The College Hill Independent V.29 N.10

the college hill a brown/risd weekly DECEMBER 5 2014 | V29 N10

independent

managing editors Alex Sammon, Lili Rosenkranz, Greg Nissan news Sebastian Clark, Kyle Giddon, Elias Bresnick metro Rick Salamé, Sophie Kasakove, Cherise Morris arts Lisa Borst, Eli Pitegoff, Erin Schwartz features Matt Marsico, Sara Winnick TECHNOLOGY Patrick McMenamin SPORTS Zeve Sanderson SCIENCE Connor Mcguigan FOOD Sam Bresnick literary Kim Sarnoff, Leah Steinberg EPHEMERA mark Benz X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff list Polina Godz, Megan Hauptman design + illustration Casey Friedman, Ming Zhen Cover Editor Jade Donaldson Senior editors Tristan Rodman Staff WriterS Mika Kligler, Will Fesperman, Stephanie Hayes, Jamie Packs, Dash Elhauge STAFF ILLUSTRATORs Andres Chang, Caroline Brewer, Brielle Curvey, Margaret Hu, Lee Bernstein, Ben Ross, Maya Sorabjee web Edward Friedman COPY Mary Frances Gallagher BUSINESS Haley Adams Cover Art Jade Donaldson MvP Casey Friedman

VOLUME 29 | ISSUE 10

news 2 Week in Review

kyle giddon, tristan rodman & alex sammon

3 Bhopal Lebot sebastian clark

METRO

4 Do The Right Thing mika kligler

9 The Hills Have Eyes megan hauptman

FEATURES 6 Gay Poets Society will fesperman

16 Thayer She Blows stephanie hayes

TECH 7 More Please

patrick mcmenamin

SCIENCE 13 Avant Mold jamie packs

ARTS 11 Space-time erin schwartz

12 whoa-fi

dash elhauge

SPORTS

5 Bank Shot

fROM THE EDITOR S THE POLICE & YOU: KNOW YOUR RIGHTS // LA POLICÍA Y & USTED: CONOZCA SUS DERECHOS ASK: to see identification.

STOPPED FOR QUESTIONING: you don’t have to give police any information. Anything you say can be used against you in court.

zeve sanderson

ASK: if you are being DETAINED. Walk away if answer is no.

EPHEMERA

DO NOT AGREE: to a search. If the police had the right to search you, they wouldn’t ask for CONSENT.

15 Rat Dad †‡

EULOGY 15 Toe Tags indy staff

LIT 17 Oh Russia kim sarnoff

X 18 Au Revoir, Felicia layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

IF THEY BELIEVE YOU ARE ARMED: they can FRISK you. If they ask you to take something out of your pockets you can say no.

POLICE CANNOT ARREST WITHOUT PROBABLE CAUSE. If you are arrested police can search you. ______________________________________________ PREGUNTE: para ver la identificación.

SI LE PARA PARA UN INTERRGATORIO: no tiene que dar ninguna información. Cualquier cosa que diga podrá ser utilizada en su contra.

PREGUNTE: Si usted está DETENIDO. Aléjese si la respuesta es no.

NO CONSIENTE: a una registro. Si la policía tuviera el derecho de registro, no habrían pedido el CONSENTIMIENTO. SI CREEN QUE ESTÁ ARMADO: Le pueden CACHEAR. Si le piden que usted saque algo del bolsillo, no hay que hacerlo.

POLICIA NO PUEDE DETENERLE SIN CAUSA PROBABLE. Si usted sea arrestado, la policía puede registrarle.

-RS & MK

P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN FLESH

by Kyle Giddon, Tristan Rodman & Alex Sammon illustration by Layla Ehsan THE INCREDIBLE BULK

MISSING BRAINS!! PLEASE READ!!

Missing: 200 human brains.

Where: The University of Texas, Austin, TX. When: Sometime between the year 1987, when the brains were given to the university for research purposes, and this week, when it was announced that the brains were missing.

How did the brains go missing? Unknown at this time.

Whose brains? Dead inmates from the Texas State Lunatic Asylum.

That’s macabre. But seriously, whose brains? Well, one of the brains was from Charles Whitman, who in 1966 climbed to the top of the university’s 307-foot tower and killed 16 people with a rifle.

How are the brains kept? In formaldehyde-soaked jars.

Wait, like in the movies? Just like in the movies.

Can you eat the brains to gain their knowledge? What?

Public statement: “We’re moving at breakneck speed to figure this all out,” UT spokesman Gary Susswein told the Houston Chronicle. “We obviously take this very seriously.”

Is the University of Texas taking this very seriously? Probably.

Actual email from a University of Texas doctor: “I have been racking my BRAIN trying to remember where those brains went.”

This year, we’re starting early—all of us. By the time the ball drops, we’ll be eating 2,000 calories; no more, no less.

Even the federal government is on board; mandating calorie counts on the menus of chain restaurants across the United States. Other countries are getting in on the action, too: Mexico is trying to slim down what is now the world’s fattest population; Europe is getting ready for beach season.

The War on Obesity is on, and solidarity has never been so resounding.

But it wouldn’t be much of a war without opposition, and Britain’s the Hungry Horse has mounted a resistance that would make the Viet Cong blush. Their answer: the “double donut burger.” The strata are a sight to behold. From top to bottom: glazed donut, bacon strip, bacon strip, processed cheese, beef patty, bacon strip, bacon strip, processed cheese, beef patty, glazed donut. The geological metaphor, in this case, seems surprisingly apt: digestion presumably occurs on a geologic time scale.

The calorie count clocks in at 1,966, which, in all fairness, allows the consumer to eat an additional ten small grapes before broaching the calorie ceiling.

The meal has engendered passionate assessment on both sides of the aisle: customers have called it “ludicrous,” “irresponsible,” and “unethical,” while asserting that “the Hungry Horse obviously has no conscience.” The Hungry Horse prefers to call the concoction “bizarre but brilliant,” and “so wrong, it’s right,” which is, of course, exactly what someone who has done something ludicrous, irresponsible, and unethical would say. –AS

LONE STAR SAUSAGE CRIMEWAVE This time of year—the month-long span between holidays of engorgement—presents an extended opportunity for many Americans to indulge in a time-tested one-two punch. Eating and then sleeping, and doing so much of the first that the second emerges as the only way out, is national canon. The search phrase “food coma,” according to Google Analytics, spikes precipitously each November. Ricardo Cardona of Austin, Texas, entered his at a truly inopportune time.

Cardona, 28, broke into Hudson Meats early Saturday morning and, after taking sausages from the walk-in freezer, fell asleep inside the butcher shop. Reports produced after the incident indicate that Cardona had no intention of robbery, but merely dozed off after a night of heavy drinking. Surveillance footage from the shop has circulated widely in the past few days, appearing at the end of many local news segments in Texas and elsewhere.

Taken in isolation, Cardona’s criminal trespass charge seems banal. But when linked with other sausage-related crimes in Texas, a large picture emerges. In late November, Regina Shaw of San Antonio was charged with stealing $6,400 worth of sausage from her employer, Kiolbassa Provision Company. The logistics of Shaw’s crime are far more puzzling. Reports make it unclear whether Shaw pilfered the kielbasa over a long period of time or in one, all-out, wiener heist. If you assume that a single sausage costs $6 (and that’s a generous estimate), Shaw still would have taken over 1,000 sausages out the door. Shaw, San Antonio’s KSAT reports, used some of the sausage to directly repay a debt. Unfortunately for Shaw, her lender turned her in. Totally not kosher.

So, if you own a small business selling meats in the Lone Star State, be on high alert. This holiday season, Texas has witnessed some of the wurst crimes ever. –TR

Irony? Probably.

Reward for finding the brains: Reanimation. –KG

DECEMBER 5 2014

NEWS

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A SAD ANNIVERSARY The Bhopal disaster 30 years on

by Sebastian Clark

Thirty years ago on Wednesday, 40 metric tons of toxic gas escaped from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India.

Wind carried the plume into the surrounding community, where it entered people’s homes and irrevocably changed life in Bhopal. While the exact nature of the gas is still unknown, the consequences are still tragically visible. 8,000 people died in the immediate aftermath, another 20,000 prematurely, and somewhere between 100,000 and 2,000,000 are severely afflicted by ailments resulting from exposure to this day.

These range from birth defects and blindness to motor neuron disease, various mental disorders, and cancer. The history of Bhopal and its survivors since that early morning on December 3, 1984 has been one of injustice, continued malfeasance, and neglect. +++ It all started in 1969 when the Indian government began to consider policies to encourage foreign direct investment.

Hoping to draw in the industry surrounding the Green Revolution, in which Punjabi farmers were already participating, Indira Gandhi’s government invited Union Carbide to set up shop in Madhya Pradesh. The government itself took a 22 percent stake in the newly formed Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) and construction went ahead in the city of Bhopal, but in an area zoned for commercial use, not hazardous industry.

As the Green Revolution played out in the 1970s, economic inequality widened in rural India. Wealthier, larger landholders could both pay the high cost inputs and, when not, had better access to credit. Smaller landholders, unable to afford the pesticides and compete with the larger landholders as prices dropped with increased production, often fell into debt and were forced to sell their land. During a time of drought, rural-urban migration took off and this new group of landless farmers accounted for over half of urban growth

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NEWS

in the 1970s. The depressing fact here is not only that this systematic practice of land dispossession continues—as Maya Sorabjee documented for the Indy in her article on skyrocketing suicide rates amongst debt-ridden farmers who use Monsanto’s Bt cotton—but that those who did, and still do, migrate to the city settle in the poorest of slums that surround industrial factories. This was, predictably, the case in Bhopal. +++ After the leak, Union Carbide moved immediately to shift culpability. It went so far as to suggest that a previously unknown Sikh extremist group—undoubtedly imagined in the Union Carbide boardroom—sabotaged the plant with the help of unhappy employees. If you go to http://www.bhopal. com/Cause-of-Bhopal-Tragedy, a website owned and operated

by Union Carbide (yes, they own the domain name to the city), you’ll see that they still maintain the disaster was a result of sabotage.

In an attempt to put the matter to rest, however, Union Carbide settled its liabilities in a closed court with the Indian government in 1989, paying $470 million of the $3 billion initially requested. The market responded positively as shares in Union Carbide rose by seven percent in value. While this increased the net worths of the Union Carbide board members by millions of dollars from a few days earlier, the compensation equated to approximately $400 per survivor.

A report by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal found more money was spent on cleaning individual seagulls after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

While determined activists have been fighting ever since to reverse this miscarriage of justice, their ability to do so has grown increasingly slim. In 2001, Union Carbide was eventually bought by Dow Chemical, who stated that in its acquisition only assets, not liabilities, were transferred—a stance riddled with contradictions given it set aside $2.2 billion for

Union Carbide’s asbestos liabilities in the US. Dow Chemical has shrugged all summons by Indian courts on these grounds.

Holding an individual culpable has proven equally futile, with attempts to extradite former Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson, widely deemed responsible for the disaster, coming to an abrupt halt with his October death.

That is not to say, though, that calls for international intervention would have succeeded. When activists demanded a boycott of the London Olympics, for which Dow Chemical was an official partner, they were, expectedly, not even acknowledged by the Olympic Committee.

The international community perhaps knows that it is still complicit, maintaining double standards on labor rights and environmental protections in the manufacturing sector throughout the developing world. It perhaps knows that any recognition of the Bhopal activists jeopardizes its ability to feign the ignorance that sustains its unethical practices.

Indeed, the Bhopal disaster continues both at the site of the Union Carbide plant and elsewhere in India. Mercury levels at the yet to be cleaned site are at 20,000 and 6,000,000 times the level understood as safe. The toxic metal is present in the breast milk of nursing mothers, alongside chloroform and lead. And, indicative of continued malfeasance elsewhere: in late 2001, steel contaminated with asbestos from the collapsed World Trade Center—asbestos that came from a Union Carbide mine in California and which resulted in exposed US citizens receiving compensation—was exported to India without first being tested.

Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, a Hollywood dramatization of the disaster starring Martin Sheen and Mischa Barton, is out today and memorializes the event, an event that is yet to finish. Don’t go see it.

