Fall 2009

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ART Dan Ashwood Dana Kase Rebecca Lieberman Rebecca Lieberman

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Fever Dreams Pyramidal Evolution 1 PATTY Untitled

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14 29 46

FEATURES NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH ST: Madeleine Schwartz Art in Hand: A Conversation with Lawrence Voytek and Peter Ballantine Faith Noir: On Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel Jessica Sequeira A Pound of Flesh for the Venice Bienniale Emily Chertoff ENVOY: Down by the Piraeus Mark Chiusano

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No Refunds Fireworks Return

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[These days are blurred] [In my dream the old lady had a ribbon for the boy] Bivalence The Concert

FICTION Ryan Meehan Justin Keenan Megha Majumdar POETRY Olga Moskvina Abram Kaplan Adam Palay Matt Aucoin

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ISIDORE BETHEL

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Art

Emma Banay, Ruben Davis, Molly Dektar*, Elyssa Jakim, Dana Kase, Rebecca Levitan*, Rebecca Lieberman, Anna Murphy, Julene Paul, Thalassa Raasch, Anna Raginskaya, Madeleine Schwartz.

business

The Harvard Advocate www.theharvardadvocate.com

Editorial Board President SANDERS BERNSTEIN Publisher MILLICENT YOUNGER Art Editor THALASSA RAASCH Business Manager Natalie Wong Design Editors AnnA Murphy

Lauren Packard Features Editor Anna Barnet Fiction Editor LINDA LIU Poetry Editor DAVID WALLACE Online Editor BEN BERMAN Art Pegasi Abram Kaplan

jessica sequeira Literary Pegasi ryan meehan

Adam palay Dionysi MARK CHIUSANO charleton lamb Circulation Manager DAVID TAO Publicity Manager jeffrey lee Librarian KEVIN SEITZ Alumni Relations Manager lillian yu

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

Peter Brooks John DeStefano

LESLIE DUNTON-DOWNER

A. Whitney Ellsworth

jonathan Galassi

Lev Grossman

Angela Mariani

Daniel Max

CELIA MCGEE

Thomas A. Stewart

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Ankur Agrawal, Ben Berman, Sanders Bernstein, Ruben Davis, Catherine Humphreville, Andrew Izaguirre, Iya Megre, Jaron Mercer*, Arielle Pensler, Anna Raginskaya, David Tao, Natalie Wong, Emily Xie*, Millicent Younger, Lillian Yu.

design

Charlotte Alter*, Isidore Bethel*, Wendy Chang*, Dana Kase, Charleton Lamb, Rebecca Lieberman, Joseph Morcos, Anna Murphy, Lauren Packard, Aimee Wang*.

features

Anna Barnet, Brittany Benjamin, Sanders Bernstein, Emily Chertoff, Mark Chiusano, Rebecca Cooper, Ben Cosgrove, Sophie Duvernoy*, Anna Polonyi, Madeleine Schwartz, Kevin Seitz, Jessica Sequeira.

fiction

Katie Banks, Sanders Bernstein, Emily Chertoff, Eva Delappe*, William Eck, Erik Fredericksen*, Sofia Groopman*, Justin Keenan, Seph Kramer, Michal Labik, Charleton Lamb, Max Larkin, Henry Lichtblau, Linda Liu, Teddy Martin, Ryan Meehan, Alex Ratner, David Wallace, Scott Zuccarino.

poetry

Matthew Aucoin, Courtney Bowman, William Eck, Erik Fredericksen*, Ted Gioia, Rachael Goldberg*, Chris JohnsonRoberson, Abram Kaplan, Andrew Klein*, Jennifer Nicole Kurdyla, James Leaf, Adam Palay, David Wallace.

TECHNOLOGY

Ben Berman, Jeff Feldman, Jeremy Feng*, Mark VanMiddlesworth, Scott Zuccarino*.

*The Harvard Advocate congratulates its newest members.

The Harvard Advocate will anonymously consider all submissions of art, features, fiction, and poetry. Submissions may be emailed to art@theharvardadvocate.com, features@ theharvardadvocate.com, fiction@theharvardadvocate.com, or poetry@theharvardadvocate. com. Submissions may also be mailed to 21 South St., Cambridge MA 02138. All submissions should be original work that has not been previously published. If you wish to have your submission returned to you, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Questions about submissions can be directed to the individual emails above or to contact@theharvardadvocate.com.

Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nation’s oldest continually published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from the Advocate house at 21 South St, Cambridge MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not The Harvard Advocate. Domestic subscription rates are $35 for one year (4 issues), $60 for two years (8 issues), $90 for three years (12 issues). For institutions and foreign addresses, the rates are $45 for one year (4 issues), $75 for two years (8 issues), $110 for three years (12 issues). Payable by cash or check made out to The Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase, but price and availability depends upon the issue. Please inquire by writing to contact@theharvardadvocate. com. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of The Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2009 by the Editors and Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.

NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH STREET: Art in Hand: A Conversation with Lawrence Voytek and Peter Ballantine Madeleine Schwartz

Artists have always had assistants—Greek sculpture was carved in workshops, and Rembrandt painted with aides whose anonymity continues to cause curatorial headaches. But the figure of the “fabricator” is a relative newcomer in the history of art production. The fabricator was born only a half a century ago, when a push toward the use of modern materials and bigger, more complex projects meant that the art waiting to be created was unrealizable without a trained hand.

Fabricators cut, solder and engineer ideas into formation; they build and construct technologically complex visions on behalf of their author. Fabricators are not just helpers. While they follow orders, fabricators know something that their bosses don’t: how to make the art work.

Beginning in the 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg synthesized found object and painting, technology and sculpture to generate art that whose form no longer offered easy understanding. Donald Judd stripped his creations to their most substantive essence so that his compositions equaled their content. In doing so, each obscured the lines between art and material, object and creation.

Artistic innovation required a technical equivalent.

For Lawrence Voytek1 and Peter Ballantine2, fabricators for Rauschenberg and Judd respectively, each day meant finding practical and mechanical solutions to ideas in gestation.

Voytek mastered material so that Rauschenberg didn’t have to. Welding, bending or just experimenting with anything industrial—from aluminum (he used over two tons in his 27 years working for Rauschenberg) to Renobond, 3 mm thick skin coating for skyscrapers—Voytek shaped the substance of Rauschenberg’s hybrid inventions. Ballantine, a carpenter, cut and glued Judd’s freestanding, discrete, plywood structures

into their Minimalist simplicity. Unsupervised in his workshop, he built Judd objects as he might have built a table, so that the art would echo the kind of well-made appropriateness suitable to a finished product. He estimates that in his shop, entirely set up for Judd fabrication, he constructed 250 plywood cubes over the course of his career.

In conversations with both their fabricators, one can hear the excitement of building art “like it had never been done before” resound twenty years later.

Fabrication meant different things to Rauschenberg and Judd. For one, it was a means for increased experimentation, for the other, a way of distancing the artist’s hand from his creation. Rauschenberg’s delegation was practical—he simply could not produce the work himself—whereas for Judd, the delegating a task meant transferring control. As a result, the two artists developed distinct relationships with their colleagues. Rauschenberg kept his fabricators close by. Judd had no contact besides the initial object order and its final pick-up. But today, both Ballantine and Voytek retain a fierce trust in the artists they worked for. It is always “my artist” and always “the work.”

The Harvard Advocate: How did you get started as a fabricator?

Lawrence Voytek: In college at RISD, I worked a lot in the industrial design department. When I graduated, my wife-to-be and I moved to Florida, where I took classes at Edison Community College. [Robert Rauschenberg’s] fabricator before me had recently left, so I sent my portfolio to him [Rauschenberg]. Bob had me come out to interview. It was pretty intense. Bob was always a hero of mine. I had seen a lot of films on him.

When I was going to school, some were into Jasper

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[Johns], some into Roy [Lichtenstein], but I was always into Bob. I went and I knocked. He said, “I’m Bob Rauschenberg.” I said, “I’m Lawrence Voytek.”

That day, [other assistants] showed me where the welder work and they asked me if I could weld an aluminum frame. No one ever told me that I had the job but they told to come back tomorrow cause they had more frames for me to work on.

Peter Ballantine: I came to New York in 1968 to be in the Whitney Independent Studies Program, which was just starting. Judd was one of the teachers there. I ran out of the money I brought with me and in those days, the fashion was for artists who needed to make money was to be a carpenter or a plumber or an electrician.

I started working for Judd on his building on Spring Street as a carpenter. I learned carpentry on the job—out of books. I always said yes whenever he asked me to do something. In 1971, he brought me a paper with a sketch and asked me if I could make it.

HA: Can you describe the studio? What kind of work did you do?

PB: There was no typical day at the studio— there was no one studio. There was Judd’s building over at Spring Street. That was a studio and the idea-making happened there. But that studio was not a place where art got made; the Judd studio was not where things got cut and glued. The art was made in shops. There was my shop, one in Switzerland, one in Long Island City and others.

The shops were small, with only 1 or 2 people.

Or in case of Bernstein Brothers—an industrial metal shop in Queens where fabrication started, there were 5,6,7,8 people working but only one guy doing the Judd.

My shop was in my house. There was a lot of work to do. Judd was prolific and sometimes before a show there would be a big rush of things to finish. It was basically a small factory. When you are an artist fabricator, you sometimes end up pulling a lot of all-nighters. It’s not a 9-to-5 job. If you had a shop in your house, you could glue up at 10 and do another one at midnight. Weekdays, weekends, evenings and all that stuff—I didn’t make distinctions among those.

Sweating about the materials was a big part 4

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of the job. It’s a special problem in Judd’s case because you’ve got angles that have to come together with other angles. If you introduce curves into that, you’re in trouble. I was always looking for really good material.

LV: Captiva [an island off the coast of Florida where Rauschenberg held his studio] was very magical back in the early 80s. Bob’s studio was a simple piling building that faced the Gulf of Mexico. You could probably throw a stone from the studio it into the water. Bob would be working upstairs, in a 35x45 ft studio with glass doors that facing the Gulf. It was painted white and he worked on a large table in the center of the room.

The welder worked below the studio and there were a lot of mosquitoes and it was hot and balmy.

The bugs and the wildlife—it was like being in a tropical jungle.

Bob was a collaborative artist and there were always a group of people working with him. I did all the welding and putting the pieces and the parts together. In the early years, we lived a very gregarious sort of party lifestyle, but it always focused around what Bob was doing. We would get everything ready for him during the day. He would wake up and go to the beach and hang out.

Since he was part Cherokee, he would get a dark tan. Then he would have a nice lunch. We would get to the studio before the sun went down and everything would be prepared and then he would work.

My working hours were really crazy. Sometimes we would work through the night. At one point I worked 73 days in a row without taking a day off, just because we had so much to do.

HA: How would you start working on a piece?

PB: Sometimes I got a phone call. Sometimes it would just be a discussion in person with me taking notes. Sometimes he gave me a drawing.

But those were not engineering drawings. In fact, you would be surprised how un-drawing-like they were. They were sometimes just ideograms—tools to get the work made. But I didn’t always need drawings because I knew his work pretty well.

Judd never stopped by. It wasn’t because the shop wasn’t close. My shop was a block and a half away from his studio. It was so close that you could walk over and discuss the new pieces that you were

thinking about in the rain without an umbrella.

But you weren’t running to ask, “Should I use a darker grain of plywood?” That kind of stuff— the type of plywood, where to cut the sheet, to a large extent the details of the joints—those were fabricator decisions. They were not Judd decisions.

You just had to make those decisions. There’s a lot of amount of unspoken trust in fabrication.

When we had discussions, they were practical, not aesthetic. I knew what he wanted and he knew that I knew what he wanted. He didn’t have to overexplain it. Though in pure theoretical fabrication, we wouldn’t be discussing that at all.

LV: Bob always had a lot of vivid dreams. I would come to work and he would tell me what he had dreamt. He would dream of a glass car tire and he wanted to make a glass car tire. That started a long journey of getting in touch with glass blowers and mold maker and finding the perfect tire that he wanted to mold.

I was also in charge of development and research, so I would read samples of what industry was playing around. Bob would see something and would say, “I want to play with this” and we would order it and he would start playing with it.

