash her a dirty look.

“Honey, can you hold this for me?” Lorraine pushes her purple cardigan in the stringy boy’s hand.

She’s fighting with her purse, making a lot of noise, deliberately rolling her eyes.

“Ah. Here it is.” She pushes a tiny piece of paper in front of Karma, tapping her knuckles on the counter with staccato. “. . . and so we figured this . . . this would be deep . . . this would be spiritual . . . this would be Zen.” “Zen?” “Zen.” Karma looks intensely at the paper. “What does 36

it mean?”

“Zen?” “No, not Zen. This—” Karma pointing to the Chinese script. The first character has what looks like the letter J at the bottom, another like the top of a man’s torso, his arms raised to the sky. And the second character is far more complicated, upside down hammers with stripes running through them.

A lightning bolt tops off the whole affair.

For the first time in a while, Lorraine goes blank. She’s not entirely sure about what the script means. It was inside the fortune cookie she ate the day she fell head over heels with the stringy boy by her side. But before Lorraine could lie, offering the prosaic suggestion—Love—Mildred chimes in from across the room, speeding down the list of Chinese characters she has inputted from Saturday Mandarin lessons, dipping black ink into brown paper.

Sacrifice? Sanctify? Superstition?

Mildred lets out “Serenity,” softly at first. “It means serenity.”

Lorraine nods affirmatively. But she does feel a tiny tug of guilt in her heartstrings. Because Lorrainesumma cum laude is used to knowing the facts, accustomed to having the right word fully formed whenever called upon. Lorraine is the one with the answers.

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But Mildred doesn’t detect this minor bout of shame in Lorraine. After all, Lorraine has perfected the lawyer mask that will come in handy when she is one day promoted to junior partner—inevitably.

Looking at the glass blue eyes and hummingbird lips, Mildred can only think that this girl with all the words, every argument tweaked, every glance sufficiently coy, logic grounded in Gibraltar, that she had to be a lawyer. It was her calling if you believed in such things.

Lorraine could only stay silent for so long, however.

She is about to open the turbine engine she calls a mouth, to relocate herself as center of attention, touching the tip of her tongue to the roof of her mouth, separating top lip from the bottom one.

Then a voice enters the room. Loud, excited, slicing the idea in half: “Ben! Lorraine!”

Until it is revealed that it belongs to a tall, broadchested man, all marble arms and stubborn hair. This is the guy who will tattoo them. There is no banter, no introductions. They are friends, Mildred gleans. Clearly, they go way back. The three disappear into a door at the other side of the parlor and you can see that they are genuinely happy, laughing, brushing each other’s shoulders in that unguarded way that people do when they love one another. * Twenty minutes later. Mildred, eyes glued to the ceiling, has passed through forty shades of red just thinking about it. Lorraine spreadeagled across the table, ink slowly bleeding from some machine, irrevocably merging into her dermis. It hits Mildred.

She’s here. Soon it will be her turn: worse than ink, a metal ring driven through her navel, through skin that gave her no such permission. And this isn’t simply getting a sign-she-doesn’t-know-the-name-of here, a long term investment involving hypothetical kids, acne or 4 o’clock soccer practice. No, Mildred has done her research. She knows the stakes. For weeks, she has been in quarantine at the Queensborough Community Library compiling facts and statistics, collating and synthesizing them into a catalogue of major conversion experiences:

(a) (b)

St. Paul: Damascus, Syria, AD 45, light through clouds Joan of Arc: Rouen, France, May 1431,

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smoke through lungs Luther: Wittenberg, Germany, October

1517, nail through door (d) Gandhi: Dandi, Gujarat, April 1930, salt

through wound (e) Bob Marley: Kingston, Jamaica, summer

1966, ganja through lips (c)

And she concludes the following: that something had to go into these folks before anything could come out. The give and the take. The yin and the yang.

It was the only way to get from A to B. But Mildred couldn’t help obsessing over the in-between space, the what-ifs, everything that could have gone wrong, that did go wrong, like: If Joan of Arc never saw visions of God If Luther got lazy, mailed in his 95 Theses If Ghandi became a corporate lawyer If . . .

“Socrates” Mildred is in mid-reverie. There’s a hand extended toward her, waiting for recognition.

“Socrates,” he says a little bit louder.

But Socrates isn’t in the catalogue. So Mildred is thinking Plato (because this is how her head works— analogies, associations), and her face reads What the fuck?, eyes squinted, forehead wrinkled.

Until she sees the man six-foot-three ½ inches of divine intervention in front of her.

“You ready?” he asks Mildred, all big toothy smile.

And Mildred wants to make like one of those ’40s movies, a Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman moment, reversing every gender role: No, No, No, baby, the question is are you ready? Because this is a man that begs for hubris, begs for hyperbole.

Mildred looks up. Nods two staccato nods.

Stupidly, like a two year old. She scratches the side of her belly for some indeterminable reason. Because the other side of this story is that, even seeing his Grecian frame, the curly hair, the Socratic beard, Mildred Chung is still wracked out of her mind. The metal ring grows larger, rounder, harder than any piercing can possibly be. Her navel becomes thinner, more delicate, than it actually is. She feels lightfooted,light-headed.Lutherdoesn’tseemtomatteras much right now; he’s too far away from the situation.

Breathing exercises, the ones pregnant women do 37

four months before labor, don’t help much. Mildred tries slapping herself. Nothing. The sides of her t-shirt are both soaked beneath the armpits, Einstein’s hair further topped off by a patch of sweat. Mildred is a mess. She needs to pee. A rush of blood to the head flushes through her body, oscillating between chill and fever.

“You alright?” Socrates asks.

And Mildred says she’s fine under her breath, pointing to her belly. “A little bit hungry, you know.

That’s it.”

Socrates thinks for a minute, tightening his jaw, twitching his frown lines. He runs off into the next room, sprightly, promptly returning with an orange in his left hand, a dented granny smith apple in the other.

Mildred gestures to the left.

“Shame,” Socrates sighs, “You know a good apple is equivalent to two cups of coffee?”

Mildred knows this. In fact, she can give you the chemical basis of the equivalence. She can tell him that, in the end, the glucose is too simple, its effects too vigorous, breaking down too fast in the end. It is a false high, a temporary thing.

“I didn’t know that,” she replies, coquettishly.

Mildred is working at the orange. The fragrance is what she needs, thrusting her index finger into the peel hard at first, and then winding her thumb between the skin and the pulp like an artist. She doesn’t tear away at the orange. She’s graceful about it. When she is done, she makes a perfect coil with the peel. Her father taught her this the summer of 1989 on Coney Island Beach.

Socrates is impressed, leading her into a room much smaller, far sparser than she anticipated. They make small talk. And the bullshit tastes like lemons in her mouth: that she is three years older than she actually is, more gregarious than she knows herself to be, that she lives in a house fifteen miles further than her actual house in Hollis.

“I’ve always wanted to work with NASA,” one moment she allows for the truth.

“Is that right?”

And Socrates, in turn, tells her about when he was a little boy before he worked at Ovid’s. He was short once. He was born in Jersey. His father got a job teaching philosophy at NYU when he was nine.

Hence, the name Socrates for which he was teased throughout his life: 38

Whadya gonna do: start a dialogue?

Dude, you got a C+ in Logic?

Big shoes to fill, buddy Socrates was supposed to be a lawyer like Lorraine and Ben. “But we read The Stranger freshman year . . .”

“Camus!”

“Camus,” he’s impressed. “But, like some people read Camus for like, you know, a paper, doublespaced by Monday . . .” Socrates’ finger tips are pressed together, suspended in mid-air like in the mafia movies, “. . . You know those people?”

Mildred knows those people.

“And I couldn’t do it anymore. If you read Camus, man, how can you write a paper on the guy?”

“Camus would never write a paper on Camus.”

“Right on,” he says and fiddles around with bottles and pads and gauze, rearranging things on the table beside him. Out of nowhere, Mildred tastes a load of sour in her mouth, the orange she just ate. She feels the pulp coming up and gurgles a bit.

“Are you alright?”

No, she’s not alright. Mildred doesn’t vomit but she does swallow whatever comes up. Acid.

“I’m just a little . . . a bit nervous you know. It’s silly, really,” and Mildred tries on the lawyer mask, looking down at her shoes, “First time, you know . . .”

And Socrates tells her not to worry.

“Because you just shouldn’t worry. It’s not that bad. It’s more blunt pain than sharp pain. Quick.”

He’s touching her white Nikes now, gently, all toothy smile, “Quick.”

Mildred looks like she’s prepared to believe every platitude this man can offer.

“But you don’t have to do anything you don’t – ” “No . . .” Mildred stops him. “I need to . . . I mean I want to do this.” Her face is contorted the way people do when they’re in such binds.

And Socrates is too wise to believe this, but he’s read too much Camus to stop her. He turns to cliché, telling her to think of a good time.

“Just take your mind off it. Sometimes we just think too much, you know? And it’s not good. It’s a bad habit.”

“Thinking too much?

“Yeah.”

“A good time?”

“A good time.” fall 2007

And for some reason: 7 a.m., Sunday mornings come to mind. Mildred transported seven years back, belly full of bake and saltfish. She had said her prayers.

She was dressed-to-boot in white lace dress, the kind with the unnecessary frills at the hem. This was the New Revival child’s uniform (male child uniform: brown pants, blue striped shirt, necktie of choice). The routine: door-to-door by 8, handing out pamphlets like the Jehovah’s Witness, a group of nine singing Onward Christian Soldiers. Mildred’s mother quoting Matthew 28:18 sporadically: “Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all nations.” Making disciples in Queens was difficult, however. And it might have been marginally less difficult had the New Revivalists chosen a later time, most people still in bed from their Saturday sinning the night before. Or had they just chosendifferentdoorsfromtheonesbetweenthe198th to 215th street limit. Regardless of this oversight, “De Lord is workin’ in mysterious ways. Mysterious ways!”

Or so it goes.

“Veronica,youalright?”SocratestouchesMildred’s thigh, sending an electric shock up her spine.

