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NEWS

FROM THE EDITORS Anywhere you go, you can ask a native and almost assuredly get the low-down on how people drive around these parts. Oddly enough, people are willing to generalize about all drivers in their city, even if they wouldn’t speak to the way humanity drives in general.

Here in Providence, people tend to drive faster when the weather’s bad. This is how we govern ourselves. It’s a sort of counter-cyclical correction, like a stimulus package for our commute.

Driving is natural, bad weather is natural, and the job of human government is to find some balance among the misaligned oscillations of the natural world.

Art, on the other hand, can at times rise up out of nature and affect a change in the human mind. Once changed, that mind can writhe free of nature’s exigencies. This is one recent goal of the Providence Comics Consortium, an organization bringing local comics artists to The Providence Community Library to create comics with kids. Consortium operator and all-aroundgreat-guy Walker Mettling reports that, pursuant to some R.I. Department of Transportation funding, “we are going to be creating a ton of characters and comics relating to seatbelts and car accidents!” Now that’s good government. — BT

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Week in Review

13

Bye Bye Beiber

15

Stealing Stuff

david adler & simon engler josh schenkkan

david adler, barry elkinton & simon engler

METRO 8

Ten Years Later

9

Land Before Time

emma wohl

benson tucker

FEATURES 5

To Late To Poe-legize julia longoria

ARTS 4 11

EPHEMERA

Subtitles

drew dickerson & mimi dwyer

Say My Names vera carothers

SCIENCE 7

Classing the Cure alisa owens

INTERVIEWS 14

David Shields drew dickerson

LITERARY

KEEP CLOSE College Hill Independent PO Box 1930 Brown University Providence RI 02912

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

Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The 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

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Checking In

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everett epstein

lizzie davis

WEEK IN PLASTICS

BY DAVID ADLER & SIMON ENGLER

Print Out Your Ear

always begin with the infomercial. Does your newborn love eating dirt? Print him a pacifier! Are you missing a tooth?

Print one! Are there ants in your kitchen? Print them an ant house!

The 3D printer is like a one-size-fits-all everything. For just $500 (See: Portabee’s Complete Kit), own one that can fit in a laptop case and have a little bitty industrial revolution in your bedroom. Take a nice big picture or draw one in your computer, and then, like some combination of Creepy Crawlers and the Easy Bake Oven, tah dah! Little robotic hands move around and add successive layers of plastic to make the object of your desire.

Michael Guslick is psyched in Wisconsin, Chapman Baetzel in New Hampshire, and Cody Wilson in Texas—all three made firearms from their 3D printers. Guslick is an amateur gunsmith (those exist) and made his after a Craigslist purchase. Baetzel just thought it would be cheaper; more Tecate at the shooting range, he drooled. Wilson, the kind of guy who wears white pants and tucks a pen into his front pocket, is trying to make some sort of point about the futility of gun control. “It’s unbannable,” Wilson said, reclining.

“The Internet has it now.” The NRA was at a loss for words.

As was Washington: big talk for big change, and now anyone can print a big gun and hurt people. It’s the 21st century, and plastic reigns supreme, stretching over us like some evil condom.

Cornell University, meanwhile, is excited about condoms.

Professor Lawrence Bonassar and his team of biomedical engineers have figured out a way to use the 3D printing technology to print out human body parts. “We think that the real leap forward here,” Bonassar explained, is “figuring out how to make that toner or ink out of living tissue.”

Bonassar is kind of inventing a new vocabulary. The caption to one picture of the professor in his lab says “Lawrence Bonassar with a printed ear.” A printed ear. They scan the head with a camera, then they print using real cartilage cells— layer by layer—and out comes a living ear. Attach it to your face or keep it by your bedside to tell your secrets to. One of the researchers in his lab called it “fantastic.”

I don’t know. It’s all pretty scary. I was thinking that the major innovations of 2013 were going to be things like the BagelMuffin or a version of Snapchat that uses .gifs. Skynet seems lame now. We can print real pigs! Or giants! —DA

MARCH 01 2013

Mystery Meat never throw away a tender steak. Meat is too precious to waste. So is blood meal, a dry powder derived by steam-drying the afterslop of industrial slaughterhouses. At least, that’s what the inventors of Novatein are saying.

Novatein is a blood-meal-based plastic currently under development by Aduro Biopolymers, a New Zealand firm.

Novatein’s physical properties will be comparable to those of polyethylene, one of the world’s most common plastics, and developers aim for the plastic to be sold at a comparably cheap price. And don’t worry about gore-colored plastic bags at the grocery store: Aduro claims to have modified the deep maroon of blood meal to a pleasant “translucent honey.”

Some investors seem eager. Aduro CEO Darren Harpur told Plastic News that the “red-meat industry in Australia [has] shown a great deal of interest.” Aduro, which was established by a subsidiary of New Zealand’s University of Waikato, aims to begin commercial production by 2016.

Using agricultural waste to improve manufactured goods is not new. Crops from sugar cane to maize are often used to create bioplastics for industrial purposes. And Pirelli, the Italian manufacturer, is now using incinerated rice husks to add desired springiness to auto tires. Bioplastics are typically advantageous for their biodegradability and for the low costs of their source materials. Aduro claims that Novatein will be even better: production costs, often a hurdle for bioplastics firms, are expected to be low.

Novatein will be used primarily for agricultural and horticultural applications: sheeting, pegs, bowls, bags, and other knick-knacks. The plastic will not be food-grade. Concretely, that means you won’t be able to eat steak from a plate made from a cow. But a cow might be able to: blood meal is also a common supplement in livestock feed. So just grab a slab of Novatein, load it up with fodder, and give it to a bovine. Wait a few minutes: soon, the world will have bumped into its own tail one too many times, and you will disappear. —SE

Plastic causes acne. At least, it does in cats and dogs.

NEWS

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What Happens When I Freeze Up Robert Merritt Visits a Hypnotist Illustration by Diane Zhou

First off, I love my job. Writing the Indy’s ‘Around the Town’ column is a sheer delight. For example, I got a chance to go to the Twin Rivers Casino with my cool roommate, Drew to see a comic hypnotist act. Another nameless friend of mine came with us too but he was hypnotized and doesn’t want his parents to find out again. They’ll take the car.

I saw Frank Santos Jr. the comic hypnotist perform twice, once at Brown University in the multipurpose room and once at Twin Rivers Casino. Twin Rivers Casino is a strange reenactment of coming to the new world, whereas the Brown Multipurpose Room is a venue for job fairs and mixed martial arts. And yes, the video slot machines are rivers, and yes, there was a ship dead center of it all its sails reaming the blown spiral.

Hypnotism can be expressed as a guided meditation or a relaxation with suggestion. For safety, a subject has to be willing to be lulled into a state of suggestibility. The show begins with Frank’s request for volunteers from the audience.

A greater amount of volunteers allows Frank the opportunity to discriminately select subjects who are more susceptible to suggestion and relaxation.★ After the volunteers get up on stage, Frank asks his subjects to trust fall into his arms after tapping them on the shoulder.

The people who I don’t like don’t fall right, and usually they get kicked off stage first. These people will return to their seats; they will not be hypnotized. Now there are ten people and me just watching. Next, the hypnotist, administers a series of tests to his subjects. The flute is playing, Alfombrar he counts backward the flute from ten I see Maggie but she is falling away for a second I see my own face freeze up. These tests will lull the subjects into a more concentrated and relaxed sleep.

Frank is sensitive to those on stage who are, as he maybe said, “not feeling it” and will ask a subject he suspects of being awake to leave the stage. At the Casino show, Frank had to ask multiple subjects who were not feeling it to leave the stage after thanking them for their participation. At both shows, some subjects occasionally broke concentration and simply walked off stage. For those who do remain hypnotized the fun is just beginning.

Frank speaks quickly into the microphone, lulling them away with a sinusoidal drone. He repeats himself in this humming and punctually inserts along the way words and phrases intended to clearly stand out to the hypnotized

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subjects. Later, he will insert warnings into his subject specific directions, like, “you won’t hit me or anybody else,” to the man, or, “but you’ll keep your clothes on,” to the woman.

After the music and backwards repetitive counting he asks them to stick out their arms so as to form a right angle with the floor. If they are getting hypnotized their arms will appear as bars of steel.

At first, each test intends to freeze up or lockdown the body while suggesting sensation. What follows is a progression of sensation from the extremities to the nose, to the eyes, and finally to the ears and mouth. Interspersed with his countdowns, Frank will suggest something like, every time I say the word microphone you will feel your underwear shrinking, or feel your ass get pinched by the person sitting to your left.★★ He points the microphone at you and polls you, I mean, Frank solicits feedback. Then sleep. Then sleep and he waves a hand or touches your head with a voice all the time rising and falling, itself repeating. Then he says as he walks by, you will all smell the worst fart. And you see everyone taken aback and unable to locate exactly what the smell is or where it comes from but it’s embarrassing, you know? My friend didn’t smell anything.

He says to picture everyone in the audience in their underwear; the shock of a world without fashion. At the R-rated casino show, Frank had his subjects imagine an orgy.

I really wonder here how the crowd was being registered, were individual faces recognizable? Frank then pointed to a man in the crowd and said to one hypnotized subject, “and dad’s here whacking off.” He couldn’t look at dad. It just killed me.

In the show’s climax, Frank exhibits all of his talents in a chain reaction of ecstasy and terror. A girl is told that there are aliens outside who have just landed in a space ship and will see them as she gets up to go to the bathroom then comes back to tell Frank what she’s seen. Meanwhile, another girl argues that there is no such thing as aliens every time she hears the word spaceship. The South African next to her is incredibly offended by the word spaceship and begs Frank to stop saying it, but will not harm Frank or anyone else. On the wings of the stage there are exclamations. Every time a boy and girl hear the trigger word _____they yell out in succession, “you suck”, and “you’re great.” Each time the guy screamed, “you’re great” I watched him bury his face in his hands, ashamed and horrified, continually recognizing that he will never be able to regain control. On the opposite wing of the stage I saw a

girl try desperately again and again to put her shoes on. Next to her a boy twisted his shirt into wild abstractions trying to put it back on but he could not. The contortions of his body exceeded the generative potential of the fully conscious mind. It looked like he hit a glass ceiling trying to come up for air. At my first hypnotist show at Brown, I was scared that I would go to the bathroom or somebody else would go to the bathroom. That’s how it began. I was so frightened by the potential deluge of anxiety of so many young minds unraveling that I began to gesture uncontrollably, screaming as I laughed. The volunteers were channeling the collected anxieties of an entire university. The room was in an uproar.

It’s funny what comes back to you.★★★ At the Casino show, there was a much smaller crowd and thus a much smaller group of audience participants to pick and choose from during the initial (trust fall) screening.

