The College Hill Independent — Vol 49 Issue 5

Elena

Masthead

MANAGING

Jolie

Plum

Luca

WEEK

Ilan Brusso

Ben Flaumenhaft

ARTS

Beto Beveridge

Nan Dickerson

Paulina Gąsiorowska

EPHEMERA

Anji Friedbauer

Selim Kutlu

Sabine Jimenez-Williams

FEATURES

Riley Gramley

Angela Lian

Talia Reiss

LITERARY

Sarkis Antonyan

Georgia Turman

METRO

Cameron Leo

Lily Seltz

METABOLICS

Brice Dickerson

Nat Mitchell

Daniel Zheng

SCIENCE + TECH

Emilie Guan

Everest Maya-Tudor

Emily Vesper

SCHEMA

Lucas Galarza

Ash Ma

WORLD

Aboud Ashhab

Ivy Rockmore

DEAR INDY

Kalie Minor

BULLETIN BOARD

Qiaoying Chen

Gabrielle Yuan

DESIGN EDITORS

April S. Lim

Andrew Liu

Anaïs Reiss

DESIGNERS

Mary-Elizabeth Boatey

Jolin Chen

Sejal Gupta

Kay Kim

Minah Kim

Seoyeon Kweon

Saachi Mehta

Tanya Qu

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Rachel Shin

COVER COORDINATORS

Kian Braulik

Brandon Magloire

STAFF WRITERS

Layla Ahmed

Tanvi Anand

Hisham Awartani

Nura Dhar

Keelin Gaughan

Lily Ellman

David Felipe

Audrey He

Martina Herman

Elena Jiang

Daniel Kyte-Zable

Emily Mansfield

Nadia Mazonson

Coby Mulliken

Daphne Mylonas

Naomi Nesmith

Caleb Rader

William Roberts

Caleb Stutman-Shaw

Natalie Svob

Tarini Tipnis

Ange Yeung

Peter Zettl

COPY CHIEF

Samantha Ho

COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS

Justin Bolsen

Jackie Dean

Jason Hwang

Avery Liu

Becca Martin-Welp

Lila Rosen

Bardia Vincent

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Julia Cheng

Izzy Roth-Dishy

ILLUSTRATORS

Mia Cheng

Anna Fischler

Mekala Kumar

Mingjia Li

Ellie Lin

Cindy Liu

Ren Long

Benjamin Natan

Jessica Ruan

Jackson Ruddick

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Meri Sanders

Sofia Schreiber

Elliot Stravato

Luna Tobar

Catie Witherwax

Lily Yanagimoto

Alena Zhang

Nicole Zhu

WEB EDITOR

Eleanor Park

WEB DESIGNERS

Kenneth Anderson

Mai-Anh Nguyen

Annika Singh

Brooke Wangenheim

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Imran Hussain

Sabine Jimenez-Williams

Kalie Minor

Nat Mitchell

Eurie Seo

Emma Zwall

FINANCIAL COORDINATOR

Simon Yang

SENIOR EDITORS

Arman Deendar

Angela Lian

Lily Seltz

MVP April & Anaïs

MISSION STATEMENT

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

*Our Beloved Staff

Week in FAKE OUT

( TEXT LANDIN BEAN

DESIGN MARY-ELIZABETH BOATEY ILLUSTRATION ZOE RUDOLPH-LARREA )

c Jeesus! At least, that’s what I said when I rolled out of bed and stubbed my big one (that’s what I call my big toe) on a block of aged Jarlsberg. Ever since Roommate went AWOL, the nights have been long and lonely, the mornings straight-up cheese. At least, that’s how I’m seeing it. Yeah, you could say I got a bit of a cocked-out mind, cockedout in the sense that I’ve been down and blue ever since Roommate left me, absconded as Mom might say or UP’N’LEFT like some loser in my Twitch chat would. Roommate was a mega chiller. He was always around, always jerkin’ it. I really didn’t mind. No, really, I did not mind. In fact, I miss that guy. Miss those sounds. TYPE SHIT. TYPE SHIT.

Anyways, let’s get down to business. Ben Flaumenhaft (B’27) and Ilan Brusso (B’27) kept banging my line like a clingy one night stand, insisting I write for this little section of theirs. I just kept shooting down the offer. I was like NO like all like NO it’s not something I do. Writing? You mean like Robert Frost or Saidiya Hartman? Hell no. Me, I’m more of a happy-go-lucky, frisbee-toss-on-thegreen kinda guy (got mad reverence for the dubious disc). Not into the whole sitting down and clacking at the keyboard thing, strokin’ the keys till a good idea finally comes out. Nah. I’m not into that at all.

But those two gay penguins, waddling ‘round campus all sad and heart-fucked. Well, there’s something I like about them two. Maybe it’s because they seem so free. So free to be themselves. They’re actually pretty attractive. Yeah, they kinda seem fatherless and infertile, but no one can say they’re not cute. Not in a gay way or anything, I just like their faces. So, I decided. Sure I’d do it. Sure, I’d write for them. But I had to sweeten the pot for me: “Fine boys, I’m not into guys but I suppose I could try my hand at this QUEER-CODED endeavor, but only if you two promise to finally learn how to dap me up. It’s mad awkward every time we pass each other and you try to go in for a hug, and I’m not doing that shit anymore.”

They agreed. Anyways, I was telling you about my day. After I had some breakfast (finished the block of Jarlsberg), I jumped into week-old jeans (crunch!), and yanked on a hoodie (yeow!), slam ming off the lights as I left Chapin because yeah I fuck w the environment. Built environment.

I’m building my environment, building my brand. A lot of people are wearing AirPods, but I just don’t vibe w the aesthetic.

I kind of dig the aesthetic of wired earbuds, so I can feel connected to something. Male isolation is real. Sometimes the boys ain’t

around. Sometimes they just don’t get it.

Before I left my dorm, I stopped by the bathroom and caught myself in the mirror. Fresh. Fresh as hell. I’ve got this perfect stubble that girls just love to stroke. Not the only thing—anyways, yeah you’d look at me and just think, “Wow. That looks like a guy who fucks.” And I do. A lot. I had this girlfriend a while back, but she was too smart for me. Man, I miss her. She was my first kiss. God, that shit was light and cumbersome. Like flames. Maybe I tear up a little, just a little, when I think about her. No biggie, though. It is what it is. That’s what they made tissues for. But the mirror. It’s morning skinny, so I’m looking kinda meek. Fuck that! My bro put me on this cut cycle. I know it’s all about grind now, jack off later, but I’m hurting man. I’m hurting when I look in the mirror and see a meek little deer little guy little stupid deer little meek hella meek guy. Hey! I’m working on it.

I skirted Patriot’s Court, headed down Thayer instead. I like to lay low on campus, dip when I can. Sometimes college feels like such a contest, like we’re all competing, you feel me? I like to just live my life and catch a vibe. Catch a wave. Catch a girl. Sometimes campus just feels like it’s chokin’ me out, you feel me? Like what can we do but dip? So we dip.

When I walk, I kinda sway. Nothing weird or anything, I just lean left when my right leg extends and right when my left one does. Also got

“Oh, hi Landin,” they almost chant in unison, “How is it, you know, not existing and all?”

“What?”

“Landin, you’re not real. ‘Landin Bean’ is literally just an anagram for Ben and Ilan. You’re just a voice we’ve affected. You’re our imagining of a gay imagining of a straight man!”

I took a step back and we laughed in Landin’s face as I couldn’t believe they were laughing at me. We couldn’t believe Landin was so weak and Ben and Ilan, I don’t understand, they are suddenly so fucking cool and scary. And I’m just a lame and stupid straight guy who we are never! letting! write! for! our! section! again! Ha! Ha! Hahahahahahha!

“Oh. oh. I don’t exist, do I?”

“No♥️.”

Hahahahaha wow we almost can’t believe ourselves! What a trick we’ve pulled!

+++

We were brushing our hair with perfect combs, laying out our best suits, and gearing up to go dancing in the square! We were to float all evening on goodness and merriment! But then he came to us. Like spring comes to winter. He flashed before us like lightning, the good kind. Landin. Ohhhh now what if we had a Landin? A hot Landin. Hot Landin who could leave us in the lurch. And

Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On:

An evaluation of erotic triangulation in the work of Sappho, Leonard Cohen, and Jacques Lacan.

( TEXT NAN DICKERSON

DESIGN MINAH KIM

ILLUSTRATION MERI SANDERS )

c I’ve been thinking about love and failure, so I’ve been thinking about Sappho. I’ve been thinking about Fragment 130, which Anne Carson quotes at the beginning of Eros the Bittersweet, her work of analysis on Sappho’s poetry. The translation she uses is from Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta. It goes like this:

“Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up”

Carson begins her analysis with a meditation on how to translate “sweetbitter” (γλυκύπικρον in Aeolic Greek), given that English inverts this compound to “bittersweet.” We know this concept intuitively in love—if it’s not in Sappho’s fragments, then it’s in James Joyce’s Ulysses. His character, Leopold Bloom, lives in the world of “[f]irst sweet, then savory” (Joyce, 320). This line is of course about dog vomit on the street. Joyce and Sappho are in agreement here—I think the arrangement of “sweetbitter” gives a chronology within the instant of desire. Sappho’s chronology is less explicitly ordered than Joyce’s. Two opposing sensations are stacked on top of each other. As Carson puts it: “[o]ne moment staggers under pressure of eros; one mental state splits” (Bittersweet, 4). Sweet and bitter are happening in the same instant. This is the split phrenes of desire, the kind of madness always present in love. It is also the start of the triangulation that makes up desire. Triangles of desire might conjure love-triangles— lover, beloved, and romantic rival. This is one (very surface level) reading of another poem, Sappho 31, where she writes of a third party, a man who “seems to me equal to the gods […] who opposite you/ sits and listens close/ to your sweet speaking” (If Not, Winter, Carson, 63). You might think she’s invoking this traditional love-triangle structure, but there is no ‘real’ rival man in this equation. In Sappho’s writing, as in other pieces about deferred or entangled longing, the triangulation of desire by means of a painful obstacle takes place in the lover’s mind. Is it possible to get what we want? Can I have what I want? Carson articulates desire through Sappho’s radiant triangulation: “eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components— lover, beloved and that which comes between them” (Bittersweet,16). The thing that intervenes, the obstacle, is not just (or even primarily) a romantic rival, but rather the category of moves and mental devices that allow two people in a relationship to keep surprising each other. Jacques Lacan lays out a similar idea in his lecture “The Rat in The Maze,” which I read in Encore: Seminar XX: “Isn’t it in love’s approach to being that something emerges that makes being into what is only sustained by the fact of missing each other?” (145). In both wanting to reach and fearing to reach the Other—the object

of love—one refocuses on “the being that is caught up” in the Other and moves to a new encounter with that being (Seminar XX, 145). To Lacan, this kind of position can’t be satisfied by definition, since love relies on the failed approach, the approach that misses its mark. Our structure is now: subject, the perception of the being within the desired Other, and the fact of missing each other. I think about these geometrical positions of desire when I think about getting what I want. I think about Leonard Cohen’s 1977 album, Death of A Ladies’ Man, and its final song “Death of a Ladies’ Man.” I think about his line: “you let me love you/till I was a failure/your beauty on my bruise like iodine.” I think about rabid anticipation, I think about people walking out of their way past their crushes’ houses, I think about a favorite food held back in the fridge until it goes bad before being eaten. It’s important to label things when they are put away in drawers, so you don’t forget that they’re there. It’s important to try to cook your favorite dishes from childhood or restaurants, not in a process of perfect replication, but so you can notice the distance between the imagined dish (that you never really ate) and the food you’re eating now. I fall in with the poet Will Oldham here: “I also do not like drawers. There must be shelves, where the contents are visible. When things are hidden in drawers, they do not exist. Doors must be open.” In this poem, “To Hell With Drawers,” Oldham’s speaker wants directness, he wants a good thing you get to understand all the time. Though this is emotionally resonant to a person in love, there is no perfect access. In the house of love there are many mansions with closed doors. If eros is lack, then things hidden in drawers will always be more interesting than things displayed on shelves. Does this mean what we love should be kept from us? Stashed away in drawers or lockets, subjects of infinite pining but minimal contact? Leonard Cohen provides some possibly elucidating examples in Death of A Ladies’ Man.

In the song “Death of a Ladies’ Man,” Cohen lays out two contrasting kinds of contact and triangulation. There is the initial romance between the woman and “the man she wanted all her life.” We might expect something traditional, the man chasing after the beloved woman. The man in question is full of classic courtship machismo; he is “the master of this landscape” the song begins upon. They make love in ornate religious buildings and a “many mirrored room.” The woman takes up everything that is the man, inverting the normative structure of pursuit. She is revealed to be the active party in the romance, chasing after the (male!) beloved. She catches up to him with disastrous effects. Instead of maintaining what could have been the endless chase of renewed love and romance, she devours him; she announces: “‘This mental space is occupied and everything is mine.’” The lover-beloved-obstacle structure has

been collapsed by the lover-woman actually attaining the beloved. This is the world of full contact, nothing hidden away in drawers, a perfect transference of two people onto each other. Does that sound romantic? It does to me, but for Cohen no sustained relationship is possible on these grounds. By the end of the song, the romance has split apart and the woman has moved on to a new man. Cohen writes:

“Now the last time that I saw him he was trying hard to get

A woman’s education but he’s not a woman yet

And the last time that I saw her she was living with some boy

Who gives her soul an empty room and gives her body joy.”

As their relationship splinters and the woman takes everything out of the man, a third figure is introduced, “some boy.” This could be read as the simple kind of love-triangle jealousy that is often reductively read into Sappho 31. Something more complicated is going on here. What is this “empty room” the boy provides her with if not a continuation of the tripartite foil structure that’s so necessary for romance? She has moved on to a relationship that provides both the infinite presence and infinite absence necessary for sustaining desire. A place full of nothing might seem unappealing, especially compared to the gilt churches of the first half of the song, but maintaining the nothing, the separation, is what’s important. The complete devouring that happens when a lover actually attains the beloved must be staved off.

This doesn’t mean we have to give in to distance. Sappho’s man who “seems to me equal to the gods,” the man who is able to be close to the beloved, is proof of this (Winter, Carson, 63). He allows the speaker to indulge in a fantasy of perfect closeness—the one initially present in “Death of a Ladies’ Man”—without giving into it. This imaginary third figure is a mental foil that reinforces the speaker’s imperfect access to the beloved, which would be there even if he wasn’t. He is made up to provide obstacle, deferral, distance, which is the actual substance of a love poem. In Sappho 31, the feelings of the speaker are so strong that, under a mere look from the beloved, she almost dies: “when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking/ is left in me…I am and dead—or almost/ I seem to me” (Winter, Carson, 63). The conduit provided by this invented third party allows the speaker to both indulge in a fantasy of closeness and preserve the obstacle between her and the beloved, even as no such obstacle (such as an envious lover) actually exists. As Carson puts it: “Sappho tells us twice, emphatically, the real location of her poem: ‘He seems to me…I seem to me.’ This is a disquisition on seeming and it takes place

entirely within her own mind…the act of constructing desire for itself.” This is the “empty room” in your soul, the irradiated absence “whose presence is demanded by eros,” the space the mind needs between perception and proximity (Bittersweet, 16).

