The College Hill Independent Vol. 39 Issue 6

INSIDE: PRONK ’19 IN REVIEW, BACKYARD CHICKENS, AND THE MEN OF MAD MEN

A Brown/RISD Weekly / October 25, 2019 / Volume 39, Issue 06

the

Indy Contents

From the Editors

Cover Untitled Sam Berenfield

We’re sitting in the corner having a conversation about non sequiturs. From across the room someone asks us why we are still here. Another person says that we should just go home. “Does anyone want to read about chickens?” says a voice from behind me. “Here is a picture of it happening,” says one more. “I like: inadvertently interrupt the independence,” offers a third.

News 02 Week in Pulling Out Olivia George & Emily Rust

Okay, Fine,

05 Speaking Up Olympe Scherer

Goodnight everybody,

Metro 03 Clean Energy, Muddy Waters Peder Schaefer

- S+T

09 Dispatches from Pronk Ricardo Gomez, Bilal Memon, Chris Packs, Eve O’Shea, Mayo Saji & Miranda Van-Boswell Features 07 The Power of Poultry Anna Pasnau 11 When Nezha Fell from the Sky Star Su Ephemera 08 Giant Food Anonymous Literary 13 Dear Emma Kofman 17

Mission Statement

Two Poems Tabitha Payne

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed

by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/ or classism.

Arts 15 Self-Made Men Cate Turner X 18 Bertandang Katrina Wardhana

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

Week in Review Gemma Sack News Jacob Alabab-Moser Izzi Olive Metro Victoria Caruso Alina Kulman Sara Van Horn Arts Zach Barnes Seamus Hubbard Flynn Features Mara Dolan Mia Pattillo Science + Tech Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru

25 OCTOBER 2019

Literary Catherine Habgood Isabelle Rea Ephemera Eve O’Shea Sindura Sriram X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Comberg Ella Rosenblatt Tiara Sharma Staff Writers Alan Dean Muskaan Garg Ricardo Gomez Jennifer Katz Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Dana Kurniawan

VOL 39 ISSUE 06

Deb Marini Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Emily Rust Issra Said Peder Schaefer Star Su Kion You Copy Editors Grace Berg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Christine Huynh Cherilyn Tan Design Editors Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong Designers Kathryn Li Katherine Sang

Illustration Editor Pia Mileaf-Patel Ilustrators Alana Baer Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Fatou Diallo Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll Eliza Macneal Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Owen Rival Charlotte Silverman Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Stephanie Wu Art Director Claire Schlaikjer

Business Somerset Gall Emily Teng Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel

MVP Jacob Alabab-Moser *** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Alumni+Fundraising Chris Packs Senior Editors Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang Managing Editors Ben Bienstock Tara Sharma Cate Turner

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

week in

pulling out LIQUID GOLD

RECIPE FOR DISASTER

In an explosion no one saw coming, a fire last month at a cattle breeding farm caused 100 cylinders of bull semen to blow. Heat from the fire caused the cryogenically frozen cylinders storing the semen to pressurize, forcing the lids off and splattering the contents out at high speed, according to local news sources.

Firefighters were called to the 2,700 square foot Yarram Herd Services facility, located in Gippsland, Victoria, shortly after 3:00 AM. Once at the scene, they went into “defensive mode,” forced not only to contend with the flames but also to dodge flying “projectiles” being thrown from the collapsing structure, Country Fire Authority (CFA) Gippsland commander Chris Loeschenkohl told Australia’s ABC. Nothing was salvageable from the ruins; the semen explosion left the building “completely shredded,” a CFA spokesman told the Daily Mail Australia. The College Hill Independent apologizes for the visual. It took firefighters from 10 different crews over two hours to extinguish the flames completely, ABC reported. The blaze caused thousands of dollars in damage, which Aaron Thomas, Yarram Herd Services Committee vice chairman, told Newsweek would be a “huge blow” to the local farming industry.

This is not the first time bull semen has graced the pages of the Indy. In February 2016, Madeleine Matsui reported on a heist in California in which enough sperm to impregnate 1,000 cows was taken from a lab technician’s truck. Nine months before that incident, thieves struck a Minnesota farm and made off with $70,000 of liquid gold. Bull sperm harvesting is big business in Australia, and around the globe. It is, after all, the linchpin of the dairy production industry. A cow does not produce milk unless she has recently given birth. For dairy farmers, no milk means no money.

Stored bull semen has one use: artificial insemination. Methods of obtaining the goods vary, but it seems that the most common process involves a mount animal (or structure) and an artificial vagina, warmed to the temperature of a cow on heat, with a vial attached. Sperm is then stored in ‘straws’ and immersed in liquid nitrogen. Each straw holds about half a millilitre of bull semen. Each one represents an effort to impregnate a cow.

The fire at Yarram came at a particularly inopportune moment given the fast approaching artificial insemination season, Thomas said. Each cylinder destroyed at Yarram was reportedly worth hundreds of dollars, with the individual price of each straw ranging from five to 95 dollars, depending on the quality of the bull who provided the goods. The semen explosion was all the more debilitating as it followed years of drought in the Gippsland region. In July, ABC reported that some farmers, in their third year of drought, have lost as much as 70 percent of their income due to a scarce rainfall and weeds hindering grass growth—a phenomenon known as a green drought.

Yarram has provided a range of services, including artificial insemination, calf dehorning, and ultrasound pregnancy scans, in Gippsland for two decades.

According to the National Herd Improvement Association of Australia, they also supply “semen and merchandise” to “DIY operators” in the area. The Indy was unable to decipher what these “DIY operators” entail. “Servicing your needs,” reads the Yarram Herd Services Facebook page. With a persistent dry patch still in sight, the Indy can only hope that the next time Yarram shoots its wad, it aims more precisely.

Forget pumpkin spice—it’s peach mint season.

Earlier this month, NBC’s Ken Dilanian made Twitter aware of a recent addition to the cafeteria menu at the Library of Congress: peach mint crumb cake.

Despite the dessert’s off-putting ingredient combination, the internet was here for it. A source sent Dilanian a picture of the dessert just under two weeks after Trump candidly confirmed that he had discussed Joe Biden on a phone call with the Ukrainian president.

Dilanian’s tweet received over 2,000 retweets and 9,000 likes. While some in the replies admitted that the joke went over their heads, and others despaired that “even baked goods are getting political,” the majority expressed heartfelt amusement. Many applauded librarians and food service workers for the subtle expression of #resistance. In the comments on Fox News’ coverage of the story, even several self-identified Trump supporters confessed that they appreciated the pun.

In spite of this popular support, the Library of Congress removed the crumbly delicacy from its offerings the day after Dilanian tweeted the photo. One can only hope that the staff had their cake and ate it too while they still had the chance. In a statement to Fox News, the Library of Congress said that its cafeteria “is managed by an external vendor which briefly offered the Peach Mint dessert. When this was brought to the attention of Library management, the item was removed.” Because it is an independent federal agency, the Library of Congress is not considered to be under the executive branch and is therefore required to remain nonpartisan.

With the elimination of the dessert from the archive, the Trump administration could once again breathe easy. While this looming threat to nonpartisanship was fortunately halted before things got out of hand, the cake situation raises the question of what nonpartisanship means in this political moment. Since taking office, Trump has made attempts to politicize supposedly nonpartisan government operations like the military, the Environmental Protection Agency, and national intelligence. Trump’s choice for the director of national intelligence, Texas Representative John Ratcliffe, drew criticism from members of the president’s own party over the summer. As the New York Times stated, Trump selected “one of the capital’s fiercest political warriors” for what might be “the most nonpartisan job in Washington.”

However, when nonpartisan groups like the Library of Congress engage in sweet and harmless opposition to the president, they’re censured.

Fortunately, Trump’s influence does not extend to what the library’s staff—or any other American—eats, drinks, and smells after hours. Since Nancy Pelosi’s announcement at the end of September, a variety of ice cream, beer, tea, and candle companies have capitalized on the politically pungent flavor. In fact, the flavor was on people’s minds long before Ukraine became a part of the story—High Point Creamery in Denver released their “I’m Peach Mint” sorbet two years ago.

In the Twitter conversation following Dilanian’s post, excited netizens brainstormed courses for impeachment-themed parties. In addition to peach mint juleps, a popular aperitif was subpoena coladas. Naturally, the main course would have to be chicken Kiev. And the side? Traitor tots.

-OG Even if the House votes to impeach Trump, removing him from office is no piece of cake. The Constitution states that a two-thirds majority vote of the Senate is necessary to convict an impeached official. In short, an impeachment does not equal a conviction. However, the prospect of finally charging the president with a concrete misdemeanor is giving his opponents the sense of optimism they’ve been yearning for since 2016. As the media and public wait for inquiry updates, many hope that bad taste is not all that the Trump administration has in common with the peach mint cake—they hope that both will be known for how they crumble.

-ER

BY Emily Rust & Olivia George ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Katherine Sang

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

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CLEAN ENERGY,

MUDDY WATERS

From a distance, the Block Island Wind Farm looks innocent. The blades spin in lazy circles, and at night, red lights at the top of each windmill blink peacefully on and off. The white turbine shafts shoot upward, catching the near-constant northeastern winds. The landscape looks like a clear win for clean energy in Rhode Island. But while the turbines on the horizon point toward a renewable future, it’s less clear what’s happening below the surface of the water, where the fish live.

The Block Island Wind Farm, finished in 2016, is the first offshore wind farm in the country, but if the plans of governments and wind developers go well, it won’t be the last. In the next decade, the five turbines off the Block Island coast might be joined by hundreds of others fanning out across the ocean waters south of Rhode Island and down the entire eastern seaboard.

Rhode Island’s clean-energy transition promises economic boosts across the Ocean State. It is also a key part of the fight against climate change in Rhode Island: Wind power plays a major role in Governor Gina Raimondo’s plan to bring lower-emission, renewable sources of energy to the state. But not everyone is happy about the potential future of wind power.

Offshore wind farms are planned for fishing grounds that traditional fishermen have harvested for generations, threatening an industry that is already fighting a changing climate, government management, and overfishing. Fishermen are worried that windmill construction will be the final straw, compromising their ability to navigate fishing grounds and possibly scaring away the fish they need to make a livelihood. “I mean, this is our last stand,” Doug Feeney, a fisherman of 25 years working out of Chatham, Massachusetts, told the College Hill Independent. “We’re getting beaten up pretty hard.”

Forget the clean electricity, say these fishermen— what’s going to happen to the fish? +++ “I told the governor of Rhode Island that I don’t want to be collateral damage,” Fred Mattera, the executive director of the Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island, told the Independent, speaking to burgeoning windmill development in Rhode Island. “We understand that we need to coexist, but, also, the fishing industry has been an integral part of the economy in this state.” Mattera said that Raimondo told him, “I guarantee that you won’t be collateral damage.”