Unlike the previous show I had seen at Brown University, Frank spent a much longer time with the early stages of subject initiation. The size of the audience also affects the performance atmosphere. If the initial culling of volunteers is belabored and awkward the subjects have less potential to be guided into a hypnotic state. Because the casino comedy club was filled with couples whose minds were more focused on the anxieties of dating and walking around, Frank had little to work with. It wasn’t until he demonstrated that he could actually hypnotize 6 people at once that the audience started paying attention. At Brown, there were very strong vibes and I was shouting stop the show. The atmosphere was full of potential energy. ★

At both shows there was a sense of contagion in the air, although my memory has become convoluted. I noticed people in the crowd shifting in their seats at the underwear line and remember my eyes glued to the subjects’ expressions.

I wanted it so bad to be hypnotized but was afraid that I would lose control and admit everything. ★★

Every single person who was hypnotized at the Brown show that Thursday, was magically reassembled at the Campus screening of the Super Bowl the following Sunday like some fantastic cast reunion of ABC’s multinational epic, LOST. ★★★

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

French Connection, RI

by Drew Dickerson & Mimi Dwyer Illustration by Mariam Quraishi

Adulte Terrible

Good Cop, French Cop

like any attempt to periodize an artistic movement in its contemporary, the phrase “New French Extremity” is only about half useful. It’s possible to consider what the transportation of a Sade- or Artaud- or Bataille-inspired ethic to the big screen might look like, possible even to name one or two films that would seem to understand themselves as part of such an ethic and nod soberly. But the question of which bodies of work and which directors are to be admitted, which are to be excluded, which to be considered disanalogy, and which are to be considered limit cases is still left unresolved.

To what movies should we be extending this novelty, extremity, and French-ness?

The term, invented by critic James Quandt, refers to turn of the century films that find equal antecedent in both art house and horror. It is a hybrid genre that does not forefront the fact of its dual-heritage—it looks instead as though horror has learned to take itself seriously and art film to have fun. Notable directors include Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, and Leos Carax, who was described by Roger Ebert as a “raving lunatic” for his Pola X (1999). Pola X features violence, unsimulated sex, and the disaffected rich, which is to say that its New French Extreme status is uncontested. But is it possible for a style to grow up alongside its stylists? Carax’s first feature-length film in thirteen years, Holy Motors, was released in 2012. It ran for a short time at Cable Car in November, and is currently showing there again as part of the Providence French Film Festival.

My cool roommate Rob and I caught a showing. The movie is French, new, and has its extreme moments, but it is a hard film to fit within the trajectory of a career, let alone a genre. As is the case with any critic-coined expression, the words “New French Extremity” only have staying power so far as viewers and directors allow them to. I, however, happen to like the characterization and am still wondering— four months after my first viewing—whether it’s possible to fit Holy Motors neatly into the category. The phrase has fallen largely out of current use, but in watching Carax’s latest work, I wonder what else we should be calling a contemporary French work that features such explicit imagery.

Can we revise the phrase for our use? Does the film submit to such treatment and, more importantly, is the work required to do so worthwhile?

Holy Motors defies plot description, and not because the plot is absent or overly thick.

It instead feels secondary. What matters more is the succession of images the viewer is submitted to. One memorable scene features the main character, Mr. Oscar, dry humping a nameless and red-latex clad woman while wearing motion-capture markers.

We pan and they are CGI lizards having sex in a tree. This is a more visually polished film than Pola. That said, the New French Extreme themes of strange sexual practice, unexpected and just as often unexplained violence, and anxiety towards the body are all present. Thematically, it would seem to easily fit inside the moniker. But it’s also bigger.

Holy Motors features musical numbers, laugh lines, and visuals of an altogether different variety than those in Carax’s early work. The director, since his going away, has grown up: the moniker enfant terrible no longer seems to pertain—and for reasons other than age. The object of Carax’s imagination no longer seems to be taboo proper, so much as something more properly imaginative. The operative question then becomes, in his artistic growth, what has the director outgrown? Holy Motors is self-contained, selfsame, and self-reflexive. It no longer makes sense to say that one sees Truffaut in the young Carax (as Vincent Canby said of 1984’s Boy Meets Girl). At a certain point, influences become interlocutors. At such a point, is a body of work to be considered too singular to be swept away under a neat phrase? It no longer makes sense to consider Martin Scorsese part of a New Hollywood. Is it then productive to use the phrase New French Extreme in conjunction with Holy Motors? The tentative and tautological answer seems to be yes, but only so far as it is productive.—DD

i had been given to understand that Polisse was something like The Wire, with a comparable crimebusting:drinking ratio, but in Paris (hence the French) and with kids, so a little bit of SVU thrown in for good measure. It’s not like that—none of The Wire’s meticulous scrutiny or SVU’s soothing moral code. Polisse is jumpy and unsettling and exploitative. I liked it.

The film follows Melissa, a mousy photojournalist played by writer and director Maïwenn, as she trails members of the Parisian Child Protection Unit through some vignettey days in their vignettey, fragmented lives. Their jobs focus on sex, and they like to talk about sex in their work cafeterias, but they also explode when their wives bring up work in bed. These people have to compartmentalize. They are the joke of the department. Their marriages are falling apart. They are sleeping on each other’s couches and throwing back shots after busting a ring of Romani child prostitutes and pickpockets, taking children from their families in the process. They are bulimic and cold on the inside. They are French rappers taking a stab at acting in the role of Fred, the dedicated but headstrong young gunner who just won’t play by the rules. He reams Melissa out in front of a falafel restaurant after a long day of searching for a junkie and her abducted baby. You choose the wrong moments, he says, click-click-click when it’s gritty or ruinous. You exploit our victims and you exploit us. Note taken, Maïwenn—early in the production process she trailed the real police, thinking of maybe making a documentary. But by the closing scenes of Polisse, Fred and Melissa are in bed in his apartment, probably not in love. She looks down on the victims she’s photographed as they walk through the streets of a neighborhood in which she doesn’t belong. Too ruinous for real life, or too balanced.

Polisse is about the police, except spelled how a naïve little mignon would spell it—a word defined by its enunciations, the ways it’s whispered, you know? The question emerges: who is inscribing the names of these damaged public servants onto the ledger of history? It is the kids, and they are messing it up because they are giving blowjobs for cell phones instead of going to school. The cops think this is a laugh riot—it was a smartphone, the girl sputters. Everybody hates the cops; the film’s cops like to think about that. Considering the blowjob incident, the viewer sort of hates the cops, too— can they be so blind to their insensitivity?

But then we watch the smug family friend of the police commissioner as he brags about the sexual liberties he’s taken with his daughter. He’s shameless and he’ll get away with it. We watch a victim land the handspring his gymnastics coach had worked him through, molesting him along the way. The neatness is sickening, emerging from chaos like oil out of water. Or something equally overwrought, equally universal.—MD

Holy Motors will be playing Friday March 1 at Cable Car Cinema.

MARCH 01 2013

ARTS

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Dear Edgar The Life and Letters of Sarah Helen Whitman

by Julia Longoria Illustration by Henry Swanson draped in the pale, empty elegance of lace, Helen’s look is haunting. It’s appropriate, against the cool, grainy darkness of the cemetery where she sits. She has a coffin-shaped necklace hanging from her rail of a neck. In her purse, she carries a kerchief, sprayed with ether, to treat some imagined heart condition or other. Her elegance for tonight’s ordinary occasion, an evening’s walk, makes her fanciness seem strange, remote, not quite of this earth.

Facing this ghostly presence is a man who looks like he was born in that black floor-length double-breasted greatcoat he’s sporting. With sunken eyes and wispy tresses, he has the look of a man who didn’t say things; he quoth them. Edgar Allan Poe might be kneeling now, the neat, mildly worn trouser on his left knee pressed on the frigid cobblestone sidewalk. On this hillside cemetery in 1848 Providence, RI, Poe proposes to his “Helen of a Thousand Dreams,” the woman he wrote odes to before he even laid eyes on her—or so he says. An 1831 poem begins: Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore…

Lo! in that little window-niche How statue-like I see thee stand!

The folded scroll within thy hand — A Psyche from the regions which Are Holy land! biographers paint helen and the people in Poe’s life as Poe would: wrapped in a veil of intrigue. After all, it’s Poe who’s at the center of this cemetery scene, the man whose name we recognize. But wish all we might that Poe’s real life was something out of The Raven, it just isn’t.

Sarah Helen Whitman went by Helen. She was a feminist, a critic, and a writer in her own right. She was born on January 19, 1803, in Providence. This was six years to the day before Poe’s birth in 1809 in Boston. Poe’s poem “To Helen” was first published in 1831, 14 years before the two met. Even in the definitive timeline of her life, it’s easy for historians to lose Helen in Poe’s shadow.

One evening in 1848, in the days leading to her delayed acceptance of Poe’s proposal, Helen walked in on Poe brooding in a dimly lit parlor, the coal fire casting hyperbolic shadows on the walls. Staring at a portrait of Helen herself hanging on the wall, Poe seems in a trance. “Helen,” he

05 FEATURES

started, as she recalls in one of her letters to a friend. “I have had such strange dreams since I have been sitting here that I can hardly believe myself awake! Your picture in this dim light looked so like the face of Robert Stanard that it startled me.

You remember that he was the schoolmate of whom I have spoken to you, the son of Mrs. Helen Stanard, whom I loved so well.”

It’s clear Helen Stanard—not Sarah Helen Whitman—is the object of Poe’s 1831 poem “To Helen.” Helen listened to Poe when he told her the poem was a sign he knew her ages ago, that he loved her ages ago. Recalling that night in the dimly lit parlor, Helen wrote to a friend that she fancied herself almost a “weird fantasy in some of his stories.” She was smitten, wrapped up in a grand man’s delusions of grandeur.

Even Helen herself couldn’t resist making herself one of Poe’s characters, linked to her “poor Raven” by premonition and parallel birth.

Long before Poe passed through Providence, Whitman was a woman of letters. She pored over the romantic and transcendentalist writings of her time: Emerson, Shelley, Byron, and Keats — literature suffused with over-sentiment and spiritualism. Helen made her own debut in the literary world with the help of her first husband, John Winslow Whitman, co-editor of the Boston Spectator and Ladies’ Album. But Helen began writing poetry as a girl, in Quaker school.

Growing up, Helen’s house was on the corner of Benefit and Church Streets, a warm, reddish brown cottage that still hugs the side of College Hill today, where it slopes toward the river. Cozied up in her home of “pure and gentle peace’ where human hearts found “fine accord” and “cares and follies are together fled,” Helen wrote. She wrote poems in wide, curly cursives. She wrote odes to invisible dogs. She wrote mountains of letters, mostly to female friends, recounting lazy days in the countryside. And as a grown woman, she published accolades to her literary admirations like Percy Bysshe Shelley and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and accounts of her fast-paced travels abroad.

In 1845, the year Poe first saw her, Helen wrote a letter to her friend Ruth recounting her meeting with another man, abolitionist Thomas Wilson Dorr. She described how his right hand’s gentle pressure “still pulsated” along her fingers and made her forget her “tea, strawberries and cream!” In Helen’s writings, there’s a quirky, providential marriage of girlish pleasure and scathing cynicism that makes her an unusually

candid voice of her time.

