The College Hill Independent

V. VV 2 . 2.

6266

TTTHHH EE I I NND DDYY Y NN.

N.11 .9

Liz SCIE St. F Sim MAN N on AG z é Be OT ie D CE J lix, MV En ING K e O P D lle a h a An vis an te gler EDIT or Cu , e n V A ee M OR i s S n S hing e M nnie am an B ETR S G t. F , M acd M aha roc O A race ac nn , G kli im on eli n d a a R Dun x i CO Dw ld, K ona reg , Ell or otm ham Se RR ld ye i m a EC w itz Vil an, , Al TIO r, Ro Sa LIST r Ro n N: b FO kin Ben ex R La ert off OD b so AR on e st S we and COVE rt S An TS J n Tu an, n an oe Sa R ek ck l dle a R m ’s er, E EDI e d r o e co , T Ro r ve rica OR D , Er tma Jon Em se i n m ra c Sc g ian a S aW n N e, I rt N h TE G EW wa wie e Z ch SD s m ge ho wie RVIE reg ohl ge WS N F u ad rha E iss AT avid rsh DE D e b us a UR SIG A r a n y K en NE use ew D , G ES E dle S at r T R r n y W AFF S C DE icke ier S mm , Ba W rr SIG ar a rso to in d R t ck Ja y E n em ITER er D N + I l m an nask kint Ro av LLU LITE ut on , i S R h, i e , no bert s, Ja TRA ARY Cla , D T o tD M re Ed ud I r O ee ia w ian err d S N L izz ard No n te e Z itt, r ho Rick n SE ie D Frie rton a N u, dm as Sala IOR vis, an ED K wa m ITO im X s s é, Sa CO RS ta VE te Ra rno d.

R W ART illan ff ea B R po obe roo ks log rt ize Me rr fo r t itt he er ro r.

PH

NEWS 2

Week in Review david adler, simon engler & rick salamé

3 Boston alex ronan

METRO

5 Battle of the Books vera carothers

7 Debating Duos kurt ostrow

FEATURES Books 17 Fave indy reading club

FROM THE EDITORS Supposedly April Showers bring May Flowers. In high school, when the clock struck 4:20 my friend would sing: “O Canada! Our home and native land!”

I think he said sacred instead of native, but maybe it’s my memory. He is from Santo Domingo.

On the first April 19 of my life the high in Providence was 57.9 °F according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac (almanac.com). Turns out the farmer became old on his 40th birthday in 1832, but only for four years. (He got his groove back.) It wasn’t till his 56th birthday that he accepted old for good. I guess people didn’t live as long back then.

There doesn’t seem to be a definitive poem or song that goes with April Showers. Wikipedia told me the proverb was first recorded in 1886 as “March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers.” The Best Answer on Yahoo!Answers gave me two choices.

Choice 2, Stanza 6:

Choice 1, Stanza 1:

April showers bring May flowers, That is what they say.

But if all the showers turned to flowers, We’d have quite a colourful day!

I want to send you lots of happy thoughts And prayers for God to bless you every day, With the softest of April showers To bring you the loveliest flowers in May.

The Mayflower brought Puritans. They probably would have gone with choice 2. We can’t buy beer at the mini mart because of them. Blue laws. “Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that blue laws were originally printed on blue paper.” We are stuck buying beer at package stores, that’s the technical term in Alabama, Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. (Wikipedia) It’s gonna rain this weekend.

Let’s make a packy run.—JDJ

Mexico 11 In kate holguin on Waves 12 Women kate van brocklin

ARTS 4

Behind You lizzie davis

Longstreth 9 Dave greg nissan

OCCULT the Iron Lady 8 Unearthing benson tucker

EPHEMERA

HEALTH & WELLNESS in the Middle 15 Stuck claudia norton & greg sewitz

LITERARY Bye Brooklyn 13 Bye doreen st. felix

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

theindy@gmail.com twitter: @maudelajoie /// theindy.org ///

Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress. Campus Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org

18

X-PAGE

anne macdonald

Week in Little Things

by David Adler, Simon Engler & Rick Salamé Illustration by Alex Ronan

Parks & Historical Recreation

Wriggling Wranglers

Ring the Bells Out (Briefly)

here lies mills end park. A cup of soil, two feet in diameter, sitting between opposing lanes of Portland, Oregon traffic, a small gangly pine tree poking its head into the air.

And across the pond, 5,000 miles away, Prince’s Park.

A soft hamlet of grass, three handsome trees—Faith, Hope, Chairty—and a small bench parked in the middle of the street in Burntwood, Staffordshire, England, surrounded on all sides by a three-foot fence.

These are the battlefields of today’s Parks-and-Rec war, vying for the coveted position of World’s Smallest Park.

I want to emphasize here, before the ugly semantics, that this is no trivial matter. The stakes are high: The Guinness Book of World Records, for many 10-year-old boys and girls in elementary school libraries across the nation, is a sacred text. Longest Finger Nails, Longest Bout of Hiccups, Longest Bridal Train—these are figures etched into the collective memory of the tiny.

At core is a disagreement over the definition of a park.

“We understand the definition of a park to be fenced area, usually in a natural state, possibly for recreation purposes,” Prince’s Park promoter Paul Griffin reported on Oregon radio.

“It is a city park. It’s maintained, watered and weeded, planted just like any other city park,” a spokesman of Portland Parks and Recreation said. Plus, “this park has a legacy and a history that goes back from the 1940s until today.”

And it’s true: back in 1946, Dick Fagan returned from war to take up his post at The Oregon Journal. From his window, he saw a small hole in the street intended for a light post and took it upon himself to collect some soil and plant some flowers. From then on, Fagan featured the little park regularly in his column, with tales of forests and leprechauns.

Just as much as Mills End is a tribute to those American values of industriousness and entrepreneurialism, Prince’s Park is to Britain’s stale monarchy—the sign reads: “Dating from 1863, the park was created to commemorate the marriage of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.”

So, like most things, it has come down to that USA v.

GBR eternal struggle. On this, Portland Parks and Recreation was quite clear: “We Americans have a pretty good track record when it comes to taking on the Brits. Perhaps they’re still smarting over that whole American Revolution thing,” Ross announced, high-fiving reporters with the one hand, chugging beer with the another, and giving a figurative middle finger with the third.—DA

they are the small, and they are tasty. They are the delight of 1950s dinner parties and the prized snack of your sauce-smeared fourteen-year-old cousin. They are shrimp. And for shrimp, ladies and germs, it’s been a rough year.

Boats in the Gulf of Maine caught 660,000 pounds of shrimp during the 2013 season, which ended on April 12. By the Independent’s calculation, that’s nearly forty million of the tender sea-bites.

But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough.

Six hundred and sixty thousand pounds might sound like a lot. But this year’s harvest was only a fraction of previous hauls. In 2012, boats took in over five million pounds of the cocktail crustaceans. In fact, the 2013 shrimp catch was the smallest since 1978, when my great-uncle ate too many at his retirement party.

It’s not that the shrimp aren’t out there. They’re still swimming around, multiplying, breeding, wriggling, teeming by the millions. It’s very erotic.

Ay—the shrimp are bountiful. It’s the Man who’s curbing the catch. More specifically: the shrimp stock in the Gulf of Maine has been repeatedly overfished in the past few years, and the Atlantic States Fisheries Commission set a limit on the 2013 harvest in an attempt to curtail the damage. So although the shrimp are teeming, they need a chance to teem some more. With the extra time to mate ‘n’ rejuvenate, it’s hoped that the critters—which are probably more important to the North Atlantic aquatic ecosystem than they are to your next catered event—will return to healthy population levels, so that they can be plundered with gusto agane.

In the meantime, buy Maine shrimp while you can. Harbor Fish, a Portland, ME distributor, sold out its entire stock in three hours back in January. And stay close—the shrimp are highly perishable, so they taste best in New England.

If you have to settle, you can always pick up imported tiger prawns at the supermarket. Remember: the fruits of aquaculture are varied.—SPE

democracy is just like dating—it’s the little things that count. Sometimes the best way to express yourself is to give her a tacky greeting card, or rub his feet, or push “DingDong! The Witch is Dead” to the top of the UK pop charts in celebration of her death.

A Facebook group bluntly titled “Make ‘Ding dong the witch is dead’ number 1 the week Thatcher dies” launched on April 8, the very day Margaret Thatcher jumped the mortal coil. Clearly sights were set a little lower than the complete undoing of the former Prime Minister’s conservative revolution, but perhaps a well-placed stunt is as good a way as any to express disapproval of her legacy of privatizing industries and deregulating the financial sector. As if on cue to validate our human love of symbolic action, the international news media latched onto the story of the internet campaign and gave it coverage totally out of proportion to its 11,000 Facebook supporters. Unfortunately for believers in the power of online activism, the plan didn’t pan out. On April 14, the Official Charts Company published the tally: 52,605 copies of the 1939 throwback were purchased, making it the second most purchased song of the week.

As the BBC’s Sunday night top-40 radio show approached—a day of independence for all the Munchkins and their descendants—conservative Members of Parliament and free speech advocates argued over whether or not the BBC should run the 51-second song. BBC Director General Lord Tony Hall, balancing his love of the “important principle” of free speech against his opinion that the gesture was “distasteful,” delegated responsibility to a subordinate who decided to only air a five-second clip of the song, according to British newspaper, The Independent. Yes, let the joyous news be spread, a lasting victory for free speech over individual tastes!

The tiny clip, which was aired on Sunday as promised, was embedded in a special news feature that explained the political context for the song’s chart placement. Listeners were reminded—in case they missed it—that Thatcher “strongly divided political and public opinion,” a not-so-subtle way of acknowledging that, for some, the lady from North London was no Good Witch of the North. But above the politicking and equivocation, the short refrain was heard in all its national broadcast glory and thousands of anti-Thatcherites savored the moment. Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead. It was a very small victory for them, but, like a mini-cupcake, it was still sweet.—RS

APRIL 19 2013

NEWS

02

Boston

by Alex Ronan

There is a candy shop on Boylston Street. Grace says something happened. Before it is called the Boston Marathon Bombing or the Patriot’s Day Bombing it is, simply, What Happened in Boston. I watch the initial videos on silent because it seems vulgar or voyeuristic. Grace asks if they are scary. “Yeah,” I say.

There’s a photograph of the candy shop. Lots of them, actually, because the candy shop is right there. There are 17 people in the frame and many people gone. But police, firefighters, someone from the K-9 unit, two people wearing hats, and a woman in a brown hoodie are there. It’s hard not to look at the hands—pointing, moving, placed with care on someone’s back. And two offering thumbs-up. Those hands belong to a big blue M&M, plastic, standing just near the edge of the frame. The M&M is smiling vaguely.

There is an American flag in the photograph, strangely shaped and printed onto. I don’t know what it is, I try to figure out what it is: it’s a bag meant to carry one of those collapsible camping chairs. Blood on the sidewalk behind it, and behind that, the M&M. I want to know what happened, but what happened is also the strangeness of what didn’t happen. On Monday someone brought a camping chair to the Marathon. On Monday they left the case, on Tuesday it is still there, in another photograph, and so is the blood. On Monday people ordered burgers and fries and beer, and they are still there, outdoor tables set, food half eaten. And a big blue M&M standing right there, watching, smiling, from before.