And the church itself. The reality that if Father, Son, Holy Ghost decided to pick a plot of land, any spot of land, upon which to descend, clouds parting, light bursting like Aurora, that this rented loft next to Shirley’s Roti Shop on Liberty Avenue may seem a bit out of the way. Because New Revival was not a church inthearchitecturalsenseoftheword:nospire,nobrick, nothing to get in the way. (Calvin would be ecstatic.)

Singing and clapping were intermittently interrupted by the overhead train, but ask any of the two hundred who were saved and “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus” never sounded any sweeter. And they came. In legion: Mr. Darling (fresh), Mother Agnes in wide brimmed purple hat, Sister Patricia in caustic red skirts that made Brother Blake say Amen for another reason. And Sister Mary ready to condemn the heathen with her husband Ian Lee, tired, in plaid suit, hair crimped up to the side. Mildred, drooling, half-asleep, in a chair at the back.

“Veronica? Veronica?” But Socrates blames her oblivion on the incense. He’s putting some cold liquid on her tummy now, and she looks like she approves.

BecauseMatthew23:12—hewhohumblethhimself shallbeexalted.MildredChung’sfather,BrotherArthur Chung,Chinese-Guyanese,bornBaptist,believedthis withallhisheartwouldallowhim,andhebelievedthat ifhewasgoingtomeetJesus,itwouldbeinthesimplest the harvard advocate

shirt and pants, shoes worn down to the soles. He was no taller than 5 foot 6, possibly the angriest man you will ever see, head full of Revelations. But Brother Chung was a prophet. He was on a neo-Crusade. He neededtoactthepart.Whenhewaschristenedtwenty years before in Georgetown, Guyana he was given the unfortunate name: Arthur Obadiah Malachi. Arthur Obadiah Malachi Chung. He would have preferred something stronger. Elijah, maybe. Something with more gravity, more bite: Isaiah. And ideally, Brother Chung, would have settled with one syllable, John, preparingthewayfortherighteous.Honeyandlocusts if you could spare.

“There are two kinds of belly buttons: the innies, the outties. The outties may actually be residual umbilical chord. Who knows?” Socrates is gunning for small talk, but gets no response from Mildred.

What Mildred has mapped into her head of these sermons, however, has all been sequenced, collated, synthesized. A cognitive referential chart whereby Biblical passages, based on frequency are mapped on a regression line so that X was verse and Y was time [in years].

“Veronica? So it’s best to take a deep breath and keep it held in for as long as you can.” Mildred does this.

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But time is not kind to such structures. Besides, the New Revival Church is far more cut and dry, either/ or. There was a mathematics to this faith. Sermons recounted in loud ratios, a little bit of this for a little bit of that, the give and the take, the yin and the yang: Saved: heathen. Snake: trap. War: Jesus. Bronx: Babylon. De factuality: De reality. Brother Chung leaning back: “But we WILL be okay!” he screams, sticking his left hand out.

“And we WILL be okay!” the congregation in response.

“Because this here is de factuality,” holding up his right hand now. “When we feel like we in the hot water.”

“Hot, hot, hot, brother.”

“But in the end, who get burn?”

“They get burn!”

“Who?” “THEY get burn!”

“But I’m not hearing you.”

“THEY GET BURN.” But Mildred, still drooling slightly, is trying to get her head around the “Burn” part. Most people on Sundays had taken a kind of solace in the word.

(We are saved. They will burn. There was justice in the word. Finality. Something beatitudinal, almost.)

Mildredwantedtoknowthenatureofthefire,however.

Was this Revelations 4:16? Fire, brimstone. Or was this something more inspired: tongues of fire settled on the tops of the apostles’ heads, speaking in tongues.

Matthew 3:11—baptism of fire.

“You ready, Veronica?”

“Brothers and sisters. 1 Corinthians 6. The Good Lord is telling us that the body is a what?” Brother Chung is jumping now, lifting each of his little shoulders up and down.

“The body is a what?”

“Temple” “I can’t hear you brothers.”

“TEMPLE!” “I can’t hear you sisters.”

“TEMPLE” “A mansion?”

“No!” “Rockafella Center?”

“Oh no. Uh-huh.”

“The scriptural factuality of Corinthians lucidly and pellucidly delineates that we must flee, FLEE!, 40

fornication.”

“Runnin’, baby, run!”

“And St. Paul tell us clear, clear that the spirit dwell in us. Am I right?”

“Amen!”

“Brothers, Amen?”

“AMEN!” the brothers respond.

Socrates asks her “Are you ready?” one more time, putting the tool closer to her stomach now.

Mildred’s face doesn’t give an alive response, an I’m-there response, but she’s smiling and her head is nodding because she’s hearing— “Sisters, Amen?”

Mildred is nodding vigorously, almost without control, which Socrates takes as an okay. Anybody would take this as an okay. But Mildred wasn’t nodding at Socrates and when the feeling floods her entire body moving from her core upwards, inwards, outwards, to her floppy ears and oversized toes, Mildredhasadefeatedlook,tryingtobrainstormsome way to somehow atone for this sudden transgression.

“Fuck” is all she manages of this, a word she reserves for special occasions. * “Y’all!”

It is 2 p.m. and Mildred is back at school. Because

fall 2007

this is the thing about nerd life for the genuine nerd, the authentic nerd: She won’t stay away from her habitat too long no matter what trauma may come.

She’s hardwired. Mildred needs school right now more than anything. She needs her physics class.

“Y’all!” And she needs this voice, Mr. Buck Rogers, her favorite teacher at the High School for the Advancement of Science and Technology. Because Buck Rogers, who has lived in New York City for thirty-five years, has somehow managed to maintain his Mississippi Y’all. This Y’all for Mr. Rogers—like the Jamaican irie, the Guyanese rass, the Canadian eh?—isn’t something that can be lost and gained in piecemeal fashion. The Y’all is not a choice; it is reflex.

“Y’all!” And the Y’all gets louder when Mr. Rogers has something important to say to his 2 p.m.

Advanced Physics class.

But the motley crew, reluctant geniuses who will allgoontodevotetheirlivestothestudyofelementary particles some day, dense matter, scattering theories, quark dynamics, quantum mechanics, strangelets and various exotica, aren’t the best listeners. Today, however, Mr. Rogers means business.

Because “As of 11 a.m. today Eastern Standard Time,” Mr. Rogers intones like he’s about to deliver a eulogy, “the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has announced that Dr. Pedro Brown et al has discovered a tremendous Kuiper Belt Object 15760 close to Pluto of unknown mass, 46.59 Astronomical Units from the sun with an approximate semi-major axis of 6,970,376,272 kilometers.” And Mr. Rogers puts down his sheet of paper, takes a melodramatic breath.

Kai Lee sticks an index finger upward, near to his face. He makes a spinning motion with it, the universal teenage signifier of Who gives a shit?

Mr. Rogers gives a shit. Because, he continues, “Pluto’s semi-major axis is a peasly 5,906,376,272 kilometers, which possibly means, a debate will now be opened within the scientific community on whether or not . . .”

“Pluto’s not a planet?” Sarah Darfield asks.

“Kiddos, Pluto just may not be a planet anymore.”

“Whadya mean Pluto’s not a planet?” Sam Browning asks, wiping the spit from the side of his mouth.

“Pluto’s not a planet.”

“Pluto’s not a fucking planet?” the harvard advocate

“Pluto is not a fucking planet.” Paco Cruz confirms, because for Paco, the number of Fucks is directly proportional to the truth. And this is the truth: Pluto’s not a fucking planet.

“Michael Jackson’s not a dude,” Conchita Cruz, class-misanthrope, rolling her eyes back into her brain as only she can.

“What about My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas?”

“Paco, yo dumbass mama just lost her job at WalMart.” Because Dave Cooper doesn’t like Paco Cruz as of November 1991. Paco Cruz stole his girlfriend, Sarah Darfield.

“Assistant manager,” a third finger pointed in no particular direction. “Fucker.”

But Buck Rogers isn’t tuned into this profanity before him, the kind that he has surely adapted to through the years, learnt to put up with. That children in this city age so fast, 20 by 15, 25 by 20, some 40 by 25, numbers disjointed, not as straightforward as it is in Biloxi. Mr. Rogers is looking at Mildred, her coat still on, her fingers rested on her stomach, a look on her face of complete shellshock.

“Mildred. Thoughts on this?”

Mildred has no thoughts on Pluto. Because as Pluto, the stars, God, providence (Mildred can’t differentiate between any of them right now) would haveit,thingsclearlydidnotgoasintended.Andwhen Mildred ran out of Ovid’s unsure on whether or not she paid, she thought that this thing in her stomach was going to be fixable. That it was ultimately reversible.

But raising her T-shirt on the way, Mildred realizes that something has gone terribly awry, something is getting progressively worst, burning, bristling. This is torture. The area round the gauze only confirms this, that whatever is happening beneath it involves some kind of feisty metamorphosis: a haughty shade of red, purple—who knows?—yellow pus oozing out from frustrated pores. Mildred Chung has never been in this kind of pain.

“Pluto?” Buck Rogers tries again.

But the clock above the blackboard says the school day is done.

“I don’t know, Mr. Rogers. I don’t know.”

Paco agrees: “Who fucking knows?” * Someone should let Mildred know that it’s time to cross the street. The sky is a nasty industrial gray 41

because in January, nighttime in this city comes at 4 p.m. Mildred walks the same route from school to home, the path that doesn’t change much from day to day, passing the multiple 99 cent stores in tacit competition with one another, Latchman’s Tax and Real Estate Services, immigration law offices with American, Guyanese, Trinidadian flags waving through glass windows—red, green, yellow. Mildred wishes there was a cave somewhere in which to crawl.

But there aren’t any caves in Queens. There isn’t enough space.

