Hisham Awartani
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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.
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c “FAGG*TS!” Vroom. We heard those two sounds and hated both. Hate hate hate. Not here, not back there. Not on Hope Street. HOPE STREET! Hate has no home here, but neither does hope. Home, hate, hope. Homos. They might have said that too. We grabbed each other, abreast, alive, but barely so. We were trees that had just met the ax, and it drove a yellow Pontiac. Ben. Ilan. Not okay today.
Could we melt into the grass? Become two gay puddles of human stuff? Resign ourselves to the worm life. Worms are sad, you know! They don’t even remember their birthdays and no arms means no Mom hugs. Is that the answer? No. It couldn’t be. Our light was gone for now, but it would have to come back. Photosynthesis. Is that what they call it? Plants are nifty little fahg- STOP.
The word. The word was like our dog after repeated colonoscopies. Constantly bouncing back. Fa- fa- fa- fado re mi fa- fa- FAFSA. Did you submit your FAFSA? . -got -got -got. Baby got? Baby got back? Baby got—Lord save our hearts. LORD! LORD! Let’s go meet her.
The closest church was the one across from Ratty, which is really to say across the way from the secret Gay Club under the Augustus Caesar statue. And all this, all of it, is to say: Eat! Pray! Fuck! Rome! And so we roamed…over to the church…our tails between our legs… our penguin tails.
Scaling the steps of St. Stephen’s Church, our hearts were melted and waggish if waggish meant bad. The steps were huge and many, and with each one we climbed our legs grew smaller and smaller. They even became tiny at one point. And then they were slightly bigger than tiny again and ultimately workable. Kinda like our shared iPhone 6. It would definitely be easier if we each had our own phones, but we’re making do. That was us with our slightly bigger than tiny legs on the huge steps of St. Stephen’s Church. Making do. Crawling.
Crawling into the church’s grand hall, our eyes shook with awe. It was so pretty. So pretty and nice to look at with our eyes. But even beauty was not enough to massage our ravaged souls. No balm strong enough to unchapp our spirit. We huddled in the center of the center aisle and called out for Lord. We knew not what to say but then suddenly psalms flung from our mouth like alpaca spit.
LORD! LORD! SO BIG AND BORED, ADDRESS OUR NEEDS, OH ONE ADORED. WE SUPPLICATE OURSELVES TO THEE, TO YOU AND YOUR INFINITY. THEY CALLED US F-SLUR, NOT OUR NAME, HOW CAN WE CRAWL OUT OF THIS SHAME?!
bam. Pew. bam. Pew. bam Pew. Bampew. A hurricane of light spiraled out from the place where they keep the Torahs. And every stained glass window shuddered and every fiber in our beings quivered. 80 million doves erupted from each and every candlestick and then…LORD WAS THERE.
“Boys,” croaked a voice, overflowing with on-high majesty.
“Boys, look.”
A second hurricane whipped through the rafters and suddenly we were drenched. Slimey and slick. Was this oil? “Is the oil okay with you boys,” asked Lord, reading our minds via womanly intuition. “I don’t mean to make a messy bitch of the two of you, I hope only to teach you a lesson. And please, I’m not Lord. I’m Lorf. With an ‘f.’ Lorf. Listen to your friends. They have something to tell you.”
And with a gay little poof, Lorf was gone. We were
left to make sense of ourselves, of our oily bodies. Ew! Oily bodies in an oily puddle. Gay penguins in an oil slick. A rig just exploded off the coast. No casualties, unless you count the EARTH! Like dogs, we wagged ourselves dry, dejected depresseddeflateddestroyeddickeddown by fate.
“Ahhhhh shit! Stubbed my toe!” We turned to check out where this voice was coming from. And there he was. Landin Bean. LANDIN?! “Yikes, bro that’s gonna fuck me up all week. Fuck. Turns out you can still stub your toe in the house of motherfucking God. Ah. Whatever. Just gonna rub it later. Rub it out. Noice. Boys, I gotta tell you about Camille. She was valid as fuck. Fuck. She broke my heart, but I respect her, I guess. She had me reading feminism philosophy, I guess. She was smart, I guess. When she broke my heart I was hurting because I knew how empty I am. And I don’t even exist. And she taught me all that. I don’t even exist. Anyways, the break up sucked, but Camille set me on track for a Gender Studies concentration, a Ph.D., and now a teaching position at Berkeley. They say shit compressed turns to diamonds, don’t they? Even though something sucks ballsack, well, some people like that don’t they?”
“chin up, sluts!” A catatonic flurry of girlishness danced through the church. It was Kat. “oil is happy and glad, so say i. it is BRIMMING AND FILLED TO THE TOP with transformative power and sexy slick potential! oh, i know all about transformation. my uber driver wife wanted a divorce, so i packed up my belongings (two sets of clothes, one wide-brimmed hat, and a lock of my own hair) and decided to start up a puppy mill! that’s right, i love illegally breeding these stupid dogs. i love how loudly they bark and how i sort of feel like god now! yes, yes, since my divorce, i have become a twisted master of creation in my own sinful little world. i’ve found my calling in a messy situation. who’s to say you can’t find beauty in yours?”
“Hey freaks.” Vocal fry. Carabiner keys. Easy laughter. Weed stench. RIDIN’ HIGH RACHEL! “Woahhhhhhhhhhhh, put the fuckin’ frowns away. I know what this is like. I was once at a cooking class, rolling gnocchi. I was so buzzed after two thirds of a joint. I was the best in the class. They even gave me a pastashaped sticker for it. The pasta was the bowtie kind, Farfalle I think it was. I peeled off the back of the sticker. The hot teacher Chef Jill was standing by the garbage can. When I accidentally handed her the sticker instead of the paper backing, Chef Jill responded, ‘I wanted your garbage, not your sticker.’ Woahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. When she saw my look of amazement, she responded, ‘Honey, I live for garbage! For the paper backings of stickers. Just to know someone’s out there with the thing that isn’t garbage. Honey, that’s a kiss!’ Woahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Chef Jill was right. Being called the F-slur is garbage, but maybe it means someone else out there is happy with a sticker??? Or uhm it means that.. I don’t know. I’m faded.”
Pretty Pat appears. “Boys, do you see it?”
Nan and Maria appear. “Boys, do you see it?”
Honest Abe ( ) appears. “Boys, do you see it?” Regina Spektor appears. “Boys, do you see it?”
Landin Bean and Pretty Pat and Kat Lopez and Nan and Maria and Ridin’ High Rachel and Honest Abe ( ) and Regina Spektor all in unison: “Boys, do you see it? Look in the oil. The oil! The oil! DO YOU SEE IT? CAN YOU SEE IT?”
And then we saw it. It was small. Small in its bigness. In the oil, the oil that Lorf had drenched us with, light struck just so, and a rainbow was formed. A rainbow of unimaginable beauty. Queerness shaped like a music note. Hope shaped like an oil spill. And then there is seeing the Mona Lisa in the mud. And then, we thought, there is using everything.
Our friends, each of them, gave us a hug so big and wet we had no choice but to sing Hammong Song by The Roches.
They say we meet again, On down the line.
Where is on down the line?
How far away?
Tell me I’m okay.
If you go down to Hammond, You’ll never come back.
And readers, we are not going back.
BEN FLAUMENHAFT B’27 and ILAN BRUSSO B’27 know a rainbow when they see one.
c On Friday, November 15, organizers from the group Sunrise Brown spilled across the steps of the University’s campus center, bearing signs and beating makeshift drums. Words scrawled over cardboard recalled hurricanes Helene and Milton, the latest in a deluge of natural catastrophes intensified by warming seas and higher waters. Together, the two storms claimed nearly 250 lives. State officials in North Carolina forecast years of concerted effort—and $53 billion in repair costs—before ravaged communities will recover. And that’s if another hurricane doesn’t come first.
Meanwhile, on the day that Milton became a Category 5 hurricane, Exxon Mobil—the fifth largest carbon emitter in the world—achieved a historic milestone: in their decades-long corporate history, their stock price had reached an all-time high.
One sign at the Sunrise protest put the facts together simply: BIG OIL DID THIS. KICK THEM OFF CAMPUS.
Friday’s rally was organized in support of a faculty vote that would determine whether Brown continues to accept research funding from fossil fuel companies and their affiliates. The push for a vote—which has yet to be scheduled or even made official—follows over a year of organizing and petitioning by Sunrise. The group has long lobbied for the University to “dissociate”—or cut all ties— from the fossil fuel industry; a “yes” verdict from the faculty would make Brown University the first higher education institution in the country to do so.1
In attendance at the protest was an alumnus who was organizing at Brown in 2013, back when the University first rejected calls from students to divest from coal. (The University did eventually begin selling off its direct investments in fossil fuel companies in 2019—but the administration said it was for financial reasons, not ethical ones).
Professor Timmons Roberts, who has also been witness to over a decade of stalled climate action on campus, mirrored the frustration of student organizers: “We’ve been trying everything,” he said at the rally. “And yet still the temperature is rising.”
The present institutional struggle invokes issues of academic freedom and university governance that have been contended across campus for decades, but that loom particularly large this year. It has also laid bare a difficult question for campus organizers
across the coalition: in the face of extraordinarily dire circumstances—from deadly storms to unrelenting genocide in Gaza—how and why do you organize within institutions so intolerant of change?
The Sunrise rally came a little over two weeks after Brown University President Christina Paxson released her response to a report from the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management (ACURM) that focused on Brown’s relationship with the fossil fuel industry. ACURM was responding to a petition (included in full at the bottom of the ACURM report) that Sunrise had filed in February of 2023, demanding that Brown dissociate from the core agents of the climate crisis. Dissociation, according to Sunrise, required Brown to adhere to three proposed policies. (The Sunrise report was covered in detail by the Indy in March of 2023.)
First, Sunrise advocated for a “fossil fuelfree careers policy,” which would prohibit fossil fuel employees from recruiting students through Brown-sponsored channels, like on-campus career fairs. It also asked the University to require all retirement plan vendors to offer a fossil fuel-free option to employees. But the central demand in the Sunrise petition was for Brown to ban fossil fuel companies and their affiliates from funding faculty research or donating to the University.
To push this provision, Sunrise first appealed to the desire to burnish the University’s standing. “Brown asserts that environmental sustainability ‘is part of everything we do,’” the report reads—but that commitment is compromised by the University’s extensive ties to the companies that manufacture and maintain environmental ruin. Dissociation, they say, would let Brown avoid the appearance of hypocrisy. Put more simply: “There is reputational damage associated with… planetary destruction.”
But a substantial portion of the group’s argument rested on the claim that fossil fuel funding for research went against the principles of academic freedom and integrity. In a separate memorandum that Sunrise sent to ACURM in March of 2023 (also included in the ACURM report), the group wrote: “Fossil fuel companies do not engage with universities in good faith. They influence research outcomes, set research agendas, and incentivize researchers to avoid conclusions that may be unfavorable to the donor… Researchers must be free to determine their own agendas and declare their findings without
fear of reprisal or the withdrawal of funding.”
In an interview with the Indy, Garrett Brand B’25, a co-coordinator of Sunrise’s Brown hub, emphasized that fossil fuel companies have “specifically targeted” academia in order to advance their goals. “It’s a little scary how well-documented it is,” he said, pointing to a congressional report from April titled “Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak.” That report reads, early on: “The fossil fuel industry strategically partners with universities to lend an aura of credibility to its deception campaigns while also silencing opposition voices. Fossil fuel companies… shape academic research programs to provide studies supportive of a prolonged life for oil and gas….”
The fossil fuel companies’ strategy might not mean funding papers that sing the praises of gas and oil, especially at an institution like Brown. The industry also supports research on apparently unproblematic or even noble pursuits, like oil spill remediation and carbon capture and sequestration. But these approaches actually “can be used to perpetuate carbon dependency,” the Sunrise report says—doing nothing to challenge fossil fuel companies’ dominance while bolstering the industry’s image, in a phenomenon called “greenwashing.” (The Indy also covered greenwashing this fall.)
Sunrise’s report sums it up this way: “By flooding climate research with funds, the fossil fuel industry dictates research agendas and fundamentally alters how we conceptualize the severity of climate change and its solutions.”
ACURM released its response to Sunrise’s petition in September. It made quick work of Sunrise’s two secondary recommendations: Brown recently added a “Fossil Free” option to participants in Brown’s 403b retirement plan, so ACURM wouldn’t address that demand. As for banning fossil fuel companies from recruiting through Brown, the committee wouldn’t make a recommendation on that either—a student’s right to freely seek employment, they said, had been codified in the Brown University Faculty Rules & Regulations and recently reaffirmed by the Center for Career Exploration.
But it dwelled on the question of banning fossil fuel research funding for much longer. It recognized research funding policies as fundamentally related to academic freedom. First, ACURM affirmed that fossil fuel funding can “[impinge] on researchers’ ability to explore and report findings freely.”
academic freedom can be cut several ways: the committee also emphasized “academic researchers’ freedom to study the topics of their choosing and to seek funding for those topics where available.”
