The College Hill Independent V.28 N.05

VOL 28 ISSUE 5 MAR 7 / 2014 BROWN//RISD WEEKLY

VOLUME 28 // ISSUE 5

news 2 Week in Review

sebastian clark & emma wohl

3 Boom Town alex sammon

METRO 9 Head Count

megan hauptman

FEATURES 11 Told You So

lisa borst, kyle giddon, josh schenkkan & carly west

ARTS 14 White Cube Dot Com jamie packs

15 MFA vs. NYC drew dickerson

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, 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 Madeline Kau MvP kim Sarnoff

TECHNOLOGY 7 Oscillations tristan rodman

SPORTS 5 G. O. A. T.

zeve sanderson

OCCULT 6 Hildy

eli petzold

EPHEMERA 13 Centered

fROM THE EDITOR S I spend long blocks of time in a small cube by a window, staring into the portal of my computer. At other times I’m in a room of five hundred strangers watching a professor perform for us or carving into a block of wood to make art.

And each night—at least most nights—I’m asleep. I rarely talk to anyone; when I leave my cave or my bubble I fear I’ve begun to lose the power of speech. Things will change when it’s warmer.

If I judge my friends by our physical proximity, then I think my best friend must be the middle-aged man who sits near me in the library every day, surrounded by stacks of books in what I think is Chinese. We’ve never exchanged so much as a hello.

If I judge by those whose words reach out to me, that means a few dead or aging politicians on the other side of the equator and my favorite writers on the Internet.

If I judge by those to whom I reach out, then I suppose that’s you. So thank you; I hope you know I’m always here to return the favor if you need a receptive ear. —EW

matthew marsico & molly landis

LIT 17 Punkish Imps eli petzold

X 18 Really Useful Engine layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

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

THE WEEK IN SECRECY

by Sebastian Clark & Emma Wohl illustration by Sara Khan SMOOTH OPERATOR Some time ago, on a lonely Tuesday night, I walked into my local pub. It’s a place of solace, where lonely people go to drunkenly impart their troubles onto other lonely people. Anyone can partake if they know the protocol: Walking through the door, you pause, taking in the tepid smell of beer-soaked oak as the group turns to see who has joined their ranks; you hang up your coat on the usually sparse rack; you approach the bar as the tender tests your steadiness with his eyes; you confirm your commitment by sighing as you sit down; you order a lager, and you simply wait. Before you know it, your therapist-cum-patient for the evening approaches you.

A rather unassuming male in his mid- to late thirties dragged his body more than most, carrying the emotional burden of a man who knew just a little too much. +++ “Doing anything fun tonight?” he asked. “It’s a Tuesday,” I replied.

After three pints, he told me he was a military officer working in surveillance, and that his job involved the “strategic mapping of UAVs.” “What areas do you strategically map?” I asked.

“Afghanistan mostly, among less expected countries.”

“What do you mean by less expected countries?”

“Mali, Niger; a ground operation in Burkina Faso, most recently.”

“Oh, what happened in Burkina Faso?” I replied, surprised I had read nothing about it.

At this point, my patient cut short his session. Making for the exit, he swiftly pulled his coat from the rack, and walked out into the wet London air. +++ Yesterday, I phoned the UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) to inquire about the supposed operation in Burkina Faso. When I asked Hannah, the woman at the press office, whether the MoD could confirm the operation, I was put on hold. Enduring a long flatline beep, my heart began to palpitate. She returned to say that she would have to consult “Operations,” so she took my details—my name, media outlet, location, and phone number—and said she would call back soon. This did little to quell my fears of being added to a kill-list.

At press time, I am both alive and have yet to hear from her. It seems “soon”’ is military time for “fuck off.”

Believing my assassination to be immanent, I kept digging. I phoned a variety of news outlets in Burkina Faso. Most didn’t answer, but I was able to get through to PANAPRESS (The Pan African News Agency) based in Dakar, Senegal. After a couple times saying “bonjour! parlez-vous l’anglais?” I was forwarded to an English-speaking journalist. I asked if he had any knowledge of a British military intervention in Burkina Faso.

“When did it happen?” he asked.

“Recently, I think.”

“Huh. What are the details? Was it a large operation?”

“Well, I was hoping you would know.”

“I will look into it,” he said, quickly hanging up. +++ “If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.” – Khalil Gibran (quotationspage.com) –SC

OHIO IS FOR LOVERS A recent visitor to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) website wasn’t interested in hunting big game, digging a well, or drilling for oil. Last week, an unidentified individual brought unprecedented traffic to the webpage while taking advantage of the public agency site’s open storage capabilities for some more personal uses.

The ODNR Oil and Gas division hosts data on over 100,000 Ohio oil wells on its website. The site also included—until someone caught wind of it—a video called “Sexy Babe,” among a number of other unofficial music and video files. The movie, which is porn, obviously, was meant to remain a secret, buried deep among construction ordinances and oil deposit coordinates.

The presence of “Sexy Babe” on the site may seem like the work of a careless employee or a peevish hacker, but actually, any Internet ogler could have uploaded the video. The site’s file transfer system, ostensibly intended for sharing large files—like, uh, maps—with the state, is accessible to anyone. But in this case, “someone was using it as cloud storage,” Eileen Corson, spokeswoman for the ODNR, explained to The Columbus Dispatch.

Since a reader alerted the Dispatch on March 1, “Sexy Babe” has been removed from the page and access to the file-sharing site has been limited to registered, authorized users—who will, presumably, leave a trail if they decide to use the site for extracurricular purposes. For secure storage of such activities, the Independent recommends a personal file-sharing medium such as Dropbox or Google Drive. The NSA might have access, but we doubt they’re judging.

According to Corson, the ODNR is taking the incident in stride. “Unfortunately, that happens,” she said.

You don’t seem too surprised, Eileen. Don’t mind if we check your browser history, do you?

—EW

MARCH 7 2014

NEWS

□ 02

IN THE FA L L

North Dakota’s fractured energy boom

It’s hard to determine when a bubble begins to burst. It seems to grow until that very last instant. If you don’t think to look for it, it will go unseen. Blink and you will most certainly miss it. Pundits love to discuss the fall after we’ve already hit the ground. The exercise is bound up in hindsight. After financial ruin took hold in 2008, talking heads from all sides rushed to diagnose the events. Obvious conclusions have been reached: We know now that we should have seen signs long before the burst, that the result should not have been surprising.

The path to economic resuscitation has been rough. Though production has rebounded in certain arenas, major metrics of economic health remain well below their precrash levels. This discouraging recovery isn’t shouldered by all states evenly. In the March 1 issue of the New York Times, reporter Floyd Norris points out that North Dakota far outpaces the rest of the union in three primary economic indicators: job growth, highway miles driven, and home prices. “North Dakota,” Norris writes, “has come to lead the rest of the US down the road to recovery.”

North Dakota now leads the nation with its 2.7 percent unemployment rate, 3.7 percent annual job growth, and 3.8 percent annual income growth. It has the only state government in America operating in the black. From a financial perspective, North Dakota has blossomed into a utopia. Superlatives decorate the state’s Forbes profile: Already designated the second-best state for “economic climate,” North Dakota has the nation’s third-best economic growth forecast for the next five years.

But this is not the land of milk and honey. It is the land of gas and oil. In recent years, American policymakers at all levels of government have shown a predilection for increasing domestic energy production. Wars in the Middle East spurred fear of dependence on foreign oil fields, while domestic producers lobbied hard for policymakers to get behind advances in drilling technology. The deployment of fracking and the underground pipeline depended only on a business-friendly climate of indiscriminate deregulation.

North Dakota’s politicians were happy to provide. They leased out large swaths of land once thought to be valueless. The Bakken Shale, a major fraction of the Badlands, was open for business.

North Dakotan fracking operations are now extracting fuel at a rate even beyond the capacity of the state’s infrastructure. It’s like the Beverly Hillbillies reloaded; everyone is striking it rich. People are flocking from neighboring states to toil at drilling operations, chasing promises of signing bonuses and $100,000 starting salaries with no qualifications.

On paper, it is a dream come true. Citing the increase in individual income, Business Insider proclaims North Dakota to be this year’s “happiest state in the union.”

Lobbyists, politicians, and economic publications laud North Dakota as a comeback story, a blueprint for national progress, an endorsement of big energy. They refuse to acknowledge any potential for collapse. A closer look shows that North Dakota is already coming apart at the seams. Environmental disaster, societal decay, and inescapable economic incongruity have all descended upon the state in startling fashion. No one is saying it yet, but they will be soon. Focus in—the bubble is bursting.

03

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NEWS

by Alex Sammon illustration by Casey Friedman +++

In late September of 2013, oil began spewing from an underground pipeline in Tioga, ND, onto a farm in the northwest corner of the state. All told, 21,000 barrels spilled from the Tesoro-owned structure across 7.3 acres. To make sense of the scale of these figures, consider: this is 882,000 gallons spread across three wheat-producing football fields.

Shockingly, the leak went unnoticed for days, until an unsuspecting farmer named Steve Jensen drove his combine into a standing puddle of crude.

The timeline of subsequent events remains vague. Governor Jack Dalrymple claims he was not informed of the spill until days after its discovery, and the pipeline was likely not patched until many days after that. Dalrymple initially tried to play it off, proclaiming the spill to be “not that large” in his first public statement. It has since been recognized as the largest in the state’s history. Independent analysts predict that it will require at least two more years to be fully cleaned up, though it’s unknown how much longer it will take until food can safely be grown again on this land. Oil spill remediation is not delicate—health inspector David Glott tells the local news that the procedure is dependent on “burning off the crude.” The private company hired for assessment and cleanup sports a notoriously speckled reputation and has been implicated in a number of oil spill cover-ups in recent years. The spill demonstrates that oil production and agriculture hang in a delicate balance in North Dakota, and with oil bringing in more revenue than wheat, the loser of this unfortunate rivalry seems predetermined.

This spill, eponymously referred to as the Tioga Spill, is a damning indictment of the underground pipeline systems that massive energy producers touted as failsafe to state and local governments across the nation. Faith in this technology allowed these companies— Halliburton, Tesoro, Shell, and others—to build lines beneath America’s major aquifers, precious farmland, and famous landscapes. The supposed infallibility of these lines belies the entire system of extraction and distribution.

The Tioga Spill is not an outlier. It is instead a sign of fundamental realignment.

Pipelines and wells have ruptured all over the state. Over the course of one week in midFebruary, four different leaks were reported: two separate oil spills, a saltwater leak, and the spill of a mix of water and chemical cocktail called fracking fluid. The saltwater and chemical solutions pose a threat to ecosystems on par with oil spills. Packed with carcinogens, they kill much of these landscapes on contact, subsequently percolating down toward the water table.