And even though she manages to pass the crosswalk, Mildred is still frozen. The image pinning herfeettotheconcreteinvolvestheKoreanwomanon Channel One who, last night, clad in gray geometric suit (only to be outdone by her geometric hair), announced that Queens Boulevard was the deadliest street in New York City for the seventh consecutive year. “Boulevard of Broken Bones,” read the caption in the orange box next to the Korean woman’s hair mass. The most recent victim, Esther Schecter, 80, of Astoria, admittedly closer to the Good Lord than most, got run over by a 1978 Oldsmobile Starfire Firenza, as was her cocker spaniel that didn’t have a name. Cocker spaniels are one of many of life’s unnecessary distractions, in any case, so Mildred

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isn’t particularly mournful. Mildred is not usually sentimental about such news. Still, she can’t help but see the chalk outline of the dead dog in the little pixilated guy ahead of her, flashing. Amber to white, puppy to corpse, life to death.

Randomness: Mildred Chung is fiddling a key through the keyhole of her house, simultaneously collecting the mail from the drop box. It’s dark: Somebodyshouldfixthelighthere;somebodyshould do this soon. It isn’t getting lighter out and winter will last a few more months, at least.

Opening the door, it appears that no one is home.

Mildred’s father is most likely still at the church.

Mildred’s mother, who runs the bakery next door to the church, is probably selling pine tarts, bread pudding, black eye tarts, coconut shortbread— overtime. Because it is Friday and this whole city needs something sweet on its tongue by Friday.

Mildred throws her backpack down in the living room, climbs upstairs slowly, peels off her coat. When she gets to her room, she doesn’t wait to turn on the light or anything. She lifts up her shirt, damp with all that went on today. She’s trying to find the center of gravity, the center of everything.

But Christ is all she manages of this.

“Mildred?”

And Mildred doesn’t hear the voice of her father climbing up the stairs. Because he is never home this early. Never.

Fluid soaks through the gauze pasted on Mildred’s stomach, smelling of eggs by now. And Mildred doesn’t know what to call this fluid, whether or not it even has a name.

“Mildred? That you?” the wood frames of the stairs cracking under feet.

Mildred registers. Christ she mouths again, hurrying now, she pulls down her shirt too fast, brushing a finger on the gauze. She bites her lips in response, crimson edged where her teeth leaves a mark. Mildred knows that she is not good enough to keep the lawyer’s mask on; she knows the weaknesses of her arguments, the fragility of the defense walls she builds in these circumstances. Mildred wants to crack, but thinks about the consequences of cracking.

Oddly, though, Mildred doesn’t know what the end consequence would be if her mother, her father, her brother finds out this transgression. She doesn’t know how bad it would be, or even if it would be bad at all. And this is the more frightening alternative: that fall 2007

they aren’t angry. That their feelings are deeper than anger.

“How was your day, sweetie?”

But Mildred, she cannot lie like most daughters can, bold-faced and coy. She just sits on her bed like a defeated angel, brushing her hand across her forehead, slouched shoulders.

“Long day, Dad, just really long.”

Brother Chung isn’t the kind of parent that asks his children what they did in school that day, but seeing the look in Mildred’s eyes, he figures it’s worth a shot.

He looks at her as she puts both hands on her knees.

“Kepler’s Third Law of Orbital Motion, Dad. Orbital masses. Newton’s revision of Kepler’s Third Law.” Brother Chung wishes he didn’t ask because he has no idea what anything she just mentioned means.

His daughter is a genius—this he knows—and he and his wife knew that from the beginning.

He walks from across the room to where she sits on the bed. He rests a hand on her shoulder.

“You ate?”

“I had a slice of pizza.”

“That’s it?” he asks her.

“I’m full, Dad. Tired. Just tired.”

“Rest, sweetie, you have to rest.”

But if Brother Chung were a just little bit more astute, he would see that his daughter does not need rest; she needs release. Because everything in Mildred’s world right now lies latent: the tear residing in her left eyeball, the orange juice settled at the back of her throat, the pus in her navel not quite brave enoughtooozeoutyet.AndtheproblemwithMildred Chung is that she thinks that this kind of latency can be avoided somehow, thinking that life must proceed fully-formed like in a photograph. But the camera, in the end, is nothing without its lens. Like using the wrong formula for a quadratic equation, Mildred thinks, blurring sine with cosine, stuck on an integral when it’s really a derivative she needs. Yet Mildred has been collating, synthesizing, working through the wrong pictures—because it is not Martin Luther or Joan of Arc or celestial navigation that has her in her current bind. It may actually be staring father and daughter in their faces: The Sunday morning that Mildred decided she needed a breath of air. She wanted a space to take off her black buckle shoes, to drool if necessary. She wantednosermonizing,nophilosophizing,theorizing the harvard advocate

or anything of that order. In fact, to understand this current bind involved this kind of digging deeper, guess work, intrusion and induction better known as nosiness. One had to take a simple picture. Mildred standing at the roof at the very top of the five storey building of New Revival. Below: people as small as rodents, ants, roaches scurrying along with things to do. A man begging for change. Women going into Stacey-Ann’s (bald), walking out with twelve new inches of hair that once belonged to an Arabian horse in Jersey. Men drinking. Old Guyanese men playing dominoes. And Mr. Singh chasing no good, shit-faced little assholes out of his store for bringing in dat devil music—LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Heavy D, in this case—doing the gyration of the hip that Mildred does only in complete privacy. People walking, running, idling. And the train like a piercing bullet running through the blue sky. And the city! The city! In the distance. Mildred on the top of all of this thinking how loud the thing was, how arrogant.

“Dad, I really should get to my work.”

Which was universal code for enough now, you’ve done your deed, you can go.

But not before, another more important snapshot: Brother Chung taking a break after service, on the top of this same roof thinking that he’s too high for

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anyone to see him. And even he looks tired, exhausted with just listening to the choir shaking walls, tapping into physics-defying frequencies. No one saw Brother Chung sneak outside for a smoke. But from where Mildred is sitting this isn’t a cigarette: a cigar? Too small to be a cigar. It smells too sweet. Definitely too sweet. Brother Chung was too reformed for the Latin of St. Xavier’s Catholic Church on the other side of his New Revival but he knew the phrase Vox clamantis in deserto,andfornowthephrasesateasyonhistongue.

And while his little girl stares at the sky, the wannabe prophetsmokesweedforhislife.Heobservesthelattice ofLibertyAvenue,andthinkstohimselfhowthisdesert is concrete, his wilderness Queens.

By now, Brother Chung has taken his daughter’s hint, gone downstairs to read a newspaper, finish a sermon, begin dinner—who knows? Mildred finds herself slowly picking away at the gauze, gripping at the side of the bed with her free hand. It’s been a long day, but the newspapers say that as of 11 a.m. this morning, Eastern Standard Time, Pluto may or not be a planet.

Pedro Brown, chief researcher, fields questions from the audience. Who knows, he says smiling. And this is how it ends: “Who knows?”

And for once, Mildred finds that she sincerely does

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not care about the science, the details, the specifics.

She just wants the idea of Pluto, the idea that My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pies, thank you very much, that, yes, Pluto is a fucking planet.

This is what Mildred thinks when she presses her fingers on the red, raised shiny skin. Little awkward hairs stick out around the navel she’s never noticed before. It’s mad masochism: a napkin in her mouth, sliding the silver bullet out quickly, irrationally. The entire room is upside down, it feels like carnival, the days before Trinidadian Lent. Nothing is where it’s supposed to be. Mildred Chung is exhausted. The tear latent in her left eye is gushing out like a geyser.

She wants sleep. Sleep is all she wants. But before she sleeps, Mildred places the tiny bullet, smaller than she anticipated, on the dressing table next to her. The fan overhead is spinning mad. She takes a look at the silver bullet one more time, rolling into a lukewarm cup of coffee, the cup next to A Brief Introduction to Kepler, Sense & Sensibility, papers, papers, papers, including brown copies of the New York Times—now many days too old.

fall 2007

A Star is Born: Busby Berkeley’s Kaleidoscopic Politics garrett morgan

Near the end of the Warner Bros. 1933 classic, 42nd Street, a frantic musical theater director tries to rouse a young starlet to the seriousness of her task: “Sawyer, you listen to me, and you listen hard.

Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. It’s the lives of all the people who’ve worked with you. You’ve got to go on, and you’ve got to give and give and give. They’ve got to like you. Got to. Do you understand? . . . You’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!”

If only Britney Spears had watched this snippet before her infamously catatonic performance at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards. Somewhere in the past seventy-five years, stars have changed for the public; as access to their personal lives became the increasingly insistent right of the grocery-shopping mom, their glorified distance faded into the background. What was it that used to make a star a star?

It might have been a name. An article in the March 27, 1925 issue of Movie Weekly asked readers to give actress Lucille LeSueur “Another Name for Her Screen Career.” The lucky winner was awarded $500, and the metamorphosed actress would go on to dizzying fame as Joan Crawford. Judy Garland began her life as Frances Ethel Gumm; John Wayne started his as Marion Morrison. In studio-run Hollywood, a star’s name needed to have the right color—literally. In a decade where Marlene Dietrich was called a Blonde Venus, a Scarlet Empress, and a Blue Angel in three the harvard advocate

different Von Stroheim films, titular shading could give an actress that extra Technicolor glow. The real-life young starlet of 42nd Street, Ruby Keeler, started out her days with the unfortunate moniker Ethel. Scarlett Johannson is a modern example of a classic, crafted Hollywood name: her first is a striking shade of red, her last is unrevealing of a half-Jewish heritage.

The choreographer Busby Berkeley, born William Enos Berkeley, benefited from a no less jazzy re-naming.

Berkeley’s aesthetic transformation, however, dealt more deeply with the question of a star’s role in film than with his own renaming. Since the 1960s, when camp revivalism brought the faded spectacle of the ’30s back into the limelight, Berkeley has received a steady stream of popular and critical attention.

Last year, Warner Bros. released a 6-DVD collection of his most characteristic films. The rapid development of his cinematic style reveals a seemingly implausible change. Between 1933 and 1935, his choreography transformed from a type of democratic aesthetic to a pervasively fascist one. Ruby Keeler, the central star of these films, had an increasingly more prominent role in his choreography, and this is surprisingly central to his own transformation.

Berkeley was born in 1895, and at twentytwo, he entered the First World War as a field artillery lieutenant. He lead a number of military parades and was exposed to their aggressive timing and intricate patterns. After the war, Berkeley demonstrated this early influence in his direction of a slew of Broadway productions, achieving broad critical success in the theater community.