“Fossil fuel companies are often the primary source of funding for large-scale remediation projects,” ACURM wrote. “To prohibit this funding source may, in some cases, prevent Brown University from making positive contributions to environmental cleanup and the science and engineering behind it.”
It’s unfortunate that remediation research is so often co-opted by fossil fuel companies looking to save face—but should individual researchers who believe in the value of oil spill cleanup be asked to jump through additional hoops to get funding?
To this question, Caitlyn Carpenter B’25, Brand’s co-coordinator, would turn to past precedent. In 2011, Brown’s Division of Biology and Medicine successfully banned the tobacco industry from funding its medical research—a move that had, at one point, been contentious. “It was controversial in the early 2000s… But now, our perception of academic freedom is that it’s a threat to academic freedom to receive money from those companies,” she said. “Because, obviously.”
Rather than litigate the balance between competing readings of academic freedom, ACURM passed that task to the faculty as a whole. “Any decision that may result in restrictions on academic freedom of individual faculty must derive from the faculty, not from Brown University administration or the Corporation,” it wrote. The committee recommended that the full faculty vote on whether or not to ban fossil fuel funding, and, if the vote passed, establish a faculty committee to guide implementation.
ACURM also recommended that the University establish a committee responsible for educating graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and certain staff on fossil fuel research. And it recommended that Brown’s Gifts and Grants Review Committee (GGRC) review any research grants or gifts for research coming from the fossil fuel industry. Brand Carpenter were dismissive of these two recommendations. The GGRC “hasn’t met since it was formed,” said Brand.
In her October 30 response to the ACURM report, Paxson pushed back against ACURM’s first recommendation. While she can’t stop the faculty from voting on a fossil fuel-sponsored research ban, she took the opportunity to assert that the vote would be unnecessary. “I believe that ACURM’s recommendation reflects a lack of appreciation of the vitally important role that Brown faculty already play in protecting academic freedom under our community’s processes of shared governance,” she wrote—pointing to the GGRC and ACURM itself to argue for the present sufficiency of shared governance processes.
“It’s ridiculous and nearly circular logic,” said Carpenter. Brand jumped in: “Right before she completes the circle, she jumps off the cliff… she’s using the existence of ACURM to say that she thinks it’s unnecessary to accept ACURM’s recommendations, right? Which is just the most ridiculously flawed logic I can possibly imagine.”
The co-coordinators see Paxson’s response to the ACURM report as part of a much broader pattern: the consolidation of power within the university in the hands of a (wealthy) few. “There’s [been] a pretty widespread trend over the past couple of decades: the erosion of shared governance across universities,” said Carpenter. At Brown, decision-making power is increasingly concentrated in the office of the President and the Corporation. Committees like ACURM, which Paxson points to as evidence of “shared governance,” don’t have “any actual power,” said Brian Lander, Associate Professor of Environment and Society (and History) at Brown. “All of those things are advisory. There’s absolutely nothing against the rules if [the University] says [to a committee recommendation] ‘Oh, we’re just not gonna do that.’”
“If you think about it from the point of view of the administration, what really matters is the big donors, people that give them money,” Lander continued. Carpenter and Brand take his point further, arguing
that Paxson and the Corporation have tended to treat Brown as a business rather than a place of learning.
On October 24, Paxson announced that the University was operating with a $46 million structural deficit and laid out a series of changes to “[diversify]... revenue sources” and “ensure Brown’s financial health.”
“The University is taking a direction to massively increase for-profit graduate degrees and professional degrees,” said Brand. “Simultaneously, the way they’re going to cut costs—the only two things that they want to cut are financial aid and faculty [and staff] compensation. Which, when you think about it, is wild, because the only things that matter to the actual function of the University is students being here to learn, and faculty being here to teach and research.”
“Students and faculty don’t have structural power at Brown,” said Carpenter. “And Brown is a university. It’s supposed to be for students and faculty. Where does that leave us?
“The proposal that came out of our ACURM decision threatens to give structural power to faculty,” she continued. “and I think that is why you got the response that you did from President Paxson.”
Today, Tuesday, the day this article was finalized, the drinking water in Asheville, North Carolina—a city of 95,000 people, almost half the size of Providence—was finally declared safe to drink. For 53 days, the city’s water had been filled with sediment carried by Helene’s floodwaters.
As the climate crisis makes storms more frequent and more deadly, and their destruction becomes more difficult to repair, it might feel odd that two leaders of Brown’s chapter of Sunrise are spending so much time thinking about mechanisms of power within elite higher education.2 Committees, recommendations, research policy, faculty referenda: has Sunrise at Brown lost the plot?
Brand and Carpenter insist that they haven’t— although they do understand the frustration that motivates the question. “We’ve known we need to make progress on this for so long… The question comes up again and again: ‘Why can’t we? Why can’t we? Why can’t we?’” said Carpenter.
But to Brand, the answer comes down to this: “We don’t have functioning governance processes.” That’s true at the federal level—where, he says, there are “all these fundamentally anti-democratic systems… that allow industries like Big Oil to exert their will through how much money they can spend”—and at the university level, too.
“Over the last year of working in coalition on campus…fighting for fossil-free research and climate policies, working with the Palestine groups fighting for divestment, working with Students for Educational Equity, fighting for the end of legacy admissions, etc.—all of us [have] run into the same issues over and over again. [It’s] a completely undemocratic decision-making process that stymies progressive change.
“It’s all the same thing in my head,” he continued. “I really see a mirror between the pushing for university-level change and pushing for societal-level change. It’s the same issue.”
Carpenter also warned that the urgency many people rightfully feel to address the climate crisis can lead to strategies that aren’t effective—or have proven not to be so. “The mass protests of the last decade… they didn’t work,” she said. “You had the Women’s March, and then you had the overturning
2 Of course, this is not all they are thinking about— by a long shot—Sunrise coordinated an intensive fundraising effort in the aftermath of Helene and Milton. It also has a number of off-the-hill initiatives, including the fight to save Morley Field.
of Roe [vs. Wade].” But rather than be hopeless in the face of this failure, Carpenter sees this moment as a chance for organizing groups to rethink their long-term strategy. “If there’s a time to plug into social movements, I think it is really now,” she said. “I think we’re gonna see a massive change.”
The task in front of Sunrise is daunting—especially after Trump’s reelection. To close our conversation, the Indy asked Carpenter and Brand what lies in store for the group in the years to come.
In the immediate term, they plan to win the faculty vote on fossil-fuel research. “We have to talk to a lot of people, [and] make compelling arguments,” said Brand. “We need to address criticism in a sufficient way.” He said that Sunrise is doing its due diligence to “make a proposed policy that actually works for faculty.” They’re talking to professors, asking: “‘Where are the holes in our proposal? How can we address those?’”
“We really do think that the faculty vote on fossil-free research is the first step” towards challenging existing governance structures at Brown, says Carpenter. “It’s coming at a time when a lot of shared governance structures are being questioned.”
She was referring, in part, to last month’s UCS referendum, where an overwhelming majority of Brown undergraduate students voted “no confidence” in the Corporation’s leadership and demanded seats on that body.
The co-coordinators also spoke of the essential role of coalition under a Trump presidency that has promised to repress student organizing. “[Working] with the Brown Activist Coalition… [has] always been a crucial part of how we operate at Sunrise Brown,” said Brand. “It’s more important for all of us than ever. If we’re all going to be under attack, more so than we have in the past, we have to stand together stronger than in the past.”
Brand reiterates that student organizing is part of a broader national struggle. “If we’re living in a country that is slipping deeper into fascism at the highest federal level, it becomes more important for all of us in separate issue struggles to stand together as… a unified leftist project… to build an achievable, realistic alternative to fascism.”
Carpenter adds that coalition can, and must, go beyond “activist groups showing up for one another.”
“That’s like five to ten percent of campus,” she said. “We need to be talking to the other 90 or 95 percent…A lack of student representation, of student structural power, affects everyone here.” She thinks that now is a good time to mobilize students beyond Brown’s activist core. “People are really politicized in this moment who might not be otherwise. We want to provide them with… an easy entrance into movement spaces.”
Brand directed his final comment towards students who are struggling with the chaos and intensity of this moment. “I like to introduce Sunrise as a political home—with people I like to be around, doing work that’s valuable to build something better. It’s a space where it’s okay to feel those things with other people who feel the same way,” he says. “I would like to offer that to anybody who feels like they’re maybe searching for that political home.”
CAMERON LEO B’25 and LILY SELTZ B’25 think you should join Sunrise.
c In the fall of 2021, we walked into a windowless room in the heart of Barus and Holley to begin our study of abstract algebra. It was our introduction to higher mathematics and to each other. The layman, picturing mathematics, might envision big numbers, giant formula sheets, rote computations, and races to see who can do the fastest mental multiplication. In actuality, we saw more Greek letters than numbers; the arithmetic was simple enough for an eighth-grader. We even re-learned long division. We were embarking on a mathematical journey which would see us to the very foundations of the field, which meant staring at a textbook for hours and bashing our heads against the wall trying to understand polynomial field extensions. But these tribulations were punctuated by moments of ecstatic enlightenment, in which the why of the matter became clear. The process of doing mathematics became something more—something transcendent, mystical. To grasp the underlying structures of math was to encounter a deeper truth.
What do we mean by mystical? It eludes simple definition. Here, we offer two perspectives on the spiritual dimension of mathematics. Hisham will explore how the process of constructing mathematical proofs elicits feelings of mystical revelation and the wanton destruction of imagined worlds. Emily will examine math’s relation to the natural world, a shadow of God.
HISHAM:
A flickering candle casts its meager light across the dank, subterranean cell. Its faint glow pulsingly irradiates the gilded halo of the Virgin Mother and reveals the outline of a sole robed figure. The monk sways back and forth, ceaselessly repeating the Jesus prayer:
Господи, Иисусе Христе, Сыне Божий, помилуй мя грешнаго
As he utters the formula time and time again, the words begin to spill from his mouth without volition, a verbal deluge igniting in intensity until it converges to a singular, semi-continuous utterance:
Иисусе
At this moment, he ceases to exist. He is consumed entirely by the oneness of the Name. The boundary of his being as an Orthodox monk on Mount Athos in Greece in 1911 has dissolved into an ecstatic unity with the divine infinitude of the Lord, through the Name that is him. Across the world and more than a century later, in a perennially damp basement-level room in Young Orchard 10, Providence, Rhode Island in 2023, I am puzzling over my algebraic topology problem set. It has to do with covering projections (kind of like those paper doll chains from elementary school), and I am stumped. I rock in my bulky (supposedly anti-suicide) dorm chair, trying to banish all non-mathematical thoughts from my mind. Suddenly it comes to me: in a flash of circles, circles within circles, circles turned inside out into infinitely many amorphous blobs which are then all tenderly collected and made tidy. The rush is incomparable; I let out a scream and punch the table, my entire body pulsing with an electric surge of adrenaline that makes me want to break something. In that moment I had ceased to be. I had become a vessel for the contours of truth itself to become manifest, a flash of fundamental symmetry of being.
Besides the superficial similarities between the two cases which arise from my authorial manipulation, there is a deeper connection at play. Our friend in Athos was a member of a heretical branch of Russian Orthodoxy called Imiaslavie (Rus: name-worship/exaltation), which believed that one could achieve mystical union with God through repetition of his Name, thought to be equivalent with his Being. The movement was cracked down upon when Russian forces stormed the monastery in 1913, drunkenly subduing the “heretics.” Outside Athos, figures such as Russian folk-saint Pavel Florensky continued to subscribe to this line of thought, as did his acolytes Dmitri Egorov and Nikolai Luzin. These latter two are particularly relevant as mathematicians who contributed greatly to the fields of differential geometry and point-set topology (the casual reader is excused in reading these as just words).