Operators are powerless to stop another leak that has been continuing uncontrollably for days, ongoing at press time. It is likely that still other spills are going unreported. Far faster than the state can keep up, the supposedly impermeable infrastructure peddled by oil companies is falling to pieces. +++ Largely male, unskilled laborers animate oil rigs by transporting huge metal appendages all over the site, pressing drillbits, and digging. The work is exhausting, and the prolonged exposure to carcinogenic chemicals often results in injury or sickness. Workers return from the fields covered head to toe in crude oil almost daily. The influx of males to the state’s oil towns, chasing gainful employment, skews demographics dramatically. The surge in single men did not bring about an increase in single women. In 2011, there were already an estimated 1.6 single North Dakotan males for every single female, and the official figure is expected to increase when new data are made available. In the Bakken Shale region, the ratio is already far higher than that.

It’s likely that the surge in single, young men with money to burn has led to the drastic increase in sex trafficking, illegal prostitution, and sexual violence seen in North Dakota in recent years. “Man camps”—the euphemistically titled housing facilities and trailer parks set up by oil companies to house laborers—are particularly egregious.

Backpage.com, an OkCupid for the economically minded, is teeming with requests for prostitutes, and prices are high. Some sex workers will voluntarily travel to these areas in search of a big payday; human traffickers forcibly ship in others.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Current statistics on sexual violence in the region are scarce, but local prosecutors tell the New York Times that there has been a certain increase in prevalence. For women living in the region, these realities are obvious. Lifelong residents of nearby small towns feel unsafe going to the grocery store. In an interview with NPR, Tiffany Aho, who owns a cleaning service in the area, recounted her cardinal rule. “I can never send just one girl to clean by herself.”

Single men aren’t the only problem. There has been an astronomical increase in domestic violence as well. In Williston, one of North Dakota’s boomtowns, the numbers are particularly alarming. Police responded to 18 individual domestic violence calls in December 2013, a figure that becomes striking once contextualized. Police Chief Jesse Wellen told NPR that he used to see just a handful a year.

But demographics alone cannot be to blame here. An unbalanced male to female ratio has little bearing on the lives of established couples. While no scientifically supported hypothesis exists, the problem likely stems from the oilrigs as well. With a huge percentage of the town’s population now clocking long, physically demanding hours in the fields, the transition to pacified domestic life can prove difficult. This correlation extends beyond just North Dakota.

The list goes on. Syphilis and gonorrhea are both up over 40 percent year over year, due in no small part to the prostitution boom. Williston, like much of the state, has seen a marked rise in all forms of crime since the oil boom began. By 2013, police were averaging one drunk driving arrest per day. And only 10,000 people live in Williston. +++ Not everyone is cashing six-figure checks on the oil fields. The state’s fast food workers, service industry employees, and truck drivers did not disappear overnight, and many of them are struggling to survive on their wages. With workers traveling from all over the nation to find jobs, and local prices skyrocketing, long-time residents are finding themselves summarily pushed out of their homes. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Williston checks in at $2,394 a month. That figure is a mind-boggling $500 a month more than the average rent of America’s second costliest city, San Francisco, according to Apartment Guide.

But unlike San Francisco, there are no suburbs in which to reside, no cheaper satellite communities from which to commute. Here, the choices consist of pricey apartments and wide-open prairie.

Homelessness has increased 200 percent since last year alone. There are 28.6 homeless per 10,000 in the state of North Dakota, far above the national average of 19. In boomtowns like Williston, the figure is well into the 30s. The actual numbers may be even higher than this, as new residents, yet to register with the state government, slip through the cracks of census data. In nearby Watford City, 25 percent of children are homeless.

The Williston Salvation Army has begun purchasing bus tickets with its proceeds, encouraging the homeless to return to wherever they originated. Anywhere but rural North Dakota. But the rest of the United States seems less excited about North Dakota’s downtrodden than its oil. This method has not been well received.

Towns were unprepared for these changes. Few have homeless shelters. Because North Dakota collects so few taxes, building appropriate facilities is difficult. Many homeless have no choice but to sleep in cars and underneath bridges. Winter temperatures frequently drop to 30 degrees below zero, causing catastrophic illness and death.

Some hope that the oil companies will intervene and solve the issue. Recently, a wealthy oil magnate donated a percentage of his company’s Man Camp to the town for homelessness remediation, though it seems worth asking whether homeless women and children are any better off living in such dangerous environments. Here in the land of plenty, there is nowhere to go.

march 7 2014

+++ Exactly how good is the money, anyway? The financials of the whole operation—for individual workers, for corporations—act as a sort of trump card. Domestic production pumped 8.075 million barrels on December 6, the highest number in 25 years, due in large part to fracking on the Bakken Shale. At $97.65 a barrel, that amount is good for $789 million in revenue generated in a single day.

But an independent analyst group, the Paris-based International Energy Agency, cautions against the sanctity of this conclusion. In a report published last week, IEA points to some glaring problems in the extraction setup, troubling notions of longevity.

Shale wells are energy intensive, and the energy input to energy output ratio is higher than traditional methods of extraction. They require huge quantities of water and chemicals to create fissures in the rock so that oil can be extracted. Shale wells produce for a much shorter period than other extraction methods, typically falling by 70 percent in their first year alone. Early returns on the profitability of this system proved to be misleading. The structures are at their most profitable when they are new, so companies sprint to build new ones to keep up profitability.

Operating costs do not subside along with decreased output. Independent (smaller, non-government-subsidized) producers will spend $1.50 drilling for every dollar they get back in sales this year. The Sanchez Energy Corporation, a Houston based company, plans to sink $600 million into drilling operations this year alone, almost double its revenue from 2013. Shale oil becomes so energy expensive to extract that producers will be losing money even if crude prices rise to $100 a barrel. Oil drillers have backed themselves into a bind. They have to drill more to justify the ever-increasing cost of production, but the flood of oil has lowered prices. Furthermore, the more they drill, the more it costs. Only oil giants with enough money to build new wells at breakneck speed can keep their heads above water. Drillers target maintenance of 2011’s 39 percent growth rate. Companies continue to hire field workers to help install new rigs, the sites of massive profitability.

All the while, the accessible shale oil, the most lucrative stuff, is already gone, and many producers are banking on new technology to bail them out. “U.S. drillers are expected to spend more than $2.8 trillion by 2035 even though production will peak a decade earlier,” reads the IEA report. The oil industry is going to have to sprint just to stay in place.

But if the financial bubble taught us anything, it’s that carrying risk and churning profit are not mutually exclusive.

ALEX SAMMON B’15 just sent his resume to Halliburton.

news

□ 04

ETCHED IN STONE sports, statistics, and making Mount Rushmore

by Zeve Sanderson illustration by Tristan Rodman It looked like a casual conversation between friends as Steven Smith interviewed LeBron James in James’s Miami home.

“Who’s your Mount Rushmore of the NBA?” Smith asked.

“Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Oscar Robinson,” LeBron replied. “When it’s all said and done, are you up there?” Smith followed up. “I'm going to be one of the top four that's ever played this game, for sure,” James said without hesitation. “Somebody's gotta get bumped.” The sports blogosphere, always in need of fodder, latched onto James’s quartet. Who had he left off? Was he arrogant to say he’d replace someone? But nobody seemed to ask why this type of ordering was legitimate in the first place.

Smith’s question assumed "Mount Rushmore" was a value judgment, that it said something about who was excluded as much as about who was included. The framing was a misappropriation of the national monument, as Mount Rushmore wasn’t meant to be a best presidents list—the monument was a celebration of four great presidents, not an official declaration of the greatest four. For non-sports fans, asking for a top four might seem like a ludicrous question. It elicits an answer that makes an argument, but there isn’t an argument to be made. It’s a matter of preference, not fact.

For a sports fan, though, Smith’s question is commonplace. Sports offer the façade of objective value judgments because of a wealth of statistics from which to draw. Who’s the greatest hitter ever? The best shooter? The most clutch quarterback? The questions aren’t framed as preferences, but certainties, the answers aren’t feelings, but truths: batting average, shooting percentage, touchdown passes. They appear to indicate value in ways intuition or feeling can’t, so bestowing superlatives seems justified. +++ The “best ever” conversation has changed in the past couple decades with the emergence of new, more comprehensive statistical analysis. Bill James, the father of Sabermetrics, named for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), was one of the first to employ this kind of analysis in sports. Traditional statistics like on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and earned run average were supplemented by the likes of PERA, DRS, and EQA. Sabermetrics uses already calculated statistics, combining them in formulas that try to measure qualities that traditional statistics could not. For example, BABIP (batting average on balls in play) is calculated by taking the difference of hits minus homeruns, dividing it by the difference of the

05

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SPORTS

sum of at-bats and sacrifice flies, then subtracting the sum of strikeouts and homeruns. It captures a pitcher’s average on batted balls that go for a single, double, or triple. The logic follows that strikeouts and homeruns occur solely because of the pitcher, so a shift in either category suggests a shift in the pitcher’s talent. Conversely, a shift in BABIP is mostly due to luck (a ball taking a bad bounce) or defense (a player making a tremendous play). A sudden spike or fall in BABIP for a pitcher indicates an abnormal coincidence of luck and/or defense, suggesting the pitcher’s performance will regress to the mean. This measurement is just one of many in Sabermetrics.

Taken together, they should allow for empirical analysis of the whole game. As Bill James wrote, Sabermetrics is “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.”

Following Sabermetrics, other sports now aggregate already measured statistics into more telling meta-statistics.

Basketball analysts created categories like player efficiency rating (PER) and effective field goal percentage (eFG%), and football analysts created expected points added per play (EPA/P) and tackle factor (TF). Starting in the late '90s, academics realized the nearly endless possibility for analysis and transformed what was once a fringe interest for sports enthusiasts into a topic worthy of the ivory tower. The American Statistical Association started publishing a peer-reviewed quarterly, the aptly named Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, a decade ago, and MIT Sloan runs a conference dedicated to sports analytics. Articles include “The Hot Hand Fallacy: Cognitive Mistakes or Equilibrium Adjustments?

Evidence from Baseball” and “Tick Tock Shot Clock: Optimal Stopping in NBA Basketball.”

Now, advanced statistics have crept into popular discourse, transforming how the casual fan watches and thinks about sports. Kirk Goldsberry, a geography professor at Harvard specializing in special and visual analytics, publishes popular NBA shot charts on Grantland, a widely read website published by ESPN. Even Bleacher Report has adopted advanced statistics into its regular coverage of the three major sports—the NFL, NBA, and MLB. +++ Statistics are themselves objective measures, but the conclusions drawn from them are not. Baseball is unique in that it is a series of discrete plays that, while related, can be broken down to individual results. Basketball and football don’t work this way. The games are too fluid, players too dependent on other players, to be meaningfully reduced to numbers. Even in baseball, though, statistics are limited. Work ethic, sportsmanship, being a good teammate. These aren’t empty phrases.

