The College Hill Independent V.26 N.1

A

V. 2 Br o

6 wn +

D W ee

O

kly +

E

H

I

.1

LL 2.1 N .20 T 13 N

E

EG D

LL

EN

C

EP

E

RI SD

IN

TH

V. VV 2. 2.2

666

TTTHHH EE I I NNDD DYY Y NN.1

N.1 .1

J F C L lau ana Sim MAN oo izzi ried sk A m d o e ks , B Da an ia N ie, D n E GING n X v ell e C is, K Liz orto ore gler EDIT e z n us imb ie D S C n S M E T O R S hin G IE t R er ley avis NCE . Fe O A rac g, l , eD i M n im Sar Ann Jeh x, Ka na u a R i D no i t n e ot nha wy ff, K M e S e V m m a a a a , er , R aty cDo mah n Br n, J Ale o o x ob Wi a n nd ald , G ckli nath Ro er n re n tS e L a an mu IST R g S , Elll n S an, S o t e dle th o a o wi r r, E PHO ber tz a V rch, m R i t F o ric T O OO lkin Be a S An San D A AR ns sen d o N ch n l T wi ie M er, E nna S Jo n Tu EWS eg D av er acd rica Rotm e de cker ha i S , o us nal chw an Jon Em d A d en d IN m g i MV , Kim ege TER e, G a W ler, B VI rs PK r a b o im erle hau EWS eg N hl F rry E s E be D y e re issa ATU lkin rl e S a n B w to y S rno L O G D n, G R E S n, ff i ar E G c r i m k CO e no r e ff C VER eg N rso r St ma oc n OV ER Dia issa LITE km n a R A R ne T D Zh DES ARY n, I E GN ian ou + I dwa e Z SE L ho NIOR LUST rd u R ED ITO ATIO N RS Ra il l a n

Br

NEWS Week in Review // 2

Barry Elkinton, Simon Engler & Rick Salamé

Gone Baby Gone // 9 David Adler

METRO Bad Cop, Bad Cop // 3 Benson Tucker & Emma Wohl

City State // 4 Jonathan Storch

FEATURES

FROM THE EDITORS

Bill Murray // 6

Jetlag didn’t exist because we couldn’t move fast or far enough to feel it. Now it is no wonder. Now I’m

Kate Van Broklin, & Ellora Vilkin,

leaving (People magazine) on a jet plane. Now you are farting in 12B. Contrails are a “nightmare for anyone shooting a period drama outside.” These thin little streamers, the detritus of all your miles. Just like any cloud, contrails are made by water, but also by people, creating airplanes and riding them.

Dead airplanes live in the desert. Stiff and sealed or all took apart. Before that just plastic metal, birding

Emma Janaskie, Doreen St. Felix,

Straight Talk // 7 Doreen St. Felix

to Denver International Airport and back. Forth and back. In 2007, Boeing introduced the Dreamliner with a promise of bigger windows and hand motion flush toilets. Little things. And what of it, that Dreamliner?

Grounded for lithium batteries and thermal runaway. Little things, again. They can’t fly, not now, but they will, eventually or not at all. And what if you could have anything from SkyMall? What would you choose?

From this altitude, two things are certain: how many people are alive and how square fields can be. You window seat and forehead press so you can see your nose doubling. It’s the same time down there. The Midwesterner says, “I’ll pay ya five bucks if you spot anyone swimming in one of those pools.” He has commandeered both armrests and you might as well listen. The pools are rectangular or kidney shaped. Blue or green or something not quite either. No one is swimming, but somebody is probably home.

ARTS O for Effort // 11 Claudia Norton

On Bass // 13 Greg Nissan

— GD, AR & SR

SCIENCE Guns // 12 Jehane Samaha

INTERVIEWS Colonel Saunders // 15 Drew Dickerson

FOOD Party Fowl // 5 Anna Rotman

LITERARY Candy Land // 17 Edward Friedman

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

theindy@gmail.com twitter: maudelajoie

X-PAGE

/// theindy.org ///

Annie Macdonald // 18

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

WEEK IN REVIEW the year is wet behind the ears

by Barry Elkington, Simon Engler, & Rick Salame illustration by Annie Macdonald & Allie Trionfetti

Ancient Infants

Live Live Birth

Fear and Loathing in Middle School

George Church is bearded and stocky, but he is no Neanderthal. The 58-year-old Harvard University professor is, in fact, one of the most important Homo sapiens in the newfangled field of synthetic biology. Synthetic biologists, like Church, modify and create genetic material to produce novel and useful life forms—think lab-born algae that digest dangerous industrial compounds. It’s hardly work cut out for a caveman.

But since a January 18 interview with Der Spiegel, it’s cavemen—Neanderthals, to be precise—for which Church has become known. Church predicted that Neanderthal cloning will soon become technologically feasible. “We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it’s very likely that we could clone a human,” Church said. Or some variation thereof: the weakchinned, strong-browed, barrel-chested Homo neanderthalensis went extinct about 30,000 years ago. According to Church, all that would be necessary for the cloning of our evolutionary cousin—legal and ethical barriers aside—would be a willing surrogate mother from our own species. Of course, these comments weren’t a serious call for female volunteers from a bizarre Dr. Frankenstein. They were the musings of a respected biologist.

But idle musings were all that the media needed. By January 20, the Daily Mail had proclaimed, “Harvard Professor Seeks Mother for Cloned Cave Baby.” the Berliner Kurier was even more certain about the future Neanderthal birth: an article in its January 22 issue declared, “Surrogate Mother to Bear Neanderthal,” and compared Church to the scientists in Jurassic Park. The popular consensus was clear; Church was playing God, and thanks to his scientific audacity—or his obscene hubris—a Neanderthal baby was on its way.

For better or for worse, no one should be expecting a cave baby anytime soon. If scientists like Church are bordering on the Frankenstein, it’s only in the smallest and the most productive of ways. Synthetic biologists at the University of East Anglia, for example, are currently developing artificially photosynthetic materials that will efficiently generate the hydrogen needed for fuel cells. These are the advances—small, gradual, superficially uninspiring—that drive science. Progress is rarely born all at once.-SE

Last August, Twitter exploded when it was reported that Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi gave birth to her first child, Lorenzo Dominic LaValle. He weighed six pounds. Snooki planned to breast feed him. But Snooki’s life is a bit like the proverbial tree falling in the forest-if it isn’t shown on reality television, did it really happen? On January 29th we finally got the confirmation we’ve been waiting for, when delivery room footage of Lorenzo’s birth was aired in a special episode, “The Final Push,” on Snooki’s current reality show, “Snooki and JWoww.”

Apparently, the baby himself got to watch his own public birthday. “So hard to tweet and hold my now 14lb Lorenzo lol!” said Snooki while live-tweeting the episode. “Hope you guys are enjoying this episode! LOVE U XO.” The birth itself was, well, pretty standard, complete with chants of “Push, push, push,” and tears of joy at the baby’s first breath. Snooki came to the hospital prepared, with a leopard print top, full makeup and her signature updo ready for the cameras. In fact, given that Snooki was in labor for 26 hours, she looked awesome and so pretty. Apart from Lorenzo’s father, Jionni Lavalle, describing the placenta as “a big bloody stingray flapping out of her vagina,” nothing seemed terribly unusual at the delivery room.

Then the circumcision happened. Snooki wanted to keep the foreskin for her scrapbook along with the umbilical cord, but the doctors wouldn’t let her. Still, this archival disappointment was small potatoes compared to Snooki’s worst fear-that something would go wrong during the procedure.

“I was nervous for Lorenzo, but everything came out fine,” said Snooki. “His penis looks awesome. He’s going to have a good life.”

So yes, it finally happened-Snooki gave birth to Lorenzo, and the whole world got to see it. Technically, of course, Lorenzo was born August 26th, but in my book, he’ll always be an Aquarius.-BE

Maria Waltherr-Willard is a schoolteacher afraid of children.

The 61-year-old Ohioan claims she has suffered from this phobia since 1991, but it did not significantly interfere with her teaching responsibilities until 2009, when the high school French program she taught was moved online and she was transferred to a nearby middle school.

According to the Associated Press, she claims that the seventh and eight grade students in her new class triggered her phobia and caused an increase in blood pressure that put her at risk for a stroke. Apparently, the summer between eighth and ninth grades is more transformative than previously thought; the oppressive weight of pubescence was too much to bear for Waltherr-Willard. She retired in the middle of the 2010–2011 school year and is now suing Mariemont City School District for an unspecified amount in federal district court.

According to the Associated Press, Waltherr-Willard’s lawyer claims that the school district violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which requires employers to reasonably accommodate disabilities, when they transferred her to the middle school. Gary Winters, the school district’s legal representative, is skeptical. “I do not believe the case has any merit,” he told the Independent. He’s doubtful the case will even get to trial, even though a trial date has been set for February 2014. Winters isn’t the only skeptic. He told the Independent that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency tasked with enforcing federal workplace discrimination law, has found no probable cause for discrimination and will not be helping her in her suit.

For those with government support, the odds aren’t bad but success is far from guaranteed. ADA-related lawsuits supported by the EEOC have had a success rate of 56.3 percent over the past 10 years, according to calculations made by the Independent based on data released by the agency.

Without that support, Waltherr-Willard’s chances are certainly lower. Exactly how low is hard to say. Louise Herman, a Providence-based lawyer with extensive experience with ADA suits, told the Independent that she has never heard of a case like this one that could act as a precedent.-RS

FEBRUARY 01 2013

NEWS// 02

SAY NO TO COPS police tensions flare in the West End’s Cambodian community

by Benson Tucker & Emma Wohl photograph by Emma Wohl

As its name suggests, the main thing that holds the West End together is geography. South of Federal Hill and west of Elmwood, the West End stretches out to the boundary of Route 10. It’s the most populous and perhaps most diverse neighborhood in Providence, home to a wide variety of languages and immigrant groups. Recently, after a police raid led to allegations of police brutality, West Enders rallied and marched, giving voice to concerns about how their neighborhood is being policed.

The neighborhood’s Cambodian community was a major presence in the protests. Since the U.S. government encouraged refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge to join Providence’s nascent Cambodian community, the community has grown, and religious institutions serve as hubs. At the Buddhist Center of Rhode Island, just across the West End border with the South Side, Yan Vichet and his colleagues live, pray, and teach in one house on a quiet street. Vichet, who came from Cambodia two years ago, teaches Khmer language and religious traditions. He says his role is to “protect the culture” of the immigrants’ homeland. But he and his colleagues have also created a space where anyone, “not just Cambodians,” can come to learn.

