Fall 2008 by The Harvard Advocate

The Harvard Advocate. $8. Fall 2008.

Table of Contents Art 20 The Honorable Bumpkin Island Company 24 Landscapes, Violence Removed 33 Reveries of the Disbelieving 36 Acrobats 37 L’heure exquise Fit of Peak 38 Chutes and Ladders III (For David Kermani) 39 Late for School 40 Just a Joy Ride 41 Seaport 42 Fou de Leuze 44 Dissected Street 48 Untitled

Jack McGrath Gregory Halpern Shannon Mulshine John Ashbery John Ashbery John Ashbery John Ashbery John Ashbery John Ashbery John Ashbery Amy Alamo Lien David Molander Lillian Fang Features

3 22 34 50 64 69

Notes from 21 South Street Brittany Benjamin An Interview with Dai Fujiwara Movable Type Anna Barnet Of Umbrellas and Sewing Machines: Daniel Wenger Matter and Manner in John Ashbery’s Collage Click, Memory: Snapshots of André Kertész Jessica Sequeira God in Grey: Houston’s Menil Collection Kevin Seitz Envoy Alexander Fabry Five Mirages Fiction

9 27 54

We’ve Reached an Understanding Justin Keenan Gangplanks Eyal Dechter Surviving Coyote Kathleen Hale Poetry

18 26 32 49

After All This Time No. 3 [Burn off my rust] [I blow the pipes with my fist] The Sculpture Garden

Patrick McKiernan David Wallace Michael Stynes Celeste Monke DVD

Cover Image: John Ashbery Late for School, c. 1948 Collage, 12 1/2 x 8 inches Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York Images © John Ashbery

Track 1 Track 2 Track 3 Track 4 Track 5 Track 6

Nettalk Marilyn Marilyn Xanadu Token Hunchback Goodbye Bear Do Rivers

Animation 16 mm HD Claymation HD Animation

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

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

The Harvard Advocate www.theharvardadvocate.com

Editorial Board President Geraldine Prasuhn Publisher Eyal Dechter Art Editor Nicole Bass Business Manager Millicent Younger Design Editors Rebecca Lieberman LeeAnn Suen Features Editor Alexander Fabry Fiction Editor Jesse Barron Poetry Editor Margaret Ross Guest Editors Thalassa Raasch Alexander Berman Art Pegasi Anna Barnet Alexander Berman Literary Pegasi Sanders Bernstein April Wang Dionysus Caroline Williams Circulation Manager Carolyn Gaebler Publicity Manager Linda Liu Online Editor Logan Pritchard Librarian Taro Kuriyama Alumni Relations Manager Alec JoneS

BUSINESS Ben Berman,* Sanders Bernstein, Giselle Cheung,* Diane Choi, Ruben Davis, Eyal Dechter, Amy Heberle, Catherine Humphreville, Alec Jones, Paul Katz, Taro Kuriyama, Justine Lescroart, Jeffrey Lee,* Keri Mabry,* Geraldine Prasuhn, Logan Pritchard, Anna Raginskaya,* Daniel Thorn,* Mike Segal, Caroline Williams, Natalie Wong, Millicent Younger, Lillian Yu. DESIGN Sabrina Chou, Dana Kase, Charleton Lamb, Rebecca Lieberman, Amy Lien, Joseph Morcos,* Anna Murphy,* Lauren Packard, LeeAnn Suen, Joe Vitti.* FEATURES Anna Barnet, Richard Beck, Brittany Benjamin, Mark Chiusano,* Becky Cooper,* Ben Cosgrove,* Alexander Fabry, Marta Figlerowicz, Allison Keeley, Judith Huang, Kevin Seitz, Jessica Sequeira, Daniel Wenger. FICTION Katie Banks,* Jesse Barron, Sanders Bernstein, Emily Chertoff,* Marta Figlerowicz, Carolyn Gaebler, Justin Keenan, Seph Kramer,* Charleton Lamb, Max Larkin, Linda Liu, Ryan Meehan, Alex Ratner,* Juliet Samuel, Matthew Spellberg, April Wang, David Wallace, Scott Zuccarino. POETRY Nicole Bass, Alexander Berman, Courtney Bowman, Judith Huang, Abram Kaplan,* Jennifer Nicole Kurdyla, James Leaf, Hugh Malone, Celeste Monke, Lauren Nikodemos, Adam Palay, Margaret Ross, Michael Stynes, David Wallace, Maria Vassileva, Daniel Wenger, Mike Zuckerman. *The Harvard Advocate congratulates its newest members

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

The Harvard Advocate will anonymously consider all submissions of art, features, fiction, and poetry. Submissions may be emailed to art@theharvardadvocate. com, features@theharvardadvocate.com, fiction@theharvardadvocate.com, or poetry@theharvardadvocate.com. Submissions can also be mailed to 21 South St., Cambridge, MA 02138. All submissions should be original work that has not been previously published. If you wish to have your submission returned to you, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Questions about submissions can be directed to the individual emails above or to contact@theharvardadvocate.com. Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oldest continually published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from the Advocate house at 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not The Harvard Advocate. Domestic subscription rates are $35 for one year (4 issues), $60 for two years (8 issues), $90 for three years (12 issues). For institutions and foreign addresses, the rates are $45 for one year (4 issues), $75 for two years (8 issues), $110 for three years (12 issues). Payable by cash or check made out to The Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase, but price and availability varies depending on the issue. Please inquire by writing to contact@theharvardadvocate.com. 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 2008 by the Editors and Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.

NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH STREET An Interview with Dai Fujiwara

by Brittany Benjamin

ILLUSTRATION BY DANA KASE

I was eighteen the time I wore an Issey Miyake dress, and it immediately struck me: there was too much fabric. The sleeves were three times the length of my arms—the neck, intended for a giraffe. It fit me like a glove, but it flowed onto the floor, pooling around my feet. But procuring some scissors, the shop girls explained: “Make of it what you want.” They pointed to some lines deftly hidden in the fabric. “There are many options.” And just like that, the consumer becomes the creator and the boutique becomes a personal workshop.

An inversion of the consumer-creator relationship and a reconsideration of the place of technology and engineering in fashion design, the dress was a product of the now famous collaboration between Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara. Viewed today as the Godfather of Japanese fashion, Miyake already had world renowned for his groundbreaking designs. Miyake created the Issey Miyake design studio in 1970, and spent the following decades challenging the conventional shapes and European traditions of high fashion.

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Miyake demonstrated particular interest in the intersection of fashion and technology, most notably with his launch of his Pleats Please line in 1993. A production technique that uses a special heat press technique to infuse simple, colorful fabrics with shape and texture, the results are light yet defined, free-flowing yet highly constructed. Further, the polyester clothing requires minimal sewing and corresponds with Miyake’s mission for beauty and function in innovative form. Fujiwara and Miyahi’s collaboration, and their technologically inspired designs and production lines, respond to timeless a question for the fashion world: the delicate balance between high art and a commercial success. Fashion has always toed a fine line between its dual identities; it is pulled towards the two poles of ready-to-wear street clothes and haute couture. For many designers, the answer comes through the creation of two lines. Designers will show their hand-made high fashion on the runways of Paris and Milan, and spread their names with factory-produced collections for lowerend merchandisers. Yohji Yamamoto partnered with adidas, John Varvatos with Converse,

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Isaac Mizrahi with Target. These partnerships allow a designer to meet the demands of a more consumer-minded business as well as maintain the freedom of high fashion expression. The answer for Miyake and Fujiwara, however, came not from the production of two lines, but from use of a new means of production. Merging computer technology with the creativity of the consumer, the design duo founded A-POC—“A Piece of Cloth,” and rhyming with “epoch.” A revolutionary design technique, A-POC transforms a single thread into clothing sans coudre. The designer develops a pattern program, funnels a single thread into the knitting machine, and presto—out comes a tubular piece of cloth, size and shape dependent on its intended use. Sewing is superfluous. Reliance on sweatshops disappears, as do long hours of skilled hand work in Parisian ateliers. In a way, then, A-POC piggybacked on the work of Miyake’s earlier work, using technology to bring new vigor and innovation to the fashion industry. Yet despite the use of machine production, A-POC defies the tedium of the mass, factoryproduced clothes. It is the consumer who adds

the final artistic element, who becomes the final designer. Cutting along faint lines embedded by the production of the cloth, the customer chooses sleeve length, garment length, neck style, and more—transforming a long tubular creation into a functional piece of clothing. With a pair of scissors, then, mass produced clothing becomes a custom-made dream. The power of this form-function solution brought the duo much acclaim, and shifted Fujiwara’s career notably from the textile engineer to the fashion designer. In 2006, Fujiwara became the Creative Director for Issey Miyake, Miyake himself moving on to new pursuits, and he has continued the Miyake tradition of fusing technology and fashion. Fujiwara rarely takes inspiration from the past. His shows are never send-backs to the 1920s flappers nor an homage to Versailles circa Louis XIV. He emphasizes what is new, different, and possible in the modern age. His philosophy is simple: “I do not believe that any discussion of art is possible without bringing technology on board.” And even in his most recent work focused on nature, Fujiwara has maintained this dependence on the mechanical and the industrial. Exploring the ways in which technology mimics, preserves, even enables the natural, he illuminates the connection he sees between the typically opposing forces. In October, he presented “Color Hunting” in Paris. In preparation for this show— the Spring 2009 collection—Fujiwara took over 3,000 color swatches to the Amazon Rainforest, aiming to capture the exact, quintessential shades of the jungle. For Summer 2008, Fujiwara was captivated by all things Wind. “To observe the wind is to be aware of nature, to think about the flow of air that envelopes us and the environment in which we exist,” the Issey Miyake Team explained. The collection included clothes unconventionally intended not to protect a person from the elements, but to enhance a person’s interaction with their surroundings. For both collections, technology was the bridge to a successful partnership between fashion and nature. For “Color Hunting,” Fujiwara identified the natural hues he desired—creating some clothes to achieve the natural element—but he

also experimented with the transformation of these colors in the urban landscape, capturing the effect a glass prism or metallic reflection create. To truly create the effect of “Wind,” Fujiwara partnered with Dyson—the high-tech British vacuum producers. Together they built a wind tunnel and included it in the runway debut of the line—mechanically engineering the very natural environment he hopes his clothes will enhance. For some designers, fashion shows are an opportunity to shock and stun. Twice a year, the runway creates an opportunity to smile smugly and say, “Oh yes, I dared.” We love them for it. We love John Galiano for filling Parisian Vogue with models garbed as pirates. We love Marc Jacobs for throwing grunge-wear in the face of New York’s most fashionable elite. Their dedication to the fabulous—even the absurd—is captivating. It frees us from the daily convention of what one wears. But what’s interesting about Issey Miyake is that despite the utter originality of his work, Fujiwara is far from smug. He intends neither to shock, nor stun. Instead, he is eerily nonchalant—matter of fact, even—about his originality. Whether by recreating the natural through the mechanical or by creating an entire evening gown from a single thread, Fujiwara will defy every fashion convention in existence all while suggesting that the convention never existed. He makes his innovation seem apparent—obvious creations the circumstance. His models add to this effect. Awash in perfectly engineered color-hues and surrounded by yards of free-flowing, crafted cloth, they seem entitled to the ingenuities enabled by engineering. In conjunction with his participation with Harvard’s Project East fashion show, where Issey Miyake’s work was shown for this first time in America, Fujiwara spoke with The Advocate, and he spent considerable time discussing the place for innovation. His design philosophy helps explain the aura of nonchalance: “Nothing, whether it is new media or emerging circumstances or matters, ever springs into existence suddenly or from nothing.” *** Harvard Advocate: Issey Miyake is famous for his integration of design, technology, engineering

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and fashion, and you clearly greatly influenced this practice. Can you describe the relationship you see between fashion, technology, and directed research? Why is this important in fashion, and how do you imagine it will influence the future of design? How or does the relationship with technology morph fashion from the world of art into the world of science? Dai Fujiwara: During the latter half of my research aimed at creating the A-POC brand, I came to embrace a vague image in my mind. Using the flow of a river as a metaphor, apparel is located in the downstream sector of the textile industry infrastructure. Apparel designers must wait for the items produced upstream and there is no great need to worry about how materials used in fashion are made. This approach and thinking had become fixed in the industry, and I was beginning to grow fed up with it. Computers offer the convenience of guaranteed information operation, with costs remaining low [as well as] the ability to turn out highly adaptable items despite being created through automated mass production. I did not see much evolution in production lines controlled by machines, or in the production methods that required human hands. Thus, just as I came to the conclusion that production lines not controlled by machines and production methods not requiring human hands were in fact necessary for fashion, I felt that the conventional image of the river had become hackneyed. Much like fish swim from habitats in vast ocean realms to congregate in plankton generated at the boundary line between warm and cold currents, new visions are being drafted and implemented in the midst of capitalist society—the scene of complex interactions between money, people, commodities and now the Net society. Naturally, it is impossible to discuss fashion outside the realm of clothing, it is also true that it is no longer feasible to ponder fashion solely in terms of clothing. When, at crucial turning points, new information, new commodities, new images and new characters emerge, people will demand those new elements, along with other

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information, things and images. I believe that creating methods to initiate these new flows is extremely important. I also feel that proposing such changes from the viewpoint of fashion is an effective means of corroborating the performance of potential catalysts. Within my work at present, I strive to fully embrace these concepts. It is difficult for individuals to generate turning points. However, it may be possible to bring about new movements by joining with different partners or consolidating different categories. If the time can be found to unravel circumstances or situations already in existence, and then find compatible partners to mutually discuss the world around us, our actions and discussions will lead to new ideas and movements. In the same right, it is also necessary to forge the future of design. A vast array of accountability derived from the structure of society has spread to the design domain, prompting the need for capable designers to respond to this need. Based on the belief that easily manageable solutions are necessary, the A-POC design concept was launched. Though it is my impression that there is little change in the scope demanded of fashion design, I can only conclude that the design clout of organizations unable to create items from the stance of environmental engineering will inevitably weaken. Design, by definition, is the work of formulating certain balances, coordinations and other elements. There is thus a need, I feel, to clarify what specific balances need to be struck. For the very reason that diversity is expanding within the sphere of fashion, the demands of design are much greater. Because the social responsibility in this area is in another increasing trend, it is clear that the sphere of design (referred to as balancing abilities here) is expanding and it will be vital to mount effective responses to social demands. HA: With the continued collaboration of fashion designers and various technicians—from within and outside the world of design—how do you envision fashion’s place within society evolving? How do the technologies now available to fashion designers change the identity of high art and more consumer fashion?

DF: It is impossible to truly discuss the diversity demanded in fashion in terms of a system that looks to Paris or Milan as the pinnacles. Each new logistical revolution in today’s Web society raises momentum explosive to fashion, threatening the status of the conventional collections (twice yearly fashion markets). Within the Web society, the demand is for “graspable clothing.” This refers to so-called “real clothes”—that is, apparel which easily appeals to consumers and is readily understood by purchasers. In a world that now expands across borders of time and distance, such fashions are beginning to take on the power to change values and thinking. I believe that this impact is also being felt at the “fashion week” events in New York, Milan and Paris—forums for showcasing new creations. There is also the concern, however, that on the flip side of excessive demands for easily understood results, the overall scene will become tedious. When proceeding with a focus on creation in an era in which both information and commodities have begun to take on their own values, it will likely become difficult to continue to hold up both sides of diverse and “graspable” clothing. Basically speaking, I believe that fashion must be allotted a major degree of freedom within the world we live in. In the quest for freedom, failure to resolve new issues characterized by strong demands for social qualities will render it impossible to nurture the freedom that everyone recognizes and wants. In that sense, fashion designers who continue to exist in environments of freedom while fulfilling their social responsibilities may very well represent the “new cool”. With regard to high art and consumer fashion, while the ability of designers to make ready use of technology may place major restrictions on their work, it will also become easier to successfully benefit from cost balance and quality guarantees. Likewise, while the use of technology by designers signifies the transition into work with a high degree of social impact from a management standpoint, it also means that designers are taking on heavy social responsibilities at the same time.