On stage, he was never concerned so much with 45

the terpsichorean skill or individual appeal of his starlets as with the choreographic patterns that they could form as part of a whole corps d’acteurs.

When Berkeley moved from the stage to the screen, it was obvious that his aesthetic modus operandi would have to change. His original de-emphasis on star power could never work for Hollywood: Stars needed to be big in pictures.

Under the regimented studio system, recognizable actors ensured box office success. A litany of Lilliputian assistants, publicists, trainers, vocal instructors, and even plastic surgeons would strap and prune their Gulliver before presenting their creation to a guaranteed adoring public. For the 1930s Hollywood musical, a chorus line was simply icing on the cake.

Ruby Keeler was one of those designated Hollywood stars. 42nd Street, Berkeley’s first Hollywood film, was a huge success in 1933; it singlehandedly saved Warner Bros. from bankruptcy.

The film, with an ensemble cast featuring actors who would reappear in the next four Berkeley movies, reinvented a likely Depression genre: the “backstage musical.” The story of a production number faced with imminent financial ruin was appealing to a cash-strapped audience, and the ensuing Berkeley films capitalized on the intrinsically escapist quality of this story arc.

In the eponymous number of 42nd Street, Ruby Keeler steps out between two curtains with a precious smile on her face and sings the opening lines. Fact and fiction mingle as she demonstrates her technical prowess as a buck dancer. Buck dancing was a new type of tap dancing that emerged in the period and was noted for the replacement of metal taps with heavier wooden soles of shoes.

When the actress first auditioned at the tender (and illegal) age of 13, she eschewed waiting her turn, walked up to the director, and showed off her fresh dancing. She was hired on the spot.

After Ruby’s shuffle, the camera pans out to reveal a movie set of New York in all its heterogeneous glory, replete with produce-sellers, keystone cops, and street performers. As we get a sense of the stage, something strange happens.

The set seamlessly becomes a larger one, as chorus girls line up, holding cut-out skyscrapers that form a skyline of Manhattan. The camera tilts up, and the new angle transforms a series of steps on stage 46

into the Empire State Building, an impossible angle for the diegetic ‘theater’ audience. On top, Ruby Keeler smiles at the camera from the arms of her on-screen partner, Dick Powell. The move is subtle, but it’s one of the first transitions from the setting of musical theater to that of musical cinema. The two actors at the top of the stairs are no longer beaming at their in-film audience; their concern is for the movie-watching audience itself.

42nd Street effectively revived the dying genre of the movie musical, and its success allowed Berkeley as choreographer to outshine his directors and, eventually, his stars. Even in his own time Berkeley was considered a heavyweight. Dreaming up his musical sequences in hours-long bath sessions, he once approached the studio head, asking to cut a hole in the soundstage roof so that he could get the cameras high enough for his dizzying geometry— an unheard-of request. The studio head complied.

Warner Bros. gave the green light for another picture in the same year, Gold Diggers of 1933, which featured more prominently Berkeley’s choreography. The musical is probably most remembered for its opening song, “We’re in the Money.” The yet-unknown Ginger Rogers’ smiling face appears on-screen as she waxes wealthy with a litany of coin-clad girls dancing in front of a stage latticed in dollars, singing about the joys of stumbling upon success— We’re in the Money, The Skies are Sunny!

Old Man Depression, you are through; You’ve done us wrong.

For an audience member experiencing the Great Depression, the fantasy is an ethereal and gloriously escapist moment. But then it abruptly ends. Police swarm the stage, the girls are stripped of their costumes, and they’re told to take off their coins: “Production’s shutting down.” In the film, the actresses try to raise money for their musical production—and a little for themselves—by prowling after rich Boston magnates.

In these early musical numbers, the more democratic aesthetic of Berkeley’s choreography comes into the spotlight. In Gold Diggers, the lovely “Shadow Waltz” demonstrates for the first time the key elements of Berkeley’s distinct style.

The number opens with the cheesy Dick Powell crooning to Ruby Keeler, once again singing on fall 2007

Illustration by Amy Lien

stage to an in-film audience; when the curtain and stars disappear, the scene is impossibly large for a realistic theater. The set and costumes, designed

by Berkeley, are all flowing, three-dimensional curlicues. The dancers play violins, and when the lights go out, the violins go on. A neon glow outlines the instruments as each of the dancing girls passes the camera, smiling briefly before another replaces her. Berkeley used this in all his early films—if individual personality was going to be a part of his carefully-constructed kaleidoscope, he wanted each actress to receive her few seconds in the spotlight.

Leaving the frontal view of the women, Berkeley does something never before achieved in the history of the theater—a top-down perspective.

The women below cease to appear human, their heads forming shifting geometric spaces. At one point, they come together to form the outline of a larger violin, its bow undulating back and forth over the simulated body. the harvard advocate

Berkeley’s use of the top-down perspective in his transition into musical cinema is typical of his early political aesthetics. His choice to deemphasize the traditional Hollywood musical star, his liberal view of stage participation, and his conception of geometric unity all appealed to a democratic aesthetic. Berkeley’s attachment to depression liberalism is especially apparent in his more overtly political numbers. In the last song of Gold Diggers of 1933, “Remember My Forgotten Man,” Berkeley pays tribute to the 1932 Bonus Army March. In 1932, World War I veterans had assembled outside Congress to show support for the Patman Bonus Bill, which would have moved forward the date upon which the former soldiers received cash bonuses. After Congress defeated the bill, the assembled men refused to leave. Police fatally shot two veterans, the army was called in, and photographs of the military turned against its own were plastered on front pages of newspapers across the country. It was an embarrassing public 47

relations low for the Roosevelt administration. In Berkeley’s “Remember My Forgotten Man,” Joan Blondell weeps for her “forgotten man,” as soldiers marching on treadmills and progressively larger half-circles of marching silhouettes fill the screen.

Berkeley applies his democratic principle once again: a moving dolly shot of a breadline echoes the scene with the girls in “The Shadow Waltz,” as we see the face of each emaciated, downtrodden man for a few moments, waiting for his chance at a meal.

The Roosevelt administration, however, managed to catch a break from Berkeley in the Footlight Parade (1933) number “Shanghai Lil.” Berkeley’s signature top-down perspective of an American flag mosaic, created by dancers holding up placards, flips into the same flag with Franklin Roosevelt’s face heroically centered; in another bird’s-eye angle, soldiers form the Tennessee Valley Authority insignia with their rifles, firing victoriously. This political symbolism hearkens back to nationalist visual culture of the nineteenth century: as instruments of mass politics, political symbols like flags, anthems, and insignias proved more effective than rousing didactic speech.

Yet beginning with 1934’s Dames, Berkeley’s political aesthetic underwent a series of transformations that started to point him away from his former democratism. The number, “I Only Have Eyes for You” is a telling example. The piece begins innocuously enough—Dick Powell sings to Ruby Keeler on a simulated New York soundstage. As he sings the lines, “but they all disappear from view,” the crowded street empties itself of inhabitants; Ruby’s sweetly smiling face is the only other human presence in New York.

Then, things take a turn for the weird. As the two ride along a subway, Ruby Keeler’s floating head occupiesthescreen,and everythingdisappears.The camera moves up, and we see a line of six replicas.

The heads rearrange themselves around the black space, before they are joined by seven additional columns of disembodied Rubys. The sheer number of starlets is overwhelming. The set morphs into classic Berkeley: revolving stairs, shiny iridescent floors, and spatial distance. We’re so far away from the dancers that they all look the same—that is, they all look like the star herself. Eventually, the iconographybecomesself-referentialadabsurdum.

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Ruby Keeler emerges proudly out of her own eye; chorus girl mockeries lift up their skirts and reveal a Ruby Keeler mosaic, reminiscent of the Roosevelt flag from Footlight Parade. Most tellingly, in the final shot of the fantasy, she occupies an ornate gold frame, standing like a proud Venus over a neo-Roman chaise lounge filled with her doppelgängers below.

What’s happened here? If Berkeley’s everchanging,ever-more-bizarredesignshadacommon thread, it was their lack of individual focus. But here the number is about Ruby Keeler, and no one else. Berkeley’s democratic choregraphic impulse is democratic no longer: rather, it has taken on a fascist edge in its singular adoration of pure, uninhibited, almost religious beauty, The cultural historian George R. Mosse1 clarifies the issue: “The aesthetic of fascism should be put into the framework of a civic religion . . . the ideal of beauty was central to this aesthetic, whether that of the human body or the political liturgy.” The more specific definition of a fascist beauty as “the good, the true, and the holy” plays well with the image of the white-clad, chaste, and prominently brunette Ruby Keeler. In the “I Only Have Eyes For You” sequence, her brown hair and innocent smile replace a racier blonde visage on the subway advertisements.

The attempt to duplicate her appearance is certainly reverent, and putting her in a latticed frame above adoring singers magnifies the religious symbolism. Fascism also annexed the neo-classical public standard of beauty as its own, a standard that had dominated Italy and Germany since the late eighteenth century. As Mosse writes, “The [fascists] valued classical beauty of form, whether of the human body or, to a lesser extent, of official architecture, as close to the sublime.”

If Berkeley’s early democratic aesthetic had de-emphasized the individual star in sequences like “The Shadow Waltz” and “42nd Street,” here we see the extremity of that democratization— heterogeneous non-entity replaced with specific non-entity, the personal applied to all. The aesthetic link between the democratic and fascist aesthetics is telling of an historic-political loop, 1 All quoted references from George R. Mosse. “Fascist Aesthetics and Society: Some Considerations.” Journal of Contemporary History. Vol. 31, No. 2 (April 1996), pp. 245-252 fall 2007

leftist and rightist extremism coming ultimately to the same thing. Fascist aesthetics depended upon direct and unambiguous statements—there could be no “formless wobble,” to use Ezra Pound’s term for parliamentary government. The Rooseveltian hero-worship of “Shanghai Lil” has stripped itself of its political allusions, and the aesthetic quality of Ruby Keeler is the only dominating image.

The narrow, fascist scope is oppressive—even her nervous smile seems uncomfortable with the fact.