DISTURBING THE PEACE A few blocks away on Hanover Street, in the West End, bright prayer flags mark the entrance to the Wat Thormikaram of Rhode Island. Erected during the residence of three-time Nobel Peace Prize-nominated monk Maha Ghosananda, the temple on Hanover Street is a hub for the community around it. When the Providence Police Department coordinated raids on two homes where some young Cambodian men were believed to be selling marijuana, officers came to a house just down the street.

According to community organizations protesting the raids, police broke down doors and stormed into the houses. Far from a dangerous gang hideout, the house on Hanover Street was home to multiple generations of the dealers’ family. The police reportedly met no resistance from the shocked family, nor did they show a warrant, or, judging by the protesters’ account, pause to evaluate whether these residents posed any threat. According to the family, the police pulled a sleeping 13-year old boy out of bed and stomped on him, kicked in the door on a woman in the bathroom, and rounded up their semi-blind 77-year-old grandmother with all the other residents.

Jeanie Dy-Harris, a family member who spoke publicly at a rally protesting the raids, tried to communicate the experience: “How would you feel if police officers broke down your door and pointed a gun at your grandmother?”

The suspected dealers were indeed found with contraband: marijuana, cash, and “packaging material,” presumably plastic bags. No weapons or other drugs were reported found at either house in police announcements following the raids.

The Providence Youth Student Movement, or PrYSM, was among the organizations to speak out against

03//METRO

the raids, and the stories of young people from the West End’s South Asian community suggest that the raids are just one instance of constant police aggression not limited to criminals. Sangress Xiong, a PrYSM member, claims that in the West End, some cops will search and question young people, even outside of their own homes, without any evidence of criminal activity. Jimmy Khiev shared a similar story with PrYSM: “One time, when I was going to Hanover Street for Cambodian New Years,” he recalls, “I got really dirty so I borrowed one of my friend’s bikes to go home. As I was riding off, I noticed a cruiser following me, and as I got home, I see two cops run in my backyard and they throw me against the wall. They asked, ‘What you doin’ here?’ and I said ‘I live here.’ They were like ‘No, you don’t live here, what are you lying for.’ The only thing that actually stopped them from actually arresting me and throwing me in the car was my neighbor. He came in at the right time and was like ‘Nah, he lives here, this is the landlord’s son.’”

PrYSM was founded in 2001 in response to repeated fighting and deaths among Cambodian gangs. It sees “state, street, and interpersonal violence” as root causes of ongoing conflict and seeks to build pride and solidarity within the local community. But—particularly in light of the recent police raids—PrYSM also emphasizes the police’s role in isolating and marginalizing members of that community.

At a rally to protest the raids, PrYSM passed out booklets with sections titled “Call a Friend, Not the Police,” and “Do We Need Police?”

OVER-EAGER OFFICERS Young people of color are regularly stopped by the police for no apparent reason, and those who demand to know why they are being questioned hear the frequent refrain that they “fit the description” of a wanted suspect. Barely plausible reasons are accepted as justifications for extreme actions, despite the frail legs that these justifications might stand on. Police violence is often justified by officers’ claiming to have seen “furtive movements” that could be a suspect drawing a weapon.

Commenting to the Providence Journal, Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements dismissed the allegations of brutality in the raid by noting that no complaint had been filed with the department’s internal affairs bureau.

Filing such a complaint, though, seems implausible given both the whirlwind nature of the raid and the fact that the complaints are submitted through an online form unavailable in Cambodia’s major language, Khmer.

Furthermore, the form makes no mention of the Internal Affairs bureau, suggesting that it goes instead to the Office of Professional Responsibility. Contacted again by the Independent, the Department noted that they have still received no formal complaint.

The growing consensus regarding the failure of the drug war has been accompanied by the rise of more structural arguments that take on the problem of policing on a larger scale. Sociologist Michelle Alexander’s influential 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, points out that

in fact drug use has long been widespread in American society and that racial disparities in punishment come largely from where police choose to look for drug users.

In Providence, racially selective policing seems to be alive and well. The comparison between the West End and neighboring Federal Hill is illuminating. While the two neighborhoods are by no means equivalent—Federal Hill is home to fewer households and fewer families—one of the major differences is that just over half of the population of Federal Hill is non-Hispanic whites, while that figure for the West End is only 14 percent. As might be expected, the drug war is almost entirely absent from whiter Federal Hill. During a typical 60-day period late last year, there were 13 drug-related incidents in the West End and only one in Federal Hill. Despite their difference in size, the two neighborhoods had roughly the same number of thefts, underscoring the disparities in drug-related policing.

Judging by police activity, College Hill is apparently entirely drug-free, with not a single drug arrest recorded during the comparison period.

PUSHING FOR A CHANGE In the wake of the raids, the community’s push to change their neighborhood’s police presence has gained new focus.

The family most affected by the raid has put a face on these longstanding concerns. On January 17th, the family led a march from the Temple on Hanover Street to the Public Safety Complex. Their demands were bold, including the dropping of certain charges against the accused and the end to all policing in their community.

The full battery of demands is unlikely to gain traction, and the Mayor’s office has yet to comment on the raid.

A more promising path might be the racial profiling bill being considered by the Rhode Island legislature. Though the bill was first introduced over a year ago and has passed through the House Judiciary Committee, its progress was derailed when the Rhode Island Police Chiefs Association withdrew its support. Nonetheless, the campaign continues, and the Rhode Island Coalition Against Racial Profiling has scheduled a return to the Statehouse with a press conference on February 4.

The legislation—called the Comprehensive Racial Profiling Prevention Act—primarily involves more thorough record-keeping and data collection on the reasons for stops and information (including race and ethnicity) of the person stopped. Major changes consist of barring officers from asking juveniles to consent to a search, since many young people don’t realize they have the option to say no. While the bill would not have prevented the controversial raids, it could be a step towards repairing the community’s relationship with the city department that one young man’s poster called an “occupation army.” benson tucker b’13 and emma wohl b’14 share four Nobel Peace Prize nominations between them.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

OCEAN STATE UPDATE don’t try this at home

by Jonathan Storch

illustration by Katy Windemuth At 5 PM last Tuesday, half an hour before Providence Mayor Angel Taveras’s State of the City address, fifteen or twenty people were milling around outside the City Council chamber on the third floor of City Hall. Five wore police regalia, a WPRI videographer wore a sweatshirt, and the rest wore suits. A few talked, but most of the people who didn’t know each other looked like they preferred to keep silent.

An unemployed man named Walter, who spends most of his time in City Hall, came over to talk to me. He showed me his Obama inauguration button and backpack, before singing a jingle about Obama (“Obama loves his mama”) and another about the mayor (“God sent us an Angel from above”). The people around me seemed a little annoyed.

Walter walked up to a woman on my left and asked her if she wanted to see a card trick.

“Not really.”

“Why not?” “‘Cause I’ve been working here six years and you’ve been doing the same card tricks.”

The atmosphere warmed as more people crowded in and started schmoozing. The man to my right was there with his daughter, who introduced him to the commander of the Providence uniformed police. A few minutes later, a shorter man with slicked-back hair came up to me and introduced himself as Council President Michael Solomon. I hoped I would get to chat, but before I finished saying my name, he was shaking the next person’s hand.

Inside the chamber, Governor Lincoln Chafee, Taveras’s possible opponent in next year’s election, sat with a few other notables behind the podium. Capacity is 160, and the room filled up quickly.

Taveras gave a pretty good speech. He started by contrasting last year’s “Category 5 fiscal hurricane” with this year’s outlook: “Providence is recovering,” he repeated again and again. He thanked the institutions that gave ground to help eliminate Providence’s structural deficit— untaxed nonprofits, but also public workers and pensioned

retirees—and gave special credit to Johnson and Wales for its “demonstration of leadership” in increasing voluntary contributions when Brown University was resisting. After working his way through the standard municipal issues, he stressed efforts to globally market Providence’s “signature brands” like WaterFire.

BY THE NUMBERS People were animated as they filed out of the chamber, but they didn’t stay Percent of Rhode Island households that own a dog: 29.3 very long. The WPRI cameraman made Number of US states with a higher percentage of households that own a dog: 46 it down to the second floor to get a few Fine proposed by Cranston Representative Peter Palumbo quick reactions from politicians, mostly for driving a car with a dog on your lap: $85 positive. Behind the City Hall building, a Amount spent by Governor Lincoln Chafee to buy the State of Rhode Island’s first few men in suits said “Good work” to one teleprompter, which he debuted during this year’s State of the State address: $3254 of the mayor’s staffers, who was smoking Number of substance abuse charges against former RI House Minority Leader a cigarette. An older well-dressed woman Robert Watson dismissed by Connecticut prosecutors this week: 2 walked down the steps. “I was going Average age of first marijuana use according to Protect Families First, to say hi to the Governor,” she told her an organization lobbying for RI marijuana policy reform: 12 companion, “but he just took off.”

Average age of first marijuana use, according to a 2012 study by the US Department of Health and Human Services: 17.5 Percentage of Rhode Island high school students who smoke cigarettes: 11.4 Number of US states with a higher percentage of youth smokers: 47 Amount that the Corner Store in Providence’s South Side was fined for selling loose cigarettes last month: $2000 Pounds of chemical emissions to air, water, and land in Rhode Island during 2011: 390,000 Increase in pounds of chemical emissions compared to 2010: 17,307 Days since Earth, Wind, and Fire’s last performance in Providence: 631

WOONSOCKET

On January 25, a wrong turn through a fence led 52-year-old Ziengxay Kmon and her car onto the frozen pond of Cass Park. The ice held up, fortunately, and Woonsocket High School senior Kyle Mulvey boldly rushed out to help the driver to safety. The vehicle, too, was hauled onto dry land unharmed.

PROVIDENCE

19-year-old Darren Main was arrested on January 14 and charged with possession of a firearm and possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. Narcotics officers contacted Main and met him at his house after viewing pictures on his Facebook account, including one of a marijuana bud alongside the text “Hit me uppppp! I deliver.”

NEW BEDFORD, MA

29-year-old John Sylvia was abducted on January 24 by two men pretending to be police officers. They handcuffed him, escorted him to a UHaul van, and took him away. Sylvia’s girlfriend, who was pregnant, refused to go along with the abductors and related the incident to New Bedford police, according to local paper South Coast Today. Twelve hours later, the abductors left Sylvia on the side of the road in East Hartford, CT, with some minor injuries.

WARWICK

Cranston native and five-time boxing world champion Vinny Paz appeared in District Court on Monday, January 28 to refute two alleged misdemeanors. Paz was charged earlier this month after causing a disturbance at the Grid Iron Alehouse & Grille in Warwick. The retired boxer, nicknamed “The Pazmanian Devil,” smashed two metal stools against the bar when urged to settle his bill of $23.