Another field in which our Russian name-worshiping companions worked is set theory, the study of collections of objects known as sets. This field in particular is more pertinent to the conversation at hand, since set theory was developed to tackle one of mathematics’ most mystical concepts: ∞. This had been a mind-boggler since the Greek days of Zeno, whose characters of Achilles and his chelonian companion (tortoise) highlighted the various paradoxes at play when dealing with ∞: Could Achilles ever catch the tortoise if every time he catches up to where the tortoise was, it will have moved ahead, thus requiring infinitely many steps from the Hellene? In fact ∞ was often conceptualized in terms of what it was not, its true positive characteristics beyond the grasp of the puny human intellect. It was not until the seminal work of (the highly religious) Georg Cantor that ∞ was finally tamed. By dealing with named sets for which ∞ was an attribute (a set can be finite or infinite), positive assertions could be made about this elusive concept. For instance, it was discovered that there could be various sizes of ∞, with ℵ0 (the size of the set of the natural numbers 0,1,2,3,...) being “smaller” than ℵ1 (the size of the number line). Imagine some infinities being larger than others! It was this act of naming sets and ∞s that captivated the Russian mathematicians. To them, naming was both an act of creation and of discovery, it conveyed power and allowed for understanding. Far from trivializing ∞ by making it an object of study, giving ∞ a name allowed for a deeper understanding of this highly profound idea. In their correspondences, they would often touch upon the mysticism of dealing with these formalized ∞s, drawing connections to their name-worshiping activities; just as they affirmed the existence of God through his Name, the name of ∞ granted access to a previously ineffable idea. This was one of the moments in which a mystical moment of union emerged from the mirror of mathematics. If you indulge me in a bit of metaphor, I see mathematics as a collection of arbitrary axioms, the logical interactions between which shape the vast, glorious, tapestry that is mathematical knowledge, with the act of doing mathematics as “unfurling.” One would find in this unfurling something deeply mystical that can only be explained by experience. When one does mathematics, it is as if you are wrangling truth itself, contorting it into shapes necessary for the next step. In some moments during this process, you step back and see the threads forming repeated symmetries, familiar patterns showing
up in unexpected places, or connections hitherto unimagined, and it is as if you have reality at your fingertips and you are feeling out its shape. It is hard for one to truly experience these ecstatic mystical moments unless one studies mathematics with enough care to appreciate the beauty in what is being discovered. This beauty manifests in the concept of “elegance” within mathematics. An elegant proof is one which requires minimal assumptions, and to mathematicians, the beauty lies in the ability to extend the tapestry using as few existing threads as possible. Such proofs are often the loci of the epiphanic experiences where underlying symmetries reveal themselves. Other proofs may not be elegant, however their familiarity makes them the mathematical equivalent of a chain stitch—simple and reliable. An exploration of such common methods of proof is a good window into the process of mathematics, with contradiction being the most ubiquitous.
A proof by contradiction is perhaps the simplest proof that is not a direct proof. It operates as such: To prove A is true, assume it to be false, and then show how this assumption leads to a logical contradiction. In metaphysical terms, it is as if you are a cruel god creating a universe with a given list of guidelines, only for these guidelines to collapse horrifically upon themselves, and the world to gruesomely perish in an apocalyptic manner, eating itself up for your perverse aims of proving a point. A classic example of a proof by contradiction is the infinitude of primes: You assume that there are finitely many primes and can thus multiply them into a number we call P; you can then consider P+1 and watch hilarity ensue (the proof is left as an exercise to the reader).
This is all fine and dandy when it comes to the personal experience of doing mathematics. However, this mystical feeling of touching the tapestry implies a certain significance of its fabric. When you step back to take a look at the bigger picture, what the hell are you looking at? Does math even mean anything? If only someone had the answer.
“It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power,” wrote mathematician and theoretical physicist Paul Dirac.
The same mathematical structures iterate across space and scale. It’s the sequence read in the densely packed florets of a sunflower or a head of Romanesco broccoli; it’s the logarithmic spiral of a galaxy, a cyclone, or a ravenous, earthbound hawk. I like fractals best of all, which show my blood vessels are a network of rivers and my hometown coast is the pattern of the waves, is the fault line, will be The Big One, if or when it hits us.
Here’s the catch: Knowing this, delighting in this, is not knowing why.
“We simply have to accept it,” continued Dirac. “One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”
Dirac, you should know, thought religion was “a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in
reality” and “a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people.” (Someone’s been reading Marx!) God, invoked by a man with an arguably combative level of disbelief, was no deity. God was nature itself. God was everything humans didn’t create and don’t understand. God was the force that sticks atoms together. God was the expanding universe. God was the rules: things fall toward the center of the earth, hot air rises, birds are light enough to fly. We made the wheel before God, but God made the circle, so He gets half the credit. God was the circle, every circle, actually, and you could say that God made things, but you could also say that things just were and God was the fact of their existence. God was located in how, but God was why, which is difficult to know for sure in the absence of a Creator. Hence Dirac’s conclusion: “We simply have to accept it.”
How do we understand math’s relation to the natural world? Many mathematicians (some being of a very high order) have attempted to describe it. Mathematics may be a mirror, a guide, a penetrating lens. The universe may be a mathematical tapestry; a symphony, and mathematics is the score plus the rules of music theory; an elaborate dance, and mathematics is the choreographer. Very often, math is God or Nature’s native tongue. Isn’t it a delight to hear mathematicians speak in such a way? What a departure from the language they use on weekdays, conducting proofs. On chalkboards, in papers, they are concerned with precision. In place of metaphors, they point out homomorphisms. They remove things from the physical world. If they have done their job well, there is no room for interpretation—you understand it or you don’t.
But on weekends, confronting the source, they trace an idea they cannot outline in concrete logic. Math is a language that proves, pins things down, settles conclusively. Of course, speculation drives mathematical discovery, but math does not do well to express uncertainty. It is a language of unknowable origin, and so it struggles to describe its own existence. So turn to metaphor. Just accept it. You do have a choice. You may conclude mathematics was discovered; that it is fundamental, and exists even when we are not there to observe it. Or you may conclude
it was invented—one of a million possible ways to understand the physical world. This is the field’s unending debate. It does not respond to attempted induction, intimidation, and contradiction. It refuses proof.
The language of mathematics relates aspects of our physical reality in beautiful and unexpected ways. That vastly different objects, processes, and phenomena share a common structure can be read as the manifestation of some higher universal order. We can’t explain the patterns, but we recognize them just the same. This is exemplified by what astrophysicist Mario Livio calls “passive effectiveness”: the application of an abstract mathematical concept to the real world years or decades after the concept’s discovery.
Consider knot theory, which deals with the structure and properties of—shocker!!—knots. (Unlike the knots in your shoelace, the ends of a mathematical knot are joined together.) In the 1860s, English physicist Lord Kelvin was trying to understand the atom. He proposed a delightfully weird and outrageous theory: Atoms were vortexes swirling in the “superfine medium” that filled all space, little aether-tornadoes. Since these vortex-atoms were knotlike, Kelvin’s formulation motivated a flood of research and discovery within the field of knot theory. His model was ultimately disproved, rendering knot theory irrelevant to atomic physics, but mathematicians continued to study knots for their own sake. The field remained abstract and esoteric, untethered to the physical world, until molecular biologists studying the properties of DNA discovered an unexpected use. In order for cellular division to occur, DNA must replicate; in order for replication to occur, DNA must unravel from the tightly-wound coils it usually occupies. In this process, enzymes sever and reattach strands of DNA in a manner precisely modeled by knot theory. Around the same time, an astonishing connection between string theory and knot theory was discovered. (This example, I have neither the space nor the trust in my own comprehension of string theory to relay, but you can look into quantum applications of the Jones polynomial and Khovanov homology if you’re interested.)
For a mathematician, claiming total
abstraction is like daring the universe to prove you wrong. English mathematician G. H. Hardy, a staunch pacifist, lived and worked through both World Wars. He believed his work in number theory was so abstract that it was useless to the war-machine; thus, number theory offered him a refuge from the military co-option of mathematics. He famously wrote, “No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or for ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.” I think he’d be horrified to learn that his work proved crucial to several breakthroughs in cryptography.
In mathematics, we build our work off principles proved hundreds or thousands of years ago. We extend them, apply them, manipulate them in novel ways, but they retain a fundamental truth. The passive effectiveness of mathematics allows us to imagine ahead just as far, or further. Today’s abstraction becomes tomorrow’s real-world discovery. There are pieces of the universe—sub-components of quarks, creatures that won’t evolve for millions of years—that we know nothing about, but already possess the tools to understand. I find this beautiful. It moves me. There is a peace in knowing these connections exist, and I accept not knowing why.
It would be presumptuous of us to claim we can offer an answer on whether math is created or discovered; whether, in the process of doing mathematics, we are discovering a divine, innate truth of the universe. And, in attempting to write down the feeling of a mathematical, mystical experience, we necessarily lose something. At some point, you just have to roll up your sleeves, get in the weeds, dirty your hands, and try not to get bogged down in the muck (we’re running out of gardening metaphors). For us, the undeniable draw of mathematics is these revelatory moments of enlightenment, of connections unveiled, of unexpected symmetry. These mystical experiences have moved us in our mathematical journeys. We hope they have moved the reader, too.
You can take HISHAM AWARTANI B’25 & EMILY VESPER B’25 out of the math department, but you can’t take the math department out of HISHAM AWARTANI B’25 & EMILY VESPER B’25
c If there is one thing that unifies Dalida’s Helwa ya baladi (an Egyptian nationalist song in Arabic by an Italian-French artist), the Maltese language, Sephardic trade networks, and anise-flavored alcohol, it is their “Mediterranean-ness.” The concept of the Mediterranean seems too familiar to even warrant a definition: a sunny, maritime area with tight-knit villages built of limestone, surrounded by olives orchards and vineyards. This image is detailed enough to include its inhabitants: hot-tempered but magnanimous, enjoyers of la dolce vita even with modest material possessions. This comforting illustration is just that; a romantic portrait of a simpler life in a region older than time itself.
Academic debate about the nature of the Mediterranean and its peoples began during the mid-20th century in the United Kingdom. Having been honed on so-called “primitive peoples,” the tools of anthropology were ready to be turned upon the “underbelly of Europe” (as the Americans referred to the Mediterranean during WWII) which had resisted modernity and was regarded as a crude if scenic backwater. The resulting “Mediterranean cultural area” that these “Mediterraneanists” invented thus paints the inhabitants of this region as noble savages: agricultural, community-oriented, wary of outsiders, honor-obsessed, culturally stagnant, superstitious, and above all, clearly different from the more “advanced” Northern Europeans conducting the study. The Mediterranean man was trapped within the unchanging reality of his environmental background, his very nature shaped by the knot of the olive tree, the twisting grapevine, and the blustering sirocco. This essentialist cultural designation placed the Neapolitan, Andalusian, and Cretan alongside the Syrian, Kabyle, and Turk, and rendered them European by geography, yet Oriental by disposition.
There is much to object against in this image. To kill the proverbial fly with a sledgehammer in
Mediterranean since time immemorial, was a dry basin between 5.59 and 5.33 million years ago. This facetious example aside, many academics from the Mediterranean objected to this characterization of their homeland. In the 1980s, various Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian anthropologists harped against the “Mediterraneanist project.” They argued that far from being unchanging, these communities had undergone significant alterations in the previous decades and that much work by British anthropologists on the timeless Mediterranean occurred during periods of significant social upheaval. One of the more famous ethnographies, The People of the Sierra by Julian Pitt-Rivers discusses a generic Andalusian town while somehow eliding a discussion of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism, and the reconstruction of the “Spanish State” by Franco.
This claim of an “eternal Mediterranean” also highlights a deeper issue in the Mediterranean project; its exoticization and the othering of an essentially different Mediterranean South. The Mediterranean, with its quaint historicity and age-old traditions, becomes an object of consumption and self-affirmation: the experience of a simpler life, surrounded by history and tradition (however shoddy) serves as a welcome break from the pressures of “developed” society. Think of how the “Mediterranean diet” represents a return to a more “natural” and “traditional” culinary experience (even though its staples of tomatoes, zucchini, and peppers are from the Americas), or how the idyllic Greek islands are such a popular vacation destination. This distinction also plays a role in the self-affirmation of the (Northern) Europeans, with the south of Europe becoming the site of interaction with the exotic, idealistic other. Mediterranean Europe serves as the buffer between Europe and the Oriental, both symbolically and, with the “migrant crisis,” literally.
While the construction of a Mediterranean cultural area orientalized Southern Europe as an exotic other, some arguments put forward against “Mediterraneanism” seemed to be based on insurmountable differences between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. To some scholars and Mediterranean purists, the suggestion that Southern Europeans might resemble Levantines and North Africans more than Northern Europeans was an absurd suggestion. What could Sicilians possibly have in common with Moroccans? Portuguese with Palestinians? The debunking of the “cultural unity of the Mediterranean” led to Europe emerging as a continent culturally incomparable with its neighbors Africa and Asia. The deconstruction of an anthropological concept of the Mediterranean was concomitant with the construction and reaffirmation of European unity. This whole conversation is notable for the almost complete lack of voices and data from the Levant and North Africa. The Mediterranean has become a spatial euphemism for GreeceItaly-Spain, and a temporal one for the Classical Romano-Hellenistic period. While ethnographies pueblas, paesi, and χωριά abound, there are scant equivalents for köyler, ḍay‘at, and idewwaren (Sp/ It/Gr/Tr/Ar/Kb: villages). This underscores a more
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ILLUSTRATION MEKALA KUMAR )
exclusionary view of the Mediterranean both in the popular and academic imagination, best characterized by the Roman Empire discourse.