“At the time I thought she was being sincere,” said Mattera. “Well, I realize now that that’s inaccurate.

She’s focused on jobs and revenue from the wind farms, and not our industry.” The economic and environmental draws of offshore wind for are huge for state governments, with renewable energy incentives and the growing need for clean energy sources making wind power a near-perfect solution in the eyes of government officials. Chris Kearns, the wind energy liaison for the Office of Energy Resource Management, said that a new offshore wind industry would help meet Governor Raimondo’s goal of 1000 megawatts of clean energy by the end of 2020. This would push Rhode Island closer to the state-mandated law of having 38.5 percent renewable energy capacity by 2035, and would be an economic boon for the state. “We’re trying to strike that balance in terms of new economic sectors, but balancing that with existing sectors,” Kearns told the Independent.

But in the eyes of fishermen, windmills are not a perfect solution. The construction of massive wind farms could have life-changing effects on the ways fishermen practice their trade. Not only are some windmills proposed to be built on top of existing

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METRO

fishing grounds, but to access areas farther offshore, most fisherman will need to power through areas with windmills—a potential danger during stormy weather, where 15 to 20-foot waves could push vessels into the turbines. Cables on the ocean floor could also damage fishing equipment and prevent fishermen from dredging, placing “proverbial fences” around existing fishing grounds. Mattera told the Independent that fishermen are asking for a mile clearance in every direction between windmills and larger transit zones reserved for vessels to pass through while steaming offshore, but whether those demands have been met has depended on individual wind projects.

Fishermen and researchers are also worried about the ways windmills could affect fish populations. Apollonya Porcelli, a PhD student at Brown University studying fisheries, told the Independent that the pile-driving of the turbine shafts during construction creates noise that can disturb and drive away fish, especially those that rely on sonar navigation. Another issue is the sets of cables that run between the turbines and the onshore power grid. These cables emit an electromagnetic field that could disturb fish. Migration patterns of juvenile fish can also be affected by the rise of turbidity in the water that comes with construction.

The wind farms might scare away the remaining fish for good, leading to economic disaster for commercial fishing in the state.

While fishermen and researchers have identified the above causes as possible problems with offshore windmill construction, the extent to which these factors will actually affect fish populations is much less clear. There is a major dearth of research that has left all parties scrambling—and fishermen in the dark —about how fisheries are going to be affected once the farms are built. This has led to a drive among fishermen and scientists to work together to gather more information fast, before project plans are finalized.

“This is the typical US way to do things,” said Mattera.

“We build it and worry about the consequences later.

And they do this all the time.”

Even though fishermen and scientists are in agreement that research is necessary, there is little funding allocated for the job.

“We keep going to the wind farm people and telling them they are doing this ass-backwards,” Mattera told the Independent. “We keep saying: give us funding. Let us work through the foundation and get some people out there and begin to study this.”

Currently, the Congressional budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s National Marine Fisheries Service allocates no funding for scientific research focused directly on the interactions between wind development and fisheries. Andy Lipsky, the acting chief of staff of NOAA’s North East Fisheries Center, told the Independent, “It would seem that removing uncertainty from this space would be beneficial, especially among those of us trying to maintain coexistence between offshore wind and commercial fishers and protecting endangered species such as the North Atlantic right whale.”

Annie Hawkins, the executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA), said that the lack of NOAA funding for the study of windmills and fisheries is not a political calculation, but instead a result of organizations being caught off guard. “They’ve done what they can, trying to put staff on it with their existing team, but because these are brand new scientific questions, it takes a lot of manpower,” said Hawkins, who is working with developers and federal agencies via RODA to coordinate research projects. “I hope in the future we see funding go to this, because it’s an absolutely critical impact of offshore wind leasing... But without any new money

going to the agency, they’re doing what they can.”

But, for now, NOAA is constrained by funding, even as offshore wind seems poised to explode in the next decade. While offshore wind has been widespread in Europe for two decades, there are only 13 academic papers ever published on interactions between wind and fisheries, according to Lipsky. “If there is one thing that is in agreement, from fishermen to wind developers to government, it is science,” he told the Independent. “Everyone agrees we need to invest better in understanding what will happen.”

NOAA produces much of the advisory scientific information that’s handed over to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which guides the permitting and planning process for wind farms in federal waters. Without good scientific data and advice from NOAA, BOEM won’t be able to make decisions that take into account the impact wind farms may have on fisheries and fishermen.

NOAA recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with RODA, the fishermen’s coalition, and BOEM to help facilitate further research ans more fully address the concerns of fishermen on offshore wind development. The Responsible Offshore Science Alliance (ROSA), recently signed into existence as a cooperative research effort between fishermen, wind developers, and federal agencies, aims to coordinate research projects to ensure more comprehensive study of windmills and fisheries. “I wish something like that was set up years ago,” Lipsky said of ROSA. “Still, that is a very positive step in terms of working collaboratively on these issues.”

Some organizations, such as the School for Marine Science and Technology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, are starting projects to help research the impact of wind farms on fisheries, but the existing research infrastructure and funding is inadequate to deliver the information federal permitters need to make informed decisions on the leasing process. “The only way around this is some sort of mutual agreement,” said Doug Feeney. “Then doing a study, whether it be every two years to five years, and mapping out everything that happens in those years: migration patterns, water quality, everything. You monitor everything, so when something does go south fast, you have a road map of what caused it to go down that route and you can make changes.”

As our world warms due to human-induced climate change, taking steps to reduce carbon emissions is key in preventing environmental catastrophe. The question is, how much are we willing to gut existing industries and ecosystems, such as commercial fishing and fisheries, in the service of a clean-energy future?

“That’s what’s so hard to bite out of this apple,” said Feeney. “This is the future. It’s almost like this is the way we need to go, that we need to start becoming more dependent on solar, and windmills and stuff like that.

But I know that there are better places for windmills.” +++ The promise of new industry, and the economic ripples that could emanate from hundreds of new turbines and towers, has led Rhode Island to pour resources into attracting developers, aiming to become a hub for wind energy in the United States. The state could find a way to use its underutilized ports and welding and boat building industries, creating new jobs and becoming a model for offshore wind across the country. Because the East Coast is one of the most densely populated areas in the United States, and because its large continental shelf offers ample space for wind farms, the waters of the New England coast provide the perfect combination for renewable energy. But wind

25 OCT 2019

Offshore windmills pose changes and challenges for fishermen

BY Peder Schaefer ILLUSTRATION Isabela Lovelace DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

developers and governments are starting to realize that what makes New England perfect for windmills also makes it perfect for fishing, setting up a conflict between the two.

After the 2016 installation of the Block Island windmills, fishermen saw rapid change, with new developers moving into the market and proposing huge wind farms on fishing grounds. The pace of the planning and leasing process jolted fisherman into action, said Mattera, as they realized that government agencies that control the permitting process, such as BOEM, were under pressure to approve permits and get projects started. Developers were driven to take advantage of federal government renewable energy incentives and were competing to enter the market with a commercial-scale project after the success of the Block Island project proved that offshore wind could work in the United States.

“That’s when the fishermen started to get really pissed off and really organized,” Porcelli told the Independent. She said the windmills became just another threat to fishermen, who have long dealt with federal regulations, such as mandated cameras on boats and governmental observers. These regulations are intended to protect ecosystems by preventing overfishing, but they also inadvertently interrupt the freedom previously experienced by fishermen.

In response to the windmills, fishermen have organized into coalitions like RODA, which seek to represent fisherman through the state and federal level processes that regulate permits and plans for new wind farms. Through organizations like RODA and ROSA, fishermen have pushed wind farm developers and the government to do more research on how windmills might affect fisheries, in a last ditch effort to try and understand the issue before plans get final approval and the wind farms reach the point of no return.

“The windmill companies hadn’t been too keen

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

and receptive hearing from the fisherman in the beginning,” said Feeney. “Pull the curtain back on this, and it’s a huge tax incentive for these companies to come and build windmills right away, so they were just throwing together these plans. Now we’re here two years later, after battling this, and they’re saying now, okay, it’s not as easy as we thought to just plop windmills here, we’ve got to start listening to these people.

So I think we’re finally at a stage, and it’s not just fishermen—it’s whale people, bird people, it’s all types of people—where I think there can be a compromise, a discussion on it how it can behoove everybody.” +++

hundreds and hundreds of wind turbines,” said Mattera. “And I think there will be impacts. I think the pounding of these pilings will kill juveniles and larvae.

It’s like putting a highway right through a nursery.

We’re killing the youth and the babies, and if we keep doing that, we’re going to damage certain species.”

Mattera said that Raimondo and the wind companies placed the drive to develop wind above fishermen’s concerns, leading federal agencies to skimp on their responsibility to do intensive research before projects are approved.

“It’s awful that BOEM and the federal government haven't done a better job working with scientists and wind companies to see what the general impacts are,” said Mattera. “We’re not here to stop this completely.

We understand we need to reduce the carbon footprint, but why does it need to be done yesterday?”

The windmills off Block Island fill the sky with hope for a cleaner future, but below the surface is inky blackness, an uncertainty for what the future holds, and the fear of fishermen that this could be their final fight.

It looks like the wind farms are coming. If the forces of wind developers, state and federal governments get their way, hundreds of windmills will take root along the Eastern Seaboard, making the existing Block Island Wind Farm look small by comparison. That’s exciting news for environmental advocates and governments who want to shift our economy away from carbon, but fishermen are being left in the lurch, forced to contend with projects in the middle of their workplaces that are PEDER SCHAEFER B’22 wanted to climb a windmill under-researched and potentially harmful to the fish- for this story but was told his experience on fire escapes eries these fishermen rely on to make a living. wouldn’t suffice.

“If someone were trying to build that in your workplace, I think most people would be a little resistant,” said Porcelli. “I don’t blame them for being upset, but I think they’re going to need to find a way to compromise, because it seems like it’s what’s coming.”

The impact windmills might have on fisheries remains uncertain, but if the wind projects do go through, and if the impacts are as bad as some fishermen fear, it could be the end of an industry that once dominated New England.

“I think we will be displaced, because guys will be very cautious about trying to fish around these

METRO

04

SPEAKING UP

BY Olympe Scherer ILLUSTRATION Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN Daniel Navratil

Some have never heard of presidential candidate US Representative Tulsi Gabbard [D-HI]. Others complain she’s making too much noise. In August, having failed to qualify for the third Democratic presidential primary debate, Gabbard denounced the Democratic National Committee’s unfairness on cable news. This followed a July lawsuit she filed against Google for $50 million when the company suspended her fundraising account for six hours.