SEBASTIAN CLARK B'16 rose by seven percent in value.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BLACK AND BLUES Police brutality in Providence

by Mika Kligler

On Thursday September 10, at around 9:30 PM, John Prince heard someone “hollering” outside his house on the Southside of Providence. According to a complaint he filed with the police department and his comments at a pre-hearing press conference he held last Monday, Prince went out in his front yard and found three police officers detaining two women. An “incident”—unspecified—had just taken place. The officers were speaking “rudely” to the women, Prince said, and “their hands were all in their bags.” Prince, a long-time activist and community organizer with Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), called out to the officers: “you don’t need to talk to them that way.” One of the officers told him to go away. Prince re-entered his house, grabbed his phone, returned to his yard, and began filming the officers. They approached Prince, told him to quit taping, and asked him for his ID: “I want to know who’s filming me,” one of them said.

Prince refused. Concerned for his own safety, he took a few steps back from the four-foot fence separating his yard from the sidewalk, and asked the officers for their names. “It was a laughing matter to them,” Prince said at the press conference, miming a manic giggle with his entire body. “One of them, noticing that I happened to be wearing an Obama hat, told me he was Obama. The other one said ‘John Doe.’” Prince turned to go back into his apartment; one of the officers told a second one: “Get that phone!” The second officer jumped Prince’s fence, and began chasing him into his house. He followed Prince inside, into the hallway, where he grabbed his arm and slammed him against the wall. When Prince managed to get his hand on the doorknob to his apartment, the officer tackled him, sending him crashing to the floor and injuring his neck.

In the courtroom at Prince’s hearing, Lisa Reels, a former staff member at DARE, told me that she was just on the other side of the wall from the commotion, in her apartment. “I heard them tackle him,” she said, a quiver in her voice. “I don’t know if it was one of them or two of them, but you only need one. They slammed him into a wall. I was scared, I didn’t know what to do.” Wresting the phone from Prince’s hand, the officer left the building. When Prince made it outside, he found the first officer deleting the video, before throwing the phone in the bushes. “That’s what you get for interfering with the police,” the second officer said.

When Rodney King was brutally beaten by police officers in Los Angeles in 1991, it was an onlooker with a Sony Handycam that brought widespread attention to the case.

Multiple witnesses caught the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant in Fruitvale Station in Oakland on their cell phone cameras; their videos spread quickly online, garnering millions of views.

When NYPD officers killed Eric Garner earlier this year, The New York Daily News published a video captured by a friend of Garner’s. As cases of police brutality often come down to he said-she said, pitting the word of the victim against that of the officers, video recording—often termed “copwatching” or “sousveillance” by those who regularly record—becomes a method of civil-rights enforcement, of citizen journalism, of mandating accountability and garnering public sympathy.

Filming the police, as long as it does not constitute “obstruction of justice,” is also thoroughly legal. If Prince were behind his own fence, in his own front yard, it would be hard to argue that he was directly interfering with the officers. And even if he was obstructing justice, police cannot enter private property without probable cause, they cannot confiscate or demand to view digital photos or video without a warrant, and they absolutely cannot delete those videos. In the past, of-

DECEMBER 5 2014

ficers have been faced with felony charges for tampering with evidence. In filming the three officers, at least one of whom is white, Prince, a black man, legally and indirectly accused them of wrongdoing; in response, the officers physically brutalized Prince and illegally curtailed his constitutional rights.

Providence Public Safety Commissioner Stephen Pare remarked in an interview with Bob Plain of RI Future, “There’s been some misunderstanding among the profession whether or not citizens have a right to video and audio in the public domain. They do.” The issue has been clarified in the courts multiple times—Prince’s attorney, Shannah Kurland, cited Glik vs. Cuniffe (2011) and Gericke v. Begin (2014), two recent cases settled by the US court of appeals for the first circuit.

There should be no confusion.

On Monday November 24, Prince’s hearing took place. On a windy corner outside Providence’s Public Safety Complex—in an email, Kurland referred to it as the “Public Danger Complex”—John Prince, dapper in a suit and pork pie hat, held court in front of about 20 supporters. “I’m going right up there in the belly of the beast,” he said, pointing up at the brick building, shaped like a gun from overhead, “and I’m gonna tell my story. Because I am not afraid.”

The hearing lasted four hours, and the inquiry still wasn’t complete; Prince has to return on December 3 to finish up.

After that, Kurland says, it will take about a month for internal affairs to issue a report. Later, when I asked Prince over the phone if he’s hopeful about the internal affairs process, he responded with a definitive no. “They were trying to discredit me, cause I work with DARE and DARE has done work with police brutality in the past.” Ray Watson, the Executive Director of the Mount Hope Neighborhood Association, foresaw this: “The fact that anyone would try to say John is doing this to push an agenda,” he said before the hearing, “frankly, it’s insulting.”

“I just want to be on the record,” Prince told me. “I can’t even predict what justice would look like in an ideal world, ‘cause this world is so fucked up.” If the accused officers are found guilty—guilt is determined, it’s worth noting, by a superior officer—they may face disciplinary procedures. But complaints filed are also important in and of themselves; the Rhode Island branch of the ACLU, for instance, keeps track of complaints in order to lend heft to their arguments about police misconduct, and since his hearing, Prince’s case has been covered by multiple local media outlets. In the courtroom—which I was eventually told to leave when the officers requested a sequestered hearing—Prince told us that the opposing lawyers asked if he’d be willing to skip the hearing in favor of a mediation process. Prince declined. “One of [the officers] is a rookie,” he said, “and they work in the neighborhood where I live. Yeah, yeah…I don’t want no fucking mediation. I’m not ready to kumbaya.”

Prince tells me that this is not the first time he’s been harassed by the police. A few years back, his car was searched and seized and he was made to drop his pants and stand with his arms out as the police searched his person in rush hour traffic. The officers claimed that Prince was trying to enter a house that they had under surveillance for drug-related operations. They found nothing on Prince or his car. According to data reported by USA Today, the Providence Police Department arrests black individuals at a rate 3.7 times higher than non-black individuals; this discrepancy is even greater than in Ferguson, MO, where blacks are arrested at 2.8 times the rate of non-blacks. If people of color in Providence are overpoliced, they are also under-represented on the police force:

Black representation on the police force is about half the rate of Black representation in the population.

Last January, there were protests in the West End, after officers raided the homes of two Cambodian families in the middle of the night, handcuffing and holding at gunpoint everyone inside, including a 77-year-old woman. Last March, Joshua Robinson, a young black man, was stopped driving home from his girlfriend’s house. Three officers, at least one of them white, began beating him while he was still behind the wheel of his car, and eventually charged him with resisting arrest. In his mug shot, Robinson’s left eye is swollen shut, and dark bruises bloom under his cheekbones. The officers claimed he had just ingested drugs that had given him “superhuman strength.” No drugs were found on his person, in his car, or inside of his body. The list of victims goes on, and these are just the more dramatic instances—the ones that have caused unrest in Providence and that mainstream media sources have covered. Police harassment can also be quotidian but insidious: a constant targeting of people of color and other vulnerable populations.

John Freitas, a street outreach worker with the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project, tells me that police harassment of homeless people in Providence is commonplace. They search people’s bags without probable cause, Freitas says, and “they’re coming up late at night with the dogs, with the canine unit, letting the dog push ‘em, and y’know, just really intimidating. Hoping that the person will do something they can retaliate against.” Sometimes the intimidation is even blunter: “One time we saw them throw a guy up against a fence so hard they broke his belt,” Freitas says. “We’ve gotten complaints of a police officer telling someone he was gonna beat him up and throw him in the river.” And when the homeless try to assert themselves, Freitas tells me, officers charge them with resisting arrest. “The police are who the homeless fear the most.”

Providence is not, of course, an anomaly. Police brutality here fits into a nation-wide narrative of misconduct, systemic racism, and abuse of power. At protests in Providence on November 25, following the Grand Jury’s failure to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, a man with a megaphone read out a list of names of people of color around the country killed by police. The names went on and on, subsuming each other, mingling in the cold air. The crowd’s response was jumbled: “Rest in Peace” and “Rest in Power” collided in a mess of mourning. Hundreds marched that night through the streets of Providence, burned a US flag outside the Public Safety Complex, and shut down I-95 for half an hour. People whose lives had been disrupted by the undue brutality of a racist system gave rise to counterdisruption.

The day before the protests, after Prince’s press conference, everyone milled around, anxiously checking cell-phones for any news on the Mike Brown verdict, which had not yet been released. In the courtroom, Prince remarked that he couldn’t wait to hear it. Lisa Reels, next to me, made a soft noise of assent, but it felt laden with past disappointments.

If history were any indication, justice would not be served. It wasn’t. Earlier this week, a Staten Island grand jury failed to indict the officer who choked Eric Garner to death. Nevertheless, Reels sung softly, leaning back in her courtroom pew: “What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now.” MIKA KLIGLER B’17 believes John Prince.

METRO

□ 04

MONEYBALL

by Zeve Sanderson

We want you. Yeah, you, the one in the jersey.

I couldn’t figure out why, but every fall, as financial institutions flock to campuses across the country for recruitment, emails filled the inboxes of student-athletes requesting their physically fit presences. The dozens of emails I received all started the same way: “Hi Bob,” the informality suggesting years of previous correspondence with Brown’s Associate Athletic Director. One email from Barclays even offered to “hold a special athlete-focused ‘Role of the Analyst Panel’” and specified that “the recruiting team remains very interested in student-athlete candidates.” This trend is seen at other schools across the country, both private and public. Of the 11 graduating seniors for the 2006 Duke lacrosse team, nine went on to work in finance. A 2013 Bloomberg article interviewed athletes from University of Virginia and Penn State who are now on Wall Street. Evidently, hand eye coordination is a desirable quality for finace.

This relationship between Wall Street and college sports programs has become so institutionalized that coaches now use it in recruiting pitches to high schoolers, boasting about former players at top firms. “The coaches told me and my parents about all of the past players that now work at places like Goldman and JP Morgan, and how they come back year after year to help us out,” a Brown student athlete who wished to remain anonymous told The Indy. My experience in high school was the same: coaches knew I wasn’t ever going to make money playing basketball, so their recruitment spiel almost always included a reference to the network of past players in high paying professions, which always included major financial institutions, as well consulting firms and large tech companies.

The choice to play college sports can seem absurd.

Student-athletes give up the freedom to choose classes, the ability to join organizations, the time to study, the energy to be social, and, ultimately, few will be able to monetize their athletic chops. But this network of former-athletes-turnedbankers can be the deciding factor for some athletes when considering where and even whether to play a college sport.

“My grades weren’t great, and I was thinking about quitting.

But when I told my coach, he said that the connections I’d make sticking it out on the team were more important than a couple more A’s,” the same athlete said.

It’s clear why student-athletes would be interested in banks—assumedly for the same reasons that led 50 percent of Harvard’s 2008 graduating class to take jobs on Wall Street, the same year as the collapse. Money, prestige, marketability, training. But why would banks target student-athletes? Are they better at financial models, or do they have a more thor-

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ough grasp of macroeconomic trends? With billions of dollars on the line, there must be a reason.

A special breed of what?

Carly Drum-O’Neill, the head of a New York recruiting team dedicated solely to connecting student-athletes with Wall Street firms, made the following argument in an interview with Bloomberg: “Entry level people coming out of school who are athletes are really a special breed… [athletes] understand team play, time management, the competitiveness.” This sentiment is echoed by “The Value of College Sports,” an article on the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) website.

Along with values like “A College Education,” “Scholarships,” and “Healthy Living,” the last on the list is “Preparation for life.” Underneath, the following paragraph: “Increasingly, the business world is focusing on creating a team environment with employees, as evidenced by constant discussion of teamwork in publications like the Harvard Business Review. By competing in college sports, student-athletes learn important skills, like leadership, time management, and how to effectively work with others toward a common goal. Companies have specifically said that they seek to hire former student-athletes, and the majority of student-athletes say that participating in college sports prepares them for life after graduation.”