The Roman Empire was undoubtedly a fully Mediterranean state as a fact of geography. However, the interpretation of this fact has been heavily distorted by ideology. The sea was called mare nostrum (Lat: our sea), and this Roman ownership of the Mediterranean is still alive in cultural memory. Roman society is viewed as a precursor to Western Civilization, and, given the symbiotic cultural relationship between Rome and the Mediterranean, the latter became a domain of the West by proxy. This obscures the crucial role played by the non-European regions of the empire; North Africa, for instance, was the home of St. Augustine (and his arch-nemesis Arius, both of Amazigh descent), and its loss to the Vandals cut the Western Roman Empire from one of its largest sources of grain and ultimately sealed its fate. A Roman would identify more closely with a Latinized Syrian than a Germanic Suebian (although they would certainly have a lot to say about the laziness, degeneracy, and fanaticism of the former), yet Italians sit squarely with Germans under the category of “European,” with Syrians among the vast swathe of Oriental others.
An example of how the Levant and North Africa cannot be ignored in the Mediterranean is the ongoing migrant/refugee crisis. Today’s migrants have revived one of the most essential features of the Mediterranean: its interconnectedness. For millennia, people have been taking to this sea to fish, migrate, plunder, and trade. Culture has diffused along these waterways, languages have spread, and crops have been shared. However, the formation of European nation-states (and later the EU) bucked this historical trend by reifying the north-south division in the Mediterranean. Maritime boundaries were set, and patrolled by coast guards making sure each patch of sea belonged to the flag under which they sailed; today their eyes are set firmly southward, on the lookout for migrant dinghies. The arrival of the Moroccan ḥarraga (Maghrebi Ar: immigrant), the Albanian migrant, and the Malian refugee thus threaten this divide by reviving the latent potential of Mediterranean interconnectivity; the sea is right there and all you need to do is sail across it. These arbitrary divisions highlight how the term “European” is just as precarious as “Mediterranean,” both geographic markers put into practice by the policing of their boundaries.
How, then, does one define the Mediterranean as a cultural region? Surprisingly, the journey towards answering this question takes us through a scenic Sicilian port city and a mathematical real analysis textbook. In 2017, Naor Ben-Yehoyada (a Columbia University anthropologist whose academia.edu profile picture is a drawing by a Canary Missionesque project called “Know the Anti-Zionist Israeli Professor,” henceforth referred to as BY) published The Mediterranean Incarnate: Region Formation Between Sicily and Tunisia Since World War II. This book discusses the history of mechanized trawling in the Strait of Sicily, and the relationships forged between Tunisia and Sicily as a result, mentioning
the capture of Sicilian trawlers fishing in Tunisian waters, Tunisian immigrant labor in the fishing industry, the TransMed oil pipeline, and so on. The focal point is the town of Mazzara, and by touching upon union-mandated cigarette rations for sailors (one carton every five days) and how proper Sicilians always break their spaghetti (BY is reprimanded by the captain for not doing so at some point), it offers a novel perspective on defining the Mediterranean. BY’s thesis argues that instead of being thought of as a unified cultural area, the Mediterranean is a platform of interconnectivity containing various overlapping regions. Using mathematical language, we can define the Mediterranean as a “manifold”–a topological space that is locally Euclidean. Deciphering the jargon, a manifold is something that can be hard to interact with on a large scale, but on smaller scales (called Euclidean neighborhoods), it resembles a simple space we can easily do calculations in. These “neighborhoods” correspond to BY’s concept of “regions,” which are segments of a population that operate on a smaller scale of cultural interaction and are constantly being formed and dissolved under various pressures. In any given region there can be various cultures interacting, but this scale allows for the forming of shared cultural parlance through the “idioms of relatedness”– small moments and symbols of shared experience. A further feature of this manifold model is that differences in these regions appear to be continuous; that is people are usually not too different from their neighbors, creating a cultural continuum. This does not mean that any two points on the manifold are necessarily similar, only that the path between them is uninterrupted by major discrepancies. This model therefore allows for both the diversity and the interplay present in the Mediterranean to be fully acknowledged. Another important piece of this model is the potential of interconnectivity. The Mediterranean, as a sea with fairly navigable waters, a mostly shared climate, an abundance of islands, and similarities in flora and fauna, has a high interconnective potential. This does not mean that this potential has to be realized, and indeed, for a long time, it was not. In fact, per BY’s model, various regions are always embracing or rejecting this interconnectivity on a variety of axes. Additional similarities may result from the fact that different groups of people will occasionally arrive at the same answer to similar pressures. No product better represents these shared environmental influences than olive oil. This ambrosiac greenish-yellow liquid is the blood of this regional network; essential in cooking, garnishing, and dressing. It can even cure any and all medical ailments (according to my grandmother). To those who produce it, olive oil is everything, and yet what this “everything” means changes from region to region. In BY’s book for example, the deckhands would goad him to keep adding more olive oil to the
dishes, to the point where they would consume a liter per day. Onboard, the oil became a nutritional right promised to the deckhand, to be doled out by the captain. A common ecological resource is imbued with regionally-variable cultural signifiers, constructing an interconnected Mediterranean. Another example of this interconnectivity is the case of Lingua Franca (henceforth LF, literally “Frankish language”). While today a lingua franca denotes a common language among various populations, the LF of the late Middle Ages and early modern period facilitated the operation of a Mediterranean trade network spanning Marseille, Algiers, Naples, Tunis, Salonika, Alexandria, Smyrna, Haifa, and countless other port cities across the Mediterranean. It was the language of communication between North African corsairs and their European slaves, French diplomats and Turkish sultans, Livornese Jewish merchants and Moroccan vendors. The language was essentially a Romance (as in latinate) pidgin, with a predominantly Italian and Spanish lexicon, a simplified grammatical structure, and a smattering of Arabic and Turkish loanwords. Verbs were not conjugated, appearing only in the infinitive, while pronunciation and substrata depended on the linguistic background of the speaker. Every individual spoke a unique version of LF, a version which was adapted to communicate with every other speaker of LF. This language was thus a continuously changing amorphous body, constantly being (re-)created by cross-cultural activity in the formation of shared regions of interaction. In other words, LF is a linguistic embodiment of the Mediterranean manifold.
“The Mediterranean can only be constructed actively; while the sea will always be there, the forging of connections across it is practiced, not experienced.”
I always find it sad that LF died out sometime in the 19th century, because with it died the interconnected Mediterranean of the premodern era. A permanent wedge was driven between the northern and southern shores of this sea of ours, cordoning off imperial Europe from its colonized Orient. As the nation-state came into being, linguistic plurality was squashed internally, and borders were drawn in the water. Here we would have “France,” there “Spain,” and there “Italy.” All these incipient nation-states sought to project their power. Spain acquired the Rif, France claimed Algeria, and Italy sought to establish a foothold
in Libya. There was no place for the multilingual environment from which LF emerged, and the borders sought to section off a linguistic region within which all speech was made the same (or in the case of the colonies it was imposed upon them).
And yet, as BY’s case of Tunisian fishermen aboard Sicilian trawlers or continual recreation of LF as a mercantile pidgin both show, The Mediterranean can only be constructed actively; while the sea will always be there, the forging of connections across it is practiced, not experienced.
In that vein, I wanted to compose a piece in LF just to challenge myself. I chose poetry because although I have no real experience or skill in this regard, no one speaks this language anyway to be able to judge my work. After poring over the only existing LF dictionary–the anonymously penned Dictionnaire de la Langue Franque ou Petit Mauresque (available only as a French PDF from a shady website)–reading Judeo-Arabic Biblical commentaries from Algiers, and spending far too much money on books about LF. The meager result is the following:
In casbah mi mirar la moukera
Venir di medina bianca
Ockio castana
Pelo notte senza luna
Di Tiro bernus poanazza
Ela parlar per mi
Di sua moshe lmimouni,
E dragoman di desira,
E sua oro iglezia
Ma star bzef di ieri
Ora in bagnio di algieri
Mi stare meskine
Perdir in mareia
Di nata incapache
Per ista dona di casbah
Translation:
In the Casbah I saw the woman
Who had come from the white city
Chestnut eyes
Hair a moonless night
From Tyre a violet mantle
She spoke to me
Of her Moses of Maimun,
And a translator of desire,
And a church’s gold
But it has been many yesterdays
And now in the slave-quarters of Algiers
I am helpless
Lost in the mirror
Capable of nothing
Because of this woman of the Casbah
HISHAM AWARTANI B’25 is looking to become an olive oil magnate.
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c Blue gowns, blue ties, and warm light paint the East Room of the White House in hues of gaiety. Glasses clink and a soft, easy laughter can be heard throughout. You’ve never seen something so beautiful. And God, that ice sculpture, how much do you think it cost? Two thousand dollars? Three thousand? Not that it matters to the recent Ivy-League-graduate staffer who broke a sweat ordering it. Tucked away in rural nowhere, you’re thousands of miles away from the party that’s fundraising, dining, and networking in your supposed name, and you’re none the wiser. Except for the enlightenment gifted by the FOX and Friends who regale you with their criticisms of this golden found footage. They mock the hypocrisy of these bleeding-heart liberals; their egregious wealth, their coy, exclusionary, empty promises. The Friends’ snide remarks plant within you a virtuous satisfaction. You are right. You are vindicated in your ignored struggle.
But you can’t relish in that comfort for long.
The clock reads 4:45 AM and you cut the noise of Jesse Watters and Co. only to be faced with your reflection on the television screen. You’re sure to return to the incessant coverage of the infringements upon your livelihood and freedom on your lunch, scrolling in anxiety as stories of closed mines and high gas prices raise hairs on your neck. You pray that whispers of layoffs won’t reach you. Men with polished shoes and uncalloused hands nonchalantly propose the destruction of the only livelihood you’ve ever known, unemployment clothed in the robe of progressivism. Washington exists miles above you, only deigning to squat down to your level in brief mentions of an economic comeback saddled upon your labor. You ought to receive their attention with grace. What you know is that there’s something tangible that separates You from Them. From their offices and campaign planes that seem to fly over you to your ‘08 Dodge Ram and union job whose benefits have seemingly gotten worse over the years, something inside you cries out for something different. Something new—you think. All this has been the same for so long, what ever happened to something new?
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Attending a coastally elite, Ivy-League institution leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of anyone who happens to know where the financial aid office is. Money talks, wealth whispers, they say. Well, the wealth of your radical peers is so silent that you’d never
know the indiscriminate pile of money they’re sitting on, save a carefully crafted Google search and inquiry into a parent’s net worth. The subtle and unspoken class antagonism here speaks volumes to the pompous ideology of the American left in a twofold manner. On one hand, the working-class voters on the right are demonized for their ‘idiocy.’ The careful wording that typically follows any discussion of manifested inequality is abandoned, freed from taboo once the marginalization is no longer easily visible. On the other hand, Democratic voters, and those apprehensive of adopting a wholly revolutionary thought, are criticized for their compliance with a broken and oppressive system. How can any of this commentary be taken seriously when it is coming from the mouths of the one percent? When it neglects the system-contingent struggles of the 99.79 percent of Americans outside the Ivy League? It can often feel like everyone is playing some game you weren’t invited to, concealing their privilege to cleanly arrive at theory-based conclusions. This concealment doesn’t end here.
“Men with polished shoes and uncalloused hands nonchalantly propose the destruction of the only livelihood you’ve ever known, unemployment clothed in the robe of progressivism.”
In recent years, the Democratic Party has poised themselves in a position of defense they seem unable to disentangle themselves from. Once an actively progressive party—characterized by New Deal politics and policy directed towards its people—they have become the unwavering centrist establishment, firm against the corrosive policies of modern conservatism. Except they aren’t. Rather, the Democratic Party has been pulled farther and farther right towards the opposition. With each successive Republican victory, they concede more of what was once their core ideology in exchange for their supposed appeal to middle-of-the-line Americans. None of that was more apparent than in the most recent election, where the Democrats’ desperate attempt at “Never-Trumpism” led them to pander to on-the-fence Republicans, all for a
failed campaign. Your average Wisconsin voter did not vote blue, though he did in 2020, though he did in 2012. The Rust Belt went red. The whole country went red. Dems responded with incredulity; an unwillingness to believe that this was the America they were facing. But this was the cake they baked. For a long while, Democratic policy has—or at least attempted to—benefit the working class. Their trademark social welfare and increased opportunity programs have been chiefly targeted at voters who partake in manual labor and minimum-wage jobs for a living. Their imagery has long hinged on clean-cut American dream boys like JFK to portray the idea of ‘American success’ as attainable, possible only through their noble, intelligent leadership. While this rhetoric was intertwined with an elite lifestyle, it was always aspirational, never cloistered from the masses. When the price of dinner and gas is manageable, and people believe their nation is serving them in the ways it ought to, they believe they are a part of something great. Something sustainable and hopeful. It is never easy times that encourage xenophobia and authoritarianism. Never easy times that drive wedges so deep in a populous that they become irreparable. Only when a widely accepted status quo has become notably lost, when people are lacking the security they once relied on without recognition, do people become wary, does the system finally waver. +++
Through the popularity of the 1960s Black Power movements, the cultural consciousness (that is to say the white consciousness) was forced into an era of self-reflection on the dual realities of this country. Black Americans and the white working class, while driven to division from the inception of this nation, have long fought fundamentally analogous struggles. The formation of the Black Panther Party and the mobilization of millions of Black bodies forced America to reckon with what it had tried to neglect for decades. For the Democratic party, that meant reluctantly acquiescing to progressive policy—only after immense political pressure through militarized protest and social resistance. All the while, the Republican party dug its heels into a further conservative stance, damning the ‘violence’ of justified resistance, denying the existence of systemic discrimination, and edifying dreams of an older America. One where the ‘peace’ was kept, oppression left unquestioned, and wealthy white Americans free to go about their ‘normal’ lives.
class to the right. Long-held fears of the power of united Black Americans became realized through the tangible political change they were able to engender, and the Republican Party used this display of power to stoke fear among working whites.
