The College Hill Independent Vol. 31 Issue 5

Vol. 31 Issue 1 Vol. 31 Issue 5

Vol.29

a Brown/RISD Weekly a Brown/RISD weekly

the NEWS 02 Week in Preservation Lance Gloss, Gabrielle Hick & Dominique Pariso

Volume 31 No. 5

05 Hotline Bling Wilson Cusack METRO 04 DoughPo Jane Argodale 07 Lobby in the Lobby Laura Durand ARTS 08 Dirty Projector Alec Mapes-Frances 11 World Wide Wasteland Eli Neuman-Hammond FEATURES 03 A Word Francis Torres 09 Breakfast of Champions Abbey Perreault OCCULT 13 Tantric Transactions Lance Gloss SCIENCE 16 A Porcini of the Artist as a Young Man Mickey Zaslavsky LITERARY 17 There’s Something About Fred Sarah Dillard EPHEMERA 15 Casual Dining Frederick Powell X 18 Selfie-stych Grace Ludmer

From the editors:

In an ideal world, a publication might be able to publish all the perspectives on a given issue and give them equal representation. But in reality, there are things that—if published—undermine the creation of a space for public discourse that is inclusive of all members of the community. Publications engage in a social conversation, in a public debate, and have the power to influence public discourse. Because a publication brings issues to life for readers that may not experience those issues personally, it must be meticulous and respectful in the way it presents matters.

A publication’s staff should strive to reflect the community it seeks to serve, empower, and inform. It has a responsibility to advocate in service of those who are ignored and maligned by forces of authority. This needs to be a priority from the hiring and recruiting process, to the editorial process, to the writing that goes into the paper. The demographics of the newsroom influence the values that the publication abides by in carrying out its work.

The Indy itself has a long history of overwhelmingly white and affluent staff membership. We acknowledge this, and realize that when we speak of ideals we describe a set of principles that we have not yet realized. But we commit ourselves to the effort, and ultimate success, of staff diversification. As editors of color on the staff of the Indy we demand this of our own staff, and recommend this to our peer publications.

Every publication should consider the standards for what it is willing to print. Making use of guiding values is especially important because any negative outcome of the production process reflects poorly on the entire staff and not just the individuals who made the offending decision. Accountability requires keeping a public record of your mistakes, owning up to them, and working towards a better reflection, and understanding, of the publication’s values.

CF/SP/RS Managing Editors Sebastian Clark Kim Sarnoff Maya Sorabjee News Wilson Cusack Dominique Pariso Francis Torres Metro Jamie Packs Shane Potts Arts Alec Mapes-Frances Jonah Max Athena Washburn Features Piper French Yousef Hilmy Henry Staley Science Camera Ford Tech Dash Elhauge

P.O Box 1930 Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

Interviews Madeleine Matsui

Literary Gabrielle Hick

Staff Writers Jane Argodale Ben Berke Liz Cory Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa Julia Tompkins Erin West

Metabolics Eli NeumanHammond

Staff Illustrators Caroline Brewer Teri Minogue

Ephemera Jake Brodsky India Ennenga

Copy Miles Taylor

Occult Lance Gloss

X Layla Ehsan Sara Khan Pierie Korostoff List Jay Mamana Cover Luke Alexander Design & Illustration Nikolas Bentel Polina Godz Alexa Terfloth

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Web Charlie Windolf Business Kaya Hill Senior Editors Tristan Rodman Rick Salamé MVP Rick Salamé

@theindy_tweets

Off the Books Where be dead skin cells, piled up, and caked upon the pages, secret treasures await: an archivist’s reading of Genesis 3:16. “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Montclair State University professor Jeremy Miller wasn’t thinking about that verse when he stumbled upon an old notebook while sifting through a cabinet of papers left by the English scholar Samuel Ward (1572-1643).

Dusting it off, and pouring over Ward’s untidy scrawl, Miller realized that he was reading the King James Bible—not just any King James Bible, but the earliest known draft of its translation, dating to about 1604. The refined version, trusted by Protestants and Anglicans, hit circulation in 1611, when “going viral” simply meant printing a few hundred copies—today, it is English literature’s most widely-read work.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has not broadcast comment on this 70-page reminder of his faith’s draftstage. He’s been too busy mitigating an international cleavage in his Church regarding its doctrines on homosexuality. African churches are pushing hard to re-criminalize it, while American elements are pressuring for a more liberal approach. Welby has made some progressive moves—as of last year, women can now be Anglican Bishops—but he hasn’t reconciled the differences among his constituents.

So, the Archbishop has no time to discuss Samuel Ward’s bad handwriting. He’s got to keep apace with Catholics, to whom the King James Bible is nbd. Pope Francis has certainly been keeping busy. This week he canonized the first married couple in Church history, Louis and Marie-Zelie Guerin Martin.

The papal numerus unus is taking Catholics on a wild ride out of institutional stricture—decentralizing Church functions, suggesting that homophobia is maybe inconsistent with the biblical spirit, calling global capitalism “the dung of the devil”—and not everyone in the Church is comfortable with it.

Both leaders have a long road of controversy ahead of them.

If nothing else, amid the tumult, these Christian kingpins seem less attached than ever to the dusty parts of books. –LG

Lost and Found A King James Bible was discovered mid-morning on Wednesday, September 30, lying open in the middle of a road in Tallahassee, Florida. The Bible was open to two pages of the Gospel of Matthew, cars driving over and over the first book of the New Testament. Good Samaritan and Chamber of Commerce employee, Lane Carroll, rescued the Bible from the street, stating that she did so because it made her sad every time someone ran over it.

Resurrected in her hands, and despite the tire tracks, the Bible revealed inside itself a series of correspondences between former owner, Helen, and a man named Henry. In Henry’s looping cursive, blue ink, heavy hand: “I will love you forever.” Helen’s response, more slanted, also blue: “Henry I promise I will marry you. Your love, Helen.” Other conversations were found on other pages, but a whole sheaf of the Bible was also discovered to have fallen out. It is unclear whether this was because Henry or Helen flipped through pages so often the paper lost its grip on the binding; or whether a car, unknowingly driving over a Bible, ripped out a section and the possible love notes on it. This lacuna is an unfortunate mystery.

An inscription on the front page of the Bible suggests Helen’s birth date is October 18, 1955. (It is hoped that she had a pleasant 60th birthday.)

The Bible revealed more. Another note, recorded deep inside the Old Testament, suggests a wedding date for Helen and Henry as November 19, 1972. The Bible, lost and found again, currently lies in wait at the Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce. It is hoped that an owner, Helen or Henry or whoever, comes forward to claim it. Anyone with information regarding the Bible may call the Chamber at 850-224-8116. It would make a nice 43rd anniversary gift. –GH

WEEK IN PRESERVATION

by Lance Gloss, Gabrielle Hick & Dominique Pariso illustration by Eli Neuman-Hammond

All’s Fair in Love and Previews There is something profoundly sad about abandoned buildings. Particularly when they once housed something held dear. And none were as sad as the scores of closed down Borders bookstores peppering the highway landscape—all causalities of the then mounting print vs. digital publishing war. For years I couldn’t drive by my local branch without my carful of friends all bowing their heads in respect, crossing themselves, and observing a brief moment of silence for the fallen giant. The building eventually became home to a year round Halloween costume store.

When Borders declared bankruptcy in 2011, all hope seemed lost. We began to envision a paperless world, destitute librarians roaming the streets, book burnings straight out of a Bradbury novel that scores of young children would now have to read on a screen. It seemed for a while that the printed word was going the way of the dodo.

And while this kind of publishing nightmare is overly bleak, the shift from paper to pixel seems to be continuing. On Friday, a court ruled in favor of Google’s quest to scan over 20 million titles and put them online for anybody to access. Users on Google Books retain their ability to search for specific phrases and, with no cost, read snippets of countless volumes without the permission of the authors. Whole books are only available if they are in the public domain. Judge Leval maintains that copyright law gives “potential creators” the right to copy their own work to expand everybody’s “access to knowledge.” If a reasonable amount of it is parodied, or if the work is put to a “transformative purpose,” it counts as fair use under the Copyright Act of 1976.

And while some literati bemoaned this loss of ground in the continuing battle royale, this writer takes heart: it is comforting to think that as the wind blows over the place where the Library of Alexandria once stood, and all the Borders now stand empty, the work of countless writers stays safe and enshrined in the Internet’s web.

But don’t fuck with Barnes & Noble. –DP

Oct 23, 2015

NEWS

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FREEDOM FOR WHOM? Speech Acts and Power at Brown University

by Francis Torres illustration by Yuko Okabe

October 29, 2013. Ray Kelly, New York City Police Commissioner, arrives at Brown for an honorary lecture.

Many of my friends and colleagues come together to disrupt his talk and to demand accountability for his racist policies.

They succeed, but also brace themselves for the inevitable backlash. In the hours and days that follow, President Christina Paxson releases a statement condemning the protesters. Students start publishing op-eds debating freedom of speech on campus. Biology Professor and Brown alumnus Ken Miller writes a Brown Daily Herald column on the pedagogical importance of having heard the leader of the American Nazi Party speak on campus back in 1968.

October 5, 2015. The Brown Daily Herald publishes the second of two racist columns by undergraduate student M. Dzhali Maier, who favorably portrays eugenics and the subjugation of Native Peoples. Again, I see friends and colleagues come together to demand accountability for these acts of aggression. This time, two undergraduates and four professors (Professor Miller among them) explicitly take up the banner of free speech in a series of Herald columns that rebuke the proposed ‘censorship’ of the newspaper and warn about the dangers of speech codes.

A recent letter by the Brown administration, also published in the Herald, includes a quote that gets to the root of these episodes, attributed to a student who protested against racist practices on campus back in 1989: “Expect to be in this room again and again discussing the same issues after whatever controversial and hurtful incident comes next, with little to no expectation that anything will change.”

By the next day I was half-convinced that Brown was trapped in some sort of Groundhog Day-esque time loop.

Students of color and their allies were again raising their voices against a damaging discourse that had been given a podium (literal or metaphorical) by a Brown institution.

Op-ed writers defending free speech claimed victimhood for themselves and lamented the death of academe at the hands of ‘political correctness.’ One phrase kept popping up on comment boards and in classroom discussions, recycled from decades-old conversations that we perhaps should have moved past by now: ‘the solution to bad speech is more and better speech.’

that Miller and other commentators express for a completely free exchange of ideas in legitimizing platforms like the Herald—going way beyond simple protection of freedom of speech on campus—is so strongly defended because so many people think of it as an essential pedagogical tool. It is a nonnegotiable conviction. Any doubt about its total validity is by definition a rejection of it. In other words, campus free speech, as described by its staunchest defenders, is a perfect example of ideological fundamentalism.

The version of free speech rights touted around campus does not recognize its own fundamentalism. Rather, it is convinced that it is the antithesis of fundamentalism. This freedom of speech is universal and universalizing, understood to be the basis of public discourse­—both in the public sphere and in academic communities like Brown’s.

