The College Hill Independent: 4 May 2012

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT VOLUME

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T HE COL L EGE HIL L INDEPEN DEN T NEWS

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WEEK IN REVIEW

MALCOLM BURNLEY, ALEX RONAN, ERICA SCHWIEGERSHAUSEN

HALE COUNTY EMMA WHITFORD

NERF

JAMIE BREW

METRO

7 LOANS 8 HOLY GHOST 1 0 CODE MALCOLM BURNLEY

GRACE DUNHAM

FROM THE EDITORS On May 1, in honor of International Workers’ Day, which commemorates the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, #occupy and related movements took to the streets. Here’s some stuff they did instead of passing out candy to their neighbors: they marched, they made a WordPress, they picketed, it rained, there was a teachin, they were late to class.

Where we’re from, though, May Day is a ritual that has nothing to do with protests. It deals with uprisings of another kind—a celebration of springtime folly.

Young girls danced around a giant pole with ribbons attached to it as some kind of pagan extravaganza, and there was a lot of candy.

The pole was, as poles, obelisks, cameras, missiles, skyscrapers, guns, and even crosses are wont to be, a gigantic phallic symbol. No word on tear-gas, though. Sex sells, but on the first of May, consumerism fucking blows.

-CAC, BAC, DVD

EPHEMERA

SARAH DENACI

INTERVIEWS

1 2 STUFFED

GILLIAN BRASSIL

FEATURES

1 4 LIBRARY HOUSE IS NOT A HOME 15 NATALIE VILLACORTA

KATE WELSH

ARTS

1 6 TRANSLATION 1 7 MICROTOPIAS NICK SHULMAN

JORDAN CARTER

OPINIONS

1 8 DUELING BANJOS

TYLER BOURGOISE, STEPHEN CARMODY

SCIENCE

2 2 PEW-KING SOMA CHEA

ABOUT MANAGING EDITORS Chris Cohen, Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer ∙ NEWS Alex Ronan, Erica Schwiegershausen, Caroline Soussloff ∙ METRO Sam Adler-Bell, Grace Dunham, Jonathan Storch ∙ FEATURES David Adler, Emily Gogolak, Ellora Vilkin, Kate Welsh ∙ ARTS Kate Van Brocklin, Jonah Wolf ∙ OPINIONS Tyler Bourgoise, Stephen Carmody ∙ INTERVIEWS Rachel Benoit ∙ SCIENCE Raillan Brooks ∙ FOOD Anna Rotman ∙ SPORTS David Scofield ∙ LITERARY Michael Mount, Scout Willis ∙ X PAGE Becca Levinson ∙ LIST Alex Corrigan, Dylan Treleven, Allie Trionfetti ∙ BLOG Christina McCausland, Dan Stump ∙ DESIGN EDITOR Mary-Evelyn Farrior ∙ DESIGN TEAM Andrew Beers, Jess Bendit, Abigail Cain, Olivia Fialkow, Jared Stern ∙ CHIEFS Annika Finne, Robert Sandler ∙ ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Diane Zhou ∙ STAFF WRITERS Sarah Denaci, Barry Elkinton, Doreen St. Félix, Taylor Kelley, Sophia Seawell ∙ STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Julieta Cárdenas, Cecilia Salama, Charis Loke ∙ SENIOR EDITORS Gillian Brassil, Malcolm Burnley, Jordan Carter, Adrian Randall, Emma Whitford MVP: Mary-Evelyn Farrior Cover Art: Annika Finne

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STAFF

LITERARY

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MICHAEL MOUNT

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT PO BOX 1930 BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE RI 02912 theindy@gmail.com twitter: maudelajoie theindy.org Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The College Hill Independent is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress. Campus Progress works to help young people–advocates, activists, journalists, artists–make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org

4 may 2012

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WEEK IN REVIEW Illustration by Becca Levinson

SYMBOLIC RECONSTRUCTION

by Caroline Soussloff

GHOST OF GADDAFI

by Malcolm Burnley

Somewhere outside Misrata, the body of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi lies buried in an unmarked grave. But 197 days after his death, he continually wreaks havoc on North African politics, haunting recent conflicts in Mali and Sierra Leone posthumously like the ghost of Hamlet.

On April 25, the six-year trial of Charles Taylor—the former Liberian President and warlord who was educated at Gaddafi’s military institute, the World Revolutionary Center—concluded at a Hague court, found guilty on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in Sierra Leone’s civil war during the ’90s. He was charged with aiding rebel atrocities like sexual slavery, rape, and with using child soldiers in exchange for blood diamonds and control of diamond-rich areas of neighboring Sierra Leone. Victims have recounted Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia mutilating them with “shortsleeves”—cutting their arms below the elbow— and “long-sleeves”—removing their hands. He became the first head of state convicted by an international court since the Nuremberg trials fifty years ago. Capital punishment is outside the Special Court’s jurisdiction, but Taylor, 64, is expected to serve 50 years to life.

According to a former prosecutor for the United Nations’ Special Court for Sierra Leone, Gaddafi’s influence permeated the trial testimony of 115 witnesses, including that of Taylor himself, who took the stand for seven months. “This was a long-term criminal conspiracy…

[Gaddafi] was the center point,” David M. Crane, the American prosecutor who first initiated the case, told TIME last year.

Libyan special forces fought on the side of murderous rebels, and Gaddafi backed their two primary leaders—Taylor and Foday Sankoh—with financial assistance during the 11 year war, which claimed 50,000 lives.

Now Gaddafi’s armaments have spilled into Mali and spawned a chaotic springtime war that has split the country in three.

On April 6, 1,000 Tuareg rebels led by a former colonel in Gaddafi’s army declared a breakaway country—the Independent State of Azawad—after seizing control of much of Northern Mali, including Gao and Timbuktu. The Tuaregs—a nomadic group indigenous to the Sahara-region—became robustly equipped with mortars and antiaircraft weaponry after enlisting as Gaddafi mercenaries during his anti-revolution campaign.

On March 22, as the Tuaregs overtook the North, a coup unfolded in the South, when members of the Malian military overthrew President Amadou Toumani Touré, citing his inept response to the Tuaregs. Throughout April, junta leaders detained Touré supporters, but a countercoup cropped up in the capital Bamako on April 30. Supporters of Touré’s government retook control of the airport and the national television station, signaling that the 7,000-member Malian army and government officials are thoroughly divided in mutiny.

After holding free-and-fair elections since 1991 and fighting with the Tuaregs for fifty years, Mali has succumbed to tripartite Civil War, incited by the Mad Dog of the Middle East.

As of Monday, One World Trade Center is once again the site of the tallest building in New York City. In the ten years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Empire State Building had reclaimed this superlative, having lost it to the Twin Towers in 1973. The Freedom Tower now surpasses 1,250 feet, the height of the Empire State Building if you disqualify its spire.

By 2013, the new skyscraper will stretch to its full height, 1,776 feet—408 feet taller than the original Twin Towers—becoming the tallest building in the United States.

Back in the heyday of American skyscraping, the WTC was only able to defend this title for one month before the Willis (née Sears) Tower in Chicago overtook it.

The database of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) lists the Burj Khalifa in Dubai as the world’s tallest completed building at 2717

feet. Willis Tower is ranked eighth, the Empire State Building eighteenth. It should be noted that whether or not to include antenna masts is a central controversy in the world of competitive skyscraping; the CTBUH numbers exclude them.

The completed Freedom Tower has a shot at second place internationally, rising above the current number two, Taiwan’s Taipei 101 (1667 feet). The media has been spinning One World Trade Center’s newfound heights as emblematic of the perseverance of American power. But it is unlikely to retain its second-place ranking for long. On the CTBUH’s list of tallest buildings under construction, five other buildings in the Middle East and Asia are projected to be taller than the Freedom Tower.

SOUTHERN COMFORT

by Alex Ronan “Great news,” said my “friends” at Ancestry. com on Sunday, “now you can grow your family tree,” referring to a project I am now involved in at the behest of my mother.

Last week she traveled with little known second cousins to Uvalde, Texas, home of ancestor and oil baron Thomas Peter Lee. (“I am under strict instructions from your grandmother not to discuss politics!” she emailed.) While there, she rode around in the back of a minivan and determined that we are, in fact, related to Robert E Lee. From Uvalde she reported “Peepa, also known as your great great grandfather, was accused of murdering his mistress’s husband,” suggesting “perhaps he had his bookkeeper act on his behalf.”

Nearly constant updates to my family tree aren’t the only thing going on at Ancestry.com. Last Wednesday, the company announced that it would acquire rival family history website Archives.com for $100 million in cash and assumed liabilities. Ancestry.com is the largest forprofit genealogy company in the world, and already owns Genealogy.com, MyFamily.

com, and LongLostPeople.com. Ancestry has 9 billion historical records. Archives has only 2 billion but recently teamed up with US National Archives to provide free access to the recently released 1940 US Census. Ancestry and Archives will maintain separate websites, and both require paid subscriptions to access most data.

Matthew Monahan, co-founder and CEO of Inflections, the tech company that owns Archives.com gushed about the recent merger. “We’ve long admired Ancestry.com’s content and technology and innovations,” Monahan told the Washington Post. As for the Ancestry team, they’re probably pleased as punch. In addition to acquiring their rival, on Wednesday the company reported firstquarter earnings of $13.5 million, a jump from the $9 million reported in the same period a year ago. Revenue increased 10 percent to $108.5 million. But not all news is good news. After researching the lineage of our family surnames, my mom reported “it looks like we are descended from left handed servants, who lived in attics, near swamps.”

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4 may 2012

FACT AND TRUTH

The Ethics of Representation from James Agee to John D’Agata

by Emma Whitford Illustration by Olivia Fialkow

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n the wake of the February publication of his book The Lifespan of a Fact, John D’Agata has been arguing that truth and fact are not synonymous. Lifespan, itself an embellished account of conversations between D’Agata and Jim Fingal, his factchecker at the Believer, details the task of sifting through (and in D’Agata’s case, defending) factual inaccuracies in a piece about a teenage boy who committed suicide in Las Vegas. Harper’s had rejected the piece in 2003. The Believer ran a version in 2010 under the title “What Happens There,” in which some factual errors had been amended, but not all. The suicide actually happened, but many details in D’Agata’s account are fictitious.

In his writing, D’Agata positions himself as an observer and interpreter of his subjects, rather than a traditional journalist.

In a transcription from Lifespan excerpted in the February Harper’s, Fingal accuses D’Agata of combining disparate events into a single descriptive moment. D’Agata replies, “What most readers will care about, I think, is the meaning that’s suggested in the confluence of these events—no matter how far apart they occurred. The facts that are being employed aren’t meant to function baldly as ‘facts.’” He sees fundamental meaning in the feelings evoked by a particular description.

The backlash against D’Agata has been considerable. Peter Canby, head of the New Yorker’s fact checking department, told the Daily Beast in March, “I think facts are just much more interesting than the inside of a writer’s head. What I think is interesting is the interaction of someone’s imagination and prejudices with the world around them.”

Canby’s criterion for nonfiction writing is that the author must exercise his creativity on a foundation of facts and quotes that he dutifully incorporates into a piece. The author contends with the facts, and is forced to make commentary.

As a critique of writerly ego, Canby’s commentary might just as easily have been directed at Fortune magazine journalist James Agee. In setting out to write an article for Fortune on his experiences living with sharecroppers in Hale County, Alabama in 1936, Agee ended up producing the epic, genre-defying 400-page artistic rumination Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee’s overwhelming preoccupation with the difficulty of his project—“this is a book only by necessity,” he wrote,“More seriously, it is an effort in human actuality”—results in a piece in which he is more invested in parsing out the challenge he has set for himself than in framing the voices of his subjects.

Ironically, Agee’s ruminations on the challenge of fair representation precede, and

distract from, the descriptions of his subjects.

By publically acknowledging his investment in stretching the truth, D’Agata has set parameters for his writing. In Lifespan, he warns his readers that his personal musings play a crucial role in the retelling. In Famous Men, Agee sets up a more ambiguous project. The length of Agee’s account, the intermingling of musings, descriptive information, and encounters, adds up to a muddy message primarily about his artistic angst.

In both D’Agata’s and Agee’s writing, form and content reveal how the writer positions himself in relation to his subjects.

For these writers, human subjects are incorporated into a grand scheme—whether it is to convey a truth independent of facts or to use human subjects to pick at the difficulty of representing reality. In journalism, fact reigns supreme. D’Agata and Agee do not produce journalistic work.

Instead, they observe and reflect. Neither writer deems himself particularly beholden to the voices of his subjects.

D’Agata incorporated the Las Vegas piece into his 2010 book About a Mountain. He saw a connection between the difficulty of conveying suicide and the difficulty of comprehending the implications of the nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain. In this book, not only does he twist facts, but he also draws attention to the way human beings tend to twist them in the face of extreme circumstances. Both tactics contribute to his argument that facts are ultimately futile gestures towards truth.

D’Agata justified the connection between coming to terms with suicide and nuclear waste for the Daily Beast on February 21: “Given these subjects it was not just okay but necessary to start taking liberties. I felt the subjects themselves were betraying some sort of unverifiability.” The subjects share an incomprehensibility that makes a fact-based account disappointing—it inevitably falls short.

Rather than simply report on the economic and social conditions faced by sharecroppers in Hale County, Agee became preoccupied with the impossibility of conveying reality on paper. With no consideration of word count, Agee grappled with human subjects and an environment that he deemed hopelessly complex. For example, he tackles the inscrutability of his subjects via George Gudger, one of the sharecroppers who invited the writer and photographer into his home: “George Gudger is a man, et cetera. But obviously, in the effort to tell of him…as truthfully as I can, I am limited.” Agee is confident that

he can “get a certain form of the truth about him,” the man “in his actual flesh and life,” but asserts his belief that “it will only be relative truth.”

It is not always easy to recognize what is problematic in D’Agata’s or Agee’s writing.

D’Agata acknowledges his fictions in Lifespan, but not in his essays, which read like nonfiction accounts. For his part, Agee collected private information to flush out his vivid descriptions of sharecroppers.

He presents this data in Famous Men, but deemphasizes the shady means by which he acquired it. His subjects are implicitly subordinated to a grander scheme.

Agee offers deeply personal information about the Gudger family. “In the table drawer, in this order: A delicate insect odor of pine, closed sweat cloth, and mildew. One swooning-long festal baby’s dress of the most frail muslin, embroidered with three bands of small white cotton-thread flowers.”

A fact-checker would have had a hard time tackling this passage.

For Agee, the contents of the Gudger’s drawer contribute to an accurate portrayal of life. He does not deny that he has acted without permission. In fact, he admits, “No one is at home…. It is a long while before their return. I shall move as they would trust me not to, and as I could not, were they here.” However, this admission is an afterthought in the context of many lengthy passages that are dedicated to detailed descriptions of private spaces and possessions. Agee does not criticize his own actions. It’s almost as if his statement of purpose has absolved him of any guilt.

My father, David Whitford, is also a journalist for Fortune magazine. In 2005 he spent two weeks in Greensboro, Alabama, interviewing the surviving relatives of sharecroppers who hosted Agee and Evans.

“The Greatest Story We Never Told,” my dad’s follow-up piece, accomplishes a specific task: it enforces Fortune’s connection to an American literary masterpiece. It implements standard reporting methods in order to showcase the voices of some of the individuals who were affected by the publication of Agee’s highly stylized account.

Whitford achieved what Agee was assigned to do, but sacrificed for his grander scheme.

My dad’s descriptions bear traces of utility that Agee would have scoffed at. In describing a descendant of one of Agee’s subject families: “I swore I would never do what I’m doing right now,” says Charles Burroughs. Tall and broad with a

bald pate and those familiar gray eyes.

Blue shirt, khaki pants, aviator glasses.

Thick, flat fingers, grit under the nails.

He has come reluctantly to meet me after work at a Waffle House in Tuscaloosa.

This is undeniably a carefully crafted scene.

Burroughs’s quote sets high stakes, since he admits to accepting the interview against his own better judgment. The description of his appearance, situated in a Waffle House, provides the reader with an easy-to-visualize conversation between journalist and subject.

Agee’s tendency to bury descriptive information under a more grandiose statement of purpose discourages a readership primarily interested in sharecropping conditions. Whereas my dad cuts to the chase: his readers need only understand Burroughs in relation to Agee’s visit. Grit under the nails is a utilitarian choice because it gives the character substance for the reader’s benefit. Once Burroughs is established physically, my dad can jump into the other piece of Burroughs’s history that solidifies his relevance in the context of this article: “[Burroughs is] still angry after all these years at how a writer and a photographer on assignment for this magazine moved into his house when he was just a boy, 4 years old (he remembers the day), and stayed for week.” Whitford, the dutiful journalist, is proud to show the reader that he has done his job.

Famous Men reflects Agee’s preoccupation with an artistic, noble task.