Gabbard’s outspokenness echoes widespread anger with a media establishment that systematically sidelines political underdogs. +++ This phenomenon is nothing new. In 2004, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean ran for the Democratic nomination. He was the only Democratic candidate who opposed the Iraq War when it began.

Dean was the voice for Americans who felt left out of politics. He withdrew from the race in February 2004 after unfavorable polls and, more interestingly, a media fiasco.

On January 19, 2004, Dean gave an infamous, rousing speech to supporters in West Des Moines, Iowa. The speech was a pep talk urging supporters to keep up the fight. But it wasn’t the speech itself that garnered attention. It was the primal yell that Dean let out at the end of it.

Suddenly, Howard Dean was the butt of every joke. Popular comedians like Dave Chappelle and Conan O’Brien mocked him on TV. The clip of the yell was broadcast on CNN an estimated 633 times in the four days following the incident. CNN executives even admitted to having overplayed the yell.

Ironically, Dean spoke so loudly in order to be heard over the roaring crowd, which the microphone failed to capture. Though Dean was already falling behind in the polls before the fiasco, many believe that it gave the media an excuse to brush him aside in favor of the more center-leaning John Kerry.

One could argue, of course, that neither Gabbad nor Dean is popular enough to deserve media attention. Indeed, according to a study the New York Times released on August 2, Tulsi Gabbard had an estimated 88,000 donors and a total of $4 million in money raised. For context, slightly more hopeful candidate Beto O’Rourke had around 188,000 donors and $13 million, and Elizabeth Warren had around 421,000 donors and $25 million. Howard Dean registered in third place at the Iowa caucuses with 18 percent of votes before he withdrew from the race a month later.

So do these outlier campaigns deserve attention? +++ As a French-American dual citizen, I am dismayed with the United States’ two-party system. For all of France’s political flaws, it can at least be said that no two parties clash for power. The political spectrum is represented in full, from right-wing nationalists to full-on communists, with plenty of nuance in between. If I endorsed the Green Party in the US, I would be mocked at best, and chastised at worst, mainly because the Green Party is not (and cannot be) organized well enough to

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NEWS

be viable. Conversely, Europe Écologie Les Verts is the most prominent green party in France and won 10 of 79 French seats in the Europeean elections. America’s ‘winner-takes-all’ system forces us into unrepresentative dichotomies like Trump versus Clinton. And the DNC and GOP have no incentive to dismantle this system. For the DNC, a progressive third party like the Green Party threatens to siphon off votes from Democratic candidates. In a two-party system, this renders Democrats vulnerable to a conservative win.

This ideological deadlock compels progessive candidates to band together under the umbrella of the Democratic Party while clashing ideologically.

One way to create a more fair system is to champion this ideological diversity within organization.

However, the DNC has been known to do the opposite: Leaked emails from 2016 revealed that DNC superdelegates broadly agreed to support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primaries. This decision is only logical in a two-party system. The DNC’s strategy is to prioritize ‘electability’ (a unifying candidate, as opposed to myriad diverse candidates) in order to defeat the Republican party in the general elections.

For example, current Democratic chairman Tom Perez is adamant about ending Trump’s presidency.

His policies reflect this mission, but also respond to critiques of the DNC’s unfairness in 2016. According to the Washington Post, Perez was involved in “pushing states to abandon caucuses for primaries to spur more voters to take part, making it easier to register for party membership and minimizing the influence of elected officials.” On the flip side, Perez has received criticism for tightening debate qualifications based on polling.

In sum, though Perez has taken measures to make the DNC appear more fair, ‘electability’ is still a major concern.

The DNC’s new policies, which are the product of the two-party system, spark frustration in outlier Democratic candidates. Their grievances are valid— many ideas are sidelined as a result of strenuous debate qualifications, for example. With the potential to unseat a president in the next election who already lampoons journalists, media outlets have lashed out at Tulsi for launching another critique against them.

An August 30 Vox article critiques Gabbard’s suggestion of a “DNC conspiracy.” Gabbard's statement followed her failure to qualify for the third Democratic debate. The journalist, Aaron Rupar, lists the polling requirements that Gabbard fell short of. A candidate must reach a donation threshold (which Gabbard achieved) and receive three percent support in four polls approved by the DNC. There are 15 “Qualifying Poll Sponsors,” including ABC News/ Washington Post, NPR, and various universities. The DNC’s process in selecting these poll sponsors is quite opaque, which Rupar concedes. He also mentions “the ugly 2016 Democratic primary,” in which Bernie Sanders was undercut by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then the DNC chairwoman. Sanders had complained that the elections were “rigged,” which Rupar warns Gabbard and other Democrats from repeating, lest they “[hand] President Trump a talking point he can use to (again) try to demoralize would-be Democratic voters.” Rupar suggests that the DNC is exempt from criticism. Why is Vox advancing this ‘electability’

logic? When the media focuses on ‘electability’ and undercuts political underdogs, it entraps them in victimhood narratives instead of engaging them in meaningful criticism about their platforms. +++ The term “smear campaign,” used by Gabbard to name the supposed conspiracy against her, is a dangerous one. Her narrative has been effective because Gabbard’s grievances contain figments of truth that are compelling at a glance. As a result, the establishment media has the imperative to educate people about these inaccuracies and the more nuanced reality they conceal.

A Times article from Oct. 15th entitled “Tulsi Gabbard, Asked at Debate About Syria, Attacks the Media” tries to do this. The article spends a good amount of time describing and rebutting Gabbard’s comments. But it falls short when the reporters, Nick Corasaniti and Neil Vigdor, play into her conspiracy claims through satire: “[Gabbard] seized on a question about the removal of American troops in Syria to launch a broadside against one of her favorite foes — the media.” Perhaps the article could spend more time challenging her ideas rather than “clapping back” at her for trying to criticize the media. Using a headline that includes “attacks the media” only perpetuates the narrative of victimhood constructed by Gabbard.

The way the Times dealt with Gabbard could have been more productive and educational. But again, one can argue that Tulsi Gabbard is not a major enough candidate to warrant an in-depth rebuttal of her beliefs. It’s however worth noting that not so long ago, a more significant political figure was the target of unproductive articles in the Times.

Leading up to the 2016 election, article upon article dragged Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders through the mud. One article, entitled “Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Kiss Babies. That a Problem?” is as petty as it sounds. Meanwhile, the Times scarcely mentioned the massive showings at Sanders’ rallies, even as many occurred right in New York City. To no one’s surprise, these cheap shots and omissions ended up weakening the Times’ credibility.

In a two-party system such as this, there should be more diverse voices in the Democratic Party, not less.

As an outlier, Tulsi Gabbard is voicing her qualms in a way that’s sure to garner attention: by being provocative and painting herself as a victim. Despite these tactics, Gabbard raises valid concerns; behind her extravagant lawsuit against Google is a necessary critique of tech megacorporations. That said, her ideas require criticism. This is the media’s role, and thus far, mainstream outlets have been as concerned with satirising her as rebutting her positions. Gabbard may not be a viable presidential candidate, but her campaign is an opportunity to expose victimhood narratives instead of fueling them.

OLYMPE SCHERER B’21 has very strong opinions about what passes for a “savory crêpe” in the US.

25 OCT 2019

Negotiating Tulsi Gabbard’s place in the media landscape

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

06

THE POWER OF POULTRY Pampered chickens, Silicon Valley wealth, and agrarian dreams Ginger is eight years old. She’s survived two dog attacks, confrontations with a deadly ferret, multiple aggressive raccoons, and a hawk. I like to think her longevity is a product of her (relative) smarts and my family’s vegetarian diet. Chickens are often a topic of conversation in our household; for the past eight years, we have had between three and six at any given time.

They eat mainly kitchen scraps, grass, and insects and are locked at night in a coop my dad built with some extra glass blocks and recycled wood. Throughout the day, we watch them play and hunt in the backyard.

Each week, they lay between 10 and 24 eggs, which we happily consume or sell to our neighbors for two dollars a half-dozen. While the eggs are a bonus, our chickens function more as pets than as livestock, many responding to their names when called. My family isn’t alone in our chicken admiration: A USDA study from 2013 estimated that 0.8 percent of US households have backyard fowl—meaning that roughly 1,020,700 households in the United States own chickens. For some families, these chickens do much more than just lay eggs. +++ In the past century, the role of chickens in the United States has changed dramatically. Throughout the early 1900s, chickens were mainly raised by poultry farmers who sold eggs as their primary source of income and treated meat as a rare and expensive delicacy. This changed mid-century when new industrial agricultural technology collided with the US government’s push for “Victory Gardens” during wartime rationing.

Chickens were suddenly introduced into the backyards of many new small-holder family farms, not just larger industrial producers. Since the turn of the century, the function of chickens has shifted again, as they have become a luxury status symbol for many wealthy and upper-middle class white Americans.

Last year, the Washington Post ran an article titled, “The Silicon Valley elite’s latest status symbol: Chickens.” If that headline hadn’t already raised readers’ eyebrows, the subtitle read: “Their pampered birds wear diapers and have personal chefs—but lay the finest eggs tech money can buy.” The article goes on to describe $20,000 designer coops made from redwood, complete with solar-powered lights and fancy carnivorous meals of organic salmon and steak.

While these California chickens with gourmet diets and luxurious abodes are an extreme example, there are many chickens that live less lavish lives, but are still used mainly for decoration or entertainment.

Even more are primarily a food source for their families. Although Ginger certainly does not live in the lap of luxury like some Silicon Valley hens, she is more a source of entertainment than protein, helping out as a gardening companion (worm-eater) for my mom, and running energetically across the yard when called.

The rise of backyard chickens is driven by both families looking to benefit from a practical food source and families looking to ornament their backyard. Why has this dichotomy emerged?

As affluent people continue to move to cities and organic food emerges as a status symbol of choice, backyard chickens have become a surprisingly effective way to signal urban wealth. While the chickens themselves are not particularly expensive (a mailorder chick can be purchased for around $3, shipping included), the space required to house them, especially in urban areas, can be very costly. Owners also

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FEATURES

benefit from the lingering reputation of chickens as a functional farm animal, softening their status symbol to something that also projects liberal ‘progressive’ values. For those who fear that their address is not sufficient to mark their brood as a luxury good, the embellishments of the Silicon Valley cohort serve to mark the distinction.

Part of the explanation for why Silicon Valley has become such a backyard chicken hub can be found in the tech industry. As modern technology increasingly pervades most American’s lives, the elites of the industry have begun to take steps back, valuing disconnection from the very goods they have created, even as such a separation becomes more and more impossible. Here backyard chickens serve as a living, breathing reminder of the “real world.” One Google employee noted in the Washington Post article, “It’s a fascinating thing to sit and watch the animals because instead of looking at a screen, you’re looking at the life cycle.” Silicon Valley tech jobs are an ideal setting for the rise of luxury chickens to counteract feelings of isolation and technology-overload among workers.