This kind of ‘everything goes’ mentality is backed by national organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). FIRE’s core mission is to “protect the unprotected” by defending and sustaining individual rights to freedom of speech, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience. Helping disempowered students is surely commendable, but whom exactly they are talking about

“None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech.

We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.”

Another author, NYU Law School Professor Steven Waldron, has a convincing metric for establishing the best place to draw lines. In his book, The Harm in Hate Speech, he defines as harmful any speech that undermines a person’s confidence that they are regarded as an equal member of society—in his terms, “an essential public good” necessary for any democracy. Hate speech is dangerous, he says, because it harms a victim’s dignity in a way that goes beyond simple offensiveness. The speech act is a “worlddefining activity” that inflicts damage through its shaping and reinforcement of structural realities that have a material effect on people’s lives.

The takeaway here is that since speech acts shape the public sphere, forms of speech that deny others equal participation in public life are not just ‘offensive’ but are themselves unacceptable acts of aggression. They erode the foundations of liberal-democratic society. Some speech acts can create social

+++ Under most circumstances, this may be true. But for free speech fundamentalists it is no longer just a statement.

It is an unquestionable axiom that undergirds the liberal understanding of college life. It is also an aspirational claim.

If better speech—delivered in a civil, non-contentious manner—consistently led to the waning of perspectives that cause ‘bad speech,’ then a strong rhetorical exercise would be all that’s necessary to stop bigotry. But does this argument always hold up? I’m left wondering why, after decades of countervailing speech acts and protests by so many minority student groups and activists on campus, the ‘bad speech’ of racial inferiority and colonialism is not only strikingly unaltered, but still staunchly defended. +++ The debates around Maier's columns, and the Ray Kelly protests before them, raise questions not about the sanctity of constitutionally protected speech, but rather about what speech should be amplified at a university that strives to foster an inclusive community while promoting a spirit of free inquiry. Determining the balance between these oftencontradictory ideals is an issue of power. Professor Miller and other commentators say all speech is fair game, since the only possible alternative is a disempowering censorship that “cheapens” students’ academic experience. The writers of a joint statement by Black student groups on campus, published on the website of bluestockings, hold a more nuanced view: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, whether or not students disagree; however, as an organization with privilege, power, and a platform, the BDH is, and will be, held to a higher standard than any one individual.”

Why do we keep having this conversation despite the Herald’s complete discretion to publish or not publish submitted content, and Brown students’ right to criticize published content for not meeting what most publications would consider basic editorial standards? Perhaps the desire

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when they say “unprotected” is anyone’s guess. In FIRE’s view, a university functions as a “marketplace of ideas” in which the imposition of ‘speech codes’ constitutes a disruption, much like how regulating economic activity disrupts markets in neoclassical theory. Brown ranks unfavorably on FIRE’s Speech Code Ratings, currently holding a “red light” status: defined as having at least one policy that “both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.” The policy the group takes issue with is Brown’s recently expanded protections against sexual harassment. The students who wrote the first free speech defense of Maier’s columns, "Some speech hurts­—and that’s okay,” are both affiliated with FIRE. +++ This demand for unhindered freedom of expression on campus is unusual. On many campuses—like in most liberal democracies—freedom of speech ceases to be protected when it becomes hate speech, a verbal attack against a person or group on the basis of held identities such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation. The notion of human dignity as an end in itself is inherently tied to these protections.

On January 13, in response to the us-versus-them discourse that many people adopted after the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris, British journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote a column for the New Statesman on the hypocrisy of free speech fundamentalism. Here’s an excerpt:

environments where some people not only feel that they are not equal, but in fact are not equal.

Given the many historical examples of materially harmful speech acts, it is particularly troubling that free speech fundamentalists tend to brush away criticism by stating, ‘there is no right not to be offended.’ Of course, there is no right not to be offended. But that is not the issue. Criticism of harmful speech is not about hurt feelings, but about reacting to attacks against human dignity that can have real consequences on the lives of those the speech targets.

This awareness of how words reinforce power dynamics and structural inequality is what’s lacking in the on campus defenses of free speech fundamentalism.

To quote the editors of bluestockings Magazine, “It is the responsibility of a publication to critically consider the effects of the words that they privilege with publication.”

Likewise, it is Brown’s responsibility as an institution, physically built through acts of disempowerment, to be aware of how amplifying certain opinions can further disempower oppressed members of our community.

FRANCIS TORRES B’16 believes words have material consequences.

The College Hill Independent

AMERICA RUNS ON RACISM

TM

A Steaming Cup of #BlackLivesMatter

by Jane Argodale

The Providence Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #3 (FOP), a local chapter of the national Fraternal Order of Police which has 325,000 members nationally and acts as a union that lobbies for pro-police legislation, held an emergency meeting on Sunday, October 2. At this meeting, the FOP issued a printed statement that ended with the declaration that “ALL LIVES MATTER.” The meeting was called in response to an incident, first reported on social media, and then on GoLocalProv, in which an employee at a Dunkin’ Donuts on Atwells Avenue handed an officer his coffee with the hashtagged phrase “#BlackLivesMatter” written on the cup.

In the original Facebook post, officer William O’Donnell wrote, “So my coworker just went to get a coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts on Atwells Ave in Providence. The worker was immediately rude, and didn’t appear to want to serve him in uniform. Upon leaving he noticed what she wrote on his coffee cup...#blacklivesmatter.? Would you drink it? My suggestion... absolutely not, go to Starbucks. When is this silliness going to end. But if the store gets robbed she’ll be calling us immediately to help AND we will because that’s what we do!!!!”

After the story broke out on local news, Dunkin’ Donuts corporate issued a statement, saying that the franchise owner had apologized to the police officer and verbally reprimanded the employee. Meanwhile, the statement that the FOP released after their meeting called for the employee’s firing, deeming her actions “unacceptable and discouraging.” The statement made reference to the larger Black Lives Matter movement: “the negativity displayed by the #Blacklivesmatter organization towards police across this nation is creating a hostile environment that is not resolving any problems or issues, but making it worse for our communities. They are doing this by increasing tensions amongst the police and the people they serve.” How the offending cup exacerbated those tensions wasn’t made clear by the FOP’s statement, and they made no direct reference to the actual mission of Black Lives Matter, which, according to a mission statement on blacklivesmatter.com, a website run by leaders of the movement, is “an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.”

Speaking to the Indy, incoming President of the Providence FOP, Robert Boehm, reiterated the possibility that the coffee may have been spiked. Though he refuses to characterize the Black Lives Matter movement as violent and believes there are “people trying to do the right thing,” Boehm called the Black Lives Matter movement “hostile to police.” Boehm added, “protest is one thing, being unruly is another.”

Originating as a hashtag on Twitter, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” has become a battle cry against racialized police brutality and the bias of America’s justice system. Though the phrase has also become an offline protest movement, it’s still commonly used by those with no affiliation to a larger organization.

Oct 23, 2015

Speaking to GoLocalProv, FOP Vice President, Mike Iamondi, implied that the slogan was a physical threat. “We have to look at the possibility if ‘Black Lives Matter’ is on the cup, is there anything else going into the cup? That is a possibility, given what’s going on around the country. If a guy goes in for a cup of coffee at a place we know, where we’re patrons at, and they’ve always been great with us, do we have to worry?” No report has indicated that anything besides coffee was in the coffee cup.

Retired cop, Tony Lepore, called on Dunkin’ Donuts to fire the employee, in another statement to GoLocalProv.

“This incident that happened at Dunkin’ Donuts at Bradford St. & Atwells Ave. is unacceptable from the employee, and management. Yes, management! They are just as responsible for not rebuking. This employee’s action was beyond verbal reprimand. She should have been fired.”

In an interview with RI Future, Mayor Jorge Elorza seemed unwilling to directly comment on the situation, and opted instead to talk about policing in Providence in general.

When asked if something should be done about police officers calling for the firing of a black teenager for writing on a coffee cup, Elorza made the distinction between the FOP and the police department, responding “well, remember this is the police union, and the Providence Police Department are two completely different entities,” and stressed that he was focused on “making sure that we have these strong relationships in the community.” When pressed on the matter, Elorza repeated, “so we’re going to continue to make sure that we have strong relationships between the community and the police department and take all the steps that we need in order to move in that direction.” Elorza’s main point seemed to be that Providence’s lack of the kind of violence seen in Ferguson and Baltimore was a sign of a better relationship between police and the communities they’re charged with protecting.

Robert Boehm agreed, telling the Indy, “99% of the time we have a great rapport with a community of any color, but when a story hits, people with their own agenda come out and their voices are loud at the time. But if you come to the office, you’ll find something different.” Boehm also rejected any possibility of widespread racial profiling by police. “I don’t believe at all in police racial bias.”

Though it’s true that Providence hasn’t made national headlines for either police brutality or protests turning violent, the reality is not nearly as rosy as Elorza’s statement suggests. In fact, Providence seems to have many of the same conditions of police-community tensions and lack of police oversight that led to the shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent protests in Ferguson. According to a report from the Rhode Island ACLU using data published by USA Today, racial disparities in arrests in Rhode Island are higher than those in Ferguson. In 2012, Rhode Island police officers arrested black individuals at a rate 9.14 times higher than that of non-blacks, while Ferguson’s rate was 2.8 times higher. The rate of racial disparities in arrests in Providence, though lower than Rhode Island’s overall rate, is 3.7.

It is also easy for cops who abuse their power to evade punishment in Rhode Island. Police officers are protected by a state law called the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, which states that any disciplinary measure more severe than a two-day suspension requires a hearing with a panel of three active or retired police officers, one of whom is selected by the officer being charged. These laws have the support of the FOP. Earlier this month, a police officer was arrested for texting death threats to his doctor, the most recent of four arrests in the last year, including one for possession of a gun with a scratched off serial number. But protected by the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, he still has his job. Similar laws in other states have been sources of controversy. The police officers in Baltimore involved in the murder of Freddie Gray were protected from consequences in the police department by such laws.

In light of the FOP’s response, Rhode Island’s STEP UP Coalition published its own statement on October 9. The coalition supports the adoption of the Community Safety Act ordinance in Providence, which would forbid racial profiling, and set standards for police stops, such as explaining to individuals why they are being stopped and prohibiting police from asking for consent for searches without probable cause. The statement further asked that police “stop addressing acts of peaceful protest and dialogue as ‘unacceptable and discouraging’ and start giving that label to acts of racial profiling and police brutality,” praised a decline in violence against police since the founding of Black Lives Matter, and called the Dunkin’ Donuts employee’s act one of free expression.

Beyond issuing statements, both sides of the issue have taken action. The FOP initially staged a boycott of Dunkin’ Donuts, which was later changed to a boycott of just the Atwells Avenue location, and protested outside the storefront on October 11. The next day, the STEP UP coalition held its own demonstration of solidarity at the location, buying cups of coffee and holding signs outside.