Bob was a real hand-on person. He was also like a little child—he wanted to see everything.

He would come up with ideas and he wanted to see different materials and different ways he could do them. So I would make samples. He would say, “I want this” and I would show him this, this, this and this and he would say, “I like this one the best.”

It was like getting a show-and-tell together. It was pretty wild—like bringing a child a new toy to play with. And we would buy these expensive exotic materials and he would just play with them.

PB: Judd made a point of not playing around in his studio.

The studios were removed from him and he from them. That was essential to do what he was trying to do. Judd was looking to work within other traditions and he was looking for well-made pieces.

He got control in his work by ceding control and putting the work into these old traditions of good workmanship, like carpentry and sheet-metal work.

This was fabrication in a straight, classic factory kind of way, like the Ford plant in Michigan, in which you don’t know who is fabricating and there’s no fabricator’s hand. This way of working that Judd did, the idea of fabrication is now pretty well accepted. You could name 100 people who do it today, but in 1964, it was pretty unusual.

The other day I was watching a Sol Lewitt wall drawing project going on nearby. Lewitt is famous for delegating the work to others. But while everyone was working, there were instructions taped on the wall. Those guys were working on a real set of instructions! And in “The Factory,” Andy Warhol might not be there for three weeks but then he was there. If you are going to delegate and supervise at the same time, that’s not delegation.

With Judd, it was real delegation.

HA: What do you feel when you see something you built in a museum? Would the work look different if it had been made by a different fabricator?

PB: I have a shop where I am the only person, alone with these pieces for their whole gestation and birth, so I have quite an intense relationship with them. Once they are gone, they were never my pieces, but when I am constructing, they are my something, “pieces” is not right word. I come back into a relationship like that when there’s damage and I have to restore the piece. I can almost always tell my own work. Even though I

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strived to do top quality anonymous work, I can tell the way I did glue blocks.

I have a feeling toward the pieces I made that I would see in a show in Zurich almost equivalent to driving by an apartment in Chelsea that I used to live in when I first came to New York. It’s not, “That’s my piece.” I don’t have a proprietary interest and even, when I am looking at a show, I don’t go rushing across the room to tell someone not to touch a piece. They become as if I hadn’t made them.

LV: When I look through the Bob’s work, I can tell you this is an Eric Holt, this is a Brice Marden.

When I started working for Bob, I changed the shop and I brought in everything. Anybody else would have done something different. Even [art historian] Calvin Tomkins said in a review that he preferred Bob’s work before that high-tech fabricator, me.

But if you look through Bob’s work, I hope you feel it’s all Bob and not the apprentice helping.

In some ways having the non-ego when you fabricate for somebody else and trying to make

what somebody else wants while your attitude was invisible—that was always important in working with Bob. Sometimes people want their mark to be known. But I think that the vision of the artist should be valued. And that’s a strange thing. You don’t want to say “Look at me” you want to say, “Look at him.”

This interview was conducted in three parts— one-on-one phone calls with Mr. Voytek and Mr. Ballantine respectively, as well as a phone conversation with both at once. The text was then condensed and edited.

Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Lawrence Voytek realized that he wanted to be an artist from an early age. He graduated Rhode Island School of Design in 1982 with a degree in sculpture and started working for Rauschenberg that same year. Since Rauschenberg’s death in 2008, Voytek has been completing approved works, including some for the Obama sculpture garden. When he is done, he plans on returning to his own art, both painting and sculpture.

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Peter Ballantine grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. He went to college in Colorado, where he was an art major. He fabricated for Judd from 1971 to February 1994, Judd’s death. He then spent ten years as an art supervisor for the Judd Foundation. Since 2004, he has worked as a freelance restorer and curator. Ballantine is currently organizing a symposium on Judd and fabrication to occur this April.

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[There are days blurred] Olga Moskvina

There are days blurred like the skin of fruit rotting, when we look into the water and cannot tell if the dark stripes shuddering over the surface are the reflections of street lamps or just our shadows. Such days do not have matching nights, unless they are white nights, but then each night is crossed out by the black stroke of a morning where a dead man lies on a table, already a stranger, like a simple object at which a child peers through a rolled up notebook page, willing it further and further away.

You wake and press your face to the plaster, folding your hands on your lap, your starched sheet, a prayer passing from your cheek to the wallpaper. No, you are not God’s favorite doll. We open and close our eyes for Him dutifully, but He only uses us for our ability to forget.

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No Refunds

Ryan Meehan

The yellow light in the lobby moves through the door’s framed glass and out into the street at midnight. It understands my shape on the asphalt out front, with my outline propped delicately over the sidewalk, whose burnished edge looks weirdly razor-like in the glow. My hand is on the glass behind me, and the heat from my fingertips gets pulled off in moist prints on its surface. The door closes with a hard sound, and I take the three steps down slowly. The night is brisk and dry. All along the Seventh Avenue sidewalks, lampposts form a colonnade that guides the eye toward Flatbush Avenue on the right and the Prospect Expressway overpass on the left. Overhead, stars defy the bright communion of the metropolitan night, shining.

I’m already walking toward Flatbush Ave. when I realize that there won’t be any cabs tonight. I’ve stayed later than I should have, I know: longer than I usually do on nights like these. The walk uptown is long and strange, and there is something about the particular air that settles in the streets at night that fills men with a sense of death or cosmic loneliness. Maybe I should’ve stayed, tried to patch things up. Maybe that’s what she was hoping for, keeping me there so long. I can still go back.

It’s been this way for three months, but it only feels like a couple of weeks, and it could have actually lasted for a half-century the way it all cycles back on itself. We won’t speak to one another for days, a couple weeks at most, and then she’ll call. Sometimes I call too, but I’ve tried not to these days. She’s sensed it. She doesn’t even pretend to have reasons anymore. And then I’m there, and a cigarette is lit and a cockroach is smashed and a star collapses and we’re screaming at one another as if nothing had changed, as if we were still together. Or we’re so quiet we could both be underwater. The period that Ellie and I 8

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were together is most easily remembered as the period where we were breaking up.

And tonight is the same, but maybe she really does want me to hit the buzzer, to apologize and we’ll go to bed and wake up in the morning baffled and miserable and smiling like machines. On either side of me, the night renders the dignified and crumbling facades of the old brownstones completely obscure. I can still go back. The light inside the slouching afterthought of the Seventh Ave. subway stop is bright and depressive; a light that strikes out against secrets. Inside the turnstile, there is a sort of abbreviated antechamber tiled from ceiling to floor in off-white ceramic with hints of flower-vine patterning at the eye level.

An almost life-and-a-half sized wooden bench, wrought with illegible carvings and magic marker scrawl, sits on the landing between two staircases.

The left, a sign indicates, takes you to the platform for the Q and B trains running uptown, toward Manhattan, toward home. The right, says another, leads to the same trains running downtown, through Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach, past the Aquarium, all the way to Coney Island.

I’m not going back. In this truthful light, I study the blue blood beneath my skin, and I’m filled with the giddy and melodramatic impulse of all true children: to become lost beyond all responsibility. I am certain I will board the next train that arrives, and I’m certain that it will take me downtown, towards disaster and Coney Island.

I imagine Ellie waiting up countless hours until she decides that I really have gone home. It’s satisfying enough to know that she’ll be wrong.

I erase any thought of rest or reconciliation from my mind. Already it feels as if I’m about to board a spaceship, momentous and apocryphal.

I can hear the nondescript rumbling of the Q

moving into the station, and I take the stairs to the downtown platform, where a boy with green slacks, white t-shirt and an olive complexion is standing beneath one of the only working bulbs on the platform. The youth’s hands are in his pockets. He could be about 15, but tall for his age, and he stares past me as if I were invisible. His eyes are black, or appear to be, and his mouth is shut tight. There’s something about his posture that makes him look either highly dangerous or chronically ill. When the train finally pulls in, he never moves. I walk past in silence, watching him.

Maybe he has some other agenda. There’s no one in my car when the automated bell sounds and the doors of the train slide shut. Maybe he’ll get the next one. It doesn’t matter. The trains run all night.

We move. The night is indifferent to elaborately vandalized concrete walls of the trench that accommodates the BMT Brighton Line, and the only thing I can see in the window is the reflection of the car’s interior; empty plastic bucket-seats, vertical handrails, rows of leather hoops along the aisle, and my own face. Above the windows, advertisements prod those passengers absent of mind or without any other recourse, “Earn Your GED,” “Give Blood,” and “Ask For Help.”

On another, a cheerful blond child is running through the spray on a beach somewhere warm with the caption, “Jimmy Doesn’t Know He Has Lymphosarcoma.”

The last time Ellie and I went out together, when she was still living with me, we rode the train after midnight back from a late movie at a revamped peep-show theater in midtown. She insisted that we take a cab, and I can remember using a sort of dismissive, parental tone I knew would irritate her.

She wouldn’t talk to me then, not even about the movie, which I knew she had loved, and which I knew I had ruined for her. It was a surf-flick from the 1950’s called “Hang Ten For Two” starring a bronzed half-Latin heartthrob named Johnny Lamar. The main character was a shy surfer-girl who tries to impress the beach crowd by surfing on her hands during high tide at the infamous Big Lip Cliff. But she doesn’t realize that there’s a shark in the water, and in the nick of time Johnny Lamar paddles in to the rescue, cruising back

to shore with a foot on the nose of each of their boards, performing the title’s trick—the ‘hang-tenfor-two.’ Afterwards, there’s a luau and a barbeque, and the film’s final shot is the silhouette of Johnny and the heroine in an intimate embrace as the sun goes down. Ellie always had a way of getting embarrassed at how much she enjoyed things; I could see tears in her eyes as Johnny played guitar around the campfire. She looked beautiful then.

I had regretted it, felt sick to my stomach about it even as I belittled her, but that never changed anything. She had put her things in boxes a week later. After a few stops, I remember a place my grandfather used to talk about from when he lived around this neighborhood, and I get off at Ocean Parkway to see if it’s still around.

It’s a short walk down a few blocks of single-story cafes and all-night Chinese groceries where men of indeterminate age sit behind counters, utterly motionless. The bar occupies a small section of an otherwise-vacant complex whose tenant could have been a YMCA or an insane asylum. The edifice is plaster matted in concrete for three stories up, and above the sign that says “Odd Hour Tavern & Grille,” I can see the bottom half of an enormous mural of a black and gold mermaid that covers the whole side of the building. She has long blue hair replete with starfish and wistful gray eyes. A man in a heavy flannel shirt leaning against the wall outside the door is smoking a cigarette and seems to be laughing at me but he doesn’t make a sound.

I ignore him and go inside.

The Odd Hour is clearly a locals-only dive, evident from the huddled conversations that collect at its corners. Its back wall is taken up by a bar whose arms reach outward at either end across half the width of the room, leaving a serviceable space in the center with tables and stools. The bar is at capacity, so I order a drink and sit at a table where two people are talking; a man in a black turtleneck and a blazer, and a woman in a blue dress who only seems to nod.

“I spent most of last year in Buenos Aires, working for a friend who owns a hotel there.

Beautiful country, really lovely people.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Of course, I couldn’t speak a word of Spanish.

It wasn’t too difficult getting around though,

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especially in the city, where most of them speak English anyway.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve always meant to go.”

“The city was beautiful, but only parts of it really, you know? Parts of the region are still undeveloped, so the outskirts tend to be pretty seedy. Filthy, even. I’d say that for the most part, Buenos Aires is a filthy city, with some beautiful parts.”

“Filthy, yeah.”

“And you get that way too. It’s not just the place.

It gets on you, you know? On your clothes. It’s in your food. I was taking showers twice a day, on average. I couldn’t stand the way I smelled and I didn’t want to get used to it. When it got hot enough, which it did plenty of the season, even though its supposed to be winter there when it’s summer here, I would have to stand on the roof of the hotel just to get above the smell of the garbage.”

“I’ll bet you couldn’t stand it.”

“I couldn’t fucking stand it sometimes. Disease too. Something like 60% of the people between 18 and 35 have a venereal disease of some kind.