They affect the locker room, which affects the field, and they can’t be measured empirically.

Some people understand this limitation. Sports journalist Bill Barnwell argues that “analytics should coexist with traditional measurements and concepts, and in many cases, that works perfectly... [but] there are some situations where analytics are totally useless.” He describes a natural symbiosis

between old school and new school, between intuition and data. “It’s not about reducing sports to numbers; it’s about finding evidence...It’s all part of the puzzle.” But proponents like Barnwell overlook the macro shift in how we’re putting the puzzle together. This season, Major League Baseball introduced a camera system that calculates the efficiency of fielders.

The NBA has installed SportVU cameras, which track the movements of players and converts the findings into statistical data prime for analysis, in every arena. Perhaps the old school will always be part of the discourse, but its voice is becoming smaller. +++ There’s no doubt statistics offer valuable insight, but the assumption that objectivity is possible has radically reconditioned the way people approach sports. Websites covering basketball, football, and baseball have calculated advanced statistics dating back a half-century to allow for cross-generational comparisons required to objectively determine the “best ever.” Given that Mount Rushmore is literally set in stone, the image seems to further the rhetoric of objectivity.

After James’s interview aired, NBA great Bill Russell, who had been left of the list, responded to the snub. “Hey, thank you [LeBron] for leaving me off your Mount Rushmore,” he said to TNT commentator Craig Sager. “I'm glad you did.

Basketball is a team game. It's not for individual honors...I won an NBA championship my first year in the league, an NBA championship my last year, and nine in between. And that, Mr. James, is etched in stone.” Media outlets in Dallas, not quite done with the story, asked James to comment on Russell’s remarks before a game against the Mavericks: “He has his own opinions. He's his own man and I'm my own man, too.”

James isn’t known for being conciliatory. He has a lion wearing a crown—symbolizing his nickname, “King James”— tattooed on his shoulder and “CHOSEN” across his back. If there was an argument to be made, there’s no doubt he would have made it. When pushed to defend his top four, though, he conceded. James acknowledged his list wasn’t a declaration of fact, but of personal opinion.

James’s conciliation suggests Smith’s apparent misappropriation of Mount Rushmore wasn’t a misappropriation at all.

Doane Robinson, the South Dakota historian who proposed the monument, initially wanted to feature western heroes like Lewis and Clark. Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, decided that to accomplish Robinson’s goal of increasing tourism to the area, the monument should immortalize presidents instead.

Borglum didn’t go to Congress to get a list of who was to be included; instead, he started with the three—Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson—he felt were most important in American history and chose his close friend and political hero Teddy Roosevelt as the fourth. Rushmore was just one man's opinion.

ZEVE SANDERSON B’15 shoots a moderate percentage.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

QUI SUNT HI Hildegard’s spectatorship and salvation

by Eli Petzold illustration by Amy Chen

“Who are these who are like clouds?”

Languorous and melismatic, rising and falling, the resonant, deep voices of men begin Ordo Virtutum (“Play of the Virtues”) with this question. Written in the twelfth century

by St. Hildegard of Bingen, abbess, seeress, and all-around renaissance woman (albeit, in the High Middle Ages), the play is possibly the earliest example of medieval allegorical morality drama. It portrays the fall of the archetypal Soul through diabolic temptation into the world of fleshly delights and her subsequent return to grace through the aid of the Virtues—each individual Virtue identifies herself, explaining her theological and salvific role for the incarnated Soul. The play stands out in its twelfth-century context: merely that we know its author sets it apart. But its theological complexity, rich lyricism, and innovative abstraction in addition to its hypnotic musical score, further distinguish Ordo from the simplistic, literal, and linear plays of its era.

Ordo survives in the Riesencodex, a 33-pound manuscript of Hildegard’s works, compiled upon the death of the Rhineland mystic. Her corpus spans media and genres: systematic theological treatises, manuscript illuminations, liturgical song cycles, medical treatises, vision accounts. We find, upon reading any of her works, a distinctively Hildegardian cosmology, extending far beyond each individual work. Indeed, she herself seems to have acknowledged her own particular “reading” of creation, compiling a list of a thousand made up words, nouns to describe the cosmic hierarchy, from Aigonz (“God”) to Cauiz (“cricket”). In Ordo, comprising the final few folios of the Riesencodex, Hildegard’s world of sounds and meanings takes on flesh, embodied in the cast. Anima, the Everysoul, is our ingénue; the Virtues our chorus; the Devil our villain and fool. Salvation is the dramatic action. Music carries us along.

Hildegard’s original musical notation survives alongside the play in the Riesencodex. Only the Devil, who refused to participate in the heavenly symphony in the beginning of time, does not sing his lines. He tempts the Soul and challenges the Virtues in cacophonous barks.

Hildegard’s language can be obscure, her metaphors mixed, and her imagery compact, but by uncovering and unpacking the work, we find the profound mystological insights of a woman deeply in touch with—or, more properly, touched by—divinity. To read it solely as a mystical text, like one of her several vision accounts, however, ignores the importance of its medium. Scholars of late Latin, medieval religion, and early drama and music can glean much from reading it as a primary source in its twelfth century context. Reading it at all presents a fundamental problem, for the text is only part of the whole. It is a script for performance, rife with dramatic potency and potential. We may speculate about its original

MARCH 7 2014

performance, actors, and intended audience, but there is no reason that we ourselves cannot play those parts in the 21st century. This idea may seem obvious in a world where directors still find innovative ways to make ancient Greek tragedy move audiences. For medieval drama, however, this approach is novel. The overt religiosity, and the simplicity of psychology and narrative can be off-putting, or downright boring, to a modern audience. Even Ordo, when translated literally, comes off as clunky Catholic jargon. But its message of virtuous living and divine forgiveness are hardly outdated. Like theatergoers, we must be a receptive and patient audience in order to uncover its meaning. +++ “Who are these who are like clouds?”

A simile nestled in a metaphor. These are the voices of the Patriarchs and Prophets of the Hebrew Bible who, according to Christian teleology, prophesied the Word becoming Flesh but never saw it come to fruition in the historical person of Jesus. Born on the wrong side of history, they lived in a blind time—they beheld Christ’s birth as though through a mirror, obscurely, and not face to face. The Virtues were merely abstract principles before the birth of Christ; only through the Incarnation of Divinity in Jesus, the human paragon of virtuous living, could the Virtues truly inhabit flesh. Thus, even in their mystic forms, wandering the timeless expanses of the heavenly realms, their perception is deficient.

Bright forms appear, but they are indistinct, nubile to the witnesses below. “Who are these that float like clouds?” asks Isaiah in his oracular predictions of a messianic age (Isaiah 60:8). The question remains unanswered there, as it does here in the prologue of Ordo. On the page, we know them as the chorus of Virtues; but on the stage, neither the Patriarchs and Prophets, nor we the audience know them. We, with our earthly eyes, share the deficient perception of the Patriarchs and Prophets. We see, with them, a chorus of women, decked in brilliant garb, but veiled, unidentifiable and unidentified at the play’s inception.

+++ Qui sunt hi, qui ut nubes?

Lingering on each of the interrogative monosyllables, qui (“who”), as though searching high and low throughout the cosmos for an answer, they invite us to join in their curiosity. When they ask, we ask with them. If the Patriarchs and Prophets are the earthly audience, asking after the meaning of celestial apparitions and auditions, then the Virtues are the heavenly chorus, chanting divine wisdom to the world below: “O you ancient saints, at what do you wonder in us?

The Word of God brightens in a human frame, through that, we shine, we, the limbs building its beautiful body.”

Coyly, they evade self-identification, answering the men’s question with their own: “What is remarkable in us?” They are not intrinsically bright and splendid; rather, they refract the radiance of something more precious—Divinity itself.

They are not the Word, but they cooperate in its Incarnation, building its corporeal form. We do not know who they are, but we know that they are divine. The Patriarchs and Prophets call them “fruits of the living eye,” invoking one of Hildegard’s most poignant names for God. In classical and medieval understandings of human anatomy, the eyes perceive through emitting, rather than receiving, light. In this conception, sight acts and creates through light. The Patriarchs and Prophets see in these clouds the bright refraction of God’s eyesight—”and we were the shadows of that light.” We remain, with the Patriarchs and Prophets, in the shadow cast by such brilliant light; or perhaps, they remain with us in the darkness of the audience. Although the Virtues have not yet identified themselves as such in this prologue, we become ready, through the selfacknowledged spectatorship of the Patriarchs and Prophets, to meet them, to learn from them, and to embody them.

ELI PETZOLD B’14 is a stranger here.

OCCULT

□ 06

HOLDING thinking through St. Vincent and Holly Herndon

by Tristan Rodman illustration by Pierie Korostoff “Entombed in a shrine / Of zeroes and ones / You know” –St. Vincent, “Huey Newton” Placing two artists on a bill together always invites comparison. The relation can be sonic: two musicians who play in a similar style. It can be of career trajectory: with time, the opener might headline the same venue. It can also attempt to claim new territory: two acts of disparate style, each playing for a new audience. Rarely, though, is the relation thematic: an evening of music designed to provoke thought in particular areas.

St. Vincent’s “Digital Witness” Tour, for which Holly Herndon opened a string of east coast dates, did not shy away from technology. Between the two sets at the House of Blues in Boston last week, the theme was comfortably worn; both artists focus their recent work on the possibilities and problems of technological overuse.

St. Vincent is the moniker of Annie Clark, a singer, songwriter, and guitarist whose pop melodies often come packaged in fuzz-filled blasts. Her vocal lines and guitar solos double over multiple octaves, battling for space through each frequency band. She plays music with no regard for alternatives. Since attending Berklee College of Music, Clark has toured and recorded with few pauses. Her fourth album, the self-titled St. Vincent, came out in late February.

The centerpiece of St. Vincent, “Digital Witness,” carries a message unhidden by imagery or metaphor. “Digital witnesses / What’s the point of even sleeping? / If I can’t show you / If you can’t see me / What’s the point of doing anything?” Drums lock into groove with marching horns, and when the chorus hits it’s near impossible not to shuffle in step. A single bass note slides up and down, moving opposite guitar chords that suspend, then resolve.

Holly Herndon is an electronic composer and performer, and a current graduate student at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. On Movement, her 2012 full-length, Herndon pushes her voice to extreme technological limits. Sounds leave her mouth at a constant rate, but return at uneven intervals. Her voice is never embodied, never disembodied. Spoken tones and syllables float from left to right before colliding with planes of booming drums. For much of the album, the downbeat is never where you expect it to be.

