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david adler, barry elkinton & simon engler

War Crimes simon engler

Days of Our Knives

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lizzie davis, grace dunham, alexander sammos & benson tucker

Around the Town

robert merritt & benson tucker

FEATURES 4 5

FROM THE EDITORS In St. Petersburg, Russia, street vendors line the esplanade that bisects the city. They, like the cobble and tread, trace the banks of the Neva River, clinging to it like a plaque. A special breed of vendor are the samogonshchiki, purveyors of samogon, bootleg vodka. They say that if you need workers to build your house, offer samogon and the house will soon be ready.

It takes three to drink a tin of samogon, and it must be done at once—the samogonshchiki know better than to sell resealable cans.

It is noon. Salarymen pour into the street.

The first customer, opening the ceremony, stands silently by the samogonshchik, extending his pointer finger into the street. The samogonshchik stirs at the first sign of today’s haul.

Time passes, the bells ring out half past noon, and a second emerges from the jostle. Standing behind the first man, he makes a two with his pink and ring finger, lifting them into the air. The anticipation, or the cold, makes him shiver.

The lunch hour is ending, and the two men in line fidget. Going without the midday tipple is one thing; to have entrusted strangers with it and come up empty would be another thing entirely.

With minutes to spare, a woman files in behind the two men. She makes a three with her fingers, and the two men clap their hands. The samogonshchik hands over the tin, they tear the foil from the rim, and spend the last five minutes of the lunch hour passing the can around, expressing their gratitude for this sip or two. The samogonshchik motions for them to move away from the stand; they’d occupied the space in front of her stand for a whole hour, and had made five rubles for her trouble. — RB

Week in Review

METRO

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NEWS

Fifty Two marc briz

Words with Friends ellora vilkin

SPORTS Heard ‘Round the World 12 Shot greg nissan, alex ronan & sam rosen

ARTS Body Embodied 13 The grier stockman & claudia norton Paintings 14 Three claudia norton

SCIENCE Need to Talk About David 9 We david adler + Me = Us 11 U jeremy wagner

EPHEMERA

INTERVIEWS Lethem 6 Jonathan drew dickerson

FOOD 15

anna rotman

LITERARY

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

That’s Not a Hotdog!

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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How I Met Your Mother jessica giguere

X-PAGE Life By 3D Printer 18 Still robert merritt

WEEK IN BOVINES

by David Adler, Simon Engler & Barry Elkinton Illustration by Drew Dickerson HORSEMEAT IS EVERYWHERE

YAK FACTS

BOVINE INSPIRATION

horsemeat is—secretly, quietly—everywhere.

Monday, British food regulator finds horsemeat in Taco Bell products in the UK. The same day, horsemeat traced in Leicestershire school dinners. Last Thursday, Polish authorities find horse DNA at beef warehouses. Before then, Ikea recalls its Swedish meatballs. Burger King, too, is horsed.

All over Europe, it’s index fingers: Sweden blames France, France blames Romania, Romania blames Ireland, and Ireland blames the Poles. The Poles. It turns out the story actually begins in Ireland, and it’s relatively straightforward. Ireland has the highest per capita number of horses (19:1000) in the European Union, but when the economy collapsed in 2007, many owners could no longer afford the maintenance. 2,000 horses were slaughtered in 2008; 25,000 in 2012. So there’s just way too much horse, and it’s cheap, like real cheap—a kilo of horsemeat for $0.66; a kilo of beef for $3.95.

The money part makes a lot of sense to me, but the logistics of the operation sound far more challenging. The traces of horsemeat detected in the European beef samples were at around one percent. How do they get little itty-bitty pieces of horsemeat into hamburgers? I like to imagine some giant Meat Machine—bring all your types of livestock and leave with a medley. It feels more democratic that way. The Great Meatqualizer.

Anyway, Europe is terrified. Secretary of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs Owen Paterson took the floor of British Parliament to declare an “international conspiracy” on the matter. Clive Black, an analyst at London firm Shore Capital, thinks there has been “substantial rogue activity,” which I read as a few men in ski masks dicing the horse parts into small little cubes and adding them (They’ll never notice!) to the beef parts before making their escape.

For what it’s worth, they really do look the same, beef and horse. Maybe the horse is a bit darker, more chunked. It seems delicious from the pictures, at least. Viande Chevaline, as the French call it, a lighter, richer, sweeter taste. The Italians have always loved horse salami; the Japanese, their equine sashimi.

Over here, Congress’s ban on horsemeat has just expired, and the United States Department of Agriculture is expected to approve the first horse slaughtering plant since 2007 in Roswell, New Mexico.

Exactly 60 years earlier, aliens crashed their spaceship on a ranch in Roswell. Now they will slaughter horses for sale at your local grocery store, which, when I think about it, just sounds really difficult, since it’s such a bony animal and so tall, too. Still, Peter McAndrews, chef/owner of a handful of Philly’s hottest restaurants, is excited to have horse on his menu, even though he receives bomb threats daily for doing so. “It’s not a good feeling, you know what I mean?”

I’m really not sure why we care, cow or horse or buffalo or ox. I guess it’s about deception. We have a right to know what we are eating! Then again, I think it’s almost better when it’s a surprise, like when you do all the work only to find out the deadline has been extended. Did I just eat human? Oh well, then, now I’ve eaten human! —DA

on february 24, Tibet’s Ta’er monastery revealed over 1,500 pounds of sculpture made mostly of yak butter. The showing, held annually, honors February’s Lantern Festival.

“The auspicious yak butter sculptures will bring our family good luck,” one resident of a nearby town told China’s Xinhua News Agency. Others seem to agree: the exhibition drew over 100,000 visitors this year.

Yak butter sculptures are a long-standing Tibetan tradition. The art form is said to have originated around 640, when a statue of the Buddha was brought to Lhasa. Lacking the customary offering of fresh flowers, devotees chose instead to model gifts from yak butter. Typical statues depict floral arrangements, scenes from the life of the Buddha, and notable moments in Tibetan history. Monks at Ta’er have been sculpting dairy since the early 17th century.

Yak butter melts at room temperature, so exhibitions like the one at Ta’er are typically held in the winter. Lamas dip their hands in ice water to maintain the dairy’s firm plasticity.

Mistakes may not be licked, and anyway, the final product is painted with an unpalatable mineral dye.

The world domestic population of yaks is healthy. 14 million of ‘em—that’s more yaks than there are people in Belgium. The butter, which has a cheese-like texture, can be used for food, tanning hides, and ceremonial lamps. So though the 100-statues are not for eating, there’s still plenty of yak butter left to go around.

Alas, the number of craftsmen skilled enough to create the sculptures is waning. This year, about 40 monks worked on the Ta’er statues; in past festivals, over 100 were involved.

As older monks have left the monastery, younger lamas have proven unwilling to get their hands messy.

In an apparent effort to curb this decline, China’s State Council listed Tibetan butter sculpture as a national intangible cultural heritage in 2006. Intangibly valuable, perhaps— but with a malleable and tangy mouthfeel. —SE

there’s something special about chasing cows. As a teenager I spent my summers ambushing the free-range cows that wander the forests of New Mexico. My goal was to touch one, preferably the biggest cow in the herd. But this was a lot harder than it sounds, and I was never actually able to pull it off. Well, there was one time when I separated a terrified calf from its mother and cornered it against a cliff, but I’ve spent the last six years telling myself this didn’t actually happen.

That never happened, okay? This was the topic of my college application essay.

Last Tuesday I discovered that I’m not alone. Meet Pastor Bo Wagner from the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Mooresboro, North Carolina. A couple weeks ago, Dr. Wagner was driving down the road, finishing his daily visits and heading back to church to prepare for the Wednesday evening service and youth meeting. As usual he was late; in his regular column for the Gaston Gazette, Dr. Wagner describes himself as “both hyper and a poor judge of how much activity I can fit into a given day.”

Things got trickier when Dr. Wagner found the road blocked by a dozen or so cows, which he recognized as belonging to his neighbor. Being a good citizen, Dr. Wagner raced up his neighbor’s driveway to let him know the cows were on the loose. His neighbor made aware, Dr. Wagner scrambled back to the car, the evening’s still-unplanned service weighing heavily on his mind. But then a moment of revelation! Right there in the driveway, Dr. Wagner says in his Gazette column, he felt the presence of the Lord, who said to him: “Oh no you don’t! You know he can’t get all those cows back in by himself... go chase cows.”

And so, wearing khakis, a polo shirt, and his trademark black leather jacket, Dr. Wagner joined his neighbor and chased the cows. This was no easy task, as any experienced cow chaser can attest. “The cows seemed to be mooing with both consternation and laughter,” writes Wagner in the Gazette, “as we ‘he-ayyed’ and ‘giddyapped’ them out of the gullies, back through the trees, down the road, whoops, one just doubled back, hurry and loop around behind him, there we go, all straight, now go right back down the dirt driveway, into the fence, close the gate.” All told, it took the two men a good half hour to corral the rogue cattle.

Finally arriving at church, Dr. Wagner had almost no time to prepare for the evening’s services and meetings. But having chased some cows, Dr. Wagner felt the spirit was now with him. “Despite my not having as much prep time as I would have liked, everything went just fine that Wednesday night,” says Dr. Wagner in the Gazette. “In fact, we had one of our best services ever.”