“By the way,” she wrote in a letter to a writer friend Julia Deane Freeman, “did you ever think how strange it is that Lady Macbeth has no name—no distinctive name?”

History remembers Helen best for her writings on Poe. She actually made the first move. At a friend’s party in Providence, she recited her hypothetical valentine she thought he’d never see: Oh! thou grim and ancient Raven, From the Night’s Plutonic shore, Oft in dreams, thy ghastly pinions Wave and flutter round my door…

Little did she know, Poe was smirking in the audience. her earnest admiration in that poem is proof Helen the writer valued candor. In her literary criticism, she revered the honest, domestic dramas of Charlotte Brontë. The books of literary magnate William Thackery, who wrote savage satires of high English society, Helen dismissed as “prosaic, ignoble and passionless.” She found passion in Poe. “I have pressed your letter again and again to my lips, sweetest Helen—bathing it in tears of joy, or of a ‘divine despair’… All thoughts—all passions seem now merged in the one consuming desire—the mere wish to make you comprehend—to make you see that for which there is no human voice—the unutterable fervor of my love for you—for so well do I know your poet-nature, oh Helen! Helen!”

This is the second correspondence, October 1, 1848, between the two writers, who hadn’t formally met yet—only acquainted through their writings: Poe’s published stories and Helen’s intellectual valentine. Not quite a fortnight had passed after their first letter of correspondence and not but a few weeks would pass before Poe would propose. Biographers write that Poe first laid eyes on Helen in her hillside rose garden in 1845, in a scene much like the cemetery one.

Their romance was fast, furious, and mostly long-distance.

After his first proposal to Helen, Poe writes to her, “Would it not be ‘glorious,’ darling, to establish in America the sole unquestionable aristocracy—that of intellect—to secure its supremacy—to lead and control it?” Helen, no doubt, was smitten. After receiving this letter and hearing that Poe, alone and awaiting an answer to his proposal, had attempted suicide, she

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

finally obliged. The engagement was conditional; Poe had to promise not to drink. It may be hard to imagine no-nonsense, levelheaded Helen acceding to Poe’s extravagant proposal. But it seems she did love him.

Helen’s literary life is often veiled beneath a shroud of romantic portraits. But Poe’s life too was swathed in its own malign mythology. The talk of the town was that Poe had begun an affair with an old flame, Mrs. Shelton, in Massachusetts, during Helen and Poe’s engagement. When Helen heard word from friends that Poe had begun drinking again, she was done.

“To my excited imagination everything at that time seemed a portent or an omen,” she wrote. “I had been subjected to terrible mental conflicts, and was but just recovering from a painful and dangerous illness.” Helen had no way of knowing the truth.

Biographies paint the next scene like this: Poe ambled onto the threshold of the Benefit Street cottage from his train from Richmond. He stands in the parlor, dreamy-eyed and ready to embark on a life with his Helen of a Thousand Dreams.

Helen’s mother and sister brood in the corner of their dimly lit parlor, frowning at the madman who thinks he’ll be marrying their Helen. Helen walks purposefully down the stairs and throws the adulterer out of her house. He protests angrily, violently, and storms out, never to see Helen again.

In less than a year, Poe dies.

“Of course the incident caused a great deal of gossip and the wildest and most exaggerated stories,” Helen wrote to a friend. Three weeks after Poe returned to Fordham, he wrote to Helen about the horrible rumors circulating about his character, asking, “by the love that had subsisted between us to write him at once to assure him that I, at least, had not authorized their circulation.”

Helen never wrote back: “Dreading that an answer to this letter might lead to a renewal of the harrowing scenes I had passed through I did not reply to it.”

Poe continued to write to her in his final days, asking her,

MARCH 01 2013

again and again, to write to him, to reassure him that the calumnies that spread came not from her tongue. “No amount of provocation shall induce me to speak ill of you,” he wrote, “even in my own defense.”

Shortly after Poe’s death, the biographer Ruphus Wilmot Griswold, a poet whose work Poe criticized, led a campaign to deface the name of Edgar Allan Poe as madman, freak, and infidel. Suddenly, Poe himself was painted as a character out of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a psychotic, amoral, drunken monster.

Seen this way, it’s easy to imagine the horrors that Edgar Poe must have inflicted on his loved ones. Whitman was likely the woman torn most by this man’s infidelity.

But Sarah Helen Whitman was elegant, dignified, and critical; she suffered no fools. Helen wouldn’t love just anyone.

Helen, whose own literary life is ever obscured by Poe’s notoriety, spent her final days clearing Poe’s name in a series of letters, articles, and her published book Edgar Poe and His Critics. Helen writes her Poe, a very different Poe from the one he wrote himself. Helen’s Poe was a man who “delighted in the society of superior women.” Poe was a poet with “exquisite perception of all graces of manner and shades of expression,” Helen writes in Edgar Poe and His Critics. But more than that, Poe the man was “an admiring listener,” she writes, “an unobtrusive observer.” In life, Poe insisted he wrote odes to Helen before he even knew she existed. It seems in her final days, Helen returned the favor. Edgar Poe and His Critics was Helen’s response to Poe’s final request. Her book was a final love letter.

John Hay of the John Hay Library. Hay expressed great gratitude for Helen’s attention to his poems while he was in Rhode Island, and after he moved out West, he wrote to her, saying he would read her letters “repeatedly.” He said he sat, immersed in her “beautiful descriptions, trying to lay the foundations of mountains in my soul and retouching with the colors of your fancy the picture of Niagara, which was fading from memory.”

Helen was fond of her community, but she wrote unflinchingly about the inequality that plagued society. Her stinging poem, “Woman’s Sphere” appeared in the Providence Journal in 1871: Theme for the reckless taunt and idle jest, — Man’s patient vassal, or his toy at best…

Alarmed the sound of her own voice to hear Kept in the dark; commended to ‘her sphere;’ Scoffed from the platform with pretentious scorn To nurse the children never to be born…

Taught to believe marriage is a woman’s heaven Though only one can get there out of seven Judging by her writings, Helen was many things, but “haunting” doesn’t seem to fit that playful, biting master of wit that comes to life on paper. Quirky, maybe, but not quite otherworldly. Her elegance wasn’t empty; it was prolific.

A new scene comes into focus. Helen, graying, still sitting in that upstairs room of her childhood cottage, looking back at a life in stacks of letters, dons a silent smirk.

JULIA LONGORIA B’13 suffers no fools.

helen never had children. She married Whitman when she was 25, and he died when she was 30. Poe was a one-year whirlwind in Helen’s 46th year. She never married again.

She lived to be 75. From the sheer volume of Helen’s letters, poems, and articles that sit in the John Hay Library, it seems words were Helen’s life’s work. Though history may not have taken note, Helen made a name for herself in the papers of her time that earned her students of writing, among them

FEATURES

06

The Culture of the Cure

Information and Inequality in Cancer Research

by Alisa Owens Illustration by Michelle Lin

more than two centuries after the coal soot that caused carcinoma among chimney sweeps became the first identified occupational carcinogen, cancer remains a leading cause of death in the United States. Despite advances in cellular pathology and radiation therapy, two out of every five Americans can still expect to experience the disease during their lives, and its endurance has led to constant attention both from researchers and the public.

Politicians from Nixon to Obama have continuously promised to increase funding for cancer research in their campaigns, while the government-funded National Cancer Institute and Human Genome Research Institute exemplify the intersection between cancer and politics. Cancer also remains nearly ubiquitous in popular media; in 2012, 41% of all disease-related media mentioned cancer, as reported by HighBeam Research. Somewhere between the two spheres of media and politics lie philanthropic giants like the Lance Armstrong and Susan G. Komen Foundations, both of which have established strong public presences but continue to face criticism for the use of misleading statistics in commercial marketing.

Between political contributions and media venues, over $200 billion has been invested in the nationwide focus on eliminating the disease. Cancer has become a cultural phenomenon.

Despite all the attention, progress towards finding a cure has been disappointingly sluggish, particularly when viewed in light of the monumental medical advances of the 21st century. As reported by the Center for Disease Control, progress in cardiovascular medicine has reduced fatal heart attacks by 40% since 2000; HIV, once treated as a death sentence, is now considered a chronic disease thanks to anti-retroviral therapy. Yet many of the deadliest forms of cancer remain incurable, and experts widely attribute the mere 6% decrease in cancer mortality rates since 1950 to the decline in smoking, rather than to any scientific breakthrough.

The lack of progress towards “the cure” may not be in spite of the disease’s public attention, but in part the result of it.

Because the research process is detailed primarily in scientific journals that use highly technical language, these articles draw a limited audience from the public. Meanwhile, journalists for more accessible publications have the undesirable task of marketing a story to American consumers while maintaining accuracy and comprehensiveness in their report. The details surrounding new findings are often watered down to the point of total inaccuracy in order to render them compatible with the typical reader’s scientific knowledge and vocabulary. This disconnect between factual research and the public perception of the disease produces false information which, when taken as fact, lessens concern for funding the cure. not sold on the acai smoothies

James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA’s double-helical structure in 1953 and recipient of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, takes an unforgiving stance on the current state of cancer research. In a paper published in Open Biology on January 8, 2013, Watson emphasizes the need for a revised approach based only in pure and empirical science. This revision would greatly reduce the inaccurate representation of the disease in popular media and politics, which Watson argues has slowed progress towards eliminating the disease. Otherwise, he warns, “the never receding 10-20 year away final victory that our cancer world now feels safe to project will continue to sink the stomachs of informed cancer victims and their families.”

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SCIENCE

Watson’s position is exemplified by his claim that antioxidants, which are advertised as cancer-fighters, may actually play a larger role in causing cancer than in preventing it.

Nearly everyone has heard praise of antioxidant-rich “superfoods” (think dark chocolate and acai berries) as media personalities from Oprah to Dr. Oz espouse their ability to protect our bodies from damaging free radicals. Watson, however, maintains that a diet with overly concentrated levels of these antioxidants may buffer the cancer cells themselves, making them resistant to treatment. The antioxidants block natural reactive oxygen species (ROS), which mediate the apoptosis (or controlled cell death) of cancerous cells, and there is substantial evidence that the general incurability of late-stage cancers arises from high levels of ROS-destroying antioxidants. In particular, excesses of the prominent antioxidants glutathione and thioredoxin associated with avocados, walnuts, and broccoli make cells highly resistant to ROS-induced apoptosis.

While initially controversial, this research has been supported by studies by Watson’s lab and is currently being investigated in research institutions throughout the country. If confirmed, these results indicate that as nutritional supplements and marketing of “superfoods” increase our generation’s antioxidant levels to an unprecedented degree, the resultant counteraction of our natural cancer-fighting system may actually be making our cells more vulnerable. This exemplifies the danger of uninformed representation of cancer by the media.

