The College Hill Independent — Vol. 44 Issue 8

THE INDY*

03 HAPPY HOUR 11 ODRADEK 15 COILED

Volume 44 Issue 08 15 April 2022

THE SENSORY ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

THE INDY* This Issue

Masthead*

00 “UNTITLED 2018”

MANAGING EDITORS Ifeoma Anyoku Sage Jennings Isaac McKenna Alisa Caira

Nina Fletcher

02 WEEK IN BROTHERHOOD Masha Breeze & Nora Mathews

03 DSF MUST NEGOTIATE WITH FAIRLAWN TENANTS Hilary Rasch

05 CROCODILE TEARS Hanna Aboueid

07 REGINA SPEKTOR IS A SINGER/ SONGWRITER Harry Levine

WEEK IN REVIEW Masha Breeze Nora Mathews FEATURES Anabelle Johnston Corinne Leong Amelia Wyckoff NEWS Anushka Kataruka Nicole Kim Priyanka Mahat ARTS Jenna Cooley Justin Scheer Arden Shostak

07 VACATION

Henry Kirwan Bohan

EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Ayça Ülgen

07 HAPPY HOUR Alyscia Batista

08 RABBITS, DUCKS, AND TOO HOT TO HANDLE

METRO Jack Doughty Nélari Figueroa Torres Rose Houglet Sacha Sloan

09 AN OBSESSION WITH ANCIENT HIDDEN TREASURE IS WEIRD

SCIENCE + TECH Rhythm Rastogi Jane Wang

Annie Stein

Dana Herrnstadt

BULLETIN BOARD Deb Marini Lily Pickett

10 “CALL ME” Lola Simon

X Soeun Bae

11 ODRADEK Alex Purdy

13 AUTOFICTION’S FUNHOUSE MIRROR Cecilia Barron Alex Valenti

17 UNBOXING Robin Zeng

LITERARY Alyscia Batista Annie Stein

DESIGN EDITORS Anna Brinkhuis Sam Stewart

SENIOR EDITORS Alana Baer Audrey Buhain Mara Cavallaro Anabelle Johnston Deb Marini Peder Schaefer STAFF WRITERS Hanna Aboueid Caroline Allen Zach Braner Rachel Carlson Lily Chahine Swetabh Changkakoti Danielle Emerson Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo Mariana Fajnzylber Edie Fine Ricardo Gomez Eli Gordon Eric Guo Charlotte Haq Billie McKelvie Charlie Mederios Bilal Memon Loughlin Neuert Alex Purdy Callie Rabinovitz Nick Roblee-Strauss Nell Salzman Peder Schafer Janek Schaller Koyla Shields Ella Spungen Alex Valenti Siqi ‘Kathy’ Wang Katherine Xiong COPY EDITORS Addie Allen Evangeline Bilger Klara Davidson-Schmich Megan Donohue Mack Ford Sarah Goldman Zoey Grant Alara Kalfazade Jasmine Li Abigail Lyss Tara Mandal Becca Martin-Welp Pilar McDonald Kabir Narayanan Eleanor Peters Angelina Rios-Galindo

COVER COORDINATOR Seoyoung Kim DESIGNERS Briaanna Chiu Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Clara Epstein Elisa Kim Tanya Qu Emily Tom Floria Tsui WEB DESIGN Lucas Gelfond ILLUSTRATION EDITOR Hannah Park ILLUSTRATORS Sylvie Bartusek Ashley Castañeda Hannah Chang Claire Chasse Michelle Ding Rosie Dinsmore Quinn Erickson Lillyanne Fisher Sophie Foulkes John Gendron Amonda Kallenbach Joshua Koolik Lucy Lebowitz Olivia Lunger Tom Manto Sarosh Nadeem Kenney Nguyen Izzy Roth-Dishy Lola Simon Livia Weiner GAME MAKERS Loughlin Neuert Maya Polsky WRITING FELLOW Chong Jing ‘CJ’ Gan MVP Anna Brinkhuis Sam Stewart — The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI in Seekonk, Massachusets.

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement

18 DEAR INDY Cecilia Barron

19 BULLETIN

From the Editors Tonight, I am wondering if I will get another parking ticket. I tend to lose my car like a sport. Spring is all halfway through a drive parking on Benefit and deciding to walk.

My car is older than I am. It cost me a whole Summer and a bit more. The engine sputters and the radio is haunted. The seats remind me both of fur and carpeted floors.

Often, I wonder if people I pass on the street know my car as another version of me. Do they look at my car, with its peeling roof and scraped sides, and think, “There, that is Alisa.”? I don’t know, and I won’t.

-AC

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

DEAR INDY Cecilia Barron

OUTREACH COORDINATOR Audrey Buhain

15 COILED

01

Volume 44 Issue 08 15 April 2022

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures.

Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and selfcritical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

WEEK IN REVIEW

Week in Brotherhood Hey, Indy. Masha here.

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard that a certain co-editor of the Week in Review has started her own fraternity. So cool, right? I’m so happy for Nora and her extremely exclusive “Friend House,” a theme house where the theme is ‘friends with Nora.’ Congrats, Nora! Everyone here at the Indy is really proud of you.

Just. Kidding.

When I tried to join the so-called Friend House, I was given the cold shoulder and the ‘muddy pillow,’ as they say in Iowa. Even though I gave a great audition (singing selections from my one-woman musical revue, Return to the Emporium: The Mrs. Magorium Story) and I let the frat haze me every day for a month (converting to an all-mustard diet, changing my name to Femcellina, etc.), I still wasn’t allowed in. Last time I checked, being “off putting” and “flirting with everyone” and being “evil but not in a hot girl way, in a dogs-don’t-like-me kind of way” doesn’t make me unqualified to join a fraternity.

And I know everyone keeps saying I should be glad I didn’t get in because Friend House has all these weird inside jokes, like, they all have to call Nora “The Oracle” and they have their own holidays, like Donate a Pint of Your Blood to Nora Day and Steal a Baby for Nora Day; I get it. They’re the cool, edgy friend group, and I’m

just…not. The only edgy thing I do is wear Jeffrey Dahmer glasses and do microaggressions against my peers every day, which is cool, but not Friend House-cool.

That’s why I’m starting my own theme house: the Fraternity Against Popularity.

FAP’s mission is simple: to foster an inclusive space where diverse individuals can gather and exchange ideas, so long as they have identical views, hotness levels, and a dedication to not asking too many questions. FAP is different from other frats, in that we’re a sorority, and also a pretty transparent MLM. While our religious order is spreading the good word about our deity, Coke Rat, our totally unrelated business is busy selling a variety of Italian sauces—just the way your Noni and Freepo made them! What makes our sauces different, you ask?

They can cure treatment-resistant depression. So say goodbye to big pharma and hello to Big Parma, the only sauce-based cure for TRD endorsed by Squeaky Fromme and sponsored by Ford Truck Month: When You’re Here, You’re Buying a Truck.

Anyway, I’m totally over this whole ‘Nora vs. Masha’ thing; it doesn’t matter who started it, or who sprinkled salt on the other one’s

crops, or who publicly doxxed the other one on Twitter. This is not a pissing contest (although if it was, I’m preeetttty confident my medically heavy piss flow and huge fucking dong would win the day).

Sincerely, Masha Breeze

Hello Noranators!

I’m here to clear Friend House’s name in light of some criticism that has been levied at us.

(One amazing way to start off on the right foot is to start a letter by saying criticism was “levied.” My vocabulary has gotten super good ever since the Creator started using me as a vessel!)

Please note that anyone who does not respond to this notice with a list of 10 things they love about me, including drawings and an original song, will be placed on probation (which you KNOW means you will not be eligible to participate in the Design A Haircut That Is Flattering For Nora’s Face Challenge!).

I know what you might be thinking, but not all of the House’s activities are intentionally centered around me! And if they were, remember who it was who first came up with the idea for Beer Yogurt—beer but there’s yogurt in it! I care about all of your gut health like sooo much.

This leads me to my next point: Friend House is a meritocracy! Why else would everyone have told me my 2022 trend predictions were spot on (1. hotdog no bun, 2. scene bangs, 3. straight marriage)? I know I’m right because I gave all of you side-swept bangs and they look amazing.

See, I deserve to be Oracle and make a crew of gorgeous elegant nerds do my homework for me!

Seriously, please remember how much I sacrifice for all of you. It’s so nice of me to use the house’s funds to buy the winner of the bi-monthly singing contest an ATV! It’s NOT my fault the only songs we can sing are from Harry Connick Jr.’s discography and it’s NOT my fault they were made for my range (baritone with an innate sense of empathy). Now I have 15 ATVs and an alternative haircut, which puts me exactly in the middle of the American political spectrum. It’s so important that your leader is popular on both sides of the aisle!

You guys also forget that there wouldn’t be a social life on campus without me. Without Friend House Fight Night, where would you all meet eligible singles willing to risk it all to fight in my honor after taking a sip of the house’s

communal jungle juice? Friend House’s secret jungle juice recipe is 100 “Nora Mathews pills” dissolved in chocolate milk. What other frat leader manufactures their own medication?

I started this fraternity (fraternity is from the language called Latin☺) for one reason, and one reason only: to make my parents proud.

My parents have always encouraged me to split rent with 30 people who are too scared to try to borrow my car! This is also the only frat on campus for multi-hyphenate creators, and anyone who tries to threaten our community of actor-producer-director-wallflower-patriot-NYC transplant-dog moms is probably really messed up on the inside and maybe also the victim of a recent hit-and-run. (This does not count as a confession, Masha! Both of our lawyers know I didn’t hit you with my car. Your argument will never hold up in a court of law!).

Oh, also, I’m hearing the Creator tell me that next Tuesday is Spend $40 On Something That Would Look Nice in Nora’s Room Day! Can’t wait to see you all there.

Love, Nora TEXT MASHA BREEZE & NORA MATHEWS DESIGN FLORIA TSUI ILLUSTRATION MICHELLE DING

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 08

02

METRO

DSF must negotiate with Fairlawn Tenants Our connections to this demand as Brown community members

TEXT HILARY RASCH

DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

ILLUSTRATION TOM MANTO

A liberal “patron”

03

In 2017, the title of Artistic Director of Trinity Repertory Company—held by the Artistic Director of the Brown/Trinity MFA programs in Acting and Directing—was renamed the Arthur P. Solomon and Sally E. Lapides Director, following a multi-year donation by Solomon.

The Arthur P. Solomon and Sally E. Lapides Artistic Director, Curt Columbus, said of his new title at the regional theater in Providence, in an interview with Providence Business News, “It’s particularly important to me in that Sally and Art are good friends of mine. I know their commitment to arts, activism, and social justice…They have a broad-reaching interest in making R.I. a better place to live, and we share that. Art and Sally are very involved with us in our MFA programming with Brown University, and with our programs for school kids.”

Columbus’ statement speaks to how capitalists like Solomon, who is a Brown University alumnus, can accrue influence and flattering proximity to political institutions and the arts.

This influence and proximity weakens the possibility that either political institutions or institutionally-housed arts programming will become more democratic, while bolstering the reputations of capitalists as socially engaged and obscuring their harmful impacts. (Here we might also think of the likes of Warren Kanders, Arthur M. Sackler, or Leon Black.) One would not know from Columbus’ description that Solomon is a corporate landlord with property in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York— merely that he is a “patron.”

