The College Hill Independent Vol. 31 Issue 7

Vol. 31 Issue 1 Vol. 31 Issue 7

Vol.29

a Brown/RISD Weekly a Brown/RISD weekly

the NEWS 02 Week in Posturing Wilson Cusack & Francis Torres

Volume 31 No. 7

09 The Franchise Awakens Dominique Pariso METRO 03 Blunt Proposition Jane Argodale ARTS 07 Out on a Limb Adam Hunt Fertig 13 Renoir-911 Alec Mapes-Frances & Jonah Max FEATURES 05 Flower Power Aanchal Saraf 08 They Doth Protest Too Much Piper French, Yousef Hilmy & Henry Staley

From the editors: Find no rivers here, but a pool that rocks and modulates. Here we are floating points, approximate in the sea of words. In grains that measure the sun, by clicks that name your heartbeat and a paragraph, light floods out of our moonlit sky and flickers on the water’s surface.

But the moon wanes, and the pool will soon dry. Now Lucifer sleeps, warming Davy Jones’ seaweed bed—but she, too, will dry.

Before Christmas intersects the full-moon perpendicular, before our candles at midnight mass greet their sibling in the sky, before the ocean tugs back towards our thighs—before all of this Lucifer will rise dripping from the water, out of her refractal medium, and into the geometry of a frozen winter, of your ribcage and a courthouse. She will rise above desert (our sea at low tide) and listen to the lunatics howl as they burn in the lightless, dry night.

(Till then, enjoy the Indy.) –ENH

SCIENCE 15 Ice Vibe Camera Ford INTERVIEWS 16 Chang-rae Lee Madeleine Matsui METABOLICS 12 Melt in Your Mouth Liby Hays LITERARY 17 From Camp, With Love Julia Tompkins EPHEMERA 11 Babes Jake Brodsky & India Ennenga X 18 Psssst Julie Kwon

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.

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

Interviews Madeleine Matsui Occult Lance Gloss Literary Gabrielle Hick Metabolics Eli NeumanHammond Ephemera Jake Brodsky India Ennenga X Layla Ehsan Sara Khan Pierie Korostoff List Jay Mamana Cover Jade Donaldson Design & Illustration Nikolas Bentel Polina Godz Alexa Terfloth

theindy.org

Staff Writers Jane Argodale Ben Berke Liz Cory Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa Julia Tompkins Erin West Staff Illustrators Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Juan Tang Hon Copy Miles Taylor Web Charlie Windolf Business Kaya Hill Senior Editors Tristan Rodman Rick Salamé MVP Alec Mapes-Frances

@theindy_tweets

WEEK IN POSTURING

by Wilson Cusack & Francis Torres

Let’s hear it for glyphosate!

It was high fives all around at Monsanto HQ in St. Louis, MO this June when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded that Monsanto’s signature herbicide, commonly known as ‘Roundup,’ was not, in fact, an endocrine disruptor. Endocrine disruptor is fancy talk for a chemical that can cause cancer, birth defects, and other developmental disorders. Steve Levine, “Senior Science Fellow Ecotoxicology and Environmental Risk Assessment, Lead” at Monsanto, even blogged about it. “I was happy to see that the safety profile of one of our products was upheld by an independent regulatory agency,” he wrote.

However, those findings may not be as “independent” as Steve or the rest of us might hope.

The EPA’s decision was based on the conclusions of 32 studies, most of which were not publicly available but were obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request. The Intercept is a news site launched in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill that is dedicated to bringing transparency and accountability to governments and large corporations. In an article published on November 3, The Intercept reported that only five of the 32 studies were independently funded and that “most of the studies were sponsored by Monsanto or an industry group called the Joint Glyphosate Task Force.” ‘Roundup’ is a glyphosate. Three of the five independent studies found that glyphosate is a danger to the endocrine system. None of the 27 industry-sponsored studies found that glyphosate caused harm, in some cases going to lengths to discount or dismiss the adverse effects glyphosate had on the animals in their studies.

The ambiguity is disturbing, considering that in 2012, the last year for which measurements exist, 300 million pounds of glyphosate were used on the US crop. The varied findings among researchers with varied funding is also representative of what seems to be intractable in many of our most important economic and environmental debates today: everyone is capable of finding or funding research that supports what they have already decided they believe.

But in this case, lesson learned: they just don’t make independent government agencies like they used to. –WC

Exquisite Corpse James Dean once said the measure of a great man lies in his ability to bridge the gap between life and death, to live on after he has died. It’s unsurprising that a Golden Age Hollywood superstar would seek immortality in the eyes and hearts of the masses. But what about those of us who never taste glory? Would we not want to be remembered in death as we were in life?

A more unassuming form of immortality is becoming modern folk tradition in Puerto Rico. On October 18, a wake was held in San Juan in which the body of the deceased wasn’t displayed in a casket but rather seated at a bar table, about to play his last piece in a game of dominos. Jomar Aguayo Collazo’s life had ended a week before, in a gunfight at his mother’s bar, the same place in which his corpse now sat. Dressed in a tracksuit and sunglasses with a beer in hand, Aguayo’s body challenged his killers—and death itself—with the stunning normality of its image.

