The College Hill Independent V. 27 N. 1

news

THE INDY

issue #01 vol. 27

managing editors David Adler, Doreen St. Félix, Ellora Vilkin news Simon Engler, Joe de Jonge, Emma Wohl metro Megan Hauptman, Rick Salamé, Kat Thornton features Lili Rosenkranz, Josh Schenkkan arts Becca Millstein, Grier Stockman, John White science Golnoosh Mahdavi, Jehane Samaha SPORTS Tristan Rodman interviews Drew Dickerson literary Edward Friedman EPHEMERA Molly Landis, Katia Zorich X Lizzie Davis list Claudia Norton, Diane Zhou design + illustration Mark Benz, Lizzie Davis, Casey Friedman Kim Sarnoff Cover Editor Robert Sandler Senior editors Grace Dunham, Alex Ronan, Sam Rosen, Robert Sandler Staff Writers Mary-Evelyn Farrior, Alex Sammon Cover Art Robert Sandler mvP Mark Benz, Casey Friedman

fROM THE EDITORS Not so far from here, there is an island.

Pile in. Bring friends, known and unknown, present and future. Past Aegean’s, the two churches on the corner, you’ll hear water—stop. Take the key from the mailbox; the rowboat’s on the shore.

The island’s green looks wild and you want to know it. Would anyone notice if you just stayed in this place of no corners? A voice drops into the clearing, and what was silence is now sound: sound seeping into the cabin, a message, like a spider, walking down your temple. Deli meat on a white paper plate. And this is why we came, why we’re here.

Welcome to the island. There’s pizza and beer. In these pages, you’ll find: the water, the moon, a house, and many sad men. Also noise and quiet. Read slowly, take your time. We’re glad you’re here. –DRA, DSF, EGV

2 3

Week in Review simon engler, joe de jonge & emma wohl

Divination indy news

ARTS One Room

5 john white

METRO Did You Miss Us?

6 rick salamé & emma wohl When Dan Met Steve

7 kat thornton

INTERVIEWS Joseph McElroy

9 drew dickerson

EPHEMERA Dance Dance Revolution

11 katia zorich

FEATURES EPHEMERA

12 Wax, Wane lili rosenkranz

Call Me Maybe

13 josh schenkkan

SCIENCE 15 Acne

jehane samaha

SPORTS Chunky Sluggers

16 tristan rodman

LITERARY

keep close College Hill Independent PO Box 1930 Brown University Providence RI 02912

theindy@gmail.com twitter: @theindy_tweets /// theindy.org ///

Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress. Campus Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org

Teen Ennui

17 edward friedman

X I Like It Here

18 lizzie davis

WEEK IN REVIEW PEARLS OF WISDOM Oyster. Oyster. Oyster. Oyster. Say it ten more times. Sounds kind of gross now, right? Like most words, it loses its meaning with repetition, but this one seems to do so faster than most.

But get used to hearing it around—this week, literary techies gleefully moved their lips around the word, as a new digital book-sharing platform, OysterBooks.com, launched its new mobile app. Oyster, the “Netflix of books” (label courtesy of various news sources, not the company itself ), allows users to read as many of the 100,000 titles available as they can, for a monthly rate of $9.95.

The site’s logo, at first glance, looks distractingly like it could be an anatomical drawing of one of several pieces of human anatomy, rather than the eponymous bivalve. That coy, casual wink of naughtiness seems to come fully endorsed by the site’s team of clean-cut young engineers and designers, all of them male. They link on their homepage to a recipe for Dark ‘n Stormys and invite customers to buy them a drink at their favorite dive bar or rooftop lounge. At the same time, Oyster CEO and former Wall Street banker Eric Stromberg and his team proudly call themselves bookworms. As of now, they grant access to the site by invitation only, a common tactic among startups for generating buzz that gives users the experience of joining an elite club. Think access to the Académie française, but American, and on your phone.

Does reading a book on a screen sound familiar? The first Kindle was introduced in 2007, and Amazon Prime, which costs about $40 less than an Oyster subscription would for a year, gives Kindle users access to its entire digital catalogue.

But that program only entitles readers to one book per month, at which Stromberg and Co. scoffed. “The world is mine oyster!” they proudly proclaimed—or, more accurately, Shakespeare did—and created a way for readers to have all the books, all the time, at least from the publishers with whom they’ve partnered. They urge their users to “reach for books at moments of impulse throughout your day,” easily accessible just a flick of the finger away from Candy Crush.

Stromberg says he considered the future of reading when designing this product. His team certainly understands how people communicate through social media—“People-powered Book Discovery” allows readers to know what their friends are reading, the same way other social media sites reveal what they’re watching, listening to, photographing, thinking. Reading almost seems a secondary concern in Oyster’s product design, clearly built for mobile phones—at the moment it is only available as an iPhone app, though an iPad app and a version for Android are in the works. It’s a pretty product, with a choice of several interfaces and tiles illustrating its thousands of titles. Its utility, given the myriad other distractions better suited to your mobile device, is more questionable.

Then again, the same has probably been said of every technological innovation since fire. Go forth, dive in, the world is thine—on a four-inch screen. —EW

SEPTEMBER 13 2013

by Joe de Jonge, Simon Engler & Emma Wohl Illustration by Kelsey Isaacs

COOL BUGS Everyone has encountered a Cool Bug. Turn on the television—maybe you’ll see one with a rhinolooking horn in a documentary about the jungle. Go down to the laundry room: you might discover a hairy bug with weird pincers on its butt. These encounters are intimate, the type of thing you would keep to yourself.

So when does a Cool Bug become national news? A recent case study reveals the answer.

Here you go: Jeff Edwards caught a two-colored lobster off Maine.

News of Edward’s Ocean-Bug was everywhere last week. His catch been covered by Reuters, the AP, the Daily Mail, the Wall Street Journal, and even the Denver Post, which, it should be remembered, has a readership about as far away from the ocean as you can get.

All of these sources agree that Edwards’ lobster is special because the colors on its back are divided, neatly, splat down the middle—one half black, one half red. Relevant experts agree that the chances of finding such a lobster are one in fifty million. The Associated Press lets readers know that “only albino lobsters are rarer.”

What does all of this mean?

Well, consider this: there is no information on weirdlooking crickets in the Wall Street Journal, and the Denver Post never reports on centipedes with missing legs. For a Bug to be really Cool—so Cool it is newsworthy—that Bug also has to provide the rarest of flavors. It has to be delicious. Then we can imagine eating it surfside while marveling at its one-infifty-million taste.

In the meantime, the lobster has been donated to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, ME, where, according to the Bangor Daily News, ten thousand students will get to ogle it every year. They will all bite their lips—either because they’ve seen Cool Bugs before, too, and never told anyone, or because they are hungry. – SPE

CULT OF PERSONALITY Some call it the Hermit Kingdom, others the “Soprano State,” most of us call it North Korea. Kim Jong-Un, the current Supreme Leader of the DPRK, doesn’t care what you call it.

And neither does his newest friend, Dennis Rodman.

Rodman made his first trip to the DPRK with Vice Media in February 2013 to stage a basketball exhibition match for their HBO series. Evidently Rodman and the Supreme Leader hit it off—Rodman visited Kim again on September 3. At a banquet thrown for Rodman, he became the first American to hold Kim’s baby daughter Ju-ae, a child very few people both inside or outside of North Korea even knew existed. Rodman and Kim also hung out at the Mount Kumgang Resort and took in a women’s soccer match as well as a tae kwon do match.

Rodman returned to the US and announced all sort of DPRK-related plans. He plans on returning to North Korea with a few other retired basketball players for an exhibition game sponsored by the Irish online betting company Paddy Power. Rodman has also reportedly agreed to train the North Korean Olympic Basketball team, and Kim has suggested that Rodman pen a book about him. Landing in Beijing, wearing a silver sequined beret, Rodman told the waiting press corp, “I don’t give a shit what people around the world think about him, he’s my friend, and you saw it on the pictures, he’s my friend.” —JDJ

02

NEWS

THE ORACLE

by Indy News Illustration by Lizzie Davis

EVERYTHING IS SPEEDING UP. It’s a common expression. But we’re not talking about 3G, Usain Bolt, or slaughterhouse processing times. We’re talking about the news. Between the instant this paper arrives at the printers in Seekonk and the moment it reaches your hands in Providence, the news will have changed.

The Indy is a weekly publication. That means that it can be hard to stay timely with what’s happening, so to speak, “on the ground.” For a weekly, in other words, it’s easy to run behind.

So instead of running just a little bit behind, this week’s Indy has decided to run far, far ahead.

Here, a preview of stories to look out for now…and in the future.

PHONING IT IN On Tuesday September 3, Microsoft got hitched to Nokia’s mobile phone sector, tying down the struggling phone manufacturer for good.

Nokia, the last remaining purveyor of the bulky, burdensome, and brickish in the cellphone world, and Microsoft, whose reputation as a top dog in tech has waned throughout the decade, come to each other well past their storied primes.

In the last decade alone, Nokia sat atop the throne of the wireless communication industry, with a stunning 49.4 percent of cellphone market share as recently as 2007. Nokia was also responsible for the incorporation of games into mobile devices, bringing cultural touchstone Snake into the mass market. However, between a cumbersome user interface and a bout of unprecedented passivity, the company inexplicably failed to produce any further smartphone models in the subsequent years, whiffing on one of the most significant consumer trends of all time. By the first half of 2013, they represented a paltry three percent of the market.

Microsoft has shown a similar ineptitude in the smartphone market, churning out an abortive attempt at the Windows Phone, before essentially admitting defeat and coupling up with Nokia.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is excited about the prospects of this marriage, and their proposed first phonechild, the Nokia-Lumia-Windows Phone 1020 has all the hyphen-y naming hallmarks of a truly modern relationship. In truth, the stakes are particularly high for Microsoft, which has fallen dangerously far behind in the smartphone race.

Though this merger is more a marriage of the two most desperate eligibles in the cell phone industry than anything else (Microsoft and Nokia are a distant third and fourth, respectively, in terms of smartphone market share), the move has the potential to salvage two fallen tech giants in the midst of a downward spiral.

Reactions from the business community were mixed, with some pundits proclaiming that Nokia’s ever-dwindling mobile phone sector, for which Microsoft paid 7.2 billion dollars, would be literally worthless within the year, while others argued that this move was necessary for Microsoft to carve out a competitive niche in the Apple/Android dominated mobile phone market.

If this union succeeds, Microsoft will be catapulted back into the technological pantheon, and if the marriage fails, it will indeed be death that does these two companies part. -AJS

03 NEWS

LENGTHY MANDATORY APPEAL FOR NIDAL HASAN On August 28 former Major and Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan was sentenced to death for the 2009 Fort Hood shooting rampage that killed 13 and wounded 31. Deemed sane after psychiatric evaluation, Hasan chose to represent himself in court. Initially, he attempted to defend himself by claiming he shot those soldiers to protect Taliban leaders in Afghanistan from danger—invoking the “defense of others” legal principle.