This logic seems reasonable in a profession that is known for long hours and a high dropout rate: student-athletes balance a 40-hour a week practice schedule with classes, work as part of a team, compete nationally. But these experiences aren’t just found on the court or field. An editor of a paper or journal, a star in a play, a member of a research project: all of these students seem to be of the same “breed,” embody the same qualities. They work with others, balance time intensive priorities, and strive to be the best. But the Barclay’s email rings loudly: “the recruiting team remains very interested in student-athlete candidates.”

Of course, anything you say.

The question, then, isn’t what qualities athletes possess by nature of being athletes, but what qualities they possess that non-athletes don’t. Keith Murnighan, a Professor of Management and Organization at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told Bloomberg in a recent interview, “[Banks are] hiring smart athletes—people who are disciplined, used to taking direction but able to take initiative.”

It’s this last part that is most striking: used to taking direction.

In an interview with The Indy, Joey, a first year analyst in Investment Banking at J.P. Morgan, described the work cul-

ture: “You do what’s asked of you, no questions asked. As an analyst, you have to do what anybody senior tells you to do…

Once, a director came in Friday night and put some work on my desk. I had a date with my girlfriend that I had to cancel.”

Roger Jean Claessens, a consultant for the financial industry, wrote in his book Corporate Culture in Banking, “[banking culture is] quite hierarchical due to the need to generate reliable, predictable results… Control and accountability mechanisms were, and still are, valued as the key to success.”

Athletes are one of the few groups on campus who are socialized to willfully and quietly accept the demands of hierarchy in this way. “I had a midterm one Wednesday morning.

Coach scheduled a 5:30AM practice. There was nothing I could do. I woke up and went,” another Brown athlete who wished to remain anonymous recalled. In high school, my basketball coach decided to mandate everyone on the team run a mile under six minutes. When I asked why we had to run a mile considering basketball is played in short sprints, he said, “Because I want you to.”

The rhetoric surrounding the natural fit of athletes in banking is accurate but incomplete. They do understand teamwork, time management, and the competitive spirit, but it’s always in reference to an authority figure. Athletes are part of coach’s team, manage their time on coach’s schedule, and compete on coach’s terms. They are socialized to acquiesce to authority, even when its commands seem unreasonable or incorrect, and this is perhaps their most marketable and unique quality.

After the 2008 crash, New York lawyer Jordan Thomas, who represents Wall Street whistleblowers, spoke about the failures of a culture in which young employees who sensed wrongdoing failed to speak up. “Many of these organizations lack a culture of integrity, where doing the right thing was the only thing that mattered and speaking up was encouraged,” he said. Instead, analysts quietly performed what was asked of them. “Mergers and Inquisitions,” a website about the financial industry, explained the role of young banking employees: “You’re a monkey, and your chief responsibility is to collect bananas for the bigger monkeys higher up in the food chain.”

Too bad the bananas are the world economy.

ZEVE SANDERSON B’15 has a potassium deficiency.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

AFTER WHITMAN “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman,” sighs Allen Ginsberg at the beginning of his 1955 poem “A Supermarket In California.”

But across a century Whitman retorts, “Are you the new person drawn toward me? / To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose.”

That’s in Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s life’s work, a sprawling book of free verse poetry first published in 1855. Those lines in particular come from the “Calamus” section, a famously homoerotic sequence celebrating “manly attachment.”

As a “homosexual” and then “gay” identity formed in the 20th century, poets like Ginsberg wrote about Whitman as their homosexual literary ancestor. Others imagined Whitman as the first in a lineage of gay poets, a community of men whose poems spoke to each other through the veil. I set out to trace some of that lineage, reading through letters, poems, and the poets’ biographies. Whitman returns like a motif in their stories.

Sullen and suffering hours! (I am ashamed—but it is useless—I am what I am;) Hours of my torment—I wonder if other men ever have the like, out of the like feelings?

Whitman’s poetry invites—even demands—an intimate response from its readers. Over and over in Leaves of Grass, Whitman picks out you, the individual reader. He wants a spiritual connection: I pass so poorly with paper and types, I must pass with the contact of bodies and souls.

American poets often had a complicated relationship with Whitman. Some poets—gay, straight, or otherwise— carried Leaves of Grass as a burden. Whitman’s long-lined, swaggering gospel was an artistic vision they had to embrace, reject, or otherwise respond to.

Ginsberg, in his supermarket poem, reaches out to Whitman with pity. In post-war America, Whitman is too optimistic for the times. Meandering through a 1955 supermarket, he’s a bit washed up, a dirty old man “eyeing the grocery boys.” Of course, Ginsberg was gay and Jewish, just as much an outsider to the America of “blue automobiles in driveways.” Aware of his similarities to Whitman, Ginsberg appoints himself literary heir.

Hart Crane, a cryptic lyric poet who lived in New York decades earlier, drew on Whitman for his 1930 poem “The Bridge.” At the time, T.S. Eliot was all the rage, but Crane didn’t like Eliot’s cynical view of the world. In Whitman, Crane found an antidote to Eliot’s wasteland. Leaves of Grass embraces all of space-time, no exceptions. 33 years before Eliot’s birth, Whitman shrugs him off in a few lines: I have heard what the talkers were talking . . . . the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

Crane, like Ginsberg after him, talks to Whitman as a friend or lover: “My hand / in yours, / Walt Whitman,” Crane says without irony in “The Bridge.” But Whitman is coy, he evades: Whoever you are holding me now in hand, Without one thing all will be useless, I give you fair warning before you attempt me further…

What this “one thing” is, he won’t say. And yet Whitman insists on his connection to Crane, both of them Brooklynites:

…distance avails not; I am with you…

I too lived—Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine…

Crane also took to Whitman as a fellow homosexual. “O my Prodigal,” Crane writes, quoting Whitman, in a poem he wrote during his 1920s love affair with sailor Emil Opffer.

(Whitman:) Prodigal! you have given me love!

(Crane:) Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam You sea!

Dash me with amorous wet . . . . I can repay you.

In August 1929, homosexual poet Federico García Lorca took an ocean liner from Spain to New York. A friend of Lorca’s brought him to meet Crane in Brooklyn. The two entered Crane’s apartment, where, the story goes, they found the poet surrounded by a group of drunk sailors. Lorca knew no English, Crane no Spanish. They tried to converse.

DECEMBER 5 2014

by Will Fesperman

(Ginsberg:) . . . and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

Crane left Brooklyn for Paris. Lorca wandered Manhattan’s canyons and wrote his “Oda a Walt Whitman.” Ever the brooding surrealist, he imagines a New York dawn as (my translation), four columns of ash and a hurricane of black pigeons that splash in dirty water.

Lorca’s Whitman has a beard full of butterflies. He’s a homosexual saint, standing above the soulless “maricas,” or faggots, of New York: The faggots, Walt Whitman, point at you.

Him too! Him too! And they hurl themselves over your chaste and luminous beard

+++ Thanks to Calamus, generations of self-proclaimed homosexuals and gay men clung dearly to Whitman’s book. Some men discovered, in Whitman’s lines, themselves and their loneliness reflected:

Homosexual and gay poets talk back to Whitman

Lorca found something shallow in the way men had sex with each other in 1920s New York. By contrast, Whitman had a pure, almost magic, sexuality: You looked for a naked man who was like a river…

(Whitman:) The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through

the transparent green-shine…

That same year, Langston Hughes returned to New York after graduating from college in Pennsylvania. Unlike Crane or Lorca, Hughes was never open about his sexuality. Perhaps, as a Black writer, he couldn’t afford another set-back for his work. But his writing does contain “gay” content, if you want to call it that, and the poet, like Crane, adored Whitman.

(Hughes:) I love you.

Across The Harlem roof-tops Moon is shining.

Night sky is blue.

(Lorca:) O Harlem, Harlem, Harlem!

Stars are great drops Of golden dew.

Crane, Lorca, Ginsberg—they did not write to Hughes in their poems, did not name him in their lineage. Theirs was a white boy’s club. hear

(Whitman:) I hear America singing, the varied carols I (Hughes:) I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

Crane drowned himself off the coast of Mexico in 1932.

(Hughes:) Old Walt Whitman Went finding and seeking…

Three years later, Lorca made plans to flee Spain for Mexico with his lover, journalist Juan Ramírez de Lucas, before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He never got to Mexico. Spanish Nationalists murdered him on the road from Viznar to Alfacar.

(Hughes:) Finding less than sought, Seeking more than found…

Hughes travelled to Spain after Lorca’s death and translated two of his works: a play, Blood Wedding, and a book of poetry, Gypsy Ballads. He worked on Gypsy Ballads for decades, enlisting the help of Lorca’s mother and brother. It’s hard to say why Hughes fixated on Lorca, but it appears to be more a matter of shared poetics than of shared sexuality. Both poets were inspired by folk music—in Lorca’s case, flamenco, in Hughes case, the blues.

In 1956, Jack Spicer, a gay poet living in San Francisco, wrote a series of letters to the dead Lorca, along with loose translations of his New York poems. Spicer fancied himself part of an gay heritage that included Lorca and the French poet Arthur Rimbaud.

illustration by Kyle Giddon Spicer liked the idea of a gay lineage, but he was not a fan of Whitman. In “Some Notes On Whitman For Allen Joyce,” he rejects the gay utopia in “Calamus.” His pain as a gay man in America distills to bitterness: Forgive me Walt Whitman, you whose fine mouth has sucked the cock of the heart of the country for fifty years. You did not ever understand cruelty.

(Whitman:) I am not the poet of goodness only—I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.

Calamus is like Oz […] A land my father Adam drove me out of with the whip of shadow. In the last sense of the word—a fairy story. That is what I think about Calamus. That is what I think about your damned Calamus.

In 1965, Spicer collapsed, drunk, in an elevator. He was taken to the poverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital, where he died, age 40. His last coherent words: “my vocabulary did this to me.”

(Whitman:) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books The following year, Hughes died in Polyclinic Hospital in New York. Complications after surgery, age 65.

(Ginsberg, to Whitman:) Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

In 1984, Lorca’s homoerotic Sonetos del amor oscuro, or Sonnets of Dark Love, were published after 50 years of suppression, and 3,454 people died of a new disease called AIDS. +++ Around that time, the word “queer” began to butt out “gay.”

Theorists like Judith Butler challenged the idea of gender as a binary, as well as the idea of a “gay” identity that spanned centuries and cultures. “Queer” was countercultural; it meant that gender and sexuality didn’t go into neat boxes.

The poets who put themselves in a lineage with Whitman can perhaps be excused for their snobbery. Yes, we should recognize that their lineage excluded Black and women poets, and that it’s anachronistic to call Whitman “homosexual,” even if he did have sex with men. That said, Crane, Hughes, and Ginsberg could not have written as they did without Whitman’s example. The publisher of Ginsberg’s “Howl”—which tells of men “fucked in the ass”—was arrested under obscenity charges. In a culture where being openly gay resulted in joblessness and familial rejection, Whitman was a needed source of strength.

(Whitman:) Through me forbidden voices,

Voices of sexes and lusts . . . . voices veiled, and I remove the veil…

Today, some gay and queer poets, especially, are reluctant to put themselves in that lineage. Poet Eileen Myles, in a 2011 interview with The Rumpus, suggested an alternative, queer tradition: “What writing is not queer? Literally and metaphorically…Stein and Wilde and Whitman and Dickinson—we just are the history of literature.”

Myles talks about writing as “literally” queer: penned by sexually- and/or gender-non-conforming writers. That’s her mini-lineage from Whitman to Stein. But writing can also be “metaphorically” queer, no matter who the author slept with.

I take her to mean writing that’s radical, unsettling, sexy. Writing that ignores the academy. Fucks with syntax. Dickinson’s dashes. If to be queer is to be an outsider, then most artists are a little queer.

In 2014, I write poetry, and I don’t know whether to call myself gay or queer. For some, there is great stake in this choice; for me there is not. I find in Whitman both the gay godfather and the queer rebel. I love his book’s queerness, its erotic, “barbaric yawp.” But I stand under the window of a gay fraternity, listening: Walt, Langston, Allen, Jack. I will miss the conversation.

WILL FESPERMAN B’15 collapsed, drunk, in an elevator.