The same logic of love and distance is preserved on the level of Sappho’s poem itself. We don’t get to know where these people are, what they’re saying, what the girl is laughing about, what the relationship of the girl and the man is, and certainly not what the relationship of the girl and the poet is. The poem itself holds us at arms’ length, disrupting a reader’s potential attempt at understanding and identification. Cohen creates the same kind of distance in “Death of A Ladies’ Man,” a song emphatically written in the third person after an album of songs from the first person perspective of a man. The narrator and the listener are denied full entry to this story. The same distance—or dissonance—is preserved not just in this song, but in the mechanics of the album itself.

This is one reason that the Death of A Ladies’ Man was not received well when it was first released. Cohen himself even initially rejected the work; in 1977 he told Janet Maslin for the New York Times: “I never heard the mix and I don’t approve of it. The mix is a catastrophe. No air. No breath. No rest” (40). The album was criticized for being incomprehensible; Phil Spector’s over-the-top production style and Cohen’s lyrical and vocal work just didn’t mesh. Contemporary reviews of the album reflect this ambivalence. Maslin quotes Cohen in her NYT headline: “‘There’s Nothing I Like About It —But It May Be a Classic.’” As Paul Nelson put it in his 1978 review of the album for Rolling Stone: “It’s either greatly flawed or great and flawed—and I’m betting on the latter. Though too much of the record sounds like the world’s most flamboyant extrovert producing and arranging the world’s most fatalistic introvert, such assumptions can be deceiving.” These sorts of mealy-mouthed, half-indictments miss the point. The album is deliciously out of joint—the same improbable mixing that Cohen hates and Maslin calls “bewildering” and “bizzare” gives the album its swinging, off-kilter feel (Maslin, 18). It’s teenage, it’s drugged out, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, and Ronee Blakley sing shrill backup on “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On,” and the ultimate effect is one of shameful accuracy. Your ears go red just listening to it; they’re singing about you!

If the album was perfect, with no discord— Cohen says that Spector would leave with or lock up the tapes after he had worked on them—it wouldn’t be as good. It certainly wouldn’t be as spot on. The dissonance between the two major technical parts of the album is a kind of mirror, on the level of form, of the imperfect contact possible in any romance. Open-door loving, sweet and concordant material would be uninteresting. On the level of both form and content, Cohen and Sappho show the importance of these asymptotic approaches. One can read the troubled production of the whole album through this sweetbitter lens. The album approaches and misses harmony, this discord provides a vital obstacle for the listener to maintain desire for the music. Lacan calls this space between what is articulated and what can’t exist in the act of speaking “the point of suspension to which all love is attached” (Seminar XX, 145).

When you read or listen to these poems, you are participating in the same mechanics of triangulation that the works are interested in explicating. This distanced appeal of the beloved—articulated in such beautiful and complex lines by Sappho—is the same distanced appeal of things that are literally bad, or bad for us. This is why the fact Death of A Ladies’ Man is “bad” makes it an even better album. The supposed imperfection is what gives the art object edges, what gives the reader something to latch onto. Rather than a lover-beloved-obstacle structure, this participation involves a reader-object-imperfection structure. This structure is also what’s at work in pieces of art that are great because they’re difficult to get at. Those oblique works are the ones you can keep coming back to. People have the

same complexity. Nobody in your life is an easy-read picture book, difficulty—difficulty that is supremely enjoyed—is the territory of love. The lover makes a repeated falling movement. They approach but do not attain the beloved; this is a mirror of the reader approaching but not attaining complete access to a work of art. In this case, the asymptote goes both ways; the work repeatedly approaches and misses perfect concord with its recipient. I try to be a ready recipient. In both cases the “missing” is the source of pleasure. The reader and the thing read, the lover and the beloved, both need to be locked in this frozen chase. Cohen indulges in this parallel often, the drive to write is often entangled with the drive towards sex. The song “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On” is one articulation of this:

“Here comes your bride with her veil on Approach her, you wretch, if you dare Approach her, you ape with your tail on Once you have her she’ll always be there [...]

Ah, but don’t go home with your hard-on It will only drive you insane

You can’t shake it or break it with your Motown You can’t melt it down in the rain.”

As Robert De Young, a professor who wrote a robust defense of this album for the Journal Essays on Canadian Writing, puts it: “In spite of the speaker’s protestation that sexual desire cannot be quenched with ‘Motown,’ the creation and existence of the song itself and its urgent performance seem to contradict this idea” (132). In other words, if it was true that songs (“Motown”) couldn’t help one with these feelings of frustrated desire, then there would be no point in making the song at all. Cohen links the act of not getting what you want, of going home alone, with the impossibility of making (or receiving!) a fulfilling and satisfying work of writing. The cycle of attempted and failed closeness with a work of art stands in contrast to the wife “who is always there.” We can intuit that the speaker doesn’t find this relationship gratifying. Why? Because this flat proximity isn’t interesting. Though this is a misogynistic trope, we can still see how the woman (the assumed object of the speaker’s frustrated sexual desire) is displaced in favor of the act of writing or listening to a song. This is the real thing the speaker is having a sweetbitter, attained and yet failed, interaction with.

This mapping of love onto the struggle with language and of language onto love is demonstrated in tight spirals on Death of A Ladies’ Man, providing a possible elucidation of what Lacan means when he talks about “love’s approach to being” making “being into what is only sustained by the fact of missing each other” (Seminar XX, 145). Cohen demonstrates how these dynamics of love are literal and imaginary at the same time. He does this by employing mediation, both between the characters in a song, and in the act of composition itself. By mediation I am talking about disruptions, like the third man in Sappho 31. These “obstacles” are more of what Carson calls “cognitive and intentional necessit[ies]” in desire (Bittersweet, Carson, 16). In Cohen’s song “Paper Thin Hotel” the mediation is first performed by a physical wall:

“The walls of this hotel are paper-thin

Last night I heard you making love to him

The struggle mouth to mouth and limb to limb The grunt of unity when he came in.”

This seems like a scene primarily concerned with the explicit; one where we’re hearing about the mechanics of these three people’s bodies in space. The speaker still wants to hear more, he presses his ear against the wall. Why is this scene so gratifying? The speaker gets to have love “out of [his] control,” within the song the narrator is indulging in the same kind of tripartite deferred desire. Cohen gives us a clue that the other man isn’t the point of the scene, the speaker’s gratification peaks when the woman is running a bath after her lover has left.

This is when he says: “I felt so good I couldn’t feel a thing.” Beyond the narrator of this song exploring mediation to cope with his frustrated desire, the “fact of missing each other” is happening on the level of Cohen’s composition. These characters are arranged on a stage, they are tools in a psychological pantomime that Cohen is performing in order to articulate love, which is to say the thing that can’t be articulated. In this sense the sex scene is turned back around (in a move that mirrors the work in “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On”) to be about imaginary dynamics between any I and you.

A more complicated example of the “point of suspension” Lacan is talking about comes in the song “Memories,” where the speaker pursues a woman at a dance. She tells him:

“‘Just dance me to the dark side of the gym

Chances are I’ll let you do most anything I know you’re hungry, I can hear it in your voice And there are many parts of me to touch, you have your choice but no, you cannot see [...] my naked body.’”

We catch these two in the moment of rabid anticipation, of suspense, the high pleasure of almost getting what you think you want. The speaker wants this woman so badly that her denial brings him to a quasi-religious ecstasy. The deferral of his wish to see her naked, to “know” her (in the biblical sense, of course), is the thing that takes him up to such “solemn” heights, pledging “all [his] faith to see her naked body.” Cohen seems to be arguing here that the highest pleasure in love (which is to say comprehension) happens in this moment of trying and failing. The repeated “missing” of the object (in love or speech) is mirrored by the speaker saying his plea over and over again. Lacan is also interested in the way our blocked access to a subject (whether in romance or knowledge) forms the basis of love.

This confrontation with deferred and mediated access is the same dynamic that Lacan believes is taking place at the level of language. It’s the same double bind of (im)possible apprehension, the literal question: “do you understand what I’m saying?”

These arrangements of obstacles I have discussed— between lover and beloved, reader and object, writer and text—exist within this confrontation with language. The grappling of the subject who wants to have “copulation with knowledge” is the question at hand in discussions of love, and vice versa. As Lacan puts it: “knowledge, which structures the being who speaks on the basis of a specific cohabitation, is closely related to love” (Seminar XX, 144). If we apply the idea that “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On” is about the displacement of a sexual relationship with a woman in favor of a sexual relationship with creating or receiving art, Lacan’s analysis would tell us that the inadequate and approximate movement is actually the engagement with speaking/writing, and thus, with being. Think of the many meanings of the phrase “to know,” stretching back to the connotations of the verb in the Bible. We hear how “Adam knew his wife” and thus she “conceived a child with the help of the Lord.” Cohen’s speaker in “Memories” tells his dance partner “you don’t know me now, but very soon you will.” Isn’t that the hope, after all? This is to say I’m not sure I can explain to you what I mean. Why can’t we have good things, all the time? Do we want to? Don’t we?

NAN DICKERSON B’26 is a ladies’ man.

Nan Dickerson B‘26 is a i a lady’s man.

6. Bring to a boil and then pour over onion. Cover and store in the fridge somewhere it won’t fall out.

5. In a small saucepan, whisk together sugar, kosher salt, water, and apple cider vinegar over medium heat.

4. Wait. Before you go any further, remember to prep that quick-pickled red onion and give it enough time to do their thing. To do so, thinly slice your red onion using a mandolin. Once you have stalled the blood flow and have a bandage over the top of your thumb, place the entire onion into a large Mason jar.

7. Back to prepping. In a colander, wash your greens. Repeat as necessary a.

3. Grab the Durum Round that’s gone slightly stale. Slice it up into small cubes with a serrated knife. Place cubes on a small baking sheet and drizzle with olive oil, garlic powder, salt, and paprika. Bake in the toaster oven at 375°F. 2

2. Clean, scrub, and peel your carrots. Boil and peel your beets . At this point, your hands should be bright pink. Set aside.

1. Source all of your produce from the fridge and/or shelves around the living room. If it so happens that the thing you went in there to look for was actually all used up in last night’s traybake or if the next Market Mobile order isn’t coming in until Monday, feel free to abandon the whole thing entirely.

Instructions:

Feel free to add any protein you want: (we’d recommend lentils, Garbanzo beans, Black beans, Kidney beans, Cannellini beans, tofu, etc.)

• 2 tbsp. of granulated sugar

• 2 tbsp. kosher salt

• ¾ cup Apple cider vinegar

• ¼ cup water

• 1 cured red onion from Langwater Farms

For the quick-pickled red onion:

• Lemon juice

• Tahini

• Maple syrup from Bats Of Bedlam Maple Farm

For the dressing:

Red Beets • Apples • Olive oil

• Uneaten Seven Stars Bakery • Durum Wheat Round

• Celeriac • Watermelon radish

• Rainbow carrots (pretty)

• Your “seasonal green” (possibilities include: Napa cabbage, pea shoots, Dino kale, purple kale, Spinach, Swiss chard, Cavolo Nero, iceberg lettuce from the Vdub, micro greens, radish tops, fiddleheads)

Ingredients:

MARRY ME CHICKEN

1

5 Bring plates and utensils to the living room, refill the Brita, help your cooking partner finish their high-concept, resource-intensive main dish they are really excited to serve to everyone but is likely running later than scheduled, replace your bandaid, run upstairs and change out of your beet-stained garb, etc.

4 Don’t throw out the scraps! Unless rotten, any vegetable scrap(s) can be placed in the gallon-size Ziploc bag in the freezer with all the other scraps. The Liquids Coordinators will use these to make a veggie stock soon they say.

3 This number is purely speculative. Open dinners can yield anywhere from two close friends of the house to thirty hungry freshmen from Sunrise. West House is also allegedly bringing some sort of allium-free-portabella-mushroom-thing so really it’s up to you to make sure everyone is fed.

2 The real oven is occupied by the aforementioned high-concept, resource-intensive main dish.

1 This part may take up to an hour, so we’d recommend you let your cooking partner/housemate do that high-concept, resource-intensive main dish they’ve been waiting to do for some time and “maybe you can just make the salad.”

NAT MITCHELL

is all like,

14. Do anything else that needs doing before serving dinner. 5 15. Wait for your cooking partner to declare that the food is ready. Any minute now…

13. Take all bowls to the long white table in the living room. When you get there, greet your housemates and any guests who have arrived. Tell them dinner will be served shortly and that they need to take their Blundstones off at the door.

12. Remember the pickled onion and the croutons. Put the croutons in their own bowl, separate from the Salad Proper.

Start to assemble. Get the biggest bowl you can find. Put everything in. If it doesn’t all fit, that’s okay. Get another bowl. Grab your tongs and get to work. For the dressing: In a small bowl, mix together as much tahini, maple syrup, and lemon juice as you’d like; no one is going to complain that much about this.

4 10. At this point, housemates will be poking their heads in to see what the dinner is going to be and decide whether they should ask you to save them a plate they can eat after the frisbee scrimmage. Tell them that it is “everything they could ever want and more.”

EVERYTHING(S) SALAD RECIPES IN THEORY

Marry me chicken Fuck you chicken Here’s a plate of fuck you chicken How would you give someone a plate of fuck you chicken? I would Tender queer chicken Tender and queer chicken THE MOST TENDER QUEER CHICKEN RECIPE How to make your chicken THE MOST TENDER and QUEER Chicken chicken Where babies come from chicken

Argue with someone you love. No, really. Do it. Feel like you have to get up and do something with your hands, your mouth, the big dumb lump of your weeping brain.

ANGELA LIAN B’26

mmgmfnjfgjfdjfj

Whip heavy cream and sugar and purple dye. Tire your arm. Doesn’t it feel kind of nice? Stack the layers, crumb coat the cake. Hide its surface so no one can tell what it was. Pipe around its soft edges. You’ll do it neatly because you’ve forgotten. Haven’t you? Take a picture. Tell your mom. Tell someone else, if you want. Do you feel better?