FEBRUARY 01 2013

WESTPORT, MA

On January 19, about 40 area residents came to the White’s of Westport wedding center for a nonexistent concert by the R&B singer Will Downing, who was actually performing at the Obama inauguration. A 61-year-old East Providence resident named Allen Ganeto, who promoted the event, had sold them the fraudulent tickets. Ganeto, who successfully pulled off a similar scheme in October, currently faces charges for larceny.

METRO//04

“To you, it smells poopy, but to me, it smells like money.”

Chris Morris is the owner of Antonelli Poultry Inc, the only live poultry store in Rhode Island. He is warm and gregarious, and he is watching his language. Growing up, he never imagined that his office door would open onto a slaughtering room. Pointing at the pigeons milling around in their metal cage, Morris explains, “Here, we don’t call them pigeons; they’re squab.” He is listing the selection of live poultry currently housed in the backroom of the grocery store he inherited from his father-in-law over thirty years ago.

At the time, Morris was in his early twenties, working construction and playing amateur hockey. The stench was the biggest obstacle: hundreds of birds defecating in a closed room, only to be eviscerated on site. But familial duty called, and he reluctantly quit his job to become “the chicken guy,” a title he now holds with both modesty and pride. He takes care of the business end and manages a staff of up to ten workers who care for the birds and prepare the meat. Of Portuguese and Italian descent, Morris speaks with a slight Rhode Island accent and is quick to open up.

He is tanned from his frequent visits to Florida, and his salt and pepper hair is neatly cropped—his wife is a hairdresser in Westerly. Even though he was not born into the business, he has a salesman’s knack for storytelling; he needs little prompting and gets to the punch line quickly.

It is the end of the month and his stock is low; Antonelli Poultry is already out of ducks, partridge, and quail. As Morris speaks, one of the butchers picks up a guinea hen by its feet and proceeds to weigh and then slaughter it. Guinea hens, he explains, used to act as guard dogs for Austrian royalty. The pilgrim turkeys, one cage over, have their toes cut in infancy to impede their movement and fatten up their legs. “Mateo,” Morris calls out, gesturing to one of the butchers, “make the turkey stand up.” Mateo opens up the cage and lifts up a turkey, Morris doesn’t get his hands dirty anymore.

The evisceration process is an exercise in efficiency: the birds are killed in seconds and are ready to be cooked within minutes. First, the bird is placed headfirst in a reversed traffic cone. The butcher slits the neck, lets the blood drain out, and then dunks the freshly killed animal into a pot of scalding water. The water is hot enough

to loosen the feathers, but not so hot that it will cook the meat. From there, the bird is placed in a cylindrical machine that acts like a salad spinner. Instead of removing water from lettuce, though, it is extracting the feathers from the bird. Once the outside is clean, the bird is cut open, and the insides are taken out.

Morris walks over to the cleaning table and asks one of the butchers to pick up a yolk from among the bird’s entrails. It looks just like a yolk that has been separated from its egg white, and it’s edible too. The butchers are finding yolks because the chickens being slaughtered are “spent” but still laying eggs. This is because farmers unload hens that have passed their prime and can no longer produce eggs on a daily cycle. Morris explains: “Just like you produce eggs on a twenty-eight day cycle, if all goes well, these birds are supposed to produce eggs on an eighteen to twenty-one hour cycle.” Once they begin to slow down, they are no longer of use to the farmers, and the menopausal birds are brought to Federal Hill, where their production rate continues to slow down, but never stops entirely.

Sitting behind an unassuming storefront on the De Pasquale Plaza in Federal Hill, Antonelli Poultry is barely noticeable. Restaurant patios, large planters, and a multitiered fountain overshadow the store and together make the pedestrian-only square feel much like an obstacle course. The shop itself has been open since 1853, albeit under different names and ownership—Morris’ Italian in-laws bought it from a Jewish family in 1931. The front of the shop is small: wide enough for two people to stand shoulder to shoulder and long enough to house two display fridges on one side and a wall of dry goods and seasonings on the other. There are only a few whole chickens, a dozen cutlets, and a tray of individually wrapped gizzards behind the glass. The sparseness of the display belies the scale of the operation; Antonelli cycles through an average of three to four thousand birds a month.

Beans, tortillas, cornhusks, and other items labeled “Mexican” line the shelves. There are also bags of pasta, chow mein spice packets, and bottles of duck sauce.

Antonelli’s ever-changing product list could provide a veritable cultural history of the neighborhood, each

incoming group inscribing their preferences and cooking traditions. Morris began working for his father-in-law in the 1960s when the majority of customers were Italian and Portuguese. He believes that for a business to succeed, it must be constantly evolving. And so it has, accommodating the tastes of the Cambodian and Vietnamese community in the ‘70s, the West African immigrants in the ‘80s, and the Latino populace in the early 2000s. Today, the labels and prices are in Spanish, to fit the needs of the shop’s mostly Guatemalan clientele.

The one constant is fresh poultry. Thick plastic curtains separate the retail space from the backroom. A casual shopper might not notice that Antonelli extends beyond the humble storefront. Indeed, the quaint setup of the neighborhood grocer is no preparation for what lies beyond the translucent portal. Hundreds—often thousands—of birds from across New England are delivered weekly and housed in crowded black metal cages.

The smell is pungent and appetite-destroying.

This room serves as an à la carte slaughterhouse.

Regulars call in their orders. On busy days, the staff can’t keep up with the phone. Holidays are the most hectic, as is the beginning of each month, when federal benefits (Electronic Benefit Transfer, formerly food stamps) are distributed. Customers walk in, grab a number, sometimes even a bird straight out of the cage, and wait their turn.

Many watch their birds being butchered. Antonelli’s customers have been known to refuse meat that’s had the chance to cool down, which explains the store’s lackluster presentation upfront: they are winning over customers with their live birds. Although Antonelli birds are ending up on the menus of some of the most influential chefs in Providence, Morris prefers the retail side of the business.

For the customers, too, the experience of an Antonelli bird in a restaurant is quite different from one in the shop. The smell is all-enveloping and the sight of the birds is jarring, but just like Morris, customers new to live poultry are sure to be won over. Local meat takes on a very different flavor when it’s close enough to smell. anna rotman b’14 cycles through three-to-four thousand birds a month.

not for the faint of heart a federal hill poultry tradition

by Anna Rotman photographs by Kim Sarnoff

Chris Morris’ Simple Roasted Whole Chicken Morris and his wife are health fiends: kale smoothie in the morning and no extra calories in their chicken.

1. Rub the outside of the chicken with salt, garlic, oregano, and turmeric.

2. Poke holes in a whole lemon and slide it inside.

3. Close the backend of the chicken with a skewer.

4. Roast for one hour at 350°F. .

05//FOOD

Honey and Balsamic Squab “These aren’t just pigeons we’re picking up off the street; they’re a delicacy,” Chris Morris explained.

What you’ll need: Squab (cut in half along the back) Balsamic Vinegar Honey Crushed garlic Thyme Directions: 1. Mix the ingredients together and marinate the bird for at least 20 minutes.

2. Transfer to broiling pan and roast squab for 25 minutes.

3. Turn oven to broil and crisp up the squab for an extra 3 minutes, or until it is done to your liking.

Whole Roasted Beer Can Chicken 1. Rub the chicken with choice of seasonings.

2. Drink half a can of beer.

3. Holding the chicken by the legs, place it over the can of beer.

4. Set the chicken as is (standing up) in oven and roast for one hour at 350°F.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

HOG WILD

by Emma Janaskie, Doreen St. Felix, Kate Van Brocklin, & Ellora Vilkin illustration by Katy Windemuth

imbolc, or the festival of the lactating sheep This day, Imbolc,¹ splits the year between winter solstice and spring equinox. On this day, sheep with heavy bellies and swollen teats prepare for lambing. On this day, we wait to see if spring will come early—if Brighid² will walk the earth. They say on Imbolc Eve she will send her snake forth from the womb of the Earth Mother to smell the thawing air. If her snake ventures out from its hole, Brighid will walk and her rain-steps bless us. Brighid is spring: purity, renewal, growth. On this day we honor her and all maidens. We bless seeds and ploughs and sew the sacred furrows.

We watch for crocus flowers winking in the loam.

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck If a woodchuck could chuck wood?

(Difficulty Level: Moderate) The word woodchuck, a synonym for groundhog, has nothing to do with wood or chucking. It is derived from the Algonquian name for the animal, wuchak. The word may have originated with Rhode Island’s Narragansett tribe, a farming people who waited eagerly for spring.

This year, Groundhog Day falls exactly one week after January’s full moon³. Algonquin Indians called it Hunger Moon because hunting was difficult this month and Snow Moon for the heavy snowfall. The full moon, like Brighid and the groundhog, is a symbol of fertility, transition, and promise.

May the waning moon help the serpents to come forth, Brighid to walk, and the groundhog to see his shadow. ₁ Imbolc is derived from the Gaelic “oimlec,” meaning “lamb’s milk.” ₂ Brighid is the Gaelic goddess of healing, poetry, and smithcraft. In Christian tradition, she is called St. Brigid. ₃ The moon was full on Saturday, January 26, 2013, at 11:38 PM EST. It was in Leo.

Above excerpted from http://tsminteractive.com/5-famousgroundhogs-youve-never-heard-of/ “I Don’t Believe The Groundhog Ever” can be roughly translated to “I Don’t Accept that the Groundhog’s Predictions are True, Especially Without Proof, Ever.”

According to Groundhog Day organizers, the rodent’s

FEBRUARY 01 2013

predictions are accurate between 75 percent and 90 percent of the time. A study conducted by The Canadian Encyclopedia of 13 cities over a span of 30 to 40 years found a 37 percent accuracy rate, a value very close to the 33 percent chance that a predication could be correct by pure chance.

The National Climatic Data Center has stated that the overall accuracy rate of collective groundhog predictions is around 61 percent.

Individuals attend the Groundhog Day festival in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania from countries as far as 4736.62 miles away.⁴ Online gambling site Intertops.com has listed the odds in favor of Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow this year at 2/9. The odds that Phil won’t see his shadow are correlatively 13/4. Phil’s odds might be higher, CBS surmises, if he lived in New England, where winter tends to stretch further into spring.

In spite of the aforementioned media coverage questioning the meteorological validity of groundhog prognostications, as many as 15,000 tourists attend the celebration in Punxsutawney. The number can swell to twice that figure if the festival falls on a weekend. Weather is fluctuation in air pressure, The Guardian points out, and oftentimes it is too cloudy for a groundhog to see his shadow. But when polled, 100 percent of tourists who were present to watch Phil surface from his burrow believed his prognostication. “It’s our tradition,” a man noted in a local paper. “We believe that groundhogs are great animals to celebrate.” ₄ cf. Russia.

