THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT V.28 N.4

MANAGING EDITORS Julieta Cárdenas, Simon Engler, Tristan Rodman NEWS Sebastian Clark, Alex Sammon, Emma Wohl METRO Megan Hauptman, Rick Salamé, Kat Thornton ARTS Greg Nissan, Maya Sorabjee FEATURES Kyle Giddon, Lili Rosenkranz, Josh Schenkkan TECHNOLOGY Houston Davidson SPORTS Zeve Sanderson INTERVIEWS Drew Dickerson FOOD John White LITERARY Eli Pitegoff EPHEMERA Molly Landis, Matthew Marsico OCCULT Addie Mitchell, Eli Petzold X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff LIST Claudia Norton, Diane Zhou DESIGN + ILLUSTRATION Mark Benz, Polina Godz, Casey Friedman, Kim Sarnoff ART DIRECTOR Aaron Harris COVER EDITOR Polina Godz SENIOR EDITORS David Adler, Grace Dunham,

VOLUME 28 // ISSUE 4

NEWS 2 Week in Review

vera carothers, sebastian clark & alex sammon

3 Sprawl Rats emma wohl

METRO 6 SouthLight

hadley sorsby-jones

7 Overdose

sophie kasakove

FEATURES 9 Revolting

doreen st. félix

ARTS 5 Femmes Françaises

stephanie hayes & john white

Sam Rosen, Doreen St. Félix, Ellora Vilkin STAFF WRITERS Lisa Borst, Vera Carothers, Sophie Kasakove, Becca Millstein, Abigail Savitch-Lew, Carly West, Sara Winnick STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Andres Chang, Amy Chen, Jack Mernin WEB Edward Friedman, Patrick McMenamin COPY Mary Frances Gallagher, Paige Morris BUSINESS Haley Adams COVER ART Polina Godz MVP Indy Metro

INTERVIEWS 13 Susan Bernofsky greg nissan

SPORTS 11 Iced

nicholas catoni

OCCULT 17 Magic, the Gathering addie mitchell & eli petzold

LIT 15 Old Daze

edward friedman

FROM THE EDITOR S We stood on the shore and stared at the haze. You were leaving soon. I suppressed the fear that told me not to drink beer at two in the afternoon, but I was still scared of letting go.

We stood in the black water, freezing and still. We were quiet as we stripped and swam out into the bay. Silent explosions of bioluminescence surrounded our naked bodies.

We lay on the shore, my blanket covering our whole bodies. We both stopped shivering when we kissed. For a second I thought that I might not be losing you.

We walked down the beach late on a Saturday night in February. You drank a beer and told me about your sex life.

I wanted to listen, but we were walking on songlines and all I could hear was the sound of old friends singing. Dancing, thinking.

“I love living so close to the ocean,” said a stranger.

“Yeah,” I said, “but unfortunately you have to bike a ways down to Barrington or Warwick to get clean swimming water.”

“Oh, I wasn’t talking about swimming,” he laughed. “I swam in Barrington once. It was awful.” — RS

X 18 Too Proud To Beg layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

EPHEMERA 12 Stacy’s Mom

matthew marsico & molly landis

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. The Independent receives support from Generation Progress/Center for American Progress. Generation Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at GenProgress.org.

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

A WEEK OF CONFUSION

by Vera Carothers, Sebastian Clark & Alex Sammon illustration by Maya Sorabjee Asking “what’s happening?” is often a mindless exercise in small talk. It doesn’t demand an answer. But this time, when you asked, we wanted to give you a real response. We mulled it over and realized: we have no idea.

THE BITTER END Ask any bitcoin enthusiast about the virtues of the virtual currency, and the answer will always be the same: it’s decentralized, unregulated, and impervious to manipulation. It’s been extolled by some as Main Street’s answer to the shady currency practices of major financial institutions. Bitcoin, enthusiastic nerds and technically savvy drug dealers tell us, is the future.

There were always questions surrounding bitcoin. What is a bitcoin? What determines the exchange rate? Where are they stored? How does it work? Those questions fell by the wayside as major distributors began to buy in. All of life’s necessities (food, furniture, even Sacramento Kings tickets) could be purchased with BTC. It shot up in value from $30 to $1200 since last March alone. Fortunes were made in middle school computer clubs. The befuddled were drowned out by promises of untold affluence.

Prospectors keen on the digital gold rush arrived at Mt. Gox, the world’s largest bitcoin exchange center. With an online interface that mirrors the stock exchange, users submitted credit card numbers and received a corresponding bitcoin balance in exchange. Investors had supreme confidence in the operation. Bitcoin, after all, was encrypted. No further explanation needed.

So when Mt. Gox went offline a couple of days ago, and $350 million dollars worth of bitcoin disappeared along with it, the perplexity was understandable. Some say their entire fortunes vanished into thin air. But those users seem to have confused this understanding as well: in order to vanish, something has to be tangibly present in the first place.

The reasons for bitcoin’s popularity are the same ones that made this massive heist possible. Details are still emerging, but it seems as though the supposedly impervious encryption had one gaping hole—big enough to extract 745,000 bitcoins unnoticed. Of course, without central regulation and oversight, it was tough to do anything about it. The potential of virtual currency here is almost sublime: only in the virtual world can $350 million fit in one person’s pockets.

There were red flags all along. Mt. Gox, which stands for Magic The Gathering Online eXchange, holds one of the clues. Common understanding of this entire currency’s presence was something akin to magic, its disappearance much of the same. Mt. Gox’s CEO Mark Karpeles, taking a page from the bitcoin playbook, has disappeared as well. Protestors linger outside of his abandoned Japan office.

Placing confidence and cash in a monetary system that no one seems to fully understand wasn’t the wisest move, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to throw in the towel. Since Mt. Gox’s closure, the price of a bitcoin has shot up over 200 percent.

Huh? –AS

FEBRUARY 28 2014

DROP IT LIKE IT’S POT I once had a cat named Frieda. Frieda liked to go hunting.

Most nights she would drag in your run-of-the-mill urban fauna—mice, squirrels, small birds. One night, however, when coming home late, I walked in to a flurry of anxiety.

There was a big black swan trying to drill its head through the ceiling. Frieda, standing in front of me, lifted her head to make eye contact. It was a confused look of pride and guilt, her body shrugging in remorse yet poised in self-regard. We both knew it: she was in too deep. +++ Last Sunday, Maximo Caminero took a trip to the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Like everyone there, he shuffled huskily from gallery to gallery, seeing a bit of this, briefly pausing, and then going on to see a little of that. The art intrigued him but not too much. He played the role of the viewer well, though, fooling everyone else around him. The charade kept up until, in a moment of unreflective reflex, he partook in what he later called a “spontaneous protest.” He approached a collection of oddly colored vases, picked up the nearest by its neck, and let it drop.

Caminero stood there defiantly with a look of pride and guilt, waiting for his arrest. He knew he was in too deep, but could not deny his self-satisfaction.

By his own admission, Caminero thought the vase was “a common clay pot like you would find at Home Depot.”

In truth, it was a neolithic vase that the artist Ai Weiwei had covered in industrial paint. At $1 million, it was worth considerably more than anything you could buy in a hardware store––not surprising given that it was in a museum. “I didn’t know that it was that amount,” Caminero told the Miami New Times. “I feel so sorry about it, for sure.”

Caminero, a self-declared conceptual artist, said he was frustrated that the museum did not show local work—so he took the museum’s collection into his own hands. In 1995, Weiwei made a protest of his own by dropping a Han dynasty vase, so Caminero thought Weiwei would be sympathetic. But Weiwei, in conversation with the New York Times, responded with skepticism: “It doesn’t sound right. His argument doesn’t make much sense. If he really had a point, he should choose another way, because this will bring him trouble to destroy property that does not belong to him.”

Weiwei, of course, did not have to deal with the potter of the vase he destroyed, who died before the first century CE. Caminero now faces felony criminal mischief charges.

–SC

TRIAL AND ERROR This past week, during a highly anticipated trial at the International Criminal Court, confusion over idiom brought proceedings to a standstill. Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto and radio journalist Joshua Arap Sang were standing trial for inciting ethnic violence following the 2007 Kenyan general election. The case hinged on evidence in the Kalenjin language, an aggregate of twelve local dialects. Witness # 409 cited two Kalenjin parables uttered by Ruto and a fellow politician to Nandi Hill residents in a speech supposed to provide damning and unassailable testimony.

The first: “Makimoche ketit ne kiibu chumbek,” which literally means, “We don’t want the tree that was brought by the white man…the trees should be uprooted.”

The second: “Ometai suswek kolanda agoi got,” which translates roughly as “you have allowed grass to grow up to your houses.”

Witness #409 understood these statements to mean that non-Kalenjin residents should be purged from the area.

Undeniably scathing to the ears of the Kalenjin-fluent, the evidence didn’t quite hit home in translation. Despite being unaffiliated with the case, Kalenjin-speaking lawyers Kigen and Bosek stepped up to aid the prosecution. In a strangely selfless permutation of speech therapy, each translator repeated the remarks in Kalenjin, asking the witness to confirm the words he had used, eventually spelling each word aloud to the court. However, the exercise stalled in disagreement about pronunciation and spelling. This time, the honorable Judge Osuji stepped down from the bench to assist in translation. In a final surreal twist, even defendant Sang himself was called upon to help confirm the accusation.

The fiasco has caused much international eye rolling.

One particularly disenchanted commenter on Standard Digital, a main Kenyan media outlet, bemoaned “the last signs of a crumbling ICC case, when the defendants play the role of the prosecution.” –VC

NEWS

02

O S T E N TAT I O N F U N K rolezinhos and the politics of consumption in suburban Brazil

by Emma Wohl illustration by Casey Friedman Evandro Farias de Almeida is an unlikely hero. The 20-yearold, who lives in the working-class outskirts of São Paulo, boasts more than 13,000 Facebook followers. A video he posted last April, in which he snorts a condom up his nose and expels it through his mouth, has more than 15,000 views on YouTube. In photos he wears brightly colored clothing and name brand baseball caps; he has colored rubber bands over his braces. His fashion statements and online tomfoolery have earned him notoriety among poor teenagers from the São Paulo suburbs.

Evandro would likely never have made a name for himself outside this set if it weren’t for the explosion in attention paid to the events he helped start—the rolezinhos, or little strolls around the city’s malls. In these gatherings, bands of youths sometimes numbering in the thousands go to the mall dressed in their finest clothes and, essentially, hang out. They flirt, they walk around; they are, according to the adult journalists who started paying attention late last year, rowdy and disruptive. They behave like the teenagers they are.

Someone—usually a local social media “celebrity” like Evandro—will call for a gathering on Facebok or Twitter, and other roleiros will flock to the event. Smaller, informal rolezinhos have been occurring since Brazil opened its first malls in the 1970s. But the first weeks of 2014 saw young, mostly black teenagers gathering in crowds of as many as sixthousand people and with surprising frequency in malls. They are mainly a São Paulo phenomenon, though similar events have happened in Rio de Janeiro in response to the national attention garnered by a few events.