HOW TO BAKE A CHOCOLATE CAKE

me, salad?” Do you feel bad? How bad do you feel? Are you ready now? Are you sure? Preheat your oven until it’s hot enough. Grease two round pans until they slip. Don’t think too hard about it. This is supposed to be easy. Mix one and a third cups flour with three-fourths cup unsweetened cocoa powder with one and a half teaspoon baking soda not powder with one and a half teaspoon baking powder with one teaspoon salt (you can make it). This is supposed to be easy. Whisk the sugar in. Two cups, white. But really you should reduce it because your mom always did and she won’t like it if you don’t. At least she wouldn’t tell you. Are you still crying? Whisk in two eggs. If you only have one it’s not your fault. It’s okay. Just mash a banana, mix it in. I said it’s okay. One cup milk, half a cup olive oil, enough vanilla. You forgot to boil the water. Pour one cup boiling water. Mix. You can pour the batter into the pans now. Forget, keep forgetting. Leave in the oven until you’ve forgotten. (There’s nothing else you can do.) Watch it rise, react, Maillard like onions. Sit and wait and don’t do anything else don’t reach for your phone don’t. Is it ready now?

3 8. Chop up all of the greens and throw out any that are kind of fucked up looking. 9. You should probably clean the debris field of scraps strewn about the kitchen, lest you want to alienate yourself from your housemates who are assigned to the post-dinner cleaning.

A Story: Hey you chicken Who me chicken Let's dance chicken I can’t chicken Why not chicken I’m broken chicken What’s wrong chicken Come here chicken Oh damn chicken Oh damn chicken Marry Me Chicken pasta BEN FLAUMENHAFT B’27 chicken. (will you) Marry me chicken Will you marry me, Chicken? A Story: Marry me chicken Fuck you chicken Kiss me chicken Fuck me chicken Nailed it chicken Move me chicken Go there chicken Date me chicken Come here chicken Tell me chicken Will you chicken Will I chicken Won’t we chicken Can we chicken Don’t go chicken Just stay chicken Just be chicken Up yours chicken A Story: Hey you chicken It me chicken Oh you chicken Who me chicken Yeah you chicken Fuck you chicken Will we chicken Do it chicken I will chicken No you chicken I will chicken Don’t be a fucking chicken Are you gonna fucking chicken? Don’t fucking chicken Fuck you chicken Shhhhhhhh chicken Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh chicken Fucking chicken You are fucking chicken Who are you fucking chicken? Who is it that you are fucking chicken?

1 I’ve been thinking about how the name of the recipe is like a spell. Or, how it's sort of performative. Like a speech act. What can the names of recipes actually do? Can they tell stories? What's in a name?

until you end up with enough greens for at least 20 people.

Home Screen Home

(Assorted wallpapers on recursivity and utility)

ELLIOT STRAVATO B’27

EPHEMERA

Dancing

Bodies in steps and stones

Underground

( TEXT PLUM LUARD DESIGN RACHEL SHIN ILLUSTRATION YAN JIANG )

The steps up the mountain of San Miguel must be swallowed in threes.

One, two, three,

with the third step carved just a bit deeper before continuing onto another set of three. Your legs may find it a bit awkward at first, but you’ll get used to it with time. With the hot sun stored in each silvery concrete step, the stairs are already a daunting task. You will scramble up the first three quickly before being forced to pause and reset each time. This third step extends further and bestows a break for breath before beginning again with the next set. The basic flamenco compás mimics these stairs. Three claps in equal measure before the switch to the bounding foot. Beating against the ground, it sets the beat nicely. Here, try it with your toes as you climb the stairs that have stolen the sun’s warmth. That rhythm. That heartbeat. You will hear it everywhere. It bounces between the mountains that enclose the city of Granada, unable to escape.

She likes that too. There is stained glass grafted to the stone to let in just a little light. And beads strung over the door to welcome wind and prevent pests. She does not let in a single fly. There is a wooden floor set in the stone so she can dance. The floor needs to be replaced every year as she tears through it with her feet. There were crescent moon slivers left by sharp heel edges wrought into the fading wood. The things our bodies do to the earth stay. Perhaps too much.

I first went up the mountain and found the caves with my friend who was hunting the boy whose lost love he was haunted by. He haunted me too. At the top of the stairs you find La Cueva de la Bailadora where Leila Sabreen has lived for 20 years. Originally from Algeria, Sabreen grew up in Toulouse, France. Her grandmother’s stories of the caves in Sacromonte clung to her memory, and so she moved to Barcelona as a single mother at the age of 28 to study flamenco. I spent my summer dancing with her. Her cave has been carefully chiseled with an arched ceiling to keep the chamber from crumbling down. She is so proud of it she had me convinced that she had hand-chiseled it herself. Just as she likes it. And painted it white to reflect the sun. Its temperature self regulates with the seasons—cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

Tourists perch on the stone wall and chat and smoke and drink Alhambra Tradicional beer as the sun comes to kiss the Sierra Nevada. The stars come out one by one, and the street lights of Granada seem to shine a bit brighter. The city was once the capital of the Emirate of Granada, the last Muslimruled state on the Iberian peninsula and home to Muslims, Jews, and a diverse array of religious minorities. They were expelled or forced to convert in 1492 by the Catholic regime of Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand as part of their project to Christianize Spain, despite these groups coexisting peacefully in the region for hundreds of years. Among them were the Romani people, the tribe of nomadic musicians and dancers known as gitanos who migrated from Rajasthan to Spain. They faced laws which broke up their communities, denied them their language, and required that they marry non-Romani people or else face death. In the 19th century, with the rise of Castilian Catholic Spanish Nationalism further propagated by the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, Spanish historians championed this history and dubbed the murder and removal of Muslims in the region the Reconquista, “reconquest.” To this day, Reconquista remains a rallying cry for far-right political figures in Spain.

At night, the mountain will turn black. And those steps are just starting to recede into the shadows. Slabs of concrete stick out for a stubbed toe. But here, one, two, three, beat as you climb. You could even do it with your eyes closed. Here, the darkness cannot best you. One, two, three, beat. Flamenco finds home in these caves. Although now upheld as a pillar of Spanish national identity, flamenco was born of the Romani people. Expelled, enslaved, and persecuted throughout Europe, they

reached the southern coast of Spain, where their music mixed with Arab-Andalusian culture, which drew from the musical traditions of Muslim people from the Arabian Peninsula and Northern Africa as well as Sephardic Jews. Dancers wear formal attire— suits in bold colors or dresses with tiered skirts. They shine in gold and are adorned with cloth flowers pinned into their long flowing hair. They sport shoes with nails bashed deep into the toes and heels. Dancers are accompanied by a rumbling cajón drum, a prickly guitar—played with a combination of a fanned finger strum and taps on the base of the body, the crooning of a singer, and poly-rhythmic clapping. And these sounds are mixed with the landscape of the city. Sordo, the low-pitched thud made when the meat of both palms collide, is the sound of the earth. And claro, the high-pitched shriek of four fingers striking against the palm, is the sound of the air.

A few days after I left, Sabreen was slated to dance at a festival in a town just outside the city. She has a plot of land there, and when she last went to visit, she noticed that a tree on her property had been cut down. She called the mayor of the town who had ordered the chopping of her tree, furious, telling him that she would show him her paperwork ensuring her ownership of the land. He dismissed her and threatened that he would chop down all the trees if he wanted to. She worked hard to perfect her footwork and bought a new dress, wanting to stun the town to show her worth to the mayor. She hand delivered him an invitation. He did not show.

Memory is sedimented in the layers of mountains. Fields of poppies crown the tops where bodies were left to rot unburied. Big red heads. And green spindly stems. And black crumbly seeds that stick in your gums long after you have gone at them with a toothbrush. Bound down the steps to the falls and disappear into the caves behind the dumping icy water. There are branches that the water has petrified with stone. Mineral-rich water enrobes objects, and when the water evaporates, the minerals harden, taking the shape of whatever the water surrounds. The old wood will rot away one day and the stone casing will remain. Sabreen told me that I, too, would turn to stone if I died in there.

Near the summit, the church of San Miguel Bajo desperately stands on the site of the former Zirid palace complex, yet the foundations of the palace still poke through the soil. Land is haunted. It remains to remind us of the people here before. A tree stump. Drooping poppy heads. Petrified wood. The stairs beating out the compás.

Flamenco is a ferocious emotional release. Dancers throw the entire weight of their bodies down to their feet, becoming an instrument in the orchestra, keeping time with toes and matching melody with arms and fingers. The floors are eaten up and there will be splinters lodged beneath the nailheads of shoes. Chunky hoops dislodge from tugged lobes and fly off into the audience. Cloth flowers crumble. The dance tears at the body, with dancers busting their knees and walking away with aching backs. They develop bobbly calluses on the loose skin between thumb and index finger, as the skin of their hands curl and coil in flowery resonance with the music.

143 steps up to La Cueva de la Bailadora in San Miguel Alto, Granada

Patio outside Sabreen’s cave and her cat, Oudin

The force of the dance mirrors the violence of its origins. The songs of flamenco relay the history of the Romani people and the extremity of Spain’s abuse. Juan Peña’s 1976 album “Persecucion” was released under the pseudonym “El Lebrijano,” in reference to his hometown Lebrija in Southern Spain. As he sings on, “Sangre, sangre,” (“Blood, blood,”) the struggle for land emerges both through lyrics and pen name. In the opening, after several sets of rapid palmas, he sings of a Romani woman—“You are going to be the mother of a son / that they are going to chase / remember us / when you feel like dying from sadness.” Memory of “us” emerges as a salve for the weeping mother, a hand she may hold when her son has been taken away.

and shining courtyards. And this story of conquest rings out from the flamenco guitarists and singers who sit on the lookout facing the sutured stronghold.

gives birth to bulging pomegranate trees. The name may also come from the Arabic , believed to mean “hill of strangers.” And yet, there are no street signs to honor this, no wriggling figures together on a hill to point tourists toward the mountain.

The color also lends its name to the Alhambra, from the Arabic الحمراء, “the red one,” after the reddish hue of its clay bricks. And in this blood red landscape of the city, feet trample on crimson cans of Alhambra Tradicional beer, a hollow conceding yelp with each stomp. The red tin sports an Orientalist gold mosaic pattern that vaguely references Arab tilework. The beer was founded by two Spaniards and is upheld as the pinnacle of European lager—promoting the majesty of people Europe fought to destroy, denying any cry of blood. You will find these cans tossed in the trickling Darro River, where the water whistles as it touches each tin and drags them away.

These sung histories sit in this bloody land and the bodies that remain. And so they must be remembered. Trapped in those stairs. Chewing on the bodies of the dancers, leaving their mark in calloused hands and swollen toes. There are ghosts dancing down in the plaza.

The sun sets to the right of where the Alhambra sits. Its palace and gardens, remnants of Nasrid rule, sing with rushing water, carefully channeled through intricate irrigation. Orange trees glisten. Lilies glide on pools. The bricks glow under the lights that remain alight until 2am. This stone giant watching over the city remembers the history of a people forced out late, late into the night. One woman refers to the fortress that looks more like a painting than a palace as mija, a term that ellides the possessive pronoun of mi “my” with hjia “daughter.” The word draws on lineage and body and baby to remind us how much we are who we came from. The souls of everyone we have ever loved stay with us. It is not easy to forget here. The water of the Alhambra shrieks. It rumbles under your feet, as if to crack the clay and devour you entirely.

In 1492, having expelled the Muslims from their palaces, Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand seized the Alhambra as their royal court. Just beyond in the mountain pass of the Sierra Nevada is “El Puerto del Suspiro del Moro,” the ridge where Muhammad XII, the last Sultan of Granada, is believed to have crossed having been forced out of the city. Muhammad XII is said to have turned his gaze to glance at the brick walls one last time, let out a sigh, and began to weep. The place is named for his breath. Sound sits in these mountains.

Following their reign, in 1526, Charles V ordered the construction of a new Renaissance-style palace to stand in contrast to the Nasrid palaces. However, his project never saw completion and the palaces fell into disrepair and were occupied by squatters until the early 19th century, when they garnered the attention of European Romantic travelers. Among them was Washington Irving, whose 1832 mythology and histories in Tales of the Alhambra drew national attention to the fortress. The Alhambra is now a major tourist attraction and a UNESCO world heritage site. It is the center of Granada’s tourist industry, and brought over 490 million euros to the city in 2010. As you walk the gardens, you can see the half-built Renaissance palace standing out awkwardly against the beautiful inscribed arches of the Nasrid palaces

constructed Renaissance palace in the Alhambra Flamenco has long been forcefully excluded from the dominant Spanish culture. During the 19th and 20th centuries, Spanish elites despised the dance because of their hostility towards the Romani people, who they believed to be vulgar and sexually explicit. The Catholic Church, too, condemned the dance for its supposedly perverse nature. And yet, flamenco continued to corrode floors and feet. The Franco regime, which tortured Spain during the mid-20th century, promoted flamenco to bolster Spain’s faltering economy, all the while refusing to acknowledge its Romani origins. Franco destroyed Romani communities and suppressed free expression, promoting a tainted, nationalized version of the dance. Even so, after his death, flamenco found a revived popularity and evolved to tell the story of another persecution. Miguel Gerena, revered as a flamenco singer, sang of rebellion even under Franco’s reign. His concerts were banned, his passport taken, and he was thrown in jail. He sings, “Sleep partner / Sleep while I remain / Working for my son’s freedom / If I can.”

In the mid 20th century, Fedérico Garcia Lorca wrote extensively about the dance, the sound of his poetry capturing the rhythm of the compás. Spain’s beloved poet and musician, Lorca was assassinated by Franco’s Fascist regime at Fuente Grande, “the Great Spring,” an eye-shaped fountain where the small bubbles are said to remind us of tears. Targeted as an outspoken socialist, he had been evading capture for years. In “La Guitarra” he writes, “The weeping of the guitar begins. Useless to silence it. Impossible to silence it.” The dancers dance their tears again.

Some believe the city’s name is derived from the Spanish granada, “pomegranate.” And there are pomegranates everywhere. Drawn daintily on street signs. Embossed on manhole covers. Speered onto iron rods that line narrow streets, imploring drives to maneuver with caution. Standing stick straight with bobbly big heads and crowns like princes. And a slice struck through to reveal the pearls of fruit, a set of gnashing teeth. The name is in reference to the red color distinctive to pomegranates that gets all sticky on your fingers, a red that mirrors the tinge of the fertile soil in the region, the soil that

Flamenco is now seen as central to a ‘united’ Spain, promoted as a spectacle for tourists hungry to consume authentic Spanish culture. Advertisements are plastered around Granada, encouraging tourists to see one of the flamenco shows. Posters of the stereotypical striking silhouette of an olive skinned woman with dark winged eyeliner, bold red lipstick, and a cascading crimson dress are tacked all over the city. Walk along Paseo de Los Tristes, and you will see several layers of posters pasted on top of each other for shows of years past, growing a swollen pregnant belly on the iron poles. This history is never rewritten, just stuck on with clear sticky tape and torn down by howling wind. Continue up the mountain. Sabreen’s floor is stomped to bits, only to be replaced, only to be beaten again.

Sabreen and her firend dance, with and Granada behind

Espectáculo in the city center

PLUM LUARD B’26 is walking with a ghost.