The judge dismissed this argument. Hasan made no further attempt to defend himself. In his opening statement, he plainly states that he was the shooter. He called no witnesses.

At one point during the trial the lawyers appointed to aid his defense requested a diminished role because they believed Hasan wanted the death penalty. Military cases, also known as Court Martials, are governed by a separate set of laws, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The UCMJ requires that in cases such as Hasan’s where capital punishment is sought, defendants are not allowed to plead guilty. His defense team considered aiding Hasan, if he and the prosecution both wanted the death penalty, to be a violation of their ethical obligation to defend, but the judge dismissed their motion.

The US Military has not executed an active serviceman since 1961. There are currently five service members other than Hasan on death row, including Ronald Gray, who was sentenced to death in 1988. The military overhauled its handling of death penalty cases in 1984 in response to a supreme court ruling and long standing allegations of racism in the application of the capital punishment, particularly during World War II. The current process has multiple mandatory appeals. Hasan’s case will now move to the Army’s Court of Criminal Appeals, after which it will be sent to the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. Assuming the sentence is not overturned, the death order must be signed by the POTUS. This process will likely take years, and while Gray seems likely to actively appeal his case, Hassan seems likely to be executed though not any time soon. -JHJ

WILL THE GAMES BEGIN? If he was considering the international response, Russian President Vladimir Putin could hardly have picked a worse time to sign into law the country’s latest piece of anti-gay legislation. Almost immediately, the law caught the eye of the many observers interested in learning about the country that will, in six months’ time, host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games—a country eager to show itself as modern and technologically advanced.

Approved in late June, the law bans any public discussion or displays of homosexuality, which it considers “pornographic” and applies to Russian citizens and foreigners alike. In a September 4 interview, Putin said he is urging the Russian legislature to ease the restrictions during the Games. According to him, athletes displaying rainbow flags during the Olympics would not be punished, although this sort of behavior could normally be considered pornographic homosexual propaganda under the law.

But though the Russian president and some other officials have promised no discrimination of gay athletes, not even all members of the president’s cabinet agree. Both the Russian Sports Minister and the Ministry of the Interior said it would be in effect for visitors and participants in the Games. And at this point not even the president is advocating an overhaul of the law that would extend beyond the Games themselves.

Some observers called for a boycott of the Olympics like the one American athletes carried out against the 1980 Moscow Games. But most mainstream sources are not so radical. US President Barack Obama said a boycott would be a disservice to American athletes, but he hoped for victories for gay or lesbian athletes as a “powerful symbol” in light of the restrictions. The Human Rights Campaign asked Olympic sponsors to speak out against discrimination based on sexual orientation. Most sponsors said they trust the International Olympic Commission to uphold standards of human rights.

The IOC, meanwhile, has shifted its position several times. After stating it had been assured gay athletes would be exempt from the law, the commission recanted, saying it expects athletes to comply with local laws and referring to the portion of the Olympic charter prohibiting any “kind of demonstration or political, religious, or racial propaganda.”

The Olympics may not be the place to effect change in the country’s law, but they will increasingly draw international attention to Russian national policy. Stay tuned toward the end of the year for further information on how the law will be enacted during the Games, and to see if such attention can bring any change in Russia’s laws concerning gay rights.

—EW

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE ICE WALL COMETH The Fukushima Diiachi nuclear power plant continues to be a nightmare from which the Japanese government cannot seem to wake up.

Just last week, reports of systemic leakage of radioactive fluid into nearby groundwater and the Pacific Ocean received widespread circulation, sparking international ire and condemnation. In response, the government has now committed $473 million to the construction of an “ice wall,” a structure proposed to halt this seemingly endless chain of pollution.

The frozen wall, a de facto refrigerated curtain, will serve as a subterranean barrier between groundwater flow and the Pacific, preventing the dispersal of radioactive water from leaking storage tanks at the plant. This leakage will then pool indiscriminately behind the frozen barrier (think placing your hand at the edge of a coffee table to prevent the spread of a spill, except the spill is never-ending).

Construction is set to begin in the coming days, and the freezing rods are expected to be fully operational in 6-8 weeks.

This is just a rough estimate, however, as this “technology” has never before been applied on such a scale.

This endeavor represents just one of a handful of patchwork attempts to right the ship in the wake of the March 2011 meltdown. When the now infamous earthquake knocked out the plant’s cooling system, operators were forced to pump in external water to cool the reactors, to the tune of 400 tons per day. Once this water passes through the system, it becomes radioactive itself and the highly dangerous byproduct is then placed in tanks (tanks with holes, as it turns out).

While the tanks have continued to stack up, reports of leakage from buckets, pipes, and the damaged reactors into nearby groundwater and the Pacific Ocean proved this solution to be futile, not to mention untenable, necessitating a new solution.

Despite initial attempts to downplay the leaks as insignificant (a mere three out of seven on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event scale), the Japanese has been forced to admit that this presented an “unprecedented crisis,” though the cabalistic solution doesn’t seem to echo this aura of seriousness. Japanese officials, however, believe that the ice wall is the most reasonable and expedient course of action, though they concede that it too is a short-term solution.

With Tokyo now responsible for the 2020 Olympic Games, the coming year will feature close monitoring of this contraption, and determine whether this issue will finally be put to rest. -AJS

SILVIO’S STILL STANDING Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had it really good—and then he had it really bad. For years, there were raucous parties, slick stashings of cash in offshore holdings— and in July and August, convictions for paying for sex with an underage woman and for tax fraud.

Berlusconi’s most recent tax-fraud conviction, on August 1, carried with it a commuted four-year jail sentence from the Italian Supreme Court. It also entailed a ban against seeking future public office—one that would prevent Berlusconi from maintaining his current Senate seat at the end of his term. For Berlusconi, the 194th richest man in the world and the sleaziest in Italy, a prohibition on reelection was bad news.

But for the former Prime Minister’s opponents, an Italian Senate without Silvio Berlusconi could hardly wait. On September 9, the body met to determine whether a recent anti-corruption law could be applied to remove Berlusconi from office immediately, rather than at the end of his term.

Talks are still underway, and they’re heated. Senators from the People of Freedom Party, which Berlusconi heads, have threatened to withdraw from the ruling coalition if the former PM is booted. That sort of political turmoil could hobble the Senate’s ability to deal with urgent economic reforms—and could even lead to new elections.

Meanwhile, Berlusconi has taken his struggles in court abroad. At press time, lawyers representing Berlusconi are appealing to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)—an international judiciary to which Italy is a party, based in Strasbourg, France—to argue that the anticorruption law cannot be applied in the Berlusconi case. If their case is successful, the Italian government, as a signatory to the Court’s charter, will agree either to remunerate Berlusconi for his trouble or to reopen his case.

If all of this seems far-fetched, keep in mind that Berlusconi has high standards when it comes to the question of his own righteousness. This is a man who has been in court over two dozen times since the 1980s, yet faced his first definitive sentence in August—in the very case in question. In the coming months, stay tuned to see how long Berlusconi can stay standing—and to find out, when he falls, if the Italian Senate crumbles with him. - SPE

LEAKING ON OUR ALLIES Whistleblower Edward Snowden has certainly had his 15 minutes. We’ve seen photos of his blonde “hot” girlfriend. We’ve performed our outrage over the revelations that Big Brother NSA is reading our Facebook timelines. But the NSA surveillance revealed by Snowden really pissed off our German and Brazilian allies.

Germany has strict laws protecting the privacy of communications, and given the history of surveillance in East Germany and under Nazi reign, it is not surprising that spying hits a nerve. In August, as a result of these leaks, Germany cancelled an agreement it had made with the US during the Cold War that permitted a limited degree of spying for the purpose of protecting US soldiers stationed in Germany. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle didn’t mince words, “The cancellation of the administrative agreements, which we have pushed for in recent weeks, is a necessary and proper consequence of the recent debate about protecting personal privacy.” This was largely a gesture, but negotiations have since begun on a new anti-spying agreement between Germany and the United States.

US relations with Brazil have also been put on edge due to Snowden’s leak of documents showing that the NSA spied on the emails, texts, and calls of their President Dilma Rousseff. These documents have also shown that the NSA spied on the current President of Mexico while he was running for that office. Brazil has demanded an explanation and negotiations for an agreement like the one Germany is demanding. President Rousseff had been planning a State visit to Washington in October, but a preliminary planning trip by her advisors has been cancelled, and it remains uncertain whether the state visit will go forward.

Meanwhile, Obama has publicly promised to look into the claims of spying. Will Obama wiretap the NSA? Will Germany and Brazil stay mad? Do we care? Stay tuned folks.-JHJ

September 13 2013

LUNAR LAD Follow the progress of NASA’s new lunar probe as it makes its way towards the moon’s surface, and you will literally see a collision in slow motion.

LADEE, or the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, is a robotic spacecraft that launched last Friday from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. It will take 30 days to reach its temporary destination, a path of orbit about 20 kilometers away from the moon. Then, after 30 more days of check-ups on the craft’s function and 100 days of scientific exploration, the craft will plunge into the surface of the moon and self-destruct.

While scientists and politicians generally agree that NASA should be focusing on a manned mission to Mars, a relative unknown entity, and moving away from the moon’s well-trodden territory, the agency is touting the LADEE’s assembly-line, multi-use production model—a streamlining from the previous model of custom-built crafts—as “just like the Ford Model T.” Currently, however, there are no other explorations planned using the same design. In fact, LADEE is the last spacecraft currently scheduled for lunar exploration.

The probe will investigate patterns of movement of lunar dust, a substance that has been known to interfere with equipment and may have produced a mysterious glow seen by astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. LADEE will also study the moon’s remarkably thin atmosphere, only 1/100,000th the thickness of Earth’s.

So tune in for LADEE’s safe arrival to the moon’s orbit in early October, and watch it explore its new surroundings in the next few months. But don’t get too attached. After the probe plunges to self-destruction, check back at the Indy to find out if NASA will produce more sacrificial robot lambs to explore new space frontiers. -EW

INDIAN FOOD PROGRAM It took ten hours of debate for the upper house of the Indian Parliament to pass a National Food Security Bill, on September 2nd. The stakes of the debate were high: riding on the bill’s passage were billions of dollars per year in funding, the welfare of hundreds of millions of Indians, and the political prestige of the ruling Congress Party, which had proposed the bill.

But passage through Parliament was just an early step for the National Food Security Bill —and by the end of 2013, it may seem like the easiest one in this most recent attempt to address Indian poverty.

The Food Security Bill aims to provide subsidized food to around 800 million people, at a cost of $18 billion per year.

Those covered by the program will qualify for sharply reduced prices on grain purchases. Pregnant and lactating women will get food free.

The Congress Party has presented the program as cure-all.

“After the food security legislation,” Congress Party vicepresident Rahul Gandhi said on September 10th, “nobody in the country will remain hungry.” And the eradication of hunger, Gandhi has rightly argued, can boost economic development.