Solomon’s prominence as a wealthy liberal with sway in Providence could also be seen, for instance, when Joe Biden visited in 2019 for an exclusive fundraiser for his presidential run, held at Solomon’s and his wife Sally Lapides’ house. The not-exactly-accessible cost of attending ranged from $1,000 to $2,800.

Like Lapides, who is President and CEO of Residential Properties Ltd., Solomon has amassed his wealth and influence through real estate since graduating from Brown University.

He founded “lucrative” real estate groups at the Wall Street investment firm Drexel Burnham, before moving into leadership at the Lazard Freres real estate unit. His latest venture was to co-found the DSF Group, of which he is currently Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

DSF Group, a corporate landlord, describes what they do as follows: “We acquire well located multi-family properties near transportation hubs and then reposition the properties through the implementation of well thought out renovations.” Given the increasing prevalence of transit-induced gentrification at the hands of real estate and developers, DSF’s self-description not-so-subtly suggests that DSF profits off of gentrification and displacement of working-class

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Black and Brown communities. One such community is the residents of Fairlawn Apartments in Mattapan, a majority Black and immigrant neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts.

From Fairlawn Apartments to SoMa at the T In the early 2000s, residents in Mattapan, who watched the Fairmont commuter rail line pass right through their neighborhood without stopping, began organizing to bring a train stop to their community. It finally opened in 2019.

Gabrielle René, a community organizer with the housing justice organization City Life/ Vida Urbana, told the College Hill Independent, “I have been in this community for nearly 20 years, and I know DSF and its chairman did not do the work to bring about this train station.

It was the community, people from my church, for example…who worked very hard because they thought, why not? We live here, a train is going through the city everyday. How come it’s not stopping?...Now that’s the stop that’s giving Fairlawn residents sleepless nights.”

With construction for the train stop well underway, DSF Group purchased Fairlawn Apartments for $65 million dollars. As Sheila Gunn, a resident at Morton Village in Mattapan—whose tenants’ association successfully negotiated a 5-year affordable lease with its landlord in 2020—said at a teach-in, “We know that chances are that any time a corporate entity purchases a building that what they are going to do is raise the rent.” And this is exactly what DSF Group did at Fairlawn Apartments.

Fairlawn Apartments has housed primarily Black, low-income, and immigrant residents for decades. When DSF bought the 347+ unit apartment complex, they raised the rents steeply, by as much as 50%. Many residents have been priced out and have faced mass evictions since, while serious problems in the buildings have been left unfixed.

“I’ve lived here for 50 years,” said Annie Gordon, a Fairlawn resident and member of the Fairlawn Tenants Association, at a protest outside of the onsite Fairlawn management office on February 14. “When DSF purchased the building, they raised the rent so high—in my personal opinion, to push people out because we are not what they want here now—I had to take a part-time job to pay what I was originally paying. I’m 71 years old. It’s unfair to me. The most insulting part is that DSF Group won’t sit with us to try to work out a fair increase and contract.”

As a sign of DSF’s effort to reposition Fairlawn apartments—in conjunction with larger, ongoing development plans to gentrify Mattapan—they renamed the complex “SoMA apartments at the T.” That DSF has failed to provide safe and comfortable conditions at Fair-

lawn, even after raising the rents by hundreds of dollars, alone suggests that the sharp increase in the cost of living was not designed to provide an increase in quality of living for longtime Fairlawn residents but instead to try to force them to leave.

Fairlawn residents continue to live with untreated mold and pest infestations. While the supposedly communal outdoor areas at the complex look pretty, children tenants of the complex are effectively banned from playing in these outdoor areas through new DSF building policies.

“I’ve been at Fairlawn for about 40 plus years, and I love my community where I live,” said Betty Lewis—who, like Gordon, is a resident at Fairlawn and a member of the Fairlawn Tenants Association—to the Indy. “We shouldn’t have to lose where we live. We are retired, we are elderly, we are disabled, and we are on a fixed income. We need a safe and stable environment with a peace of mind, not having to worry about housing. This is a community issue. This is a big development of 347 units. Its future affects all of Mattapan.”

In response to the threat of mass evictions at the hands of DSF, residents at Fairlawn formed the Fairlawn Tenants Association in 2019 to fight to stay in their homes and to improve conditions. Since its formation, members of Tenants Association have demonstrated outside of the onsite Fairlawn management office and outside of DSF headquarters in Boston, and they have petitioned with community support.

They have also refused to sign new leases with unjust rent increases—becoming tenants at-will, or tenants who have no lease—in an effort to get DSF to respond to these community demands. But DSF continues to refuse to bargain with tenants.

“The tenant association is asking that DSF owners meet with us to negotiate a fair and reasonable contract for this community,” said Lewis. “This has been a long fight for us. DSF refused to meet with us. They act like they don’t know us. They don’t want to be a part of us.

They own the building, but they don’t want to deal with the tenant association. I am saying that we are here. We are not going anywhere.”

Since 2019, members of the Fairlawn Tenants Association, including Lewis and Gordon, have become central figures in housing justice organizing in Boston and beyond. They have lent their presence and support to struggles in East Boston, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Malden—and have rallied for statewide legislation.

During this time, they have seen a number of other landlords come to the table with tenants.

That DSF has continued to refuse and ignore Fairlawn tenants highlights DSF’s particular cruelty as a landlord, as well as the Fairlawn tenants’ steadfastness and creativity in their struggle.

METRO

Seeking new ways to get DSF to respond, Fairlawn tenants and community supporters recently decided to bring their fight to Brown University and Trinity Repertory Company—given the connections between DSF chairman Arthur P. Solomon, Brown University, and Trinity Repertory Company.

Trinity Rep’s hollow “commitment to fighting racism” Trinity Repertory Company, where Solomon sits on the Board of Trustees and previously served as Vice Chair, is a prestigious and pricey regional theater located in Providence, founded in 1963. Over the years, Trinity’s relationship with Brown University has deepened. In 2002, Trinity Repertory Conservatory merged with Brown to become the Brown/Trinity M.F.A. Programs.

Trinity Rep has faced criticism for anti-Black casting decisions in its productions. In 2016, for instance, community members engaged in a silent protest outside of Trinity Rep before a performance of Oklahoma! in response to racist casting decisions in that production and in other recent productions. Trinity Rep responded by defending its actions.

In recent years, Trinity Rep has done more work to associate itself with progressive values.

For example, its website has a page called “Anti-Racism at Trinity Rep,” which states, “At Trinity Repertory Company, Black lives matter. We commit to struggle together for equity, diversity, and inclusion. We stand in solidarity with and alongside those who are committed to fighting racism, oppression, and hate.” This section of the website also includes a land acknowledgement.

Such statements can only ever fall profoundly—even cruelly—short when board members like Solomon are playing an active role in the displacement of people like the Fairlawn tenants—largely working-class Black elders— from their homes and land.

As 150 artists and art workers wrote in an open letter targeting MoMA board members with ties to war, prison and border enforcement systems, and gentrification and displacement— but which applies equally to Brown University and Trinity Repertory Company—“we must think seriously about a collective exit from art’s imbrication in toxic philanthropy and structures of oppression, so that we don’t have to have the same conversations over and over, one board member at a time…Museums and other arts institutions must pursue alternative models, cooperative structures, Land Back initiatives, reparations, and additional ideas that constitute an abolitionist approach toward the arts and arts patronage, so that they align with the egalitarian principles that drew us to art in the first place.”

Solidarity with Fairlawn from graduate workers and undergraduates “I’d like to take this opportunity to express our union’s solidarity with Fairlawn’s tenants,” said Michael Ziegeler, the political director of Graduate Labor Organization (GLO), the union of graduate student workers at Brown University. “Our union is dedicated to using our collective power for the good of those who are harmed as Brown bolsters the reputations of wealthy donors and operates less like a school and more like a profit driven hedge fund. We are preparing to enter negotiations for our second contract, and are already looking at ways to leverage our labor to achieve wins for the common good. In the meantime, our members are

ready to do all we can to assist Fairlawn tenants in this fight.”

Ziegeler shared these words at the “TeachIn with Fairlawn Tenants: DSF Negotiate!” on March 25. At this Zoom teach-in, members of the Fairlawn Tenants Association, other organized tenants from Mattapan, Brown University graduate student workers and undergraduates, and organizers with City Life/Vida Urbana gathered to learn about the history of the Fairlawn Tenants Association and their struggle with their corporate landlord, the DSF Group.

Following a conversation led by tenant organizers in Mattapan, including Fairlawn tenants, members of the Brown community offered solidarity statements supporting the community demands on DSF. A member representing the Palestine Solidarity Caucus, a group composed of Brown graduate student workers concerned with the complicity of Brown University in the ongoing colonization of Palestine, said, “It is no surprise to us Palestinians and allies in the caucus that the same university that refuses to divest its holdings in corporations that sustain Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing, against the democratic demands of the Brown community, is also complicit in the forced dispossession of the Fairlawn tenants. I wanted to share a phrase in Arabic that goes ‘ .’ It’s a resounding refrain in Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and it means, ‘we will not leave.’ It resonates with the Fairlawn tenants, ‘we shall not be moved’… So I wanted to say, let our “ ,” ‘we will not leave,’ and ‘we shall not be moved,’ echo between our communities—from Palestine back to Turtle Island—as an expression of our shared resilience, our love for our communities, and homes and each other, our solidarity, our willingness to fight together, and our refusal to leave.”

Undergraduate representatives from Decolonization at Brown and Resource Generation, along with an organizer from the Providence Living Tenants Union, also spoke in solidarity with Fairlawn Tenants.

The teach-in, which 60 people attended, concluded with the circulation of a petition demanding that DSF Group negotiate with Fairlawn tenants or Arthur Solomon be removed from the board of Trinity Rep. Nearly 150 people affiliated with Brown University, Trinity Rep, and/or from the Providence community have signed. Fairlawn tenants, community supporters, and organizers with City Life/Vida Urbana are also considering organizing an upcoming rally in Providence.

They are committed to continued creative interventions across a range of pressure points to get DSF to negotiate, though they hope DSF will respond sooner rather than later.

“We are not going to give up the fight,” Lewis said at the teach-in. “We are going to keep fighting…We shall not be moved. That’s all. We shall not be moved.”

Community demands on DSF Group • •

• •

That DSF Group meets with the Fairlawn Tenants Association in Mattapan, MA That DSF Group negotiates with the Fairlawn Tenants Association for a long-term, fair contract that keeps increases for market tenants to a cap of 2.5% for the next five years.

That DSF Group keeps rents for Section 8 tenants within the payment standard.

That DSF Group works with the city of Boston to bring subsidies and affordability to the complex.

Members of the Brown University, Trinity Repertory Company, and Providence communities are demanding •

•

That Arthur P. Solomon’s name be removed immediately from the title of the artistic director position if DSF does not meet with Fairlawn Tenants That Arthur P. Solomon be removed from the Board of Trustees at Trinity Repertory if DSF does not meet with Fairlawn Tenants

Sign the petition! tinyurl.com/DSF-Petition

HILARY RASCH, a graduate student worker

at Brown and volunteer tenant organizer who lives in Boston, knows tenants in the Fairlawn Tenants Association through organizing with City Life/Vida Urbana, and urges readers to sign their most recent petition.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 08

04

NEWS

CROCODILE TEARS

TEXT HANNA ABOUEID

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

The Western imperialism at the heart of Russia’s war on Ukraine

05

On February 24 of this year, Vladmir Putin announced that he is executing a “special military operation” in what he claims to be an attempt to protect the recently Russian-controlled territories of Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine.