Just a few days later, on October 14, at Tolman High School in Pawtucket, a School Resource Officer bodyslammed a 14 year-old student. The next day, 200 students protested the officer’s tactics outside the high school. The event suggests that communities in Rhode Island are not nearly as confident in the fairness and good judgment of police officers as Jorge Elorza would have them believe.

After all, the issue can’t even be kept out of a coffee chain. A slogan on a Styrofoam cup is enough for a police union to hold an emergency meeting in condemnation. This also suggests that police have yet to understand what their communities are asking for.

JANE ARGODALE B’18 takes her coffee with milk, sugar, and justice.

METRO

04

PAST AND PRESENT Justice in Guatemala

It began on April 16, when the UN International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala announced the uncovering of a corruption scheme now known as “La Linea” (The Line).

The scheme involved a customs fraud network, wherein port officials would accept bribes to decrease tariffs on goods being imported into Guatemala. Its moniker comes from a supposed hotline that interested importers could call. Prosecutors claim that the scheme brought in $250,000 a week. The day it was announced, 20 private industry and government officials were arrested, including the current and former heads of Guatemala’s tax collection agency. Investigators first became suspicious after the Guatemalan tax administration had not recorded a single tax fraud complaint in two years. An arrest warrant was also issued for Juan Carlos Monzón, the private secretary of former Guatemalan Vice President Roxana Baldetti. Mr. Monzón was thought to be the ringleader of the scandal, and he and Ms. Baldetti were in South Korea at the time of the announcement. According to a statement by Ms. Baldetti, Mr. Monzón disappeared after she told him to turn himself in.

The announcement led to months of peaceful protests in Guatemala City, the nation’s capital. The protests had as many as 60,000 people participating on some occasions and demanded the resignation of the Vice President and President. Roxana Baldetti resigned her Vice Presidency on May 8 and was arrested August 21 on corruption charges related to the scheme. The protests continued. Much of the presidential cabinet resigned August 22 and 23. And, again, the protests continued. On October 5, after six months in hiding, Mr. Monzón turned himself in and said that President Pérez Molina, not he, was the ringleader of the scheme. He said the President and former Vice President personally received 50% of all the bribes collected. Once more, the protests continued. On September 1, President Molina was stripped of his presidential immunity to prosecution in a 132 – 0 vote in the Guatemalan Congress. Crowds, gathered outside the congress building in the rain, chanted “Yes, we could!” Finally, on September 2, Molina resigned the post of presidency. He is currently being tried for corruption.

Guatemala’s Attorney General, Thelma Aldana, said more then 1500 businesspeople participated in customs’ fraud scheme. So far, fifty businesspeople have been barred from leaving the country. The only foreigners reported among them are South Korean importers.

This is not the first time business has gotten entangled with politics in Guatemala. In fact, the last century of Guatemalan history is scarred by an even more diabolic entanglement of business and politics. +++ By 1930, the American-owned United Fruit Company (today Chiquita Brands International) was the largest landowner and employer in Guatemala. The company began exporting bananas from Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1870s and had been helped along in Guatemala in particular by a series of land concessions and tax-breaks from Guatemalan dictators. In one case, the dictator even capped what United Fruit Company could pay workers, fearing those outside the company’s plantations would also demand higher wages. By the mid-1940s, banana plantations in Guatemala accounted for more than 25% of the company’s Latin American production. But things were about to change.

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In 1951, Jacobo Árbenz was elected president of Guatemala in the second democratic election since the overthrow of the dictator Jorge Ubico in 1944. Among other things, Árbenz wanted to institute land reform in Guatemala. At the time, apart from the land owned by United Fruit Company, 2% of the Guatemalan population owned 70% of the land, and the landless population lived in poverty. In 1952, Árbenz enacted an agrarian reform law that allowed the government to expropriate the uncultivated land of estates of more than 671 acres. The landowners would be compensated for their land at the price claimed in 1952 tax assessments.

This law did not bode well for United Fruit Company. The company sat on swaths of unused land in Guatemala and used this valuable land, on which public transport could be built, to maintain a monopoly on transportation in the country. The new law meant the redistribution of 40% of United Fruit Company’s land.

Things had been trending against United Fruit Company: labor unions were being set up and a new labor code had been enacted. The land reform was something of a last straw, so the company turned to the US government, namely the Eisenhower administration, for help.

Lars Shoultz says in Beneath the United States: A History of US Policy Toward Latin America that “the relationship between United Fruit and the Eisenhower administration is perhaps the best example of corporate influence on US foreign policy. The list of overlapping interests is so long that it is difficult to identify anyone who made or directly influenced US policy toward Guatemala in the early 1950s who did not also have a direct tie to United Fruit.”

For the US government, the goal was to defeat communism. Recently, historians like Ronald Schneider have argued that Árbenz was influenced but certainly not controlled by communists. But in the eyes of the US government, caught in the middle of the Second Red Scare and prodded by United Fruit Company, Árbenz’s communist sympathies, coupled with his land reform policy, was enough to say (as one US senator at the time did) that “Guatemala is going to be a source of Red infection throughout Central America and the sooner we help sterilize [sic] that source, the better.” So, the US backed a coup led by Castillo Armas of Honduras to overthrow Árbenz. On May 26, 1954, Castillo sent planes over Guatemala City, dropping leaflets that encouraged the people to rise up against communism and support Armas. This signaled the beginning of a coup that would lead to a civil war engulfing Guatemala until 1996.

The period from 1944-54 is called the Guatemalan Revolution and is the only time Guatemala existed as a democratic state until 1996. The 36-year civil war officially began in 1960; it would claim the lives of 150,000 civilians before it ended. Most civilians were killed at the hands of the military, and many Mayan communities, in particular, were decimated. +++ Recently-ousted President Pérez Molina was a military general during the civil war. For nine months he commanded a garrison in one of the regions most devastated by violence. In addressing Molina’s presidential candidacy in 2011, the Guatemala Human Rights Commission summarized his involvement in the civil war: “Molina was the general in charge of the Ixil triangle [highlands in Guatemala, northwest of Guatemala City] from 1982-83, a time when the government’s “scorched earth” policy has been characterized as genocide and between 80-90% of the villages in the area were completely destroyed and the inhabitants were massacred.”

But no charges have ever been brought against Molina, and the corruption scandal in which he is now mired is more or less business as usual in Guatemala. In 2014, Guatemala ranked 115 out of 175 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, and the Guatemalan presidents preceding Molina were mired in scandals of their own.

What is uncommon is that Molina and many others are being forced out of office because of the scandal. Many attribute this to the UN International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala––known by its Spanish acronym CICIG––which uncovered the scandal and is driving the prosecution. CICIG was set up as part of an agreement between the UN and Guatemala in 2006 to try to remedy some of the problems of Guatemala’s justice system, which

The College Hill Independent

by Wilson Cusack illustration by Brielle Curvey

ranked as one of the worst in the world. The CICIG consists of international prosecutors but, as described on its website, it “operates under Guatemalan law, in the Guatemalan courts, and it follows Guatemalan criminal procedure.” It is the first time the UN has ever directly intervened in the domestic affairs of a country in such a way.

But there have been plenty of local heroes in this story, too, working before the CICIG arrived, and empowered by its presence. Judge Iris Yassmin Barrios Aguilar, for example, presided over the trial of the former military dictator of Guatemala in 2013. This was the first time a former head of state had been tried for genocide in his home country. There is also Dr. Claudi Paz y Paz, who was a Noble Peace Prize nominee in 2013, and became Guatemala’s first female Attorney General in 2010. She reshaped criminal investigations in the country to increase convictions and was integral in trying the criminals that the CICIG exposed.

What, above all else, cannot be left out of this story, however, is the agency exercised by the Guatemalan people. In a recent interview with The Huffington Post, Paz y Paz said: “I’ve never seen such a protest of that size in Guatemala. It’s a fundamental change.” And the momentum is continuing into the new elections. +++ All of the recent resignations did not upset the political process too much: Pérez Molina’s term ended last January, and so elections were already scheduled for September. But the events have upended the favorites.

There has been a sort of unwritten rule in Guatemalan presidential elections for the past few terms that the candidate who comes second in an election wins the next one. It is like taking turns. The runner-up in the last election was Manuel Baldizón, who is seen by many to be a part of the corruption that has mired Guatemalan politics for the last decade. His running mate is currently under investigation, and his party tried to stop the stripping of Molina’s presidential immunity, a necessary step in his prosecution. In the last election, Baldizón campaigned on the promises that if he won, there would be more public executions and Guatemala would win the World Cup. Protesters made it clear that they would not accept these status quo proceedings in the next election, chanting about Baldizón, “It’s your turn next,” at a rally to get Molina to resign.

Guatemala has two elections: one to decide the top two candidates, which was on September 6, and then a run-off between the top two candidates, currently scheduled for October 25. Baldizón quit the race having come third in the first election, vaguely citing corruption in the voting: “I can’t endorse anyone who would participate in a process marred by irregularities and corruption.” There was a record 70.38% voter turnout.

In second place, ahead of Baldizón by only 6000 votes, was Sandra Torres. Torres is actually the ex-wife of former Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom, who served from 2008-12, succeeded by Molina. She divorced him before the elections in 2011, perhaps to avoid the Guatemalan law that says a spouse of a current president cannot run for office. In first place is Jimmy Morales. Morales’ success is both unexpected and expected: unexpected in that he is a comedian and television actor with no political experience, expected in that he is seen as an outsider to the corrupt system, and thus capable of creating real change. His campaign slogan is “Not corrupt, not a thief.”

Morales is not beyond reproach, though. The New York Times reported that retired army generals have been seen at his events, inferring that he might not be beyond the reach of the incumbent political power structure, and there are videos of him on YouTube doing comedy sketches in blackface.

Many hope that the prosecution of Pérez Molina on corruption charges will lead to further charges concerning his involvement in the civil war. The events on the whole are encouraging— a milestone on the road to greater transparency in Guatemalan politics.

WILSON CUSACK B’16 is boycotting bananas.

Oct 23, 2015

NEWS

06

THE STATE OF LABOR As I ride the escalators to the top floor of the Rhode Island Convention Center, I am greeted warmly by Mike Araujo, a prominent community organizer and labor activist in Rhode Island. Mike, former policy coordinator at ROC-United RI and recently appointed co-chair at Rhode Island Jobs with Justice, is a charismatic man with a broad smile and a firm handshake. He leads me to a registration table, where I sign in as his guest for the convention being held by the Rhode Island chapter of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFLCIO). Several attendees approach us to greet Mike and it is clear from their friendly interactions that Mike is well-liked and respected among his colleagues. We amble into a large hall called The Ballroom, where twenty or so tables are set up facing a main stage with a speakerphone and the crest of the AFL-CIO. The insignia depicts two hands of different skin colors— one labeled AFL and the other labeled CIO—locked in a handshake with the American continent floating in the background.