But critics worry that little of the allotted money will be converted into food for the poor—and that the recent failings of other welfare programs in India demonstrate a general problem of management that will hinder this effort, too. Of particular concern is the difficulty of locating and identifying the neediest families in a country of over 1.2 billion. And then there are poor roads, hot weather, corruption, and yes, even rats. The parliamentary opposition further claims that the bill is an electoral ploy of the Congress Party, a bid to gain support before the nation chooses a new parliament in early 2014. M. Venkaiah Naidu, of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Part, went so far as to deem the legislation a “gimmick.”

For now, watch for news of President Pranab Mukherjee›s final signature on the bill—it›s expected soon and is the final step in ratification. Stick with the Indy as the story unfolds. – SPE

04

News

LOCALLY MADE RISD Museum opens up a world of local art

by John White a full-size, wooden, one-room

house currently sits in the RISD Museum. The house, called One Room, is part of the museum’s show “Locally Made,” which celebrates local artists and their work. The structure has moveable walls and furniture, and over the course of the nearly four-month-long show, over 250 local artists have taken over the house as their temporary studio, stage, and home. The Independent caught up with a few artists involved in the show in order to get a grasp on what it means to be a local artist in Providence.

JORI people spill out of the front of 186 Carpenter in Federal Hill onto the roughly triangular paved area in front of the building formed by its oblique orientation with the street.

Everyone seems to be having a good time, but no one is particularly friendly. It’s a gallery opening, and inside, there is art on three of the square room’s walls. Against the fourth is food and alcohol and more people. There is dull but heavy music playing overhead. Somewhere in the midst is Jori Ketten B’02, who curated a week of One Room artists and who co-founded and curates 186 Carpenter.

The show is called “Dry Socket,” and it features work by printmakers Alison Nitkiewicz and Julia Moses, who are recent RISD graduates. The left wall is dominated by a large installation of dark thread that is strung maybe half an inch off of the wall in precise lines that form something like an archway. On the right wall are four silkscreen works, all of which are black and white except for one that has a little bit of reddish pink. Two of them look like kaleidoscopic Rorschach inkblots, and another one has sharp lines reminiscent of the thread on the opposite wall. Finally, on the back wall from floor to ceiling are vibrant, geometric silkscreened patterns on paperboard. They simultaneously look like both scary bugs and beautiful gemstones.

Back out front, someone points out Ketten. She is 33 and has dark hair with blonde highlights. She wears almost all black. Ketten started renting 186 Carpenter with three friends in early 2011. “We just started showing work of our friends’ that we were drawn to,” Ketten explains. The RISD Museum approached Ketten to curate a week of One Room programming. “The RISD Museum let me choose whatever artists I wanted to. Sometimes they’d say, ‘Oh, someone already chose this person,’ and sometimes they’d be excited because I thought of someone they’d never heard of. I chose almost exclusively sound artists, though, because I love when artists create whole little worlds or environments,” she says, motioning toward the gallery. “I liked when the artists chose to close the house.” She smiles. “My week was titled ‘Inside Voices.’”

People swoop in to say hi to Ketten, to congratulate her on a great show. “There’s something nice about being kind of underground,” she says of 186 Carpenter. Before there is time to ask her to expand on the thought, a car pulls up and the driver asks what’s going on. “A gallery opening!” someone shouts. When the driver asks if it will be going on for a while, Ketten replies, “Yeah, ‘til nine!” The driver grins and, as he pulls away, says, “Great! We’ll be back with some Coors!”

SEPTEMBER 13 2013

HOLLY artist holly ewald says that intuition brought her to Rhode Island. “I was driving through the area with my two sons. We weren’t even looking into moving away from New York, but then we saw a house in Pawtuxet Village that was for sale. And the lilacs in front were in bloom. We’ve lived there ever since.” Ewald, now in her late 50s, has lived in that house for 16 years.

Ewald is in the midst of her “Office Hours” at One Room, and the structure is opened up and bursting with paraphernalia related to her work with Mashapaug Pond, the largest natural freshwater lake in Providence. In 2007, Ewald was approached by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts on behalf of the state’s Health Department to produce user-friendly signs warning visitors to the pond not to swim in it or eat its fish due to the severity of its pollution from nearby industrial parks. The job ultimately led Ewald to found the Urban Pond Procession (UPP) in 2008, which celebrates and raises local awareness of the pond through an annual parade complete with intricate costumes, musical performances, and oral history initiatives.

Each year the parade has gotten larger, and the One Room structure is decorated with an overabundance of testaments to all of the work that Ewald and the UPP do. Colorful costumes are hung from one wall, a large projector shows image after image of UPP’s parades and community involvement, and among it all moves Ewald, who is excited to meet each of the many people who keep entering the space. “Isn’t it so welcoming, with the smell of the wood?” she asks a newcomer as she points to the schoolhouse walls around her. Ewald is working on a series of ice boats that she designed. The boats consist of a base of ice that Ewald freezes in a sculptural mold that she made and, atop the ice, a translucent paper hull that is held up by sticks and that permits the glow of beeswax candles placed inside to be seen. On September 21, from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM, she is inviting the public to celebrate the arrival of fall at Mashapaug, where she will launch the boats.

“This is the first studio-like work that I’m doing with Mashapaug,” Ewald says. “This One Room set-up is funny because it brings together the more intimate ‘studio me’ with the active side of me that the community sees.” She turns to touch a suspended artwork of rock and wood and net that hangs behind her. “Works like this and my studio practice are important, but I need to be out in the community, connecting. I’m always trying to find the balance between the two. But it’s ultimately all about telling stories.” And then she’s off telling someone else Mashapaug’s story. As she cradles a mold for the boats’ ice base that a man has asked about, she says, “I’m not really a sculptor, but I needed to sculpt in order to achieve this vision. So I figured it out.”

RUTH riding in a car with Ruth Dealy is the best way to learn about Providence. “You know that’s not a pineapple, right?” she says of Federal Hill’s welcome arch. “It’s a pignoli nut.

Please remember that; it’s very important to me.” Dealy has lived in Providence for over 40 years, ever since she got her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Painting from RISD in the ’70s, and one of her paintings is on display as part of “Locally Made.” “I didn’t even know that painting’s in the show. I hate it,” Dealy laughs.

The car ascends a steep street. Rundown buildings line both sides. “This is the Valley,” Dealy says. “I love it here.”

The car pulls up in front of a three-story, symmetrical brick building across from a park that is surrounded by small homes. “About 14 artists have studios here,” Dealy explains.

Inside are wide, clean hallways with heavy double doors and chalkboards that are remnants from when the building was a schoolhouse. Dealy’s studio itself is on the second floor and overlooks the park across the street. It has soaring ceilings and is the perfect image of a painter’s studio: a serene, lightfilled space with more paint on the room’s surfaces than on the many canvases that lean against three of the four walls.

On one of the walls is a cork board with mementos attached to it, including a cut-out obituary from 2011 of a friend and colleague who lived in Providence all of her life as well as photos from Dealy’s RISD days.

Dealy begins pulling canvases out. They’re all largescale self-portraits. “I use self-portraiture like Monet used Impressionism. I like to see how light and time change the self.” The faces staring out of the paintings all look like completely different people. They all, though, contain Dealy’s aggressive brushstrokes. Thickly-applied, bold strokes of vibrant colors animate her many abstracted, almost grotesque, giant faces. “This one I painted after I’d gone gradually blind,” Dealy says, pulling out a self-portrait that has more unpainted canvas poking through it than do any of the others yet is somehow the most vivid. “I felt around it with my hands.

Now that I have sight in one eye back, I never want to go to that place again. But this is one of my best. In art, every disadvantage is an advantage.” She pauses. “It was helpful to go blind. It’s been helpful to age.”

Later, sitting down, Dealy says, “I stay in Providence because time is slow here. Providence is forgiving. There’s time to look at yourself. I think the biggest problem Rhode Island artists have is chips on their shoulders. They think they would’ve done better elsewhere. Sure, nothing’s really happening here for me, which can be really frustrating, but it’s wonderful for painting.” She peels a clementine. “And the sense of community here is really so strong. I don’t know where I fit into it, though. I’d have to ask someone else.”

Putting on a thick Rhode Island accent, she says, “They’d probably just say that I’m fun at parties.”

“Locally Made” is on view at the RISD Museum until November 3. To see a calendar of One Room events, visit risdmuseum.org/ calendar.

Intuition brought JOHN WHITE B’14 to Rhode Island.

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ARTS

WHILE YOU WERE OUT Summer in the Ocean State Like migratory birds that move with the seasons, many of our readers left Providence for the summer. We know you were busy preparing policy briefs, reading from slush piles, making documentaries and nostalgically communing with your childhood cat, but PVD waits for no one. Here’s what you missed while you were out.

OUR LADY OF PVD Virgin. Mary. This Summer. Sort of.

Providence, we have been blessed by the presence of her majesty. Maybe. The world’s oldest virgin appeared as a stain on the cross of the Church of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in North Providence this summer. Go check it out over on Mineral Spring Avenue and see for yourself.

North Providence resident Brian Trambowitz was the first to discover the Marian apparition as he drove past the church one evening late this summer. Trambowitz claims that the weathering of the metal on the cross is in the shape of the Virgin Mary and that the image “jumped out” at him as he passed by, according to The Valley Breeze. Other parishioners quickly began confirming Brian’s sighting and, with the help of local talk radio host John DePetro, the good news spread far and wide—wide enough to cause major traffic jams in the area as the faithful flocked en masse to witness the miracle, necks craned and eyes squinting in the early August drizzle.

But not everyone is convinced, even among the community of believers.

An August 12 statement by the Catholic Diocese of Providence says that the Church finds it “highly unlikely” that the image is “the result of divine intervention.” God, they said, often works through “ordinary means.” But it’s not clear that “ordinary means” excludes the possibility of the divine.

When you put bread in a pan it ends up being toasted.

But maybe we can never really know if the heat caused the toasting or if something else unseen and unperceived made us our snack. Philosopher Nicolas Malebranche thought that God was the real cause of all things. Probably including toast.

So maybe it was really the hand of God that put Mary’s face on Diane Duyser’s grilled cheese sandwich back in 1994. And maybe God weathered and stained a metal cross in North Providence. We just can’t tell you these things for certain because the Catholic Church didn’t approve Ms. Duyser’s apparition either.

For now the Church recommends that you just attend mass regularly.—RS

by Megan Hauptman and Rick Salamé Illustration by Casey Friedman

PVD GIVES COAL SHOULDER On June 20, Providence’s City Council voted 11-1 to pull the city’s investments from oil and coal companies, making it the 16th municipality in the country—and the first state capital—to divest from fossil fuels.