In a post-emancipation landscape, Black Americans faced a labor market similar to that of their white working-class counterparts; both parties were forced to partake in unskilled, demanding manual labor to make a living. Solidarity was imminent as the workplace conditions and struggle to survive became shared across racial divides. To maintain their power and control of the workforce, wealthy elites played into the fears of lower-class white workers, dividing the labor force. What ensued was a legacy of racism and distrust, manufactured by the rich, maintained by the poor. The reckoning of the 1960s provided a chance for working people to re-investigate their similarities. It was a moment of potential redemption, for unification.
The Black Panthers promoted worker solidarity through support of the United Farm Workers of America and similar groups. They renewed old sentiments of collective power and a true leftist mission, alarming the elite establishment. The right returned to old tactics and convinced their voter base that what was social and political change for Black Americans could not possibly be conceived as change and progress for them as well.
The legacy of this divide is more salient than ever today, only exacerbated by the Democratic party’s insistence on its own inclusivity. Now, it seems the party has lost both the loyalty of its beloved minority bloc as well as the dedication of workers who once believed in their mission. The Democratic stance has ignored the white working-class in their personhood, instead opting for an over-intellectualized, patronizing saviorship. People in the Rust Belt, in the South, in the unpopulated Midwest have become toddlers in the eyes of the left elite. From their campaign podiums, standing proud in tailored Armani and Prada, they espouse rhetoric of disgusting, racist
The past successes of the Democratic party lie in its verbalized inclusion of the traditional “other” in American politics. The recognition of groups rejected by a strict Republican ideology centered on “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” regardless of condition makes for a large, diverse base. Historically known as the party of the little guys, the modern Democrats now assume much of the minority vote throughout the country. In recent years, they have made a distinctive portrait of the party as a patchwork of the nation. Multicolored yard signs with sentiments checking every box and carefully selected back-rally crowds echo messages of inclusion, reaching arms into every previously ignored part of America. This verbalized and simultaneously tempered recognition of such a large portion of the nation makes for the deeper entrenchment of a two-party system, forcing voters to align themselves with the party of inclusion or the party of no recognition.
Acceptance and recognition as political tools for policy and voter incentivization have now become increasingly viewed as the manifestation of identity politics within the party platform. The political environment created after the 2016 election and the victory of a boisterous conservative candidate in the wake of years of standard Democrat vs. Republican back and forth has seen the Democratic Party become associated with the “Radical Left.” Stereotypes of bleeding-heart, blue-haired snowflakes have become the laughable, weak caricature of liberalism in the eyes of the corn-fed, middle-of-the-line guy. Heavily intellectual presentations of an “ideal” America and all the theory, literature, and philosophy behind it are shouted down to the undereducated American from a soapbox built upon $100,000 degrees and trust funds. The inability to synthesize and
the damning of the non-intellectual commoner to hell. In the event of any environmental, social, or violent catastrophe, red states face the patronizing message: “YOU SHOULD HAVE VOTED BLUE.”
This vicious rejection of this population and the inability of the Democratic Party to build material rapport with the working class only furthers the vitriol between the over-educated left and workers. An American left rooted in theory and the strict manipulation of visible oppression ultimately alienates workers, pushing their material, everyday struggles to the back burner.
Issues like the cost of living are defining for much of the nation. The loud left and the Democratic Party have become synonymous with those consistently degraded by it, high gas prices deemed a simpleton’s issue. The characterization of the Democratic platform as one of unattainable idealism reads as contradictory to the material needs of the majority of Americans, allowing for the Republican Party’s pandering of the working class to hold this population indefinitely. Where the Democrats’ uplift of empty, alienated idealism implicitly denigrates the struggle of the white worker, gaudy appeals to this politically crucial population succeed, presenting a long-sought recognition of the working class’s struggle.
There is nothing more antagonizing than being made to feel stupid. Nothing less convincing than the subtle mockery of ignorance thrown in the face of people who see themselves as—who are—the backbone of this country. Democrats no longer advocate for the common man, they no longer represent America as an economic puzzle at its root. American liberation movements of the 20th century brought about tangible change, effective and visible in the lives of every American. Now all we get is talk. And with the way inflation is going… it’s pretty damn cheap.
KALIE MINOR B’27 and NATALIE SVOB B’27 will give it to you straight.
c When I was ten, my homeroom teacher had a Halloween extravaganza in lieu of a lesson on the Mercator projection. It had all the classics; skinned grapes in a bowl that felt like eyes, cold spaghetti dyed red to look like guts, and a potluck of sweets. A precocious math whiz whom I had a crush on brought crime-scene-themed red velvet cupcakes. He hadn’t put any red food coloring in them.
“It’s not actually red velvet. They just call it that. My mom says red dye is bad for you.” These cupcakes had shattered sheets of clear sugar candy sticking out of them. It was meant to resemble broken glass for the whole crime-scene effect. In a misguided attempt at pre-pubescent courtship, I tried to show him I could eat one whole, like a snake. I got the cupcake down fine, but the sugar candy got jammed behind my molars, giving me a coughing fit and a cut on my tongue. I was spluttering and sending bloody chewed-up cupcake spit all over my fauxwoodgrain plastic desk. I was sent to the school nurse to nurse my wounded pride and school my wounded feelings. This is where all my problems started.
I’m scared of food capable of playing these kinds of look-alike tricks on me. Is all food capable of this? Is there any pure, resemblance-static food out there to eat? That’s a great question, but right now I want to ask you: why would you ever make candy that looks like broken glass? I am haunted by those chocolate pudding cups with Oreo crumbs on top, meant to resemble dirt. I have bad dreams about cauliflower buffalo “chicken” wings. Fortunately, I’m not alone in this.
In Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho, Patrick Bateman is plagued by these kinds of culinary land mines. A great deal of American Psycho is about restaurants. Whole chapters are devoted to what exclusive establishments Bateman and his associates might get a reservation at, and what bizarre and extravagant dishes they are served once inside. At one point he is served a “rabbit that has been cut to look... just... like... a... star,” a terrifying experience for this fine-dining finance capitalist Bateman finds the star-rabbit unsettling. It is an instance of the shape, the look of something being out of joint with what it’s made of or what it means. Meat already presents a problem on this level—we distance pork from the pig, beef from the cow. Many consumers prefer their chickens processed, with head and feet cut off, both for convenience and to ensure they aren’t confronted with the practical details of killing an animal. Bateman has a deeper problem; he’s obsessed with destroying the distinction between surface and substance. The most obvious dimension of this obsession is his deranged murderous crusade against people—primarily women, which Ellis describes with so much relish that most readers immediately (and rightfully) clock the author as a misogynist. I don’t have time to get into all that, but put it down as a footnote. American Psycho is the best book I could never recommend to a friend, a terrific book not just about the breakdown of “reality” in an increasingly abstracted world, but also about food. Read this Indy article instead. Better yet, read “Symbolic Exchange and Death” by French social theorist Jean Baudrillard. For Baudrillard, no “original” things are leftThe simulated object—the thing in relation to
reality, a copy of reality, or even a copy of another copy—is all that remains. Our world is dominated by representation, which is increasingly inseparable from, or even synonymous with, what we take in as “reality.” Baudrillard calls this mess of “codes without referents” the hyperreal. In other words, the referent in question itself is another simulation. It’s simulation all the way down. In his essay “‘Into the Void’: The Hyperrealism of Simulation in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho,” Martin Weinreich contends that all the interactions in American Psycho can be understood through Baudrillard’s conjecture that commodity fetishism has been replaced by “a fetishism of the signifier.” To understand what this means, let’s begin with the commodity fetish, a term from Marx that describes how capitalism disguises the labor needed to produce a good by transforming the social relationships people have around goods into the relationship of products to one another. Baudrillard’s extension of this idea is that the transformation, the magicking away of social (read: labor) relations that make an item into a fetish, is happening now with the signifier. The signifier is a term for a material form (a shape, a sound) separated from its associated meaning—like a word on a page disconnected from the concept it refers to. The “signifying system,” the network of connections and understandings that allows us to connect the signifier to its associated meaning, is now fetishized rather than just the commodity.
An example from American Psycho can help us understand this. Bateman isn’t in a world of “tangible object[s]”: rather than referring to the “material object,” Bateman “refers to the brand name, to the ‘object-become-sign.’” He isn’t talking about a tangible coat or watch but instead about the perfect signifying system that makes an object of clothing into a status symbol. The “real” thing stops existing at all. He isn’t just consuming food at a restaurant, he’s consuming codes, he’s consuming the meaning of his ability to get a reservation or the best seat in the house. In Weinreich’s terms: Patrick “must reduce everything, whether object or human being, to a patchwork of brand names.” In American Psycho the complete domination of branded objects undergirds Bateman’s nonexistence. All experiences are reduced to codes. Bateman seeks to destroy these encoded experiences (as if murder was a conduit for authenticity) even as code is the only thing that composes his world.
The rabbit-star dish is one low-stakes example of Bateman’s issues with the world of signifiers. Once a meal is arranged “to give the appearance of a sunset,” there is no designated place where resemblance-based associations should or would
stop. Once a meal looks like a sunset it can also look like “one big gunshot wound.” The landscape of American Psycho is predicated on the same kinds of codes and aesthetic substitutions. When he makes an “indentation of one finger, then another” in his meat, he is trying to make contact with the tangible. He fails—there is no such thing as substance here.
The sunset meal or star-dish are entrance points into the broader question of the signifying world of food and the potential consequences of systems of association contained within. To you and me, a piece of rabbit cut to look like a star might not be that big of an issue. Broken glass cupcakes aside, I’m not actually haunted by cauliflower buffalo “chicken” wings. I like them. I spent over a decade as a tenured vegetarian-pescatarian, and I really missed eating fried chicken during that time. I’m still interested in this trend of trompe-l’oeil dishes—of making food look like what it’s not—within “modernist” cuisine. These illusions are nothing new (Umberto Eco writes about Baroque food simulation, parties “where the meat had to look like fish, the fish look like meat, and the fruit look like vegetables”). Still, these simulations are in vogue for expensive dining experiences. Simulations here (and in Baudrillard’s sense) are not just imitations of something else, but are more than “real” and begin to blur the line between the simulation and any discernible reference.
Easy examples come from the menus of restaurants like Mugaritz or Noma, where Chef René Redzepi was at one point serving diners edible dirt. I guess all dirt is edible, if you’re an intrepid five-year old, but this dirt was made of dried malt and beer. I’m sure it would have given Patrick Bateman an aneurysm, and maybe edible dirt could have saved a lot of lives in American Psycho. It’s interesting to me that an effort to make gastronomy more grounded (moving away from the earlier fads of liquids, gels, and foams) is supposed to be served by way of this highly-tooled culinary illusion. What could be less grounded than a precision-cut fruit-leather beetle? I mean, actual bugs were regularly on the menu at Noma, so what’s the appeal of this illusion? The Noma fruit-leather beetle had its 15 minutes of infamy when the New York Times broke the story of one unpaid intern, Namrata Hegde, who spent her three month term at Noma doing nothing but making trompe-l’oeil fruit beetles. The beetle illusion itself isn’t the problem, but its ridiculousness meant her story caught public attention and joined a larger conversation about the darker sides of fine dining. All parts of a hyper-curated dining experience (not just these culinary magic tricks) require a huge amount of labor, and these restaurants often rely on underpaid or unpaid interns who do the grunt work to make the illusions happen. To be clear, I don’t think that illusion as a dining mechanism (or even finely crafted or visually engaging dining) is what’s at issue. The fine-dining experience, in all its precision, requires an incredible amount of work. This working environment, from the physical toil to the emotional atmosphere, is the problem. These
culinary workers can be in precarious financial or visa and documentation binds, which makes it hard to push for better labor conditions. In 2022, Imogen West-Knights covered the intolerable conditions many workers in Copenhagen fine dining (and hospitality more generally) face for The Financial Times West-Knights wonders how “customers [could] be expected to confront the material realities of the restaurant world when the whole experience is engineered to make you feel as effortlessly cared for, as special as possible?” It’s worth noting here that Noma started paying their interns in 2023, and shut down their restaurant for financial reasons in 2024.