Watson makes the accusation that the uninformed marketing of alleged cancer prevention is not only lacking substantive evidence but may actually have dangerous health consequences, particularly for those who rely on mass media to inform their health choices. A dangerous effect of this widespread misrepresentation is the unequal access to accurate information, which in turn carries the risk of leaving communities of lower educational and socioeconomic status behind. Watson argues that communities with high scientific literacy are more likely to approach information from mass media sources with skepticism, relying more heavily on health care providers to inform their health behaviors. Other groups, however, may not have the technical knowledge necessary to sort the facts from the phony marketing. the classism of cancer

Dr. Melody Goodman, biostatistician and Assistant Professor of Surgery at the Washington University School of Medicine, focuses her research on the social risk factors behind health disparities and works to develop culturally competent cancer prevention strategies. She attributes the high rates of cancer incidence among marginalized communities in large part to the lexical divide between cancer researchers and the public.

Central to this divide is the pattern of normalization in which poor health behaviors become the standard, rather than the exception, in underserved communities.

These detrimental behaviors may arise from reliance on inaccurate information supplied by the media, including the emphasis on excessive antioxidant intake that Watson cautions us against. Dr. Goodman explains that because the mention of cancer is nearly ubiquitous in public media, people feel they have gained a satisfactory understanding of the disease without developing the technical familiarity necessary for intellectual access to truly scientific publications. Thus, those with strong educational backgrounds will continue to have a more accurate conception of the research process because they remain skeptical. While the socioeconomic divide already

creates unequal access to health care, selectively providing accurate information to the more educated communities leaves others even further behind. To combat this divide, Dr. Goodman emphasizes the importance of “marginalized communities having a level of scientific literacy,” while maintaining that “it is also important for the scientific community to have a level of literacy when it comes to marginalized communities.” In forming a common language, researchers can address public health concerns directly, “working collaboratively with communities as partners, not on communities as subjects.”

This cooperative process will counteract the normalizing effects of cancer’s media presence by allowing these communities a more direct perspective on the research process.

In this way, Dr. Goodman envisions that research for a physiological cure will also address the “systematic and environmental” factors that also threaten public health. Her research group is currently working to implement the Community Research Fellows Training Program in downtown St. Louis, which will “[treat] underserved communities as partners in the research process” by inviting community leaders, public health professionals, and faith-based organizations to participate in forums and strategic planning sessions with university researchers. Designed to elucidate and address health concerns, these sessions included workshops on the collaborative promotion of health in minority populations as well as formal research training to facilitate a university-community relationship. As a provider of training sessions meant to dispel false messages from the media and develop the infrastructure for participatory research, Dr. Goodman hopes that this program will become a model for “community-campus partnerships” in other low-income areas. While unequal access to costly health care will still exist, Dr. Goodman maintains that addressing these larger problems relies on first eliminating the information divide through collaborative education. a new direction

Even as scientific research progresses towards a cure, normalization of poor health behaviors in underserved populations deepens class divisions as accurate information is provided preferentially to the scientifically literate.

In the same paper in which he denounces the recent stagnancy of cancer research, Watson acknowledges that today’s communication networks are potential vehicles for activism and awareness on a massive scale. If transparency between the research community and the public is made a reality, collaborative educational efforts like the one Dr. Goodman proposes may begin to address the unequal access to accurate information surrounding the disease. While the factors that give rise to social divides in cancer incidence and treatment are numerous and complex, enhancing communication and collaboration between the scientific community and the public is a key starting point for revitalizing progress in cancer research.

ALISA OWENS B’15 is currently being investigated in research institutions throughout the country.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ON SACRED G R O U N D Memorializing the Station Fire

by Emma Wohl Illustration by Casey Friedman two days after the ten-year anniversary of the Station Nightclub Fire, the ground where the club stood is smooth. A circle of crosses has been planted in memorial to some of the 100 people who died. A few people circle the grounds, some just stopping by out of curiosity. After a few minutes the only person left is a middle-aged man named Mike.

“Oh, hey,” he says with a shrug, seeing me stop to take pictures. “Here it is.”

I ask if he visits the site often, and he launches into his story: he was at the Station the night of the fire, but he was outside when it started. He left with two friends who wanted to smoke, but he saw the building go up in flames. At the time, he lived behind the woods on the other side of the street from the club. He moved to Arizona after the fire, but now he’s back and lives just a few blocks away. He comes here regularly, sometimes once a week, to see what new things people have left at their loved ones’ crosses. I asked him if he’s heard about the plans to build a new memorial.

“I think that’s the worst thing they could do. Why would you want to commemorate a tragedy like this?” he says.

Looking around at the makeshift memorials, he adds, “They want to cover it in asphalt and put up a marble monument.” the station nightclub burned to the ground during a concert by the hair metal band Great White on February 20, 2003. The fire killed 100 people and injured more than 200.

The Station Fire Memorial Foundation has had plans for the site since the debris was cleared away. The foundation was founded in June 2003 by friends and families of the victims to ensure that they got a proper memorial on the ground where they died, according to the foundation’s website. The foundation’s members never intended to wait until the fire’s tenth anniversary to break ground on the memorial; they have been trying for years to learn whether they would be allowed to build it on the lot where the club stood. A lawsuit filed by those who lost family members or were injured in the fire tied up the property initially, but even after the lawsuit was resolved in 2009, with $176 million distributed among the injured and families of the dead, the fate of the lot remained up in the air. On the fire’s ninth anniversary the foundation sent a letter to Raymond Villanova, the lot’s owner, asking for “an acknowledgement or a statement of what is to become of the aforementioned site.” At the time, he gave no answer.

Some survivors felt that they had been abandoned because they were working-class people gathered to see a washed-up metal band. David Kane, whose 18-year-old son died in the fire, felt the delays holding up the memorial’s progress were “about a whole disregard for an entire section of our society who isn’t connected,” he told the New York Times last September. Kane was on one side of a dispute that drove a wedge between the families trying to build the memorial.

MARCH 1 2013

A faction of the Station Fire Memorial Foundation’s board wanted to ask the city to claim the land through eminent domain. Governor Lincoln Chafee told the press he was looking into how to turn the land over to the group, but some members felt that would not be fair to Villanova. Plans were made for a memorial at a different location in Warwick.

Then last September, without speaking publicly on the issue, the Villanova family agreed to donate the land for the construction of the memorial. Construction will start “once the snow thaws,” said Victoria Eagen, the foundation’s vice president. It may be a step, perhaps even a final one, toward helping people find peace with their experiences of the tragedy.

A design competition determined the plan for the new memorial. Contributors were asked to create a model that fulfilled four requirements: it would recognize each individual who died, allowing families to leave mementos for their loved ones; it would include interactive features; it would commemorate the efforts of first responders; and it would incorporate elements of the temporary monuments left at the site up until now. The final design for the Station Fire Memorial Park was unveiled in 2009. It will honor the victims’ and survivors’ love of music with a 30-foot-tall gateway topped by an Aeolian harp that will sound when the wind blows. Along a walkway through the gardens will be spaces for individual memorials to the victims and offerings to the dead.

In the absence of a permanent monument, the circle of crosses at the site of the fire served as a temporary memorial to the dead, incorporating photographs, flowers, candles, and other objects linked to the lives lost. In her book Memorial Mania, Erika Doss argues that these sorts of temporary memorials have seen a surge in recent years, “suggest[ing] that traditional forms of mourning no longer meet the needs of today’s publics.” These memorials, unlike more formal ones, allow for a multitude of voices and representations of those who died.

But as time passed at the site of the Station fire, even those who made the memorials grew tired of this form of recognition. “It’s overgrown and yucky and moldy,” Paula McLaughlin, whose brother and sister-in-law died in the fire, told the Times in September, at the time when the foundation learned it was being given the property. “Just looking at everything is sad,” Claire Bruyere, who lost her daughter, said.

Temporary memorials are all about those who died— the things they cared about in life and the people who loved them. These memorials’ focus on recreating how the dead lived, Doss writes, creates a persistent “inability to acknowledge human finality and reckon with loss” that is unique to memorials centered on material objects and spontaneous outpourings of grief. While more permanent monuments may mobilize people to action or educate the public on a certain issue, temporary memorials remain fixated around an emotional response.

While the families working on the memorial are ready to move on to a new stage of recognition, they do not want to forget the last ten years. At the Station Fire Memorial Park, a time capsule will house some of the artifacts from the temporary memorials. But it will not be buried; in fact, the construction company building the memorial will be instructed not to dig into the ground on which the park will be built. To many, that ground is sacred. on my visit to the site of the fire on February 22, Mike invites me to walk around. We visit each cross, where he pointed to things left for the dead—a box of ice cream sandwiches, a manicure set, photographs, balloons. He shows no concern as he picks up or rearranges these objects. “You can learn a lot about people from seeing what’s left here,” he says. He recognizes things that have been added recently among those that have been here for years.

Whenever Mike sees a balloon tied to a cross, he stops and cuts it loose, watching it float away. “I’m setting them free,” he says.

EMMA WOHL B’14 is waiting for the snow to thaw.

METRO

8

WOONSOCKET INSURRECTION Dave Fisher’s 21st-Century Candidacy

by Benson Tucker meet dave fisher, as i first saw him, in his campaign announcement video, titled “The Big Announcement.” He looked like this: His appeal sounded like this: “It pains me to see the decline of this city that I grew up in, that I have so much pride in, and I feel that our current leadership, at the municipal level, at the state level, really is not bringing anything new to the table, and that’s why I started this [Facebook] page, that’s why I started a blog, to kinda get my ideas out there and see what kinda reaction I could get from people, and see how much support I could garner from the residents of Woonsocket for a run for the Mayor’s office.”

Fisher’s tone is grave as he announces his reason for running, but as he gradually transitions to describing the campaign itself, he begins to sound almost shy, like he’s making an honest disclosure. When he gets it off his chest, he feels better. He pronounces the words “Mayor’s office” triumphantly.

Dave Fisher is running for Mayor online. I first interacted with him on Twitter, where he looks like this:

when i met him in person, Dave Fisher wore a worn wool jacket over a faded green- and white-checkered shirt, as well as a well-kempt beard and a light backpack. He carries himself with a casual earnestness: free of the pomp and sound-bytereadiness infecting many seasoned urban politicians. He captures a seriousness of purpose without inflating too much his seriousness of self.

Fisher became involved in local politics over the last few years while writing and editing for ecoRI.org, and recently worked as the campaign manager for Abel Collins B’00, a 2012 Independent candidate for the RI House. Collins received just over 9 percent of the vote. Fisher, 38, is still an outsider to government, with more experience in the scrappy realms of local organic food and digital journalism. Since he is still far from a household name in Woonsocket, he entered November’s race before any other candidates in the field, posting his “Big Announcement” on February 13.

So far, Fisher has done no registration paperwork and has collected no donations. As he put it, “My campaign consists of a Facebook page and a blog.” Fisher is decidedly not playing any traditional game of government. “Our government, at every level, is a dinosaur,” he declared during our interview. “It’s on the verge of total petrification and collapse, because people don’t have faith in it.” Fisher sees restoring faith in government, and in Woonsocket, as the heart of his mission, and he seems to believe he can do that by giving it a modern face.