Romani people playing at Mirador San Nicolas, with the Alhambra behind

Half

SPECULATION STATION

We wanted strange stories. Bizarre dreams and premonitions. Dispatches from a digital future. For Issue 5, our writers give you six works of speculative fiction. For optimal results, read in the dark with a flashlight or under a blood orange sun. Lock your windows and watch the exits. Conjure spirits. Plan ahead.

With wonder, fear and reverence, G.E.E.S.E

Splitting End

( TEXT ELENA JIANG )

c We heard the headlines as we were crossing state lines—everything would be virtual by December, self-sufficient by March. We didn’t want to hear any of it, except the transmission kept cutting into our station, chirpy and insistent. Can you believe it? In some other timeline, we’re turning 20, graduating, moving to a city with more concrete than sky. I’d be a singer, you said, offering me a sip of your Baja Blast from the driver’s seat, your knee hiked up on the dashboard. I took it, although by then I could no longer taste anything. At the next turn, you cranked up the stereo’s volume and drove us right into the song’s chorus. Even though it was late when we got back to the dorm, I convinced you to give me a haircut. I could tell that you’d showered that morning from the way your hair fell softly onto my face every time your fingers brushed against my nape. You had to keep tucking strands behind your ears as you worked. At least that was what I imagined you must’ve been doing, kneeling over me as I sat by the mirror propped on the floor. After taste, sight was the next sense to go. I could recall roughly when it started. It was summer and we were driving back from the lake when you pointed up at the cloud like you were noticing a new star. I searched for you in the rearview mirror, the sand scattering in your eyes or mine, I couldn’t be sure. It’s growing, you said. About time. They had been warning us about the transition for

long enough. I watched you blip in and out under the streetlights, losing shape. The night was coming in warm through the open window. I briefly wondered when that detail, too, would be wiped from our world, how they would go about remaking it in another.

We laid next to each other on the carpet. I kept still as you plucked out pieces of hair lodged in my sweater, all faded and splitting ends. You gathered them in a pile in the corner of the carpet, the same place you had stood when you confessed that you felt like you had ended up in the wrong place, the wrong time. You could still see everything and taste the lime in the soft drinks, and I had to try hard not to cry. Even back then I’d pictured us rooming together all four years.

There were cannons going off in the distance, or perhaps it was the sound of everything I was trying to say loosening like teeth in my throat. Maybe it was you, the pop star, singing to me from the soundboard of another life, through tempests and technological debris and a thousand trees split with error. Maybe you were even coming to salvage us. I rolled onto my back. The tune filled out my body where I no longer could. The fairy lights you put up in freshman year flickered on and off as if winking, their other eyes waiting in the dark. Somewhere a screen had learned to blink in the same way.

I could feel your body humming when you lifted your shirt so I could help switch out the patch on your back for a new one. I’d never figured out what

Air Bleed

c After La Jetée (1982) dir. Chris Marker

Listen to me: we don’t have much time. When you are five years old you will see a man fall on the tarmac of an airport runway. The sun will be orange and the wind will be blowing, and you will be pulled away by the hand of your mother before you can see blood. You will remember the contorted face of a woman. When you are eight years old a boy will kick you in the stomach. In your pocket will be the

egg of a mourning dove, a gift for your mother, and it will be smashed as your body hits the dirt. The yolky viscera will be sticky against your thigh. You will recall the face of the woman.

When you are twelve years old you will press your lips against the lips of a girl so soft on the train. You will be shoved against the window. She will run away.

When you are thirteen your father will teach you how to change a tire. There will be grease staining your hands and a hot acidic smell in your clothes. You will be afraid to ask questions. When you are fourteen he will shave your head. Get ready. When you are fifteen he will teach you to shoot a gun. You will watch a deer collapse, the trees vibrating in its wake. See the blood? You will hear birdsong only faintly underneath the ricochet of your heart. You will see your face warped and trembling on the surface of silver shell casings, and you will wonder when you will grow up.

When you are sixteen you will learn to drive. Your palms will flex around leather cold and smooth. Your face will be lashed by the

they were for, and now it was too late. Underneath the patch, the spot had grown soft, faintly wet, and I mapped out the palm-sized shape in the dark from the way your skin was raised at its edges. That night, I dreamed that we were at the state border again, underneath an LED billboard I could no longer read. Let’s sit, you said. Overhead, the cloud glitched, glowing blue. Perhaps this was already the new world. We were persisting against all of it. I could not imagine anything more beautiful than what we already had. What was there left to augment, I wanted to ask. And I reached out to check that you were still there.

ELENA JIANG B’27 struggles with iCloud.

wind, your sinuses burning from fuel. You will see your neighborhood reduced to pinpricks of light, and you will think you know freedom.

When you are eighteen your father’s lungs will fill with smoke.

When you are twenty you will see your last sunset.

Listen to me.

When you are twenty-nine, fire will rain from the sky and cities will fold in on themselves. In the streets the blood of men will pool like sewage. You will be captured. They will send you backward in time. They have sent you here from the future.

It has been so long since you’ve seen the sky aflame not with gasoline but with the colors of the sun. The rustling of the trees and the smell of the earth is like a dream remembered. From your eyes you taste salt but your father is not there to stop it. You hear birds and think of your mother.

Listen to me.

In the past you will meet a woman. You will feel like you have known her all your life, her eyes as dark

( TEXT AUDREY HE )

as a deer’s. You will remember the storms of fire and falling cities ahead, and you will want to run away.

You will not have much time.

The airport will be crowded; it is almost the new year. You will clasp her hands so soft in your own, your pulse pattering in your throat. In the pocket of your coat is a one-way ticket. You will step outside. The plane is resting.

The tarmac is warm. The wind is blowing. The sun is orange.

You will push through the crowd towards the plane’s open door. You will turn to look at her. Are you ready? Her smile will unfold like petals. You will be almost there when you feel it. A sharp pain between your ribs. Your body will double over. Your knees buckle. Before

Effervescent

c She was born when two stars collided in the sky. Light burst around them and fell to the ground. A farmer’s wife, milking the cows as the sun rose, watched the whole affair from the barn.

The farmer’s wife’s name was Elena and she had eyes like drops of honey. When they saw that the light was still shining faintly in the field, she got up, nearly colliding with the milk bucket, and ran towards it.

In a swaddle among the carrots, lay an infant, chewing on the edge of the gossamer blanket it was wrapped in. Elena gasped and drew the infant into her arms. It nuzzled into her, mouth opening and closing. She drew the blanket away from her legs to see that it was a girl.

The farmer and his wife had two young sons, but no daughter. Elena ran back to the house and into her bedroom, where her husband lay.

“The moon spirit has sent us a gift! A daughter, Fedyre! A daughter!” She sat on the bed and presented the bundle to him. “He put her in the field for us to find!” The farmer sat up and looked into the infant’s eyes. They were dark, so dark that the candlelight bouncing from the nightstand seemed to reflect a million times within them.

“Elena, she is not ours. Who knows what trouble may come of taking in a child marked by starlight?”

“My darling, we have two sons and no daughter. Who will help me make dinner during harvest season for three hungry men?” Elena said, grabbing one of his hands. “She was sent for us, Fedyre.”

The farmer looked into Elena’s eyes, and sighed. “I will fetch the bassinet from the cellar.”

Elena beamed and kissed the girl’s forehead. “Let us call her Mila.”

Mila grew, and with every week that passed, Fedyre found himself looking into her eyes less. Elena fixed her eyes to the horizon as she fed her. At three months, she placed a thin scarf over the bassinet whenever she laid her down.

The farmer’s sons, Ivan and Julien, peered at Mila from around corners. When she began to play, they stayed in their own room. “Mama,” Julien said one night at the dinner table, “why does Mila hurt my eyes?”

Elena clucked her tongue.“That is just how she is. Now hush and eat your peas.”

Yet, a month later, the farmer rode in from the town holding a velvet box. Inside the box were five pairs of spectacles.

“Cost us near a fortune,” he said. Elena painted over the lenses of the spectacles with a plum-tinted paint, and fitted them over everyone’s face.

“I don’t like them, Mama,” Ivan complained. “They hurt my ears.”

“Shh,” said Elena. “You are just to

wear them when you look at Mila.”

“Then I won’t look at her!” Ivan said, and scurried away.

you hit the ground you will hear her cry.

A few feet away a boy has been watching. A boy holding the hand of his mother, his mother who will drag him away. A boy who will remember the contorted face of a woman.

72’B EH YERDUA

( TEXT NAILE OZPOLAT )

Despite the spectacles and her brothers’ disinterest, Mila had an adequate childhood. The farmer grew a myriad of crops to sell at the market, but especially plums, and Mila scurried up and down plum trees, knees dirty, braids undone. Her hair had grown an iridescent yellow, her skin the color of maple sugar.

At eight, when the harvest was over for the season, Mila was sent to the village school. Some of the girls liked her glow. When Mila was there, no boys could lock them, terrified, in a dark closet. They linked arms and walked around the schoolyard together. The third week of school, one girl drew them. Mila crouched in front of it to look at it closely. Three girls were holding hands in a circle among the trees.

“Where am I?” she asked

Her friend pointed to the far right of the picture, where a small form stood. “That’s you. You’re scaring away the boys!”

“Oh,” Mila said. The figure had blue eyes.

That year, the harvest was bountiful. On her fifteenth birthday, Mila unwrapped brown paper tied with twine. A golden ring with a crescent moon.

“Thank you, Mama!” Mila exclaimed, and hugged her mother tightly.

At the age of seventeen, Mila started to take a different route home from the market she sold her family’s crops at. With no eyes in sight, she could press her quivering palms to the baskets of fruits, watch them as they rose into the air, glowing. She levitated plums, changing their skins from purple to green to yellow. She sucked the light from a basket, watched it go dark, and brought the light back.

One day, as she was experimenting with swirls on the plum skins, a boy’s voice startled her from the bush.

“How do you do that?”

She dropped the plums, and crouched frantically to pick them up. “How do I do what?”

“Make it float and change color.”

She sighed. “I don’t know, it’s sort of a–a calling. From each object.”

He picked up the last plum and put it in the basket. “Can you teach me?”

“No.”

“Can I watch?”

Mila paused and looked closer at the boy. He looked to be around her age, but his arms were strong and his chin resolute. “Okay,” she said.

Every Thursday, after she finished at the market, she would run down to the alcove in the woods, where the boy she met, Idris, would join her. She showed him all sorts of tricks she learned. She made sticks roll over and rocks assume the appearance of diamonds. Her proudest achievement: making a squirrel appear to wear a dress. Idris laughed and clapped at the show she put on. “Mila,” he said. “You’re incredible. You’ve got to show this to the town.”

“I can’t,” said Mila. A smile formed on her face.

The whole town was trilling with talks of a dance in the square. One Thursday, Mila closed up her family’s stall at the market early and went down to the alcove.

When Idris arrived, she beamed and stepped back. The birds flapped their wings to form letters, their colors shifting in a brilliant rainbow of of radiance. When she saw the confusion on his face, she said, “Read the message on them.”

“Let us dance and be merry,” read Idris from the bird formation. “What?”

“Will you dance at the square with me next week?” said Mila. But it was all wrong.

His face looked stricken. “Mila,” he said. “I’m going to the dance with Annika.”

She looked down. Of course.

“And,” Idris continued. “These birds are an abomination. They should be flying free. What were you thinking?”

She could feel herself getting brighter. Idris squinted among the glare. “I don’t know,” she said, releasing the birds. Idris started to back away.

“You’re blinding me! Stop!”

She blinked a couple of times, then ran off into the woods.

Mila sat in the bar, rotating the moon ring around her index finger. A figure hopped onto the stool next to her. She turned to look.

He was a skinny man, around her age, sitting in his scruffy jacket, holding a glass of orange liquid. His hair was long and tucked in his hat.

“What are you to order?” the figure asked, and it was not a man she was looking at, but a woman, wearing men’s clothing.

“I haven’t a clue. I just got to Herrkiva.”

“This tangerine delight is rather good,” the woman the woman said.

“I’ll try it then,” Mila said, motioning the bartender over as she had seen her brothers do before. “A tangerine delight please.”

The bartender nodded and got to work. The woman took a swig. “I’m Soren. Where are you from?”

“From Kwolipi. And I’m Mila.” The truths slipped from her tongue too quickly, and she cursed herself in her head. She could not be revealing those kinds of things to strangers. “I’ve not heard of it. South of here?”

“Southeast.”

There was something she suddenly felt, a fence starting to form around her thoughts. Soren had fooled her in her presentation at first. And there was a way she looked at her. Directly into her eyes.

They crept into Soren’s small room, giggling and shushing each other. Soren pulled off her hat, long messy hair tumbling out, and stumbled as she shut the door. At this, Mila began to laugh harder. Soren surged forward and pressed her mouth to hers, eyes squeezed shut.

Mila froze and then kissed her back, softly, slowly. A glow appeared around their lips, so faint you could barely see it.

NAILE OZPOLAT B’25 is staring directly into the sun.

The Box

c Andy lets out a crisp cough, disturbing the relative peace, but her brother doesn’t spare her a glance as she trundles along, slightly out of step. The corpses of flowers bend backwards, permanently reaching for a reddened sun that only shines through smog and ash.

They tread the landscape in silence, careful not to disturb the weeds in hopes that they may grow green again. They don’t say much anymore and wouldn’t know what to say even if they did.

She stares at the back of her brother’s head. His black hair is dusty yet well-kept, and he plods across the barren ground with a swiftness.

Look back, she wants to say. He doesn’t.

When they arrive at camp, empty-handed and starving, they don’t say goodbye, but turn their separate ways all the same.

She’s hungry for something, anything at all.

She leaves camp when the quiet becomes too loud. She goes west to find somewhere to scream, to stomp. The ground is sacred, the camp believes, but it does not grow food like the tattered books say it used to in the Prior. Instead, they walk miles, searching for it.

Ma used to tell her stories about the Prior—the towers reached towards the sun, the sky was blue, and the ground was green. It’s true, Andy thinks, because she can see the wreckage sometimes as they ghost through.

Most of the people who remember the Prior have died off by now. Ma was one of the lucky ones and even that luck ran out when she got the Cough a couple years back.

How did it come to this, she wonders, but no one is around to tell her. The camp is mainly composed of people her age and none of them are old enough to know.

She’s lost in her thoughts and before she’s really aware she’s made it anywhere at all, she finds herself miles away in the remnants of what must have been a city in the Prior. They pass it often on their scavenging trips; its concrete stretches

for miles before the fields finally return on the other side. Her brother doesn’t let her wander.

It’s dangerous, he’d grunt. Still, he won’t notice she is gone for some time. When he’s hungry, he sleeps, stretching his dreams for as long as he can despite the stabs in his stomach.

He sleeps and she wanders.

In the city, there is mostly glass and concrete from buildings fallen from the sky. She steps through the debris attentively. She picks up a flat screen with cracks down the center. It is almost a box except it looks as though someone has flattened it down into the thinnest margins possible and thumbed the corners until the points smoothed out.