The passage of the bill is due in part to Fossil Free RI, a local group formed in April that seeks to make Rhode Island more environmentally friendly. The group, made up of a handful of students, climate activists and concerned citizens, introduced the idea of city divestment to council member Yurdin, who then wrote the Providence proposal, using language from a similar resolution promulgated by 350.org, a major national climate change organization. Besides urging local politicians to adopt divestment policies, Fossil Fuel RI is trying to start up student divestment campaigns at CCRI, RIC, and URI (Brown and RISD both have active fossil fuel divestment campaigns underway). Eventually, they hope to get the state of Rhode Island to cut its investments in fossil fuel companies.

Divestment strategies took hold in climate change circles last fall when several universities organized campaigns to get fossil fuel investments dumped from their universities’ endowments. The student campaigns have by and large been hampered by bureaucratic roadblocks and administrative politics. Six small, politically liberal schools have passed resolutions to remove their money from fossil fuel investments in the past year, but despite the enormous numbers of students riled up about this issue, most universities, including Brown, have stalled on making this decision. Which makes it all the more impressive that in an even shorter period of time, 18 cities have voted yes on similar resolutions, including Madison, WI, San Francisco, CA, Boulder, CO, and Portland, OR. Most of the cities that have adopted divestment policies could also be lumped into the “crunchy-green-granola-eater” category but even so, the quickly growing roster of cities indicates that some politicians are more willing to take a stand on climate change than administrators of universities that pride and sell themselves as places for the politically engaged and socially responsible.

Even President Obama, not generally on the cutting edge of environmental activism, encouraged young Americans in a June 25 speech at Georgetown University to “Push your own communities to adopt smarter practices. Invest. Divest.”

Or, in the more vernacular phrasing of Brown Divest Coal’s 2013 Spring Weekend tanks, “It’s getting hot in here, so divest all your coals.”—MH HP LOVE-FEST “I AM PROVIDENCE,” reads HP Lovecraft’s unassuming gravestone, tucked behind the Phillips family obelisk in Swan Point cemetery, right off of Blackstone Boulevard. The inscription, taken from one of the writer’s personal letters, is a fitting epitaph for a man who spent all but two years of his life residing in, roaming around, and writing about Providence.

His short stories, mostly horror and science fiction, often take Providence as their setting; amorphous monsters and contagious madnesses lurk in the streets of his stories, just barely contained beneath the city’s quaint streets and civilized veneer.

Lovecraft fans often bemoan Providence’s lack of interest in its horror writer-laureate, but this summer Lovecraft has been honored prolifically in his hometown.

SEPTEMBER 13 2013

On July 17, the Providence City Council voted unanimously to name the intersection of Angell and Prospect St. “HP Lovecraft Square,” kicking off a summer of Lovecraft love.

On August 22, a exhibit celebrating the life of HP Lovecraft opened at the Athenaeum, coinciding with the start of Necronomicon, a four-day-long Lovecraft convention that featured academic panels, walking tours, movie screenings, concerts, a costume ball, and something called the Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast. Necronomicon, heralded as the largest convention of HP Lovecraft fans ever, came to life at various locations throughout the city, including the Biltmore, Lupo’s, the Ladd Observatory, and the First Baptist Church.

WaterFire that weekend was also Lovecraft themed, featuring eerie music and a torch-lit procession of Lovecraftian creatures and their devotees, including a 16-foot bulbous, tentacled Cthulhu, built by Big Nazo puppeteers and Steel Yard artists.

WaterFire also partnered up this summer with Brown’s Public Humanities department to develop a virtual Lovecraft walking tour, The Call of Lovecraft, which is accessible for free as a mobile phone application. The tour connects Lovecraftian history and elements of the short story “The Call of Cthulhu” to the physical buildings of Providence, using “augmented reality to bring the sites to life,” says Paul Margrave, the program manager for the application. If you want to experience Providence as both Lovecraft and his protagonists might have seen it, this may be the virtual mobile tour for you.

Devotees came from all over the country to pay homage to Lovecraft, and to the city that played host to his fantastic and creepy creations. Wilum Pugmire, a horror writer who flew all the way from Seattle to attend Necronomicon, said in an interview with the Providence Phoenix that he hoped to get some Lovecraftian inspiration from his visit to Providence, planning midnight walks through “areas near to the Biltmore, stalking beside the river and contemplating the things that swim and crawl beneath the water.” Necronomicon, which celebrated Providence as well as HP Lovecraft, reminds us that even 76 years after the author’s death, Providence still remains a holy grail for lovers of the weird.—MH Check out: The Shadow Over College Street exhibit at the Providence Athenaeum, open until September 22.

Download: The Call of Lovecraft mobile virtual tour for free at www.calloflovecraft.com

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metro

here comes the groom A marriage in Providence

by Kat Thornton

brian deslauriers met stephen hartley seven years ago at Club Hell. It was a weekly fetish night and Miss Kitty Litter, Stephen’s drag alter-ego, was hosting. Brian is a mild-mannered man, a night-shift transportation worker who prefers to stay in the background. Stephen is the opposite—he basks in the spotlight as Kitty Litter and as a prominent political activist.

Brian had to come back to Club Hell five more times to see Stephen without the sparkly earrings (never fake) and customized gowns, tailored to fit his 6’3” frame. Over the next few years, Stephen fell in love with Brian, and his daughter, Courtney. They started planning a wedding six years later.

It was a stroke of luck that they could have their wedding this year in the state they both grew up in. After 16 years of bills that didn’t pass, Governor Lincoln Chafee signed gay marriage into law on May 2 of this year. The pair says they would have gone ahead with a wedding in a nearby state or with a civil union if the things hadn’t panned out. But they did. It was a now or never chance for for gay rights activists in Rhode Island—marriage equality had the backing of Governor Lincoln Chafee, House Speaker Gordon Fox, and a majority of state legislators. It was a landslide vote. On August 1, 2013, the state officially began recognizing samesex marriages.

I met with Stephen and Brian a week before the wedding at their condominium in Pawtucket.

Brian’s daughter watched TV in the adjacent room while Stephen, Brian, and I sat down in the dining room. A big box of wedding decorations sat next to us on the table.

Stephen, a 49-year-old Johnston native, said he didn’t expect to see marriage equality in Rhode Island in his lifetime. Although the ocean state is one of the bluest in the nation, many state democrats have vociferously opposed gay marriage. Rhode Island also has the nation’s second highest concentration of Catholics, whose church opposes same-sex marriage as a violation of the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.

Stephen remembers the first gay pride parade he went to had less than 100 people in it, and many were marching with brown paper bags over their heads with the eyes cut out. They were afraid of what might happen to them if their co-workers saw them marching for gay rights. He added that many people from that generation are still hesitant to get married because of what their co-workers might think.

From marches to city nightlife, the scene in Providence was completely different. “You didn’t have gay bars on the main street with the windows open, it was always down an alley, you had to go in the back way,” Stephen said, speaking nonchalantly, as if that time was all far-gone now. “You never would see a gay couple holding hands in downtown Providence … now it’s no big thing.”

This year’s victory is undoubtedly huge. But I was shocked when Stephen said that for him, for now, the battle is over.

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“My thing is I think the fight is over. We got what we were fighting for. We got marriage equality. We’re just as equal as my next-door neighbor over here, or my next-door neighbor over there. For me, the fight is over. I’m done. I’m sure there will be another cause at one point… I mean they even closed the office here.”

The office is that of Marriage Equality Rhode Island (MERI), the largest coalition group for gay rights in Rhode Island for the last decade. Ray Sullivan, former board member, tells me the offices are still technically open, but they did go into a state of “dormancy.” The board of directors comes to the office every once in a while to talk about what

lies ahead for the local LGBT movement, such as rights for the transgender community and LGBT youths, says Sullivan.

In 2007, Lambda Legal, a nationwide LGBT legal group, published a study showing that most discrimination against the LGBT community has to do with the gender expression, rather partner choice. Maybe in this way, Rhode Island can consider itself ahead of the curve for gay rights. It is one of few states that has legal language to protect from both gender identity and sexual orientation discrimination.

Stephen and Brian, much like the other gay couples at

their wedding, look just like many other middle-aged white men. The societal norm of marriage can now be officially shared among all sexual orientations but what about the people who don’t fit into that norm? Where does the gay rights movement in Rhode Island go from here? +++ the guests at brian and stephen’s wedding sat in wellmannered excitement in the old wooden pews of the Beneficent Congregational Church on Saturday, September 7th. The event was intimate in its simplicity and traditional look. People in the back rows wearing colorful suit jackets exchanged smiles and giggles, the ushers were jolly, but it felt like there was less diversity than I’ve seen at other weddings— not as many children, mostly men, mostly white. It wasn’t a large crowd—186 invitees—but the event felt monumental because of its historical relevance. It was one of the first same-sex marriages in the state.

A series of friends approached the church podium to give speeches, some read from the bible, while others read from essays. Two pastors officiated the wedding, Pastor Nicole Yonkman, the senior co-minister of the Beneficent Church, and Father Martin, a friend of Stephen and Brian’s.

Pastor Yonkman evoked the weightiness of the event. After the couple exchanged vows and “pretty rings,” as Stephen called them, she pronounced each word carefully and proudly as she said, “By their promises made before us today, Stephen and Brian have united themselves as husband and husband in sacred covenant.

Those who God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Stephen had been in tears for most of the ceremony, and this moment was no exception. Pastor Yonkman continued, “Stephen and Brian, by the power vested in me by Beneficent Congregational Church of Christ and the state of Rhode Island, I now pronounce you husband and husband. You may now kiss your husband.”

According to Yonkman, Stephen and Brian wanted the wedding to be as traditional as possible. The both grew up Christian and saw no reason to exclude that element from this ceremony. Although many churches in the country oppose gay marriage, the Beneficent Church is an exception. Pastor Yonkman said their official policy is to be “open and affirming.”

“On every level, there’s no distinction that sexuality is just not a distinguishing factor in terms of rights and privileges and membership,” Yonkman told me after the ceremony, adding that the church’s previous pastor was gay. It was Yonkman’s first time officiating a gay marriage in the state.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the wedding reception took place on the third floor terrace of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Providence, looking out onto Kennedy Plaza and College Hill. A man played an electronic keyboard and sang next to the open bar, and a large group of people who had known each other fovever chatted and gave Stephen and Brian their congratulations.

State Representative Frank Ferri and his husband, Tony Caparco, were among the guests. The pair has been friends of Stephen’s for nearly 30 years. Ferri was an activist for marriage equality for years trying to push like-minded people into state office, before he decided he should take one of those seats.

He and Tony got married on August 1, 2013, their second ceremony, on the day marriage became legal and coincidentally also the 32nd anniversary of the day they started dating.

Ferri said he was ecstatic to see Brian and Stephen getting married. “I cried the whole ceremony. I just thought it was wonderful,” Ferri said.

But the fight for gay rights is not over. “There’s always going to be some type of discrimination and we can’t let our guard down,” he said. “We always need to make sure there’s equality and fairness for everybody.”

The grooms said everything in the wedding went according to plan.