If this foundation can be mobilized to render new proposals for consumers through the act of supplying the world with clothing, it will also come to wield great clout in society. HA: Last year you teamed up with Dyson to create “Wind” as an element of the Spring show and this year the colors of the Amazon influenced your show. What is the role of nature in your work? How has your relationship with and your vision of nature changed over the years? How do the natural elements of the show connect with your more technological leanings? DF: Any worthwhile discussion of nature is incomplete without the inclusion of technology. It is patently clear, therefore, that technology has become indispensable in sustaining the Earth, as we know it. These influences have already been internalized in the realm of fashion as well. HA: Conventionally, nature and technology seem as opposing forces, and yet both greatly influence your designs. How do they come together in for you in design? How do they complement one another, oppose one another, etc.?

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Fall 2008

DF: Please conceive that nature is you, yourself. Technology, furthermore, is also encapsulated within your being. While as you say, nature and technology appear to act as opposing forces, in reality they exist in a mutually complementary, give-and-take relationship. HA: Academy has routinely placed fashion on the sidelines of scholarship, and yet museums and design forums are increasingly acknowledging the place of fashion as a historical artifact and commentary. How do you see fashion and design as a social commentary? Do you have advice for scholars on ways to study and analyze these artifacts? DF: In recent years, the reality that fashion differs from its conventional image as an extravagant and festive celebration, and is in fact one component of the overall social fabric, has come to be understood through the lens of economic angles. Someday, perhaps, an economist specializing in fashion may be honored with the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences!

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HA: Would you like to share anything more on your design philosophy? DF: Nothing, whether it is new media or emerging circumstances or matters, ever springs into existence suddenly or from nothing. Rather, I believe it is people who sense that the old ideas and thinking no longer do the trick are the forces behind such evolution. Toward that end, to enter new realms through the medium of design, I believe in the need to create, through your own effort and volition, specific opportunities for encounters which demand decisive situations and events. Once you take part in something that needs change, you have put yourself on the path.

We’ve Reached an Understanding

It is a hot day in the city on the edge of summer, the sun shining clear and crisp like a giant overhead lamp. Two boys sit on a bench. The first is tall and thin, with masculine shoulders and hair made of the straw he used to roll in and that his mother eventually gave up trying to remove. His face would be almost perfectly formed were it not for his nose, which hasn’t been even since an older boy smashed it in grade school. He leans with elbows jutting outward and hands cupped over kneecaps, his eyes idly following the motion of the street but not focused on anything in particular. Later that night he will meet up with his girlfriend from the state college across town because someone cut her bike lock the previous weekend, which means for going all the way out to see her he should be able to expect at least a blowjob. He exhales and runs his hand through his hair. These thoughts occupy his mind as he turns to his roommate who is busy watching people on the street. He has narrow shoulders and wears khakis even during the summer because he’s embarrassed of his thin legs. His frame is slight, his height concealed by a mild hunch. He breathes loudly, as if he thinks his brain needs more oxygen than other brains. Later that night he will go for a long walk across town and through the park, alone, hoping to find a way to clean out his insides before returning to the apartment where he will lie in bed all night, trying to stare through the ceiling into the room above him. He taps his fingers against the table. ‘Hey, Davey.’ He turns. ‘Jake?’

by Justin Keenan

‘You hear about those two dudes and that nun got run over by the state college?’ ‘What?’ ‘Swear to God. Girlfriend told me this morning. These two dudes were walking this old nun across the street when this big U-Haul with no driver’sside door and a dinosaur on the side shot out the dorms and run them over at a crosswalk. Saying it was a drug deal gone bad but they didn’t find nothing on the bodies.’ He pauses to let this information settle, but in the thick spring air the words just hang uncomfortably in front of them, so he adds: ‘Seems stupid, though, go to the effort of dressing one up like a nun then doing the exchange in the middle of the street and all.’ ‘They catch the guy who was driving the truck?’ ‘It wasn’t a man. Heard it was this woman with a crazy beehive and sunglasses. At two in the morning. Girlfriend told me she’d seen her driving that U-Haul around campus a couple times before so it must have been going on for weeks, but she figured it was just someone’s mom helping move out early. You never think someone’s mom’s going to be in on distributing but I guess anything’s easier if you can turn it into a family business.’ ‘You think they’re going to find who did it?’ ‘Doubtful. I imagine now they’ve run afoul on one deal they’ll change cities and start over. Lay low for a while. Maybe find a new school, repaint the truck. That’s how these things usually go.’ ‘Huh.’ Weird shit, Davey.’

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They pause for a moment, let Jake’s words linger. Davey goes back to watching people on the street. He squints his eyes, trying to imagine the terrible things going on in the minds of others. ‘Hey, Davey.’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘When did Phil get a bike?’ ‘Phil doesn’t have a bike.’ ‘Well he’s got one now.’ Davey turns to see their roommate Phil, with his fixed grin, bouncing down the sidewalk on a cherry red bicycle. The bike screeches, halts in front of the bench. Davey can’t help but stare at the chrome fenders which reflect little suns straight onto his retinas. He looks down, closes his eyes. When he looks up again, a pulsating purple blob hovers where Phil’s head should be. ‘How you boys doing?’ Jake slides off the bench and moves toward Phil. ‘Mind if I take a look?’ ‘Be my guest.’ Davey’s eyes clear and he turns to Jake, who proceeds to examine Phil’s find with a mechanical scrutiny particular to boys from the state’s farflung counties. Davey attributes a certain mythic quality to this phenomenon which, he observes, touches boys of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. He envisions the eastern state as a sepia-toned expanse of dirt and uncut grass, dotted by the rusted remains of Fords and John Deeres, around which county boys congregate daily, as if observing an unspoken — perhaps unspeakable — ritual. They scour their machines with the reverence of scribes, contemplating the subtleties of rust spreading over an engine block, or picking at the meaning behind a piece of leather flapping in the wind with their pocket knives. Surely, they posit, some secret waits anxiously beneath infinite layers of minutia. Their efforts do not go to waste. When they emerge from their ancestral homes, the boys of Pike, Bourbon, and Hazard counties possess the arcana of the mechanical that welldressed city boys, foppish dandies by comparison, secretly covet. Jake finishes his assessment. The first hints of rust begin to creep outward from behind the fenders. The chain needs oil. The back tire sags a little too much. ‘Still,’ Jake says, ‘it’s nice. Where you find it?’ 12

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Phil’s grin widens. ‘You know Jefferson Street?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, there’s this guy there, sitting in front of a house, completely crazy, but he’s got all these bikes, you know? Just sitting out in his yard. So, I’m going by there earlier today, you know, and I stop by and ask him how much he wants for one and I pick up this little honey for twenty-five dollars.’ Jake’s eyebrow rises. ‘Where’s he get them?’ ‘Well, man, here’s the thing,’ Phil lowers his voice, ‘I hear he gets them around the neighborhood.’ Jake looks skeptical. ‘That for real?’ ‘Yeah, man. Old woman at the convenience store told me he and his brother and wife or girlfriend or something get them from kids. Like I hear they wait until it gets dark and go out wearing big heavy work boots and animal masks. They walk up and down the street shoulder to shoulder. Barn animals with baseball bats, like they’re on patrol. You know? When they walk abreast like that kids can’t get around them. They just sweep the neighborhood, up and down every street, real methodical, like a pattern. And if that doesn’t work, I hear they crouch in bushes or hide in trees and then come down on kids when they ride by. That’s how they get the bikes. Think about that. You’re just riding home with some milk from the gas station and then this guy with a cow’s head jumps down from a tree and goes to town on your legs with a baseball bat.’ Davey keeps his eyes trained on the ground, hears heavy boots pounding pavement, the sound of bones snapping like dry tree limbs after a storm, the sound of a sack of flour hitting the floor hard. Then human sounds, moans, while the whirr of bicycle wheels and the tenor tremble of a little bell fades with distance. ‘That’s fucked up.’ ‘I know, man.’ ‘Wait. How does that even make sense? Why they got to break the kids’ legs? Why don’t they just take the bikes?’ ‘I don’t know, man. They’re crazy, you know? Maybe they don’t even care about the bikes that much, maybe they just do it for kicks. Or maybe

they got crutches for them or something.’ ‘That story don’t make any sense, Phil. Does everyone in the neighborhood know these guys are doing this shit? Why don’t they call the cops? Or why don’t they just go over to the house with a shotgun and get all the bikes back if all these guys got is some baseball bats? Where do you hear this shit, man?’ ‘Shit, man. You know. Sometimes there are just stories. You find them somewhere and then you tell them.’ ‘So what happens when the neighborhood runs out of bikes?’ Davey jumps in. ‘Or they run out of crutches.’ Phil only addresses Jake. ‘Come on, Jake. Who knows? Who cares? Maybe they go to different neighborhoods, I don’t know. I was just telling you this thing I heard because I thought you might be interested.’ Jake pauses. ‘Girlfriend just got her bike stolen.’ ‘You do anything dumb lately you should make up for?’ ‘Not that I can think of, but it might be good to give her something just in case I did something I didn’t know about.’ ‘That’s fair.’ ‘You think he’s got anymore like that?’ ‘Probably. You ought to go out and take a look. Maybe find something for yourself, too.’ Jake stares ahead for a moment, his eyes blank, making calculations and value judgments in rapid succession. He nods, slow and slight at first, then more emphatically. He turns to Davey ‘You in, man?’ Davey pauses, looks down. He doesn’t like the feel of wind against his face and besides that can’t will away the onslaught of images: men with animal heads carrying bats, children with limbs twisted in unnatural directions, a single bicycle lying on its side in the grass, the front wheel still spinning and clicking softly. He shivers and the hair on his arm stands up. In his brain he feels like he shouldn’t go which is how he knows he should. He raises his head and nods slightly to Jake. Jake returns the nod and turns to Phil. ‘Good. You going to show us where this place is?’

‘Down on Jefferson a few blocks north. I’ll take you over there.’ Jake rises and Davey follows a moment behind. They cut across the park, through the buzz of inane conversation and neglected burgers sizzling on grills and country music playing from blown Jeep speakers, to the sidewalk along Fourth Street. Phil follows behind at his leisure. Fourth Street is lined on the side opposite the park by a series of apartments, urban jungle trees forming a dense canopy of satellite dishes, antennae, and rainbow umbrellas. Revolutionaries and rock stars fill the window frames. As the boys move away from the major roads, buildings slowly decrease in height, reduced to empty lots of cracked concrete punctured by patches of grass and chain-link fences that terminate at the corner, which is unmistakable for its stop sign mangled by years of impaired driving. The boys pause at the corner. A black child in an enormous leg cast hobbles across the street. The rubber thud of crutches followed by the sound of plaster grinding across the concrete makes Davey wince. Jake and Phil politely avert their eyes. After the thudding and grinding fades into the background, they cross the street. Jefferson Street looks like a permanent yard sale. Families spend entire days in empty houses, watching their furniture and appliances on the lawn. They patiently await the arrival of their creator in the form of an ethereal auctioneer, big mustached, who will come in checkered suit and tie with golden gavel in hand to relieve the men and women of Jefferson Street of their worldly burden, allowing them to rise, their cornrows and nightgowns fluttering gently, into the soft and breaking clouds. For now, however, their earthly goods, subject to earthly elements, fade and mildew and rust, while they creep behind windows of empty houses. Houses, themselves in various stages of dilapidation, the most distinguished among them adorned by small pink placards like prize-winning produce, awarded not by the ethereal auctioneer, but the county building inspector, who recognizes distinguished entrants based on a bureaucratic calculus of many variables: number of broken windows, crooked door frames, missing shingles,

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dead grass, dead dogs, live dogs, dogs tied to fences, children, children tied to fences, missing house numbers, rusted lawn furniture, 40 oz cans on lawn, etc., etc. As he passes by, Davey keeps his head down; he knows what the neighborhood looks like and doesn’t need to be reminded. He hears Phil pull up alongside him and Jake and sees him gesture toward a house that looks like at least an Honorable Mention. On the sidewalk, Davey sees four young black boys flicking bottle caps on the pavement. One sits in a wheelchair, too high to participate, leaning over the other boys sitting Indian-style. They play without joy, their expressions blank, detached from the movements of the game. A pair of rusty bicycles lean against the chain-link fence. Davey attempts to wave at them, but his arm refuses to rise above his shoulder, and the gesture comes off as somewhat aborted. ‘Davey, we’re here.’ Davey stops, finds himself standing in front of a house overrun by bicycles. They spill out into the yard of tall grass, dozens, chained together against the house, lying sideways in the grass, or propped up by unreliable kickstands. Many lack chains, others look like cannibalized pastiches on dryrotted tires, rust the only consistent feature among them. Amidst these, the owner of the house, Phil’s man, scours the boys through jaundiced eyes, the only clearly delineated features on an otherwise dark and bald head. His skin is a deep black, almost purple to the boys, and he wears a white t-shirt plastered by sweat to his chest. On the porch directly behind him sits a woman, hunched forward in a kitchen chair, her features largely obscured by the shade from her towering hair. She keeps her knitting in her lap, turning the needles over in a methodical way perfected through countless afternoons like this. A discarded car door, white with a red stripe, leans against the porch, the rearview mirror cracked in the grass around it. The man rubs his raised chin with his thumb and middle finger, stroking outwards, as if indicating the direction he plans to speak. For a moment, the boys remain in front of the man, hands in pockets, stiff with the awkwardness of a first date. Finally, Phil cocks his head back and says ‘How you doing, man?’ 14

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The man doesn’t turn to face Phil specifically, instead addressing the boys’ general direction. ‘Good.’ ‘Brought a couple of friends of mine to look at your bikes.’ ‘Tell them go ahead.’ Jake glances at Phil and then advances toward the bikes. Davey looks the man over, head to toe, once, twice, before heading to the closest bike. Phil lays his bike down on the sidewalk and comes up alongside Jake. Davey sticks close to the boys, partly because he fears being caught alone in the man’s field of vision, and partly because he doesn’t know a thing about bikes. Jake runs his hand over frames, trying to detect subtle defects in welding or alignment, squeezes handbrakes with his ear between the handlebars, his eyes sliding side to side each time he applies pressure. Phil squats and examines tires for punctures or signs of dry rot. This ritual continues for several minutes. One bids the other to come, look here, waiting for the other to find a defect noticed by the first, which when discovered, prompts the other to confirm, yeah, he saw that, too. They find most in need of repair before riding can begin, and all too small for Jake or Davey. The man stands to one side with his arms folded, watching the boys sift through the tangle of metal and rust. He tosses a question among them: ‘Y’all boys from the state college?’ Jake turns. ‘No, man. We just live nearby.’ ‘Ah. I figured y’all for college boys.’ He indicates Davey. ‘At least that one. You met my wife?’ He gestures to the woman on the porch, still enmeshed in her knitting. ‘She spend lots of time at the state college nowadays. She likes to check out books from the library. I tell her she keep it up one day they going to make her pay tuition!’ ‘That’s cool.’ Jake tosses another wreck to the side. He turns to Davey, who is still looking thoughtfully at a flat tire. Then, visibly dissatisfied, scratches his head and says, ‘Hey man, this all you got?’ ‘You looking for something else?’ The man’s response makes Jake pause. From his angle, Davey can see Jake’s eyes shift quickly, as if searching for support in the eyes of his friends.