Union leaders from across the state are in attendance, and I learn from Mike that the formal proceedings will follow lunch. He hints that some of the speakers will be emphasizing ways in which the AFL-CIO needs to grow in the coming years and points out the overwhelming demographic in the room, which is homogeneously older and white.

A formal program is laid down at each seat that catalogues the speakers—among others, the secretarytreasurer of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, Maureen Martin, the national AFL-CIO secretary treasurer, Liz Shuler, and Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo.

The choice to have a group of powerful women lead the proceedings seems symbolic of the shift that has begun to occur within labor movements, both in Rhode Island and across the nation. +++ In her speech, Liz Shuler spoke passionately about the biggest trials the national labor movement currently faces. But she also struck a more positive note, outlining the year’s biggest accomplishments and future goals for the AFL-CIO. Shuler remarked that Rhode Island is truly a model right now in the labor movement, citing the recent triumph of SEIU 1199NE (the union that represents childcare providers) in securing pay increases for providers who are a part of Rhode Island’s Child Care Assistance Program. Still, regardless of the strong labor movement to which Shuler gestured, Rhode Island labor remains susceptible to corporate interests in disturbing ways.

One of the largest challenges currently facing Rhode Island’s workers involves an ongoing dispute between Verizon and the company's unionized employees, whose contracts ended this past August.

Not only is Verizon trying to reduce retirement benefits and force its employees to shoulder more health-care costs, the corporation is also attempting to cut its landline operations, which would threaten job security for between 900 and 1000 Verizon workers in Rhode Island. Similar conflicts have occurred in nearby states: in 2011, negotiations about pension benefits and health care led Verizon workers across multiple states to strike for two weeks without pay.

Although the workers agreed to go back to work in exchange for Verizon’s eventual promise to “engage in serious bargaining on the contentious issues,” they did not consider the strike to be a success, but rather a small step in the right direction.

However, this most recent Verizon labor dispute seems to be a deliberate attack by the company on their unionized workers. The unionized workers at Verizon work almost exclusively in the company’s landline operations and are represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA). By refocusing their efforts on wireless services, which are provided by younger, non-unionized employees, the company could make serious job

07

METRO

Providence's Union Problem

cuts, cuts in healthcare and retirement security, and cuts in worker compensation and paid sick leave benefits. Verizon recently cut hours at the Providence offices for no apparent reason, but customer service employees have been noticing that their call queues rise to the hundreds after they leave. It is suspected that the company has been using those hours to train scab labor (someone who works despite an ongoing strike or dispute). The CEO at Verizon, Lowell McAdam, currently makes in one day what the average Verizon worker makes in a year. The corporation’s attempt to eliminate the union presence in their workforce will only increase this astonishing disparity. +++ Another Providence labor dispute that continues to meet resistance despite its strong organizing efforts, comes from the hotel workers employed by the Procaccianti Group (TPG, the company that owns the Hilton and the Renaissance Hotel). The relentless Procaccianti employees—whose campaign has previously been covered by the Indy—recently headed a rally outside Providence City Hall on September 3. Susana Ramirez, a housekeeper who had been at the Hilton for almost thirteen years, described how she slipped and hit her head while rushing to clean a bathroom and was subsequently fired from her job.

Her managers expect housekeepers to clean 18 or 19 rooms in only eight hours, which inevitably leads to injuries. Ramirez added, “we are not machines, we are humans,” and concluded her testimony with an empowered call to fight: “¡Sí se puede!”

A report published by UNITE HERE Local 217 (a local hospitality workers’ union) titled “Providence’s Pain Problem” discloses bleak statistics: rates of work-related injury and illness for Procaccianti employees are 69% higher at the Hilton and 85% higher at the Renaissance Hotel than the national average rate for hotel workers. At the Hilton, housekeepers are expected to clean between 17 and 23 rooms per shift, while the expectation for unionized employees at the Biltmore is only 14 per shift. As a prominent national real-estate investment and management company, and the largest hotel owner in Providence, TPG can afford to be a leader in the industry and treat their employees with fairness and respect.

The demographics of the battle to end Providence’s ‘pain problem’ are, nevertheless, encouraging: the Hilton and Renaissance workers who are spearheading the protests are primarily women of color and immigrants. Historically, the overwhelming majority of labor union members have been white men, while minorities, women, and immigrants have been perceived as incapable of organizing. The shift away from traditional union numbers in the Procaccianti dispute is an important step towards a more inclusive labor movement. +++ On June 17, Governor Raimondo signed a bill to raise the state's minimum wage to $9.60—a marked accomplishment for labor activists. However, a bill called One Fair Wage—spearheaded by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United) and supported by State Representative Aaron Regunburg—did not have the same success. The bill called to eliminate the state’s tipped minimum wage, which lies at a dismal $2.89 per hour and has not increased in over 20 years. Lawmakers agreed only to

by Laura Durand

raise the subminimum wage by one dollar. Seven out of ten of the country’s lowest paying jobs are in the restaurant industry and none of these jobs receive benefits. Historically, the industry has not been unionized and only in the past few decades have organizations like ROC United and other worker centers begun organizing to gain rights and raise working standards. Still, the disjointed nature of the industry makes large-scale collective bargaining difficult, because workers are not on a single site or with a single employer.

The bottom line is that in Rhode Island and across the country, traditional union models are deteriorating as members age and industries change. The White House recently held a Summit on Worker Voice, with the goal “to explore ways to ensure that working Americans are fully sharing the benefits of the broad-based economic growth that they are helping to create.” At the event, Obama spoke about the fact that ordinary workers have been seeing their wages and incomes flatline. Since the mid 1950s, the percentage of American workers in unions has fallen from 30% to about 12%. Simultaneously, wealth in the US has become more and more concentrated in the top 1%. At the AFL-CIO convention in Providence, the average age of union leaders in the room was well over 40 and Schuler pointed out that 60% of young people these days don’t think unions are necessary. Hard work should guarantee security for workers and historically, the formation of unions during the industrial era was the way for the working class to obtain this security. That being said, these traditional union models are becoming less popular and less successful under current neoliberal conditions.

What does all this mean for the future of labor in Rhode Island and beyond? The primary goal of the AFL-CIO right now is to expand their reach and diversify their membership. They are beginning to form alliances and collaborate with groups outside the traditional labor movement and are directing recruitment efforts towards younger people, women, and people of color.

Finding new strategies for empowering today’s workers will also play an important role in the labor movement’s future. Some of the newer, non-traditional labor organizing models—like ROC United’s attempt to organize a fragmented restaurant workforce and Coworker.com’s innovative online presence—have already begun emerging and are finding success. All of these changes are allowing minorities, women, and immigrants to represent themselves in unprecedented ways. A growing corporate attack on unions is an attack on the working class, but the increasingly diverse composition of this labor force means that a consideration of intersectionality will be key in addressing today’s labor issues.

LAURA DURAND B'16 tips well.

The College Hill Independent

THREE DESERTS

Notes on Cinematic Desolation

I.

III.

For me, the desert has always been a fascinating thoughtimage within the Western imaginary, even if it’s exceedingly ambiguous or overdetermined. Desert seems to be the space of overdetermination itself, or at any rate, the abstract space of determination and indetermination: a void where beings emerge and disappear, where ruins are excavated and buried, where histories are inscribed and erased in the shifting sands.

It’s an entity with ancient theological significance, of course, a space of traversal in Islamo-Judeo-Christian traditions, and it’s also an important entity in what might be called the modern/postmodern sublime—there are significant deserts in the works of Tanguy, de Chirico, Dalí, Borges, Bataille, and likewise in the American Western, in The Matrix, in Operation Desert Shield. Desert is sublime because it is the void; it is Zero; it is nudity; it is the blank page; it is the smooth space threatening dissolution, through which one can only keep moving. Desert is thus the ‘any-space-whatever’ of capitalist economy, of Orientalism, and of Empire, where, as Jean Baudrillard writes in America, the hallucinatory “lyrical nature of pure circulation” becomes most palpable.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film Red Desert (Il deserto rosso) contains no red desert. Rather, its visual language consists mostly of hard-edged reds (Monica Vitti’s red hair, red barrels of oil) which punctuate foggy gray deserts of gray waste and gray sea. In the film, Vitti, as the wife of a petrochemical plant owner, drifts through a decaying landscape, plagued by some form of existential neurosis. Even the shocks of vivid, piercing, lively red cannot help but suggest desert annihilation. The slats of a sea-house, bright red on one side and pallid gray on the other, are ripped deliriously from the walls and burned in a fireplace, in order to avoid freezing to death. Red is here the color of pure, meaningless drive; in his book The Cinema of Economic Miracles, film scholar Angelo Restivo reads red as the stain or the trace of what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls the Real. In this sense, red is desert, if desert is, like the Real, an incomprehensible, abject domain which occasionally irrupts into the order of things. And yet another desert in Red Desert is the window, the blank fantasy-surface of sky or sea, framed in glass (sand, one could say), across which looming, empty ships glide. The window, too, is a screen with a peculiar transparency or opacity—a desert-screen for projections, for transmissions, for shaping, refracting, and shattering the images of ourselves.

by Alec Mapes-Frances

II. Like the page and the canvas, the screen is a desert, and the desert is a screen. In the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema, the screen shows us a multiplicity of deserts: there are lawn-deserts, kitchen-deserts, factory-deserts, deserts domestic and highly managed and all the more terrifyingly blank. Teorema is about a beautiful, even divine young man, denoted only as “the Visitor,” who suddenly enters into the life of a bourgeois family and becomes a kind of lightning rod for their formerly repressed desires. The boy stays for just a few nights, and it is only when he leaves, deserting the family blessed with his presence, that the deserts of the bourgeois home and factory are fully encountered by those who inhabit them, or who are inhabited by them. At this point, it becomes a matter of situating oneself in the desert, or being-towards the desert. One might simply strip bare, give oneself over to the nothingness of desert: this is the reaction of the bourgeois, factory-owning father which closes the film. (In the volcanic desert of Mount Etna, he faces the camera. Screaming, naked.

Cut to black.) The desert gestures toward such a communion, of course, a masochistic or mystical dissolution, but at the same time it points toward the possibility of a community.

Sitting in a darkened movie theatre, in front of the desertscreen, we are faced with the necessity of finding each other: in the desert, through the desert, in spite of the desert, but also only because of the desert.

Oct 23, 2015

IV. In the hegemonic globalizing imaginary, desert is the landscape of the ascetic just as much as it is the landscape of the capitalist and the oil magnate. American drones, NATO planes, and insurgent vehicles share desert-space with nomads and ‘holy men.’ The entirety of Simon of the Desert, a 1965 film by the Surrealist director Luis Buñuel, occurs in this zone. In the 5th century, in a desert near Aleppo, the Syriac saint Simeon Stylites attempts to stand atop a pillar for six years, six months, and six days in order to prove his devotion to God. Simeon interacts with various spectators and with mirages apparently sent by Satan: women, children, priests bearing food, and so on. He resists, for the most part. But in the last five minutes of the film, a screaming crosses the sky: a commercial airplane from 1965. Saint Simeon is gone, his pillar empty—now he’s in New York City, in a club, among a hysterical, dancing crowd. “The ‘Radioactive Flesh.’ It’s the latest dance. The final dance.”