As tech companies increasingly gain a reputation for exploitative practices and politics, backyard chickens allow for a progressive lifestyle “detox” for tech workers, often in the name of authenticity—romanticizing a rural working-class lifestyle only accessible to the white and wealthy.

The trendiness of backyard chickens also has deep connections to the increasing popularity of organic and farm-to-table foods. Although organic foods have been growing in popularity for decades, in recent years, companies like Whole Foods have begun to market them as a moral necessity. By limiting the amount of chemicals used, organic food can minimize the pernicious effects of farming on surrounding ecosystems and farm workers. Organic food also allows a mostly white and upper-middle class consumer base to, in effect, purchase a reprieve from climate-based guilt by using their money to buy the more expensive foods. Backyard chickens are an even more extreme example of this—though at first glance the archetype of ethical food, the sustainability factor of their eggs drops off rapidly when, for example, the chickens are fed gourmet salmon meals.

As the wealthy increasingly value disconnection and organic becomes their status quo, backyard chickens are an easy way to signal a desire for authenticity, an appreciation for local food and a surplus of outside space.

BY Anna Pasnau ILLUSTRATION Georgianna Stoukides DESIGN Christie Zhong

Ginger, left, getting some sun.

favorite habits and aesthetics of middle class and poor Americans, appropriating them and benefiting from the salt-of-the-earthiness these status symbols suggest.

Recent economic trends can help to explain these patterns. While the wealthy have become wealthier, low-income households have lost money, in large part because of policies that tax the richest Americans at far lower rates than the poorest and a financial crisis that affected low-income people and people of color the most. Compared to only 15 years ago, the poorest half of US households now have 32 percent less wealth, while the top one percent of households have more than twice as much. As inequality skyrockets in a system that only entrenches wealth disparities, it becomes more troubling that those at the top continue to appropriate elements of the lives of those in the middle or at the bottom for style or pleasure while ignoring the circumstances under which these elements exist for most. With their overalls and homemade jam, the one percent wannabe-agrarians halfheartedly conceal a wealth disparity they both benefit from and choose to ignore.

This appropriation is especially noticeable in the world of agriculture, where wealthy white Americans increasingly romanticize farming and their roles as ‘stewards of the natural world.’ Ironically, these very ideals around farming can in fact lead to less efficient and sustainable farms. The article “Stop Romanticizing Farms” in Modern Farmer points out this contradiction, writing that “we’re incentivizing farmers to use their limited resources to perpetuate a romantic stereotype that consumers enjoy, rather than to spend money on functioning, sustainable (but perhaps not magazine-beautiful) models of local farming.” Backyard chickens as a status symbol can be seen as an extreme version of this trend, an attempt to bring the idealized farm to individual homes. In the case of Silicon Valley, chickens create an expensive and undeserved halo effect for their owners while their luxurious accommodations make them far less sustainable than alternative egg sources. +++ Reading these pieces in the Washington Post and Modern Farmer makes me wonder about how to think of Ginger. It seems too extreme to condemn owning chickens except in cases of necessity. While Ginger does not exist for purely practical reasons, she doesn’t live the life of a pampered Silicon Valley chicken either.

Ginger—and my family’s chicken hobby—lives somewhere in between. Ultimately, the chicken isn’t the problem. But it can become one when used as a tool for disguising wealth and appropriating working-class necessities. As an ancient Ginger approaches her ninth year, she has mostly stopped laying eggs, except on days of exceptional motivation. With the rest of our flock she spends her days roaming the yard enjoying the near-constant sunshine. Our coop has no cameras or solar panels, but there is a heat lamp we turn on when nights are colder than 20 degrees, and when it snows my mom shovels paths through the yard so the hens can stretch their legs.

+++

Chickens are a somewhat charming example of a growing trend. While backyard chickens, tiny houses, and Instagrammable van living become trendy among the wealthy, they become overlooked as decisions made out of practicality or necessity. Indeed, in a time when Wall Street executives find minimalism stylish and their teenage offspring shop at Goodwill, the wealthy increasingly fetishize the aesthetics and habits of America’s poor and middle class. Of course, the wealthy are always sure to emphasize the differences. One can expect the Marie Kondo aficionado’s closet to be empty, but also expensive, clean, perhaps coordinated. While the trendy Goodwill fanatic might ANNA PASNAU B’20.5 has backyard chickens on her brag about their affordable purchases, they would resume. never be caught in a Ross. No one would confuse the Silicon Valley chicken coop for that of a low-income, rural family. The wealthy pick and choose their

25 OCT 2019

DISPATCHES FROM PRONK Last Monday, hundreds of Providence residents—artists, activists, students, misfits, puppets—danced the night away to the upbeat cacophony of Providence’s own What Cheer? Brigade in the parking lot abutting Laborers’ Local 271 on South Water Street. Above the performers hung a banner reading: “FUCK COLUMBUS: THIS IS STOLEN LAND.” This is Pronk (Providence HONK! festival): the anti-fascist, family-friendly party that takes over the southern tip of Fox Point each Indigenous Peoples’ Day to celebrate the people and curse the wicked.

According to the “Pronk Manifesto,” the annual street party “spawned from the original HONK! Festival in Somerville, MA,” which united activist street bands to throw a counter-party each Indigenous Peoples’ Day that celebrates “resistance to consumerism, colonialism, hatred, and injustice.”

Although there are now HONK! festivals all around the world, Pronk, now in its 12th year, remains a uniquely Providence event, highlighting the work of local organizers, the music of local bands, and the moves of everyone dancing by the river. Pronk 2019 brought a few changes to the old formula—highlights included the incorperation of the new pedestrian bridge and a mysterious geodesic dome on the sunflower field—but it retained the raucous, radical, and righteous energy of Pronks past.

Pronk balances the desire to celebrate and reclaim public space and the reality that, in order to be reclaimed, the land must have been stolen in the first place. In creating this piece, we recognize that as non-Indigenous Brown students, we are not only complicit in the ongoing colonization of Indigenous land on the East Side, but also in the systematic exploitation of Providence communities—from the gentrification of Fox Point to the occupation of Pokanoket land at Mt. Hope to labor abuses against university employees. We are not the first Brown students to participate in Pronk, but we do so conscious of the harm that our university has done to Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in Providence and in solidarity with the work of local organizers, artists, students, and all residents in their struggles for social and economic justice.

The following works were all inspired by our time at Pronk this year. This is not a review in the strict sense, or a critique really; it’s just a few disconnected thoughts, jots on the back of the napkin, from some people who appreciate Pronk. In short, this is our way of paying homage to the party that reps Providence to the fullest, and gives us all some time to dance and reflect in the presence of community. In honor of the death of Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Hernán Cortés, and the rest of those genocidal motherfuckers, PRONK 2019: -CP

BY Ricardo Gomez, Bilal Memon, Chris Packs, Eve O'Shea, Mayo Saji, Miranda Van-Boswell ILLUSTRATION Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN Christie Zhong

-EO

PAUSING AT PRONK scarf shorn and coat itchy, fraying, i felt at my most then. frantic neon trumpets and babies in backpacks. soggy leaves latch on to boots as i half-step from the bus. it’s past time. and dark. a noise from not too far. on the corner, people laugh and stroll on over. little to no food but the pronk and tonk was an earworm and i had to fidget. next to me, a man three generations senior, cane dropped to the side, a blue suit, all polyester and stubby with a two toned tie and a collar that scuffs the neck. dance-stomping with more verve than me. instruments swirl. artists in the crowd. this was a parking lot. this is cheer. a move from the amphitheater. touting lyrics. new friends and a walk to the bridge. cops monitor the taco trucks. cheer. someone approaches for an interview. microphone in two hands for a podcast. asking. can spaces be reclaimed? i answer. reclaiming seems like a word far too burdened. hanging on fraught histories. (re)claiming reminds too much that something was lost. stuttering, it should have always just been ours. then there is the dome. no place like dome. one dome under dome. dome alone. a centerpiece. a focus point. the community centers itself. sees a mantle. icons only. more verve. on the back of a city. old and new see the same space down at the river. cheer. a hurricane barrier idles as it folds to new venues. a reentanglement of sorts–the private on the public’s terms. little to no importance is given, just that they are here to charge, decompress, and then disperse. so to say. buckets for donation but pocketbooks are shy. brass horns muffle the jangle of money lending. it’s fine. dawdling on unread newspapers. there is a mission for the condensation of the crowds. still there is cheer.

-RG

-MS

09

METRO

25 OCT 2019

The backpack bobbed up and down Against the crashing waves of hands.

The boy hit the floor, the bag threatened to fly away.

He shot up, it attempted to sink into the earth.

The protests, sterilized by the sagging straps, Resulted in a frustrated equilibrium.

The young couple unevenly swayed against the slow march of the trumpet, She closed her eyes and smiled To avoid the glances and snickers From her friends on the edge.

This brought relief to the young man, Who would appreciate it if the entire world closed their eyes.

As heads and shoulders met, They tried to anticipate the forthcoming notes, Dreading their subsequent disappearance Into the moonless night.

A set of tortoise frames watched from afar As the boys jumped and the young couples swayed.

Light and noise grew confident, Dropped their bashful guards and entered a playful waltz, Stirring dull senses.

As confusion gave way to lost virility, The old man descended the steps to join the merry-goers.

-BM

LE FESTIN’

The scariest nightmares are when the people we trust become monsters. The last time I went to Pronk was with D. There was tremendous tenderness in our love then, but soon after a thin line of difference began to show itself.

BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER

OBSERVATIONS FROM THE JAZZ STAND

The most beautiful parts of Providence to me are all infrastructure. The upturned Gano Street Bridge, the weathered roads always accumulating puddles, the deserted parking lots, the Hurricane Barrier, the Ghost Tunnel. They’re Providence’s public spaces, just as much as Kennedy Plaza or Roger Williams Park. They’re meant to be climbed on, chipped at. Meant for encounters and places to smoke a joint for the first time. Their intended purpose is secondary. This infrastructure comforts me. I see those three smokestacks in the sky (Providence’s Orion’s Belt) and I know I’m back.

But that highway that slices into downtown and cuts across the river through the heart of Fox Point, etching a sardonic question mark onto the city’s landscape: That is an infrastructure of pain. They built it to displace the Cape Verdean community at the Point, everyone knows that. The city called it “rehabilitation” and “revitalization.” Nobody buys that. The new $22 million pedestrian bridge: They built that to gentrify the Jewelry District. Everyone knows that too. They opened the bridge the same summer the state took over the Providence Public School District. The same summer we found out that Brown, after promising to raise $10 million for the PPSD over a decade ago, couldn’t muster $2 million. (Brown has a $3.8 billion endowment). There’s no comfort here; this infrastructure bleeds.