‘Just a bike. But something that my girlfriend can ride.’ ‘These is all twenty-five dollars. But I got some other ones if you’re interested.’ Jake and Phil exchange curt nods. ‘Yeah, we’d like to see those.’ ‘A’right. Come on, then.’ The man uproots himself from the center of the yard and walks to the house next door, a two story house the color of old mustard with a partially collapsed roof and boarded up windows. On the porch next to the padlocked door rests a faded pink placard, which reads: ‘This house has been declared UNFIT for human habitation by the Magnolia County Housing Commission’ followed by an illegible date and signature. Davey turns to Jake, whose eyebrow hangs high on his forehead. Phil gives them a quick nod and motions with his hand that everything is cool. The man stops on the porch and reaches between his shoe and sock, producing a small key which unlocks the door. He tugs at the door a moment, one hand gripping the handle and the

other the decaying frame, prying it loose with a creak that releases a gust of cool, musty air into the faces of everyone trying to look in. The man steps from the doorway, his stony hand resting on the frame. ‘OK. Go in.’ They go in. On the wall facing the entrance hangs a stuffed boar’s head that Davey almost stumbles into upon entering. It has begun to peel around the snout and looks short several tufts of fur which have drifted down and collected in a neat pile on the floor below. The man pulls Davey by the shoulder and directs him further back in the house, where the other boys move through a narrow hall lined with nails where portraits of dour matriarchs once hung. On the floor lay discarded rims, bike locks, and fenders which groan and crack as they walk over them single file. The hall spills into a larger room — perhaps a former dining room or kitchen where the dour matriarchs received their dour guests — which houses four pristine machines resting as if on permanent display. Jake and Phil’s expressions

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brighten. ‘These is all forty dollars if you’re interested,’ the man says, then, indicating a solid black bike in the corner nearest the door, ‘except this one. Y’all boys can’t have my Harley.’ The man erupts in laughter, his teeth the same color as his eyes, gesturing toward the letters h-ar-l-y scrawled in white across the bicycle’s frame. Jake and Phil manage weak chuckles, and the man exits without sound. The boys move toward the bikes. Jake mounts the white one along the back wall, gets a feel for it. The joints might need a little oiling, but everything else feels nice and smooth. It’s a little big for his girlfriend but it fits him just fine. Phil looks over and whistles his approval. There’s a mount on the back where they envision a boombox fitting snugly, spilling punk rock anthems with bass-boost all over the sidewalk on trips to wherever they feel like going. With these bikes, they will become marauders and highwaymen. They will descend without warning. They will ride in formation all around the park and to the record store everyday. They will ride while listening to ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ They will ride shirtless. They will ride to the park near Third Street and get high in secret places. They will ride circles around friends who are trying to get someplace on time. They will write rude things on the sides of restaurants that ask them to keep the noise down. They will ride at night, and challenge other established bicycle gangs that rise up against them. They will do battle in the parks and in the streets, in abandoned churches where the moonlight spills through fragments of stained glass, bathing the combatants in rich blues and reds and greens like court jesters while they pummel one another with arm rests from broken pews. They will become renowned for their prowess with the stretch of pipe and broken bottle. They will establish territory, and it will stretch from Fourth Street to the Walgreen’s on Broadway and west to the park. They will collect tribute from defeated gangs and the police, whom they will allow to continue operating only in designated areas and at designated hours. While Jake runs his fingers along the spokes of his find, Davey realizes that he has no business here, in this house, around stolen bicycles, with

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the boys. He stands up and walks back through the narrow hallway. He hears the faint buzz of a television in another room. He waits a while longer for Jake and Phil, sure now that he will never be the kind of boy that can ride a bike and look cool or make girls want to sleep with him based on force of personality. He imagines himself the conscience of his generation, the one who will list the evils he observes on a long roll of paper that unfurls from where he writes and forms a huge pile in the corner of his room, where he will meditate on them in his room, in hopes that his creator will notice Davey in his quiet vigilance and tell him that he is his faithful servant and seat him at his right-hand side, where they will meditate on the failings of man together, forever. Then from the other side of the house, wafting in from the open window, comes a sound like metal clanging over men’s voices. The buzz of the television increases. Davey moves back down the hallway, careful to avoid the broken fenders and bike locks, and past the ancient boar’s head. He follows the lingering clanging like a scent hanging in the stale air. He becomes a tangle of contradictions. He becomes aware of the inside of his body for the first time. Outside he remains still, cool, motions steady while his organs revolt. His stomach coils and twists, attempting to swallow itself like a suicidal snake while his brain screams and pounds and throws itself against the inside of his skull. He sweats anticipation and dread, secretly fearing and hoping that someone is watching and taking note. As he turns a corner he nearly trips over a heavy pair of wire cutters. The sound leads him to a room stripped bare except for two metal folding chairs and an old television tuned to a dead channel, the source of the buzzing, paneled in fake wood, sitting on the floor among piles of dust and cigarette butts. On the wall hangs a large map of the city with supplementary maps of the sprawling suburbs tacked onto the corners. Portions of the map are exed out or circled in hasty black marker. Dotted arrows turn off major roads into labyrinthine back alleys all the way back to Jefferson Street. The room is dim save for two windows, open but with blinds drawn. The

clanging comes from just outside. Davey walks over to the map, traces his finger around the thick black circle that lassoes the state college across town. He can’t help but feel disappointed, can’t help but feel that the heart of this house should be something more, something less empty. He moves to the first window and pulls the blinds apart and on the other side the enormous yellow eye of an allosaurus stares back at him. For an instant his insides fill with terror, in full view of something much greater than himself. His stern resolve turns to something like cold oatmeal and he pulls back from the window. Before he can collapse, however, he pauses. The moment’s hesitation makes him reconsider the eye, framed by a high, pastel colored ridge, given texture by a row of rivets. The rest of the face is a single shade of peeling green, locked in a permanent roar, between its jaws a hunk of ketchup-stained brontosaurus meat and below that the words UTAH: The Fossil State. The scene feels crudely excised from its natural position, as if set apart for closer examination. It is silent except for the sound of men breathing and rubber rolling across sheet metal which appears to come from somewhere beyond the Jurassic period. The background is lab coat white, except for a red stripe which runs horizontal behind the allosaurus’s head. Davey tilts his head to one side, absorbs what he thinks should be a lesson from the scene in front of him, though not sure what to do with it. After a moment he hears the definitive slam of retractable steel and the sound of a diesel engine revving. The allosaurus and his meal begin to tremble, perhaps with fear of academic scrutiny, perhaps with anticipation at the approach of a meteor they know to be arriving a geologic period too early. Davey closes the blinds and retreats back down the hall, knocking the side of his face against the boar as he passes it, afraid that evil might just be an empty room in an old house where someone left the TV on. Clambering out the door, he finds himself in the burning clarity of afternoon light. After a moment, the softly focused mass in front of him solidifies into Jake, his back to the door and clutching the white bike by its frame, standing near Phil and the man, who has removed his shirt

and wrapped it around his head like a turban. An Arab merchant in the middle of Jefferson Street. Jake flails his arms, first toward the man, then the bike. ‘You said all those bikes in there was forty dollars.’ ‘This bike’s different. It’s a hundred.’ ‘What’s so different about it?’ ‘It’s an import. I get it from Europe.’ Jake turns to Phil, who looks immaculately composed. He says: ‘Hold on, Jake. Now, man, it’s a nice bike, but that don’t make it worth a hundred dollars, surely.’ The man doesn’t budge. ‘It’s a good bike. It’s the only one like it in this country. I get it from a little Spanish kid with one arm. He know the king of Spain. He save the king’s life and the king give him the bike. This bike a king’s bike, boy. How am I going to sell this for less than a hundred? Look, it even got his seal on it.’ The man points to a chipped white decal of a five-pointed crown, below which reads: Royal Bicycle Co., Cincinnati, OH. Phil scratches his head. ‘Well, yeah, man, that’s nice and all, but he don’t have a hundred dollars to spend on a bike.’ ‘It’s got a rack on the back for your boombox, too.’ ‘Yeah, but he ain’t got a hundred dollars, man.’ For a moment this settles the issue. The man remains as he has the entire time, his arms folded, statuesque. Jake turns to Phil, nervous, and then notices Davey for the first time. He looks him up and down. ‘Where you been?’ Davey responds with a look like the sounds that just came out of Jake’s mouth were in some ancient pagan tongue, if not from some darker, subhuman source. The heat rising off the street makes the intersection look underwater. Davey thinks and sees in slow motion. By the time he forms something resembling an answer, Jake has turned away. The woman on the porch continues to turn her knitting over and over and over in her hands, the sunlight collected in the jewelry on her towering hair, now a papal tiara on a pagan priestess. She could be a tarot card. Her dominion is the front porch, where she

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reposes after conducting her sorcery, oblivious or ambivalent toward the events unfolding in the yard, which belongs to the Arab merchant. He stands, legs slightly splayed, and flexes his jaw. ‘Make me an offer.’ Phil says: ‘He’ll give you forty for it.’ ‘Eighty-five.’ ‘No way.’ The man’s eyes narrow, but Jake and Phil can spot the tiny spark that let’s them know this man’s a haggler at heart and from then on they know the bike is theirs. ‘Eighty.’ ‘You said all those bikes was forty.’ ‘Seventy.’ ‘Forty-five.’ Pretense of strategy and subtlety evaporate in the day’s heat. ‘Sixty-five.’ ‘Forty-five’s all I got.’ ‘That’s an awful good bike and I don’t want to sell it for no forty-five dollars.’ ‘It’s what I got.’ ‘It’s from Europe.’ ‘I’ll give you forty-five dollars for it. That’s all I got and I’m offering it.’ The man works his jaw for a moment, biding his time, as if hoping more money will appear in Jake’s pocket to be laid on the table. After a moment he concedes. Jake and Phil exchange satisfied glances. Davey stands apart, hunched over and pale like a sick thing. Jake digs in his pocket and produces a few wadded bills. Money changes hands. The man unfolds each bill meticulously and softly counts them, pausing to adjust the t-shirt wrapped around his head, wiping beads of sweat from his forehead with the excess cloth. The transaction concludes without words. The man’s face returns to its normal configuration and he moves back toward the center of the yard where he folds his arms, satisfied with the day’s trading. Phil takes his bike from the ground while Jake mounts his. They begin to pedal. Davey takes one more glance at the Arab Merchant and his Pagan Priestess and begins walking a few feet behind his friends. As soon as they’re out of earshot, Jake and Phil congratulate one another on their shrewd dealing. Riding high on their shining mounts,

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they are crusader kings, returning from the Holy Land with treasure liberated from heathen peoples. The buildings along Jefferson Street are the ransacked Constantinople. The whirr of their spokes lingers in the air and follows them as they roll around the corner and disappear onto Fourth Street. Farther back, Davey walks through the ruins with his head down, without haste or even an awareness of it. The air is still heavy and sticky and he feels almost too tired to continue, but he can’t stop here. Up and down Jefferson, the children flicking bottle caps stop and watch Davey. With every step his feet seem to cement themselves more fully to the pavement. Nervous sweat runs in his eyes. High above, a laboratory demonstration is taking place in a brilliant white room proffered by the creator. Principalities and dominions fill the lecture hall, every seat occupied for hundreds of rows, the seraphim in the choicest seats near the front, taking meticulous notes as the creator indicates Davey with a pointer and glides the overhead lamp into position as needed. On the dry erase board, he scribbles an elaborate diagram with equations and flow-charts that lead nowhere. Nervous sweat runs in Davey’s eyes. He looks up, but there’s only bright, clear sky. He staggers to the intersection and turns, not wholly in one piece, but alive enough, and disappears behind the fence, hoping to evaporate and rise above the hot and heavy air, drifting up and dispersing into the atmosphere.

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After All This Time #3

You are always clever, watching, and I can tell today is different. I can tell because I am noticing these thoughts of you, these lucid dreams. The new day beginning with you in my head, a flower I’ve read about, pinned gently to my back, gently up against my standing in the shower, in the puddle here beneath me, the sunrise sucking in its drink, its gravity— I am pulling too, you know. I am pulling closer at least for now, you’re seeing me, today I don’t believe in talking, don’t feel like I am moving, fiercely round the sun, again I pass it. I am so tired. I am so without callous, without you, even, your old superstition and your shadow I’m calling from, reminding you: you cannot forget me. I own your age, your fragile point of view, your name: I sat one day for hours (the hours then had number) deflating my own body, and out of me I uttered the thoughts you woke with. You must keep living! You must keep explaining to me while I slowly build it back, my breath, and linger slowly in my body, in order to lose track again, to lessen, faster than knowing if ever we were whole. If ever we had eaten and left and weren’t hungry. If ever we had parted. We had parted, this I know, but now we have not parted,

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by Patrick McKiernan

our voices cannot stop, and how can we get closer. There is no love to speak of, no hidden hunt between us, but only that it happened once the song and how it felt cold each night of your body the celebration kicking in my steps they are the overwhelming start please always return home. Please, always keep transporting, the light in this room, outside me, to the flaking orange leaf I tastedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;dirt clung dry against the oak stump. You, foreign city, I overhang you. I crash against the sidewalk, I know no water but my stories of it and myself pulling always down the embankment, the prism, the blueâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;I am talking from up inside the tree across to you. Across the street, across the lucky phantom of your youths, the coming days: I am always where you are before you, where you are after I wonder always, am moving down into the soil, sinking while I move it, cozy up inside the object of your toil, the winter where I linger, the spoonfuls in the evening. I wonder how the trees grow.

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Jack McGrath The Honorable Bumpkin Island Company, 2008 Environmental installation, mixed media

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photo by mark wilson, courtesy the boston globe

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Photo by nayeli rodrigueZ

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Movable Type

by Anna Barnet

Fall 2008

Gregory Halpern Landscapes, Violence Removed, 2008 Photographic video game stills 5 x 7 inches How does a proud nation internalize defeat? How does it absorb the consciousness of its weary troops as it brings them home? How do we concede mistakes made on such an overwhelming scale? Machismo is defined by its inadequacies. The Iraq war attempted collective catharsis via a deranged lashing-out at the Iraqi landscape and its people. Some will claim American victory. It is a war that cannot be won. How will our loss in Iraq affect the American man's understanding of himself? Once we remove our troops, what remains? These images are stills from war games, with all traces of violence removed. Rather than becoming more peaceful, the landscapes seem haunted by the promise of psychopathic violence. The removal of violence only seems to infuse the landscapes with the certainty of an unknown and possibly unprecedented kind of antagonism, or with what we have come to know as "terror."