Dear Lorca, In my last letter I spoke of the tradition. The fools that read these letters will think by this we mean what tradition seems to have meant lately—an historical patchwork […] Tradition means much more than that. It means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never really losing anything.

FEATURES

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NOTES ON CONNECTION

by Patrick McMenamin

Technology—and more relevantly, those who make/use it—very much wants to work within a language of disruption. Tech has always defined breaks in eras—the printing press, the steam engine, the Internet—but the modern invocation of “disruptive innovation” goes one step further, self-consciously trying to begin and end eras for the sake of continuous motion. Yet the impulse to disrupt comes equally from the fact that there’s a system connected enough to be disturbed, that the waves of a new product’s splash can ripple across the psychosocial board. At the same time, most new tech that claims disruption also claims to herald a new era of connection, of refiguring or further linking the world’s processes. Disrupting the act of connection in order to connect. Watch as these systems of play feed back on each other, unplugging and replugging as devices accumulate. Connection as an era. +++ While having lunch with friends in my kitchen one day, I remembered that late this past summer, I had been sitting in a park with a friend when the Google Maps car drove by. I pulled up the image on my laptop and passed it quickly around. Another time at lunch, I asked a different set of friends to show me their childhood homes on Street View. My friend navigated down the street to show me how close her house was to the entrance of a trail through a redwood forest. I was told that my friend’s old roommate used to traverse long distances in the continental US entirely within Street View. If you face non-street items on Maps, it offers you a flat rectangular plane running parallel to the street. As you move along the street to face different sections of this photographic barrier, Google Maps throws out the back half of your perception in a blurred jitter to square your perspective on another part of the planar wall. The background’s disorienting shifts enable fluidity in foreground motion as I come to face a brief moment from late this summer. The surface offered in the end can be zoomed in upon, registered and reckoned with even as its faces are blurred. But the shift of even small calibrating movements in the background feels to me like an uprooting, a doubly flattened form of vertigo. +++ 2013’s #Accelerate Manifesto, by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, made the kind of disruptive splash within leftist wordpress circles uniquely possible in the hyper-educated blogosphere. Their basic argument is that neoliberalism has slowed technology’s development and possibility by constricting it within the value and exchange demands of capitalism. Once freed from these demands, technology could develop into an interlocking web of systems and people, capable not only of a central “Plan” of governance dictated efficiently by “The Network” of people, but also of extending the individual human. Williams and Srnicek see technology’s freedom—think ‘80s sci-fi, with all devices connected and feeding back on each other—as “unfastening our horizons toward the universal possibilities of the Outside,” technologies becoming the vehicles and appendages of “selfmastery.” Technologies stop acting as external surfaces we bring ourselves to—carrying mental space into how we interact with our phones—but extensions of our mental space itself. They understand that what we do, the technologies we use, changes us, our actions contained by the “platforms” available to us. At the center, though, is still the self to be extended, mastered in its total opening to the “Outside.” Emptying the center to find the Network. Pure possibility, floating systems of connection, responsive to any needs that may arise—the self as Network. +++ Literature that addresses traumatic events—everything from mass murders to personal loss—often tries to preserve the sanctity of the event by creating a network of hints around its description, never fully squaring to face the event itself. This is in part a matter of ethics, of not imposing narrative exigencies upon something incomprehensible, of allowing the event to remain whole in uncharted, associative space. These texts often adopt the euphemistic language of obituaries—referring to suicide as “a sudden death” or only describing the minor changes accidently precipitated by mass horror—even as they try to communicate a desire to get past euphemism. They build an absent center, create and enact the desire to reach it. The network of hints they offer multiplies in reading, where each individual reader is challenged to try to access the absent center, at the same time

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TECHNOLOGY

as the text ethically questions her desire to do so. For this reason, these texts are often profoundly unsettling. They deny the desire they create, sharing with a network of readers the desperateness that accompanies the need to make meaning from a tragedy. Distance and omission as communication, sanctity in the shared ritual of search. +++ In May, one of my closest friends from high school committed suicide. I spent most of the summer in a place of near-total panic about the possibilities of connecting with others. A lot of this centered on the ways I could fine-tune my internal system to facilitate connection, if I could build internal technologies to construct myself outwards, open myself more fully to help or connect with others. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to navigate the surface hints of others to guess at or approach their cores. I thought there was a way to make myself Outside and accessible enough to be open to all connection, to be entirely “there” for everyone in any situation, even if only by the guesswork of surface hints. On a camping trip with friends, I tried to explain this to them. I failed to make this in any way communicable and they tried to tell me how intuitive, how dynamically simple, love and connection really were (yes, we were around a campfire). For a long time, my failure seemed like part of the problem. +++ I once read (somewhere deep in music-related parts of the Internet that I’ve now forgotten) that the most subversive type of music to be made today was ambient, repetitive, and/or drone music because of the focusing power of this type of music. That the foregrounded sounds and textures cut through a distraction heavy culture to force the listener to focus on and reckon with the sounds to the point where a space of free, dissociative thought opens up. At the time, I found this remark really compelling (my habit of listening to this in/out of sleep playing heavily into my acceptance of the focus-freedom link), that total sublimation in shifting, feedbacking sounds brought about the free play of thought. Now, though, I think the real power of this music lies in its promise to do so, that it requires the listener to meet it on its own terms, to do the work of free thought and sublimation. To me, this is also why this music remains the hardest to critique: its power in the work and belief of the individual along with the shifting suggestibility of the music itself.

Recently I saw Tim Hecker—one of my favorite drone/ambient artists—do a Q&A. What struck me about the Q&A was how instinctually personal he described his creative process as (repeated comments along the lines of “I have to make music or I’d go insane”) alongside an almost willed self-importance about what he was doing. The promise of free spaces of connection acting as a kind of faith, each listener (or creator) projecting into these spaces instinctually. How this must be a blinded projection, one that ignores its own movement—what comes off as self-importance really being a desperate faith. +++

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

While technologies of communication furnish the possibilities of our interpersonal existence, there remains the work—the free discursive play—of how we think about them. If we are to think of them as extensions of internal technologies, the expansion of internal positioning to make us more accessible, we perhaps start to understand how intricately woven the promises of connected technology are. Yet, we risk thinking of connection in abstract terms, as creating ourselves as Outside independent of actually talking to people or glancing over at what our neighbor looks to be plugging away at. If we are to separate our thinking from the technologies we use (even as we understand this to be impossible, a willed faith), to start to think of technologies as surfaces navigated rather than networked extensions, we start to foreground the work we must do to adapt, adjust, share. A separation that makes it clear how much one’s work is merely an attempt, an effort toward the Outside—the real absent center—as a starting place of connection, conversation, understanding. That we can understand our own efforts as a series of hints toward this center, look over at our neighbor who also looks up and outward, wave, create a network of trying, of desire. +++ I find myself very interested in the idea of writing as a surface of connection, that it becomes the external source upon which people can start to talk about a whole range of issues. A point of stillness that can be grabbed onto and grappled with, even as those doing the grabbing and the locations of said grabbing seems to shift constantly. This follows from the idea that to bring out fears, concerns, or joys directly dead ends in a recursive solipsism that’ll either scare away the small group of people you’re standing with in a house party’s kitchen or be too intimidatingly large that you stare back speechless and shifting.

Art, writing, even the weather then become technologies of connection, taken on to suit internal temperaments—“taste”—and relevant shared social values. These technologies respond in their irregularities to shape new spaces, shift us internally, set different terms, but only once they are approached and shared. They require the work of interest, openness. I learned most of the minimal baseline tech knowledge I have from my friend, who worked for a software company in San Francisco. The last thing I sent him before his death was an Indy article I had written about youth and connection in Silicon Valley. +++ In Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir about the year following her husband’s death and her daughter’s life-threatening medical problems, she turns to everything from medical texts to etiquette books to poetry to make sense of her grief (she also holds nothing back, as if personal tragedy needed to eliminate its own sanctity to become communicable). At one point she turns to a line from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then.

These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them.” That same line from Eliot rattled around my head for the majority of this past summer. Making connections, drawing out feedback. For Didion, the fragments of knowledge surrounding her husband’s death nearly overwhelmed her in her desire to reconstruct, to revive him. It seems notable here

December 5 2014

to mention that for most of this summer, when I thought about connection and internal technologies, I didn’t think the words could connect or help, but save. Didion eventually comes to realize that these fragments cannot really be understood as such. That they cannot be brought together into some greater whole, that this is too much to ask or perhaps just violates the basic logic of shoring—where single things wash up, seemingly at random, at the whim of the tides. +++ No matter how complicated, responsive, or echoing, surfaces and technologies of connection are ultimately just that, liable to break down, requiring attentive maintenance and care that cannot be expected of everyone at all times. These have broken down for me at various points in my own life: there have been times when I cannot bring myself to care about art, much less communicating with others; points where even an abstract theoretical distance seems unapproachable. I still have a hard time believing connection writ large solves anything, if it is really worth pursuing—even if asymptotically, through its hints—or if there might be other models that better approximate the expansion/bounds of selfhood. Connection may merely be a frame handed down, its absent center decreed by previous technologies we no longer find relevant or even interesting. The navigation between depths of self and surfaces of technology can never be smooth, accurate, or immediate. There’s an equation here that I often find myself guilty of: that if the depths of self cannot be brought out in toto upon shared spaces, they are better left unexpressed, whole in their sacred complexity. But technology, like anything else, moves, it shifts and adapts over time, less in an exaggerated series of disruptions than as an undulating wave, driven by human work. People work similarly, through a steady drip of self that occurs over time, often inadvertently. Routine, banal daily comments gradually sharing and reshaping interior worlds. A fluid expansion merely as a result of presence, belief in this unspoken, accepted. +++ As a model of memory or writing, a “web,” while linking its component parts, also allows each its unique spatial location, drawing lines between locations but resisting the urge to subsume events or utterances within a larger narrative. Webs open up possibilities of further connections, the identification of further centers and nodes of meaning. But written webs are still read linearly, their webness only revealed in the act of reading (like any good text, they teach you the terms it should be read on, they feedback). Their goal is to impel belief, to construct the text so as to push the reader out of the text’s construction.

To subsume its own component parts, to save them for the reader. To expand dimensionally, leaving as many handholds and absent centers as it can. To multiply sanctity to reach beliefs. Webs try to do the impossible, they try to suspend what all desire and normal habit would combine. They pass this along to the reader as an act of faith, work withheld to be shared, talked about. They are desperate.

PATRICK MCMENAMIN B’17 takes the Google Maps car to school.

technology

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PROVIDENTIAL When Massachusetts exiled him for his radical religious beliefs in 1636, Roger Williams trekked south through an icy New England winter, reaching the Seekonk River as early spring thawed the riverbanks. Accompanied by Narraganset Sachems who lived along the bank of the Seekonk, Williams canoed down the river until it opened into a bay, which turned and narrowed back inland into the Great Salt River. Surveying the land he would soon claim as his colony, Williams docked his canoe in a tidewater cove between the slope of two hills.

Though the cove and surrounding land was marshy, the land beyond it seemed wellsuited for Williams’s colonial vision, dipping and peaking into a series of hills. Some were steep and majestic, while others rolled gently, flattening into plains. Williams counted seven and drew boundary lines around their undulations. * Seven has always been a special number. For those who trust in the Christian Bible, it signifies perfection, completion. God rested on the seventh day.

Seven holy hills supported the weight of early Jerusalem.

And here is the mind which has wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sits (Revelation 17:9). * When Constantine built a new Rome in the center of his Empire, he chose to build it around seven hills. From the tops of each hill, Constantine could survey the rapidly growing city from above. He likely felt more powerful from atop a hill, elevated above his empire.

A city set on a hill cannot be hidden (Matthew 5:14).