She sees these things often, but they don’t do much; she still picks them up everytime. They stand apart from the concrete and exposed wires that no longer hum with the steady whirr of electricity. She can sense they are not rubble, but relics. For the most part, their edges remain entirely too smooth to have fractured from some lost artifact buried beneath the graveyards of cement.

It’s fascinating, holding something whole from a past that only exists in fragments and scattered memories. The box feels cool. This time of year, everything in the camp is too warm, even when the sun disappears.

She balances it evenly in her hand. There are round ridges on the thin sides. She taps them quietly in quarter notes, savoring the soft clicks. She likes the noises they make, likes to think people in the Prior fidgeted with their hands, pressing the ridges until they were content. She mirrors these imaginings as she beats against the bumps on the edges.

She’s surprised to see a glint—so faint against the setting sun she believes it to be a trick of the light—appearing on the smooth, reflective surface. It slowly gets brighter, and soon she’s sure the box is luminescent.

The glass shows a silvery, blue water—the type of blue that the sky used to be. Ma used to tell her about something called “beaches”, how the sun’s rays settled onto the water with skips and ripples. This is the beach, she thinks as she stares at it.

She swipes her fingers across the screen excitedly and the ocean is replaced with rows of boxes. Her fingers tremble as she hits each one, expecting nothing and everything all at once. She hits a green box with a pointed circle. Suddenly, she’s staring at a white display with an alphabet at the bottom.

The letters are rearranged in multiple rows on the screen. QWERTY, it begins. How odd, she thinks. She recounts the song her mother used to sing when she was young—ABCDEFG—attempting to match the order against this one. She can’t.

The house

is on fire.

c When my dad got sick, I moved back in with my parents in their house on 30 Parks Road. His illness was terminal. Within a couple of weeks I had fallen into that peaceful boredom that plagues suburban life.

Then one night, the next-door house on 32 Parks Road suddenly burst into a pillar of flames reaching the clouds. Only a few minutes before, 32 looked like every other house on Parks Road, which looked like every other house in town: two stories, gabled roofs with shingles, small front yard, neatly

trimmed grass, driveway leading to a garage with two cars. Now, there was a fire instead of a house. A remarkable change of scenery. The Levys, who lived in 32, somehow escaped unharmed. They stood outside in shock and were wearing pajamas. The whole neighborhood in their pajamas went outside and watched as the fire department came and tried to put out the fire. The fire was warm and mesmerizing. The fire kept burning, but it didn’t spread. So for the next few weeks life went back to normal. The only thing that seemed to be

HELLO, her fingers patter across the flat surface. She sends it into the void—she has to hit the arrow pointing up, she discovers, after a few attempts— expecting the message to bounce back somehow. Perhaps with a booming declaration from the gods.

Nothing happens. Still, she is satisfied. This one does something. She takes it through the ashes as she turns east toward the camp. When she passes her brother’s tent and tiptoes back into her own, it suddenly re-illuminates itself and reads, Hello.

A prod of the box brings her back to the rearranged alphabet.

She taps out with a quiet rhythm, Who are you?

I’m from PROMETHEUS, an organization searching for people who survived the Fallout.

She stares at it for a while and finds she doesn’t entirely understand. She clicks the ridges until the words disappear and the glass goes blank. She ponders them quietly until the exhaustion hits. There is nowhere left to go except to sleep.

In the morning, she wakes to a steady whirring getting louder. She stumbles outside, expecting a falling sky, but finds the noise isn’t coming from above at all.

Just west over the horizon, as the blues of dawn recede, she can see black boxes getting bigger as the mechanical whirring crescendoes. They screech to a stop in front of the tents and rushes of white come out.

The campers who are awake scream and run because there’s not much else to do. The men—at least, she thinks they are men—push down tents as they stomp across the field, grabbing those who can’t run, chasing those who do. No one gets away. It is over before it begins.

This ground is sacred, she wants to yell.

Instead, she screams for her brother.

“Pandora,” he echoes, a name she hasn’t heard in years, reaching for her while men in rubber suits pull him in the opposite direction. She hopes he can see her, desperately hopes she won’t be the last thing he sees. She tries to answer but chokes on a sob. For a brief moment, she thinks, This must be how it happened. This is the fallout. Then they drag her into the back of one of those machines as she thrashes against them. It is cold and dark once the door closes.

In the tent, the box illuminates a message she’ll never read: Have hope.

Pandora cries.

VANYA NOEL B‘26 is obsessed with her phone.

( TEXT COLE MESSINGER )

different now was that we had to keep the AC on full blast constantly because of the heat. +++

Then one morning there was a white news van outside the house. A reporter was saying, a house is on fire and it isn’t burning down

Then twenty white vans with twenty cameramen and twenty reporters and twenty producers all saying, the house is on fire and it isn’t burning down. And more

kept coming. Their white vans took up all the parking on the road. Then pilgrims came from every faith and they danced and sang all night and declared the house a miracle. They built their tents on the front lawns.

Tourists arrived in swarms of minivans and campers. They came to the house and took photos and then bought t-shirts and shotglasses with graphics of the house on fire.

Then the Guard came and cleared everyone off the block who didn’t belong. They built their own tents on the front lawns and took up all the parking with their armored cars. Now there were tanks and tents with soldiers in front of the house instead of white vans and tents with pilgrims. Now there were checkpoints with armed guards. They required ID and a pass signed by a government official. A line to see the house grew so long it wrapped all the way into the next town.

People started moving into the town to be near the fire. Each new building promised a better view of the burning house. A skyline grew, the town was now a city. They began new art movements, formed

new institutions, sparked new cultural discourse. At the heart of it all was the house. The people just wanted to see the fire, to feel its warmth.

The Guard started only accepting passes signed by the President himself. The people became enraged and marched, demanding to see the house on fire. Riots erupted. They threw all the old books into the fire. Fanatics from the Church of the House on Fire stood on crates, they said, before He created the world, God set the house on fire. The Guard shot their machine guns into the crowds to keep the peace. But people only became angrier, more impassioned, more frenzied. A person ran past the Guard and hurled themself into the fire.

Everyone just wanted to see the fire, to feel its warmth.

A year after I came home, my dad passed away and then the fire died, leaving behind a pile of ashes. Everybody left. No reporters, no vans, no tourists, no pilgrims, no checkpoints, no

Still Waters

c November passed by in showers of rain seeping into the brickwork and a carpet of fallen leaves collecting in the canopies of alley houses. A single shop window was dimly lit on the corner of Jasper and Main. Talia moved toward it briskly, one hand bunched in the pocket of her coat and the other steering her little brother around particularly bleak pools of water, like the color made by paintbrushes swirling watercolors in a cup.

The shop seemed to hold its breath upon their arrival. A table beside the doorway was littered with jars containing scales, fingerbones, and what looked like some petrified organ suspended in thick solution. Stacks of books crowded the floor, one teetering precariously over a wire cage where a golden-eyed raven was perched. Talia carefully removed her scarf while Emmett shuffled in behind her, his worn leather shoes soft against the carpet. He looked up at her through a tangle of dark curls, uncharacteristically quiet. Behind them, a small bell rang out and splintered the stillness of the room. Talia reached for her brother’s wandering glove.

“Don’t touch anything,” she whispered.

A tall, dark-skinned boy with thickly framed glasses stumbled out from the back curtain, meeting her gaze in the dim light. Talia approached the counter and produced the parchment folded delicately in her coat pocket, a torn page from an old tome.

“Summoning spell?” The boy’s eyes glinted with an animated quality, the sharp angles catching the light of a single candle resting atop the cash register.

Emmett began to cough sharply. His gloved hand slipped from her grasp and clutched his chest. Water dribbled down his chin and sunk into the neckline of his sweater.

Talia rubbed his back. “Something like that.”

Talia had never thought about what drowning would feel like.

She’d never cared much for the water, unlike Emmett, who would run to the garage and pull on their dad’s old rubber-lined work boots—comically oversized on his pudgy little feet—to splash about in the puddles, screeching manically whenever he saw a worm wriggling by. They used to play in the creek near Grandma’s country house, their mom watching absently from the porch over a glass of Prosecco.

Once, when she was eight, she found the broken body of a bluebird that had crashed into the screen door. The bird was long dead, its feathers crusted with blood, a swarm of murmuring flies congested in its twisted neck. Talia cried out, shielding Emmett’s eyes; when their grandmother came over, wiping her

knotted hands over the soft patchwork of her apron, she scooped up the bird and carried it inside: a sacrificial lamb nestled in the bread basket. She closed the screen gently and wiped a tear from Talia’s cheek.

“Don’t blame the flies for what they eat, Talia. Many of us make our living from death in this world.”

The next morning, there was a bluebird building its nest outside the window. Grandma winked at her over blueberry pancakes, and they didn’t speak of it again.

Talia returned home that summer with Grandma’s leather-bound spellbook and a vow that she’d tear her own heart from her chest to make this world decent for her brother. She lived in the white sands of a broken hourglass watching the time fall away, like mayonnaise or mothers or other things with expiration dates; but that little kid, he held something in his heart that felt like their grandmother’s hugs and freshly fallen snow. I will weather this storm for the both of us.

And maybe she knew exactly what drowning felt like, because she’d been doing it for years.

+++

Talia fidgeted with a loose button on the outside of her coat. Across the counter, the boy smoothed the creases on the torn out page where delicate handwriting whispered secrets from below the dirt.

He examined the list. “You need something that belonged to the deceased. Like a token.”

Talia didn’t speak. She just reached into her satchel and produced a miniature model of train car, green paint chipping and wheels spinning helplessly in the air. Placing the car on the counter amongst all the other foreign objects, it looked extremely small. It felt like the heaviest thing in the world.

+++

Emmett had died on a Thursday. It was the day after a particularly nasty storm, and Talia had driven her brother and some of his friends to the lake while she pored over a book of poems. She hadn’t even noticed he went under until she heard the boys’ screeches and raised her head to scold them. There was never going to be enough time. When they dragged the body from the water, his skin was sodden and colorless, like the figures in a wax museum. Talia might’ve laughed if she wasn’t already swallowing vomit. The rocks lining the water looked too much like teeth. She saw Emmett that same night, standing in the corner of her bedroom with a distant look on his face. If she screamed, no one heard it, and since then he’d never left.

Guard. When I got back home from the funeral, I realized that the AC was off for the first time in a year and everything was just quiet.

COLE MESSINGER R’25 is a high-ranking member (Log Master) of the Society for Staring Deeply in the Fire.

She didn’t know how else to say it, but she felt she would love that little kid after the tea kettle had grown cold and the scones had grown stale and the flowers from the bed in the back garden had wilted and fallen against the dirt. She would love him through brittle bones and thinning hair and laugh lines carving themselves like battle scars into his face. She would love him if she had to drown herself in the same eager depths of Lake Lenora and dig his body out of the ground with nothing but her fingernails.

I was never good enough to you. Her eyes settled just above Emmett’s head, unable to meet the dark cavities where pretty brown eyes used to be. I was never good enough for you.

+++

The air outside the apothecary tasted of cigarettes and rotting fruit. It was late, and her mother would certainly be asleep by now, most likely draped over the couch with some comedy rerun playing silently in the background and an empty bottle of red tipped over on the coffee table. The pockets of Talia’s coat dragged her shoulders down slightly, filled with strange objects and desperate hopes. Somehow, she felt much lighter than before.

“What are you thinking about?” Emmett asked. His lips were blue again now that they’d stepped into the cold. Talia could make out dark puddles on the sidewalk through the gaps in his small ribcage.

The loneliness of gods. “I think it’s going to snow.”

KEELIN GAUGHAN B‘25 needs a new winter coat.

( TEXT KEELIN GAUGHAN )

can’t beat Big Meat

How the meat and dairy lobby has shaped attitudes about protein

( TEXT TALIA REISS

DESIGN KAY KIM

ILLUSTRATION MEKALA KUMAR )

c In a culture that is unbearably weird about food, I try to relegate my judgment to the culture—not the individual—when I think and talk about eating. I generally believe that weird nutritional choices are not an indictment of the eater themselves, but of the society in which they eat. So, reader, please note my utter kindness and neutrality as I tell you what I saw at the V-Dub this morning: An athletic guy, tall, t-shirt taut against his biceps, with a plate in each hand. On one: a precariously balanced mountain of eggshells. On the other, no less than eight shiny hard-boiled eggs.

And he’s not the only one. I’ve seen seven boiled eggs and a bottle of processed protein milk. Eggs and Greek yogurt. Eggs and cottage cheese. Nine boiled egg whites, whose nine boiled egg yolks were carefully extracted and promptly discarded. Eggs and bacon. Eggs and sausage. Eggs on eggs on eggs on eggs!

The high-protein diet is the latest fad occupying the nutritional zeitgeist, marketed as a silver bullet for body transformation, especially when consumed in quantities as ridiculous as 200 grams per day (or 33.3 eggs). We haven’t always thought about protein this way. So when did this protein pandemonium start, and what prompted it?

In 1990, annual US meat consumption (beef, pork, poultry) was 114.12 kg per person per year, or about 18 hamburgers per week. Throughout the decade, this number rose steadily, perhaps with some help from an industry-funded advertising campaign depicting happy families eating big fat beef dinners. Beef kabobs. Beef bourguignon. Beef sandwiches. Beef stew. Beef anything you can possibly imagine: juicy and hot and falling off the bone. Every commercial featured honky-tonk music and ended with the slogan, “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.” The campaign was so pervasive that when I called my dad this afternoon and asked him to use his memory of television ads to answer the question, “What’s for dinner?” he quickly answered “Beef!” Indeed, Beef Checkoff, a national program designed to “sell more beef,” recognizes the campaign as “a catalyst for pushing beef to the forefront of consumer advertising and into the center of the dinner plate.” As a result, beef consumption reached around 123 kg

per person per year in 2002, nearly 10 kg more than it was a decade prior (an extra 32 eggs each week).

But in 2003, something strange happened. Sid Lerner, a public health advocate and advertising executive, conceived of the “Meatless Mondays” campaign, encouraging Americans to “one day a week, cut out meat” in order to prevent chronic disease. That same year, meat consumption flatlined.

Meatless Mondays quickly gained traction, earning the endorsement of the Baltimore City Public Schools (which implemented Meatless Mondays in their cafeterias), Oprah Winfrey, Yoko Ono, Kate Moss, Bob Harper, and Paul McCartney (who founded his own distinct “Meat Free Monday” campaign). By 2011, 50% of survey respondents affirmed that they had heard of “Meatless Monday,” and 27% of these said that it influenced them to eat less meat. By 2012, meat consumption in the US was down to 113 kg/year, the lowest it had been since 1987. For the first time in at least 20 years, another country—Australia—surpassed us in meat consumption.