03

NEWS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

GETTING GOOD GOVERNANCE

A Very Brief History of Providence’s Library Reform Movement

by Vera Carothers Illustration by Mariam Quraishi

outside the smith hill library in northwest Providence, there is a big red sign with Providence Community Library written in white block letters. Inside, the reading room feels calm, almost sleepy. Cracks draw the eye up the wall to the high ceilings. In one place there is a hole, paint peeling away from it. At the computers, a few seniors scroll quietly. Tutors at wooden tables prepare for the after-school crowd. Afternoon light lazes over boxes of used books. Five books for $1—that’s a ridiculous sale. I’m tempted by beat-up copies of Roald Dahl epics and the keenly titled Awesome Gardening for Young Dads, but I stop myself because I see Patricia Raub, a founder and board member of the Providence Community Library (PCL) whom I have asked for an interview, at the circulation desk. She’s wearing a gray turtleneck and chatting familiarly with the other librarians. I introduce myself as the person writing the piece about the library takeover. I am unsure, as I say it, what that means.

In the fall of 2008, decades of brinkmanship between the Providence Public Library (PPL), the private nonprofit that ran the municipal library system at the time, and the city government ended with an ultimatum. The PPL’s statement was calm and authoritative: as a result of a “sustainability survey,” the PPL would be forced to close down five of the nine neighborhood branches in Providence unless the city government increased its yearly funding (despite its $35 million endowment). City officials were disgruntled by the threat of implosion of the library infrastructure, which has been controlled by the PPL for over 130 years.

Meanwhile, in the wings, library reformers exchanged the signal. It was time for a library takeover. A group of reformers, finding consensus in its absolute disillusionment with the PPL, had recently founded a 501(c)(3) organization called the Providence Community Library (PCL). The group believed that despite its inexperience, it could do a better job running the nine neighborhood branch libraries than the PPL. With empty coffers and a bad taste in its mouth, the city approved a transfer of governance of the branch libraries to the PCL, effective July 1, 2009. The PCL moved to make good on its founding tenets: transparency and diverse community representation in its decisions. “When we started the PCL, we said, ‘We need to get everyone involved.’ We went around to all the neighborhoods in Providence and there was a lot of community support,” says founding member Judy Blackadar.

No More Money Last year, Mayor Angel Taveras warned that Providence might have to file for bankruptcy protection. The city expected an annual structural deficit of $110 million for the 2011-12 fiscal year. This January, however, the city closed the books with a structural deficit of only $4 million. The city had sacrificed $36.5 million in union and retiree concessions, $30 million in education cuts, and increased taxes by $23 million.

In the next five years, the city will have to pay the current

05 METRO

deficit back to the state and try to close the structural debt, the projected $4 million gap between the city revenue and its expenses each year, a figure which may even widen. This means that city government will continue to struggle to fulfill public services like education, housing, and health care for the foreseeable future.

Public money is becoming scarcer in settings way beyond Providence as city, state, and national governments are increasingly forced to cut services and privatize. The climate of recession and austerity focuses attention on equitable and accountable governance, an age-old struggle for private nonprofits such as the PPL and the PCL which render public services.

Monopoly on Libraries Since its inception 135 years ago, the Providence public library system has been in private hands. Providence followed the model of other cities in New England (like Boston and Springfield), a region unique for building library systems before government funded social services were conceived of. In the 1880s, wealthy residents and philanthropists formed the Providence Public Library (PPL), an organization chartered as a private nonprofit to support community libraries. Along with the growth of immigration and industry in Providence, the PPL eventually expanded and institutionalized the informal network of community libraries into the municipal library system. Until 2009, when the organization was diverted from its municipal role, the PPL received about one third of its annual budget from the city and an even greater portion from the state. Like other non-profits, it was in part dependent on donations to its $35 million endowment. However, it received 70% of its budget from either city or state “public” money—much of it funded by taxpayers.

So in theory, despite its private status, the PPL is accountable to the government because it provides a public service. However, the relationship between the PPL board and the City Council had been fraught with tension as far back as the 1950s and ’60s, library reform activist Judy Blackadar tells me. Many Providence residents were unaware of the library’s status, believing it to be a government agency and therefore wrongly blaming the city for faults in service. The Providence Journal (whose main financiers include a member of the library board) ran angry letters to the editor from library patrons who indicted the city for not providing the library with sufficient funds. The last decade of Providence Journal archives reads like a timeline of the conflict between city and library— a series of landmark disputes, legal actions, and hostile negotiations.

The connecting thread of these tensions was the lack of accountability of the PPL to the city. Of its 33 board members, dominated by academic and institutional local elites, the PPL offered the city one spot for a city representative. In November 2005, the City Council and the PPL sparred over this lack of Council representation. Under the heat of community unrest about library service cuts and redistributions, the Council pushed to instate nine new library board representa-

tives for the city. In turn, the PPL brandished a harsh ultimatum: it would reject the $3 million the city provides annually if the Council demanded the right to appoint what would be a third of its board members. The city was backed in a corner; they could not allow the PPL to default on its services. This ploy left the city with little recourse for oversight. Taxpayers had even less. Pre-PCL takeover, the situation amounted to “taxation without representation,” pointed out Lisa Niebels, a member of the Library Reform Group, a group that rose in opposition to the PPL (more on them later).

Interestingly, both sides of the heated debate invoked the roles of public and private to justify their actions. Frustrated City Councilman Luis Aponte argued in the Providence Journal that any institution that accepts so much money from the public is no longer a private institution. The Council felt that although the board portrays itself as a private vendor that “sells” its services to the city, it had an obligation of transparency to the public. Howard Walker, vice-president of the PPL board, retorted that this would unfairly subject private donations to political interests and amount to “public control of a private institution.”

Finally, after a three-month standoff, the board issued a statement saying it would “agree to work toward a new arrangement with the City of Providence.” A month later, the PPL board reneged without public discussion of any kind and passed a vague internal resolution against accepting City representation. “We thought there would be negotiations taking place right here, right now,” said Patricia Raub, a Providence College professor who (take note) would later spearhead the founding of the PCL. She was quoted in the Providence Journal: “I’m angry. It’s a signal to us that they would rather do nothing at all.” Their proceedings consistently lacked transparency, and they seemed determined to ignore ever more urgent calls for open discussion of library policies.

Move to Reform The library reform group, which would go on to form the PCL, was created in 2004 after the latest periodic wave of service cuts shook the community that spring, laying off 21 staffers and reducing hours at many branches. The group, a grassroots movement of library friends’ groups, patrons, and community activists alike, believed that the stubborn, out-oftouch leadership of the board was to blame for the flagging services more than a shrinking city budget. Its goal was to push public accountability of the PPL board, which they felt was overspending on administration. Less than a month after the cuts, the public discovered that the library’s top five administrators had averaged a salary increase of 12% a year since 1998. The outrage that ensued helped fuel the reform movement. xThat summer, the group embarked on its biggest project yet: drafting and passing an Open Meetings Law in the city legislature that would require quasi-public organizations to open their board meetings to the public. The group’s

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

campaign of rallies and petitions was incredibly effective; by the fall, the law had passed.

Before the PPL could hold their first public meeting on September 15, 2005, the board met to move fundraising activities to a new “private” foundation that would not be subject to the law. This first meeting was not only closed to the public, but also to city officials. “Just their big donors are invited?” said Councilwoman Rita M. Williams, outraged. “The board has always impressed me as being very elitist. They are trying to keep their finances out of public scrutiny apparently.

Why do that? What is it that they are hiding?” In a public statement, library board member Maureen Sheridan deigned to spell out the board’s motivations: “Just as public donors— the taxpayers— want accountability for their taxpayer dollars, private donors want accountability for their private dollars and many donors want that done privately.”

At this point, the situation was very clear for Patricia Raub, then head of the Library Reform Group. The board wasn’t prioritizing the public interest. “They don’t want to change. I’m not saying they are doing anything wrong. I think it has more to do with power,” she said. The head of the library board was making a salary larger than that of Providence’s mayor. The board was more focused on pouring resources into the downtown Central Library, which enjoys national prestige for its historic collection, than into the neighborhood branches. The preponderance of board members, living “in the 02906 zip code”—well-heeled neighbors like the East Side or Barrington— had little or no contact with the neighborhoods slated to be closed in 2008, such as Fox Point, Smith Hill, Wanskuck, Olneyville, and Washington Park.

APRIL 19 2013

For the members of the Library Reform Group, the board failed its purpose by being out of touch with the genuine needs of communities. Judy Blackadar, a founding member of the PCL, recalls going to the board meetings (once they were opened to the public) with fellow library reformer Ellen Schwartz, an accountant who would grill the PPL on financial specifics: “The board was never happy to see us at their meetings—and we are their patrons!” This conflict, it seems, stems from conflicting ideas about the role of libraries in society. Arguably, the board was operating with a different view than members of the communities they supposedly served. It was attached to the idea of the library as a pantheon, an antiquated view perhaps tied to its 130-year-old tradition of leadership. In Patricia Raub’s opinion, however, the role of libraries has changed drastically in the last few decades: they are no longer historical repositories of knowledge but community centers that keep kids off the street and provide opportunities for learning and advancement. “It’s not your quiet library anymore,” she adds.

When it took over the nine neighborhood branch libraries in July 2009, the PCL instated an organization structure that diverged dramatically from that of the PPL, who continued to run the downtown Central library. In order to ensure broad-based representation and accountability to patrons and taxpayers, each branch’s Friends group elects some board members while others are appointed by the Mayor, City Council, and Governor. The Board itself appoints some members, such as the staff representative (a new position created by the PCL). The Board also attempts to disperse the top-down leadership through various committees such as a staff committee, which gives those with a day-to-day knowledge of the library’s workings a voice, and a fundraising committee.

The transition to the new system has by no means been flawless. It has been tough on long-term library staffers who were accustomed to the more hands-off management style of the PPL. In contrast, the PCL method amounts to micro-

management. One staff member says staff is now over-committed because they have to balance serving on a committee with an already demanding job. Although the staffer acknowledges that the PCL’s focus on community and the public interest is admirable, she bemoans the shortcomings of a board headed by well-meaning ideologues without a concrete grasp or either the everyday mechanisms of the library or the process of fundraising.

The Good Fight July will be the PCL’s fourth anniversary. They are still struggling to balance private and public interests. Community support is high, but consensus still proves a challenge. Just last month, internal board conflict led to the firing of the head of one of the library Friends groups. Although the PCL managed to end last year debt neutral, they still face serious pressure to increase fundraising revenue. The Smith Hill library will finally undergo much-needed renovations this summer to install an elevator that would make bathrooms handicap accessible. However, it will not be getting AC units. A staffer tells me they were only open a total of three days last summer due to the heat. Many of the problems that the PCL faces were also sites of conflict under PPL leadership. The PCL can’t install AC or fix every crack in the ceiling. The difference going forward is that they are making a genuine attempt at community representation.