But it isn’t just a lack of faith that brings Woonsocket’s government to the verge of total collapse. The City’s debt burden has some local leaders considering bankruptcy, and Moody’s rates Woonsocket bonds as having “significant credit risk.” According to Ted Nesi of WPRI, the city’s interest alone accounts for 12 percent of government spending, and Woonsocket’s obligations amount to nearly a fifth of the value of all property in the city.

Despite his doomsaying about the status quo, Fisher doesn’t consider bankruptcy—at base a technique for renegotiating crushing debts—a viable option. When it comes to municipal pride, he’s a sort of knight traveling into darkness to uphold the full faith and credit of Woonsocket. At the same time, his campaign is founded on democratic media and a rejection of conventional wisdom. “Most people who know me would say I’m a reasonably intelligent guy,” Fisher claimed towards the end of our interview, amongst other credentials. The darkness is vast, but Fisher has a vision of the transformative capacity of ordinariness. a new chapter for woonsocket

The focal point of his web presence, which is essentially his campaign, is his Facebook page:

This is where he aligns himself with progressive local causes, like this one:

09 METRO

The way Fisher tells it, the history of Woonsocket is in sore need of a turning point. Like many other Rhode Island cities, textile mills drawing power from the Blackstone River drove the city’s growth. The mills began to decline in the mid-twentieth century, their descent reaching critical mass in the 1960s. After losing industry as its economic center, Woonsocket entered an age centered on multinational chain stores like Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, and Staples, which Fisher accuses of draining money out of the city. “Now we’re at a point where even those big box stores are leaving town,” Fisher explained, “and that’s pretty indicative of where the city is right now.” In the last thirty years, Woonsocket’s population has fallen from 46,000 to 41,000, and the share younger than 20 has dropped from 24 percent to 19 percent. Over 75 percent white, the city is largely composed of the workingclass descendants who have stuck around.

Fisher has ideas for building a more “resilient” economic center to sustain the city in the long run. One of his major

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

initiatives would hinge on betting big on renewable energy.

Fisher looks at the flat roofs of Woonsocket schools and sees opportunities for solar panels. While the Woonsocket school system’s energy bill is less than a million dollars in a city budget over fifty million, Fisher notes that municipalities are free to sell as much energy as they can produce back to National Grid. Pointing out that Rhode Island entrepreneurs have already begun to offer renewable energy installations funded by future savings at no up-front cost, Fisher sees this strategy as entirely positive.

For the buildings on Woonsocket’s Main Street, Fisher envisions shops on the ground floor with live-work spaces above them where local artisans would produce their goods.

But if even chain stores are packing up, it’s unclear whether such artisans would earn much of a living. A lack of local demand across the economy fuels the cycle of the city’s problems. Fisher bemoans the unfilled condominiums that now occupy many old mills, which he sees as misguided artifacts from an exciting late ’80s housing boom when Woonsocket conceived of itself as the perfect ProvidenceBoston-Worcsester bedroom community.

For Fisher, this is an example of the outmoded “attract and retain” model of economic development that persists across the country: localities throw money at hints of big, transformative cash-ins to bring growth to their area, but the windfall often fails to materialize. “It pits cities against each other,” Fisher claimed, “and it leads to things like the 38 Studios fiasco,” where the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation loaned a video game studio 75 million dollars to come to the Ocean State and received under two years of payments before 38 Studios closed its doors.

Fisher prefers long-term economic thinking to chasing the quick fix. He would have the mills filled by light- and medium-manufacturing: “Those are going to be the only concerns that can take on a building that size and support the property taxes and support the footprint of the building.”

Rather than figure out how to snatch more of the national pie, Fisher wants Woonsocket to find prosperity through global markets. “It’s really detrimental for us as a nation to be infighting as far as which city’s going to get this business,” he explains, and high-tech manufacturing would respond to global demand. A turn to global economic thinking might help Woonsocket recapture the local industrial vitality that has been slipping away for a century. Though textiles have been displaced by electronics and chemicals, manufacturing still makes up the majority of United States exports.

the vast majority of over 150 applications for targeted aid; Clinton’s Empowerment Zone program, on the other hand, set out to competitively distribute extreme federal support to only ten areas.

This competitive mentality now pervades public and private funding, placing a high premium on innovation.

President Obama’s Race to the Top education reform challenges school systems to remake themselves, while Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge seeks to identify (and, for a lucky five cities, fund) creative, high-impact problem solving programs. These are only the most visible examples of the new urban funding order, and Fisher’s thinkbig approach may be just what funders are looking for.

But finding new money for transformations won’t cover the city’s ballooning obligations. We discussed the city’s unfunded pension problems, a major issue for Woonsocket and cities across the state. To encourage cities to address the issue, a recent state initiative called the MAST program has made some state aid to cities conditional on their pension plan meeting certain benchmarks. When I asked Fisher if Woonsocket was on track to receive these benefits, he was not familiar with the program. Fisher admits that some will write him off as unaware of how government works, and he rebuts, “What I’m more familiar with is how government doesn’t work, and that’s what I want to change.” “a total paradigm shift” Fisher doesn’t claim to have all the answers, and much of his appeal is about a change of attitude: “My challenge to the people of Woonsocket is, yeah, we have a lot of problems, but we have a lot of potentials, and we have a lot of successes, too. We need to start focusing more on those successes and more on those potentials than, basically, complaining about everything.” For Fisher, a habit of negativity has kept good ideas from getting off the ground, and he promises to seek out bold proposals from every corner of the city.

Fisher points to this approach as a distinction between him and current Mayor Leo Fontaine. When unexpectedly high

enrollment in the Woonsocket school system required a few new hires, Fontaine told the Blackstone valley newspaper Valley Breeze: “I know that the law says that we have to have these assistants but at the same point the other law says that we can’t spend money that we don’t have.” Facing serious challenges, Woonsocket’s leaders have seemed cornered.

In a blog post on his campaign website, Fisher called Fontaine a “one-step thinker,” pointing to Fontaine’s idea to sell unused recycling bins to Cumberland for a one time profit. Fisher argues for another path: “We could keep these bins and offer a low-cost recycling solution to our city’s businesses, increasing our recycling rate, and thus increase the annual profit share from the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation for years to come.”

Fisher recently told the Valley Breeze that in March he would begin a series of public meetings to flesh out his platform with community ideas. Woonsocket is the right size for this sort of engagement to win a campaign, if the momentum is right. According to Fisher, Fontaine won the last election with just under 3000 predominantly elderly votes. Fisher hopes to access new voters by campaigning in new ways. As yet, there’s nothing on paper to make Fisher a candidate.

Converting casual clicks to ballots in the box will require convincing Woonsocket citizens that Fisher can really succeed. I asked him what he would say to a skeptic, but his response might not be strong enough to win over nonbelievers: “We’ve tended to become more insular, to just draw the blinds when we see something going on. But at the end of the day, the successes and failures of our city and state are not on the mayor, the city council, the general assembly. We all share-every citizen, it’s on our backs-the successes, the failures, and I think that’s a powerful message we need to convey to people. And if that’s not something different that will convince people that I can get this done, because I’m talking about bringing us all together, and making us more cohesive as communities.”

BENSON TUCKER B’13 is, at every level, a dinosaur.

getting from here to there

Overturning a local economy is always difficult, and it becomes nearly impossible with a debt burden like Woonsocket’s. Here, too, Fisher sees great promise in updated thinking: “We have to use the power that we do have at the municipal level and try to find ways out of these financial messes. And there are a ton of them out there, but because our government and the people we elect are largely still stuck in the 1950s, or ’60s—or even ’70s, that’s 40 years ago now —they’ve failed to recognize new sources of revenue.”

I pressed Fisher for details. “The absolute number one thing that Woonsocket can do is have a full-time grant writer on staff. There are literally billions of dollars available in federal and private grants,” Fisher argued.

Given the transformations in how money makes its way to urban problems over the last few decades, Fisher’s strategy makes sense. Since the Clinton administration, America has entered an era of contest-style thinking about urban aid. In 1966, President Johnson’s Model Cities program accepted

Illustration created with the interactive page “Radical Paintings!”

MARCH 01 2013

METRO

10

In t he Hall of Mi rro rs Fernando Pessoa Today

by Vera Carothers Illustration by Robert Sandler

fernando pessoa was the author who tried to write the author out of writing. His works were published under 70plus heteronyms, of which he said: “I don’t know, of course, if they didn’t really exist or if it is me who doesn’t exist. On such matters, as in all others, one shouldn’t be dogmatic.”

To fill in the gaps: he was the Joyce of Lisbon, flâneur of city streets better known by a score of pen names than by Pessoa, which simply means “person” in Portuguese. He worked by day as a freelance correspondence translator for over 21 firms throughout his lifetime, often two or three at the same time. He struggled to conceive of himself as one author, believing that subjectivity is by nature dispersed among many.

As a writer, he rejected traditional forms of authorship. He allowed his literary personas to replace and rewrite the man behind them. In that sense, his writing cannot be reduced to one origin or truth. This irreducible multiplicity is shared by the hyper-textual medium of the Internet today, where information is decentralized and personal identity often dispersed. Just as there is no “real” Pessoa, the originators of what we find online are not understood to be authors in the traditional sense (they are, in fact, often plagiarizers).

In anachronistic reverie, the modern reader—the fanatic few—can imagine the potential of Pessoa’s web presence: a cross-referencing zig-zag of Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook accounts that never will be. His accounts of Lisbon are as myriad and intersecting as his personas, leaving one of the most overlooked and under-translated literary legacies of the 20th century. pessoa in the mirror: heteronyms

It may seem like Pessoa just couldn’t stop changing his profile picture. But it was deeper: he was up late one night scribbling at his desk and he experienced sheer and unexpected inspiration. He began to write things, wild things he could not have written under his own name, and signed them Alberto Caeiro. One of Pessoa’s three most important heteronyms was born. In contrast to his other personas, Caeiro is completely unconcerned with the metaphysical.

For him, a stone is just a stone. All is surface in the world; there are no hidden meanings. His work stems not from an emotional connection to his surroundings, but rather from a total absence of sentiment. He is considered artless, an anti-poet, and thus the perfect foil for Pessoa’s true literary problematic: a deep-seated artistic and metaphysical uncertainty.

40 I see a butterfly go by And for the first time in the universe I notice That butterflies do not have color or movement, Even as flowers do not have scent or color.

Color is what has color in the butterfly’s wings, Movement is what moves in the butterfly’s movement, Scent is what has scent in the flower’s scent.

The butterfly is just a butterfly And the flower just a flower.

7 May 1914 A. Caeiro

42 The coach came down the road, and went on, And the road was no better for it, nor even any worse.

So with human action in the world at large.

We take nothing and add nothing; we pass and forget; And the sun is on time every day.