Last year, Pronk ended at the Hurricane Barrier. We were glued together, dancing on concrete slabs, embodying that odd crevice of Providence. I wish Pronk ended at the Hurricane Barrier again, not at the Pedestrian Bridge, although I like the way the railings light up at night.

I want to tell Brown to go shove its new bridge up its ass and stop trying to take Providence. But maybe another future exists for that bridge. Maybe—once a nor'easter finally knocks down the miscalculated Hurricane Barrier (designed in the 1960s, the barrier was built without accounting for sea-level rise), and they demolish the upturned bridge in the name of “beautification”—the pedestrian bridge will be all we have left. The only place to go to a punk show in the summertime or drink a ’gansett with your feet dangling over the dappled river. Since Pronk is meant to reclaim, maybe it would have been counterproductive to ignore the bridge and let Providence developers have their way. Or, maybe that's just what they want, for their bridge to gain community legitimacy...

Here is my imagined future: 30 years down the line, the pedestrian bridge is teeming with high schoolers cutting class and kids making snowmen. Brown University’s assets have been liquidated by the new governing coalition of the undergraduate, graduate, professors, and university workers unions and given to the newly elected socialist city government as back taxes. Once-beloved parking lots are parks. The three smokestacks are windmills. Providence Developers have skipped town. Jason Fane is nowhere to be found, and models of his dystopian tower are now a collectors item. Indigenous Peoples’ Day comes around and everyone knows: time to head for the bridge.

-CP

How American is the word sex? The act is not bound by the actions people use to describe it. What about: how bodies resonate with each other? A way of understanding thought, electricity, and creation.

This is supposed to be a happy event, but to be here again, all I can do is compulsively snap pictures, trying to photograph the absence of D. -MVB Inspired by Italo Calvino and Carrie Mae Weems

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO

10

WHEN NEZHA FELL FROM THE SKY In my childhood, I watched Nezha. It was an animated series based off the Chinese myth of a boy named Nezha.

At the beginning of every episode, a theme song played.

This is how I first met Nezha. This is how I will meet Nezha now. Each section of the essay starts with a verse from the song. 说一段神话 There are not many words to describe the past in Chinese. When it is necessary to speak of the past, we say 一段时间. I began writing this when a new movie on Nezha came out this year. It has been 一段时间 since I last watched Nezha, since I last spoke Chinese.

The song opens with let us speak of a legend. It was unclear to me whether 段 referred to the past or the legend. After a while, I realized that the distinction between the two made them the same. 段 is the same word as parts, apart, breaking. 话说那么一家 These words speak of a family. 这家夫妻，两生了个怪娃娃 This couple gave birth to a 怪娃娃.

When I was five, the same age as Nezha, my mother would do my hair. Nezha was the only character I watched with hair like mine—dark, straight, stubborn.

Though Nezha lived in the Shang dynasty, I asked my mother to make my hair into buns like theirs. The buns had to be constructed symmetrically and rose from my head like horns. Sometimes, I would make her redo them, to make sure they rose distinctly. I was not to be mistaken for an alien. I was Nezha.

I cut my hair in third grade. By then, I had realized that Nezha was a boy. My mother would make a point to smooth what was left of my hair, to tell me I looked a 娃 娃. I had taken a large 段 of my hair. It would be years before my mother could tie it again.

Once noticed, gender surfaced everywhere. In the tips of my hair, in fabric, on the playground, in the words we held. My mother told me it was 怪 if I played with boys. I wanted to show her I was anything but, that I was the 娃娃 she wanted. When she chose my outfit in the morning, I picked the option with dresses. I felt this was forgivable, for Nezha wore a dress.

Our mothers wove dresses, ribbons, bindings into our hair, our bodies. We were 娃娃 to be positioned and dressed with care. We were 怪 and watched for something strange. We were 怪娃娃 to everyone, to ourselves. 扎两个冲天鼽 I had to call my mother to understand this line. She taught me ways I could find the meaning of unfamiliar words.

me. I noticed the left half of 冲 resembles 氵. The droplets signify that it comes from the family of water characters. This family held characters I could hold still in my hand. I knew 海 was ocean. That to describe it, I could use other members of the family, like 深 or 清.

is thick, there is a single wall that slopes outwards like a cape.

For a long time, I imagined 护 to be a blanket. It gathered surrounding words under its roof. They would come and go when the meaning was right. Others The right half of 冲 was 中. I knew how to pronounce would slide off the roof, tracing where it met the sky, this character, because it is the name of China, of the the world beyond. family I hold close to me. It is also the word for center.

In the air, 护 sounds like an umbrella. It unveils a I give these pieces to my mother. She tells me that 冲 silence that has an interior. means washed away.

This is how I arrive at the conclusion that 护 means to protect. 光这俩小脚丫 轩辕箭满弓拉 Although Nezha’s footfalls were light, everyone in the house knew the steps of mischief. Everyone in the village knew who was coming to play a game. Even Nezha’s other weapon was 轩辕箭. It was a ribbon of everyone in the ocean, where there were no footsteps, red that he handled with softness. Whenever Nezha fell from the sky, 轩辕箭 would unravel from his shoulknew the reverberations of Nezha. ders. It would extend like a hand of red, for him to grasp.

Nezha never wore shoes. He touched the world the same way he met it. When his brothers forbade him This year, when Nezha was revived for a movie by a from playing with them, he stepped into a courtyard, Chinese director, I was skeptical. I no longer knew where he found one of his greatest companions, a small what I needed to hold onto. For weeks, I deliberated if pig bear. The creature was not afraid of him when I should watch the movie. Would it pull me back into he saw that Nezha’s feet were dirty, covered in will- the story? The language? What did I need the movie to ingness to listen to the earth. Like the earth, Nezha save me from? occupied the capacity of multiple states. With friends, he was like mud, mischievous without consequence. The movie was only showing in East Providence, at a With enemies, his stubbornness hardened. When the time of night when there were no buses. I went on the emperor’s guards came to imprison his parents, he last weekend it was showing, alone. I didn’t expect it to stepped on their feet until they groaned loud enough hold out a 轩辕箭 for me. that the heavens could hear.

In the car on the way to the movie, I held in my mind the things I had left. I remembered how Nezha’s brothers 踩着俩风火轮 practiced swordplay without him. Nezha snuck into On Nezha’s third birthday, his teacher gives him a the armory to find a sword, to hold something stronger mount. With his teacher, the mount is a plump flying than they could. He found only a bow that had been pig. With Nezha, it becomes 风火轮, wheels of fire passed down through his family. The first two arrows under his feet. The mount transforms to suit the like- landed leagues away—on the forehead of an emperor, ness of its owner. The smoke, the light, the anger drives the whiskers of a sea dragon. His father found him him to the skies. At least in the clouds, he cannot see before he could let the third one go. Nezha shaped the the disappointment of his parents. They do not want course of history, without the knowledge of his own him to protect them. But every moment he grows older, family’s history. he flies closer to danger, closer to his destiny.

At home, scooping up family photographs or Chinese When I watch Nezha fly, I understand why 飞 cuts books, I knew that asking questions was a dead through the air. Flight requires the precision of a language. I did not know if my mother did not want me dagger, beginning with the point of feathers. I ache to to understand, or if she did not want to remember. I was drink in the blue, to belong to the wind. But more than aware of what was visible—this face that looked like anything, I want to understand how to be unbounded. my mother’s, this character that looked like a bird, but heavier. I am not afraid of the words that my parents buried. I am afraid that they will grow into a sound that 乾坤圈手中拿 no one remembers.

When the gods first give Nezha 乾坤圈, it looked like a large ring. He carried the weapon as you would a When I pulled myself up trees and over rooftops, I frisbee. It was in the air more often than it was in his knew what scraped me raw. The sky did not seal away its color. When it bruised violet or laid stripped with hands. red, I understood at least there was blue underneath.

In battle, it was always Nezha’s first choice. Before being thrown, 乾坤圈 would light up, as if taking a Nezha’s parents never told him of the bow. He split breath of Nezha’s life. When it met its target—the neck open the sky, their love, trying to find the sky underof a dragon, the body of a panther, a stubborn boulder— neath. There are no words for a memory that you do not it chimed. It had a sound like all the wishes being have. granted in a fountain at the same instant, the coins 两眼是照妖精 burning dry.

Chinese characters can be split in half for understanding. The left half tells us how to read the character, while the right tells us to sound the character. As with I sent a picture of these characters to my mother. She 混天绫护着他 any rules in language, this is broken and often, without replied with an audio clip in English. reason.

When I don’t know words in Chinese, I look at their 双腿是追风马 shape on the page, how they fly through the air. The I tried this with a character that had slipped away from character for 护 resembles a house. Although the roof

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FEATURES

25 OCT 2019

BY Star Su ILLUSTRATION Sandra Moore DESIGN Christie Zhong

My Chinese could fit in a fountain. When I’m at school, the fountain dries up and you can see what words I have left. Sometimes, it swells with the words I find in a TV show or cartoon. I am certain that if you were to comb through the water, it would be filled with the remnants of Nezha’s battles. You might find the sparkle of the northern sea pearl he stole from the dragons. If you put your hands in the water, you might feel the warmth of the phoenix that Nezha freed so it could go back to being the sun. And if you put your ear close to the water, you might hear whispers of the battle cries I learned.

If asked to describe this sentence, I would say that horses run with wind under Nezha’s two feet. Making sense of this is difficult, so I will exchange these words for what moves in the animation, in the movie, in the copies of Nezha that breathe. 上天下海本事大 Nezha’s power is large—in the skies above, in the oceans below. 本事is part power, part skill, part hard work. When I reach the end of my wits, hope, perspective, my mother asks me to give 本事.

It is important to remember that the ocean is an old dragon. With each stroke of its salted, white beard, it dreams of swallowing the earth. The sun is just a phoenix, who enjoys napping in the forest at night as much as burning the sky by day. Its rest is as important as its rise.

The work of remembering dreams is using 本事. When I reach a stone I cannot move, I remember the ocean or the sun. With the hand of water or light, they would wave it possible. The stone can be rolled over, sliced open, melted. I must learn how to use 本事 to shape the earth on my own terms. When I grow tired or frustrated with the edges of my 本事, I remember Nezha. Before his master taught him anything, he asked Nezha to build a tower to the skies using only stones. I remember that even the path to the sky is finite. 千征百战头魔法 The only characters I recognized from this verse were 千 and 魔法, a thousand and magic. This time, my mother described the unfamiliar characters with other Chinese characters over the phone. She filled them in with words that she knew I hadn’t forgotten. I wish I had pressed record.