His full name is “Punxsutawney Phil Sowerby, Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators and Weather Prophet Extraordinary” but you can just call him Phil. Punxsutawney Phil, that is.

But you’ll never get close enough to call him anything.

Phil’s been on Oprah, he’s met Reagan. Most groundhogs can’t live a day past three years, maybe four if the alfalfa is good. But Punxsutawney Phil? He’s going to make his 123rd appearance atop his Gobblers Knob burrow on February 2.

They say he’s lived so long because every summer he drinks from the Elixir of Life, brought to him by the elites of the Inner Circle. They say it’s because of his strong wife Phyllis who takes care of him while he hibernates in their underground home outside of Punxsutawney Memorial Library. They say it’s because Punxsutawney, a rural town in Pennsylvania named after its mosquitos, needs him.

They say that Phil is “being treated better than the average child in Pennsylvania,” or so says Bill Deeley, president of the Inner Circle of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club.

Some wish to protect Phil. In 2010, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sent a letter to the president of the Inner Circle demanding the release of Phil to a sanctuary. They argued that the shy, burrowing creature is badly treated by the chaos of the crowds at Groundhog

Day. Their suggested replacement? A robot. The idea was quietly dismissed. An animatronic groundhog may be more humane, but it wouldn’t have Phil’s ephemeral spirit. Phil lives on simply because he wants to. He can make winter snows swirl into April or make spring rain drench March.

When Phil gets out of that hole and looks for his shadow, he can make the weather.

the elixir of life Serves: 1 Punxsutawney Phil Preparation time: 4 days ingredients: 7 large carrots 3 stalks celery 5 lbs. alfalfa sprouts 1 bucket of acorns 1 cord firewood from a California Giant Sequoia 2 Gingko tree limbs, dried 100 lbs. Antarctica ice 10 lbs. apples 1 bushel dandelion roots 3 cloves garlic, crushed 20 packages strawberry Kool-Aid 2 c. Lochness Monster urine, distilled 1 pair underwear from a member of the Inner Circle, laundered Salt and pepper to taste PREPARATION: 1. Place a 50-lb cast iron kettle above cord of firewood.

Light fire by rubbing tree limbs together.

2. Place Antarctica ice in kettle once firewood burns into flaming embers. Bring to boil.

3. Add carrots, celery, alfalfa sprouts, acorns, apples, dandelion roots, garlic, and Kool-Aid to kettle.

4. Simmer for four days at exactly 215° F. 5. Add Lochness Monster Urine.

6. Let cool, then strain through underwear into another container.

7. Season to taste.

Serve elixir to the Great Prognosticator, Punxsutawney Phil, every September to ensure another seven years of life per sip.

FEATURES// 06

Hair

by Doreen St. Felix illustration by Katy Windemuth From follicles in the middle layer of skin, out sprouts the dead thing.

Hair begins in the bulb-shaped organ called the follicle. Once hair grows past the surface of the epidermis, it is dead. The length of hair outside of the skin is referred to as the shaft.

Hair is primarily composed of protein, like keratin, and other biomaterials such as melanin, vitamins, and zinc. About 10 percent of hair is water.

When the shaft hits the outside air, it expresses itself in a multitude of shapes. The coils, the springs, the spirals curving around each other like a string of Zs. The strands diffuse from the scalp in all directions—the look is that of density but the feel, when the fingers sink into the mass, is that of sparseness.

The individual strand of afro-textured hair is flat and fine, the strand tending to twist upon itself. When afro-textured hair is wet, it shrinks.

In the early fifteenth century, hair served as a carrier of messages in West African countries. The Yoruba, the Molof, the Mende, the Karamo, the mothers, the grandmothers, the daughters who looked like their mothers and grandmothers, used hair to communicate age, rank, wealth, marriage status, ethnic identity, and religion.

“The hair is the most elevated point of your body, which means it is the closest to the divine.”—Mohabed Mbodj, a historian We are trying to say something.

“For instance, a braided style begun from the forehead and that ends at the back of the neck showed that the woman is married. On the other hand, maiden style always runs from the right side of the head to the left ear. The smaller, and the more strands a young lady carries, the more beautiful such a lady will look.”—Mbodj Her scalp has already begun to burn. Although my sister is wailing, my mother blowing and spitting on the raw flesh, her hospital-gloved hands guiding the gush from the sink to wash off the pink chemical, my sister’s scalp has already begun to burn. I was four, she was fourteen and my mother was unfazed. The first time she chemically relaxed my sister’s hair, we were in our kitchen. There were tears in our kitchen.

Blue-black, sickly snakes of hair sucked into the drain, in our kitchen. Some of the hair was still attached to pieces of her scalp. A couple of hours later, a blow dryer and dabs of burn ointment later, my sister beamed under the hat of Californiastraight hair, there in our kitchen.

The relaxer works by process of controlled damage. During its cooking time, it changes the coil by stripping the outer layers of protein. No-lye relaxer kits claim gentler processing. The caustic agents they use instead of lye—hydroxides including potassium, lithium, and guanidine—do the job just as well.

The pH value of these agents ranges from 10 to 14. The pH of human skin is approximately 5.4.

Can you kill an already-dead thing?

“But, it should also be said that afro-textured hair is difficult to categorize because of the many different variations it has from person to person.”-Andre Walker, Stylist to the Stars

07//FEATURES

In 1834, Professor Calvin Stowe of the American Colonization Society said: “The woolly hair and dark skin are evidently adapted to warm climates; and those are the situations for the physical and intellectual development of the negro race.

Where shall we find the most favorable exhibitions of the negro character? In the cold regions of the north? Or in Egypt and Ethiopia? In Carthage and Morocco? In the West Indies and Brazil?”

“His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven.”-Song of Solomon 5:11 Sandra owns Maribel’s, on Stephens Court and Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. The salon boasts an extensive list of services: weaves, wash-and-sets, braids, texturizers, trims, cuts, coloring. The $60 relaxer is the most popular service and Alana, another hair stylist, is the best at it. “Alana can hook anyone up. The girl could relax a damn sheep’s head,” says Sandra.

Sandra snaps her fingers over the phone and I can hear it.

“Shit, even white and Spanish girls come to see her.” People wait hours for Alana. On the burgundy awning of Maribel’s is a stock photo: Brown Woman with Wavy Black Hair.

“Dark and Lovely is the only No-Lye Relaxer featuring a moisture replenishing system! New moisturizing benefits added to the advanced no-lye conditioning formula using a combination of natural ingredients and body enhancing polymers. Dark and Lovely Moisture Seal No-Lye Relaxer System infuses and seals moisture into each and every hair strand providing a soft and full finish. Not only is your hair silky-straight, it has ultimate body & shine!”

And then I feel it: the girl’s teenage fingers crawling, digging a little to see if its false. She is disturbing the shape I made, the shape that made my chemistry teacher roll his eyes. I rushed in three minutes late. The girl getting closer to me, smelling it.

Her hand, it circles around my twisted bun like a shark’s fin.

My body, it tightens because the hand there is not its hand.

Her hand pulling the hair down and her lip dropping when my hair did not spring back up because my hair does not spring back up. Her voice squeaking, inevitably, “why is your hair so fuzzy!” and it is not a question.

What was sent, what have I received?

“Dark and Lovely Moisture Seal No-Lye Relaxer System contains alkali. Please follow directions carefully to avoid skin and scalp burns, hair loss, hair breakage, and eye injury. Do not use if scalp is irritated or injured. Do not use Dark and Lovely Moisture Seal No-Lye Relaxer System on bleached hair or permanently colored hair that is breaking, splitting or otherwise damaged.”

Concerning black hair, Professor Ingrid Banks said: “For black women, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If you straighten your hair, you’re seen as selling out. But if you don’t straighten your hair, you’re seen as not practicing acceptable grooming practices.”

“I tried going natural but it was hard…my hair started growing out like an Afro…”

Who changes you and are you changed?

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

“Pain differs from the classical senses (hearing, smell, taste, touch, vision), because it is both a discriminative sensation and a graded emotional experience. Pain is termed nociceptive (nocer – to injure or to hurt in Latin), and nociceptive means sensitive to noxious stimuli. Noxious stimuli are stimuli that elicit tissue damage and activate nociceptors.” Nociceptors, a complicated labyrinth of bare nerve endings, are found in the skin.

My mother decided she wanted to do an experiment on me.

To her, my natural hair “wasn’t too bad,” so she never relaxed it. Every other Tuesday, up until I was in high school, my mother sat me on the floor and trapped my small body between her thighs. She did my hair. It hurt and I squirmed and sometimes she struck my back with the comb and sometimes she sang to me. Braids going back tightly up to the crown, and twists in the back so my hair swung. The style could last two weeks. For the first few days, when the style was still fresh, the skin on my nape stood taut from her pulling. My red scalp glittered bright with grease.

“The doll experiment involved an African-American child being presented with two dolls. One doll was white with yellow and the other was brown with black hair. The child was then asked questions inquiring as to which one they would play with, which one was the nice doll, which one looked bad. The experiment showed a clear preference for the white doll amongst all children in the study.”-The 1939 Clark Doll Experiment Contessa Gayles, a journalist, noticed a bald spot on her hairline. “Some serious dandruff and an annoyingly itchy scalp were cramping my style following my latest relaxer.”

But this isn’t the 20th century anymore: “It wasn’t because I heard a rallying cry, too revolutionary to ignore. No marches or riots led by rebels whose afros were accessorized with picks molded into the shape of the raised “black power” fist. She cut off her relaxed hair and is now growing out her natural hair.

She has “never been comfortable being categorized, corralled into a group.” Particularly not, “when it comes to her ethnic identity.”

What of the meanings, what of the meanings we brought?

What I remember most is how pink it was. Against my father’s wishes, my mother outfitted the small kitchen in our new house with rose countertops and rose hand towels.

Above the sink hung a plastic crucifix, painted in deep Rosa Mexicana. From up there, it “blessed us, O Lord, for these thy gifts which we were about to receive.” By the sink, there was a perpetually half-empty bottle of grapefruit soap. The stool cushions—not yet worn because we had not yet lived in that house—were generally green plaid. But even that polite design was striped with the color of carnations. Pinkness strikes you, the way it refuses to be red. All the while, it’s calming, neutralizing you so much that you barely notice the stink of burning scalp.