To call the rolezinho a flash mob, as most US news sources have translated the term, is at once accurate and sugar-coating. There is nothing threatening about the act of gathering in the mall in itself. But the rolezinho exposes and destabilizes

03

NEWS

the deeply rooted divisions of race and class within Brazilian society. The responses of observers, writing and commenting in newspapers across the country and around the world, may provide fuel for a stronger damnation of these divisions than the acts themselves. +++ São Paulo does not lie along the beach like Rio; it has no public space in which people can gather, apart from a few widely dispersed parks. For years, those who cannot afford access to private clubs, bars, or hotels have made their own diversions, pulling their cars up to gas stations, parking lots, or the middle of the street; blasting music out of powerful sound systems; and enjoying the space they have made for themselves.

While the clothing worn by young people in the rolezinhos may not make a political statement about their disenfranchisement or repudiate consumer culture, it is—at least for some—motivated by the class and racial priorities of their society. In the last half century of uneven economic growth, Brazil has increasingly tried to present itself as a modern, cosmopolitan country; for its wealthy citizens, flashy, internationally recognizable labels are a key status marker. “No one speaks of these things, but it’s clear that you’re discriminated against when you go to the mall badly dressed,” one roleiro told the Internet news provider iG. Poor and middle-class youth are attempting to participate in a culture held up in front of them as their nation’s present and future, then derided and dismissed—effectively telling them they have no place in this future.

“These youths decided to call attention to themselves, yelling and making a commotion,” Fernando Ricciarelli, a

35-year-old financial director in São Paulo, told the LA Times.

He said the idea of having rolezinhos “scares the people in the mall who want peace and quiet so they can do their shopping.”

“The presence of these teenagers in malls is shocking to some because it’s being done in an organized way, instead of being diffuse,” Pablo Ortellado, a public policy professor at the University of São Paulo, told the New York Times. On social media, people claiming to be shopkeepers and shoppers say the gatherings have gotten violent and led to shoplifting, but others—largely left-wing intellectuals, some newspapers, and the youths themselves—vociferously disagree. Whatever the threat posed by the young revelers, it was met by swift escalation; at a January 11 rolezinho in the Shopping Metrô Itaquera on São Paulo’s western edge, military police—also alerted to the gathering by Facebook—used rubber bullets and tear gas to dispel the roleiros as soon as they began to gather. Such a violent response should not come as a surprise to those who know what is happening across Brazil, where police regularly use lethal force against poor, marginalized populations. In the slums and neighborhoods in the hills or on the outskirts of towns, constant police presence often means that the youth cannot come or go within their own neighborhoods uninterrupted. +++ “The only problem they have in regards to consumption is that they do not practice it as much as they would like,” Alana Rizzo, Alexandre Aragão, and Bela Megale wrote in an article in Veja magazine, a conservative biweekly. Many who see the rolezinho as devoid of substance or political character point out that its participants valorize the consumer culture with

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

which they interact. Rizzo, Aragão, and Megale observe that, rather than disrupting consumption or attempting to claim a space for the disenfranchised in elite areas, most events take place in peripheral, lower-middle-class areas.

On that matter, many of the rolezinho’s original participants agree. “Why would I wait two hours inside a bus to go shopping in a place where everything is more expensive and no one knows me?” Evandro Faria asked Veja. Another young man who participated in several rolezinhos told iG that the purpose of the event is “to pick up women.” Though the events have spread to the point that roleiros are attempting to access some of the country’s most elite areas, it seems that they are consistently failing to gain access. One event was planned in mid-January at the Shopping JK Iguatemi, in São Paulo’s upscale Vila Olímpia district. The mall managed to block it by obtaining a court injunction. Several events in Rio’s beachfront Southern Zone were similarly blocked by police and mall security.

“They just want to have fun, but here come the profiteers and troublemakers,” the Veja article continues. Those troublemakers are leftist politicians, anarchists, and members of the squatters’ movements—the Landless Peasants’ and the Homeless Workers’ Movements, primarily—who critics on the Right accuse of co-opting a display of immature fun into a political statement. Indeed, many of the latest gatherings in more central areas have taken on a more organized, expressly political tone. A planned rolezinho at the Shopping Leblon in one of Rio de Janeiro’s most expensive and chic neighborhoods was aimed to show “support for the people of São Paulo, against all forms of oppression and discrimination against the poor and blacks, especially against the brutal and cowardly daily action of the military police in Brazil, whether in the malls, at the beaches, or in the suburbs,” according to

FEBRUARY 28 2014

the Facebook event page. But the planned gathering never happened. Instead, the mall’s owners shut it down for the entire day; military police with German shepherds stood guard as about fifty people gathered outside, grilling food, playing music, and carrying signs protesting police brutality and the World Cup. A response to the police crackdown on the original rolezinhos, this event—which called itself by the same name— appears to differ from the traditional event, at least judging by those who attend and speak up and the message they are spreading. “People in favelas usually only enter malls to work in the shops. The customers are almost all rich, white people,” Hanier Ferrer, a 23-year-old student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, told The Guardian. While the university is free to attend, its entrance exams are difficult and it is highly selective, with a student body that is disproportionately wealthy and white. “The people from the favelas and the periphery want to prove they are just like everyone else. They want a rethink of social relations,” he added.

No organizers of the rolezinhos have made such a claim.

Instead, they call this movement a grito por lazer, or “cry for leisure.” “The sounds they’re mainly listening to aren’t antiestablishment rap but ostentation funk,” Leandro Beguoci, editor of a new media start-up told The New York Times—referring to funk ostentação, a local musical genre whose themes center around consumption of cars, motorcycles, alcohol, and other luxury goods. To him, that signifies that these youth aren’t acting from a place of political consciousness. Beguoci wants political partisans of all kinds to stop assigning a political message to the youth participating in the rolezinho and just see them, as he says is their goal, as people.

For Maria Rita Kehl, a São Paulo-based essayist and professor of philosophy at the University of São Paulo, the underclass roleiro’s practice of taking up space in the leisure places of one’s socioeconomic superiors is inherently politicial. It “functions as a denunciation of discrimination,” she wrote in a Folha de S. Paulo opinion piece, whether articulated consciously or simply by roleiros’ ongoing presence in places where they are clearly not welcome.

Kehl is right to call their presence political. But by bringing in a whole host of other national concerns, overly zealous politically-minded observers run the risk of stealing from those really affected by Brazil’s social divisions the opportunity to articulate their own message, whether with words or their bodies. On the other hand, the fact that the response of conservative critics was to denounce the youths’ activities as a rude, déclassé effort to “wrest from the middle class the space it views as an oasis of calm and security,” as the Veja feature described it, underscores the prejudice and scorn they are coming up against. That scorn demands a response.

Roleiros may not claim to be protesting, but they are learning the difficulties and the joys of taking up space—in the malls and in newsprint. The backlash is disappointing but not surprising; it only reveals that many among the middleand upper-class do not think these youths have earned the right to access the consumer culture they themselves can appreciate. If flashy clothes on young black people in commercial spaces hasn’t yet disrupted or reversed that prejudice, at least it has proved that the prejudice is real.

EMMA WOHL B’14 went for the air conditioning, the WiFi, and the Starbucks.

+++

NEWS

04

Les femmes du film Women on Screen at the Providence French Film Festival

by Stephanie Hayes & John White Illustration by Piere Korostoff

The Providence French Film Festival runs from February 20 to March 2 at Cable Car Cinema. Showtimes are available at cablecarcinema.com.

Jeune et Jolie (Young and Beautiful) Directed by François Ozon, 2013, 93 minutes

Blue Is the Warmest Color Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013, 179 minutes

It’s summer. Isabelle is 16 and on vacation with her family.

Determined to lose her virginity, she sleeps with a German boy named Felix on their first date. It’s unspectacular. “It’s done,” she tells her prepubescent brother. Days later, she leaves without saying goodbye. Cut. It’s autumn. Isabelle is 17. Dressed in business attire, she strides across a hotel lobby and takes a lift to the sixth floor, room 6025. There she meets Georges, a white-haired Frenchman with a deep, echoic voice.

He tells her that she has melancholy eyes. She undresses. Later that evening, she leaves, 500 euros richer.

Jeune et Jolie (Young and Beautiful) tracks a pivotal year in the life of Isabelle, a dainty Parisian schoolgirl, played by Marine Vacth, who suddenly becomes a high-class prostitute.

As fall melds into winter, we witness a catalogue of sexual encounters between Isabelle and older men. We see her stockpile banknotes, hide text messages, and steal her mother’s formal blouses. Yet, we are not given an explanation that feels satisfying. All seem superficial: television, the Internet, an absent father. Isabelle doesn’t need the money. She says she doesn’t find pleasure in the sex. She has liberal parents. She’s an intelligent girl at a good school. Even after her double-life is discovered and we’re given a police statement, psychology session, and mother-daughter confrontation, Isabelle’s psychology remains opaque. What drives her?

Isabelle’s absent logic is one of the film’s major strengths.

Through the inpenetrability of Isabelle’s choices, Ozon forces us to think about transgressive sexuality in a fresh way. Faced with a woman who willingly enters into sex work and still meets hardship, we are made to see the complexities of sexual power dynamics—Ozon does not reduce them to a tug of war between dominance and subordinance. Confronted with a blank-faced, remorseless protagonist who describes her encounters as “an experience,” we must rethink the placement of pity or blame.

Isabelle’s journey is signposted by four seasons and four accompanying Françoise Hardy songs, an overly simplistic format that that reduces her coming of age into a collection of clichés. When Isabelle loses her virginity, Hardy croons “La petit fille que tu as connue / Moi, je ne la suis plus” (“I am no longer the little girl you once knew”). At the end of the film, Isabelle’s errant year is flippantly summarized by the Hardy song: “Je suis moi” (“I am me”). A year of prostitution is passed off as an adolescent search for identity.

The Arthur Rimbaud poem, recited by Isabelle and her peers partway through the film, offers the most compelling –and yet hilariously obscure—explanation for all this. No one’s serious at seventeen. One fine evening, you tire of beer and lemonade, and the cafés with their lustrous lamps. Under the green lights of the promenade, you walk. –SH

“When you cross paths, and you both exchange glances spontaneously, like with love at first sight, is there something less or more in your heart?” asks a high school literature teacher three minutes into Blue Is the Warmest Color. The class is discussing the eighteenth-century novel La vie de Marianne.

Adèle (played by Adèle Exarchopoulos), the film’s protagonist, sits in rapt attention. Eight minutes later in the film, Adèle performs this exchange with a blue-haired woman as the two cross a busy street in opposite directions.

The woman is Emma (played by Léa Seydoux), who Adèle meets later on. In the intervening time, Adèle has an unfulfilling fling with a guy and an unfulfilling flirtation with a girl, both classmates. She goes clubbing with her friend, Valentin. Valentin dances with some friends, and Adèle, left alone, follows a group of women down the street to a gay bar, where she and Emma immediately hit it off. Emma studies Fine Arts, and, though Adèle knows little about art, conversation between the two is effortless and entertaining (“Why isn’t there an Ugly Arts school?” asks Adèle).