In Gold Diggers of 1935, a sequel to 1933— though the incestuous nature of these films makes the term “sequel” somewhat irrelevant—the fascist aesthetic is taken to its critical apex with Berkeley’s most fantastic number, the best of his career—“The Lullaby of Broadway.”

In the sequence, a massive nightclub is revealed incrementally as the camera zooms back from a series of steps to show an impossibly large space; on the pedestal of an art deco cliff, a woman and her partner are the sole audience members in a Reifenstahlian fantasy of negative space. (The architecture is more streamlined modernist than neo-classical, linked to the Italian fascist tradition: Mussolini prominently annexed modernist architecture in the look of his futurist-inspired progressivism.) Men and women enter separately: For the fascist virtue of aggressive masculinity, the sexual division of labor was as important as the economic one. The separated genders march in a rigorous, violent tap dance, shining in patent leather and sparkling black clothes. For the first and only time in Berkeley’s career, the music cuts, and we have Berkeley’s version of pure dance—only the aggressive tap of shoes filling the audio. From shot to shot, the violence of the dancers is obvious— their movements are inflexible and rapid, as they hauntingly reenact Hitlerian salutes and Mussolini marches, their enormous silhouettes menacingly cascading along the pure white walls.

The violence reaches a climax, as they command the girl watching to “Come and dance!” to which she responds, coquettishly, “Why don’t you come and get me?” They don’t waste any time. As they pull her from atop her pedestal, she dances around with them, playfully trying to escape. She opens a door to a balcony, and as the dancers move in, she falls to her death.

Did Berkeley consciously simulate the political the harvard advocate

situation in Europe? Not quite. Berkeley’s cinematic aesthetic reflected a democratic liberalism at its beginning, and it certainly transformed into a fascist aesthetic by its end. But the development was perhaps biographical; Berkeley might have begun to progressively infuse his art with a militarism that he learned in his years as a drill instructor. Likelier still, the genre itself underwent transformation. The Hollywood musical in the 1930s was aesthetically caught in the middle of an oppositional constraint. On the one hand, its chorus lines and geometric emphasis were conducive to the reduction of individual recognition. On the other hand, its important star power worked against this force of larger spatial integrity in the depersonalized human body. A fascist aesthetic is the unlikely synthesis of this binary opposition; through the coupling of individual glorification and depersonalization, Hollywood and Fascism both found a dialectical sublation, the seeming contradictions of their motives resolving into an aesthetic coherency.

Berkeley went on to direct numerous films after Gold Diggers of 1935, but the fascist iconography that he had developed by the end of his memorable stint at Warner Bros. had disappeared. These later films aren’t much to look at—some are practically intolerable. (Watching a black-faced Judy Garland jig her away across a stage as her character put on a “good ol’ minstrel show” for a community theater in 1941’s Babes in Arms was one of the most frightening cinematic experiences of my life.)

Berkeley’s experience in the ’30s and his growing reliance on star power ultimately made him a panderer, and his career ended regrettably; Babes in Arms is not only racist but also boring, predictable schlock. Looking back, our detachment from the period makes Berkeley’s final fascist overtones, unlike Judy’s blackface, strangely beautiful.

Berkeley’s transformation is an amazing thing to watch, and its glorious apex in “The Lullaby of Broadway” seems to hint at his inevitable fall through its stunning energy—an energy that just isn’t able to sustain itself. Without making any direct political reference, his numbers nevertheless make us realize why this mass aesthetic were so hypnotically appealing. Berkeley may be the only choreographer of the cinema to accomplish such a feat. Fascism has never since looked so good.

49

THE CURDLED CAT

I stand at Toilet, piss on the seat and drink orange juice from the carton. The cycles of reincarnation.

Drip on my toes and so cement me. I haven’t done my push-ups, managed wake-ups in the nick of luck. Don’t look at any reflection just yet. I scratch chest like lotto and try to feel, muscle bone beat. I feel one shoulder then the next, and then ’ceps and ol’ forearm. I pull my calves up to my to my lower back, pissing all over the bathmat. Bootstrap.

The juice carton goes in the plastic trash bin and the toothbrush goes in to fight the orangey.

Mirror give a guy a break. I feel my chest again, trying to pinch ribs and casually keep count. Hold still you buggers.

In the shower before I know it. Shower learns me that I’m in. The hot water falling down, I grab my sides again, now sure that there aren’t matching hearts and clubs, no suits for I-and-I this heyday.

The shampoo goes in my hair; piss reeks up from the mat as steam turns to smoke. Maybe only it’s that I’m not standing up so straight. I stretch more in the shower, huffing, trying to open my chest.

What is that. Vicks?

Next shaving. One side of my face there is scratchier and more leather-gnawed. Is this penance for push-ups? I cut identical rifts with the razor, rubbing in the aftershave until I’m mended symmetry.

Shaving without mirror. I lean all the way back onto my tailbone until the skin is stretched taut against my stomach, niggling at fat. Two sides of the hip are not at about-face, cannot dialogue like chums. Standing up very, very straight my hands drop to my sides and I feel for pockets in my thighs, 50

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equivalent places to put the hands so I can see if they are the same length. No standard can be achieved, no weights and measures. I wish. I am a-jangles.

Throwing on clothes I think I could do twelve push-ups, to atone instead of ten. But push-ups are before shower, and that’s writ.

Apartment a loose collection, no guiding principle. Man and woman but girl and boy when clinic comes between. Me that guy, that guy, that guy, the couch, stoned at all hours, drunk even upon waking, drove my car into the porch last week, oblivious or impervious to abortion and why shouldn’t? Not mine, but was my friend before my hips clenched out of align and hers clenched out of: “MEMPHIS TENNESSEE.” Who are we us these people? Radio always, doesn’t have to be coming from anywhere. No lights on, radio, radio, lights: no. Girl there all sprawled out on the couch, wombless what a first, cat curdled nearby, boy gets the bed tonight I see, one of these days someone will ask for my room.

Bed hunches your spine a fair piece down the road, can’t recommend.

Not thinking that way. No car so bus stop.

Good lord what a fucking hall of ghosts. Each room modeled after somebody else’s vision, past life of people whose lives aren’t even anymore, not even present lives, bunch of squatters are we, merry roving band this part of the country. Friend started building baby’s room without telling, guest room or some shit excuse, room for baby that is a word that no one can say, me only the third wheel, fall 2007

couch-bound car wreck.

“WHAT WOULD YOU DO FOR $111?”

Want to yank that voice but got no clue, direction a non.

Anotherthingthatnobodyturnedon.Apartment got ghosts like fleas, no spook, just hateful. A place no one can get out of but everyone is gone. No discussion of how we came, such a universe of used-to-be-friends, liable to wake up anywhere, any old place, hope you wake up all shipshape, cuz if not.

Shitshape.

Okay, so the bus. But at waiting I am called.

Yeah, Phony Baloney RigaTony, be by in a jiff if the bus. We rollin’ this day? I have thrown on clothes; loose, loose, loose keep from seeing my ruin. Don’t seem to hobble, subtle hunchback at this point of morning, bleak form in sweatpants and jersey.

Bus has come and gone, town square waiting, in the lurch and not even noon. Sip a chocolate milk, summer a’coming. Motorcycles scoot by, deliveries of smut to the general store, and chocolate milk.

What jersey am I wearing anyway this June, but don’t look, accentuate spine fuck, drove car into the porch what a goddamn-it.

Sip with a straw so fewer spittle. Cheeks sliced like pears, aftershave burn real good. Sun eyes me logy, sees me there tryin’a’ keep cool, just you wait boy, sweat noon soon. You bake pears this part of Mississippi or Tennessee? Pay them $111 sooner or later if bake ’em good. Milk rotten like a dime store porn mag, don’t hold off. Dog days early onset, be want to die by two, no ice cream do you any good.

Cell phone, beat box ringtone Saturday on the airwaves, ice cream rin’d too, on the street sidewalk dirt on the basketball summer days, browsing, downloading like a hornet, just give me everything onto my storage and then I’ll have it and when it rings, BOOM BA DOOM BOOM BOOM. What would you do for $111?

Aloney Zamboni, speak good clear Queen’s this time around.

Road trip, no telling where tomorrow, get you out of that hole you’ve been driving whose porch into. The Queen’s English, no doubt.

Your wheels?

I am wheels, no worry.

So swing by. Hella day for hard labor, not in mind, hope not to foresee it. the harvard advocate

Don’t break your back, hero.

I gag. He knows. I’m broken in two-by-four.

Can’t let on. Yeah, good. Here I am. Pick me up.

Got nowhere but for here to wait until us is.

Be seein’ ya.

Think of the roommates, like is there a tipping point or if it just gets worse and worse and worse.

People basically wrecked, don’t know if that’s

Illustration by Amy Lien

51

saying anything. Place a sinkhole, pull down ships if they go too near, killed its own baby if you ask, nothing new birthed from there, cat barely more than mange, no manger, motley better off than no one.

Watch them hobble. Radio in the store some kiddie reading rainbow, girls and woods and hoods and bread crumbs and scarecrows and gum drop ovens the better to cook and eat and ask three riddles to you with, drink this chocolate milk before hot cocoa unseasonable ice skating in winter wonderland with more girls in hoods and the Loch Ness circling underfoot and the woods are deeper there, in Sweden, Swedes in Spades, where the ponds are frozen if that’s what we dwell on, and who knows what lives beyond the thicket.

Do things heading out to die seek out the already dead or to be alone instead. The Tibetan and the Egyptian Book of the Dead might spar for us, if given reign. And then knowledge.

Old, old, hobble, cigarettes tucked in breast pocket, blue with factory-sewn name above the heart, Shawn, Cullin, Morty, shirts sagged like my real chest on this splendid morn. If somebody doesn’t turn off that radio.

And then Goldilocks asked the frog man if he’d like a kiss and he said no a wish and she said eat your porridge or I’ll have the Sultan string you up with a noose of hair and you’ll dangle from the parapet until your friends roll by in a Saturn and shout, hey dick wad get in we’re rollin’.