ALEC MAPES-FRANCES B’17 is an entity with ancient theological significance.

ARTS

08

In 1898, a young doctor from Michigan removed a batch of disfigured granola from his oven.

Flat, he observed. His failed culinary attempt would soon become a medical revolution. Wheat berry, flaked and flattened, was an antidote before it became a breakfast cereal.

Dr. J.H. Kellogg was a chief physician at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, one of many medical treatment centers in the late 19th century governed by the laws of Seventh-day Adventism.

Adventist practitioners like Kellogg enforced a health plan intended to support a clean lifestyle, encouraging adherence to the kosher diet taken from Leviticus Eleven. Spiritual purity was achieved, in part, by replacing sausage with cereal, removing from the body the residues of creatures regarded as dirty. Not pure. Not clean.

But before it was introduced to the canon of American breakfast foods, the cereal was prescribed as an anti-aphrodisiac. A believer that onanism was the most dangerous threat to the wellbeing of humanity, Dr. J.H. Kellogg developed a health regimen that endorsed strictly bland foods to prevent masturbation. (When that venture was inevitably found to be futile, he turned to mutilation of the genitals, applying phenol to the clitoris.) Corn Flakes, the Great American Boner Killer.

There’s no mention of this on the Kellogg’s ® website. Just a picture of a young boy, his cheeks painted in rose, lifting a silver spoon to his mouth, smiling a silver gap-toothed smile, presumably not thinking of masturbation.

Although it is recognized as the fifth-largest worldwide Christian communion, most people know little about Seventh-day Adventism. To those of my parents’ generation, it is Waco; it is cult leader David Koresh waving an M16 in the shootout that followed his refusal to evacuate the compound. It is sharp-eyed men pressing women down against heavy walls and locked doors in the name of the Lord. It is incest. It is Cult. To those of my generation, it is a mystery.

It’s just a branch of Protestantism, I say, to keep it simple. Clean.

Seventh-day Adventism arose from the Millerite Movement. In 1822, a successful Baptist farmer from rural New York named William Miller announced that, after collecting clues hidden in the Prophecies of Daniel, he had calculated the exact date of the Second Coming.

For 21 years, Miller and his followers gathered to pray in preparation for the Cleansing of the Sanctuary. They dreamt of thick hot flames that rolled over the fields like red oceans. They prayed for the melting of trees, the exclamatory bursts of buildings turning fast to ash, the popping sound a sin-filled body might make when consumed by fire. They saw their souls, rising like tiny soap bubbles, ascending to Heaven’s Kingdom. For twenty-one years, they waited for death.

It didn’t come. When Miller and his followers sold their possessions and marched to the tops of hills and mountains, breathlessly awaiting their white-robed ascension in the black night, nothing happened. Not in 1843, the year Miller had first predicted. Not six months later, when his second prediction of the Second Coming again fell through. After what was later referred to as The Great Disappointment, many abandoned Millerism. Others, however, clung to the faith. Some believed that Jesus would come soon, acknowledging that the date was simply unpredictable; others claimed that The Second Coming had indeed happened, but was a heavenly event and thus invisible to Earth-bound humans. These remnants of Millerism would eventually give rise to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. J.H. Kellogg’s church. My mom’s church. In some ways, my own. +++ I sit at the kitchen table, shoveling dripping spoonfuls of Corn Flakes into my mouth before church on Saturday. I am five, and there is very little I know about organized religion, except that once a week I am forced to wear black nylon tights that make my inner thighs itch uncontrollably.

Church is a dark room filled with organ music. A life-sized statue of Jesus Christ pinned to a cross is behind the pulpit, his face contorted and his eyes turned upwards, looking toward the stained glass windows that split the sky to squares of burnt orange and deep violet. When the sermon has too many words I don’t know, I like to look at him, study his face staring in anguish at the sky. I feel comfortable doing this; with his eyes fixated upward he can’t watch me watching him.

In the classroom, Anna lets me arrange Jesus and his disciples on the felt board. She speaks in a kind voice, and doesn’t mind that I take each character down to examine before putting it up on the board, stroking the felt with my small soft hands. One time, I place a character from the wrong Bible chapter on the board, and someone else is called up to the front of the room to correct my mistake.

During the children’s sermon, a balding man tells the story of Abraham in a swelling oration: And then God instructed Abraham to take his eldest son, Isaac, up to Mount Moriah, where he was to build an altar upon which Isaac would be sacrificed, he said. I freeze, feet wrapped tight in itchy black nylon stop swinging in mid-air. I cannot hear Mom’s breath, cannot feel her warm body through her thick black pea coat. And so Abraham obeyed His command, binding his son with rope and laying him upon the altar he had built. Abraham raised his hand, holding the knife high over Isaac’s body…

In the end, God reprieved Abraham, seeing that he loved and feared Him enough to sacrifice Isaac. Instead, God gave him an old ram to sacrifice. Abraham brought the knife down, slicing through a web of soft tissue and nerves running along the delicate neck. How could he do it, I wonder? Watching the widening pupils, hearing the confused bleating, seeing the muscles jump to life before going limp—how could he do it and not think of his son?

As we drive home, Mom turns on the classical station. I try to measure her breath from where I sit in the back, strapped tight into my car seat. My tights itch, and I grab at them, try to yank them off. Would you do it? I ask her. If God asked you to? Would you do it?

09

Features

The College Hill Independent

by Abbey Perreault illustration by Ivan Rios-Fetchko Mom tells me she was a “dark” child. Somber, intense, with curious eyes round as European plums. A quiet, stringy girl with clunky sandals and an awe for God: one part love, one part fear. She tells me the stories born inside the one-story house that faced slightly away from the street. How her home was carefully decorated with history: black-and-white photographs of her Portuguese family hung on the wall. On the shelf, porcelain Jesuses peeked out from behind kitschy beach souvenirs. She tells me of the strong-willed Adventist women who loved her with ferocity: her mother, my Grammy Ruth, sewing her into a lacey stillness in the living room with hands strong and nimble from sewing the clothes of squirming girls by day and the flesh of squirming patients by night. How she would one day chase my mother and aunt around and around the kitchen table with a Mulberry branch. Around and around, they ran from her, giggling, their untouched bare feet barely touching the cold tile. They took flight from the branch, from their mother’s overworked fingers, from the things that weren’t yet understandable, but to them assumed a spectacular hilarity—all the porcelain Christs, looking on in mild amusement.

Mom tells me of my Great Grandma Lima, her thin-boned grandmother who took care of her when Grammy Ruth was working at the hospital. A fierce worrier and protector, she would carefully safety-pin the thin cotton sheets to Mom’s bed each night to ensure she didn’t tumble out in the darkness. Great Grandma Lima, with big bulging eyes that threatened to see more than their subject wanted to reveal. She was devout, disapproving of her daughter’s marriage to a non-Adventist. And then she was solitary, refusing to leave the house, her bulging eyes maintaining an incandescent glow of the indoors.

I come from a line of women who worried for the world.

Mom tells me of the noise that comes with the worrying. She laughs and sings the angstridden song she wrote at thirteen about preparing for the Second Coming. But I see it sometimes, without the laughter—I see in her the residues of worrying over something much greater than herself. She tells me to always be prepared for anything, to keep canned food on my shelves in case of a natural disaster. To believe in the connecting force of family love, if anything ever should happen. Over dinner, she tells me, you just never know. She worries for herself and for us and for the world, a deep and shocking empathy that permeates all her mind touches: the death of a small rabbit outside, an earthquake millions of miles away.

She also tells me of the quiet that comes with worship on the Saturday, the seventh day.

On these Saturdays, her family, like many practicing Adventists, refrained from secular work and leisure activities. Mom began to spend the Sabbath outdoors, where she found herself solitary and full. Alone, she felt love. She felt God in the trees and in the grass and in the quiet. +++

In 1901, Dr. J.H. Kellogg stood before the Annual General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists and uttered the statements that would set him on the path to being ‘disfellowshipped’ by the Church for infidel sentiments that crept a little too close to pantheism: “Some of you have watched a flower winding up a string, a morning glory winding around a string. Perhaps you have seen a vine climbing up a lattice, and you have watched the end coming out, and turning in, back and forth, between the interstices of the lattice. How does the vine know what to do? There is an intelligence that is present in the plant, in all vegetation…”

God is everywhere. In everything. There is God in my cereal, too.

In 1902, Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium caught fire. Engulfed by thunderous flames, it was razed to the ground. Ellen G. White, one of the sanitarium’s founders and Seventh-day Adventist leader, advised him not to rebuild it.

We leave the church when I am still a child irritated by nylon tights. My mom becomes disturbed when my sister, now eight, describes the video she has seen in religious education class depicting the horrors of people cutting babies out of pregnant stomachs. She is afraid, and my mom doesn’t want the fear for us. It shouldn’t be about the fear, she says.

On Saturday mornings, we sit on the couch with her, our heads rested against her arms, as she chooses stories from the Bible to read to us. Pressed against her in my cotton nightgown, it’s easy to feel the warmth of her body.

Mom left Seventh-day Adventism, but I can’t say that it ever left her fully. Maybe, in some ways, it hasn’t left me either.

It must feel strange to finally walk away from something, knowing that there’s a chance you can never fully detach from what it has given to you. Religion gave my mom the stillness of worship, a quiet reflectiveness for which she tells us she’s thankful. Now, on Saturday mornings, she sits in the garden writing poetry with a cup of black coffee, listening for God in the chirping of sparrows, the sloping branch of our cherry tree, the twisting clouds above.

Religion gave her the deep cavernous capacity to worry for the world. A twisting cloud can become, in a moment’s time, a fleeting concern. A daughter, forgetting to call home one night, ends up with seventeen missed calls.

Sometimes, too, the daughter sees a river and thinks immediately of floods. She laughs it off, tells a friend it’s just the product of being an “apoca-baby.” And sometimes, too, the daughter sees a river and thinks of God, that God is water and nature and Mother Earth and Mothers.

I think of my great grandmother and my grandmother, of all of my Portuguese relatives smiling in their frames, of Anna and her felt board, of the nylon tights that still make me itch. They all are with me, in me; perhaps this is my own disjointed pantheism.

In every solid object—in even a simple bland Corn Flake—there is a buzzing whirlwind of recycled atoms fumbling before clinging, a pulsing and incomprehensible narrative. To force comprehension, we read from left to right. We force the quivering into stillness to avoid discontinuity, to join the disjointed. But if you look closely enough, you see the fumbling before the cohesion. We are not continuous; we are fragmented and disjointed and wonderful at the core.