I have these now: magic, thousands of fights, ceaseless. 要问他名字叫什么 If you asked for their name… 哪吒, 哪吒… 小哪吒

STAR SU B’21 is looking for a red ribbon.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATURES

12

DEAR She has sort of chewed up hands. I don’t mind; I don’t need her to be perfect. And she’s wearing

some sort of cotton candy scent so sickly sweet I’m surprised either of us can keep eating. Even though I am looking for interesting, she orders a trio of cookies for dessert.

We met at a party, when I walked in on her in the bathroom and she was peeing and twisted to her left, snorting something off the tiled countertop. I’d heard four things about her: She’d spent the summer living in a tub with a sex guru. She once made fifty shots from the foul line. She’d had three abortions. She had started calling herself pumpkin head in high school, and even though it never caught on, she still refers to herself this way.

It really is a big head. She grabs for a cookie and at first it looks normal on the plate and also in her frayed hand, but by the time it gets to her face it is shrunken by at least half.

“Mark?”

“Sorry?” She’s staring at me, but I heard nothing over her cookie trick.

“Just that I realized I had to let things come to me.”

The cookie continues to wane and grow as she dips it in milk and brings it towards her shining mouth.

“Oh, right. And what sparked that?” I let her take all three cookies so I can stay entertained.

“Well when I got my blood drawn later that day and felt better than I had in years, I realized maybe bloodletting really was the key.” She’s smiling just a little. It’s honestly the best thing she’s said yet, and I grin a little too at this thought. She’s encouraged, says, “I mean not for the bubonic plague, obviously.”

“Just your general malaise.”

“Exactly.”

“I’ll get the check?” I’m already gesturing to the waiter, flicking my wrist around in the air with a flourish that embarrasses the both of us. She nudges me a little with her foot under the table and doesn’t say sorry, just sort of holds my gaze.

There’s a pillow and it’s clear she made it, unclear why.

Black buttons are splayed out like watermelon seeds on top of different floral patches. She’s leaning against it and I’m pressed up against her but I keep thinking about all that plastic digging into her back and leaving disgusting marks. I pull the pillow out from under her, trying to make it flirty, and toss it onto the floor.

It lands upside-down and the backside reveals itself— also buttoned.

We put some normal pillows under her hips and pelvis and she’s arched like a letter, a lowercase r. Her torso’s sloping away from me and the added perspective helps her head look a normal size. We’re fucking and she just about kills me, telling me I look like a cartoon character, and I can’t help myself. I finish and

13

LITERARY

pull out and she’s smiling like she just knew it.

“We should take a trip. Maybe Vegas,” Her eyes are closed, so I guess she’s not looking to see how I react.

“I did a puzzle of Vegas once.”

“That’s probably all it’s good for.” I’m starting to really like her, I think.

She glows in some pictures, is less focused in others.

She is on my mind more than normal and I’ve taken to looking at her on Facebook.

Mark: Hey. She doesn’t respond at first, so I keep trying. First with variations on the “Hello” theme, followed by some questions. And then.

Susan: What’s up?

Mark: Tell me something else.

Susan: Uhhhhh Two hours later, it’s dark outside now: Susan: The voice of your soul is breath.

Mark: OK. Did you write that?

Susan: Got it off a teabag.

Susan: Do you want to come over?

We spend a while fucking before she takes me to her friend’s something party. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, in one of those soft type houses with dim rooms and green velvet couches. There’s the same self-conscious swaying and tight shirts and pants you always find at these kinds of things.

“You must be Mark.” A woman with sort of tilted hips is looking at me. But I am not interested in proving myself.

“No.” “Mark, this is Jamie, she’s wonderful,” Susan’s beside me now and her delivery’s dry, like she’ll tell me more about Jamie later. Like Jamie fucked her cousin in the tenth grade or something. She puts her hand on my lower back, her fingers restless.

Stuck, I go with: “Well, I guess I am actually. Nice to meet you.”

The woman with the hips, Jamie I guess, she’s standing right in front of a painting of Victorian dolls in a baby carriage.

“So Mark, what do you do?”

I piece together more of the painting as she wiggles back and forth, turning from Susan to me to the random woman who has joined the conversation a little too late and is smiling vacantly. I let them ask their questions.

The dolls are wearing bonnets. Jamie finally moves away and I learn there’s a cat curled on top of the piled up dolls, smiling churlishly at the viewer.

I stand by the food for too long to give myself a break. There’s a fruit salad and I need to do something, so I keep scooping random wet fruits into a hard, clear plastic cup. I leave the table; my mouth is all pineapple sores.

She is the change we need to see that evening. She moves to put on her shoes without asking anyone first

25 OCT 2019

BY Emma Kofman DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

if they are leaving. Instead, they come to her. And say “Susan, you heading out?” and “I think I’m walking your direction” and “I’ll get our coats” and on and fucking on. But she doesn’t seem to care, just pulls on her boots and her blue furry hat that barely makes it past the tips of her ears.

The pack starts to thin as people turn off on side streets and couples go into alleyways to start hooking up. Soon it’s just her and me and she’s walking just far enough ahead of me that I can see her ass sort of swaying/jerking back and forth. She doesn’t look back when she says, “So, you want to stay over?”

I tell her back pockets, “Okay.”

a lot publicly, but always to herself. I wake up and it’s still night and she’s standing in front of the mirror into her own eyes and can’t look away. She is crying and there are some drops dripping down but mostly her unblinking eyes are reabsorbing the moisture. I want to be invisible and in between her and the mirror, so I can stare right into her without her looking away. She has a note next to her bed with the words, “My pen is orange and so is the socket and there is an urge.” Her eyes are mostly closed when we fuck.

Dear Susan, Hi. I’m not sure. I wanted to tell you this a long time ago, I think. It’s sort of like when you’re in a dark room and you have a flashlight and if you move it around quickly, the same shadows keep popping up, like they’ve always been waiting for you. Anyways. I think I love you. I don’t want to freak you out. So I’m hoping this email gives you some space. Excited to see you Friday.

- Mark

She takes me to a medieval museum and we see puzzle jugs and chainmail and accidentally my college roommate, who looks ten years older. Susan makes a lot of sense here; I can just see her jousting on top of a rippling horse with that big head stuffed into a shining helmet. When we leave the snow is thick and creamy.

“That’s so weird. I just remembered I overdosed in my dream last night from a sip of hot chocolate.”

Snowflakes are falling into her mouth and watering it Her response finally comes weeks later when I’m as she speaks. visiting my grandmother. I leave my grandmother to I taste some wet too. “What do you mean over- her CDs and step outside. dosed? Someone put something in it?”

“I’m not sure, but I woke up and checked my pulse.”

Sorry, Mark.

“And?” Maybe it was just that you are warm and I’m “Well, you were still asleep, but mine was slower sort of lonely and miserable in my own ways. But than yours. I think that means my heart is well trained, I’m not really looking for what you’re getting at. like an athlete’s. Yours, I don’t know but it seemed kind You know when people take a photo of your face of high.” and they want to do something with it? I don’t “Maybe you were just really hungry.” I realize that know if that’s ever happened to you… I hope you since her cookie trick I haven’t seen her eat a real meal. understand.

“No, I don’t think so.”

I’d still fuck if you wanted to, Susan I’m a few beers in and I need to know what the design is on the soles of her shoes. I want to know if they’re practical, made to grip and tread, or if they form a sort of decorative mark in the snow. I don’t want her sliding around on an icy patch of sidewalk.

Mark: Send me a pic of the bottom of your shoes.

Susan: What?

Susan: …

Susan: Is this your fetish?

She sends a picture. There’s crumbling dried mud clogging up the designs, flattening the whole surface.

Mark: Hot. (Joking, but thanks.)

The jokes she likes best are the ones referring immediately back to the conversation we are having. I rush to think of them even when she’s not there.

Susan: Send me yours?

Mark: [One attachment] Susan: Hmm. See, that doesn’t really do it for me.

I’m noticing new things: When she eats in a room full of people she watches her spoon and composes each bite, then when the metal hits her lips, she looks up and stares down the whole of the room. She laughs

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LITERARY

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M F SEL

E D A

Wanting and getting in Mad Men

Wanting to be a man, or a certain kind of man, animates most of the heavy-hitters of ‘prestige TV.’ These shows tell the stories of men who want to be the man in some particular area: meth distribution, Mob administration, borderline-paramilitary policing. But Mad Men, the fabulously popular AMC drama that ended after seven seasons in 2015, explicitly dramatizes that want itself. Mad Men focuses on 1960s Manhattan advertising agencies, and advertising is, after all, the industry of orchestrated want.

Don Draper, Mad Men’s protagonist, is better at orchestrating want than anyone else in the show, because he is the best ad man in the game. It becomes clear early on that he is also the best man in the game, full stop. He starts the first season with a family in Westchester and a mistress in the Village, and he moves—at work, at home, and in the city—with total self-assurance. He drinks dark liquor and drives a Buick. Not only does he smoke Lucky Strikes, but he also creates their ads. What Don represents is a masculinity so distilled that evaluating its toxicity has always felt, to me, like missing the point. It is toxic, of course— all masculinity in Mad Men, without exception, is toxic.

Don’s masculinity is unique not in the danger it presents, but in its concentration.

Don has an alcohol problem and a lying problem.

But for a man in advertising, these are features, not bugs. For all his faults—in some cases, because of them—Don is the aspirational figure at the center of Mad Men, because he is good, if nothing else, at two interconnected tasks: his job and his masculinity. We see what aspiring-to-Don looks like very clearly in Pete Campbell, a junior accounts man. Over the course of the show, Pete strives, over and over again, to be like Don, but he can never pull it off. When Pete tries to flirt with women, he leers. Professionally, his attempts at mimicking Don are even more obvious and turn out even worse. In the show’s pilot, he takes Don’s notes out of his trash, then pitches an ad to a client based on them. He is roundly rejected, and Don has to swoop in with a moment of improvisational genius to save the working relationship.

Seasons later, after Pete is set up with a house in Connecticut, a wife, and an infant child, Don still surpasses him. Toward the beginning of season five’s “Signal 30,” we see Pete in his kitchen at night, unearthing a toolbox to fix a leaky faucet. He turns some valve with some wrench, and the rhythmic drip stops. Later, Pete invites Don, along with another accounts man and both their wives, to his home in Cos Cob. The sink Pete thinks he's fixed springs a worse leak during dinner, and the women scream as water shoots toward the ceiling. The men rush in; Don immediately strips to his undershirt and gets to work.

While Pete stands by, rifling in a panic through the toolbox, Don goes to work on fixing the sink, finishing in seconds. Pete tells Don that he fixed a leak recently, and Don tells him that, actually, Pete’s ‘fix’ did nothing.

“It was a coincidence,” he says, that it seemed to do anything at all. Don no longer has either a home in the suburbs or custody of his children, but Pete still hasn’t caught up to him.