On “Chorus,” released as a single earlier this year, she samples her online activity, from Skype chats to the idle browsing of YouTube videos. Its sounds are dense and deliberate, the result of intensive studio work. The B-side, “Solo Voice,” turns a single, extended vocal tone into small packets spinning around the listener’s head. It was recorded in one take. In an email interview with the Independent, Herndon describes her work as “an unfolding experiment in reconciling the theory/practice and academic/popular divides that are so embedded in people’s brains.” The tension lives in her music, the way it plays between continuity and disjunction, sustain and attack.

This past week, Herndon released #sonicchatroulette, a web-based remix of “Chorus” that splits the track into thirty discrete samples. Visitors play parts of the song together in real time.

When I logged on to the site last week, four people were practicing their own sequence, attempting to lock into a groove.

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+++ In her opening set, Herndon stands behind her laptop with her arms outstretched. The glow of her computer screen illuminates her face, black robe, and burnt-orange hair. As she pulls her arm across the surface of her laptop, a sweeping tone cluster moves from left speaker to right.

Herndon uses an induction microphone to play the sounds of her hard drive; its oscillations generate data she uses to control different tones and effects. “A lot of the gestural interfaces I use, like the induction microphones, are done to make performing live a bit more volatile and interesting for me,” Herndon says in her email.

Her set moves quickly, never losing pace. It’s a deliberate and continuous construction, vastly different from her performances in an academic context, where she usually performs a single piece. As she tours, she keeps refining. No two shows are alike. At the end of Herndon’s set, she puts her hands together, bows, and exits the stage. “I really like the idea of my music reaching places that weren’t entirely designated for it,” says Herndon. “That would represent progress.”

As she moves through her set, some audience members fall into a groove. A version of “Fade” has feet stomping, hands patting, heads nodding. Others have more trouble with the music. Herndon’s performance of “Breathe,” in which she turns the sound of a deep inhale into a lush textural floor, startles the man next to me. He opens his phone, records a video on Snapchat, appends #WEIRDOPENER, and sends it off to a friend. +++ Technology, spun as something always new, insists on oppositions: digital and analog, virtual and real, online and off-. One word invites its opposite, closing a linguistic circle. Each pair of terms contains uneven relation: one inauthentic, one authentic. Technology talks in binaries, not spectra.

In its technical definition, analog refers to continuous temporal processes—one signal of voltage, position, or amplitude measured relative (analogous) to a reference. Changes oscillate rapidly, blurring into one signal. Your wristwatch is analog if its hour and minute hands move continuously; your synthesizer is analog if its oscillators, filters, and amplifiers are controlled continuously by electronic currents.

Digital processes take analog signals and sample them in discrete chunks. Rather than measuring one signal relative to a baseline, a digital process samples values at a fixed rate and reports the changes between sample points. The signal can be zero or one, its continuity reassembled from the captured bits. Where analog wavers, digital is precise. Your wristwatch is digital if its hour and minute read-outs change in discrete, blinking packets; your synthesizer is digital if its signal processing relies upon the re-generation of sound from quantized points.

Before digital, analog was not a necessary naming convention. Pining for analog technology is often misused and misunderstood as fetishized nostalgia—a time when things sounded better, a time when we were all more real. Read another way, returning to an analog mode asks us to think spectrally and continuously, in relativity and variation. Analog, as mode of thinking, offers an alternative to the binary, discrete, and absolute. Without sampling, quantizing, or quantifying, analog thought slips into many viewpoints at once.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NOTES +++

+++

On St. Vincent, Clark finds every possible way to play between fluidity and fragmentation. Her lyrics are melismatic, then syllabic. She fills space with strings, then horns. Her synth lines glide, then attack. The spectrum occupies vocal technique, instrumental arrangement, and production choices.

The vocal melody on “Rattlesnake” descends through neighboring notes before repeating a sharp, percussive “Ah.” “Birth in Reverse” opens with two guitars alternating in maximal dissonance. Their harmonics form a tritone—two notes split halfway through an octave—before resolving into a major key melody. On the first verse of “Regret,” guitar chords come short bursts.

In the chorus, they disappear into glistening sustain. Over a quiet string arrangement, Clark sings, “I’m afraid of heaven because I can’t stand the heights / I’m afraid of you because I can’t be left behind” Her voice decays, and seconds of silence fill the space. Then the guitar bursts back in.

St. Vincent oscillates so quickly between analog and digital that to grasp on, we capture it at a given point, fix meaning in each moment. In the lyrics to “Digital Witness,” the technology critique is too obvious. In its sliding bassline, the critique is too subtle. When Clark suggests “I can’t show you / You can’t see me,” perhaps this indeterminacy is what she means. The only way to hear the full spectrum is by letting Clark fly between the two registers, feeling the oscillations cycle between two notes so rapidly that they form a single tone.

+++

The audience at the House of Blues moves in fits and starts. In both sets, heads nod, fix themselves still, then nod again. Arms remain crossed. The crowd drifts between flow and fixity. “We perform our identities in the analogue and digital realm,” Clark writes in a guest piece for The Guardian. Really, though, we perform in all the places in between. When I ask Herndon about reconciling divides, she asks a question back: “We don’t receive information in these neatly packaged, quarantined environments, so why should we tailor our work in that way?”

Placing two artists on a bill together always invites contrasts. We pick points, we sample, we compare. Clark is x, Herndon is y. But what happens if we stop sampling and allow divisions to collapse into each other? We might find that instead of pinning viewpoints and fixing meaning, we let our thoughts oscillate rapidly from pole to pole. Ideas glide through frequencies like a theremin sweep.

TRISTAN RODMAN B’15 squelches and squeals.

For more thoughts on the tension between academic and popular music, using technology as a creative material, and the gestures of performance, read the Indy’s full interview with Holly Herndon online at www.theindy.org.

Before Clark takes the stage in Boston, the house music fades to silence. A computerized voice rises above the crowd: “Greetings, fellow analog witnesses. To maximize enjoyment of this evening’s entertainment, please refrain from digitally capturing tonight’s experience. Thank you, St. Vincent.” The audience cheers.

As Clark walks onstage, a few audience members take out their smartphones. They take single snapshots—indulgent transgressions—before putting their devices away. By the time Clark begins to sing “Rattlesnake,” she has a captive audience. A modular synthesizer walks bass notes underneath her voice, warbling and uneven. Clark and keyboardist/guitarist Toko Yasuda stand mostly still, moving their heads and arms in small, discrete bursts. They shuffle their feet when they move across the stage, and glance to the side in perfect synchronization. Digits and limbs move deliberately, their direction careful and considered. Through “Digital Witness” and “Cruel,” two of St. Vincent’s most danceable songs, Clark and Yasuda remain robotic. In line with the on-stage choreography, the audience moves minimally.

Following the opening trio of songs, the band pauses and a spotlight falls on Clark. Instead of bantering with the audience, she speaks deliberately. Her tone soft and poetic, she gestures outwards. “I can feel you up here,” she smiles. “It’s sort of like I already know you.” She feels cold, almost predetermined.

As St. Vincent continues, the show warms up. On “Huey Newton” and “Bring Me Your Loves,” Clark’s guitar tone rips through the room. Her motion becomes fluid, and the performance feels emotional, raw. Clark sings “Prince Johnny” from a tiered pedestal, and as the strings taper off, she rolls down the steps.

Towards the end of the set, “Northern Lights” rises in crescendo. Clark repeats herself over different harmonic formulations, leaping octaves. Each word extends over multiple notes.

Her voice is slippery, hard to pin down. As the energy peaks, Yasuda takes a theremin solo. The instrument squelches and squeals, sliding through tones. It never falls on a distinct note.

MARCH 7 2014

TECHNOLOGY

□ 08

prison-based gerrymandering in Cranston Cranston’s Ward 6 has either 10,209 or 13,300 constituents, depending on how you’re counting heads. About 10,000 of its residents live in brick and vinyl-sided houses on suburban streets and cul-de-sacs. But over 3,000 of Ward 6’s residents live on Howard Avenue, in the same cluster of cement and brick behemoths surrounded by barbed wire: the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institute (ACI). The complex is the state’s only public prison system, and includes seven facilities, ranging from Intake to Maximum Security. The men and women incarcerated at the ACI come from all over the state. They cannot use the local library, go to public school, or vote for their elected officials. But their bodies are counted in Cranston’s census, and pad Ward 6’s voting base, giving these Cranston residents’ votes more weight than votes from any other city ward. In the City Council, Ward 6’s 10,000 non-incarcerated residents are given the same representation as the 13,000 residents in Wards 1-5. This reduces the voting power of residents in Wards 1-5 to three-fourths of one vote in Ward 6. On a state level, this also inflates Cranston’s population, giving the city more representatives in the state Congress and makes it eligible to receive more state funding.

On February 19, the Rhode Island ACLU—supported by Demos and the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), national non-profit advocacy groups—sued the City of Cranston over their 2012 redistricting plan that continues to count inmates at the ACI as part of Ward 6’s population. The lawsuit, Davidson v. Cranston, alleges that the redistricting plan violates the equal representation clause of the 14th Amendment—one person, one vote— by diluting the voting power of Cranston residents outside of Ward 6. +++ Prison-based gerrymandering—districting prisoners as residents of the area where they are imprisoned—is not a problem unique to Rhode Island. In fact, it’s the default for states across the country; counting prisoners at the prison’s address goes back to the original Census in 1790. In the first major study done on the effects of prisonbased gerrymandering, released in 2004, Peter Wagner, now director of PPI, called the practice “an outdated concept that predates both modern uses of Census data and high incarceration.” Since then, PPI has worked extensively with community organizers and state legislators all over the US to address this issue; in the past three years some states have taken measures to have prisoners counted as residents of their home addresses, starting with Maryland in 2010. Though Maryland, New York, and Delaware have passed state-wide laws to change the way prisoners are counted in the census, many efforts to eliminate prison-based gerrymandering have occurred at a local level: over 200 cities and counties across the country have chosen to change the way they district their incarcerated residents.

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metro

COUNTIN The issue first came to light in Rhode Island in 2010, after Bruce Reilly, an organizer with Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) who formerly served over a decade in the ACI, heard a talk Wagner gave at Brown University about prisonbased gerrymandering in New York. Reilly looked at the census and districting maps for Cranston and realized that the entire population of the prison was drawn into one Senate district and split between two House districts, creating substantial artificial representation in the state congress. He contacted Wagner and PPI, who, along with the ACLU and Common Cause RI, helped DARE contact state politicians and start publicizing this issue.

In March 2010, the RI House Judiciary Committee considered a bill that would count incarcerated Rhode Islanders as residents of their prior addresses for the census.