7 May 1914 A. Caeiro Pessoa’s metaphysical concern is fleshed out in the works of Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, two particularly vivid heteronyms. Pessoa describes Campos in a letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro on January 13, 1935: “Álvaro de Campos is tall (1.75 meters tall, two centimeters more than I), thin, with a tendency to a slight stoop…between fair and swarthy, a vaguely Jewish Portuguese type, hair therefore smooth and normally parted on the side, monocled.” Reis has “vague dull brown [hair]…a bit, though very slightly, shorter (than Caeiro).” Although each of his heteronyms has a distinct appearance, temperament, and writing style, these remain two of his most complex. They incarnate Pessoa’s idea of the heteronym, defined in the field of linguistics as two or more words spelled identically but with different sounds and meanings. Take for example tear, which means both “rip” and “liquid from the eye.” The second definition of heteronym offers a slightly different take­; two or more words that are used to refer to identical things in different geographical areas of a speech community, such as sub, hoagie, and grinder. Finally, the third definition; each of two words having the same meaning but derived from unrelated sources, such as preface and foreword. Curiously, Pessoa’s use of the word heteronym encompasses all three meanings. His idea of heteronym as a multitude of personas springing from the same mind reflects of the word’s definition.

During his life, many of these literary personas were not known to be Pessoa. Literary critics studied the oeuvres of the best known. Contemporary novelists admired their work.

Publications of the time even documented their personal lives with avid curiosity and speculation. In 1986, half a century after Pessoa’s death, Ricardo Reis became the main character of José Saramago’s Nobel Prize winning novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. In his acceptance speech,

11 ARTS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Saramago described his early fascination with the poetry of Reis, whom he took to be a real Portuguese poet. Some observers, such as Antonio Tabucchi, one of Reis’ foremost critics and translators, believed Reis to have died peacefully in exile toward the end of 1935. Others speculated that Reis mysteriously passed away in Lisbon a year later, an unwitting casualty of revolts that spilled over into Lisbon from the Spanish Civil War. the theater of himself

Pessoa actively cultivated these personas. He wrote for a wide array of publications in Lisbon at the time and would manufacture literary criticism of the work of his heteronyms.

In a book supposedly written by Frederico Reis, Ricardo Reis’ brother, he writes, “The whole philosophy behind the work of Ricardo Reis can be summed up as sad Epicurism.” (The Sad Epicurism of R. Reis) Today we’d call this “self-plagiarism” or even “academic dishonesty,” if he was even able to keep the game up at all. Real or not, these heteronyms stand out vividly in literary memory. For readers, it is sometimes impossible to distinguish the real man from his heteronyms.

For Pessoa, the boundary between self and other was often completely erased. On several occasions he claims to have seen his face in the mirror fading out and being replaced by that of a bearded man.

When he wrote, it felt like being owned by something outside of himself, as if his right arm were lifted by a curious sensation. The practice of automatic writing fascinated him.

He said, “It seemed to me that I, the creator of it all, was the least thing there. It is as if it all happened independently of me.” This sense of the occult and the spiritual occupied him throughout his life. He had astral visions and saw himself as a medium. He saw himself not as the origin of his works but as “the empty stage where various actors act out various plays” (The Book of Disquiet, tr. 1991). In various ways, his work dispersed the idea of assuming one origin or source of inspiration. Pessoa asserts, “To create I have destroyed myself.”

He plays with the idea of cryptomnesia (later explored in Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote), in which one experiences a memory as if it were a new inspiration. What is heard or overheard by the subject is mistaken for an original thought.

My own discovery of Pessoa was just such an instance of unoriginality. I remember searching his name on Wikipedia in a flash of what I thought was revelation. I later realized that I had heard his name in a French radio emission I wasn’t paying very close attention to.

dilemma surrounding its namesake— how to convert Pessoa’s fragmented requiem into a readable medium. One page displays his poem “Autopsicografia” so that three of thirteen translations can be read simultaneously. Is this triptych a new work—a study in translation?

And who is the author of this website, the translator of Pessoa to the Internet? The bottom of the webpage ambiguously reads, “Special thanks to Dr. José Blanco, Pessoa “supplier” / This site is a subset of Disquiet.com.” What does it mean to be a Pessoa “supplier”? Am I one?

It’s hard to know how if one can get an accurate sense of Pessoa’s writing from translation. As a friend who speaks Portuguese pointed out to me, I can’t get the “real” experience of his writing without reading the original. But is the Portuguese material even original? His verses seem to have already undergone the most drastic translation, that of his mind to the page, to a tangible object of reality. This proved a lifelong struggle for Pessoa: reconciling his experience of the world with its reality, here addressed in his chef d’oeuvre, written under the name Álvaro de Campos: Excerpts from Tabacaría […]

Today I am torn between the loyalty I owe To the outward reality of the Tobacco Shop across the street And to the inward reality of my feeling that everything is but a dream. …

Given this, I rise and go to the window.

The man has come out of the Tobacco Shop (putting change into his pocket?).

Ah, I know him: he is Esteves without methaphysics.

(The Tobacco Shop owner has come to the door.)

As if by a divine instinct, Esteves turned around and saw me.

He waved hello, I shouted back “Hello there, Esteves!” and the universe Reconstructed itself to me, without ideals or hope, and the owner of the Tobacco Shop smiled.

VERA CAROTHERS B’14 stems from a total absence of sentiment.

simultaneity in translation

An online project called “Pessoa’s trunk” is dedicated to “applying the tools of the Web” to an appreciation of Pessoa.

When Pessoa died in 1935, he left behind a trunk containing some 25,426 items—a vast collection of poems, fragments, letters, and journals that had previously been attributed to his heteronyms. The site grapples with the linguistic and material

MARCH 01 2013

ARTS

12

TAINTED LOVE

by Joshua Schenkkan Illustration by Lizzie Davis

“We thought it was [odd] that she was in there with [Gucci Mane]. One time [producers] sent security to make sure she was OK… It almost became a joke, [another employee] said [to Gucci Mane] ‘Watch out or I’m telling Justin.’ [Gucci] was like ‘Fuck that lil’ nigga.”

— Selena Gomez Accused of Affair with Gucci Mane While Dating Justin Bieber, www.entertainmentwise.com

gucci, as he did every monday, snuck into Selena’s trailer hours before she was due on set. He spread rose petals on the bed, lit several dozen tea candles, and put on Selena’s own album. Selena liked to make love to her own music; Gucci would have preferred Nina Simone, or perhaps Leonard Cohen, but he reasoned that, in any relationship, compromises have to be made.

And so Gucci would wait. Sometimes he read (poetry, mostly), other times he would quietly meditate. That particular morning, though, Gucci was putting the finishing touches on his screenplay It was a retelling of the Abelard and Héloïse story; Gucci intended to dedicate it to Selena. Gucci would play Abelard, or Andre (a drug dealer with a heart of gold), and Selena would play Héloïse, or Hennessey (a waifish young prostitute wise beyond her years). Gucci knew that the story ended in tragedy, but it was only in the correspondence of the two figures that he found the language to describe his feelings: “God knows I never sought anything in you except yourself. I wanted simply you, nothing of yours.”

Yes, Gucci thought. Héloïse understands.

Selena burst through the door, throwing her purse on the couch, and began to take off her shirt.

“We have to make this quick. I have to shoot in half an hour, and then I’m getting on a plane to New York to meet Justin.”

Gucci looked at Selena. Her chestnut eyes looked tired; she clearly wasn’t using the La Mer serum he had gifted her for President’s Day. “There’s something I want to give you,” he said.

“For the last time, I don’t want your ‘So Icy Brick Squad’ necklace,” Selena groaned, unclasping her bra.

“No, not that. I wrote something for you—a screenplay. It’s a love story,” Gucci explained. “I thought it might be our next project.”

“Our project?” Selena laughed. “Gucci, there is no us.”

“But, I thought…”

“Look. I have an exclusive distribution deal with K-Mart. You’ve got an ice cream cone that says ‘burr!’ tattooed on your face.

We’re never going to be anything. I thought you knew that.”

Gucci’s heart was breaking. Where there used to be love—a profound, uninhibited love—he felt emptiness. He looked at Selena, searching for some kind of answer. All he saw was a half-smile.

“So, are you going to fuck me or what?”

He couldn’t breathe. The room began to spin around him. He felt a sob rising in his chest.

“I have to go,” Gucci said, pushing past Selena and out into the bright California morning. He felt like crying. He felt like breaking down into deep, heavy sobs that would wrack his body. But as he turned the corner, he bumped into a paunchy production assistant.

“Did you just leave Selena’s trailer again?” the sweaty man laughed. “Watch out—you keep that up, and I’ll tell Justin!”

Gucci wanted to hit him or grab him by his neckbeard and throw him against the wall. Instead, as he shoved the assistant aside, he whispered, “fuck that lil’ nigga.”

13

NEWS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

HOW TO SAVE A LIFE Talking to David Shields

Interview and Illustration by Drew Dickerson the 2010 release of david shields’s (B ‘78) Reality Hunger saw some of the greatest attention paid to a work of literary nonfiction in the past fifty years. Almost anyone at all concerned with contemporary American writing has either read the book and formed an opinion on it or developed a no less opinionated reason to not read it. Composed entirely of quotations, Reality Hunger urges readers to consider new formations of the essay, to re-examine their tacit assumptions as to what the book as form can and should be doing. Shields has been widely read, widely misread, and widely written on.

How Literature Saved My Life, now out from Knopf, is his follow-up. After calling for the death of the old, it fell and it falls to Shields to help inaugurate the new. What results is a candid and thoughtful investigation into the possibilities of the written. The Shields essay is highly personal, formally innovative, and searching. We talk here about truth-value, Zadie Smith, and Brown University. Shields will be reading at RISD March 4th.

The College Hill Independent: Between Reality Hunger and the new book, there was a lot of debate surrounding your own project. But I’m also thinking of The Lifespan of a Fact conversation with John D’Agata. Why do you think that people are so hostile to new formations of the essay?

David Shields: I guess the way I think about it—I think of three quotes that I really love. “You can always tell the pioneers. They’re the ones with arrows in their backs.” Then there’s a line by FDR who says—he had all these people trying to stop the New Deal, all these arch-conservative Republicans—“I welcome their hatred.” And then Jay-Z’s line, which is “I’m not looking at you; I’m looking past you.” So that’s the way I think about this stuff. I mean that is my general take.

The Indy: I guess I was interested in why it is that the scandals in our literature have more to do with truth-value— whereas before it might have been something like masturbation in Ulysses. It seems like the Puritanical anxiety has shifted from content to form, this form that makes truth plastic or at least manipulable.

DS: Right. Well I think it’s interesting. I do think that journalism as we know it is very clearly on its last leg. The web has completely changed human life. And I think the arts, journalism, literature, copyright are all in the process of changing. I can’t help but think, somewhat vaingloriously, that I’m a bit of a perhaps transitional figure—from a post-literature age to whatever comes next. First of all, I think there’s a huge journalistic investment in trying to pretend that journalism as journalists would want it still exists, that truth still exists in big black type. So there’s this idea that somehow truth still exists in a newspaper.