The meat industry was livid. Lobbyists and politicians from beef-producing states threw a fit over the USDA’s adoption of Meatless Mondays in their own cafeteria—including Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who so eloquently tweeted, “I will eat more meat on Monday to compensate for stupid USDA recommendation abt a meatless Monday.” Meat lobbying expenditures more than quadrupled, and the meat industry circulated a myth that 75% of children were not eating enough protein. Shortly after, meat consumption in the US slowly began to rise again, and a fixation on protein consumption took hold. A 2013 Wall Street Journal article read, “When the Box Says ‘Protein,’ Shoppers Say ‘I’ll Take It.’” Today, meat consumption is the highest its ever been.

I’m not saying that the meat and dairy industry is compensating for a mass migration away from meat-eating by overselling the importance of meat for muscle growth and fat loss… am I?

Well, I am saying that the relationship between government health officials and the meat lobby is undeniable. In 1994, a newly-inducted Head of the Food Safety and Inspection Service was surprised to find just two speed dials set on the office telephone: the American Meat Institute and

the National Cattlemen’s Association. Since the 1880s, the meat and dairy industry has exploited this relationship to intervene in nutrition advice and steer our culture towards meat eating.

In the 1970s, for example, milk consumption plummeted and the dairy industry responded by boosting lobbying efforts, contributing many millions of dollars to candidates like Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, and a slew of congressmen. Their contributions paid off. In 1983, Congress created the National Dairy Promotion & Research Board, a semi-governmental organization under USDA direction that exclusively aimed to boost dairy sales. This Board helped fund the “Got Milk?” campaign, an inundation of star-studded advertisements claiming that the protein and calcium in three glasses per day of milk could make people taller, thinner, and more muscular. Some ads called milk “nature’s wellness drink” and marketed it as something “real quick” to grab in lieu of a meal – which sounds, to me, a whole lot like modern messaging around “on-the-go” protein bars and shakes. The recommendation ignores evidence that milk does not strengthen bones or limit weight gain. Furthermore, one in four Americans are unable to digest lactose, including 90% of Asian Americans and 80% of both African Americans and Native Americans, which demonstrates the prioritization of white Americans in health policy. Still, the USDA requires that schools do not “directly or indirectly restrict the sale or marketing of fluid milk,” making the National School Lunch Program the largest buyer of fluid milk and America’s children pawns in Big Dairy’s money-making game. What happens when the government falls out of step with the meat and dairy industry? In 1977, a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs tried to recommend a decrease in meat consumption, but they faced aggressive pressure from the meat lobby, including a comment from a National Cattlemen’s Association representative that the term “decrease” in the context of meat consumption should be a “bad word.” In response, the committee modified the guidelines to read, “Choose meats, poultry, and fish which will reduce saturated fat intake.” When the 1979 Healthy People report recommended eating less red meat, representatives from the meat industry offered to “fund research to counter what was perceived as a growing scientific threat to the economic security

of their industries,” reported the International Journal of Health Services. Healthy People was the last federal publication to explicitly recommend eating less meat, despite the fact that expert health advisory committees have advocated for the USDA to lower the recommended intake. Why? “The current system opens the guidelines up to lobbying and manipulation of data,” Dr. Walter Willett, chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, told TIME. Dr. Marion Nestle, an expert who assisted with the development of the guidelines, said, “I was told we could never say ‘eat less meat’ because the USDA would not allow it.” The practice of lobbying is fundamentally embedded into American democracy; its purpose, ideally, is to protect the interests of citizens who cannot, themselves, be policymakers. But what happens when the interests of corporations and individuals are diametrically opposed—for example, when corporate profits rely on poorer public nutrition? It seems the government has decided: money wins. While government guidelines certainly influence attitudes about nutrition, I think it’s safe to assume that fewer Americans are reading the USDA’s quinquennial Dietary Guidelines for Americans than are trusting their favorite fitness influencers, science teachers, coaches, doctors, dieticians, and that one “certified nutrition coach” on most of our FYPs. Unfortunately, the meat lobby has its claws in these folks, too.

In 2014, coinciding with an increase in meat consumption, the meat lobby revived the old ad campaign, “Beef. It’s What’s For Dinner,” this time with an emphasis on targeted digital marketing. Beef Checkoff’s newsletter The DRIVE emphasized industry collaboration with authority figures such as “health professionals, fitness professionals, credentialed nutrition experts and communicators, medical doctors, nongovernmental organizations, academics and third-party scientists, culinary leaders, bloggers and other experts.” These relationships “positively affect attitudes and perceptions about how beef is raised, its health value and its role in a nutritious diet.” Does the dude flexing his lat spread on TikTok believe that his progress came from shoveling down so much protein that he released a ‘protein fart’ with every bench press, or has his attitude been positively affected by Beef Checkoff? Does he care about your body transformation, or does he care about the money he earns from spreading positive messages about beef? What about your coach: has their attitude been positively affected? Your doctor? The meat industry isn’t just preying on influencers; they’re leveraging the strong relationships between influencers and you.

And for the past eight years, the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture (AFBFA), which is a contractor to Beef Checkoff, has organized programming for school science teachers that aims to foster a “more positive perception” of the meat industry. Thus far, the programs have worked: educators who attended an AFBFA program were “8 points more likely to trust positive statements about beef production,” according to an AFBFA report. The folks we trust with the education—the science education, no less—of our country’s children are swayed by industry propaganda, which has disturbing implications for the institutional health of our public education system and for the physical health of the next generation. Children, whose minds are most malleable, are subjected to AFBFA-designed lesson plans, like a bingo game for 8- to 11-year-olds in which the teacher must “remind students that lean beef is a nutritious source of protein that can be incorporated in daily meals.” In others, students must create a school menu using educational resources from the beef industry or hypothetically convince a conservation agency to introduce cattle into their ecological preserve.

For kids whose only access points to information are school and the Internet, the fact that neither teachers nor Internet users are reliable sources of nutritional information poses a real health risk.

So, okay, yeah. I am suggesting that the meat industry is behind the protein craze. With strategy, persistence, and a boatload of money, lobbyists have effectively weaseled their way into government policy, public education, and digital discourse—as much now as in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

This is not to say that we don’t need protein. Protein, by scientific standards, is good for the body. It stimulates muscle growth, repairs tissues and bones, supports a healthy metabolism, and keeps us feeling satiated. Thus our innate desire for protein is natural and good; I, like you, protein fiend, often feel a carnal need to sink my teeth into a ribeye, to feel it bleed and rip from the bone (I’m not kidding). What’s unnecessary, however, is the fervent obsession with protein, particularly given that today, the average American gets a full fifth more than the recommended amount (and do keep in mind that the recommended amount may already be skewed by lobbying).

Is there any harm in getting a little extra of a good thing? Well, yeah. According to a 2013 study in ISRN Nutrition, “There is currently no reasonable scientific basis in the literature to recommend protein consumption above the current RDA [Recommended Dietary Allowance] … for healthy adults due to its potential disease risks”—namely heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and metabolic syndrome. These risks are associated with every source of protein but are greatest with red meat. There’s a scene in the TV series Fleabag in which a feminist lecturer asks the room if they’d trade five years of their lives for the so-called “perfect body.” If high-protein was the miracle diet, if you could pack it down and be impossibly sexy and toned, but you’d die at 50 from a heart attack, would you do it? Would you choke down the chalky powder, the mountain of egg whites, knowing it could carve years from your life?

Lucky for you, you don’t have to make the sacrifice: the high-protein diet is neither risk-free nor a miracle body-sculptor. When we eat excess protein in any form, “‘it turns to fat,’” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts told Inverse. “This type of fat typically pads the organs, he says, and has been linked to an increased risk of metabolic syndrome and heart disease.” Additionally, many protein powders, drinks, and bars contain artificial sweeteners that are—contrary to popular belief— linked to weight gain. In other words, it’s a loselose; those looking to stay lean will not find success with outrageous overconsumption of protein.

It wouldn’t be the first time that an all-or-nothing fad diet overemphasized its health benefits and ignored serious risks. In the 1990s, the government and every major nutrition organization recommended a diet low in fat and high in carbohydrates (six to 11 servings). According to NPR, “the food industry saw the low-fat, high-carb mantra as an opportunity to create a whole new range of products. Fat-free frozen yogurt, fat-free muffins and cookies — the formula was: Take out the fat; add lots of sugar.” My personal favorite relic of the era was Lay’s fat-free “WOW!” chips, which replaced traditional fat with a synthetic oil that slid through the body without being digested. The result? Uncontrollable diarrhea and orange-tinted “anal oil leakage.” Still, the chips flew off the shelves, topping $340 million in sales in the first year alone.

Despite the era’s widespread belief that a fat-free diet would create a fat-free body, David Ludwig, a professor of nutrition at Harvard, said, “All those years of focusing on ways to get fat out of foods has actually contributed to the obesity epidemic,” as the “low-fat foods brought to market over the past 40 years—high in refined carbohydrates aimed at making the foods more palatable—actually raise our insulin levels, trigger our fat cells to hoard calories, slow our metabolism, and make us hungrier.” Worse, the low-fat diet did not succeed at reducing heart disease, stroke, diabetes, or cancer.

We also learned from the fat-free fad that unidimensional nutrition advice can create an unbalanced, unhealthful diet. Today, we know that many fats—particularly monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which are found in vegetable oils, nuts, seeds, and fish—are healthy and lower the risk of disease. Eliminating fat entirely would deprive dieters of these “good” fats.

Likewise, people who singularly prioritize high protein consumption may be at a deficit of other essential nutrients. Only about seven percent of Americans eat enough fiber, a critical nutrient for improving heart and gut health and stabilizing blood sugar. For people looking to put on muscle, omega-3 fatty acids are associated with increased muscle gain and decreased muscle loss. +++

Food is an expression of culture, and eating can be an outlet for extraordinary joy when we allow ourselves to indulge. Protein bars and shakes are, in my opinion, an insufficient replacement for the delight of a warm meal, and the “grab-and-go” culture that they foster simply fuels the capitalist fire. It trains us to be more efficient workers, cutting out the time we have historically reserved for eating in community with one another (or decompressing alone) to make room for more working, studying, locking the fuck in. When we do sit down at the table, our food choices matter. Health and strength are important, but our mental health relies on our ability to think about things other than macros during meals—the blossoming flavors, the beauty of our friends around the table, the privilege of having a full plate, the feelings of nostalgia and cultural connectivity that can come from a full, fun, and well-balanced meal. Tallying up protein intake to the last gram requires mental labor and can take a real emotional toll.

It’s frustrating that we receive such conflicting nutrition advice from institutions as central as our schools and government, and we partly have the capitalist construction of lobbying to blame. My advice? Ignore the fads; learn what your cravings mean and honor them. Notice how different foods make you feel. The body has a way of telling us what we need.

TALIA REISS B’27 wants you to know that the egg yolk has all the nutrients… and it tastes the best.

This Moment in the Movement

Seven student organizers on grief, hope, and the future

c Last Friday, more than 150 pro-divestment protestors marched to the Warren Alpert Medical School, where the Corporation of Brown University convened for the first time since releasing its decision not to divest from Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Surrounding the exits of the building, they chanted for immediate divestment and condemned individual Corporation members for their complicity in human rights violations. The march finished on the Main Green with a vigil honoring Palestinian martyrs.

At the end of the long day, members of Brown Jews for Ceasefire Now (JFCN) and their guests settled into the “Gaza Solidarity Sukkah,” a traditional wood and canvas tent erected by the group in observance of Sukkot. The eight-day holiday commands Jewish people to dwell in the sukkah to honor the blessings of a bountiful harvest and shelter—issues that are particularly poignant during a time of mass displacement and famine in Gaza.

The sukkah was meant to provide a badly-needed place to rest, to sing, and to regroup. Knitted blankets carpeted the grass. Light filtered in through the palm and willow above. On Friday evening, they sang: Bless those in need of healing with רְפוּאָה שְׁלֵמָה. The renewal of body, the renewal of spirit. But starting even earlier that week, Brown’s administration had stepped in the way. With a new and unprecedented prohibition against sleeping in the sukkah—and later, occupying it, during certain hours, at all—Brown turned a project of rest into a project of preservation. JFCN members were forced to take two-hour shifts, from night to early morning, watching over the sukkah from the steps of Manning Chapel. By Sunday, they had had enough. JFCN members decided to fulfill their religious commitment to sleep in the sukkah. On Monday, DPS officers woke them around 4:30 a.m. to take down their IDs, triggering Brown’s disciplinary process.

At this point in a long and often disheartening movement, student groups are faced with a challenge: how do you build a sustainable organizing structure, honoring the need for rest and mutual care, while maintaining momentum and moving with the urgency that Gaza demands? And how do you do all of this in the face of continued University repression?

In the wake of last week’s actions, the Indy spoke with seven organizers from Students for

Justice in Palestine (SJP) and JFCN about how they’re navigating exhaustion and grief, renewing their commitment to their work, and envisioning the student movement’s future.

Arman Deendar B’25, SJP

I want to push back on framing the vote as a setback. We kind of knew that divestment was an impossible feat. And if we look at ACURM1, the committee was set up to fail. They said themselves that it’s hard to imagine any instance they could think of where they would recommend divestment.2 With that, there’s a lot of room for thinking about how we get our demands met beyond the very institutional focus that we’ve had so far. What is driving me, in spite of the “no” vote, is what’s happening on the ground in Gaza and now Lebanon. It’s seeing how steadfast and resilient Palestinians are on the ground—how they resist just incredibly horrific violence on a day-to-day basis. The end goal is peace in Gaza, not necessarily divestment. Divestment is a means to that end. And so long as Israel continues to perpetrate violence, we will fight for Palestinian liberation. Of course, pursuing divestment is still incredibly important. Even voting on a divestment proposal turned a lot of heads. You know, it’s not novel for an institution that’s run by billionaires and built off chattel slavery, on stolen land, not to listen to their community. For any movement to be successful, we have to look beyond this campus. How do we reorient how we think about ourselves as students?

1 The Advisory Committee on University Resources Management, tasked with making recommendations to the Corporation on divestment.

2 From the 2024 ACURM report: “Under the ACURM definition of “social harm”, it is difficult to envision even egregious examples of ordinarily understood harm meeting the definition of “social harm” as required for potential divestment action.

… However, the Committee underscores the importance of clarifying for members of the Brown community under what conditions the University would be willing to take divestment action. If the answer is that such conditions do not exist, the University should say so.”

(

TEXT TALIA REISS DESIGN ANAÏS REISS

ILLUSTRATION BENJAMIN NATAN )

How do we take the fight beyond the gates?

Eden Fine B’25, JFCN & Brown Divest Coalition

The Sukkah, as an expression of community, has a real capacity to threaten the dominant, choke-holding narrative of the University and of homogenized Zionist imperial Judaism. So the reason why we have to continue to build this community is absolutely to tend to our spiritual health and to fulfill religious commandments. But it’s also to re-articulate to the University, over and over and over again, that we are stronger than any alienating, isolating, repressive tactic.