Blue Is the Warmest Color isn’t terribly interested in the details of Adèle and Emma’s increasingly shared lives. Adèle is a high school student with aspirations to teach, and then she’s a well-established preschool teacher. She lives with her parents, and then she’s comfortably settled in Emma’s apartment. Time jumps indeterminately, and suddenly it’s unclear whether the two have been together for three months or three years. The tensions between them feel instantly familiar—Adèle doesn’t feel at ease with Emma’s intellectual friends, and Emma pushes Adèle to write more, suggesting that teaching can’t be her true passion—and that is part of what makes the three-hour film simultaneously banal and compulsively watchable.

The film’s interest in the details of the females’ bodies, however, is less easily watchable. Director Abdellatif Kechiche lingers on Adèle as she chews with her mouth open, sleeps with limbs askew and on display, and walks ahead of the camera down the street. When she and Emma have sex, the scenes are graphic and glamorized and full of close-ups.

While the camerawork is beautiful and moving, it is difficult to watch Blue Is the Warmest Color without getting distracted from its characters by the film’s focus on their bodies. The women’s bodies are necessarily important to the story of their relationship. However, the camera’s heavy-handed voyeurism feels out of touch with the nuances of the film, particularly in that it takes away from the two leads’ captivating performances.

Midway through the film, Emma and Adèle lie in bed together. “I’d just like for you to be fulfilled,” Emma says, staring into space. “I’m fulfilled with you,” responds Adèle, eyes fixed on Emma’s face with the same look as the first time she saw her. -JW

Jeune et Jolie screens Friday, February 28 at 9:00PM.

Blue Is the Warmest Color screens Sunday, March 2 at 2:15PM.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Night Light illuminating the Grace Church Cemetery

by Hadley Sorsby-Jones illustration by Aaron Harris

Michelle Garcia, age nine, looks delighted to be wandering around the Grace Church Cemetery. Michelle poses for a picture with her mother and her sister, and when I offer to take it for them she smiles. After the picture her mother, Danica, tends to Michelle’s younger sister, who seems shy and preoccupied by the pine trees warped on a screen behind me.

Michelle, however, makes sure to introduce me to the small stuffed owl that she proudly carries with her. His name is Mr. Owly.

Michelle and her family are touring SouthLight, a twonight urban lighting exhibition created by RISD undergraduates in an urban design class, at the Grace Church Cemetery on Providence’s South Side. Bordered on its longest edges by Broad Street and Elmwood Avenue, the cemetery is the first thing that people see when they enter the South Side from downtown. Its triangular shape connects three of the South Side’s major neighborhoods: South Providence, West End, and Elmwood. It is a resting place made visceral by both the rich biographies of its entombed and the crime and hard drugs that are associated with it at night, when it usually remains unlit.

On the night of February 6, the cemetery is crossed with white lines and punctuated with beams of glowing blue.

SouthLight uses lantern-lit paths to guide visitors through the cemetery’s nine-acre plot of land. At certain places ethereal white concave discs hang obliquely from the tree branches arching over the headstones. These discs serve as screens for films that are projected upwards onto them from the bases of their trees. Each light installation represents a theme based on the lives of the people buried near the tree from which it hangs, and music ranging from a violin waltz to a slapstick cartoon soundtrack plays in accompaniment to the films honoring the deceased. The blue light percolating through the cemetery comes from fixtures placed at ground level that flash in patterns, adding depth to the tree bark that they illuminate. +++ The important thing is that “when a project like SouthLight comes into the neighborhood, [people] see the possibility,” says Doug Victor, a founder of the Elmwood Neighborhood Association. Though the cemetery houses many venerated former residents of Providence, the Grace Church Cemetery was long a poorly lit and secluded site for crime and drugs.

For years a coating of trash marked the ground along the tombstones, and most people avoided the cemetery. That began to change in 2001, when the Grace Episcopal Church transferred ownership of the cemetery to the Trinity Gateway Project, a non-profit that organizes bi-annual clean ups and general maintenance projects. For the past two years, a group of residents have been working with Stop Wasting Abandoned Property (SWAP)—a non-profit that works to revitalize neighborhoods on the South Side—to address unmet concerns about the cemetery.

Doug Victor, who is also chair of the South Providence and Elmwood Neighborhood Crime Watch, told me that during the group’s first meeting two drug overdoses brought consecutive ambulances to the cemetery. The Grace Church Cemetery is one of the projects of both the residents’ association, which seeks to rejuvenate it as a community space, and the crime watch group, which aims to improve its poor reputation. “The cemetery was known as a place where people could do what they want,” Victor said. “That is changing now.”

FEBRUARY 28 2014

+++ Lighting the Grace Church cemetery has been of interest to the surrounding community for years. Groups like SWAP and the Elmwood Residents’ Association would like to see the cemetery reclaimed as a symbol of the potential for revival in the South Side as a whole. A well-lit cemetery would be significant progress towards this goal, but the cost of permanent lighting is prohibitive. SouthLight was sponsored by RISD, the City of Providence, SWAP, the Social Light Movement, National Grid, PHILIPS Color Kinetics, and other Providence organizations as a trial run for cemetery lighting that would not incur the costs of a permanent installation. With a final cost of about $3000, however, SouthLight was not cheap.

SouthLight’s does not offer a permanent solution to the lack of lighting in the Grace Church Cemetery. Laura Briggs, the head of the Department of Architecture at RISD and a key organizer of the event, described it as facilitating the “next step” of permanent lighting in the cemetery. But can a temporary project actually lead to rejuvenation in the long term?

Doug Victor seemed optimistic on this point. “I want the South Side to have equity with other neighborhoods in Providence,” he said. SouthLight drew people from both within and outside of the community around Grace Church Cemetery and got them talking about how beautiful, not how dangerous, the cemetery is. An important question, Victor said, is “What do children [in the neighborhood] see when they look out the window?” The appearance of a neighborhood is an indicator of its worth to community members and visitors alike, and arts-based development can create instances of beauty that become sources of community pride.

Fred Ordonez, the Executive Director of Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), a group that works for socioeconomic justice for low-income communities of color in Providence, was more critical. He believes that the arts are a valuable part of community development when they involve local people and create opportunities for them, but not if they are “just for the sake of trying to make things look better.”

Ordonez did not see SouthLight, but he was skeptical of the project’s long-term impact. “To really know what effect the project had you would have to knock on doors around the neighborhood and ask people about it,” he said, but his intuition is that any project needs to directly engage community members if it is to enact change. SouthLight drew people to Grace Church Cemetery and communicated its potential for growth, but community members did not create the light exhibits or gain opportunities from them. People at SouthLight were obviously enchanted by the cemetery, but it was unclear how many of them were from the neighborhoods surrounding the cemetery. Symbols of revival can provoke thought, but they do not implement revival itself.

In order to become authentically rejuvenated, Ordonoz says neighborhoods “need art, but not just art.” He describes Providence’s recent history as a “Tale of Two Cities,” in which municipal development pushes minority communities away from downtown and encourages superficial new construc-

tions like the dog run in the West End’s Dexter Park. Ordonez also cites a racial divide between the leadership of residents’ associations and the neighborhoods they represent as a barrier to them meeting the needs of their entire communities. The South Side would undoubtedly benefit more from direct investment in education and affordable housing than that two nights of lighting and good publicity. These factors call into question SouthLight’s relation to the needs of the larger South Side community and how equitably resources are distributed between neighborhoods. Ordonez points out these issues not to dismiss the role of the arts in a community, but to emphasize the need to “engage [people] in a real way.” +++ There have been multiple thefts, assaults, and cases of disorder logged by the Providence Police Department in the area surrounding Grace Church Cemetery since SouthLight. On February 7th, the last day of the event, there was a narcotics violation near midnight on the cemetery’s Broad Street side.

But when I am at SouthLight on February 6th, the people that I see wandering through the lantern paths and admiring the curved effect of the installation films seem enthused at the cemetery’s glow. Danica Garcia talks to me about her many years living in Upper South Providence while her daughters watch the lights around us.

HADLEY SORSBY-JONES B’17 was pleased to meet Mr. Owly.

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all When Jim Gillen arrived for work at the Providence Center on February 4, he found a crowd of his clients dressed in black suits, shuffling nervously around the lobby. Gillen, who serves as Manager of the Providence Center’s Recovery Services Division, knew where they were going without having to ask. He held open the door as the group silently embarked on its routine walk to the cemetery and scanned the crowd for the missing patient.

The missing patient was Charles Brown, one of 45 people to die from opiate overdoses in Rhode Island since the beginning of 2014. The 27 deaths recorded in January alone show a sharp increase from the 18 reported in January 2013 and 15 each in January 2011 and 2012. The overdoses—which, according to the state’s Department of Health, have reached “epidemic” proportions—are due in part to a rise in the availability of a powerful painkiller called fentanyl, which was detected in 28 of the overdose victims screened so far. Fentanyl, which is about ten times more potent than heroin, caused a similar wave of overdoses in New Jersey several years ago, killing 133 people between April and December of 2006. The drug is used as a pain reliever in clinical practice and is available as a prescription, intended mostly for cancer patients.

Holly Fitting, Director of Residential and Intermediate Services at the Providence Center, said that many people exposed to fentanyl unintentionally use heroin laced with the drug. The recent spike in overdoses from fentanyl has been compounded by a national increase in heroin usage in recent years. “We’re trying to educate our clients that if they’re going to use, they need to get their drugs from a reliable source,” Fitting told the Independent.

Josiah Rich, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the Brown University Medical School and Attending Physician at The Miriam Hospital, told the Indepedent that heroin addiction often starts with prescription drug abuse. “[People] get injured, start using opiates, use more and more until they can’t stop,” Rich said. “But these drugs are expensive, and when people get tight on resources, the first thing they do is turn to heroin.”

Since prescriptions for opiates like OxyContin and Nicodin are offered by doctors, many users don’t recognize the danger of these drugs. But the rate of overdose from prescription painkillers has more than tripled in the US since 1990, claiming more than 125,000 lives in the last decade.

The past few years have seen a national effort to crack down on prescription drug abuse. People can no longer fill multiple prescriptions for the same drug from different doctors or fill the same prescription at multiple drug stores. State lawmakers are cracking down on “pill mills” across the country by requiring pain management clinics to record prescriptions on a state registry. But current trends suggest that shutting down the supply of opiates will cause users to turn to heroin to get high instead. The transition poses a different and equally dangerous set of problems. “Rather than buying OxyContin tablets that are made by a reputable company, where there’s quality control,” said Rich, “you’re going to buy a packet of powder, and you don’t know what’s in there.”