Six years ago my particular experience chasing cows left me in a deep state of ethical disrepair. Why did I let myself settle for the smallest and most helpless member of the herd? I still don’t have an answer, but it’s nice to know some cow chasings have happy endings. -BE

MARCH 08 2013

NEWS

02

AMBIGUOUS DIRECTION The Acquittal of Momčilo Perišić

by Simon Engler

Momčilo Perišić is free.

On February 28, the 68-year-old Serb was acquitted of all charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Appeals Court of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in the Hague. The court’s decision overturned a September 2011 ruling, in which Perišić, a former general in the Yugoslav Army, was convicted of aiding and abetting atrocities committed by Serb forces during the Bosnian War of 1992-1995.

The charges leveled at Perišić in 2011 were grave.

Prosecutors argued that the former general had provided personnel and logistical assistance to the Army of Republika Srpka (VRS), whose predominantly Serb members murdered over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims near the town of Srebrenica in July 1995. Perišić was further accused of equipping the VRS for its attack on Sarajevo, in which hundreds of civilians were killed, and of failing to punish subordinates for deadly rocket attacks on Zagreb in May of 1995. For these charges, Perišić was sentenced to 27 years’ imprisonment.

On March 1, he returned to Serbia.

The recent acquittal was not an attempt to revise history.

The Appeals Court doubted neither that Perišić provided assistance to the perpetrators of the atrocities under question, nor that these atrocities were as extensive as believed. What happened, in general, is well-established. The International Commission on Missing Persons has already identified nearly 6,500 Srebrenica victims by name.

The ruling was based instead on a reevaluation of personal liability for war crimes. Perišić claimed that his complicity in the murders at Srebrenica and Sarajevo was not intentional.

A just conviction, Perišić argued, would require proof that his assistance to the VRS was specifically directed to the execution of atrocities.

Perišić’s argument referred to the 1999 appeal of Duško Tadić, a former Serb paramilitary implicated in crimes against humanity in northwestern Bosnia. At the Tadić appeal, the Tribunal established a distinction between two degrees of complicity in war crimes: on the one hand, aid deliberately

03

NEWS

directed to atrocities, and on the other, general assistance not necessarily intended for criminal activity. The 1999 Tribunal referred to the latter form of general complicity not as “aid and abetment,” but as “participation in a joint criminal enterprise.” According to this precedent, Perišić argued, only the “specific direction” of assistance to atrocities could be considered criminal aid and abetment.

It was a novel interpretation of the Tadić ruling, but the Appeals Court was convinced. After further review of the case, the Court determined that the weaponry and personnel Perišić provided to the VRS was intended for general military purposes, and not specifically for civilian slaughter. Because this general aid did not constitute specific direction, and was therefore insufficient for a conviction based on the precedent of the Tadić appeal, Perišić was set free.

The details of the official story—the provision of weapons and personnel to the Army of Republika Srpka, the murders at Srebrenica and at Sarajevo, the body count and mass graves—remain the same. Only official responsibility has been reevaluated.

Perišić’s acquittal is an anomaly in recent legal history. War criminals in the 20th century were most always convicted of aid and abetment without evidence of specific direction.

The most notable instances occurred in the aftermath of the Second World War, when military tribunals were erected to punish those complicit in Nazi crimes against humanity.

In 1946, a French military tribunal convicted Robert Wagner, the former Nazi administrator of occupied Alsace, as an accomplice to the premeditated murder of French citizens.

In that trial, aid and abetment was defined only as the knowing provision of “arms, tools, or any other means” used to commit a crime. The question of specific direction was not considered.

The American tribunals held at the former concentration camp of Dachau, from 1945 to 1948, operated on similar principles. As in the trial of Robert Wagner, specific direction was not relevant to the tribunal’s ruling. Hundreds were condemned.

The tradition evidenced by these trials has since gained a strong institutional foothold. Neither the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, nor the United

Nation’s Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind, nor the Statute of the International Tribunal for the Rwandan Genocide refer to specific direction as a requisite feature of criminal aid and abetment. The very charter on which the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was founded does not refer to the concept. In fact, a direct and willful link between aid and atrocity is not necessitated by any of the past century’s most important statutes on crimes against humanity.

Liu Daqun, a chinese jurist who has served at the Tribunal since 2000, was the only judge to issue a dissenting opinion on the Perišić appeal. Liu argued that an acquittal would detrimentally restrict the future prosecutions of those complicit in crimes against humanity. In his dissenting opinion, Liu wrote that insisting on specific direction as a requirement for conviction “effectively raises the threshold for aiding and abetting liability.”

If that’s the case, the consequences of the Perišić acquittal could be immediate. To begin, the decision opens the door for future appeals on related grounds at the ICTY. Similar rulings would contribute to the international rehabilitation, deserved or not, of the current Serbian government.

The precedent affirmed by the Appeals Court also means that future criminals might protect themselves from liability by deliberately avoiding the specific direction of aid to the execution of crimes. The Appeals Court seemed aware of this possibility when it warned that its ruling “should in no way be interpreted as enabling military leaders to deflect criminal liability by subcontracting the commission of criminal acts.” How such misinterpretation is to be avoided was not indicated by the Court.

SIMON ENGLER B’14 has remained the same.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Cairo 52

The Queen Boat Trial 12 Years Later

by Marc Briz

in between cairo’s high-rise hotels and dusty highways, riverboats lie anchored along the Nile, pumping Egyptian pop songs and multi-colored lights. On a Thursday night, a group of policemen entered the Queen Boat that was moored in the upper-class, palm-lined district of Zamalek. At the floating nightclub, the officers arrested 30 men and placed them in two cramped cells with 22 other men picked up off the street.

All 52 men were suspected of homosexual conduct, and from May 2001 to 2003, they were subject to public condemnation, denial of their basic civil liberties, and torture.

On May 11, 2001, the 52 men were tried for suspected consensual gay sex acts. The episode is referred to as the Queen Boat Trial, or the Cairo 52. International media called it a massive attack on human rights. The incident involved swift denunciations from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations. The trial dragged on for three years, with numerous convictions, acquittals, and verdicts overturned. A retrial ended in March 2003 with two men still serving their original sentence of five years of hard labor, 21 men serving three-year sentences, and 29 acquitted.

Human Rights Watch understands the difference between sentencing as arbitrary and sentencing as testament to the Egyptian court’s mistreatment.

John, a 24-year-old living in Cairo who self-identifies as gay, called the episode “an injustice,” yet the Egyptian populace at the time widely approved of the trial as a consequence of religious tradition and political maneuvering by the Mubarak government. This month marks the 10th anniversary of the final Queen Boat Trial convictions, and more arrests of suspected homosexuals are reported. “they captured me because they just needed a body,” yelled one of the Cairo 52 into a microphone in the courtroom. A YouTube video, “52 gay men go on trial,” captured a few minutes of the initial court proceedings in 2001. Before the judge arrived in the chamber, reporters crowded near the cage that held the men. The man answering questions in English wore a piece of white cloth over his face like all the other men. The reporter asked him why the men had been arrested. “I have no clue about this trial,” the man yelled.

The court charged all 52 men with fujur, roughly translated as “debauchery” or “promiscuity.” The Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, “In a Time of Torture: The Assault on Justice in Egypt’s Crackdown on Homosexual Conduct,” published in 2004, explains fujur as “encompassing a concept of sexual excess.” The charge stemmed from a law against prostitution passed in 1951. The report explains, “A law without distinct limitations lent opportunity to a criminal justice system under diminished restraint.” Judges were free to interpret the law at will, allowing any measure of their biases to inform the verdicts.

In a predominantly Muslim country, Egyptians widely reject homosexuality as an immoral choice. Among the Cairo 52, two men were charged with additional “contempt for religion” and served the heaviest sentence, five years of hard labor. The report states that officers labeled one of the men as the “ring-leader” of the group, though the Cairo 52 repeatedly stated they did not all know each other. Investigators ignored the details, opting for prompt censure. Local leaders responded quickly, fueling public desire for guilty convictions. “From my religious view, all the religious people, in Christianity, in Judaism, condemn homosexuality. It is against the whole sense in Egypt. The temper in Egypt is against homosexuality,” said Dr. Essam Elarian, spokesman for the Muslim Brother-

MARCH 08 2013

hood, in a 2002 BBC article. The chief government spokesman, Nabil Osman, echoed a similar sentiment in the article, explaining that what the justice system did was “actually an interpretation of the norms of [their] society, the family values of [their] society. And no one should judge [them] by their own values. And some of these values in the West are actually in decay.”

Liberal Egyptian voices captured the domestic press’s moralization of the episode, which placed homosexuals in a category of degeneracy and malevolence. The English language commentaries (intended for both the Egyptian expatriate community and an international audience) were published at the same time as the start of court proceedings in 2001.

In the Cairo Times, Hossam Bahgat wrote that Al-Ahram, the state-owned Arabic language newspaper, “published [the morning after the arrest] in its crime page that the defendants were members of a new devil worshipping cult.” The state-owned media framed homosexuals maliciously, echoing the court’s official statements that “accused [the Cairo 52] of engaging in acts of sexual immorality.” Other media outlets pushed the lines further: “Egyptian press have published the names and workplaces of the defendants,” reported Rana Allam for Al-Ahram Weekly. This was one example of the country-wide shaming campaign that destroyed the mens’ reputations and put their families’ safety in danger.