“I think it was perfect in every way,” Brian said.

the beneficent church adopted this policy about 11 years ago, but Father Martin’s church has been practicing outside the law of the Roman Catholic Diocese for more than 150 years. St. Therese’s Old Catholic Church in downtown Providence is a member of the Dutch sect of Catholicism that broke from the Pope’s self-proclaimed “infallible” word in the 1860’s because the community wanted to be able to elect its own bishop—something the pope would not allow, even though this was their practice, historically.

Rather than becoming Calvinist protestants, the community wanted to remain Catholic, becoming The Old Catholic Church. Father Martin said the sect is more common in Europe than in the United States.

According to Father Martin, the message is clear: same-sex marriage deserves no separate recognition from heterosexual marriage.

“The message is the same: Put as much work into the marriage as you did into the wedding, and you’ll be good to go,” he told me after the services. He was standing outside the church, smoking a cigarette with a few other men when I caught him. This was the fourth same-sex marriage Father Martin has officiated in Rhode Island.

After vows were exchanged and the Providence Gay Men’s Choir sang the guests out with a song called “They Got Married Today,” personalized for Stephen, Brian, and their daughter Courtney, a shuttle bus took the guests to the Providence Biltmore for the reception. +++ gay marriage has taken the forefront of LGBT activism, pushing aside issues like violence against individuals and transgender rights. “All of the oxygen in the room has kind of been swept up by the same-sex marriage debate, for really almost 10 years,” says Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas.

As Lisa Duggan, a professor of American Studies at New York University, puts it in Jacobin, gay marriage “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.”

September 13 2013

According to the dominant agenda of the last decade, Haider-Markel said the gay rights movement has made significant shifts in a relatively short period of time. Activists “have not only dramatically changed policy in a relatively short period of time, but just as important, public attitudes about the movement’s issues, have dramatically changed in the past 20 years,” he said. Perhaps now there will be room for the movement to address what have been secondary concerns for the last ten years, unless those masses have been demobilized by a big victory.

“Now that the formality’s over we can get on with our lives,” Stephen said. The two left the next day for a honeymoon in the Florida Keys.

KAT THORNTON B’14 crashed the wedding.

Credit to Sam Henry Photography

+++

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WATER WAKE A conversation with Joseph McElroy

by Drew Dickerson Illustration by Aaron Harris

the los angeles times describes Joseph McElroy as “the lost postmodernist,” but that doesn’t feel quite right—periodization, always such a hard thing, seems to fall flat on its face when confronted with that crop of postwar writers working after Nabokov. “After” here describes both a logical and temporal relation. While it makes sense to think of Joseph McElroy as of a piece with such writers as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William Gaddis, McElroy has always felt to me to be at something different.

More than that, the term “lost postmodernist” seems a contradiction in terms: to be a purveyor of the postmodern (to whatever extent that word works for us) has always been to pay attention to the lost and the outré. The 83-year-old McElroy, in any case, has, again, always felt to me to be at something different. His project is one of tremendous scope and power, incorporating logics of complex connection, repetition, and what it means to not know. While sharing certain structural and formal similarities with the above figures, his work remains singularly strange and unique. This is all to say that Joseph McElroy has never been lost to anyone but the readership that he rightfully deserves. His newest novel, Cannonball, was released June 11 and his third, Ancient History, was reissued with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem. We speak here about water, Donald Rumsfeld, and springboard diving.

The College Hill Independent: The main character of your novel Cannonball is a wartime photographer during the invasion of Iraq. As a young person in this country, I only have experience of media coverage specific to the Global War on Terror and no other major American conflicts. Is there anything particular to the images coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan that made them of interest to you?

Joseph McElroy: When I look at the two volume history of Vietnam War reportage, there were a lot of journalists who were accompanied by photographers, and the photography was profound. I think that the narrator of my book Cannonball is struck by a difference between what his employers want and the personal, sometimes violent shots that he seems to like to take. We don’t know a great deal about this. There’s a scene in the book in which his shots—and apparently he’s taken many, many photographs—are looked over by the Captain. There seems to be a distinction

09 INTERVIEWS

between the more darkly humorous or painful photographs and another range of photographs which would be more acceptable to the government. I think this is not peculiar to the Iraq War. The Indy: Of course.

JM: I had a piece in the summer issue of Art Forum about the photographs of Garry Winogrand [1928-1984]. There’s a huge retrospective in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—a really, really important show of photographs. I’m not at all a professional photographer. I think the medium tends to be a natural, automatic, and maybe deceptive practice. I think we know what photographs fail to do and we continue to be astonished at what photographs find.

The Indy: Photography almost seems to come, deceptively, from an ideologically unmarked place.

JM: I don’t think that’s explicit in Cannonball, but it’s certainly there. What we know of the narrator’s photographs before the climactic, confusing scene is that they are odd, they are truthful, they certainly are unpleasant and—in some ways—not acceptable, to the extent that they would not reflect an ideology coming out of Washington. It’s such a complicated thing, photography. I think that Winogrand’s street photographs and the later photographs (which were heavily criticized for lacking the close thinking that characterized the earlier work) show that photography is not really a matter of ideology.

It may betray all kinds of themes, our positions, but the best photographs are complex and ambiguous.

The Indy: The phrase “named unknowns” occurs in the book, and this seemed to me to recall the Rumsfeldian line on pre-invasion intelligence: “There are known knowns…known unknowns… and unknown unknowns.”

JM: In my long book, Women and Men, there is repeated use of the word “unknown” and it seems to represent whatever is meant by the Unknown Soldier, the grave in Arlington. But it also stretched very widely into the depths of other people which we may associate with anonymity,

which we may associate with something related to ourselves, but which is mysterious. It seems to me that my narrator in Cannonball, Zach, has grasped that there are strange behaviors involved with his family and certainly involved with his being dragooned into the army. These are, to some extent, unknowns that he will try to cope with. But I don’t think that he any more than I would assume that the world is known. You’ll notice that there’s some calculus at various places in the book and it’s associated with the motion of diving and the understanding of the dive and the measurement of the dive. I think there’s a kind of mathematical analogy to all the unknowns that Zach partially penetrates—the relation to the sister, his relation to his family. I think unknown is what is around us. We can try to penetrate it by means of the imagination or whatever intuitions we have. If you want to connect it to what came out of Rumsfeld, I think there’s that also.

The Indy: The known or named unknown allows you to deal with the unknown in a sort of formalized way.

JM: It’s a formalized phrase and therefore for me it has a certain irony. To formalize something is to assume you have really got it licked. I think that’s partly the way our minds work. In order to understand anything, we put a frame around it, we try to understand it. We try even to generalize about it. But, as in the climactic scene of Cannonball, the unknowns in a situation are constantly besetting us. By that I don’t mean that Zach doesn’t arrive at certain very important truths. But the process, a little bit like the photographer who excludes all kinds of things from outside the frame, is disheartening. And it is fraught with betrayals and all of that.

The Indy: I think Zach’s phrase is, “clarities you didn’t quite get but believed in,” with respect to calculus. There seems to be an idea of surrendering yourself to the unknowable and to unpredictable contingencies.

JM: I think that’s so. The book is hardly mathematical and fiction is not mathematical but it presumes to include anything which comes into Zach’s consciousness and his thinking and, as we know from Proust, this is often unplanned.

What we know is accidental—it comes to us,

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

we latch on to it and try to understand it. So the relation of the calculus of motion flickers into Zach’s mind partly because he was a diver and he’s interested in springboard diving. The calculus of motion, trying to understand motion, trying to understand it even as we stop it—with our minds and with our cameras—always knowing that the motion we’re stopping doesn’t itself really stop, has always interested me. I think it has been opening—whether like a shutter, I don’t know, I don’t think of myself as a cameraman—but it’s been opening in my imagination and reopening and reopening pretty constantly. I think of my book Women and Men, and there’s an analogy here to Cannonball, as having something to do with the experience of entering a series of motions. As I look at everything moving at once, and the difficulty of deciphering that, it finds me again trying to enter a multiplying structure. I don’t think that Cannonball is confusing, in the end, but I do think that it is partly about confusions.

The Indy: Is the central image of the cannonball at all complicated by the fact the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now mostly typified by drone combat, the fact that cruise missiles take a very different trajectory from older, conventional ordinance?

JM: You know from looking at the book that—as it is true at least of all the novels that write, I suspect it was true to for Moby Dick and I know it was true in the writing of Halldór Laxness’s great Icelandic novel Independent People—the narrative comes from many sources.

Of course, one of the last things you should do is trust the writer if the writer tells you how something happens.

But I think it’s accurate to say that Cannonball began in many places. It began with my thoughts on the way we got into the Iraq War, but it began also with people who were at some distance from the war. It began also with springboard diving. It wasn’t as if I began with there being a connection between springboard diving and a climactic event in the Iraq War. You must feel as a reader, you’re a writer too, that when you begin something you have to feel the forces out there and elements and they may get closer as you think about them. But in the beginning they’re quite separate. One beginning, it had always struck me as being kind of poignant that very fat people, big people often can go off a board and go into the water and not make a big splash. I’ve meditated on this, because of both my love of diving and interest in water. I also—like most kids, though I’m 83 now—love to go off a board and just do a cannonball. And so it began with this stranger going off the board and making a gigantic splash, versus the large child making no splash at all.

There’s a curious relation between violence and softness, between the cannonball dive and the water it goes into. I think at the climax, when the boy goes off the board in, presumably, Saddam Hussein’s swimming pool, I’m trying to bring together the water and the dive, the gracefulness that is possible with the dives, the strangeness of water as it receives us and as it reflects us, in a situation of war.

The Indy: I was hoping to talk about your nonfiction book on water. I understand it has taken quite a long time to write.

JM: The book came from my writing a piece for a magazine—they were interested in publishing something alongside a piece about my fiction—and a friend of mine said “Why don’t you give them a little essay on water? You always write about

SEPTEMBER 13 2013

water.” And that was news to me. What happened was that I wrote ten or twelve thousand words, which was too much for what they wanted. But out of that came a large meditative book about water which is not only about the emergencies that we face on the globe, but also a meditation on how water and its properties in some way reflect us. I think that’s where the book began. That it has taken a long time is due less to my uncertainty as to what it should include, because it has always had three parts: properties, rights, and imaginings. Rather it is so interesting and I so love being in it, in the midst of it, that it has in some ways expanded. There’s a book of mine called Ancient History that came out in 1971, its just out now with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, and that has a lot of swimming and a lot of water in it.

The Indy: I was looking at your Twitter today. You say “Water emergencies: much that’s being tried is to the good. But the real emergency is in our imagining & how water itself reflects this in us.”

JM: Can you forgive me that I have a Twitter? I was prevailed upon by my web designer to do it. I think you’ll see if you go through it there are quite a number of tweets about water. It’s like a kind of run-up to the book, maybe to keep people interested. There’s always an advantage when you’re reduced to what used to be called 25 words or less. That’s really what the book is about. By “imagining” I don’t mean primarily literature and the arts, though I certainly include that. I think that, in all the talk about the global emergencies, not enough inquiry has been devoted to what this life is that we want to survive, beyond physical survival.