A city on a hill is visible from farther away than one built on low land. It is a beacon of God, civilization rising out of the wilderness. * Williams marked these lines on English maps then signed an agreement with the Narraganset who lived there, promising them English trading privileges in exchange for the parcel of land. Williams named the new city Providence, in gratitude for God’s divine guidance and care. It was to be a utopia, a beacon to outshine Boston, the city upon a hill that had exiled Williams for preaching religious tolerance. * Most of the earliest colonial houses in Providence were built east of the salt-water river, on a sturdy bank that rose into a sharp slope. Early residents named the slope Prospect Hill for its view over the surrounding land. Colonists leveled trees into roads, developing the forested hill into houses, taverns, and churches. The neighborhood looked over the flatter, swampier farmland west of the river. It was on the apex of this hill, removed and elevated above the rest of the city, that John Brown began to expand his university in 1770. * One of the hills west of the river, Weybosset, rose into a bluff where the river narrowed into a skinny neck, preventing inland roads from reaching the water. In 1724, Thomas Staples got approval from the city to begin dismantling the hill, carting off its rich clay to make bricks. Some of the leftover earth was packed into the marsh at the edge of the river to make flat, solid land. Brick buildings were erected on Weybosset from the former hill’s clay innards. The city grew as men disassembled nature to suit their demands. * The Great Salt Cove shrunk and became land. The farms moved further away from the river, and the former swampland became Market Square, a growing city center.

Wealthy inhabitants of Providence continued to build their houses on the firm incline of Prospect Hill, renamed College Hill. Poorer residents—lower-class whites and free blacks—rented rooms in poorly constructed clapboard houses mired in the soft former swampland, at the base of the hills. One of these neighborhoods, built at the edge of the shrinking Cove, came to be called Hardscrabble. In 1824, a white mob tore down several houses of black families, beginning a riot that destroyed the neighborhood.

Four of the white rioters were brought to trial. Joseph Tilinghast, the attorney who defended the ringleaders, closed his defense with scathing sarcasm: “The renowned city of Hard-scrabble lies buried in its magnificent ruins! Like the ancient Babylon it has fallen [...] and my client stands here charged with having invaded this cla sic ground and torn down its altars and its beautiful temples.”

The court appeared to agree with Tilinghast’s critique of Hardscrabble as disreputable and beneath the protection of law, finding only one of the defendants guilty. The houses were never rebuilt. Hardscrabble was not Babylon, Jerusalem, or Rome. It was never raised as a beacon of civilization and godliness. It was built instead in the gulf between the holy hills, on land that sank and stank of salt. * In 1838, the General Assembly constructed the first state prison on the low-lying land where Hardscrabble used to stand. Built of gray stone and ringed by fences, the prison was at the center of the city, visible from most high points. It sought to deter free citi-

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METRO

by Megan Ha illustration b

zens from crime and sin by making an exam

Soon after the prison was built, the Providen to contain the remains of the cove that lappe uneven banks into a smooth ellipsis, ringed b the Union Passenger Depot around the sout stretched like rays away from the water. * Water was contained, land created, and new of Prospect Hill to see the straight lines of th of the narrowing river. From above, the grow human-made patterns were superimposed on * On the eastern slope of Prospect Hill, where hill: Tockwotton (Foxes) Hill. The area was w and foxes reined its slopes. The Narraganset is frozen.” By the 1800s, this frozen land had ing Irish population. The streets were unpave dumped their waste in the brook that ran ac

In 1869, a hurricane flooded the city and th prompted the city to tear down the hill—an sewage system. Workers leveled the hill, tore to the eastern edge of the city, where they du and moved the hill, laid roads on the packed new street was paved and sanitized, made int industrial modernity. The brook became Bro lined the paved road. * In 1891, the city commissioned a new state rose from the cove basin, above the ruins of The new State House—a three-story dome o posite columns—overlooked the growing do adorned with a gilded statue of the Independ spirit that led Roger Williams to found the c became a beacon, rising above nature. * A few years after the new State House opene Railroad Company began building a railroad tion to the tracks that ran across the Seekonk the impassably steep grade of the hill, and th railroad decided it would be easier to go thro

By 1906, tunnel construction had begun in drilled and dynamited through the soft shale a day. A small electric train ran through the g earth in wooden carts. It took two years for w nel, and a few more months to run two track through the hill. The trains—moving coal, o New England cities—shook the foundations rattled through the tunnel. The railroad over with dynamite, cement, and braces. * Since 1640, Providence had grown far beyon Williams’s original plot. It was no longer obv constituted the seven hills. In 1937, a group formed the Seven Hills Garden Club, but in that local historians had long debated which founding documents, they identified the orig Tockwotton Hill, Christian Hill, Constitutio

The name seemed apt for a Christian club th The members shared gardening tips, cleaned shows, and wrote poems and beatitudes. By poem by English poet Dorothy Frances Gur

“The kiss of the the song of the One is nearer God’s than anywhere

In a city built on holy hills by men who wor reshape the landscape to their own design, th closest to God in gardens. They found solace that grew in green creeping tendrils and unfu *

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

auptman

by Adriana Gallo

mple of those who had transgressed.

nce Railroad Company built a walled basin ed up on the prison grounds, shaping the by a stone promenade. The railroad built theast curve of the basin, laying tracks that

* w maps made. The surveyors stood on top he roads and railroads, to redraw the curve wing city became more comprehensible, as n the irregularities of the land below. * e the city edged into the bay, rose a smaller wooded when Williams first explored it, called the land Tockwotton: “that which d become the home of Providence’s growed and the houses overcrowded. Residents cross the peak of the hill.

he contaminated brook overflowed, which nd the neighborhood atop it—to build a e down the houses, and hauled the earth umped it into the Seekonk. They flattened d, flat land and named it Gano Street. This to an emblem of the city’s progress towards ook Street, and new, expensive houses soon

* house, to be built on Smith Hill, which the recently abandoned prison building. of white marble flanked by colossal comowntown. The dome peaked into a cupola, dent Man, symbolic of the independent colony. Man, in all his imaginative capacity,

Standing on top of College Hill in 1955, a surveyor of Providence would have first noticed the tall peaks of smokestacks and boxy edges of factories that rose over the maze of roads. The city’s many metal and textile factories had profited from World Wars I and II, but production had slowed and unemployment rates had risen as soldiers came back from the second war.

Automobiles—boxy metal Model T Fords—swarmed like industrious beetles through the city, easily climbing the winding, steep streets of the hills. Trains fell out of favor as cars became more affordable and ubiquitous; in the early 1950s, the railroad company removed the passenger train track that ran through the College Hill tunnel. Cars took over the city. Trees were felled as roads were widened and paved, and wild flora along the streets withered from the constant clouds of thick exhaust smoke. Members of the Seven Hills Gardening Club planted flowers and herbs in their yards and church gardens as public green space continued to shrink. * Today, the highest point in Providence isn’t one of the original seven hills, and it isn’t open to cars. Neutaconkanut Hill—which marked the northwest boundary of Williams’s original land agreement with the Narraganset—rises 296 feet above sea level on the western edge of the city. Sturdy cement sidewalks, built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, make it easy to climb the hill’s wooded, rocky slope.

From the top of the hill, you can see eastward as the whole city unfolds. Straight ahead, the cluster of grey stone and cement skyscrapers that make up the heart of downtown Providence—formerly Market Square—tower over the landscape, but are dwarfed in scope by the sprawling, leafy grids of residential neighborhoods. To the southwest sit the solid sandstone turrets of the Armory, and beyond those, the three Point Street smokestacks that seem to rise out of a glimmer of the bay. If you angle yourself to the northeast, you can see through the leaf canopy to where the sun turns the dome of the State Capitol a brilliant white. From above the city, the smaller seven hills seem to disappear, the landscape flattening as it stretches out, until the city blurs into the endless, godly blue of the horizon.

MEGAN HAUPTMAN B’14.5 outshines Boston.

* ed, the New York, New Haven and Hartford d track to connect downtown’s Union Stak, at the top of College Hill. Frustrated by he houses built erratically up its slope, the ough than up.

earnest. Teams of construction workers e earth, working in 10-hour shifts, 24 hours growing tunnel, carting out the excavated workers to clear the almost mile-long tunks—one for passengers, one for freight— oil, and people to and from other industrial s of the houses on College Hill as they rcame the inconveniently hilly geography

* nd the chain of seven hillets that ringed vious which of the city’s many inclines p of thirty women from all over Providence n researching the city’s lore, they discovered h slopes were the original seven hills. In their ginal hills as: College Hill, Weybosset Hill, on Hill, Federal Hill, and Smith Hill.

hat sought to beautify the city with gardens. d trash from roadways, organized flower 1941, the club had adopted a verse from a rney as their motto:

sun for pardon, birds for mirth s heart in a garden, re else on earth.”

rked against the constraints of nature to he Seven Hills Garden Club members felt e from the busy, industrialized city in plants urling blossoms. *

DECEMBER 5 2014

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THE GREAT B E Y O Infinity and humanity in Interstellar

by Erin Schwartz illustration by Caroline Brewer

When I was little, I was afraid of the woods and outer space. My still-forming suburban consciousness might have already known that my survival skills would be better suited to handling a long abandonment in the mall than 10 minutes alone in nature, or, god forbid, on a spaceship with Lance Bass. But space and the woods were also lumped in with other fears—elevators, windowless rooms, airplanes—that were eventually labeled and treated as claustrophobia. An expanse of stars or trees scared me in the same way a locked door did, even though one felt endless and the other confining. Now I think that it wasn’t exactly fear of being enclosed, but something else, being unable to master demarcations of space. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get myself to the outside of the place where I was stuck. And in that way, infinitude and finitude were functionally the same. An infinite space was just as inescapable as a bounded one: surpassing its limits and getting to the outside was impossible.

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is a sprawling film, taking on time and space, good and evil, God, loneliness, love and death in its three-hour runtime.

But each strand of its narrative comes back to the breakdown of infinities and limits. Not too far in the future, Earth’s population is desperately stuck with crop shortages and a dwindling supply of breathable air, and Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and a crew of fellow astronauts take to the infinity of space to find a new home planet. But Earth isn’t the closed system it seems—there’s a ghost that sends messages in binary to Cooper’s daughter by pushing books off of her shelf, and NASA scientist Dr. Brand (Michael Caine) is working on a theory of gravity that will allow the Earth’s remaining population to travel through a wormhole to their new home.

So much of the film is about reaching across space and time in ways that defy three-dimensional logic.

The crew of astronauts leaps through black holes and experiences time like a viscous fluid in a Dali painting, one hour of their journey becoming ten years of video transmissions that show children growing up, starting their own families, losing faith that the crew will ever return. For a film full of beautifully composed shots of the vastness of space and incredibly complicated CGI ecosystems, the image that best encapsulates its logic is relatively simple: astronaut Romilly (David Gyasi) illustrates the path through a wormhole by drawing two points on a flat sheet of paper, then curves the paper and punches his pencil straight through the points to bring them together. With the tip of his pencil, the limits of space are broken. Much of Interstellar’s foundation concerns spacetime and relativity, and the idea that time doesn’t happen as an infinite series of discrete stable units, but can distort.

Interstellar isn’t shy about referencing 2001: A Space Odyssey; its snarky robots TARS and CASE even look even like mini versions of of the Monolith from Kubrik classic sci-fi film. There’s also a conscious mirroring of its three-act structure: dusty earthly bodies lose their innocence, passing from ignorance to knowledge; two wily characters struggle with life-anddeath consequences; and finally, a visual explosion that expresses some impenetrable metaphysics, trying to force us to see outside of three dimensions. The breaching of limits and infinities, among other things, pierces through a narrative that occasionally feels too diffuse, drawing its strands together.

The film’s first act is beautifully self-contained, full of exciting implications. The apocalypse imaginary of Hollywood blockbusters seems to be more and more about banality, and this Earth of parent-teacher conferences and giant dust storms, baseball and food riots, is haunting because it’s so recognizable. But the unfolding of a narrative about the Earth as much as its human occupants made me hope that Interstellar could also be

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some genre-defying, New Materialist Western. Nolan introduces a universe of powerful dust and lumbering farm machines that go on strike, the Earth endowed with its own rebellious subjectivity. At one point, Cooper’s daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy) cradles a downed drone like a bird with a broken wing. Here, nature and technology are as active, as sentient, and as angry as any of the leading actors. Even Cooper’s superlative, masculine individualism seems set up to be knocked down, a cowboy of the Old West who will be sacrificed to dislodge the human subject from the center. The hard lines between man and nature or man and machine start to dissolve as non-human bodies assert their own will.