And none of them get treated. One of the clerks had to take off work because of an untreated case of syphilis. This is supposed to be a democratized nation—the Americas are supposed to be developed. It’s worse in the mountains too. And don’t get me started on the rats.”

“No, I don’t think I want to go there.”

“It’s the same everywhere, really.”

“Anywhere.”

It’s enough to convince me that these people are either schizophrenics or some sort of malfunctioning animatronic puppets, and I take my drink to the stool at an end of the bar that’s opened up. I sit elbow to elbow with a woman who, unless I’m deceived, is strikingly beautiful.

She wears a long gray dress that barely reveals the tips of a pair of black flats, and short brown hair in bangs over a sharply featured face. Her eyes are green. She seems to be staring at me—back at me.

“Never seen you around here,” I say automatically.

“Nice try,” she smiles.

“How about a drink then?”

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“I already have a drink.”

“Right, well. It’s a standing offer. It’s extended, like, temporally, you know?”

“You’re funny,” she rolls her eyes.

“That’s not the way the metal men here talk.”

“The lushes around here have their own language. I don’t pretend to understand it, but how they unwind is their business. I saw that Oskar over there was entertaining you.”

“They shouldn’t let a guy like that on the airlines. He’s a paranoid for sure.”

“They don’t. Oskar lives with his mother.

He’s never left the city. The threads are his deceased father’s. He watches the Travel Channel obsessively.”

“You his nurse or something?”

“He’s got a new story every week. I can do math.

We get the Travel Channel in my building too.”

“And where is your building?” I say, with a smile. Risks are the type of thing that one takes in a new environment.

“My building is in Shangri-La, pal. Why don’t we start with names? And where’s that drink?”

Lily laughs at my dumb lines, one after the other.

I haven’t used some of them in years—haven’t had to. Even when we were barely speaking to one another, I found the idea of infidelity with Ellie repulsive—beyond forgiveness—mostly because I knew how it would crush me if I ever heard something on the other end. But tonight I’m free, and I’m as lost as I can be, and the faces down the bar are like masks of solemnity and confusion, as if a funeral procession had forgotten the name of the departed, and all stood still for a moment longer than they could to ever escape. And the two of us are alive and real. I can feel in her mocking laughter the grain of softness that could be affection or love or nothing. Before the end, Ellie accused me of being an essentially methodical person; “You’ve always already made up your mind about someone, and that’s why you’ll never reach out to anyone. I feel sorry for you.” If I had wanted to say something back, it would’ve been, ‘It’s extraordinary that you know how to break what’s already broken.’

The drinking has come to the point where physical pain is no longer an issue. Lily keeps ordering a drink called a ‘Cyclone’ and I keep

paying for them. I’ve let my advances fall by the wayside—I’m forgetful, if nothing else—and I’m becoming restless. I suggest we go for a walk.

“I don’t know if I’m equipped for that,” she indicates a third empty cocktail glass. “You should probably just take me home,” she says in complete seriousness.

“Shangri-La?” I can’t help but smile.

“Charming. No, Beverly Road. You’re going uptown anyway, right? Manhattan? Mr. Heartbroken. The trip won’t take so long with some company.”

She fits herself underneath my arm and asks that we walk slowly. I forget about Coney Island and every promise I’ve made to myself. I kiss her once, gently on the lips, and she smiles. Clouds are growing paler out over the sea. Our shadows are faint and doubled by the overlapping orange light of the lampposts. We walk past the cafes and the groceries all over again, and the mermaid diminishes and finally disappears at the turn onto Ocean, its gaze barely penetrating a moment close to dawn in early autumn. I am suddenly overcome by a tension and a fatigue in the whole of my body, of waking from a dream of the world.

“I never learned to swim,” I say, and my voice cracks.

“What?” Lily leans her face into my cheek.

Our pace is slow and the walk seems interminably long. I feel as if I could cry at any second. I’m not sure if I really can’t swim. I can’t remember if I ever learned or not, but something hurts me and those are the words for it.

“I never learned to swim, its nothing. I just— let’s not stop. It’s not a big deal.”

She turns in to kiss me again, this time more forcefully. She has the lapels of my jacket in her hands and pushes her body towards mine. I can feel the hope in her eyes, which are closed. I can feel her expectations rising. She’s forgotten she has no idea who I am, and I remember. I’m certain at this that moment I’d rather be holding on to anything else. The sound of the Q pulling in to the downtown platform rips my thoughts away. I set her back on her feet and walk toward the turnstile.

“Where are you going?” Gone is the nonchalance. She’s adamant in a way I didn’t anticipate. She stumbles forward and steadies herself on the ticket-taker. Something is wrong

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with her balance, I realize, that has nothing to do with the alcohol. But it doesn’t matter.

“I’m going this way. I don’t think either of us need me to go that way. We’re both better off if I’m on this one.”

“You’re not making any sense… What’s wrong?

Tonight was so…” I can hear in her voice the sound of something slipping away, something frantic that can’t be undone. Her posture has become unhinged, and she’s listing back and forward.

Lily falls over the metal spokes of the turnstile and onto the concrete on my side. She catches herself with the heels of both hands, sparing her chin, but fails to totally conceal the obtrusion of a hard, flesh-colored plastic mass where her right leg ought to be. A sudden gust of wind carries the beginning of her sobs and blows the sound inward to reverberate off the walls like some guttural language, as I put my hands under her arms to pull her upright. Hot tears are flooding her cheeks, tears that aren’t proportional to anything that, in an instant, could be clear. I understand that her tears have always been missing. But then the truth of it falls away from me, and it’s never near enough to grasp again, as if everything were behind an asteroid belt or a great reef. I leave her standing against the turnstile and as I walk down to the awaiting train, I can hear her or someone like her repeating the word pig over and over in the stairwell that has become an echo chamber.

Between Brighton Beach and Coney Island, the line moves out of the trench and onto an elevated track that has a view of the surrounding neighborhoods, whose inhabitants, come dawn, have either returned from their sleepwalking or awakened from the hypnosis that, by night, seems to take this city by the throat. The morning is dewy and overcast, and clouds heavy with seawater fill the sky. I don’t think I will ever see Lily again in any of our lifetimes.

Maybe it’s been so difficult to put a stop to all this because I can’t remember when it started. Is that what you want me to say, that I’ve wasted a year—it may as well have been ten—searching for someone I know I’ll never find? She was always so good at hiding, Ellie was—did I tell you that? She was like a child in that regard. She always had a way of fitting herself behind a bookshelf or in the 12

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folds of our comforter in just the right way that I would never know that she was still there. And that’s what it’s like now, except that I know she’s there and she doesn’t. Or I only know one thing and she knows everything. Or I know everything, but I keep forgetting the most important parts, and she couldn’t care less. Christ, it’s enough to make a man drunk! Where to now, Ellie? Coney Island?

Is that where I lost you, where it all dissolved like a strip of film in an acid solution or a sea of ghosts?

Is it that easy for me to forget the question? Or is it some new question? But the question never changes, only the answers.

The train station at Coney Island is built like a cathedral whose narthex is a shooting gallery.

I pass down flights of green iron stairs with slats between them. I walk through a sort of cavernous passageway filled with grotesque mosaics; a minstrel clown, a thief and a dog. It’s still too early in the morning for the vendors to bring their carts around, and barely any customers move through here during the fall anyway. The mist is heavy over the beach as I move toward the boardwalk.

A small pavilion striped in purple and white has been erected in the sand about 25 yards away, and a woman in possibly her early seventies is sitting in a folding chair, with an absent but contented expression, holding a sign that says “THE CHAMBER OF THE ASTRAL MIRROR: KNOW THE FUTURE AS ITS WRITTEN IN THE STARS. $7. NO REFUNDS.” “What’s inside the tent?” I ask when I reach her.

“Oh well, what to say, it’s different for everyone I suppose!”

“But what do you see when you go inside?”

I’m almost pleading now. I notice that her face looks much older when she speaks, because her wrinkles stretch themselves tight at the strain with which she appears to constantly smile.

“Oh well, what to say, what to say? I don’t go in much anymore, not me. Not much of a future left for me, but the Mirror—now it’s perfect for a young fellow such as yourself, I think! You see, the stars sit in the sky for billions of years—believe you me, I’ve been around the block quite a few times! But for them, our lives can be understood in the blink of an eye. When the light from our planet

reaches them, they send it back in a superwave that moves so fast it catches things that we don’t know have already happened! Yessir, its no accident neither—how did you think I got the idea? I saw myself get the idea in the mirror itself! But just this mirror. It’s the one that catches the special kind of light you need. Yessir, and we take it out in the nighttime and then trap it in the chamber you see behind me. Just seven dollars! Step right in—no refunds.”

I give her three bills and I pull the flap of the tent aside. There is a fine scent of rotting seaweed inside, and propped against one of the pavilion’s poles I can see the Astral Mirror, a corroded antique looking glass with an ornate wooden frame whose white paint is chipped. Next to the mirror, four people are sitting at a picnic table in the shadows eating McDonalds hamburgers wrapped in wax paper and drinking orange juice from clear plastic cups. When they look up, I realize that the youth I saw on the platform on Seventh Ave. is among them. He’s sitting next to his younger sister, who wears her dark hair in pigtails. He doesn’t recognize me. The boy’s father, a round and balding man with a full, dark mustache, turns around and looks surprised, and then gestures to his wife, who’s similarly shaped and wears her hair in a bun. The woman looks at me.

“Did my mother let you in? She’s very old, she forgets we don’t start for another hour with this.

I’m sorry, we’re right in the middle of breakfast.”

She whispers something to the father, who takes out his wallet and offers me seven dollars.

“You’ll never get your money back from that one,” he chuckles. “She didn’t just make the policy, she is the policy.” I make a motion without words to refuse the money, and I walk back out the way I came. The old woman’s expression has changed. I can’t tell if she’s heard what her family has said, but her face is even more haggard now.

She has a look as if she’s been thinking with great difficulty, as if she had discovered that it was her life through which the course of human history must proceed before there can be any rest. She looks at me, only now realizing I’ve returned, and forms her trembling mouth to the words.

“What did you see?”

*** In the winter, the beaches and the boardwalks of Coney Island are deserted, and at dusk on this day, it would be no different except for the solitary gray form, leaning against the railing, of two people in an embrace. They stand bundled in coats and scarves, indifferent to the wind that cuts from off the surface of the water. The man and the woman never speak to one another, or if they do, their words are muffled or lost in the wind. It’s difficult to say when it begins to snow, but when the flakes fall, they collect in the man’s collar and in the long brown hair that falls from beneath the woman’s cap. The sun, almost setting, casts veins of ochre light from behind the elongated clouds. They do not turn away from one another, but in the wild of the near-night, neither man nor woman has ever seen the sky so close as it is for them at this moment on earth. A long time seems to pass, and they don’t so much as shiver, nor even seem to breathe. They remain, holding one another away, as if concealing each other from some hidden name, or a world into which they are not yet born.

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Faith Noir: On Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel Jessica Sequeira

I. OUR MAN IN NOTTINGHAM In every photograph of Graham Greene, the author seems slightly startled, his eyes staring out into some distant beyond or into his own soul. A biographical sketch of his early life takes shape as a litany of failure: a miserable boarding school education during which he was bullied for being the headmaster’s son; afternoons spent spinning the cylinder in solitary games of Russian roulette; half a year of psychoanalysis at age sixteen; unsuccessful attempts at poetry and journalism; an unhappy marriage and a series of affairs; a libelous review of a Shirley Temple film for which the magazine in which it was published was forced to fold. Despite this last setback, it was film—the money he brought in as a critic, as well as the royalties from adaptations of his own novels—that made up a large part of his livelihood, enabling him to write. (The other source of income was his espionage work as a double agent for the British M16, an excuse to travel to other parts of the world as material for his fiction.) Pinballing back and forth between the extremes, Green swung from the heights of exhilaration to the depths of depression. He wrote bleak dramas set against a landscape of sin as well as lighthearted parodies of the intelligence community; sought baptism to become a Roman Catholic like his wife, renounced it, and claimed it again; and embraced Castro’s communism with sudden ardor at the end of his life after a career of lampooning it. Medical diagnosis would identify this condition as bipolar disorder—yet his depressed, conflicting tendencies also hint at a more metaphysical malaise.