Listen closely, and you hear the shifting mosaic of history, perhaps your own, singing out its garbled hymn.

ABBEY PERREAULT B’16 no longer eats Corn Flakes.

Oct 23, 2015

features

10

NOTES ON DISCONTINUITY

by Eli Neuman-Hammond There is a grid; it gathers itself from beyond the picture-frame, and focuses to a point in the distant horizon. From that distant point, facing the opposite direction, one can imagine the grid’s expanse ad infinitum, like an ocean that falls off beyond the curvature of the earth. A group of young men and one woman meet on this grid, pasted together in relief against the precise lattice beneath them. They eat; they play music; they listen; the woman and a man lie down, embracing. Where is this rendezvous? There are mountains, bounded by a field on one side and a forest on the other. The grid, though extending beyond the frame in the direction of the viewer, terminates within it at this natural border.

SSS In 1966, two recent graduates of the Florence School of Architecture, Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, began Superstudio as an architectural firm that didn’t practice architecture, but thought it. Fed up with the old guard of architects who ran the Italian universities, but lacking the means or clout to get commissions, the young architects used the language of architectural drawings and collages to critique the blanket of modernist architecture that covered many cities in the post-war period. Whilst parading values of democracy, transparency, and egalitarianism, post-war modernist architecture was proving to be imperialistic and callous to particular histories and human needs. In an accelerationist gesture, Superstudio pushed modernist architecture to extreme ends in a polemic against it. One of their projects envisions a giant cube in the middle of New York City in which millions of human brains lie thinking in liquid-filled containers, finally “free to reach the supreme goals of wisdom and madness, perhaps to reach absolute knowledge,” as put by Superstudio member Piero Frassinelli.

But their most famous project was the Continuous Monument, a series of architectural collages that imagined a grid superimposed across the Earth. In some of the collages, the grid wraps around natural landscapes like valleys or mountains [fig. 2]. One displays Manhattan, spared as a relic of an architecture that used to be, and surrounded by the neutral, monumental non-architecture that has supplanted it. Picnic-Orgy [fig. 1] is one such visual thesis of the Continuous Monument. The grid was a conceptual project, never meant to be built. Its sublime goal of a total, equalizing surface is beyond even the scope of representation; hence the strategy of a series of collages, geographically scattered, that each imply the grid as a whole.

The imagined material for Superstudio’s grid was glass—a symbol of industrial technology, equality, and clarity. The glass grid would dominate Earth’s topography through sheer neutrality and ubiquity. It’s worth noting that during the first test of the atom bomb, the area of impact turned into glass because of the explosion’s violent heat—neutrality becomes neutralization by technical force. The architect and urban theorist Rem Koolhaas, whose many conceptual projects take after Superstudio’s example, noted how the actual urban grid that structures so many cities “is, above all, a conceptual speculation [...] in its indifference to topography, to what exists, it claims superiority of mental construction over reality.”

The grid counters narrative, which takes place in and through architecture. Likewise, the Continuous Monument is a monolithic architectural gesture, implemented over

time, in defiance of time. In this imagined, context-less setting, there is no benchmark against which to measure normality or strangeness. A picnic-orgy measures against an executive meeting on the same terms.

The grid critiques this argument by taking it to a dystopian extreme.

The Continuous Monument corrodes the freedom promised of modernism and reveals that it only arrives at the expense of oppressive structurelessness.

Humans become collage-pieces, violently cut-out of context.

The Continuous Monument is a terrifying and beautiful nightmare; a moment of consciousness, and its foundation dissolves. For one thing, glass, while apparently stable and clear, is not actually solid: it is structurally amorphous, which means that on a molecular level it is somewhere between a liquid and solid. While it has some crystalline elements of a traditional solid, its molecular structure is randomized like a liquid. On a geological timescale, glass is melting: in its physicality, the grid becomes a pool, without structure, enveloping.

Furthermore, a grid, while refusing all narratives on the surface of the Earth (human history, architecture, diversity), forgets the depth beneath it: millions of years signified by layered inorganic material. From this perspective, the glass grid is one scene in a much bigger story playing out beyond the sensible limits of human beings, cosmically slow (or fast).

figure 1 This crystalline grid-pool has a source: Earth’s crust.

Industrial glass manufacturers use a synthesis of sand, recycled glass, soda ash (sodium carbonate), and limestone (calcium carbonate). Soda ash derives from sodium chloride (salt), which is primarily gleaned from sea water and harvested from brine wells, salt lakes, and salt mines. Limestone is composed of skeletal fragments from marine organisms like coral and mollusks, and mined for in areas in which the sea level has been higher than it is now. Glass is the corpse of an ancient ecosystem, dug up from the earth and smelt into transparent grids for human ecosystems.

A glass grid that spans a global surface ignores a latent impossibility, and of course part of the methodology of conceptually realizing a physical impossibility is to tease out the ideology working under cover of unfeasible dreams. Modernist myths, whose conception of human history is incommensurate with geological time, ground themselves in Ebenezer Howard’s plan for a Garden City—an Earth of fertile abundance, an urban Garden of Eden that gestures towards an achievable utopia born of human technological progress.

But this end is always a tendency, a gesture that never finishes, except in an implication beyond possibility itself. History goes on, even as the forces shaping it—imperialism, massive exchanges of wealth and power by those with wealth and power—feign a messianic motion.

SSS

figure 2

11

ARTS

In 1969, ARPANET went live, coinciding with the Continuous Monument’s critical assault on architecture. But while Superstudio’s grid was never built, ARPANET prefaced the development of a genuine global grid of sorts, the Internet.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network was the first computer network, built under the aegis of the United States Department of Defense. At first ARPANET only connected four computers at Stanford, UCLA, UCSB, and the University of Utah, respectively. By 1975, the number of nodes in the network had grown to 57; by 1981, a new host connected to the network every twenty days, inexorably expanding ARPANET into a rhizomatic realization of Superstudio’s conceptual

The College Hill Independent

figure 3 impossibility: the fluid, potentially omnipresent, apparently democratic Internet.

What was hyperbole to Superstudio is, at least in part, reality today. The Internet problematizes the relationship between isolation and association, muddling notions of authenticity, certainty, and subjectivity in a similar manner to Superstudio’s conceptual collages. Yet, unlike the Internet’s creators, they knowingly did so, and only in politically prescient theory. The Internet is real, yet not in any analogue to our imagination of it as a neutral, ubiquitous, invisible network. We picture ourselves interacting in digital spaces when using services like Facebook or collaborating through Google Docs or Dropbox; we imagine our voices and images mingling in a cloud, but the cloud is underground, in transatlantic cables and bleak server farms. The image of the Internet as equalizing and everywhere, is promoted by the military-industrial complex from which it sprung. The reality: a power-laden regulative apparatus, at once a liberating commons, an invisible prison, and a physical strata composed of metals extracted from the Earth. Multi-million dollar contracts between state agencies and our most-used Internet services render them a police on the citizens who use them. The scene in Picnic-Orgy is ambivalent; while dystopian to some extent, an extension of modernism to absurdly equalized space, the scene is still beautiful, elegant, captivating: a paradise in image form. Likewise, the Internet maintains a pleasant image, belying its oft autocratic, environmentally insensitive, and scary reality. It’s a dream. But while we conjure it up in our minds, it exerts real transformations on our social and physical landscape. Can we sustain this dream, now that it is not a collage in an art museum?

As the glass grid balks at its material origins, refuting its lineage of stone and sea creatures, the Internet obscures its material base on all fronts. The Internet is all water, flowing through protean screens and polished aluminum. The user interface through which people access the Internet literally gives a face to an opaque and complex organism of metals and electricity; the interface is more than three times removed from the electrically charged hardware of a computer (if such a hard/soft distinction can be made) by machine language, assembly code, high-level programing language, and finally a visual, trivial language. The elements used to bring the Internet to life [Zn, S, Ag, Cl, Al, Cu, Au, Y, Eu, K, F, Mg, Mn, Cd, As, Gd, Tb, Ce, Pb, Si, Ca, Ti, P, Pb, Fe, Sn, In, and Cd] are buried beneath application windows, videos, documents, C++, and binary code—buried, in spite of the fact that they’ve been un-buried to reach their present form. And the very name ‘Internet,’ which describes a decentralized system of nodes and signals, brings together these parts into a fictional unity—a continuous monument.

ELI NEUMAN-HAMMOND B’18 is mostly O, C, H, and N, with a sprinkle of Na.

figure 4 Oct 23, 2015

ARTS

12

In 2014, Washington, D.C. extended the sales tax. Residents would now cough up for tanning services, car washes, and upholstering jobs. They would also start paying taxes on healthclub services; among healthclubs, the legislation specified “a charge for a multi-lesson pass to a yoga studio for access to classes with the studio’s yoga instructor.”

D.C.’s yoga community let out a yelp—yoga is not some banal exercise, to be lumped in with tennis clubs and gyms! It is a spiritual practice, and its studios are more akin to churches, masjids, and other houses of worship (which, in the US, are tax-exempt). But the taxman won the day. For a year, Washingtonians have been paying six cents on the dollar when copping a monthly studio pass.

The quest for spiritual recognition is better off in Providence County, where over thirty studios, myriad gyms, the Unitarian Church, and the Pawtucket Senior Center continue to offer yoga classes without this particular tax. Likewise in New York City, where, in 2012, yoga was explicitly ruled exempt from sales tax. Department of Taxation spokesman, Geoffrey Gloak, delivered a knowing justification. “We looked into the history and origins of yoga,” spoke Gloak, “and found that it was more meditative and spiritual rather than fitness.” This detailed position aside, the question remains: when Americans do yoga, what are they doing? +++ Some of the folks hitting the yoga studio this week will be attending a fitness facility. Hitting the mat. Working out. Every Wednesday, say, 7:00 PM sharp. But at 6:43, as they snap the waistband on their stretchy black pants, another set of practitioners will be climbing on their bicycles to ride down to their house of worship. Such is the uncertain dichotomy of America’s yogic experience.

At 6:56, both types will pay to enter a studio, the aesthetics of which are connected, by various skewed conventions, with Eastern spiritual practices. The room will exhibit certain calming palettes, certain aspects of minimalist design extracted from Japanese Zen, some symmetry, a few indoor plants. A teacher—who may have undergone 10,000 hours of training, or perhaps only 200—will step them through concerted movement, and remind students to be mindful of their breath. The teacher may spray essential oils from little squirt-bottles, or lead chants beseeching the Hindu Lord Shiva. Practitioners will set intentions for their practice— not intentions to lift more weight or run farther, but meditations on kindness, or on privilege, or on the constitution of self. Surrounding the dedicated yogi will be clumsy initiates, glancing around for some indication of the next posture, as well as the fellow studio members who congregate weekly for the ritual. Say, Wednesdays, 7:00 PM. At 6:59, everybody is settling onto their mat. Yogis who see the practice as a workout will tell you this: to commence yoga, the first thing you do is unroll the mat. Those who perceive a spiritual factor will reply that, for a mat to be unrolled, it must first be bundled. Certainly, yoga was already rolled up into a number of East Asian cultures and religions by the time it reached American shores. The range of practices that can be called yoga was developed over millennia in and around India. Only over the last century-and-a-half have yoga’s foundational Sanskrit texts—the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Ayurveda—broadly infiltrated the American imagination.