VERA CAROTHERS B’14 is threatening takeover.

METRO

06

School of Talk Rhode Island’s Urban Debaters

by Kurt Ostrow Illustration by Alex Ronan genesis sanchez, a senior at Juanita Sanchez Educational Complex, moved to Providence with her mom from the Dominican Republic when she was in fifth grade. Neither of them spoke English. They’ve lived in seven different houses in as many years. Carmen Tavarez, Genesis’ mother, explains that they immigrated to the US for better opportunities: “I was working in my country almost six years at one company, and never I bought a bicycle. Here, I have a car.” Genesis lives with her mom and stepdad in subsidized housing on the South Side. On top of school, where she takes a handful of AP classes, Genesis works 16 hours a week at the front desk of a Boys and Girls Club. “I pay my own phone bill. I bought my car. You see that TV?” She says, pointing to a Philips flat screen. “I bought it.” She spends six hours on weekdays at church, where she teaches Bible study and takes part in a youth group. On Sunday there’s church proper, and “everything that happens after church is dominos.”

Carmen admits that she misses the Dominican Republic but adds, “I love this country. I like cold weather. I like how people drive here because in my country it’s a disaster.

And [there’s] too much violence.” Someone shot and killed Genesis’ dad when she was young, and no one did anything about it. Unprosecuted violence is common in the Dominican Republic, according to Genesis. That’s why she’s wanted to be a criminal prosecutor since she was seven. That’s why she joined debate. watching a round at the Rhode Island Urban Debate League (RIUDL), it’s not immediately clear which policymakers these high schoolers have decided to emulate. They don’t sound like the bumbling, fact-averse grown ups in Congress, and that’s gotten them far. Four Rhode Island high schoolers will represent the state at the Urban Debate National Championship (UDNC) this weekend. Janet Novack, a senior at Classical High School, is one of them. With a selfreferential third-person she picked up from Genesis, Janet explains how the foursome approach tournaments: “Brendon is the one who preps all night. Janet is the one torn, standing in the middle, listening to Brendon spread but trying to talk to Genesis. Genesis is the one who wants to watch a movie.

Grace is the one who’s like, maybe we want to prep—oh wait, what movie?”

The two-person teams qualified as participants of the RIUDL, a nonprofit partnership between 13 high schools in the State’s poorest cities and roughly 30 Brown University student volunteers. As one of those volunteers, I act as a coach and coordinator. In an urban debate league, low-income students—mostly of color, many who learned English as a second language—have space to chip away at content deficits and below-grade reading and writing skills. The urban debate

07

METRO

movement got its start in Atlanta in 1985, providing an alternative to a predominantly rich, white landscape of debate.

UDLs have since spread to 19 cities. Some urban debaters, like those at the UDNC, go on to compete at the highest level. The conclusion of this year’s college season saw alumni of UDLs—Eli Smith (New Jersey) and Ryan Walsh (Kansas) from Emporia State University—win both conclusive national tournaments.

Students spend all year researching one area of US federal policy. This year’s topic resolved that Washington should substantially increase its transportation infrastructure investment.

At the UDNC, the two Rhode Island teams will argue for an overhaul of interstate highways with piezoelectric (“pressure”) technology in order to harness sustainable traffic energy. This, they say, will reduce our reliance on dirty coal and shore up US hegemony.

Most top policy teams spread their arguments—make them as fast as possible, at rates of words per minute most lay judges can’t follow—in abbreviated jargon meant to shave seconds off speech times. They cite experts in relevant fields and come to know their evidence well enough to quote it by author and year.

After a while, many debaters reject the resolution entirely.

They criticize assumptions made by the language and process of policymaking with an argument called the kritik—from the German, drawn heavily from critical theory. Debaters grapple with whose epistemology we should privilege and what our a priori values should be, maybe from an ecofeminist or Foucauldian perspective. Debate about debate is especially popular among urban debaters. Many rap or perform personal narratives. Judges to vote for the team that better deconstructs racism or classism, not the team that better weighs the costs and benefits of a federal policy. grace cole doesn’t look like most of the RI urban debaters. An upper class white girl from LaSalle Academy, the only private school in the League, Grace “dresses pretty preppy.”

But according to Grace, “private schools get a bad rap. The idea we’re all snobby and spoiled is a big stereotype in the League, which is understandable, I know, but not everyone is like that. I’ve seen that the better you do and the more you prioritize school, the more opportunities you have. I want to do something important and make a change. I don’t just want to get an a-hundred.” And, for what it’s worth, Grace is best known in the League for her flow. Grace spits Lil Wayne and Drake better than most.

Because LaSalle is a tuition private school, the National Association requires that its debaters pair up with students from public schools in order to qualify for the UDNC. Grace likes the rule: “I don’t want to be living in a white, wealthy

bubble. I don’t think that’s in any way beneficial. There’s a huge cultural diversity in the League, and to hear different viewpoints on these topics is great.” So before the start of last year’s season, Genesis, in need of a partner equally talented, was the obvious choice.

Grace appreciates the way all the debate in her life—she’s also part of Model Legislature and Model United Nations— has taught her to evaluate many sides of an issue. This has shaped her view of the political process: “I believe in not being overly attached to a party,” she tells me. “I think you can become blinded to what may be on the other side.”

Brendon Morris, a junior from William Davies Career and Technical School, condescends to politics. He likes pretending to support Obama in front of a Romney crowd and vice versa.

He says there’s value in performing irony: “It shows people that what they say is really stupid. They realize how dumb it can be.” In gym shorts and an Angry Birds t-shirt, he mocks a Republican explaining trickle-down economics: “You just don’t understand! Cutting taxes on the rich means they’ll give it all away to the poor!”

Ever since Brendon went to a four-week debate camp at Emory last summer, he’s devoted himself to developing his debate skills. He trades hundred-page debate files on cross-x.com with other teens. He practices his spread with the discipline of a marathoner: “I do two minutes forward as fast as I can, then two minutes backwards, then two minutes forward with a, e, or i in between each word, then again backwards.” He dreams up bogus kritiks about the comparative prurience of cupcakes and muffins. He Photoshops desktop backgrounds with the faces of bearded philosophers often cited in policy, like Žižek and Heidegger. janet lives in massachusetts, but goes to school in Providence, just a couple of blocks from Genesis’ house. She stays there regularly. “Genesis is my best friend,” Janet says. Born in Somerville, Janet moved around a lot, and lived in a church in Cambridge during a short homeless spell. When her parents got divorced, Janet and her brother, who’s autistic, stayed with their mom, relocating to Iowa after their house went into foreclosure.

Despite the itinerancy, Janet has found stability in school and debate. She walks around RIUDL tournaments bossing people into hugs and screaming “good luck!” at nervous teammates. “They say home is where the heart is,” Janet recites, “but I don’t know where my heart is: half with RIUDL, a third with my mom, a quarter with Genesis.”

KURT OSTROW B’13 just wants to get an a-hundred.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SPECTERS OF T H A T C H E R Police State Magic

by Benson Tucker Illustration by Lizzie Davis “The first task of the Magician in every ceremony is therefore to render his Circle absolutely impregnable.” – Aleister Crowley former u.k. prime minister Margaret Thatcher died on April 8, and the occasion to consider her ghost is nigh. The spirit of Thatcher animates many legacies, but one revenant (swirling, perhaps, with those of Nixon and Reagan) murmurs still that nations are built only of two things, markets and police. Markets sort out the dynamic components of the nation: changing preferences, diminishing resources, finding work. Police pin down the parts thought already to be stable: enforceability of debts and contracts, unified authority on judicial and political process, prevention of the impermissible.

An echo from the vortex: it is 1987, the year the Iron Lady is elected to her third and final term in Parliament as Prime Minister: “I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbor. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations.

There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”

Every human community calls upon its own magic to produce truths out of uncertainty. In Thatcher’s time, as in our own, officialdom and police are crucial to the state magic whereby leaders’ views are realized throughout the land.

Thatcher’s assumption that there is “no such thing as society” ran up against a few obstacles during her time as Prime Minister. Such situations called upon unwavering application of police power. Defiant assertions of the existence of society had to be snuffed out by the only unifying element Thatcher recognized, the police. Such was Thatcher’s response to the unrest in Northern Ireland, as well as to the idea that the miners and steelworkers who long toiled in state industries might reasonably be entitled to honest negotiations with their employer. The order Thatcher invoked brought record-high unemployment rates and inequality measures. Her tenure saw a near doubling of the portion of the citizenry in poverty. At the same time, it exorcised economic stagnation and drew renewed capital investment. Thatcher’s state magic quite effectively brought into being a market society, a nation of market participants fixed in that role by the insistent presence of the police. an apparition, kensington town hall, 1976: “It is clear that internal violence—and above all political terrorism—will continue to pose a major challenge to all Western societies, and that it may be exploited as an instrument by the Communists. We should seek close co-ordination between the police and security services of the [European] Community, and of NATO, in the battle against terrorism. The way that our own police have coped with recent terrorist incidents provides a splendid model for other forces.”

Thatcher was referring to terrorist incidents in Northern Ireland, where the Irish Republic Army violently asserted the region’s separation from Britain. The “splendid model” was the transition from military security forces composed of British soldiers to a newly-professionalized police consisting of people from Northern Ireland. The policy, deemed “Ulsterization” for the Northern Ireland province of Ulster, attempted to minimize the political costs of British deaths and allow the British-managed security regime to persist indefinitely.

APRIL 19 2013

What sense could a regional sovereignty struggle have within Thatcher’s individualistic vision? None—it could only be “internal violence,” an impermissible rupture of the state. These damaged individuals clotted into groups asserting a common identity. They even went so far as to claim that they were separate from the non-society of individuals. Under Ulsterization, the clot of group identity was broken up, and the bounds of individualistic society— the police—were redrawn using native bodies.

But some incarcerated bodies refused to be depoliticized.

In 1981, jailed members of the Irish Republican Army demanded the status of prisoners-of-war and backed their claim with a seven-month hunger strike. Ten prisoners starved themselves to death, even though many who died faced sentences under 15 years. That such an act defies individual rationality left Thatcher unconvinced that something broader was at work. Her response to the deaths was unwavering: “Crime is crime is crime. It is not political.” notes from a 1984 speech, during fourth year as Prime Minister: Enemy within — Miners’ leaders Liverpool & some local authorities —just as dangerous in a way more difficult to fight In Britain, too, the integrity of Thatcher’s order was threatened. By the late 1970s, while Thatcher was Leader of the Opposition and on her way to becoming PM, nationalized industries like coal and steel were operating at consistent losses. Thatcher brought the government in line with the rules of the market, closing steel plants and coal mines, often the major employer in the depressed areas where they operated.

John Stalker, then-Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, wrote in the Daily Mirror on Thatcher during the miners’ struggle: “Britain has never been closer to becoming a police state than when Margaret Thatcher was in charge... I saw at first hand how her authoritarian policies could have permanently shattered the bond of trust between the police and the people. She turned the police into a paramilitary force and put us on to a war footing…

That was never more clear than during the miner’s strike in 1984.”