More than perhaps any other literary form, the 14

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novel depends on the prolonged contemplation— and often melancholy—of its author. But the Catholic novelist is more than unhappy: he writes as a way of knocking against the gates of heaven, to which he has been denied entrance.

His writing is a transcription and translation of his despair. To make God a mere character is already a transgression, a source of guilt and shame; to write with sincerity about the evils in His world one must have struggled with His absence. “Being a member of the Catholic Church would present me with grave problems as a writer if I were not saved by my disloyalty,” Greene once wrote. “If my conscience were as acute as Francois Mauriac’s showed itself to be in his essay God and Mammon, I could not write a line.” The example was not a particularly accurate one, for Mauriac himself struggled with his dual identity as religious man and writer. To be a truly good Catholic and dissolve oneself in its dogma, he said, “one would have to be a saint. But then one could not write novels.”

Seeking to define himself as a novelist first, Greene rebelled against the label of Catholic writer and all the heavy-handed religious expectations that accompanied it. His prose takes on a selflacerating quality, rubbing at the raw wounds of skepticism, rather than soothing characters with the swaddling clothes of prayer. (The reader too suffers: how often can one read of doubt without coming to embrace it as a reality above faith?) In The Power and the Glory—chronologically the second of the four books most critics consider his “Catholic novels,” which also include Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair—a lieutenant lies in his squalid, beetleinfested lodgings and thinks with disdain of the

priest he is trying to capture: It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

Greene’s most convincing characters are—like the lieutenant—not those who dutifully recite their Hail Mary’s, but instead those who suffer painfully from uncertainty, or do not believe in God at all. The author’s split consciousness, his divided loyalties, brought him intense misery during his life. But it also allowed him to hear other frequencies, dimly sensed yet ignored by so many.

II. THE FULL WORLD Classical Hindustani ragas begin with the drone of a tanpura, a long-necked lute with four strings. This one note, sustained by an apprentice for whom such monotony is an honor, sounds throughout the entirety of the performance.

It enters before the plucking of the sitars, the drumming, the vocals that build into a complex wave of sound and subside into nothingness; it is what remains when the musicians cease playing at last.

In Greene’s novels, too, one note hums beneath the action, suffusing all of his work with the timbre of melancholia. “What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery,” says police officer Scobie in The Heart of the Matter. “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.” The film noir atmosphere through which the characters wade is one of inescapable unhappiness and sin, Picasso blue stirred with dark violet. American abstractionist painter Frank Stella once wrote an essay praising Caravaggio for defining painterly

space through the use of projective roundness and poised sphericality, which had the effect of making a “domed mansion of the void.” Greene’s innovation was to transfer this idea to literature— redefining its space as a heavy, unshakeable mantle of sin, in which every action and word takes on a special weight.

Catholic novelists before and after Greene had thrown stones into this darkness, exploring the consequences of moral crises by single individuals in the midst of an apathetic humanity: “Christians keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it,” wrote Walter Percy in The Moviegoer. “There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise.

The highest moment in the life of one suffering from malaise is that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human.” Yet Greene went far further. Sin settles like a fine, ineradicable dust into everything with which humans come into contact; so omnipresent is it, and so inevitable, that even God becomes superfluous. In Greene’s books, despite the number of letters and tirades addressed toward the divine being, He never speaks at all. This replacement of God by sin explains an otherwise cryptic comment Greene once made: that his characters can “never sin against God as hard as they try.”

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All of this was bound to make his fellow Catholics squirm. Evelyn Waugh couldn’t put a finger on his uneasiness, but he rightly sensed the presence of something deeply profane in Greene’s work, which he would dub a “Quietest heresy.” Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar too criticized Greene for his “mystique” of sin.

Even by-the-book Catholics want unity—but not at the expense of their system itself. Stylistically or thematically, most have chosen to traverse the abyss by writing in a manner lofty or abstract enough to bridge these questions: not Greene.

III. THE PROJECTOR SCREEN On a cold April day in 1953, a man from the Paris Review was sent to speak with Greene in his posh flat on St. James’s Street. Having at last made it through the preliminaries of drinks and discussion of his critics—Greene disliked wasting words, and all of his responses are phrased with an urbane and slightly disdainful precision—the interviewer subtly worked his way around to the question of sin. Just then, the telephone rang.

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Greene “smiled in a faint deprecatory way, as if to signify he’d said all he wished to say,” and took the call to discuss a film he was producing in Italy that summer. The waiting journalist undertook a close study of the collection of seventy-four miniature whiskey bottles Greene kept ranged above his bookshelf; at last realizing that he had been forgotten, he closed his interview with an ellipsis and left.

Greene’s productive relationship with the cinema arguably surpassed that of any other twentieth century artist, outweighing at times even his literary commitments. His own writing lends itself to the screen; over eighteen films have been made of his books, the most recent being British director John Boulting’s adaptation of Brighton Rock earlier this year. Part of this “cinematic” quality has to do with the exoticism of Greene’s chosen landscapes: Mexico, Brighton, West Africa. And part of it has to do with the gritty realist style in which he wrote. (“‘Hullo,’ said the somber thin man in black with a bowler hat sitting beside a wine barrel”: a typical line.)

Like the pointillist paintings of Seurat, in which

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thousands of colored dots resolve themselves into a lake-shore, the realist novel is a masterpiece of illusion. Bound and taken together, sketches of a character’s appearance and random snatches of atmosphere resolve into suggestive wholes.

Black leafless trees like broken water pipes and rain dripping down a man’s stiff coat are enough to color an entire page sinister, much as in film, multiple static images presented one after another cohere as a single, moving scene. In that sense, his technique has much in common with the work of contemporaries like Vittorio de Sica and other Italian neorealist directors of the ’40s and ’50s.

But, notably, the cinematic adaptations of Greene’s novels are not European art films.

They are thrillers, just as his books are thrillers: the realist genre taken to its extreme, a gun once described now fired. Greene always insisted that one’s childhood literary preferences are what most influence one’s technique, and he was weaned on the pulpy adventure stories of Rider Haggard and R.M. Ballantyne. His affinity for the form makes sense, for the thriller also aligns surprisingly well with the novel of conscience; the ticking bomb now applies to nothing less than one’s spiritual life.

Greene’s Catholic novels slide down the greased rails of suspense and dialogue: “If you excite your audience first,” he said, “you can put over what you will of horror, suffering, truth.”

Thus the ghosts of Balthasar’s nightmares obtain substance. Moral failure is not only inevitable in Greene’s books; it is also necessary for redemption.

The world of sin finds its release in knife pulling, attempted murders, adulterous affairs. And it is here, amidst these sordid exploits—the stuff of movies—that something like divine grace radiates forth.

IV. ASHES Can the Catholic novel still exist?

The question presents more grounds for apprehension than the general fretting over the death of the novel or literature as a whole. No modern writer has taken up the heavy vestments assumed by Greene. Most of the writers we associate with Catholicism—Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark, Shusaku Endo, 18

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the British and American novelists of the postwar period—have already passed on to the refuge they could not find in prose. And the conditions that the Catholic novel has traditionally depended on— both its particular brand of social realism and its uncynical assumption that qualities like good and evil exist—are slowly vanishing as well. As the main character, a novelist, asks in The End of the Affair: How can I disinter the human character from the heavy scene—the daily newspaper, the daily meal, the traffic grinding toward Battersea, the gulls coming up from the Thames looking for bread, and the early summer of 1939 glinting on the park where the children sailed their boats, one of those bright condemned prewar summers?

Greene’s “heavy scene”—the use of realist techniques to depict a world already condemned to sin—represents the farthest extreme toward which the Catholic novel can tend. At the heart of every great work lies a great, unknowable mystery: what Eliot calls “the heart of light, the silence.”

Like every writer with an ideology, the Catholic novelist is given this mystery ready-made. So assured was Greene of the world’s inherent guilt that he had no need to refer to morality directly, and could keep it as the profound, silent center around which he wrapped his melodramatic plots.

Today’s would-be Catholic writers have no recourse to that kind of certainty, and they sag under the strain. One can still enjoy Greene’s work, but only in the way that one savors a sacramental wafer: as a precious, blessed fragment of something long since departed.

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Fever Dreams

Dan Ashwood Animation: 5 minutes 9 seconds 20

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To see the full animation, visit www.theharvardadvocate.com

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Fireworks Justin Keenan

The funeral home clutches the side of the highway outside of town, about ten minutes past the Tastee Freez. The attendees consist mainly of Dwight, forty-two and newly aware of his own mortality, and his family—his wife, Marie, and their two children, Jordan and Luke—the preacher, whom the funeral home had called when Dwight revealed that his father hadn’t been in church since the Truman administration, and the large, black nurses who stand silently behind their lolling, wheelchair-bound VA hospital charges.

An old private with a trucker’s hat covered in pins complains that he needs to go to the bathroom.

His nurse tells him to hush and be respectful. He grumbles a response.

Dwight at the podium. The eulogy is largely biographical. His father had spent the Depression shooting rabbits and squirrels out in the field for his mother to boil that evening. A few years later, he took his talents to occupied France, where he found that the profile of a German head was larger and generally slower than what he’d been accustomed to. He came back to Kentucky with a bronze star, which he kept on his nightstand until the day his name was added to the great register of souls claimed by bacon and egg breakfasts.

Dwight does not mention the womanizing that caused his mother to pack a steamer trunk and catch a Greyhound east when he was still a boy.

Instead, he spreads praise on his father’s fidelity to traditions. How he used to watch his father sharpen his straight razor on a leather strop that his own father had given him. Seated in his heavy wooden chair with a shaving cream beard, he looked like a gaunt Santa Claus caught in an unguarded moment.

The longest part of the eulogy—which all told runs for nearly twenty minutes—is another story, 22

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about how the weekend after Decoration Day Dwight and his father would drive south for two hours past blasted fields and peeling billboards, until they found a squat, white building just off the Goodlettsville exit, a converted convenience store made of cinderblock, with the garish, tearstreaked clown face on the side. How inside they were always greeted by a smiling fat man in a gray, pinstriped suit and porkpie hat who called himself Wailing Willy and met everyone who came into his store with the enthusiasm of a boisterous second cousin who knew that he liked you even if you weren’t sure he could remember your name.

How Willy began every one of his sentences with “Well, hell” (here Dwight can’t help but laugh as he assumes Willy’s oversized accent, with i’s as country as an engine backfiring). How, if you asked him, “What’s good this year, Willy,” he’d answer, “Well, hell, it’s all good!” Or if you asked, “Willy, you got any of those cherry bombs you were talking about,” he’d say, “Well, hell, I got bushels of them—let me cut you a deal.” How, in the evening, they would return home with the trunk sagging so low that if you hit a bump it would smack against the pavement and spray sparks all over the roadway on account of all the big, brown paper sacks of aerials, rockets, mortars, fountains, and spinners stuffed inside. How on the appointed evening (here Dwight begins to stammer) his father would gather up the whole family—cousins included—and take them up to their spot on top of the hill overlooking Jeff Davis park, where they would grill hot dogs over the built-in fire pit and shoot fireworks late into the night. How Pop would light all the fuses personally, surrounded by cousins drunk on beer and hollering from lawn chairs. How Dwight wished his children could have known their grandfather in that way.

Marie, built like a pillar, looks concerned if slightly confused. She likes to think she knows her husband, but has never heard this story before.

When Dwight takes his seat, she puts her hand on his shoulder but does not say a word. Jordan, twelve years old and fresh from learning long division, has already lost interest and looks eagerly toward the window, as if he thinks he can spot the Tastee Freez from where he’s sitting. Next to him, Luke, barely six, is in tears, not from the story, but because he sees a half dozen Wermacht soldiers without heads seated in the folding chairs around him. The preacher takes the podium and makes his closing remarks. During the Lord’s Prayer, the old private loudly announces that he has gone and shit himself. His nurse wheels him from the visitation room.