What is globally acknowledged as a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine has since gained immense international media coverage. Ever since Putin’s international address rang out, news outlets have been tracking the atrocities that Russian military forces and officials are inflicting on Ukrainians. The same outlets have been showcasing the steadfast and violently hypocritical cries of western leaders against Putin’s actions, as well as panicked speculations about what the outbreak of such a war means for the rest of the world. In most of the western media coverage that the crisis has received, through all the government officials’ crocodile tears and performative outcries, there has not been enough reflection on the full extent to which these very governments helped create the conditions leading up to Putin’s declaration of war. The crisis in Ukraine did not develop spontaneously nor was it inevitable, it has been decades of US and European intervention in the making. The blatant hypocrisy exhibited in this international outcry becomes more understandable when we recognize what these nations have to gain from this humanitarian facade and what they have to gain from the war itself. +++ When attempting to contextualize the hostility and urgency behind Russia’s war on Ukraine, it’s important to understand two key points. One, Ukraine’s ethnic and political independence has been constantly and violently threatened ever since the area started developing its own nationalist sentiments. This is in large part due to Polish and Lithuanian imperialism in the 16th century and Stalin’s genocidal campaign against Ukrainians in the 1930s, both of which caused significant restructurings of population demographics. These changes have led to current tensions between eastern regions

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

of the state (which have more Russian influence and are against strict independence from Russia) and western regions (which have more European influence and want recognition as an independent nation). Nationalists fighting for Ukrainian independence have been calling for Ukraine to be recognized as a European state; as is historically well-proven, one of the best ways to have Europe/the west respect your claim to independence is to be a European/western state.

Being a western state tends to provide you with the protection of the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), alliances in which western nations vow to protect each other’s rights to maintain their capitalist, imperialist systems by exploiting and destabilizing the Global South. The second point is that Russia’s main stake in the war

“The crisis in Ukraine did not develop spontaneously nor was it inevitable, it has been decades of US and European intervention in the making.” against Ukraine is to keep Europe from reaching its borders, according to historian Matt Lewis.

Given the hostile relationship between the west and Russia, having the EU and NATO close in on its borders even more than they already have could be the end for Russian national security.

So very roughly, the root of the conflict boils down to Ukraine’s recognition that its acceptance as a western nation is the only way to ensure its independence and Russia’s understanding that NATO’s expansion is a direct threat to its national security, both of which are a result of western imperialist interventions in the region that have created this precedent. Of course, this is not to excuse or justify in any way the absolutely inhumane and irreversibly destructive decision that Putin made in declaring war on Ukrainians. As Jacobin writer Doug Henwood stated,“Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is a horrific, unconscionable act. NATO’s expansionist policy made such an invasion more likely.

Both of these things are true.” The western imperialist agenda of expanding its economic,

political, and militaristic control further east has created consequences to both not being seen as a western state and to being in close geographic proximity to western states. These consequences, implemented and maintained by the US and Europe, have been laying the groundwork for this war to erupt for decades. By declaring war, Putin chose to respond to this fear of western militarism by inflicting terrible violence on both Ukrainian citizens and Russians alike.

Given this context, it is especially appalling to then see the very imperial nations that played a direct hand in destabilizing both nations politically turn around and try to act as saviors and peacekeepers on a global scale. The US has been proven to have intervened multiple times over the past few decades to ensure that the dominant political ideology in Ukraine would be intensely anti-Russian, to the point of near genocide of Russians and Russian sympathizers in Ukraine. In order to set the stage for the success of a US-backed coup to get rid of the democratically-elected, neutral/pro-Russion government heading Ukraine in 2014, the Obama administration funded and supported a neo-nazi fascist group (who sought the complete eradication of anything and anyone Russian in Ukraine), the Azov Battalion. This group then enacted a genocidal reign of terror, during which they killed a significant number of southeast Ukrainians, who were the most sympathetic to Russian influence, and forced many others to flee. Any who remained were terrorized into not expressing their political leanings.

In February 2014, this armed militia stormed the Ukrainian parliament, forcing the elected President Viktor Yanukovich and members of his party to flee for their lives. The US-backed coup succeeded and an intensely anti-Russian regime was put in place in Ukraine, heavily abetted by these US-funded fascists. The memory of the 2014 genocide and coup, and all of the countless other ways the west has continued to try to destabalize Russia through destabalizing Ukraine, exists at the forefront of Russian political consciousness. This memory has fueled anti-western sentiment that is playing a key role in the war on Ukraine. +++ The west’s interest in the conflict, specifically the explosion of news coverage of the war and the politicized sympathy for the Ukrainian cause

NEWS

only goes so far as to further its own interests in the region. The only aid and attention western nations are willing to give Ukrainians are international political methods that have long been used to reinforce imperialist structures in the receiving countries. For example, much of the media outcry about the war has been tied to a call for governments (and individuals) to donate to and support international aid efforts, namely various NGOs and UN initiatives. While NGOs are often touted as the most effective means of providing direct aid to people who need it, both internationally and domestically, they have long served as weapons that fuel and maintain global capitalism and imperialism.

One way that international NGOs serve these means is by undermining autonomous mass organizing in the receiving country, diverting it into reformist dead ends, and supplanting it. Counterpunch writer Stephanie McMillan explains that “instead of building a mass movement, [NGOs] manage public outrage… Capital has no need to infiltrate these organizations because they fund them.”

NGOs are also complicit in and actively reinforce imperialist aggression under the guise of humanitarian intervention. A prime example of this is the international NGO presence in Haiti.

When the 2010 earthquake hit Haiti, there was a global rush to provide financial aid to help rebuild damaged infrastructure, feed people, house them, etc. This money was, as expected, not funneled directly into the hands of local organizers on the ground in Haiti, but instead through the 10,000+ international NGOs in the country before the earthquake hit. Haiti was left worse off than when it began the post-earthquake relief effort, as 99 percent of international and domestic earthquake relief aid was funneled through NGOs and other agencies, who “made out like bandits, pocketing most of the money that people around the world had donated in good faith with the expectation that it would actually help the communities devastated by the catastrophe,” according to McMillan. The mass theft that occurred (and continues to occur) in Haiti is not an uncommon event, and in many occupied countries, NGO directors have become a significant fraction of the nation’s bureaucratic bourgeoisie and political leadership, using the state as their source of primary capital accumulation. All of which is to say that global imperialism doesn’t just give NGOs a reason to exist, NGOs actively reinforce imperialist domination

themselves. As such, governments and media outlets’ focus on donating to and expanding international humanitarian relief orgs that aim to provide aid to Ukrainians are not well-intentioned and are simply bolstering yet another weapon of western imperialism.

NGOs aren’t the west’s only weapon of global capitalist dominance that is currently at play in the Ukraine crisis. The instant that Russia declared war on Ukraine, leading political figures in the US and Europe started implementing “targeted” sanctions against the Russian financial system and, later, the fuel industry, supposedly in an attempt to strong-arm the Russian government into giving up the war effort. In reality, these sanctions are little more than an act of war on Russia’s working class, many of whom have been arrested and brutalized for protesting the government’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia utilizes a “fortress economy,” an economic system that stocks up on its own currency, as well as currency from its geopolitical allies, to make its capitalist economy resistant to economic aggression from its adversaries. It can afford to stock up by slashing social spending and allowing the mass privatization of services, essentially leaving the working class to fend for themselves. That being said, by the time the effects of these sanctions hit the most wealthy, most influential members of Russian society in a way that is detrimental enough to lead to calling off the war, the Russian working class will have been economically decimated.

But this decimation of the Russian working class, along with its economy, is still entirely beneficial to the west, as it will lead to further social and economic destabilization and conflict that will leave Russia and Ukraine (similarly in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and other countries) pitted against each other and vulnerable to western interference. +++ Western media coverage has been instrumental in legitimizing this imperialist campaign.

News channels have been covering the conflict religiously, painting Ukrainians in the typically patronizing and agency-stripping way that many refugees are painted in. This portrayal leaves little room for Ukrainians to speak to the events upending their lives, especially not in any way that is critical of the very agencies and governments that are monopolizing the resources that

could help them survive this conflict. Media outlets only engage with the war and the lived realities of Ukrainians in so far as it helps garner popular support for imperialist countermeasures taken against Russia and (laughably) “for” Ukraine, like economic sanctions on Russia, UN peacekeeping initiatives to Ukraine, and NGOs providing humanitarian relief.

Additionally, many western news outlets have been portraying Ukrainians as the “good” refugees; they are being presented as white, European, and less impoverished than their majority-BIPOC, non-western counterparts. The way mainstream media has been making this comparison erases BIPOC Ukrainians from the narrative and reduces the entire population to a hegemonic demographic without considering very real ethnic, racial, and socio-economic distinctions. Many Ukrainian refugees’ experiences will certainly be different than the experiences of BIPOC refugees from countries of the global south. For example, western states receiving them will generally be more sympathetic to their displacement, they have more money to negotiate their movements elsewhere, and state borders were not created to limit their mobility and autonomy in the same way. That being said, Ukrainian refugees are survivors of imperialist terrorism and exploitation, and they are being forced to flee their homes and rely on international relief efforts to survive a war that the US has been setting up for decades. The dichotomy these news outlets are establishing between majority-white Ukrainian refugees as the “good” refugees and non-white, non-European refugees as the “bad” ones only serves to pit the two demographics against each other. This decenters the horrors that Ukrainians are living through, discourages solidarity between BIPOC, non-western refugees and Ukrainian refugees, and pushes the incredibly harmful, racist imperialist agenda that helped create the conflict in the first place.

HANNA ABOUEID ’24 wants to see justice in her lifetime.

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LIT

Vacation Grinding at the grain of the percussion of Trees, I till the vermouthian air with A single clenched arm, Fleeing the far away hissing. I Will drown in my new Plotted point, and Will not wince for a fraction of the morning Breeze.

TEXT HENRY KIRWAN BOHAN, ALYSCIA BATISTA, & HARRY LEVINE

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION LIVIA WEINER

HENRY KIRWAN BOHAN R’22 is bored.

07

Happy Hour We are sardines packed in a can: floating in our own fluids. I feel your hot breath on my neck and you lick me.

You laugh when my face scrunches like a rat who just ate a lime. Come closer, so I can rip that tongue out of your mouth.

ALYSCIA BATISTA B’23 is sticking to wine nights from now on.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Regina Spektor is a Singer/ Songwriter The handsome man sits quietly at his desk.

He flips his hair and tries to make it steady.

He looks around the room and catches the eye of someone else, a younger woman reading a book.

He gets back to work but can’t help feeling that he’s being watched.

She leaves to go to the bathroom, and the man is relieved!

He can finally take a break.

He’s writing in his notebook when she returns.

His body stiffens.

Do I know her from somewhere?

He can hear her turning the pages of the book.

Thwip, thwip. It feels like no one else is talking.