In the face of mine closures that would put tens of thousands of their number out of work—some announced only 5 weeks before taking effect—unionized miners went on strike across Britain. They did so, though, with a measure of civility: because completely cutting off the supply of coal to steel plants would damage the steelworks, picketers compromised to allow a minimum amount of coal to reach steel plants. But when the strikers learned that more coal than agreed upon was reaching the plants, they intervened to try to block the deliveries.

On 18 June, 1984, at a steel precursor plant in Orgreave, Yorkshire, 5,000 to 6,000 picketers attempted to force the closure of the plant by preventing a coal delivery.

They were met by 8,000 police from surrounding counties, armed and armored for combat with rioters. The picketers hurled stones and invectives, and as the delivery neared the plant, they rushed forward to try to block it. Their charges were hopeless, and, again and again, they were beaten back and dispersed.

Towards the end of the day, which came to be known as the Battle of Orgreave, police cavalry, at some unknown stimulation, charged the remaining picketers. More than 50 were injured and over 90 arrested. The charge gave rise to one of the miners’ strike’s classic photographs: a mounted policeman is caught mid-swing, his baton traveling directly towards a photographer’s head. following her corporeal demise, Thatcher’s ghost has undergone some contortions. Last week (as Rick Salame explains in this issue’s Week in Review, “Ring the Bells Out (Briefly)”) the market society voiced discontent, with thousands of purchases launching the 70-year old “DingDong! The Witch is Dead” to this week’s top singles charts.

Deciding whether to intervene as an officer of good taste and keep the song from the airwaves, BBC Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper said, “To ban the record from our airwaves completely would risk giving the campaign the oxygen of further publicity and might inflame an already delicate situation.” He was likely animated by Thatcher’s wayward spirit, his words the living return of Thatcher’s own. From a 1985 speech justifying a radio ban on Irish independence agitation: “We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.”

Perhaps her ghost has simply grown milder, today’s stakes lower than those under which she governed. In her memoirs, Thatcher describes a strain of political dissent posing an existential threat to the nation, writing of the “Hard Left”: “They were revolutionaries who sought to impose a Marxist system on Britain, whatever the means and whatever the cost… [they] wanted to defy the law of the land in order to defy the laws of economics. They failed.” Her unearthed legacy may boast more successes than the “Marxists” she disdained, but Thatcher, too, was undeterred by the costs and means required for her own ideological imposition.

BENSON TUCKER B’13, too, is part of the phantasmagoria.

OCCULT

08

POLAR david longstreth’s songs don’t explain him; they imitate him. The creative force and leader of The Dirty Projectors, Longstreth has founded a career on a stubbornly quirky approach. He formed the band in 2000 as a solo project while he was a freshman at Yale, but he dropped out soon, recording so much in his dorm room that he barely attended classes. It’s still very much his project, but he’s got a full band now— an astonishingly tight rhythm section and two more singers, Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle. In 2007, two years before Bitte Orca solidified the band’s sound and landed them in indie rock’s critical elite, they released Rise Above, an attempt to recreate Black Flag’s hardcore classic Damaged entirely from

09 ARTS

memory. Longstreth hadn’t listened to the album in 15 years.

For anyone who’s heard Longstreth scratch a riff out of his left-handed Fender, or even sing in his warm wobble, this odd task seems easily intelligible. His music is a site of conflict: prickly guitar lines spar, personal lyrics wander into abstraction, and each song enters a sort of time machine, making pit stops in every decade to gather a few choice elements (a thin ‘60s snare drum, an ‘80s West African guitar chime, a Destiny’s Child drum thump). When he speaks, he offers few concrete answers, but explores his music from multiple angles in a way that mirrors the songs he’s describing. He is a notorious control freak, famous for 12 hour practices, and

he handles every aspect of songwriting, mixing, and production.

This conflict might be why the band is so pleasurable to listen to— Longstreth’s songs are collages with the stitches on display. He once told the New York Times that he keeps the Bible with him on tour for the stories and obsessively listens to Lil’ Wayne’s mixtapes, from which he draws inspiration. It’s not hard to believe. Critics heralded Swing Lo Magellan, the band’s latest album, as their most concise, but it still swims in and out of styles: stuttering electronic drums find Broadway melodies on the anguished “About to Die.” The golden age of ‘70s folk-rock breathes through the title track, while “Gun

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

OPPOSITES A Conversation with David Longstreth of the Dirty Projectors

by Greg Nissan Illustration by Michelle Lin

Has No Trigger” could score a James Bond movie if they ever decide to shoot one in Williamsburg. Concise, perhaps, for Longstreth, but the album is a study in multiplicity— how many ways can he write a song? I spoke with Longstreth over the phone in late March about his erratic production style, the relationship between the band in the studio and the band on the stage, and how the group has changed since Bitte Orca.

I expected him to clarify some of his music’s enigma, but instead he seemed an extension of the counterpoints in play.

environment. Immediately there is a sense that they can’t exist in the same place, that there is a wall between them. When the lacquered vocals enter on the left, the guitar migrates to the middle, and now we feel three spaces— two cathedrallike expanses of claps and vocals, separated by a guitar in the middle that feels plucked from a bedroom. I envision a stage split into three parts, a different scene in each. The middle is brightly lit, the others are dim. +++

+++ The College Hill Independent: I’m fascinated by the production on [Swing Lo Magellan]. There are elements that feel distinctly modern, very studio-manipulated, and others such as the drum tracking that feel like a sort of ‘60s style when stereo recording was still not fully developed. It seems like a collage of production styles. How do you draw from such different sources to create cohesion in your band’s sound?

David Longstreth: One of the models for the album, or maybe not a model but an album I really love, is Revolver by the Beatles. One thing I love about that record is that every song on it is so different, it’s almost like every song from the album is one track from a whole other album. Every one of those numbers opens into a sound world all its own. I wrote so many songs going into Swing Lo Magellan, and we recorded in kind of a relentless but low key way for a pretty long period of time. There was a real wide spectrum of sounds and feel, and so one of the craziest things about cutting all the songs down, figuring out which twelve would be the ones on the record, was seeing how that came together. It was weird, since every song seems so different from the production standpoint.

I really wanted the album to capture something that felt like where we were in our actual performances as opposed to something with a lot of digital recording. You usually try to get some sort of objective capture that you can digitally manipulate later on. This album was kind of like, fuck that.

Make decisions as soon as possible— what the sound of the drums would be like, how many mics are we gonna use, compress on the way in. That kind of stuff. A lot of the sounds are from the ‘70s and ‘60s because those are my favorite [producers], Glynn Johns, Jeff Emerick. You know. +++ longstreth is aware of the relationship between sound and space. Even his digital elements seem to predict their life beyond the computer. The sounds will bounce off the walls in an actual room, charting the space. He builds a unique sonic architecture through his production, however, one contrary to many popular production trends in rock music. Many producers attempt to situate the sound in a cohesive setting, in which the sounds feel as if they’re coming from the same place, with a few elements that come and go. Longstreth’s peculiarities surface in the way he opposes spaces in his song, fighting cohesion. For example, Swing Lo Magellan’s “Just From Chevron”: the song begins with a twitchy guitar line (signature Longstreth) fully panned to the right and an echoing, repeated clap on the left. There’s little reverb on the guitar, so it feels as if it comes from a small room, and an exaggerated amount on the claps, which sets them in a cavernous

APRIL 19 2013

Indy: I find it interesting that you brought up the Beatles in relation to the production when you talk about how you wanted to capture the band as you are now live, because by Revolver the band had transformed very much into a studio band, playing few shows and exploring what can’t be done live. I’m curious how your experience playing live informs your songwriting or the production, and what has your experience been playing this album live?

DL: That’s a big one, because my normal answer that remains true is that Bitte Orca is the album I made where I wanted to capture what it felt like to be on stage, us playing. I wanted that record to feel like an emblem of the live band, whereas Swing Lo Magellan is a different beast. It’s more like I put those songs on [the record] because those are things I was thinking about, things my mind wandered to, and it was a definite challenge to figure out how to play some of those songs live. Like “See What She’s Seeing,” a lot of those effects we created, or I created, in the computer. Giving them to a player and making them something physical was part of the challenge— how the fuck are we gonna do that? That being said, playing the album live is amazing because it’s a more personal record. It’s more open-hearted, and so to play music that’s a little bit less guarded, it feels like a real communication between the band and the audience and between us on stage. It’s been cool. +++ “we don’t see eye to eye/ but I need you/ and you’re always on my mind” he croons on “Impregnable Question.” Even in what might be his most straightforward song to date— a burning, lo-fi slice of ‘70s AM radio— Longstreth stresses disagreement. It’s a conflict not only referenced, but enacted throughout the album. The album’s opening lyrics: “There was a single one, then there were ten. Ten made a hundred, a hundred million.” Longstreth’s voice wobbles into song with abstraction, a litany of numbers beyond image. In the chorus, however, he screeches above fuzzed-out guitars, “He was made to love her. She was made to love him.” The insight in his words is more in the system of voices he creates— the various registers— than in any one line. It’s in the way he forces abstraction and image to look back at each other. Just as his guitar parts progress through counter-rhythms, counter melodies, his lyrics move dialectically, opposing what came before to flesh out a world of voices from several mouths. Coffman and Dekle, whose airy, sugar-throated vocals serve as a foil to Longstreth’s, offer even more depth of register. Pitchfork’s laudatory review of the newest album called them the Greek chorus to his narrator. The Dirty Projectors always sounds like, well, the Dirty Projectors, and it’s because Longstreth

knows how to plant a foot on his influences— Neil Young, Beyonce, Richard Wagner, John Coltrane, to name a few he’s referenced— and push off, beyond them. +++ Indy: I remember an interview with Pitchfork, sometime after Bitte Orca, you described the album title as two words that just sounded nice together. Your lyrics always feel tied to the rhythms of your guitar lines and the music in general. How much of this sonic quality that dictates meaning is present in your lyrics now?

DL: I think with Bitte Orca that was definitely true about the sounds of the words, totally abstract for the most part.

Some lyrics were about something, but the way I put words on Bitte was about sound. I would say on Swing Lo I did it pretty differently. I got really excited with the possibility of lyrics. I was so overwhelmed with the color of music, about an exploration I hadn’t really given much thought to. +++ at this point in the interview, as I tried to penetrate this vague affection for the color of music with another question, a crackling voice interrupted the line. “Sorry guys, I gotta jump in here. That’s it for the interview today.

Thanks so much. Dave, I’m gonna call you back with the next interview in just a few minutes.” It was Longstreth’s PR guy, who’d put me in touch with him. It was only a tenminute interview, and on hearing the last of him, I couldn’t help but imagine Longstreth sitting at a desk, propped on his elbows, taking phone calls from 20-year-olds for hours on end. He didn’t seem unengaged, only overloaded. He’s the type to find his most insightful moments after hashing it out with himself, positing things he can discard in order to refine his ideas.