The Kentucky-Tennessee border is desolate country. The pre-noon light catches the country by surprise—no one has yet come by to clean up what look like the remains of a scorched earth march in the middle of the night. Occasionally a skeletal barn rolls by. A pair of cows. An abandoned Ford with pink and blue and yellow stickers affixed to the windshield by the highway patrol. A wire fence, tracing a line gently undulating that doesn’t quite run parallel to the muted ground. Mostly it’s just ground, though. The border crossing threatens to go unnoticed, marked only by a faded sign that rises up from the ground and then races by before you’ve had a chance to anticipate it.

The drive is two weeks after the funeral, the Thursday before the holiday. In the back, Luke sits middlehump so his grandfather can have an entire seat to himself. Jordan protested in the driveway, saying he didn’t want to sit next to his brother in the car because he knew the leather seats would soon become unbearably hot and sticky and besides it was stupid to make room for the dead. Luke admonished his brother not to say such things in front of their grandfather. Dwight agreed that Pop would not want to be left out of the drive and insisted that he be allowed to sit in the backseat, though he extracted a promise from Luke to not touch his brother.

Between the Pleasant Valley and White House exits they hit deadlock. A mile ahead, a station

wagon drunk-hauling a boat had collided with a farm truck, which overturned and spilled its cargo—tomatoes and chickens—all over the interstate. For near an hour highway patrol has been chasing down panicked chickens. One gets itself entangled in a life vest and it takes two officers almost ten minutes to catch it because it manages to fall into the creek and the current threatens to carry it off until its vest catches on a rock. When it becomes apparent to the family that they aren’t going anywhere soon, they relocate to the car’s trunk, where they eat the sandwiches that Marie had prepared that morning. When Jordan and Luke finish, they run to play with the dogs that people are walking along the median. Marie says, “Electric bill has been sitting on the table near a week now.”

“I’ll get it,” Dwight says.

“I don’t want to come home to no lights again.”

“Said I’ll get it.”

She looks out across the road and feels a sense of kinship with all the people in their stalled cars.

“Also, I think the kitchen sink is clogged again and we’re out of drain cleaner.”

“We’ll stop at the store on the way home.”

Though Wailing Willy the man died years ago, his name has been preserved in a sprawling complex that straddles the interstate. Willy’s original operation has expanded from its original cinderblock outlet to include a gas station, liquor store, family restaurant, and casino. The crying clown face that was his trademark now covers billboards for miles in either direction, and the motif has been adopted by lesser competitors like Krying Karl and Melancholy Marvin, each of which lays claim to one of the state’s major arteries. Even during the hottest days of a late Tennessee June you can see someone dressed in Willy’s signature suit and hat, waving to cars coming in off the interstate and corralling them into the nearest convenient parking space. The original building has long since been demolished, replaced by an acre-sized white, windowless cube.

If you saw it rising out of the Tennessee fields without the adjoining buildings, your first thought would be that it was set there for unknowable purposes by a higher intelligence. The kind of

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thing animals know not to go near.

The interior of the cube is laid out like a grocery store. The first clerk Dwight finds is sweeping the floor, a lanky boy of nineteen or twenty with close-cropped hair, long lost to Slayer’s hypnotic double bass and given to dreams of manning a machinegun, though the Verbal Expression component of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery has twice thwarted his attempts to enlist. He bought himself a test prep book with all the answers in the back, and six months from now he will be on an armored personnel carrier rumbling down an IED-laden Afghan road. Deep in the aisles, Jordan pulls packages of fireworks off shelves and hands them to Luke to hold. The clerk eyes Dwight suspiciously. He clutches a broom to his chest the same you would a battle axe. Dwight asks the clerk what’s the best thing around and he tells him that he guesses it’s all pretty good. “I’m trying to put together something good,” he says.

“We got Screamin Hellcats three for ten dollars,” the clerk says.

“No, no. I don’t want anything you got on sale. I want something good. Something worth remembering,”

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“Who does anything worth remembering?”

Outside, Marie smokes a cigarette on the curb a few yards away from Wailing Willy’s impersonator, who smiles at her through his perpetual frown.

She grew up in central Pennsylvania—knowing fireworks only indirectly, through their sharp reports and the briefly lit sky over the houses across from her window. Her parents had been Jehovah’s Witnesses and put all holidays, federal or no, into the same category of idolatry. Dwight emerges from the cube carrying a sack of fireworks in each arm. Behind him, the children appear, each holding their own sack. Marie looks at the bags incredulously. She asks him what all he bought and he tells her it’s a surprise.

“I don’t like surprises,” she says.

Dwight opens the trunk and uncovers the recess where a spare tire should be. Like a drug smuggler about to attempt a border crossing, he lays each bag gently in the recess, rearranging them several times until he finds the best fit. Then he replaces the cover and they leave. On the way home, he forgets to stop by the store to get the drain cleaner.

By the time they get back a perfect dark has fallen over the country. The haul is impressive.

The most expensive are the cakes, collections of a dozen or more tubes fastened together and tied to a single fuse. Dwight’s favorite is a squat one called Smiling Buddha, whose back label promises fuchsia and azure lotus blossoms with a loud crackling finale. There are also a dozen upright tubes of Napalm Rain, a handful of the Screamin Hellcats, and Roman candles, as well as a gross of bottle rockets that Dwight only grabbed because they were on sale. He had spent more than Marie had asked him to, but what of it? Once he gets everything into the house, he gives each of the boys a small, tank-shaped piece with a pink cannon on the front. Jordan asks if they can make the tanks fight. Dwight sets the tanks facing one another about three yards apart. Then he gives Jordan a match and tells him to light one tank while he and Luke light the other. Marie stands with her arms folded on the porch.

What is supposed to happen is this: both fuses would be lit at the same time, and once the fuse burned down, a plume of sparks would erupt from

the back of each tank, propelling the two toward one another, at which point the stubby pink cannons on the front of each tank would begin spitting sparks and smoke in a wide forward arc, simulating flashes of small arms fire from nearby infantry in addition to the tanks’ own weaponry.

With a little luck, a sustained firefight would ensue in which one—though preferably both—of the combatants would be reduced to smoking wreckage.

What actually happens is this: Jordan gets excited and lights his tank before Dwight and Luke are ready and Dwight barely has time to light the fuse before he has to pull Luke out of the way of Jordan’s tank. Fortunately, before Jordan’s tank even gets close, one of its wheels becomes stuck on a groove in the concrete and flips onto its side, at which point the upended tank begins to spin like a top and spew sparks in a wide circle while Jordan, helpless to the side, stands dumbfounded like a trainer anxious to leap over the ropes to pick his boy up. Meanwhile, Dwight and Luke’s tank manages to veer from its intended course straight into the lawn, where it becomes stuck and proceeds to discharge its ordinance into the grass before Dwight, cursing loudly, runs over to stamp it out.

Marie watches from the porch but doesn’t speak until Jordan appears next to her. His eyes are red and watery—whether from the disappointment or merely from the thick white smoke that had settled over the driveway, it is unclear—and he asks his mother if he could set off something else, since the tanks hadn’t worked right. She tells him he’s going to have to wait until the weekend. “Where you going to put em?” Jordan asks.

“Somewhere you can’t get hold of em,” she says.

“I’ll find em somehow.”

After the children go to bed, Marie directs Dwight to hide the fireworks in the old doghouse.

Then they sit on the porch for a long while, letting the bug zapper do all the talking.

The house they live in sits on its own acre along a numbered road. It had once belonged to Dwight’s uncle, who built it with his own hands before he went to war so that he and his sweetheart

would have a place of their own when he got back. The family called it “The Lovers’ House,” but when Dwight’s uncle got back he learned that his sweetheart had skipped town with a draftdodging TB-patient so his uncle had to move into the new house alone. One day the family moved the apostrophe without telling him. Though it was plenty special for Dwight that he got to live in his uncle’s house, it would have been nicer if the man had known how to put together a house.

The porch is slightly uneven, so that if you set a marble down it will roll off one side. In the living room, you have to turn both switches on before the light works.

Marie at home while Dwight works and the kids are out. The kitchen sink is clogged. Dwight probably poured bacon grease down it and forgot to chase it with hot water. He has done this before.

Marie pours more than the recommended amount of drain cleaner and waits, but a tiny, caustic sea remains. She lights a cigarette and climbs under the sink with a bucket and then disassembles the plastic pipes. What water the bucket doesn’t catch ends up on her jeans. She watches the patches of blue turn sickly white before her eyes.

When she finishes with the pipes, she takes off her jeans and washes them in the sink. Her panties are floral patterned. She goes outside and hangs it on the clothesline with the towels. The afternoon breeze is cool against her bare legs. A foreign-made car slows down as it passes by but she does not pay it any mind.

Later she disconnects the phone line and plugs it into the back of the family computer. They keep the computer in the dining room, which is the only place they had room for it. Marie is not good with computers and keeps instructions for how to check her e-mail taped to the wall. The sound of the computer turning on like a tiny sunrise. She sits at the computer in her floral panties. Stretch marks across her once taut thighs. She moves the pointer slowly, like she’s afraid it could get away from her. From the depths of her inbox, jokes about lawyers in hell and images of the Virgin in a Waffle House waffle call out to her. A chorus made up of everyone you’ve ever hated. She opens each e-mail but reads few of them. There is a message she has prepared a response for but

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hasn’t received yet. She does not forward the pleas from the parents of cancer patients, a flagrant challenge to their promises of karmic vengeance.

Once Dwight told her that she should just forward the stories. “They don’t hurt anybody,” he said.

“They aren’t real,” she said, “just clutter.”

“But what if they aren’t?”

Jordan makes good on his word and tears the house apart in search of the fireworks. He enlists Luke to help. They begin in the obvious places— under their parents’ bed, in the hall closet, behind the winter coats and boxes of empty picture frames and scented candles, in the back of the garage, where they find a long-forgotten Christmas present.

It is Luke who says he sees something out in the old doghouse. He takes out a long rocket with an electric blue dragon curling around the tube and the name Lucky Dragon in lettering like the Asian buffet sign. Jordan tells his brother that when you launch fireworks they scream because they have ghosts in them and the ghosts are burning up.

“Who puts the ghosts in them?” Luke asks.

“The Chinese,” Jordan says.

“Where do they get the ghosts?”

“Protestors.”

“Why were they protesting?”

Jordan tells his brother that the protestors were protesting that the ghosts of other protestors were being put into fireworks.

“But what happens to the ghosts?”

“They burn up.”

“What happens when they burn up?”

Jordan pauses. “They die.”

“What do you mean?”

What could he have meant? Luke looks like he is going to cry. Jordan tells him to shut up and then he stuffs handfuls of bottle rockets and Roman candles in his bookbag, finds his mother’s cigarette lighter, tells Luke that he’s going out and then he is gone.

The car graveyard is an old lot, two acres at least, of cars, trucks, and tractors in various states of disrepair, covered in rust the color of crusted blood. The grass is tall; more than one young heel has been threatened by a copperhead here.

A stand of conifers on the far edge of the lot. A murder of crows huddled on the power line. The 26

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boys gather round an old flatbed. There are six of them, all wearing t-shirts and shorts. They spread out amongst the dead cars, each pocket stuffed with extra Roman candles, to reenact the lore of someone’s older brother. For a moment everything is still. The day is warm and still and absolutely clear. Someone begins to enumerate the rules— no teams, no shooting someone when he’s down, no aiming for—but he is cut short when a scream of green light shoots past him. Three respond.

They hold their candles straight out and trained on their targets even as their bodies shift laterally between cars. They take aim through the cars, the old windows framing their targets. Someone jumps up onto the seat of an old tractor and aims straight down at unprotected heads. The air fills with shots like comets from illuminated manuscripts. Errant stars skipping across car hoods and bouncing off bodies, leaving marks the boys won’t forget even when after they’ve faded. Sparks dancing over fatigued metal. Small plumes of smoke rising up from the grass. The field is reduced to light playing across the thickening smoke and the complaint of crows. Someone takes off for the field and another gives chase. The entire ritual is over in less than ten minutes.