During the hearing for the 2010 bill, several state representatives testified that counting prisoners as residents of Cranston also inflated the city’s population, allowing more state and federal resources to be directed into that district. But Cranston’s Mayor Allan Fung opposed the move to count prisoners as residents of their previous homes. “Those that are incarcerated at the ACI, particularly those that are here for a long sentence, have an impact on the services that we provide,” Fung told the Judiciary Committee. “Our police, fire, and rescue make multiple runs to the prison [...] I cannot support a proposal that might disadvantage Cranston’s ability to get sorely needed resources.”

Fung’s counterpoint—that prisoners cost local taxpayers—is valid. In 2010, the average cost to incarcerate someone for a year in Rhode Island was $49,133; overall state jail and prison spending that year was $172.1 million. Prison buildings, like other government facilities, are exempt from property taxes. But the prison also operates its own hospital and has an extensive security apparatus in the form of hundreds of correctional officers. The operational budget for these services come from state and federal funds, not from Cranston’s coffers.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NG VOTES And Fung has publicly dismissed the idea that prisoners should be able to make use of Cranston’s other publicly funded resources. When second grader Joline Correa— the daughter of an inmate in the ACI—petitioned to stay at her elementary school in Cranston rather than switch to an elementary school in Providence, where she had moved to live with her mother, Fung had a different take on what residency means. “[Joline’s father] is not a taxpayer to the city of Cranston, he’s in a situation where he’s incarcerated,” Fung told a local TV station in March of 2010. Fung’s vacillation between designating prisoners as resource-using citizens and prisoners as objects of the state is common among politicians trying to use this disenfranchised population to serve their own interests. Incarcerated men and women have no vote in the society that locks them up, but their bodies are valuable political commodities. +++ Maine and Vermont are the only two states that allow incarcerated residents to vote from prison. In some states, anyone convicted of a felony is indefinitely barred from voting, even after they’ve served the full term of their sentence. Other states restrict only the currently incarcerated from voting, while some withhold voting rights from parolees and probationers as well.

In 2006, a referendum in Rhode Island extended voting rights to the formerly incarcerated, even those released on parole; voter registration forms are now provided as part of the Department of Corrections’ discharge planning process. But for the length of their stay in the ACI, prisoners can’t cast ballots.

States are justified in restricting the voting rights of felons and ex-felons under Section 2 of the 14th Amendment—the same section Davidson v. Cranston is predicated on—which asserts that states cannot deny any eligible citizens the right to vote, except “for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” Section 2 was originally included after the Civil War to prevent southern states from counting their newly freed black populations for representation while continuing to deny them political voice. But the except-for-crime clause ultimately had a disenfranchising effect. In the wake of abolition, the criminal justice system and aggressive policing of black bodies became mechanisms used to control former slaves; the proportion of black citizens in both southern and northern prisons grew rapidly in the late 19th and early 20th century. Along with losing their bodily autonomy and often being forced to work on prison plantations or chain gangs, those who were locked up also lost their badge of citizenship: the right to vote. The 14th Amendment made it unconstitutional to deny citizens the franchise based on their skin color, but Section 2 reasserted the validity of the Greco-Roman concept of civic death—that those who transgress societal norms or laws deserve to be excluded from the democratic process. Prisons exclude and hide bodies physically while felon disenfranchisement denies individuals the ability to weigh in on the system that has placed them there. Making people into criminals invalidates their personhood and nullifies them as citizens.

by Megan Hauptman illustration by Maya Sorabjee

In the 47 states that still allow incarcerated men and women to be counted as residents of the prison district, incarcerated bodies often give voting strength to voters who have diametrically different backgrounds and political goals. A majority of the country’s prisons are located in rural, conservative, and predominantly white counties— often districts that voted in support of the War on Drugs that has funded massive prison expansion over the past 40 years. In New York, which outlawed the practice of prisonbased gerrymandering in 2011, activists highlighted the fact that predominately black and Latino prisoners from New York City were inflating the voting power of conservative white voters in rural upstate New York. The voting clout of these “phantom voters” has a historical analogue in the 3/5ths clause of the US Constitution—slaves were counted as 3/5ths of a person for the purpose of congressional apportionment—which artificially boosted the South’s national political representation and power, allowing Southern legislators to defend the legality of keeping slaves under their control.

Most any conversation about mass incarceration, or the prison-industrial complex— buzzwords that have proliferated in politics and media in recent years—does and should address the still-racialized nature of policing, prisons, and punishment in America. While explicit codification of race into our laws is a thing of the past, the ostensibly color blind nature of our current day police, courts, and prison system can mask the ways that racial bias still influences who is seen as a criminal, how they are sentenced, and whose voices and votes count. To bring this back to Rhode Island: African Americans make up 7.3 percent of the state’s population, but 28.9 percent of the people in its prison system. +++ Rhode Island is a small state with small cities. Cranston is a ten-minute drive from downtown Providence. Even so, there are demographic and political shifts crossing from one city to the next. Almost half of the men and women incarcerated in the ACI come from Providence and Pawtucket, though the highest concentration is from the squaremile city of Central Falls. Providence and Central Falls are both majority-minority cities with Democratic mayors. Central Falls is the state’s smallest and poorest city, with a 60 percent Latino population. Providence’s median household income is $38,243— almost $20,000 lower than the state average. In contrast, Cranston’s median household income is $58,772, and the city’s population is 81.9 percent white. Mayor Allan Fung is a Republican in a solidly Democratic state; Michael Favicchio, the councilman of the contested Ward 6, is also a Republican. In 2012, the House District lines around the ACI were redrawn, but in 2010, half of the prison’s population was counted in District 16, represented by Democrat Peter Palumbo. The same year, Palumbo, who has run several campaigns on a tough-on-crime platform, tried to introduce a bill into the House modeled after Arizona’s infamous SB 1070.

Rhode Island’s size is much of what makes the ACI’s comparably small prison population matter for districting and representation. “The problem in RI is magnified because of the nature of the state—we only have one prison, we have a relatively small population, so the skewing that takes place is fairly substantial,” says Steven Brown, director of the ACLU. The ACLU, backed by PPI and Demos, as well as local groups such as DARE, have organized both legislative and judicial challenges to Cranston’s districting of the ACI. In 2012, representatives from the ACLU and PPI testified about Ward 6’s vote distortion in front of the Cranston City Council during their redistricting process; the council chose not to change the existing practice when they drew the district lines that year. And in 2014, along with the Davidson v. Cranston lawsuit, state congressional representatives have introduced a “Residence of Those in Government Custody” (S-2286 and H-7263) bill into the House and Senate, which would mandate that all prisoners be counted as residents of their home addresses. Brown says that the ACLU chose to introduce a legal constitutional challenge to the practice as well as continuing to pursue a legislative remedy because of the upcoming elections. If the Congress passes the bill up for debate, the challenge of Davidson v. Cranston becomes moot. “In the meantime,” Brown says, “we hope the city council will reconsider and perhaps on their own agree to redraw the lines before the upcoming election.” +++ Redrawing district lines to exclude the prison or counting incarcerated Rhode Islanders as residents of their home addresses would solve the issue of vote distortion. But that still leaves a silence at the crux of all of this: the lack of political voice afforded to incarcerated Americans, who live inside of one of the most politicized structures in the country.

Whether or not they benefit from prison-based gerrymandering, politicians use prisoners for their own political gain by employing tough-on-crime rhetoric to get elected, passing harsh sentencing laws to stay in office and building prisons to create jobs in their districts.

The people who are funneled into and housed in these prisons become numbers to be manipulated.

Davidson v. Cranston uses Section 2 of the 14th Amendment to argue for equal representation for all of the city’s non-incarcerated residents. In 1868, the 14th Amendment extended citizenship and the vote to the country’s newest and most marginalized citizens; Section 2 was intended to protect their votes from political manipulation. But in denying people who’ve committed crimes this most basic element of citizenship, this clause actually opened up new ways to disenfranchise marginalized sectors of the American populace. In considering what it means to have equal representation, we should think about why people labeled as criminals are the one class of Americans still not deserving of full political humanity. The men and women in Cranston’s Ward 6 are people, not numbers, and they should be afforded the same right of citizenship that the 14th Amendment promises to all Americans.

MEGAN HAUPTMAN B’14.5 sees people, not bodies.

march 7 2014

metro

□ 10

BELIEVE THIS

by Lisa Borst, Kyle Giddon, Josh Schenkkan & Carly West illustration by Layla Ehsan

Sometimes, we find contradictions in the world—coincidences, aberrations, quirks.

Mostly, we accept these oddities as innocuous and get on with our days. But there are those of us who claim that the stakes are higher, that we have been lied to by those with terrible secrets to conceal. Among us live conspiracy theorists. These are their worlds; don’t stay long, or you, too, might believe.

HOT RATS I have a friend who likes to say that Frank Zappa is like the Grateful Dead if the Grateful Dead were good at math. There’s a certain amount of truth to this quip: like many of those late-60s West Coast folk-rock projects, Zappa’s music is very weird, but it’s often a little smarter, a little less hazy than that of his countercultural contemporaries. Furthermore, Zappa—despite living, along with famously left-leaning artists like Joni Mitchell and Jim Morrison, in LA’s Laurel Canyon during the height of the region’s countercultural activity—rarely did drugs and consistently tried to distance himself from the hippie movement, a fact that lies in stark contrast to his self-described “freaky” aesthetic.

In fact, one theory suggests that certain members of the Laurel Canyon scene—with the oddly straitlaced Zappa chief among them—were actually moles, penetrating the counterculture on behalf of the US government. If you’re wondering why the government would bother trying to infiltrate an insular group of folk musicians churning out such classics as Mr. Tambourine Man and Blue in the hills of Los Angeles, remember the political landscape of the time: the US was slowly losing the Vietnam War, and these musicians—along with their hippie followers—were publicly opposed to the effort. Was Frank Zappa the government’s secret attempt to paint the anti-war counterculture as a group of discreditable stoned weirdos in the woods?

This theory crops up on poorly designed blogs all over the Internet, but its details can all be traced back to a WordArt-heavy series of blog posts entitled “Inside the LC: The Strange But Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation.” These posts are part of a larger project called The Center for an Informed America (“The Internet’s best source for disinformation-free news and commentary!”). The Laurel Canyon conspiracy starts, according to the suspiciously acronymed CIA, with the sinister lineage of counterculture superstars: Zappa, Morrison, Jackson Browne, and several other figureheads of the counterculture were all children of high-ranking military officers (Zappa’s father, for example, was a chemical warfare specialist). Allegedly, these connections allowed the artists to avoid conscription during the Vietnam War. Instead of enlisting, the story goes, they all flocked to the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles—suspiciously close to the Los Angeles Air Force Base—and began creating some of the decade’s best-known music. It was there that Zappa wrote “Plastic People,” from 1967’s Absolutely Free, in which he sings, “There’s this guy from the CIA, and he’s creeping around Laurel Canyon.”