The final track on SLM, the acoustic crawl “Irresponsible Tune,” features only Longstreth’s voice. But he has two voices, actually, and though they’re staggered they sing the same words, the same melodies. One arrives a half-second after the first, on the other side of the recording. Even in agreement, there are multiple Longstreths. The song ends with an earnest imperative: “Sing all day.” Three gentle strums follow, each wide enough for a breath. “Record and play.” Three more strums, breathing now. “Drums and bass.” Three strums, ringing out at the same lazy pace.

“And a guitaaaaaar” Longstreth stretches out in an airy undulation, as if the word is infinite. The final stanza: “Will there be peace in the world? Or will violence always own the truth? There’s a bird singing at my window, and it’s singing an irresponsible tune.” He repeats twice more: “An irresponsible tune.” At the heart of his music— self-antagonizing, self-devouring— is this simple need to investigate two oppositions, to pit them against each other and watch the show. Longstreth sits in the middle of the poles, of his various influences and styles, of his many incarnations, and he’s always chirping something beautiful.

GREG NISSAN B’15 bit the orca.

ARTS

10

Tiny Hill People

In Memory of Clotilde Martínez Cano

by Kate Holguin Illustration by Adriana Gallo

“todos van a pensar que es una bruja,” my grandmother would frantically tell my mother. At a very young age, it became apparent that I was left-handed. My grandmother worried no school would take me left-handed because they would all think I was a bruja, an evil female spiritually linked to el Diablo who holds a vast knowledge of malevolent spells and curses.

My bisabuela, my left-handed great-grandmother, was considered a curandera, also a witch-like figure, but connected to the Christian God. Unlike a bruja, my bisabuela used her powers to heal, not harm. She was, all at once, a psychic, a midwife, and a herbalista. During la Revolución, there was no access to doctors in Acambay, my grandparents’ tiny town in the hills of Mexico. The tiny hill people of the tiny hill town were all true Mexicanos, with fair, Iberian complexions, standing proudly at their small, indio statures. My 4’10” bisabuela was the town’s healer, rubbing herbal bouquets over infirm bodies, praying for their health. Everyone revered her.

When la Revolución ended, things were supposed to get better for everyone. The government sent doctors from la capital to the tiny hill town, leaving no need for a curandera, especially a left-handed one. In the Bible, el Diablo sat on the left side of God before being cast out of heaven. The left-hand of my bisabuela brought evil and shame to the tiny hill people.

She was no longer connected to God; she was a bruja. No longer did the tiny hill town ask her to care for their sick. But in her shame, she dedicated her energy to making her seven sons doctors, all with good right hands. Most of them practiced in nearby Toluca but two stayed in Acambay, and the tiny hill town revered them. And yet, my bisabuela was always a bruja to the tiny hill people—her and her wicked left hand.

Sometimes when I have dreams of when I was young, all I see are beans.

Pinto beans and cheese wrapped in a tortilla.

Scrambled eggs with beans on the side.

Arroz con beans.

Many times just a bowl full of pinto beans.

My grandmother stuffed me with pinto beans because she wanted me to have strong blood—sangre fuerte. She told me that the more I ate pinto beans, the better blood I would have. I wouldn’t get hurt as badly as the other kids at school if I fell and scraped my knees. Weak blood spills out of a person’s body, even with the littlest flesh wound. Sangre fuerte refuses to pour out; it is always circulating, perpetuating life.

She knew what happened if you didn’t have sangre fuerte.

She remembered what happened to Cecilio, the beloved town tailor and her future brother-in-law. Cecilio never liked beans, even as a child. He would push them around in his plate, secretly spit them out, or feed them to the cat.

Cecilio’s family, even with 17 children, managed to find enough space and food in the house to take in two orphans, Adam and Moises. Adam was a year older than Cecilio and Moises, a year younger. They all became good friends, riding horses through the mountains and fishing in the nearby stream. Moises, however, turned out to have a very mean

11

FEATURES

streak. He set small booby traps to capture rodents and crafted slingshots to shoot rocks at birds.

When Moises got older, he was an angry drunk, quick to rage. He became very jealous of the town’s love for Cecilio.

One night at the local cantina, drunk Moises challenged Cecilio’s even-temperedness in questioning Cecilio’s machismo.

Cecilio cold-cocked Moises, knocking him halfway across the room. Countering Cecilio, Moises whipped out a knife and stabbed him. Horrified, the other men in the cantina whisked Cecilio to the local doctor. They could not contain his blood because he did not have sangre fuerte, or so they said. So, he bled out and died. Maybe the story would have ended differently had he eaten his beans.

My grandfather, driving one of the cars back, noticed two well-dressed men on the side of the road. They grinned and tried to wave him down. As he got closer, he noticed that the men were wearing ill-fitted suits. Ill-fitting suits were a well-known sign of ladrones. My grandfather quickly sped up and drove past them. The other car, which my grandmother’s brother drove, did not return that night. Her brother’s vision was not as good as my grandfather’s vision. He did not notice the men’s ill-fitted suits. So, the ladrones robbed him of his car. He and the others in the car had to walk the rest of the way home.

I suppose my grandmother’s brother did not eat nearly as many carrots as my grandfather.

I only drink whole milk. My grandmother drank whole milk almost her entire life, until the distant age of 95.

“Para que tienes huesos fuertes, mija,” my grandmother would tell me. Whole milk makes strong bones—huesos fuertes.

“Three brothers from la capital established Acambay many lifetimes ago,” is the way my grandmother’s story goes.

Before they arrived, there were only indios in the tiny hill town. Once settled, the eldest brother ran a cattle ranch and the middle brother harvested crops and sold them in Toluca.

The youngest brother helped his two older brothers, but he grew tired this and wanted to start his own business. He asked his brothers to give him a loan, but they refused. The youngest brother had to find money elsewhere.

A local india told the three brothers of a legendary pile of rocks near the hill town, underneath which a captain of Hernán Cortés’s army had hidden a chest of gold. Though it is unclear how, the brothers managed to locate the fabled pile of rocks. Both the eldest and middle brothers could not lift the rocks but the youngest brother, a consumer of whole milk, lifted the pile with his huesos fuertes. Underneath the pile laid the captain’s gold. Since the youngest brother had lifted the pile of rocks, he kept the treasure. The brother with the huesos fuertes invested the gold in his own business: the first general store in the tiny hill town.

“never eat white eggs,” my grandmother always reminded me. “Farmers bleach white eggs. They aren’t good for you.

Only eat brown eggs. If you stay away from white eggs, you’ll never have to go to the hospital because you’ll never get that sick.” My grandmother never ate white eggs. She also never went to the hospital until she was so old that she had forgotten what a hospital was.

When she was 96 she forgot who anyone was, even her husband. She would often leave our house and start walking up the sidewalk. She had been convinced for some time that her brothers were coming to pick her up and take her on a picnic. Once, waiting for one of these picnics, she tripped on a tree root jutting out of the sidewalk. She broke her leg in the fall.

The doctor had told her a year before the fall that whole milk wasn’t good for her anymore, so she bitterly stopped drinking it. But since she stopped, she no longer had huesos fuertes. She also stopped eating beans in the last year before the fall. She stopped eating carrots. She stopped eating most everything. Nothing tasted good anymore, she would say. So she also lost her sangre fuerte. She nearly lost her sight. My grandfather had started shopping for the two of them after my grandmother started to fade away. He bought white eggs instead of brown eggs. She refused to eat them at first, but sometimes, when she was so far away from us, she would eat anything put in front of her. So, sometimes she ate white eggs.

In her last days, my grandmother’s body swelled up with displaced fluids. She couldn’t move. Her body rapidly deteriorated, matching her already dissolved, demented brain.

The swelling hurt her so the doctors gave her morphine, but she desperately whined to return to her tiny hill town. She implored her long-deceased mother, her curandera, to make the pain go away. She wanted the curandera to bleed her, bathe her, surround her with candles and incense, and chant incantations to expel the pain.

My grandmother stopped speaking during the last week she was alive, but was still alert. A nurse routinely took a long needle in her left hand and injected the IV with morphine.

“Bruja,” my grandmother whispered.

“i didn’t need glasses until i became an old woman,” my grandmother told me. “It’s because I ate carrots every day. Do you see any rabbits with glasses? No, you don’t. It’s because they eat carrots every day, too.”

After la Revolución, when things were supposed to get better for everyone, the state government started paving the few roads in and out of Acambay. More cars appeared in the hill town, but with more cars came more ladrones, or car robbers.

One day, many years after la Revolución, my grandmother, her brothers, my grandfather, and other friends decided to go on an afternoon picnic a few miles away from town. They took two cars. They ate, and sang, and played guitar, and laughed at all my grandfather’s jokes: “¿Cuál es el colmo de un ciego? Llamarse Casimiro.”

After a few hours, the group headed back to Acambay.

KATE HOLGUIN B’13 only eats brown eggs.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

No Man’s Land click “i need an abortion,” and you will be led through a medical consultation and referred to a licensed doctor who will ensure that a medical abortion pill is delivered to you.

On Womenonweb.org the caveat is that the doctor can only help the patient if she lives in a country where access to safe abortion is restricted, is less than 9 weeks pregnant, and has no severe illnesses. With the use of the pills Mifepristone and Misoprostol, women can now perform safe abortions on themselves.

Worldwide, abortion contributes to 13 percent of maternal mortality. In 2006, Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts, a former resident doctor for Greenpeace, created Women on Web with the intent of providing services for women who seek to end an unwanted pregnancy but are limited by the laws of their country. Women on Waves, its sister organization, was founded in 1999 by Gomperts as an international nongovernmental organization headquartered in Amsterdam. Women on Waves provides abortions and advice from boats anchored in international waters near countries where abortion is illegal. The idea for Women on Web emerged in 2004 after the Portuguese government blocked the Women on Waves ship campaign from entering Portuguese waters because the Minister of Defense said Women on Waves was “a threat to national security and health.” In reaction to this, Gomperts went on a Portuguese talk show and explained what Misoprostol is, how women can get it in a pharmacy, and how women can perform an abortion on themselves. This dispersal of information through television sparked the idea for Women on Web. The website offers information to ensure that it’s theoretically possible for women in every country (North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Libya included) to do druginduced abortions in their own homes.

“This organization recognizes that every woman has the human right to scientific information and to the benefits of science,” said Susan Yanow, a consultant to Women on Waves and Women on Web. The website has a help desk, working in over 13 different languages at every hour of the day, that guides women through the process of procuring the necessary pills. Between 40 and 50 people work on Women on Web at any given time, sending about 100,000 emails a year to women in over 130 countries. The organization is a self-sustaining service; after women go through an online consultation, they are encouraged to make a 90 euro donation at the end if they complete the whole process. If a woman can’t pay, or can only pay partially, the service is still provided.

The website states that “a medical abortion can be done safely at home as long as you have good information and have access to emergency medical care in the rare case that there are complications.” Mifepristone and Misoprostol are the two medicines that Women on Web disperses information about and supplies free of charge. These drugs provide the “safest, most effective type of medical abortion” a woman can perform on herself. Both drugs are on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) list of essential medicines, and Misoprostol is often available in many countries where abortions are illegal.