Home to the highest proportion of Asian Americans from the mid-1800s, California was American yoga’s inevitable epicenter. Yogis foreign and domestic congregated around the Bay Area, and by the 1950s had taken up the serious study of Classical, Hatha, Raja, Ashtanga, Buddhist, Jain, and Tantric forms of yoga. Many of the early leaders were Indian yogis, like Maharashi Mahesh Yogi, who instructed the Beatles and B.K.S. Iyengar. The seeds of their influence were cast by the handful in the late-60s, as San Francisco absorbed and expelled multitudes of the disaffected, young, mostly white suburban dwellers known as hippies. Bohemians and longhairs on the San Fran streets embraced what they perceived to be Eastern spirituality as part of a larger agenda of countering mainstream culture—some became serious Buddhists, Taoists, and yogis, while others hopped onto a more mutable flower-power bandwagon. When overcrowding made San Francisco unviable, the flower children became diasporic missionaries, spreading the word from Vermont to New Mexico, deploying versions of the yoga ashram in new communes and old suburbs. Their efforts and attachments, conscious and otherwise, proliferated fragments of so-called Eastern spirituality throughout the country. These cultural seeds sprouted in the 1970s and 80s, from which time yoga experienced its meteoric rise in the US. Many of these nouveaux yogis encountered Eastern traditions with a selective eye, and appropriated attractive elements as they saw fit. Americans passed over a whole host of yogic teachings, but latched onto a few pieces: asana, or those postures and movements with which yoga is often conflated, pranayama, or breath, and a blurry sense of meditation and ‘Eastern’ teachings. Asana is part of the yogic traditions, but is only a narrow slice of the practices articulated by Patanjali in his 5th century Yoga Sutras—in which he describes an eight-limbed practice combining spiritual and lifestyle dimensions, including Vedic study, celibacy, religious ceremony, and the rejection of avarice and vice. All of this is intended to liberate the individual from the cycle of birth and death in which he suffers.

But these features are only vaguely alluded to, or entirely disregarded, in yoga studios where asana is the focus. Celibacy is surely not espoused at fitness center classes, where yoga is radically different from its forebears; in such places, the practice has been transformed into an act of appropriation. +++ Edward Said, in describing the objectification and appropriation of Eastern culture in his work, Orientalism, wrote of those “Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for [West-

13

OCCULT

The College Hill Independent

by Lance Gloss illustration by Blaine Harvey

America’s Bends With Benefits

ern] use.” Yoga clearly falls among these. And just what has it meant to domesticate yoga? To bring it home, and to feed it, so that it may earn its keep.

For the mat that is rolled, and the mat that is unrolled, are both the same mat: the mat that is purchased. America’s 20 million yogis have generated a sales economy around their practices worth as much as $27 billion. So, whether or not D.C.’s taxmen get a slice of the pie at the studio door, they will find that a plateful has already been served to them by the market in yoga’s accessories. Outfits, practice mats, incense, tapestries. Icons and statues of Buddha, Ganesh; supportive blocks, private lessons. Books on technique and theory, cute little quote of the day calendars, specialty Chai. Brands like Lululemon make a killing. And then there is Yoga Journal itself. A monthly magazine created by the California Yoga Teachers’ Association, the Journal has grown since 1975 to a 1.3 million annual readership. Their mission? “To meet readers wherever they are on the mat and offer the latest updates from the yogasphere, while honoring the traditions and authenticity of this powerful, 5000 year old practice.”

Commercial mobilization has propelled the yogasphere’s explosive growth. Cities across the nation co-opt yoga into their public images, leading to a superficial diversification of practices. Yoga Journal’s October 2015 issue detailed ten cities where, in the words of Yoga Alliance’s Andrew Tanner, people “have fully accepted yoga into the zeitgeist” such that a majority now view it as “healthy and worthwhile.” In Portland, Oregon, the “highly educated population” has produced “a collaborative and socially conscious yoga community.” Austin, Texas has crafted its practice to complement its “thriving live-music scene and eclectic mix” of cultures. Los Angeles, San Fran, New York, and Denver make the list, each with a unique “hometown pride.” But in all ten of the cities, one can attend a CorePower yoga studio; and thanks to homogenous interior design, once inside, one feels that one might be anywhere. Flipping deeper into the Journal, the reader faces page after page of trim figures in various postures. They are all neatly dressed in fair trade clothing, and smile broadly out from the advertisement pages, as if inviting the reader to their local studio, and maybe to hit the juice bar after class. But there’s no money left for juice—it all went into the outfit, and to the charge at the door. To get in on yoga, Americans are shelling out bigtime. How do they justify the expense? +++ All too often, time and money spent on yoga come down to an investment: one sows to reap.

It has been so since the hippies first laid a hennaed finger on it. B.K.S. Iyengar, oft credited as the most influential figure in American yoga, loosed the cork on framing yoga as a practice pursued for its benefits. As a youth in India, he found yoga helpful in overcoming the many illnesses that marred his childhood. His 1966 book, Light on Yoga, was an effort to share yoga’s benefits by systematizing asana in a way that made postures accessible to the uninitiated. Public figures continue to articulate yoga’s importance in a similar fashion. As emcee-cum-reggae rocker-cum-sustainability guru, Michael Franti, explains it, “yoga has extended my health, but it has emotional benefits, too. It has helped me be a better father. A better musician.” This language of benefits is pervasive among American yogis; many see practicing simply as a means of bettering one’s existence—physical, emotional, and (optionally) spiritual.

Vague benefits-thinking has been supported by science and aped by corporations. Empirical evidence now substantiates yoga’s benefits. Professors Bower and Irwin at UCLA published an article this year to declare that yoga, along with other “mind-body therapies” of East Asian origin, has “been shown to be effective in reducing symptoms and improving quality of life.”

Less bad; more good—just what the doctor ordered! Others corroborate; Chandwani et al. found that yogic practice improved quality of life among breast cancer patients. In the hands of major San Francisco tech companies, yoga-as-wellness is now being exploited to improve the lifestyles, and thus the productivity, of employees. Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others have integrated yoga into the workday with free classes and company teachers, special rooms, and tie-ins to corporate philosophies. The employee centers herself during her hour on the mat, so that she can keep pace during the rest of the day, and still feel sane, or somehow above it all, as she takes the train home at night. For this reason, Slavoj Zizek has pointed to yoga as a new facet of Karl Marx’s framework of religion as the “opiate of the masses.” Zizek, in his discussions of “Western Buddhism,” argues that the “meditative stance is… the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity.” This would suggest that the yoga studio is not only a gym and a house of worship, but a performance-enhancing drug for modern workers.

Patanjali wrote sparsely of benefits. For him, asana was never a means to increased workplace productivity. Among the benefits he did list is the observation that, “from self-study and reflection on sacred words, one attains contact, communion, or concert with that underlying natural reality or force.”

LANCE GLOSS B’18 stretches.

Oct 23, 2015

OCCULT

14

THE EDIBLE COMPLEX Paths to the Ultimate Mushroom

by Mickey Zaslavsky illustration by Rachel Hahn

Under the brush, a golden-red cap glints. Trembling, I push back the undergrowth and gasp. I then gingerly pull out the Boletus edulis and bound over to my father and grandfather, beaming with pride. “Papa Sasha, grandpa Vitya, a Белый Гриб!” Father and father’s father, who emigrated from the Soviet Union and instilled in me a passion for mushroom picking, are grateful and excited—but then they take a closer look.

“No, son—” “No, grandson—” “This is not the King Bolete, this is not a cep, a porcini mushroom, loved all over the world! It is its bitter twin. Take a lick!”

Not believing my ears, I take a lick, apprehensive. A profound acerbic taste strikes the tip of my tongue, then slowly overwhelms all of my senses. My eyes widen, and shortly after narrow with anger, with bitterness. I am indeed bitter about it, resentful of the illusion. The quest for the Boletus edulis had ended in a false Holy Grail.

My parents and grandparents were part of the first wave of immigrants to leave the Soviet Union, my dad’s side being especially early, migrating in 1975. With them, they brought cultural suitcases that were opened to me upon my birth.

I was happy to find some mushrooms in there. Mushroom gathering has always been a staple activity for Russians. But not all mushrooms are equal, or equally good, for humans.

Many are deceiving. Perhaps this is why most do not pick mushrooms, fearing venomous retribution. But I don’t believe this is how one should live life—instead of avoiding a whole realm of knowledge and delicacy, one should strive to confront it. Mistakes will occur along the way. They are, in fact, quite common. This is the tale of one of them, a tale of deceit through which I learned how to find what I am truly looking for. +++ I’m in the woods again. I’ve been here before with father and father’s father. I am not afraid of getting lost, having brought no bread crumbs with me—these woods are light, full of promise. After all, I’m chasing the mushrooms, chasing the dream. To find the best I must stray from the paths, for it is far more likely that the ones on the path have already been picked. I spy an opening and plunge into the forest. Quickly, father and grandfather are two specks in the distance, each pensively following their own course. Back in Mother Russia, the picking had been different: my dad recounted to me how in Leningrad, hunting for mushrooms was an immensely popular and competitive activity. He would get up with my grandparents at the crack of dawn and take a train to the countryside, in hopes of not being late—sometimes, upon arrival, a throng of Russians would be already streaming out, baskets bursting at the brim, having completely combed through the forest. Now, my family enjoys the luxury of not being rushed, for there is no such competition in the US. In fact, the few people we encounter on the trail with their own baskets are Russians themselves. I take our getting up at a comfortable nine o’clock completely for granted.

Meanwhile, our taxonomical voyage begins; and, beneficially for us, there is just one path, long ago identified. We enter through the gates of Kingdom Fungi. Fungi used to be part of the Kingdom Plantae, as in the 18th century there were only two kingdoms, Plantae and Animalia: plants, which have cell walls, and animals, which don’t. With the advent of the electron microscope, allowing for study of organisms in

Oct 23, 2015

great detail, the animal–plant binary was expanded. The Fungi Kingdom was established after two key distinguishing characteristics were identified: fungi are eukaryotic—their cells contain both nuclei and organelles in their membranes—and, they don’t have chlorophyll. As chlorophyll is the biomolecule that is needed for plants to absorb energy from light, this means mushrooms cannot photosynthesize. Thus, Fungi are heterotrophs because they cannot eat light for lunch, instead nourishing themselves by absorbing organic carbon. This is done by decomposing the surrounding environment with enzymes and absorbing the resulting grub.