Disappointingly, Nolan drops this thread almost as soon as Cooper and the crew of space explorers exit the Earth’s atmosphere and the tone shifts to a tale of personal survival. The astronauts explore three planets, each with the potential to support human life. The limits of the human body are tested by unpredictable ecosystems, but the planets ultimately act as a backdrop to the main struggle of Interstellar’s second episode, a life-and-death battle between two lonely men, a cowboy in a white hat and a villain in a black hat.

Earlier in the film, astronaut Amelia Brant (Anne Hathaway) tells Cooper that nature is not evil. A lion killing a gazelle isn’t acting out of cruelty; the capacity for destruction in nature follows different rules than human destruction. Maybe Interstellar needed evil, a real human antagonist instead of a complicated network of natural forces that aren’t working for or against the human explorers. But those natural forces could also be humanized through evil, or evil made into something both inhuman and natural, arguing against Brant’s claim that only people are capable of true cruelty. The questions about the lines between human and non-human raised in the film’s first chapter definitely lose some power with the introduction of Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) as the film’s main villain. Inverting 2001: A Space Odyssey, Nolan’s Dr. Mann is an antiHAL: his evil is selfish, cowardly, and lacks the cool rationality of Kubrik’s AI villain. Mann is figuratively drowning, too desperate to recognize that he is acting against his own survival and the survival of his species.

Survival might be the chapter’s most durable element: on Earth as well, an adult Murphy (Jessica Chastain) is working to find an equation that can bend gravity and time to save the world’s remaining population. As they fight, Mann tells Cooper that the instinct for survival is about finding something outside of the body’s limits to sustain it. The film’s second chapter feels constrained because it focuses on the beyond of the individual human body, while the universe it has introduced is so much bigger.

The film’s most challenging and divisive chapter is its last, exciting and frustrating in the impossibility of reconciling all of the questions that it raises about relativity, time, and multi-dimensional representations of the world. It has no choice but to leave us with contradictions. The final chapter mixes science and spirituality as Murphy returns to her childhood home, acting on intuition born out of love for her father. At first, it feels like a Hallmark declaration that science

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is incomplete without heart. Nolan is making a more complicated argument, but love is still the transcendent force that allows Cooper to distort time and space, passing on the knowledge that will allow his daughter to save humanity.

The optimism at the core of Interstellar is also where it breaks down: there’s a grandfather paradox here, where Cooper is able to affect the past due to the interventions of the humans of the future, who are rebuilding the conditions of their own survival. But it seems impossible to change events in the past to ensure existence in the present. Despite its fascination with metaphysics, relativity, and quantum physics, Interstellar still defers humanity’s salvation to an unknown, unexplained force. It chooses not to break down the paradox of Cooper’s infinite mirroring of himself, how exactly he is able to save his future. Apocalypse is averted through the intervention of something that is almost human, but not quite. And although there is some optimism in this, there is also a sense of relief that we don’t need to save the planet entirely on our own, although we’re entirely responsible for the destruction of its environment. Nolan needs this string theory deus-ex-machina for a satisfying ending to his epic, but looking closer, it feels somewhat dishonest.

Interstellar doesn’t put on same postmodern selfawareness as some of Nolan’s other works, no Inceptionlike nested virtual realities. Its plays with boundaries and the sameness of the infinite and the finite, and ultimately an earnest hopefulness that pierces through the narrative like Romilly’s pencil through paper.

The brilliance of Interstellar is subtle: Nolan is telling us a story about the instability of space and time in a medium that distorts both. You walk away from Interstellar exhausted from travelling across the galaxy, finding yourself years ahead of Earth in collapsing and impossible spaces.

ERIN SCHWARTZ B’15 is a mini version of the Monolith.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

TAKE IT AS IT COMES An interview with lo-fi legend R. Stevie Moore

by Dash Elhauge illustration by Ming Zhen

Before there were hipsters in faded t-shirts digging through garage sales for vintage tube amps, before kids swiped their grandparents record players to spin vinyl they bought at Urban Outfitters, before there was an Internet on which to have pissing contests about obscure bands, there was R. Stevie Moore.

R. Stevie Moore has been writing and recording music since 1968. He has released over 400 albums in his lifetime, making him one of the most prolific musicians of all time.

When I emailed with him he mentioned he’s slowed with old age, even though he’s released eight albums this year alone: Lymph Nodes, Make It Be, Epiglottis Captcha Fracking, Spoiler Alert (RSD), May I Be Excused, Eloquence Arrogance & Innocence, MARISTEVIE MOORETON, and Seattle Party. And these aren’t your little eight-track indie LPs—Lymph Nodes, for instance, is 84 tracks long. The results of these albums are radically different—some contain garage rock pop, others intimate folk ballads, others spoken-word diatribes to politicians and some drum machines crudely overlaid with MIDI keyboards. A personal favorite is “I Still Want It” off Lymph Nodes, in which R. Stevie Moore’s booming voice describes the fingering of each of the chords he’s playing. His music seems to completely embrace the DIY ethos, even though he has been recording music since before punk rock even existed.

In fact, R. Stevie Moore pioneered home recording when he self-produced his debut album Phonography in 1976.

But for years, his music received next to no recognition. His only contact with fans was through the occasional appearance on a local television show or the R. Stevie Moore Cassette Club, in which he hand packaged and mailed his home recordings and videos across the country. But recently his music has found an audience on the Internet. This new distribution network, combined with indie rock’s interest in lo-fi tones, has raised him to an odd throne of veneration. In 2005, The New York Times called him a “lo-fi legend.” In 2012 he made a record with Ariel Pink and went on his first tour, as far as Europe.

Why did it take so long for R. Stevie Moore to gain recognition? As one interviewee put it in I AM A GENIUS (AND THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT), the 2012 documentary about R. Stevie Moore’s life, “There was a time in the ’70s when no one knew how to write a song and play guitar. R. Stevie Moore was one of the few people who didn’t let that bother them.” Which isn’t to say that R. Stevie Moore is bad—in fact, if you dig through his discography, you can find some real gems. Some of them are even pop songs, the sort of thing I’d imagine on the front page of Pitchfork. The Vaccines covered one of them. But much of his work is the sort of thing that would bolt us awake if it came on in a sleeping playlist, that would tempt the boundaries of music and sound art.

“My religion is variety,” R. Stevie Moore told Pitchfork in 2012. “Lots of people like bad music.” And in spite of his ability to produce songs with widespread appeal, R. Stevie Moore is happy to indulge them. In fact, Jad Fair of the band Half-Japanese, a frequent collaborator of Moore’s, once said he thought that if R. Stevie Moore released one percent of the music he wrote he might have actually been famous. So why does R. Stevie Moore release bad music if he doesn’t have to?

And furthermore, how does he find the energy to produce so much music in the face of what seems like failure? It’s easy to understand how the Beatles were able to release around 200 songs, surrounded by adoring fans and open-mouthed sycophants clamoring like seals for more, more, more – but how does R. Stevie Moore, of trifling acclaim, summon the energy to keep writing and producing without any of this positive feedback? By his own admission, he “follows his muse.” Is the difference between R. Stevie and the rest of us that he follows his muse blindly? +++ The College Hill Independent: Your discography contains more variety than maybe any other rock artist in history.

What do you listen to, and who are your influences? Do you

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listen to as wide a variety as you play? How was what you’ve listened to changed over the years?

R. Stevie Moore: I listen to everything. Doesn’t everybody?

Everyday is different, as is life. And since everything I listen to is influences, that might ultimately mean I have no influences. I listen to as wide a variety as I play. I don’t know how what I’ve listened to has changed, but I guess it has. Edison cylinders to Daft Punk. Exactly the same.

The Indy: When did you start recording music? What was the motivation?

RSM: As a boy with tape recorders, basic primitive finally progressing to songwriting and overdubbing. The motivation was to listen to playbacks. I like that, this is what I want to do here on out.

The Indy: How does your recording process differ from that of other artists?

RSM: I don’t record as much as I used to, so I kind of forget.

Unsure how other artists’ processes go. There are so many step-by-step variables to arrive @ the final result, and no one method in particular is favored.

The Indy: Why do you think your music hasn’t received more recognition?

RSM: I have no answer to the q. Apathy and indifference curse, how’s that?

The Indy: Recent advances in recording technology mean that more people than ever can record at home. But at the same time, a lot of people in the lo-fi community argue that something is lost. I noticed, for instance, that you use Bandcamp to distribute your music, but most of your recording is done with older microphones. Do you feel that evolving technology is detrimental to lo-fi? Beneficiary? Both?

have toured the world 5 times. Huge festivals and proper rock venues are glorious, smoky beer pubs or hipsterindie house shows are pretty dismal. Seems I need my band badly; otherwise “such wonderful music so poorly performed.”

The Indy: You’ve also created a large number of music videos of yourself, long before the days of MTV or YouTube. Were these videos released as part of your cassette club?

RSM: Videos were never “released” in the early days, not seriously. I offered homemade VHS compilations and then DVDs, for sale, mail order. But never much luck. MTV never aired my work, and I couldn’t even get play on underground cable shows etc. The internet changed everything, as internets do. I am my channel.

The Indy: Many bands see music videos just as a vehicle of promotion. Do you see them as something else? How do they complement your songs?

RSM: Moving visuals are by now a fairly essential element of experiencing songs, wouldn’t you say? They can serve many varied purposes, but they really don’t need any. They can enhance the music, or they can distract.

The Indy: You’re the son of the great Bob Moore, one of the best session bassists Nashville has ever seen. What did he think of your music?

RSM: I don’t know.

The Indy: You once described working on music as a day job. Do you see music as a kind of day job like working in a grocery store, just a way of making a living? Your dad was a session musician—has that influenced your view of making music? Do you think there’s a kind of beauty to a daily job?

RSM: I said that? Well, I don’t work it like I once did. Permanent vaycay nowadays, semi-retirement.

RSM: Something is lost by recording @ home? Or by being “lo-fi”? My cyber distribution avenues have nothing whatsoever to do with microphone style! Evolving technology is detrimentalbeneficiary.

The Indy: Why don’t you collaborate with other artists very often?

The Indy: How have you adjusted to technology’s evolution over the past 46 years?

The Indy: Have you ever thought about taking a break from music?

RSM: Simply by following it, as most musicians do.

RSM: I do that all the time. Breaking, not thinking to.

The Indy: I have never seen the word “prolific” used so many times in my life than in reading about you. Why do you think your output is so much higher than other artists? Do you let ideas come to you, or do you find them through experimentation?

The Indy: What’s the first thing you do when you’re handed a new instrument?

RSM: I followed my muse. Much more active in the ‘70s-‘90s than current times. Old ppl get slow. Ideas come from both extremes. Talent is an asset.

The Indy: Why do you choose to mostly record at home? Do you find it important to be more in control of the recording process?

RSM: I hate to say this, but... because I can. I don’t sit and decide to make a decision to record @ home instead of deciding to go out and do it somewhere else which isn’t my home.

The Indy: Do you feel it’s important to do live shows? Do you find you can engage effectively with your audience through just recording?

RSM: I have mixed feelings about gigging live, again, both extremes exist. For years I just did it solo, and seldom, but in the past 4 years I have finally had a badass Brooklyn band and

RSM: Total inaccuracy, that’s basically ALL I do anymore.

RSM: Doesn’t really mean that much to me, never been a gearhead, old or new. And I don’t thrill out by playing constantly.

The Indy: Why don’t you still do any work as a session musician?

RSM: No interest whatsoever in pursuing that avenue. That was briefly in the early ‘70s only.

The Indy: Is there anything else you’d like to say?

RSM: Quite! +++ When I followed up with R. Stevie Moore, my first question was, of course, what was it that you wanted to say that you didn’t?

“Run what we have,” he told me. “Run what we have.”

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GENETIC POETICS Christian Bök gets experimental

by Jamie Packs Illustration by Pierie Korostoff

“The word is now a virus” —William S. Burroughs Something deeply radical is pulsating under poet Christian Bök’s seemingly normal exterior, something that is belied by his blonde crew cut and crisp button-down shirt.