Gay activist Horus (who chose to speak under a pseudonym) explained in a 2001 BBC article that issues of language inflamed the public’s revulsion with the Cairo 52: “In all the Egyptian media they’ve been attacking homosexuals…of course they don’t mention the word ‘homosexuals’— they say ‘perverts,’” he said. In Alexandria, I observed the use of the word mithli to refer to homosexuals. The word’s root denoting “same” or “like.” Mithli, though gaining currency in liberal, college environments, is still not as popular as the slang word, shaiz, or deviant. The discourse surrounding the trial, even the word used to refer to the Cairo 52, signaled the public’s disdain. John expressed a word of caution to queer-identifying men in Egypt. “There are limits,” he said. “There are gay clubs, but [men] should keep a low profile because their families got very hurt. People who hear this might think I’m one of the people suppressing gays.” the torture and physical harassment the men experienced in their two cramped cells during their trial was arguably worse than the outside vitriol. The 21 men interviewed

by Human Rights Watch said that they were “whipped, beaten, bound and suspended in painful positions, splashed with ice-cold water, and burned with lit cigarettes.” State security officers subjected the men to electroshock, psychological torment, and forced rape between prisoners. One of the men, Mazen, moved to Paris after 12 months in jail (before the retrial occurred) and participated in an interview for The Oprah Show.

“These two guys started beating me on my head and on my face,” he said. He described being stripped naked as doctors forced objects into his rectum to determine if he was homosexual. He did not have contact with his family for six months and said, “My mother was looking for me everywhere.” At the end of the interview he admitted, “I tried to kill myself twice in jail.”

Domestic human rights groups stayed silent on the episode both because of their fear of retribution and for their disinterest in protecting homosexuals’ rights. Hisham Kassem, director of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights

(EOHR), offered his views for a BBC article published in 2002: “What could we do? Nothing. If we were to uphold this issue, this would be the end of what remains of the concept of human rights in Egypt…We let them down, but I don’t have a mandate from the people.” In other words, Kassem believed defending the Cairo 52 would hurt the organization’s other human rights efforts. Yet, Hafez Abu Saada, the SecretaryGeneral of the same organization, told the Cairo Times, “Personally, I don’t like the subject of homosexuality, and I don’t want to defend them.”

Hossam Bahgat also worked for EOHR and was dismissed from his position after criticizing the organization’s inaction regarding the Queen Boat Trial.

Bahgat decided to launch the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). In reaction to the public’s outcry against homosexuals, Bahgat defined his organization’s focus as “personal autonomy, bodily integrity, and privacy.” EIPR’s campaigns are not based on identities but on a wider circle of individual rights that extend to issues of religious conversion, marital rape, and incest.

Addressing and propagating labels such as “gay,” “homosexual,” or “LBGT” held connotations of immorality but were also understood as a sociopolitical identification to the west. “They said you’ve all been part of an organization,” said the English-speaking reporter in the YouTube video before the trial began. “That is not true at all. Because we don’t know each other…We’ve been together six months. Some people did not even know the names of other people,” explained the prisoner, continuing to hold up the white cloth to his face.

According to the HRW report, homosexual conduct was often considered “a subversive network threatening state security,” most likely due to homosexuality’s visibility and broad acceptance in countries that were former colonial powers, such as the United Kingdom, or current allies with Israel, such as the United States.

Horus said homosexuals were also described “as agents of Israel” by the Egyptian media. Bahgat has argued that the Mubarak government fueled these accusations in order to distract from recent economic failings.

The same tactics occur under Mohamed Morsi’s reign. The often-criticized justice system benefits from prosecuting homosexuls— a case most Egyptians can agree on and media outlets can profit with sensationalist spins. Five months ago, seven men were arrested for the same charge of “practicing debauchery.” Scott Roberts, of OutQ News wrote, “The story has been reported heavily in the Egyptian press, and EIPR has told OutQ News that it remains difficult for the group to convince the men that it’s safe to talk with them.”

The jail sentences of the Cairo 52 have all ended, but new convictions continue to be made, whether they are products of an intolerant brand of faith, a political maneuver, or both.

MARC BRIZ B’14 is without distinct limitations.

FEATURES 04

REDUX DICTIONARY 10 dead words to rev you up

by Ellora Vilkin

Illustrations by Katy Windemuth

bobby-dazzler [`bс bi `dæz lɛr], n. ca.1866 Something striking or excellent; a strikingly-dressed person.

“The kickball crew were bobby-dazzlers in smirks and striped cotton; sartorially, they were unbeatable.”

these words may be out of print, but if vintage is cool then archaic is next-level. Drop one of these babies next time you’re at sup. Outshine your arch-blatherskite with a real humdinger.

Impress that honey-slop you’ve been dinking out over. What, don’t you buy it? Save the contumely and ask Joyce. No one’s calling him a snivelard. Come on, we dare you.

kexy [`kɛk si], adj. ca. 1641 Dry and brittle; withered; like a kex.

“James hated how kexy his hands felt after flying, so he made sure to pack a tin of shea butter.”

shenk [ʃɛnk], v. ca. 496 To pour out (liquor); to give (a person) drink.

“May I shenk you?”

magpiety [mæg `pai ɛ di], n. ca. 1832 Talkativeness, garrulity (esp. on religious or moral topics); affected piety.

“The perfect candidate would combine Sarah’s charisma and Mitt’s magpiety.” murklins [`mɛrk lɪnz], adv. ca. 1568 In the dark.

“When people make out it’s usually murklins.”

Thurseve [`θərz iv], n. ca. 1325 The evening before Thursday; Wednesday night.

“I always get laid on Thurseve.” findible [`fɪn dɪ bəl], adj. ca. 1656 Able to be split or cleft.

“The pizza arrived, oozing and findible.” graocracy [greɪ `с krə si], n. ca. 1830 Government by an old woman or old women.

“A graocracy controls Bravo’s programming.”

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FEATURES

nuncheon [`nən(t) ʃ(ə)n], n. ca. 1260 A drink taken in the afternoon; a light refreshment between meals; a snack.

“Jack and Gilda always dawdled at nuncheon, giggling over their Arnold Palmers.”

quop [kwсp], v. ca. 1382 To tremble, wriggle, writhe; to throb, pulsate, palpitate.

“The thought of seeing Kendrick in the flesh made Astrid’s heart quop.”

ELLORA VILKIN B’14 just wants to swive.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

HAVING IT ALL A Conversation with Jonathan Lethem

Interview by Drew Dickerson Illustration by Katy Windemuth “genre bending” is a term that has recently come into a strange sort of critical vogue. In light of literary fiction’s increasing concern with the detective story, the comic book, and television, readers were left in want of a quick phrase to attach to such writers as Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, and Junot Diaz. From this particular pack of contemporary curator/collector-novelists, Jonathan Lethem has emerged as literary celebrity, his sprawling novels ransacking a very idiosyncratic cannon. The 2003 publication of Fortress of Solitude saw the making public of some of his most personal, emotionally engaged material— to enormous success both critical and commercial. In the time since, he’s written on Bob Dylan, sparred with James Wood, and put together an essay in defense of plagiarism composed entirely of quotations.

There was a time in his life when he used to write while walking on a treadmill. We talk here about The New Yorker, a fictional place by the name of Camden College, and Robert Coover’s gang.

But I was always interested in the outré, partly because those were the books that wouldn’t sell from used bookstores and you’re with them longer. And they’re cheap to take home, sometimes free to take home because nobody is buying them.

And the other way that I think I’m informed by the used bookstore clerk I was for so long is this curatorial gesture.

That I tend to want to bring in other writers, bring them into view. But it also infiltrates the writing itself, where I find myself making lots of explicit references and naming a lot of my sources rather than leaving them unnamed. In a way, it’s sort of like I’m still working at that bookshop saying “Look at all this great stuff.”

The Indy: It’s interesting to me that you talk about yourself as distinct from the Dirty Realists, or what otherwise might be called the Literary Brat Pack—

The College Hill Independent: First off, I was hoping to talk about genre. There’s a lot of talk about science fiction currently in literature. But it seems to me most writers are writing about reading sci-fi as opposed to writing sci-fi proper.

Jonathan Lethem: The thing to say about science fiction, and really also about crime fiction—because for me they seem to have an equal sway over my imagination and my coming of age as a reader—is that when you first meet these things, the word “genre” isn’t in your head. It’s just about storytelling and iconography and images and things that quicken your pulse and make you lean forward. So these appetites and fascinations develop in a much more native way. And now I find myself in these sophisticated conversations with people because critics and readers have become really self-conscious of genre boundaries. But the fact is my interest, my organic appetite for this stuff, didn’t come because I was like: “Oh these are really interesting genres.” I was just turned on by the writing and the stories. And I was simultaneously discovering other things I liked, some of which turned out to have been examples of what people would call literary fiction. For me it was all mashed up together. The things I liked were the things I liked. A desire to have it all—to have that kind of energy, that fascination with some of these popular forms. Early on I worked strongly within the classical formats. I’d write a dystopian book or I’d write a horror book. Now these things are more chaotic and more inborn in my storytelling. I feel much less obedient to fashion.