The blog UrbanBushBabes asks: “ARE YOU READY TO JOIN THE NATURAL HAIR MOVEMENT?” Years before he began signing his name “X,” Malcolm bought a can of Red Devil lye, two eggs, and two medium-sized potatoes. The supermarket trip couldn’t have cost him more than two dollars. Then he got a jar of Vaseline, a bar of soap, a

FEBRUARY 01 2013

wide-toothed plastic comb. An apron and a hose and gloves— these were made of rubber. The trip to the drugstore to buy these probably cost more. He met up with his friend Shorty, who rented a slip-shod room in his cousin’s apartment for six dollars a week.

“A jellylike, starchy-looking glop resulted from the lye and potatoes, and Shorty broke in the two eggs, stirring real fast—his own conked hair and dark face bent down close. The congolene turned pale yellowish. ‘Feel the jar,’ Shorty said.

I cupped my hand against the outside and snatched it away.

‘Damn right, it’s hot, that’s the lye,’ he said. ‘So you know it’s going to burn when I comb it in—it burns bad. But the longer you can stand it, the straighter the hair.’-The Autobiography of Malcolm X I remember that the hair on my sister’s nape is not as flat as my sister would like it. My mother bends down, smoothes a popsicle-stick’s worth of pink glop on the edge hair. The beady tufts go limp, almost immediately limp. Here, the kneeling mother.

Can you kill an already-dead thing?

Malcolm’s hair caught on fire. Once he steadied his trembling knees and sucked the mucus back up his nose, he dunked his head in the waiting washbasin. Then, using the mirror, Shorty shaped his silky sideburns all slick and Malcolm didn’t remember a thing.

“I always gotta tell them to keep still, these grown-ass women.

You move, I get some of it on your ear, it’s gonna burn. And it’s not gonna be my problem.” Alana says that most of the time, though, they listen.

Of the botched relaxing attempt, Malcolm said, “This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair.”

My sister isn’t “trying to look white,” she’s just “trying to look good.” “Natural” doesn’t look “natural” on her.

“Okay. You already know that scientists can detect DNA in a person’s hair. Now, researchers can use hair samples to trace a person’s movements in time and space. This has to do with subtle chemical differences in the water they drink. Scientists can now use hair to tell where you have been.” —Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition “The personal is political.” What Carol Hanisch means, I think, is something like this: A young girl chooses to play with one doll because she thinks it’s nicer or prettier than the other. A mother chooses to straighten one daughter’s hair while she does nothing to the other. A woman decides she is part of a movement and the other doesn’t care. A man dunks his burning head into a washbasin.

Who can send, and who can receive?

Hands soaked in the juice of mucilaginous herbs, laps opened to receive the waiting head, Yoruba mothers braided messages into their daughters’ hair. Sometimes they plaited in Spanish Moss to give the message lift.

FEATURES//08

INFANTICIDE THROUGH A G In the year 1198, there were a lot of babies in the River Tiber. Unmarried mothers had few choices beyond depositing their unwanted infants along the Roman waters.

The Tiber became a veritable Styx, newborns floating toward the underworld.

The ruota dei trovatelli was Pope Innocent III’s solution, a revolving door on the Santo Spirito Hospital in the Vatican into which mothers could deposit their babies, slide the wheel to the other side, and walk away anonymously. The babies entered the care of the church, assigned names like Proietti (“to throw away) or Esposito (“exposed”). All throughout Europe, merchants and missionaries installed these foundling wheels on the sides of orphanages and convents alike.

The problem of infanticide never fully faded, though, and problems arose on the other side of the wheel. In the mid-19th century, amidst a French recession, the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés (Hospital for Foundling Children) in Paris faced an influx of tens of thousands of newborn babies per year. Economic hardship means more unwanted babies—in Europe today, where children occupy 20 to 30 percent of average household income, the pattern is repeating. 1,200 abandoned infants in Greece and 750 in Italy in 2012 alone, a 20 percent increase from years past.

Where medieval mothers feared social stigma, many of these mothers simply lack the means to care for their children. And in order to meet a modern need, a modern technology has emerged in the “Baby Hatch.” On the outside of many European hospitals is a small incubator into which mothers can drop off their babies, signaling an alarm inside of the hospital to retrieve the newborn. 100 in Germany, 40 in Poland and Czech Republic, 10 in Italy.

Of course, the River Tiber is still not totally baby free—in February of last year, after fighting with his wife, a man grabbed their baby and tossed him into the water—but the baby hatch hopes to solve the abandonment problem altogether.

were only 914 girls for every 1,000 boys, a ratio that has been on the decline for the past ten years and counting.

It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of patriarchy, as the beloved son becomes the breadwinning father while the daughter assumes her domestic role from childhood through wifehood. If they are not abandoned at birth, these daughters are often poisoned or neglected; if not actively harmed, daughters are underfed, under-educated, and banished to the periphery of the family unit. As a result, prenatal sex determination has been outlawed since 1994 in the hopes of preventing gender-specific abortions.

India has had its own experiments with the baby hatch. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, a Cradle Baby Scheme (CBS) has been in operation for over 20 years.

New mothers can place their female babies “anonymously in cradles located in noon meal centres, PHCs [Primary Health Centers], selected orphanages and NGOs,” according to the United Nations Population Fund. CBS collected 2,410 baby girls between 2001 and 2007.

As it had for the Parisian hospital in the 1860s, the CBS scheme in Tamil Nadu puts major stress on the state to account for the babies it collects. It’s the classic dilemma of the Indian state—big problems and little money to solve them. And adding to the issue of childcare infrastructure is the lurking presence of baby trafficking networks. In 2001, a scandal erupted in the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh when several adoption agencies were charged with running a baby racket, selling female newborns for $15,000-$50,000 to parents abroad. The agencies acquired their babies for a few hundred rupees from mothers looking to relinquish their parental duties, according to the First Information Report (FIR) filed in Andhra Pradesh.

Workers forged documents, signatures, and even invented villages; there were occasions when a dead baby was still listed as alive so that when they found another close in age, there was no extra paperwork required. ten pound controversy

global babies

Infanticide is a global problem. In China, where a onechild policy has been in place since 1979, close to a million orphans are abandoned each year. In India, a similar number of babies are “missing.” Medical statistics are hard to come by, but headlines each day in the newspaper speak to the frequency. January 20: “New-born Baby Girl Found Abandoned.” January 21: “Abandoned Baby Found at St. Cruz.” January 25: “Abandoned Newborn Girl Dies in Gurgaon.”

The gender imbalance in the infanticide problem is evident. UNICEF reports provide unnerving statistics on Chinese infanticide: (i) Chinese girls are twice as likely to die within the first year as Chinese boys. (ii) Risk of death for the second girl is three times higher than that of the first one.

Meanwhile, the frequency of Indian female infanticide poses a significant demographic challenge. In 2011, there

09//NEWS

The harrowing tale of baby trafficking and its tangential relationship to the CBS scheme is one of the many controversial aspects of the baby hatch method. The CBS scheme, one argument goes, merely encourages the son preference, offering an easier, legal avenue for the disavowal of female children, creating a new underclass of female orphans. The state has a responsibility to encourage responsible, gender-neutral child rearing.

Other criticism centers on the rights of mother and child. On the former, many argue that the baby hatch encourages unsafe births, protecting the baby at the cost of the mother’s health, for whom no assistance is provided.

Baby abandonment is the effect, not the cause; the baby hatch is a misguided substitute for state assistance to struggling mothers, who should be encouraged to raise their own children. Moreover, while the anonymity of the baby hatch may curb abandonment, it also opens the door to the non-consensual disposal of the baby by the father or other relatives.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

GLOBAL LENS At the same time, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child openly advocated a full-scale ban on the baby hatch. While the practice is still outlawed in Britain, 11 of the European Union’s 27 countries support the baby hatch, which the U.N. claims to come in conflict with Articles 7 (“right to know and be cared for by his parents”), 8 (“right of the child to preserve his or her identity”), and even Article 6 (“every child has an inherent right to life”) of the charter, as the baby hatch supports unsafe birth methods. “It’s paradoxical that it’s okay for women to give up their babies by putting them in a box,” Committee member Maria Herczog told the Associated Press, “but if they were to have them in a hospital and walk away, that’s a crime.” the baby haven

In July 2000, Martha Cedeno found a baby in a cardboard box in her Providence driveway. A student at the University of Rhode Island, she quickly called the police, who arrived just in time to transport the baby to the Women and Infants Hospital on Plain Street. Luckily, the infant survived.

Cedeno and the story of the seven pound, three ounce boy was one of the main instances of baby abandonment that came before Rhode Island’s 2003 adoption of the Safe Haven policy. Today in Rhode Island, a mother can anonymously leave her baby at any hospital, EMS provider, fire station, or police department within 30 days of its birth. The newborns are then taken into the custody of Rhode Island’s Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), which works to find them a suitable home. This is the Ocean State’s particular brand of the Safe Haven laws—or Baby Moses laws—which offer anonymous baby drop-offs at various locations and with various durations across all 50 states.

Safe Haven seems to offer a solution to the European problem of Article 6: provide the anonymous avenue of the baby hatch with the medical care of a proper hospital. For Mike, a clinical social worker at the DCYF who asked the Independent to omit his last name, the Safe Haven policy “has certainly not encouraged baby abandonment. It has created a route for mothers who cannot take care of their kids.”

Mike thinks it’s really an issue of cost—“for society and certainly for the infant.” On the former, the Safe Haven policy allows a mother who does not feel capable of responsibly raising a child to put him or her into proper care, avoiding the psychological trauma of a childhood of neglect and, hopefully, creating a productive and healthy citizen. The reality is slightly less pretty; foster care does not always solve these problems and often exacerbates them.

Yet on a very basic level, Mike believes that Safe Haven is a good alternative to “what medical treatment would cost for an infant who is left alone in a northern climate.”

Nonetheless, the Safe Haven policy is not without its own controversies. In the summer of 2008, word spread about a new Nebraska law that allowed for the disposal of

FEBRUARY 01 2013

by David Adler

illustration by Lizzie Davis

any “child,” which, unspecified in the law, opened the doors to anyone under the age of 18. Disgruntled parents took advantage of the new Safe Haven policy, and by November, a total of 38 non-infant minors had been handed off to the state. “They were tired of their parenting role,” said Todd Landry from Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services. The state quickly moved to amend the law, and now has a 30-day cap like Rhode Island. Yet the Nebraska case illustrates well Safe Haven’s deficiencies. The public portrait of Nebraska’s “tired” parents reflects the state preoccupation with the baby, that sacred item in the American imaginary. When it’s the fetus at risk, Safe Haven is an ally to the conservative; once the baby is delivered— or 30 days after, Nebraska decided—it’s a liability to the taxpayer’s pocket, or worse, a threat to the sanctity of the family unit. At the hearings held at the Nebraska legislature following the revision, parent testimony pointed to the state’s failure to offer psychiatric services for struggling children and their parents as one of the main reasons so many families took advantage of the loophole in the first place.