A diner comes to an exclusive and expensive restaurant to consume an experience along with their food. Part of that experience involves comfort, which means not being bothered about the backof-house people who aren’t compensated for their labor. The beautiful meal sits on the plate, cut away from the extraneous labor required to produce it, labor that can only exist at market prices under a system that exploits workers to get there. This is the force of a fetishized commodity; part of the product is the concealment of labor. To apply Baudrillard’s idea of the fetishized signifier, we see that an integral part of the diner’s consumption is the brand name, the prestige of the meal, not just the quality and beauty of the meal itself. In the case of edible dirt, you are buying the meal, the mealbecome-sign, and the comfort of feeling like you’re having a grounded, authentic dining experience.
These kinds of authenticity markets are everywhere. The force of the fetishized “farm-to-table” restaurant experience is that you could simply buy a more moral, more “real” dining experience. These restaurants are selling the “homemade” feeling, the “make it from scratch” ethos that might spur you to begin baking your own bread (and wonder if you should really be milling your own flour). Even when things are literally made at home, the homemade is still part of what’s for sale. That’s the appeal of a pre-made box cake mix, right? Or pre-proportioned meal ingredients sent to your door? That there’s something good, something valuable, something better about having the authentic experience of putting things together yourself. People have a lot of anxiety about “processed” food, food that is in some way “fake,” and selling solutions to that fakery is a lucrative market. One may try to address their “whole” food or “real” food anxiety in a kitchen, making things from scratch, but this is equally a zone of simulation. People, of course, are finding and selling solutions to this simulation: more simulation. Damn.
The same authenticity question is at play in raw food or paleo diets, where some idea of a past “pure” food experience is put on a pedestal and used to justify expensive and sometimes unhealthy eating. This past diet is another fabrication; the romanticized low-carb paleo diet probably never existed. Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, told Knowable Magazine that
“we actually do have preserved evidence that early humans are eating lots of starchy vegetable foods,” a meat-centric diet wasn’t all that common. There’s still money to be made by promising ancestral consumption (as if that would fit into modern food production), the global paleo food market is valued in the billions of dollars. Whole Foods, a business that cut its teeth selling, well, the idea of “whole” foods, had a net annual income of around half a billion dollars, even before being bought by Amazon. Health-associated stores like Whole Foods can sell “real” food back to us (at a high price) because so called “fake,” “processed” foods are so common. One reason for this is that processed food is cheap. For many Americans it’s not financially viable to buy food with these authenticity concerns in mind. If you live in a neighborhood that’s getting gentrified, high food prices may make it impossible for you to shop at any supermarkets. In other neighborhoods, there are no supermarkets—in 2022 the USDA estimated that 40.5 million Americans live in food deserts. Income inequality, access to food at all, can preclude these kinds of authenticity games, and it’s perhaps one reason for the moral associations present in discourses of “fake” food. This is a morality routed through class. The question of “processed” food is still a question of simulation, but it’s important to recognize that the food-on-the-table stakes are very different.
A lot of hay is made over eating “real food,” eating “simple food,” and what corporations have to flag for consumers as potentially “fake.” I’m sure you’ve seen the label “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product” on the side of American cheese slices, a result of a 2002 warning letter from the FDA to Kraft Inc. in which the FDA said that calling Velveeta and American singles “food” was a misrepresentation, since the “product does not conform to the definition and standard” of what constitutes food. I may not know the essential definition of “pure” food as such, but I guess the FDA does. This is the other side of these discourses about resemblance in what we eat. I wonder if we could call a slice of Kraft cheese another trompe-l’oeil culinary offering. Obviously the highbrow vs. lowbrow dichotomy between these two kinds of illusions accounts for some of the moral associations people have with American cheese, associations they don’t have around melon juice pretending to be caviar. On and off this spectrum of censure, faux-food is constantly present in our edible lives.
We have become accustomed to consuming a certain amount of unreality. You can see it in little ways—the ubiquity of unblemished and perfectly-shaped produce, the concept of an Impossible burger (they finally did it!), the rectangular prism of pork that the butcher cuts into ham at the supermarket. Some people argue about these things, but they are at least part of a culinary rule rather than a culinary exception. On both the expensive and inexpensive ends of food-become-representation, we’re dealing with simulation.
To be clear: simulation can also be fun. Flaming Hot Cheetos taste good, Trader Joe’s Chili & Lime Flavored Rolled Corn Tortilla Chips don’t taste as good. On one level I’m craving red 40, on a deeper level I’m craving the “object-become-sign,” the brand name that makes a 15 dollar bottle of wine taste like it’s 90 dollars. Imitation games (in objects, in theater, in art) are some of the oldest games humans like to play. The idea of a trompe-l’oeil artwork has been causing problems at least since the Greeks were faking out birds with paintings of grapes, and faking out each other with paintings of curtains. The term itself was coined by a wily Frenchman, Louis Léopold Boilly, who painted himself (being surprised at his own painting’s accuracy) into his trompe-l’oeil painting. Playing the game of resemblance and repetition with difference might be the basis from which we make things at all. How do we square this circle? What are the stakes?
This is why I bring up American Psycho, not to be provocative but to look at a work that pushes signifier breakdown in everything, including food, to its most parodic (and cannibalistic) extremes. The stakes of American Psycho are semiotic: Bateman is in an associative death spiral that makes any kind of trompe-l’oeil a source of “nameless dread.” Watch out for that star-rabbit! I’m reasonably sure we don’t share this position with Bateman (except on the most theoretical level), and maybe that is why the Noma fruit leather beetle isn’t an existential threat, but rather an opportunity to look at labor structures in the hospitality industry. What remains, for me, is the question of where the brakes are on this kind of simulation-substitution lateral slide. For Bret Easton Ellis—and Baudrillard—the answer is that there are no brakes. Bateman has no way to stop. Baudrillard says in an attempt to deal with hyperreality the real is put in a vacuum, somewhere it could be looked at objectively and then reproduced. But, this isn’t possible, real things survive only as imitations of themselves, imitations where the referent for reality is gone. The repeated imitation here is a consequence and a part of hyperreality, where the “real” loops back around on itself and any “objectivity” by which we think we measure the real is just another instance of our gaze on the object. This looping means that the “real” object disappears, there is no framework for it anymore, except for more looping. The game goes on, the boundaries are just different. There’s no fixed place where “real food” lives, there’s no one thing that food is or immutably looks like, the artistic work of cooking is part of this overlapping and overflowing simulation and re-simulation. Baudrillard says that in this world, there is still a “consummate aesthetic enjoyment [jouissance]” in looking and re-looking, watching and picking out the kaleidoscopic play of an ever-changing game.
In art or analysis, it’s possible to talk of a character or a person as “consuming codes,” rather than eating anything edible. To move beyond this, we might try to fall back on the material. This angle serves us a little bit; at some point you are eating food that is entering your body even if you’re also consuming the “object-become-sign.” We could say that the line here is tangible: what you can hold in your hands and what you cannot. We could even say, “forget the semiotic consequences, is the food any good?” Fair question! However, the filter of the tangible vs. intangible gives us an incomplete picture. Trompe-l’oeil dining and Kraft singles have my fascination because they suggest that the line between what is firmly tangible and what is symbolic is thin to the point of nonexistence. They are unsettling and unique, as complicated resemblance artifacts beyond the play of signification. It’s easy to see how a thing you can hold in your hands is a conduit of associative meltdown rather than a solution for that meltdown. Fruit that looks like a bug or a bug that looks like a fruit are just easy examples, all tangible things are subject to these kinds of theoretical associations. I don’t think there’s a safe zone, or an area these reality questions skip over. The hyperreal is here to stay, let’s gut it and have a pig roast!
NAN DICKERSON B’26 is “eating” an “apple.”
c In 1995, a good two decades removed from her most “critically acclaimed” works, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman was approached by upstart French actor Juliette Binoche, who asked Akerman to “write a comedy for her.” As Akerman recounts in a 2015 interview, Binoche “wanted to have a career in the US.”
Out of the collaboration came A Couch in New York, an irreverent rom-com which seemed to put these two titans of European arthouse cinema at the doorstep of mainstream Hollywood success. For Akerman, the creator of serious, long, and above all incredibly slow-paced arthouse dramas, the pivot to the rom-com was quite the change. Her most famous film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, was a 201-minute long odyssey about the mundanity of a widowed mother’s chores, depicting each action in excruciating detail. The affect of most of her films thus far was a sort of malaise, far from the confectionery of the Hollywood comedy.
The setup of A Couch in New York was classic, if a little contrived: Binoche plays Béatrice, a carefree Parisian dancer who swaps apartments with Henry (William Hurt), a burnt-out New York psychoanalyst looking to escape the demands of his needy clientele.
There was just one problem: nobody liked the movie. The general sense was, as New York Times critic Janet Maslin remarked, that the film was nothing more than “pleasant but unaccountable fluff.” Time Out called it “a comedy without humour, a romance without affection.” Across the ocean, the French film magazine Positif concurred: “As for American comedies, we prefer American comedies [Comme comédies américaines, on préférera les comédies américaines].”
What unites these critical perspectives is a sense that this romantic fluff was somehow beneath Akerman. A Couch in New York seemed to eschew all of the heady themes of Akerman’s previous work for a generic Hollywood fish-out-of-water plot and a couple of mediocre jokes about psychoanalysis. But if we are to take these reviews at their word, then why would Akerman want to make the film at all?
Roughly a decade earlier, Akerman made another film that seemed much like fluff: 1986’s Golden Eighties, a farcical musical-romance set in a mall. Though the generic register of this film seemed like an inexplicable departure for Akerman, Golden Eighties gave her new tools to expand on the same ideas she had been working through in her more “serious” films. Akerman used the constraints of the musical to explicitly comment on the confines of the economic apparatus within the mall, deploying the comedic setup and repetitive choreography to reframe her habitual themes. Fluff or not, the film was received well. As the film theorist Laura Mulvey remarked, “[it] is a significant development for Akerman, taking her play with seriality, for instance, beyond the sequential structure of shots and scenes into the form, even the materiality of the film.”
Viewed alongside Golden Eighties, one wonders if A Couch in New York could be read as a continued interest rather than a passing fad in Akerman’s career. As she grew older, she seemed increasingly drawn to genre films, to experiments in plot and tone that led her away from the plodding pace of her earlier work. In Akerman’s hands here, the
( TEXT DANIEL ZHENG
DESIGN JOLIN CHEN
ILLUSTRATION LUNA TOBAR )
stock images and systems of a rom-com became tools for an artist so interested in cinematic code.
When Henry and Béatrice switch places at the beginning of the film, Akerman literally plays out the above context—the European filmmaker finds herself lost in the great big American world. And with Hollywood comes a series of classic genre codes, which A Couch in New York follows carefully. Corny quips, a will-they-won’t-they, intricately designed apartments, an initial resistance between strangers, and of course, a happy ending. Playing the “role” of an American rom-com filmmaker, Akerman stumbles her way through the generic systems of the commercial mainstream.
Béatrice, settled into Henry’s apartment and the wonders of New York, finds herself quickly bombarded by a string of patients who barge through her door, assuming she is filling in for him, and begin to recount their varying traumas. Henry finds an incessant series of love-letters and voicemails from a coterie of Béatrice’s former lovers which he becomes obsessed with, reading and listening through to pass the time. If both are faced with the outwardly unpleasant prospect of having to deal with the other’s baggage, they nonetheless seem to jump in with relish. There’s something fun, of course, in playing the role of another. The long intercut sequence at the beginning of the film, jumping back and forth between Paris and New York, highlights the obvious similarity of the two situations, slick match-cuts drawing connections between the freedoms they find in their new lives. But of course, the life of the famous psychoanalyst and the struggling young dancer are not the same, and it’s here that Akerman starts to chart out an alternate path. Henry, sick
of plugging leaks in the bathroom and banging his head on the low ceiling, has had enough when Béatrice’s former lovers start asking him for analysis, and hops on the plane back to New York. If the obvious economic imbalance here—and Henry’s quick escape at the first sign of hardship— tells us anything, it’s that Akerman simultaneously trains a critical eye at the American comedy even as she follows its rules. If playing a role is initially fun, it’s no doubt less exciting when you’re a rich psychoanalyst roleplaying the life of someone less well-off. Akerman plots her film to provide an indictment of one of its central figures. Or even: A Couch in New York offers something like an immanent critique of the very genre itself. +++
Much has been made of the inspiration that Akerman drew from filmmakers like Michael Snow—she adored his 1971 La Region Centrale (a three-hour long film which features random camera movements created by a specially designed robotic arm). P. Adams Sitney, in his foundational essay “Structural Film,” categorized Snow (alongside filmmakers like Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, Joyce Wieland, and more) as primarily interested in the structure of the cinema as such rather than questions of plot or narrative. As Sitney writes, “theirs is a cinema of structure wherein the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape that is the primal impression of the film.” This insistence on “the shape of the film” was established through techniques like loop printing (“the immediate repetition of shots, exactly and without variation”) which used a constant series of repetitions to reaffirm the predetermined structure of the work.