His family and friends drank and danced around him, memorializing a mundane scene from the man’s daily life.

The ceremony is the most recent in a series of “propped body” wakes, a practice first pioneered by the Marin Funeral Home in 2008. In the first out-of-the-box ceremony, funeral aides propped up the body of a murdered gangster in a defiant position with hands inside pockets, in a pose meant to frighten his enemies. Other bodies presented in this fashion include an elderly woman sitting in her armchair, a boxer ready to pounce from his corner of the ring, and even a taxi driver sitting at the wheel of his cab.

The prize for most intriguing wake, however, goes to Renato Garcia Delgado. In his wake last February, the deceased San Juan local was presented in a Green Lantern costume. Mourners cheered upon arrival at the home wake, regaling each other with stories of how Garcia—his body propped to appear standing by the wall with one arm crossed over his chest and a green bandana over his eyes—used to stroll around the neighborhood in full superhero regalia.

Larissa Vazquez, an editor for the Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Día disparagingly called the practice a “reality show” of death, fueled by macabre media fixation and an exhibitionist ethos. Others think of it as a kitsch version of the baquiné, a local tradition in which mourners place a deceased child on a table around which they congregate to eat, drink, and celebrate the child’s ascent to the immortal plane. Propping up the dead may seem crass in comparison, but perhaps we can find solace in the immortalization of the mundane. I, for one, would embrace death as an opportunity to celebrate life as it actually was. Forget the eyes and hearts of the masses; immortality is playing dominoes with guests at your own wake. –FT

Nov 6, 2015

NEWS

02

HIGH HOPES

The Movement for Marijuana Legalization in Rhode Island During the winter of 2012, residents of Colorado and Washington state lit up in celebration of the legalization of recreational marijuana. Images on CNN showed residents in Colorado waiting patiently in the snow to legally buy weed for the first time. Some painted their faces green and held up signs in support of the legalization laws. In July of last year, the New York Times editorial board wrote a series of articles in support of legalization, titled “Repeal Prohibition, Again,” with an accompanying animation of the stars on the American flag morphing into pot leaves.

It’s no secret that support for marijuana legalization is growing, along with marijuana’s visibility outside of stoner comedies and niche publications like High Times—it’s hard to imagine the New York Times gleefully putting together a weed American flag in any previous decade.

President Barack Obama admitted in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, to smoking weed regularly for many years, and said in an interview published by the New Yorker that marijuana is less damaging than alcohol “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer.” According to a Gallup poll published in October, 58% of Americans believe marijuana should be legal in the United States.

As it remains, only a handful of states have actually legalized marijuana: Alaska, Washington, Colorado, and Oregon. Rhode Island may be next. +++ According to the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, Rhode Island has the highest percentage of regular marijuana users of any state in the country. Around one in eight Rhode Islanders over the age of 12 smokes marijuana monthly. In Rhode Island, possession of small amounts of marijuana has been decriminalized and results in a fine, and medical marijuana can be legally purchased to treat certain conditions, including cancer, chronic pain, and HIV/AIDS. Support in Rhode Island for marijuana legalization is about the same as it is nationally—according to Public Policy Polling, 57% of Rhode Islanders support legalization.

Over the last two years, the window for Rhode Island’s state legislature to pass a bill to legalize marijuana has repeatedly opened and closed. The Marijuana Regulation, Control, and Taxation Act, sponsored by Representative Scott Slater from Providence, includes provisions that would allow individuals over the age of 21 to legally possess and cultivate personal amounts of marijuana, would establish a system of taxation and licensing for businesses growing and selling marijuana, and would prohibit smoking in public. The legislation has repeatedly been introduced and debated, but in the last session of the State House, which ended in June, the bill did not even come to a vote.

In spite of growing support for legalization, opposition is still strong. In a letter to Rhode Island’s House Judiciary Committee in April, Attorney General, Peter Kilmartin, wrote, “I do not believe that the societal costs and the damage to the future of our youths are worth any kind of anticipated revenue” from taxes.

Revenue is indeed one of the most enticing prospects of legalization for many state officials. According to data released by Colorado’s state government in October, monthly sales of legal marijuana had exceeded $100 million. According to the Marijuana Policy Project’s estimates, Rhode Island could raise $58 million per year with the taxes proposed in the legalization bill. Jared Moffat, director of Regulate Rhode Island, a coalition of 30 organizations that support the bill, says that this year is the time to act in order to maximize economic benefits.

With legalization likely in Massachusetts and Vermont in 2016, Rhode Island may miss the opportunity of getting big investors in marijuana businesses and increased tourism revenue first.

“Rhode Island citizens will cross into Massachusetts for legal marijuana. But if we legalize first, it’ll be the other way around,” Moffat told the College Hill Independent. Peter Kilmartin’s words, however, reflect worries about legalization—increased prevalence of drugs, high rates of addiction, and drug use among children.