Is the song secretly autobiographical?

Much of the Laurel Canyon counterculture centered around Frank and Gail Zappa’s home, an opulent compound they called the Log Cabin. The house functioned as a sort of commune, with various groupies and artists (including, for a while, the Manson family) hanging out in its many secret tunnels and caves. Zappa assumed the position of a sort of father figure to the LA countercultural scene. This much, we know, is true—but there might be more to it: according to the Internet’s best source for disinformation-free news and commentary, Zappa’s position within the emerging movement was intricately orchestrated by the US government, which engineered the Laurel Canyon counterculture in order to reduce the credibility of Vietnam War protesters by portraying them as a group of grimy hippies with guitars. The Center for an Informed America speculates that Morrison, Browne, and Stephen Stills were all involved, but Zappa, the wildly mustachioed man who wrote such bizarre numbers as “Broken Hearts are for Assholes” and “Weasels Ripped My Flesh,” is considered to be one of the project’s chief implants.

The series ends with an ominous “To be continued,” although The Center’s last full entry in the Laurel Canyon series was posted in 2008. Later posts on the Center for an Informed America website suggest that the author, Dave McGowan, has been focusing his recent energy on uncovering details about the moon landing. In light of what we now know about the Laurel Canyon conspiracy, Zappa’s decision to name his daughter “Moon Unit” suddenly seems highly suspicious. –LB

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FEATURES

ILLUMINATI While the royal, rich, and beautiful have long been revered, leave it to America to supersize the allure into a full-blown obsession. But the spotlights of fame cast dark shadows, with celebrities subject to invasive scrutiny, criticism, and at times, conspiracy. In recent years, theorists have focused their attention on the hip-hop industry, and the powercouple Jay-Z and Beyoncé in particular. Some have gone so far as to claim that they have single-handedly revived the historically supreme and clandestine cult of elites known as the Illuminati.

The origins of the Illuminati can be traced to the 1760s, when a man named Adam Weishaupt established a secret society to counter the influence of the Catholic Church in Bavaria. The stated goals of the group included establishing a One World Government/ New World Order, to rid society of national identity, and to dismantle the power of the Church. There is no evidence that the cult survived past 1785, when the Bavarian government banned all secret societies, and yet, its name has lived on as fodder for conspiracy theorists around the world. The Illuminati tag has been cast on various groups throughout time who’ve posed a threat to reigning institutions, ranging from French revolutionaries to Jewish elites to Soviet communists.

Conspirators of contemporary illuminati have pointed the finger at Jay-Z and Beyoncé, two powerful forces in the music industry and American culture at large. Bloggers have scrutinized their every lyric, performance, and article of clothing to accrue evidence of this industry-wide Illuminati allegiance.

“Jay-Hova,” one of Jay-Z’s many aliases, has been argued to sound like “Jehovah,” a word for God and an indicator of his heretical sentiments. Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records symbol is the triangle, or the “dynasty sign,” which is interpreted as a reference to the all-seeing eye of the Illuminati. In his “On to the Next One” video, he gives himself devil horns and features a goat skull—a possible nod to Baphomet, the goat-headed god revered by 19th-century occultists.

With Beyonce’s recent delivery of her daughter Blue Ivy, speculation about Illuminati ties has never been so high. Some Internet conspiracists have proposed that Blue Ivy will inherit the crown of Illuminati royalty, and have interpreted the clues in her name: Ivy (position in the alphabet)- I=9 V=22 Y=25-2+2+2+5=11-11x9= 99 flip 99 and add another 6 = get 666 = Illuminati.

B.L.U.E.= Born Living Under Evil I.V.Y= Illuminati’s Very Youngest.

Eulb Yvi (spelled backwards) = Latin for “Lucifer’s Daughter”. You may note those words don’t exist in Latin anymore. But there’s an explanation for that too: conspiracists claimed that the Illuminati “disappeared” these words from the Latin language. –CW

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

AN OBITUARY, PERHAPS According to convention, Paul McCartney is alive and well. He spends time on humanitarian causes. He has been knighted. He has been married and remarried. He has been twice inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Another narrative alleges that Paul McCartney was killed in an automobile accident outside Liverpool on the morning of November 9, 1966, at the age of twenty-four.

Following his death, he was replaced in The Beatles by an impersonator, who has since assumed his identity.

For most of recent history, such theories of McCartney’s early demise were told in whispers or, largely, in jest. In the late ’90s, Internet sleuths came together, assembled the evidence, and dispelled the lies. Their argument, as told on a series of pre-Y2K websites with predictably poor color contrast, proceeds as follows: In 1966, the CIA and MI6 attempted an assassination on Beatles manager Brian Epstein. Government agencies, the theory goes, found Epstein’s homosexuality unfitting for the public podium he occupied. When they engineered a collision of Epstein’s car, they were unaware that McCartney was also in the vehicle; upon McCartney’s death and Epstein’s survival, the CIA panicked, and convinced the remaining Beatles to accept a replacement for Paul. (Maybe Ringo didn’t notice.) Conspicuously soon after the collision, a Paul McCartney lookalike contest was held. The winner, rumors say, was never announced. Instead, this anonymous lamb was given plastic surgery to resemble Paul even further, and faked his own death in order to wholly assume Paul’s identity.

Many websites are devoted to comparing photographs of the pre-collision Paul with post-collision Paul (often referred to in this literature as Faul, as in “faux Paul” or “false Paul”). Apparently, Faul is two to three inches taller than Paul, has differently colored eyes, and maintains partial scarring near his jaw from the cosmetic operations. One page, in boldface white on a gray background, implores us to “[o]bserve how much droopier and sleepier Paul’s eyes are compared to the Faul’s.” Perhaps Paul is the one who had plastic surgery?

But the most important pieces of evidence pointing to the replacement of Paul by Faul are the hidden clues that the remaining Beatles left in their work. For instance, the famous cover of Abbey Road actually reenacts a funeral scene, with Paul barefoot and out of step with the others, and Ringo in funeral black. The text on the art of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, when viewed in the mirror, reveals “I ONE I X ^ HE DIE,” with the arrow pointing toward Paul. And near the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” John Lennon howls, sotto voce, “I buried Paul.”

Lennon would later claim he is actually saying “cranberry sauce.” That interpretation, one thinks, is easier to stomach. –KG

MARCH 7 2014

THE LIZARDS AMONG US The idea that extra-dimensional reptiles control the world sounds like something cooked up in a hazy college dorm room. It lacks the nostalgia of Area 51 and the vague plausibility that the moon landings were faked. It’s just plain weird, and it seems like something no one should believe.

But according to a 2013 survey by Public Policy Polling, four percent of registered voters—12 million Americans—consider themselves unabashed “reptilian theorists,” and they wish you’d wake up and smell the scales.

Reptilian theory, popularized by self-proclaimed “Son of the Godhead” David Icke, posits that reptile aliens from the Orion, Draco, and Sirius constellations came to earth in pre-history to mine the gold reserves buried in southern Africa. To ensure their complete (and secret) dominance of earth’s natural resources, they began to interbreed with humans, creating a royal bloodline with which they shared not only their scales, but also their secret, sacred knowledge. This knowledge allowed the reptilian lineage to become kings, emperors, and eventually, heads of state. Conspiracists point to the fact (verified

by Burkes Peerage, the “definitive guide” to royal, imperial, and presidential genealogies), thatalmost every leader in the history of the western world has shared a common bloodline. This bloodline, conspiracists claim, proves the world’s historical domination by a cadre of shape-shifting lizards.

If genealogical proof isn’t enough, YouTube boasts literally tens of thousands of videos purporting to have captured the reptilian elite momentarily shape-shifting. According to Icke’s theory, reptilians are only able to maintain their human form through the consumption of human blood. When reptilians are “hungry,” they slip up and expose their true forms: President Obama’s irises change to vertical slits as he explains his tax reform plan; President Bush’s skin turns a scaly grey as he calls for a new bailout package; Secretary Clinton’s lips form the archetypical “reptilian joker-mouth” as she worries about the power of the Russian media.

But even if shared bloodlines and video evidence can’t prove anything, the elegance of the reptilian theory is that, ultimately, they don’t have to. Reptilian theory functions as a kind of meta-conspiracy, folding into itself every other popular conspiracy, including, but not limited to: the “New World Order,” JFK’s assassination, 9/11 and the “Global War on Terror,” the Illuminati, fluoride mind-control, and micro-chipping. The reptilian theory creates a matrix of meaning out of the absurd, using its own inconsistencies, and the inconsistencies of the theories it relies on, to further prove the validity of every idea involved. Whereas the typical conspiracy theory relies on a wash of paranoia to distract from its logical inconsistencies, the reptilian theory appropriates hundreds of such washes, unleashing a deluge of self-doubt.

And then, there you are: alone and drowning in your apartment at 5AM, wondering, “Was it really a coincidence that there was a serpent in the Garden of Eden?” –JS

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The first book of Euclid’s Elements, the most famous geometry textbook of all time, deals with triangles. It begins with a set of axiomatic assumptions, grouped into three categories: “Definitions,” “Postulates,” and “Common Notions,” before its first proof, or “Proposition.”

Later proofs use propositions which came before. The architecture of the Elements is pretty amazing: in reading, you are being invited to witness, or contribute to, the edification of a system.

The penultimate proposition of Book I is a demonstration of the Pythagorean Theorem: that the sum of the squares of the two short sides of a right triangle is equivalent to the square of the longest side, or the hypotenuse.

Proposition 1

Euclid’s most famously irritating assumption is his “Fifth Postulate,” which states:

If a line segment intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side that sum to less than two right angles, then the two lines, if extended indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles sum to less than two right angles.

John Playfair, an 18th-century mathematician, restates it as follows: “Two straight lines, which intersect each other, cannot both be parallel to the same straight line.” Why does this need to be an assumption? It seems both totally obvious and qualitatively different from every other of Euclid’s assumptions: for example, the first postulate states that a straight line can be drawn between any two points. How could these two lines meet? Euclid himself seemed bothered by it—he doesn’t invoke the fifth, or “parallel,” postulate for the first twenty-eight propositions; it’s not until the twenty-ninth that he brings it up.

Proposition 47

Nikolai Lobachevsky’s Geometrical investigations on the theory of parallel lines, published in 1829 (over 2000 years after Euclid was alive), discards the Fifth Postulate and builds a geometrical system anyway: the first properly “non-Euclidean” geometry. Lobachevsky’s work is responsible for the branch of non-Euclidean geometry known as hyperbolic geometry. Elliptic geometry, another important branch, allows us to properly describe the surfaces of spheres. For very small surfaces, such as the planes we deal with on a day-to-day level, Euclidean geometry makes a lot of sense—this is why the “Parallel Postulate” is so intuitive, why a geometrical system without it is tough to wrap one’s head around.