How can he possibly hear it?

He wishes he had a hearing aid so he could manually adjust the volume, to make the book go away. Instead, he decides to take off his glasses so he can’t see her anymore. In fact, he really can’t see anything. He’s legally blind once his glasses are off. She becomes, to him, very hazy and round, like a rugged orange straight from the grove. (She is wearing orange.)

He is so proud of this observation that he forgets that he is staring at her at all, and looks at the orange shape for a while without processing what it means.

She notices, however, though his gaze is diffused enough that she can play it off as someone staring through her, not at her.

It’s hard to focus, though, and her thwips became slower and slower.

Finally, the orange shape walks over to him, and the orange becomes a woman, and the man turns into a tomato.

Oops! he says. I like your sweater. I can’t see very well, but that orange stands out.

The woman smiles and says she bought it at a

thrift store.

This is a nice man, and she likes meeting people in the library.

Once the man puts his glasses back on, he begins to change. He is forceful and talks a lot.

He’s sweating a bit and keeps pushing his hair back: a nervous tic. Why is this man talking so much in a library?

Well, people contain multitudes, she thinks, and goes back to her seat to continue reading.

The truth was that when the man put his glasses on, he remembered who she was and where he had seen her.

At least, he thought he did.

The customs of the library be damned, the man decides to walk up to this woman and ask her a few more questions.

You remind me of someone, he says. I think I know you, he says.

She responds in the negative. She has an idea of what’s coming, though. For many years, she has been considered an almost perfect double of Regina Spektor, and her commutes to work, her lunches, her nights out, had been delayed by strangers wanting a photograph or asking when she was going on tour again. Instead, the man asks if she works at a bank. She looks like his teller.

No! she says. She is all smiles. Regina Spektor is out of the public eye and so is she. The man eventually finishes his work and gathers his things. As he is about to leave, he waves goodbye to the woman and asks, “Orange you glad I didn’t say Regina Spektor?”

HARRY LEVINE B’22 is a big One Piece fan.

FEATS

convincing my friends and family that I unironically believe in the show’s genius. The premise pits cynicism and belief against each other in the most entertaining way possible: On Too Hot to Handle, the battle manifests in the opposition between meaningless sex and meaningful relationships. A group of sexed-up singles is sent to an island retreat, all thinking they’re in for an endless slew of hot beach hookups. Instead, they’re forbidden from any form of sexual contact, and told that each breach of the rules will deduct money from a prize fund ($100,000 in seasons one and two, and $200,000 in season three, rapidly drained regardless of season). The ultimate goal, as purported by the show’s coneshaped, Alexa-esque, bluetooth-speaker-overseer Lana, is to teach these horny hotties how to function in emotional, communicative, real relationships.

This description sets off multiple alarms in our inner cynic’s battle command center. First of all: false opposition alert! Sex and meaningful connection aren’t mutually exclusive. Second of all, talk about a disingenuous premise… The show claims that the purpose of Lana’s sex ban is to promote emotional growth, but obviously

ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES

To watch a steamy, sensational, catfight-filled, tear-saturated reality TV show—the kind of show my dad says “makes you dumber”—is to enact a cosmic battle between cynicism and belief, a battle between jaded disdain and naive openness. Are you the friend who refuses to come to the weekly Bachelorette viewing party because hearing someone say the phrase “my journey” makes you want to vomit? Or are you the friend who sobs when Zac proposes to Tayshia in season 16 and sobs again when they break up not too long after that? Maybe, though, you drift suspended somewhere in that sweet, sweet cosmic battlefield, the mysterious terrain that lies between throwing up in scorn and crying in devotion. Picking a side is more consequential than just picking a show to watch; it’s picking who you are. Are you a cynic or a sucker?

This conflict is embodied, with what I think is philosophical elegance, in Netflix’s reality competition show Too Hot to Handle—my go-to choice for “makes you dumber” TV. My problem with that categorization, however, is that I don’t think Too Hot to Handle is dumb at all. In fact, I think it’s brilliant, and it’s been an uphill battle

DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

the battlefield of belief in reality TV

TEXT ANNIE STEIN

RABBITS, DUCKS, AND TOO HOT TO HANDLE

it’s meant to make inevitable sexy rule-breaks even SEXIER—for the sake of our mindless entertainment! Third of all, REAL relationships?

Let’s not kid ourselves. Every exchange is contrived to the point of scriptedness, or, if not, edited to the point of straight-up manipulation.

Nathan and Holly claiming to be in love, the full L-word, after making out in a pool for two weeks and exchanging nary a complete sentence? (Season three spoilers, sorry.)? If love doesn’t find a way, a producer obviously will.

Across the battlefield, our inner believer, wallowing in the murky depths of hookup culture, waiting for a noble, illusory savior to lift us out and kiss us tenderly on the forehead— which would deduct no money from the prize fund!—thinks maybe there’s something to it.

If we watch Harry finally ask Beaux to be his girlfriend (season three spoilers again, sorry) and feel an all-consuming euphoria mixed with a deep longing in the pit of our stomach, who’s to say that’s not real?

In the summer 1977 issue of the journal Shakespeare Quarterly—to orient yourself, that’s forty-three years before the first episode of Too Hot to Handle aired—the late scholar Norman Rabkin published an essay called “Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V.” In the essay, Rabkin describes a classic optical illusion: a drawing that looks like either a duck or a rabbit, depending on how you look at it. You can see the duck or you can see the rabbit, but you can’t see both at the same time, even if you know the other one is there. Rabkin uses this rabbit-duck illusion as a way to read Shakespeare’s play Henry V: In one reading, Henry is a Machiavellian tyrant; in another reading, he’s a noble leader. You can only understand the play one way at a time, even when you know the other way is there. That, Rabkin argues, is the genius of the play: “In Henry V, Shakespeare creates a work whose ultimate power is precisely the fact that it points us in two opposite directions, virtually daring us to choose one of the two opposed interpretations it requires of us.”

Maybe the ultimate power of reality shows that make you dumber, reality shows like Too Hot to Handle, is precisely the fact that they point us in two opposite directions, virtually daring us to choose between two opposed interpretations of ourselves. You can watch an episode and hold the opposite poles of your personality in each hand, flipping back and forth from rabbit to duck, cynic to believer. Rabbit: Scoff at bodies that are sculpted to the point of absurdity and faces that are clearly botoxed. Duck: Marvel at their beauty. Rabbit: Laugh at contestants’ sheer, stupid ineloquence. Duck: Lovingly adopt their lingo. Rabbit: Call every relationship fake.

Duck: When the season ends, watch newfound friends say goodbye and cry along with them.

Google whether Harry and Beaux are still together. Read that they aren’t, and feel something quietly real, something like heartache.

ANNIE STEIN B’24 hopes to someday be a bird with top banter.

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08

TEXT DANA HERRNSTADT

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION LOLA SIMON

FEATS

An Obsession with Ancient Hidden Treasure is Weird

09

An obsession with Uncharted is less weird On February 24 at 6:10 p.m, I received this text from my friend: “R u doing anything tonight/ would u like to come to Uncharted at Providence Place,” to which I sent an immediate response, “omg would love to what time?” to which they said “8:15,” to which I said “Wait amazing I am so excited.” They followed up with, “Also not sure if some of our party is pregaming but ur welcome to if that’s ur vibe,” to which I responded with “Oooo sounds fun! I have to do some hw before though so perhaps tonight is not my pregame night,” which would have made my mother proud, were she aware of the exchange.

Those six texts, give or take, are how I ended up in the back right of an almost-empty Providence Place movie theater, sober, absorbed by the story of Mark Wahlberg, a seasoned and jaded “treasure hunter” (according to the blurb that arises from a Google search), who recruits pickpocketing bartender Tom Holland to help him hunt for Ferdinand Magellan’s lost gold, yes, the colonizer, and no, it doesn’t address that. The movie, based on a video game series of the same name, takes a slew of name-brand actors across European marvels, ruins, and rooftops (but only the pretty ones), fighting, stabbing, and man-bonding their way toward hidden piles of gold. All so Mark Wahlberg can pick up the broken pieces of his time-weathered, cynical little soul and learn to trust again.

The two hours that passed between climbing up the theater’s gray-carpeted, LED-brightened stairs and climbing down the theater’s gray-carpeted, LED-brightened stairs felt like an avalanche of every action trope that’s ever existed in any capacity, piling higher and higher, snowballing further and further into sheer spectacle for the sake of spectacle. It spirals into absurdity fast, from the moment that Tom Holland, voicing over an opening montage of his fraught childhood, states in a desperate attempt at profundity, “There are places you can’t find on a map. They’re not gone, they’re just lost.”

I wanted to give him slam poetry-style snaps right there in the theater, because, really, so true, Tom. My favorite instance of this absurdity is that Tom Holland is a bartender, and that that somehow remains relevant throughout the movie—even when he’s sprinting away from gangsters in a secret nightclub under a centuries-old church in Barcelona. And also when he’s hiding from more gangsters under the deck of one of Ferdinand Magellan’s recently-discovered ships in a cave in the Philippines. He twirls bottles of gin to impress a pretty, irrelevant female bar patron, makes a mean Negroni, and lights a puddle of vodka on fire. All of this from a maybe-kleptomaniac orphan with a missing brother.

The past? It can’t keep him down.

In a similar vein, Uncharted is, for no clear reason, utterly steeped in ruthless murder. Maybe it’s because all three people who wrote the screenplay are violence-infatuated men. Maybe

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

it’s because of a societal fascination with death.

More likely it’s for the spectacle. Either way, Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg kill basically everyone and feel absolutely fine about it. I thought that killing someone also kills a part of your own self-perception, shakes you to your core, erodes your sense of purpose. But in Uncharted, killing someone is totally cool, as long as they’re evil and you’re dating Zendaya.

The female characters also embody this sense of over-the-top absurdity, but their brand of spectacle is a little different in was that is in equal parts predictable and, yeah, sexual.

Tati Gabrielle wears lacy black corsets during hand-to-hand combat; Sophia Taylor Ali’s entire personality is based around copious amounts of eyeliner. At one point, she enters the living room of her unbelievably nice apartment with her bathrobe dripping from one shoulder. It felt forced. Nobody looks that good in terry cloth.

As Tom Holland and Sophia Taylor Ali are trapped in an underground cellar filling rapidly with water, Mark Wahlberg tells them over the phone that he’s “literally in a Papa John’s right now.” When the gang walks into an ancient church seeking treasure and instead encounters clergy, Tom Holland says, “Oh, great. Nuns.

Why does it always gotta be nuns?” And, of course, there’s Sophia Taylor Ali’s whispered goodbye to Tom Holland, “You’re a nice kid….

Too nice.” There’s no complex morality, no ambiguous meaning. There’s absolutely nothing to latch onto except the absurdity, which consumed the movie and consumed me.

Halfway through, I had to pee, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to leave the theater. It was like watching a mindless trainwreck—if that trainwreck had a $120 million budget. For a week or so after, all I wanted to talk about was Uncharted. Making fun of the movie became my own incessant avalanche of pointlessness, my conversations snowballing further and further into Tom-Holland-Mark-Wahlberg-GoldHeist territory, entertaining not because of any genuine love, but because of my own twisted need to ridicule. My skepticism of the genre is what pushed me into this morbid fascination, warping my perspective into believing that this movie is one of the funniest I’ve ever seen.