The Indy: You talk a lot about influence, most obviously in “The Ecstasy of Influence”, but also one of the more publicized bits of trivia about you is that the only real jobs you’ve ever had, aside from being an author, is working in antiquarian bookstores. I was wondering if you understood that past as contributing to the lexical quality of your work.

JL: That’s a great way to put it. Yes, absolutely. I would say that there are two really direct and really extensive ways that my years in used bookstores have a sway over the writer I became. And that is: one—that I was always entrenched in out-of-print, obscure reading, older reading. I was never very influenced by the idea of the contemporary. And even when I thought I was sniffing out what was contemporary I was usually 15 or 20 years behind the curve, still thinking that Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover were breaking news when, in truth, in the mid ’80s they were sort of out of fashion and forgotten. And there were all of these what came to be called the Dirty Realists that were supplanting them.

MARCH 08 2013

those younger writers who’d come to prominence just before he was working. When in fact Ellis and Wallace were the same age. My own relationship is a little more peculiar because, as I say, my sense of the contemporary was so inadequate. I was reading no one when they were first published. And that even included my friends and acquaintances at “Camden” or Bennington or whatever you want to call it. I was aware of them and sort of reacting against them socially, but in terms of my writing I wasn’t reading them so much as I was just reacting to the whole milieu of that particular college and distancing myself personally from it. But I wasn’t even tempted to think “Oh, Gee. I’m going to be one of these writers.” Or “Oh, God. I better not be one of these writers.”

It just didn’t seem remotely possible to me that what they were doing could be relevant to my work. The very youngest writers I feel a powerful identification with tend to be Delillo and Coover and Barthelme. Which is not to compare myself to anyone, but that’s just where, for me, the relational energy comes from.

The Indy: It’s interesting how you wear these influences so flagrantly. It seems like sort of a generational thing.

JL: Right. Well, I have felt for a long time—and it’s weird how Bennington is implicated in all of this in a strange, very particular way—to understand the environment that my generation of novelists was born into and reacted against, you need to rediscover an argument that was made by John Gardner, when he published On Moral Fiction and basically denounced what, for convenience’s sake, we’ll call the postmodernists. Another name for them is Coover’s Gang.

Because Coover was explicitly the gang leader over at Brown.

He was holding these conferences and inviting all those guys and basically acting as if literature—with a couple of uncomfortable exceptions like John Updike who just wouldn’t go away—was exclusively dominated by himself, Bath, Barthelme, William Gass…who am I forgetting?

The Indy: Gaddis?

JL: There’s overlap. The Literary Brat Pack members were the younger part of the ‘80s generation. But with Dirty Realists I’m thinking of the Raymond Carver short story writers, who, at the time that I was inventing myself as a writer, were the hot names. But I kind of didn’t know it because I was still reading stuff from the ’60s and ’70s. But you’re right—those writers directly influenced the people you’re calling the Brat Pack. Their instinct for mentioning brand names and using a flattened affect and direct style rather than a postmodern maximalist style was very strongly connected for sure.

The Indy: I mentioned the Literary Brat Pack to connote people like Ellis or McInerney. The disassociation you make in the distinction in style, but also the disassociation you implicitly made by dropping out of a place like Bennington —I wonder whether or not you see maximalism at all as a classed movement, reacting against the people of the “Camden College” of the ’80s?

JL: Right. Obviously a great exemplar of my generation of maximalist or postmodern writing is Wallace. He did it himself very explicitly. He satirized Ellis and gives a lot of evidence in his essays of being oppressed by, or disgusted by,

JL: Gaddis, of course. Gaddis and Pynchon were less likely to appear in person at those gatherings, but they were certainly part of his orbit. And then Gardner comes along and says that the entire literary landscape is bankrupt and corrupt and ironic in a poisonous way, that readers were being malnourished by this and that we need a whole new vision of American writing. It was exaggerated, hysterical, over-compensatory. But he also struck a nerve. There were readers and critics who felt that there was something missing for them. The postmodernists got very powerfully on the defensive and, in a way, never recovered their dominance. Say a writer like John Barth, who won the National Book Award, who had a crazy book like Giles Goat-Boy be a big New York Times Bestseller—I mention him to my student now and he’s forgotten. And Coover himself is published by small presses now. Whereas a book like The Public Burning was a big bestseller, comparable to something like Jennifer Egan’s book. But do my students really know who Coover is? No. And so that landscape was toppled by Gardner. And that’s the world that Wallace is responding to. When he’s doing his manifesto, or when Franzen is doing his manifesto, in a way they’re recapitulating. You need to have it all. You need both.

And it’s hard. And I’m doing my damnedest when I write not to pick one of those two teams to be on, but to encompass everything that can be known by the heart and the head. So I just don’t accept the breakdown implicit in those binaries.

INTERVIEWS 06

KNIVES DOWN

by Lizzie Davis, Grace Dunham, Alexander Sammon & Benson Tucker

Like any city worthy of the title, Providence has a long and troubled history with knives.

Precision instruments among humanity’s earliest bionic adaptations, fine blades can be a point of pride. At base, knives mean power, a dangerous allure.

When the knife is used for ill, though, the result isn’t mastery so much as amateurism. In November, a knife-wielding robber wearing a skeleton mask attempted to rob a Cranston Rite Aid. The clerk repeatedly insisted that she had no money to offer. After arguing with her for a while, the would-be thief left empty-handed. A Fall River liquor store robber, blade in hand, held up the same store three times in a 24-hour period but was apprehended after the store owner realized it was the same culprit who had hit the place the year before.

Knife crimes are often both juvenile and tragic. A disproportionate number of knife crime suspects are teens. Knives are the most readily available weapons and, accordingly, they set up young trouble-makers to get in well over their heads. Two Central Falls teens, aged 18 and 15, face first degree robbery charges after a pair of attempted muggings. It’s the involvement of the knife that makes the charges first degree, a classification holding twice the prison term that the two might have faced under second degree charges.

Knives crop up as parts of a varied makeshift arsenal. In one incident in Washington Park late last year, four men armed with a knife and a crowbar approached a 19-year old passerby and robbed him of his sneakers and cell phone. The same gang may have turned up on College Hill in January, when a group fitting that description robbed a student on Brown’s campus. Here, too, teens were the culprits. The Independent has the inside scoop, some elements imagined, exploring knife crime, production, and miscellanea in Rhode Island.—BT

THREE INCHES MAX In a recent radio broadcast, the ever-iconic Al Sharpton claimed that knife regulations represent the logical next step for gun control, suggesting that a society committed to minimizing violent crime must act on both fronts. Sharpton put a face to the question of knife control and crime prevention, one of few public figures to broach the issue. However, a debate over knife control cannot begin without first shedding some light on this fairly obscure legal issue. Knife control varies wildly from state to state, and what is considered kosher on one side of state lines could result in a small fine across the border. While the stakes certainly aren’t as high, the law is generally worth knowing, and Rhode Island’s knife control law is actually one of the more rewarding laws to be fluent in.

The Rhode Island state knife restriction law, Section 42 of the state code’s Weapons chapter, primarily emphasizes a limitation of blade length, in a way that is not particularly noteworthy. Rhode Islanders are entitled to both open and concealed possession of any knife up to three inches in length, from tip to handle. This posits Rhode Island as one of the least knife-friendly states in New England, second only to Massachusetts, whose tyrannical knife control provisions limit legal knives to two and a half inches, much to the chagrin of knife enthusiasts everywhere. (For comparison, New Hampshire emphatically did away with all knife regulation in 2010, creating a veritable knife-wielder’s paradise).

In the context of the gun control debate, this three inch limitation seems to best correspond to the ban of assault weapons. Without categorically illegalizing the weapons in question, Section 11-47-42 justifies limited public use of knives of excessive length or power, which can only conceiv-

07 METRO

ably be used to incur severe bodily harm. To borrow a line from advocates of assault rifle restriction, this law draws a hard line between what is useful and what is excessively dangerous and violent. And it seems to work--knives are only present in 22 percent of assault cases in the greater Providence area.

Yet, like so many things Rhode Island, just beneath the surface there exists a world of eccentricity that tows the line between comical and practical. Because Rhode Island’s state legislators are thorough, hard-working, and hip to the lingo of the kidz these days, they went to painstaking lengths to close any and all loopholes that could be found within the law. Urban dictionary in hand, they explicitly inscribed all small weapons that are not legal for open or concealed carry, including and not limited to those “commonly known as a blackjack, slingshot, billy, sandclub, sandbag, metal knuckles, slap glove, bludgeon, stun-gun, crossbow, dagger, dirk, stiletto, bowie knife, a sword-in-cane, or the so-called ‘Kung-Fu’ weapons.” That constitutes 16 different variants of knife-like weaponry explicitly prohibited, for those of you keeping score at home.

The wording of this statute sounds like a list of props from a Robert DeNiro movie, and perhaps raises as many questions as it answers. While it may seem perfectly logical that a family-first atmosphere like Rhode Island would not want its elderly citizens running around with swords masquerading as canes, it is unprecedented in New England’s knife law tradition to enumerate all conceivable types of small weaponry, all the way down to “so called kung-fu weapons.”