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Fall 2008

[Burn off my rust]

I was cut by the other tightening wire Because I wanted to but was afraid It stripped each piece of skin away Like a picturebook I saw each piece Of what red I was I wanted every unit to be holy And to speak you without irony The view of the sea the great bridge Holier than the last time I spent making it The steel parabola cables Who knows where they end unsighted Things take ways at frightening speeds Or maybe just personal things I am still looking at the shape of the bolts Hugging the beams There is a fog over the hills It has little to do with anything Like thin wire encircling Every atom remembers past The fog and wanting still To be sheared and unable To speak and not really anything any Longer and just hovering fog Or no fog seeing every part of myself My body over the bay

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by David Wallace

Gangplanks

by Eyal Dechter

Six days a week, Alex taught intermediary and advanced English to Shanghai’s growing population of would-be globetrotters. He did it well enough, he flattered himself, that they might go on to plunder the American way of life, its universities, its businesses. Each day by midafternoon Alex had contributed in this modest fashion towards China’s inevitable ascendancy to the heights of international power, and he spent what hours remained learning Mandarin and taking lessons on China’s culture and history. He would return home bone-tired and awed—in proportion to his exhaustion—by some vaguely bigoted sense of Chinese industriousness. Sometimes, if the prospect of sleep did not savor of quite the appropriate respite from the long day’s work, he ended up wandering the stretch of broad city sidewalk where his favorite female companion paced back and forth in miniskirt and heels. A small Jewish boy with a sharp eye for a good deal, Alex appreciated her petite size and proportionate price. Also, it turned out that she loved him: “Honey, please! They fucking love me!” he sometimes whispered to his shut flip-phone after sex. He wanted to call Julia, yet that is precisely what he wanted to tell her, and so he hardly ever did. But when he did, he would tell her other truths: that he loved her and that he wished she would join him and that, for her, he would come home soon. ***

In his one fine business suit—matching shoes and socks held tight in his right hand—Alex spent the latter part of a summer’s day off walking carefully back towards the shore. He had been to the jetty’s end and imagined that he looked across the Pacific Ocean and over the American continent and that he could see a long-legged girl, perched somewhere near Cape Cod, back arched, about to dive off the Massachusetts coast, from a warm, barren, shell-littered beach. The tide had risen so high that it poured over the top of the jetty. Already the cold saltwater stung at the sensitive flesh beneath his ill-kempt, torn toenails. It was late afternoon on the Chinese coast and too early to be awake in New England. But he wanted to call her. Distracting himself from the sharp rocks cutting his bare feet, he simulated his side of the conversation out loud: “Honey, please! You don’t understand.” He paused briefly. “Do you want to know why or do you want to know why?...Because they fucking love you. Me.…No, you don’t understand. Let me tell you.” A longer pause. He let go a triplet of quick, assured steps towards the beach and stubbed his right big toe. “Let her speak,” he thought, for he was working on being a better listener. He responded, “Okay, given. But they fucking love Jews in China.” Upon arrival he had learned this self-evident fact from an ever-broadening circle of seasoned Jewish authorities. “Ask me how I know,” he challenged, smug, as if it were his own gem of truth, as if his regular hooker’s

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cheap rates were the definition of Semitic love. *** The only email he received overnight was from Julia. On receipt, he had thought back eleven months to an evening they had spent in the Beacon Hill apartment he had sold just before ditching Boston for Shanghai. For some ten minutes side by side on Alex’s bed, their laptops obediently placed in their laps, they had instant messaged back and forth trite vows of their mutual love. As Julia later explained, the instant messaging had been for her a very private protest of “the degradation of intimate relations imminent within the increasing electronization of human communication.“ He had grown to adore this kind of talk. Halflistened to, it sounded fleshed out and deeply earnest. He heard her continue. “The formal choices we, all of us, you Alex, make—little punctuation, no capitalization, and, in the worst cases, almost lasciviously wanton abbreviation— are merely attempts at recreating the casual

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immediacy of speech, without (and here is the problem and the root of degeneration) the commitments to intimacy and to the risks of spontaneity inherent in speech. And, Alex, even when you don’t make those choices, when your emails looks like they could be lifted from some old nineteenth-century epistolary novel, that is still merely a rebellion. That is not despite, that is because of, the problem we’re talking about here. You are still trapped in it, or, rather, entrapped by it.” She looked at him with deadpan conviction, he smirked in heartfelt adoration (“lasciviously wanton abbreviation!”), she tried not to notice. “So, what can we do?” he asked. “Well,” she said—and it was relatively clear to her—“if we must succumb to these fraudulent forms of immediacy ourselves, then our mere recognition and constant awareness of that fraud can serve as our protest against it.” Now, when he read Julia’s emails, he thought about the fraud being perpetrated, how like a spring it intensified in the distance between them, how the protest imminent in the conceit of immediacy was not merely a protest of electronization. It was also a protest of the distance itself. She seemed to be pleading: “This doesn’t work so well, you know, this imminent critique of AIM, MSN, whatever, when we’re not in bed, side by side, laptops on our laps.” And today was hardly different. The same plea, the same protest. “You must be doing something right and I must be doing something wrong,” Julia’s email began. She studied Medieval British verse and explained that in the nearby Barnes and Noble, which she unabashedly favored above the local and quaint but outmoded bookshops, there stood, until recently, a small narrow table, one foot by four, dedicated to new poetry. And because it was such a modest table amongst the mesas of “New Arrivals” and “Summer Reading” and because it was placed askew in the corner just inside the store, the small selection of thin new collections seemed to gain a seemingly unfair but actually most deserved prominence by the entrance. And “just now” she had passed through the store and had had a real laugh. That special

little gangplank of a tabletop, with all its modest effrontery, its gumption, was piled high with thick books and each cover bellowed in big blocky font: CHINA. Or something similar. And you know what she did when she saw this? She walked out of there (quick shuffling steps, head down, Alex imagined), she turned straight around and found the nearest bench and that’s where she was right now. And hell—who knows? she wouldn’t exactly be surprised—maybe some enterprising collection of young poets had found that country so “fecund” in its promise of twenty-first century world domination that they had felt inspired to write simultaneous volumes of Sinophile verse. Perhaps it was he, she joked, for she had always said that he had the makings of a poet—so sweet and so slight and so lacking in her own dreadfully self-assured cynicism. And surely he found in that country enough wonder and potential—that is, fecundity—to write several tomes of poetry blasting its name! “Don’t you,” she protested bitterly. *** Every moment in history, Alex was sure, there

was a place to be, a place more rewarding, more exciting, more conducive to being watched than watching. What is China but the place to be? Where was that place if not China? If one had pledged to oneself to live, to really live, wouldn’t it be part and parcel of that commitment to give up the familiar if the familiar no longer promised centrality, epicentrality, the hot pressure of lives upon important lives, personalities upon important personalities? Surely this was the place! A fifth of the world’s population and a GDP growing so rapidly (so radically!) that in less than a decade it would surpass that of the US and end its century-long domination of the world! And say, for kicks, that there is no war and that there is no strife (which of course there will be and the Chinese have nukes too, you know?). Regardless, Alex thought, it’s the money that really matters. The deepest and rawest crevices of our inner lives—drainage ditches, irrigation channels, ports and canals on the cultural topology—must be carved by the trickle of money. One can prepare as best one can, he told Julia, which as far as he was concerned meant drinking a little from the yet-unpolluted

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stream. In the future, when the Western World was neither western nor the world, Alex intended to look on it and say to Julia: “I, rare among us, know the source of the stream that has carved this culture—your culture—from the bedrock and (even better!) I have drunk, drunk prodigiously, from that stream.” *** Alex continued haltingly towards shore. He could no longer see the broken planes of brown rock that formed the jetty underfoot. Earlier, he had carefully avoided those occasional slats that, covered in slippery sea moss, were icy to the touch and covered in pale green bands. But he was getting tired now, and now he could not see the rocks any more, and his feet were being cut by the sharp edges—pumiced in the stinging brine by rough, broken planes. So he sought out the slippery islands of moss underfoot, and now that he could not see them, he felt better about the contact. Alex paused on the rocks to rest, for this was a particularly good spot, the ball of his right foot firmly placed on some short stretch of one brown rock’s mossy sheath. He let the water slowly soak the ankles of his slacks and thought that while he was resting there, he might call Julia and wake her in the early morning. In China, he wanted to tell her, one could purchase a custom tailored suit, unspeakably expensive in the states, for a hundred bucks. A hundred bucks! How does that translate for dresses? he asked himself. He should know that. And his was a finely made suit! There was plenty of evidence for that,not the least of which was that the tailor had called him in three times, and, each time, had made alterations to ensure perfection. And yet, on some days, like today, it seemed to hang dumb and loose away from his body. But Chinese girls, he reminded himself, did they love it or what? “Julia!” he yelled in his skull, “You and I could live like kings!” The sound seemed to echo off the inside of his temples. He continued on towards shore, and he kept going as best he could his conversation with Julia: “I will have drunk from that stream, you see! What is more valuable, let me ask you. Yes…yes. 32

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Oh, of course…honey, please!” For him, somehow, the use of “honey” as a pet name for Julia had acquired a guarded secrecy similar to that which adolescents sometimes reserve for their parents’ given names: Jim and Sandra, not Mom or Dad, but almost always in the third person, and if in the second, then embarrassedly so. Given time, he silently told himself so often, he could grow out of most anything. “Look,” he continued, “I’m not saying there isn’t anything noble about me being here. And I’ll come back, come home, for you, but what you should really do is get on the next plane to Shanghai. Because what there is here to see is the future!” His wildly gesticulating arms shot outward to steady himself, and he dropped his shoes. But now he could feel the water just above his waist, and the moss was thicker now and stuck between his toes. He had slipped off the jetty and into the waist high waters. Slowly his pants and tight cotton briefs filled. Alex, however, considered himself lucky. He had wisely left his phone in his sports jacket pocket, and this luck mitigated the feeling that his lower half was pickling in the brine. He wanted to call Julia, and tell her that he was walking a tightrope of a jetty back to shore, and that he had walked out there to see if he could spot her on the far North American coast, and that he had nearly drowned. It seemed to him that he always wanted to call her when he shouldn’t. For example, now—with the tide rising and his balls pickling in a custom-tailored cotton encasement. The water was warm in the cooling evening, and so he made no attempt to get back on the jetty. The sunlight of day was dissipating rapidly now, and a cool breeze swept in as if to fill the void where the light had been. He shivered his upper body, clenched his teeth, and kept his arms shot outward, staring down at the water’s surface just below his navel. The water, too, shivered in the breeze. He felt his pants—so well tailored, and yet somehow too loose—shrivel tight against his ankles, his knees, bunch up against his upper thighs. Water was in his pockets, in his wallet. In the salty water, something down there stung in a way he couldn’t quite be sure was normal.

Once on land, he reassured himself, he could call Julia if it were past seven. The twelve hour time difference between Boston and Shanghai seemingly placed them at either pole of a worldly axis that connected them directly, without any unnecessary circumnavigation of the globe. Always, on their cell phone clocks, they read the same numbers. Thank god Americans won’t go past twelve! So, really, it was as if there were no time difference at all. Or, he sometimes mused, that the difference represented some temporal incarnation of the octave: twelve half-tones apart and you were really back in the same place, weren’t you? Any interval larger or smaller and you risked discordance or sentiment or something else equally complicated and wrapped up in dreaded implications and connotations, historical eras, cultural paradigms and their variable aesthetic sensibilities. But no one could argue with the octave. No one could deny that it eschewed a commitment to any mode or attitude whatsoever save, perhaps, that of perfect identity. Julia would like that thought, he thought. And yet the analogy, he reminded himself as infrequently as possible, did not do justice to the differences between midday and midnight, dusk and dawn, or any other time and its complement on the far pole of the earth. A poignant example: later that day, at one o’clock in Boston, he imagined that she would head down into the beige stucco and cement labyrinth that constituted the basement to the otherwise Beaux Arts university library. The cafeteria was located at the tip of one of the labyrinth’s better lit tentacles, and Julia would pull from the bottom shelf of the common-use refrigerator the soggy vegetarian patty sandwich that she prepared every morning before leaving her apartment. But at one in the morning in Shanghai, half a world and half a day away from Julia, Alex would just be reaching the climax of a short-lived carnal ascent in feigned tandem with the female companion he had long since named “Juliana” or “Honey” or “Juliana, honey.” And then, imagining Julia back in New England—slowly munching on her cutlet of processed soy, charmingly hypnotized by the

fliers stapled to the cafeteria corkboards—he would watch Juliana pull up her skirt over her tacky high heels. When she left, he would look at his phone and wish he could call her and tell her how much they loved him, worshipped him. With the least bit of prodding, he wanted to tell her, the Chinese girls just fell at his Jewish feet. *** Alex noticed that he wasn’t making great progress. It was getting darker and colder, and he felt a familiar and unhappy resentment of the tall bluffs on the beach. The sun had set behind them, in the West, and they had absorbed the last of its warm light. The thick ribbon of shade that formed on the water—its edge jagged from the bluffs and softened on the waves—crept heavily homeward, over Alex and into the Pacific. When it got uncomfortably cold above water, Alex dove to his shoulders. Now he was awkwardly swimming. The salt water lapped soothingly at his ears. The suit was ruined, but he could buy five more and it would still be a great deal. He would tell Julia that. His right hand found his jacket pocket feeling what wet wool feels like but then it left off and kept pulling towards shore. Now that the phone was dead, he opened his mouth a little and lowered his lips to the water’s surface. Slowly, as he swam on, the darkening brine lapped in.

Fall 2008

[I blow the pipes with my fist]

I blow the pipes with my fist in unison you blow pipes and the grass to laugh toes, my dancer does not have any feet so height happens, his mouth remembers how small feet can be you will take the quality.

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by Michael Stynes

Shannon Mulshine Reveries of the Disbelieving, 2008 Micron pen on paper 6 x 6 inches

Fall 2008

Of Umbrellas and Sewing Machines: Matter and Manner in John Ashbery’s Collage

by Daniel Wenger

Image ©John Ashbery

John Ashbery recently floated the idea that his once-covert life as a collagist—a sixty-year affair exposed this fall in a one-man retrospective at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York—centers around “placing something unexpected next to something else to see what unexpected result might emerge—as in Lautréamont’s oft-quoted ‘chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.’” As it happens, the line Ashbery invoked from Les Chants de Malrodor—a proto-surrealist favorite of André 36

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Breton, Man Ray, and Max Ernst, among others—was written to evince the beauty of a young boy. Which is what Ashbery might have meant to do himself when he wrote a poem for a Harvard lover called “Some Trees,” his first official entry into a career responding to “chance encounters” of every kind. The iconic poem was initially published in the March 1949 edition of The Harvard Advocate when Ashbery was a senior at Harvard; in 1956 it gave its title to Ashbery’s first collection, in which it reappeared sporting

several edits. The strange and beguiling music of the opening, the same in both versions, depends on its muted subversion of conventional reference: “These are amazing: each / Joining a neighbor, as though speech / Were still a performance.” Other parts of the poem, meanwhile, undergo subtle but meaningful changes. In the second stanza, “That our merely being here” becomes “That their merely being there,” so that the trees speak to themselves rather than to the couple they stand ready to address: you and I

Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are: That their merely being there Means something; that soon We may touch, love, explain.

The trees aren’t “here” or “ours” any longer; now they’re “there” and “theirs.” Where Ashbery lets the metaphor barrel along uninterrupted in The Harvard Advocate version, he doubles back on himself in the revision; the colon, which promises to advance the cross-species pollination, in fact obstructs it. Similarly, in the line enjambed across the penultimate and ultimate stanzas, a “canvas on which emerges / A gathering of smiles, a summer morning” features instead, in the updated poem, “A chorus of smiles, a winter morning”—an abandonment of the metonymic for the surreal (in the case of the smiles), and of the expected for the surprising (in the case of the season). In other words, Ashbery pushed metaphor toward rupture as he migrated toward a selfstyled “turning point” that came in the form of The Tennis Court Oath (1962) and Rivers and Mountains (1966), both written during his expatriate decade in Paris. They grew out of a riff on Byron Gysin’s cut-up method, by which Ashbery recombined into verbal collage “elements from magazines or popular literature (including a circa World War I British novel for girls called Beryl of the Biplane that I found at a bookstall along the Seine).” Ashbery’s poems of this period are successful not because they have something to do with Gysin (or William Burroughs for that

matter), but because they have everything to do with Ashbery’s visual sensibility—manifest as early as 1948, the year that Dorothy Miller’s MoMA exhibition of surrealist collages inspired Ashbery to make his first attempt, the HansChristian-Andersen-meets-National-AudubonSociety “Late for School.” In a 1967 ArtNews piece, Ashbery praised American artist and collagist Joseph Cornell for figuring out how to “neutralize romanesque content in such a way that it becomes the substance of his art rather than its embellishment.” He might as well have been talking about himself, about the way in which the theory and perhaps the practice of collage helped him to generate a stylistically spare and philosophically substantial poetics. Ashbery’s is a poetic craft—as he said Joseph Cornell’s was an artistic one—in which “matter and manner fuse to form a new element,” giving us hints of “the stories that art seems to want to cut us off from” and large doses of “the asceticism of abstraction.” Usually, we pat Harvard University on the back for denying aspiring artist John Ashbery space to paint, shuddering to think what contemporary American poetry would be like without his lyrics. This time around, think what his poems would be like without his collages.