That’s exactly why Stephanie Terry, Associate Director of Child Protective Services in Rhode Island, thinks that Safe Haven has been such a success in the Ocean State.

“Since we adopted the policy, we have had two instances of true Safe Haven babies left at fire stations,” she told the Independent. “I would attribute that to the fact that we have a lot of prevention services.” According to Terry, the DCYF works hard to assist mothers of infants and noninfants alike to take care of their children and, if possible, to help them stay together. Even after the DCYF collects the babies, they “advertise for the parent just in case they change their mind.” Rhode Island’s two Safe Haven cases, Terry assured me, “were adopted, and they are happy and healthy.”

Down at the Providence police station, few policemen seemed to know about the policy at all. “Can I drop off my 45-year-old wife?” cracked a policeman behind the counter, as the station erupted with laughter and a series of highfives. “But seriously, we would just take ‘em over to DCYF, and let them do their work.”

On a global scale, the Safe Haven policy offers a valuable case study. As a legal battle looms over the conflict between the U.N. Committee and European Union member states, Safe Haven could present a feasible compromise, a rare moment when the E.U. looks to American welfare programs for a progressive solution.

“Look, nobody’s perfect,” Mike admitted over the phone.

“We all just want to keep these babies safe.” In this, Safe Haven seems to have succeeded. david adler b’14 floats toward the underworld.

NEWS//10

CINEMATIC SUFFRAGE

Sweating Through the Oscars

by Claudia Norton illustration by Carter Davis

Oscar nominations were announced earlier this month, and some people care which films win. Others are more interested in why certain films may win. According to the Academy, voting members “make their choices based solely on the artistic and technical merits of the eligible films and achievements,” but that’s not actually true.

Last year for a Social Psychology class, Adam Morris ’15 analyzed films nominated for “Best Picture” between the years of 1929 and 2011. He measured each film’s length against its success in winning the award. He found that 22.6 percent of longer films (longer than the median length of 120 minutes) have won “Best Picture” while only 11.1 percent of shorter films have won the award. Morris, who is pursuing an Sc.B. in Psychology, told the Independent that this finding is highly statistically significant and that he believes this discrepancy may be connected to a psychological model called effort justification. Effort justification is a cognitive process that rationalizes the exertion of effort in the face of minimal gain or even displeasure.

When a person acts contrary to her beliefs or emotions, she may experience discordance that social psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Because the experience of cognitive dissonance is unpleasant, the mind searches for a way to make things add up: a person’s beliefs change to align with her actions. In this faulty cognitive math, social psychologists find effort justification.

An extreme example of effort justification in artistic evaluation is Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. Heinously long at three hours and two minutes, the film won the 1979 Oscar for Best Picture. One year later Cimino debuted his latest film Heaven’s Gate to executives at his studio. It ran five hours and twenty-five minutes but was shortened to three hours and thirty-nine minutes. The movie flopped. A review in the New York Times made clear that, “for all of the time and money that went into it, it’s jerry-built, a ship that slides straight to the bottom at its christening.” Apparently there is a limit to how much effort justification can delude a viewer.

What makes effort justification so philosophically intriguing is how quiet it is. Professor Fiery Cushman, principal investigator in Brown’s Moral Psychology Research Laboratory and Morris’s professor, told the Independent that “processes like effort justification seem to be largely automatic, and to occur without our conscious awareness.”

One illustration of this phenomenon was found in the 1959 study The Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group (Aronson, E & Mills, J.). The study involved female subjects who participated in a discussion group on the psychology of sex. Some women were not subject to initiation into the discussion group. Others were asked to take a reading test which was expected to cause them mild embarrassment because it required that they read aloud words like “virgin” and “petting.” A third group was asked to read aloud words like “cock” and “screw,” as the researchers expected that this ritual would cause them severe embarrassment. After each subject listened to a simulated dull discussion about the sexual behavior of non-human animals, she rated her enjoyment of the discussion. Women who were subject to mild or no initiation rated their experiences roughly equal, while

FEBRUARY 01 2013

women subject to a severely embarrassing initiation rated their experience of the group much higher. The outcome of the study suggested that people who experience more discomfort in attaining a goal or completing an activity value the goal or activity more than people who experience less discomfort and achieve the same outcome. Morris told the Independent that the principle also applies to fraternity and sorority initiations involving hazing. He also made it clear that his Oscar findings don’t imply causality—that the Academy doesn’t necessarily vote for longer movies more often because they are longer—but that the correlation stands nevertheless.

Movie length isn’t the only thing that requires effort on the part of a viewer. Boring movies and emotionally difficult movies also put stress on an audience, and perhaps, as a result, viewers may feel a subliminal push to justify spending two hours of their time focused on something unpleasant. This could explain why people value the Academy Awards ceremony itself. Additionally—according to my calculations at least—the principle of effort justification may not just apply to the work an audience puts in to watching a movie, but may also apply to the perceived efforts of those involved with production. Perhaps viewers, subconsciously wanting to save a cast and crew and production team from embarrassment, evaluate films as more enjoyable based on the energy and resources that went into the project. It could also be that perception of an actress’s effort effects an audience’s evaluation of a film. The Academy tends to award actresses and actors who undertake some sort of radical and unpleasant state change in order to play a character. Proof of this fact can be found in Robert De Niro’s 1980 Award for Best Actor in Raging Bull, a film for which De Niro had to gain 60 pounds to play a retired boxer. The Academy also justified Hillary Swank’s efforts by awarding her Best Actress in 2004 for getting into peak physical condition and then embodying a quadriplegic. She also won Best Actress for her role as a trans man in Boys Don’t Cry. While transforming one’s body takes sustained

and intense effort, understanding and mimicking a new mind state is a feat of emotional and intellectual effort-an effort which Dustin Hoffman was rewarded for after his performance as an autistic savant in Rain Man. It seems that Tom Hanks has cracked the code, having won Best Actor twice: first for his role as a gay AIDS patient in Philadelphia, and then for playing Forrest Gump, a developmentally disabled southern man. Charlize Theron also won an Oscar for her transformation in into a world-weary prostitute-serial killer with “bad teeth” for Monster. There’s no doubt that it takes great dedication to inhabit the mind and body of another, especially another in the throes of suffering. With avoidance of negative emotions or discomfort as a common human pattern, maybe we reward actors who are brave enough to dive into and face suffering—to voluntarily become one who suffers.

It has been suggested before that the Academy awards actors and movies that deal with difficult subjects. Could it be that we empathize with actors who put in the work to transform themselves, inferring the amount of suffering they must have endured in order to produce their work, and reward them with accolades regardless of their acting skill. Really, how good can acting get? We know if an actor did her job or if we liked a movie by evaluating our emotional state during or after viewing, but if our emotions are being intercepted and altered, or even determined by the subconscious forces at play in effort justification, the validity of the Oscar judging criteria is called into question.

The implications of effort justification on emotional experiences and meaning making may be foundational to our notions of effective narrative and artwork. Maybe we like heroes whose journeys are stressful enough for us to reward them. Maybe that finally explains Ulysses. claudia norton b’14 doesn’t like movies unless they’re pornos.

ARTS//11

FEBRUARY 01 2013

SCIENCE// 12

DYNAMIC RANGE

The Politics of Popular Dance Culture

by Greg Nissan illustration by Robert Sandler

This is not about you. You will not Travolta across the dance floor, the neon lights on the lapels of your white suit.

No one will notice the new way you bump your hips back and forth. No crowd will circle around you as you shimmy from side to side. This is faceless, collective movement.

Popular dance culture has a new home, Electronic Dance Music (EDM), and its most salient trends— commercial success, streamlined structure, homogenized rhythms, and mammoth club gigs and festivals—are manifesting themselves in the way bodies are moving. In a GQ piece about Electric Daisy Carnival, a three-day Dionysian lingerie party of 300,000, Gideon Lewis-Kraus describes the communal aspect of the dance: “Mainly what a DJ seems to do is egg us on to a collective dance victory, which he celebrates by putting his arms up in a great V, usually just after he’s pumped his right fist for a bit.” It’s now a dance that you can enter and leave at ease, in which your own body’s motion is just a piece of the sweat-drenched, drugged-out mass. The dancing is characteristically done in conjunction—bouncing in unison as the bass drops, each rave-goer mashed into the audience’s pulp.

According to Forbes, EDM is an estimated four billion dollar industry. Its abduction by the major music

13//ARTS

industry was completed when Skrillex, the spectacled, waifish bass wiz, won three Grammys. It’s the only sector of music whose prospects are rising, as the rest of the industry languishes in the mp3 age. While the ubiquity of mp3s has hurt the traditional record giants (illegal downloads, a shift away from albums toward singles), these factors lend themselves well to a culture that relies on constant remixing, where new tracks are posted to sites like Soundcloud every day. In addition, the start up costs are relatively small: a laptop, mostly pirated music software, and some headphones. All that money comes largely from from touring. The tours cost promoters less than the traditional rock set up, as they involve fewer personnel (Swedish House Mafia is the largest popular DJ group, with three members, and even that number is rare) and don’t require staggering tour busses to carry expensive gear and roadies. DJs can get from show to show more quickly. Show up, unpack your gear, plug in the laptop, go. This recent success is plastering itself onto the bodies of fans. EDM’s commercial success has led it to bigger and bigger venues, and the way people dance—synchronized head bops, arms pointed up, the moment of eerie stillness before the bass drops, the jumping organism—matches the space in which the dancing takes place. In his essay “The Pleasure of Popular Dance,” Robert Crease explores dance’s relationship to space: “By popular dancing I mean the kind in which people dance amongst themselves, spontaneously, without professional training, in ordinary spaces without sharp borders between participants and spectators… one gives oneself over to… a gestalt, an entire situation, a setting in which the people, lighting, environment, and ambiance foster an informal moving atmosphere.” Fans often cite festivals like Ultra Music Festival in Miami or Electric Zoo in New York as the apex of the new rave culture experience. These gargantuan festivals are so crowded that to dance individually is literally impossible—

either run with the group, or don’t join the stampede.

Isn’t this the lost ’60s ideal, though? A gathering that obliterates the individual, that celebrates peace, love, and narcotics? Aren’t these next-to-nude neon-lovers and their bejeweled bodies carrying the torch of Woodstock?

Nouveau Hippies? At first glance the EDM aesthetic seems to promote these utopian ideals. The crowd undulates together like an amoeba, hops up and down as one body.

To lose oneself in the human sea at these mega-festivals, in the bodily comfort of being one of many, might sound appealing, but this is a music sub-industry that aggressively standardizes its sound and style, forging a frightening mass aesthetic in which everything is neon, everything is instagrammed, and every rhythm sounds the same.