Agee was a recent Harvard graduate looking to exercise his intellect on the predominantly uneducated citizens of Hale County. His account maintains a luxurious frustration that my dad, who writes within a genre that prioritizes clarity, does not contend with.

For example, Agee writes, “Here, a house or person has only the most limited meaning through me: his true meaning is much huger. It is that he exists, in actual being, as you do and as I do, and as no character of the imagination can possibly exist.” Agee is preoccupied with abstract concepts, and the intentionally complex and unstructured style that he adopts subverts the possibility of a piece that is accessible, or even has a traceable argument.

I visited Greensboro in 2007 and again in 2010, on my dad’s initiative. While there, I volunteered for a nonprofit that built homes for poor families in Hale County. During both visits, I offered my services as an unskilled laborer on construction projects. I spent most days running errands—picking up tools, delivering building materials.

I didn’t read my dad’s article in

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preparation for either visit, much less Famous Men. However, every person I met in Greensboro had met my dad in 2005, and spoke highly of him. The fact that I was able to travel from my home in New England to an isolated rural county in Alabama, specifically because my dad had been there before me as a journalist, enamored me of his job. What inspired my visit had more to do with the experience my dad had there than with the words he produced.

This speaks to his position as a journalist primarily interested in collecting voices. His quest for truth was fact-based, his trip was short, and the conventions of interviewing aided him in making a positive impression.

While I didn’t go to Greensboro on a writing assignment, it was through writing that I eventually came to terms with an experience that was both foreign and unsettling. Initially, I came to these terms in private. I evaded the problem of audience by writing specifically for myself. Until the publication of this piece, no one from my circle of family and friends, much less from Hale County, had read my reflections.

Now that they are public, I notice some of the same tendencies in myself that are traceable through D’Agata and Agee. I don’t use quotes, and my subjects exist primarily as characters in my own coming-of-age narrative.

When I decided to write about my twoweek stay in Greensboro, I chose the framework of driving cars. Here is a memory from my time in Greensboro in 2010, an afternoon recorded a year later: Dirty white, the van had three full passengers rows and double doors in the back. The interior was filthy and splattered with white paint. I had never sat so high in a driver’s seat before. My right leg was fully extended to reach the gas pedal.

Alone in such a big vehicle, I had the nervous sensation of being watched from behind. All the way to Marion I felt like I was driving a caravan of silent, forward gazing passengers.

Unlike Agee, my writing has an explicit

focus—this is a piece about me. Agee’s focus is less clear; he doesn’t address his own central role. Instead, he implies this focus by disregarding the parameters of his Fortune assignment and mixing projects— credo statement, political message, aesthetic message—in a way that feels comfortable for him.

Agee also describes driving in Hale County, and in doing so restructures a nervewracking situation—driving an unfamiliar car over uneven terrain after dark—into one that is inexplicably under his control. He recalls an undeniably precarious moment: “You can’t afford to use brakes in this sort of material, and whatever steering you do, it must be as light-handed as possible.” Still, “your senses are translated, they pervade the car; so that you are all four wheels as sensitively as if each were a fingertip; and these feel out a safe way.” This leap of faith mirrors Agee’s approach to his subjects in Hale County. Agee follows his senses down many different descriptive paths— never imposing the rigidity of a traditional investigative style.

From the beginning of my dad’s piece, it is clear that in visiting Hale County, he is following Agee’s path. When he drives into Greensboro, it is with Agee front-and-center in his consciousness. “But Fortune has never been back, and so now I am driving south on Alabama Highway 69 from Tuscaloosa.”

He is undeniably a journalist, a humble guest, standing at the crossroads of cautious outsider and informed reporter. He has done his research.

My dad’s piece concludes with an account of his conversation with the great grandson of one of Agee’s sharecroppers. His name is Phil Burrows, and he sits on his front porch with his wife and two sons, both seniors at Hale County High. The placement of this scene is strategic—it showcases the voice of a Famous Men descendant who is articulate when it comes to assessing his family’s legacy: “How would you feel if somebody

cast your folks, your parents, or your grandparents in that [negative] light?”

The conclusion I composed for my Hale County reflections is introspective, rather than political. I describe delivering lunch in the twelve-seat van to County Jail inmates gutting a house. Swift walked me back to the van and opened the door, stepping aside while I pushed the key into the ignition.

Then he slammed the door and motioned for me to roll down the window. He reached his hand in and pulled lightly at the loose hair at the nape of my neck. Then he said, “I appreciate you.” In retrospect, I’m writing about the moments that made me proud. The initial privacy of my writing is essential because my documentation of positive experiences might not translate to an audience. A reader might interpret the vignette as an attempt to paint myself as a selfless volunteer. In reality, this writing should only serve as a reminder to myself that I am capable of rising to challenges. Maybe, in drawing attention to these shortcomings, I’m absolving myself.

When Agee addresses journalism in Famous Men, it almost sounds like he is admonishing a criminal. He insists, “Who, what, where, when and why (or how) is the primal cliché and complacency of journalism.” To accept the parameters of journalistic writing is to accept trite facts and quotes as satisfactory. According to Agee, these questions disregard a majority of the information and insight to be gleaned from engagement with one’s subject. An account that purports to focus on facts undervalues its subject. D’Agata would agree. For him, adherence to fact stands in the way of a narrative that evokes the truth—a truth that lies in the emotional response to a subject.

However, Agee’s ideal is impossible. When he drafted Famous Men, contemporary theory posited that a photograph was the truest, most objective method of capturing life. Agee explains in the opening passage of the book, “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs;

the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth.” If the goal is to convey life, writing falls far short. Agee’s decision to offer these specific alternatives— photographs, cloth, cotton, clay—is itself a stylistic, selective decision.

Yet Agee defends his impossible task.

Over and over throughout the book he expresses his desire to present Hale County sharecroppers as human beings with inherent worth. He gets so wrapped up in describing the complexity of this project, and adopting a complex form to reflect it, that his subjects become secondary. In the opening pages of Famous Men he admits, “I might say… that I am only human.” Agee doesn’t think he’s going to find an ideal form of representation, but this realization doesn’t make him any less invested in the project.

D’Agata addresses the same problem as Agee. But instead of dwelling on a paradox, he intentionally destabilizes his journalistic reliability. In Lifespan, Fingal asks D’Agata to verify that a rumor had circulated about a kink in the Hoover Dam. D’Agata claims to have heard the rumor on a tour bus, and Fingal asks for the name of the bus company so that he can make an inquiry. D’Agata responds, “No, I don’t remember... Sorry, readers are going to have to feel factually unfulfilled here.”

EMMA WHITFORD B’12 is absolving herself, but is not absolved.

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4 may 2012

NERFWAR Urban Taggers v. the Law

by Jamie Brew Illustration by Cecilia Salama

M

artyn Yang of Canberra, Australia says his blog, UrbanTaggers, as “dedicated to all things to do with toy blasters, be it foam, water, infra-red.. and maybe the odd spitball or marshmallow launcher :)” His posts range from reviews of new blasters from Nerf and other manufacturers to photos from Toy Fair 2012 and commentary on photos of Joe Biden playing with super-soakers. The third Google result for “Nerf blog,” UrbanTaggers maintains a sense of humor appropriate when talking about toy guns. Yang often punctuates his sentences with smiley faces instead of periods or exclamation marks. He writes that the blog “is about keeping the inner child in us alive.”

The website is part of a whole online culture devoted to toy guns that analyzes and celebrates the current crop of blasters while it anticipates the next. A promotional video for the N-Strike Elite on Nerf ’s YouTube account opens with a heavily backlit shot of the gun looming up out of dry ice mist, accompanied by ominous, droning strings­—which are abruptly replaced by power guitar riffs as the mist vanishes and the camera orbits the blaster, showing off its Rapid Slam-Fire Action, 25 Elite Darts and Tactical Rail. The video has accumulated 27,321 views since it was posted on April 11, while a related, fan-produced video “Speculation on the Nerf Elite Series” has been viewed 3,723 times.

On March 15, Nerf ’s parent company Hasbro sent an email to Yang to offer him some free Nerf Pinpoint Sights as giveaway prizes for his blog. Yang happily agreed and thanked Hasbro: “The Pinpoint sight IS one of the most sought—after accessories so offering some to us as a giveaway would be

fantastic.” Yang asked if there was anything he could do to help promote. The Hasbro advertisers responded that they would just need his mailing address.

The pinpoint sights had not arrived six days later when Yang received, by snail mail, a letter from international law firm Baker & McKenzie, acting on behalf of Hasbro, asking that he take down his review of Nerf ’s yet-to-be-released “N-Strike Elite Rampage Blaster” on the grounds that the review included a publicity photo that had not yet been released. Yang, who had acquired the photo of the futuristic, blue-orange gun from the Chinese eBay equivalent Taobao, complied. However, he declined the lawyers’ additional request that he also turn over the “name, address, email and IP address” of his source for the photo, noting that even if he had the relevant information, “recent amendments to the Australian Evidence Act introduced express protections for journalists and their sources.”

Soon afterwards, Yang received another email from Hasbro PR, this time claiming, with uncanny specificity reminiscent of an e-mail phishing scam, that “I have ordered 11 pin point sights for you. Can you please supply a delivery address?” When Yang asked the lawyers at Baker & McKenzie about Hasbro’s redundant request for his mailing address, representative Robert Arnold said that the advertisers’ continuing requests “have nothing to do with me. I can only assume that Hasbro really does want to send you some stuff.” The lawyers continued to ask Yang for information about his sources for unreleased guns.

Three weeks later, Yang returned home on a Sunday afternoon to find two Baker & McKenzie-hired investigators with tape

recorders who, as alarmed neighbors would later tell Yang, had been “hanging around all day waiting.” Again they asked for Yang’s source, and again he refused. Unable to escape this labyrinth of lawyers and Nerf advertisers, Yang finally threw up his hands and sent an email to the lawyers asking that they leave him alone and consider themselves “lucky no one called the police.”

Yang’s story has since received considerable online media attention, arguably becoming the latest instance of the “Streisand effect,” a term coined in 2003 after Barbara Streisand’s attempt to suppress photos of her California house led to unexpected publicity over the very fact that she was trying to suppress them. Most coverage has tended to emphasize Hasbro’s corporate heartlessness (headlines include “Hasbro Guns Down Fan” and “Hasbro Are Total Dicks”), though some have pointed out that Sunday afternoon lawyer visits are actually pretty much par for the course in legal investigation, at least in Australia. “The bigger question,”said Brown University Professor of Sociology Mark Suchman in an email to the Independent, “is whether the meme [a picture of a crying baby with the caption: “Hasbro promised freebies… sent lawyers instead”] takes off in a way that tarnishes Hasbro’s reputation.”

Indeed, despite Yang’s clarification that he has not urged any kind of boycott, Hasbro boycotts are a popular conversation topic among commenters on articles about the UrbanTaggers story. However, no coherent boycott group has emerged yet, certainly none as formidable as the 2010 Christian-driven boycott of Hasbro for producing Ouija boards, which recruited 983 supporters on BoycottOwl.com before its

originator chose to discontinue it when the BoycottOwl web page began to display ads for Hasbro.

Public backlash does not seem to have grown enough to alarm Hasbro just yet— asked for comment, an employee at Hasbro’s Rhode Island headquarters said she was unaware of UrbanTaggers’ existence. But at least for those who commented on Yang’s story, Hasbro’s culpability depends largely on whether or not its PR team intentionally tricked Yang into giving up his address so that the law firm could send him letters and lawyers. Hasbro issued a statement on April 25 saying that their advertisers and the Baker & McKenzie reps had contacted Yang independently, albeit with remarkably poor timing. The marketing team’s emails, the statement read, were “completely unrelated to the confidential global investigation being conducted on Hasbro’s behalf by independent investigators.”

In a post to the UrbanTaggers Facebook group, Yang said that he accepted this explanation and that he viewed the whole saga as “a horrible case of poor internal communication among all the parties concerned.” Yang has still not received any pinpoint sights.

JAMIE BREW B’12 is an elite rampage blaster.

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RATE HIKES

A Conversation with US Congressman David Cicilline

by Malcolm Burnley Illustration by Annika Finne

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s the most recent member of the club with massive amounts of student debt, I’ll go first,” Shawn Patterson, a senior at Brown University, opened the forum at Rhode Island College hosted by US Congressman David Cicilline (D-RI). Cicilline named the May 1 event “A call to action on student loans,” and gathered testimony from students, parents, administrators, and business leaders about the ramifications of the doubling of Stafford loan rates. Seven million current and former students will incur $6.3 billion more in repayment costs, effective July 1, unless Congress acts.

“I just completed my exit forms and I’ve discovered I have $25,000 in subsidized Stafford loans,” Patterson said, which is the federal maximum allowed to a student who is still a dependent of parents. If the interest rate doubles this summer, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, he estimates needing an additional $850 per month for graduate school. And for Patterson, whose father was recently bought out by General Motors and had to take a job in Missouri to pay loans at the current rate, it’d be crippling. “When your parents are living pay check to pay check, that additional $850 breaks the bank on a monthly bill,” he said.

President Obama and both parties of Congress have shown willingness to prevent the rate hike, but there’s ideological gridlock over how to offset the costs. Cicilline cosponsored two bills, each preventing the increase, paid for by ending subsidies for the five largest oil companies or by closing tax loopholes for S-corporations (untaxed corporations that instead pass incomes down to shareholders who are then taxed). But last Friday, before either Democratic bill was voted on, House Republicans passed their own legislation restoring the low rates, which Obama has promised to veto. The Republican plan will pay for student loans through repealing the Prevention and Public Health Fund, a $15 billion part of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. “They’re saying, ‘OK, we’ll prevent student loans from increasing, as long as you’re willing to gut prevention for women and children,’” Cicilline said. “And it’s wrong.

This is the sort of political gamesmanship that makes people so cynical about government.” The Independent spoke with Congressman Cicilline for more context.

Independent: If Stafford student loan rates increase from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on July 1, without preventative legislation, the effect on future students seems certain. But what will be the effect on currently enrolled students and recent graduates?

David Cicilline: If Congress fails to act, the new interest rate applies to all new loan disbursements after July 1st—impacting one in three college students—more than 43,000

from Rhode Island. Each year students have to “re-apply” because Federal Stafford loans do not automatically renew. So, many currently enrolled and future enrollees are going to be impacted.

Indy: You’ve criticized your colleagues across the aisle for being obstructionists. But they did introduce, and pass—215 to 195— legislation that would prevent the student loan increase, an issue you’ve supported.

Why did they do so?

DC: It was only after they were backed into a corner that the House Republicans proposed to extend low-interest student loans by repealing the Prevention and Public Health Fund—a program included in the healthcare reform law that directs investments in prevention services and public health programs including vaccinations for underserved children and adults, detection and containment of disease outbreaks, public health workforce development, and the prevention of chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes. Because Democrats and the President have called attention to this issue and are fighting to protect students, Republicans are just playing politics with the issue—putting forward a proposal they know the President and Democrats will not support instead of working in a bipartisan fashion to find a solution.

Indy: Why is the Democrats plan to cover the $6 billion cost of keeping the current rate a better solution?

DC: Extending student loans shouldn’t be a partisan issue—Democrats have put forward a plan that would repeal tax subsidy giveaways to Big Oil in order to pay for this program. With so many families across Rhode Island hurting right now, I think a more appropriate financial offset is ending unnecessary tax subsidies to the largest oil companies, rather than undermining public health programs and asking working families to foot the bill.

Indy: What was your own experience with student loans?

DC: I took out loans to put myself through law school. And it took a long time to pay them off (laughing).

Indy: Were student loans as prevalent in the Stone Age? DC: It depended on what school you went to. Pell Grants for some kids covered a much greater percentage of college. They were supposed to make college affordable. But college costs have gone up... So I think they were prevalent, but they covered a greater share of the education costs than they do today.

Indy: Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell was the father of Pell Grants.

DC: Oh, yeah. He’s responsible for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Pell Grants. As a senator, his record was an extraordinary achievement, and he was one of America’s great voices for arts and education.

Indy: How do you feel about Pell Grants being cut in the proposed House Republican Budget, authored by Paul Ryan?

DC: I just think it’s wrong. It’s shortsighted not to understand that we’re competing in a global economy in the 21st century. We have a responsibility for the generation of students today, and frankly, for our economic well-being of the country, that we make college as affordable and accessible as possible.

If we’re going to be successful and “win the future,” as the President has said, we need to be sure that we’re providing opportunities for young people to access higher education and to afford to go to college and graduate school. Not only for the sake of our competitiveness, but for the sake of insuring we have Americans leading the way in science and research, in discovering new technologies and cures for disease, and exploring space.

Indy: Student loans have topped $1 trillion nationally—is this also a national deficit issue?