Non-Euclidean geometry has proved remarkably useful, though: it really helps when attempting to describe larger scales, like in astronomy.

The form of Euclid’s Elements is worth sitting with for a moment. Here is a system which tells you where it’s starting from, and situates itself such that participation and questioning are not only possibilities but encouraged—first thing he does is tell you where he’s starting from, and he goes step by step through the whole thing. The form of the book facilitates the identification of points of dissent while challenging you to think how things could be otherwise. And when dissent did occur, really fundamental dissent, it was incredibly productive, and didn’t nullify that which had come before—Euclidean geometry still describes the world of ordinary perception well enough to make it the curricular standard for secondaryschool geometry.

Euclid’s fifth postulate is one of the most controversial moments in the history of mathematics, but the way it sits there on the page feels very honest, very transparent: this is what I see, it seems to be saying, and it’s what I need to make things work, even though I can’t prove it. He is right: you can’t always prove what you feel like you know, and you don’t always know what you think you do, but it does a disservice both to reason and to the world you’re experiencing not to acknowledge the intuition at its heart. While Lobachevsky’s and others’ geometries are magnificent constructions in themselves, Euclid’s geometry, with its unprovable Fifth Postulate, is scaled to human intuition.

What would it mean for us to have, like Euclid does, the human being at the heart of our systems?

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EPHEMERA

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

TALK OF THE TOWN exhibition, redesigned

by Jamie Packs illustration by Katherine Hsu

If you let your eyes linger for a moment, you’ll notice that there is something a little off about the images on the homepage of loveytown.org. The visitors to this online gallery seem somewhat flat, their gestures over-exaggerated. The space feels compressed. Lovey Town, an exhibition space conceived and operated by Madison, Wisconsin–based artist Michael Velliquette, is a physical space turned virtual—and miniature.

Velliquette photographs physical art works (confined to 4” by 6” or 6” cubed) and cutouts of visitors within a small, foamcore “gallery.” He then posts these photos online. Although the idea seems simple and perhaps vaguely amusing on the surface, Velliquette ultimately uses Lovey Town to expose the permeability that exists between the digital world and the material world, expanding our perceptions of what it means to be an exhibition space.

In its first iteration (developed in 2010), Lovey Town sought to be a space in which Velliquette challenged artists with a strong studio-based practice to create projects in new media to be exhibited online.

This model did not endure.

“I missed the tactility,” Velliquette tells the Independent over the phone. As a result, the space began to morph into its current form. Nonetheless, this first model emphasizes the immense importance that the interaction between the physical and the material has held for Velliquette, who has always had an interest in a curatorial practice alongside his own studio work. Explaining his longing for a more hands-on relationship with artworks and their creators, Velliquette said that the current form of Lovey Town seemed like a “cool compromise” between materiality and virtuality. +++ “It was a matter of practicality,” Velliquette says when describing the development of Lovey Town’s miniature physical form.

Through the reduced scale of the space, Velliquette is able to save immense amounts of time and money as compared to a full-sized gallery. Yet if miniaturization was a pragmatic choice, it is also the source of Lovey Town’s powerful effect.

“Working with objects at this scale started as a way to seek more authentic relationships with other artists” and to “reconnect with the joy of creating,” Velliquette says. Making a work on such a small scale “permits a play that is not as much possible when working on large-scale pieces.” The miniature transcends coherence and cost, the two most ubiquitous anxieties of physical gallery spaces, and replaces them with a freedom without tangible stakes. As such, Velliquette moves well beyond the “cute” image of the miniature and instead asserts it as a powerful intellectual tool.

Users can visit Lovey Town by sending in a full-body image of themselves to the gallery via email. Velliquette then

MARCH 7 2014

cuts out the images and places them within the space. He endearingly calls these cutouts “dolls,” conjuring images of the uninhibited sense of play upon which Lovey Town thrives.

Visitors to the current exhibition seem to run the gamut in their behaviors; they contemplate, converse, examine, and eat.

There even appears to be a litter of cats roaming around the gallery and climbing on the art.

The ability for anyone to “visit” Lovey Town gently mocks the dominant gallery culture even though Velliquette did not set out to construct a bold commentary on the state of the art world. “I don’t know if it’s critical. It’s the kind of gallery I would want,” he says. Nonetheless, the space is a definite (though perhaps unintentional) parody of gallery culture

admired. Despite claims about the importance of the art, however, this shows how Velliquette may be creating his own microcosm of the same exclusive art world that he sought to escape. Velliquette told the Indy that the gallery came from a sort of disillusionment about cultural institutions such as Artforum, which “are much more about the people and the scene than the people.” It is unclear whether Lovey Town succeeds in this regard, as the social purpose of the space often seems to eclipse the artistic one.

In Lovey Town, the interactivity between the audience and the artist seems to be as much a part of the art as the physical artworks on display. It does not assume the gallery space to be an empty vessel, but rather incorporates the social features of the space as a part of its larger artistic vision. Consequently, Lovey Town obscures the division between art display and art object, for it is the format of the gallery itself that draws in the spectator in addition to the art. “This is exhibition space as art object,” Velliquette explains in an interview with fellow artist Amanda Browder, adding, “It’s not that artists haven’t done this in the past, but it’s a different way of thinking about it.” +++

Lovey Town fuses the social and the anti-social. An art gallery is supposed to be a place where people gather, look at images, maybe do some thinking, maybe not. Despite the image of a bustling gallery space on Lovey Town’s homepage, the lively atmosphere that we see is entirely fabricated. In a time where art galleries are becoming increasingly less about the art and more about the networking, Lovey Town denies this change in a beautiful way.

Lovey Town was conceived primarily as a way for artists to connect with one another and to ultimately construct a very specific community of people. “More than anything else, the space constantly provides an excuse to reconnect with other artists,” says Velliquette, joking that artists are his “favorite people in the art world.” Unlike other forms of social media, the interactions here have a certain degree of physicality to them, for they are materialized in the way these artists actually “visit” and interact within the space itself. This shows how Lovey Town’s capacity to bridge the physical and the digital pervades even the space’s social atmosphere.

The social dimensions of the space are especially pertinent to the current show on display (the second in Lovey Town’s history), “Friend of a Friend,” in which artists from the previous show recommended an artist-friend whom they

Despite the gallery’s attempts to spring clear of the conventions of the modern gallery, however, it ultimately conforms to many of those conventions. But even though Lovey Town has many of the same failures— of accessibility, of exclusivity—as many physical exhibition spaces, it ultimately succeeds in overcoming the failures that are traditionally associated with online exhibition spaces. Lovey Town rises above the sense of alienation that often drives people away from digital exhibition spaces and instead turns towards a more palpable model. In this sense, Lovey Town transcends the limitations placed upon it beyond its online framework and connects us to something real—art, people, or some sort of nebulous emotion. It feels like if you reach through the screen, something just might be there.

JAMIE PACKS B’17 is an assortment of pixels.

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TEACHABILITY OF THE FORM on MFA vs. NYC

by Drew Dickerson illustration by Felipe di Poi The MFA takes conceptual center stage of MFA vs. NYC, as it probably should. According to Poets and Writers (purveyors of the annual MFA Index, which ranks high- and low-residency creative writing programs along such criteria as selectivity, student-faculty ratio, and funding opportunities), 120 new programs were founded within the first 30 months of the current decade—this versus 97 new programs founded in the same such length of time in the early aughts, 39 in the ’90s, 28 in the ’80s, and 11 in the ’70s. Where NYC’s publishing industry faces the prospect of increasingly diminished relevance in a media environment becoming all the time more information-centric, the MFA’s workshop culture is faced with an oppositely-oriented existential anxiety: the fact that the graduate creative writing program has quickly become one of the fastest growing, lowest-utility disciplines within the university.

Of course, in actual fact, the contemporary literary landscape does not divide neatly into the antagonistic terms suggested by MFA vs. NYC’s title—and Chad Harbach, editor of the collection, admits as much in the book’s first essay:

details here in part) no longer enjoys the influence he once did. All the while, creative writing programs have continued to popup incessantly. If there is today a unitary MFA aesthetic, it is no longer dirty or realist—nor does it look at first blush like the charge of an MFA-specific literature could reasonably hold up at all given the sheer number and variety of students and programs.

However, if writing can indeed be taught, it would seem that there must be something to it at once self-same and determinate. How otherwise would one impart technique? If there is an argument to be made against the MFA with respect to the uniformity of its output, it would (given the wide variety of programs, students, and subject matters) likely have to move from this specificity of craft. David Foster Wallace’s “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young”—excerpted in MFA vs. NYC as “The Fictional Future”—seems to anticipate just this possibility of standardization:

The NYC writer most probably earned an MFA; the MFA writer, meanwhile, may well publish her books at a New York House. There are even MFA programs in New York, lots of them, though these generally partake of the NYC culture. And many writers move back and forth between the MFA and NYC world, whether over the course of a career or within a single year.

A larger issue is whether Writing Programs and their grinding story-every-threeweeks workshop assembly lines could, eventually, lower all standards, precipitate a broad-level literary mediocrity, fictional equivalents of what Donald Hall calls “The McPoem.” I think, if they get much more popular, and do not drop the pose of “education” in favor of a humbler and more honest self-appraisal…we might well end up with a McStory chain that would put Ray Kroc to shame.

However, the rhetorical strength of the title obtains. Despite the inevitable existence of exceptional or mixed circumstances, it does feel to the lay reader, would-be novelist, or closet poet looking in on the world of professional print culture that a writer must, in the final instance, declare institutional allegiance to one camp or the other. This allegiance is one most likely foregone in whether a particular writer earns a living by publishing or by teaching, by his or her own sales figures or by a salaried faculty position. Distinction thus drawn, MFA vs. NYC offers essays from a variety of contributors detailing the respective merits, drawbacks, and plain facts of each marked-out territory. In any case, no one can accuse Harbach (or the partnered publishers at n+1 and Faber and Faber) of burying the lede.

Most charges levelled against the first MFA programs cite a perceived homogeny of workshop output. The specter raised is one of a literature comprised of technically unimpeachable pieces virtually indistinguishable from one to the next. Raymond Carver is often named as stylistic lodestone and forebear here, with his seminal collections What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Cathedral ranking two among the most influential books of post-war American short fiction. Incidentally, this fact raises another interesting feature of the graduate creative writing program: its formal tendency toward the short story. If the two competing cultures of contemporary fiction have assembled two competing and alternative canons, the MFA program leans more towards the short story collection and NYC the novel. Harbach suggests that this is most likely attributable to the former’s teachability and the latter’s salability. It’s easier to get someone to buy a 400 page novel at the same time that it’s easier to get someone to actually read a 15 page story. Specific illustration of the MFA vs. NYC dynamic might then take the form of something like pairing Jesus’ Son against Bright Lights, Big City, Lorrie Moore against Donna Tartt, Drown against The Corrections, Lydia Davis against Paul Auster.