Misoprostol is sold under a number of brand names in different countries and has multiple uses: it prevents gastric ulcers and treats rheumatoid arthritis. It can induce labor and prevent postpartum hemmoraging (PPH) in addition to inducing a safe abortion. PPH is the leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide.

Women on Web features an online diary called “I had an abortion” where women can choose to write entries

APRIL 19 2013

by Kate Van Brocklin Illustration by Allison Grosso

about their abortion experiences. Anjali Sidhu from India wrote about using Mifepristone and Misoprostol tablets on her own. “I had a very safe and painless abortion without any complications,” Sidhu said. When asked about how the illegality of her abortion affected her feelings, Sidhu responded, “No, the illegality didn’t affect me, because my health is more important than any rule or law.”

Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone, which is necessary to maintain a pregnancy. Based on research by the WHO Department of Reproductive Health and Research in 2012, using Misoprostol to cause an abortion will be successful 90 percent of the time within the first nine weeks of pregnancy. In Morocco, for example, a woman can go to a pharmacy and buy Misoprostol for the equivalent of 10 US dollars and use it to perform a safe abortion on herself.

Abortion procedures are illegal in Morocco unless the woman’s life is at risk. “it’s a beautiful loophole in the system,” Julia EllisKahana B’13, an intern at Women on Waves, explains of the organization. Women on Waves operates one ship that takes women into international waters to perform safe, legal medical abortions up until six and a half weeks of pregnancy, in accordance with Dutch law. Women on Waves made its maiden voyage aboard the Aurora to Ireland in 2001. The ship carried two Dutch doctors and one Dutch nurse. EllisKahana calls it a symbol of mobility, but it’s more than that.

The ship can reach many countries where abortion is illegal, so long as they aren’t landlocked. Since 2001, the ship has traveled to Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Morocco.

Each campaign lasts about a week and the ship makes a few voyages to and from international waters throughout its stay.

The group also averages 200 women aboard its ship for its open houses, where leaflets about safe abortion and birth control are distributed. In the Ireland ship campaign diary, featured on the Women on Waves website, the group writes that it is usually greeted by “eggs and paint being thrown at [them] while at the same time supporters are screaming ‘Welcome! Welcome!’”

The idea of bringing women to international waters to perform abortions is innovative—but it’s not cost-efficient.

The ship campaigns are meant to function more as a symbolic gesture rather than a practical solution to a problem of facilitating access to abortion in countries where it remains illegal.

Before the ship departs, organizers work to establish partnership programs. Women on Waves has safe abortion hotlines in 11 different countries. Partners range from local NGOs to informal social justice groups. The most recent hotline was established in Morocco in October of 2012 as part of the safe abortion ship campaign. The Alternative Movement for Individual Freedoms (MALI) invited Women on Waves to come to Morocco with its ship. Abortion is illegal and taboo in Morocco, but approximately 600 to 800 women still have abortions every day, according to figures published by the Moroccan government. While wealthy women can afford safe abortion access by leaving the country, women of low socio-economic status must often resort to unsafe methods that can result in complications and death.

While informational hotlines are incredibly useful, by publicizing information on home-induced abortions,

organizations like Women on Web unintentionally threaten accessibility. If the organization has all this information, so does the government. Ultimately though, Women on Web feels the benefits of publicizing it outweigh the negative aspects.

“The local women’s movement, they didn’t know about Misoprostol,” Gomperts said in an interview with The Daily Beast, explaining the benefits of her organization’s awareness campaigns. “Nobody I talked with in Morocco in preparation for the campaign had any idea about the availability of Misoprostol.” But often, the premise of the organizations hinges on technological accessibility, which inevitably limits who they can serve. “The organizations recognize that not every woman who needs a safe abortion has access to the internet,” Yanow said. Despite the looming threat of censorship and the challenge of dispersing information to women, WoW aims to break the silence about abortion.

KATE VAN BROCKLIN B’13 hinges on technological accessibility.

·

·

·

·

· ·

If performed within the first nine weeks of pregnancy, a medical abortion carries a very small risk of complications. This risk is the same as when a woman has a miscarriage.

Out of every 100 women who have medical abortions, two or three women have to go to a doctor, first aid center or hospital to receive further medical care.

The advice provided on the Women on Web site covers what a woman should do if complications arise. “If you live in a place where abortion is a crime and you don’t have a doctor you trust, you can still access medical care,” the website says. “You do not have to tell the medical staff that you tried to induce an abortion; you can tell them that you had a spontaneous miscarriage. Doctors have the obligation to help in all cases and know how to handle a miscarriage.”

The symptoms of a miscarriage and an abortion with pills are exactly the same, assuming that the pills have completely dissolved by the time a woman sees a doctor.

If a woman used the Misoprostol under the tongue, the pills should dissolve within three hours of taking them.

If she inserts the pills vaginally, she must check with her finger to make sure that they are dissolved.

Traces of the pills may be found in the vagina up to four days after inserting them.

FEATURES

12

THE MEN IN HER HAIR

by Doreen St. Felix

Illustrated by Lizzie Davis

Windsor was going to see the girl with men in her hair.

The pharmacy was dark. Everywhere else on Church Avenue was lit up: Rainbow Clothing Store, No Pork Indian Restaurant, the Amoco gas station, the Western Union, the broken-down van with spices and the old vendor’s swollen feet inside. As he walked towards it, Windsor felt his skin turn neon. He held up his arm to the Western Union sign dangling before his eyes—there was the yellow seeping through his wide hands. Night was descending on Brooklyn, on Church Avenue, on the spice lady’s water toes, on the stroller tossed spitefully by the parking meter.

Night was falling on Windsor, touching the green crumpled twenty-dollar bills in his fist. Night was falling on 1996. But Windsor was lit up like the block. Curvin and Tricia were all the way up in Harlem, in the lobby of Sans Souci, and the woman with men in her hair was perched on the bed in her second floor apartment. What would she smell like?

The old lady saw him.

“Sugarcane, ya want?”

Twenty, forty, sixty, sixty-six. Windsor rubbed the paper to make sure it was all there. He’d felt dumb, embarrassed to be walking down a block so close to his apartment with so much cash on him. If someone jumped him, he could be killed for that kind of money. And Curvin would be quiet.

And Tricia would be pissed. And then all that sneaking Tricia had done, weeks spent beating the dawn so she could slip her hand into her dad’s only leather thing, a wallet that was becoming strings under the pillow under his sleeping head, would be for nothing because they’d have nothing to offer the girl and he would be dead.

“Sixty, sixty. Six, Winds,” she’d said before backing down the subway steps. Ten minutes, there was still a diminishing sun hitting the pharmacy and Curvin was already underground, standing on the subway platform.

“Don’t fuck this up, you can’t fuck this up,” Tricia said.

“Yeah,” he said, because he and Curvin and the wives could only say yes to Tricia. Yes, yes, yes is what they breathed to her when she touched them, Tricia had boasted to the two boys. And I ain’t even ask them a question.

They were mangling cigarettes that day, under that winter tree on Beverly Road. Tricia laughed, then stopped laughing, then let out a low moan when she noticed how Windsor’s big hands crushed his cigarette. When had that boy, whom she had known for years, grown the hands of a man? The stories about the woman was all they talked about, then. When struck by the bigness in Windsor’s hands, Tricia suggested that they go and Curvin and Windsor could only say yes.

Windsor tapped out the pulse of the 3 train that was arriving then.

13

LITERARY

“She’s not gonna see us if we don’t bring her that stuff. Be cool, and be there in an hour,” Tricia bounced down the subway steps, the boys’ jeans jostling on her hips. Windsor’s lips curled into his mouth while he listened to the arriving noise of steel rubbing on steel like an irritable whistle blaring into Curvin’s ears.

Ten, maybe fifteen if she could wrestle enough overtime, was all his mother gave him on Mondays. Windsor looked up and east and saw his apartment window and thought up what the shadow of his mother would look like walking past the window and then saw that. How would her face break if she knew he was to see that woman in Sans Souci, the woman with men in her hair? Would her cheeks crumble into her open hands or would her eyes sink underneath her skin? All around, mothers warned their sons about her, Windsor’s mother did, Curvin’s mother. This woman had just come from that island, where she had done a number of spells, to perch in a dingy apartment in Harlem. Because Windsor’s mother knew her son, the type of kid who could spend one hour angling his hand to the setting sun bewildered at the way the color changed, but could get sucked into things like a wrapper on a subway grate, she warned him.

Standing in front of the vendor’s can, Windsor calculated that at no moment in his life had he ever held that much money.

He sighed at that miracle. In front of the vendor’s van was a wooden table, and on it, rows of small plastic bags full of dried foods.

“Ya, I want.”

Twenty, forty, sixty, sixty-five. He wouldn’t tell Curvin he’d taken a dollar from the wad to buy an already-rotten stub of sugarcane. The spice lady’s hand jutted out swiftly, extending from the taped-up backseat with a mind of its own, sucking up the dollar into her fannypack. “Is sweet but not too sweet.

Eat it with milk.”

She winked at him and bared her Jamaican teeth in a smile that lasted too long. Windsor would not eat the sugarcane, it’s brown, he thought. Red lipstick, a little brown like the final fibers of the stub, spilled out from the corners of her lips.

Instinctively, Windsor wiped the corner of his own lips, to remove the lipstick. He remembered which body was his body and withdrew the finger.

“Milk. Thanks.”

Windsor was lit up like the block. Was he directing this?

Walking past the storefronts, Windsor realized that this was sort of the opposite of dying. When you are dying, like in Ghost or Touched By An Angel or other movies or shows he sometimes watched with his mother, you are supposed to walk towards the big yellow light. You hesitate at first, so the camera can catch the way the glow wraps your blond face in a blond halo. You blow a kiss maybe, if someone’s watching and you’re Patrick Swayze. But then you always march towards the big yellow light waiting for you, your feet disappearing as you go down that tunnel.

But Windsor was walking forward in the open air, feeling himself go hot as the sign for Newkirk Road grew sharper; Windsor was walking away from the lights; Windsor was walking to the darkness and Windsor was not going to die.

He was going to see a special woman. Windsor was as rich as a kid with the name Windsor could be. He might even grow up to be a black man with a strong jaw, a round white wife, and a cellphone that blinks. Because he was not going to die, he clipped off a chunk of the sugarcane and sucked out the sugar until he tasted the white also dissolving on the spice lady’s tongue.

Plain, sharpened in his field of vision: Newkirk Road. From the window in his apartment, Windsor had seen many lost people stop at Al’s Family Pharmacy. Curvin called them “pearls-and-suit” people, and Tricia thought that was stupid, and Windsor thought it was right. A woman carting a bag made of reptilian skin, a man who clutched his watch like he had been born with it, a family soothing a squirming kid.

White people from Manhattan always stop at Al’s Family Pharmacy, confused by the blankness inside. The kids around Church knew, of course, that Al’s Family Pharmacy had never been a pharmacy; the storefront had never opened. There was no Al. Als were chubby white guys with grandchildren.