When Jordan comes back to the house he finds his brother in the backyard next to a hole in the earth. He asks Luke what he’s doing and Luke says nothing, but Jordan sees the corner of one of the cakes sticking out of the hole. Luke says that he doesn’t want more ghosts to die. He sees the hate in his brother’s face and gets up to run, but Jordan is nearly twice his age and Luke barely makes it around to the side of the house before his brother is upon him. Jordan throws him to the ground and gives him a black eye. A shrill cry rolls over the yard and through the towels and jeans on the clothesline. Jordan pummels his brother’s arms, which are instinctively thrown over his face, until he tires himself out and sits propped on his knees like a Mandarin bureaucrat, breathing heavily while his brother reels from side to side.

Marie gets home first. She finds Luke in the kitchen with his hand over his eye. She takes a bag of frozen corn from the deep freeze and hands it to him. Jordan is upstairs, where he will wait anxiously until she is ready to come up and give

him what he’s got coming. She sits with Luke at the table until Dwight comes home.

Dwight, Marie, and Luke drive to Jeff Davis park. Jordan is left at home at Marie’s insistence.

For a while he watches TV, then he goes into the kitchen, where the floor is covered with bits of dirt from where Dwight tried to clean off the fireworks that Luke buried. He goes back out to the garage and wipes the dust bunnies off the ancient Christmas present. Inside he finds a toy he might have cared about once. Years later he remembers that night for the cool of the screen door against his cheek where he waited like a dog for the rest of his family, before he went upstairs to lie awake in bed.

At the park, Dwight has trouble lighting the remaining cake. He curses and smacks the red trigger lighter with the heel of his hand. After a minute or two, he gives up and asks Marie for her matches. The cake spews sparks and fireballs into the air but it looks nothing like what the label promised. Luke screams and refuses to let go of his mother’s leg, for reasons he cannot articulate to anyone. When Dwight gets to the Screamin Hellcats, dented from the small shovel Luke had tried to bury them with and still speckled with dirt, he will catch the attention of a passing patrolman.

Marie will be the first to spot him, just before he pulls up alongside the grass and tells Dwight that it’s illegal to set off fireworks in a public place. He will threaten Dwight with a citation when he gets indignant. When he asks what’s wrong with the boy, Marie will tell him there’s nothing wrong, he’s just scared, is all.

Before that happens, Dwight takes an empty beer bottle from the grass and begins shooting bottle rockets away from the hill. If you were to watch that part of the sky from about a mile off, maybe from the bed of a pickup truck, next to someone you do not love but can bring yourself to sleep with, you would see the bottle rockets overcoming gravity and hear the dull sound of laughter or crying—which is indistinguishable from a distance—and feel thankful that someone had, at least for a moment, peeled back a piece of the night.

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Pyramidal Evolution 1

Dana Kase Fabric, Thread, Polyfill; 42” x 21” x 8” 28

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A Pound of Flesh for the Venice Biennale Emily Chertoff

I. The writer arrives at the Venice Biennale at about 10:15am. This seems quite good by her recent personal standards—these are somewhat loose after three weeks of mojitos in Rome. But it is not good enough for a hard-hitting journalist. She imagines the Arsenale, one of two venues for the Biennale’s International Art Exhibition, swarming with reporters. Probably they have all been up since six. Probably they have fancy voice recorders and notebooks with expensive French paper. Probably they are being paid.

Everything about this undertaking seems very glamorous. But by the time an efficient Apparatchik at the press office has fixed the Advocate up with a press badge—she is now The Harvard Advocate’s official envoy to the Biennale, to Venice, to all of Europe!—a packet of promotional materials from the sponsors—Enel, Nivea, Illy—and the Advocate’s first tote bag of the day, it is 11am. This is horrifying. But even more horrifying is the crowd of journalists. There is none.

The Advocate begins to worry. Perhaps this is the wrong place. Perhaps they have squirreled the press office away next to some adjunct show or collateral event that nobody goes to. However, twenty minutes of aimless wandering through the galleries reveals that the giant warehouse is indeed the Arsenale. The Italian Pavilion, largest of the national shows, is here. So are the Chinese and Turkish and Chilean pavilions. So are individual installations by big-name artists like Pae White and William Forsythe. So is a good chunk of the main international show—Fare Mondi, “Making Worlds.”

Slowly, it dawns: nobody is here yet. Probably all the journalists are hobnobbing at elaborate breakfast

meetings. Probably they are sleeping off hangovers so colossal and expensive that the Advocate’s morning troubles seem juvenile by comparison.

Finally, around 11:45am, the Beautiful People start to filter in. The Advocate recognizes art critics, academics, some curators. The center of press activity appears to be a temporary outdoor café wedged between the Arsenale and a canal.

The Advocate stands in line for ten minutes to buy a four-euro can of Pepsi—official soda of the Biennale—finds a seat at one of the tasteful moldedpolyurethane tables, and surveys the scene. As one might expect, she sees a lot of black. As one might not, she sees many tote bags of varying size, shape, color, strap length, and fabric quality. Glasses are common. So are blazers. So are the dropped-crotch 80s-style bottoms that the Spanish call pantalones cagados, or “shit-pants.”

The Apparatchiks, who at 11am were huddled in purposeless clumps around the building, have swung into action. They are answering questions, giving directions, requesting contact information. If the Beautiful People dress like upscale vacationers, the Apparatchiks make an effort to look like professionals. Many are wearing (black) suits. They are young. They are bright. They are well turnedout. They cannot afford to be otherwise. The Biennale pays them to be pleasant, and they need the work.

Months from now, in late September, the international art press will circulate a report that 110 Apparatchiks have gone on strike to protest poor working conditions at the Biennale. The strikers will claim that the Biennale manages them badly, offering them only three-day employment contracts and withholding overtime pay. Furthermore, they will allege, they have been laboring under these conditions since the show began.

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But there is not a glimmer of conflict, present or future, on anyone’s bright face right now. These three preview days are more important than all the rest of the Biennale, because the visitors are the pillars of the art world. Curators, journalists, academics, dealers, and collectors have assembled, and the valiant Apparatchiks stand ready to shepherd them along. “Making Worlds” stretches before them all. It will dictate tastes and change reputations.

II. This Biennale is the art world’s crown jewel, an event so spectacularly large, so tremendously expensive, so irrationally important that Venice employs a permanent squadron of bureaucrats whose sole job is to plan it; that participating nations bankrupt their arts endowments in order to stage their contributions; that a full-priced admission to the two main venues—forget the dozens of peripheral shows that dot the city—costs 18 euro per person; that the royalty of the art world brave the heights of the mosquito and tourist seasons just to pay it a visit.

What makes the show such a huge draw? Simply put, it’s very old and very well established. When the first Biennale opened in 1895, it was the only semiannual art show in Europe. Imagined as an event to honor the silver anniversary of Italy’s King Umberto and Queen Margherita of Savoy, it wound up attracting over 200,000 people to Venice’s public gardens for a mostly tame selection—barring one “scandalous” painting of female nudes—of mostly Italian art.

Other nations began building pavilions in the garden starting in 1907. In the 1930s came the first special exhibitions to promote Italian art abroad. And, of course, the Apparatus of the Biennale was differentiating, acquiring layers of bureaucracy—Boards, Secretaries, Presidents, Special Commissions and Groups—tasked with testing the waters and currents of the European art world, keeping the show inoffensive, middlebrow, and a good couple of decades behind the artistic vanguard. Most of the art came from the 19th century until well into the 20th.

Thus was the good name of the city was preserved 30

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until 1948, when a tiny revolution, a youthful rebellion, took place within the Apparatus. A new General Secretary, Roberto Pallucchini, was in charge. The dust from the Second World War was settling. Suddenly, the organization realized it had just about missed a crucial half-century of developments in Western art. Pallucchini spent the next five shows scrambling to compile the Greatest Hits of the modernist splinter groups whose influence the Apparatus had been battling.

And, just like that, the work of Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, and Piet Mondrian went up.

By the start of the 60s, the Apparatus had caught its audience up to where the rest of the art world was. Somewhere around this time, things shifted.

The Biennale didn’t just show art anymore, some prestigious, some not; it became itself a thing of prestige. It became a tastemaker. This development has made the show much sexier, and more social, and more fashionable. But it has also overshadowed the show’s original purpose, which was to give a platform to artists.

A number of unattractive intellectual tendencies have accompanied this shift in focus. The Biennale’s curators have gained power. Supplementary critical texts have become as important to the exhibition as the art. Show concepts are abstract but not illuminating, and depend more and more on art theory. A layperson may enjoy individual works of art at every Biennale, but he or she is unlikely to find the International Show as a whole an edifying experience.

1964: Robert Rauschenberg, a central figure in the development of Pop Art, wins the Foreign Artist prize, earning the Biennale a new reputation as a pioneering show. 1968: Demonstrators protest the commercialization of art; many Biennale artists join the protestors, upending or covering their works in solidarity. 1972: The era of overarching thematics begins with the “Work and Behavior” Biennale.

1980: An entire hall is dedicated to “Postmodernism: la via novissima.” 1982: The big theme is “Art as Art.” 1984: “Art and the Arts.” 1988: “The Place of the Artist.” 1990: The controversial “Aperto” section of the Biennale is closed temporarily after the formaldehyde suspension leaks from one of Damien Hirst’s Plexiglas-enclosed cow carcasses.

1995: “Identity and Alterity.” 1999: “dAPERTutto.”

2001: The critic Harald Szeemann builds an entire show around a single work by Joseph Beuys.

2003: The critic Francesco Bonami breaks up his exhibition into a bunch of little sub-exhibitions with titles like “Clandestine” and “The Zone.” Reviews are mostly negative. 2007: The critic and academic Robert Storr’s Biennale is overtly political, offering a critique of American foreign and domestic policy.

Reviews are mostly negative. 2009: Critic and academic Daniel Birnbaum (more on him later) gives us “Making Worlds.” Reviews are mostly negative.

Theme. Thematics. Thematicization.

Art as Art. Art and the Artist. The Place of the Artist. Where is the Artist? Art without Artists.

Text, context, subtext, pretext.

The Zone. The Zone. The Zone.

III. There is an apocryphal story that, when someone asked Rodin whether he worked from his heart or his head, the sculptor replied, “I work from my balls.” There is a type of curator who also works from his (her?) balls.

But this sort of curator seems to have fallen out of favor recently, at least at the Biennale. Here, the criticacademics have been in charge for quite a while.

Biennale curators emeriti Szeeman and Bonami both neatly fit the mold. Daniel Birnbaum—who has a rectorship at the Staedelschule at Frankfurtam-Main, plus a regular gig writing scholarly essays for Artforum—does, too.

Birnbaum is not the type of curator who works from his balls. Birnbaum is the exact opposite of this type. He and the other critic-academiccurators seem to care very little about instincts, or about pleasure, whether aesthetic or otherwise.

(Though Birnbaum does have an awfully cute smile, a smile the publicity people have plastered all over the Biennale’s promotional materials.) The critic-academics do appear to care about theory—a lot—and about curating an argument. Like past Biennale curators, Birnbaum has built “Making Worlds” around a theme that is both complex and vague. He has slotted into this theme some art by midcareer artists, and has padded out the show with

abstruse critical statements.

The critical texts that accompany an exhibition like the Biennale lay everything out for the viewer (more or less) explicitly. And so they become the show’s default reading, the one critics use to judge its success or failure. As a consequence, the artist says less—or is forced to say less, or gets away with saying less—than he did in the days when curators had a lighter touch.

In the catalog essay, Birnbaum gives his personal vision for the show at length: The innumerable translations of the phrase ‘making worlds’ is [sic] simply a conceptual starting point […] the impulse to move away from the understanding of this show [the Biennale] as a museumlike presentation of ready-made objects.

This is hardly a revolutionary conceit for a biennale today, but we can still place particular emphasis on its character as a site for production and experimentation, and it is my hope that this exhibition will create new spaces for art to unfold beyond the expectations of the dominant institutions and the mechanisms of the art market.

This is all highly ironic. The Biennale is one of “the dominant institutions.” It drives and is driven by values and fluctuations in the art market.

Nobody whose work is commercially undesirable shows at the Biennale, and nobody who shows at the Biennale is commercially undesirable.

To read the forgoing statement charitably, Birnbaum wants to show artwork that is in process, or self-constructing, or aware of its own construction.