DC: There’s a cost of keeping the rate at 3.4 percent. There’s a cost because the Ryan budget contemplates the rate doubling, which generates a need for $6 billion additional dollars. But I think it’s an investment we should make. If you look at incomes people are likely to earn with a

college degree, and you consider that income taxes are paid on that, I think it’s in the long-term financial interest of our country to have as many people as possible to have the opportunity to access college. We generate more revenue on higher incomes of people who go to college. So it’s also in the selfinterest of our government to have as many people have access to higher education. In the short-term it costs money, but it’s an investment.

Indy: What can higher education do to assist students in the future? Should institutions be more open to freezing tuition costs? Or assisting with private loans?

DC: I think that, like every organization that is weathering this difficult recession, universities and colleges have to get more done with less. There are two parts of the same question—how do we ensure that higher education is affordable? One part is being sure that interest rates don’t double, and another is that colleges and universities need to be conscious that the increasing costs are imposing real challenges to families.

Indy: With student debt at record highs, over $25,000 on average per graduate, and unemployment so high for bachelor’s degree-holders, do you believe college is still a rite of passage, or part of the American Dream?

DC: It still should be for anyone who wants to go to college. College isn’t for everyone and not everyone wants to go. But what is part of the American Dream is that if you want to go to college, that you’re not denied that opportunity based on where you live or what zip code you live in, and I think that’s central to the American Dream.

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4 may 2012

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BOYS’ CLUB Resurrecting Portuguese Tradition on Trenton Street

by Grace Dunham Illustration by Robert Sandler

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he procession started around 7:30, a half-hour behind schedule. A young blonde girl walked in first, carrying a silver crown on a red velvet pillow, and an older blonde boy followed close behind with a large Portuguese flag. When they entered the Club, everyone in attendance—more than 50 people—stood up at their tables and put their hands on their hearts. When the kids were settled in at their spot at the front of the room, everyone recited a Portuguese prayer in unison. Then the feast began.

This was the third Dominga of the Holy Ghost Festival at the Portuguese Sporting Club, in Providence’s Fox Point.

The Holy Ghost Festival is a slice of folk religion by way of Portugal and, in particular, by way of the Azores, a nine-island archipelago 1,500 miles west of Lisbon in the Atlantic. The festival begins every year after Easter and lasts for seven weeks, ending on Pentecost Sunday. Every Saturday during this period there’s a Dominga—a ceremonial feast open to the public, provided for and hosted by a different family. The host family keeps a silver crown in its house during the week leading up to the Dominga, and each evening members of the community come into their home for an hour of prayer. At the end of July, there is a three-day outdoor feast where the wishful put their names into a lottery in hopes of being picked for the following year’s seven Domingas.

Holy Ghost festivals happen in Portuguese communities all over America— there are over forty organized festivals in Rhode Island alone. They’re hosted by neighborhoods and Portuguese churches, but they’re also hosted by social clubs, like the Portuguese Sporting Club. In the early 20th century, these clubs functioned as centers of solidarity, giving men a place to play cards or raising money to provide self-sustaining community welfare systems. For over 100 years, social clubs have been a staple of the Portuguese-American experience. There are fewer clubs now than there used to be, but the Sporting Club, one of the oldest, remains open every day on the corner of Trenton and Gano.

A Tuesday afternoon at the Portuguese Sporting Club: a white Cadillac stretch SUV limo parked in the empty parking lot. A few kids chasing a basketball around near the corner of Ives, while the rest of Trenton Street lays quiet. It was pretty quiet inside the Sporting Club, too. Jim Mitchell, who goes by Mitch, was, as usual, behind the wooden bar. A few men (who looked like they might have been there for a while) drank beer and ate pretzels under the fluorescent lights while an Indiana Jones film played on the television.

Three guys walked in through the side door and it was clear that they had arrived in the limo. Daniel Fernandes seemed to be in charge. He wore a turquoise shirt and a white jacket. A brown feather poked up from his white fedora. When he saw me at the bar—noticeably out of place—he asked me if I’d like to marry him. He offered to take me anywhere I’d like to go in his limo.

All three are career longshoremen— as Mitch tells me, “real hotshots.” After decades in the union, they make as much as a hundred dollars an hour. They rented the limo for the evening and were looking to have a good time. They were thinking about heading up to Boston, but, for the moment, they were drinking at the Sporting Club as they often do. Soon, Mitch approached Daniel Fernandes and told him that he was looking to get a swordfish. Fernandes nodded. Mitch tossed a twenty at him and Fernandes tossed it back. “These guys won’t ever take my money,” Mitch told me afterwards. “You need anything, go to them. They know everyone. They throw a Christmas party, buy the bar out, fill the place with food, invite everyone they know.

Hearts of gold. They keep this club going.”

The Sporting Club is a non-profit organization, run by a board of directors with an elected president and owned in equal shares by its 160 members. The fact that it’s tax-exempt helps it stay open, but it still doesn’t make much money—beers cost far less than they do at other bars in

Providence and, even so, Mitch likes to give them away for free. It can get crowded on weekdays, around five o’clock, when men— especially longshoremen—get off work.

Friday nights are popular for dinner, but few people wander into the club who aren’t members or regular patrons, even though it’s open to the public. The club is kept afloat by a loyal group of men, like Daniel Fernandes, who see the Sporting Club as home.

The Club was founded by a similarly loyal group of men in the early years of the Great Depression. Before the club was official, its founders gathered in the back of Silvestre Cardono’s Ives Street barbershop every Friday night. After their shaves, they played dominos and cards, and—according to the framed charter in the current Club’s basement—“reminisced about the good old days in the motherland.” Soon, the group decided it wanted to start a soccer team. In March of 1934, a charter was approved by Rhode Island. The group called itself the Portuguese Sporting Club after Sporting Clube de Portugal, one of Portugal’s three biggest soccer teams. By June, the Club had 214 members, a building at 107 Ives, and its own playing field in East Providence.

After the prayer ended at the Third Dominga, the waitresses brought out the centerpiece of the meal: the symbolic Holy

Ghost soup, made with cabbage, beef, and linguica sausage, in a white-wine broth, poured over pieces of day-old bread. Five waitresses, all in red shorts and red and white striped shirts, brought the soup out in large metal bowls and quickly replaced them as soon as the broth started to reach the bottom. They moved quickly through the dining room, dropping plastic pitchers of red wine off at each long fold-up table.

After the soup came the meat—big platters of it, chunks of beef and pink sausage piled atop potatoes. The first platters finished, the waitresses brought out seconds. By that point, adults had traded seats and kids had abandoned them altogether. Then the auction started: potted plants, espresso makers, bottles of expensive liquor. Two men in suits stood in the middle of the room holding up the goods and shouting out Portuguese numbers over the music. After the auction was a raffle—the waitresses had handed out strips of pink tickets with the salad—and after the raffle there was dancing.

The Holy Ghost Festival has something to do with Queen Isabel and bread, which explains the crown and the symbolic soup.

Nobody seems to agree on exactly what the story is, but it dates back to the fourteenth

the college hill independent

century, when Portugal was ruled by Queen Isabel, famed for her charity. Some say that every Pentecost Sunday she would choose a peasant girl, give her a crown, and let her preside over the blessings of bread, meat, and wine to be handed out to the poor. Others say that she would ride through the streets tossing bread to the hungry. Manuel Limos, who used to head the Club’s Holy Ghost planning committee, tells a story with a miracle: “The king was a miserable bastard in Portugal, the Queen was a sweetheart, and she used to put it in her apron and give it to the peasants outside the castle. One day the bastard King says to the Queen, what do you have there? She tells him she’s got flowers… and then, she opened up her apron, and there were flowers! There was a miracle or something like that and this time there happened to be flowers. She was in for an ass-kicking if she had bread in her apron.”

Sitting around a table in the Club dining room on a Friday night, Manuel Limos, who goes by Manny, his brother Mario, and their friend Daniel Joseph, who goes by Junie, told me their take on the evolution of the Club. They made it clear that they are the bearers of its history. Manny pointed to the

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photographs of past Club presidents that hang on the walls, repeating, “They know… they know…A lot of the old-timers are dead, but they’re the ones who know.”

Manny and Mario come from Faial, in the Azores. In 1957 a volcano erupted and covered Faial in car-sized boulders and ash.

“The ground was shaking for days,” said Manny. “We slept in the middle of an open field.” After the eruption, Senators John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and John O. Pastore of Rhode Island passed a relief act allowing 1,500 families from Faial to enter the states. That’s when Manny and Joe came to Providence.

Even in the sixties, their lives were defined by their Portuguese heritage. Manny worked at a textile factory next to Rhode Island Hospital, since demolished, and in his 100-person department there was only one person who didn’t speak Portuguese, a woman named Dotty Wright. It wasn’t just Manny’s job: American Slater Wire, Imperial Knife, and Davol Rubber were all “Portuguese through and through,” Manny told me. “If you didn’t like a job, you went down to another street and there’d be a factory there that would take you.” Junie once had 12 factory jobs in one year, if only because he wasn’t particularly satisfied with

any of them.

The men who worked at these factories lived in the same places and frequented the same clubs. And so when factories all over Rhode Island and the rest of industrial New England started closing, the social fabric of the Portuguese communities inevitably changed. Manny’s factory shut down in 1982, and Mario’s factory shut down soon after. Manny tried living in Pennsylvania, Mario in California. Eventually they came back to Rhode Island, opening a small copy center in East Providence. Their members no longer bounded by shared labor or even language, clubs became more luxury than necessity. The older generation was dying.

The younger generation was losing interest.

Membership dwindled. Dozens of clubs either closed or went bankrupt. In the face of deindustrialization and the related process of assimilation, the Sporting Club and others like it faced a kind of crisis.

Manny Limos revamped the Sporting Club’s Holy Ghost Festival 12 years ago in search of a renaissance. The Holy Ghost Festival offered a way of maintaining—even recreating—community through heritagebased family fun. If the Club had always been a place for men—“a place for card playing, drinking, and staying up until the wee hours of the morning,” as Manny puts it—the Festival brought in a new crowd. At the planning meetings, men brought their wives and sometimes even their daughters.

Junie and his wife were picked in the Holy Ghost lottery last summer. They will host the fourth Dominga on May 5, paying for the food and drinks and getting reimbursed by whatever money is made back in the auction. “I guess it’s the kind of thing you have to do once in your life,” he said.

“You have to keep the Portuguese tradition alive… If you let it get away so far, you won’t ever get it back.”

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After the auction and raffle, the organization of the feast started to devolve: Manny sat in a chair against the wall flipping through a big wad of cash, kids ran around with plates of rice pudding, few people remained in their seats. At that point, Sabrina Bolarinho, a 12 year-old from East Providence, told me it was time to get desert and dance.

Her mother, a DJ named Sedonia, played Portuguese pop over the speaker system. A large group of people had already moved to the dance floor.

Before the procession had even started, Sabrina made it her job to look out for me.

She’s a singer and a traditional Portuguese dancer. She traveled to Portugal with her dance team last year, and when she got back she was named Miss Portugal at the Cranston Portuguese club, the largest club in Rhode Island. Introducing herself to me at the bar, she said, “I’m the last Dominga.”

Her parents entered her name into the lottery. Sabrina jumped up and down when she won. They’ll pay, but the final feast will be held in her honor.

A few days later, in the late afternoon, the Club was empty except for Mitch and me. He let me go down to the basement, the club’s memory bank, lined with trophies and photographs: blurry sepia prints of serious looking men in high-collared shirts and suspenders; the board of directors, all sideburns and wide lapels, gathered around a Rhode Island Senator; men in short-shorts (and Tom Selleck mustaches) all holding soccer balls; portraits of past presidents, in black and white and color.

GRACE DUNHAM B’14 would like to marry you.

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4 may 2012

CODES OF OUR FATHERS Deciphering Roger Williams’s Shorthand

by Sarah Denaci Illustration by Cecilia Salama

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n 1817, a book was donated to Brown University’s John Carter Brown Library.

Either because it never had a title page or because it has been destroyed by age, the exact title, author, and year of publication of the book itself are still unknown. The “PREFACE by the author To A Certain Person of Judicious Quality” is followed by a treatise entitled “An Essay Towards the Reconciliation of Differences Among Christians,” a dull tract which uses scriptural evidence to justify the Reformation and its aftermath.

Far more interesting than the book itself are the handwritten marginalia filling literally every inch of unprinted space. At first glance, they almost look like Roman or Arabic characters that are slightly out of focus. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that the characters are neither—they are more geometric than either of these alphabets—and some seem to be crude drawings of ships or planets. Parts of sentences are written in English, and most of the symbols are repeated. The book came attached with a note from its donor, an equally mysterious T. Tweedy, attributing the encoded shorthand marginalia covering every page to Rhode Island’s radical preacher-founder, Roger Williams.

Although the library has had the book for almost two hundred years, there wasn’t much interest in the book or the code until last spring, when the 350th anniversary of Rhode Island sparked a renewed interest in Roger Williams. A library staff member remembered the existence of the book and set about trying to find someone who could crack the cipher. The math professors whom the library contacted were largely uninterested in what seemed to be more of an esoteric historical problem than a conceptual mathematic one. The library then contacted the Brown Daily Herald and asked it to run a piece on the book and its strange shorthand, hoping that it would pique the interest of a student. Lucas Mason-Brown, a Brown University junior concentrating in mathematics, read the article and decided to try to his hand at deciphering it.

Judging from the liberal use of longhand and pictograms, Mason-Brown decided that the cipher would require something more intuitive than the complex mathematics required to break most modern ciphers. Using only a pencil and a notebook, he first tested to see if the shorthand

was a substitution cipher. In a classic substitution cipher, each letter is replaced by a corresponding letter. Substitutions are relatively easy to decipher using frequency analysis, a technique first developed by the Arab philosopher Al-Kindi in the eighth century. In frequency analysis, the relative distribution of letters or groups of letters in the cipher is compared to the distribution of these letters in the original plaintext language: in English, for example, the letter E is the most commonly used letter, so the most commonly used letter in a simple substitution would probably code for it.

Although these ciphers are relatively easy to break, they are often used in letters and diaries because it is fairly uncommon to find anyone who cares enough about someone else’s ramblings and passions to run a frequency analysis on his or her journal. For this reason, and because it was the easiest place to start, Mason-Brown decided to start with a frequency analysis of the 28 characters. He copied the 28 geometric characters that seemed to be systematically repeated, known in cipher circles as the “core characters,” and ran a frequency analysis on them.

This yielded unsuccessful results.

Mason-Brown’s next step was to follow the trail of the uncoded longhand scattered throughout the notes. Longhand appears often in the book, at the top of the page as a kind of topic header. When Mason-Brown saw “Netherlands, Utr,” followed by a bunch of cipher, it was obvious to him that the jottings were about Utrecht, the populous Dutch city. Furthermore, because the relative distribution of characters was atypical of general English plaintext, Mason-Brown guessed that vowels must be represented implicitly, similar to the way they are in Hebrew, or the way they are in a shorthand popularized by John Willis’s 1602 book The Art of Stenographie. He turned out to be right.

Williams’s method of representing vowels, which Mason-Brown describes as the “clock mechanism,” is tri-fold. If a vowel is at the beginning of a word, it is represented by a substitution of its corresponding core character. If it is in the middle of a word, it is represented implicitly by the next consonant’s position relative to the previous one. The letter A’s position is in the bottom left-hand corner of a consonant, E’s is on the middle of the lefthand side, and so on. For example, Williams would represent the word “bat” by writing a large character which stands for B with a small

character which represents T in the implicit A position—the bottom left corner of the B symbol. Williams represents vowels that come at the end of words with a dot in the appropriate vowel position.

Williams omits more than just vowels; often entire syllables are left out. Florian Coulmas observes of consonant-based writing systems in his book Writing Systems of the World, that “cnsnt scrpts r nt s dffclt t rd s n mght thnk.” Of course, what you have just read is in typeset, not faded, messy handwriting, and all Coulmas omitted were the vowels—not entire syllables or parts of words the way Williams would for fouror five-page stretches. Words abbreviated in this way are commonly known as “defectives.” Many of Wiliams’s defectives are cartoons or pictograms: friendship is depicted by a longhand F followed by a crude drawing of a ship, and “around the world” is depicted by a dot with a circle around it—not unlike a boob drawn by a sixth grader. These fanciful aberrations are what make the translation most difficult. “In modern codes, decoding is the hardest part, and the translation is easy,” says MasonBrown, “but this code is the opposite: he gets lazy at times, and he has really bad handwriting.”