Manny was tall, with a high head and long dreads. Three years ago, when Curvin and Windsor and Tricia were walking home from Hudde on the last day before winter break, they noticed a red and blue awning on the then-abandoned store.

Al’s Family Pharmacy. Slack-hipped under the weight of her hair rollers, Windsor’s mother shook her head when they got to her apartment.

“You better stay away from that man Manny, and his pharmacy. That’s not a damn pharmacy,” she sucked in her teeth. Windsor remembered the sound of her teeth. “You’re just kids.”

Windsor had never dared to step inside. He would turn left whenever he walked by it, in other moments. But at this moment, at thirteen with a bundle of cash, thirteen with this body drumming so hard he winced when others heard it, Windsor knocked on the grime-encrusted door.

A hand forces itself through the mail slot in the front, palm up, palm gesturing up. A minute, two empty minutes. A second hand, sticking through the slot, wrapping the first to sense its width, its age. Then the second hand, balled in a fist, meeting the other, releasing. The second hand pulled back in.

Twenty, forty, sixty. Paper rubbing on paper and cold rubbing on concrete. The first hand pulled back in; a succession of blank seconds; the first hand reappearing through the slot in the form of a fist. The second hand reaching, flesh and blood and wet and sticky from sweat. The second grasping a plastic bag filled with white powder. A whisper: you turn the other way.

Windsor felt plastic filled with white powder instead of green paper in his hands and grinned.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

When he found himself in front of Curvin and Tricia at Sans Souci, Windsor wondered what he had looked like. Running back up Church, down those six blocks to the corner of Stephens Court, that block east to Farragut, not noticing the neon light from the Western Union but briefly under it, what had he looked like then? When he went down the subway steps, waited for the 3 train, the arriving steel on steel, had he looked nervous, like a boy who was finally going to see a woman with men in her hair? Had the older Chinese man, sitting next to him on the subway bench with a lot of grocery bags, smelled the sugar on him? A cashier waiting for customers at a 125th street bodega—had he jumped when he saw a black boy run across his window to Sans Souci, where Curvin and Tricia were sucking their teeth?

“Sorry,” Windsor mumbled, mock humble.

“S’aight, brother. You got it, right?” The “brother,” the upward intonation of the question-sound, the grumble Curvin reserved for when he was defending Windsor against Tricia’s needling aggression, signaled to Windsor that Curvin was talking to him.

But he was facing the building lobby’s wall, chipping off peeling paint with the pen he always nestled behind his ear. Sans Souci’s lobby was bathed in a harsh blue hospital light, the flailing bulb at the ceiling’s center emitting no more of it than the glint of a scissor’s point. Windsor made a scissor motion with his index and middle finger in the air, to see if he could cut the bulb out of this, if he could make the room dark.

“Snip,” breathed Windsor. “Yeah, I got it, Curv.”

Windsor did not know. There was a metro card tucked poking out of his pocket when he got there. Then Windsor held up a hand to Tricia’s face; the light from her face seeped through his hands and Windsor instantly saw her body and his body.

“Why is your hand in my face,” clucked Tricia, shimmying down the elastic waistband of her younger brother’s sweatpants so they hung low, showing her older brother’s boxers. Windsor’s mother would sometimes quip that Tricia was the type of girl whose hips would never swing. A fourteen-year-old pimpled girl who would reach an optimistic thirty, thirty-five if she kept messing with the wives of men. A girl who wouldn’t care about dying, because she had learned to hold her life lightly in her dry hands.

“And why are you late,” she scuffed the only clean part left on Windsor’s sneaker, the ones she had bought him with more money she had taken from her father’s wallet for his thirteenth birthday.

APRIL 19 2013

Windsor uncurled the fingers—his fingers—and produced the baggie, heated with the condensation from his skin. Like a scientist, and he was something of a street scientist, Curvin held up the bag to his eyes, fingers half-mast, and peered at it like it was a critter in a three-piece suit. Curvin’s eyes sank.

“This is pure. See that?” Curvin brought his spider arms up, injecting the powder with the little light from the bulb. Tricia oohed so Windsor oohed. “The real shit is supposed to shine like glitter.” The bag shone like glitter. “She’s gonna shine. We in,” Curvin winked and Windsor saved the wink like he did everything Curvin gave him.

Sans Souci was deceitful. Boarded-up windows, peeling paint, an elevator that nearly laughed when you thought its buttons would work—Sans Souci looked like the type of building that ate up its residents and spit them out in packed pine-box pellets.

But the stairwell, the stairwell smelled like spices: cinnamon, cloves, dried ginger, dried bay leaves, the dried bay leaves his

mother ran in his bath when she sensed fatigue in his limbs.

What would his mother think if she knew he had gone to see the woman, he thought, as Tricia knocked on the ailing wooden door so the three could see the woman.

It was like the door dropped at the light force of her knock.

Hallway light got sucked in by the planet of darkness inside—a curtain of black hair was already walking towards an interior room. She smelled like hair. Curvin shrugged at Windsor, Windsor swallowed the phlegm mounting in his throat and Tricia was already walking towards her. The three sat on the floor of the interior room. Windsor pulled fibers from the carpet.

“Don’t do that,” cooed the woman, the woman with at least a dozen small men in the environment of her hair.

A girl with men in her hair, clinging to her by the roots. They are small, and naked like she is. Not screaming, but wrapped tightly around the strands, the strands that have weight like legs. She is a tower; there is light coming from her. There is powder going inside her. Her nostrils flare, Windsor’s nostril flare, Tricia’s nostrils, Curvin’s nostrils. Watch that one lock of hair trace down the groove of her cheek, tickle the length of her neck, round the curve of her left breast, how did it move? But the hair did move to the curve of her right breast, lap against her wet and sticky stomach skin, disappear into the black patch where her womanness sat, lick the toes of Windsor, Tricia, and Curvin, the strand did lick their toes until they sputtered and giggled and sighed and laughed heinously, the laughing shrinking as the strand wrapped them about their stomachs and pulled the three back to her hair.

LITERARY

14

Crossing the Midline

by Greg Sewitz & Claudia Norton Illustration by Stella Chung

it’s a natural instinct to cross your arms when you feel vulnerable. Social psychologists hypothesize that crossing your arms functions as a protective measure against threat and new speculation suggests that reaching your hands across the body can calm you down in stressful situations. “Crossing the midline,” which refers to the ability to move a part of the body, such as a hand or foot, into the space of the other hand or foot, indicates that the right and left side of the brain are working in tandem. Many people believe that exercising this ability is akin to working out your brain. Accordingly, when you make cross-line movements, it forces both sides of the brain to communicate and strengthens the pathways that link them together. So next time your boyfriend crosses his arms when you’re talking about your diva cup, don’t freak out. He’s not grossed out—he’s working on it.

Inability to cross the midline leads to trouble reading and playing musical instruments like the piano.

Parents used to speak about their children’s midline issues in hushed tones. Now that “scientists” (really just Australians) across the world (mainly Australia) have come out with regimens for bilateral fluidity, there’s hope for self-integration. An increase in bilateral fluidity not only helps people with developmental deficits, but can also strengthen concentration and intelligence in business people.

But what is it really about the midline that makes crossing it so powerful? Why are people racing to jump on the lateralization bandwagon? The Indy decided to get to the bottom of this burgeoning field, crossing continents and our own midlines in the process. Here are our findings.

®

Superbrain Yoga

if you’re unsatisfied with your level of intelligence, Superbrain Yoga® may be for you. Developed by Master Choa Kok Sui, Modern Founder of Pranic Energy Healing®, Superbrain Yoga® is a carefully calibrated treatment method designed to capitalize on your midline—the exercise incorporates the ancient pressure point of the ear lobe, the healing capacities of bilateral movement, and the modern squat-thrust. Superbrain Yoga® has been anecdotally proven to help people re-energize their minds in the middle of the workday, mitigate developmental delays in children with Downs Syndrome, and improve the cognitive function of children with Autism, and ADHD. You can achieve an energy boost and heightened cognition by developing your own practice of Superbrain Yoga®.

First, cross your arms and reach your hands to the opposite ear. Use your thumb and index finger to pinch each earlobe. Make sure the pads of your thumbs are pointing away from your body. If you switch the orientation of your fingers, you will not achieve the desired effect of Superbrain Yoga®. Press your tongue against the top of your mouth.

Exhale as you squat down. Rest in a squatting position without breathing. Inhale only once you are ascending to a standing position. Repeat this 15 times each day and within as little as one week you may notice your newly calm self building concentration and intelligence. You may be wondering if you are too old or too young to feel the effects of Superbrain Yoga®, but don’t worry. The great thing about Superbrain Yoga® is that it works just the same no matter who you are. Don’t jump right in though. Do a short warm up first. There’s nothing worse than a strained midline.

Work Your Midline: A Warm Up x. Pop bubbles with only one hand (you will have to reach across your body to pop the bubbles floating on the opposite side). x. Write your name in the air while rotating your foot in a circle clockwise. x. Play flashlight tag. In a dimmed room, lie on your back and have the child follow your flashlight beam projected on the wall with his own flashlight. x. Do grapevine walks. x. Point your left finger out and put your right thumb up. Switch them, and switch, and switch, and switch… [Editor’s note: THIS DOES NOT COUNT AS CROSSING THE MIDLINE] x. Slap your thighs and switch your hands…switch, slap, switch, slap… x. Wash the car and make sure the arms cross midline while scrubbing.

Courtesy of the North Shore Pediatric Institute (“Experience and Innovation to Maximize your Child’s Potential”)

15

HEALTH & WELLNESS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Art that Crosses the Midline, and Not Crossing the midline even makes things looks better. According to Indy Arts Editor Claudia Norton, crossing the midline has a naturally attractive aesthetic. Here is a famous painting that succeeds “in large part because of its high midline-cross quotient.”

This painting doesn’t feature midline crossing and suffers for it.

Are you Cross-Lateralized? QUIZ the human brain has a midline, too, called the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is a big bundle of neural fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Because of this lateralization, a certain side of your body will be more dominant in different movements; for instance, you probably have an eye, ear, hand, etc. that is more dominant than the other. Your brain’s primary dominance is reflected by your handedness. If another trait displays a different dominance, that trait is cross-lateralized!

Take this quiz to see if you have any cross-lateralizations: 1. Are you right or left handed?

Left

Right

2. When throwing a ball, which hand do you use?

Left

Right

3. When flipping “the bird,” which hand do you use?

Left

Right

4. When chewing gum, which side do you normally chew on?

Left

Right

5. Cross your arms in front of your chest. Which hand is on top?

Left

Right

6. Which of your breasts is bigger than the other?

Left

Right

7. Think back to all of those late night phone calls in high school.

Which ear was against the phone?

Left

Right

Left

Right

Left

Right

Left

Right

Left

Right

8. Which eye do you wink with?

9. Which nostril do you pick?

10. To which side do you part your hair?

11. Try rolling your eyes. Which direction did you look?

If any of these answers differ from your handedness, you are cross-lateralized when it comes to that action. If a majority of your answers are opposite to your handedness, you are globally cross-lateralized. Congratulations.