The increasing popularity of prescription painkillers has led to a demographic shift in heroin use. Patrick McEneaney, Senior Vice President and Regional Director of the Phoenix Houses of New England drug treatment facilities, explains, “The way people are entering into use of these drugs is not the street corner anymore, it’s a medical office building.” As a result, prescription painkillers have become a primarily white, middleand upper-class “drug of opportunity.” According to a study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the number of non-heroin opiate admissions for whites totaled over 9000 in 2011, while the admissions for all other races combined was under 1000. The fact that these opiates act as a gateway to heroin means that the demographics of heroin-users have shifted drastically as well. While heroin was most popular among African-Americans and Hispanics in the ‘70s and ‘80s, whites now make up a striking majority of heroin users. Of the 45 people that have died of overdoses in the past month in Rhode Island, 40 were white and five were African-American. +++

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Prescription-drug abuse and overdose rates have been increasing nationally since the start of the millennium, but Rhode Island’s numbers are particularly staggering. With a rate of 15.5 drug overdose deaths per 100,000 people, Rhode Island has the 13th highest drug overdose mortality rate in the country and the highest in New England. Traci C. Green, a researcher at Rhode Island Hospital, told the Providence Journal that Rhode Island’s high rate of mental illness could be a contributing factor to the state’s drug-abuse problem. Given that approximately a quarter of all adults with serious mental illness have substance-use dependence, and that Rhode Island has the highest rate of serious mental illness in the country, Green’s theory seems plausible. Other possible factors include Rhode Island’s high unemployment and high foreclosure rates. Gillen, of the Providence Center, which provides behavioral health care services in Providence and Burrillville, RI, believes that Rhode Island’s drug abuse and overdose rates are inflated because of the state’s small size and comprehensive reporting and record-keeping.

In response to the increase in overdoses, Rhode Island lawmakers and health advocates have attempted to address the factors leading to drug abuse and overdose in the state. In 2012, Rhode Island General Assembly passed the Good Samaritan Overdose Prevention Act, which guarantees legal protection to people who report overdoses. Even more dramatic is the extended availability in recent weeks of Naloxone, a drug that can counter the effects of an overdose. Walgreens began selling the drug (also known by the trade name Narcan) in the spring of 2013 for $16 a dose. In early February, Rhode Island State Police announced plans to train and equip all police officers with Narcan. The drug also recently became available in all licensed treatment clinics and facilities treating people with histories of drug abuse. Narcan, which can be injected or inhaled nasally, restores the signals between the brain and lungs, which become blocked during an overdose.

The next step is to make Narcan readily accessible to individuals who, due to poverty or lack of knowledge about the drug, would be less likely to purchase it themselves at Walgreens. At the Community Listening Forum on Overdose Prevention sponsored by Rhode Island Communities for Addiction Recovery Efforts (RICAREs) on February 19, Dennis Dutra of RICAREs suggested supplying all incarcerated individuals with Narcan and offering training in its administration upon release from prison. Fitting, of the Providence Center, told the Independent that many former prisoners resume drug use upon release, unaware that their tolerance has waned during incarceration. According to the World Health Organization, the risk of dying from a drug overdose in the first two weeks after release from prison is up 10 times higher than it is a year after release.

Another important solution raised at the forum is the increased availability of drugs like Methadone and Suboxone, used to control withdrawal symptoms in patients treated for narcotic drug addiction. Medication-assisted treatment has gained popularity in recent years as addiction increasingly becomes understood as a medical rather than a behavioral or criminal issue. The Phoenix Houses’ McEneany told the Independent: “People recognize now that addiction is a brain disease, that drug-use causes the brain to change physiologically. If people see it as a medical issue, they’re more likely to use medical means to fix it.”

The fact that these withdrawal drugs are covered under current healthcare reform is further incentive for this particular route to recovery. Health advocates such as Rebecca Boss, of the Rhode Island Department of Behavioral Healthcare, argue that the drugabuse prevention community should strive to make these drugs even more accessible by expanding methadone treatment facilities and amending the federal law that prevents physicians from treating more than 100 patients with Suboxone at a time. +++ Whether discussing Narcan, medication-assisted treatment, or more standard behavioral health treatment facilities, health advocates agree that the most crucial goal for the recovery community is to erase the current stigma—internalized by addicts as shame— surrounding drug use and recovery. Ian Knowles, director of RICAREs, who himself was addicted to drugs and alcohol from age 16 to 46 (he is now 71), says that many problems facing recovering drug addicts—from flawed treatment options to a lack of

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

too common drug overdose in Rhode Island

by Sophie Kasakove illustration by Ruth Kremen

safe, affordable housing and employment—are a result of stigma. Michelle McKenzie, program director at Miriam Hospital, identifies healthcare as an area particularly affected by shame. Many current and former drug addicts do not reveal information about their addiction to health care providers, fearing discriminatory treatment. The fact that addicts feel compelled to lie to their doctors, whether that fear is justified or not, is, according to McKenzie, a “failure of the healthcare system.”

Stereotypes of drug users in the media perpetuate the stigma. “When you see celebrities in the media who have struggled with addiction, they’re at their lowest point,” McKenzie says. “When people survive and get their life back together, that doesn’t make the front page.” Overrepresentation of minority and impoverished groups as drug users often cause the stereotypes to take on racial and socio-economic characteristics. “The recent rise in drug abuse and overdose among whites hasn’t gotten rid of the stigma,” says McKenzie. “But more people are paying attention.”

Knowles thinks that the only way to overcome stereotypes about drug addiction and reduce stigma is to put positive voices of recovery into the community. “For many years myself and others kept our recovery within a small circle of friends and family,” he says.

“But the only way we’re going to make a change is by addressing this issue publicly and by letting people know that recovery is a reality.” Knowles says that stigma surrounding addiction stems largely from ignorance of addiction as a biomedical condition and instead seeing it as a sign of moral weakness. Political campaigns such as Nixon’s domestic “War on Drugs” in the 1970s have created a structural stigma by treating drug-use as a criminal issue rather than a public health issue.

Dutra, a board member at Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), believes firmly in the power of positive recovery stories to encourage others to seek treatment.

Growing up in East Providence in the ’80s, Dutra was surrounded by drugs and alcohol from a young age. His father was a marijuana dealer, his best friend’s dad an alcoholic.

By age 12, Dutra had begun using marijuana and alcohol. It wasn’t long before he started using cocaine. After becoming addicted to heroin at age 25, Dutra went to prison 30 different times on drug-related charges. He was court-ordered into treatment programs in 1998 and 2000, but relapsed immediately after both. “I didn’t want recovery then. I didn’t think I deserved to live a productive life,” he told the Independent. “Every time I went to prison, all I did was get high behind the walls.”

Finally, Dutra had what he calls a “spiritual awakening” and decided to enter into recovery. He spent six months in inpatient treatment at the Providence Center and went on to join a 12-step fellowship program, in which he continues to participate. The day I met Dutra was his 1000th day of sobriety. “It’s a gift,” Dutra says, nodding emphatically.

“I want to send a message to people who are struggling with addiction that recovery is possible.” +++ While Dutra’s story shows that recovery is possible, it doesn’t mean that recovery is likely. Of the 40 people in Dutra’s treatment class at the Providence Center, only four successfully completed the program. And while the community listening forum featured many people who, like Dutra, have been able to overcome their addictions and use their experiences to help others, the voices of loss and hopelessness seemed to outnumber the voices of success.

Rhode Island native Elise Reynolds began the forum with her story of losing two sons to overdoses. In 2002, her son Paul had been prescribed OxyContin following back surgery after a motorcycle accident and became hooked. Paul’s older brother, Ted, was introduced to OxyContin by a friend soon after. The brothers spent years in and out of treatment until Paul died of a heroin overdose at the age of 22. After Paul died, Ted, who had been clean for three months, relapsed. At the age of 30, Ted died of an overdose.

As Reynolds left the stage, the room was silent. Much of the audience—social workers, doctors, and policymakers—was well-acquainted with tragedy. Many others heard this story and, like Elise, wondered how they could have missed the signs. In smaller numbers, there were the recovering addicts, who heard this story as one that could have been theirs. “It used to be that we were talking to ourselves,” said one of the forum panelists, Craig Stenning. “But right now, people are listening.”

The Providence Center Residential Treatment Facility (401) 276-4020

FEBRUARY 28 2014

Phoenix House Residential Treatment Facilities (401) 331-4250

RICAREs Communities for Addiction Recovery Efforts (401) 475-2960

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bacteriother universe in

by Doree illustration by I’ve come into the habit of considering myself a human being. Dr. Charles Raison seems to disagree with me.

Biologically, my human body evidences itself. I am landborne, bipedal, masterful at the art of deceit. I feel embarrassment. Part of our human species classification is that we belong to the class Mammalia—breasts, backbones, odd number of toes on each foot, possessive of culture, naturally covered with a thin coat of hair. Humans are mammals, I thought. The National Institute of Health-funded Human Microbiota Project (HMP) is generating data that could prove that we are actually bacteria.

Dr. Raison, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Arizona’s Medical School, doesn’t mean this genetically, of course. He’s talking about sheer body composition. My mother, who is in her early sixties and otherwise deceptively vital, has colitis, inflammation of the colon caused by Clostridium difficile, an unremitting, spore-forming bacteria cluster known to bloom in the gut. I subscribe to a number of colitis-related newsletters for her.

I got an email from psychcongress.com this past September, titled “In a Very Real Way, We Are What We Poop.” In the article, Dr. Raison sent grainy pictures of a new galaxy, at once primordial and from the future: “Only one in every ten cells in your body is mammalian. By cell count each of us is about 90 percent bacterial.” Over 100 trillion bacteria, using our body space commensally, symbiotically—and in the only relationship dangerous to overall health, pathogenically— form an ecological community: a microbiome. +++ This universe weighs less than five pounds. Bacteria populate the entire body; currently, the NIH and dozens of privatelyfunded research enterprises in the US and abroad are pouring millions into exploring, sequencing, and characterizing individual microbiomes. Microflora teem in the mouth, the vagina, the skin, but the largest reservoir of bacteria resides in the gut, and the easiest way to study it is to extract samples from excrement.

Over one hundred million neurons in the ENS (enteric nervous system) communicate with microflora to execute the complex daily industry of digestion. The ENS, your second brain, consists of the esophagus, stomach, small intestine, and colon. Diverse bacterial species populate the bowels, and “good” bacteria balance the bad ones also living in the gut.

That gut flora are marvelously industrious laborers—churning, liquidating, extracting, and eliminating our recurring waste on the clock—has been well established.

But microbiologists have known about this shit for a while. Intrepid scientists like Dr. David Relman at Stanford aren’t poring over excreta just to uncover further machinations of the digestive system. That’s old school.

“Humans are like coral, an assemblage of life-forms living together,” he told the New York Times. My mother’s gastroenterologist, who prefers to remain anonymous, is more explicit. “The bacteria are the ones in charge,” she told me over the phone. “If we have a better understanding of what they do and don’t do, who knows, we can more effectively treat a lot of ‘incurable’ intestinal diseases.”

Intestinal flora have also been linked to disorders like autism, asthma, depression, anxiety, obesity, and hypertension. Recent neurological studies on mice tease citizenscientists with enticing prospects. In one study, replacing the pathogenic microbiota with healthy species alleviated core behavioral aspects of the autism spectrum. In another, obese mice injected with bacteria from thin humans dropped in BMI; in another, mice known to exhibit anxiety-prone behaviors “became much more adventurous explorers” when they received infusions from their bolder rodent cohorts.

Microflora influence homeostasis so essentially, says Christine Gorman, health editor at The Scientific American, that “there is simply no way that the gut environment does not also contribute to psychological states.”

Influence, originally an astrological term. A process of streaming ethereal power from the stars to act upon the

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character or destiny of men; a body infusion. External factors influence your behavior, but some mystical autonomy should persist. That internal microorganisms could control my mood utterly leaves me intrigued and deeply, deeply disturbed.

Evidence is mounting against me, but I think I’m still human, that my mother is.