A code this unsystematized was not primarily intended or used as a way to communicate classified information, or even to hide it forever. The code was not intended to be totally impenetrable: other more secure codes were known, such as the Vigenere cipher, which, although widely used for secret government correspondence (each iteration relies on a keyword system, so multiple governments can use different versions without being able to decipher the others’), wasn’t broken until the nineteenth century. Furthermore, John Willis’s shorthand system, on which the code is based, was the most popular system of the hundreds circulating in England at the time. And although the history of codes is filled with things like Mary Queen of Scots hiding coded letters in a beer barrel and Chinese spies swallowing scrunched balls of waxed silk, as far as we know, Williams didn’t go to great lengths to hide the book itself. Which is to say, judging from Williams’s relative laziness in hiding and encoding his work, although we can never be sure, he probably did not write in a cipher because he was an undercover agent or an Illuminati saboteur. So why did he use such a system?

Certainly part of the reason is that shorthand saves space. Mason-Brown estimates that the notes would be four or five times longer written in longhand.

This was especially important in a society where the cost of paper was relatively high, and there was an ever-increasing demand for paper and writing among the rapidly increasing professional class of attorneys, clerks, and accountants. Furthermore, the use of shorthand for marginal notes and for copying out whole works or speeches rapidly gained popularity in the early 17th century. Sermons, to the great irritation of many preachers, were often copied down in shorthand and sold by independent print shops without any compensation to the original authors, who were unable to sue due to lack of copyright laws. In her book Shakespeare in Shorthand, Kenyon College professor Adele Davidson argues that the textual inconsistencies among the various editions of King Lear arise not from faulty memorial reconstruction, as many scholars have previously argued, but from misinterpretations of shorthand bootlegs written down by audience members.

Davidson argues that shorthand should be seen as a kind of proto tape or video recorder that democratized access to information by allowing people to write about events in real time. By the mid-seventeenth century, the practice was so widespread that the Czech scholar, Jan Comenius, marveled at the “common people” who copied down sermons and speeches, and Sir Ralph Vernay, a parliamentarian who fled England during the Civil War before coming back and joining the Restoration government, expressed amazement at the “multitudes of women” doing the same.

Plus, as Mason-Brown notes, Roger Williams “probably wouldn’t have used it if it didn’t save him some time.” Before Williams’s American adventures—getting banished in 1635 after being convicted of “sedition and heresy,” moving in with a Narragansett tribe, and founding the beautiful settlement of Providence, —he apprenticed with a the London jurist, Sir Edward Coke. It was here he learned Willis’s method of shorthand, adapting it to his own style so that he could write quickly and from memory without having to translate from plaintext into shorthand.

Willis endorsed freedom and flexibility in shorthand, suggesting in his book that each user adapt the system to his own purposes for enhanced speed and secrecy. John Locke suggests shorthand “both for dispatch in

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the college hill independent

what men write for their own memory, and concealment of what they would not have lie open to every eye.” Indeed, Samuel Pepys, a British naval administrator and Parliament member whose famous Diary is now one of the key primary source documents of the Restoration, wrote the work in his own cipher shorthand for speed, secrecy, and what he called a “racy spontaneity.”

Because Williams’s cipher was primarily for personal use, the pictograms vary, the abbreviations are unstable, and the handwriting is often quite hard to read.

Certain abbreviations are consistently used across the marginalia. Furthermore, the Rhode Island Historical society granted Mason-Brown access to some of Williams’s personal letters in order to corroborate his handwriting. Not only did Mason-Brown ascertain that the handwriting was a match he also found examples of Williams’s shorthand at the bottom of one of these letters.

The content of the first part of the mystery book’s marginalia is not especially mindblowing—it’s an almost verbatim copy of popular preacher and polemicist Peter Heylyn’s 1652 work, Cosmographie in Four Bookes. Cosmographies were a popular genre at the time, combining occult mysticism, alchemy, history, and geography in an attempt to describe the entirety of the world in a single work. Heylyn’s was one of the first English-language cosmographies and was among the first books to ever mention Australia or California. The book ends with a section on “Terra Incognita,” which begins

in Australia and ends with a description of a fairyland utopia. Mason-Brown says that Williams copied down the entirety of the book, but he can’t quite account for why. Part of the reason could be that Heylyn was a lecturer at Cambridge while Williams was a student or that Heylyn was an outspoken loyalist like Williams himself.

The publication date of this book coincides with Williams’s second and last trip back to England from 1651-54, and suggests a reason for why he copied whole sections of it: he didn’t want to lug “Four Bookes” all the way back to the New World. Heylyn’s book was quite popular and mainstream in his England, but the focus on mythical lands and not-quite-Puritan mysticism may have been a motivation for Williams to hide his notes from prying New England neighbor eyes. Or perhaps Williams was interested in the subject matter but was just too cheap to buy a real copy.

As you hoped, Williams’s writing has a “sexy” side. As Mason-Brown puts it, “some of the stuff at the end is pretty racy,” dealing with human physiology and reproduction, with a particular emphasis on sexual dysfunction. Mason-Brown believes them to be notes from some text which he has not yet identified. The last twenty pages of notes are filled with sentences like: “But Eunuchs are also lustful. They are great lovers of women.” There are also references to sperm, abortions, and—this last category is particularly noteworthy because many believe that Roger Williams was one— hermaphrodites. Furthermore, there are fifty pages of margin notes in the middle of the book that Mason-Brown believes to be

original Roger Williams writing, but which he has not yet deciphered.

Willis, citing the Italian cryptologist Baptista Della Porta, suggests that the cryptanalyst know as many languages as possible. Mason-Brown’s next project, Roger Williams’s marginalia in the leaves of the Elliot Indian Bible, makes the logic behind this suggestion clear. The Elliot Bible was the first to be published in the New World and was the first book ever to be published in Algonquin, which had been an exclusively spoken language until the Reverend John Elliot adapted it to text as part of his missionary attempt to convert the Algonquin tribe. The marginalia in this book is written in a mix of English longhand, Algonquin longhand, English shorthand, and Algonquin shorthand. When I asked Mason-Brown how he was going to deal with this, he dryly replied that he would probably have to learn some Algonquin.

Considering that Williams thought the Algonquins were one of the lost tribes of Israel and that they needed to be converted before the second coming of Christ, this could reveal something very strange and interesting.

But what if it doesn’t? There is an expectation that cracking a cipher will reveal something new and secret, something sexy and nefarious. Spies and governments send messages in code. Books, movies, and television are filled with stories of plots unraveled by the cracking of a code or cipher.

Just last week on Gossip Girl, Blair cracked a cipher which revealed that Nate’s boss/ lover was actually Chuck’s mother who ran a high-class prostitution ring and at the last

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second wasn’t Chuck’s mother after all. Or something (it was very confusing). Codes, secrets, and plots capture our collective imagination in a way that few other things do. Having cracked Williams’s shorthand, it seems that the next step is understanding Williams’s reasoning for making it, and it seems so . . . disappointing to attribute it solely to concerns of time, space, expense, or convenience. But what if it was only that? So far, the weirdest thing in Roger Williams’s code is his interest in sexual dysfunction, which actually isn’t actually that weird—I’m pretty sure that everyone is interested in that. What if Roger Williams wasn’t trying to hide anything? What if the secret twist is that there is no secret twist? Why are we always trying to find one?

SARAH DENACI B’12 lv d edg prwkhuixfnhu.

skin & bones

A Conversation with Taxidermist Becca Barnet Interview and Illustrations by Gillian Brassil

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ecca Barnet is an artist, museum exhibit maker, and taxidermist currently based in Charleston. The Independent spoke to her on the phone this week while watching two rats play with each other in a Chinatown park.

Independent: How did you first get into taxidermy?

Becca Barnet: I went to RISD from 2005 to 2009—I have a BFA in illustration. In illustration, you can kind of make your own curriculum in a way; you can choose what avenues you want to go down and what subject material you want to do. I basically started collecting images and video and drawings and things that excited me, and then my goal was to try to figure out why those things excited me, like what about those things really pushed my buttons. One of the things was taxidermy.

Indy: What were some of the other things that interested you at the time?

BB: I was looking at medical illustrations a lot. I love the fact that people in the 1500s only had these corpses for a few days before they rotted, and they were trying to quickly describe them through drawings and then make an etching that would be really laborious and take forever and ever.

I was looking at anatomical wax studies; I was looking at historic preservation: people preserving houses, people fixing things and keeping things from basically biodegrading.

X-rays. Photographs. Tintypes and spirit photography—you know, photos of things that didn’t ever really exist, but they kind of forced it to exist. I like that a lot too.

Indy: At what point did you decide you actually wanted to work with animal materials?

BB: Taxidermy had always kind of fascinated me and I was always really interested in it, and then as a junior, I took a class with 3D puppet-making. I made some little puppets with feathers, and I thought to myself, “How amazing would it be to be able to make more puppets and use animal skins as another medium?”

During the Wintersession of my senior year, I ended up going to the Missouri Taxidermy Institute, where I lived for a month in an RV park by myself. Every day, I walked over to the taxidermy school and spent 14-hour days with about 20 people, mostly off-duty construction workers and wives of husbands that already knew how to do taxidermy. It was very bizarre. I was definitely the only 20-something-year-old in the class. Everybody else was going to go and be a taxidermist on the side; they were going to mount their buddies’ deer, that kind of thing. And I was the only one there that wanted to do it for art, so it was a really interesting experience. Totally life-changing, totally worth it.

Indy: Could you walk me through the basic process of taxidermy?

BB: So, the modern way of taxidermy involves using polyurethane forms. They’re foam. Kind of like insulation foam that you would see on a house—not the pink stuff, but the hard, yellow kind. Companies that make forms will skin out an animal and put them in a really nice position, and then they’ll freeze the muscles of the animal.

They’ll make a mold of it, cast it in foam, and sell it as a taxidermy form.

The first thing you do when you have a dead animal is measure all the aspects of your animal—how wide it is from nose to tail, eye to eye, eye to nose, and overall length—and then you order your form.

You can choose from a variety of positions: looking left, looking right, looking up, snarling, head down. Your form usually comes a little bit wrong, because the measurements are hard to get on a dead animal. So you have to reshape it a little bit, but it generally looks like the animal.

Then you take your dead animal and remove all the skin and throw away the carcass. On the inside of the skin, there’s all this fat and blood and gross stuff that isn’t skin; it’s basically left over from the muscle.

So you have to scrape all of that away with a knife, trying to get it down to just some skin with hair on the other side. I’ve been told that really good taxidermists can get it to be paper-thin without cutting holes in it—you

want it as thin as possible, because it dries better and it looks better on your mount.

Once you’ve removed all the fat and muscle from the skin, you have two options.

You can send it to a tannery to get a dry tan, or you can do a wet tan: you put your skin in chemicals, and then you have to stir it every 30 minutes for 48 hours. When that skin comes out, it’s tanned, but it’s wet and really stretchy. It’s a little bit cheaper and more low-maintenance than sending it off to a tannery; when you get it back from the tannery, it’s dry, and it looks like a purse.

You could wear it as a vest if you wanted to. So you have to rehydrate it by soaking it in water, and then you put it in the freezer overnight to get rid of any mold.

Now the skin is supple and stretchy, so you start to measure it over your forms: you put it over your form; you see if it fits.

You have to take it off about a million times and put it back on a million times. Once you’ve stretched the skin into place, you set the eyes, nose, and mouth, and tuck the lips inside of the form. Before your final fitting, you put down the rub, almost like a waterpaper paste, and then you just put on the skin, pin it, and sew it up.

There’s a three or four week waiting period to let it dry completely; you always want to keep a bag over the head of whatever you’re doing, because if the face dries too quickly, it’ll stretch. Then you do your detail work, which is my favorite.

Sometimes you have to sculpt a brand-new nose on your animal, because the noses will dry really weird, so you’ll let them dry, cut them off, and then sculpt a brand-new nose. I love sculpting nictating membranes, which are right in the corner of your eye.

You might want to richen up your animal’s fur with an airbrush, and then you hit them with a blowdryer and send them to wherever they need to go.

Indy: How do you deal with something like a turkey wattle? I understand how deer skin could be cured and treated so that it doesn’t decay, but what about softer, weirder tissues?

BB: There’s a couple ways to go about it. One way is to get a false head from a catalogue, which is actually molded from

a real, freshly dead turkey; they’re cast in a nice rubbery plastic and then painted to look realistic. The other thing you can do is freeze-drying, which is a process that takes out all the moisture in the animal that you’re working with. You can’t really do anything bigger than a turkey head or a small squirrel or a rabbit, because you still have all the meat inside: even if you left it in the freezedryer for a month, you still have those guts in there and you still have some moisture. So people do freeze-dry turkey heads and then place them onto their mounted turkeys and then paint it so you can’t really tell, but the eyes would be fake too.

Turkey feet, however, are real. Bird feet in taxidermy are usually real. You can inject them with this liquid that kind of hardens and keeps them looking plump, and then you paint them the right color. As animals die, their colors change drastically—so, for example, mallard feet are usually bright orange, and they’ll be brown by the time you finish doing your taxidermy piece; you have to paint them orange again.

Indy: What are the easiest kinds of taxidermy projects?

BB: The first thing we did in the school was skin out birds. Birds are very forgiving, because they have so many feathers on them: if you lose some feathers, it’s not a big deal.

The other thing about birds is they’re kind of like lumps. You know, they’re kind of circular, and they don’t have a lot of muscle definition. I think the hardest part about taxidermy is just getting the eyes to look right and getting the muscle definition to look correct, because on a short-haired animal it’s very obvious. So the birds are easy, because they’re fluffy, and you can fluff them back up.

That being said, a very small, delicate bird is extremely hard to do, because the skin is really easily torn, and it’s hard to get your hands in there; it’s hard to handle them without kind of ripping the skin. That’s the worst part—breaking bones is not a big deal.

Small, delicate things are very difficult to do, which is a lot of times why people just freeze-dry anything smaller than a squirrel.

Indy: You said that using forms was the modern way of doing taxidermy—what was different about older methods?

BB: So, the inside of taxidermied animals today is all foam. What they used to do is take wire, form a body shape, wrap it with string, and then literally stuff the animal.

The other thing they used to do was actually take the bones and rearticulate the skeleton and then use clay to form all the muscles right on top of the skeleton; they’d make a mold of that and do a plaster cast, so you’d basically get a sculpted version of your dead animal. So the bones aren’t inside the final product, but they were used to create the shape of the animal that the skin is stretched over. That’s actually how most of the animals in the Museum of Natural History in New York were done.

Indy: Is that method considered better but just too time-consuming, in the same way that people are really into vinyl over CDs or MP3s? Or is the modern way of doing taxidermy generally considered to produce similar results?

BB: The old method is very time-consuming, and you probably end up spending a lot more money. Modern taxidermy is completely accepted in the World Taxidermy Championship and in museums, and I kind of think it’s like the MP3 thing you’re

talking about: it’s a welcomed and exciting new form of technology, which I don’t think is shunned in any way. And actually, I don’t know of anyone who does it the old way anymore. I mean, unless that was kind of part of your process and you wanted to do it, but most people just buy forms.

Indy: Do you identify as a taxidermist— and if so, do you feel connected to other taxidermists? How much of a community is there?

BB: There’s actually a huge community.

Right now I’m doing fabrication of exhibits for animals, so I’m not doing a lot of taxidermy at the moment, but I guess I identify with taxidermists because I worked at taxidermy shops and I love, love, love those guys. You know, their passion is incredible, and they love to recreate nature, and it’s just amazing. I think there’s a lot of people that do it because they know they can make money and they do it quick, but I’m really a fan of the ones that are like, “I want to reproduce this animal’s majesty in fullblown force.” I think that’s really awesome.

Indy: Does taxidermy feel like art to you in the same way that making a puppet or doing an illustration does?

BB: Yes. Absolutely. I think taxidermy’s a huge art form. If you can do it well, you’re

just a master sculptor. It’s almost like a whole different ball game, because when you do a sculpture that’s from your brain, like an abstract sculpture or even a created animal, you’re asking people to believe in what you’re doing to a certain extent, because it’s coming from your brain. You’re saying, “This is my sculpture, but it came from my brain, so anything is correct.” But with taxidermy, if you’re wrong, everybody knows.

Indy: How do you feel about the stigma associated with taxidermy? What do you think of people finding it creepy?

BB: My whole thing when I got back from taxidermy school was: “I need to make art that challenges what people think is appropriate.” So one thing I did when I got back was sculpt these human teeth that were really, really screwed up—we’re talking malformation of the teeth and gums. I mounted them on different plaques, and I hung them on the wall. I wanted to kind of challenge people: what is acceptable to put on your wall? Why wouldn’t it be acceptable to have human parts on your wall? Like, what’s up with that?

So I think there is a stigma; I think there are a lot of people that think taxidermy is just the weirdest thing. But I like the idea of placing things that are real with things that are not real, and I like the idea of presenting things as: “Is this acceptable?” I’m

really drawn to that part of it, but I definitely think that there are people that just don’t understand it, and they never will. And that’s fine—I mean, I think that’s what makes it special, and that’s what kind of makes it a niche for people to get into. Or for people not to get into.