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opposite

(top) John Ashbery L’heure exquise, 1977 Collage 3 ½ x 5 ½ inches Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York John Ashbery Acrobats, c. 1972 Collage 3 ½ x 5 ½ inches Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York Private Collection

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(bottom) John Ashbery Fit of Peak, 2008 Collage 4 1/8 x 5 7/8 inches Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York Private Collection

Fall 2008

(above) John Ashbery Chutes and Ladders III (for David Kermani), 2008 Collage 18 1/2 x 18 3/8 inches Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York Private collection (right) John Ashbery Late for School, c. 1948 Collage 12 1/2 x 8 inches Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York

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Fall 2008

(above) John Ashbery Just a Joy Ride, 2008 Collage 15 1/4 x 20 1/2 inches Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (right) John Ashbery Seaport, c. 1948 Collage 8 x 10 1/2 inches Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York

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Fall 2008

Amy Alamo Lien Fou de Leuze, 2008 Wool 24 x 28 inches

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Fall 2008

David Molander Dissected Street, 2008 Combination photographs 16 x 17 inches, 10 1/2 x 13 inches The project Dissected Street presents the viewer with an artificial street as seen from a remote, unnatural perspective, with the possibility to discern, compare and combine its different buildings and spatial layers. The work deals with an environment very familiar to us and seeks to dissect the different spaces that the urban inhabitant confronts every day. The more than a hundred photos that make up this work have been shot and collected from Boston, Cambridge and New York.

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Fall 2008

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Fall 2008

Lillian Fang Untitled, 2008 Coffee, thread, masking tape, paper towels, hair 18 x 24 inches

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The Sculpture Garden

by Celeste Monke

Statuesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; lithe sculpture garden frolic fractured the body and the bodies before it. And behind. The rose-light gave birth to a black spiral, rejecting the broken body in its greys and reds outward into pouring rain, to the droplets sphered intense. Where refractions played upon the walls, the body called out vision, named itself Perspective, and Crafted Hand. But over there, down Gable Street, an unintentional plot of watering cans and upright sprouting half-moon heads in yellow. Over there, the part-time drummer kept his instrument, the original statement of circle pulling in the cymbal clap strewn upon the asphalt. The figures remembered of galleries filled with curving gods in vibrant skin, of blue and purple robes. Before-drawn bodies of beforedrawn men could not have circled themselves, nor have sputtered into light, rehearsing the motion of rain.

Fall 2008

Click, Memory: Snapshots of André Kertész

New York, 1954. A man stands at the window of his Washington Square apartment, staring out at the falling snow. Nosing his telephoto lens over the sill, he chances upon a person making his way home, a small figure threading through tapering black branches and the tracks of past walkers. Click!—then silence. The snow is white, and it falls and falls and falls, drifting down into its own blue shadow. The man watches, and his own memory drifts, alighting at last on the first days.

by Jessica Sequeira

André Kertész was born in the midst of a hot Budapest summer, near the intersection of the 18th and 19th centuries, to a middle-class Jewish bookseller and his wife. When he was fourteen, his father died, and the family moved to the Hungarian countryside. The plains near his home were long and low and the Danube was deep enough to swim in. In the evenings, when night cast its first pale wash over the bowl of sky, he would come home and flip through the illustrations in old copies of Gartenlaube. School had never been more than a weary distraction; now his mother glanced at him askance as he idled over his magazines in the paprika-scented kitchen. An additional hint from his uncle was enough to send him, suit-clad, to the stock exchange. Life as a clerk was for him a private hell, all paperwork and anonymity. The day he had saved enough he bought a box camera and set to wandering through the surrounding puszta, photographing peasants and gypsies, river and shadow.

chance, replacing sandwich with pistol—sent a bullet racing through the jugular of an archduke and the course of human history. Kertész thus found himself on the front lines of the losing side of a great war. Armed with his Goerz, he snapped photos of his friends in the Austro-Hungarian army engaged in everyday actions, from drinking to washing to using the latrines. Blood-soaked battlefields and dying soldiers held little appeal for Kertész: his talent was instead to infuse the quotidian with joy and impart to it an almost spiritual significance. After the war, Kertész—with a bullet wound to the arm—returned to the stock exchange, left it, and returned again. During this restless time, his camera was never idle. “Wandering Violinist” (1921) captures a blind musician and two peasant children in a small Hungarian village. The richness of the imagined music, the warm spaces between the three people, and the viewer’s ability to see a scene that one of its characters cannot, make of the photo something living. The perspectival positioning too appears ideal—a line of two children as minor notes topped in a harmonious triangle by the adult’s clear major presence. But despite appearances, Kertész never posed his photos, and rarely used more than a few takes. For him, this would destroy the integrity of a moment and transform photography from art into mere profession. “The moment always dictates in my work. What I feel, I do,” he said. “This is the most important thing for me. Everybody can look, but they don’t necessarily see.”

How long this dreamlike state may have persisted, who knows, had it not been for another obscure young man hundreds of miles away, who—emerging from a delicatessen, seeing his

Kertész, though he did not know it then, would encounter the “professional” side of photography. Years later in America—after a sojourn in Paris— in the lights of New York City…but better not to

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André Kertész, “Distortion #40” (1933). courtesy of grossman publishers

continue. It would be cruel to document what first met him there: the rejections, the apathy, the disobedience of his tongue in forming those anglicized syllables. Breaking with his agency because it did not allow him to take jobs offsite, Kertész was forced to turn to what he considered more trivial work. In the women’s magazines in which his photographs ran, his carefully figured images of houses and gardens gave way—with but a flick of licked finger—to bobbed models in roller skates and advice on the subtler points of fork order. The experimental photographs Kertész had taken during a sojourn in France also proved a failure in the New World (so averse to the new). Inspired by the way a swimmer’s body appeared underwater, he had sought nothing less than to capture the essence of a thing, the whole as fluidity and movement. Take two women, photograph them naked with funhouse mirrors

and altered lenses. Imagine a whole body as a leg—the curve rising sensuously above a long floating bubble—and a bi-handed arm in sweet repose on a floor streaked with light. “Distortion #40” (1933) depicts a woman in fetal position, showing only legs, shoulder, and head. She stares upward, hands between thighs, left calf thin and right bulging; behind her, the wall curves gently, mirroring her body. It is permeated with surreal weirdness and wonder, a dreamy question mark as to the possibilities of photography. “You are too human, Kertész,” said his publisher. “Make it brutal.” He could not. The pictures forced their way intact onto a museum wall, but the eyes of the ladies in highnecked silk told him all he needed to know. The gift shop would not stock posters. Not enjoying the work he did, and not respected for the work he enjoyed, Kertész longed

Fall 2008

to leave the country to which he had traveled so enthusiastically a few decades before. But once again, a world war caught Kertész in its cross-hairs, making travel difficult. As Hungarians, Kertész and his wife were classified by the government as enemy aliens, and he was forbidden to photograph in public. Their best option was to settle down in this new country and make a life for themselves. Kertész, though, would never manage to feel at home in America. One of his first pictures here was of a lone wisp of cloud floating beside the imposing metal side of the Rockefeller Center— the impermanence of the isolated individual beside the solidity of modernity. Kertész felt acutely the loss of his homeland. His spirit, like the cloud, lacked roots; one gust of wind could blow it away. Better to fold back time then, to nestle like the doves nesting in his atelier into the Paris years. Paris had meant everything. “J’aime Paris,” he wrote in an epigram to one of his collections of photos from the period, lending the book the same title. Mondrian and Chagall, Colette and Eisenstein, the fantastically innovative artists of the Dada movement—all visited him in his little studio, sitting for portraits and learning from his technique. In the daytime he wandered the streets, searching for angles—Paris from the top of a flight of stairs, Paris from a church tower, Paris through the hands of a clock. “Under the Eiffel Tower” (1929) exemplifies this unusual point of view. Taken from some unknown window on a level with the tower, the ground seems to slant upward to touch the tower itself. The belly of the tower’s enormous frame just skims the top of the photo, projecting below the iron beams a clear shadow imprint. Below, in the Champ de Mars, people mill about; in the street, which runs parallel, two small cars are parked. Brightness and shadow, sun and shade feature prominently here, as in the rest of Kertész’s work. As Kertész himself put it, “I write with light.” Kertész’s work as a whole possesses a rare intimacy and nostalgia. The hand-held camera had just been invented when Kertész embarked

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on his photographic career, yet his photos probe the effects of light and shadow with extraordinary polish. Kertész was unafraid to experiment with style—from realism to distortion to color Polaroids—to achieve diverse effects, while preserving their same characteristic beauty. That his pictures are so powerful without relying on a showy style or political agenda puts his works at the forefront of both photojournalism and art. “Whatever we have done, Kertész did first,” said Henri Cartier-Bresson; another artist dubbed him “Brother Seeing-Eye.” But this same understatedness also works against him. American photographers and the public, all wanted sharp images, made to order— “perfect technique but expressing nothing,” as Kertész put it. In contrast, his eye wandered past the obvious, finding overlooked moments and people. On assignment for Life magazine, Kertész photographed not only the boats requested, but also the people, harbor, and sky. Life refused to publish these pictures, but the act was very characteristic of Kertész himself. His work, then, is finished with a slight gloss of tragedy. His photos are a loving testament to the people whose lives he encountered, from beggars to dancers to walkers on the streets of Paris. But Kertész himself was never on the other side of the lens. The man at the window develops his photo of Washington Square a few days later. A jagged tree stands beside a crescent-shaped path in the snow, a vein of black streaking through endless white. Behind the tree the silhouette of a lone man in a coat is walking: unrecognized, leaning forward with restless movement, elusive and searching as the artist himself. André Kertész (1894—1985) was a Hungarian photographer whose intimate and innovative compositions were a major influence on a number of 20th century photographers and artists. “On Reading,” his 1971 collection of 68 duotone photographs featuring people across the world with their books, was recently rereleased by W.W. Norton. It will be accompanied by a two-year museum tour.

André Kertész, “washington square, winter” (1954). courtesy of grossman publishers

Fall 2008

Surviving Coyote

My name is Pamela Andrews, and boobs are ruining my life. First of all, the predators won’t stop calling me Pamela Anderson, which is not my name. Even Dillon Kondrick, who’s the only boy in Gifteds, recently used his first conversation with me since fourth grade to call me that, and now he’s always coming up to me and starting trouble. “Saw your grandma today, Pamela.” When I tell him my grandmother lives in Florida and he’ll probably never meet her—and that she wouldn’t like him anyway—he says I’m lying because he was just with his Gifted Program Elderly Partner, Mrs. Betty Anderson, and since that’s my last name, she has got to be my grandma. “Because you’re Pamela Anderson,” he says. As if I didn’t get that’s what he meant. I guess I wouldn’t be so sick of it, because who cares what Dillon Kondrick thinks (he has a rattail), except it’s like I’m haunted. The other day Francesca called me from the payphone in Houston, and all she had to say about the Animal Adventure thing she’d watched on cable is that it was called “Mammalian Motherhood,” and was mostly about suckling. Plus my fifth grade teacher, Miss Yoo, has us studying Venn diagrams, which look like boobs, and recently she even re-taught us how to pledge, which means having your hand against your left nipple, which will someday be a boob. I guess she thought the predators and me were looking out the window with our bodies all lopsided because we didn’t know how to do it, when really we’re just bored with the pledge 56

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by Kathleen Hale

because we’ve been doing it since first grade. Miss Yoo even got up on a chair so we could see her better or pay attention better—I don’t know— and kept on saying, “I, Miss Yoo”—class, this is an example—I, Miss Yoo pledge—are you paying attention? This is how you pledge, a pledge is a promise—I, Miss Yoo, I, Miss Yoo.” The predators have thick, dumb skulls whose insides churn toward violence. So obviously none of them thought it was funny, even though she was basically just saying I miss you, over and over again. But later I told Francesca who laughed her butt off, and now we make fun of it all the time: I, Miss Yoo, pledge that you should miss me too; I, Miss Yoo, pledge to be Chinese forever. Stuff like that. It’s usually really hysterical, but right now I’ve got boobs on the brain so bad that nothing funny can’t be ruined. I even checked the lunch schedule for this week and sure enough every day there’s something from cows, who have udders, which look like deformed boobs. Even on Wednesday when they’re serving sausages we’re having chocolate milk. Plus, I just remembered girl pigs breast-feed. *** Nobody can fight a blue whale. That’s what Francesca and I have decided. There’s tricks to fighting all sorts of things you’d never think were fightable. Like for instance crocodiles or white sharks, where it’s mostly about sticking your thumbs into their eyeballs. But blue whales are too huge. It’s our professional opinion that we should all stay away from blue whales because

they are actually real-life monsters. Whales are not my favorite animal, but they are in my top thirty-five. I don’t have a first favorite, but my second favorite is a tie between dogs, cats, Siberian hamsters, and moose. I’m very into mammals. I was not always an expert. I used to not be able to remember if it was dinosaurs or dragons that were fake. But since I’ve matured I have become so good at animals that I always know exactly what exists. Moose are actual real things, but Big Foot isn’t. Same with vampire bats and vampires. Just because I’m an expert doesn’t mean I love every animal. For example, I don’t love Camel Spiders, cougars, coyotes, or alligators. That would be like saying I like a gun, or anything else that could kill me. I pretty much don’t like whatever’s simultaneously bloodthirsty and very scary looking—but I still know everything about them. Francesca and I both do. The reason is we want to be prepared. The world is a terrifying place. Don’t even get us started on the deep-sea creatures. *** Probably most of the reason Dillon Kondrick and the predators are bugging me so bad is since Francesca’s out of town. Plus, she took the Animal Fact File, which I usually have in my backpack for when I’m getting really haunted. Francesca and I have collected a lot of data that shows there’s much worse things than boys who call you porn names. For example, Dillon Kondrick might tease you with his lizard breath, but an anaconda will break all your bones and then eat you alive. Francesca and I don’t talk about mushy stuff, so it wasn’t like I said anything about why I’d maybe want the file while she went to Houston. She probably knew a little bit, though. Francesca can usually tell I’m scared of something, even if she can’t get it exactly right. Anyway, it wasn’t like she took the Fact File to be mean or torture me or anything, it was just we did some rational thinking: one of the best animal shows on television is called Crazy Larry’s Animal Adventure and is only on cable, which both Francesca and my parents don’t believe in. And they always have

cable at hospitals, so Francesca and I concluded she should take it and do updates on our research while she’s there. So now I’m stuck in Austin doing species drawings based on what Francesca describes to me over the phone. It’s only for three more days, which isn’t so bad. Only she’s the one who’s good at doing fangs, which always look like mustaches when I try to do them. *** The way Francesca and I met was we were both new in Cancer Group. She was there because her mom had just gotten diagnosed and had done a lot of research on kids and cancer and counseling, and I was there because my mom was already upstairs on the eleventh floor of St. Mary’s, and one of the nurses had told my dad about it. Usually Dad would have said, “Go ask your mom,” but Mom was busy getting carved out like a turkey, so he just looked at me hoping I’d know what was right. I hypothesized to do some really violent things to the nurse for bringing it up, like watch her be stampeded, or mauled like in the book I’d brought. But I concluded to go because Dad’s eyes were bloodshot and he kept on rubbing them. He said it was the hay fever, and it could have been that, I guess, or just the fact that he had been awake for almost two days. But I was afraid that maybe he’d cry. That’s the real reason I went. The first thing the counselor made us do was sit down in a circle. He said his name was Señor Chavez and that he was here to tell us about coping and “getting through.” Francesca and I hate that mush, but I didn’t know her yet so instead of looking at her I opened up my book and started reading. Señor Chavez kept on going for a while about trials and tribulations and meditation strategies, but then he stopped all of a sudden. “What’s your book, Pamela?” I didn’t look at him. “It’s called When Animals Attack,” I said. “My dad gave it to me.” Señor Chavez wanted to take it away, but I had a lot of rage feelings left over from the nurse, and I think that he could see it in my eyes because he let me keep it, so long as I kept it shut while we did circle time.