The moments where the writers injected arbitrary moments of emotion to cater toward Box Office sales especially dragged my cynicism to the forefront of my brain; Uncharted’s random, halfhearted attempts at insight during haphazard, unrestrained chaos wracked me with an inability to take a single second seriously.

The movie tried to give characters depth in the same way that a toddler tries to speak: things get garbled in translation, but the effort is still sort of cute. In this case, though, the toddler was learning to talk in order to make a huge amount of money, and it only says things like “There’s only one rule in this game, kid. Don’t get caught.”

When Tom Holland’s brother gave young

Tom Holland his last piece of bubblegum in a gesture of brotherly connection right before running away, leaving adolescent Tom alone, helpless, and innocent in a stern orphanage, all I could think about was that the symbol of his intense heartbreak was a stick of gum. When, at the end of the movie, this motif of bubblegum returns and Tom Holland gives Mark Wahlberg his last piece as they fly over the West Indies in a stolen helicopter, I didn’t consider their character arcs or the trust they gained in one another. All I could wonder was how old the gum was. Even now, I can’t conceptualize any way to take the characters seriously. I don’t even remember their names. I can only think of them as Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg.

Everything in Uncharted is ridiculous; that’s part of its draw. Why just have one gangster when you can have a slew of them? Why just sink a pirate ship when you can dangle it from a helicopter and drop it onto jagged oceanic rocks below? Why just have a missing brother when you can be an orphan, too? Ultimately, I had to stop thinking and let the gold, the fighting, the treasure hunt, the trust issues, the bubblegum, the churches, the ruins, the underwater caves, the above-water caves, the secret nightclubs, the Papa John’s, the nuns, the murder, the sheer spectacle of it all fill my brain, and then let myself laugh at the spectacle. See it. I’ll go with you. I’ll even give you my last stick of bubblegum.

DANA HERRNSTADT B’24 will not get caught.

X

LOLA SIMON “CALL ME” Lola Simon B'24 “Call me” 8” x 6” Monotype on paper, gold leaf

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10

S+T

Odradek

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION TOM MANTO

i. ritual Everybody’s suspicious of the god gobbler. A follow request from him is ominous: no bio, no posts, no name, and a hole for a head. He scrounges about the digital slushpile of my social feed, eating up anything with a name and offering nothing in return. I watch as he slurps along a slime trail of meta-ironic themcel memes, joe biden catboys, he/him lesbian discourse, @tinyjewishgirl ootds, and adhd infographics. In the early hours of the morning, when I can’t sleep, I sit up and watch him slobbering on my nightstand. I ask him if he’s found my face yet. He just keeps munching—a grotesque black hole stuffing everything inside with nothing to show for it. The images of everyone who’s anyone but me slosh down into his bottomless gullet. How am I ever going to get a follow back?

In my hand, I hold a screen which will be a mirror this time. I cling onto the image of a disinterested techno-punk goddess, or a soft boy in blue jeans, or a dreamy raw vegan survivalist, or a loud, bitchy twink, or an LA career woman dripping over her Peloton. I scrap whatever skin came before and will myself anew in this pixelated image of what I am sure is a golden futurity. Every scroll is a metamorphosis where I reach the limit of myself, where I am so nearly undeniably real—until a greedy fiend rips these costumes from my back. I grab on, but he is too quick, and before I can reclaim any last piece he is gnashing up the pixels with threads with dried-out passions and failed ideologies. Soon enough this new version of myself is digesting in his belly, and I am once again the naked mole rat sniffing after deliverance. I try to locate something real, but every deity I try to claim for myself is another win for his intestinal tract. He doesn’t say much, but he giggles. If it came off that easy, it can’t possibly be you!

TEXT ALEX PURDY

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11

Diagnostic Criterium 3: Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.

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ii. God is a series of electric shocks Last semester, hyperpop girlies were my gods. Amid the clash of grinding synths, bubblegum pop, and baroque, Dorian Electra

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

shapeshifts from a hyperfemme, shopaholic bimbo in one song to a Dorito-fingered incel gamer dude in the next. With exaggerated high glam cheekbones and dripping, industrial noise attacks, SOPHIE continuously eludes the grasp of identification—the transcender behind the glistening cyborg, the immaterial being shifting between a multiplicity of incongruent images.

As they say to Paper Magazine, LustSickPuppy is the “shape-shifting sex canine from outer space,” warping our desire and orientations towards one another beyond the realm of the human. These artists, aided by the mutability of sound and image in the digital age, play a game of rapid-fire dress-up, mismatching signifiers across gender, age, sexuality, species, and beyond. They refuse to locate themselves, always exceeding the identities they throw on. Their reality, their selves, their being, is not in any one image but in the act of manipulating image—as SOPHIE terms it, “faceshopping.”

SOPHIE, Dorian Electra, LustSickPuppy, and a sea of other electric trans shapeshifters offered me the chance to be real. As my glitching brain failed to form a consistent sense of self, these artists turned my absence into a radicality and my ever-changing image into the workings of a sexy, anarchist techno-girlboy. In this wonderland of transfiguration, I cry out, “I am the bimbo! Your grungy twink skater boyfriend, the bitter gnome under the bridge, a sleeping child, a wise old stone butch: I am King Rat reincarnate. I am all of these things and none of these things. I locate myself in the act of transmutation. I am the immaterial orb of disorder!”

From pink pleats to Miller Lite tees to combat boots and gnarly pasty legs with dog ears and camo caps on Hello Kitty-Sid Vicious crossover episodes, my orientation towards the world followed the jerks of a spasmodic waltz. As all Long Island lesbians know, to enter a Bagel Master with a stretched-out binder, a mullet and oversized acid wash is a lot like being an ostrich in church: Please, I’m just here for the bread!

Every day, I gussied up and entered the ecstatic world of cosplay. Every night, I unzipped my clown costume and my limbs clattered out onto the floor. It was okay, really—I was exceeding neoliberalism’s grasp, even as I exceeded my own. I was the embodiment of queer radicality, the limit-approximation of anarcho-bimboism!

Isn’t self a modernist fallacy? Isn’t certainty a fucking lie, and opacity an ethics? Let me douse

myself in images, which point every direction except inwards. I take off all my clothes and twist around in a hall of mirrors, knocking at the door of myself. Anybody home?

In all this undeniably beautiful chaos, what stays the same? What holds me(s) together?

I dig under my skin and am confronted, once again, by an absence. Like I’ve done every year since I was 14, I slink back into black hoodies: myself so far, an attempt at transparency. A blue jay meets my eye and flies away. I look up at the bright circle of the moon and will it towards me.

There has to be more than this.

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Diagnostic Criterium 7: Chronic feelings of emptiness.

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iii. name one thing in this image In their last Instagram Sunday Theorypost, @ spinozain_schizo shared: “At first glance, the whole shit/trashpost thing doesn’t really make sense. The beauty is that it isn’t supposed to. As @deleuzean_thembo has previously pointed out, the purpose is to collapse the spectacle into itself by being a self-referential expression of nothing-as-particularity. Even better: corporations/capital won’t ever quite keep up or generate a system of capture around it. The shitpost is always one step ahead.

Whilst not being *the* most radical thing, it’s a solid example of rhizomatic expression-qua-hyper reality.”

The shitpost is a surreal soup of pixelated vomit, a giggling, hissing release with nowhere to go and nothing to say. There’s nothing to do when you see a shitpost, and that’s the point: to arrest you into non-responsiveness. You fall down a chunky slip-n-slide of wojaks and comic sans and enter into a stale abyss. Half-way down to nowhere, you see a signpost in red that reads: “Look, mom, I have no content at all!” No wonder one of the top definitions for “based” on Urban Dictionary is: based. To shitpost is to embrace the always already stunted catharsis of everlasting meaninglessness.

Welcome to what’s commonly termed the “schizoscene,” coined in loving memory of French philosopher-psychoanalyst power duo

S+T

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and their work on the revolutionary power of the schizophrenic. This is the land of chronically online, depressed (mostly) white grad students, where littering is praxis and doctors are cops. As global racial capitalism implodes on itself and the U.N. reports that for addressing climate change, it’s now or never—read: never—it makes sense that contemporary youth digital culture would be defined by absurdism, randomness, and endless layers of irony. But for this crowd of 20-something cringecore prophets, disorder is the political move, bringing us to the exterior limits of capitalism where we cannot be identified as individuals to be economized or sold.

I get it. There’s a certain rush that comes with rejecting the legitimacy of absolute truth, of any system of identification by which the state aims to categorize, divide, and oppress us. It’s why today, these incessant memers continue to simp for Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, and other key figures in this postmodern discourse who are long dead. But this emphasis on deconstruction and identity abolition creates, as theorist Sara Ahmed points to in her essay “Queer Feelings,” a glorification of a kind of disorder which is both exclusive and fundamentally ineffective. Writing in the early 2000s, Ahmed critiques an “idealisation of movement” in contemporary theory which defines queerness as “mobile and fluid,” in contrast to “stagnant” forms of being which are construed as normative and oppressive; while Ahmed is speaking directly to failures in queer theory, her words have implications for the range of postmodern thought. Maintaining this “active positive of ‘transgression’” is not only inaccessible to, and potentially dangerous for, “some individuals and groups given their ongoing and unfinished commitments and histories”—it’s also just unproductive for everyone involved. As political youtuber JrEg points out, while deconstruction is great for helping us see the failures of political structures, when pushed to its extreme, the emphasis on radical relativism annihilates all frameworks for human existence. With nothing left to disorder, it implodes, leaving us with nothing at all.

Like discourses of gender abolition, shitposts are about de-essentializing and revealing the inadequacy of all social structures under capitalism—but in its very definition, the shitpost cannot have content, cannot support any

framework by which we can make meaning out of our lives. The shitpost invokes every image to gnaw at the heart of sincerity, paralyzing us just as soon as it ‘liberates’ us. Theorygram throws us into some pretentious abyss and calls it freedom.

One more catboy and I’m gonna lose it.

What now?

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Diagnostic Criterium 6: Impulsivity in at least 2 areas that are potentially self-damaging (spending, reckless driving, calling ur ex, watching the same youtube video on ego death over and over and ov —————————————————————–

iv. i hate my psychiatrist New diagnosis unlocked! About this time last year, someone finally told me who I was. It was affirming, to know that my symptoms weren’t just the result of some social anxiety gone haywire, to be let into this exclusive club of pill-getters. Christened by SSRIs, I joined the small group of people who, in the whiplash of highs and lows, don’t know who they are. Could this be community? Could this be content?

My diagnosis was an identity of absence, a name pointing to a lack—but it was a name, nonetheless. Could absence be a positivity, a ground on which to stand? I embraced my new state-given label with open arms, because if you’re going to be called anything by the state, out-of-order seems best. It’s nice to feel like you’re a radical, like you’re doing enough to be

a threat; but the standard of order is the standard of whiteness, and it’s troubling to think that just even when I’m outside, I can so easily slide back into place. Yes, I am disorder, and it will be good this time.