That’s me getting in, squeezed into bitch in the back seat, no doubt, now finally at liberty to blare ’n’ roll into the speakers.

Feel a twitch, need to manage to never return to that apartment. Turn that music up. Toll man: turn that music down. But where are we, who’s got a dollar, who’s idea, you have any idea how hot it’s s’posta get?

Grandparents’ homes ring the city. Inner part all flophouse, cock and flopdooble, rush of souls of a weekend, slurp down on the bars and gobble molecules till they’re good and fucked and can swoop again into the week where no one’s got a name and shuffles right through the noon hour, morning to night, shuffle paper the souls do in the city. Keep finding quarters at the bottom of shot glasses, booby trap from petty haunters lived there before us, want sucking metal think that’s funny.

52

Grandparent land, pay-per-preview of us and fate, a date, for two, may I take your order dear sir or madam. To whom it may concern.

Drive, drive, drive, boom-boom-shackalack, you know the band wiseguy, Drive.

With miles and miles under the car, sun starts to make good, no vague boast, with my head at my knees I will keep my head still. Stare at the cornfields as they get cycled through, repeat with variation, learn and learn and still not get anyplace, same old country, these eyes are the eyes of the old and I am draped in a jersey and hunched like a claw but otherwise am dad. Not dead.

So now too bright. No one worry, free men today, no paper to shuffle, there isn’t a number you can call the pay phone. Four other guys in that car, all variations on Tony, Toby, like any old anyone could find you sitting next to, in some locality.

Me in the middle keep faltering for left or right window, just corn neither way, neck a grinding halt, a jumblee from the land of men who went to sea in a sieve.

See that damn baby out there in that sieve, listening to the radio underwater. Bring it back all sopping for the roommate, wrap in a towel or piss bathmat for the girl and then they can get married and move out, and me too.

Ever having used to know anyone is a funny tale. If anyone survives.

Classic refrain right, no-brainer, everybody hurts. Milk in stomach like cat on couch, curled. $111. $110: fridge; $1: milk / porn.

Haven’t been seeing while driving for a long spell. Tony in the cockpit at the gears, drunk drive like gangbusters, mason jar this way comes, neck crack, click-clack, tick-tick, tock, radio mentions the clock and I oh no, dream within a within a within a within a within a, but no, that’s high school passé. This is a me within a car within a mason jar.

And neck crack and glug and then oh but sweetness follows.

Tunnel vision. Straight and narrow to our destination, place away from dead things for a lone chunk. Curiosity killed the cat but for a while I was a suspect. Past tense gnomic voice. One thing I know. Prince Caspian of the scrolls and the wishywash, spread them over this Saturn window light fall 2007

show corn epic, and step from X-marked spot to the next, to a T. Roll across gravel strewn tundra, speed scrape and then none. Kill the engine, first dead thing, unless dead heat so two, but nonsense isn’t new to me.

The Killing Fields. Golden sun, golden corn, golden horn. Wander ’mongst the blades, hey there stranger, you gonna share your smokes there or what. Make an Iroquois circle hidden in the ticks’ thrive, and smoke. Dead stoned and stone drunk half the time on that couch, God’s level best worse off the other halftime. Cousins come traipsing through apt. past my puddle of gloom on the carpet, piss on the bathmat like Sandinistas and take their place for the evening, care not about who’s no longer with us, Ignoreland.

They hypnotized the summer, 1979 . . . cool kids never have the time. Like a live wire, jumped across the street.

Tony, yo Riga’, take your fuckin’ hit.

Yo sorry hey.

Mellow in the dead spring, but that dead heat’s been counted. Scott free. Pack another, another pack but I quit. You and whose army.

And then evening onward rolls, fuck me kitten, the couch the cat the girl the baby, but no, ’twas his. No death in this field of amber waves and Goldy Locks.

But enough = enough. Ticks have thrived and more on less. But still. Sick. Not in that car backward get. Who’d know the way. Test legs.

Stand straight to a T. A tunnel cuts one way not two. Shan’t chocolate milk in the cool evening smutty another ever more chug.

Yo Tony, see me for a minute here.

Left leg a fork, right a spork, a sprocket, a spring, Toad the Wet. Toe’d the wet grass in time for Monopoly, Twenty-one, Checkers and Chess.

[Yeah-yeah yeah yeah].

Broke into a run. Suck air easy for won’t be needing it. Suck it all, go back there a damper, radio-free Europe from now on. Friends watch in Tony-stupor, can’t see rightly, field an easy milecircuit, no sense in census, don’t count and be sure.

I book it, clamoring and clattering and going to pieces, a prescient body listen, how else to respond.

This is motor, some small town paper scoop it up. the harvard advocate

Tell ’em what back home? Easy. Mr. Andy Kaufman’s gone wrestling.

Clatter crack and crumble, leg gropes for ground until finally by knowing can let go. I forgot my shirt by the water’s edge, and the moon is low tonight.

A lessen before dying, please radio I’ve heard you, now these things they go away, replaced by every day.

A mile in a minute. That’s what. Can do it if you’re not to go home, all chips on the table. What you see is you: I thought I knew you; you I cannot judge.

Unraveling of balls of words; The Morning has to be one morning so this morning. Wake up and see it, smell the napalm of which whose smell you allegedly love. Now I know, say I’m sorry to them but lie, their cat to brood over, not to return and admit of my children. But find them underwater, the man who went to sea in a sieve. Name him Tony.

I don’t think all these people understand.

Now floating in Finnegans pond they casket my Olympic leg mess. And leave to bobble toward the conduits of water bodies until we are one.

They set out backward, watch the road and memorize.

Simple: I have got to find the river.

Closer now than lightyears to go.

To leave the dead and pay the toll on the highway for midnight snack and the whir of soulmolecules is easy into a town that dies and lies and wakes again, a car crash porch abortion is no Ides in no book; smut and ten dimes for a dollar. Stick shift no longer a chore. Stop for a drink: a truck stop instead of St. Peter’s.

Rolling funerary down the corn promenade:

[Automatic for the People].

53

FOR A.R.J.

michael stynes The many-fingered rose

window holds the sun in its palm. I will take it, and you will ask

me why I hold it in such tightly

clenched fists and

do not

let it spill through my fingers as the glass let it.  I will

reply that though I seem

to hold it, I possess

only as much

as the window, that I too am seen through.  You will laugh and ask

me not to play this game, and I

will stand with

one leg crossed over the other and look down.

54

fall 2007

Were I not to take it, neither

you nor I

would speak and each of us would stand already with his legs

crossed, looking down

at the floor where a maze is made

from stones

he follows from the entrance at the outer rim to the center on

his knees, and would look

up at the

multifoliate palm.

I look down at the maze and know

that you, as you

look at the gesture, will joke that if

the harvard advocate

I were as adept

55

at solving the maze

as I am

at playing this game, we would have left and not

have watched the

petals

drop onto stones.

I gesture to the flower and

return what I should

have not taken. Though

you still

smile as if what I had taken

were yours and I

were returning it after feignings and evasions. As if now we

56

could speak freely, and were

fall 2007

not standing on one side of the maze

beneath a

flower, dry-palmed.

You watched me cross from the maze having

returned what was

neither yours nor mine to the manyfingered rose window, whose gesture

was as it had been. I watched

you laugh and

cross your legs as you looked down to say to yourself

you could not see

stones, and you

unclenched your fists.

the harvard advocate

57

THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

There was the road still before and behind was the road. And breaking into what came before was his body. Fat like a girl’s. Not moving for the weight was him. Full of shame for the moving was not him. The window in front of his bed was a cut of land: the road going onwards away from him, and the sky that sat with its drawers pushed down heavy around the ankles. Storm like heavy; before the ice storm the clouds wait down around the ankles. The sky waits to be broke into with a long thrust of his hips.

The rest of the road came from behind him to go onwards away from him like the scar goes out from a child gone into the man. He couldn’t remember it. He had forgotten some things from the pictureword parts of his mind but still his eyes kept going on to that cut like you bite down on your tongue so it hurts and you keep biting it. And his limb-locked body that was fat like a girl pig. He thought about the up and down flatness of the picture window and not the traveling flatness of the road. The way that the sky outside was unfurling downwards to lie like a skein of black skin tethered tight to the ground. Or blue jeans pulled down to bare that night black skin and the blue goes into the ground and goes and just her legs left. His mind was stretching out into a space that spread even on that larger space that he didn’t have any words for yet.

And the pictures lost their edges and colors into a stream of light. And he knew that he should not reach it, but still he struck his body physically into the light as hard as he could, breaking the light in two. And in the light his eyes were opened to 58

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run across the length of the long road before him to that girl’s unmoving shape stretched across it, breaking it cleanly in two.

He asked for the window to be shut and the blinds drawn so that he’d stop looking out the damn window and seeing that girl with her pants down and all that good body pouring into the ground and it wasted just gone into the ground.

Still, with the windows closed and his eyes shut tightly, the clean marks of those blinds were like somebody’s fingers stretched across his eyelids.

Telling him if he wanted to see he was going to have to see it all. He knew he would need to pull the fingers off of him if he ever wanted to see.

He did not want to pull them back into blinds for that would bring him back into the bedroom and towards the window. He thought of other things which would come straight across his eyes and he began to envision lines of snow falling horizontally across his eyes which were desolate like the long black road being filled with white. And as they fell faster he understood the dream-like quality of falling towards an accumulation of himself. He allowed his parts to fall into himself and tried to commence the act of melting out of himself with the idea that he would evaporate and so return to a weightless state. Instead he found underneath the snow the hot asphalt like a young woman’s young tits that he placed his hands onto. Saul looked up and there were the headlights as thin white lines speeding towards him. And her unable to move from the asphalt which was an accumulation of her own body pressed into immobility against itself. fall 2007

Away from the window, he was still in the bed.

He continued to see that girl he was waiting for because his mind would not shut off when he wanted like his body shut off when he did not want it. She was standing outside and she was looking at him. Through the blinds she cut like a mouth of teeth, gnashing and biting. Her eyes were like the protuberances of seashells that she held tipped onto the ridges of her cheeks, that were like the color of a black sand. She looked like she could have been painted onto the window. All paint and teeth and white teeth. Maybe she was just the paint coming from the walls of this room and they were swirling above him and he was seeing them in the form of this girl outside the window. No, he didn’t believe she was there. To fill in the cut like blood pouring from a wound. And his mind wouldn’t keep off from turning slowly like a finger wrapped in hair just wrapping up the hair. You are no more than the worm that is trying to get out of the road.