Pete is far from the only character who tries to catch up to Don. Peggy Olsen, Sterling Cooper’s first female copywriter, climbs the ranks from Don’s secretary to the head of his creative team over the course of

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ARTS

the series.

Peggy is not indebted to Don for her success, but he is her mentor, often her advocate, and—especially as the series progresses—her friend. “I see you as an extension of myself,” he tells her in the third season, asking her to move to a new agency with him. Don sees himself in Peggy, but he also sees her for her gifts.

“Nobody understands that,” he tells her, speaking of the forces that make people want. “But you do.” In the show’s fourth season, Don wins a Clio award for an ad Peggy contributed to significantly, and when she expresses anger that he didn’t publicly acknowledge her work, they end up in a screaming match in his office.

“You will get your turn,” he tells her. She’s an extension of Don, it seems, not only in her talents, but also in the trajectory of her career.

But Don’s masculinity is embedded in his advertising talent, and vice versa. To want a career at all is coded masculine in the world of Mad Men—for advertising in particular, and for the Don Draper school of advertising most of all. Don’s professional skill is bound up in his masculine persona, so the transmission of skill is muddied and augmented by that persona.

Some of what he ends up transferring to Peggy seems to be his larger-than-life masculinity.

At one point in season five, Peggy ends up at her apartment with Dawn Chambers, Don’s secretary, after convincing her to take a cab back with her. Dawn, the only Black employee at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, has been sleeping on the couch at the agency after staying late at work, because she hasn’t been able to get a cab to Harlem from the office.

Peggy drunkenly holds forth, interrupting Dawn whenever she speaks. Dawn waits for Peggy (who, eager to prove her progressive mettle, tells Dawn, “go ahead, you can talk!” at intervals) to wrap up. Finally, Dawn has a chance to tell Peggy what she’s been trying to since they were in the cab. “I hope you won’t tell Mr. Draper about me sleeping there,” she says. “You two talk sometimes.”

The grouping of Peggy and Don together seems to set Peggy off. She recites some platitudes about her and Dawn needing to stick together, then asks Dawn if she wants to be a copywriter. Dawn says no. “Yep,” Peggy says, “you’re right. Copywriter’s tough.” Then she adds, abruptly: “Do you think I act like a man?” “I guess you have to, a little,” Dawn says, and Peggy continues, as though she hasn’t heard her, “I try, but… I don’t know if I have it in me. I don’t know if I want to.”

Peggy is fixated, especially in the show’s middle seasons, on how much of a man she has to—or wants to—be, mostly to the exclusion of any other political self-reflection. This has something to do, certainly, with the fact that, for Peggy, self-reflection on masculinity isn’t really about politics at all. Whether she wants to be a man isn’t a moral question for her—it’s not a question of what she owes to other people, not really. It’s a question of what she owes to herself, or, more specifically, what she owes to her career. It’s also a question that she seems to already have the answer to. She wants to act like a man as much as she wants to do what men do—in this case, writing copy. Drunken vacillations aside, it’s utterly clear throughout the show that Peggy wants to write copy more than she wants practically anything else.

The better question than whether Peggy wants

to be a man: What would acting like a man entail that Peggy hasn’t already done? By the fifth season, she resents her sexual partners and drinks heavily at work.

She unceremoniously fires artists with whom she has problems and considers other offers when dissatisfied with her job. On paper, she has all the credentials for the masculinity Mad Men presents.

But Pete has all of these credentials, too, and they haven’t gotten him nearly as far as he would prefer. For all the ways that Peggy and Pete are radically different— she ambivalent about masculinity, he charging toward it at any cost; she a woman by any standard, he a man by the same—they share this not-quiteness, this position of almost-Don, of almost-really-man. They reside on the same asymptote.

Of course, Don Draper is hardly a stable ideal.

The central thread of Mad Men is the dismantling of the Don Draper image, and all the nuclear-strength masculinity woven into it. His name and past, we learn, were stolen from his commanding officer in the Korean War, who died in a firefight only Don was present for.

The man who was once named Dick Whitman took on the Don Draper name because he wanted to be discharged and because he wanted a fresh start. In other words, he pussied out—out of the war, out of his life. In a story littered with not-quite-proper-men, Don stands out as the closest thing around to a masculine standard. Then we bear witness as that standard is revealed as a sham.

In Mad Men, being born into manhood offers power, but it doesn’t seem to offer a real sense of security. Men don’t escape the desire to be men. That desire, in Mad Men, seems as certain a condition of maleness as any.

It isn’t just a condition of manhood, though— Peggy Olsen’s desires prove as much. It’s a condition of wanting power, of wanting to be seen as fully there, fully able, fully real. The world of Mad Men is ruled by two twin truths: wanting to be a man is rational, and actually becoming one is impossible. +++ Mad Men reached me at the right moment, I guess.

By the time I started watching it in earnest, I’d been tearing my hair out over the show’s central paradox for years.

I knew that I wanted to be a man, was the thing. It was as obvious to me that I wanted to be a man as it was that I wanted to pass my classes and get a job. These were, I thought, very sensible things to want. Nobody I knew, of any gender, would dispute that being a man set you up better than being a woman did. Men didn’t have to worry about their weight, skin, or clothes. They never got interrupted, and when they interrupted, it was because they had something more interesting to say than whoever had been speaking before. They sent boring texts to women they liked. They said cruel things to women, did cruel things to women, and never saw repercussions. It would be nice not to be a target of such frequent cruelty, I knew.

But I knew, too, that the things men had were not so easily obtained as they sometimes seemed. Men around me worried about their weight and skin and clothes, and when they interrupted, it was often to say something so stupid that everyone rolled their eyes.

25 OCT 2019

MEN Women laughed at men’s boring texts and passed them around. And a lot of the cruelty men did, they seemed somehow coerced into doing, by their friends or by their ideas of what it was they should do. This didn’t make the cruelty less painful, or the doing of it less cruel, but it didn’t seem like they got anything good out of it, not really. It seemed like the cruelty was a test, complete with the potential for failure. I knew more than anything that men hated to fail. When men failed, they weren’t punished the way women were, but they became something that occasionally seemed to me even worse than being punished: they became pathetic.

It was horrible to see a man trying and failing to pull something—anything—off, because there was always that odd jolt of realization that any man, no matter how tall or gruff, was still too small and frail for the huge and jagged ideal he was supposed to house.

It wasn’t that I never wondered, in the middle of all this obsession with what men did and were supposed to do and how I could never do any of it, whether I might be trans. It was that I’d broken my thought process down into two parts, and both were insurmountable.

One: it was not trans but reasonable, as reasonable as the eminently reasonable Peggy Olsen, to want what men had. Two: even men like Pete wanted what men had, and they didn’t have it, so even if wanting it were trans, the direction of that transness would be straight up an asymptote, one that never quite touched what it was that I wanted. I knew I had a desire, but ‘it’s only rational’ and ‘it’s impossible’ are the two best ways to silence want, and I’d deployed both.

TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) ideology was more or less designed to appeal to teenagers in my situation. These so-called feminists, whose communities have taken firm root in many social media platforms, focus most of their energy on harassing trans women, but use any spare time they have to express concern for young ‘women’ like the one I was. These feminists are concerned about us. They know that being a woman is terrible; in fact, they claim to know this better than anyone. But they know, too, that attempting escape is wrong-headed: it’s an abandonment of women, and, even worse, an abandonment of women’s collective future.

They wish we would realize that no one wants to be a woman, is all. Everyone wants what men have; the fact that they get it and women don’t is the major problem of modern society. They don’t bother to remind us of the corrupting influence of all this power we claim to want, the evils of these men we say we want to be, but they don’t really have to. We, being women, aren’t evil, but deluded. We’ll never become what we want to be.

What we want, they assume, is to get to do what men get to do. Men are what they have, and they have exactly what Mad Men tells us they do: power, decisions, freedoms everybody deserves, freedoms nobody does.

Unfortunately, what kept me from falling into this worldview had very little to do, at least at first, with any of the real bad it does in the world—the women it degrades, the communities it dissolves, the people it keeps locked in the closet. What kept me from signing on was how small a range of wants it actually seemed to account for. A lot of what I wanted from being a man, in the end, had vanishingly little to do with power, at least on the surface. What I wanted was tiny, stupid verbs. I wanted to be clapped on the shoulder, to say “what’s up” as one inflectionless syllable, to sit with my

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

elbows on my knees and my hands clasped loosely. To drink dark liquor and like it, and, of course, to fix a sink effortlessly. There were some tiny, stupid nouns, too: apartments with barely any furniture, shampoo that smelled like nothing, deodorant that smelled, supposedly, like the Arctic. White undershirts; gray suits. The best thing about being a man, it seemed to me, was the silent transmission of these verbs and nouns. As much as I wanted to own a LazyBoy and smell like ice, I wanted even more to know the language in which these things are learned.

Men commune with men through nods, shrugs, and small, schooled gestures. They tell each other things they wouldn’t tell anyone else, anyone on the outside, through codes that no one else would understand if they ever were to see. Often, this language is used toward the ends of manipulation and ass-covering: we see the men of Mad Men deploying the fine art of leveling-with on countless executives, trying to win them over, and we see them shrugging and nodding and conveying without speech that wives are made to be lied to. But we also see where and how this language can sustain men in more redeemable ways— why, in other words, anyone could possibly want it for itself.

In the second season’s “Flight 1,” we find out early on that a plane has crashed. Moments later, Pete emerges from his office, looking blank. Without hesitation, he downs a drink, walks into Don’s office without announcement, and tells Don that he just heard his father was on the plane that crashed.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says, shrugging, hands in pockets. He’s profoundly vulnerable in his lack of affect—in the matter-of-factness of his loss, of his being at a loss. Don simply shuts the door and pours Pete a drink.

Don tells Pete to go home to his family. “Is that what you would do?” Pete asks, and Don responds, “Yes.” As Pete leaves, Don tells him, “There’s life, and there’s work,” then claps him firmly on the shoulder.

On some level, Don’s advice, and the care behind it, is hypocritical. We have seen that, for Don, life is secondary to work at best, a mere tool toward work’s perfection at worst; we’ve seen, too, that Pete has tried to undermine Don at every step, going so far as to reveal Don’s old identity, and that Don has not taken kindly to the treatment. But they share a language still.

It doesn’t matter that Pete speaks it haltingly and with a cracked voice; it doesn’t matter that even Don is only faking fluency. They get each other, and they get each other.

The language, of course, is mostly comprised by silence—or, failing that, stale scripts with about as much real verbal content as silence. The first time Don speaks in his conversation with Pete, it’s to say, “I’m sorry to hear that,” a phrase pat enough that it conveys very close to nothing. Much has been made of how repressed and repressive this kind of functional silence is, and with good reason. But it also serves a purpose.