This formal proclivity as well reveals a tacit (because obvious) feature of the creative writing program generally: the tenet that writing literature can be taught. It would be impossible for a workshop leader to read and usefully respond to full-length, semi-amateur student novels. The short story is then prevalent because it is practical, because it can be read in a single sitting and fairly excerpted, and because it rewards economization and technical polish. From the workshop’s specific pedagogical limitations, an aesthetic philosophy in-part emerges.

A lot of this is a gloss of Harbach’s argument in the title essay.

Where MFA vs. NYC becomes most interesting is in its examination of the conjunction between the so-called “workshop style” and regularity of form. For the most part, stylistic arguments brought to bear against the MFA program are old hat, dating back to the fiction students of the ’80s and early ’90s and their emulation of so-styled “Dirty Realists” such as Carver above, these writers working for the most part in a minimalist style with spare and flattened affect.

However, the reading and writing communities have obviously changed a great deal in the past 30 years. The mega-novel enjoyed a brief period of cultural currency. Gordon Lish (Carver’s editor, Amy Hempel’s editor, hyper-sexual lothario whose misadventures Carla Blumenkranz

(Quick clarifying note: Ray Kroc was the Czech-American franchising agent who made of McDonald’s the McDonald’s it is).

Wallace’s insight is in the fact that an MFA-specific creative writing style does not stem from overbearing, please-me professors (although surely, on a circumstantial basis, this must sometimes be the case), but from the program’s professedly education-oriented structure. From the basic fact of what a program is and how it operates—structured, as all curriculums, to make regimented, regular demands on students’ and instructors’ schedules—the risk of a McStory franchise opening on your campus becomes here apparent. Rarely in MFA vs. NYC are there any horror stories of programs themselves insisting upon a house style. What the writers instead rankle at are the expectations tacit in instructor comments, reading lists, and classmates’ conversation. There is, as well, in the workshop leader’s assessment of a short story as “exemplary” or “teachable,” something of a normative claim. Which is to say that canon-building always gives the rule to the literature it curates.

Nobody here, at least on the face of it, is putting one over at the expense of anybody else.

To judge by this collection, most writers attending graduate creative writing programs (as well as those attached to such programs at the faculty level) are relatively sober in their language and professional expectations. The love-hate relationship that most writers and readers enjoy with the MFA comes in alongside the peculiar and ambiguous place it occupies with respect to the rest of the university proper. The graduate program in creative writing is an academic department concerned definitionally with the production of literature, and the historic novelty of this situation (a space carved out in the culture for large numbers of people to go about the business of creating fiction, poetry, and essays) is not to be underestimated. Though it is a situation with certain unresolved problems, it is a situation without a bad guy—apart, maybe, from Gordon Lish, who comes off truly diabolical under Blumenkranz’s treatment. Instead, one’s dissatisfaction with the MFA program is coincident with the necessary suspension of several fundamental questions: “Can writing be taught? Am I a writer? Is any of this, in short, worth my while?”

These questions remain unanswered in the form of a blanket “yes” because, if the answer to any one of the three were to turn up conclusively negative, one could not be an MFA student.

Such reservations arise because of the creative writing program’s educationally-motivated organizing principle. MFA thinks of itself and grows in the consideration of comparative rankings and metrics such as P&W’s MFA Index. NYC takes its cue instead from sales data reports such as Nielsen BookScan. The value of the first arrangement is its existing largely outside of a market logic. The value of the second is its quantitative demonstrability. Though the publisher today fears for his or her job, this job is unambiguous and will remain the same (in its basic, money-making form) tomorrow. Though NYC culture struggles to stay afloat, its battle is not one of self-justification. If the MFA story must work to legitimate itself artistically, the MFA program must work to legitimate itself intellectually.

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arts

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

What then are MFA’s aesthetic and academic functions? It does not seem an overstatement to suggest that the foundation of academic creative writing (and its disciplinary distinction from the university English department) is one of the most basic determining factors in all of postwar/contemporary letters. Eric Bennett’s essay “Pyramid Scheme” suggests that, at its inception, the MFA program was concerned with the articulation and codification of a particularly American literary experience, a concern that lives on vestigially today: In the chemistry department, you fabricate new molecules; in the creative writing department, you give voice to an undocumented American experience…Until the 1960s, creative writing programs entailed an inclusive ideology whose time had not yet come; then its time came (and accounts, I think at least in part, for the boom). The universal white male subject…stopped having to be white and male.

Bennett also writes that the CIA funneled money into the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop through an organization called the “Farfield Foundation” during the Cold War. The interesting dynamic here is that between regularity of form and particularity of content. In this way, the universal subject is liquidated in favor of a formal universality. By this account, increasingly specific aspects of American experience are subsumed under written “craft” and so detailed.

Literature is then functionalized in the exploration of literary identity. I am myself uncertain how convincing I find certain movements in Bennett’s piece, but it seems to me (considered in conjunction with Wallace’s McStory anxiety) that the formation of creative writing as a discipline concerned with the uniform exploration of plural circumstances is right on.

MFA tries at one and the same time to own and to disown its place within American higher education. Whether or not writing is teachable, the fact remains that it is being taught all over the country. Proponents of the creation of literature, however, often characterize it as an emotionally intuitive (where not downright anti-intellectual) act. The paradoxes of program structure are in this way similar to the paradoxes of story structure. Creative pedagogy neces-

march 7 2014

sarily involves a critical reexamination of the creative discipline. As the MFA program navigates this tangle between literature and the academy so far as each is independent of the other, a weird intermediary space emerges. Queasiness arising from the directions of both NYC and the university evinces this ambivalent and equivocal status.

MFA vs. NYC raises in this way (and leaves largely open) several critical questions, all of which are especially germane to the young creative person facing the professional world, perhaps facing as well the imminent prospect of college graduation. What does it mean that one can earn an undergraduate degree in creative writing? Why are more and more short stories being written at a time when, paradoxically, fewer and fewer are being read by the generalinterest public? Does the fact of literature’s increasing orientation towards (and reliance upon) campus culture represent a sort of death knell? Should I be reading Annie Dillard? What can I reasonably expect if I am to try to earn my living by being a writer (whatever that means)? Am I temperamentally suited for journalism? Publishing? The Academy? Am I, in an honest estimation, temperamentally suited for any of this?

The book, in any case, was released February 25.

DREW DICKERSON B’14 gets his stories to-go.

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pagan providence

by Eli Petzold

here where wood statues of the old gods stand at the meeting of two rivers, withered and withering in wind and water. once proud, now they stare on a still, cloudy day, at their forms in silver mirror bay water. a pilgrim comes from a land of car-flattened crows, decomposed coyote bones across black deserts where whale vertebrae and tern feathers bleach in midnight sun— waste of giants’ feasts. they brought the goddess’ corpse down the hill in a bulldozer and brought her to the boat where we stood in mourning blue. hydrangeas, dried in february, are like paper— are paper on which i write my pagan songs. the wise build their homes on stone— but i’m a fool to glide along creeks, goliard, cycling from temple to silent temple, eulogizing. punkish imps under leafless trees, under condominium windows, silent (sound of snowplows and trash trucks nearby) follow overgrown train tracks to their origin beyond the wolf-maw gate. our deer king, humble hart, pierced five times and left to die by the swamp where hollow televisions float. wednesday at dawn, i hung myself from the ash tree, pierced in the side by my own spear. nine hungry nights, upside down, and on friday morning i had nine songs to sing. friday mourning, we pushed the boat into the bay, unmanned, but for the old ones, and their treasures. the wise, nor the warsome can say who might receive that cargo.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Friday, March 7 12-1PM // 212 Giddings House, Brown University, 128 Hope St., Providence Professor Webb Keane from the University of Michigan is going to talk about moral codes and ethical precepts from an ethnographic standpoint. Keane thinks that it can be useful to look at ethical life from both naturalistic (psychology/linguistics/etc.) and normative (law/philosophy/religion/etc.) perspectives and assures you that his approach does not invite reductionism!

Girl Swarm 6-8PM // Granoff Center, Lower Lobby, Brown University, 154 Angell St., Providence This exhibition is about the digital feminist movement. It was curated by Celine Katzman ‘15, Ana Cecilia Alvarez ‘13, and Katarah da Silva ‘15 and I’m sure there will be snacks.

6:30-7PM // Stephen Robert ‘62 Campus Center (Faunce) Front steps, Brown University, 75 Waterman St., Providence

Saturday, March 8 10AM-1PM // Meet at Teas and Javas at 199 Wayland Ave., Providence

Midnight // The Parlour, 1119 N. Main St., Providence // $5 (the) Viennagram, Minibeast, Gezan, Baylies Band, Cave Bears

Sunday, March 9 Open Rehearsal brings dance and movement beyond the proscenium stage and into other cultural and architectural contexts. Watch Li Jun Lai and Jessica Howard move around in the gallery spaces.

Monday, March 10 6:30-8:30PM // 106 Bayard Ewing Building, 231 South Main St., Providence

Elizabeth Alford, principal of Pollen Architecture and Design, will be giving a lecture. Dad, this one’s for you.

Tuesday, March 11 6:30-9PM // Stephen Robert ‘62 Campus Center, Petteruti Lounge, Brown University, 75 Waterman St., Providence

Basically, people go around to different towns throughout the state, collect littered plastic bags, and take pho- Clifford Brown and Rachel Seligman, authors of the new biography, Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave will discuss their work researching the life of Solomon Northup and the tos with town reps to raise awareness about RI’s possible banning of plastic bags (I’m assuming these people are in favor of banning plastic bags, but you might want to check). Google “ri plastic bag hunt” and RSVP to partake in the hunt.

THE

Wednesday, March 12

5:30-8PM // Providence Biltmore Hotel, 11 Dorrance St., Providence

“Learn how to approach people, introduce yourself, strike up conversation, connect your interests, gain insights about their company, exchange business cards and more!” (if you’re looking for something to boycott this week…)

Thursday, March 13

6-8PM // 100 Save the Bay Dr., Providence // $20

Peter Andreas is the author of Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America. He will be a major part of this event. At this event, you can taste quality sipping rums and enjoy light snacks while learning about America’s LTR* with smuggling and illicit trade. Tickets for sale at Bottles in Providence and at the door. *Long term relationship

8PM // Cable Car Cinema, 204 South Main St., Providence // $5

so much time looking at that blog that I didn’t have time to give you more than one event on Tuesday and Wednesday.

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