How long can I cling to this nametag? I will myself to believe that this little string of words can encapsulate my life, that absolute truth can come from a year of sitting on a beige sofa in an office. I don’t want to lose this—even if it’s the name for an absence, take it away and I’m just another hole. But it’s not enough. I need my identity to be something other than the fact that I don’t have one. There has to be more than this.

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Diagnostic Criterium 1000: To be almost unintelligible.

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v. A Glutton’s Promise “Oh, YOU’RE @godgobbler!” Yes, acquaintance from German class, I am the grotesque neutrality. I am the one who, looking for something, gobbles up everything. I am the black hole with the best metabolism in the world—nothing will remain inside and nothing will come out. I will consume every referent until I find what’s underneath. I will keep saying “I” until it all pastes together.

I grip this wet feather in my palm and look up at the great, bright alterity of the moon. I’m here.

ALEX PURDY B’23

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ARTS ILLUSTRATION JOHN GENDRON DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS TEXT CECILIA BARRON 13

he writer Sheila Heti loves Édouard Manet’s “Sprig of Asparagus,” the sequel to the modernist painter’s “Bundle of Asparagus.” She’s devoted space in two of her three books to the still life. In “Sprig,” the lone asparagus lies on the edge of a table like a limp cigarette. The head of the stalk bends up towards the heavens.

Standing before this painting, Mira, the protagonist in Heti’s newest novel Pure Colour, realizes that “humans make art because we were made in God’s image—which doesn’t mean we look like God; it means we like doing the same thing that God likes.” Creation has been God’s hobby for millennia. But Mira, here, is not creating “Sprig.” She’s an observer of the creation. It is as a critic that she feels God’s awesome power.

Pure Colour, Heti’s ambitious third novel, tells an alternative creation myth. It begins with the declaration that this world and all its history is only God’s first draft of creation. God, at the beginning of this draft, split up humanity into three types of critics: the bears, the fish, and the birds. The bird critiques from above, the fish “critiques from the middle,” and the bear approaches humanity from an even plane, with love and warmth. Operating within this framework, humanity works to revise and edit our current draft in hopes of producing a better one, farther down the line. Mira, the birdish protagonist, is an aspiring literary critic who struggles to justify art’s existence in a time just before cell phones. Comprised of aphoristic chapters, Pure Colour scales between the metaphysical

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and the physical, the mystical and the real.

Mira is the glue which binds these pages into coherence. Halfway through the book, though, Mira’s father dies, and her mythology collapses.

Skipping decades to her death, it’s clear that by the end of Pure Colour her life is about enduring, not making. Mira “would not go into the world to critique or fix it.” Instead, she would live, and then she would die.

The narrator of Pure Colour is not Mira, nor is it God. I won’t make the critical mistake of assuming it is Heti herself. The narrator instead acts as a middleman between this world and the one above, someone hovering between the creator and the created. One eye looks down onto mortal chaos and the other looks up to perfection. With her attunement to the process of creation and her understanding of public reception, Mira’s occupation as a critic leaves her in the same suspended state.

Pure Colour, like Heti’s other works, could be considered “autofiction,” a subgenre that has only become popular in the last 15 years.

In 2014, the critic Jonathan Sturgeon made the first brave attempt at a concrete definition. He argued that autofiction is a work where the artist’s oeuvre “is the soul.” These are books by writers about writers, hence the auto that mocks the genre’s bend towards biography. But, beyond this, autofiction books are books “about their own writing,” as critic Christian Lorentzen puts it. Mira is at once studying criticism and critiquing the world; she is learning about the lives of artists as she contemplates her own artistic life. Autofiction presents itself to the reader with an acute self-consciousness.

It blurs the line between author and text, between form and content, and eventually, between the reading subject and the autofiction object before her.

Autofiction allows the tension held within Pure Colour’s narrative structure to explode upon the reader, throwing into question the fundamental form of the novel. These are books about their own writing, so they envelope the reader in the project of her own reading. If the text is suspended precariously between its ambivalence towards a concretized self and an insistence on this self, then the reader is suspended in this dialectic too. To literalize this phenomenon through a less textual medium, take Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms.” The rooms, covered in mirrors and kaleidoscopic sculptures, create a tangible feeling of endlessness. At the same time, the parallel mirrors reflect the viewer infinitely, allowing them to see themselves as the work’s subject. One could imagine Mira stumbling into a Kusama exhibit, looking around for the project’s form. She would only find herself looking back at her, a thousand times over, critic after critic after critic.

What results from Pure Colour’s autofictiveness is a novel rife with muted dictates and maxims directed towards the omnipresent you: “You have love in you, but that part is extra-human, and that part is in the plants, and the animals, and the clouds, and the seas, and everything. What is lovable is not humans, but life.” But life is hard to love without first loving humans, and it is this problematic that traps Mira as she tries to critique a world infested with people. Pure Colour, like other autofiction that tends to focus on a writer in crisis, rejects the human while idolizing her. Mira, at one point, leaves her human form to inhabit a leaf with the soul of her father—whether you take this as metaphor or not, a devalorization of the human is implicit within this shift. Rachel Cusk, another famous autofictionist, wrote the Outline trilogy from the perspective of an academic/writerly figure going through a divorce, a biography similar to her own. The protagonist, though, is most notable in her mysteriousness—the novel is in the first person, but it is almost entirely about other people. These authors, though, only glorify a life beyond the self by using the traditional mechanism of character.

What results is an even heavier emphasis on the individual, for it is

now both the thing to be overcome and the tool through which the overcoming can occur. Pure Colour and its contemporary acolytes in the new world of autofiction have thus doubled down on the self: the author’s, the character’s, and most importantly yours. +++ “Asparagus” does

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not tell Mira what to do. It exists, as art does, in-and-for-and-of-itself. Pure Colour, on the other hand, inverts the sprig of asparagus; it splices open the head and peels the stalk down to its meaty base. It is a novel interested in how life should be lived, not just in that life is lived. Heti’s first novel, after all, was titled How Should a Person Be? Though Heti avoids unliterary maxims on quotidian life—take a walk! make your bed! eat salmon!—her work is intimately concerned with the question of, well, how a person should be. Autofiction specifies this question to a sharpened end, for the work becomes entangled in the author’s own identifications. This is a remarkable return to the self, something the “death of the author” and postmodernism had worked to disassemble in the middle of the 20th century.

The devastation of WWII, the collapse of the integrated Fordist model, and the emergence of a global network of communication all worked to bury the idea of a substantiated self in the decades following 1945. Before Pearl Harbor, characters like Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway rejected any sort of coherence or totality. Woolf ’s style is a testament to this emphasis on fragmentation, but she still prized the self as a space of creation and possibility. Following the end of the war, the trend was to undermine or overwrite character. Any claim to the self could only prove to be a testament of the self’s falsity in the post-Fordist economy. While nations championed individualism, fiction devoured the individual. As the famous scholar of postmodernism Frederic Jameson argues: “The liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling.” Humans, though, do have feelings.

And in the years following the turn towards postmodernism, it seemed as though the American populace wanted more direction about what to do with these feelings than ever before. +++ The self-help share of the publishing market more than doubled between 1974 and 2000 from 1.1% to 2.4%, the exact years The Author—as a theoretical concept—was dying.

According to Micki McGee, scholar and author of Self-Help Inc., between 1991 and 1996 alone, self-help book sales rose more than 96%. Today, approximately 150 new self-help titles are released every week. Readers have become interested in the self again, but this time, the self is an actual, breathing person. Tony Robbins defeated Mrs. Dalloway; Deepak Chopra crushed Leopold Bloom. Americans today prefer people to characters. Why bother with characters when you could have the real thing?

Autofictionists will implore that their genre is not self-help, and, for the sake of the genre’s artistic integrity, I mostly agree. But it’s impossible to read Heti and not wonder, for even a short moment, if she might be trying to tell you how a person should be: “Sitting opposite Annie, Mira now wondered if this was also true of herself and Annie, that sometimes a person is meant to move forward in the world with the one they love at a distance, and that the distance is there to make it more beautiful.”

But, of course, Heti does not read like Robbins or Chopra. Her prose is much more delicate, “cobweb”-like as critic Parul Sehgal put it. And there are characters and metaphor

and narrative, all things that cannot be found in the business-speak didacticism of current self-help manuals. Her novel is fiction—and a good fiction at that. But to ignore the concurrent booms in the past two decades between autofiction—which has skyrocketed writers like Heti, Ben Lerner, and Tao Lin to literary success—and self-help would be to imagine that art operates without attention to the external world surrounding it. +++ “Sprig” appears twice in Pure Colour, at the beginning and at the end. You must always look twice, God seems to say.

The brush strokes all rush towards each other horizontally, like waves threatening a ship[love this -sj]. The sprig stands undisturbed; its root remains taut as it hangs over the table. Just as the asparagus’s inanity threatens to overtake the painting, the vegetable reasserts itself as a serious subject. The painting unfolds from the ridges of the stalk. It invents itself: an asparagic style. Mira describes it as “the perfect balance between carefulness and carelessness,” the thin line Manet tows between specificity and freedom, between the single and the bunch. +++ Criticism as an activity requires action from the viewer: a peeling back, an excavation, a discovery. It is a “desire to undo things,” to use Heti’s description, an attempt to grab at the root of the thing, even if all you’re left with is the wilted stem of a spring vegetable.

Pure Colour leaves room for criticism, but it simultaneously gestures towards a trap door.

Autofiction offers an out, an opportunity to side-step all that critical meandering. You can read the book like critic Nora Caplan-Bricker, who works out its “antic cosmology” to reveal the fables of Heti’s works. Or you can read the book, learn a little bit about criticism and love, and walk away with a thin cloak of having-beenchanged.

Heti’s approach is analogous to the work of Jenny Holzer, the famous conceptual artist from the 1980s known for her public installations.

Her work Truisms is a running list of maxims—“ambivalence can ruin your life,” “a little knowledge can go a long way,” etc.—that she plastered along the streets of New York City.

There’s a lot to be said about Holzer’s work, but there’s also a lot that it just says. Yayoi Kusama’s installations contain the same shortcut.

The long wait times and the 900,000 Instagram posts in the rooms under #yayoikusama suggest people prefer the mirrors as much as, if not more than, any commentary the rooms offer on infinitude.

“Both making life and making art are pouring spirit into form,” Heti writes in Pure Colour.

It’s unsurprising, then, that we find art’s spirit in our life, and we happen upon life’s spirit in our art. But a purposeful intermixing of the two is no longer taboo. The only appropriate reaction to a Manet in Mira’s time was a silent marveling. Now, the viewer approaches the frame and asks what Manet can do for her.

There are still revisions to be made in this draft, but God’s creations seem a bit stalled on the grander critical project. Surrounded by

screens and reflections, personal optimization has become the mechanism by which individuals enact change—something that was true in the postmodern era and remains today. The world is too big, too wide a project. Let’s start small, autofiction seems to say. The self—as fictively contained as it may be—is a much tinier form, more apt for a concise critique. If the subject becomes the object, the work of art becomes a spellbinding ouroboros, rife with meaning without ever having to look outside of itself. And it is only a testament to Pure Colour’s strength as a novel that instead of prospering, Mira’s critical project fails. Caught up in her own world, trapped in her own leaf, birdish Mira can’t tell the forest from the trees. She retreats from her original critical undertaking, and she dies alone.