Scientists are unsure about the implications of cross-lateralization, but at least you can stick the fun fact next to other useless signifiers like “supertaster” and “special.”

Rub it Better a new report from university college london claims that you can alleviate pain by confusing your brain. They suggest that simply crossing your hands is enough to trick it out of feeling pain. The team used a laser to generate a pin-prick sensation­—“pure pain,” according to the paper­—on participants’ hands. Perception of pain was weaker when the arms crossed the midline of the body, allegedly because maps of internal and external space get mispaired. “In everyday life you mostly use your left hand to touch things on the left side of the world, and your right hand for the right side of the world,” says Dr. Giandomenico Iannetti, the lead researcher of the study, in a moment of clarity. “When you cross your arms these maps are not activated together anymore, leading to less effective brain processing of sensory stimuli, including pain, being perceived as weaker.”

It’s surprising, to be sure, that such small-scale misdirection could fool the organ whose greatest achievements include arches, jet planes, and quantum computers. But the data must be believed. However, certain ramifications remain unclear. Does crossing multiple body parts defend against more pain?

Could crossing my eyes cure my headache? According to BBC News, a spokesman for the Pain Relief Foundation said a lot of research into relieving chronic pain is focused on ways of confusing the brain.

Dr. Iannetti recently claimed, “perhaps when we get hurt, we should not only ‘rub it better’ but also cross our arms.” You really can’t argue with that.

APRIL 19 2013

HEALTH & WELLNESS

16

Open Sesame, Read a Fucking Book

by Emma Janaskie, Alex Ronan, Erica Schwiegershausen, Doreen St. Félix, Ellora Vilkin & Emma Wohl Illustration by Lizzie Davis

today, we decided we would stop. We took off our shoes, we did not go to work, we forgot about our cars. We sat down on the couch with our books. We pored over our books, and as we slipped in the chapters, we realized that we were experiencing pleasure. Here are the books we read.

Green Girl + Here’s how it went. Central Park, early May. I said, “Let’s go get pizza.” He said, “I have to tell you something.” Then he admitted to cheating on me. Then I admitted to loving him.

The rest of the summer found me prostrate, crying. I also read some books.

To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t really get into anything written from a male perspective. Instead, I latched onto an excessively simplistic posture of reading only about girls and women and losing things. When I saw Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl described as “the Bell Jar for today,” I rolled my eyes at the reductive marketing, but also bought a copy. I was feeling indulgent. Green Girl was all those words everyone uses to describe books they love. I’ll spare you, but get a copy. I went on to read Bluets by Maggie Nelson, The End of the Story by Lydia Davis, and Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding. I borrowed Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? from a friend and we discussed it over dinner. Now and again I pick up Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians to reread various parts I remember from the summer.

It’s April, almost May. This summer I’m nixing all that crying, have a long list of books to read, and will probably keep my running shoes out so I can pretend to be the kind of person who does that with anything that resembles regularity.

We’ll see.—AR

Bill’s Life Do you even remember him? Do you remember what the sax sounded like? The way he purred in that hot Arkansas drawl, slow as Sunday, about taxes? No, you’ve forgotten him—you only think of his wife. Do you, does anyone remember how much he loved McDonalds?

I do. William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton is a vegan now. He wasn’t in 2004, when his autobiography My Life was published, before he needed that quadruple bypass. He loved fish frys, he loved cured meat on cured bone. These are the quiet moments in My Life, they stick on you as tightly as the louder ones in the 1,008 page monument—his out-of-placeness in college, his fifth time as governor of Arkansas. The presidencies, of which there were two. The father who died three months before he was born (William Sr.), and the stepfather who sometimes abused him (Daddy).

Bill has a particular fondness for Kant. I have a particular fondness for Bill. Nine years ago, I followed him to Cape Cod. I found him sitting in front of a shiny banner of his

17

FEATURES

face, in an antique-y bookstore. I was shy, but Bill smiled. He signed my copy of My Life in black pen that seeped through to the other side of the first page.—DSF I Love Dick I first came across Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick in a seminar on bad taste several years ago. I remember the professor placing the book in the middle of our seminar table. “Can something be bad”—she tapped I Love Dick—“in a good way?”

The question is a useful aperture into I Love Dick: “badness” and “goodness” shore up the kind of female trouble that embarrasses the literary establishment. Kraus’s lightly fictionalized account of her extra-martial epistolary affair is “bad” in the sense that it is adolescent, it is unruly, it is sentimental. It is bad because it is an emblem of what the literary and cultural establishments tell women they’re doing wrong.

The brilliance of Kraus’s book, though, is that it ruins the categories we’ve inherited for talking about writing, culture, and criticism. “Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our debasement?” Kraus seethes. “Why do women always have to come clean?” Like a woman dutifully going through the unread contents of her desk drawer, Kraus catalogues letter after letter that she penned to Dick, her crush, coaxing us into what quickly becomes a roving and impassioned exegesis of those “bad” female feelings that strain otherwise “good,” “universal” literature. –EJ The Marriage Plot I first learned about The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides’ story of life at Brown in the 1980s, from someone I had a one-night stand with. He referenced it the night before, which was just after the book came out in the fall of 2011, and then again a week later when I asked him to get coffee. He took me to Carr House, the café from the first chapter in the book. He used it as a jumping-off point to talk about how love doesn’t exist and that’s liberating. I told him it sounded stifling. He laughed. I moved on from the guy, but something stuck with me. That winter break I read the book in four hours. Both of my parents were also reading it, so we’d have to trade it around, save each other’s places, and be careful not to spoil plot points. My mother, who graduated from Brown in 1972, thought it seemed like an absurd caricature of college life. I thought it was spot-on.

A friend and I reread it last summer, when we were both experiencing romantic angst. It had diminishing returns, because after the treasure hunt of picking out all the locations and intellectual types still to be found on College Hill, what was left was a boring story about insufferable characters. The heroine didn’t do anything. This probably doesn’t sound like much of a recommendation, but I do revisit that book a lot.

Ever since reading it the first time, I try to sort the boys I like into Mitchells and Leonards. It’s gratifying, maybe, that there are more of the former. The latter is much more elusive.—EW

Hunger of Memory Haters like to hate on Richard Rodriguez because of his whole anti-Affirmative Action thing (or maybe it’s the glamourpuss

headshots on his paperbacks), but if you ask me he doesn’t totally deserve it. It’s tough to fault an autobiographer who spares us the gloss: this is a guy who quotes his mother explicitly asking him not to write about their family’s private lives without flinching. Rodriguez’s 1981 The Hunger of Memory, a collection of six essays, is testament to his belief that there is space for the “deeply personal in public life,” and so he spares no one—not his mother, not his peers as a “scholarship boy” at Stanford, and certainly not himself.

You’ll also learn about the creation of Third World Centers and Ethnic Studies departments (and why Rodriguez, a Mexican American intellectual, opposed them). Plus, there’s an intriguing reverse-Oedipal pool scene that finally makes sense when you check his Wikipedia and realize he came out in 1998. Get an education reading about how Rodriguez got his.—EV

Are You My Mother?

Recently, I told someone that if I could be anyone when I grow up, I would be Alison Bechdel. “Can you draw?” she asked. “No,” I said, feeling silly. I don’t even really want to make comics. Mostly, I think I’m comforted by Bechdel’s willingness to admit she’s a monster.

I know that many people find the tortured writer to be a subject of limited interest. In her second memoir, Are You My Mother? Bechdel writes about her relationship with her mother—herself a resistant subject. “I must confess that I have taken to transcribing what she says,” Bechdel writes.

“I don’t think she knows I’m doing it, which makes it a bit unethical.”

Before I read Are You My Mother? I read Dwight Garner’s review of it in the New York Times. He calls the book disappointing. He says it’s not nearly as good as Fun Home— Bechdel’s first memoir, about her father, a closeted gay man who, as she tells it, committed suicide four months after she came out to her parents as a lesbian. I can’t help thinking that Garner is sort of missing the point. “Mom had told me she felt I’d betrayed her by revealing things in [Fun Home] that I told her in confidence,” Bechdel writes in retrospect. “I’d thought I had her tacit permission to tell the story, but in fact I never asked for it and she never gave it to me.”

In Are You My Mother? Bechdel agonizes over her desire to write about her mother. She knows that her mother is uncomfortable with the whole process; also, that her mother considers memoir a suspect genre. I’ve heard people call the book repetitive and say that it drags, and I don’t disagree. It is reflexive and redundant the way that any book that is self-consciously about writing must be—to the point of exhaustion.

But there is a reason that I keep coming back to it. I find the incessant self-questioning comforting, oddly reassuring— because I am, of course, looking for permission to do what she is doing. “Our truce is a fragile one,” she writes. “Yet here I am making another incursion.” She suggests that though her second book may hurt her mother, this isn’t reason enough to stop writing. Maybe this is harsh, but it is the ultimate resolution of the book. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t exist.—ES

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

clothing & more sale // the wheeler school, 407 brook st., providence Manolo Blahnik, Gucci, Bruno Magli and Tory Burch are just a few of the designers you will find at the Boutique. We went yesterday, but there’s probably some okay stuff left. Cash and checks accepted. Friday 9AM – 8PM. Saturday 9AM – 4PM.

farm tour // new urban farm, 483 weeden st., pawtucket Tour three geodesic dome greenhouses. Learn about aquaponic systems and shiitake mushroom production in oak logs. The farmers will offer cultivation tips and demonstrate space saving techniques.

Free! 2PM. psychic self-defense // mother mystic spiritual apothecary, 179 dean st., providence Powerful methods of countering psychic toxicity. $30. 2PM.

“urban vintage bazaar” // stephen robert ’62 campus center, brown university The start of Brown University Fashion Week. This is probably a good place to be if you’re looking to be photographed for the Street Style section of Unhemmed. Free admission. 10AM – 6PM.

mars 2 multiverse // starr auditorium, macmillan hall, brown university Refreshments & a talk about our expanding university featuring a professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics from Cambridge. 3:30PM.

who goes to college? // smith buonanno hall, brown university A conference on the effects of class and higher education. Begins at 9:30AM.

show // fete lounge, 103 dike st., providence Two bands with the word “magic”: Slow Magic and Magic Man, plus Ravi Shavi. legislating same-sex marriage // starr auditorium, macmillan hall, brown university Panelists will evaluate the possibility of Rhode Island becoming the 10th state to permit same sex-marriage. 4PM.

lol comedy series // saplinsley hall, nazarian center for the performing arts, rhode island college Jenny Slate! She’s the one who said “fuck” her first night on SNL, and then she made all those precious Marcel the Shell videos. She’s pretty funny most of the time. $5 in advance; $10 at the door. 8PM. beyond war // joukowsky forum, watson institute, brown university David Rhode B’90 discusses his new book: Beyond War: Technology, Economic Growth, and American Influence in a New Middle East. 5PM.

dining out // providence restaurants Go out to eat! Restaurants around Providence will donate a percentage of the day’s proceeds to AIDS Project Rhode Island. A list is available at aidsprojectri.org.