When I was spending a lot of time thinking about what I loved and why I loved it, I figured out that I love when humans go to all these crazy lengths to try to preserve things. Carving something in stone takes forever: why do we have the desire to do it?

Why do we take photos? Why do we need to record stories? Why do we need to do an oil painting of someone’s face? And what is lost in our interpretation of things, or what is gained in our interpretation of things?

What I really love about taxidermy is that you’re capturing this moment that never existed. It’s just the artist’s interpretation.

But I also like how final it is; I like how definite it needs to be. That part really excites me. So to go back to your original question: it all started with puppets, combined with a desire to figure out why people need to hang onto things that nature is just trying to take.

14 features

4 may 2012

ATHENA’S ADAPTATION

A 19th Century Library in the 21st Century

by Natalie Villacorta Illustration by Robert Sandler

W

hen people step into the Providence Athenaeum for the first time, they take their first breath of 19th century air and gaze up at the colorful shelves crammed with crumbling books. They carefully climb the creaking narrow stairs to run hands over leather-bound books, their fingers coming away covered in ash-colored dust. For visitors used to the cold glow of computer screens, the Athenaeum feels more like a museum than a library.

Despite its reverence for the past, the Athenaeum is by no means stuck in it. The library is still a place for scholarship and solitude, but it also a place for conversation and cultural exchange and many of the books still circulate. This balance between staying relevant and staying true to its history is the reason why the library has survived wars, natural disasters, and depressions.

“It would be really hard to do an elevator pitch about this place unless it was a really tall building,” said Christina Bevilacqua, director of programs and public engagement.

FLIPPING BACK The Providence Athenaeum was founded in 1836 and moved to its current location two years later, a Greek revival temple at 251 Benefit Street designed by William Strickland. Often eclipsed by the much larger libraries on College Hill, the Athenaeum is unknown to many college students, but cherished by its members for whom it is much more than a library.

The Athenaeum is one of 18 remaining memberships libraries in the country—many of which are located in major East coast cities including Boston and Philadelphia. Unlike public libraries, membership libraries do not rely on municipal funds. The Athenaeum has 1,000 members who pay $160 per year or $195 for a family, $35 for college students.

But these dues account for less than 20 percent of the library’s budget — nearly half of which comes from the endowment. And while anyone may study in the library, only members have borrowing privileges.

Contributing to the learning of all Providence residents, not just members, has always been a part of the Athenaeum’s mission, as stated in the original 1753 record of the Providence Library Company, its progenitor. The yellowed tome, with hand-scripted pages that have fallen away from their binding, lists the first members of the Athenaeum, who each paid 25 pounds sterling to join.

In 1758, there was a fire at the library’s first quarters—the Council Chambers of the Town House—situated a few blocks north of the current building. Only 71 of the 345 b, representing 60 titles, that were checked out at the time survived. Of these, 45 original books remain today and are housed in the library’s climate-controlled rare book room with other tomes published in 1870 or earlier.

The oldest book in the library is an illuminated manuscript from the late 13th Century. The greased, wrinkly, gilt-edged pages are made from vellum—pig intestine—and ruled with ink to aid the precise penmanship. It is a Latin book of wisdom entitled “De Studio Sapientae” that the library paid $120 for in 1883.

Inside the December 1847 issue of the journal “The American Review,” kept in the rare books room, is an anonymous poem

entitled, “Ulalume: A Ballad.” Sarah Helen Whitman, resident of 16 Church Street, just down the road from the library, suspected that her lover, Edgar Allen Poe, had written it because of the writing style and morbid subject matter (the death of a beautiful woman).

One afternoon when the lovers were in the Athenaeum—where they used to court—Whitman asked if Poe was the poem’s author. He pulled the book off the shelf and signed his name in affirmation.

The signature, in unassuming, pencil script still graces the page today. Whitman and Poe keep watch over the library from their portraits in the second-floor art room.

Unearthing stories like this one is the reason why Kate Wodehouse, special collections librarian, loves her job. “Every book has a story to me … and it’s not just what the text is,” Wodehouse said. She looks through the library’s annual reports and reference works on Rhode Island families to find each book’s story: how the Athenaeum came to acquire it, who previously owned it, and who read it. This information says a lot about the library, as its collection is dictated by the literary tastes of its members.

John Hay, for whom the John Hay library is named, was also a friend of Whitman and a member of the Athenaeum. He graduated from Brown in 1858, when the University was still very religious, so he would visit the Athenaeum to read material unavailable further up the Hill, like “The Hasheeh Eater” by Fitz Hugh Ludlow, a then popular book about the effects of cannabis extract, which Hay admitted to experimenting with.

“I used to haunt the rooms of the Athenaeum, made holy by the presence of the royal dead,” Hay wrote in a letter to a friend, most likely in reference to Poe. Although the library no longer has the money to purchase rare books, Wodehouse still acquires books using the 55 specialized funds for material as specific as books by or about Virginia Woolf or as strange as the Elmer S. Blistein fund “For all books except cats and cookery.” The historical collection it does have grows in value as it ages: the $1.25 the library paid in 1855 for the first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” signed by Walt Whitman, was certainly a good deal.

But the Athenaeum is more than a museum of ancient objects preserved in amber.

New books are added to the shelves every day, and its members are very much alive.

During the spring and fall, the library hosts programs open to the public at least once a week. The staff knows that the library must adapt if it’s going to survive, but they always keep the library’s history is always in the back of their minds.

STAYING ALIVE In 2005, the Athenaeum sold one of its prized possessions, John Audubon’s Birds of America, for $5 million. The highly controversial decision was made to ensure the future of the library, whose endowment was shrinking and financial situation was dire.

A minority of the members took the case to the Rhode Island Supreme Court, claiming the loss of their rights as shareholders. But the court ruled in favor of the library on the grounds that members had ceased to be shareholders when the library became a nonprofit in 1974. Until the sale,

the Athenaeum was among the few remaining original subscribers of the 200 sets of folios printed with life-sized, colorful birds.

People missing the Birds can take a short walk up the hill to the John Hay library, which always has a set of Birds on display.

It was after this rough patch that Allison Maxell became executive director of the Athenaeum and hired Christina Bevilacqua as director of programs and public engagement. Bevilacqua brought the Athenaeum back to life.

She knew programs needed to cater to a culturally sophisticated audience and that competition for this audience was tough given the dozens of other forms of entertainment available in Providence. She wanted to work against the stereotype of snobbery that a membership library may give off. After all, the idea behind forming the Athenaeum was to pool resources to create a collective educational community space.

She was reminded of the 19th Century—when people were “tremendously intellectually curious” and embraced variety and conversation. That’s how she got her idea for the salons—something “so arcane that it is new again,” she said.

Every Friday night during the spring and fall for the past seven years, the Athenaeum has hosted salons — conversations on subjects including art, literature, history, science, and theater—which draw an average of 120 guests. The Athenaeum also hosts a Proust reading group, poetry competitions, and events for children. Since last fall, anyone, not just members, may attend events.

John Chiafalo, 58, of Smith Hill, has been a member for 10 years and rarely misses a salon. The Athenaeum is his home away from home. It is his social life. His “university.” His “graduate program.” His “refuge.” His “old-fashioned men’s club” where he can “settle into one of the chairs and wile away the time.”

“It’s one of the few regrets I have in my life that I waited so long to join,” Chiafalo said.

He is not the “traditional” kind of member, he said. He doesn’t come from the East Side. He didn’t get a college degree until he was 40. He isn’t employed. But “they have totally embraced me,” he said. He can sit down with a Chafee, a doctor or a lawyer, and “we’re both Athenaeum members.”

PAGE TURN “A lot of people come in precisely not to indulge in the digital world,” said Nancy Whitcomb, children’s librarian assistant.

Eight or nine years ago, when the Children’s Library had two computers, kids were constantly throwing temper-tantrums and parents were annoyed that their children weren’t interested in reading. “Finally, a mother said, ‘Get rid of those things…I don’t bring my children to the library to play on the computer, I bring them to look at books,’” said Lindsay Shaw, the children’s librarian.

The absence of computers is essential to the 19th century ambience. It is impossible to tell that in every nook and cranny of this temple of learning patrons can connect to the Internet, wirelessly. In 2009, the library received federal funding to install this invisible system in order to preserve the feeling visitors have of walking into history — Golda herself sits at a computer “behind the scenes.”

“It’s a 19th Century library that we’re maintaining in the 21st Century,” Golda said.

Since 1999, the library’s catalogue has been automated. It contains every book the library has acquired since 1998, as well as any book acquired before then that has been checked out. People looking for items not found in the online catalogue must use the card catalogue.

Thousands of cards are organized by title, author, and subject crammed into little drawers.

This antiquated way of doing things is part of the library’s charm. But it’s easy to imagine a day when the card catalogue will no longer be necessary. Already most of the books old enough to be missing from the online catalogue are not allowed to circulate. Any book 60 years or older must be read within the library walls.

PRINT MATTERS While the library still looks much like its 19th century self, it works to stay up to date in other ways. The library has a Facebook account, a Twitter handle, and a blog, called “Ravenus,” a play on words tribute to the library’s patron poet, Edgar Allan Poe. These efforts “came from me wanting to be out there…to have a face beyond these walls,” Golda said. “We don’t want to be forgotten.”

The Athenaeum also purchased a Kindle and a Nook for patrons to borrow if they want to read a book with a long waiting list. But as any book-lover knows, these are not replacements for the real thing. At the Athenaeum, patrons can hold books in their hands that historical figures have read from. That kind of inspiration is irreplaceable.

“We’re trying to live in both worlds,” she said. “We draw from a past, we live in the present, and we are constantly looking at the future.”

NATALIE VILLACORTA B’13 lives in both worlds.

features 15

the college hill independent

RETROFIT Theaster Gates Takes Chicago

by Kate Welsh Illustration by Olivia Fialkow

T

he wooden floors of the house at 6918 Dorchester Avenue in Chicago originally lined a West Side bowling alley.

The stacks of vinyl once stocked a Hyde Park record shop, and some of the windows were once doors in a museum. Viewed from the kitchen, the words “Museum Hours: 9 to 5” run backwards across the glass.

The Chicago artist Theaster Gates has shown at the 2010 Whitney Biennial and this year’s Armory Show, as well as at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Seattle Art Museum. But at this Dorchester residence in the Grand Crossing neighborhood, discarded pieces of Chicago’s urban landscape are helping him create a house-turned-artwork-turnedincubator.

Gates has combined a former candy store, a single-family house, and a duplex across the street into a site of artistic and community change for a neighborhood that has suffered years of blight and cultural neglect. The installation is an entry in a growing art movement to create hybridized arts spaces that serve multiple functions.

For the buildings that Gates calls the Dorchester Projects, trash to treasure is an understatement. In the first house, the former candy store acquired in 2005, ware boards from an old Wrigley chewing gum factory smell faintly of spearmint. Gates bought vinyl records, shelved nearby, when Dr. Wax, a Hyde Park record store, closed in 2010. Next door, a two-story house refitted with salvaged wood holds hundreds of architecture books from the now-defunct Prairie Avenue Bookshop, as well as a collection of half-century-old lantern slides donated by the University of Chicago.

As part of the hybridized art movement, Gates has begun inviting local per-

formance artists and the public into the first two houses. At one such event, Gates served soul food to a diverse crowd of Museum of Contemporary Art donors, neighbors, and other Chicago artists. He hopes to catalyze a community change in the area around Stony Island Avenue and 71st Street that once bustled with businesses, jazz clubs, and restaurants.

Gates’s creative approach takes as much from the privileged precincts of contemporary art as it does from his own biography.

Raised in rural Mississippi and Illinois, he joined the choir of Chicago’s New Cedar Grove Missionary Baptist Church when he was twelve years old. By fourteen he was the choir’s director. In college, Gates became immersed in politics. “The conversation of the choir seemed too narrow,” he told the Independent. “I had as much zeal for the political and social as I did for God and the choir.” In 1996 he graduated with a degree in ceramics and urban planning. A decade later—in a bid to burrow deeper into his spirituality— Gates obtained another interdisciplinary degree that included religious studies.

He continued on this eclectic path by working for a Christian mission in Seattle that ran a housing program in poor neighborhoods. He ran an arts education nonprofit center, Little Black Pearl, in Chicago’s black community. He slogged as an arts planner for the Chicago Transit Authority under Valerie Jarrett, a job he found bureaucratic and limiting. Eventually he settled into work as a coordinator of arts programming at the University of Chicago.

“I’m not a social worker,” Gates has said.

“I did study urban planning because I knew that cities had problems, and black people in cities were considered the problem.” Gates immediately embraced art-making with a

rare and savvy sense of social responsibility, knowing that poverty was the principal problem. In the guise of an artist-curatoractivist, he served as a bridge between his community and the contemporary museum.

James Baldwin wrote, “No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.” During his brief but significant career, Gates has raised virtual cathedrals from this sentiment. During his one-man exhibition at the Milwaukee Arts Museum, Gates led a 250-person gospel choir he assembled from local churches through its galleries. They sang hymns the artist had scored as a response to poems written by a slave-era potter named Dave Drake. For his 2010 Whitney Biennial turn, Gates built a space that was part Buddhist temple and part minimalist hangout—it hosted, among other collaborations, Gates’s band, the Black Monks of Mississippi, whose music combines black spirituals with Zen chants. In another instance, the artist gathered some 200 musicians and dancers to perform for 150 white academics at the University of Chicago. The performance was followed by a lecture the artist delivered, corrosively titled “You Need N*****s?” For a university whose relations with its predominantly black neighbors are notoriously fraught, it is funny to imagine the audience’s squeamishness.

These activities were only a precursor to The Dorchester Projects. Its chief mission, as defined by Gates, was not merely to integrate life and art, but to do so at a juncture where creativity might get a jump on commercial interests. That crossroads, Gates judged, exists in America’s inner city, a place looked down upon not just by realestate developers and city planners, but also by the culture at large. Gates believes that

places that need but can’t possibly afford culture today provide contemporary art with a purpose.

Predictably, Gates turned the building on Dorchester Avenue into a haven for cultural activity. Dinners, concerts, performances, and other happenings followed, attended by people from every walk of life. In creating this easily replicable model, Gates has successfully combined the business of real estate with what Andy Warhol once called “business art.” By taking advantage of market conditions as well as municipal and federal housing grants, Gates has found a breach in the system that allows himself (and, by extension, others) to use art’s freedom and leverage to break through high society’s cliquishness and runaway commodification.

Gates’s project has boldly ventured to the places in Chicago’s blighted inner city where money dare not go.

“When I first moved to 69th and Dorchester, people were like ‘You need a dog and a gun,’” Gates has said. “There was such a stigma. And I began to wonder, ‘What can I do to destigmatize the place?’” Aside from buying up buildings and converting them into miniature cultural institutions, Gates has trained and employed local people to do the construction once done by crews from outside the neighborhood. Today they constitute his main artistic workforce. Once unemployed (two are ex-convicts), these individuals speak to the power of contemporary art as reimagined from the ground up.

It’s a work in progress. As Gates told the Chicago Reader, “I’m at the beginning of asking questions about what else the black South Side can be.”

KATE WELSH B’12 raised virtual cathedrals.

16 arts

4 may 2012

WHAT’S THAT IN YOUR EAR? David Bellos on Translation

by Nick Shulman Illustration by Katy Windemuth

I

n 1595, as spiritual leader of the Jesuit mission to China, Matteo Ricci guided his subordinates to shed their robes and grow their hair. After 12 years spent carefully observing Chinese customs, Ricci had determined that the Jesuits could not accomplish all they sought if their prospective converts thought they looked like Buddhist monks. The Chinese literati with whom he wished to associate were Confucians, not oblates. To be perceived as Western intellectuals, as they were in Europe, the Jesuits began by adopting the clothing and manner of the intellectual class.

In changing their appearance, Ricci broke with Jesuit traditions to make his translated message of Catholic salvation more intelligible to his Chinese audience.

The fidelity of translations is always in question. Reading about the sartorial adjustment in his letters, Ricci’s superiors in Italy feared what else might be lost when he discarded so many Jesuit rituals. If their missionaries had been stripped of what distinguished them aesthetically, perhaps their message of faith had gone, too. Like a teacher discovering her students using an English translation of Camus’s L’etranger to complete their French homework, these clergymen must have lamented, “A translation is no substitute for the original!”

In Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Faber & Faber, 2011), veteran translator and academic David Bellos uses the classroom example, among others, to dispel myths about translation. While he addresses translation theory, Bellos never strays far from his thesis that translation is a practical tool for communicating between languages.

Translations, he argues, can be perfect substitutes for the originals from which they are derived; if they were not, students would never use them to complete their homework more quickly. Although audience-centric alterations must be made, content is not lost in the process.