Pure Colour does not deem Mira a failure, and the problems it raises are not inherent criticisms of autofiction as a whole. Rather, Heti’s novel splices open the belly of the genre by positing the narrator not only as a writer but as a critic herself. The mechanisms and contraptions by which autofiction swallows you, the reader, into its circular form are revealed through Mira’s incisive, and fruitless, attempt to escape the whirlpool herself. The subject becomes the object, in a mirroring that would take the physical form of a Kusama room. You’re caught in the middle, looking at yourself, then the art, then yourself, over and over again. You become one with the object, as the author becomes one with the protagonist, as the critic (this review might show) necessarily becomes one with the work.

The art becomes a projection of you, and thus a projection of your world. In that tiny, familiar universe, you become God. What an awesome power to behold.

CECILIA BARRON B’24 is considering a thesis on “Asparagic Style.”

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FEATS ILLUSTRATION SYLVIE BARTUSEK DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS TEXT ALEX VALENTI 15

Co i l ed Living with snakes

My grandparents used to live in Florida, in one of those gated communities for older people.

Every house had beige stucco siding and a red roof, and every garden was comprised of some combinations of cacti, palm trees, aloe plants, and gaudy red flowers, marshaled into neat strips bordering the lawns. Once a year or so, my parents and my brother and I would fly down from New York to visit. I liked the clubhouse pool because it was often empty and I could slap my big plastic noodle wherever I liked.

Grandma and Grandpa had some friends in the community who would sometimes appear while we were visiting, other transplants drawn ineluctably to the Floridian sun. One of these friends took me on a walk around the neighborhood one day. My sprawly eight-year-old body needed a chance to air out, a break from all the sitting and talking that constituted much of life in that place. We followed the bright sidewalk, hemmed on both sides by bright grass, and I’m sure she told me about this or that while I gave brief responses. Being a child, my face was fairly close to the ground and thus fairly close to the thick black snake that suddenly appeared on the sidewalk before us, its curled body stark against the concrete like a calligraphic mark on parchment. My older companion reacted calmly and explained that this was a creature one sometimes saw around here. Yet the sight of a snake in front of a manicured lawn was entirely novel to my northeastern eyes and it jolted my senses in a way that has preserved the image in my mind through all these years. Most of my other memories from that period have blended together into general impressions, watery fields of color, but that snake cuts through the blur and remains discrete, calling on me to witness it now, as then.

For much of elementary school I was a reptile kid. In kindergarten I was a bug kid, but something changed—maybe the bugs began to feel too small—and my attentions shifted.

My parents gave me books about reptiles and I learned all sorts of facts about them, like where they lay their eggs and how some lizards can regrow lost tails. I learned that a herpetologist is someone who studies these creatures and I imagined that I might become such a person one day.

I was drawn to snakes more than any other reptilian troop. Their leglessness conferred a mysterious alterity, setting them apart from all the leggy creatures which seem to set the standard for what it means to live on land.

Snakes disclose to us that there are other ways to traverse solid ground, routes of travel that swing from side to side. Their smooth, fluid bodies are elegant in construction, seemingly frictionless; they exist in perpetual glide. For me, the business of liking snakes was a matter of learning about various species, stratifying the serpent into its particular manifestations:

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anacondas and adders, milk snakes and rattlesnakes, copperheads and cottonmouths. Each clan had its own wonderful powers. Egg-eating snakes could feast on eggs thicker than their bodies, swallowing them whole; the venom of the inland taipan was more concentrated and potent than that of any other snake. I saw the snakes of the world as a writhing, motley family, full of strong personalities.

My psychologist dad, versed in animal behaviorism, encouraged my snaky pursuits.

When our family visited Utah one summer, he made it a goal of the trip to see a rattlesnake in the wild. Our forays into the desert were continually unfruitful, but eventually, a snake appeared. We found it by the side of a road, crushed and mangled; Dad said it had probably been run over by a car.

In third grade or so, I got a pet snake. My dad purchased him from the local pet store, bringing him home in a paper carton. He was a corn snake, a species native to the eastern United States that is commonly bred for pet-keeping, and he was small and skinny when we got him, like an overgrown worm. He had richly colored skin, burnt orange with red spots and hints of black. We named him Sammy. Common sense dictated that a snake’s name must begin with the letter S. At first we fed Sammy crickets, but once he got older, thickening out to the width of an adult thumb, we had to start feeding him frozen mice. Baby mice initially, then ones that were a little bigger. We bought packages of these sad, dead, pink things at the pet store and kept them in our freezer, next to the ice cream.

As often happens when children are given pets, Dad ended up becoming Sammy’s primary caretaker. He was usually the one who fed Sammy and replaced the woodchips in his tank when they got mucky. Sometimes I scooped Sammy up from where he lay, warming under his heat lamp, and held him in my hand—or, really, he held me, coiling himself around my fingers, gripping onto me with ever-surprising strength. He would extend his head out into the air in search of a new resting point and I would offer my other hand for him to slide onto, and in this way the two of us coordinated our movements so that he wouldn’t fall, reconfiguring ourselves, improvising.

I showed Sammy off to my friends like a cool toy that no one else had. Their reactions varied, ranging from excitement to confusion to the aversion with which snakes have been received in much Western fable and mythology. I let them pick up Sammy, if they wanted to, and they too adapted to his forceful grip.

Informed reptile owners know that thanks to their muscularity and flexibility, snakes are liable to free themselves from their enclosures if they find a loose seal. Dad and I made sure to keep the lid of Sammy’s cage clamped tightly with metal clips and weighed it down

with heavy stones for good measure. Nevertheless, after a few years, he escaped. We searched around the house for a day or two without success. Dad conjectured that Sammy had found some crevice and slithered into the walls, or departed our property entirely. I wasn’t overwhelmingly sad. For all my affinity for the reptile world, Sammy always retained a trace of the unfamiliar, the unassimilable. I found him interesting and fun to play with, but I don’t know if I loved him. In the years since, I’ve often imagined a long white skeleton lying somewhere in the bowels of our house, insects crawling through the delicate tunnel of its ribs.

When uninvited, snakes tend to be an unwelcome presence in domestic space. The surprise appearance of a scaly creature in a closet, kitchen, or toilet is common fodder for sensationalist reporting. A Google search for “snakes” immediately offers several articles and videos about a California man who recently found a seven-foot blue beauty rat snake, a species native to Vietnam, curled under his couch cushions. “This next story is the scene of some peoples’ nightmare coming to life,” said news anchor Kimberly Hunt as she introduced the story for ABC10, giving the word “nightmare” a dragged-out emphasis.

Alex Trejo, owner of So-Cal Rattlesnake Removal, was called to diffuse the situation.

He told ABC10 that the snake was probably an escaped pet, and that it had developed a respiratory infection due to being outside of a climate-controlled environment. In a video on Trejo’s Instagram documenting the removal, he holds the snake close to its tail, its long body extending downward. Rendered vertical, closer to human posture, the snake flails awkwardly. It looks so far from any home, swinging through the air in that comfortably furnished living room.

It can be hard to disentangle the physical and imagined bodies of animals, complicating attempts to engage ethically with them. To think about snakes is to enter a particularly crowded, knotty den. Satan, Leviathan, Typhon, Medusa, Jörmungandr, Kaa, Nagini—the world’s mythic serpents have claimed much attention and set the tone for our encounters with their real, living kin. Monstrously figured snakes have left in their wake a trail of impressions—deceit, deviance, toxicity, lethality—that cling to the flesh of the snakes we meet in the wild and in captivity. We have marked them, and these obfuscating marks can make it difficult to see snakes as they are.

But the trouble goes deeper than bad press.

Nonhuman organisms often appear to us as not much more than instances of their taxonomic categories. Thinking about an encountered animal as a member of a species can lead to assumptions of its identicality with other members of that species, rather than attuning us to the creature before us as a unique being. We

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are particularly prone to adopting this stance when it comes to non-mammalian life, with organisms whose biologies are more distant from ours. When we apprehend a creature as a “snail” or “hermit crab” or “crow,” it flattens into sameness with other “snails” and “hermit crabs” and “crows.” To borrow from Jane Bennett, a theorist of the nonhuman, how can we attend to animals as “vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them”?

I’d like to imagine that, before he escaped, I glimpsed something of Sammy’s being, the being that preceded and exceeded our marking of him with the name “Sammy.” Doesn’t having a pet bring a creature into acute singularity?

Caring thoughtfully for a pet necessitates responding to its individual behaviors and tendencies, learning how it likes to live. You sense, or you think you sense, that your pet has something of a personality, a particular orientation to the world. You find yourself in an intimate, mutually affecting relationship with this animal, the two of you co-creating a novel union. I was in closer proximity to Sammy’s agential force than I had been with any snake I had previously encountered; I couldn’t hold him without being held by him. Perhaps at no moment did this force find more salient expression than when he removed himself from his captivity.

The events that followed Sammy’s escape, however, seem to suggest that our relationship

did not leave me particularly concerned with the resistance of snakes to spaces of confinement, nor with matters of creaturely singularity. In a way, we didn’t let him disappear. Not long after his silent exit we bought another corn snake that looked just like him. I’m sure I would have noticed a distinctness to the new snake’s coloration and patterning at the time, but in my memory he is visually indistinguishable from his predecessor. We named the new snake Sammy, too. Or, Sammy 2.

Bound to the same casually conceived name, the two snakes collapsed into each other, joined into one continuous body. We treated the second one just like the first, keeping him under similar constraints, except for the additional fortifications we devised to seal the lid of the aquarium more securely. Like Sammy 1, Sammy 2 spent most of his time in that tank, occasionally being granted the vantage of our hands, but he never managed to escape. A few years on, Dad found him lying dead among the woodchips.

The intimacy with nonhuman life that comes with having a pet, that rare interspecies affiliation, can have steep costs. We know little of how our pets experience their pethood, but we know that conditions of pet captivity—while undoubtedly variable and potentially healthy— can harm animals and may quicken their deaths.

Pet snakes are often kept in enclosures not large enough to allow them to extend to their

full lengths, their movements sharply circumscribed. Even as a child, I wielded enormous power over my snakes. This power is of a sort that is enticingly expedient: we can slide our pets from subjecthood to objecthood with ease, when we want to, when animal liveliness is no longer fun and becomes an inconvenience.

Sometimes Sammy would shit on the table I was letting him traverse and I would shut him back up in his tank.

My family has had three pets since the death of Sammy 2. When a former babysitter and her boyfriend found themselves with one reptile too many, they gave us a bearded dragon named Ducky. Ducky was flabby and yellow and exuded a surly regality, seeming to brood upon her lamp-warmed rock. My dad took a liking to her and before she died he bought a second bearded dragon from the pet store, a young one.

We named her Lenny, and she still lives in our house today, though in bigger, flatter form. Two years ago we adopted a dog, Niko. The expressions that animate his face and the plaintiveness of his howl have seemed to render those quiet reptiles more inscrutable than ever. Niko is the first of our pets to receive gifts for Christmas, and, if we were a family who sent out Christmas cards, he would probably have a place in the photo.

ALEX VALENTI B’22.5 has a snake in his boot.