Fall 2008

Circle time meant we had to go around one by one and “open up,” which meant telling the story of how our parents told us. The other kids already knew each other’s stories, but Francesca and I didn’t so they repeated them for us. When it was my turn, I told them all my that parents had sat me down at the kitchen table to tell me, and then given me a Nintendo. I don’t know why I lied except that everyone else had that story (only instead of a Nintendo it was sometimes a Slip N Slide). I started reading right away then, so I didn’t really hear Francesca open up—except I know she said something about a prayer because I remember when she came up to me later, I thought she might try to give me a Jesus packet like one of those ladies outside the mall. Only instead she asked me if my book had pictures, which I thought was a good question, and which was the only reason I didn’t mind when she sat down next to me to put my book across our laps. We picked our top five most gruesome attacks, and I told her how Mom was upstairs getting the cancer in her crotch scooped out, which for some reason meant no more babies or periods, which didn’t bother me even though I knew it bothered Mom. I liked being an only child. Plus, not having a period was a good thing, because not having all that blood come out means less chance of attracting bears. After a few Groups was how Francesca got the idea to make our own book, only more specific. Not just sharks and bears, which are obvious, but every single animal that lives in, or might ever be in, Texas. Surviving coyote attacks is pretty much the only thing you have to worry about in Austin— and that’s easy—but we’re doing all fifty states, just in case any of the North American animals decide to migrate here. Plus Mexico, obviously, since it’s our basement, and also anywhere else we think we might go. For example, Francesca would like to go to Italy someday because her dead grandma lived there, and I would not like to go anywhere. *** I have the phone number for the payphone across the hall from Francesca’s mom’s room 58

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at Houston Hospital. But I only get to call her on it once a day because it’s loud and Mom says Francesca’s mother needs her sleep. So far I’ve called from inside our kitchen, because the phone there has the longest cord, and that way I can sit down and talk for longer, or draw at the table if I need to. Mom likes to sit down and monitor me for the first few minutes. Mostly so she can nudge me with her foot and mouth questions I’m supposed to pretend I came up with on my own. I don’t get why she has to spy so much when she gets updates from Francesca’s aunt every other day. “My mom wants to know how you’re feeling,” I tell Francesca. Mom gives me a look. “You mean my mom?” Francesca says. I put the phone into my shirt and look at Mom. “You mean how her mom is feeling?” Mom gives me another look. She is always trying to get me to talk to Francesca about feelings because she doesn’t get it. One time she convinced me to ask Francesca, “Are you scared?” and Francesca snorted like it was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. “Cancer’s not so bad,” she said. “They take it out and then it’s gone.” I give my mom a look and mouth PRIVACY. Mom thinks privacy is very important for girls my age, so she throws her hands up singing, “Sorry, sorry!” and goes away. Francesca starts talking about Crazy Larry’s segment on flying snakes, (which is another reason I’ll never go to the Congo), but then she makes some joke about the Mammalian Motherhood segment and I think about how tomorrow’s Monday and get quiet and she stops. Like I said, she knows me. “You think the predators will call you Pamela Anderson again?” She says. It’s more about the udders at lunch, but it’s still true when I tell her yes. “You should tell them that the only same thing about you and Pamela Anderson is that neither one of you would ever want to be their girlfriend.” The way she says it, I can tell that she’s been practicing.

*** I would never say a comeback like the ones Francesca gives me. First of all, I’m not very good at them, and I’m pretty sure no one wants me to be their girlfriend anyway. But also, sometimes I’m not sure I want the predators to stop, even if what they say is stupid and annoying. Making fun of me is the first time most of them have said anything to me since Mom got sick, and unlike with the girls, none of what they’re saying has to do with how she was sick in the first place. (Girls get weird about sickness and try to be like moms or something for attention. ) So I guess it’s kind of nice to be noticed, in a way. Like, I don’t like it but I don’t want to stop it. For example, I don’t not do the things that will make them tease me, like bringing When Animals Attack to school, or talking about the mating cycle of the blue crab for my Tuesday Presentation. I know that camouflage is the best way to avoid a predator, but I don’t ever want to be invisible. *** There is something you will not believe about me, which is that even though I know more about animals than anyone in the fifth grade, I am one of the only kids in my class who doesn’t have a pet. Even Jorge, who has incredibly bad ADD and should not be allowed near domesticated animals, has a cat and an iguana. When I was much, much younger, we used to have a terrier named Bosco, but he got eaten by a coyote, and after that we became a no-pet household. I obviously have wanted a pet very bad, and have tried many convincing arguments, but Mom has never budged. Once, at the end of fourth grade, I even tried to tell her that we should do it because animals make you live longer, but she started crying into her mashed potatoes because she still had the cancer then, and after that I figured it probably wasn’t going to happen. *** On Monday Francesca’s mom is set to have her boobs chopped and we have a sub. Her name is Ms. Hannycack, but none of the predators laugh when she writes it on the board. Ms. Hannycack

tells us Miss Yoo got sick on her trip to Mexico, but none of them are laughing at that either. The predators love poop jokes, but I guess they’re all too dumb to know “sick in Mexico” is just another way of saying Montezuma’s Revenge. The runs are hard, but I’m pretty excited about Miss Yoo having them, since Dad said the one time he got them in Mexico, he had to spend the whole time on the pot, so I hypothesize that Miss Yoo will be gone at least until tomorrow or maybe Wednesday. Subs are easier to trick, and I’m already calculating how many phone calls I can get out of the quarters that I brought for lunch. Another funny thing about Miss Yoo having The Revenge is that she’s usually very strict about giving bathroom passes. She’s also strict about how we ask to go to the bathroom. My first day of fifth grade I asked her, “Can I go to the bathroom?” And she spent way too long telling me the difference between “can” and “may.” After that I put all the smartest words together I could think of. Now when I have to go I say, “Miss Yoo, may I please be excused to attend the restroom?” The one time she wasn’t strict about anything was when Eva got a bladder infection from wiping the wrong way (I don’t know how Eva gets to be in Gifteds if she does things like that), which for some reason meant she also got to go to the bathroom without asking. After Ms. Hannycack writes her name on the board she picks up Miss Yoo’s notes and reads them like a robot. “It says here: Do not forget to tell the nonGifteds that tomorrow their Tuesday Presentations will be due. They are allowed to write on whatever they want, but usually the boys stick to sports, and Pamela will give hers on an animal she’s scared of.” She looks up at me. “Is that you?” I want to tell her duh, aren’t I the only girl in the whole class? Does she want to have me killed? The boys are already whispering Pamela Anderson under their breath, and when I look over at Fernando, who sits next to me, he’s rubbing his thumb and finger together in front of his nipples and making a face like he’s a girl. I raise my hand and the sub looks at me, confused. “May I please be excused to attend the

Fall 2008

restroom?” I say. *** Dad’s the one who told me about who Pamela Anderson is, which is how I know she’s a lady who got her boobs inflated like balloons and sometimes shows them in the magazines they have at barbershops. Dad’s a gym teacher, so he doesn’t like to talk bodies except for what muscles are hurting. The whole Pamela Anderson conversation made him turn pink and say “well,” a lot, but I’m still glad I asked because it meant I finally found out the boys were making fun and not just getting my name wrong. Mom probably would have been the better one to ask, I guess. She and Dad know the same stuff, but Mom’s the one who finds her words better, and she never gets embarrassed. The thing about Mom is sometimes I don’t want to ask her things because she tells me more than I really want to know. Like how she told me about sex when I asked her about babies, or how when after she got the cancer in her vagina scooped, she wanted to show me what the scars looked like. It was a couple months after the surgery, because I guess it took a week for the bleeding to stop, and then a ton more time for the scabs to turn into skin again. She tried to tell me that battle scars are inspiring, and that looking at the evidence of pain can sometimes make your heart stronger, but I didn’t want to see them. I could tell it hurt her feelings, which I hate to do since there was all that time I had to stop taking her for granted. Still, I never looked at them. *** “Spam?” Francesca asks. She wants to know how the hell I’m calling her from school. “I asked to go to the bathroom,” I say. She makes an annoyed sound. “You’re going to have to do a lot better than that,” she says. “Why?” She groans. “Because I need to talk to you more than just one time today!” I’m afraid she’s going to say something mushy about her mom’s surgery. She sighs. “It’s boring here.” 60

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“Did you watch that thing on domestic animals gone bad?” I say. “Yeah,” she says. “Did the Gifteds leave already?” “Yeah.” “So you’re alone with all the predators?” “Yeah.” *** For some reason they built our school right next door to a retirement home, and this year the principal started a program for Gifteds where each one gets paired up with an old person next door. I guess they decided it’d be good to use the Gifteds to distract them while they get even older, so now Dillon Kondrick and the girls go over there twice a day and talk, talk, talk while the elderly just stare. I guess I forgot to mention I’m the only girl in my whole class who’s not in Gifteds. Francesca goes to a Montessori school, which Mom says means the whole school is technically gifted, which is the fair way to do it, I think. At my school they bring all the first graders in one by one for a test to see if they’re gifted, and if they are, then they’re in Gifteds, and if they’re not, like me, then they never are. The crazy thing about it was the test they gave, which was for each kid to name as many animals out loud as they could. Afterwards it turned out all you had to do was name thirty—thirty!—all you had to do was be fast. I knew so many animals that I sat there trying to come up with the most impressive answer and wasted all my time. It became a big story in the PTA, and Mom always laughs about it at parties even though it’s embarrassing for me. She says our family’s finally made some lore and it’s the best damn lore she’s ever heard. “She sat and she sat and she sat, my baby, spinning her little brain so hard,” Mom says, and all her drunk friends smile like they care, except for Dad, who actually always likes to hear it. “Tell ‘em, Gail,” he says. And then everybody wants to know: What did she say? What did she say? I said emu, okay? I sat there for fifteen minutes and then I whispered, “Emu.”

I guess I thought it’d be a good choice because it wasn’t as obvious as an ostrich, but still remarkable because it was the world’s second largest bird. It was dumb of me. The people giving the test got big-eyed, I remember that. I guess most first graders can’t say emu, or something, and that’s why it became such a thing. But still, it was only one and so I didn’t get in and stayed out. “I would have gone in after you and just said a bunch of kinds of furniture,” Francesca said. “That way we’d be in the same class.” And that’s the thing about Francesca: she is always on my side. *** When I come back, it’s chaotic and Miss Hannycack is reading a science fiction novel, not paying any attention. The predators are all talking about boners or poop or vomit or professional wrestling, and when I walk in they start making sex jokes. I stay for a little bit to draw some of the deranged domestic animals Francesca told me about, but after a while I’m so lopsided and bored I think I’ll die, so I go up and whisper to sub I’ve got to go again. “Again?” She says. I tell her I’ve one of those bladder infections. “And you know what that means,” I say. She makes a face like she’s grossed out and doesn’t want to hear it, so right away she waves me out and next thing I’m at my cubby scooping quarters and heading to the payphone by the gym. *** There are certain special treatments that go with having your mom sick. Like, Francesca doesn’t have to make up any of the work she’s missing for her mom’s surgery, and last year I was allowed to go to the nurse whenever I wanted to. I’m pretty sure I can still do that, but I haven’t tried yet. That doesn’t mean I’m a terrifically good person or have an over-big conscience. For example, after Mom got better, I wanted to keep going to Cancer Group, so I could see Francesca, but Mom didn’t think that was appropriate, since it was a counseling session, not a social hour. So

I lied and told her that I wasn’t finished coping. That’s how I got to keep on going. And when there are new kids, I keep on telling my fake story, even though my story’s over. *** The real way it happened was that I was at the championship for the Little Longhorns, which is the T-Ball team Dad coaches (and which I used to be on until it turned out how bad I was and I told him I’d just like to watch). On the way over was when he gave me When Animals Attack. “A lot of important animal facts in there, Lampy,” he said. Dad calls me Lampy because he says I light up his life. “And look,” he told me. “I made sure to get the one with color pictures.” Dad’s really cool like that, which was pretty much all I was thinking, which was why I didn’t see it coming. I don’t remember if we won or not, only that after the game was done, Dad didn’t shake the other coach’s hand for very long. Usually, he talks to the other guy for a very long time, because he says it’s important to make sure there aren’t any hard feelings, but this time I remember he looked over at me halfway through the handshake and clapped a hand on the other coach’s shoulder, which is how Dad ends a conversation, and which is how I knew he was about to have a talk with me. “Hiya Lampy McGoo.” Dad adds McGoo to Lampy when there’s bad news. “I’m fine,” I said, because sometimes when he says McGoo I forget what part of the conversation we’re at. That’s when he climbed into the front seat and turned the car off and told me. Mom can say just about anything, but Dad can’t always find the words. “Mom’s got cancer in her groin,” he said. I knew about groins because sometimes Dad pulled his at work and had to sit on the couch with a bag of frozen peas against his penis while he watched the game. Before I learned better, I’d go over and try to sit on him, and he’d say,

Fall 2008

“Lampy, no, my groin.” I turned the pages of When Animals Attack even though I wasn’t reading it. “I didn’t know girls even had a groin,” I said. Dad sucked his lower lip and nodded. “Yep. Yep, they do.” He started to say something else, but I interrupted him. “Do primates have groins?” He started the van. “Everything has a groin.” *** Later that night after the game, after Mom was done explaining where it really was—and done saying things like, “Yes baby I might go bald, yes baby I might look like Daddy Warbucks. yes you can try on my wigs if I get them”—Dad came in and tried to give me a high five. “We can win this,” he said. He was smiling with his mouth closed, which means he isn’t actually smiling. “I know that it seems hard but we can do this.” And then he told me what he tells the Little Longhorns: “Get your head in the game.” I leaned over into his lap because that’s what Dad’s good at: giving hugs. But it wasn’t like it usually is. He rubbed my back and everything, and curled my hair around his fingers, which he kissed a couple times. But all I could feel was the heat from his pants, because all I could think about was how close my face was to his groin. *** “Spam?” Francesca’s mouth is full of something. “Yeah,” I say. “It’s me.” I try not to sound too stuck-up when I tell her how I tricked the sub. “What are you eating?” “Chips.” “Liar.” Francesca’s mom doesn’t let her have chocolate because they’re all trying to be healthier now that there’s cancer. “Sounds like an apple.” “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” she says, and takes another bite. It’s definitely an apple. “Mom’s surgery’s in like an hour,” she says. “So I got to go and do a prayer with her and Aunt Susan.” 62

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I don’t know what to say to that because we don’t pray at my house. I want to say don’t worry, but that’s mushy. “When they scooped my mom’s out it only took two hours,” I tell her. “So I’ll call you after recess.” I put on my not-stuck-up voice again. “I’ve got unlimited bathroom passes so it’s fine.” “K.” The apple cracks. “So where’s Miss Yoo?” I smile and look around all of a sudden to make sure that no one’s watching. “She got Montezuma’s Revenge.” I don’t know why I’m whispering. Francesca laughs. “I, Miss Yoo, pledge allegiance to the Montezuma.” I can’t think of anything good. “I, Miss Yoo, too.” “Oh stop the mush,” she says. *** At recess all the Gifteds are walking back across the lawn from doing whatever with their elderly partners, and I’m so distracted by how unfair it is that they don’t need a teacher or even a hall monitor to leave the school that I don’t even notice Dillon Kondrick coming over. “Hey Pamela,” he says. He starts up with all the usual stuff about how his elderly partner, Betty, is my grandma and how her last name is Mrs. Anderson and how that makes me named Pamela Anderson. At first I feel a little bad for him because he’s not as good at this as the predators and keeps looking around at where the other boys who aren’t Gifted are playing basketball or wrestling or talking to each other. It seems like what he mostly wants is for them to look at him. “And then your weirdo grandma lifted up her shirt,” Dillon’s saying. “And didn’t have a bra on or boobs, even.” “Gross, Dillon.” All of a sudden I don’t care that he hasn’t talked to me since third grade. He wears jeans with elastic waists and has all short hair except for a really long piece in the back that he sucks on. He probably doesn’t even know the difference between an African and an Asian Elephant, but still he gets to be in Gifteds. “She’s a pervert,” he says.