Akerman, at least in her “canonical films,” often took the tools of structural filmmaking and
interjected a narrative into the situation, using the iterative techniques of Snow & co. to highlight a psychological state or habitual pattern within her characters. In Jeanne Dielman, for instance, minuteslong and incessantly repeated scenes of Jeanne scrubbing floors and washing dishes plays on the audience’s boredom in order to emphasize the constricted and asphyxiating situation Jeanne was in. In Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, the almost-mechanical conversations Anna has with her interlocutors only further emphasize how estranged and lonely she is. Above all, the duration of shots, plodding pace and recapitulation of behaviors constructed the “shape of the film” that Akerman’s characters remained stuck within. For Akerman, the magic of structural film was that it gave her a heuristic from which to investigate the repressive and smothering fabric of modern life and its many inequalities.
But I do not think it does justice to Akerman’s work to say that what she found interesting in Snow and Conrad were merely the techniques of slowness and repetition. What if Akerman’s interest in Snow was not just about his concrete ways of producing images, but rather the preoccupations and intentions underlying those techniques? After all, nothing in Sitney’s definition of a “structural film” implies that the only way to achieve one would be through discourses of “slow cinema.” Instead, what makes a film “structural” for Sitney at base is nothing other than an interest in the formal constraints it sets up for itself, and how it develops within the limits of its rules.
When A Couch in New York replays many of the moves of the romantic-comedy, it establishes a different set of rules onto the shape of its construction. Although certainly not slow, the rom-com nonetheless inscribes formulas into its characters—even when life moves at screwball-speed, we still find ourselves stuck amidst codes, patterns, habits, which tell us how to live. What defines the “shape of the film” here, then, is not the technical devices of loop printing and mechanical apparatuses, but the question of genre.
In retrospect, a move to genre seems inevitable for Akerman, the cinematic thinker of structure, rhythm and quotidian codes. Genre, after all, is the construction of systems that tell us what counts and what doesn’t count. In his essay “The Law of Genre,” Jacques Derrida associates genre with a certain paradigm of law: “As soon as the word genre is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: ‘Do,’ ‘Do not,’ says ‘genre,’ the word genre, the figure, the voice, or the law of genre.” This “legality” of genre comes from its demarcating gesture, the erection of a border that defines the terms of participation and of transgression. Genre as a concept extends the iterability of daily life into generalizable codes, played back again and again ad infinitum
In this light, the generic patterns of A Couch in New York begin to feel more and more fraught. Those very same habitual codes of the romantic comedy—the placement of characters in scenarios with conspicuously predictable resolutions, the unabashed obsession with houses and interiors, the inconceivably corny and unrealistic dialogue—are, even as they are replayed by Akerman, themselves subject to critiques, interpretations, commentaries. If, for instance, the apartments and kitchens in a Nancy Meyers film (The Parent Trap, The Holiday) are meant to signal toward an aspirational way of life, to promise just-behind-the-corner the perfect fantasy lifestyle waiting for anyone, here Henry’s sleek modern apartment and Béatrice’s run-down flat serve less as vessels of freedom and more like ones of restriction. Béatrice stumbles around Henry’s apartment which doubles as his psychoanalytic practice, a conflation of work and home that disrupts the classic generic usage of the apartment as a signal for “upwards mobility.” Describing the sense that she gets living in Henry’s apartment through the eyes of his depressed dog, Béatrice calls it an “antiseptic environment…an obsessive universe. Somber. Fascinating.” Haunted by the soulless and inauthentic geometry of the apartment, with its
massive windows yet dying plants, its intricate decor yet blank white bathrooms, Béatrice finds traces everywhere of Henry’s morosity and malaise. The rom-com’s ultimate dream of transcending one’s class and finding a new life is flipped on its head.
But if Henry’s depression comes from the fact that he conflates work with life, perhaps this isn’t so class-conscious after all. Money can’t buy happiness, the film seems to say, and isn’t it so great that Béatrice, this working-class ball of wonder, is here to solve all of Henry’s problems? After all, when Béatrice comes to New York, everything seems to change—the plants begin to grow again, even the dog’s depression is somehow cured. Except— Akerman never loses sight of the fact that Béatrice, too, appears irrevocably broken. At the end of a psychoanalytic session, she begins to tear up: “For me, the worst thing about mothers is that they grow old and then they die. Then, all of a sudden, you have...you have no mother...and no father.”
What’s most at stake seems to be the system as a whole, this system that tells us our jobs define who we are and how we should live, or, conversely, this world in which everyone grows old and dies. Everything in the film is punctuated with a deep sadness. And if the rom-com normally functions as an optimistic salve patching up this hole at the heart of reality with the fantasy of a happy ending for all, Akerman uses its form to shatter that impossible illusion. This ostensible comedy is struck through with an ambient despondency behind every corner. Akerman turns the quippy happiness of the rom-com into a hall-of-mirrors of dejection and projection. In an exceedingly enigmatic gesture, as part of notes that she gave to cinema scholar Nicole Brenez, Akerman simply writes “death of my father” next to the title of this film.
Maybe this, above all, is the appeal of the psychoanalytic practice at the heart of the film—in it, Béatrice finds a shield from the crushing sadness she sees everywhere she looks. She’s not drawn to Henry’s psychoanalytic role just because she loves helping people, but because it lets her supplant her own feelings via the lives of the others. “When you lie on the couch, it’s not like in the real world. You’re totally protected from everything. You can displace.”
But then what does it mean that the defining action, the romantic gesture which instantiates the film in the first place, is established via this false displaced haven of the couch? When Béatrice and Henry finally meet person-to-person for the first time, a cool 49 minutes into the film, they still do so under false pretenses: under the auspice of the droll pseudonym “John Wire,” Henry approaches Béatrice and asks to be analyzed. And when the faux-psychoanalyst and the real-psychoanalyst sit down to begin the session, what follows is nothing but essentially silence. Both sit on their respective couches unable to utter anything but “mhm” and “yes.”
The moment is a callback to a running gag the film makes at the expense of psychoanalysis, where Béatrice’s friend Anne tells her that most analysts just nod along and say “mhm” or “yes” in critical moments. But it’s also a figure of the strangling of speech, empty signifiers which signal absolutely nothing and yet somehow are still enough to light the spark of love. If the practice of psychoanalysis is about the “seriality of the unconscious,” then so is the practice of dialogue in the rom-com, which is repetitive and predictable to a fault. Instead, then, their love develops through a twisted combination of transference and repression, less about the words than the mere context of their meeting. Each one’s internal sadness is redirected and displaced to the other lying on the analysis-couch—they live their feelings out on the couch. At one point, Anne throws out the Lacanian maxim: “Do you know that loving is wanting to give something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it?”
Is this what happens to Béatrice and Henry? That they find each other not through their genuine love, but through a fundamental lack? A sort of atmospheric lack, that comes from their existence in a world pervaded by melancholy? Do they only fall in love as a systematic inevitability? Akerman plays by the rules—they do fall in love, even if this love feels shot through with artifice, projection, transference. What does it matter if these two characters do not know how to speak outside
of their faux-psychoanalytic technique—they don’t need to say anything meaningful to fall in love. But if we still chart a course to a happy ending, one can’t help but think of the irony of it all. What the romantic comedy aspires for is nothing liberatory, even as its characters always inevitably quip their way into fairytale endings. Like all other forms of structure, it inscribes a code—of heteronormativity, fantasies of class-mobility, and the dream of a perfect solution to all the problems in the world via the immaterial promise of love. And this false inevitability or teleology that the rom-com gives us is, Akerman shows, just as constrictive and repressive as the environment it provides an escape from. +++
And still. All of this is no doubt correct, and the cynical writer would simply end the article there. But when Binoche, at the end of the film, stumbles back into French to declare je vous aime, or when they physically climb over the barrier between balconies to finally embrace, one threatens to believe all the same, improbability or generic teleology be damned. As one critic for Frieze Magazine remarked: “When the building, the rooms, the walls, and the bars of the balcony that separate the lovers become irrelevant (they literally climb over the silly contrivances that have kept them apart)—arbitrary physical constraints are evaporated in a single leap of cinematic abandon that makes us cry out with happiness.”
Derrida reminds us that even as genre marks out its rules, these rules can never succeed in the totalizing way they claim to. Genre is always struck by a paradox, where the act of setting boundaries, of separating one genre from another, is precisely what allows for mixing, joining, and contamination. As he writes, “It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy…the trait that marks membership inevitably divides.” That is to say, the very act of saying that this belongs and this doesn’t, the erecting of a boundary in between, already contains the problem where each genre is marked via a relationship to the other, where the space in between genres therefore only exists in relation to another.
For Derrida, structure is bound to fail, and any generic rule is always struck by contamination, impurity, artificiality. And this gets at the essential difference between Akerman and Snow, or any of the “structural” filmmakers that she took so much influence from—in Akerman there is always the limit-situation where the structure falls apart, where the structure is subverted from within. One cannot read Akerman as strictly “structural,” then—rather the failure of structure is Akerman’s central interest, the moment where the asphyxiation of structure builds to its tipping point and the film breaks loose. In Jeanne Dielman (seriously spoiler alert), this tipping point is the moment of ecstatic violence where Jeanne orgasms and then kills the client.
Romantic comedy is, of course, already a contaminated genre: mashing together the romance and the comedy, it forms an artificial pairing that nonetheless historically coalesced into a united form. If A Couch in New York tells us about how repressive and constrictive the rom-com is, it nonetheless also contains the conditions for its freedom. The cynicism of A Couch in New York, its repressive and constrictive ideology, and Akerman’s subversion of it via malaise and dejection, is contaminated by a moment of radical joy. Something genuine leaks into the generic framework, and it threatens to—just barely—redeem the whole thing.
Béatrice and her friend Anne walk out of a movie, Anne hates it. “Oh, that movie was so bad…the actors were awful, the story was vain and the ending was unbearable…and the music, so schmaltzy, when they look at each other like two cows in a field!” The metacommentary is obvious, and she’s right, of course. The rom-com is always schmaltzy, awful, unbearable, and its refusal to acknowledge this encodes a fantasy that can only be dispiriting. But when Béatrice responds: “It’s the most beautiful film I’ve seen in my life,” I can’t help but agree, if only for a brief instant.
DANIEL ZHENG B’25 doesn’t believe in psychoanalysis.
I spread a shit rumor. Well, a rumor about shit: a log in the showers. Graduate Center Tower D. A scatalogical compulsion by a secret shitter who snakes from floor to floor, leaving their wafflestomped mark in each suite’s stall. A fetish? Political protest? A drunken joke?
Why would I plant this poop-psyop? Well, it was part of a campus-wide experiment. I walked down Waterman Street a few months ago and saw a sticker that was peeling off a lamppost. Clearly a product of twee-millennial dramatic angst, it read: “Providence isn’t big enough for the two of us.” I thought the sticker was tacky, but I did resonate with the message. College Hill often feels like an inescapable network of acquaintances who know slightly too much about each other.
I am fascinated by the web that is “the social” on College Hill. I have a constant desire to distill it, to map it, to formalize it, to understand it. There is no better way to do this than to track the spread of gossip by fabricating a rumor. Gossip requires a certain level of intimacy in order to be spread successfully: a group of people need to be at least acquaintances in order to feel comfortable sharing unverifiable information. Gossip can also be spread to many people at the same time, which can inform an understanding of which groups of people spend time together in a way that is conducive to the spread of juicy details. It’s effectively a proxy for tracing social capital.
So, with all this in mind, I set out to conduct a pseudo-scientific, semi-sociological experiment.
THE METHOD
A good rumor contains one or more of the following elements: sex, excrement, drugs, and money. A single visceral image, a central detail people can remember and regurgitate, is the foundation of any rumor worth its salt. The difficulty of crafting the perfect rumor lies in balancing the shock value of this image with its believability. All these factors inform the juiciness coefficient of a rumor; that is, both the likelihood that a person will spread it given the opportunity and the the velocity at which it spreads. However, as The Law of Juiciness (Fig. 1) tells us, the more harmful a rumor, the juicier it tends to be (up to the point where sharing it just feels mean). I did not want to implicate any real people in this experiment, so I settled on a safer solution in what I have labeled the Anonymous Shitter Zone.
To fabricate the perfect shit-cident, I didn’t stray far from the existing canon of South Campus dorm bodily-fluid incidents: residents of an adjacent tower of Graduate Center had received emails about someone urinating in bottles and disposing of them in the trash room. Observing the high juiciness coefficient of the piss bottle rumor, I decided to stick with a successful formula.
I knew that I couldn’t be the only person spreading the rumor, so I planted nine informants across social groups and grade levels on campus to spread this shit. These informants hailed from disparate groups across campus: Tech House, Pirate Acapella, Theater Kids, and of course, the infamous Indy-verse. I wanted to trace these connections between these spheres to truly understand how they exist in relation to one another.