An exchange with the Providence Police Department yielded no information about the history of kung-fu style crime in Providence, but did suggest that in spite of the comical wording of section 11-47-42, it may truthfully deserve praise instead of reproach. Despite a high-visibility knife related incident in the College Hill area in recent weeks, Providence is not home to an inordinately high amount of knife violence. Knife crime in Providence has actually trended downward over the past three years, by a startling 15 percent.

Furthermore, data indicate (by omission) that kung-fu style swordplay is at an all-time low in the Providence metro area, and there has been a conspicuous absence of sword-in-cane style assault. If anything, knives seem to be reasonably controlled already.

Perhaps most important is that Rhode Island’s knife control laws are quintessentially Rhode Island. Fluency in their stipulations tells just as much about legality as about the culture of the state itself. Quirkiness seems to come naturally to the union’s smallest state, and its penal codes are no different. Plenty of states limit the legal public use of knives, but only Rhode Island does it in such a way that is both laughable and laudable. —AS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

MAKING GREAT KNIVES This past Autumn I started spending too much time searching the Internet for paraphernalia from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. I loved imagining millions of people from all over the world going to Queens to visit “The World of Tomorrow.” One Google led me to this eBay listing: “RARE 1939 New York World’s Fair Imperial Pocket Knife Providence RI.” The knife was two-bladed, with a pearl handle and knickerbocker-orange lettering: “New York World’s Fair 1939.” Below the letters: a trylon and perisphere, the fair’s iconic symbol. It was a beautiful little knife.

The old Imperial Knife factory is just a ten-minute walk from where I live, on the two-block long Imperial Place, in the Jewelry district. When Italian brothers Felix and Michael Mirando founded Imperial Knife in 1917, Imperial Place was Blount Street. People say the Mirando brothers changed the

MARCH 08 2013

name: Blount was close to “blunt,” which they did not like.

Their Knife Factory, after all, was on Blount Street.

The factory on Imperial Place was 6 stories: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd for stamping metal; 4th for assembling; 5th for packaging; 6th was all offices. At their best, Imperial made 10,000 dozen knives a day, which is 120,000 knives.

A year before the World’s Fair, Domenic Fazzano— childhood friend of the Mirando brothers and a partner in Imperial—went to Germany to buy a patent made it possible to press a thinner metal piece onto a knife’s handle.

The new knife cost less and looked better. They called it the “Jackmaster.” It was one of the best pocketknives on the market.

After the World’s Fair, Imperial converted to full warproduction. The company teamed up with the Ulster Knife, owned by Henry and Albert Bear (another pair of brothers),

opened two more factories, and produced more than half of all knives delivered to the American Armed forces. In 1945, they were awarded the ARMY-NAVY “E” for excellence in the production of essential war goods. For over fifty more years, Imperial had a greatest hits list of knife achievements.

By 1966, they were the largest supplier of electric knife blades in America. Soon after, they won the Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s “SYMBOL OF EXCELLENCE” award.

Imperial, in short, made great knives: combat knives, kitchen knives, more pocketknives. It stayed open longer than most other factories in Providence, finally shutting down production in the early 2000s. A 1939 New York World’s Fair Imperial Pocket Knife sold on March 1 for $65.00 on eBay. We’re in the world of tomorrow.—GD

METRO

08

HERE A Dream Guide

by David Adler FEBRUARY 27, 2013 To see or ride a motorcycle in your dream symbolizes your desire for freedom and need for adventure. You may be trying to escape from some situation or some other responsibility in your waking life.

According to Freudian theory, dreams of falling indicate that you are contemplating giving in to a sexual urge or impulse.

You are lacking indiscretion.

If you are feeling fear when you are flying or that you are flying too high, then it suggests that you are afraid of challenges and of success. Perhaps you are not ready to take the next step.

According to biblical interpretations, dreams about falling have a negative overtone. It is believed that such dreams relate to how you are acting and walking, according to his own way of thinking and not those of the Lord.

To see the president of your country in your dream symbolizes authority, power and control.

To dream that you are at a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah ceremony represents a transitional phase into adulthood. It indicates your social responsibilities, sense of morality, mental reasoning, and hopes.

If you are the one doing the chasing, then the dream may highlight your drive and ambition to go after something you want. Or perhaps the dream suggests that you are falling behind and having to catch up with everyone else.

09 SCIENCE

FEBRUARY 28, 2013 To dream that you are at the mall represents your attempts in making a favorable impression on someone. You are trying to establish your identity and sense of self.

Known as “the big apple,� dreaming of New York City could mean that you need to eat a more healthy diet.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

I AM It’s been a difficult week. I took like fourteen Advil yesterday. But, a caveat: I am generally difficult, or “a frantic gesticulating shit,” as Arts editor Greg Nissan just called me. I get anxious about jobs and romance and if my friends like me. These are qualities I do not take great pains to hide, but still, “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind”

Freud

Over the course of the last week, I transcribed all of my dreams in the Notes section of my cell phone directly upon waking. The following is a thorough analysis of these transcriptions.

MARCH 2, 2013 To dream that darkness comes upon you signifies failure in some work that you are attempting.

A bikini indicates superficial desires

To see mud suggests that some spiritual cleansing is needed.

MARCH 1, 2013

To see a pig in your dream symbolizes dirtiness, greediness, stubbornness or selfishness.

To dream that you are confronted by the police suggests that you feel sexually or emotionally restrained because of guilt.

To dream that you or someone commits a crime represents feelings of guilt and shame. Your inner fears are hindering your growth and progress.

Instead of confronting the situation, your dream indicates that you have a tendency to run away and avoid the issue.

To dream that you witness a murder indicates deep-seated anger towards somebody.

All dream interpretations courtesy of DreamMoods.com

MARCH 08 2013

SCIENCE

10

Ballad on the Divergence Theorem A Song of Love and Integrals

by Jeremy Wagner

by Jeremy Wagner

The divergence theorem is employed in many branches of science. It states that the integral taken over a closed surface of the dot product of a vector-valued or tensorvalued function with the surface normal is equal to the integral of the divergence of that function taken over the volume bounded by that surface.

In other words, it allows one to say something definite about the behavior of a function inside a volume based only on how it behaves on the surface surrounding that volume. Thus, an unknown interior can be characterized by a known exterior with the application of the divergence theorem.

It makes, however, no predictions about the heights of folly reached by a young man in love. In fact, though the problem is still open, it is widely supposed that such a function is entirely unbounded.

There was a lovelorn mechanician, facing Cupid’s dread perdition, daily sending vain petition to the object of his love.

Daily sending, daily writing, everyday on dates inviting, losing battles always fighting, for her heart he could not move.

Said she, “I cannot know what lies beneath a suitor’s tender guise.

His gentle hands and lovely eyes conceal the contents of his heart.

The features on his surface tell me nothing of his volume; sell me not the looks I know so well, love is not won by lover’s art.

“I will not be your Ariadne, cast aside when once you’ve had me, bride in mourning tatters clad. Be sure of what I tell you now: the poems that you write today, the kisses on my cheeks you lay mean nothing; inner truth will sway me only; you must find out how.”

She gave the hand she held a squeeze, and parted, leaving on his knees our hero, failing to unfreeze the heart of his beloved one.

This mechanician wandered home; his thoughts began to widely roam of how for once he should intone that he loves her as he loves none.

His dinner went untouched that night, he only had an appetite for teasing out how yet he might relieve his hopeless suit’s travail.

But leaden-lidded Somnus came and called him by his very name.

When he or else his brother claim a soul, no protest will avail.

So fast asleep, he fell to dreaming (easier to bear than scheming ways to show that more than seeming was his promised love to her).

But ev’n in dreams his troubles goosed him, hounded him, and still refused him comfort. Oh, a man abused was he as no men ever were!

Then suddenly, an apparition

11

SCIENCE

woke our sleeping mechanician, following the grand tradition of more famous bedside ghosts.

“Lagrange I was in life,” it said, “since then I’ve wandered cold and dead, with Green and Gauss (of whom you’ve read) on Hades’ dark and gloomy coasts.

“You see, for lack of hobbies there, we shades take up a special care for mechanicians everywhere, and rise to give advice when needed.

The cry goes ‘round the underworld “A Mechanician Seeks His Girl!”

So back up onto Earth I’m hurled: now let my words be duly heeded.

“I’ll tell you of a lonely lad who loved a lady, but sat sad and wept, because the poor boy had too little to endear him.

The lady scorned the bright-eyed youth for want of syllogistic proof of love. Yet lacking her, in truth, the boy had naught to cheer him.

But finding some mathematics book he chanced to take a lucky look and felt a shock! The whole earth shook!

His answer now was near him!

The proof was on the printed page, the calculus would set the stage: young lovers two would get engaged by the GREAT DIVERGENCE THEOREM. Along his surface, head to toe, he’d integrate his outward show of love with normal dotted (so the theorem always goes.)

This integral’s equivalence to that of true love’s divergence within him stood as fact. And hence, his heart he could expose!

The loving surface features hold a loving volume, theorem told.