I want to bite something. “Well hey guess what you’re a wiener with bad hair,” I say. “And you’re too stupid to even lie right because everybody knows you’ll never see anybody’s boobs or have a girlfriend ever.” Dillon doesn’t look sad; he just stops trying to talk. “Ever, Dillon,” I say. “Everybody knows.” “Oh yeah?” He says. “Then how come I actually saw Mrs. Anderson’s chest, which has scars on it?” He nods with his mouth open like this is the actual and real deal truth. “And no nipples and”—he looks around and blinks—“and blood and guts and monster veins—how would I know that then?” “Because you wished it to happen,” I tell him, and even though I don’t know where these comebacks are all coming from I keep going. “And that’s really sick because old people are old and gross.” Dillon still doesn’t look sad, but he also doesn’t know what else to say. So he makes a noise like I’m weird and walks over to the basketball hoops, where he just sort of stands and tries to act like he doesn’t want to play. *** When I try to call Francesca again, there isn’t any answer. I let it ring eleven times, and then I call back and let it ring to fifty. After that I call again, but an old man picks up sounding angry. “You again!” He screams. I can tell he’s senile, like the elderly next door. “Not me,” I say. Then I hang up and go to the nurse for a little bit. Just to wait for the buses to come. *** Usually when I get off the bus, Mom’s out back watering the bushes. But today she’s in the front doorway, and she’s even got the door held open. “Come on in, Spam,” she says. “I want to talk to you.” She’s smiling, so I know I’m not in trouble, which is why I tell her, “Later.” I’ve got to go try calling Francesca again first. But Mom says no, now. She tells me to sit down, and before I can whine, she’s got celery

sticks and a jar of peanut butter out on the kitchen table and I can’t remember what I was saying. “I’ve just spoken to Francesca’s aunt,” she says. She thinks I haven’t talked to Francesca yet—or maybe that since Francesca doesn’t like how are your feelings questions, that she wouldn’t tell me what today is. I nod and keep on chewing. “Have you spoken to Francesca?” I’m not sure I am supposed to use the phone at school. Actually, I’m pretty positive. Plus, there’s Mom’s once-a-day rule. “No.” “Okay,” she says. She drums her fingers on the table. “Well do you know what happened this afternoon?” “Duh.” I lick the peanut butter off my mouth and roll my eyes. “Francesca’s mom went to the hospital and they chopped her boobs off.” “Well, they removed them, yes, that’s correct,” she says. She smiles like she’s trying to. “Francesca’s mother is now flat as a board and strong as a man”—she reaches across the table and starts to screw the cap onto the peanut butter, even though I’m still trying to stick my celery in it—“and she’ll need to be—for the radiation, for the chemo, believe me.” She closes the jar and www.TheHarvardShop.com

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Fall 2008

crosses her arms. “Francesca’s mom is going to have to be very strong, and Francesca’s going to have to be very strong, and you’re going to have to be very strong for Francesca.” She nods and raises up her eyebrows. “Aren’t you, Spam?” She’s talking like she read this in a book and she’s being mushy. I open up my mouth full of celery and peanut butter and make a gag-face. “I’m serious, Pamela,” Mom says. “But her mom’s better now,” I say. “She’s got her battle scars, and now she can just lie around and watch TV and inspire everybody.” That’s when Mom’s hand crawls over mine. “They can go in and take out the stuff that’s bad,” she says. “But sometimes while they’re in there, they find more.” *** Mom used to know a lot about animals, because before she met Dad, she lived in Hyde Park in an apartment that was full of various species who were not even her pets. She had cockroaches, snakes, squirrels, birds, bats and rats in her walls. “It was a very noisy infestation,” she said. “Lots and lots of them—talking, reproducing. After a while there got to be so many that I could hear infestations eating infestations. It was fascinating.” I remember I asked if it got quieter once they started eating each other. “Not at all,” Mom said. “They were noisy and their massacres were noisier. To the scuttling, scratching, flapping, was added chewing, screaming, the growling of digestion. At night, I thought I could hear them moan in one another’s stomachs.” At Cancer Group one time Señor Chavez had us use those stupid crayons to draw what we thought our family member’s sickness looked like. I’m not very good at drawing, so I just copied Francesca’s, which was a huge black spiral that she kept going over and over again until it looked like a hole or a sloppy tornado. But I think if I could have been an artist like Mom, I would have drawn it like her infestations in Hyde Park. Not the apartment part, but the feeling of it. With snakes eating rats eating cockroaches inside my guts or Mom’s downstairs parts. Causing so much 64

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noise but never really dying. *** The next day at my Tuesday Presentations, I use pink chalk to draw a circle on the board, then grab a yellow piece to draw one next to it but a little bit on top of it. The back row starts whispering titties and I spin around. “It’s a Venn diagram, idiots,” I say. I look over at Miss Hannycack, who’s sitting in a chair against the wall, yawning at the pages of her book. I write “first name” in the part that overlaps. Then I write Pamela Andrews above one of the circles and Pamela Anderson above the other. That’s when everyone starts laughing—not just regular laughing, but laughing the way boys do it. Like they want you to know they know it’s funny. “Poop boob!” Someone shouts. Miss Hannycack looks at me, then at the Venn diagram, but instead of yelling at whoever said the poop boob thing, or at least reminding the predators to raise their hands, she comes over to the board to stick her finger in my face. “I’ve had enough of you,” she says. “Your jokes with the class at my expense—your using your mom as an excuse to cause a riot.” She’s so close to my face it’s like she’s going to kiss me. Her breath smells like tuna, so I look at my feet, which of course makes me look guilty. “The rest of the school might put up with it,” she says. “But I won’t be taken advantage of by a ten year old.” “I have to go,” I tell her. “It’s an emergency,” I whisper. Just in case somebody asks. Just so that I can say I said something before I bolted. “It’s my ovulation and I need a tampon or maybe even the pad.” That’s when I run. *** I tell the lady at the front desk I’m there to see Betty. “Betty on the fourth floor Betty?” “Yeah,” I say. “Oh,” she says. “Are you in Gifteds?” “No,” I say before I can think. I say, “We’re just related.” She raises up her eyebrows. “Oh.”

I nod. “My name is Pamela Anderson.” *** After she tells me she’s sorry—she’s new and didn’t recognize me—the lady at the desk says to not forget to keep the lights off because you know your grandma. Then she says that when my Mom’s done parking, she’ll be sure to send her straight up after me. I didn’t say anything about my Mom, but it’s fine she thinks that. It’s better, probably, since they’re probably already after me, and this will give me time. Betty Anderson’s room is on the fourth floor and when I get there I don’t even have to knock because her door is open. She’s sitting on her bed wearing a pink button-down shirt with purple and green flowers on it, and she’s staring at the wall next to my face, but she’s smiling. I wave but she doesn’t look at me. She just keeps looking at the wall. “Mrs. Anderson?” I say. I figure maybe she can’t see me, so I turn the lights on. She makes a face like “oooh,” and blinks at all the walls. Then the ceiling, then the floor. Then me. “Oh!” She says. “I’m Pamela,” I say. She starts fiddling with her buttons and my heart starts pounding. “My friend Dillon told me you were sick.” “Oh!” She keeps blinking at the walls and fingering her buttons and all of a sudden I remember what the lady at the front desk said and think maybe this is very wrong what I am doing, maybe even the sort of thing you can get arrested for if they catch you. Betty sort of swings her head around toward me opens up her mouth into a bigger, empty smile, and before I can feel too bad she’s pulling apart the flowers on her shirt with shaking fingers that look like claws. They’re snap buttons, so all she has to do is tug. I’m wondering whether this is gross, what I’m doing, like I told Dillon. I’m about to see an old lady pretty much naked because I want to. Only it’s not like that. I hypothesize it’s not the same as boobs. It isn’t like they’re still attached

That’s when there’s feet on the stairs and shouting in the hall. I hear my name. My stomach drops and I am frozen. “Oh all that ruckus,” Betty says. And I jump at the sound of real words, not just noises. She waves a claw at the door and sighs, like life is so annoying and she’s a pretty good sport about it. “Shut the door please dear—oh, all that ruckus—lock it, too.” *** It’s like this: the skin there scoops in like it shouldn’t. Both sides are like empty sockets in a skull, except big, and on her chest. It scares me like I thought it would, but not because I knew what it would look like. It looks like closed eyes burned shut forever. It looks like worms sewn into bones with black thread and then covered with dry skin. It looks like nothing I have ever seen, but the thing about it is there’s Betty’s mouth above it, which is empty in a smile, waiting open. My heart feels like it’s beating on both sides, and my ribs hurt underneath the skin the way that collarbones can ache because you hear somebody broke theirs. I don’t know why something that’s fixed has to look so terrible. Animals don’t have these empty spaces where pain used to live, with wounds sewn up and over them like covers. And I’m so scared I think my butt might fall off. I want facts from my file. I want Francesca to come back. But instead I breathe. I try it on my own, fast, so that I know I might have to change my mind about it later; I hypothesize that when animals get this sick, nobody wants to fix them. I conclude that the rest of us, we’re humans, and we save each other. Or at least we keep on trying.

Fall 2008

God in Grey: Houston’s Menil Collection

The Texas night is enormous. Without any hills, Houston sprawls out off the sides of its raised interstates unbound, expansive. The highway exits, onramps, bridges, and interchanges provide the only real topography, as they wrap around each other between the George Bush Intercontinental Airport and the city itself. The concrete pillars of an overpass frame the highrises, which approach in glimpses between tractor-trailers and dark, fat trees. This is the city of Enron and NASA. Its skyline was built on oil fortunes, and Kennedy launched the space race from its football stadium. Assembled in a single neighborhood near Rice University in the Montrose district are 18 eclectic museums, ranging from a Holocaust memorial to a Health Museum, including a Contemporary Arts Museum, a Center for Photography, and the Czech Cultural Center. The roads are exceptionally wide. Houston’s zoning regulations are notoriously lax, and the museums themselves are scattered among homes, parking lots, and office buildings. Some of them are modest and unassuming. The John C. Freeman Weather Museum is a plain house with shutters on its windows and a sign on its small front lawn. Others are enormous and bold. The buildings that house the Museums of Fine and Contemporary Arts have tall stone-faced facades, porticos, and expansive windows. The Menil Collection is on Branard Street, past the small Catholic University of St. Thomas. The streets are quieter and more insulated, and small park lawns are nestled among the broadleaf trees. 66

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by Kevin Seitz

The houses along Branard Street are all painted a neutral grey, and house a rotating assortment of visiting artists. Tall trees block any view of the horizon and there are no tall buildings. There is, in fact, no location where you can survey the multiple structures of the Menil Collection itself: the collection’s buildings are scattered haphazardly among the few surrounding blocks. In 1941 Dominique and Jean de Ménil fled from Paris during the Nazi invasion. They bought a townhouse in New York and then a home in Houston, where the enormous oilequipment company she inherited had just built its headquarters. There, in nine square blocks of a lower-middle-class neighborhood, they would establish a sanctuary for their vision of the arts. émigré artists from Europe were making the same trans-Atlantic shift, and so the de Ménils found themselves situated at a unique convergence of inspiration and means. Dominique and Jean began purchasing and commissioning art. In the 40s, they bought a portrait from a struggling Max Ernst, for which Dominique recalled an initial distaste: “Now, we never liked it very much, but at that time we thought that there really was not very much background and the face was not much of a resemblance.” Over the following five decades, they were dedicated to a patronage of the arts. Ultimately driven by a fascination for the spiritual undercurrents in art, they pursued a comprehensive philosophy of aesthetics across the spectrum of cultural expression. Years later when they found Ernst’s portrait, Dominique recalled, “We opened it and then we screamed, because

by that time our eyes were open and maybe there still is not a resemblance, but the colors, which are much more beautiful than on the slide, and the whole composition is really so imaginative… It was this extraordinary feeling that our eyes were different, we hadn’t seen something, and now we could see it.” The main gallery of the Menil Collection is a low, wide building that nearly fills its block. There is no sign beside its front walkway nor is there a grand entrance hall: only a small information desk, and a lone attendant behind a row of pamphlets. The museum was completed in 1986 and is made possible by generous donations, which keep the exhibits free and open to the public. All of the galleries on the museum’s single floor diverge from the main hallway, which runs the length of the building, beneath high ceilings that filter sunlight over dark wood floors and plain walls. This neutral space flows like an artery into the exhibitions. From the mid-1940s, the de Ménils felt uniquely empowered to encourage a dialogue between contemporary artistic movements; to them, proper appreciation of art could stimulate creativity and illuminate more fundamental matters of experience. “Dynamism is contagious,” Dominique said. Foremost in their favor were the Surrealists (especially Magritte and Ernst), the American Pop Artists (Warhol, Claes Oldenberg), and the Abstract Expressionists (Pollock, Rothko). They felt these pioneers were not receiving enough public appreciation, so the de Ménils donated pieces and sponsored high-profile exhibitions. But the real meaning of art, they stressed, lay in its intersubjectivity. Dominique, a self-professed “frustrated archaeologist,” and her husband collected and exhibited Eurogothic, Native Mexican, Oceanic, and African arts to juxtapose world-views and emphasize the ineffable intercultural connections. The de Ménils were highly conscious of their social role, as a patron family for the city of Houston in an art world that was rapidly globalizing. A New York Times article in 1976 addressed the city as, “A Brash, Young Houston Schizophrenic Over Its Culture.” Several decades of the industrial and high-tech growth brought both wealth and

a continuous influx of people. The money and industry bought cultural influence. Dominique felt her contribution and guidance to be of all the more significance, “That is where our efforts must be concentrated,” she wrote, “Because here we are almost alone.” The main gallery’s exhibit halls are separate islands: art from different styles and eras, each with a different design for ceiling and walls. There are spaces devoted to mid-20th century New York, European Cubism, early Christian, and ancient votive statuary. The title-cards bear no paragraphs of explanation. “Art is of all human activities the one that can least be explained… Explanations if they are given remain on the surface. They…wouldn’t tell you why the work is great,” Dominique wrote. As curators, the de Ménils made all their decisions personal, and in letters they stressed that any work they bought should be something they would be happy to place in their own home. Indeed, the galleries still have a slightly domestic feel. The Cubists, Surrealists, and Dadaists have a darker set of rooms with grey-blue walls where major works of Dalí and Duchamp hang with a restless calm beside Magritte’s non-pipe in “La trahison des images.” The wood floors are worn to a light tan beside empty walls and beneath pedestals. They have been endlessly rearranged and re-ordered: the process of curation was never complete for the de Ménils. In the back, through the public halls of Magritte and Miró is a small cluttered room where the lights are much dimmer and the ceiling much lower. Like an attic collection of a strange private obsession, the room is a wunderkammer of relics, sculptures, and drawings owned by Surrealists. Bright indigo birds hang from strings along the back of a wall case. In the center of the small room, a strange hollow, black figure stares down from a pedestal, thin spikes protruding from every inch of its body. The de Ménils seem fascinated by the strange power of these pieces, and so in this back corner of Renzo Piano’s flat, low structure, they crafted a shadowy and mysterious experience to relive the inspirations of Surrealism. There’s a fourteen-lane interstate five blocks away, but there is no sign of the city from within

Fall 2008

the Menil’s neighborhood. A large sculpture in a small clearing—two large steel beams angled into the air by Mark di Suervo—in on the boundary between pensive and lonely; its sanctuary has a strange calm even in the heat. Across the street, the Cy Twombly Gallery was completed just over a decade ago as a sanctum to the artist’s work. Twombly was one of many artists for whom the de Ménils took forceful initiative to promote and preserve, for while their social circles were global, they were also uniquely personal, as many of their intimate dealings in art were through letters, gifts, and recommendations from friends. It is a smaller building, also designed by Piano, with a glass grid roof that seems to float off the top of the concrete vault. The airy rooms within give Twombly’s enormous gestures free space to roam. In the last room, an enormous work bears a name that is typical of Twombly’s classical allusions: “Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor” is his largest in the gallery at 13 by 52 feet. Twombly once reported with delight that a guard had found a young Frenchwoman standing before it stark naked. Heaps of dripping color are

spasmodically plastered onto the right side in blurs of black, yellow, blue, and red. Frantic and seemingly senseless scribbles of numbers, verses, and tally-marks are scattered across the rest of the piece. Twombly was a former army cryptologist, and he composed works that are fascinating, but among his sculptures of heaped white plaster in a room near the exit, the enshrinement of Twombly’s work seems to be the most persistent question in the whole provocative exhibit. “A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing the rocks before the Lord. The Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake. After the earthquake there was a fire—but the Lord was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound.” Quoted by Dominique de Ménil at the opening of the Rothko Chapel, Houston, 1971.