Inside the Kingdom, there are many divisions. It is in Division Basidiomycota that our epigeous (above-ground) macrofungi are ranked. The first thing to note is that flagella are absent. These are whip-like structures that make locomotion possible for organisms such as bacteria and algae.

Basidiomycota are filamentous, composed of hyphae, which are tiny tubular structures that grow at the root like hair. The collection of these hyphae is called the mycelium: the underground body of the fungus. It is through the mycelium that a mushroom nourishes itself, using the hyphae to penetrate decayed organic matter and absorb the nutrients. +++ I duck and weave through the branches that jut out sharply from the trees. My eyes move to and fro, here and there, front and back, back and forth. Porcini could be anywhere, for when spores are disseminated from the mushrooms after reproduction, they are carried wherever nature pleases. Spores start out at maximum several micrometers—it is no hard task to animate them. Winds and rains, earthquakes, scampering animals…these are the forces that perpetuate dispersal. These forces can disperse humans as well—but in the case of my family, it was more the ideological indoctrinations permeating through every Soviet institution, the totalitarian state, that did it.

I move blindly towards a porcini, as my family once crossed the Atlantic, as taxonomists advance unto the Class Agaricomycetes of the Basidiomycota Division. This means that the fruiting body of the mushroom can be differentiated into three parts: the pileus, the stipe, and lamella, or colloquially the cap, stem, and gill.

There are agarics all around, all poking out at me from the Earth, strange fingers with inflated tips pointing at me, letting themselves be known. Yet they are lamellous, and the presence of gills means that the cep is not among them.

Within Class Agaricomycetes, the Boletus I’m in pursuit of belongs to Order Boletales. The underside of the cap in this order is instead spongy, dotted with many pores. For now, I mostly spy many Suillus luteus, another Boletales, commonly known as slippery jacks. These are fine mushrooms, but not up to par.

A table materializes in my mind, adorned with a panoply of soups that my Russian grandparents have made for me over the years of my childhood. Most of these have been made with slippery jacks—but far superior were the ones prepared with porcini, always made by grandpa Vitya. He has disappeared from my view, but I am not worried—we always make it out together in the end.

The cep, the mushroom that I’m after, musn’t be far off, I reassure myself unconvincingly. At least, taxonomically, it

isn’t that far off. Among the many families Boletales holds, Boletaceae is the family I hunt. Typically the members of this family are known as Boletes. And we are looking for their king, the king that is, by our allegiance, the king of the whole Kingdom Fungi.

A few hours ago, I mistook a charlatan for a King. This is because biologically, the specimens are part of the same classifications up to their genus. The charlatan was Tylopilus felleus, and is so similar to Boletus edulis that it used to be classified in the genus of Boletus itself. The genus is the taxonomical rank right after the family and right before the species, the end of our journey. It was not until 1881 that the Boletus felleus was placed under a new genera, Tylopilus.

The more obvious feature that gives away the fake Bolete is the proliferation of pink pores underneath the cap. And even then, these are not always present—young bitter Boletes’ pores are sometimes white. And it is bitter. The King Bolete, is not. +++ It’s been a long day. Mushroom gathering with my father and father’s father is frustrating. I have less experience, my eyes move in a less intelligent fashion, I am easily distracted by bugs, and impatient. It is time to go home: our taxonomical voyage is at an end, and my home, the end of my parents’ cross-atlantic path, is waiting. I had only found a forgery of my favorite mushroom, an inedible imitation of the ideal mushroom I was trying to find. The path I took culminated in nothing; I simply did not find it. I sulk on the way back—absorbed in my failure, despondent, my cheeks burning, my eyes downturned—and then, I see the gleam again, hidden by the moss. A golden-red cap. In a fervor, I rip out the mushroom, and hold it to my lips, to deliver a delicate lick.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It is usually flavor that inspires, really gets me going—this time, it is the bliss of the insipid raw Boletus edulis.

There will be Grandpa’s soup tonight.

MICKEY ZASLAVSKY B’18 is a fungi.

SCIENCE

16

FRED

by Sarah Dillard illustration by Yuko Okabe

The following is a story, and this story is fictional. It is about a man named Fred.

Fred’s black hair sat on top of his square shaped face, which appeared even blunter—squeezed as it was by the frame of his glasses. He had a gap between his two front teeth that was only noticeable when mentioned recently.

Fred had always been a successful student: he was Ivy League-educated and grateful for the advantages it provided him. There was no misfortune he didn’t learn from, even when that misfortune was randomly inserted into the plot.

Fred was in sales, one could tell by his cufflinks, and he managed a product that was in marginal demand. He commuted every day in a car that was small and compact, black like his hair and as reliable as this description.

He worked in an office with mineral-wool insulation peeking out from ceiling joints. The building was still able to keep in heat. Living in a duplex with private neighbors, Fred always wondered what omniscient source forced him to inhabit uniformity: The rusty brick homes were all low and attached, each with a set of four steps leading the way to the front entrance.

Fred’s eyes were often red, for he liked to press his forefinger and thumb into his rolling sockets, causing dark swirls of purple and green to blot his vision. He believed it helped him focus more clearly, to blur the world and wait until everything before him appeared new.

His stomach was large but his arms were long, balancing out the mass of his middle when he walked. But whenever he sat and adjusted his arms to wherever they had to be—typing at his desk or instinctively spread over the back of a neighboring seat—a bulbous protrusion was exposed.

On weekends, when Fred did not have work, he had football Sundays, his acceptable outlet of competitive investment, dedication, and anger. Saturdays could vary, but often included meetings with friends, either for networking or obligation.

Fred owned a large, L-shaped sofa that was welcoming enough to sleep on. His preferred spot was the corner with the outstretched segment; while reclined, his dark brown fingers stroked the empty space beside him, leaving traces of impressions in their passing.

Now the writing is over. The story of Fred is left to comprehend.

17

LITERARY

The College Hill Independent

FRI

10/23

Newsies Providence Performing Arts Center 7:30PM // $26 “Pulitz-uh and Hoist they think they got us/Do they got us?/No” – Newsies Newsies is a liberal-reformist musical about a group of newsboys who go on strike to protest William Randolph Hearst’s price gouging.

The musical seemingly endorses forms of protest not limited to non-violent resistance.

Despite the musical’s ostensible pro-labor politics, the main character (played by a young Christian Bale in the film version of the musical) eventually gets into a carriage with Theodore Roosevelt, an imperialist and war criminal, and enjoys his company. Ultimately a self-defeating and “selective” depiction of the newsboys’ strike of 1899.

The Monkees Tribute Courthouse Center for the Arts, 3481 Kingstown Rd., West Kingston 8–10PM Post-Grobangate, it seems Providence is caught between classic rock saturation and post-ideological perpetuation of the idiom.

This Monkees tribute group, performed by a band called the “David Tessier All-Star Band of All-Stars”, apparently has opening for them a duo who are performing music by The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Who.

SAT

10/24

10/27

Asian American Heritage Series Presents Hari Kondabolu 190-194 Thayer St., Metcalf Auditorium 7 9PM // Free

Urban Bush Women – Dance For Every Body Movement Workship Ashamu Dance Studio, 83 Waterman St. // Free

Hari is a funny guy. A topical/political comic who doesn’t always go for easy, lame topical/ political jokes. Sometimes he does though.

A dance workshop from an important dance collective. Reserve a spot by emailing annette@first-works.org.

Zombie Dance Class The Rhody Center for World Music and Dance, 172 Exchange Street Unit 201, Pawtucket, RI 02860 // 2:30-4PM // Free

WED

If you have been following the list this year, you’ll recognize that this is the second part of the zombie dance class I put in the list several weeks ago. You’ll learn the zombie dance from “Thriller”. It will be performed at an undisclosed location on Tuesday, October 27th.

It is unclear why this is happening but it will be a crazy thing to say you have done.

SUN

10/28

Teach for America: Pre-Med Panel with TFA Alumni Sciences Library, 3rd Floor, 101-109 Waterman Street // 67:30PM

Teach for America is bad for schools. Schools lay off full-time teachers to hire rich college kids who teach for a few years and then leave to enter lucrative professions like medicine and finance. It’s bad for students. It obfuscates real systemic problems with education in the United States that can’t be solved with a dumb TFA Band-Aid, which is a thing no one even pretends is a serious attempt to address these problems in the first place.

As the LW this year I get to see countless panels like this one listed on events pages: JPMorgan interest meetings for students.

Group advising for getting into consulting.

Senators and congressmen on panels about state violence. It reminds me that it is not merely Brown University’s administration that is entrenched in neoliberalism, but its student body as well. This is depressing. Seeing as how this publication is for the Providence community and not Brown students, I feel the need to condemn this kind of destructive thinking, to call attention to the fact that it is endemic to that institution, and to accept that I am complicit in it by writing from this vantage point.

10/25

A Poem By the LW The ghost of regret Haunts me so I like Helene Alving have received so much wisdom from my forebear

This kind of comprehensive pastiche is emblematic of the lazy reification of the canon we associate with Boomer mid-life crises. I’d hesitate to render any specific judgment about this, mainly because English departments all over the country do the exact same thing with the Western canon, uncritically reproducing “great works” by “great artists”, and receive handsome compensation.

TUE

And yet I cannot find any events for Sunday Except for a performance By tween-wave pianist Ethan Bortnick Who at 14 can play like Glenn Gould…

I am not a keyboard master.

Digression: Do u this Monkees tribute was formed by a group of tribute recording executives?

Salon: Black Social Dance: Rhythm, Race, Community 251 Benefit Street, Providence 5 –7PM // Free

What have I done? Where will I go? Where have I been?

THU

10/28

A Haiku by the LW:

Nowhere… Bortnick makes me look doofus with his nimble fingers.

Bortnick…

A discarded sheet On whose website is an endorsement: Advertises an event

A very cool talk by Brandeis professor Jasmine Johnson about the relationship between dance and black liberation. There will be a dance performance set to the transcendent music of John Coltrane. Highly

Jay Leno: That no one went to “This kid is amazing.”

recommended.

Providence Ghost Tour Prospect Terrace Park, Congdon St., Providence // 7PM One of the top 10 ghost tours in the nation according to tripadvisor.com, folks. No doubt some real life scares may occur here…

Who knows… U may see a real ghost.

MON

10/26

LIST

Screening of “339 Amín Abel Hasbún: Memoria de un crimen” Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street 7–9PM // Free Part of a series on social justice in Latin American cinema. Etzel Báez directs.

Should be worth a viewing.

When I was a kid we used to hear chains in my attic. Bangs and bonks from the basement…cold drafts that would make the TV get all fuzzy. Ghosts live among us…

The ghosts of ancient relatives…of failed relationships…of lapsed friendships…of fallen dreams…these are all round us. The great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote about regret in his play, “Ghosts”. Regret.

The specter we can “see”. The ghost we know is real…

I know it is real…

Did you know?

The ghost of regret lingers among each and every single one of us and will never leave. listtheindy@gmail.com