If this is the standard, then many of the works in the show meet it. If the viewer applies other, timeless standards, then only some works make the cut. In the long, thin Corderie that connects the two parts of the Arsenale, the first pieces are strong—and strongly beautiful. First, a Lygia Pape sculpture, a web of golden filaments, lit to a soft radiance; then a roomful of massive, baroque, gilt-frame mirrors, each smashed with a mallet by Michelangelo Pistoletto. Both works are striking; each echoes Birnbaum’s theme. Pape’s work is constantly being realized by the shining light; Pistoletto’s very visibly

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bears the marks of its own creation.

But then comes a pile-up. There’s a trite, visually unimpressive lightbox show by Paul Chan; Aleksandra Mir’s “viewer-activated” postcards of Venice; free candy and amateurish anti-imperialist protest from Anawana Haloba; a silly, tree-sized projection of a Bonsai by Ceal Floyer.

“Such rich work! It just keeps on giving!” says a woman with an Adam’s apple.

Among other things, Birnbaum’s promises Biennale-goers “points of visual intensity” and “beautiful objects” in his catalog essay. But these are lacking in the show itself. Few of the works “pop.” And rarely does the viewer experience that vertigo one feels in the presence of truly gorgeous, or joyful, or thought-provoking art. The latter are Romantic standards, perhaps, and hopelessly time-bound; but does this make them any less desirable?

Pleasure-seekers must find what they’re looking for elsewhere at the Biennale.

IV.

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If you’d like to understand the Biennale, you’d do well to read the social pages. A lot of major art glossies have them now.

The Biennale’s authority is at least as much social as it is cultural. If you are a prominent (or resourceful) critic or dealer or curator or hanger-on, you attend the Biennale’s preview. It’s like a highend trade convention. You catch up with friends, spy on competitors, party, chat, fuck, drink.

Of course, if you really have pull, you show up before the preview, while the art is still going up. The editors of Artforum, the really wealthy collectors, and the major museum heads all pull this trick. Once you’ve reached the highest classechelons of the art world, the real sign of status is the ability to skip the preview entirely while the lumpen-elite scrap for tote bags at the United Arab Emirates Pavilion.

You can’t take two steps in the Giardini without running into a bespectacled, be-shit-panted Beautiful Person holding a tote bag. After a couple of hours of careful observation, the Advocate develops a Theory of Swag to explain the bags’ appearance. Let’s say that, around 3:00, the Dutch pavilion has a lull. Not too many visitors are coming in. So some enterprising staffer decides to crack into the tote bags. He hauls a couple of cardboard boxes’ worth out of storage and begins to distribute them—maybe to press, along with copies of the promotional materials; maybe to all comers.

Within half an hour, the bags—emblazoned with the name of the pavilion—start appearing on the shoulders of the first Beautifuls.

Suddenly, there is a rush on the pavilion. By 4:30, half the guests and a handful of Apparatchiks are clutching at Dutch swag, and the staff is getting ready to pack it in for the day, having drawn most of the preview attendees to their show.

As art has commoditized, anything associated with art has done the same. The reception at the Nordic pavilion is, unusually, selling the swag they have on offer. The most popular item—and the most intriguing, and repulsive—is a canvas bag emblazoned with quotes from Sarah Thornton’s recent, totally uncritical pop-sociological study Seven Days in the Art World. The bag’s designer has apparently culled from the book all references to sex acts—plus quotes that have the word “fuck”

in them—and screen-printed them on the canvas.

The Nordic and Danish joint exhibition is a crowd favorite, at times so packed that it’s difficult to get into one or the other building. The artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have transformed the pavilions into the homes of two fictional collectors. The Nordic Pavilion “belongs” to the mysterious Mr. B, an ethusiast of (often homoerotic) contemporary art. Handsome young actors playing hustlers lounge around on couches and sip cocktails while the Beautifuls view Mr. B’s collection. The show is quite witty, if gimmicky. It pokes fun at collector culture: at mixed motives for buying art, at the eccentricities of personal taste, at the signification of social status in the art world.

Elmgreen and Dragset clearly have mixed feelings towards their buyers, with whom they are locked in a symbiotic relationship.

You could look at how popular these two pavilions are and say that the Beautifuls, as a group, have a good sense of humor. And maybe this is true.

But isn’t it funny, after all, that their favorite show at the Biennale is all about them?

V. The Advocate is squeezed into line at the Biennale store with a shrink-wrapped copy of

the show’s two-volume catalogue when she feels something brush the back of her neck. She ignores it. The something brushes her again. She turns around. Behind her is a toddler with corkscrew curls. The Advocate smiles at him as he thwacks her repeatedly and vigorously on the shoulder with his little fist.

“I’m sorry,” says the man holding the toddler.

He is a portly Italian with a long, dark ponytail and crinkly eyes. He is not wearing a blazer, round glasses, or shit-pants. In the crook of his other arm, he too is holding a shrink-wrapped catalog.

The Advocate likes toddlers. “Don’t worry about it.” The toddler delivers a left hook to the side of her neck.

“Sorry, sorry.” The man smiles apologetically at the Advocate and then coos something at the toddler in Italian.

“Sorry!” says his wife, who is big and soft just like he is. All three of them are wearing bright clothes, felts and velvets, newsboy caps and colorful, rubberized tennis shoes. They look like characters from a children’s book.

“It’s okay!” chirps the Advocate. The toddler swings wildly at the air.

The sorries and the cooing and the apologetic smiles continue until the Advocate and her new friends make it to the front of the line. The Italian-

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speaking clerk finishes with her last customer and waves the family over.

They begin an involved conversation. The Advocate, who knows only rudimentary Italian, makes out the following: Is there any way to get one without paying? asks the man.

I’m sorry, says the clerk. We can only offer a discount.

But I have work in the show.

We’re selling the catalogs here, not giving them away.

The Advocate loses the train of the conversation for several seconds. Then the Apparatchik trots off.

The artist stands at the counter, waiting. He waits for two, three, four minutes. All around him, the dealers and journalists and curators and academics are shopping. They contemplate books, and pencils, and CDs, and t-shirts that say “Art Loves You,” and posters, and magnets, and tote bags— really nice ones—and toys for their kids, and pins, and housewares, and limited edition collectible trinkets—and they do it with the same look of halfglazed sobriety that they use when looking at the art in the 53rd International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. It’s all the same.

The first Apparatchik returns with a second Apparatchik.

You might be able to get one through the national pavilion, but here we’re selling them.

You can contact the office directly and see if there’s any way to get one. Sorry.

That’s all right, says the artist, and pulls out his wallet. All parties smile apologetically. The artist pays for his catalog and then signals his wife that they ought to go.

VI. There is something in the world that allows the Beautiful People to press out weaker but more honest voices. Often these voices are the voices of the artists.

She leaves the Biennale, has dinner, and goes to bed.

But, later that night, something causes her to put her day clothes back on, to slip back out of her 34

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hotel and into the quiet dark. She is tired, and her calves ache, but she takes a vaporetto to the main island of Venice. She has not done enough, or seen enough, to justify going to bed.

She gets off at the Arsenale—it’s the force of the day’s habits—and starts walking, after a moment’s hesitation, toward St. Mark’s Square. Bands of tourists pass her in both directions. They seem unusually light and graceful, as people on vacation sometimes do: all talking and laughing gracefully, all clutching each other’s arms lightly, all escorts and charges, all dignified.

Seawater washes onto the promenade at points, and the Advocate has to pick her way to St. Mark’s more and more carefully. Little puddles become great sloshing mouths of canal water. They get wider and wider until the Advocate can barely jump them.

And she comes to St. Mark’s—where the Beautiful People stay; where they drink their Bellinis, at Harry’s Bar and at the bar in the Cipriani Hotel; where, after-hours, they promenade their expensive linen suits and asymmetrical gowns and round horn-rimmed professor glasses and their shitpants, and their attitude; where they sip espresso and settle deals and laugh clubbily at each other’s jokes—and the entire place is flooded knee-deep.

The water doesn’t seem to be flowing in or flowing out, but standing, standing deep enough to ruin silk Louboutin pumps and Lanvin suits and Wolford tights. Deep enough to strand all the Beautifuls in their expensive St. Mark’s hotel rooms, while the tourists—and the Advocate, and the artist from the shop, and his wife and kid, and all the less fortunate—wheel free in the night air.

The stars in the sky shine down on the water to create a second, inverted sky. The Advocate catches the next vaporetto back to her hotel and goes to sleep.

[In my dream the old woman had a ribbon for the boy]

Abram Kaplan

In my dream the old woman had a ribbon for the boy and the ribbon had a message. What to make of this. That the woman I dreamed of had a penis on her knee she could find no one to hold.

That the man who is central plays guitar and all he wants is to be loved.

I seemed to be that man whose death is his security, whose stony head will model stony crown.

Who turns away predators with assiduity dips his head to swallow wide reflections in the body.

The brain’s a map that’s flat.

Don’t expect to feel the incision.

Nerves don’t end there.

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PATTY

Rebecca Lieberman Video: 16 minutes 36

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To see the full video, visit www.theharvardadvocate.com

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Return

Megha Majumdar

She saw him steal the necklace. The men smoking beedis at the corner yelled, “Hey!” and the woman raised a startled hand to her neck. He sprinted through the guava sellers and hooting cars, his rubber slippers slapping the road.

At dusk, he came to her house. She was bent over the kerosene stove, stirring rice with a twig and nibbling the raw skin around her fingernails.

She heard him clear his throat and spit betel juice before lifting the sun-beaten curtain to the room.

Long shadows stretched from his feet to the walls, coming closer. Swiftly he stroked her head and yanked her hair. He bit her neck. Then he made her drop the twig she was clutching and opened her fingers. Thin gold poured from his fist to her palm.

He said, “Like it?”

Her chest caught with fear. She brought the warm chain to her face to look. It smelled like the rice at the bottom of the sack. She said nothing, thinking of the woman’s frail fingers at her bare neck. Her face had dissolved in her mind.

They could hear the neighbours complaining about the water supply when he grabbed her throat and pushed her on the bed. While he unbuttoned her blouse at the back, his thorny chin pressing her breasts, she said with her eyes on the ceiling, “Where did you get it?”

Someone peed into the drain that ran between the houses. She listened to the trickle.

“If you don’t like it…”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Then?”

Spit dripped on her nipple. She lay still. He stopped and sighed.

The watery rice was bubbling, dirt floating in the foam on top. She pushed his thighs away and swung her legs to the floor. “I have to finish 38

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cooking.”

He watched her from the bed, chewing betel nut with his mouth open. When her grandmother hobbled in, asking if dinner was ready or if she would have to cook it herself, he smoothed his vest over his dark belly and left. He walked with long strides, passing by children in dresses that hung open, men screaming at their mothers, the sour smell of liquor brewed from jaggery. At home he lay on a thin mattress, feeling the anxiety of giving seep into his jaws again. She had lain still with her sari hiked up to her knees, the necklace growing hot in her palm, aloof to his hungry body. He should have clasped the necklace tenderly at her throat. She would have liked that.

After a plate of rice and eggplant, the grandmother lay down, complaining of a pain in her legs that, she said, would finally kill her.

She sat by the old woman and pressed her calves, trying to soothe both of them. Her own fingers tingled with knowing. Her eyes ached.

In the morning she took a bucket to the borehole and waited in line for two hours. She would have to tell him, she thought, because there was no other way to begin returning it. With straining arms she carried the bucket back, spilling water on the ground as she went. Her grandmother was sitting on the bed, shaking her head at some private discontent. They did not speak.

He would return from the garage at six, his fingers stained black and smelling of diesel. She slipped the necklace under her blouse and left at five-thirty. At the edge of the houses, where the main street curved, she waited, watching people shake themselves free of crowded buses, their hair sticking up and their clothes pulled sideways. The necklace could belong to any of them. A woman’s shoe slipped off a foot, and the bus roared away

with it. It could be hers.

But the police station was not far. They could stand before a potbellied policeman and say they had found it by the sewer. In a few days the surprised woman might even send them a reward—something small and glad.