In the 1980s, when the de Ménils discovered a 13th century Byzantine fresco stolen from a small chapel in Cyprus, they tracked down and purchased the 38 fragments. In the original

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personal votive shrine, the Pantokrator Christ fresco loomed from the central dome and a Virgin Mary leaned over the apse, painted in bright hues of rich blue and gold. The de Ménils built a reliquary for these works, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum, and tucked it around the corner from the Twombly gallery. The central hall is an expansive room with a black ceiling that seems to recede endlessly. In its center, a small skeletal chapel of frosted glass and black steel tubing gives off an eerie blue glow. The Christ and Mary are in their respective places in its ceiling, built to the dimensions of the original. The presentation is historical and anthropological, for its pamphlets retell the chapel’s painstaking respect for the original’s conception, and their desire to present the frescoes again in their former grandeur. Devotion is nearly thrust upon the visitor. The ingenious vault presents an experience that is intended to be religious, artistic, and historical. Dominique was direct about her philosophy: “Through art, God constantly clears the path to our hearts.” Such private votive chapels of the 13th century present one version of a chapel, with their dark interior adorned with colorful frescoes. Where their walls are covered with pigment, Paris’s contemporary Sainte-Chapelle glows with the dazzling colors that stream through walls of stained glass, and mere tendrils of stone support the roof. Later, Corregio’s illusionistic ceilings gave worshippers a view to Heaven itself, while Le Corbusier and Matisse fashioned dramatic chapel projects in the mid twentieth century. Their buildings are conceived as transportive and transformational, inspiring veneration and reflection in its visitors. The Rothko Chapel, across Branard Street, was dedicated in 1971 as a non-denominational space for reverence, and it became first structure in the Montrose-district Menil Collection. Housed in a squat brick building, its façade is tame, with plain right angles and a simple door. Like the gallery, there is no intention to mediate with a grand entrance. Nevertheless, the contrast at the door, between the burning sun and an airconditioned shade, is dramatic in its own right;

eyes take several moments to adjust. Rothko’s octagonal room sweeps around the viewer and 14 giant, dark canvasses hang on the walls. The chapel’s plums, maroons, and browns resonate with one another in somber tones. The space is powerful and baffling even to the wellprepared. The very lack of color and imagery seems to create the force that binds the room together. Its shape and triptychs propose allusions, but the walls are clear with their iconoclasm. Even the dark pigments are set into a slow motion that resists a focused stare. The interior of his chapel is a not-space; it is the color of closed-eyes. But the intensity and authority is generated by that very contradiction; some of the works have a soft border of lighter purple, but the nuance has no meaning to it. The canvases are too large to have come through the door, as their huge paintings present more of the shadow than any thing itself. The sensation is that of a self-generating presence without form, a void that takes up space. A young woman looked closely at one canvas, observing its texture and sheen. An old man, legs-crossed on a bench along the wall, read from a book. He glanced out at the canvases around him, to tie together the text and the environment whenever he turned the page. A young man whispered to his puzzled companion, as they stood near the center with their gaze bouncing from one surface to the next, “ I heard if you stare at it long enough, you can see really different colors in each.” Every viewer is stripped of interpretative tools without symbols or guideposts from which to de-code and receive a meaning. The ideas one conjures, of peace or anger, distance or sympathy, flit across the imagination without any causal sight, sound, or taste; they are frightening as possible reflections of some more inner-self. The work culminates in the sensation it evokes—the hints of something else, something divine, something unspeakable, in the room, in the viewer, in the world—these were the moments to which Dominique dedicated her public life. She seemed quite willing to allow her own words to frustrate and contradict themselves of any direct meaning, as she articulated them at its unveiling, “It was a vision of simplicity, a message of silence.

Fall 2008

An inviting silence, a regenerating silence. There is a warmth in these paintings. They embrace us without enclosing us. The eye and the mind go through into the infinite. There is a faint glow in the central panel of the central triptych and this faint glow is like a whispering voice.” It has been called “preternaturally quiet;” it has a “deafening calm.” When it was finally completed and installed, Rothko had committed suicide, and the de Ménils were still seeking $600,000 in donations to cover unpaid expenses. In 1987, Shell Oil Company financed a painstaking restoration, because egg proteins had crystallized on the surface of Rothko’s experimental paints. In 1989, partly as a consequence of a lingering economic slump in Houston, the Dominique asked for $35 million to keep the exhibits open. Apparently the de Ménils had always been on the extreme edge of finances in their philanthropy. They contributed as much as they possibly could. “Houston’s adopted daughter” died on the last day of 1997. Their legacies are extensive: their foundation and other initiatives still recognize and support work in human rights, art, music, culture, spirituality, and the environment, sponsoring speakers and performances at the Chapel in Houston. In the fall of 2008 Iraq War correspondent Robert Fisk spoke there, along with Texas environmentalists and Native American dancers from San Juan Pueblo who performed a traditional dance. “When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave. A voice said to him, Elijah, why are you here?” Quoted by Dominique de Ménil at the opening of the Rothko Chapel, Houston, 1971.

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ENVOY Five Mirages

Folded and wrapped around the transparent orange bottle, the information sheet of my antimalarial pill—one innocuous white tablet of mefloquine once a week to provide temporary inoculation, taken with food and a full glass of water (but lacking the degenerate sophistication of the British Empire’s malarial prophylactic, that bitter quinine tonic made palatable with aromatic chilled gin and drunk punctually before dinner)—this information sheet warns that reported side effects of the medication include hallucinations and vivid dreams. My dreams certainly were vivid afterwards— faces and limbs trapped inside a block of granite, bending the surface like rubber; a tumbling erector-set tower of Babel—but those dreams and the subject of this story were neither feverish malarial hallucinations nor the radiant antimalarial side effects. Parts felt dreamlike, and in recollection seem to have accumulated an artificial vividness, but perhaps objectivity is the crutch of those lacking sufficient imagination. And please remember, too, that I was vaguely disappointed when my weekly medication failed to trigger phantasmal visions. I must begin in the middle: in the middle of a long bus ride from the desert fort of Jaisalmer in the far western spur of the Indian state of Rajasthan—a city carved in honey-hued sandstone and buffeted by near-constant gusts of hot desert wind (one morning this zephyr lifted my honeyed toast clear off my plate at a rooftop café); a city perched near the boarder of Pakistan, with a beautifully impenetrable stone fort perched on the city; a castle of sand—I begin in the middle

by Alexander Fabry

of a journey to Udaipur in the southernmost quadrant of the state. The bus has stopped among a dingy strip of open-fronted shops, somewhere in the middle of the Thar Desert. Here, surrounded by scrub, dust, and sand, is a little outpost of mechanics (they sprawl next to cracking tyres— Buy Atlas Tyres!—and large greased gears), with the occasional white-blue lighting strike of the welder’s torch. I get off the bus and stand around with the other passengers under the corrugated roof of a make-shift dirt-floored bus stand. I get a cup of hot, spiced masala chai, and another traveler asks in a nearly accusatory manner if that’s all I’m going to have. He is filling a newspaper parcel with dripping sugary confections; he is decorated with a saffron turban and a billowing gray mustache. His lined face is framed by two bright gold earrings (each an aureate asterisk), and on his feet are a pair of leather slippers— sturdy yet whimsical, embellished with pointed embroidered toes. In concession, I buy one of the sugary logs stacked behind a dingy glass display case. “It is a specialty,” he offers. Changes often begin with a single morsel: a cake labeled “eat me;” a sanctified wafer; a medicinal tablet. For hours after, I could not rid myself of the aftertaste of this gigantic sugar-pill, this single massive placebo. A heavy metallic film cloyed my tongue. It was not until we were leaving that I realized where we were: a painted sign proclaimed the area “Pokhran” as a gaudilydressed wild peacock strutted beneath, its Arguseyed fan-tail folded away. This town, Pokhran, a remote outpost in the Thar Desert, has been the Fall 2008

site of India’s nuclear weapons testing, first in 1974 and then dramatically in 1998. Its name means “the place of five mirages,” but isn’t every place experienced only in passing a bit of a mirage? The bus’s two tiers of tinted windows—this was a double-decker bus, with rotting seats below and aluminum sleeping compartments crammed above (both crammed with people)—were opened as much as possible, and the constant jet of dry dusty desert air through the periodic gaps had blown my hair into a fierce and wiry halo. The sun was low in an ashy sky, becoming a visible disc dimmed by the dust and haze; you could look it in the eye, a fat nuclear sphere falling towards the desert as evening approached. The constant wall of air had also desiccated my sinuses, and with a huff and exnasalatory puff I dislodged a hard obstructing pebble into a pad of ever-ready traveler’s toilet tissue. Following close behind—I must tell things as they were, since mirages should be in the seeing and not in the telling—was a single ruby drop that stained the white two-ply wad. Forgive me if I let you know that this gem was mirrored by a garnet gouge on my tailbone. I had spent two days on the back

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of a camel and the rolling and jolting waddle of my runty Cuckoo had rubbed raw my backside, which now boasted a dull ruby scab. Slowly we get to the heart of things—that trembling spot midway between nose and bottom. The rusty red hemoglobin which stained me tip and tail owes its color to the same iron which had rusted the desert sandstone’s hematite into a dingy red—though this red soon revealed itself as another one of Pokhran’s mirages. Looking out the windows, by some curious alignment of perspective it so happened that my left eye and my right eye each had a line of sight through a different window, each view hidden from the other eye. And it so happened that while the desert my right eye saw was a full redstained umber, my left eye saw a dusty mustard. Perhaps it was my sunglasses, I thought; perhaps there was a mistake, and the two lenses had different tints. But no: even without sunglasses, my right eye continued to see rich reds where my left eye saw dull yellow-browns. With an oddly dissociated and resigned recognition of the way things are after all, I decided I was colorblind. But what sort of phantom was this,

what hallucination or reaction? If my own two eyes disputed the color of reality, there really didn’t seem any hope for objectivity, or science; the personal equation becomes everything. And so, faced with contradictions between experience and expectation, I turned to the blue peacockpaisley tatters of the fabric on the seat in front of me, worn nearly to invisibility, and played games with my colors by winking each eye in turn: I see you, too, said each peacock-eye. Every traveler both lives and dreams their journey at the same time, and my dreamy mind was crowded with fully formed and overwritten sentences. Vision gives way to visions. Coleridge claimed that his “Kubla Khan” came to him in an opium-dream (dulling the senses and expanding the mind). As he strove to solidify in words the crystal pleasure-dome of his gleaming poetic vision, the dream faded. (Another aside: I had re-read Coleridge’s lovely lines on Xanadu when visiting the Moghul palaces and mausoleums of Delhi and Agra, the courts of Akbar and Shah Jahan, the hollow lotus-domes of Humayun and Taj Begum, whose ancestor Timur the Lame, Tamurlane, was a descendent of the house of Coleridge’s Kublai Khan.) I believe Coleridge:

the ornate sentences of that bus ride come back to me now just as they appeared in my mind then. But like Coleridge, I then slept—fitfully bouncing through the long night—arriving at dawn in Udaipur, a city of lakes and sharp hills and floating palaces, a city of artists who paint miniatures, grinding their pigment and boasting of brushes with a single hair. One artist showed me a tiny traditional triptych, painted on silk: a honey-colored camel, a peacock-blue elephant, a hematite-red horse. When he goes home, he paints large abstract oil canvases. It wasn’t for a few days that I realized what had happened—it wasn’t for a few days that I could explain that, burning its evening goodbye, the low north-westerly summer sun had shone in only my left eye, striking my retina, catalyzing temporary color-blindness from an asymmetrical glare. By that time, of course, I could see things—how do we say it?—as they were. But then again, perhaps it was the disconcerting feeling of the disagreement of my own two eyes that is the trembling heart of this trip through the bomb- and sand-blasted desert. But also, perhaps it really was the artificial quinine or even the sugary lump I ate in Pokhran that triggered this internal mirage.

Fall 2008

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Vernon R. Proctor Family Ross Gregory Scruggs Donald Silberger Richard Simonian Richard M. Smoley Daniel A. Stolz Peter A. Tcherepnine Alexander Traverso Nancy Treuhold

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES Alamo can’t live without hot dog. Anna Barnet is washing her hands. Brittany Benjamin has cinnamon on her nose. Alex Berman: A film about the Even reindeer herders of Far Eastern Siberia. My friends, who is Enzo Camacho? Eyal Dechter spelled backwards is rethced laye. Construct a line, Alexander Fabry. Lillian Fang’s art aims to overwhelm in an underwhelming way. Kathleen Hale has the rage. Greg Halpern graduated from Harvard in 1999 and is currently back as a visiting Assistant Professor of Photography. He was shocked to get the job. And he secretly thinks Art can’t be taught... but he really wants you to take his course (Intro to Photo, VES 42a)! His work can be seen at www.gregoryhalpern.com. Justin Keenan went over everyone, & nobody’s missing. Jack McGrath and Jane Van Cleef are founding members of the Shuttle Design Group. Patrick McKiernan is from Worcester, MA. Celeste Monke is the best monke. David Molander is the creator of “Dissected Street” that can be viewed at www.davidmolander.com and reached at: david@davidmolander. com. A Freshman student-artist-nordic skier of Harvard College, Shannon Mulshine, is an insatiable being for existence, art, dark chocolate, learning, laughing, dancing and getting lost in the woods. Tim Reckart (‘09) knows the professions, hobbies, and facial hair patterns of the men who founded the Society of American Magicians in 1902, but he can’t remember the name of the girl he worked with this summer. David Rice is following the river, down the highway, through the cradle of the Civil War. Kevin Seitz isn’t convinced the future exists. Jessica Sequeira is loving, living, party going. Michael Stynes, Poe’s mechanical chessplayer was not the less a miracle for having a man inside it, Poe predicted the whole Civil War. David Wallace: anger is his song. Image ©John Ashbery

Andrew Wesman denies watching “Grizzly Man” for research.