Over the course of a month, I had my informants track their progress on a spreadsheet (“the spreadshit”), including details such as the date and location at which they spread the rumor. My fleet of fabulators found all kinds of creative ways to spread the rumor. We staged phone conversations in public, simulating loud, animated reactions to get the attention of passers-by who would have no choice but to eavesdrop. We noted down subjects’ suspicions about the rumor and sent new informants to re-establish its credibility. I created a tweet about the rumor as “proof” of the incident. One informant posted about it on Sidechat,
but was shot down for being ableist for shaming the spurious shitter (see appendix). My biggest achievement was spreading the rumor at a silent party, scribbling down the rumor in my notepad and passing it around.
We also had a superspreader event originating from a non-informant. They included the rumor in a funny meme (see appendix) for a certain (often-unfunny) meme account whose handle references this very publication. I went through the 90-odd likes of the post and noted down the overlaps (that is, people who already heard the rumor as per my spreadsheet – in total, there were ten).
Once the experiment had concluded, I contacted a representative sample of non-informants who had been exposed to the rumor to get an idea of its spread outside of my ten-person informant circle. I did this by lingering around Campus Center, tapping those exposed to the rumor on the shoulder and politely asking them if they had heard of a certain Grad Center Shit-cident. Some people did not know who I was and were confused why a random person was asking them about something they vaguely remembered hearing while drunk at a party. Responses were mixed. Some rolled their eyes, tired of hearing about the shower shitsuation. Some felt deeply betrayed by the month-long deception, shaken by the realization that their informant friends had lied to them so blatantly. The majority of people had no idea what I was talking about and were a bit creeped out when I pulled up a spreadsheet with their name, date, and site of exposure to the rumor.
Overall, 156 people (including informants and non-informants) were implicated in this rumor-spreading experiment. Each person is represented by a node on this graph, and the lines represent the connections between each of these individuals. For example, I spread the rumor to one of my freshman year floormates (a line connecting us was thus drawn), but they also heard the rumor from one of their friends (a non-informant spreader who I don’t know), who had in turn heard it from another informant during a party (Fig. 2).
There were around 3790 edges connecting individuals to each other. On average, each informant spread the rumor to around six people. Non-informant spreaders (that is, people who were not aware that the rumor was fabricated) spread the rumor to a median of around two people. This suggests that the rumor was not particularly juicy, but was amusing enough to serve as a funny anecdote.
As you can see, the matrix of “the social” becomes quickly convoluted. The connections between individuals are cyclical, spanning and doubling back on each other, linking people who have never met (and likely will never meet).
The bottom line is that we are all connected in strange but beautiful ways. A rumor that starts deep in the bowels of Tech House can make it as far as the Ivory Tower of Indy HQ.
SHOWER SHITTER.
JUICINESS
ANONYMOUS SHITTER ZONE
BORING ZONE
MEAN ZONE
FRESHMAN FLOORMATE
HARMFULNESS
c Born from the blood, sweat, and tears of Conmag’s strongest soldiers, the Indy Babies™ form a relentless army of pure publication joy, marching towards a brighter future. What began as a way to track how long it took us to finish each issue became a record of late-night companions, last-minute squabbles, and deteriorating mental states. The rules were simple; whoever was still left in Conmag when the final PDF was sent to print had the opportunity to sign the Baby™. Each one was hand-crafted with love, care, and sour gummy worms, an immaculate conception in a cradle of crumpled Indies and leftover takeout. Every week, these little angels uplifted our spirits and shined like beacons of hope in the darkest of hours, smiling, bouncing, and jousting their way through the thick and thin. They are more than just hastily drawn doodles used to cover stains on our walls; they are our closest confidants, our cherubic comrades, nurtured by the MEs and branded by the Design Team’s fancy-schmancy RISD signatures. They give us something to work for; in fact, we work for them! Unfortunately, there is an ongoing custody battle for who will get the Babies™ once the volume is over, and Cavity Baby’s teeth are being auctioned off to cover our printing dues. Indy Babies™ forever!
Indie has faith that we can know all the answers to our own questions, buried in the dungeon of our minds, guarded by the fierce dragon of cognitive dissonance. Besides, she’s tired. And maybe you can help yourself for f*cking once.
Indie prides herself on being wise in respect to the world. She has seen few horrors but felt great magnitudes of sorrow and desperation and they’ve shaped a kind sort of person over the years. In that she has learned that sometimes the best wisdom comes from working in the negatives. It’s too easy to see all that’s there, yelling at you its importance, asserting its relevance in action and fact and existence. It’s the stuff that makes itself known, greedily so, that is the stuff of life you cannot avoid, even if you tried. But the negatives? The shadows? Those are where the true answers lie. Half the time they aren’t truth yet, only possibility. The other half of the time they are so frighteningly true that they’ve been relegated to the alleyways of darkness, too gritty in their reality to be acknowledged. But that does not make them go away.
But Indie recommends you do this with a friend. Or enemy. Acquaintance, even.
Verb: The thing I’m doing deep in my chest. Brewing? Fighting? The things everyone is always doing. Decaying, fucking, stack overflowing, and seasoning food. Pick a card. Roll the dice. Pluck petals from a rare and frail dandelion; they either love you or love you not. Make a choice, because standing at the intersection of two roads forever has never been progress.
Some brief reminders: Adjective: A descriptive word. Evoke the senses, pluck the heartstrings. Envision nausea, then heady elation. Cloying. Fundamentally (adverb). Pale. Then rich. Noun: A person, place, or thing. My estranged Great Aunt. The Sonny Angel stuck to my door and the green electrical box at the end of the block where I used to meet my childhood crush. Crushed ice. Swill.
In the depths of my adjective mind, I came face-to-face with my truest self. It was the adjective shadow of my noun . I felt duly emotion but refused to verb . Suddenly, I saw the memory of the time I past-tense verb , swirling in the body part of my shadow. Oh how it past-tense verb in the adjective noun of my defenseless soul. It whispered to me a belief I’ve held about myself, though it felt more like a universal truth: “I am emotion and it is responsible for my adjective way of seeing the world.” I could not speak so I could not say thank you.
upon a time…
The shadow clapped in my face and I awoke in the body of your first and last name , only number under 50 weeks younger. Enough to avoid recent mistake , but not enough to do this all over again. I thought about my father. I made a list. I opened up The College Hill Independent to peruse. If I had looked outside I’d see the crop circles cut into the grass outside my window. They would only look exactly like that 13 years from then, and I would never get to see them. Maybe it was for the better. It’s all circles anyway. In the corner of my room I caught one last glimpse of my shadow. It winked. I smiled. It left. I knew it’d be back. I knew I’d be different. Lucky me! Lucky you.
Then, the scenery changed and I was in my shadow’s dimly lit penthouse office. It turned around slowly in its big material chair to face me. On a giant sheet of paper, it drew a picture of my organ and ripped it in half. The animal s circling outside seemed to verb in approval, I anticipated a twinge of pain but all I felt was emotion . “You are ok,” my shadow said. “If you draw a picture of your life and rip it up a million times over, nothing will happen. It’s just a picture. Ink has never been magic. You aren’t powerful enough to rip up the real thing, no matter how hard you try. God made love easy because He knows that we find sick satisfaction in making it hard. And He loves us so he lets us do what we like.” The shadow adverb touched my forehead and I was transported to my place . The air smelled like food , reminding me of emotion nights. The ground seemed to hum adverb beneath the brand shoes I wore in middle school. I knew without a doubt that I was reliving a brief memory . Though it was adjective , I could not avoid the fact that it was simultaneously opposite adjective , and I was grateful for both. name of childhood pet materialized before me, placed a bouquet of plural noun in my arms and cupped my face. “You do not have to be adjective . You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert verb ending in -ing . You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” they said. I thought of my relative and their hands crumpled and small with age. I thought of hunched shoulders, the weight of a responsibility enough to burden someone their entire life. I past-tense verb in realization.
Saturday 11/23
@1PM-4PM
Location: 400 Harris Ave Unit E, Providence, RI 02909
Novel Writing Month Write-ins
Hosted by LitArts RI, join fellow Rhode Island writers at a series of Novel Writing Month write-ins. In support of local writers working on novels, there will be free in-person writing sessions all the way until November 23. Come and meet fellow writers, while also cultivate your own writing!
Tuesday 11/26 @12PM-1PM
Location: 95 Empire St, Providence, RI 02903
Brown Bag Book Club
PPL’s Brown Bag Book Club meets on the last Tuesday of every month. The chosen books include classic and contemporary fiction and nonfiction. Copies of each month’s selection will be made available for checkout at PPL’s Info Services desk before the meeting!
Saturday 11/30 @1PM-4:40PM
Location: Warwick Library, 600 Sandy Lane, Warwick, RI 02889
Providence TGNB Community Meetup
Come meet and spend your afternoon hanging out with other trans and gender nonbinary folks in the area! Feel free to bring snacks, drinks, and games to share. Please mask up and take a test prior to attending. To learn more or to stay connected about the next monthly meetup, check out @pvdtgnb on Instagram.
Tuesday 12/03 @12PM-2PM
Location: Rochambeau Library – Community Room, 708 Hope St, Providence, RI 02906
Monthly Genealogy Meetup
Are you looking for your family’s roots? Come make use of the Library’s new subscription to Ancestry.com Library Edition! A staff member will be there to help navigate the website and offer guidance on how to build your family tree. Bring your own laptop or use one of the Library’s. No registration required.
Thursday 12/05 @6PM-10PM
Location: 89 Brown St, North Kingstown, RI 02852
Festival of Lights Tree Lighting
Come to Wickford Village for the annual Festival of Lights! This is an annual tree lighting celebration. This Festival is a 4-day event that transforms Wickford Village into a winter wonderland. The festival begins with a tree lighting ceremony at Updike Park on December 5th, with the support of the Chamber of Commerce, the Town of North Kingstown, and the Wickford Village Merchants.
Saturday 12/14 @1PM-3PM
Location: 400 Harris Ave Unit E, Providence, RI 02909
Queries, Proposals & Publishing for Writers of Genre
Funded by the Dexter Donation, come join acclaimed local authors Riss M. Neilson, Sophie Burnham and Vanessa Lillie to discuss the challenges their genres face in traditional publishing circles and their personal journeys to book publication. Join for an in-depth conversation on Queries, Proposals & Publishing for Writers of Genre.
Sunday 12/15 @8PM Location: Virtual – Zoom
Abolish Rent Online Book Event
Join authors of Abolish Rent, Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, for a virtual event to discuss the tenant movement. Come to learn about the increase in real estate consolidation, growing tenant power, organizing building, and to reflect on tactics that will bring a radical transformation of our housing system. Please register for the event at bit.ly/ATUN-abolish-rent to receive the meeting link.
Friday 11/22 @1PM-5PM
Location: Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, 154 Angell Street Providence, RI 02906
Coming Home:
A Living Room Concert by The Haus of Glitter “What does it feel like to come home? / Home to the self / Home to each other / Home to the earth / What does liberation look like in the living room?” Join The Haus of Glitter Dance Company + Performance Lab + Preservation Society in asking and exploring questions related to the intimacy of home in a multidisciplinary performance installation.
Monday 11/25 @6PM-7:30PM
Location: Mt. Pleasant Library – MakerSpace
Tapestry Weaving
In this multi-part workshop, come learn how to use different weaving techniques, including plain weave and tapestry. Materials will be provided; all skill levels welcome! Space is limited, so please register at khaines@clpvd.org.
( TEXT QIAOYING CHEN & GABRIELLE YUAN DESIGN ANDREW LIU )
Please note: it is recommended that participants attend at least three classes to learn a variety of techniques and complete a weaving.
Friday 11/29 @12PM-4PM
Location: 36 Beach Street, North Kingstown, RI 02852
Holiday Small Works Exhibit
Wickford Art Association is presenting the exhibit, “Holiday Small Works.” This exhibit includes a community of great artists whose works will be small in size and in relation to the holidays. This exhibition will be on display until December 22nd. The exhibit is free and open to the public!
Sunday 11/24
@7:30PM-9:30PM
Location: 95 Empire Street, Providence, RI 02903
The Lucky Chance
Presented by Head Trick Theatre at AS220, The Lucky Chance is about two young women who have married rich old men. Their relationship is marked with daring, ridiculous, and unethical measures. Come watch to find out just how far things will go in this satire on marriage, money, and misogyny. Free with Brown ID.
*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.
Friday 12/13 and Friday 12/20
Location: 400 Main St, Pawtucket, RI 02860 and 171 Chestnut St, Providence, RI 02903
The 11th Annual Holiday Benefit Cover Show
This year’s Holiday Benefit Cover Show will feature eight different bands across two nights. Proceeds will go to RIOT Rhode Island, an organization that uses music creation and collaborative relation-
Toe Tag
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