And with a ring of solid gold she married in a year him.

They revel, in regular intervals, while lovingly solving their integrals recalling that wonderful principle, of the GREAT DIVERGENCE THEOREM.”

The ghost an end of speaking made, “I’ll say no more, son, I’m afraid.

The answer is before you laid; no longer can I linger here.

Two married mechanicians fight o’er frame indifference every night And I must set the two aright!

My duty calls me towards their care.

“A phantom’s work is never done.

Take care that you might not be one!

Stay living while you’re able, son.”

And suddenly the ghost was gone.

Our mechanician, startled by the haunting, breathed a heavy sigh.

The ghost’s advice he vowed he’d try tomorrow at the rosy Dawn.

And when the rosy Dawn got up, he’d long since drained his breakfast cup.

He couldn’t wait for her to sup, so anxious was he on that day.

He tied his best and brightest tie; he pulled his argyle socks up high; to Bachelorhood he waved “Good-bye,” (at least he hoped things went that way.)

To his Beloved’s door he came, announced his suit in true love’s name.

He promised not the tired, same old tale he brought, but novel proof!

With patience and with hand-drawn graphs he taught her all his vector maths, professed his love, but she with laughs responded to the earnest youth.

“Dear boy, you are much denser than a stone to think a tensor can prove love. Would any censor ban your mad address? I’d say he should!

“Depart, without my pity, now You’ll never have my love, I vow, Nor will my sire a fool allow to take my hand in his for good.”

Our mechanician never saw that girl again; he took in lawful wedlock someone else. Now “Pa” four daughters call him and two sons.

And he, when met with apparitions (‘specially those of mechanicians) holds no tactful inhibitions: their every word he duly shuns.

THE END

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

UP IN THE AIR

by Greg Nissan, Alex Ronan & Sam Rosen Illustration by Alex Ronan

“I’m not sure I quite believe the final shot, though,” Robert Ebert said of Love and Basketball’s climax. Too cinematic, perhaps. But isn’t there always an alliterative ease to sports.

Two-handed heave. Buzzer-beater. Nothing but net. And yet, the whole thing defies descriptions, or at least one so simple.

People in White Plains are excited. There’s less than point one seconds on the clock. Khalil Edney says that his mother, dead of cancer, watches over him while he plays. The story is licked up, clicked.

Both the teams circle up on the courts, whooping and hugging, slapping backs and smiling. One pinches his jersey away off his chest so the number is clear. One. But the shot counts, the team loses, and the losers win.—AR

“i…i did it out of love. love of the game.” His heart did not feel like the Romantic Organ. “I had to put the team on my back.” Instead it was something of an engorged fist, pounding the brittle sticks of his ribs. “It…it just happened.” Sweat slicked down his adam’s apple onto the wooden floor. His Air Jordans bathed in the sticky perspiration. “It came out of nowhere.”

It’s hard to perform in front of an audience.

The crackling wash of their shouts, the smear of waving arms against the white walls.

What matters is the clock. The impending buzzer’s scream. Beat it. Beat it. Beat it.

“They checked the tape. It left my hands .1 seconds left” Adrenaline unborders the body. Pain is like a footnote to the situation, a distant comment. “All I did was throw the ball” The ball broke through the rim and seemed to scream from a thousand mouths.

Of course it was the crowd. The gym erupted in a leather-throated cry. Disbelief.

Ecstasy. Then, confusion. Was it enough?

Did it leave his hands in time? “But I knew it was goin’ in.”

The tension builds all game, mounting toward the final moment of release. That one sweet stroke to bring them to their knees. To send them into the miasma of the locker room with their heads down. They lumber onto the bus for the limp ride home. The opponents, that is. The other team stews in the electric warmth of The Big W. Tomorrow it will be a number, one more win in the left column, but tonight it engulfs them. —GN

MARCH 08 2013

there are people who listen to songs about a love triangle and cannot help but identify with the one left out. It’s that same phenomenon that keeps my eyes fixed on Devonte Banner. To find out who he is I had to watch the clip, pause it as he pivots to pass so that I could see his jersey number, and use the #20 to find him on the Mt. Vernon Basketball website. I was relieved to see that he’s only a junior because that horrible decision won’t be the last play of his career.

The thing about the shot is that, in and of itself, it’s not that incredible. As much as a buzzer-beating-half-court heave to beat the perennial juggernaut in the championship game can be “not that incredible.” What is incredible is the sequence, the way two opponents together created an outcome that neither one could have pulled off himself. In under three seconds there’s a pass, a steal, another pass, another steal, and the shot. It takes more time to read a description of what happened than it took for it to actually happen.

But none of it had to happen. Banner, the player who made the game-winning steal and then gave it right back, just had to hold on to the ball. Virtually none of the stories about this shot mention Devonte Banner, but we all understand that he’s the reason this game will be remembered. It’s so simple that it sounds like it must be some kind of trap.

Just hold the ball and your team wins the championship. This has probably been a rough week for Devonte Banner. Next winter someone will mention this shot and I’ll go look up Devonte’s stats. I hope he’ll be having a great season.—SR

SPORTS

12

Hands on Rawhide A Conversation with Sarah Bliss

by Grier Stockman & Claudia Norton Illustration by Henry Swanson

when you see sarah bliss in line at the post office, you probably can’t guess what she’s thinking. Sarah Bliss has short, gray hair and wears loose fitting earth tones. There are no frames around Sarah Bliss’s photographs, and for the provocative themes her art tackles, the artist is surprisingly calm.

At her show’s opening at the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center last Thursday. Bliss carried herself with thoughtfulness and spoke of her artwork slowly and with a considered seriousness.

Her show “All the Flesh of His Body” will exhibit in Brown’s Sarah Doyle Gallery until March 22nd.

Sarah Bliss is a new media artist who works in video, sound, performance and photography. The work in “All the Flesh of His Body” was incubated during an extensive stay on the remote Gaeltacht (Gaelic-speaking) coast of southwest County Kerry, Ireland. It negotiates the competing worldviews of an Irish Pagan era and a post 5th century Christian era. While the Pagan era was characterized by porous boundaries of nature and humanity, Christian dogma promotes the idea of the transubstantiation of the body of Christ.

Bliss deconstructs bodily boundaries, forefronting the seamlessness between material realities and the continual flux of form and matter. Scenes of a man encased by, struggling with, and romancing the skin of another animal are filmed and then projected onto sculptural forms molded from rawhide (created by sculptor Roslyn Driscoll). These projected images are then photographed. This continual transformation and the layering of permutations of flesh on flesh through flesh – dead and alive, flayed and intact – builds a world located somewhere between hallucinatory dream, piercing vision, and presumed reality. Along with the aforementioned photographs, All the Flesh of His Body includes a video installation entitled You Leave Here and two audio pieces.

Irish martyrs. It’s the only place where that happened. What was it about the compatibility of the pre-Christian Celtic mindset and early Christianity that facilitated that?

For me, there’s a wonderful dialogue between those two sensibilities. It’s a dialogue that can be contentious but it is also one where there is much resonance between the two worldviews.

Indy: Language, lost and found, plays an important role in your work. Your video, “You Leave Here,” is overlaid with a strong muffled voice. What is the voice doing in this work?

SB: The video is really about the experience of rootedness and place, and the way that is centered in the body. The voice gives directions about how to get from one place to another across a very specific landscape. Instructions about where to turn and which road to go down are interwoven with both a personal history and a cultural history of a specific place and a particular community. But the voice stumbles and falterst— hose pieces of history are broken and inaccessible.

The attempt to create a map, a way through or a way out, ultimately fails. This is a metaphor for the destruction of the Irish language, which was banned by British colonialists. The destruction of language destroys culture, disconnects people from their particular way of experiencing the world and expressing that experience. “You Leave Here” tells the story about the way that the pain and loss of that theft becomes lodged in the body. The hands become stand-ins for the entirety of the human body and they speak, silently but powerfully, of the anguish of that loss.

Indy: Could you speak to the “porous” nature of body and spirit as depicted in your work. Do you think humans are conscious of this fluid physical-spiritual relationship? Or is it your intention to bring awareness to it through your artwork.

The College Hill Independent: So, what’s your background?

Sara Bliss: I’m an artist with formal training in theology. I have a Masters from Harvard Divinity School. My practice centers on the body, exploring the spiritual, psychological and physical realities of embodiment, so all of the work that I do draws from that way of being in the world and the experience of embodiment.

Indy: Did you have a particular connection to Ireland before the retreat? What was your intention in going?

SB: I had been doing a lot of work investigating and exploring the kinesthetics of sacred space and the experience of the body within planned architectural spaces. I was very interested in continuing this research in Ireland in the ruins of both secular and sacred sites. I did a tremendous amount of research before going to Ireland, steeping myself in its history, particularly the history of the coming of Christianity to Ireland, and also the more recent history of the Great Hunger of 1847-49. The work in this show grew out of that experience and my interest in the Irish people’s navigation of cultural change and loss, both as a people subjected to political and cultural imperialism, and as a people navigating the same kind of ruptures from land, place and culture that are happening worldwide.