The Indy: Do you think your thoughts on water are at all conditioned by your experiences as a Coast Guardsman?

JM: Oh, yeah. I was in the Coast Guard. I was at a station on Cape Cod for part of it and I was on a weather ship out of the middle of the Atlantic for six weeks at a time. That was wonderful and fascinating and I think that has to do with seafaring and being aboard a ship which I never have really written about. But it has to do also with meteorology, which interested me even before I was in the Coast Guard and then I got involved with some of the meteorologists that were aboard the cutter that I was on. I think Women and Men shows this—that weather both in the science of it and the way it touches our imagination, weather is always important to me. I can’t get away from it. It obviously has a great deal to do with water.

The Indy: And it seems with this logic of the “named unknown”—meteorology is predicated on a baseline materialistic explanation for things but, in the end, the predictions are very highly probabilistic.

JM: I really would love to believe that, actually, of myself.

I think you put it very well. If that is true of me, it explains a lifelong interest in water and what’s at the heart of the nonfiction water book. I think it even has something to do with Zach’s discoveries of backstroking and it has a lot to do with Women and Men. You can call it a dichotomy if you want. As you must know, these alternatives have a way of impinging on themselves. You make analytic distinctions between two ways of seeing weather or two ways of seeing water and, before you know it, they have such familial relations that you have to redefine what you’re talking about all over again. I think what you say is a way of describing how my mind’s working.

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INTERVIEWS

LUNACY a garbage truck roars by and I am preoccupied with President Eisenhower’s face, shellacked on posters and trays. Dr. H wears corduroy, carries a clipboard, and covers his desk with enigmatic keepsakes, like the decades-old campaign artifacts.

He asks about my first memory, sputtering as persuasively as possible something about how psychological inquiry relies on retrospection. I start to hear a faucet sink dribble, a cadence of steel sniffling, and the string of Eisenhower paper-dolls snicker. The room is orchestrating a cautionary song, all of its clutter creating a score. This is confession: trying to halt an invisible hum.

My first word was luna, which I practiced pronouncing while a parent’s hands made hospital corners, while the other parent’s shoulders, smelling vaguely of piano varnish, inched towards the bedspread. This is the way I remember it—my father’s shirt striped by the moonshine slipping through the slates of the blinds.

Recently, I asked my mother about that night when I whispered in Spanish, besotted by what could barely squeeze through the shades. She smiled, not recalling, but not wanting to squelch my enthusiasm, and replied, “you loved extrapolating patterns as a child.” Skeins of sparrows in flight, lines of red daisies on wallpaper, the even number of cream tiles climbing around the backsplash of the bathtub. Or, the ways the moon has pervaded my past.

The fan is decelerating.

Dr. H presses on, probing this instinct to found my infancy on one word. This is our first session; he is taking emotional inventory, so eventually I can find filial relief.

I argue that the moon is the perfect guardian, which cures crippling cases of homesickness and shifts seamlessly from clock, to compass, to face. It mutates and rotates, but is stable. It is moored by an imperceptible tether to the sea, captaining currents, without swaying with the waves. I plastered it in the form of a glow-in-the-dark sticker on the ceiling of my childhood bedroom; it is lodged aloft, refusing the haste of planes and clouds.

He says this may not actually be my first remembrance.

It could be a sketch of safe rearing that I have invented, thrust upon my past, and deemed seminal. An ingenuous mythology to rue the death of a parent, the loneliness of the other parent left alive. To resist this unsettling splitting, I believe the moon is a unifying force, uniting absolute darkness and the full volume of the sun. I cannot bifurcate or break down. So, I pinpoint a plastic and celestial north star.

Anxious, I seize at things—the loose seam of the couch, my knees. This is the grievous astonishment: that the memory may not be real. +++ a full moon is sinister, because the moon is the mechanism of lunacy, and lunacy gives the moon its Latinate name.

It is not even a star—something to make wishes on; there

September 13 2013

by Lili Rosenkranz Illustration by Charles O’Leary

is no sound or seasons. Around its edges, the sky looks like soiled wool.

Its skin is shrouded with spots. The maria look like silhouette puppetry, cankerous inflammation, or Rorschach blots.

People hide from its fullness in fear that it will strike them dead in ways more insidious than lightning. Astronomical rhythms will clot their blood, trigger miscarriages or aberrant menarches. Mothers’ stomachs and breasts stop swelling and emptying.

Surgeons have refused to operate; a man will sell all his stocks or jump from a bridge.

Because of its brightness wolves eat their own and lament this betrayal by baying. The moon attends to these confessions but offers no response. Instead, it unloosens bats from its underbelly.

Some surmise that in its absence, creatures with wings would perish. This lunar effect will plague cities with crime and sun-strangled countrysides will crack open; the cleft will birth a ravine of red ants. All other animals will display duress—the ducks will gather in crowds and fall asleep as if under a spell; the chickens will scamper to their roosts; the crows will hurl themselves against houses.

One week each year in early spring, after a full moon, millions of corals secrete eggs and sperm. Blue light breaking black water will initiate a mass spawning among compact colonies. Primordial things, far removed from the surface, without eyes or brains are obeying.

A full moon will also draw beans up the post; weeds will wither; corn will be coaxed out of their stalks because of the same power that pulls horseshoe crabs ashore to copulate.

The human body is mostly water. It will sweep us away, sending us toward the sea. +++ i am telling dr. h about how I draw back curtains, and stand, sequestered, in cavernous rooms so the roof will not obstruct the moon, so I can scavenge for its shadows on floorboards. Winter is revelatory because it means more hours spent under lunar watch. When church bells startle the sky, I am urged to search for the spire, because the moon never seems far from a scalable summit. Attainable. My parents ascended a Mexican pyramid named after it. Then my father, nerve-ridden, knelt. An anthem: my parents danced to a wedding song, which Sinatra croons; in the chorus, he calls the moon a zenith of companionship. Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars. A week earlier, I quietly sang a verse of it when the subway stalled.

It’s summer; I’m sweating as words and water drain from me. Muffled car horns coming from the Midtown tunnel strike me as something more serious. I hear sirens. It’s just a

jam at a stoplight. Dr. H mistakes my silence for shame and assures me that rituals have calmed centuries of people who exhibit compulsive behaviors. +++ in northeast siberia, the elderly disrobe, even during snowstorms, to bathe in shafts of lunar light. The bare bodies assemble on the highest foothill, like a swarm of newly sheared mutton, and the men sing, almost panting, with the hope that this practice will enlarge their lungs. As they inhale the coal-tinged aura in their coughs and chants, the partakers are reawakened; they now possess the powers of shamans and shed the wrinkles of old age.

In Mexico, the Aztecs would sight the silvery crescent and solicit messages of salvation. During these periodic spectacles, the tribesmen would send supplications to the sky with outreached arms. Their hands seemed close enough to corral the stars.

In Guangong, daughters are trained to make tartlets, soaking the dough in lye water. Today, moon cakes are consumed during carnivals. To eat is to worship and ward off misfortune. When Ming revolutionaries tried to overthrow Mongol rule, they used pies in their espionage efforts. Mosaics baked onto crusts carried messages of revolt. To eat was to destroy evidence In the States, we commemorate the territory on which we have set foot and brandished a flag. It is a part of the American ethos to surmount and colonize. This lunar settlement is like any other flocking—a gold-rush inclination, where instead of heading west we aim higher.

In Tanzania, the Maasai fling sand and cowhide sandals into the air during an eclipse. Sometimes the silt is swept away, but most nights it comes back down like unwelcomed rain. The children rub their eyes to adjust to the darkness, to wipe away soot. +++ a girl sits in her doctor’s office in a city; a group of Siberian elders collect on a crag. Both must strip naked to see that the moon is the seat of their understanding.

A girl cannot explain her father’s cancer—why his body was chosen to haul a colostomy bag; a community is trying to rationalize months of drought or unseasonable winds. Both develop habits, like scouring, speculating, and granting sacred status, because how can they accept that calamity occurs for no reason; that there is randomness?

Many think its crescent outline reveals a human profile.

A girl is convinced that what happened remains reversible; the moon with its recurrent curing and cursing and curing will bring the loved one back, or at least hints of him. The first marital dance, the proposal, her toddler prattling, his telescope perched by the doorframe; relentless, she carries these moments around like sealed envelopes, hoping to one day to pry them open and solve the riddle.

Apophenia. We imagine messages because we must, to persist, to make purpose of our suffering.

12

FEATURES

FOR QUICKER PROCESSING AND DELIVERY Telemarketing and the decline of print media

by Josh Schenkkan Illustration by Diane Zhou

big red, an ex-felon with “sinner” tattooed on his neck, is politely explaining to a woman from Louisiana that the American Farrier’s Journal will quintuple her profits. She hangs up on him because she realizes that he is a telemarketer and that he does not actually know what a farrier does. Big Red gently disentangles himself from his headset, which has left small centipedeshaped indentations in his shaved and inked skull. He goes outside to the camper van that he lives in, parallel-parked at a meter. He rolls himself a cigarette that is not too large, because he has exactly seven minutes to smoke it. Afterwards, he goes back inside, and spends the next four hours calling approximately 430 businesses around the country, offering them each magazines tailored to their trade: Mortuary Management, Advances in Advanced Pathology, Scroll Saw Woodworking & Crafts. He sells three magazine subscriptions and leaves the office.

Big Red is a magazine telemarketer, and three years ago he was on the verge of unemployment. Magazine telemarketing is a dying industry because print media is a dying industry.

Today, fewer national newspapers are being sold than at any point in the past 60 years. Just last year, print advertising revenue and daily circulation fell 14 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

Profiles in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Guardian are quick to point out that this doesn’t mean the death of the newspaper or the magazine itself—just those medias in their print form. But this says nothing of the industries and companies that depend on those magazines in their print form. Industries like magazine telemarketing, and companies like Cascade Subscription services, where I worked for a summer in 2010. +++ bobby, senior manager at cascade Subscription Services, snarls when he talks, even when he’s asking you a straightforward question. He’s about 6’2’’, 35 years old, with thinning black hair that’s slicked behind his head. You hear him before you see him—he’s a massive, powerful man, and the collection of silver chains around his neck jangles loudly—but you smell him before you hear him. He walks in an acrid cloud of Dolce and Gabana “Light Blue,” which he reapplies every time he smokes a cigarette—and he smokes exactly four cigarettes an hour. I would later learn that he used to be in charge of collections for Seattle’s largest Key Bank, until he robbed it at gunpoint.

“Are you, or aren’t you, about makin’ a fuckin’ dollar?” he asks me in our interview, before offering me a job as a “telephone sales representative.”

Bobby shakes my hand and looks over the suit that I’ve put on for the interview. Dress for the job you want, not the job you’ve got.