Bellos seeks to answer the most fundamental question put to him: “Is faithful translation possible?” From a distance, it appears to some that the translator is doomed by his task. To generate a

translation, a person takes a word or phrase in one language and proposes an equivalent in another. She then refines her choices to achieve the best translation. Thinking of translation in this way seems only to approach perfection asymptotically. Striving for the most precise equivalent phrases seems to imply that there is an unattainable perfect translation.

But while philosophical treatments of translation often dwell on the striving for perfect agreement between the original and derivative versions, translation in practice never concerns itself with substituting words verbatim.

Even when the words, meaning, and even syllable count of an original text are preserved in a translation, pessimists will always say that the poetry of language is somehow lost. Bellos devotes an entire chapter to proving that “What Can’t Be Said Can’t Be Translated.” These critics, he writes, cannot point to the poetic qualities that they miss so dearly. To expect a translation of the ineffable properties of a particular set of words in a specific language is to demand something fantastic. There are no translations of imaginary subtexts or the pure meaning underlying language.

Translation is practical, not magical.

In China, Ricci faced a second roadblock. The intellectuals he met were versed in neo-Confucian philosophy, which was fundamentally incompatible with the immortal soul at the core of Catholicism.

Worse still, Qi, the most soul-like concept they had, was bound up with un-Christian notions about the elements. If the Chinese were ever to understand the Catholicism, Qi could never be translated as ‘spirit’, or viceversa.

Undeterred, Ricci dove into the history of Confucianism. He found ancient Chinese spiritual texts that were compatible with modern Catholicism. Unlike neoConfucianism, these documents allowed for the existence of an immortal soul.

Citing the devastating book burnings of the Qin period (221-207 B.C.), Ricci claimed that Catholicism—not neoConfucianism—was heir to the spiritual notions of Confucian sages during China’s

high antiquity. To create a common ground between incommensurable belief systems, he accommodated and adapted traditions in a process that would eventually be called the “Ricci method.” He appropriated classical texts and discredited later commentary, and preserved fundamental Chinese traditions by referring to parts of Aristotelian metaphysics that had been adopted by Catholicism.

Neo-Confucians, he contrived to say, were Catholics all along.

Manipulation of meaning is not new in translation. The notion that “Eskimos have 100 words for snow,” for instance, is not only inaccurate, but also exhibits xenophobic vestiges of colonialism. When Western European conquerors travelled to distant lands, they met the natives, then pointed at objects and asked for translations into the local tongue. When they had satisfied their curiosity—and plundering appetites— explorers were inclined to conclude that the feeble-minded savages had a plethora of words for exotic oddities, but lacked the intellectual rigor to develop category words, or hypernyms. The natives knew wet-snow and sticky-snow, but couldn’t fathom all types of snow—if only the sailors had asked.

Bellos does not spare more recent translation-related blunders. He takes to task the twentieth-century anthropologicalhistorical belief that there was once a single, original language. The theory of language diversity harkens back to an underlying belief in the Tower of Babel.

Even contemporary theories of linguistic development are affected by the origins and aspirations of their creators.

Like his seafaring and historian-linguist counterparts, Ricci’s doctrinal zeal may have convinced him that his purposeful translations were just. Nothing is translated without a reason.

Personal motives aside, translators do face systemic challenges in their work. It is especially difficult to translate regionally distinct accents and those marked by class, for instance. The monologue of an uneducated farmer from the French countryside in the early nineteenth century cannot be reproduced easily in English.

Should the farmer’s words be traded with

someone of equivalent class status in the United Kingdom? Will the adoption of an entirely different patois not confuse the reader about the book’s setting? Are the associations between farmers in one country the same as those in another? What if the book is read by an American unfamiliar with the spectrum of UK vernacular? Should the slang adopted be modern or that of the appropriate time period? As a result of these endless quandaries, translators tend to normalize levels of speech. This is especially evident in fiction, where characters’ idiosyncratic word-choices are jettisoned in translation. While meaning can usually be translated, accents rarely make the leap to a new language.

Since its inception, translation has been just one way that speakers of different languages communicate with one another.

Communication across language and between cultures is only possible, Bellos postulates, thanks to a common human experience.

At its base, translation is empathetic.

While a set of words may be unfamiliar, their underlying meaning can be communicated across tongues. Language, Bellos concludes, is the culmination of needs, wants, and feelings. Translations may not match the originals from which they are derived in every way, but if they convey a similar meaning in a manner comprehensible to the target audience, then they are successful. Constructive translation led Matteo Ricci to alter his rituals and those of his target audience. As a result of their meeting, the Chinese and Jesuits not only came to understand one another, but experienced cultural change in the process.

In a situation demanding translation, two seemingly incompatible systems of thought were brought together. Negotiating ambiguity, intent, and deception plays a role in all human interaction, including those mediated by translation.

NICK SHULMAN B’14 is practical, not magical.

the college hill independent

arts

17

PROMISE IN THE PRESENT Faith and Skepticism in Carol Becker’s Micro-Utopias

by Jordan Carter Illustration by Robert Sandler

L

ast Thursday, Carol Becker—writer, scholar, and Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts—gave a talk on micro-utopias to a micro-sized audience at the Martinos Auditorium in Brown’s Granoff Center. Her lecture, entitled “Micro-Utopias: Public Practice in the Public Sphere,” attempted to bridge relational aesthetics, socially engaged art, and other public demonstrations that do not explicitly declare themselves art. She used the term “micro-utopia” to synthesize an array of disparate activities including the Occupy Movement, Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present, Tino Sehgal’s This Progres, and Mohandas Gandhi’s hunger strikes. According to Becker, small gestures in the public sphere, artistic and otherwise, can produce “micro-utopias,” instances of collectivity that temporally alter the possibilities of the present. These microutopias do not promise to instigate longlasting change, but they facilitate a certain faith that change is possible.

Early in her lecture, Becker repurposed an inspirational quote from anthropologist Arjun Appadurai: “think of the biggest problems of the world and think of the smallest solution.” According to Becker, this is socially engaged art’s modus operandi. But as many art critics, including Claire Bishop and Jacques Rancière, have noted, these so-called relational or socially engaged art forms often pre-suppose their own success.

By declaring themselves art on the loose basis of dialogue and collaboration makes it difficult for art critics to evaluate the success of these works in terms of traditional aesthetic criteria. In other words, if talking is art, how do we determine the Kandinsky of communication.

Following the lecture, I asked Becker to give her position on what makes a successful micro-utopia: its conviviality, its antagonism, or its level of participation. She replied that she, unlike Bishop, is not an art critic—and for a reason. She is not interested in grading works on a spectrum of success and failure or creating some sort of formalized rubric for socially engaged art. Becker disclaimed, “I choose to talk about works that make sense to me, in their simplicity. For me, there are no checkpoints.” She doesn’t write off works she doesn’t like, because she finds that less valuable than proliferating the possibilities presented by the works she does.

For Becker, criticism and criticality seem to stymie the hope and possibility inherent in these miniature social interventions.

But considering that the talk was given at a university—the epicenter of critical inquiry and habitual skepticism—did Becker really think she could give a one-sided

motivational speech without acknowledging the Achilles heel of her micro-utopias? If we can’t rank the success of these projects, or even provide a critical language to analyze them beyond hope and possibility, it’s unclear whether or not they should even be discussed in an academic setting.

Becker claims that she sees no difference between socially engaged art and public activism proper. She also does not adhere to a linear timeline; her slide show consisted of a variety of “micro-utopias” that injected art into the public sphere, ranging from Gandhi’s pacifist hunger strikes to Creative Time’s Key to the City project, which distributed skeleton keys to NYC citizens, transforming previously private spaces into spaces of public exploration (i.e. one key actually opened a storage closet in the governor’s mansion). All of these projects are different in their approach and their context, but Becker finds a similar sense of possibility in the “micro-utopias” they facilitate. The word “micro” is essential to Becker’s argument. These gestures are particular, involving a particular audience in the context of a particular issue. But that is not to say that these micro-interventions are inevitably pointless. Inspired by Carl Jung, Becker asserted, “Things can exist for a moment and permeate the human consciousnesses, coming back and being reinvented in new times and spaces.”

The first half of Becker’s lecture focused on the collapse between public and private space. She says that we “could blame Oprah” for cultivating a society of public confession, in which “the public has become a screen for the projection of public problems.” Becker argues that contemporary art must be continuously and dynamically responding to the question: “where and how do we facilitate public dialogue.” Although Gandhi’s gesture was individual, introducing his personal, physical suffering into the public sphere, he did so to catalyze public action surrounding a public problem. His private suffering was a mechanism for projecting public problems onto the public screen, not vice-versa. This is what aligns him with artists like Rick Lowe (Project Row Houses) and Mel Chin (Project Paydirt/Fundred Dollar Bills), who work as “individual provocateurs” in the public sphere by transforming derelict shotgun houses into a community art project or drawing public awareness to the neglected lead levels in New Orleans soil.

Although Becker stressed the potential of the agora (the assembly space of a democratic society)—citing instances from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street— she could not shy away from museum-based

art. A good portion of her talk revolved around Marina Abramovic’s performance piece The Artist Is Present at MoMa, in which the artist sat for hours on end looking directly into the eyes of spectators who had waited in line to experience the “intimate” one-on-one experience. While Becker mentioned that many participants, after locking eyes with Abramovic, would hurry to the exhibition website to see the photo—the proof of the encounter—she did not seem to think this in anyway delegitimized the work’s social relevance. Personally, I can’t help but be wary of the influence Abramovic’s art star status had on the public’s level of participatory engagement. Doesn’t going to sit with a celebrity qualify as spectacle, irrespective of whether or not some people did have truly revelatory experiences? It’s difficult for me to get on board with Becker’s conflation of Gandhi and Abramovic, Occupy Wall Street and Creative Time’s Key to the City project.

Yes, in all cases there was a considerable degree of public participation that could be categorized as a “micro-utopia.” However, starving one’s self for social change is very different than practicing patience in a MoMA gallery and getting paid for it.

Bodies accumulating in Wall Street to protest economic inequality cannot be equated to public participation in Creative

Time’s conceptual scavenger hunt.

But at what point must we as students suspend our dogged criticality, our focus on aesthetic legitimacy and simply give in to the possibilities of the work? Perhaps it’s necessary to consider the limitations while honoring the possibilities inherent in these micro-utopias. As hard as it is to ignore these artists’ precarious ties to the economy of the art world—especially when juxtaposed with the labor of Gandhi—at times these critical questions must be deferred in order to be uplifted by the aspects of these projects that are undeniable successful: their ability to get people to perform new publics in preexisting spaces, facilitating moments of minor social and spatial transformations.

JORDAN CARTER B’12 lives in a perpetual micro-utopia.

18

4 may 2012

opinions

METAPINION A Section in Conversation

by Stephen K. Carmody and Tyler C. Bourgoise

T

yler C. Bourgoise runs the Indy Opinion’s section with myself, Stephen Carmody. This is an interview pre-structured to approach the questions we’ve had about argument, opinion, and knowledge.

Steve: Where is opinion located?

Tyler: Somewhere between the extremes of the pursuit of objectivity and purely emotional investment.

TROLLING SKC: In online communities, trolling was originally an idea constructed to test membership. You put a strong opinion on the message board, and older members recognize it and don’t react so strongly because the arguments are hackneyed and trite. But new posters might pour out an intense response. What issues do you see with trolling?

TCB: Often trolling is a manifestation of some freedom of identity that the internet allows, where we are entitled to as many different roles as we want with very little consequence. So it’s a way to detach yourself from the opinion you express. But you are still saying those things.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE OED: devil’s advocate n. [Latin advocatus diaboli] one who urges the devil’s plea against the canonization of a saint, or in opposition to the honouring of any one; hence, one who advocates the contrary or wrong side, or injures a cause by his advocacy.

SKC: Just by saying “I’ll be the devil’s advocate,” I’m both making an argument, and not making an argument. We already have modes, outside the online community, where we detach ourselves from a certain argument, and we see how it plays out. So what is the function of devil’s advocate?

TCB: I sometimes get the impression that the position of devil’s advocate is more for the person who takes it. So it’s possible to hold an irresolution about an issue but still ask a question or see a certain point addressed that otherwise would promote antagonism. It’s a productive way of stirring up an emotion or bringing an opinion that doesn’t sacrifice your identity.

SKC: You still have to trust the intentions of the devil’s advocate. Its function is a teaching tool. But what are the circumstances under which devil’s advocate should replace straightforward argument?

TCB: I get the impression often that people use devil’s advocate to seem really exhaustive on an issue. When something is really closed-case, you bring up a devil’s advocate just to insure the antithesis to whatever thesis you’re proclaiming is addressed. The

full scope of positions becomes known.

POETRY

Do you think poetry furthers argument?

ARISTOTLE V. PLATO

SKC: This is a quatrain quoted by an author—the context is neutered for now— that serves to further the author’s argument.

The connection here is that Plato uses drama and poetry in service of an argument. Poetry is something that resists analytical argument, or goes in a different direction. So does this quatrain have the ability to capture a point?

TCB: I’m less concerned with how poetry can inform philosophy as a discipline. When they are both doing good things, they are both trying to get at knowledge, or a state of being that is important to experience. In philosophy you have laws of contradiction, ideas about what is and what is not. In poetry, there’s a line I’ve thought about from Tomas Tranströmer in a poem called “Allegro.” He talks about how he plays music after dark, black days. He comes to a figurative point in his music playing.

SKC: Which form of knowledge do you find more compelling: Aristotelian declarations or Socratic irony through Plato?

TCB: If you’re talking about the benefits of opinion in two-sided conversation, versus one-sided argumentation, often I find what Aristotle does to be more appealing.

And there’s a sort of union between what Aristotle does and what Socrates does, because you take an Aristotle text and you discuss it in a classroom. And then you get some great synthesis of methods. Granted he’s not there, but Aristotle has spoken for himself quite a bit, if he’s done his job well.

SKC: But Plato is in the silences of Socratic dialogue. Not that he is fully formed, but with Socrates leading the discussion—in itself, a play—Plato puts something else on display, by how the discussion goes or the arguments that the discussion overlooks. The way arguments fall apart, or turn back upon themselves, or are proven to be contextually meaningless—in that wild display, there is a voice coming through. What if Plato and Aristotle formed one androgynous philosophical being? What’s missing in that picture?

TCB: Aristotle will never get at the ironies and the contradictions and these tacit ways of communicating concepts or voices that Plato can do. That’s the literary merit of Plato’s form. Its implicit references add richness and mystery. People can find different things in it. Whereas reading Aristotle is mostly resolving ambiguities at the sentence-level and trying to figure out what is being said. It’s a very different task.

SKC: But if you work hard enough at it and truly understand that sentence, is Aristotle capable of grasping the truth?

TCB: Well, what happens when you strip away as much of the room for possible misinterpretation and you just deal with arguments? It seems that at least what you discover is how sticky things are. How little we know about how language works, for example. But it may still be the best thing that operates beyond the scope of the individual. Aristotle is really intended to educate everyone in some sort of principle.

SKC: And it might be what you want opinion to be?

TCB: Opinions have more of a complementary role in this. What interest me in Op-Eds like the ones you see in the New York Times are these opinions that come out of a hunch or intuition. And if that’s a particularly novel notion in a staid intellectual climate, it turns people towards new avenues of thinking.

Gerhard Scholem:

My wing is ready for flight I would like to turn back.

If I stayed timeless time, I would have little luck.

TCB: There’s something that’s really salient about being ready for flight and being in a position of unluck. This concept of being ready for flight is applicable to reaching some sort of conclusiveness on an issue, some resolve, which we so often pursue.

Once you find that time for flight, you are not continuing to dwell in the place you were seeking to take off from all this time. It’s such a powerful notion that this last line “I would have little luck” implies that you could not grasp anything further if you stayed in this place any longer. You can escape the strictures of fortune if you know when you’re ready to move on from something. Writers don’t continue to publish and republish the same texts over and over.

They leave a text, because if they continued to work on it, it would keep them from other places.

SKC: But I want to direct this reading a little bit. It’s a conditional statement, “If I stayed timeless time.” I don’t sense the control you ascribe to the speaker over that moving on.

TCB: “I would like to turn back” can be read like a wish that cannot be satisfied ever.

Staying is a position between where you hope to go back and where you could go.

The conditional of staying presents a notso-fortunate option. If we suspend the idea of control, instead of “My wing is ready for flight,” we might have “My wing is lifting me.” Then it’s not a choice of how we used these fine-tuned instruments of our wings, or of our minds, or of our writing. It’s rather that we’re going with it, and there’s got to be sense that we make of it, or we just leave it alone.

SKC: So this is Scholem quoted by Benjamin. This is about the “Angel of History.” I pushed you to this, but in Benjamin’s description, there’s a storm blowing from Eden and the Angel of History is being blown—facing backwards towards the past—with her wings outstretched towards the future. And she’s watching the debris pile up, unable to fully form the structure that would have saved the moment. Your reading grasped that image.