Men learn to cultivate silence as a space for misery, and it’s a uniquely capacious one: any kind of misery, any kind of bad at all, fits there. Accepting silence offers a blank check for care. I love you the same, no matter what it is that you aren’t saying: at many different levels of love and investment, that’s what silence means.

In practice, men use this silence as license to do anything, anything at all. Within that silence lives the whole range of shitty male behavior, from the

BY Cate Turner DESIGN Kathryn Li, Katherine Sang

basically-harmless to the irretrievably harmful. Men cash in checks on all kinds of cruelty, and they know none of them will bounce. From each other, they get the whole world.

Nobody, of course, should get the whole world— and if you asked me, straight-out, whether I wanted it, I would say no. For all that I can entertain my past self’s conviction that she was just like Peggy Olsen, or just like Pete Campbell, or some strangely outfitted hybrid of the two, I know that I’m not actually like either—not more than anyone else is, and maybe even less. I can tease out my desires, unpeel the layers of money and admiration and power, and see that what I want most isn’t what men have; it’s what they have with each other. On balance, it doesn’t make sense to want this for itself: the shape silence takes is, in nearly all cases, terse, mutually incomprehensible resentment. A blank check is only as good as what it’s used for. But—call me irrational—I want one anyway. +++ If what I wanted wasn’t rational, that left impossible.

So long as I wanted something that could never come true, it didn’t matter that I wanted it.

Everyone wants there to be something true in the world, some faith-deserving object. Everyone wants there to be something certain and beautiful out there, something obvious, and Jon Hamm in an undershirt, crouching to fix a sink, is one of those, at least. The logic of calculus is this: You grant that things are real because you need them to be.

But there are benefits, too, of losing faith. If what I wanted was already broken, I couldn’t break it with my want.

Put a different way: In “On Liking Women,” Andrea Long Chu writes, “To admit that what makes women like me transsexual is not identity but desire is to admit just how much of transition takes place in the waiting rooms of wanting things.” Waiting rooms make every moment feel interminable; they make the world stretch out, or narrow, until waiting is the only thing left.

Waiting for my call out of this room sometimes feels like waiting for the call you get when the organ you need a transplant for becomes available, or the call you get when your best friend gives birth, or the call you get when someone dies. Mostly, though, it doesn’t feel like any of those. It feels, instead, like waiting to be called up, as from the minors to the majors. It feels like waiting for something I want badly, something I think will make me feel more like myself and less like a test-run of the same—but it also feels like waiting for a tap on the shoulder from a group I don’t know, can’t know, whose motivations for taking or leaving me I’ll never fully understand.

My saving grace: this room, at least, isn’t empty.

I’m surrounded by men, and none of them is wearing the right jersey. We all want to play on a team that doesn’t exist.

Waiting rooms are quiet, and this one is particularly silent. I used to think that it was the silence of everybody looking at me, waiting for me to give up and leave. I’m starting to think it’s a different kind altogether—the silence of getting, not as in having but as in knowing. I'm starting to think it’s precisely because being a man is impossible that someone like me can do it.

CATE TURNER B’21 is a guy’s guy.

ARTS

16

TWO POEMS

BY Tabitha Payne DESIGN Christie Zhong

When I left you in the lovely dark, you held up the morning in your hands Sometimes when we sleep together I wake up sweating.

Even in the winter.

Your body, which has always run warm, has that effect on me.

The sweat pools around the inside of my legs, sleeping against the skin at the middle of you; between my breasts, stamping obscurities on the center of my tank tops; & on my cheeks, sticking to your naked chest.

Usually I am waking up from a dream.

I dream you love me, or I dream you’ve left me, or I dream you’ve figured me out as that weak, beating thing I fear myself to be, & suddenly I am lucid, salty & pressed up against you, & I remember all that we are & all that we aren’t & every time it is somehow comforting, even strange, usually sad, but always breathy, the solidness of you, the sound of your short, urgent breaths which I worry should draw longer, the sometimes snores, the purrs & snags of grinding your teeth in the vestibule of night.

When I left you in the lovely dark, the college was slowly shutting its doors.

The snow melted & froze into ice sheets slippery & sticking to the asphalt.

I wept hot, flat tears that fell onto my lap, & you were mostly sleeping, your heavy arms wrapped around the middle of me, your breaths humming something lovely in the key of A minor.

I said, this is sad.

You said, it is sad, although I don’t know if you’ll remember that now, because you were mostly sleeping.

I looked at you, already weeks in the future, already dry & yearning for the salt-thickness of you, already acquainted with the ghostliness of being gone, which arrives most swiftly after the goodbye but congeals & pulls more wholly outward from beneath the skin over time.

All this,

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LITERARY

Heavenly body (i wonder how wonderful it must & you were mostly sleeping, & somehow holding up the morning with your hands.

It was five a.m. & silent, the darkness generous & weighing like a blanket, & I was already late for my flight.

You wanted to drive me to the airport, & I wanted you to, but insisted anyway on calling a car.

I wanted you to sleep enough.

Forgive me.

Insomnia held you for days only to drop you into a well so complete & exclusive, I could only admire it from where I was waking, & now we were perhaps not friends but intimate opponents wary & respectful of each other’s abilities.

have felt for God, to have been made known) can you imagine? back in that time when we were just graduating from our well-worn words for things & onto words for ideas, like spirits, like death, like bodies? all those thousands of years ago, your great grandmother to the nth power laying her tired to sleep beneath a heavy blanket of stars. you know, that heavenly body. silent, & stirring. of course she believed in God.

What was it you said once?

We were falling asleep, we were falling in love, & I said I’m fighting sleep because I don’t want this moment to end?

You said, maybe this moment is so lovely, sleep wants it for herself?

maybe not the God in your head, or the God of mine, but, my God, how couldn’t she? each night her smallish body was made to face that frightening, insistent spaciousness, constant, & turning, wholly unlike & You would go on to forget you said that. unbelonging to this world of decaying things.

I learned this one of those later times when I was & somehow shining, drifting proudly, off & you were lying without explanation. awake, & so perusing the painted-over plastic stars on my ceiling. demanding it.

(But the darkness had come for you really, by then.) what was she to do but happen (Sleep upon God? had taken all a sky that grand, the moments & brain that big, for herself.) with that bluish terror sitting (We heard her shy footsteps.) at the base of her tailbone? (& still as if put there to remind her we leaned she was only passing through. into & with that tinier body, too, the lovely dark.) clutched to her chest,

coughing and wailing in the darkness— All I can do now is rewrite this poem. & who-knows-what All I could do then was kiss you on the forehead. hungry, invisible things were hearing it.

You smiled, a small one, that body above just as much as sleep let. could just as well have meant the end As I whisked away into the car. of her.

As I opened teary making small talk with the driver.

As I watched the credits of the city roll past. thank God, Behind & behind me were the ghostly she soothed that impatient, houses & brackish rivers noisy child, pawing at her breast. & little cars that couldn’t keep up. thank God, she looked up at that pregnant, terrible stillness

25 OCT 2019

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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THE LIST SATURDAY 10.26 Celebration of Lifetimes in Organizing: Father Ray & Juan García - Blessed Sacrament Church, PVD - 4-6PM Popular Praxis and the George Wiley Center are showcasing their new oral history initiative, honoring the work of longtime activists in Rhode Island. They’ll be screening interviews and holding a Q&A with Father Ray Tetrault and Juan García, two prolific community organizers who have been fighting for immigrant justice throughout their lives. Come through to hear about their experiences with faith-based organizing, working with PACE and the Olneyville Neighborhood Association, and the future of social movements! The event is wheelchair accessible and Spanish interpretation will be available.

SUNDAY 10.27 Tooth and Nail Día de los Muertos - 165 Prospect St., Seekonk, MA - 9AM - 1PM Join the newly-formed community healing arm of the FANG Collective for food, crafts, and garlic planting in honor of Día de los Muertos, the holiday celebrated throughout Latin America in celebration of loved ones who have passed away. Along with the traditional calavera-making, this celebration will also include garlic planting for the next season’s crop on the Tooth and Nail Farm in Seekonk.

MONDAY 10.28 Bake Sale for Student Farmworker Alliance Day of Action Faunce House, Brown University - 11AM-1PM Honor the Student Farmworker Alliance’s National Day of Action by swinging by the Blue Room for some scrumptious baked goods! The bake sale will be taking place from 11AM-1PM and sponsors the Student Labor Alliance’s trip to NYC with—and in support of—the Coalition of Immokalee Workers on November 18th. SLA is organizing and fundraising to send buses of folks from the Northeast to join the Coalition in their fight against Wendy’s ongoing exploitative practices. If you’d like to contribute baked goods for the sale, consult the event’s FB page for SLA members’ contact info and reach out!

TUESDAY 10.29 Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular, Presented by Citizens Bank Roger Williams Park Zoo - 6-10:30PM If you, like, have nothing else to do on a Tuesday night and feel a little dead inside, boy do we have a treat for you. The theme of this Spectacular is…...the weather? The 20,000 ‘terns on display are inspired by “autumn’s beauty, winter’s swirling snow, spring’s first blossoms and summer’s ocean breezes.” Whitman found even deader! XD

WEDNESDAY 10.30 Haunted Boat Tours - 525 S. Water St. - 6-9PM The collab you’ve been waiting for your whole life: Providence Ghost Tours x Providence River Boat Company. Captain Peter will introduce you to “some of Providence’s longest-lingering residents” along the city’s not-quite-Venitian but more than Gowanian waterways. Who those longlingering residents might be, we’re not sure. The PC Friar? The raptors in the Superman Building? Adler of Adler’s Hardware? A petrified rat in the bus tunnel? Take the tour to find out. (Tickets cost $26 for adults.)

THURSDAY 10.31 Sexier Things Halloween Party - The Foxy Lady - 8PM - 1AM Last winter, undercover cops shut down the famed Providence strip club— known for decades as a hotspot for mobsters including none other than Baby Shacks—under prostitution allegations. But with backing from the ACLU, workers succeeded in reopening the club. Come to the Halloween event for the RI lore, stay for the cash prizes available in the Stranger Things themed costume contest. 21+

FRIDAY 11.1 Indy x Findy Halloween Covers Show - Findy Co-op, 116 Waterman St. - Doors at 8PM Print ain’t dead yet — with your help, that is. Come see Indy staffers (and co.) dress up as the Talking Heads and play the RISD alums’ hits to raise money for our print distribution costs. Dance like its the 70s in Asbury Park to Duncan covering Bruce, the 80s in London to Belu Olisa covering Sade, and the aughts in Sheffield to King Scuba covering Arctic Monkeys. $4-5 suggested donation.