While some of the sounds produced by the giant DJs are innovative, the forms are quite conservative; every EDM pop hit follows a rigid structure, surrounding the build-up and the drop.

In a recent study of contemporary pop music, a group of scientists and academics, Joan Serra et al. analyzed a huge database of songs in terms of pitch, timbre, and loudness, to see whether pop songs sounded more alike today than they did in past generations. The findings showed an overwhelming homogenization of pop music. The analysis of pitch served to compare melodies, and melodies are closely tied to the rhythms of songs and the way we

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

dance to them. Almost every top 40 song gets the EDM treatment—the four on the floor stomping bass drum, the bone-shaking synth bass, the ethereal synth wash before a chorus that makes you feel like you’re standing on a mountaintop, yodeling something in a lost but magnificent language. The new unifying production trends are leading to a loud, sterile march. This rhythmic compression, a departure from the diverse array of syncopated or intricate rhythms that dominated the past half-century of dance music in genres like funk or soul, coincides with the compression of dance. The dance becomes a coordinated, simple, and repetitive motion with everything lining up to the beat. EDM is no utopian music ideal; the flowered masses are left with the skeleton of dance’s old rhythms, as evidenced by the singular body of dancers that amasses at these festivals Serra’s work on loudness poses another question, especially in light of the debauchery of EDM festivals—is the music influencing the drugs (MDMA is the marquee drug of the moment) or are the drugs influencing the music?

Many of the production trends of popular dance music are related to purely physical sensations. If you’ve ever stood in front of a subwoofer, you know that bass isn’t just about the melody, but the feeling of large sound waves vibrating through your body. As songs are produced at louder and louder volumes, this is a measure of relative, not absolute volume. No matter how loud you crank up a Joni Mitchell song, your brain will perceive a David Guetta club banger as inherently louder. Molly, the movement’s drug, heightens music’s physical impact. Are people taking so much Molly because the music is perfect for it, or is the music responding to the culture’s drug du jour and shirking certain creative elements in favor of speakers large and loud

FEBRUARY 01 2013

enough to shake your body into ecstasy? As we become more accustomed to the sensations of loudness, it seems less likely that the trend will be reversed.

As dance is compressed so is our definition of dance music. It becomes synonymous with the tank tops, vague lyrics about saving the world and, of course, the impending bass drop—a moment so seemingly addictive that it is eliminating other ways of bringing a song to new heights.

The form of a dance hit is so conservative (build-up, drop) that it seems to undercut the sonic advancements these DJs are achieving. The rampant sub genre-ism of EDM makes this even clearer. As Lewis-Kraus got the opportunity to interview a rising DJ, Sander van Roorn, the DJ’s publicist instructed him to make no queries about genre.

Lewis-Kraus finds a scary explanation for this: “House is ascendant; trance has been sliding out of fashion, and a rising DJ such as Sander isn’t keen on being identified with last year’s category, even if the sounds themselves remain debatably distinguishable.” This genre-squashing, this narrowing of what is popular dance music and what is yesterday’s fad, mirrors the compression standardization of rhythm, of space, of individual dance itself. Dance music that doesn’t have an ejaculatory bass drop, that doesn’t seem arena-ready, is getting pushed to the sidelines. Perhaps dance music needs room in the conglomerate sound of the

world’s top DJs (DJ Magazine’s yearly ranked list of the world’s top DJs is taken entirely seriously and often cited, as if this is a pure measurement of talent and not style or fame) for other genres, many of them electronic and technically EDM, which are not receiving the attention or fratty fist pumps that the rest of the movement is. With EDM’s popular takeover, however, it seems as if it will claim the “dance music” title for itself for some time.

It’s easy to get distracted by the bright lights. The spectacle. But this mass movement—both of culture and body—features a rigidly controlled aesthetic of motion, even as it masquerades as a hedonistic celebration of the senses. It might be both. This story seems to be playing out like others we’ve seen. In the ’60s, too, lofty selling points like “love” and “fun” and “peace” were turned around on those who coined them. The importance of social networking to the EDM generation, where mixes are constantly recycled and remixed, suggests a specious democracy at the heart of this giant “scene.” But while the Internet has made it easier to put music into the world, social media sites also make it that much easier for advertisers and promoters to know exactly what people want and, in response, to exaggerate those trends until that’s all we see. Pop music and creativity are not always in opposition, but what we hear as a rally cry to dance sounds more like a military march to me: One-two-whoop-whoop.

According to Forbes, greg nissan b’15 is an estimated four billion dollar industry.

ARTS//14

IT COMES FROM L a conversation with George interview by Drew Dickerson illustration by Lizzie Davis George Saunders is the man of the proverbial literary hour after the January 8th publication of his book Tenth of December—which isn’t to say that he wasn’t already well acquainted with media attention. His debut collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline was a 1996 finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and nearly all his works have fast become bookshelf fixtures. The George Saunders setting is often bizarre, the plot often fantastical, but the George Saunders sentence is without fail unimpeachable.

It necessitates itself. It has a unique and matchless rhythm that paradoxically works to serve as an example of how all sentences should be written. The man behind that rhythm remains remarkably nice. We talk here about syntax and whether or not there’s such a thing as a George Saunders intellectual project.

The Independent: It seems like voice is a big preoccupation in your early career. You speak often about a turn, after which you started being able to trust your own voice.

At the same time you attribute a lot of your originality as a writer to your background in science and geophysics. What role can education play in the development of a particular literary style?

George Saunders: That’s a huge question. I mean really probably a million different paths. I think maybe if you take a young person who’s got talent and interest in writing—or any art probably—whatever you put in front of them they’re going to assimilate somehow, right? So if it’s reading the classics, that’s good. A summer job at a landfill, that’s going to get in there. So I think, for me, one of the reassuring things about someone starting out in writing is that you don’t have to carefully design a career. You just have to say: “Whatever happens to me, that’s going to end up feeding my work, informing it.” And ultimately—this is kind of mysterious maybe—ultimately you’re going to become the writer you were meant to become. All these little stepping stones and obstructions and stuff are just kind of grist for the mill. So for me to take that kind of unconventional path—one thing it did for sure was give me access to a lot of unusual voices early and I don’t know if they’re unliterary but they’re literary in an unusual way. To work in the oil fields and to do a lot of the jobs I did, you heard highly organized dictions and syntactical speech that were very, very functional. But they also, to anybody else, would have been nonsense. So that made me think a little differently about what style might be or what poetry might be. You have these kinds of overflowed dictions and then say, “Okay, those are totally offbeat or out of the running for so-called literary voices” or “I’ve got to learn to hear them a little bit differently.”

Indy: Given that formation of “any background is going to serve a mature voice,” is there any danger in the increasing prevalence of the MFA workshop of a sort of meta-writerly feedback loop?

15//INTERVIEWS

GS: I think there’s always that danger. And I think any good workshop would take that into account. That fear has been with us. It was there when I started going to a workshop in—what was it?—’85 or ’86. I think a good workshop leader understands that danger. So I don’t worry about that too much. Mostly our students, by the time they get to us, they’ve already had a lot of input. They’ve already had some life under their belts. So I know people talk about that and I don’t quite feel it as a thing, at Syracuse anyway.

Part of the job is just to make sure that shit doesn’t happen.

I think that means just calling yourself on your own nonsense. There is a little danger, I always call it The Best Red Headed Short Stop on the Little League Team Syndrome, which is you’ve got this closed group of people and it’s fairly easy to become a celebrity within that small group for some small thing that you do. So part of a teacher’s job is to just keep reminding everybody that there’s a bigger world out there and you might be writing the best comic, suburban novel about a dad who’s a tollbooth collector but if you look up there’s probably somebody else doing something very similar in another program. So I think that kind of falls under the responsibility of the teacher, to keep saying, “It’s not just us twelve. There’s a bigger world out there.”

Indy: Maybe this is an obnoxious question, but just to return to your own work: Do you proceed from premise or language in writing a story?

GS: No, that’s a great question—not obnoxious at all. My usual answer, and I think this is the most truthful answer, is that it comes from language. I found out from about an eight year period of barking up the wrong tree that if I start from premise then I tend to just execute premise and things are not fun or exciting. So then, when I was working for an engineering company and writing that first book, and partly because of the trauma of not writing anything good for eight years but also because of the setting—I was at work, there wasn’t much time, and the time came in small blocks—I kind of just stumbled on this approach of trying to make a sentence that I could live with. I often would get one that was kind of all right and then get hauled away, come back, and try to get two more. I found that in that way you actually can generate plot and character and theme and all that stuff if you keep your eye on the idea that stories proceed linearly. They proceed a sentence at a time.

That’s the way you’re going to experience a story by Tolstoy.

So somehow keeping that in mind, I think when we are intellectuals and we want to do big things in a work, we tend to say, “Yeah, sure. A sentence at a time. You bet. But what are my larger themes?” And for me anyway, I’ve found that if I keep the language first, the themes will appear and they’ll be more complicated and better than I could have come up with. Now having said that, that’s an approximation of an approach and I know sometimes in the middle of a sentence or a period of language-fun a plot event will pop. You will go: “Oh, this is about class.” So then it is, conditionally. “Now let’s keep going with the sentences.”

As you’re going deeper into a story, there’s your awareness of what the story would be about to a first time reader.

There’s your desire to sort of puncture that or complicate it. There’s this growing sense that there’s another thing the story might be about that you don’t know yet. But I would say, to go back to your question, for me it’s always an intuitive thing rather than a cerebral thing or a conceptual thing. At my best it’s more about imagining a person in a real situation and letting it unfold and then trying to put all those concerns about politics and other things off to the side for as long as I can.

Indy: Setting aside that intuitiveness, do you think it’s a mistake to read your stories allegorically? Is a story like “Adams” an allegory? Or do you think that the temptation on the part of the reader to read a sort of code into your work is a function of your voice?

GS: Well, it’s okay to read it however. This method, hopefully, will afford a lot of pleasures for readers. The approach might be intuitive, but at the end of the day I’m in charge.

In [“Adams”] in particular, that one was definitely conceived of as a half-assed allegory. It was just an experiment.

I think I was feeling a lot of frustration about the war.

And it was written maybe right before the war was really savage and it was still possible that there would be weapons of mass destruction found. And there was this liberal paranoia or split, to say, “We shouldn’t be doing this but if they do find a full warehouse of mustard gas, maybe we should’ve.” So I was really confused about that and in that confusion I thought: “Well, I’ll make a little scale mode.”

And of course the hope is that in the process it becomes more than that—that, at the very least, your short story shows you moral-ethical places that you hadn’t considered.