With his mind-shattering Xenotext Experiment, Bök is set to catapult the esoteric realm of experimental poetry firmly into the minds of anyone with an interest in science, literature, the future. In his description of the project, Bök proclaims that The Xenotext Experiment “strives to ‘infect’ the language of genetics with the ‘poetic vectors’ of its own discourse, doing so in order to extend poetry itself beyond the formal limits of the book.” While this may sound ideal, what exactly would it look like if poetry were to “infect” the language of genetics?

Here’s how it works: Bök translates a short poem of his into a sequence of genetic nucleotides, the building blocks of genetic materials like DNA and RNA. With the help of a laboratory, these nucleotides are then implanted into the genome of a certain bacterium. In doing so, the bacterium then effectively becomes a living manifestation of Bök’s text. This is all a very simplistic explanation of what Bök’s project is. When asked about further details concerning the technical aspects of his project, Bök told The Independent that it is “difficult to explain.” Understandable.

It is perhaps important to note here that Bök is not a scientist. While he did admit to having an interest in science as a younger child and teenager, he is a poet by training.

His decision to genetically engineer a biological organism as a part of his poetic practice is thus a remarkable one, and, arguably, verges on lunacy. It is also important to note that Bök is doing almost all of the work himself, i.e. without the help of the extensive team of scientists that you might have expected. While he does need scientists to actually make and test the organism, his is almost entirely a solo mission. Beyond the sheer complexity of the project itself, it is for reasons like this that The Xenotext Project has taken 14 years and is still unfinished.

With his poetic organism, Bök has taken the idea of poetry as a way to bring words to life to a quite literal extreme. He has eschewed the quaint notion of a poetry that can only exist on a piece of paper, shattering the limits of this constricting two-dimensional space. But the project seems to be much more than a showy gimmick, for Bök is not merely flaunting this technology at the expense of substance. The conversation that Bök seems to engage is instead something much more meaningful. And while the confluence between art and science is something of a buzzy trend in academia these days, Bök’s Xenotext merges these two fields in a way that is topical and thought provoking.

His timing could not have been better. In a culture that is fraught with conversations around the ethics of genetically modified organisms, Bök’s gesture seems to be an artfully crafted statement about what these kinds of manipulations might mean. And while you may not be assessing your genetically modified corn product for its aesthetic value, Bök’s project launches this controversial process firmly into the realm of art. In the end, his project is something more than a vaunting gesture aimed at parading its own technological prowess. It is more than simply a place where comma splices can become gene splices. +++ Bök has constructed his poem in such a way that the organism will actually respond to it in a coherent and, most importantly, meaningful way. The microbe will interpret the inserted gene sequence as a set of instructions for building a protein, and the amino acids that make up this protein will in turn encipher a poem in response. As such, the bacterium does not serve only as a repository of Bök’s own writing, but is a veritable poetic mechanism in itself. In this way, the microbe almost reaches the level of co-authorship.

And it is here where Christian Bök principally diverges from others who have tested the coding potentials of biological organisms before him. There are, in fact, a surprising amount of people who have tinkered with experiments similar to Bök’s in the past.

Scientist Pak Wong, for example, encoded a few lines from “It’s a Small World After All” into the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans as a means to explore the archival potential of biological organisms in the case of a catastrophic disaster. Wong’s goal was to see if bacteria could be used as a way to store and pass on information if, say, nearly all of humanity was effaced by a natural disaster. American multimedia artist Eduardo Kac has also experi-

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mented with this technology, although in a manner more akin to Bök’s own vision. In his 1999 project “Genesis,” Kac translated a sentence from the Bible into Morse code that was then encoded as DNA and then “edited” the inscription by exposing the organism to radiation. And while Bök may have drawn inspiration from these preceding figures, there appears an unquestionable desire to move beyond them. “I wanted to do something more ambitious, and, as it turns out, more difficult,” Bök says over the telephone.

And he does seem to be taking the idea a considerable step further. For one, his biological inscriptions are much longer than any of his predecessors (thanks principally to improvements in the technology involved). More important, however, is the way that the project conceives of the biological organism itself. By giving his organism a kind of agency in his poem, Bök is not adhering to the one-sided dialogue of his predecessors. Bök explained how he sought to “hijack” the biochemistry of the organism as a way to create a dialogue, noting his desire to create something that was not only an archive for his own poem but also mechanism for writing a poem itself. Rather than using The Xenotext Project as a platform to herald the dominion of humanity’s scientific prowess, the project instead engages in a veritable dialogue with organisms that have historically lacked any semblance of a voice. And the results are beautiful.

But don’t be fooled by the outward simplicity of his poetry. “It took four years to write these two poems,” Bök tells me emphatically. His work has, however, finally paid off. Bök achieved his co-authored vision during an experimental test on the bacterium E. Coli. His poem, entitled “Orpheus”, begins: Any style of life is prim […]

My myth now is the word, the word of life.

After being genetically inserted into the E. Coli, this poem essentially acts as a set of instructions for building a protein. The protein that is created, it should be noted, causes the bacterium to fluoresce red, and the poem that is written in response by the bacterium reflects on its red glowing state. Bok has titled this poem “Eurydice,” complementing the previous poem while also humorously suggesting what Bök calls “the infernal context of this book.” It begins: The faery is rosy of glow.

In fate we rely.

Yet what Bök refers to as the “Herculean constraints” of the project are also a fundamental part of its success as an art object. And while Bök is quick to explain how challenging these constraints are, they are not exactly uncharacteristic of his work. In his 2001 book Eunoia, for example, Bök wrote five chapters in which only one vowel was used throughout each chapter. The book contains sentences like “A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars all stanzas and jams all ballads.” And it is important to also consider that Bök’s oeuvre is itself situated in a long line of literature that is driven by fiercely rigid constraints. Groups like Oulipo, for example, characterize a tradition of using extreme limitations as a means to engender creative work to which Bök is greatly indebted. So while constraints may not be anything new in literature nor even for Bök himself, the Xenotext moves out of a world of playful linguistic constraints and into one of very real technological constraints. Yet much like his previous work, the Xenotext unquestionably derives much of its power from these restrictions, as they ultimately play an important part in driving Bök’s own creative practice. In the end, Bök’s success is characterized by his capacity to work in conjunction with the technical fetters that he creates for himself, moving his work from a space of rigid limitation into one characterized by a complex, unlimited freedom.

One possible critique of Bök’s poems stems from the problem of translation.

Through his process, Bök essentially forces the bacterium to speak in a language not its own, making it say something in a language that we understand so that we can perhaps claim a kind of power over it. While this is a problem that can, of course, be argued about

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

any form of translation, there is something perhaps particularly problematic about Bök’s gesture given that it could be interpreted as a way of asserting mastery over an entire species. While the complexities of issues of this sort are vast, I think it is perhaps more important that Bök is creating a dialogue in the first place, albeit an imperfect one. While other scientists are quick to speak for the organisms they study, Bök is not afraid to take a step back. +++ He goes still further. And here is where the project garners its cosmic scope and where Bök gets to have the last laugh: the bacteria he has chosen to use for this project is called Deinococcus radiodurans (D. radiodurans), or as the Guinness Book of World Records puts it, “the world’s toughest bacterium.” D. radiodurans is widely recognized as one of the most indestructible organisms on the face of the earth. It is capable of surviving in the vacuum of outer space, of tolerating 1000 times the gamma radiation that a human being can. It is classified as a polyextremophile, an organism that is capable of surviving extreme conditions that are otherwise lethal to us lesser species.

And given its quasi-immortal status, no environment on the planet has been capable of driving the evolution of the species.

Some scientists have even gone as far as to speculate that it may have spent a part of its evolutionary history in an extraterrestrial environment.

Given the capacity of this organism to survive in the most extreme of conditions, what Bök likes to call the “punch line” of his experiment is that it has the potential to outlive terrestrial life.

With this notion, Bök has taken the artist’s impulse of creating something that will outlive himor herself to an almost dark extreme. In effect, his poem has the potential to last forever. “Such a poem, stored inside the genome of a bacterium, might conceivably outlast terrestrial civilization itself, persisting like a secret message in a bottle flung at random into a giant ocean,” Bök writes in his description of the project, which fittingly hovers somewhere between a scientific abstract and an artist statement. +++ Bök has been working on the project for around fourteen years.

It has cost over $110,000. And while it is not quite complete, there have been some successes.

Bök’s process has been proven to work in Escherichia coli (known as E. coli). But the project has not quite received the critical attention that it deserves, perhaps, as Bök admits, because of the extremely lofty promises he made at the beginning.

The Project has, however, proliferated greatly. Bök has lectured widely about the project, and it has even been staged as a gallery exhibition at the Kasian Gallery at the University of Calgary. This exhibition will include the artistic spinoff that has been created thus far in the project. “A lot of material gets generated,” says Bök about creating the Xenotext. But the scope of the project has fittingly not only been limited to our small planet. According to one of Bök’s recent Tweets, a segment of The Xenotext Experiment is “hitching a ride aboard Orion EFT-1 to Mars,” which in addition to serving as a kind of fundraising also “points to the interstellar potential of the project,” as Bök excitedly describes over the phone.

Bök’s project, however improvident it may seem, does serve a very critical function.

Through its merging of art and science, the project suggests a kind of necessary symbiosis between the two fields, a symbiosis that is skeptically brushed off by many in our commu-

December 5 2014

nity today. The Xenotext Experiment urges that these two seemingly disparate disciplines have much to learn from one another. And not only can science become more artistic, Bök is also implying that art can become more scientific. “Science is the most important cultural activity that we participate in,” Bök told the Indy. And while it was clear that this was not the first time Bök has given this spiel, it was shocking nonetheless. Underscoring the importance of science, Bök reflected that the current state of poetry wasn’t quite up to par: “Poetry needs to adequately respond to our technological milieu.” He then went on to discuss how there has yet to be any poetry written about the moon landing, for example, which is one of our most important cultural achievements of the past century. In this vein, Bök began sounding something like a PSA for contemporary poets. In Bök’s mind, poets have a responsibility to respond to what is going on in the worlds of science and technology despite the tensions that have historically existed between these discourses.

“I foresee that, as poetry adapts to the millennial condition of such innovative technology, a poem might soon resemble a weird genre of science fiction, and a poet might become a breed of technician working in a linguistic laboratory,” says Bök in his description of the Xenotext. And whether or not you buy into his model, what is important is that Bök is provoking us, pushing us to debate what the future of science or art might conceivably look like. +++ Pizzathiefgg says: “Its a cool idea, but would it be better to store more important information than 3rd rate poetry?”

Dghughes says: “It reminds me of Start Trek TNG episode ‘The Chase’ where the DNA of many organisms contain a star map and a holographic message.”

Yannn says: “The only people who would say that art is its own end and means are those who seek to justify pointless art.”

Ex_astris_sci says: “At first I was worried he was attempting to achieve “immortality” through his art.”

Maplevanwax says: “This is cool!”

While Reddit.com is surely not a holistic representation of our cultural beliefs (although on second thought, maybe it is), these comments represent the fascination, the misunderstanding, the controversy that surround Bök’s project. And that seems to be part of the point.

It is easy to sing the praises of a project of this sort. Its innovative use of technology is without question astounding. But is there something meaningful behind this flashy façade? I think so. The Xenotext Experiment pushes language nearly to its breaking point, ultimately achieving its goal to “draw concerted attention to the sublimity of language itself, teaching us about the wonders of science in a manner that might seem more engaging to a layperson untrained in biochemistry.” And while every reader of the Xenotext may not immediately yearn to don a lab coat, the project does integrate these two worlds in a refreshingly thoughtful way. Yet Bök’s Xenotext also pushes beyond a simple collapsing of the time-honored duality between science and art, as it also typifies much of what it means to be an artist in an age of technology. On the one hand, Bök is a kind of translator of bacteria whose work primarily consists of prompting and decoding words that aren’t his, yet on the other hand he is creating a project that is at the same time very much original and his own. It is through this tension that the Xenotext opens up a larger conversation about what it means to create in contemporary space. Bök perhaps exposes that in a technological world, artists don’t only straddle the line between art and science, but also between creator and manipulator.