I think in the post-“secret ‘no’ vote” era, there’s a lot of grief. I’m certainly feeling that. I think we have to make space to grieve. I’ve been talking to a lot of movement elders, people who have been doing this for a lot longer than I have, and they’ve all reiterated that this is what organizing is. It’s setting ourselves up for heartbreak because we have to—because we have to stake so much heart into it—and then we have to experience the political heartbreak, let it happen so that we can do it again.

I also will say, I don’t really feel optimistic. Like, I don’t really feel hope. This shit is really hard. And while all this bullshit is happening on campus, last week refugees at a hospital-turned-refugee-camp in Deir al-Balah were burned alive, which is a really stark image to pair alongside Sukkot, a time you’re supposed to be praying for rain. Rabbi Miriam Grossman basically said, I don’t need to ask myself to have hope. What I need to ask myself to do is make hope habitable. Make it possible for hope to arrive. It means building a beautiful room that is welcoming and has doors wide open for hope to come in.

We can’t wait for hope in order to act. We have to act in order to build hope.

Aboud Ashhab B’25, SJP

I knew this “no” vote would be the outcome. What the divestment campaign did was expose this university and all universities and their corporate interests: it’s profit over people all the time. And they stand against the interests of students, faculty, collective voices, and the world at this important crossroads.

We need to find ways to reclaim the University as an institution of learning, for students. While I don’t believe that having student seats on the Corporation will achieve anything—the Corporation is antithetical to concrete changes—I believe that just daring to re-envision a university without corporate ownership and more student and faculty stakeholders, even Providence community stakeholders, is a way to go forward.3 I also think we need to find a way to start amplifying more of what’s going on currently in Palestine and in Lebanon. We’re fighting with these centers of knowledge production to actually talk about what’s going on.

I’m from Palestine. I always feel a loss of hope and desperation when I see what goes on in the headlines, and when I talk to my family. But seeing the number of students who have protested, who have showed up and personally

3 The Undergraduate Council of Students (UCS) is advocating for changes in Brown’s governing structure. Shortly after the Corporation voted “no” on divestment, UCS released a student referendum to approve or reject the following statement: “The undergraduate student body lacks confidence in the leadership of the university by the Brown University Corporation. We demand elected student representation on the Brown Corporation and democratic reform across our institution.”

comforted me and supported me, makes me more hopeful and optimistic that people are not just forgetting about the plight of my people. They’re actually recognizing injustice and naming it.

When people came to write the names of martyrs on the Main Green, this continual writing—I think that was very moving. It was a grieving space, and everybody needs a space for grieving. There’s so much pain, and there’s so much loss. The Corporation… that’s just a vote, and it was a very flawed one to begin with. There’s so much loss of human life and human dignity.

In the long term, it’s about sustainability. It’s making sure there’s always some sort of momentum going on, and that when there is a riskable action, there’s a way to have a day after and to continue. We need to preserve students’ ability to resist and to demonstrate.

Nationwide, they’re clamping down on students, suffocating them. Even the Liberation Sukkah is getting a lot of pressure from the administration. And I’m worried about it getting much worse if Trump is elected. It could get to the extent where universities, to make themselves “marketable” in a Trump presidency, could fully do away with any Palestine organizing. And that’s something we’re bracing ourselves for. That’s a very long-term fight we need to look at. But the immediate one is divestment, and advocate tirelessly about what’s going on in the war.

Lena Noya B’25, JFCN & SJP

I haven’t observed Sukkot in the past. But this year it felt very important to me. How could we not observe Sukkot as a Jewish holiday—and an act of solidarity with Gaza, and an act of solidarity with displaced people in general? The language and the themes around the holiday very much compel us to be in solidarity with people who are displaced. During Sukkot, we’re commanded to be joyous. We talked a lot about how to balance that with what we’re working for and what we’re facing. The Sukkah is a space to find joy in the hope for liberation. The joy is in the possibility. For so many people, divestment felt like some sort of telos, like an ending. But the fight for divestment is really about giving Gaza enough attention, and giving it enough power, so that—in Naomi Klein’s words—it “trickles up.”4 If Brown doesn’t divest, maybe another school will. But I believe that it’s hard to see that kind of progress without making it a sustainable movement. The South Africa divestment movement took years and years

Niyanta Nepal B’25, UCS President & SJP

When you’re organizing in a private institution that seems to have very little accountability to its community, it can be challenging to navigate what that means for the hope that you bring into an organizing environment. I don’t want to let the hopelessness of existing in a system like this negate the fact that there’s still so much to do for Palestine. But I’m hoping that if we can fight for some of those structural changes, we can make it so that other generations that come here in the future don’t have the same kind of setbacks that we’ve experienced.

I think that [Friday’s rally] was a testament to the level of frustration that we were all experiencing. The decision they made [regarding divestment] is not just a University decision. It is a decision of whose lives they prioritize on this campus, and that is not the lives of Palestinians at all.

Even if this institution no longer wants to engage with this movement, that does not stop our responsibility to keep engaging with it. It is ultimately our job to push those in power and also not let the power of the movement die as a result of feeling these setbacks and these frustrations.

The only way forward for this movement is to continue our calls for divestment, but also to create spaces that this University refuses to create, for those who are most impacted, to process what it means to be a student in a place that does not care about you. That’s why I always want to center

4 During the last week, JFCN welcomed several organizers and public intellectuals into the Sukkah for conversations on movement work—including writer Naomi Klein, along with City Councilmember June Rose, IfNotNow founder Simone Zimmerman, journalist and Reclaim RI co-chair Dan Denvir, and Green New Deal advocate Thea Riofrancos.

“I don’t need to ask myself to have hope. What I need to ask myself to do is make hope habitable. Make it possible for hope to arrive.”

community and healing and restoration in a lot of organizing practices, because you’re asking a lot of people to grapple with some really hard truths.

I got into organizing at Brown because it was the first community space where I felt seen and heard and cared for. For me, activism has always been a healing space.

Anonymous, JFCN

Before last fall, I used to be very heavily involved in Hillel. I loved Sukkot on campus. I really did. I think it was the fact that it’s a community holiday, that it comes at the end of the High Holidays. Sukkot is really special.

I’ve always felt before this year that I could do whatever I wanted. I could sleep outside. I could build my own sukkah. It would be haphazard and last minute, and I knew that I was cared for by the University and that the University was going to facilitate rabbis’ ability to look out for us, to not make this challenging.

The chaplains office is great, but [with the Gaza Solidarity Sukkah], there’s no official rabbi who’s taking care of us in that particular way. The University is not gonna make this easy or painless.

We were squashed so aggressively, and not that we can’t regroup and rebuild, but it feels a little bit scary. I mean, I’m anxious about the war. I’m anxious about the genocide, like it’s hard to turn on my phone. But the feeling of singing together and being like, wow, there is a real desire for community and connection, gives me a lot of hope.

There’s this prayer for rain [during Sukkot], which feels a little bit like looking ahead, like we’ve had this whole season celebrating introspection and now it’s like, okay, the year is coming Like, yeah, there better be rain. Things have to work out in a really serious way. This month, as a Jewish community, we have really been experimenting with building up what we are religiously and as a political movement, and putting to rest this thing that we’ve been working on for a long time. And now we have to hope that the next year works out materially. It’s time to pray for rain.

Isaac Slevin B’25, JFCN

I’m not someone who’s traditionally observed Sukkot. I was happy that the group was building a Sukkah, but I didn’t feel a personal stake in it. But I am now, like, physically sick because of the nights that I’ve spent watching over the sukkah, because it’s become such a place of home and community. Just to walk by it and there are people singing or studying or sleeping or reading Jewish Currents or doing Torah study–this is

a really profound space. I’m really happy to be here. [Monday] night I was here from 7pm to 2am. And I hadn’t eaten dinner. That is a really long time. And so I went to the bathroom at the Rock, got food at Jo’s. I came back up here for a final two hours and I got back and the lights were all on and everyone was singing. And if they didn’t know the words, they were humming. Everything was really neat, it looked like a home. And that gave me a lot of energy to be here until some really evil hours.

I do worry that the efforts to silence our speech are taking their toll. There are fewer students who can do each action because so many people are on probation for the previous one. There are students who are being watched by the administration. There are students and faculty who have been investigated for harassment complaints. And, it’s tough because I want to say that they’re trying to silence us and they can’t do it. But ultimately, I gotta graduate from Brown University.

At the same time, we have also seen a dramatic increase in capacity because so many new folks are drawn to Jews for Ceasefire, to SJP, to Sunrise Brown, to Students for Educational Equity, to all of these groups that know what we’re up against and refuse to be cowed.

Students at Brown have gotten so skilled at organizing, at holding actions, at building our base, at having hard conversations. We’ve gotten so good at placing trust in one another, opening our social circles. And we’ve gotten really strategic. Brown was one of the very few schools in the country to win even a vote on divestment. And that was on the students’ fourth escalation of the year. Holding a coalition together for that long, even though it obviously wasn’t always easy, makes me really hopeful that, even as students go through the conduct process, even as students graduate, even after we lost the divestment vote, there are a lot of really talented people here who are more than ready to carry out whatever comes next.

TALIA

REISS B’27 is praying for rain.

Inventing Saaz

On ritual and return

( TEXT COBY MULLIKEN

DESIGN ANAÏS REISS

ILLUSTRATION

BENJAMIN NATAN )

c I learned of a place called Saaz very early in my life. When, exactly, I am not sure: perhaps I overheard the name in an anecdote from my great-grandmother while I ran circles about the living room of her Western Massachusetts home, or perhaps its name was passed to me by my mother on a long car ride. The difficult thing—the essential thing, which I did not realize until I was nearly 18—was that I could not find Saaz on any map. Saaz—the German name by which my great-grandmother knew her hometown—still exists, in a sense. It is still a sleepy Bohemian village an hour and a half from Prague, surrounded on all sides by hop fields and gently sloping hills. It still has its church and its synagogue and its expansive, if now empty, central square. But it is no longer Saaz; it is Žatec now, the Czech name officially given to it by the postwar government amidst the expulsion— and, in many cases, extermination—of the region’s German majority, the same majority which, six years prior, had participated in the expulsion—and, in many cases, extermination—of the Jewish minority of which my great-grandmother was a member. These facts make Saaz a rich historical parable. I think this is what first drew me to it, this notion that the place had some deeper story to tell, the idea that if I were to probe it enough, I might coax it into revealing the true narrative of the 20th century; what had gone wrong, how it might be fixed. There was something tragic in Saaz’s successive displacements that demanded reckoning. I wanted to reconstruct Saaz as it had been in my great-grandmother’s time, a time in which I imagined it undamaged, somehow more whole, before violence and modernity undid it.

Reconstruction was easier in theory than in practice. My great-grandmother had died when I was 14, three years before the angst of late adolescence drove me to “look to my roots,” so to speak, and obsess over the Old World locale to which—through her—I was tangentially linked. All I had, then, was the 40-page typewritten memoir my great-grandmother had written for my mother when she was in college. The document became a textbook of sorts. I fixated on the place names of her childhood—Krigern, Klatau, Ober Sekerschan—and filled Google Maps with pins. I spent my spare hours on StreetView traversing Bohemia’s rolling hills and threadlike lanes.

The imagery in my head grew more and more lifelike; for a creative writing class in my senior year of high school, I produced a short story imagining my “return” to the town and the places I might visit: her school, her house, her synagogue. The story—which was, as with much autofiction, both navel-gazey and poorly written—served as a sort of placeholder itinerary for my inevitable journey to Saaz. Though I found little literary value in the exercise, the project was not for nothing; weeks later, my father—whose only connection to Saaz was, admittedly, through my mother—hatched a plan for the two of us to visit the dormant town on the tail end of a family vacation. Saaz would be real at last.

My father and I amble south on a quiet boulevard. It is our sole afternoon in Žatec, and a pleasant one at that. I make mental notes of how the sun dapples the buildings at our side—ornate 19th-century storefronts, some covered with ivy, others with political posters. Our destination: my great-grandmother’s school. As we walk, my mind wanders to the summer of 1938. A German nationalist politician by the name of Konrad Henlein has risen to prominence in the Sudetenland—the German-speaking part of

the Czechoslovak Republic—and enshrined “Aryan supremacy” in his party’s charter. My great-grandmother’s friends and classmates begin sporting a uniform of white kneesocks to show their support for Henlein. In only a few months, the Nazi government will annex the Sudetenland with support from the great majority of her neighbors; my great-grandmother will flee on the last train out of the country, tipped off about the invasion by a friend of her grandfather, who—in a more accepting time—had served Austria-Hungary in World War I.

The daydream falls away as the art-nouveau gymnasium draws into focus. It is perhaps the most imposing elementary school I have ever seen. Marble busts (of whom I am not sure) peer out over its entrance, above which two enormous arched windows open out onto the schoolyard. I try to imagine my great-grandmother here, practicing her gymnastics or gossiping with her friends. But it is summer, and school is out of session. The schoolyard is empty, as are the sidewalks, and I cannot find a single face on which to project her. My father utters some comments on the architecture, but I am too absorbed in my thoughts to respond.

We wolf down dinner (goulash and a pilsner— very fitting, I think to myself) at the nearest pub and wander north, perhaps in the direction of our hotel. We slip into a park and follow an unmarked trail up a gradual incline. By the time we crest the hill, the sun, half dipped beneath the horizon, casts an almost glaring yellow over the landscape beneath us: in the foreground, church spires and quaint—if crumbling—earth-toned homes; then the Ohře river, a spindly tributary of the Elbe; past it, Eastern Bloc-era industrial parks and great gray apartment blocks. My father studies the low-resolution PDF guide he’s downloaded from the regional tourism website for historical sites in our vicinity; I scan our surroundings for yet more evocative imagery that might one day make its way into an article or an essay.

In the homes beneath me, I imagine my great-grandmother going about her life. I picture her picking gooseberries in her cousins’ secluded garden, paging through dense German literature at the local bookstore, loading wheat onto wagons in Saaz’s hinterlands during harvest time. I want so badly to see her here, to witness this life before its violent interruption. But the images do not quite fit; they are somehow too kitschy, too cliché. I feel not like a historian but like a voyeur, projecting my own absences onto a place I do not know and in some sense can never know. There is no parable, no plaque, no takeaway: only a town in which my great-grandmother once lived and now does not.

At the conclusion of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, Sebald’s narrator—a German gentile living in exile—returns to the Bavarian spa town of Kissingen with a manuscript in hand. But his is a peculiar sort of return: the narrator has never been to Kissingen before. Rather, he has come to reconstruct the origins of his friend, a German Jew exiled to Manchester whose mother hailed from Kissingen. He visits the town’s Jewish cemetery—“a wilderness of graves… crumbling and gradually sinking into the ground”—and its synagogue, following his friend’s manuscript in an attempt to retrace a life at once foreign and deeply familiar.