Her gastroenterologist tells me to look up something called an FMT, a fecal microbiota transplant. She says that my mother isn’t interested in the procedure, for “aesthetic issues.” Some doctors are willing to perform transplants and the whole thing is over with quickly. If not, and many will refuse because of new restrictions imposed on the procedure by the FDA, FMTs can be done at home. It requires few tools: a blender, a sieve, saline, an enema tubing, healthy human excrement from a donor, and lots and lots of newspaper. A commenter on an experimental therapies blog performs routine fecal transplants on herself, “when [she’s] feeling low or down about something.” She believes her young son’s stool is healthier than hers, that it takes her out of small depressions.

She’s gotten so good at it she can do it in the tub. +++ Our storytellers knew gut might influence mood. Ivan Ilyich could not think well, and the problem flourished from his blind gut. A deep intestinal gurgle traps Ignatius J. Relly in his seat in the faculty men’s room. Beloved’s stomach violence grows bigger and bigger. Soon she eats the whole house, and Denver is disgusted.

Repulsion is loaded. What disgusts you? As an evolutionary mechanism, repulsion safeguards your body from foreign agents. Socially, it pads your prejudices. You’re disgusted by that moldy sandwich (throw it out) and you’re disgusted by the homeless man on the corner (refuse him his dollar).

The person repulsed by her own diarrhea recoils her shoulders in a manner similar to the person repulsed by young black men.

The curative potential of shit troubles repulsion, and it should. Not only does the site of rejection come from you; it restores you. In the wake of commercialized medicine, the possibility of a doctor tailoring treatment to her patient’s ecological makeup sounds radical, futuristic. Enough to surmount the recoiling instinct.

Little critical theory exists because scatalogical waste does not hold any intrinsic value. Joshua Reno, an anthropologist and biosemiotician at SUNY Binghamton, challenges the prevailing non-account of human waste in western cultural discourse. Last month, he published “Toward a New Theory of Waste: From ‘Matter Out of Place’ to Signs of Life.” I suspect that he’s conferencing with the microbiologists.

Reno situates the problem of theorizing waste in our fondness for opposites. Symbolically, “excreta has no opposite,” he explains. Unlike garbage, we reject it because we must; unlike dirt, it pollutes because a body has already extracted nearly all its value. Cross-culturally, excrement is offensive, animal, and disease-baring. Less dead than it is useless, shit is matter with no right to functional space. Our

self-blinding, of course, disguises pure performance; shit is certainly “caught up in the same systems of valuation and distinction as are other rejectamenta.” You peer into the toilet to evaluate. If you’ve been eating many fruits and vegetables, you’re proud of your newfound regularity.

Repulsion unlearns itself when there is health to gain.

Tracy Mac, Zen practitioner and editor of thepowerofpoop. com, teaches her e-patients this. “In 2011, a series of fecal microbiota transplants at FMT pioneer professor Thomas Borody’s Centre for Digestive Diseases in Sydney…gave me the physical and mental strength to keep on fighting,” she writes. Her hair is shiny and thick in the picture, her skin glowy and sun-kissed. She provides information to people suffering from intestinal distress, so that they can perform safe DIY FMTs. My mother wonders what antidote will give her back her intimacy and still make her feel like a person. The antiinflammatories cause her stomach to bloat. Nervousness sometimes stops her when she goes to bed with my father.

Philip Roth found it wrenching to write of his father sweating against the bathroom tiles in that basic state, the whole room doused in his uncontrolled shit. Shit was the word he used.

She has never asked me for help when she gets sick. She’s not compelled to show her shit. She can clean it all up herself. +++ When Darwin concluded that the indomitable human species evolved from apes, John Hooker seethed, “it was like confessing a murder.” What would Hooker say about this bitter satire, that human shit might be reintroduced to balance the body’s mental and physical states? What are we saying to that?

Evidently, the scientists and the doctors and the gutconscious are saying “yes.” To an interviewer’s inquiry about bacterial attack, Julie Segre of the National Human Genome Research Institute requests, “I would like to lose the language of warfare. It does a disservice to all the bacteria that have co-evolved with us and are maintaining the health of our bodies.” Certain bacteria, probiotics and other species, that

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

rapy and the n your gut

en St Félix y Layla Ehsan can do things for you and that kind is not only good, it’s essential. The probiotic food and supplement industry is chic and lucrative—the global market will top $30 billion in the next fiscal year.

Microorganisms, though, are fickle; the benevolent microflora you inherit from pushing against your mother’s vaginal wall at birth may ominously switch course. Influenced by environmental factors and foreign agents, the microbiome may turn, bringing about irritable bowel diseases similar to the condition my mother lives with, contributing to obesity, perhaps even triggering anxiety and depression.

That unpredictability worries Dr. Andi L. Shane, a contributor for The Atlantic. He treats infectious diseases, specializing in the gut. Antiobitic resistance is a growing problem and Shane concedes that FMTs serve as an attractive alternative. He’s still worried about people “practicing unscrupulous and unsterile procedures.” This is his greatest concern: “that I will be unable to offer them the best care and they will seek treatment from the black market, where their risk for complication is unknown.”

A healthy stool donor and an enema may treat diseases that kill tens of thousands every year, especially young children in slum areas across the global South plagued with life-threatening diarrhea, E. Coli, and other parasitic infections. So far, FMTs performed in the United States boast an unheard of 90% cure rate: “there is no drug or anything with a rate that high,” according to a 2011 article on fecal transplants in Wired. The sample size remains small; the vast diversity of gut flora has yet to be fully catalogued.

In 2012, the Human Microbiota Project released an ambitious five-year report detailing how changes or full transplantations of the microbiome might be associated with disease. Scientists at nearly 100 institutions across the US studied and sequenced the microbiomes of 245 individuals. According to Dr. Relman, the study “barely scratches the surface [of microbiota diversity] but is the first step in

trying to improve health by deliberately altering the microbiome.” Packed with extensive investigation of the human microbiome, a particular innovation struck me quite dumb.

I had understood bacteriotherapy as offering a progressive individual-centered approach to treatment, but— By combining 22 newly sequenced faecal metagenomes of individuals from four countries with previously published data sets, here we identify three robust clusters (referred to as enterotypes hereafter). (Nature, 2011) Like the common bloodtypes, an enterotype would group individuals based on common bacterial diversity, linking potential donors with stool transplant candidates. The shit would get very formal, very corporate, very fast.

We’re still human, mammalian. Medically, it’s less that we would be better understood as giant, lumbering bacteria on legs, but more that we are bacterial, in essence. We’re human, still, but I’m disturbed by the notion that I have an essence. This feels calculated, non-intimate. The citizenscience community triumphs bacteria as revolution, when really, these therapies may be monetizing shit on the same utilitarian terms on which it was formerly rejected.

For our feces and the cures mysteriously packed in, there’s now a hallowed but conventional place. This is Bacteriotherapy. +++ Marie Myung-Ok Lee is known amongst her friends for eating her fruits and vegetables. “It was kind of inevitable, then,” she writes in a New York Times op-ed published last June, that her good friend called Gene would ask her for help. For more than a year, Gene “could do nothing but writhe in bed in pain.” Open sores on his large intestine bloomed, subjecting him to uncontrollable bouts of internal bleeding and diarrhea. He could not eat or drink without extreme pain and discomfort. He lost weight, became anemic.

Around half of patients with ulcerative colitis, a form of irritable bowel disease marked by ulcers on the intestinal walls, suffer mild to moderate symptoms, like my mother. Gene’s case was debilitating.

Gene chose a treatment not suggested to him by his gastroenterologist or technically allowable under the tightened FDA restrictions. His doctor offered him two terrible choices: powerful immunosuppressant drugs or a total colectomy.

Gene chose FMT. This is where Lee comes in. She ate a lot of fruits and vegetables. Would she be willing to give him her healthy stool so that he could perform an FMT on himself?

She delivered her first donation in a Tupperware container.

Thought to flourish due to antibiotics disrupting the balance between “bad” and “good” species, dangerous strains colonized Gene’s GI tract to near devastation. The first FMT left Gene feeling better immediately. After more home transplants and a comprehensive colonoscopic FMT from Dr. Shepherd down in Florida, Gene entered a state more

mysterious to physicians than pathology: Gene was cured.

My mother, a cardiac nurse, was not surprised, but she also wasn’t swayed. I suggested to her that she look into it, that maybe it would give her relief. “I’m not just bacteria,” she said. She has her supporters. Worried physicians and scientists agree: recolonizing pathogenic bacteria with screened healthy bacteria positively suppresses symptoms. Yet, “the excitement has led to premature interest among the general public suffering from ailments for which [FMTs] have been unproven,” cautions a recent article in the Boston Globe.

Microbial trailblazers like Mark Smith, a graduate student in microbiology at MIT and cofounder of the Boston nonprofit stool bank Open Biome, recognizes the uncertainty. He cowrote a paper published in Nature last week, along with other researchers from MIT and Brown’s Alpert Medical School.

“I have pretty serious concerns,” he told the Globe. “It’s an exciting area of research, but it’s not ready for patients to get their hands on.” +++ Dormant knowledge of the curative power of fecal bacteria lurks through the ages. Millenia ago, Chinese healers whipped up yellow soup—a watery mix of fecal matter and water for people with diarrhea. An eccentric 20th century Swedish doctor reached brief fame for popularizing the “fermentation diet” of the ’40s. He was rumored to have grazed on his morning stools. In the ’50s, spiffy American veterinarians injected ailing racehorses with healthy animal stool, immediately sending them back on the track to win for their bettors.

This is Bacteriotherapy, a conglomerate of biology and ecology, of DIY homeopathy and metallic innovation. In a decade, fecal matter will be grown in labs, and Dr. Raison says my psychiatrist will ring me up scripts for anti-depression fecal pills. It feels like a frontier. And it is. Bacteriotherapy may be doomed perpetually de rigeur. Exactly the fact that makes microbiome transplantation possible—that bacteria are always changing, either because of environmental changes, intra-bacterial interactions, or something not yet explained—renders it amorphous. Barbara Methé, a microbiologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute, knows this: “We are stepping back and saying, ‘We don’t really have a population study. What does a normal microbiome look like?’” she told the New York Times. How do we measure homeostasis, calculate the aberrant? Is there such a thing as a stable bacterial state? Researchers cannot definitively say that microflora stabilize over time. The science is not there yet.

And yet, bacteriotherapy resembles towards the ‘same old shit.’ On the one hand, microbiology spots the underlying imbalance and mines the body’s self-healing capacities.

On the other, it medicalizes and reduces a capacity that was always there.

Applied microbiology starts to smell like recycled Pasteurian essentialism. New Germ Theory shifts the emphasis from bacteria as pathogen to bacteria as remedy. Against a historical bent towards misguided medical conservatism, bacteriotherapy fits in quite nicely. The symbiotic relationship between doctors and Big Pharma requires that people be simple, map-able things. Medical funneling massively complicated human bodies into “environments.” This is political—biological illness should not be considered immutable fact.

Treat the root, but what of the tree already sprouted?

Current institutional financing for microflora research will figure as pennies in comparison to the billion dollar profits pharmaceutical companies will turn on gel caps that cure depression and love handles. Valueless, un-patentable, and regenerating—human shit is the capitalist dream.