“I’m just trying to be the best 21st century poet that I can be,” says Bök.

JAMIE PACKS B’17 is infected.

SCIENCE

□ 14

dead rat breaks leg; keeps walking By †‡

TOE TAGS Eddie lives in a pink room with two copies of Gravity's Rainbow. He's not a vegetarian, but sometimes people ask if he is. Maybe it's the honey in his voice, though his toned, protein-packed musculature says Chipotle barbacoa all over it.

Constantly surrounded by babbling egomaniacs, Eddie knows how to choose his moments. He walks into the chatterstorm like Captain Ahab—if Jeffrey Eugenides had written Moby Dick—as he digs into some almond butter and inquires about your grandmother's second marriage. Was that before she took up water colors? Was Burt happy?

The only piece of evidence for his exercise routine is a foam roller in his bedroom, though that might be some artisanal contraption from a head shop in Portland. If Eddie were president, cuddling would be the nation's pastime, and baseball some odd kind of performance art. In the Friedman administration, every time it rains, it automatically becomes Sunday afternoon. "Noble champion of the Affordable Netflix Act!" his supporters would cry.

More than a few auburn-haired sophomores have lain awake wondering about Eddie: Is he actually the TA of this Latin American poetry class?

Are they shooting the Hunter S. Thompson biopic at this RISD party?

But was Hunter S. Thompson ever that swoll? Is he Ryan Gosling on a Wiz Khalifa diet? He'll only whisper the answer: just stop it, you're making him blush. ;)

15

□ EULOGY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BUILDING EXCLUSION INTO COLLEGE HILL

by Stephanie Hayes

The old saying goes, ‘If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.’ But what if the right tool for the job is a hammer, and the only tools you have are a badge and a gun?

— Building Our Way Out of Crime, by Bill Geller and Lisa Belsky In 1999, the majority of the Olneyville residents surveyed by the US District Attorney’s Office said they refused to leave their homes at night for fear of their safety. In 2001, three murders occurred in the half-square-mile region. In 2002, Olneyville had the third highest violent crime rate of Providence’s 25 neighborhoods—a striking statistic given the amount of vacant land in the region and large drop in residents it had seen in the preceding decades. In 2003, Olneyville responded by adopting the “Building Our Way Out of Crime” approach.

Championed by community experts Bill Geller and Lisa Belsky, this strategy subscribes to the hotly-contested “Broken Windows Theory” of crime, which holds that physical deterioration breeds delinquency, disorder, and even violence.

Consequently, well-maintained homes and the swift removal of graffiti are thought to deter crime by suggesting that a community cares and illegalities will not be tolerated. This approach therefore advocates for strong police-urban developer relationships, arguing that the physical revitalization these groups enact can deter crime.

Adopting this approach, Olneyville law enforcement paired with community leaders in an attempt to deter crime through environmental design. In the space of a few years, the vacant lots and abandoned properties near Aleppo Street, which had become hubs of prostitution, drug dealing, and violence, were filled with affordable public housing. The nine acres of brownfield—the sad, hazardous remains of the Riverside Mill, which burned down in 1989—were converted into a bike path. Better roads were built, and parks and playgrounds were constructed. By 2006, the crime “hot spots” that had once hogged police resources demanded their fair share of policing, and individuals had begun to “self-police and take pride in their neighborhood,” explained Lietuenant Dean Isabella, commander of the District. In the space of a few years, Olneyville effectively “built its way out of crime.”

Crucially, it did this while keeping the low-income members of the community in the area and maintaining its ethnic diversity; according to the local nonprofit Providence Plan about 58 percent of residents are Hispanic, 22 percent are white, 14 percent are African-American, 7 percent Asian, and 2 percent are Native American.

+++ Now, Thayer Street is adopting a similar approach—at least that’s what the Thayer Street Planning Study would have you believe. The study, conducted by the City of Providence Department of Planning and Development, states that the recent alterations to Thayer Street are modeled after the redevelopment of the area of West Philadelphia surrounding the University of Pennsylvania. Like Olneyville, this region had high rates of violent and property crime and underwent significant redevelopment and remarketing to become “University City.” Although never explicitly labeled as such, the neighborhood took a page right out of the Building Our Way Out of Crime playbook in the late 1990s. Following the shooting of a UPenn student, the university paired with local police and redevelopers to limit crime through urban redesign. Sidewalks were widened, public parklets were added, new restaurants and retail sites were installed, and the region’s motto became “kick litter in the can.” Affordable housing units were replaced with large apartments and higher-rent housing, and many long-time residents were displaced as the median household income raised dramatically. Yet, when it came to crime, it was deemed a success. The rates of violent crime reduced significantly and professors of UPenn who had been scared off by the region’s violence returned to live in the area. Locals unaffiliated with the university often refer to this process as the “Penntrification” of West Philly, whereby the entire community is being made in the image of the wealthy Ivy League university.

December 5 2014

On a superficial level, the recent changes to Thayer Street are exactly like those that occurred in University City. There are the freshly painted pedestrian crossings, the parklet outside the Brown Bookstore, and the widened sidewalks in front of Blue State Coffee and City Sports. Thayer even has a foil to the fancy skyscrapers being erected in University City: 257 Thayer. This multi-million dollar, 95-unit housing development occupies almost an entire block in the center of Thayer Street and required the demolition of nine existing residential structures.

Relating Thayer to the area around UPenn seems like an attempt to use crime reduction as a means to justify redevelopment. There’s one major fault with this: unlike Olneyville and the area now know as University City, Thayer isn’t struggling with crime. Far from it. “There’s very little crime on Thayer,” said Lieutenant Ryan, commander of the District, “because it’s such a vibrant, busy area.” Although the District as a whole has seen decreases in violent crime and drugs and weapons offenses since the redevelopment, Lt. Ryan explained that these statistics have little connection to the bustling Thayer Street, where the most common problem is disorderly conduct when locals leave clubs and hookah bars on weekends. When it comes to crime, Thayer Street and West Philadelphia in the ‘90s are worlds apart.

In spite of this, the Providence Police have plans to increase their presence on Thayer Street when the redevelopment is complete, Lt. Ryan explained. He added that a cohort of recent police academy graduates will hit the streets in mid-December, and many will be tasked with performing foot patrols of Thayer. When asked why more police are needed when Thayer has so little crime, Ryan unhelpfully explained that the District as a whole has been strapped for officers. So, why fix what’s not broke? Professor Stefano Bloch of Brown University’s Urban Studies Department offered a compelling view, during a class called Crime and the City. “Police often provide more protection and frequent areas where people have higher degrees of capital,” he said. When it comes to Thayer, it sounds accurate. When 257 Thayer is complete and higherincome residents move into the area, the economic capital of Thayer will rise—and, according to Lt. Ryan, police are prepared to respond.

We don’t even need to wait to until mid-December or the completion of 257 Thayer to witness changes in policing.

The context of redevelopment already appears to have altered law enforcement’s perception of what constitutes criminal behavior on Thayer Street. A few months ago, you couldn’t walk past Ben & Jerry’s on Thayer Street without being solicited for change by a homeless person. The same was true of the sidewalk in front of Au Bon Pain. These men and women were fixtures of Thayer Street. In my experience, none of these panhandlers hassled passersby, nor did they block foot traffic.

But now they’ve disappeared. In a similar vein, one vendor who often sells jewelry on Thayer Street explained that he’s been asked to move on a number of times in recent months, in spite of his possession of a vendor’s permit. These relatively sudden changes suggest that with higher-income housing and parklets has come a decreased tolerance for quality-oflife crimes like panhandling and loitering. This shift proves the particularly subjective nature of these kinds of low-level crime. Certainly, Thayer Street is not the only region noticing this. In recent weeks, there’s been much discussion in The Providence Journal about what constitutes aggressive panhandling as opposed to lawful panhandling. Although there are specific criteria for what constitutes an aggressive or unlawful offense—including following a potential donor, blocking their path, or continuing to solicit someone after they’ve rejected a request—a number of authorities interviewed by the ProJo suggested that panhandling arrests often don’t meet these standards.

Importantly, this intolerance for quality-of-life crimes may not be entirely the result of police efforts, but due to the actions of local residents. As Lieutenant Dean Isabella, Commander of District 5, said of his experiences in Olneyville: “When people believe they live in a tidy neighborhood they think differently, they tolerate less. Unlike those neighborhoods that are broken down with blight and public safety issues, in the tidy environments, people begin to self-police.”

In short, with stricter policing and increased criminalization, Thayer Street is building its way into crime, rather than out of it. Formerly permissible acts are now punished. Crucially, this trend not only narrows the bounds of permissible actions, but of permissible actors. By criminalizing acts like panhandling or sitting in public spaces—acts homeless people must perform in public in order to survive—communities criminalize the very existence of homeless people. As Don Mitchell writes of anti-homelessness legislation in his article “The Annihilation of Space By Law”: “In other words, we are creating a world in which a whole class of people simply cannot be, entirely because they have no place to be.” The saddest part is that the people who punish quality-of-life crimes (read: enforce anti-homelessness legislation) believe themselves to be helping the community. As Mitchell writes: “[T]hey see themselves not as instigators of a pogrom, but rather as saviors: saviors of cities, saviors of all the ‘ordinary people’ who would like to use urban spaces but simply can’t when they are chocked full of homeless people…” +++ This intolerance for quality-of-life crime signals a broader shift to privileging the exchange value of space over the use value—or, more simply put, profit over people. It’s becoming more and more true that you can only occupy space on Thayer Street if you can pay to do so. This is most apparent in the city’s plan to implement parking meters and regulations on Thayer Street, of which Bob Azar, Director of the Providence’s Department of Planning and Development, informed students at Brown University last week, when he visited a class called Crime and the City. Even the little public parklet outside the bookstore can be seen to have ulterior economic motives. On the surface, it converts two parking spaces— a possible source of city income—into an open public space that seats 8-10 individuals. One glance at The University City Annual Report for 2013, however, suggests that the area’s developers view the parklet differently. The caption beside a photograph of the parklets installed near UPenn boasts not an increase in community well-being but a 40 percent increase in sales at Honest Tom’s Tacos. Perhaps it’s a cynical view, but Thayer Street’s new parklet might be intended to serve as nothing more than extended seating for the nearby Blue State Coffee and Chipotle. At the very least, we can be sure it wasn’t built to serve the homeless population of Providence.

To borrow from Mitchell again: “As troublesome as it may be to contemplate the necessity of creating ‘safe havens’ for homeless people in the public space of cities, it is even more troublesome to contemplate a world without them.” Thayer is becoming such a world. +++ Thayer Street is not West Philadelphia, that’s for sure. However, we can make some predictions about the future of Thayer using University City as a model. Following the trajectory of West Philly, Thayer will presumably become far less diverse.

Already home to some of the highest rents in Providence, Thayer threatens to become the terrain of exclusively high-income residents, big spenders, or those with high cultural capital. This exclusion could even extend to who can occupy these streets on a temporary basis. Another interesting consideration is Brown University’s injection of significant funds into the redevelopment, which is sure to become a source of town-andgown tension. Azar’s claim to students at Brown that Thayer was an example of “organic development” is a cringe-worthy attempt at deflecting responsibility. His assurance that the university has the same weight in the decision-making process as all other stakeholders is also a tough line to swallow in light of the gentrifying influence other Ivy Leagues have had on their surrounding areas. Brown has long been criticized for influencing the surrounding area, but perhaps locals will take inspiration from the residents of West Philly and lend it a new name: the Brownification of Providence.

STEPHANIE HAYES B’15 was converted into a bike path.

FEATURES

□ 16

siberian nightmare skeleton footprints hang on the shore’s frame, mistake me for dead, I thought them french lovers. oh, Russia, the ocean pounds now.

I rest in the bow and claw at the water. in dreams, the sea eats me, saline shrew—the red rolls in, a place for the kiss.

17

□

LITERARY

siberian dream pine trees, I imagine the shoreline fleeting towards me. oh, Russia, the ocean cannot flow mid-country. in dreams the sea meets me, the waves tongue me, nature on nature, natural changes. a parade in my mind, and the drums were skeleton, their hands beating, scream and the stopping—my heart!

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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