And second of all, I think there’s a tremendously literalminded, litigious, trial-by-Google thing, in which people can access through the web that you maybe took four pages from some nurse’s journal in World War II and endlessly re-litigate that. I think we’re in a hugely transitional age.

What beats me is—all the twentieth century—in physics, in philosophy, in mathematics, perhaps in anthropology, practically every field was about this idea that the observer by his very presence alters what’s observed. And so to me it’s bizarre that anyone would still be fighting this. But when you have these debates, they’re always economic in origin. Everyone from publishers to websites to newspapers to magazines. I feel like when people push back against John D’Agata and—to a certain degree—push back against Reality Hunger and How Literature Saved My Life, it’s almost always from what strikes me as literal-minded, flat-footed

MARCH 01 2013

journalists who are still trying to cling to an unbelievably outmoded definition of the “real.” And I become, or John becomes, or whoever becomes a kind of useful whipping post.

But they haven’t engaged with the issues at all. That’s the way I view it. Is that how you view it?

The Indy: I’m a student of critical theory, so I sort of have to recognize that these debates are ages old. To see it leaking just now into a literary space or inciting scandal within the small magazine world feels a little depressing. It speaks to literature as a sort of late adopter.

DS: Totally. Look at what the past twenty five years in contemporary music have been about. Hip-hop has already moved past this. It’s just unbelievable that we’re debating this when, as you say, in architecture, in music, in visual art, in film and television and stand-up these questions have been endlessly explored. But I feel like in literature, we’re still back in 1880 trying to argue, “Is it okay if we change this comma?”

It’s kind of unbelievable actually. So there are people I show some of my work to, say Reality Hunger, and they go, “I like this, but what’s the big deal?” All these things seem to them terribly self-evident. The photographers, the visual artists all say “Okay, but you’re just saying what everybody knows, right?” And I have to go, “No, that’s not the way it is in literature.” So I know what you mean. There are more socially educated people than I who could point out why literature is that way. My basic take is that it has to do with that wonderful book by Ian Watt, who traces the rise of the novel and shows why the rise of the novel corresponds exactly to the rise of the middle class in Europe. Basically the bourgeoisie wanted to see their lives portrayed in flattering, politely honest ways. I don’t think literature has ever gotten past that.

People are still invested in this idea. I’m not sure what to do about it other than push forward. I really love this idea that all great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

If you are doing serious work you have to be willing to break the form. Those are the things I’m trying hard to do. So full steam ahead.

The Indy: Do you think the essay is uniquely positioned to be a force for that sort of genre-blending good?

DS: Well I do. I guess you’re speaking to the choir here. I do think at one point the novel was doing that. Early twentieth century—James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Kafka—there are people doing incredible things with the novel one hundred years ago. To me that is not really where the action is. There are either incredibly boring bourgeois novels, which to me is no longer a very useful way of conveying what life is like. And there is the willfully experimental novel which, to me, seems to be drafting off of a false model.

They just seem kind of beside the point. The word “essay,” going back to the medeival French, is “essai,” meaning to attempt, to try, experiment, to explore. I really love that, the tentative probing that the essay is about. The whole form of the essay is devoted to uncertainty, to doubt, to confusion, to paradox, to self-doubt, to self-questioning. And what could be a more perfect vehicle to convey what life is like now? Whereas somehow the monumental authority of the novel seems very far from contemporary life. I’m particularly interested in literary collage, the collage essay. Which to me seems to correspond even more excitingly to contemporary life, so that people whose work I really love like Amy Fusselman, Simon Gray, Spalding Gray, Leonard Michaels, J.M. Coetzee, David Markson, they’re all doing things that are nicely fragmented. Which to me captures even more powerfully how people think now. As opposed to that five hundred page seamless narrative, which seems to me to belong to a couple of centuries ago.

The Indy: I know that James Wood’s term “hysterical realism” isn’t really thrown around anymore and that moment seems to be…if not passed, then most of its writers are dead or doing other things. But it seems to me that the idea of a self-contradictory mega-novel can answer that concern within a fictional sphere.

DS: That’s not a bad question. To be honest, I’m not hugely invested in what the novel is doing or what the novel isn’t doing. Sometimes I somehow position myself or people position me where I’m this dumb antagonist of the novel. To be honest I just don’t read novels anymore. I loved Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, but that’s only a quasi-novel. I don’t have that much knowledge of the contemporary novel.

For perhaps the last fifteen, twenty years I’ve read precious few of them. But having said all that, I sort of look at them, and I read friend’s books. So James Wood has this term “hysterical realism.” He meant to, I think, describe people like David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Zadie Smith, people like that with a sort of boosted-up realism. I think it’s not a bad term. One can see what he means. I think he’s saying there’s a kind of rhetorical storm. Where I agree with him is that he’s saying these are essentially realistic novels in an old-fashioned way. And that they sort of cover the realism in a rhetorical wind-storm to try to disguise what is essentially a realistic novel. Is this kind of work getting to what life is about? I’ll be at the bookstore and read twenty pages of Zadie Smith, and I can’t help but say “No.” You can feel those chains still imprisoning the writer. They’re trying to do some interesting things. They’re trying to have fun and trying to get a little splintered and chaotic and fragmented. But they’re constantly trying to make these narrative gestures.

It just feels like the game is not worth the candle. They’re over-invested in what feels like the furniture moving of the conventional novel. They’re imprisoned in what seems to me like the nineteenth century reassurances of the conventional novel. That’s my take on these books.

INTERVIEWS

14

HEISTS 2000

by David Adler, Barry Elkinton & Simon Engler Illustration by Lizzie Davis

It’s always been a three-act plot.

First, the preparation. There’s the shoot-n-grab, but that’s too obvious; maybe the switch-n-swap, or better, swing-n-hop. Find your groundman, your twister, your fireworks. Second, the operation. Tony and Sam up top; Jackie and Mary West swinging in through the bottom. Put your ear close and never sweat. Finally, the aberration. Something’s off here. Where’s the key, the bullet, the diamond. Who’s he, I’ve never seen him once in my life. The very first heist we filmed was a century ago. In Alias Jimmy Valentine, Jimmy robs a bank; Ben Price, the new detective, cracks the case. It seems so old—trench coats and top hats and shmoking shigars, like Humphrey Bogart would say. But when, inspired by this anniversary, we looked into it, we found that the 21st century is all about the heist. People are still very much stealing things, and stealing them well. And we are also more creative this time around; maybe just weirder. Either way—whether it’s in New Jersey or Belgium or Miami or Taizhou, China; whether it’s bee hives or coal or copper wire—the heist is alive.

DIAMOND DELINQUENTS There’s an empty seat in the middle of Row 34. By the window, a young man fidgets with the controls on the armrest, trying to activate the entertainment system. But the plane isn’t taking off for another fifteen minutes or so, and the only thing on the screen is an airbrushed red background and white text—Helvetic Airways. The man in a suit on the aisle looks over and shakes his head. A folder is open on the tray table, and he is all business. He hates going to Zurich; the Swiss are such boring, disciplined people. It’ll only be a few days, though, and then he’ll head back to Brussels.

Then they both sigh. Their fate is upon them, and they know it because it always seems to happen this way—the perfume gets there first, and the large, elderly lady soon follows. The middle seat is hers. It was foolish to think it would remain empty.

It’s a pedestrian drama that is unfolding in Row 34. If only he could see down below. Eight men arrive at the tarmac in two black police vehicles, flash their machine guns, seize the diamonds, get back in the car, and drive away. $50 million in diamonds escapes with them, mostly uncut, meaning

15 NEWS

untraceable. The whole operation takes five minutes, and not a single shot is fired. The passengers in Row 34 have no idea.

Leonardo Notarbartolo is also at the Brussels airport February 18, but he is in handcuffs while the burglars are getting away. He is being extradited to Belgium for breaking the conditions of his parole. Ten years ago—exactly, to the week—Notarbartolo led a five-member team in the Heist of the Century™. Thirty miles to the north, his ring of Italian thieves cracked ten layers of security—cameras, heat detectors, a seismic sensor, a magnetic field—to break open the vault at the Antwerp Diamond Center. They doubled the Brussels airport heist, $100 million in diamonds, but police found a half-eaten sandwich on the side of the road, and a receipt with his name, and Notarbartolo was sentenced to ten years.

No one knows who stole the Brussels diamonds. It could be the Pink Panthers, a crime ring from the Balkans. They have stolen jewels in Dubai, Spain, Britain, and Japan, and the Brussels heist is just their style—flashy and bold, precise and well-timed. Or it could be Notarbartolo’s School of Turin. Everyone knows him: he is handsome and charming and always plays the Danny Ocean; his cousin Benedetto

Capizzi was recently tapped to become the next capo dei capi, king of the Sicilian mob. But Notarbartolo insists that his cousin wasn’t involved, and anyway, he was in handcuffs at the Brussels airport—there is no sandwich.

Then again, timing is everything in a heist. It’s easy to imagine a slow grin creeping over Notarbartolo’s face. A decade later, out of prison, another masterpiece. This is the legacy of the old guard heistmen, playing the long game, plotting each step and planning their escape.

And then—ahead—at the dinner table, Notarbartolo and his family in the foothills of the Italian alps, where they actually live. There is no secret lair, no hidden cave. Just a small two-bedroom, with a kitchen and a bathroom and a little yard for the kids to play in. The children chuckle as they chase each other; Notarbartolo checks his watch and laughs along. -DA

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

STICKY SITUATION Most heists happen quickly– a cut fence, a quick snatch, and a cloud of burning rubber. But every now and then a heist comes along that happens in slow motion rather than with a flash or a bang, and these heists are often the delicious. That’s why heist aficionados worldwide went wild in August 2012, when the world’s biggest maple syrup cartel announced that 18 million dollars of syrup had been stolen over the course of six months, drip by drop, from “Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve” near Quebec City.

The thieves had a plan, and the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers was the target. Founded in 1989, the Federation is the world’s largest syrup cartel– the OPEC of maple syrup– controlling 77 percent of the global supply from their strategic reserve near Quebec City. Maple harvests can fluctuate wildly from year to year, so the strategic reserve uses its giant stockpile of syrup as a bulwark to keep prices in a profitable sweet spot. Between 2009 and 2012, with sap flowing at unprecedented rates, the cartel’s stockpile expanded dramatically, forcing the Federation to rent out another warehouse in the town to store the overflow.

But the cartel only rented out half of the new warehouse.

The gang of thieves saw their opportunity. Organizing a crew of nearly 20 men and women with names like Richard Vallières and Avik Caron, the thieves rented out the other half of the warehouse for what seemed to be an unrelated business. Then, during the quiet hours of the night, they would sneak into the syrup reserve and siphon the syrup from the 54-gallon drums where it was stored, covering their tracks by refilling the barrels with water. The thieves would then transport the syrup to New Brunswick, a cartelfree zone, where they presented themselves as legitimate distributors, and were able to get full market price for their labors. By the time the cartel discovered the theft during a “routine inventory check,” over six million pounds syrup had gone missing, enough to fill 100 tractor-trailers. To put it differently, that’s enough for 183 million pancakes.