In the story’s final lines, faced with a faded photograph of three anonymous women, the narrator finds himself without logic or explanation. Have his reconstructive abilities reached

perhaps he knows nothing. Still, he reconstructs with “spindle, scissors, and thread,” patching, cutting, and stitching a history—a carpet of “irregular geometric patterns”—out of absence.

This is how I feel too, peering up at my great-grandmother’s childhood home, knowing at once nothing and everything, having constructed in my mind a narrative of her youth, of her face in the window that I know to be false. I am astounded at how extrahistorical this place feels, how untouched it appears to be by the great movements of history, which I had assumed it would elucidate. There are no monuments, no memorials—only a labyrinthine hop museum and the remarkably well-preserved landmarks of my great-grandmother’s youth.

As we leave Saaz the next morning, I consider the extent to which my notion of return is bound up in ritual. I have constructed a version of Saaz that is purely transactional, a site to which I imagined I could make pilgrimage and, perhaps, recover a lost part of myself. But Saaz offers no unified narrative or origin story, no list of wrongs, no recipe for righting them. It is but a town of 20,000 or so people, kebab shops, beer halls, bakeries, and an unplaceable sense of becoming.

The spires and rooflines grow smaller in the rearview mirror. We are headed towards Berlin, towards famous places with famous names, towards battlefields and Holocaust memorials and well-kept historical sites. I feel a bizarre comfort in leaving this place—and all its unsettling normality—behind. (When my friends ask later what I think of Czechia, I will say that it is the most incomprehensible place I have ever been, that it is so utterly normal as to be unplaceable.) And yet I fight that feeling. I know it conceals something, the only truth I’ve uncovered here: that history lives in the banal, that any attempt at reconstruction must grapple with the unreconstructable, that the “takeaways” that are handed to us are the easy ones, that the important ones take effort.

Saaz may be banal now. But it was banal 86 years ago, too, when upwards of 90% of my great-grandmother’s neighbors voted for Nazi politicians in free elections. It was banal—by my logic—when my great-grandmother was born and banal when she fled on the last train out of the country. It is not that it was once a site of history and now is “just a town”—it has always been so. This is what Saaz demands of me: to accept it as it is, yes, but also to make something of it, to probe it, to narrativize it, to risk being wrong. We are far from Saaz now, passing from hilltop to hilltop in a sea of grain broken only by the road along which we travel. I feel already the memories fading, morphing into new ones, merging with those passed down to me by my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. I do not know what I will make of them; but, with memoir in hand, I will try.

COBY MULLIKEN B’27

can’t pronounce Žatec

Dear Yellow Wood Walker, The first time I understood what true agency felt like was in making the choice of which college to attend. It was like looking down the barrel of every de cision I had made up until that moment and being asked what it was all for. Before then, there had been moments in which I felt I’d made choices that mattered—eg. stealing a Polly Pocket from my mom’s friend’s house (which why did she have so many), LARPing in elementary school, the countless days of school skipped—but nothing that measured up to that Big Choice. I had to decide who I wanted to be, without any certainty of who that was, or what it would look like. I alone was responsible for what followed. Do you remember that feeling, that gratifying assertion that You Are Real, You Are Alive? Not to mention that the choice led to a year of independence, the first of its permanent kind. It’s overwhelming and sweet, and half the time I felt like someone had dumped a box of Legos out in front of me, and asked me to build the Sistine Chapel. No steps, no handbook (and I can’t get the 2x2s stacked together apart!). Then it became easy. The agency faded into the quiet again. Not fully gone, but concealed. The routine of a day, the paths you take to classes, the assignments due at 11:59. They become the new authoritative forces in life, moving one from Point A to Point B. I can’t be mad, I asked for this, I wanted this, I want this. But sometimes (a lot of times) I wonder if there is space for me in my own life. The cruel part, though, is that life keeps coming, and coming, and all of a sudden, you’re a senior and the past three years have already happened, and This Part is almost over. I think it’s alright that you regret your major, I think it makes total sense that you regret a lot. The tides of life will sweep you where they please, and it’s impossible to stand staunchly against them, unmoved. But no one knows how it will end as it begins. You are coming up on another moment like the first. When you graduate you’ll have all the opportunities of your life laid out in front of you. This time you’ll be older and wiser. Kinder, maybe? I won’t tell you to not repeat your mistakes, because, in this sense, you haven’t made any. You’ve done what we all do. You’ve lived life, and now you will do it again. This time, you know more of what to look for, and what to hide from. Embrace that, the world awaits. Its future is not written in stone.

NOTHING IS REAL? THAT CAN’T BE TRUE.

CLASSES.

EVERYONE IS EXISTENTIAL THIS WEEK AND INDIE IS TAKING TWO PHILOSOPHY

I’m a senior regretting my major. Actually, I’m regretting a lot of things… relationships made, ended, or never began… the stupid stuff i did as a sophomore when i thought i was so cool… skipping all those 9ams… clubs i joined and clubs i didn’t… i keep dwelling in regret and the finality of everything is overwhelming, what to do?

—Yellow Wood Walker

I’M SORRY.

Dear Crumbl Cookie, Probably like three DUIs. Or more than ten elephants in a room. Also, seven degrees of separation. And never the number of monthly listeners that Drake has. Bisou, Bisou!

How much is too much?

Indie has a friend who speaks in largely decisive terms. We, as friends do, converse at length about many a thing. She calls things right, she calls things wrong, and she makes sweeping statements about the definitive nature of people, the Earth, and all that falls between. When I hear her talk, I believe it. It doesn’t matter if a part of me whispers disagreement, or if she has since contradicted herself. She speaks with an assuredness so compelling that I want to believe her. It’s an act of faith, in a sense. And Indie has always been prone to belief in something. Then I go home, and am left to my own devices (iPad, Tamagotchi, electric blackhead remover I got off Temu which probably sparks too much for me to be using it on my face) and the truth she had painted so beautifully, dissipates. This is not an uncommon occurrence. Among the many relationships I’ve nurtured in life, I’m eternally grateful for the perspectives I get to digest, the wonderful and unique ways I get to learn about how people see truth. But my understanding is impermanent. I always return to myself. I used to think that I was missing something in my conception of the world. That everything I knew to be messy and overlapping and infuriating was neatly discernable, and I just couldn’t see it without the aid of someone else. It was like I needed someone to tell me what was real and what wasn’t. As of late, I’ve come to learn none of that was ever true. I can be spacey and confusing; I see the world for an infinite number of things, which at once makes me terrified and elated. And the sorts of proofs I admire so much about the world—their binary neatness—cannot exist within the frame of mind I’ve cultivated, and I am okay with that. Maybe that’s a roundabout, unsatisfying way to say that different people think about the world in different ways. But it’s more than thinking, it’s truth. How can one reconcile themself with the feverish knowledge that someone will always believe the exact opposite of what guides you, and in the essence of their belief, solidify as much into truth? Indie has been thinking about recursion and regression. We need to do something— believe something, perform something, follow steps, get an answer—but starting where? Nothing worthwhile exists on its own, everything we care about is built upon the data and fact and life that existed before itself. But that’s just the rub, isn’t it? How far back do we go? How do we know to stop looking? Before something there was nothing, and something had to have come out of nothing, or else it’s k+1 turtles, all the way down. We are crude mammals, made glittering and special by the little leaps of faith that create us, determining truth from something→from something→from something→from something. A base case cleverly crafted in my code. Indie thinks her faith is probably love. Yeah, it’s love.

–Crumbl Cookie

The BulleTin 10/25/2024

( TEXT QIAOYING CHEN & GABRIELLE YUAN

DESIGN APRIL S. LIM )

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

Friday 10/25 @3:30-5:30PM

Location:Washington Park Library - Main Area 2 1316 Broad Street, Providence, RI, United States

Hispanic Heritage Month Celebration

The Washington Park Library is celebrating the end of Hispanic Heritage Month. With different events at different times, join Ines from Carolina’s Restaurant from 4:00-5:00pm for a cooking demonstration on how to cook moro rice, a traditional dish from the Dominican Republic. Then, from 4:30pm-5:30pm, dancing security guard Tropicana Danny will be performing! In addition, Clínica Esperanza will be offering free vaccines outside from 3:30-5:30 pm.

Saturday 10/26 @ 11AM - 6PM

Location: Masjid Al Kareem, 39 Haskins Street, Providence Rhode Island

First Annual RI Palestine Day

Join us for Rl’s first annual Palestine Day to honor our people’s liberation struggle, history and culture of our homeland, in solidarity with our Brothers and Sisters in Palestine. Palestine Day will have local halal food vendors, cultural performances, children’s activities, prayer, Palestinian traditional goods, political education, art, raffles, a children’s bouncy house and more. Come by any time between 11-6 pm, or stay the whole day.

Saturday 10/26

@7:30AM-9:30PM

Location: Barker Playhouse - 400 Benefit Street, Providence, RI 02903

Newport Live Presents Amandla Freedom EnsembleJazz From South Africa

Hosted by Newport Live, The Amandla Freedom Ensemble from South Africa will be performing at the Barker Theater. Led by a South African Trumpeter, come enjoy some good music as Newport Live celebrates their 30th Anniversary of South African Independence with the Amandla Freedom Ensemble.

Saturday 10/26 @3-7PM

Location: 150 Empire St, Providence, RI 02903

Wicked Walk: A Trick-or-Treat Experience

Wicked Walk is a free event designed to provide a safe, accessible, & high-quality immersive environment for youth to celebrate Halloween! Those who attend can engage and expect different Halloween Doors to discover the delights of Trick or Treating. There will also be a variety of themed crafts and activities, including a StoryWalk, Spooky Stories, Ghost Haunt Adventure Walk, and Dog Costume Parade. Register through Facebook.

Saturday 10/26 @11:30AM-1:30PM

Location: Rochambeau Library – Community Room, 708 Hope Street, Providence, RI 02906

PVD Banned Book Clubs

Come join PVD Banned Book Clubs, who have monthly meetings the last Saturday of every month. Together, PVD Banned Books Club wants to hold open, honest, and respectful conversations about the book ban phenomenon and explore what happens when censorship takes over. Furthermore, this is an open forum about book topics, characters, and issues that are being deemed controversial. Some reads are easy, while other topics can be heavier.

Tuesday 10/29 @6:30PM-7:30PM Location: Zoom

Forum On Detention Abolition Legislation

Join AMOR and learn about legislation to shut down Wyatt Detention Center. There will be a discussion on what has been successful or challenging in the fight to close private prisons and ICE detention from public facilities in other states, and how those lessons can be applied in Rhode Island. Contact sophia@ amorri.org with any questions, and RSVP through Instagram @amornetwork or on https://forms.gle/ecvjtsLKDpeBEgfW8.

Wednesday 10/30 @2PM-6PM

Location: Knight Memorial Library – Outside 1, 275 Elmwood Avenue, Providence, RI 02907

Sankofa World Market

Swing by for the last Sankofa World Market of the year! Sankofa World Market is a weekly market that celebrates food, community, and culture. Shoppers with SNAP/EBT and WIC can purchase fresh produce. Drop by to pick up some fruits and veggies before they close out the year!

Thursday 10/31 @6PM-7PM

Location: Rochambeau Library, 708 Hope Street, Providence, RI 02906

BIG Semi-Annual Book Sale

Beginning on 10/31 and running through 11/02, the Rochambeau Library branch of Community Libraries of Providence will be hosting their semi-annual book sale to fundraise for the Rochambeau Library. Books of all conditions, genres, and editions will be sold at a steep discount of $1-$2, with special deals for children’s books, first editions, antiquarian books, and more. Book sale hours will be different on the last two days, 11/01 and 11/02. For more information, email friend@friendsofrochambeau.org.

Arts

Saturday 10/26 @11AM-2PM

Location: LitArts RI, 400 Harris Ave., Unit E, Providence Beyond the Pages: Creative and Empowering Writing Workshops for Survivors of AbuseIn recognition of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Beyond the Pages is holding a workshop led by Courtney Oman, the creator of Wayfinder Writing. This workshop offers a therapeutic and intentional approach to writing as a tool for self-aligned living. Dedicating her work to guiding and supporting those who are ready to recover a sense of inner trust, her framework teaches how to fulfill them through actions in a holistic and nourishing way. There will be a blend of writing prompts and artistic exercises. All skill levels are welcome. This is a free event; refreshments will be served, and space is limited.

Saturday 10/26 @1PM-5PM

Location: Mt. Pleasant Library – MakerSpace Introduction to Tufting

Through a one-day workshop, come learn the basics of how to use a tufting machine and even complete a small rug! The workshop takes up to four hours to complete. Participants will also receive safety instructions and sign a liability waiver. Starting in November, students must bring their own yarn. Everything else will be provided. Come explore a new hobby!

Wednesday 10/30 @2PM-3:30PM

Location: Fox Point Library – Main Area Chronicles of Yarnia

Come be a part of Fox Point Library’s crochet club! Join the club to chat, exchange ideas, or work on your current crocheting creation. If you want to learn how to crochet or need help with a specific project, Donna, the library clerk, will be there to help.

Wednesday 10/30 @5:30PM-7PM

Location: Sojourner House Drop-In Center, 1570 Westminster St, Providence, RI 02909

“The Art of Healing” Domestic Violence Awareness Month Exhibition

Sojourner House, an organization that supports survivors of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and human trafficking, is hosting their inaugural Domestic Awareness Month exhibition titled “The Art of Healing.” The exhibit, which will feature visual and performance art, will showcase the voices and healing journeys of survivors, and honor the stories of those who have lost their lives to abuse. Snacks and light refreshments will be offered to attendees.

Saturday 11/02

Rhode Island Latino Arts Call for Writers

Focused on a current exhibition by Niko Tolentino, this month’s writing prompt from Rhode Island Latino Arts (RILA) calls for poetry or short prose inspired by his visual art submitted to the Fronteras | Borders exhibition. Submissions will be posted to the RILA website and may be read during the December Artists MeetUp. If you’re an interested Latinx writer or creator, submit by 11/02 through Instagram @rilatinoarts!

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers

*Mutual aid is “survival pending revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

Donate to AMOR Rhode Island

AMOR (Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance / La Alianza Para Movilizar Nuestra Resistencia) is a community support network that organizes against state and police violence. Check out the LinkTree in their Instagram bio @ amornetwork to tap in on their ongoing campaigns in shutting down the Wyatt Detention Center and the distribution of resources to community members!

Queer and Trans Mutual Aid Providence (QTMA PVD)

Support a local mutual aid fund for queer and trans folks in the Providence area! Since their founding in June 2020, QTMA PVD has distributed over $80,000 to Providence community members. Send a donation at the Venmo and Paypal links above, or contact QTMA PVD at qtma.pvd@gmail.com if you’d like to get more involved with volunteer work!

Do you have an event, action, or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page? Email us at indybulletinboard@gmail.com!