TRANSTRÖMER: I raise my Haydnflag—the signal says, “We do not surrender, but want peace.”

TCB: We don’t see the second line as a blatant contradiction. Yes, poetry challenges the principle of contradiction. And to disregard contradiction is something useful.

But what Tranströmer does here is offer something in its place. In this poem, by the time you arrive at this point, you’ve exacted some sort of feeling in yourself that is tantamount to knowledge. In that moment, you think of something between surrender and war, wanting to maintain force but not to do violence. What poetry is doing there is a mind expansion; taking the concepts we typically work with, and offering new things beyond the boundaries of those concepts.

We’ll never see a poem published in lieu of a physics article. But we’ll look to poetry as an indication of what is and can be true about the world.

SKC: What does opinion do?

TCB: What it does is fairly marginal, messages being emptied out into our public consciousness. But opinion honestly presents the self and says some thing about the world.

I want to leave it that vague.

STEPHEN K. CARMODY B’12 finds Play-Doh more appealing.

TYLER C. BOURGOISE B’13 is in the silences.

the college hill independent

science

PARASITES IN THE PEW Something Rotten in the State of Nature

by Soma Chea Illustration by Robert Sandler

M

any scientists have been wary about using evolution to study human nature. But not Randy Thornhill.

Author of The Evolutionary Biology of Human Female Sexuality and A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, Thornhill is part of an expanding circle of researchers who believe that human nature can be explained by modern evolutionary theory. They call themselves the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.

The members of this society are experts who come from across the globe and represent many different disciplines of study including biology, psychology, anthropology, medicine, economics, and sociology. Thornhill, who was accused by another scientist of “endorsing rape” in his book on sexual coercion, is no stranger to controversy, nor is he deterred in his quest for knowledge. Thornhill, along with Corey Fincher, another professor of Biology at the University of New Mexico, has recently published an article in the peer-reviewed journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences that reveals a peculiar link between parasites and religion. The paper suggests that stress on a population caused by parasitic infections promotes behavior that includes strengthening religious activity and commitment.

It seems hard to believe that mere worms or single-celled animals—so small that it takes a microscope to see them—can have such far-reaching impacts on human behavior. Until the last five years, scientists had no proof that parasites had been infecting people for most of human existence. But new evidence of lung fluke eggs found in fossilized feces put the earliest parasitic infections to at least 5,000 years before Christ.

For scientists like Fincher and Thornhill, this meant 5,000 years of human-parasite coevolution. Parasites and their human hosts have been continually locked in a biological arms race—each adapting and evolving through the ages to meet the challenges of the other. One of the mechanisms of protection against parasites, as Fincher and Thornhill have suggested, is the formation of social groups and religious structures.

The defenses against parasitic infections includes not only the classical immune

system—the biochemical, tissue, and cellular responses to invading organisms—but also, an additional level of protection called the behavioral immune system. The idea of a behavioral immune system isn’t new. Mark Schaller, another evolutionary biologist who can be credited for coining the term, described it as behavioral and psychological disease avoidance. The phrase, applied to Fincher and Thornhill’s study, can be understood as the anti-parasite psychology and behavior that reduces the risk of infection in an individual. Included in these instincts are the negative attitudes and biases against organisms and objects in environments that from sensory cues are judged to be unclean or likely to be infected with parasites. The behavioral immune system explains why we get that stomach-churning feeling at the sight of blood, an open wound, or a flowing pustule. It connects the dots between unpleasantness and avoidance. Is human waste and rotten food inherently bad-smelling or are they unpleasant because they should be avoided?

The preventative measures of our adaptive psychologies might have more profound impacts on the decisions that determine social grouping. Another aspect of Fincher and Thornhill’s theory is the notion that the behavioral immune system supports favoritism toward individuals within a social group and avoidance and bias against individuals outside it.

The idea returns to the concept of hostparasite co-evolution—the constant backand-forth interactions, evasions, and adaptive maneuvers humans and parasites both use to gain leverage over the other. Thinking about these social formations as products of in-grouping behavior, Fincher and Thornhill were able to establish correlations among the amount of parasite stress on a population, the relative numbers of different religions, and the proportion of religiously affiliated individuals in a given region. Both the U.S. and the cross-regional study found that the higher the parasite stress, the broader the diversity of religious groups and the higher the percentage of religious affiliations.

Participation in religious communities, Fincher and Thornhill explain, may

provide and reinforce critical knowledge on a population that can help to prevent and contain local infections. Through the teaching and inheritance of customs, norms, and values, group formations like religion determine the rules of an abiding population. Such collective knowledge may help to combat infections. Methods of cooking and rules on sexual practices and sanitation are some examples of insider knowledge that may prevent an individual from becoming infected with parasites. Outsiders without this knowledge are inherently at a disadvantage for infections as their own customs and norms may not completely align with an unfamiliar environment.

Some of the best-known religious texts show that parasites have made profound impacts on religious societies. Dietary restrictions and suggestions appear throughout the religious canon—many of which have practical implications against parasites and infectious disease. The Talmudic laws against eating pork may have been a way to prevent the spread and infection of Trichinella siralis, a worm commonly transmitted by pigs that can cause painful inflammation of heart muscles and swelling of the brain.

The Bible also mentions fasting and quarantine—mechanisms that would have been beneficial in controlling some parasites. In some Hindu cultures, nagas are worshipped for their powers, including guarding water supplies.

If we are to accept Fincher and Thornhill’s findings, how would they change the thinking behind our actions? Is there a biological explanation for xenophobia and ethnocentrism or a biological motivation for religious formation? Even if this were true, acknowledging an idea neither proves or disproves these implications. Such questions must be raised if any progress is to be made in understanding the human mind.

Self-motivation, awareness, and the ability to produce complex thoughts are commonly identified as traits that set us apart from other animals. But it is due to these traits that such ideas exist.

SOMA CHEA B’15 has been infecting people for most of human existence.

19

Steve Carmody

Kate Welsh If you don’t look down much, you haven’t noticed that Kate Welsh has a MET-level collection of socks. If you haven’t downed an order of Farmstead cheese biscuits, two winter brassicas salads, and two macaroni and cheeses in t-15 minutes with Kate Welsh, you haven’t lived. If you have trouble differentiating between similar articles of black clothing, you have no appreciation for Kate Welsh’s wardrobe. If you haven’t asked Kate to borrow a scarf in the wintertime, you probably never realized she wears three at a time. If you’ve never indulged in a Kate Welsh playlist, you have no appreciation for “Dreams” or “Family Affair.” If you’ve never followed Kate Welsh, you’ve never been lost. If you haven’t been in a fight with Kate Welsh, then you’ve never been shamed. If you’ve never found Kate Welsh’s phone, wallet, passport, or all of the above, then you don’t go to Brown. If you’ve never seen Kate Welsh’s Fashion Friday debut, you don’t know what it means to strike a pose. If you’re skeptical of astrology, you should do a comparative analysis of Dadhichi’s Scorpio and Kate Welsh’s soon-to-be-released memoire: OC Clad with Chicago Swag. If you’ve ever seen Kate Welsh not finish what she started, then you must have taken beginner’s Chinese.

If you don’t publicly refer to Kate as Kate Welsh, then you’re dumb because she is obviously a first-last-name person. If Kate Welsh has never told you a secret, you’ve yet to truly gossip. If you’re not obsessed with Kate Welsh, then go to hell.

It was debated, at first, whence he came, stepping through the opalescent thunderheads of Camel Blue with that grin, easy and sly, eyeing up the other men with a laser stare that could incise cold butter into Chinese Lanterns. He was a regular fixture on street corners and stoops, a shadow that disappeared in all the shadowed alleyways, leaving only the fluorescent glimpse of a radical windbreaker. And it was debated to where he went. Inciting dance parties on the highway overpass, or jumping into neighbors’ hot tubs, grinning, of course, even all alone in the night, teeth glowing like the Cheshire cat, or maybe he just got high and talked to strangers.

Legend has it he was once able to kick a soccer ball. But now he used the same foot for the sole purpose of kicking ass. It’s just him against the world, and the score hasn’t been settled yet.

Adrian Randall In the corner of Adrian’s bedroom, next to the stale quesadilla and the basket full of New Mexico state pennies, is a small porcelain pot containing the ashes of Claude Chabrol.

“Yeah, some old guy gave that to me,” he’ll tell you. “I helped him find the North Star and he was like, ‘thanks man.’” This is Adrian’s rising sign, “THE WANDERER”—sewn into the inside of his pants pocket. It’s no wonder his middle name translates to “Grey Wind.” Ever he goes, dragging his oar inland, growing old and happy and wise.

Gillian Brassil Taylor Kelley Taylor Kelley wasn’t born for digging deep holes. He emerged from the womb with a five-day beard and a beer in hand, his sweat reeking inexplicably of weed and his cries louder than an owl’s hoot. He strode forth into a land where everyone drank lean with their zan and all the pussies were yanking, but he just shrugged and ate what was offered and turned out OK. Well, more than OK: motherfucker’s changing his name to Benjamin Money these days, like Scrooge McDuck but not on some bitch shit. His new lifestyle is about to get decadent as fuck: soyfree vegan food, loofahs made of shredded cash, days spent sitting in a bathtub covered in honey just because he likes the way it feels.

She goes by many names: Boss. Homie. Booty Monster. Each day, She-Who-Run-ThisMother rises from the depths of her lair in the venerable Fuck House, and proclaims to her subjects over the parapet. “Yes!” She raises a crawfish to the sky. “Let there be boiled crustaceans in every pot!” She crushes the fuck out of it, shrieking for battle. She flicks her one earring. With a tearing belch, a rupture in the fabric of space-time appears.

She leaps into the wormhole, emerging hours later having vanquished the cosmic evils only she can speak of. We are spared from doom another day. She returns to the bowels of Fuck House to rest her head. Here, now, she is left to the gnawing quiet of her mind. Swag swag swag swag swag swag swag swag swag swag swag….

Audrey Ellis Fox Eve Blazo You know how this starts. There was a garden.

Something about ribs. A girlchildwoman.

Let’s call her Eve. She cut off all her hair, bleached it blonde, ate an apple, and got the fuck out of there. Probably because Eve likes clothes. She is testing and twisting out of a thousand chrysalises and you can’t help but watch. Eve is going somewhere and you should probably tag along. She’s saying something profound and you are wondering if you will ever speak like that and also you are always (always) wishing you were wearing that. She is dressed like Poe’s raven and wrapped in Benjamin’s aura. Give Eve your words and she will keep them close. Give Eve your concerns and she will braid them into something else entirely and you’ll be left nodding profusely, because, of course, she’s right.

“Excuuuse me? Can somebody tell me where a girl can get a paternity test around here???” screeched Audrey’s mother as she carted her new babe, swathed in black velvet, down the halls of Cedars-Sinai. (Tim Burton and Anthony Kiedis were in the parking lot, chain-smoking and avoiding eye contact.)

When infant Audrey starred in FIDLAR on the Roof at the Hollywood Bowl, someone asked how she growled so ferociously. Audj replied, “I mean, you just gotta whatever it.”

MTV tried using footage of Audrey cruising down the 405 for its show “The Chills” but she click-clacked her heels and a house fell down on every chick who thought she could out-basket-case her. I heard she got banned from Olneyville Halloween for being “too fucking scary.” I heard she was booked for SXSW but didn’t get farther than the Valley before she was stopped by all of the drummers in LA, wearing matching Mz. Kitty t-shirts and screaming, “I just want to sleep with you.”

I heard there’s a separate circle in Hell for her, where all she has to do is cackle, “Margaritas, motherfucker!” and Satan rushes over, lime and salt in hand. To answer your question, no, Audrey, you’re not going crazy. You always were.

Jordan Carter If we are all nodes in a network, what does that make Jordan Carter? Is he the central node, emanating bytes of consciousness on which for us to nibble? Is he a malevolent overseer, subjugating us in our unenlightened subjectivity? Or is he our emancipator, come to cast off our media shackles and lead us toward the light? There’s gotta be some explanation for his initials. Our bad romance began with JC making money honey in the Indy’s business department. A suitable replacement has yet to be found. From there, he revolutionized our new media strategy (Fashion Fridays, anyone?), and carefully critiqued the culture industry from behind his red horn-rims. If his rise to managing editor was less than mercurial, his speed on the Pembroke Field kickball diamond—where he took us to the edge of glory year after year—made us consider giving up meat, too.

His voice—“You’re writing my toe tag?! In the In-dy?! Real-ly?!”—is more distinctive than Germanotta’s, even if it could never make me fully understand relational aesthetics. Jesus is my virtue: Jordan Carter is the demon I cling to.

Timothy Nassau Timothy Conklin Nassau is the last king of erotica, and if not that, at least he is the prince birthed from the charms of Bataille and diplomatic distance. On the dawn of his birth, the oracle who travelled from Damascus to kiss his forehead had spoken to the infant Tim: “Fallen water, let’s go on a trip. Brick the lodge or whitewash the walls, parry the Bible falling in rebellion. Your mal-abnormal aptitude for bored sinning makes George march in madness. Notate hip-hop, young regicide, the cover was never yours.”

Caroline Soussloff You’re afraid to talk to Caroline Soussloff.

And you should be. Because there is beauty.

And then there is Beauty. The former is tame, the girl at Coffee Exchange with the glasses, the Murakami book. But the latter is something that breathes and grows and makes your eyes water, your head empty. Caroline is Capitalized. Listen closely when you stumble down John Street at dawn. Mingling with lilac petals and dew, the wind whispers her name. Really listen: that dress you wear, the one that makes you feel so hot, so hip, so chic—she wore that in high school. Kids’ stuff. Don’t try to outsmart her, out-dress her, outdrink her. Don’t try to out-anything Caroline. Because Caroline is in. And she was there before any of us.

Max Lubin Maxwell Lubin is undercover.

Codename: Raw Dog Assassin (RDA002).

Mission: Casual Blackout Method: Calm Persuasion.

“Okay,” he says, nodding softly and looking directly into your eyes. All of a sudden you’re the little spoon. “I told you so,” his chest hair whispers. A Nate Dogg poster stares down at you from the ceiling above.

Westside. RDA002 out.

Malcolm Burnley RUMORS CURRENTLY IN CIRCULATION ABOUT MALCOLM BURNLEY

Rachel Benoit

Miss Frizzle and Coco Chanel had a sister, and her name is Rachel Benoit. She is the mother of logos and daughter of the Fates and one of those ladies who lived in shoes (a swag sneaker, that is). Proust has courted her. Vincent Cassel got down on one knee.

Gertrude Stein even had a go. But she gazes at a world en rose from behind Ray Banned eyes and wouldn’t it be nice right about now to have a macaron from Pierre Hermé. She sips champagne with a wisdom that eludes a grandfather owl, and does battiness like nobody’s business. She will come to you one night in a dream, a halo of bubbles and tendrils escaped from her bandeau framing her head. She will purse her lips, and it will be a blessing. A sigh. A flick of the hand. A soupçon of Diptyque through the air. And what she says will be meant for you and you alone and it will change your life beyond all wildest imaginings. Well…

Alex Corrigan It was a breezy night, stars sparkling over Switzerland, when a new mother prayed to whatever god her Alexandra would eventually worship: “O, let there never be more than one fathom between my beloved and the nearest Bikram yoga studio!” The moon must have been in Saturn, for naught but perfect stellar synchronicity could have produced such a pulchritudinous psychic. As soon as she could stand on her own two legs and sashay out of that country (“neutrality? so last solstice”), she hailed the nearest magic carpet and hollered, “Yo home, to Tangier!”

Daily, we thank ar-raḥīm, for without Alex’s divine mercy, how would we know whether to “like” or laugh off Daniel Libeskind’s winning WTC design? How would we know whether to go see the Kraftwerk exhibit or pass (“ugh, so many blips”)? She doesn’t tell anyone, but she’s formally the Duchess of Old Boston and jets to the Holy Land every March 18 to recover from her parade duties by drinking the actual elixir of the gods. Both Brooks Brothers proposed to her, but she turned them down after Prince Harry planted a bad omen in her tea leaves. Unfortunately for all three, she’s holding out for Žižek—“but he’s born on the cusp of Pisces and Aries, so first I need to make sure we’re compatible.” We’re praying, Alex, we’re praying.

Dylan Treleven Ever felt a cool breeze, which turned out to be a hypnotic guitar riff, which turned out to be the blindingly blonde shine from a hair-flip? What was that? Wait, am I at a post-Coachella beach party? Am I an extra in Rebel Without a Cause?! No. You’re in the Campus Center. Suddenly a chorus of the hippest alumnae surround you to whisper in unison: that’s Dylan Treleven. Awash in a daze of Levi’s and blasé perfection, you cry out: Why do I love him so?! The sirens coo: Dylan was in four of your favorite bands from sophomore year, but his beauty split them all up. Dylan has never bought a decoration for his apartment, and it singlehandedly made Brooklyn uncool. He took passport photos at CVS, but the government chose to use a black and white still from SXSW. You’ll try to forget him, but every time you see a white V-neck with short sleeves rolled up, your marriage gets a little bit worse.