At first it seemed like they might get away with it. It’s impossible to trace the origins of maple syrup, so it couldn’t be tracked, and by the time police discovered the heist in July 2012, most of the syrup was considered long gone.

But Canada’s mounted police are no saps, and they weren’t going to take this one sitting down. After interrogating 300 individuals and executing 40 search warrants, police arrested 18 suspects in December, and have recovered almost 70 percent of the stolen syrup. There may not have been any squealing tires, but it seems that even these sneaky slow thieves still left a rather sticky trail. -BE

MARCH 01 2013

PILLS, PILLS, PILLS On the night of March 13, 2010, thieves cut a hole in a building’s roof, rappelled inside, disarmed a security system, and made off with goods worth nearly $80 million.

But the goods weren’t diamonds, and the building wasn’t a bank vault. The heist went down at a drab warehouse off Interstate 91 in Enfield, Connecticut—and when the thieves had pulled away, it was with dozens of pallets of pharmaceuticals loaded into the back of a tractor-trailer.

The Enfield warehouse was operated by Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical firm headquartered in Indianapolis, and the drugs stolen included Prozac, Cymbalta, and the cancer drug Gemzar, among others. The thieves took so much that they had to use a forklift to load up their getaway truck. In all, the theft lasted five hours. The thieves, who rented a Cadillac Escalade the night before the crime, were banking on success.

It was the largest pharmaceutical heist in American history.

The stolen drugs were recovered in October 2011 from a storage unit in Doral, Florida. Fingerprints on a water bottle found at the Enfield warehouse later led authorities to Aumary and Amed Villa, two brothers living in Miami. Both Villa brothers were arrested in May 2012; they’ve since been charged in Connecticut for stealing the Lilly pharmaceuticals, and in Florida, for possessing them illegally with the intent to sell.

Amed Villa’s attorney told the Associated Press on Friday that his client will likely avoid a trial by pleading guilty to the charges he faces in Connecticut this week. Amaury, who has already been sentenced to 11 years on his Florida charges, pleaded not guilty in New Haven on Tuesday. The Villa brothers allegedly worked with a larger crime ring also responsible for stealing cigarettes, liquor, and electronics worth millions. Nearly a dozen other suspected members have been charged. The Villa brothers’ ring, US Attorney of Connecticut David Fein said in a statement, has now been “dismantled.”

But other criminals seem ready to take up where the brothers left off. A shipment of 49 pallets of pharmaceuticals was taken from a Georgia truck stop on January 22. Police tracked a GPS device embedded in the shipment to a trailer abandoned roadside nearly 60 miles away. All of the stolen drugs were inside. But the thieves were long gone. -SE

POULTRY PILFERING The chief economist at the National Chicken Council was deeply concerned. Corn prices were up, and corn is two-thirds of chicken feed. “Simply put,” he warned—jowls sagging, eyes fixed low—there would be “fewer birds produced” in 2013. the chicken apocalypse was on the horizon, and Super Bowl XLVII—the biggest day of the poultry calendar—was fast approaching.

Dewayne Patterson and Renaldo Jackson cleared the table and began their planning. Both employees at the Nordic Cold storage plant in Doraville, Georgia, they would rent a truck, pull up to the back of the distribution center, and load up ten pallets of Tyson chicken. It was a classic wing-n-snap, stringern-switch, breast-n-bone operation. 26-year-old Jackson would do the heavy lifting; 35-year-old Patterson, with an extra decade of trade wisdom and experience under his belt, would take care of the rest.

All together, the greatest chicken heist in history—$65,000 of bird pieces. An inside job. Management, though, was one step ahead. Following the operation, the police were notified, and Patterson and Jackson were arrested the following week, charged with felony theft.

The wings, meanwhile, are missing, which is like, very impressive, considering the fact that ten pallets of chicken probably weigh close to 1000 lbs. A secret poultry lair, perhaps. Or, just maybe, an inside-inside-job: management lured them in, warned the police, and split the wings 50-50.

George Clooney and Brad Pitt take off their SWAT masks and watch the game. -DA

NEWS

16

THE WOODS OF LEHIGH VALLEY

by Everett Epstein Illustration by Adriana Gallo

the 4 p.m. light in room 213 cast the walls azure and the shadows—from the bed, table, lamp, and bulky RCA—a deep navy. The throw, un-tucked with the sheet and kicked to the foot of the bed, was decorated with the staple pattern of Ramada Inns: a puce plaid hemmed with lavender thread.

It too assumed the blues of the afternoon. On the bed, the silhouette of a body indented the mattress—an outline in fabric.

Outside the window, the woods of Lehigh Valley. Shoots of pines and cedar crowded together, so close that their branches entangled. In time, they knit into a single, tubered mass— one vast thicket. Looking in, you could make out felled trees through its interstices. Leafed ribcages at odds with the surrounding trunks.

Amid the downed branches, buried loosely under veined foliage, an obsidian shard. Fist-sized, ink-black, and missing a divot from its face, the stone’s surface had a grooved texture, like vinyl. Smeared fingerprints spotted the shard, and its polished edges fractured pale sunbeams.

Tugging off the pile of sheets/throw, her mind wandered to her sister, the reason she made the unpleasant, unscenic, just plain “un” drive out to Lehigh. Her nerve. Her gall. Lenore’s damned ugliness. She and I can’t see each other, which I guess is sad, but that’s life. That’s what happens to sisters. Still, can’t help but be annoyed.

By now, she had draped the sheets across the bed and retucked its ends. Pausing to look out the window, she reviewed the conversation with (ungrateful) Lenore. To bring up my marriage! At this point in her life, a dignified forty-three, she refused to apologize for the events—the ups and the downs—of her thirties. Why even mention Albert? Why not just gloss tactfully over her bare ring finger, and all the pain, aggravation, embarrassment its bareness implied? Admittedly, Lenore’s asking looked (to an outsider) innocent enough, but I knew what she in fact meant: So, Albert finally unhitched himself from your sinking ship. Your ugly, dead weight. Good for him; he can do better. I got it Lenore! Message received!

Roger dodger!

here are the names of the animals in the woods: Sciurus carolinensis Odocoileus virginianus Clangula hyemalis Colinus virginianus Bubo virginianus Melanerpes erythrocephalus Didelphis virginiana Sorex hoyi They keep their distance from the obsidian. A breach in the earth, a thorn in their collective flank. They felt its jags, its protrusions. Felt and shuttered. the woman staying in room 213 opened the door, noted the unmade bed, and frowned. Coming in from Wind Gate (a three and a half hour drive west), she expected and deserved a made bed. Not unmade. Made. Better just make it myself.

Not worth troubling the staff. Still, can’t help but be annoyed.

17 LITERARY

and then to suggest that I sleep there, as if I was champing at the bit to bask in your fucking (excuse me) family’s glow. No thanks, Lenore! Not for me. The Ramada is more than hospitable. I’ll sleep happy here, alone.

What am I doing? Making a used bed. Why on earth? She stepped over to the beige landline and hunted the laminate numbers for the front office with her index finger —a hairless predatory animal. 601-266-6213. Hello. I just checked into room 213. Housekeeping must not have come because the bed is unmade. Well, not anymore, but. I just need a change of sheets. Uh-hun. Ok. Ok. Thanks. Great.

Clapping the receiver back onto the base, she stared out the window. Her mind—tremulous with offense—ebbed to a calm. A second of silence, just the air conditioner’s purr.

Squinting, she found the woods. Growing up in Allentown meant always living on the periphery, always recognizing that dense, insistent thicket. It dragged you into its orbit, pulled you downhill. Even if you didn’t look at it directly, you could feel its pulse, like a headache—a dull pressure behind the ears.

I’m glad I’m in Wind Gate now, she thought.

on march 14, lisa pollard’s body was found off the side of State Route 3013, fourteen miles west of Allentown.

The coroner determined that an intracranial hemorrhage originating in the frontal lobe caused the death. The bruise, a violet blush the size of a fist, extended from hairline to eyebrow. The cranial pressure, altered by a blunt trauma to her face, sent Lisa first into a coma, then crushed her cortex—a vice of fluid.

Linda Warg, a Wind Gate resident, discovered the body by accident. She had pulled off 22 into a Wawa. Coming out of the store with a Diet Coke, she passed her Mazda Protégé and continued walking aimlessly beyond the Wawa’s florescent halo and into the night’s black curtains. She came across Lisa fifteen minutes later.

A missing person’s report, filed on February 26 by Lisa’s parents, noted that she was home from Lehigh University when she was abducted. Upon investigation, the assault took place before the abduction, although she died soon after. Her clothes showed no sign of tear. Indeed, the initial suspicion of sexual violence, proposed by the Allentown police department, proved inconclusive. No murder weapon was found.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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THE LIST March 1-7 k in wee this stery li 1968 sh & a ny C are John Carter d June pily we hap

in the know? e.g. how to win the science fair? email listtheindy@gmail.com @list_easy

FRIDAY MARCH 1 lincoln // martinos auditorium, granoff center, brown university Come see what all the fuss is about.

Birthday cake will be served in belated celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the film’s two Oscars. Free; reserve tickets online. 5:30PM. symposium // metcalf auditorium, chace center, risd museum As part of The Festive City exhibition, historians and visual artists discuss ephemeral events which take place in cities (fireworks, battle re-enactments) and their representations in books and art. Members $20; non-members $35; students free with ID. 1-6:30PM. SATURDAY MARCH 2 a show // building 16, providence (email: bigtrain_farm@yahoo.com) Us and Y’All, Jael’s Peg, Ducks for all Seasons, TBA. Free. 8PM. SUNDAY MARCH 3 skating // bank of america skating center, kennedy plaza, providence The last day of the 2012-2013 skating season at the Bank of America Skating Center. The rink may look and feel small, but it’s twice the size of Rockefeller Plaza’s ice rink in New York City.

Adults $6; Children/Seniors $3; Skate rental $4. 11AM-12PM.

MONDAY MARCH 4 david shields // tap room, memorial hall, risd He wrote The Marriage Plot, right? Free.

7PM. TUESDAY MARCH 5 tasteberries // room 315, science center, brown university In case you still haven’t tried these, or if you just really like fucking with your taste buds. Everything tastes different!

Register online. 6PM.

WEDNESDAY MARCH 6 trisha brown dance company // nazarian center, rhode island college A postmodern dance performance. $35.

7:30PM. // room 201, smith-buonanno, brown university Roxane Gay will read from her forthcoming essay collection and talk about writing from imperfect opinions and conflicting principles. 6:30PM. bad feminist

THURSDAY MARCH 7 a reading by george saunders // martinos auditorium, granoff center, brown university You may have heard of him. Free; tickets required. It’s been sold out for days but there will definitely be scalpers outside. 2:30PM. poetry slam // as220, 115 empire st., providence This is an alternative if you can’t get into the Saunders reading. $5. 8PM. stolen jars show // fete music, 103 dike st., providence If you want tickets message or text one of the band members. There will also be a band called Magic Man. $8. 8PM.