And that one, I think it spins off to be something more general about violence and about being afraid. That was maybe the one time in my writing career where I set out to make an allegory.

Indy: Do you think your work implies a politics?

GS: From the kind of questions I get, I think the answer is yes. But my hope is that, if taken as a whole—and I think this new book is going to help with this—I’d rather have it not imply a politics but a kind of… I don’t know. I was going to say a moral stance but that always ends up sounding preachy. I think it implies a relation to the world, maybe, but I’m not sure what that is. I hope that if I write another ten books that relation to the world will continue to change and refine and stuff. When a person writes a lot, the things that come out are always a little bit misshapen. In other words, you think you have this intention to be this kind of writer. But your talent, such as it is, might not always cooperate. So you go to do Thing A and Thing B comes out. And, for me, I have this thing about intuitiveness and Chekhovian open-heartedness but I know that my stories are doing something a little freakier than that. They just do.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LANGUAGE Saunders

And I would have a whole shtick for you about how politics is not fiction’s job and yet I know that my stories seem to advocate a kind of liberal-humanist something-or-other.

would move towards the ceiling as they got better and better. Does that compartmentalization lend itself to humorous writing? Or maybe vice versa.

Indy: So there is a Saunders project, but it’s more a trajectory at the moment than anything else.

GS: There’s a similar story about Isaak Babel. His mistress said she didn’t really know what he was doing, but he had this table with a bunch of different pages on there. He would walk around the house and as he walked he would dart in and write something on one of the pages and it seemed to matter which page he wrote it on. She couldn’t figure out the details. I mean, for me, maybe it’s not even restricted to humor writing because there’s something in my way of thinking where prose is like rhetorical nuggets.

A true paragraph block belongs together. It does a certain work. So, in a way, you can just concentrate on that true paragraph block, make it do whatever it wants to do, and then later you can figure out where it optimally goes. So it’s

GS: Yeah, and I hope that I won’t know what it is ever. The project is to be as deeply engaged in whatever story I’m working on at that time and keep pushing and pushing and see if it’ll yield a little more than I thought it would. At some point you take 12 of those or whatever and put them in a book. There’s some selection there but that selection is pretty intuitive, like assembling an album. You just want it to work as a functional unit. So the project is really kind of, within my head, to try to hurry up and be the best writer I can be—which is not unrelated to being the best person I can be. Because I feel like, as I go through these books, my writing self is finally starting to get somewhat close to the person I feel I am in terms of an expansiveness and kindness and a patient narrative position. I always felt that way as a person, but you have to get your chops up to speed, so now, at 54, I’m finally starting to get in the ballpark where I think I could represent almost any human being with a certain amount of sympathy. I can make these big crashing situations, but it’s taken me longer than I thought. So I’m really just kind of in a race to keep ascending this ladder of my own potential. Not so much in terms of success as in getting the person that I feel I am at heart on the page somehow.

the idea that the section would have to work line-to-line, but also that it would be needed somewhere. That kind of double functionality is what I think really causes prose to light up. It’s almost like that old Lite-Brite game. If you put the peg in, it lights up. So that atomism’s a good way of putting it. Sometimes you’re best to think of a bit of prose as just being in and of itself and you don’t know quite what it does yet. I’ve even had it where I’ll have a really nice section that I really like and I go, “You know what? You’re good but you don’t belong in this story that I’m writing.”

You pop it out and you put it on the side and it starts to kind of vibrate on its own and it generates its own story.

Indy: Right. You seem to have this ethic of extemporaneousness and then you also talk a lot about your incubation period as an early writer or a non-writer.

GS: Yeah. And also, in those stories, the aim is to make them seem spontaneous, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of rewriting to do that. So my early drafts often seem really stiff and written. But over the hundreds of drafts it comes to be loose enough to feel a little bit more like a spoken thing. I think there’s a lot of—I always heard this when I was younger and I didn’t really get it—this trope of a writer’s working while he’s sitting and looking out the window. And I was sort of like: “Yeah, he’s not working—he’s looking out the window.” But now I can see there’s a lot of subconscious activity going on and you can’t rush it and it presents itself. You just have to see it. It might have taken you a year off or some really disappointing failure in a book or in a period of your life to get that. And the second part is to get that confidence to say “Okay, somehow I just wrote three good pages. That’s never happened before. I’ll take it.”

Indy: You’re talking about stories and sentences as these discrete chunks. It seems to me that funny writers—their process seems to lend itself to a sort of atomism. You hear about notecards with Nabokov. There’s that story about Wodehouse where he would have pages on his wall that he

FEBRUARY 01 2013

INTERVIEWS//16

TOFFEE

by Edward Friedman

There were three things: the first was standing in the ocean up to his shoulders and the water was warm and the deep purple sky and deep black water ran together ahead of them in an invisible horizon and Daniel said “Don’t you get the feeling that something terrible is about to happen?”

The next was three weeks later in a little Twin Otter plane. He looked out the window and down on bright green foothills at the periphery of the valley. The hills were terraced for growing rice and from the plane the terracing looked like the contour lines of a topographic map, stretched and inflated into life.

They wore cotton balls in their ears, which the flight attendant had handed around at the beginning of the flight along with a basket of also-little caramel candies. Still the roar of the engines and their propellers filled the cabin and his head, so when they landed in the dusty airport the hum of the luggage truck sounded delicate and the noise from the abutting road seemed further away than it was.

Finally, another week after that came the third.

As the jeep wound through the early sunset, up the asphalt strewn with switchbacks, he thought about his father’s death—the early return home; a month spent with his aunt and cousins in their little corner of Colorado. Her: quiet, sad, and loving. Little towheaded Zeke and Hannah didn’t know

17// LITERARY

what to do. He was up crying one night and Hannah came downstairs in pajamas and sat on the couch beside him and wrapped him up in her arms, and they sat there together while he cried. Long walks alone and other things alone.

climb into the back with them and squeeze along the facing benches, pushing his and Daniel’s ribs and upper arms into the back of the second row seat. He fingered the toffee in his pants with his backpack in his lap.

As the sun sank through the gauzy air over the flat expanse behind them, the light got oranger and softer and the green of the overhanging jungle went purple while the foliage thinned.

Halfway up the hillside or mountain, one of the plump older women—she sat at the passenger door of the front seat—began to vomit out the window, pulling him back down into the car. Not long after, the driver stopped at a cluster of buildings on the roadside to hose down the side panel.

They arrived in the town, shouldered their bags and asked for directions. It was the first night of the festival of lights.

Children and their parents stood with sparklers in the streets laughing and screaming and shooting tiny flames into the smoky night. The meandering cobbled roads led uphill with concrete facades looming on either side, trapping the smoke and sulfur. Packs of teenagers ran by in both directions, setting off fireworks that exploded with the sound of a gunshot.

Daniel cursed each time.

They ordered tea at one of the places and stood by the back of their jeep to drink it and smoke a cigarette. Flecks of greenish rice swam past their feet in the hose’s runoff. He went to pay for the tea and buy two pieces of toffee. The young proprietress smiled and gave him the toffee for free. Her face was semi-round with light, smooth skin, cheekbones high under bright brown eyes. He smiled back, feeling the best he’d felt in days, and pocketed one of the toffees.

Once in the mountains, the human light became brighter than the sky. The jeep wound through towns teetering on the hillside. It stopped to pick up more passengers who would

They found a place to stay and were tired enough to not eat.

He closed his eyes and listened to the booms while Daniel breathed heavily with his mouth and shuddered in his sleep.

Nothing terrible happened, really. He left the candy in his pocket and it melted into the seam. Prodding for a quarter or pen, he found it the following spring—wrapper long gone and dusted with lint—and picked at it while thinking about the girl from the store.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Follow the Leader clean your head

HOW TO CUT OUT YOUR ERASE HEAD: 1. hit the eject button. 2. feel around inside your tape deck for a small lever on the top left. 3. hold it down and press record/play. 3. two heads will spring up to meet you. the one on the right is the tape head. you’re going to want to keep that. the smaller one on the left is the erasehead. 4. sever it.

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 1 beekeeping classes // uri, kingston

Early morning. Buzz buzz. Hey honey, what’s up? Who cares, I’m going to start beekeeping. Wear white, and after a while, start liking it. Beginner’s classes meet once a week. $65.

RIBeekeeper.org.

big book sale // weaver library, east providence

Browsing titles, finding gems. Everything < $1; everything benefits library community programs. February 1&2, 9AM5PM, February 3, 1AM-5PM.

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 2 curatorial practices // bannister gallery, ric What was the curator? A panel of curators and artists contemplate. Presented by the Art League of Rhode Island.

11AM.

ri brew fest // pawtucket armory, pawtucket

The great international(?) brew festival! Unlimited sampling!

One hundred styles of beer to taste! Complimentary pint glasses! Limited VIP passes! 1PM-4PM, 5PM-8PM. Regular Admission: $45; VIP: $75; DD: $15 (complimentary water & soft drinks).

little ships // uss constitution museum, boston

The first day of the 34th Annual Ship Model Show. Celebrate intricacy with the masters. This year’s show features over 50 models of all sizes and a special section on the War of 1812. 10AM-5PM.

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 3 true hughes // metcalf auditorium, 20 n. main st., providence

Eighteenth annual Langston Hughes community poetry reading, with jazz accompaniment and a reception. Maybe refreshments. 1PM.

MONDAY FEBRUARY 4 the view from india // pembroke hall, room 305, brown university

Listen to the Indian Ambassador to the US, Nirupama Rao, and Christina Paxton talk about India and the US. Count how many times they use the word “pivot” ;). 5:30-7PM.

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 5 i heart providence // city hall, providence

An outwardly expressed who’s-who celebration of people’s love of Providence. Will it be a parade? Will it be televised?

It has everything you want: complimentary hors d’oeuvres, drinks, live music, 6PM – 8PM. And an after party.

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 6 styleweek northeast // the biltmore, providence Tents! Cameras! Fashion! As usual the Accessory Showcase will be held on both the 17th and 18th floor of The Biltmore, showcasing the hottest trends in accessories for the hottest prices. Tickets online. styleweeknortheast.com.

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 7 the sky is the limit // the watson institute, brown university, providence

Manifest destiny: onwards and up. A guy who knows stuff about NASA will talk about the errors and dangers of space expansion. Too bad we’re all out of space shuttles. 5PM.

week of february 1st - 7th k wee this stery i in l 979

1 is arst y he patt sed from relea rison p

invisible

// cinemas 16, providence place mall

Premiere of Invisible, a documentary chronicling the underground world of prostitution and addiction in Providence. $10. 7PM.

_______________________________________ IN THE KNOW?

e.g. how to grow a venus fly-trap

EMAIL LISTTHEINDY@GMAIL.COM