The worm is no more than a piece of thread. That came from the ball of thread that nobody sees any use for anymore. Your mother is a ball of thread.

Still, he continued to wait for the girl who was no more than a worm and her body got wiped in half by the sky and the dirt of the road.

He laid still underneath the white sheets waiting. Sweat came down from under his armpits to run along the underside of his arm. His face was still, he would not move it until the nurse came in, and then he would ask her a question. How long until they come to get me. Until then, he held the question between his rigid teeth and bit down on it. The weight of his body pressed into the bed like the weight of a sow resting fully in the trough from which she drank. He did not care for those, behind the house there had been a place for them and he’d hated the stink of it. They were dirty animals and now he was one too. His legs came down along the bed fattening with every step he was not taking towards her.

His mind kept making the words for her so he opened his mouth. And out his mouth came words up like vomit into the room that had emptied, while his chin drew more downwards into his body so that he could become a ball and not that coming long that mocked the road. “I must know when you are coming for me. You came from the road with no base. The loose gravel with loose dirt underneath. the harvard advocate

You are the dust that stretches outwards from the sides of that road to meet the ends of the mind.

The face of the man who sits on the side of the road pushed back into the corner. The mind of the boy who imagines the road, exploded. If this is what regretin feels like then I am unable to move my body for all the regretin it feels. So you must come to me.”

After he calmed, when the words stopped coming, and into the stretching out of dawn, his eyes closed and his head tipped forward until his chin was drawn to his sternum like knees are drawn upwards in defense. So he dropped his chin down to create an unbroken bend of his neck, which seemed to run like a smooth human cord across the distance of his body. * It was done behind his house, and his house stood before it like a white hand raised to the sky in praise. The boy he did it to was behind his house.

The porch light had not been on. His family was not righteous, but they went to Church every Sunday riding in the car. He in the backseat and his legs didn’t touch the floor until they did and still riding in the backseat. And now his knees came up behind the passenger seat. His mother and father in the front, neither of them saying a word with the radio off. And his mother’s hand resting in the middle. He had not laid hand on a Bible. The words of the Bible were not like stones on his ears but like the little moths on his ears. They pleased his skin but he’d catch them on the wall by the porch light outside in the summer and smack them and not know why and his hand would come down on them like the hand of God. They were dumb and did not move.

In the Church he waited for something to happen. He was looking down the aisles and seeing the pews lined up before him. Big long aisle with the white seats coming out like rows of teeth with eyes. Red carpet in the aisle. Big red mouth or a red tongue or the red part of a girl. His feet were beginning to hurt him. I want to sit down in the mouth he thought. I want to walk into the red and sit on one of those white pews but they’re all full of people already. Legs and arms and eyes. There ain’t no room for me he thought. He wanted to go into the ground and keep going down under 59

away from their eyes. He covered his face with his hands. All the red and the white was making his head hurt. They told him Saul you gotta make good for all that sinning you done. But my eyes hurt. He covered his eyes with his hands. I don’t know what’s happening somebody tell me what I’m supposed to do. He heard the creaking of the pews as all the eyes were turning. He heard a voice coming: and as he journeyed, it came to pass that he drew nigh unto Damascus and suddenly there shone about him a light out of Heaven: and he fell upon the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? He looked through his fingers and saw her. Black girl against the white sitting in the pew with her legs swinging.

He looked at her. Beautiful black girl with your legs kicking all along. You look full of light and grace.

Inside that large red mouth. He wanted to follow that body down the road a ways so he could do something good for her. He standing up there in his heaviness and she sitting down there with her legs swinging up. He wanted to come down and get her but they were watching him. She rose and walked down the long aisle refusing to look at him anymore. He walked down the aisle and inside the Church they fell quiet and still. Go on his mother said, go on and be saved. * Outside the church the sky came down upon his head in all its heaviness. Looks like it’s going to snow. It does not matter. The sky is heavy over my head, which is bent. My eyes are following the road because there is nothing but the road to follow. I am putting this road between me and the others.

And I will get to where I am going. Where am I going. I am waiting to be saved because they told me I would be saved. I do not hate them. I only feel that I hate them but I do not hate them. Hate must be more than a feeling. It must be a knowing. I do not know anything. I will make them right about me. I do not believe what they say will happen but I will make them right about me anyways. Them and their faces. Them and their faces coming up behind me to put me away from myself. I like to keep moving. And my arms strong and lean. I can keep walking and if something happens then I will fight it off. But if I have to stop walking then what?

And if it hurts. But my arms so strong and lean. If 60

what I am is bad then maybe I am bad. I did not tell them they were wrong. I only did not listen in the church and I made faces. Because the words did not agree with me. And that is the words. That is not me. Why can’t I send the words out here then.

And not me. They are wrong. I said it. I said that they are wrong and not me. The words tell them to do it wrong. That is the words. That is not me. I am just walking. If it was real God woulda struck me down right then when it happened. When that boy was kneeling before me and I was tempting his word to come down and get me. I tried to make him know I was right. Him on his knees before me with my thing in his mouth. I told him if god exists would he let this happen. He shook his head no and that felt good to me. I told him to stay doing that. Him on his knees not moving but to say no.

Goddamn that felt good.

The heavy sky is waiting above my head. If it begins to snow that will be the sky falling down onto me. There is someone coming towards me up along the road. They told me that what I did was bad but now I could change. She is coming towards me now unmistakably. * A cardinal is no more than a piece of lipstick that got wiped across the sky by the woman who was forgetful. A cardinal is no less than the lip. He had awoken to a red bird sitting on the windowsill.

After an hour had passed, he could not tell whether the bird had left and he was seeing imprint of the bird as it blocked out the plane of light that was coming through the window, and if so, how long it would take for the light to grow back into the red space left by the bird. He was not sure if the bird was there. When the nurse came in, he asked her about the bird.

“What do you think that bird shape is?” he said.

The nurse concerned herself with the white sheets that were on him. The nurse tucked the sheets underneath the mattress tightly, so that the sheets pulled over his legs and arms looked as though they were a series of declining planes rather than flat lands broken by peaks and valleys. His feet were pointed upwards underneath the sheets. The nurse laid them flat for him because he could not, so that they were splayed away from each other and fall 2007

not in the shape of the bird’s beak.

“Do you think they will still be waiting for me?” he asked. “It has been over three days now and I must be on my way. I was not supposed to spend my three days here but I got caught up on my journey.”

When she left without answer, he was still staring at the window. He wondered where the bird had gone. * He met her on the road. Black girl against the white sky and snow coming down around her. She was pale even through her blackness with eyes that protruded from her face. He came to meet her. Did you come to meet me. He asked her. Where are you headed to. He did not answer but asked her again. Did you come to meet me. It depends on where are you headed to. I am headed away from you. I am waiting for the sky to fall down around me he said. It’s heavy enough; it might just break I hit it right. To let all the light pour down. You get along your way now she said. This is my way; I got to be somewhere up along the road a bit. Then let me get by. But she did not make to let him by.

He did not move from her but kept staring at her

the harvard advocate

face, steady into her eyes. He took his hand and put it on her tits. Young tits like a cow. She took his hand and pushed it away. He moved it back up looking steady in her eyes. The eyes were like holes filled in with sand that appeared smooth from a far distance. He approached the distance as from a height, and ran his fingers into and grasping hold of the sand. Hot sand came between his fingers to go running hot over his body. He was a mound of sand and his mouth was sand too. He opened his mouth and sand flowed down his throat to fill the empty shell of his body. He had met him behind the house on the porch; you said you’d teach me yours was real but I don’t see nothing bad happening to me. And the words running out of his mouth like she was running away from him down the road. In the damn snow that was coming around him and making him slip. Where the hell you going from me he yelled at her. His voice was tight full of all the sand inside. Let me tell you how I know my way is real and letting him feel that it was there inside his pants. But nothing had happened. You got to wait for me because I just can’t help myself I need to put it in you. When he got to her him saying I got people waiting for me up the road a bits to know I’ve changed so we got to be fast. She shook her head. But if we wait too long I’m gonna lose my way and in the middle of the road he’d stopped her with a strike and pushed her pants down and into her he went with a long thrust. This don’t hurt none girl, this don’t hurt me none. Come on show me I have changed let the light come down. He kept going into her and there was thunder like a thunderstorm came the car and the tightened shape of Saul’s body held fast for a moment before his eyes and then loosed, like a hand letting go its quarry from a fist into the open-ended road of the palm. Saul saw the light break through his body which had not done rising to be free from her body. And over her body went the light and her body went down into the road. Saul looked up out the window onto the road. The sky was storm like heavy. Two days passed and here was the third coming on. Girl you got to get back here to me so we can finish.

I am waiting for that light to pass through me, unbroken.

61

Envoy

Our Man at Harvard norman mailer Let me tell you about the Somerset Maugham party that we gave at The Advocate in the spring of 1942. The magazine was housed then in a dark gray flat-roofed three-story building across the street from the stern of The Lampoon (and indeed we were much aware of being in their wake­­­—Lampoon editors usually went to Time; ours to oblivion). In those days The Advocate building was as ugly from the exterior as it is now. A few small and dingy stores occupied thegroundfloor;somemysteriousnever-seentenants were on the second; andThe Advocate offices took up the third. They were beautiful to me. One climbed a dull, carpeted staircase as dusty as a back road in Guerrero, used one’s Advocate key to go through the door at the top, and opened the suite, an entire floorthrough of five rooms, five mystical chambers full of broken-down furniture and the incomparable odor that rises from old beer stains in the carpet and syrupcrusted empty Coke bottles in the corners. It is a better odor than you would think, sweet and alcoholic and faintly debauched—it spoke of little magazines and future lands of literature, and the offices were almost always empty in late afternoon, when the sunlight turned the dust into a cosmos of angels dancing on a pin. Maybe I loved the Advocate offices more than anyone who was taken in my competition—I spent the spring of sophomore year at Harvard drinking Cokes by a table at the window that faced on The Lampoon, and I read old issues of the magazine. Once I was an authority on the early published work in The Advocate of T. S. Eliot, Van Wyck Brooks, Conrad Aiken, E. E. Cummings, and Malcolm Cowley—it must have been the nearest I ever came to extracting genealogical marrow from old print. Occasionally, our President, or our Pegasus, would come through the office, give a start at seeing me at the same chair and table where he had glimpsed me on the last visit and go off to do his work.