“Nice suit, by the way. Don’t wear it to work.” Leaving his office, I hear him mutter under his breath: “…fruitcake.” +++

13

Features

phones have been used as a marketing tool since the early 1900s. But magazine telemarketing emerged only in the ‘30s and ‘40s, as a more cost-efficient means of acquiring new subscribers than going door-to-door. Rubber and gas were in short supply then, making travel expensive, and a travelling salesman could only make four to six contacts a day. A telemarketer sitting at a desk, by contrast, could make two hundred contacts before lunch. The introduction of the Wide Area Telephone Services lines in 1960 made high-volume outbound calling incredibly cheap, which paved the way for national or regional call centers like Cascade.

The first telemarketing success story, though, was Reuben H. Donnelley. Back in 1955, Donnelley launched a telemarketing program that offered advertising space in the Yellow Page directories. By 1985, the Yellow Pages were the most profitable publications in California, with a third of its revenue generated through telemarketing sales.

Donnelley’s success mirrored the continued rise in telemarketing sales. In 1996, sales totaled $63.1 billion dollars. By 2002, those sales had skyrocketed to $100.3 billion dollars. But as telemarketing profits increased, so did high-profile telemarketing scams, as well as general animosity towards telemarketers. This led to the creation of the National Do Not Call Registry in 2003, which allows individuals to forbid telemarketers from contacting them. By 2007, over 77 percent of Americans had registered their numbers, and telemarketing, for the first time, began to decline in profitability.

No sector has been hit quite as hard as magazine telemarketing. The profitability of telemarketing depends on what’s being sold, and the profitability of print media has been on a downward spiral. When Cascade began selling subscriptions over the phone in 1986, there was an unprecedented demand for its product; newspaper-advertising revenue was at an all-time high of $60 billion dollars. In 2000, that revenue was down to below $50 billion dollars. When I began at Cascade in 2010, the total revenue was down to an all-time low of $20 billion dollars.

Today, telemarketing companies are struggling to find ways to cut costs and increase profitability. Cascade already employs a number of practices to make it more efficient economically. Its employees make a base wage—Washington state minimum wage, or about $9.19 an hour—but the company increases that wage based on an employee’s sales. Each magazine has a “credit” in dollars, which means that even if you sell a three-year subscription to Mortuary Management for the “preferred customer” (or, more accurately, for the specially inflated) rate of $148.99, your credit would only be around $30 dollars. Rather than working off commission, these credits get averaged over the course of a two-week pay cycle. If your combined credits are enough, you get paid an adjusted hourly wage. For people like Dwayne, an ex-Microsoft employee turned identity thief, this works out well; he claimed that he regularly made close to $30 dollars an hour. But for almost everyone else, who had only one or two exceptional days per pay cycle, this meant the same wage you’d receive for working at a grocery or convenience store, with more rejection.

Cascade also works hard to hire ex-felons for similar cost reductions. The relationship is

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

symbiotic: for Cascade, ex-felon employment offers a substantial federal tax break. For the ex-felons, telemarketing offers one of few options for employment with a criminal record (though, crucially, not the best one—according to one list, telemarketing is just the seventh most desirable job for ex-felons, after medical test subject, second, or joining the army, fourth). As a result, nearly everyone in the office had a serious criminal past. Bobby robbed a bank. Jason in the cubical next to me nearly drowned a police officer. Trixy, an unassuming blond, and Tracy, a short, busty brunette with a 24-inch multi-colored weave, both used to turn tricks on Aurora. Nobody knew what Big Red had done, but everyone assumed it was something serious. In rare moments of community, the office would gather during breaks: “Which do you think has better food: prison or jail?”

“Prison, no doubt; you get those little fruit cups. I love those little fruit cups.”

“You’re a fool; in jail, you get Wonderbread. You don’t get no Wonderbread in prison.”

“You want to know the difference between prison food and jail food? Nothing. They both fuckin’ suck.”

There were the employees who stuck out for other reasons—Louanne, overweight and in her mid-thirties, worked eight-hour shifts when the rest of us worked four or six. Every morning, she’d hang a sign above her cubical, which read in rainbow-colored bubble letters, “It Will Never Get Any Worse Than This.” But for every Louanne, there were five other employees who would come in every day, do their shift, and leave without speaking a word to anyone. I heard rumors of what had brought them to Cascade. Home foreclosure. Mounting medical bills. Terminally ill children. Always on time, and always the last to leave.

Just as much of a motivating factor is a sustainable drug habit. Almost everyone in the office was a habitual pot smoker, but others had graduated to harder drugs. Dwayne confided in me that he smoked meth on his lunch breaks, and that he made the most sales when he was on the drug. He described one morning where he had been trying to sell a Parent and Child subscription to a woman who had recently lost her triplets in a late-term miscarriage. Normally, in the face of a personal revelation like this, he would have expressed his condolences and move on to the next call. But this morning, he was so high that he hounded her until she bought a three-year subscription to Ebony and Jet. Bobby, I learned, sat in his office popping Oxycontin and Vicodin. When he heard midway through the summer that I had strained my back and was briefly on painkillers, he made me an offer: “Three dollars a pill. Way more fuckin’ money than you’ll get on the street.”

And then there were the sales tactics themselves. Everyone was supposed to use a script, which worked as a kind of choose-your-own-adventure book. If a customer responded that they were not interested, the script told you to ask why, and then provided a number of responses to whatever their answer might be. If they weren’t finding the magazine useful anymore, you’d agree that (for example) Food & Wine’s coverage of (whatever aspect of the magazine that was pertinent to the customer) had been lacking in the past few months, but that the magazine had actually undergone a dramatic transformation, and if they re-subscribed, you were sure that they would once again find it useful. None of the magazines had, in fact, undergone dramatic transformations within the last decade. But once you had their credit card number and thanked them for the sale, their satisfaction was no longer your problem.

The most successful people in the office, though, use the script in conjunction with their own tricks. Thomas was pushy and to the point, which worked well with male business owners and the rare CEO he could get on the phone. Dwayne was almost flirty with customers, getting them to divulge personal information, which he would then use to clinch the sale: “You mentioned your daughter—how old is she? Seven? That’s a wonderful age. I re-

September 13 2013

member when my daughter was that young. But—and I don’t mean to impose—but don’t you think she wants to see her mother succeed as a small business owner? Of course? Well, that’s just what Elle Décor helps you do: succeed. And I can actually get that started for you at a special introductory rate of….”

But, try as it might, Cascade couldn’t stem the financial tide. Doors would open, leaking shouts into the call-room, and then be slammed shut. Pep talks would be given, threats would be made about productivity and about keeping the company afloat. The more senior members in the office would try to rev everyone up, but we would stare back blankly. And then it was back to the phones.

“Hi, I need to speak with the person that handles the subscription to…”

“No problem, I’ll call back another time.” +++ often when we discuss the decline of print media, we yearn for its physical presence. The crease of a newspaper, the gloss of a magazine, the snap of a spine. Print media is beloved because it is tangible, and its tangibility suspends its temporality. But even as we’re holding onto today’s paper, but tomorrow’s is on its way. We love the tangibility of something that is ultimately disposable. We value the apparent permanence of print when, in fact, print media is an industry that has always been about what comes next.

From inside a cubicle at Cascade Subscription Services, it became clear to me that the industry of telemarketing has been built around this transience. It has always relied on—and profited from—the consumer’s anxiety that the next issue would be better than the one before it. The irony, though, is that telemarketing is itself transient. This is an industry that consistently has one of the highest turnover rates of any profession in the country. And Cascade was no different. After three months, nearly three-quarters of the office had either left or been replaced.

Bobby had stopped showing up to work, and everyone assumed that he had either gone back to jail or had overdosed on pills. Tracy had begun to show up to work more infrequently, and there were rumors that she had gone back to Aurora Avenue, where the money was better and the customers more appreciative. There was even a new manager—Michael, a former junior-college baseball star who had been expelled for assaulting another student. +++ i look around the office for the last time; Big Red is on the phone with an automotive engineer from Houston, Dwayne is flirting with an interior decorator in Albuquerque, and another college-aged kid is sitting outside the main office waiting for an interview. As I’m about to leave, I hear Dwayne about to clinch a sale: “Now, for quicker processing and delivery, we do accept all major forms of credit and debit…”

He frowns, hits pause on his phone, and waits for the next call.

Josh Schenkkan B’14 accepts all major forms of credit and debit.

14

Features

ON THE FAT ATHLETE

by Tristan Rodman Illustration by Casey Friedman

suggesting that player specialize, baseball builds in plenty of slack for its non-elite athletes: hitting a ball over the fence earns a leisurely trot around the bases, pitchers rarely have to run, and the American League features a designated hitter, who sits on the bench when he’s not at bat. Elite athleticism can be a huge advantage for a player, but lacking peak physical capabilities rarely prevents superstardom. In football and basketball, one weak link will break the chain, but in baseball, players are isolated enough so that one physically incompetent athlete minimally influences the way the rest of the team plays. Writers label the rare, once-in-a-generation baseball talents “five-tool players” for their ability to hit for power, hit for average, run, field, and throw, but everybody else has acknowledged shortcomings. In baseball, fat is not an exclusionary term.

The list of prominent fat baseball players—past and present—is impressive. David Wells, 6’3” and 250 pounds, won 20 games for Toronto in 2007. Mo Vaughn, 6’1” and 275 pounds, took home the American League MVP in 1995. Tony Gwynn, 6’0” and 225 pounds, holds the San Diego Padres record for stolen bases. And of course, Babe Ruth, arguably the game’s greatest slugger, had more than a bit of a beer belly.

“There are two different shapes, one for fitness, one for throwing the ball.” – Hyun-Jin Ryu, SP, Los Angeles Dodgers some athletes are just perfect. Melding physical ability and mental execution, they make the superhuman look mundane. Their movements are beautiful, graceful, effortless.

Every sport has a few figures like this—LeBron James, Mike Trout, Adrian Peterson. These men, watched primarily by other men from their sofas, reify the ideal masculine form: broad shoulders, muscular chests, lightning-quick agility that belies a large frame. At any given time in the sports cultural arena, however, there are a handful of professional athletes whose bodies are indisputably imperfect—rounds of fat disguising muscle, spilling out of sleeves into shapes that resemble the average American couch potato’s form far more than they resemble that of the athletic elite. The fat athlete, always already male, aids in the creation of the American male sports viewer as a subject—he keeps us watching, a reminder that we’re not as far away from our idol figures as it seems. When we watch a fat athlete, we see ourselves.

We typically slap the fatness label on our most visible figures. Behind the walls of a doctor’s office, you’re “overweight”; in the pages of The New York Post, you’re “fat.” It’s a term loaded with disabling potential: to be fat is to not be fit. Most figures in popular culture have power sapped by the label of fatness—Oprah, for example, battles it constantly, as a slim figure seems necessary for a daytime talk show host to mirror what her demographic desires. But in athletics, the main demographic—males in front of large screens—desires both the elite athletes and the visibly unathletic.

Major sports embrace many imperfections (some in athleticism, others in skill), often disguising shortcomings by calling players “specialists.” Basketball general managers focus on players who can shoot three pointers and defend the perimeter, skills that complement the elite scorers and shot blockers.