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EPHEMERA ROBIN ZENG “UNBOXING” Robin Zeng B'24 “unboxing”

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

DEAR INDY

Dear My Friend, the Smelly Girl,

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 08

DESIGN SAM STEWART

A few summers ago, my friend got very into wool. Wool sweaters, wool tops, wool socks. It worked for them! But then, summer came. The wool got sticky, their skin got sweaty. Locked deep within the hairs of their clothes was a must so potent it was as if the wool had come back alive, taking on the smell of an urban sheep. It was bad, in short. But I didn’t know what to do.

You seem to be in the same position. If you say nothing, you keep on suffering. Even worse, everyone else will notice, and your friend will be naive in their stank. But if you do tell them, not only are you criticizing them, but you’re admitting that for a long time, you’ve been silent about their smell. Your friend will realize that for months you’ve been breathing through your mouth around them, and they didn’t even know they smelled bad!

They probably thought they smelled good. Ngai laments the discontinuation of her favorite perfume called Dzing! With a peculiar description: “It smelled like a mixture of horse, leather, sawdust, cotton candy, popcorn, and poop.” Smell is subjective, to a certain degree, so criticizing your friend’s scent must be done with care.

All you have to do to get around this quandary is lie a little bit. When you’re in a small space with them, say a car or a bedroom, start sniffing.

Look around, confused. Smell your armpits. Then ask, “does something smell weird in here?” She’ll say no, since she’s obviously immune to grime. Then follow up, “do I smell weird?” She’ll smell you and say no. If she doesn’t say anything after, you might need to push it a bit more, with a “That’s weird…”

At this point, if she has any social consciousness, she’ll smell herself. “Do I smell weird?” She’ll ask.

You must be careful here: don’t be too enthusiastic, but you can’t be too polite either. With my wool-friend, I told them that they “probably just needed to do laundry.” You could tell her that maybe she should just get a better deodorant, or shower before she goes to bed. It’s important to offer concrete directives, both so that your friend will follow these instructions—do your laundry once a week, wear deodorant every day, you can never shower enough— and so that they won’t interpret your advice as a blanket condemnation of their behavior.

Scent is a tricky thing. It is both always present and always an affront. It floats through the air, but we all have a different perception of it (chlorine lovers, I stand with you). I don’t believe your friend was waking up every morning, smelling herself, gagging, and going outside. Most likely, she had no issue with her aura. Scent, because it’s so intrinsic to our atmosphere, requires social intervention. You can be that olfactory critic for your friend, just make it clear that your judgment is a matter of aesthetics, not of moral character.

TEXT CECILIA BARRON

Spring is here, and my sinuses are infected. Every new bud, every blooming flower is a threat to my nose’s sensitivity. I take Claritin like a vitamin. I carry Kleenex in my back pocket. Neti Potting has become a hobby.

This means I can barely smell, which is a shame, because there is so much out there to be smelled! Spring releases the burDear Indie, ied scents of last summer: the mulch getting shoveled into front yards, rubber tires on hot pavement, clothes wet from the rain. Sianne Ngai, cultural critic and general genius, writes in The Paris Review that “Smell really vexes the problem I know this sounds of aesthetics because it’s always a judgment. I smell something, I identify it, and it smells good or it’s not good.” crazy, but the othWe don’t happen upon smell, rather smell happens upon us. It’s the most democratic of the senses: some of us er day my boyfriend just like the smell of gasoline and however concerning that may be, we still let them into society! But democrasmelled suspiciously like cy, for better or worse, allows for free expression. And some of you seem to be finding out the costs of free Bath and Body Works. expression. What to smell and what not to smell, how to be smelled Neither of us wear perand how not to be smelled, these are the very specific, fume, mostly because he has Dear Indie, and perhaps unrelatable questions. a sensitivity to it. It made me wonder whether he was seeing The other day my favorite someone professor saw me smoking else. Is this reason enough to ask outside.

I got embarrassed him if he’s cheating? I’m worried he’ll get mad so I looked away, but now that I don’t trust him.

I’m wondering whether I should bring it up with them? The day Dear Love, before I knew I smelled suspicious Bath and Bath and Body Bandit in class, and I want to make it Body Bandit, clear that this isn’t a regular thing.

Their opinion means a lot to me.

If my boyfriend had a sensitive nose and smelled Love, like Bath and Body Works—a scent so A Smoking Student strong you can almost hear the neon storefront in the mall—I would be suspicious too. Those body sprays suffocated my high school bathroom; whether or not he’s cheating, it’s a triggering scent.

I wouldn’t, though, lead with the question of his fidelity. Scent, while a powerful sense, is a faulty one. If you saw him cheating or heard him on the phone, you might have more of a case. As Ngai says in the same interview, smell is “relational and causes boundary confusions.

Dear Smoking Student, Is it out there or is it in me? Well, if you’re smelling it, it’s both.” Are you sure this scent was on Why apologize? For all you know, your boyfriend? Are they think you look really cool. Just buy Dear Indie, you sure it wasn’t some perfume and avoid smoking in the that 14 year old middle of campus at noon.

I have a friend who walked by who I love dearly, while you were but she just doesn’t talking? Are you sure it wasn’t released from the old high school sweater you were wearshower enough. Someing, buried down deep in a thread and coincidentally released when you hugged him? times I have to back Maybe your partner has been wondering why you’ve been smelling like a tweenager, too. away because she smells I know you’re sure it was him, with absolute certainty, and no doubts whatsoever. so strong. Is there any way I But your boyfriend, understandably, might question your sense of smell if it’s going to can bring this up with her? Both act as the judge and jury on your relationship. Instead, pose this question to him: “The for my sake and for hers, since I can other day, you smelled like strawberries, lipgloss, and pumpkin spice lattes liquified into tell other people have noticed. a perfume form, and I would like to know why.” Don’t jump to conclusions. Smell might be instinctual but that doesn’t mean it’s reliable.

Love, Your Friend, the Smelly Girl

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BULLETIN

BULLETIN Friday 4/15 @ 7 PM: Pride (2014) - A film based on a true story of solidarity Pride at Work RI will be holding a film screening and discussion of Pride (2014) at Red Ink this Friday. A $5 donation is recommended, but no one will be turned away. Snacks and good company will be provided!

Location: Red Ink Community Library, 130 Cypress St., Providence Sunday 4/17 @ 12 - 3 PM: Queer Archive Work Open Library Hours The QAW’s Open Library Hours are back. The library is free and open to anyone for drop in browsing, reading, chatting, resting, etc etc etc. Open every other Sunday this Spring!

Location: 400 Harris Ave, Unit F, Providence Saturday 4/23 @ 3 PM - 5 PM: Adult Ally Open House - Spring Break Edition The Providence Student Union will be hosting an Adult Ally Open House—come tour the office, meet and greet their youth leaders + staff, learn about ongoing campaigns, enjoy food from Small Format, and more! RSVP at: https://tinyurl.com/psuadultally Location: Providence Student Union Office, 769 Westminster Street, Providence Saturday 4/30 @ 8 - 2AM: Ocean State A$$ Birthday Fundraiser Celebrate O$A’s 2nd birthday and spend some cash on your local sex worker organizing group. Featuring local DJs, a dance party, and hot merch. Studio 54 theme - dress to impress!

Location: The Salon, 57 Eddy St, Providence

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers

ILLUSTRATOR NINA FLETCHER

*Mutual aid is “survival pending on revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities. +

Community Support Needed Donate at https://givebutter.com/amor4sol AMOR is fundraising for Sulayman, “Sol”, a Gambian father to an 8-year old boy from Providence. Sol was detained by ICE in late 2018, and ultimately deported to Gambia in March of 2019. Now, his family are beginning the process of getting Sol back to the US to reunite with his wife and son. Any help would be appreciated.

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Support a Black mom who is grieving Donate at tinyurl.com/Black-mom-grieving This fundraiser is intended to raise money for a Providence community member who has faced several trials this past year: assaults on her family at the hands of police, traumatizing DCYF raids, and the passing of close family members and friends, including her father. While battling cancer, she is also the primary caretaker of several grandchildren, and needs the funds to provide for them and pay for her father’s service.

DESIGN SAM STEWART

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The railroad fund provides sustainable support to people currently incarcerated in Rhode Island. Please donate and help Railroad support a friend who is in need of continued survival and support this winter.

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

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Queer and Trans Mutual Aid PVD Venmo @qtmapvd, PayPal.me/qtmapvd Support mutual aid for LGBTQIA people in Rhode Island! There are currently 16 outstanding requests for aid, equal to $1600. Help QTMA fill this need!

Kennedy Plaza Survival Drive (by Wide Awake Collective) Venmo WideAwakes-PVD, Cashapp: $MutualAidMondays Support weekly survival drives on Saturdays at Kennedy Plaza! This drive distributes food, water, hygiene materials, warm clothing and other important items to folks in need.

Railroad Fund PVD Venmo: theorytakespraxis

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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Ocean State A$$ Mutual Aid Fund 2022 Venmo: OSA-funds Support local sex workers by donating to the venmo above and consider buying an Ocean State A$$ calendar, on sale at Fortnight Wine Bar, Hungry Ghost Press, Symposium Books, Mister Sister Erotica, and RiffRaff.

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COYOTE RI Closet (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics RI) Now accepting donations of hygiene products and new or used clothing at the Love and Compassion Day Health Center; 92 East Avenue, Pawtucket RI, 02904. Contact Sheila Brown (401) 548-3756 to donate or collect items.

A message from Sock & Buskin: Calling all writers and actors! Interested in trying playwriting for the first (or hundredth) time? In the iron grip of writer’s block and in desperate need of a prompt and a deadline to get your creative juices flowing? Then sign up for Sock & Buskin’s Writing is Live Bakeoff!

WHAT IS WRITING IS LIVE? A festival of new plays by the playwrights in Brown’s MFA Playwriting program! Six fantastic new works are being performed April 21-May 1.

Check out http://www.browntaps.org/writing-is-live-2022/ for more details.

AND WHAT IS A BAKEOFF?!

A bakeoff is an event created by the playwright Paula Vogel whose goal is to join writers in community to create new plays based on a single prompt. The prompt looks like a list of “ingredients” that you must “bake” into your play, as well as a narrative structure in which to bake these ingredients.

For this bakeoff, we will use “ingredients” drawn from the six plays being presented in the Writing is Live festival!

You are more than welcome to participate even if you don’t identify as someone who writes plays. This will be a great opportunity to try out writing words for other people to read out loud!

Acting more your vibe? You can also sign up to read other people’s work. And if you’re not interested in acting or writing but still want to be in the room to hear everyone’s amazing writing, please feel free to sign up to be an audience member.

Sign up using this Google form by TUESDAY, APRIL 19TH at 11:59PM: https://forms.gle/wznHfhf6D6LrtHvEA. *Fill out the form if you plan to attend in any capacity so we can get a head count!* If you are writing for the event, we will send you a prompt on Wednesday, April 20th. You’ll carve out a bit of time to write on Thursday and Friday, and send us your writing by Friday evening. Then we’ll gather on SUNDAY, APRIL 24TH from 11AM-1:30PM in Lyman Hall (on Brown’s campus) Room 005 to share and celebrate our work in an informal, relaxed environment.

Questions? Concerns? Email sockbuskinbrown@gmail.com. We can’t wait to see you there!

Do you have an event, action, or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page?

Email us at indybulletinboard@gmail.com!