My thinking hadn’t yet turned critical when I first encountered FMTs and these bacterial therapy discoveries.

Maybe the little universe inside darkened its influence.

DOREEN ST. FÉLIX B’14 shits gold and her mama does too.

FEBRUARY 28 2014

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10

THIN ICE

amateurs and professionals in Olympic ice hockey

by Nicholas Catoni illustration by Sara Khan

On February 23, the XXII Winter Olympic Games in Sochi came to a close with the Men’s Ice Hockey gold medal game between Sweden and Canada. For the second straight year, the Canadians left the Olympics with gold, but the players won’t be able to enjoy the moment for too long before heading back to work for their professional teams. The entire Canadian roster—and all but one Swedish player—came to Sochi from the National Hockey League.

The current professionalism of Olympic hockey exists in stark contrast with the amateurism of earlier Games.

When the modern Olympics began in 1896, competition was reserved for amateur athletes—and before the 1988 Winter Olympics, amateurs filled both the Canadian and Swedish hockey rosters.

But when the USSR skirted the amateur distinction by having its entire team enlist in the Soviet Army, the situation began to change. A roster filled with active military allowed the country to have their “amateurs” spend most of their time playing hockey—while receiving a monthly salary via Army commission. This enraged multiple countries: Canada boycotted international ice hockey from 1970–77, and Sweden joined the cause in ’76. Eventually, in 1986, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ruled that professional athletes could participate in all sports, pending approval from each sport’s international federation.

A decade passed before the NHL allowed its players to travel to the Olympics. In the interim, players from other professional hockey leagues, like the American and International Hockey Leagues, took part in the Games. With the popularity and presence of the NHL waning in the ’90s, the League knew it was time to make a change. In 1995, the NHL decided to allow its players to participate in the Olympics, starting at the 1998 Games in Nagano. The move elongated the NHL season and forced the League to stop operations for roughly two weeks during the Olympics. Joining the Games raised the stakes: With NHL players scattered throughout Olympic hockey rosters, camaraderie within national squads became a temporary, rather than solidified, atmosphere, and the Olympics began to resemble a collection of NHL All-Star games.

said in 1997 to the LA Times. “To have the best players in the world participating can only help us. It’s a big world out there and a big marketplace. With players’ salaries going as they have…we’ve got to find more revenue streams.” But opposition from players remained. Steve Yzerman, then Red Wings captain, questioned the relative value of Olympic gold for NHL players. “The Olympics don’t carry the importance to [Detroit] that the Stanley Cup does,” Yzerman told the Detroit News in ’97. “We need to make sure we’re ready for the playoffs.

Since ’98, NHL involvement in the Olympics has improved the quality of hockey at the Games and increased the prestige of the NHL. However, opinion within the League has flipped: now, League executives see risk in Olympic competition, and more players prize Olympic gold and the Stanley Cup to the same degree. As St. Louis Blues captain David Backes told USA Today before Sochi, choosing between the two trophies would be like “asking a mother to choose between two kids.”

Philadelphia Flyers owner Ed Snider is the most vocal opponent to continued NHL participation in the Games.

Snider argued to reporters that shutting the League down for two weeks is “ridiculous” and damages a team’s playoff preparation. And sending the League’s elite players to the Olympics risks injury. In Sochi, John Tavares, star and captain of the New York Islanders, tore his MCL, ending his NHL season. Islanders General Manager Garth Snow was irate: “Are the [international hockey governing bodies] going to reimburse our season ticket holders now? It’s a joke,” Snow told Newsday. “They want all the benefits from NHL players playing in the Olympics and don’t want to pay when our best player gets hurt.”

Because of this divide, it’s possible that the NHL won’t participate in the 2018 Games. The NHL signs on for only one Olympics at a time, and the decision requires an agreement between both the League and the NHL Players’ Association. At a press conference in Sochi, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said that a decision is expected within the next six months. But this seems ambitious: the parties didn’t agree on the League participating in Sochi until July 2013.

+++

+++

Back in ’98, League executives and general managers almost unanimously supported the decision. Ken Holland, General Manager of the Detroit Red Wings, advocated NHL involvement in the Games for, above all else, commercial reasons: “Everybody in the world watches the Olympics,” Holland

The NHL did not suspend its season for the Games until one day after the opening ceremonies, and so NHL players on Olympic rosters arrived in Sochi less than four days before the ice hockey events began. The US men’s ice hockey squad first practiced as a team three days before their first game against

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Slovakia. The quick shift from NHL games to Olympic play creates some interesting situations among Olympic hockey players. Prior to the Games, teammates on national teams play against each other in their professional leagues; likewise, players on opposing Olympic teams are often NHL teammates during the rest of the year. In the week leading up to Sochi, all but three players on the US roster played against at least one of their Olympic teammates in the NHL. Moreover, when the US and Canada faced off in the semifinals, nine NHL teams had players on both Olympic rosters.

This has caused recent Olympic ice hockey to look a little like a two-week collection of NHL All-Star games. Out of all 12 Olympic ice hockey teams at the 2014 games, only five owned rosters with less than half NHL players: Switzerland, Norway, Latvia, Austria, and Slovenia. Out of those five countries, only Switzerland has medaled in hockey, with their most recent being a bronze in ’48. +++ Consider the 1980 U.S. men’s ice hockey and the “Miracle on Ice.” Head coach Herb Brooks, who coached the team to gold, looked for cohesion on his amateur roster. His motto was that teams “win with people, not talent.” Following tryouts, the US team toured together for roughly half a year, playing in over 60 games before heading to the Olympics.

The 1980 team started as a bunch of college kids, but in the months leading to the Games, they fought, failed, and grew into a cohesive unit capable of making history.

In a perfect world, professional players would leave their respective teams and join their national rosters weeks or months before the start of the Games. NHL players would be forced to choose between chasing the Stanley Cup or the gold medal. It’s nearly impossible to compare any hockey memory to the “Miracle on Ice,” but without months of mutual growth, without rosters working like teams, there will never be another moment in Olympic hockey that comes close.

NICHOLAS CATONI B’14 agrees with Herb.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT @ Ur moms house Weekly

FOREIGN WALLPAPER

a conversation with translator Susan Bernofsky

by Greg Nissann illustration by Aaron Harris

Translators do many things. Sometimes they search their own language for a choice phrase in an attempt to capture the beauty of the original so that it reads as novel in English, and other times they undertake a forensic mission to discern foreign experiences so elemental and every-day that an author might not even think to name them. This balance between literality and experimentation, between faithfulness to the original and infidelity, is always at the core of the translator’s work. Susan Bernofsky is one of the preeminent contemporary translators of German literature, as well as the chair of PEN American’s Translation Committee and Director of Literary Translation at Columbia University. She spends much of her time investigating the cultural secrets hidden within words. Bernofsky’s work blurs the borders between national literary cultures, and not just in her vast array of translations—from mammoths such as Franz Kafka and Herman Hesse to contemporary writers like Yoko Tawada, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Uljana Wolf. Many of the works she’s translated feature a distant, foreign approach to one’s native language, whether it’s the Swiss modernist Robert Walser who, writing in High German )a language much different from his native Swiss German), is always marked as a distant observer; Yoko Tawada, whose native language is Japanese and whose books investigate the way a foreigner’s language constructs her role in a new society; or Uljana Wolf, whose prose-poetry collection False Friends is a bilingual tour de force that dances around false friends—words that look like cognates but are not. In her reinventions of the last, Bernofsky proved herself not only a deft translator but also a stunning poet in her own right.

I spoke with Bernofsky over the phone about her exposure to translation, her process, the difficulty of maintaining an author’s distant relationship to language in translation, and her new translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, forthcoming from Norton.

The College Hill Independent: I’ve found that translation is often a discovered passion, as its focus in education is rather small. Was there a moment when you got interested in translation?

Susan Bernofsky: I got into translation sort of accidentally, as someone who was planning to grow up to be a novelist and was studying creative writing kind of seriously, but I also just happened to be learning German. One of my writing teachers at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, a public high school for the arts, said, “you know German, why don’t you try translating this?” It was fun.

I went to college to study creative writing and kept studying German and wound up living in Germany for a little while. And I just kept translating things on and off for fun on the side.

I never had a plan to make it what I do. I started translating things and sending them out to magazines, and sooner or later I had a little portfolio of things that I had published. I just kind of backed into it. I think in my generation and older that’s very common. I think it’s only in the younger generations that people actually think about becoming translators and studying it. It never occurred to me to get a degree in that.

The Indy: I’m interested in what you mention about the generational gap between aspirations to translation. You’re quite involved in the translation community at large. Are there any other progressions or trends you’ve seen in the translation community that feel different from the way things were when you started?

SB: ALTA, the American Literary Translators Association, was already pretty active when I

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was coming up. I attended my first meeting when I was in my mid-20s. Going to ALTA as a 25-year-old, I had a sense that there were translator networks, that translators helped each other and workshopped each other’s work.

I think in that sense there’s been an established network, but I think now around the small presses that specialize in translation, which is kind of a new thing, it’s all become younger. There are a lot of networks. I know networks in New York and Berlin and all that. Translators getting together to share work, and get better together, and find career options. There never was much money in translation and there still really isn’t, which does make me worry for the ones who study translation planning to go into it.

The Indy: I’d love to ask a question about some of your work. Your translations have an incredible range, from Uljana Wolf ’s False Friends, which really sits at the border between German and English, to Robert Walser, who reads much more traditionally. I wonder how your approach differs in encountering works with such different levels of foreignness within the text.

SB: In a sense the part of the Uljana Wolf project that does not come through in my translation is the between-languageness, but there’s an imbalance. Your average German reader of her book knows enough English to read both sides, but your average English reader probably doesn’t know much or any German, which is why I decided to take a more monolingual route. There’s a couple places where it gets a little polyglot, whereas the original is heavily, heavily polyglot.

And that changes the project. It’s something I discussed with Uljana as well.

I think all these projects cross-pollinate each other. Dealing with issues of bilingualness in her work is helpful for me in thinking about Robert Walser, who is also sort of bilingual in a different sense, the Swiss writer writing High German. His work actually plays with typically Swiss German expressions, and the difference between those expressions and High German become invisible in translation. I’ll try and mark them as quirky or sticking out as strange or playful, but there’s no good equivalence to the relationship between the Swiss German and High German.

The Indy: I was first introduced to Yoko Tawada, whom I’ve read in German now, by your translation of The Naked Eye. I remember reading in an interview with you that you found it difficult to translate Tawada’s distance from the German language without lyricizing it a bit.

In the case of Tawada—a writer who’s always witnessing this foreign language within her own writing—how do you maintain her foreign relation to German in the translation? [Tawada is a Japanese immigrant to Germany who often highlights the strange texture of German as opposed to her native Japanese.]

SB: In a way that’s very similar to the Robert Walser question of the Swiss German. It’s very hard to translate or communicate peculiar relationships to the norm of the language that the original writer is writing in. When you read Yoko Tawada in German, she uses German in a very specific way that has a lot to do with the fact that she learned it as not even her second but her third language, after Japanese and after Russian.