Football teams feature an entire offensive line responsible for protecting the quarterback, yet the players arenever intended to touch the ball.

Baseball, however, presents an exception. Rather than

September 13 2013

‘ROUND THE BASES the inherent contradiction of a professional athlete attempting to overcome his own lack of athleticism fuels some of baseball’s most compelling moments. In 2003, Blue Jays catcher Greg Myers barely made it around the bases after a botched play in the outfield led to an improbable inside-thepark homer. After scoring the run, he lay down in the dugout, winded. His teammates left an oxygen mask, a can of red bull, and an IV by his locker after the game. In 2007, Milwaukee Brewers first baseman Prince Fielder—listed generously at 275 pounds—lifted a pop up to straightaway center field that should have been an easy out. The centerfielder lost the ball in the domed stadium’s lights and the ball dropped. Fielder picked up his pace, breaking from a run into an all-out sprint.

What should have been a simple prerequisite for a professional baseball player—the ability to run the bases successfully and all at once—became a study in contrast: legs developing horizontal momentum and beginning to move independently of an upper-body that gyrated vertically, grinding around the bases until the tension exploded outward in one unwieldy lunge for home plate. Fielder was unable to stop himself, running straight from home into the Brewers dugout, nearly tripping on the top stairs. Fielder became the 3rd heaviest player ever* to score an inside-the-park homer, and found himself the butt of many jokes—even though Fielder traveled 360 feet of basepath in 16.1 seconds, an average of about 15 miles per hour and a major athletic feat for a man of his girth.

At 5’11” and 275 pounds, Fielder has a body mass index of 38.4, qualifying him as clinically obese.

LOADED TERMS in baseball, the challenge of player vs. body is commonplace enough that broadcasters tend to give masking euphemisms to overweight players. When a baseball player overflows in his uniform, he’s “husky,” “burly,” or “a big guy.”

Any ESPN broadcast of a game CC Sabathia pitches is sure to contain at least two of those phrases. The euphemisms come from affinity, a vested interest in seeing the un-athletic succeed. In other sports, that’s not always the case. Large basketball players are “fat,” “soft-bodied,” or simply “out of

shape.” Basketball’s up-and-down pace makes it far tougher to disguise exhaustion, and attitudes towards those who can’t keep up are rarely forgiving. Coach Greg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs joked that one of his players, Boris Diaw, whose frame resembles a 6’10” body pillow, had “never been in shape.” As the New York Knicks were eliminated from the 2012 playoffs by the Miami Heat, ex-player and broadcaster Reggie Miller suggested that Knicks star Carmelo Anthony would “have to be in better shape next year” for the Knicks to succeed. Anthony’s trainer vehemently denied the accusation: “He’s not a fat ass, man. He’s a world-class athlete.”

Broadcasters aren’t the only ones using larger athletes as pointed examples. Deadspin kept a list of prominent baseball weight gains and their bogus explanations at the beginning of the 2012 season. Bleacher Report has published numerous slideshows of fat athletes. Four days after Prince Fielder’s improbable trip around the bases, The Onion joked, “Prince Fielder Dies of Inside-The-Park Home Run.” Large athletes also work particularly well for advertisers seeking a connection with the typical couch-bound male viewer. Shaq appeared in ads for Buick based on his status as a “size authority,” selling the luxury and comfort of a car interior that moves mechanically like a la-z-boy. Donovan McNabb and his also-large mother sold Chunky Campbell’s Soup, appearing at construction sites and in living rooms to deliver a hearty meal to men in deep states of work and leisure.

A FULL FIGURE the fat athlete is one of the great American characters: there’s something impossibly endearing about watching people who look like normal schlubs accomplish great things.

We set them up by demeaning their physique—suggesting, as ESPN’s John Hollinger did, that Boris Diaw ate Chris Paul— or by imposing upon them a nickname that mocks their cuddly nature—Pablo Sandoval is “the Panda,” Juan Uribe is “the Uribear.” This systematic lowering of expectations makes the payoff of success even greater. Diaw will make a surprisingly graceful finish at the rim and earn extensive praise from the broadcast crew, Uribe and Sandoval will make diving plays at third base that prevent extra base hits.

In couch culture obsessed with the male body image, there’s an element of magic to those who can match the super-bodied without their super bodies. When we talk about LeBron James, we talk about the superhuman, the way he drives from the perimeter to the hoop under such control that he hardly appears to move at all. When we talk about Prince Fielder, what we admire is the humanity, all the work and strain that go into simple mechanics. The fat athlete tethers fan, television, and sport together; he’s a figure of extreme identification and relief for any male on the sofa. When Juan Uribe takes a particularly bad swing, so bad that he falls first backwards, then over onto his knees and stomach, weight shifting unexpectedly as the bat flies out of his hands, it enables the couch potato to look down at his body and think, “hey, it’s not totally impossible for that to be me.” *Kyle Blanks of the San Diego Padres holds the record at 285 pounds, but he’s a full six inches taller than Fielder and hardly appears overweight.

TRISTAN RODMAN B’15 was a fat athlete once, but it was in elementary school and maybe not so compelling.

16

Sports

O FACE

by Edward Friedman Illustration by Julieta Cardenas

A girlfriend once described my face when I come as so happy but so sad.

Since then I’ve tried to make it sadder.

We were fucking in the car as the sun rose, at a place where I used to park and smoke pot in high school.

And we came and she said that.

It was in the hills, and you could look out over downtown from there.

I told her I loved her face when she came and thought it was beautiful.

She said I doubt it and was a little bit right— I was in kind of a dark place.

But the sun was up now over the buildings and across the river, glaring at us like the pushy, loving aunt who might be your best friend, saying, ok, but now you should probably go to bed.

17 Literary

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Friday, September 13

Sunday, September 15

Reiki Presentation

Fiddle N Folk Fest

2PM // EPOCH Assisted Living, 1 Butler Ave., Providence.

EPOCH Assisted Living hosts Carole Caprio to discuss the benefits of Reiki and perform a demonstration. 401-275-0682 to RSVP.

Screening of Made Not Born

5:30PM-7PM // Rockefeller Library, Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, 10 Prospect St., Providence.

Simone de Beauvoir rolls over in her grave to sneak a peek at this biographical documentary about “The Wife and Dimes of Professor Josiah S. Carberry.” Snacks from the professor’s own cookbook will be provided. Discussion to follow.

Saturday, September 14 Face Painting

12PM-4PM Saturday & Sunday // Crescent Park Carousel, 700 Bullocks Point Ave., East Providence // $5 per face

Armenian Food Festival

Saturday 3PM-?; Sunday 12PM-5PM // St. Sahag and Mesrob Armenian Church, 70 Jefferson St., Providence.

There will be Kebob, pastries, and plenty of free parking. If you purchase a meal on Saturday you’ll receive a $2 coupon for a meal on Sunday. Credit cards accepted. I’ll be there at least Saturday with my grandfather Manoog Heditsian.

Providence Roller Derby

Doors open at 5PM. Bout from 6PM-8PM // One Sabin St., Providence // GA $10 online; $15 door. VIP $30o, $35d Old Money Honey’s compete against the Mob Squad. There will be an After Party at Union Station Brewery, 36 Exchange Terrace #2, Providence where your favorite skaters might just sign your body part.

PRONK! Fundraiser

8PM // Dusk Bar, 301 Harris st., Providence // 21+ // Suggested donation $7-10 Naftali Avari, Kickin Brass, Extraordinary Rendition Band, What Cheer? Brigade. What else could you ever want.

12PM-6PM // Haines Memorial State Park, Rte 103, East Providence.

Featuring Pendragon, Bob Drouin & Rich Horowitz, Bluegrass Invitation Band, French Roast, Elwood Donnelly, Bay Spring Folk, and more. To sign up for fiddle workshops on Sunday, email sydney_mike@fullchannel.net.

Screening of 2013 Sundance Film Festival Short Films

12PM, 9:30PM Sunday. Shows 9/13-9/19 // Cable Car Cinema, 204 South Main St., Providence. // $8 matinee, $9.5 evening. $8 with student ID. Didn’t make it to Sundance this year? Check out this collection of eight short films which includes five award-winners, action, documentary and animation. Who knows, maybe after you leave the theatre you’ll be happy you skipped the festival to stay on the slopes.

Monday, September 16 Mashapaug’s Neighbors: Stories from Beyond the Pond

Cribbage (& Backgammon) in the Courtyard

2PM-3PM // Providence Public Library, 150 Empire St., Providence Learn how to play, or win against those who are learning. Indy Protip: it’s all about the open.

Open Life Drawing

6PM-8:30PM // AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence // $6 They provide bodies but not drawing materials.

After Trayvon

7PM-9PM // Salomon 001, Brown University Listen to Tricia Rose and others discuss Stand Your Ground Laws, Stop and Frisk Policies, and attitudes of fear toward black and brown young people.

Wednesday, September 18 Simple Steps to Protect Your Invention

12PM // Founders League, 95 Chestnut St., Providence.

Got an idea? Better keep it close to the chest until Dan Holmander (and the Founders League) show you the ropes. Join them for lunch and coffee as you learn how to properly protect your inventions. Email listtheindy@ gmail.com if you have an invention you’d like to chat about.

24/7 until 10/6 // your cell phone Call 401-643-2578 to listen to a tour of Providence’s largest and only natural fresh water pond. For more information and to see a nice website, visit http://storiesfrombeyondthepond.

Annie Lanzillotto reads from ’L is for Lion’ com.

5:30PM // Brown University Bookstore, 244 Brown Swing Club: First Beginner Swing Thayer st., Providence Poet, songwriter, and vocalist Annie LanzillotDancing Lesson to will read from her memoir “L is for Lion An 9PM-10PM // Alumnae Hall, Brown University Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir”.

194 Meeting St., Providence.

No experience necessary. Don’t bring your I’m An Artist: Women of Color Speak most frictive shoes.

7:30PM-11PM // AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence.

Come listen to panel of poet Sussy Santana, Francis Parra of ECAS Theater,Jackie Davis Guided Architectural Library Tour of New Urban Theater Lab, and Kate Rushin, 10:30AM-11:30AM // Providence Public Library, 225 Washington St. entrance, Providence author included in Cherrie Moraga’s Anthology “This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Take a tour of the hundred and thirteen year Radical Women of Color. at 8:3t0 there will be old building this Tuesday. If you can’t make an open mike, and at 9:30 : “Bloodwork: The the tour every first and third Tuesday of each Ana Mendieta Story”—a documentary about a month, contact Tonia Mason at 401-455-8090 Cuban-American artist who fell thirty-four floors or tmason@provlib.org to schedule a private from her New York City apartment. guided tour.

Tuesday, September 17

Thursday, September 19 Partner Massage Class

7PM-8:30PM // Harmony on Hope Therapeutic Massage, 355 Hope St., Suite 4, Providence Learn the bare bones therapeutic touch with a sweetheart, friend, or parent. Don’t worry—it’s a safe space.

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