One of the interesting things about Ireland is that it was converted to Christianity without violence. There were no

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ARTS

SB: Yes, this fundamental truth is not part of our conscious lived experience. We are very much out of touch with our bodies in lives significantly oriented toward technology; and we prioritize vision almost to the exclusion of touch, sound, smell, and sense of movement. I do seek to communicate about these truths in my work and to inspire reflection on them. The photographic work in the show is from an ongoing project that examines the back and forth of matter, and the cycling and slippage of the body and its transformations.

I’ve been researching the structures and systems of industrial slaughterhouses, learning a lot about exactly how living bodies are transformed in massive numbers into food products. Its brutally horrific, and it’s something that our culture has chosen to sequester from the view of the public, because it is so deeply morally repugnant. I believe that it’s vitally important that this massive killing machine, which brutalizes not only the animals it slaughters but also the workers who labor within it, becomes known to us so that we can make clearer ethical choices about our own bodies’ participation in this cycle.

Roz and I have been looking for ways to bring our human bodies into another kind of contact with these animal bodies.

We’ve been projecting my video of human bodies onto and into and through the cattle skin. The photographic imagery in the show is made by filming a human model who is exploring, fighting with, and engaging the cattle skin. That video footage is then projected onto and through large sculptural forms that

have been made with the rawhide. This new species of animal (a sort of compound cow-human) is then photographed.

The link with Ireland is explored specifically through engagement with both Christain and pre-Christian texts (St. Patrick’s 5th century Confessio, and the 1st century pre-Christian epic Tain Bo Cuailnge). The Tain exquisitely expresses the pre-Christian sensibility of fluidity of matter the continual morphing and shape shifting of human and animal, sea and sky, plant and people that are happening around us all the time.

Indy: We’ve heard rumors that you’re planning to print the photographs in this show on hide. Is this true?

SB: This presentation of the photographs is not wholly satisfactory for me. I want to have a closer marriage. I want the skin to stay present all the way through, and having it on paper was a compromise for me. I have begun experimenting with making contact prints of the images onto animal skin.

I’ve been working with a wonderful old-style tannery. I can describe to the folks there the specific type of skin I’m looking for— goat or deer, sheep or cow skin with a particular quality of transparency. They are able to choose for me skins that retain the markings of the life of the animal. Including that physical evidence of the lifestory of the animal – the branding on a cow’s flank, the scars where a deer gouged its leg in a fall –is important to me.

Indy: Speaking of layering, do you connect the process to the themes in the piece? Did you choose layering for just the visual effect, or for some conceptual elegance?

SB: The layering is really important to me conceptually. My process reenacts the transformations which I’m highlighting.

It starts in the real with a live human body and a semilive animal skin (though dead, it feels alive when wet and slippery). The next transformation is the video editing and then the next layer is projecting that back onto another type of skin and then going again into photography. The process is a mirror of the ideas I’m working with, and it insists on the fact that everything is always changing.

We don’t think about it in our daily life, but if you just stop for a second and think that when you eat a hamburger, you’re taking a cow into your body and your body is literally changing cow into person, you touch into the sacred. The cow doesn’t remain a cow in you, it turns into human cells.

It becomes your eyes, it becomes your skin, it becomes your stomach, and that’s incredible to me and that’s the story of the incarnation—that matter changes and that the spirit is in all of these things. We walk around and think that our bodies end where our skin ends and that on one side is us and on the other side it’s the world, but it doesn’t work that way. You’ve had the experience of driving past a place where a skunk has released its scent and you smell the skunk, right? We think we’re just passing and smelling a skunk. We’re here and the skunk was there. But what’s actually happening is cells from the skunk’s body are literally entering your body and merging with your body and becoming you. You’re becoming part skunk.

GRIER STOCKMAN B’14 & CLAUDIA NORTON B’14 are going to County Kerry for SpRiNg BrEaK 2013!

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Hot Wieners

by Anna Rotman Photographs by Jenna Klorfein

leaving the cab double-parked and idling, the man runs in and breathlessly orders three wieners “all the way.” He wolfs them down, meter still ticking, and explains that he has just flown back into TF Green airport after two decades away from town. He is returning to visit his mother whom he hadn’t seen since leaving Rhode Island all those years back.

Before the cab could make it to her home, though, he had to make a stop on Plainfield Street: he couldn’t put off getting his fix. “That’s right,” owner Greg Stevens chuckles as he recalls the story, “he had to get his hot wieners even before he went to see his mother!” After over 35 years working at Olneyville NY System Wieners, Stevens has met his share of dedicated fans.

Despite his graying hair, Stevens looks younger than his 52 years. He speaks softly and isn’t easily fazed by his hectic surroundings. He says he’s not outspoken and doesn’t have a sense of humor, but within minutes, he’s discussing Fox News and in the same breath introducing a cook behind the counter as his soon-to-be-former employee. Most of the staff has been working with him for over twenty years and many of the customers have been coming in for generations. In most wiener establishments, customers can ask the guys behind the counter to prepare their wienies “up the arm,” lining them up on one limb while dressing them with the other. And the cooks are not the only ones providing entertainment: almost every late-night location has some sort of a competition. At the Plainfield shop, the last recorded was a customer eating 16 wieners in under 35 minutes. At the Original NY System on Smith Street, they keep tally of the total number of wienies downed by groups of university students. Right now, La Salle University is well ahead with an average of 11 wienies apiece.

A “all the way,” it must have these four toppings: mustard, meat sauce, diced onions, and celery salt. The choice of wiener and the meat sauce recipe varies amongst Rhode Island’s dozen or so hot wiener restaurants. One part of the equation never changes, though: these wieners are decidedly not hot dogs. They most closely resemble frankfurters. According to Stevens, classic wieners entail veal, pork, and beef encased in lamb intestines. The distinction sometimes gets blurry and both the Original NY System on Smith Street and the Olneyville NY System on Plainfield Street accused the other of the unthinkable: serving their patrons hot dogs.

Competition amongst franchises and their loyal customers

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reached such a level that the Rhode Island Monthly had to take a break from including hot wieners as a category in their “Best of Rhode Island” competition. It had become too contentious, and they couldn’t keep up with all the angry letters from loyal customers.

At least three of the state’s dozen or so chains are descendants of the same initial shop. Legend has it that Gust Pappas, a Greek immigrant who had first arrived in New York City and then moved to Providence, opened the Original NY System Hot Wieners in 1927. The meat sauce recipe, passed down patrilineally, is a guarded family secret: his grandson, Gus Pappas, still comes in once a week to mix the spices into the 100 pound batches of ground beef. In the 1940’s, though, Gust grew ill and his son wasn’t yet old enough to take over the business, so they brought their cousins from Brooklyn to help with the shop— that’s when the Stevens family comes in. Once Gust was back on his feet, the Stevenses moved on and opened two stores, one that became Olneyville NY System Wieners. These three different chains have evolved independently, though their products are not wildly dissimilar.

Plus, many of the other stores across the state got their start with employees or customers, family members and friends, of the earlier hot wiener shops. So when people say that they prefer Rod’s Grill in Warren, or Wein-O-Rama in Cranston, or Nick’s New York System in West Warwick, one can guess that it’s a lot like supporting your local sports team: it’s something you’re born into.

Stevens, who started working for his father at the age of 14, now owns and manages the Olneyville NY System with his sister. They are the fourth generation to run the family business. Not much has changed since they took over: “Look at this siding,” he says, “it’s from 1946.” And the tables?

They’re from 1946 too. Tradition is important to Stevens.

It’s what keeps customers coming back. He says that the best compliment he can get is when patrons return after years away and say things haven’t changed a bit.

The menu is simple and any attempt to spruce it up has been thoroughly ignored by regulars. So Olneyville NY System sticks to the basics: hot wieners, beef stew, and coffee milk. To native Rhode Islanders, these items don’t need further explaining. And that’s partly why it’s so easy to spot first-timers. They fumble with their orders, ask for ketchup on their wiener, and avoid the beef stew. Locals might not

know the story behind the beef stew, but they do know what it is: a plate of fries with ketchup, vinegar, and salt. And they certainly know better than to ask for ketchup on a wiener.

“We don’t just ignore that order, we humiliate the customer,” Stevens jokes.

The Olneyville NY System chain has expanded to two new locations: one in Cranston and one in North Providence, and Stevens does not intend to take thier operation out of state.

It just wouldn’t make sense. They’ve tried marketing their doit-yourself hot wiener sauce spice mix in grocery stores, and sales drop off as soon as they pass state lines. Even opening up the two new stores was a challenge. Stevens made national headlines in 2009 when he got caught up in an FBI and US Attorney’s Office investigation into a corruption scandal involving three of the seven members of the North Providence Town Council. Stevens knew that opening up shop in North Providence would mean going head to head with greedy politicians. His sister thought he was stuck in the past; that stuff was Rhode Island history, but didn’t exist anymore. And yet the day after the two filed for a late-night permit to extend their hours past midnight, Stevens began receiving phone calls from the council members and their friends. Finally, he was approached directly and told that the permit was going to cost him a $5,000 bribe. He laughed it off, gave up on the permit, and hasn’t looked back. The council members in question were indicted and Stevens is more than satisfied with the latenight crowds drawn in by the Olneyville location.