She plays a lot with the kind of language the people begin to write as learners of foreign languages, and that texture of beginner-mind language use is all over her work. And that’s something very specific that’s very difficult to imitate in English. The moment you start writing some sort of pidgin English to represent it, it immediately will be wrong, because she’s writing not in any way incorrectly. She gravitates toward grammatically simpler sentence structures sometimes, not all the way, but compared to your average born-speaking-German German writer. It’s a little pared down in terms of syntactical complexity and grammatical complexity. She’s not throwing

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the genitive construction all over the place, for example, which your average German enjoys playing with, unless she brings them in to thematize them and to talk about them.

I hate the idea of turning her into something that sounds pidgin because she’s finding ways of writing very poetically within these sort of guidelines. You could tell that the speaker is not a native speaker, but it’s not about grammatical errors—there aren’t any—it’s about the avoidance of overly complex syntax, the specifically German syntactical complexity.

It puts the translator in a somewhat odd position. If you translate it into nice neutral English, it gets a little boring, because part of the charm is the characteristic way the person is talking. So I think of the tone—and to my mind this way she has of writing winds up being very lyrical. You can hear in my translation that I find her writing and constraints lyrical. The lyricism makes it over but the sort of slight limping doesn’t. She knows what’s she’s doing, it’s not like she doesn’t know how to write German. She’s very intentionally creating this sort of immigrant German that sounds spectacularly beautiful. I love translating her. Maybe somebody else will translate her and find out a way to really communicate that.

The Indy: How often do you correspond about a translation? You mentioned that you corresponded with Uljana.

SB: I always correspond with the living writers I’m working with at some point, because inevitably you have the kind of questions about the text that only the author could answer. But I try and keep it to a minimum, like with Jenny Erpenbeck. This is our fourth book we’ve done together and she’s my age—we’re friends, we’ve visited each other—so I’ve been corresponding with her, but I’ve saved up all my questions when I was translating the book until like a week before I was going to turn it in and then sent her all the questions of the things I hadn’t been able to figure out by myself. Then she sits down and answers all the questions systematically, and it’s all clear.

You want answers to the questions you really need the author for. There are things that it really makes a difference to get the author’s opinion on. In the Erpenbeck novel there’s a clock, and in order to figure out how to translate it, I needed to know the size of the clock. But it turned out she was talking about an actual clock that was in her family’s possession, so she could send me a picture and show me how tall it was. It’s a thing that in my translation is going to be called a “miniature grandfather clock,” which if you Google is actually a thing, a genre of clock. But in German it’s a standing clock, you know, Standuhr, and that doesn’t mean anything in English.

The Indy: Are there any books that you’ve dreamed of translating for which you feel a translation wouldn’t be successful—or that the challenge isn’t necessarily something you’ve figured out how to solve yet?

SB: Hölderlin would go on that list. He’s somebody that I would love to be able to translate well enough, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get there.

The Indy: For reasons inherent to his work?

SB: What makes his work so difficult is that it’s poetry in which the thing that makes it beautiful is syntax. You know, if you put words in the wrong order in an interesting way. Syntax turns out to be not all that translatable.

very good cultural toolkit. I understand what it’s like to stand in line in a bakery in Germany.

Just the wallpaper and furniture of everyday life. Knowing these things actually can be important for translating because writers will refer in passing to things that everybody understands, but if it’s something you the translator don’t understand, well, too bad for your readers and for you. The actual cultural knowledge of a country whose literature you’re translating is kind of crucial.

I mean, I had to translate an old man in the early 20th century and he’s talking about needing to get to the toilet. I know what a toilet looks like in that kind of building. I know that it is a separate little room that’s off the stairwell between floors, that you may or not have a key to, that doesn’t have water in it, that you would have to get a bucket of water from a tap somewhere else, because this is how it works. And all this knowledge about the structure of how the toilet would’ve been in that kind of building, that doesn’t go into the translation, but if I didn’t know that I probably would have mistranslated that passage. You certainly wouldn’t say “the bathroom.” Because it’s not a bathroom. So I read up in the OED: okay, when did the word “lavatory” start being used?

I wound up using the word “privy.” I did research on bathroom, toilet development, in English and in German. Keep in mind that the word “toilet” is also fairly entrenched. Toilet comes from toile, which is a cloth. It means to wash yourself. Basically, a toilet comes from the word “towel.” If you’re saying going to the toilet, etymologically you’re basically saying go to the towel. We have all these levels of euphemism around urinating and defecating and other languages have them too, but how do they line up chronologically with ours? You’re always doing forensics on the history of the development of language.

The Indy: I have a question about your new translation of Metamorphosis. I guess this is a bigger question about your approach as a translator. What is your relationship to the cultural legacy of a book, especially one like this with an ever-shifting afterlife in the eyes of scholars and readers?

Essentially, how does translating a classic differ from translating something that you’re bringing into English for the first time?

SB: Higher anxiety. Otherwise quite similar. This is only my second time translating something that already had multiple translations. I did it with Siddhartha and it was the same thing; there were already a bunch of translations, and in both cases I sort of looked at all the others before starting the job just to get a sense of whether there’s something I can do that hasn’t been done, or whether any of these translations feel so right to me that there’s no point in my doing something.

I looked at them to figure out if I wanted to try, and after that I sort of did not look at them. With Siddhartha I did look at them right before I turned it in, when I was doing the final edit, to see how they handled the passages that I was having the most trouble with. But invariably, I didn’t find solutions that made me think, “Oh, well there’s the solution.” I found evidence of other struggles. And the Kafka, I thought before I’d turn it in that I would look it over, but I was really busy and the deadline was tight and I didn’t have time so I didn’t. I just turned the thing in. And then I was glad I didn’t.

The thing is, if you start looking at all the translations, it will kind of confuse you. This is really crucial in a translation, especially one that is a retranslation: you have to find a voice for the thing that is your voice, and if you’re constantly triangulating between other people’s translation, that can very quickly get bewildering, in my case anyways, and that would interfere with my ability to hear a voice for the thing.

The Indy: I wonder how your experience living between two cultures has shaped your approach as a translator, or possibly how your work as a translator has influenced that experience.

SB: It was the living first, because I wound up living in Germany for at least five years, but not all in one piece. Just spending that much time in Germany, living among Germans, gave me a

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INTERVIEWS

14

CYRIL’S

by Edward Friedman

The summer I lived with Cyril, we had the most beautiful apartment. The building was near the river, on Palace Street, fittingly enough. A nice, liminal triangle of grass and mud-when-it-rained sat at the end of Palace, before the river, where the highway bridge that spanned the river into the city had had its eastern base before it was abandoned and subsequently torn down a couple years prior to our summer.

Back then—when the bridge had been emptied of traffic but still stood—my friend Iris and I ate a bunch of pot cookies and walked through the low-hanging November clouds into the corridor of chopped-up concrete and construction vehicles. All we could see of the city were the tall buildings that came up through and over the chain-link fences to our left and right and a mess of parking structures, steeples and unremarkable façades collecting where the bridge touched ground at its other end. It felt quiet and serene in this way. Iris took my camera and took a picture of me smiling with my eyes closed, lying on a concrete barrier. In the picture my hair is long and shapeless, I have an ugly, sparse beard, like a teenager. Then she came over and kissed me lying there, and we made out for a few minutes. That night, still in a fog, I took the bus to New York to have Thanksgiving dinner with my uncle and his friend at his friend’s girlfriend’s house.

Our apartment’s building was rather rundown, as in every other column supporting the banister of the staircase to the front door was rotten and detached at its base. The landlord had his office on the first floor, where he’d sit with his wife and middle-aged daughter and his daughter’s dog, smoking Virginia Slims and every once in a while parking a giant van from a Korean Church—or, for a couple weeks, a giant blue and yellow RV—in one of the choice parking spots in the lot behind the building. There was a salon in the basement-storefront, which shared the lot, and the hair stylists often complained about how their customers kept getting ticketed for parking on the street for more than two hours, but the lot was full of Korean Christian vans.

Our apartment was on the third floor, and it was glorious. The front door opened onto a high-ceilinged common area, beyond which stood the kitchen-counter-brunchbar. The slope of the roof formed the ceiling up and to the left, with a skylight right in its middle. When it rained the edges of the skylight leaked and we distributed cookware on the widely spaced floorboards. Above the bar were two green steel lamps, which had been installed by whoever lived there a couple of tenant-generations earlier. The wires ran from where the lamps attached to the ceiling along the ceiling before disappearing into it behind a full-sized wall clock, which featured colorful songbirds in lieu of numbers.

Presumably each was to chirp on its hour, but the hands never moved. Before the bar sat several steel barstools with red vinyl seats from the soda fountain, which, when my grandmother describes it, makes her eyes wet. Their bases were quite narrow, though, and they were not fixed to the ground, so one had to be careful.

Cyril told me that a tenuous reminder of the present is necessary when perched on nostalgia. So we didn’t change a thing. +++ There were three bedrooms in the apartment. Cyril and I each lived in one. In June, my friend Claire and her girlfriend Olivia lived in the third. Claire and Olivia were fun. They cooked big, funny meals and complained about the heat. Olivia was from Texas, but she was very used to air conditioning. Evidenced, for example, by the time she told Claire that—contrived as the circumstance may sound—she would take a big shit in their bed and never explain herself to Claire if, by the whimsy of some cruel god, it would make the heat stop.

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It really was awfully hot, especially for a couple weeks in June. I’d wake up each night puddled in bed. I had no sheets for my mattress on the floor, so I was borrowing a set of Cyril’s. They were designed with big cartoon cactuses and pillars of sandstone rising in the distance of the desert. They were the size for a double, but mine was a queen, and so they wouldn’t stay. And I’d wake up from a dream of having detached my genitals (again) or swimming harder and harder trying to save my twin brother drowning in the middle of the lake (I’m an only child in waking), and my hair would be wet and the corner of the sheets still associated with my body or my area would be totally wet and there’d be water around me, literally pooled in the oblong diamonds of the mattress’s surface as if I’d peed myself. In all cases I hadn’t peed myself, but it was that hot.

Then, though, Olivia and Claire went to Mexico for Olivia’s research—she was a PhD candidate. I moved into Claire and Olivia’s room, as it was bigger, and from the bed, with my head on the pillow, I could see the skyline of downtown where The Heathman Hotel’s giant neon red-orange sign lit the night. I knew it said Heathman, but the only chunk visible through my window read H-E-A-T. +++ Ava was weird and very pretty. She moved into my old room in July when Olivia and Claire left. My friend James went out with Ava off-and-on the year before, and it sounded tumultuous. Maybe she was a little manipulative, but Cyril and I walked around in our underwear and tried to flirt with her anyway. In return, she would make fun of us for only eating eggs and quinoa and black beans, and she would go out of town for the weekend, often, and often for Monday and Tuesday too, to the Hamptons, where her parents had a house.

Another thing when you walked into the apartment was the spiral staircase right in front of you. The steps were wooden and worn. The banister was a series of black steel rods connected by a wooden railing. It wound once and a half before emerging onto the loft, into the dining room with the roof closing in around it, lined with funny little windows that didn’t close all the way and would bang and rattle on windy nights.