The following academic year, ’41-’42, Bruce Barton, Jr., was elected President and John Crockett became Pegasus. We had troubles instantly. Pete Barton was the nicest guy a lot of us met at Harvard, and with his blond hair, good if somewhat pinched 62

features, and fundamental decency, he could have passed for Billy Budd if he had not gone to Deerfield Academy, which left him a little more patrician than yeoman in manner. But he was gentle, he was quietly literary, and his father had millions. Since The Advocate was in its usual cauldron of debt, no other man would have been so appropriate to serve as President. Barton might even have had a benign, well-financed, and agreeable administration if not for the new Pegasus, John Crockett, a man as talented as Claggart and equally riven in his soul by detestation of our Billy Budd.

Being innocent of Crockett’s propensities for literary evil, we were a happy group coming into the office. The magazine would be ours. We would print what we wished. Our first issue, therefore, consisted of each of us putting in his own story. Crockett then took our gems to a printer in Vermont. This was, I think, in November. By February we still did not have a magazine. Crockett kept assuring us the printer would soon deliver. None of us ever called him.

Crockett had promised us that the inexpensive rate he had managed to extract from the Linotype mills of the Vermont woods would be ruined forever if we broke any of our voices on the printer’s ear. Therefore, we waited. Nervously, impatiently, suspiciously, we waited for the issue with our stories.

Instead, Crockett came back with the seventyfifth anniversary edition of The Advocate, a little work of love Crockett had gotten together by himself over the last year--collecting poems, pieces, and comment from the fine ranks of Wallace Stevens, Horace Gregory, Djuna Barnes, Marianne Moore, Robert Hillyer, Frederic Prokosch, Mark Schorer, John Malcolm Brinnin, Richard Eberhart, Bowden Broadwater, William Carlos Williams, plus a poem

by John Crockett, “The Sulky Races at Cherry Park.”

None of us on The Advocate had had the first clue as to what Crockett was cooking. As for the issue with our stories—Crockett promised to get to that next.

The expression on his young but sour face told us what he thought of our stories. Crockett, incidentally, while not as well-featured as John Dean had a great fall 2007

resemblance to him—I remember his tortoiseshell glasses, high forehead, and thin pale hair.

Pete Barton had been agitated for weeks at the long wait on our first issue. Painfully aware of his father’s weight in the world, he was invariably overscrupulous never to push his own. He had suspended himself into a state of forbearance worthy of a Zen warrior considering the immense agitation the late appearance of the magazine had caused.

When the anniversary issue appeared (to rich critical reception in the Boston papers, worse luck!) Barton finally demonstrated his father’s blood. He called an emergency meeting, where he calumniated himself for his derelictions of attention, took the full blame for the financial disaster of the issue (it had cost something like three times as much as more modest issues; our debt on the consequence had doubled overnight) and—Billy Budd to the last, absent even to intimations of a further notion to evil—stated that he would not ask for Crockett's resignation if he could expect his cooperation on future projects.

Crockett replied with a nod of his head and a profound turning of our collective head. Having heard, he said, that Somerset Maugham would be in the Boston area during April, he had sent an invitation to Maugham to come to a party that The Advocate would be happy to throw in his honor, and Maugham had accepted. Maugham had accepted.

This piece of news ran around the ring of Cambridge like a particle in a cyclotron. Nothing in four years at Harvard, not Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, or the blitz, not even beating Yale and Princeton in the same season for the first time in years, could have lit Harvard up more. Not to be invited to that party was equal to signifying that one had mismanaged one’s life.

The literary grandees of the faculty sent their early acceptance. The officers of The Lampoon sucked around. Housemasters’wives asked how things were going at The Advocate. On the night of the party, four hundred souls in four hundred bodies as large as Patrick Moynihan’s and as delicate as Joan Didion’s came to the small rooms on the third floor and packed themselves in so completely that you ended by bringing your drink to your lips around the wrist of the strange forearm in front of your face. The noise ofcocktailgabbleanticipatedtheoncomingshapings of time—one would not hear the sound again until the first jet planes fired up their engines at an airport.

Drinks were passed overhead. If you did not reach at the right time, another hand plucked the drink. It did not matter. More was on its way. Glasses bounced like corks over white choppy Harvard hands. From the harvard advocate

time to time, word would pass like wind through grass that Maugham had just entered the building, Maugham was having trouble getting up the stairs, Maugham was through the door. Maugham was in the other room. We formed phalanxes to move into the other room; we did not budge. A phalanx cannot budge a volume that is impacted. The lovely smile of resignation was on the lips of faculty wives: It is the establishment smile that says, “Life is like that— the nearest pleasures are not to be tasted.” After a half hour of such smiling into the face of a stranger as one brought one's arm around her neck to get at one’s drink, the wind came through the grass again.

Maugham, we heard, was at the door. Maugham was slowly going down the stair. Somerset Maugham was gone.

Hands passed drinks above the impacted mass.

Eyes flashed in that hard gemlike smile of pride retained when opportunity is lost. In another half hour, there was a lessening of pressure on one’s chest, and bodies began to separate. After a while, one could walk from room to room. What was the point?

Maugham was gone.

It was only on the next day, after the claims of liars had been checked against the quiet evidence of reliable witnesses who had found themselves analogously empretzeled in every room and on the stairs, that the news came back. By every sound measure of verification, Somerset Maugham had never been in The Advocate building that night.

Crockett, now confronted, confessed. Out of his unflappable funds of phlegm, he allowed that he had known for weeks Somerset Maugham was not coming—the great author had been kind enough to send a telegram in answer to the invitation. "Certainly not," it said.

It was too late to ask Crockett to resign. Due to the war and an accelerated graduation, our term as Advocate officers was up; the new President and Pegasus were in. Because of the party, we left with a debt that had just doubled again. The Advocate has never been solvent since.

A postscript: Pete Barton became a Navy officer and commanded a ship, came home, worked as quietly for Time as if he had been a Lampoon man, and died before he was forty. The only time I saw John Crockett again was about ten years ago in New York on a reunion at the Harvard Club. He was now in the State Department and had been stationed for years in Yugoslavia. He told delicious stories about idiotic conversations with Madame Tito at banquets in Zagreb. He looked to be as wicked as ever. Our cause was being well served in Yugoslavia.

63

The Harvard Advocate wishes to thank the following generous individuals for their support of our activities during the 2007-2008 school year. Their gifts have made possible extensive repairs and improvements to our historic Harvard Square building. However, we still hope for assistance in replacing obsolete media and design equipment, preserving historic documents and photographs, and digitizing our back catalog so that our rich legacy can be available to all. The continued publication of the nation’s oldest continually published college literary magazine depends on such contributions; please consider supporting us at any level.

Patrons Meryl Natchez

Donors Norris Darrell, Jr.

FRIENDS David L. Auerbach, Lily L. Brown, Lawrence Clouse, Edward J. Coltman, Robert Cumming, Caroline G. Darst, Frank P. Davidson, Lorraine T. Fowler, Nancy Hannaford Greer, Rex Jackson, Frederick A. Jacobi, John Keene, Richard M. Smoley, Anita Patterson, Charles R. Peck, Vernon R. Proctor

All gifts to The Harvard Advocate endowment fund, a partitioned division of the Harvard University endowment, are fully tax-deductible according to 501(c)(3) non-profit donation guidelines. Gifts will be acknowledged in the four issues following receipt according to the giving categories of Patron ($1000 or over), Benefactor ($500 or over), Donor ($200 or over), and Friend ($25-$199). Those who give $50 or more will receive a complimentary year’s subscription to the magazine.

Checks should be made out to “Harvard University” with “Harvard Advocate fund #480105” written in the memo line. Envelopes can be sealed with a kiss and mailed to 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Please e-mail contact@theharvardadvocate.com with questions or to discuss specific giving opportunities. Thank you for your devotion to Mother Advocate.

64

fall 2007

Jesse Barron can explain everything.

Richard Beck should read slowly and thoroughly.

Emma Bloomfield likes to draw x’s.

Alexander Fabry closed his eyes, spun the globe, and put down his finger.

David Rice ‘10 is the friendliest dinosaur at the tricountry fair.

Endria Richardson is a senior English Concentrator in Currier House.

KIDDO started with a really great game of badminton.

Rebecca Lieberman is cuteoverload.com.

What are you mumbling in your sleep, Garrett Morgan?

Stevie Narain loves you.

Last night, Caroline Schopp found a ladybird stowed away in her purple jacket after a long trip—it reminds her of Berlin and lives in her aloe plant.

Michael Stynes is a yellow rat bastard.

Chris Van Buren is always getting kicked out of Eden.

Email Martabel Wasserman at martabel@h-bomb. org to contribute to H-Bomb!!!

Moira Weigel fehlt Berlin.

Paul Whang is all about cheeseburgers.

Norman Mailer served as an officer and editor of The Harvard Advocate before graduating in 1943. His published works in the magazine include “The Greatest Thing in The World” in 1941, for which he won the Story magazine prize for the best undergraduate story, as well as “Right Shoe on Left Foot” and “Maybe Next Year”, which appeared in 1942. “Our Man at Harvard” first appeared in 1977 as an article in Esquire and the introduction to First Flowering: The Best of the Harvard Advocate, edited by Richard M. Smoley ’78. It was anthologized in Pieces and Pontifications (1982) and served as the second prelude to The Time of Our Time (1998), from which it appears here with permission from Random House. Mailer is the co-author, with Michael Lennon, of On God, which was published in October. He passed away on November 10, 2007.