Hot wieners are not as grimy as corrupt North Providence politicians, but their history is just as murky: their creation myth is convoluted and cloaked in mystery. Gust Pappas’ son and Greg Steven’s uncle, Ernie Pappas, is in his 90s now. Stevens often presses him for details on the origin of Rhode Island style hot wieners, but Pappas always manages to evade the question: “Nobody wants to know,” he tells his nephew. “Everybody wants to know. I want to know,” Stevens tells me.

ANNA ROTMAN B’14 knows the story behind beef stew.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

IS IT SPRING YET?

by Benson Tucker

Photographs by Robert Merritt

YES

this week in ‘around the town,’ your investigators decided to ask people whether it is springtime yet. The results are inconclusive.

Our measurement system was not quite up to the level of our received responses’ specificity. More often than not, respondents preferred to suggest that the current season is in fact a direction, a gradient, or a hope, and it was up to your investigators to coerce them into a more simplistic position. At times, we believed the respondents were lying, and we have recorded liars in the column that we believe corresponds to their true, secret response.

It is a commonly held belief in the field of street solicitation that mixed-gender pairs elicit higher response rates. Many respondents did not stop. Some would comment on the presence or absence of springtime, but would refuse a picture. One gentleman claimed to be camera shy, despite looking pretty good! This problem may not have presented were your investigators a mixed-gender pair.

NO

BENSON TUCKER B’13 & ROBERT MERRITT B’13 have sprung.

MARCH 08 2013

METRO

16

A Story of this Nature

by Jessica Giguere Illustration by Diane Zhou

sebastian engaged in coitus at age 18 in 1957. Two spawns were engendered from this act of passion. Sebastian was young. He was in college. He ate the majority of his food from tin soup cans. He played football for the University of Vermont. He had a rabbit named Fur. He had a German Shepherd named Sex Wax. He was very young. His new twin sons were very young. A couple towns over, Maria was also very young. On May 3, 1957 at 6:00PM, she was 2 months 8 hours old. It can be assumed that Maria and Sebastian had not yet met at this time (she was recently born and he was beginning a family). Stories of this nature demand a certain precision. At this point, time moved onward. Thankfully, Maria physically, intellectually and emotionally developed from infant-hood.

Sebastian grew up in whatever way a man of Sebastian’s nature can grow up. The pair of blue-eyed spawn evolved in girth, length and weight over the years. The responsibility of offspring instigated a process of maturation in Sebastian. 20 years passed, at which point Maria had aged to 20, and Sebastian 38. They had reached a comparable degree of perception and sagacity. The spawn had reached the age of 20 as well.

Sebastian had amassed a fortune, which he was now quickly consuming, through the development of a kitchen appliance technology (electric mixer) and came to believe cigar smoking to be imperative for a man of his stature.

Accordingly, at 12:03AM on Wednesday, July 3, 1977, Sebastian Vittver drove down Interstate-293 in a red Jaguar with an unlit cigar positioned between his lips. In these days, “impression was everything.” As a child I often received the advice, “Fake it ’till you make it, baby.” That is what he was doing on this particular July 3. It can be assumed that a generic Bob Dylan song played from a tape player—for the purpose of setting the scene and aiding imagination.

Maria wore a silver-sequined camisole. She was driving a lemon-green 1974 Volkswagen Dasher; a stark contrast alongside Sebastian’s cherry-flavored vanitymobile. At my first inquiry and since then, Maria has abstained from revealing her summer profession at this time. This piece of the puzzle remains missing. I have taken the liberty of including some hypotheses that aids in my understanding of their courtship. These are: unlicensed pediatrician, investment banker, Barnum & Bailey ringleader, surrogate mother, the fourth Charlie’s Angel and President.

My recommendations are based in an extensive archive of personal qualities and knowledge of careers my mother excels at today. Aside from the hum of friction clinging to air, body and vehicle, silence pervaded the scene. While driving home, she was organizing, scheming, inventing—employing all lobes of the brain stowed inside her head of straight, strawberry-red locks. My mother and the owl exhibit a peculiar quantity of analogous characteristics. Among these: they both do their thinking at night.

Somewhere around 12:05AM their respective vehicles came abreast. Sebastian caught site of bona fide, version-red Goldilocks. He decelerated to allot five additional seconds for observation of the specimen. Maria perceived the lingering

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LITERARY

and took notice of the unidentified presence in the red car. It is at this moment I assert that an element of fate commandeered the situation. Or perhaps it was fate that led them to this highway at this hour. Either way, something of this manner ensued: Maria accelerated. Sebastian accelerated. Maria accelerated more.

Sebastian accelerated more, more. Maria accelerated more, more, more. Sebastian became intrigued with Maria’s competitive nature and driving capabilities. Maria questioned whether her competitive nature was dangerous. Maria turned off exit 17, towards the apartment of her at-the-time-boyfriend.

At this point I become doubtful of my capabilities to accurately clarify my father’s mental rationale. He had a total of three minutes for deliberation. At the culmination of these three minutes he chose to exit I-293 at the succeeding ramp in pursuit of his mysterious contender. It will be assumed that within these three minutes of deliberation he found himself fantasizing, envisioning a woman of such intoxicating qualities as to be worthy of pursuit. He pulled off at the exit and began his quest. He explored for ten minutes without success. Amused by his spontaneous impulse, yet discouraged, he turned back in the direction of the interstate. He reminded himself to do things of this nature more often.

Fortuitously, as he approached the ramp, he caught a glimpse of the lights of her car in a parking lot beside the road. There she sat, reading. Her automobile glowed in the darkness. I imagine that my mother glowed as well, more radiantly than car lights or streetlights or stars.

He pulled his car alongside her in the nearly empty lot of the sleeping apartment complex at 12:25AM. She became exceptionally aware of the lingering, unidentified presence in the red car.

She had thoughts like, “He’s kind of big and old.” And, “I need to stop reading the newspaper in empty parking lots at night.” And, “How many people do you think he’s killed before?”

He was wearing a tuxedo. She started to perspire. He rapped on her car window. She shook her head in disapproval.

He mouthed, “I don’t want to rape you.” tales of this class can have a profound influence on their audience. At age seven, I became helplessly romantic, often sending private notes to suitable gentlemen in gymnastics class, math class and mountaineering club. These notes read along the lines of, “Marty, I don’t want to rape you.” Or “Benjamin, I don’t want to rape you. Meet you on the slide.” My handling of the word “rape” was discovered one Thursday, and I served a week of in-school detention. Despite my misdemeanors, at the culmination of lower school, I was awarded the prized superlative, “Class Casanova.” At the time I was unaware of the significance of this award. However, today it is my most treasured achievement. Due to the success of my seduction technique I was able to kiss (without tongue) a total of twenty-four boys between 2nd and 4th grade.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

thi

Ma s day rc th h 8 is in l cale e year in the 67 ister nda t r (6 the G h day o y 8th r in a egorian f leap year ).

FRIDAY MARCH 8

MONDAY MARCH 11

WEDNESDAY MARCH 13

saltwater fishing show // rhode island convention center, 1 sabin st., providence Tackle, rods, reels, lures, electronics, charter guides, boast, motors, clothing, and accessories. As seen on Wicked Tuna. Friday 1PM9PM, Saturday 9AM-7PM, Sunday 10AM-5PM.

annabelle selldorf // martinos auditorium, the granoff center, brown university Did you know they’re renovating the John Hay Library? Details at 6PM.

boundless poetics // mccormack family theater, brown university Poets and novelists from the Middle East discuss communicating sensibility during times of changes. 3PM.

concert // the granoff center, brown university Stephen Vitiello, a break from the Providence noise scene, watch this cute guy fiddle with things. Ooh, birds. Free. 7:30-9:30PM.

SATURDAY MARCH 9 trailer show extravaganza // the granoff center, brown university The Arkham Film Society presents an hour of crazy trailers (horror cult & exploitation films) AND a surprise mystery feature. Yikes. $5.

7PM.

SUNDAY MARCH 10

cd release // building 16, providence Wolf Porn, Cigarette, and the first show ever for Nightmom. The show will also feature projections, lights, and tropes of spectacle. $4-5. 9PM.

creative medicine series // room 315, pembroke hall, brown university I’m always feeling sick. Challenging the illness narrative: hypochondria et. al. 5:30PM.

TUESDAY MARCH 12

THURSDAY MARCH 14

culinary adventures // easy entertaining inc., 116 valley st., providence A BYOB cooking class! You will learn how to break down a chicken, debone, and even grind (whoa) a turkey. $19. 6PM.

zine workshop // third world center, brown university DIY. RSVP online. 5PM.

intersections // metcalf auditorium, brown university A lecture by Julia Serano, author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity.

“artists on art” // risd museum, risd Talk about the RISD Faculty Biennial. It happens every two years, I’ve heard it’s pretty good. 2PM.

in the know? >> e.g. how to vanquish? >> listtheindy@gmail.com >> @list_easy

talent show // as220, 115 empire st., providence Featuring the Indy’s own power couple: Playground Jerks wearing velvet, dressed as David Bowie (from different eras). Also Goodman, good friends, etc. Free. 9PM. social creatures // trinity repertory company, 201 washington st. providence An international pandemic has decimated humanity. Where are the true monsters found? World premiere.

It’s a play. $28-68. 7:30PM.