Or maybe the policeman would interrupt them to ask his dozing colleague at the next desk if the chai boy needed an invitation these days, and they would stand with sweating armpits under a wheezing fan. They would look around at heaps of folders succumbing to termites until he turned to them again. “So?” he would say smilingly, burping up his egg curry from lunch, “No, you tell me, what am I supposed to do?” Then he would drag a folder onto his desk with a thump, lick his finger to turn the pages, and tell them to go home.

Everybody would hear. The necklace would be bunched in her cold hand, and she would feel her pulse in strange places like her ankle. They would be humiliated in the room, more humiliated than the thin boy drooling blood in the corner.

He would not talk to her until she began to watch the doorway every evening and sit awake for another hour, hoping. He had closed his mind and listened to the hard fall of his heels on the potholed road, had seen the glittering necklace that she would wear because she had never worn, even held, gold. He felt dizzy with fear. The sun was too white.

The light turned grey, then black. When headlights began to swoop across her face, she stopped picking her nose.

The gold meant something because her hand had been opened, ring finger first. He had let it slide into her palm. He did not know many ways of giving, but he had tried, with plans kept from her, or a seething in his chest one afternoon. He had given her this.

When would he come? Maybe she had missed him in the sequence of buses and the deepening evening. Her grandmother would be waiting on the raised bed with the stove underneath. She would be waiting in the dark, because her hands shook and she could not light the lamp. The neighbours would gather around a doorway, as if pausing only for a minute, but spending a whole hour by the end, talking about how thieves shoved somebody’s cousin out of the four o’clock local because he would not

give them the folded notes tied in his lungi. Then they would disperse in the nighttime lanes with armfuls of dirty plates and their children’s worn clothes (the girl’s soiled skirt tucked in the middle of the roll).

There went the woman whose husband once slapped her so hard she was deaf for a week.

The streetlight turned on. She took out the damp necklace and laid it on the back of her hand to see how it looked on her skin. Insects hit the bulb like pebbles, and a few dropped on her arm, but she tilted her hand gently, this way and that, watching each gold link catch fire in the light. It made her aging knuckles pretty, prettier than— He came striding out of the darkness and clamped a hand on the necklace. “What are you doing?”

She laughed. “Waiting for you.”

“What for? I was coming to see you. Someone could’ve picked it off your hand, standing here like this.”

They turned to walk between the rows of houses crouching like a purpling bruise among the city lights. He said, “Let me see you wear that.”

She said, “I can’t. The clasp is broken.”

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Untitled

Rebecca Lieberman Wooden dowel and supports, string, plastic pulleys, gun, glass jar, G.I. Joe dolls, garbage, gold ase, grating, gerbil wheel, game parts, garland, gold beads, gravel, glasses, goggles 36� x variable height 40

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Bivalence

Adam Palay

Far back before the sun made any sort of difference, and the icicles hung like knots in the light-grains that housed us, I was unafraid to take your hand, unaware of the future we unzipped like a winter coat in late March, thinking not so much I was touching you, but somehow touch, and thus entering some kind of experience. But it was remarkably just like any other object, for something with so many nerve endings.

Even your eyes, glowing in the halo the sun praises from the atmosphere in a still and timeless ring of dawnanddusk, spin through it like a pair of fading globes.

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The Concert

Matt Aucoin

Not that we love order the skeleton but o – o if outside this room it carved up such fruits, such pulp between the beats – And then the stretch of road we needed has been swallowed – still we turn, twisting our seatbelts at the neck, and point. The grey sky there is not the chaos we need to make that point and still the sun with uncanny execution acts its ancient orchestrations – “there are conductorless ensembles,” says the conductor, “that play so beautifully and yet I miss that hand and I wish–”

and do we need to wish? stamp speaking faces on a grid all blank arpeggiation, bright thoughtless precise display?

Then the sun too would have to speak clearly in a prologue to the grass on cue you’ll die over and over or else the grass did say the same at the same time or else a whistle-camera-pistol-memo flown to all: on cue you’ll live over and over and as well at your convenience die but that is not my area

In the room the numbers attend their coming colors.

The soft old man stands up.

He holds a bass clarinet.

He listens then he listens louder.

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this summer

Harvard

At Harvard Summer School, you can continue fulfilling Harvard degree requirements.

• Choose from courses on campus and abroad • Enroll in reading and research courses or premedical studies • Experience Harvard and Cambridge in the summer

44

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www.summer.harvard.edu

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ENVOY Down by the Piraeus Mark Chiusano

Plato opens his Republic with the words, “I went down to the Piraeus yesterday.” The first verb is “kataben,” from “katabaino,” meaning “I went down,” the same verb that is so prevalent in Book 11 of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus offers his blood and descends into the underworld.

The movement of Plato’s long meditation can be seen as one of descent. In many ways the Republic is Plato getting off his high horse, descending from the heavens of rationality and righteousness, rolling up his sleeves, licking his lips and preparing to do the dirty work of governance.

He is interested in the human world where people are not perfect. He is interested in practicality.

His mathematics and high geometry are meant as much for intellectual speculation as they are for the construction of catapults or the guidance of ships at sea. Plato says that the true philosopher king must go down, must use his rationality and ethics in the sordid real world.

If the trajectory of the Republic starts in the rational heavens and moves to the real world, then Book 11 of the Odyssey starts in the real world and travels down to Hades. Odysseus is looking for guidance from the dead, but once he obtains it, he busies himself chatting up the residents of this strange land. He asks his mother for family news.

He greets Achilles who wants to be told all about the exploits of his son. And everyone else crowds around Odysseus to ask after those they’ve loved and lost. When Odysseus tells us about his trip he quickly glosses over encounters with the godly dead like Minos and Orion. He rather spends entire paragraphs on the commonplace: the hovels of fathers, the airing of old arguments, old grudges concerning stolen armor. No one speaks about death, rather focusing on the banalities and joys of the living. Death is tempered by this menagerie 46

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of the living.

In Episode 6 of Ulysses, Joyce opens not with kateben but rather with, “Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself.” This is Joyce’s recreation of the Odyssean descent to Hades, and while the word kateben itself is lost the motion stays the same: we start with an image of going down, of carriage riders ducking themselves into the funereal vehicle for a ride to the cemetery.

But in this “underworld,” as before, death is only as powerful as the commonplace. During their deathly descent the men joke amongst themselves (“the sky is uncertain as a child’s bottom”). They worry about debts. Bloom notes that he is sitting on something hard, and it is making him slightly uncomfortable. This is a world of death, but it is mostly a world characterized by the worries of the living: where fathers complain about the company their sons keep, where sons observe the anniversaries of their fathers’ suicides. Death and the everyday go hand in hand, and it is through the everyday that Bloom arrives at the extraordinary.

The mutterings of a father remind Bloom of his lost son Rudy, the origins of his marriage: among the most important events in his life. In the cemetery, Bloom and his compatriots have entered Hades.

But even here—wonder of wonders—they are surrounded by the daily elements of their human world.

If the tension in literature comes from the embarkation on a journey—a journey down— then the release from that tension comes when we convince ourselves that down-here is mostly the same as up-there. Bloom sees it when he surveys the crowd-like rows of headstones (“How many! All these here once walked round Dublin”). Homer’s underworld and mortal land look strangely alike

when, down below, we see Odysseus and Ajax, childlike, failing to reconcile their differences.

But in the Republic we see this sameness most explicitly and artistically, in the closing Myth of Er. A story of the regenerative afterlife, the myth details the post-mortem travels of the good soldier Er who dies in battle but comes alive again to tell us all about the underworld. He speaks of hosts of the dead and their great journeys across rivers culminating in a wide meadow where the dead choose who they want to be reincarnated as in the next life. Should they become rich? Poor?

Powerful? Should they be a hero? Or simply reclusive and unknown? It is Plato’s belief that to make the right choice, to pick a future life that will be good and happy, one must be schooled in the ways of justice and reason. This is the ultimate carrot at the end of the string, an all-important reason to be good.

Tracing the trajectory of the Republic, the rational philosopher-king must go down from the heavens in order to school the masses in the ways of justice. Then these pupils must carry themselves

up, just as Er does at the end of the myth. After their transformation, the reincarnated travel past the River of Unheeding and up the stream of forgetfulness, elevated back to the earthly plane.

What goes down has come up. The two worlds become the same.

This is why the opening of the Republic sounds so familiar to us, from, “I went down to the Piraeus,” to, “The slave caught hold of my cloak from behind: Polemarchus wants you to wait, he said.” That’s when the philosophical conversation starts. In the lines up to it, Plato describes his descent into a real world that he can make just as holy as his rational heaven. He sees it so vividly, this world that he is so fond of, this land of human interaction and human agency: He tells us that “he went down to the Piraeus” yesterday with Glaucon, Ariston’s son. He wanted to say a prayer to the goddess, but mostly he wanted to see the parade that was coming through. Perhaps he watched the young girls tossing flowers or saw the old drunks staggering behind. He says he enjoyed himself at this admittedly frivolous entertainment, and was about to head back to Athens. Just then—a swish of a cape, a darting hand—a slave catches hold of his cloak. He bids him wait because his master wants a word.

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SPECIAL THANKS The Harvard Advocate wishes to thank the following generous individuals for their support of our activities during the 2009-2010 academic year. They have made it possible for the Advocate to remain committed to publishing the best literature and art that the Harvard campus has to offer, four times each year. The contributions of the following individuals, though, have not only supported the printing of our magazine, but have also made it possible for the Advocate to further our mission of promoting the arts on campus. Last year, our building at 21 South Street was home to a host of literary and artistic events, including visits from Richard Russo, Denis Johnson, and Robert Pinsky, to name only a few. We witnessed the revival of the Spring Dinner, which will be from here on out an annual event, produced the first Advocate DVD featuring student films, and reestablished the Advocate’s presence in the Boston-Cambridge music scene by hosting several concerts featuring local artists.

Gifts have made possible the creation our new website (www.theharvardadvocate.com) and we are dedicated to improving and expanding further our new web presence. We are implementing new features such as video hosting and online subscribing, while also expanding the depth and breadth of the back catalog of issues available for viewing online. However, digital development can be costly and, as we pursue this project of digital expansion, your contributions to The Harvard Advocate are now more valuable than ever. Please consider supporting The Harvard Advocate at any level!

All gifts to The Harvard Advocate endowment fund, a partitioned division of the Harvard University endowment, are fully tax deductible according to 501(c)(3) non-profit donation guidelines. Gifts will be acknowledged in the four issues following receipt according to the giving categories of Patron ($1000 and over), Benefactor ($500 and over), Donor ($200 and over), and Friend ($25-$199). Checks should be made out to “Harvard University” with “Harvard Advocate fund #480105” written in the memo line. Envelopes can be sealed with a kiss and mailed to 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Please email contact@ theharvardadvocate.com with questions or to discuss specific giving opportunities. Thank you for helping to support Mother Advocate.

PATRONS Anonymous BENEFACTORS Anonymous DONORS Anonymous, Peter and Tina Barnet, Bruce A. Boucher, Frances Suen FRIENDS Daphne Abel, Nancy Hannaford Greer, Jessica R. Henderson, Walt Hunter, Robert C. Johnston, Taro Kuriyama, Emery M. Younger 48

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Contributors’ Notes MATT AUCOIN is hibernating. DAN ASHWOOD ‘s father, William J. Ashwood, is eighty years old. Whoa! EMILY CHERTOFF infringes on MARK CHIUSANO’s personal space. DANA KASE , by Edward (Edouard) Lanteri; marble bust, 1902; 29 3/4 in. (755 mm) high; Given by West India Committee, 1971 ABRAM KAPLAN is back from Piraeus. JUSTIN KEENAN has crossed the threshold of what our Thriving Prosperity can accept. REBECCA LIEBERMAN is disapprovingrabbits.com.

MEGHA MAJUMDAR made up most of it. RYAN MEEHAN will believe whatever you believe. OLGA MOSKVINA is patiently setting nets for the ghosts in her machine. ADAM PALAY ‘11 is a fixed point of ~Prov(y).

MADELEINE SCHWARTZ’s nose and ears will never stop growing.

JESSICA SEQUEIRA sees centers everywhere, circumferences nowhere.