Every Hay librarian is in love with him, even the lesbians.

He will be starring in Space Jam II: Hoops Don’t Lie. He can actually make eggplant taste good.

He wrestled a gator, won, and then apologized to it.

He has won the nonfiction Pulitzer Prize for eight years running, but always agrees to let someone else take the prize in exchange for a knit hat.

He invented Friendship Bread.

He’s been interviewed by The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Cookie magazine, Maxim, and Cat Fancy.

Jonah Wolf It’s tempting to think that Jonah was born at the wrong time. The picture comes easily to mind: 1977, a foggy Manhattan winter night, an unmarked nightclub. Jonah stands out front, leather-jacketed, talking to people smoking cigarettes but not smoking himself.

But it doesn’t stop there: wouldn’t he have also been a smashing success running rum out of 18th-century Barbados? What about combating heresy for a 12th-century Pope? Why wouldn’t he lay down the law on Metternich, critique-style, at the Congress on Vienna in 1815? And who better to advise Titus Flavius, 10th Emperor of the Romans, on the spectacle of the inauguration of the Roman Coliseum?

And on it goes: Jonah lending a hand at the tower of Babel, resplendent before the Taj Mahal, reading a newspaper on the Orient Express, sharing a cell with Nelson Mandela, on horseback under the banner of Genghis Khan, sitting in a rocking chair, relaxed and quiet, with Betsy Ross stitching beside him. What it comes down to is this: Jonah couldn’t have been born at the wrong time, because Jonah is eternal.

Emma Whitford The Guinness World Record for best vanity plate? “2LV DLBR8LY,” hung above a cabin in Concord. From its wintry stoop a wispyhaired old woman points a stubby thumb at you. “Whence come you, stranger?” she asks, producing nine apples from her Carhartt.

She turns her face to reveal a neck tat and nose ring. At first you think she is beckoning you. But she has undertaken some kind of ritual. She looks you deep in the eyes, and you understand: while you were sleeping she was carving a wooden nondenominational cross from the tree that fell on July 3, not exactly the summer solstice, and then using it as a jewelry stand with no jewels. She painted its portrait, and kept a notebook on the process, and eventually there was a four-part feature in Mother Jones. The cross stands humbly in her mudroom, for visitors to dry off Duck Boots. You’re entranced.

You’re wandering. You see two leather-bound books on the table. The first: THESES OF WHITFORD WOMEN, 1876 - ∞.

Its final pages are written in an English unknown to you. The second is a book of classic photography. Is it Richard Avedon?

Walker Evans? No, it is some “Dov Charney” character, and a letter of thanks. Under it, in the purple-red scrawl that could only belong to a very young or very old person: “I DID IT FOR THE GIFT CARDS.”

Annika Finne Long ago, an ephemeral, lanky toddler resided in an unknown land. Her name was the stuff of legend, for she had achieved the unthinkable: she had tamed a raccoon, combed its pretty paws and cooed, “I will paint you in a funny paper hat.” Later, the raccoon betrayed her, climbed out of the painting, and ravaged the nordic pugs who resided in her ancestral ice palace. “????? >:( :(” she wondered, pupils dilated. It scampered away, and for many months she tracked the matted and bloody creature, arriving in Seattle with the triumphant blow of her Japanese sickle. There, as she watched the Space Needle pierce the sun and scoffed at its tackiness, a revelation befell her: the force of the creature’s attack was proportional only to the force of the golden light emanating from her fingertips.

Beware the silken lady born Annika. She goes by many names, modern forces (Dries Van Noten) strengthening ancient charm (Breugel). By scarf upon scarf you will know her. She feeds only on peas and the residue of your palpable fear; she builds the stands that support the meat grinder that rendered chicken for the primordial soup. Tremble not in the face of greatness, for the gods will laugh at literally anything.

Becca Levinson In dark of the LA river culvert there is a woman. A pH radical. Don’t ever ask her for acid-free paper. She knows everything about pulp, from paper to fiction. She saw my graffiti and spit on it, telling me, “Baby, you don’t know anything.” Baby, I didn’t know anything.

Her hair was piled on top of her head, held in place by a sword-sized awl.

She caught my gaze, my Dewey eyes, and whispered “Your spine looks archival” I felt like fish glue.

She took the shaky drips, her single .000001 micron in hand, and made my little ying yang symbol into three hundred wolves running towards the sky, a thousand tigers, a million octopi. By the time she was finished I can’t even tell you what it was other than badass.

The dawn was breaking through the smog. She turned to me, “Run, run fast and hard, hide. Your dream diary awaits. Who will bind you? Becca.”

Chris Cohen Chris Cohen’s Just Jonin’ You Out: A Memoir (Scholastic, $24.95) is a captivating compendium of cycling minutiae, drunken anecdotes, and style tips. (“Tip 14: A sherbet shot is the perfect complement to any summer look.”) From swapping jokes with Cam’ron at Magic City to swapping spit with Edith Zimmerman at a stranger’s bar mitzvah, Cohen’s stories are both profound and gut-busting, and a useful YOLO meter at the bottom of each page helps you track his mood. Especially compelling are his tales of hardship, like the hours spent trying to updog President Obama at a state dinner. Cohen has really nailed it, with prose so sharp it could penetrate an airlock and a spacesuit. This new classic proves that Cohen truly is the voice of a generation, a cold and tall troubadour for our times.

22

4 may 2012

literary

MOJAVE

by Michael Mount Illustration by Becca Levinson I. The road to Mojave is long and thin, fading into a horizon. An old, tattered van rattles to the shoulder of the road and a man leans out the window.

“You boys lookin’ for a ride?”

“Yes sir.”

“This door doesn’t work. You’ll all have to get in through the side.”

We slide into the back of the van. I dust the cigarette butts off of the seat, leaning back with all my sweaty clothing. He puts the van in gear, rattling forward.

“Thanks for the lift,” Furniture says.

“No worries. I’ve seen your kind out here before. Doing the trail, huh?”

“Yes sir,” Furniture says.

“My name’s Bob,” he says. He lights a cigarette and the first cloud of smoke rushes back into our faces. “Where you boys coming from?”

“Mexico,” Rally says.

“God damn. What are you doing?

Smuggling drugs?” he cackles.

Rally cracks his own grin, icy and sly.

“How about you?” Rally says. “Where are you from?”

“Me? I’m from right here in town.”

“And what town is that?”

The long stretches of Pinyon Pine subside to brown blankets of sand. The only thing on the side of the road is litter. High desert becomes low desert and the horizon opens up.

“Mojave.”

“So this is the Mojave Desert?”

“Sure is.” He nods to the right. “See those black smokestacks over there? That’s the silver mine. See that over there? That’s the cement plant. I used to work there. Used to lift pallets and shit. Now they got me in an office and I’m growing tits.”

II. The town of Mojave is quiet. Bob drops us off at the crossroads of two broken slabs of old American asphalt, honking as he drives away. An old freight train rolls down the tracks, slowly showcasing its gallery of graffiti.

It’s easy for us to find the motel, the tallest building in the town, at three stories.

It looks like the kind of place where people sell drugs and kill one another. Or perhaps a host to visitors to the concrete and sand convention.

“Nice,” Rally says, flipping on the light in our room. He unfurls the crisp comforter and falls on the mattress. He turns the air conditioning all the way up and the room shakes from the tremor of the cooling box.

“Let’s get something to eat.”

As soon as he says “eat” I can feel it in my stomach too—the rumbling urge to consume something other than candy and peanut butter- the old ancestral instinct to flood one’s face in fried chicken and ice cream.

We walk across the street to Primo Burger, ordering fried everything- zucchini, fish, mozzarella, onions. It comes on red plastic trays, piled on wax paper, laying in puddles where the grease bleeds through. I can feel it slithering down my throat.

“We forgot to get French fries!” says Rally.

He accosts the cashier, a large woman whose nametag says Brenda. He comes back with a glistening pile of fries.

“I figure if anyone is a resident expert, Brenda is our girl.” He lifts up his thigh to fart.

Yesterday we were sitting in a thick slab of ice on the slope of a godforsaken mountain: “God damn. Who moved Antarctica to California?” Rally asks.Furniture piles up a little mound of M&M’s in the ice, sorting them into colored castles.

“It’s only going to be a few more days or so,” he says.

“You said that a month ago.”

“Well it takes a long time for the Earth to change.”

“Why don’t we take some time off ? You know, kick our feet up a little bit? Wait for the snow to melt?”

Furniture flicks a yellow M&M into a green one. A falcon screams far away.

At the road crossing we made an executive move to thumb into town and sit out the arctic circle for a week or two. That way we could get a little tan, thaw out our toes, and of course, eat crispy food.

“So did you call that lady about the job?” Rally asks.

“I’m going to later,” Furniture says.

We put down the last of the food, sending it to our intestines where it will kick later. The bells on the door jingle as we walk out into the hot, dry world. The town is a strange collection of desert fortresses, one-story concrete buildings and glowing fast-food syndicates. Mojave is less of a community and more of an outpost, much less of a township and more like a desperate scratching in the sand, a place to buy beer after work. One of the most remarkable things is the pedestrians: there are none.

The sidewalks are just us and the occasional can that rattles down the street in the fierce wind. But then, a man stops us.

“You new here?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Well let me tell you something. This town’s full of history. You look around and think, ‘This place is a dump,’ but it’s not.

It’s brimming with history. Famous people lived here. You see that house over there, for instance? Emmylou Harris took the photograph for her second album cover there. You know that album? The one where she’s propped up on the porch. You see that building over there? I know it’s got boards on it now. And it looks dilapidated.” He uses his fingers to quote dilapidated. “But Frank Zappa spent the night there once. It’s true.”

His wide-open brown eyes glow. Rally looks nauseous. I don’t know if it’s the heat or the food or the prophet. Prophets will do that to you sometimes.

“I’m Bob, by the way, the town historian.” He extends his hand.

His scalp, peeling off in crispy brown flakes, comes off on his hair, curling in white ringlets.

“It’s so nice to see some young men in town. If you want, you should check out the library. That’s where we keep all the books.”

“Really?” Furniture says.

“This town is just full of history. But I won’t stop you any longer. Nice to meet you boys.”

“Good lord,” Rally says.

We watch Bob walk away into the dust.

“Is the sun more intense out here?”

We walk down the sidewalk, kicking the errant bottle caps. A large sign swings above us: MOJAVE THRIFT, the lettering rubbed raw by the weather.

The store is dark and musty. It smells like America’s bunion, rotting in silence. Strange clothing has been piled haphazardly, losing sequins. Glowing blue pants, strings of fake pearls. Trucker hats and umbrellas, shoved in corners where the dust accumulates.

“Can I help you with anything?” a spidery woman behind the counter asks.

“We’re just looking,” Furniture says.

“How’s this?” Rally asks. He puts on leather dress shoes, slick and shiny. “Ish, try this pic out.”

He shoves the pink comb in my hair. I haven’t had it cut in two months now, and it’s starting to develop a critical mass of its own, tangling every time the wind picks up.

We put money in the cashier’s little wrinkled palm, and she tediously counts the dimes and pennies. “You boys visiting?” she asks.

“Yes ma’am.”

“Have you been to the donut shop yet?”

“No ma’am.”

“It’s the best in town. You must go.”

Rally looks like he’s going to vomit.

Out in the hard daylight again, we wind through the concrete alleyways, past the polished glass fast food storefront, past the abandoned lot. Furniture swings his plastic bag gently against his thigh, slapping his old pants against his new pants. His beard is getting longer. The little scrap of his cheeks not covered in hair is tanned to a crisp, and I can almost imagine crow’s eyes creeping out from the corners of his eyes. What is it that he used to do? Sit in an office with a hammer and chisel and play with wood?

A name is the only thing in life that goes unchanged, even when our bodies shed all of their old mannerisms. The name is the last to go, Furniture.

The neon sign on the donut store is unmistakable: DONUTS. At least Mojave is articulate. We see our reflections coming to meet ourselves in the front door. The inside of the store is cold and the air conditioner rattles and drips. The last of the day’s glittering donuts grow old beneath a glass case. I can feel the fried food settling in my stomach, as the heavy-weighted insulin crash creeps through my veins.

Rally chooses a black donut, dusted with sprinkles. Then a cruller, polished with glaze, then a few donut holes. The cashier raises his golden eyebrows. We stake out the table in the corner, looking at the long Mojave road, with the long Mojave train rolling beside it.

“Why are we here?” Rally asks.

“Because we walked.”

“No I mean why are we at the donut store.” He looks at his donut, untouched and shiny.

“I don’t know. I guess we were hungry.”

III. Cold wind blows by us on the way back to the hotel, rustling the plastic bags with our leftover zucchini sticks and our new clothes.

I wonder what my mother and father are doing right now. I wonder what all my friends are doing right now. I wonder if Furniture and Rally miss their family too, or if the way they look at the sunset is the way they feel all the time. A little cricket clings to a strand of grass on the sidewalk and he flings himself into the air before we collide, streaming away in a green blur. I wish I could put him in my pocket, and carry him to safety.

Rally turns on the National Geographic Chanel, ogling at the African men who run from the mountains to the sea, dark and lean.

“Those guys are incredible,” he says. “I bet they could pound some donuts.”

5/4 friday

5/6 sunday

5/8 tuesday

5/10 thursday

waterfire fete 7pm // fete music, 103 dike st // $12 ($10 adv) waterfire providence throws a kick-off fundraiser with an evening of genre-defying music on two stages. block party outside with dj’s and fire dancing.

drag brunch 11am–1pm // aspire restaurant, 311 westminster st aspire seasonal kitchen’s monthly drag brunch. food, drinks, queens and dj’s. call for reservations.

supersuckers 8pm // providence social club // $12 sub pop cowboy garage punk with skinny millionaires, the mcgunks, and old edition.

patti cassidy, “the secret life of war memorials” 6–8pm // the aldrich house, 110 benevolent st // $5 patti cassidy’s documentary, “frozen glory: the secret life of war memorials,” explores the design and spirit of war memorials in historical context.

5th moon 4–7pm // as220 gallery, empire st opening reception for a show of new work by eugene petty and kenneth norman.

5/9 wednesday

ringling bros and barnum & bailey present: dragons! times vary // dunkin’ donuts center // $20-90 dragon tribes from the far reaches of the earth come together to display breathtaking acts of dragon sorcery in a circus tournament of champions. sounds safe. recurring daily through 5/7.

horse feathers and brown bird 8 pm // the met (pawtucket) // $10, $12 are twee and fre(e)ak folk the same thing? find out.

5/5 saturday

5/7 monday

thayer street festival 11am–11pm // thayer st // $15; kids 10&under free the first annual thayer street festival! live music all day & food and drink specials at local bars and restaurants. runs through sunday.

rhode island international film festival 10am // the vets (cumberland) // ticket prices vary RIIFF incorporates gala celebrations, premiere screenings, vip guests, industry seminars, educational programs, and award ceremonies into a week long extravaganza. runs through 5/12.

rick springfield 8pm // twin river casino (lincoln) // $30+ rock out to “jessie’s girl,” “i’ve done everything for you” and other 80’s hits. cool world, 962 main st apt 2, coors light 8pm // scary door, westminster & messer sts get crunk with the supermoon.

gestural projections in sound and movement 7pm // granoff center, studio one (brown) // free a new multi-channel video piece by derek fukumori, colin o’connell and dylan treleven. live music by meth (nyc) and robert earl thomas. santigold and theophilus london 8pm // lupo’s heartbreak hotel // $25, $28, $35 john weise, c. lavender, stephan moore, time ghost 9pm // as220, empire st // $6 heavy electronic/electro acoustic solo performances by members of sunn o))), sissy spacek, cock e.s.p. and evidence. this is going to be divine.

textiles senior show opening 6–7:30pm // woods-gerry gallery, 62 prospect st come see work by the risd textiles department’s graduating class. refreshments provided.

thanks for making this winter/spring a lush one. for your contributions, enthusiasm and makings, we’re eternally grateful. stay golden until we meet again this fall—and remember—you can always call. listtheindy@gmail.com // ac dt at

pico iyer & casey shearer memorial lecture 6:30pm // martinos aud., granoff center (brown) author pico iyer will deliver the lecture “writing­— and rewriting­—our new global swirl” as part of the great brown nonfiction writers’ lecture series. korn 8pm // lupo’s heartbreak hotel // $39.50, $44, $45 all ages…we suppose.

ery y in list this da eople p e p lena 1626 the tan island for . nhat sell ma oth & buttons l $24 in c tudents die at ur s nti1970 fo ing an a ate dur . t s kent st te war pro

THE LIST may 4th– may 10th