Then there was the sitting room, our crown jewel. Its northern and western walls filled entirely with a window each. West was the grassy triangle, the river, and the high brick of an old power plant. That had been the industry. North-northwest was downtown and The Heathman with its sign again, and somehow, in the evenings, better sunsets than I’d ever seen or thought could be found so dependably night after night on the same cut of horizon. Subtle ones, real artworks and then the firework displays, too, but they always made the sky look tall and narrow in the same way, like it was shot in portrait mode. Cyril and I would sit in the sitting room after work and eat some combination of spinach, eggs, black beans, and quinoa, drink a beer and watch. Sometimes Ava would join us. We had plants—cactuses and frondy things—in there that Cyril mostly watered and a defunct telescope in the corner, for style. +++ Cyril was working at the school, giving tours and doing office work for admissions. He figured himself something of an anomaly in this way, coming off a little spunky, edgy, vulgar next to your classic lineup of college tour-givers that may as well have walked backwards out of the womb in Nantucket Red shorts. He frequently told me the story of how the committee had been split nearly right down the middle when it came to offering

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PALACE him the job, so polarizing he was. It was self-congratulatory, but I loved to hear him say anything.

Cyril’s from North Carolina, and there’s a lilt to his speech. He’s a little taller than me; maybe 6’1” with medium to shoulder-length black hair that he wears greasy but organized like a crow. His father’s father’s father was Japanese-American, interned at Manzanar in the desert just east of the Sierras over in the other corner of the country. I don’t think he’s any part Cherokee, though he tells people that sometimes and gets away with it, because of his hair and complexion and some intangibles, which he’s totally nailing.

We liked a lot of stuff together that I might be embarrassed to admit that I liked to others. It seemed aesthetically coherent nonetheless. Things like the French Press, The Great Gastby, the new Drake album, the pull-up bar, the Pacific Crest Trail, which Cyril had walked while taking time off school and then written a novella about, which I read that summer and let pervade my imagination. We drove to New York some weekends in Cyril’s tiny white two-door convertible Suzuki Barbie car. His uncle—one from his dad’s side who still lived in LA—used to take it out into the desert on the back of his RV and drive around on the sand, I guess, but he gave it to Cyril when he got old or bored or found a more suitable sand vehicle. We would park high on the West Side, windswept, ears ringing, and newly exhausted from the humidity that we hit like a wall as soon as we got across the bridge. The heat came from the concrete and trapped you like Han Solo or a slug. But we had friends around, so we came anyways, and Cyril always said—probably in reference to the era’s most-referred-to commencement speech—“let’s drink like fish ‘til we forget we’re swimming.” +++ The memory from that summer that feels the most important now was local. It was a whole Friday evening, but, at 5PM, Ava and I were both home. I don’t think Ava worked on Fridays for her unpaid reporter gig at a local business newspaper. She wasn’t in the Hamptons either. I wasn’t in the Hamptons either. I worked on Fridays, usually, but I worked mostly for a house construction company called Lawrence Brothers, and I wasn’t lazy, but I wasn’t real skilled either, so sometimes they sent me home early when the fence was painted, the cleanup was done, the wall was demolished, and Esteban and Michael were taking the preciser of the nail guns to the more ornate molding, or framing— whatever. Sometimes I got a call at 6:30AM saying I could stay home entirely that day.

And I’d go back to bed then sit in the sitting room reading or trying to write little poems.

But Ava and I were home together, and it was 5pm, not too hot.

“Do you want to go for a run with me?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

We ran north, uphill, past campus, into the beautiful residential neighborhood that was up there with the synagogue and varied, pretty houses with yards and views of the bigger river to the east. When we got back to the area of campus we walked, tired, and started to talk about stuff. Ava, because I asked, told me about her parents’ sexless “partnership”-marriage, how it was going to an International high school in Paris, and then graduating from college and being freaked out about looking for a job and stuff.

To be honest, none of these details were particularly new or exciting to me. I had constructed a much more compelling fantasy-personality for the girl whose iPhone password was “eggs,” who slept (her senior-year housemate disclosed) with a butcher

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knife under her pillow as she was on the first floor of the house, who was so beautiful and seemed so depressed. I don’t know if it was that I found her boring or vapid or that I knew she wasn’t interested in me sexually (or maybe at all) and so maybe I was externalizing defensively, albeit cruelly. I don’t even know if it mattered.

When we got back Cyril was there and made a joke about us having sex, and that’s why we were sweaty. Then he made us dinner and we sat at the dining room table to eat. +++ Later that night, we went to see Cyril’s friend’s band play at a dive-y bar on the west side.

Dive-y was the word. The bar—old, vaguely maritime-themed—was full of smoke. The band was playing loudly and happily, and the lead was a big guy wearing kind of a limp, dirty chicken suit with a red cape. The clientele was a felicitous intersection of a lot of crazy-looking old people and a lot of hard looking young people. They all seemed like old friends, which I found intimidating. Cyril was wearing a big old New York Rangers sweatshirt, but he’d cut the sleeves off, so it just said “ANGER.” We sat at a square table near a corner and I went up to the bar to get us drinks, beer for Cyril and me and a gin and tonic in a flimsy plastic cup for Ava. When I got back Cyril was telling Ava a story. He continued, “So we were looking for a place and ended up in the Arts & Crafts building. We boned on the loom that kids used to like weave friendship bracelets for their parents. We got really filthy. I guess that’s it. Your turn, Ava.” Then, to me, “Thanks, man. We’re telling sex faux pas stories.”

I sipped the beer and pictured a loom in a bedroom, then in the center of the dance floor, where the patrons that had been watching the band stood and perspired and danced less and less as the guy in the chicken suit drew out the last bars. The loom was dusty and lonely looking, and it occurred to me that there was no way that a loom for friendship bracelets would be this big. Ava brought the plastic cup, weeping with condensation, to her cheek, where it mingled with sweat and caught the blue, red, and orange light from all the beer neon around the walls. Hairs clung at her temple.

The gist of Ava’s story was that on Valentine’s Day a couple of years previous her boyfriend at the time—a guy who we’d gone to school with too—didn’t really make any special plans, they had sex, then he broke up with her. It wasn’t a great story but had this kind of straightforwardness to it that I appreciated. I guess the same thing could be said about Cyril’s, but Ava’s was darker.

The band was packed up, the stage empty. The lead was wearing normaler clothes now, standing at the bar and talking to a couple of the hard youth. There was some music that someone had put on the jukebox.

“Wanna dance?” said the woman who now stood beside Cyril, to Cyril. She looked about 48 or a heavy-smoking late thirties with long and waxen blonde hair, a tight, limegreen cardigan and a kind of damp looking and fuzzy knitted purple scarf. She dropped her bag and scarf on the table in front of Ava, and Ava and I looked at each other in a remarkable moment of connection and understanding as Cyril was led away from the table to the nearly empty dance floor by the hand.

I tried to maintain the eye contact with Ava but she lost interest and began to text in her lap, so I lit a cigarette and watched Cyril dance. He struck me as very gentlemanly. I didn’t know there were places where you could still smoke inside. I wasn’t tired at all, just sad.

LITERARY

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ト ス リ ・ ー ザ Friday, February 28

This Week in Listery:

March 1, 1700

Sweden introduces its own Swedish calendar, in an attempt to gradually merge into the Gregorian calendar, reverts to the Julian calendar on this date in 1712, and introduces the Gregorian Calendar on this date in 1753. Make up your mind!

In the know?

E-mail listtheindy@ gmail.com.

Music Show

10PM // Kristina’s World, Olneyville // $5

Beasts, Monsters and the Fantastic in Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, SKI MASK, Houseboy the Religious Imagination 6PM-Saturday 6PM // 001 Salomon Center, Brown University 91 Waterman St, Providence

Tuesday, March 4

Political contexts of beasts and monsters, social Lecture by Penelope Umbrico contexts of beasts and monsters, theoretical contexts of beasts and monsters, ethical conChace Center, 20 North Main Street, Provitexts of beasts and monsters. Organized by dence Religious Studies grad students. Google for Penelope Umbrico is a photo-based artist schedule. whose work explores the ever-increasing production and consumption of photographs on the web. Umbrico employs various photographic techniques and video, along with methods of appropriation, extraction, multiple producCreature Creation Show 8-10PM, 1PM Sunday // RISD Auditorium, RISD, tion, and intervention, to explore how we, as a culture, make and use images. Her focus on 17 Canal Walk, Providence // $1 collective practices in photography navigates It’s Big Nazo and students in the RISD Creabetween materiality and immateriality, consumture-Creation Wintersession course. They made er and producer, the individual and the collecfoam-rubber creature-characters and they want tive. Treating online images as a massive shared to show them to you. So they also put together archive, she utilizes these images as evidence of a “comical and creepy multi-media perforsomething other than they depict. mance-art spectacle.” I’d go.

Saturday, March 1

Seussational

Open House

6PM // AS220 Industries, 131 Washington 11AM-2PM (and Saturday) // Providence ChilSt.,Martha Street Entrance, Providence dren’s Museum, 100 South St., Providence // $9 Explore the facilities, scope the cuties, get Puppet theater, Seuss stories, DIY seuss sounds, involved. so many activities, so many excited young people.

Emerging Perspectives in Modern Culture and Media

11AM-2PM, 201 Smith-Buonanno, Brown University, 95 Cushing St., Providence

Wednesday, March 5 10 Quick Tips: Better Time Management

12-1:15PM // Rhode Island Foundation, One MCM grad students have organized a panel dis- Union St., Providence snackfood, so many excited young people.

Sunday, March 2 Art Shots: The Exotic and the Alien

exactly what to do. Just bring your lunch (don’t bother bringing a beverage, they’ve got those).

They’ve also got 10 useful tips for better time

2:30-3PM // RISD Museum, Grand Gallery 224

lenging time management issues.

Join Raina Fox (Brown University, MA Public Humanities, ‘14) to examine several depictions of “exotic” and “alien” and the cultural and social shifts these representations reveal. It’s only 30 minutes so it will probably be jam packed with good ideas!

Thursday, March 6

Music Show

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Richard Lloyd: The Street, the Row and the Hood: Place and the Production of Culture in Nashville TN

5-6PM // 29 Manning Street, Brown University, Providence

9PM // Spark City (sparkcityprovidence@gmail.

Richard Lloyd wrote Neo-Bohemia: Art and com) // $5 Commerce in the Postindustrial City. He is Parasol, Malportado Kids, Olivia Neutron John, currently completing a book about Music City, and has published recent work on cities in the malportado means misbehaved, and Olivia NetSouthern United States, residential high rises in won John was in Grease and she’s won an Obie Nashville, and the politics of new urban design. and 4 Grammys.

Lloyd will talk about the relationship between local place in Nashville (Music City) and the elaboration of musical production, examining three distinct Nashville districts. He will explore the generalizable dimensions of the durable Paja Faudree: Book Launch link between culture and urban place: Legacy, Industry and Scene. Legacy, Industry, Scene, ence Room, Brown University, 111 Thayer St., Legacy, Industry, Scene, Legacy, Industry, Scene, Providence Legacy, Industry, Scene, Legacy, Industry, Scene, This person is really smart and she just wrote a Legacy, Industry, Scene. book that’s probably really smart too. The book is called “Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico.” There will also be a panel discussion.

Monday, March 3