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METRO

Indeed, the threat of the societal costs of legalizing a drug weighs on many. Stories have surfaced in local and national press about children in Colorado accidentally ingesting marijuana-infused edibles. Reports from the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a branch of the federal government’s office of National Drug Control Strategy, showed an increase in marijuana-related emergency room visits from 179 to 248.32 per 100,000 residents in Colorado between 2012 and 2013, the first full year of legalization. Unlike many other drugs, however, a fatal overdose of marijuana is essentially impossible. Excessive drinking of alcohol, which is legal in all states, is responsible for one in seven deaths in Colorado, above the national average of one in ten, according to a 2014 CDC report. +++ Marijuana may not cause liver failure or have fatal withdrawal symptoms, but claims that marijuana is merely psychologically addictive and not physically addictive—lacking the severe physical withdrawal symptoms of alcohol or opiates—downplay the importance of responsible use.

In the article, “Of Course Marijuana Addiction Exists. And It’s (Almost) All in Your Head,” published on Substance, an online publication that reports news on addiction and recovery, Maia Szalavitz asserts that most drug addictions are in fact largely psychological. After all, many medications for depression and high blood pressure also have severe, even fatal withdrawal symptoms, but “because they don’t produce a high, you don’t see people robbing drug stores to get them.” While it’s true that marijuana may be less addictive than crack cocaine or heroin, it can still worsen habitual users’ lives in insidious ways. “Marijuana addiction may quietly make your life worse without ever getting bad enough to seem worth addressing; it may not destroy your life but it may make you miss opportunities,” Szalavitz adds. The success of legalization partly depends on how well-equipped states are to address issues of addiction and safe substance use.

In an email to the Indy, Amy Kempe, Public Information Officer at the Office of the Attorney General, wrote that “the criminal justice system has a role to play in combating drug addiction,” citing the Adult Drug Court’s programs that provide offenders with substance abuse treatment.

Jared Moffat characterizes Attorney General Kilmartin’s view as a reflection of the War on Drugs-attitude that arose in the ‘80s, an attitude that he says has failed to reduce addiction or weaken violent drug cartels. “This is true of most people who raise these concerns, that they think prohibition has reduced the availability of drugs, and legalization will open Pandora’s Box. But the box is already open, and opposition to marijuana itself is not an argument against legalization,” Moffat said.

Moffat believes that regulating marijuana would actually prevent problems like availability of marijuana to minors. “Ask any high schooler now where to get marijuana and they can tell you. Drug dealers don’t care if you’re a child, and don’t ask for IDs. You can have regulated businesses accountable to the community or you can have drug dealers.” Legalization is predicated upon accepting that marijuana use exists and will never disappear, regardless of anything law enforcement tries to do to stop it. The acceptance of this principle with alcohol is why liquor is taxed and regulated, rather than sold on a black market. Moffat imagines a world where marijuana is treated like alcohol, including labeling the potency levels of marijuana and products in which it is an ingredient. +++ The criminal justice system is still primarily how the government addresses drug problems both locally and nationally—the same drug war strategy Moffat criticizes. According to the ACLU, 88% of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010 were for possession. The racial disparity in these arrests is significant. Again according to the ACLU, black people are 3.73 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana-related charges, in spite of their slightly lower rate of marijuana use. This racial disparity also increased between 2001 and 2010.

The College Hill Independent

by Jane Argodale illustration by Teri Minogue

Such disparities persist even with changes in laws. In Rhode Island, possession of up to an ounce is currently decriminalized but still results in a fine of up to $150. Because a marijuana possession fine is treated as a traffic ticket, not paying can also result in having a driver’s license revoked. And anyone unwilling or unable to pay this fine may still end up with a criminal record, privileging those who can afford to pay. A criminal record can result in lost employment opportunities, among other disadvantages, creating a vicious cycle of disenfranchisement. As an individual’s criminal record builds up, the penalties they receive become harsher. According to a study from the Sentencing Project, an organization that collects data on incarceration and advocates for sentencing reform, there are about 20,000 to 30,000 people in prison for selling or possessing marijuana, nine out of ten of whom have no history of violence.

To address this uneven enforcement of marijuana laws, Rhode Island’s legalization bill would allow individuals with a criminal record to retroactively expunge anything made legal by the new marijuana laws. The Rhode Island NAACP, Direction Action for Rights and Equality, and the Univocal Legislative Minority Advisory Commission are all members of Regulate Rhode Island and support the bill. Speaking to the Indy, Rhode Island NAACP President, James Vincent, characterized marijuana legalization as part of a larger effort to end racial disparities in law enforcement. “We see this as a social justice issue. Communities of color and particularly black communities are targeted by police and incarcerated. We hope the law would make a difference in healing broken lives, broken families, broken communities.” +++ A CNBC article published in April refers to new legal marijuana companies as “start-ups,” using the language of the overwhelmingly white and male tech industry. The article goes on to describe former Microsoft executive Martin Tobias’ investments in marijuana real estate, apps billing themselves as “the Uber for pot,” and former Silicon Valley workers turned “marijuana connoisseurs.” As marijuana becomes a legitimate industry, the most publicized leaders are overwhelmingly white men. This year the International Business Times published a list of the 20 most influential people in cannabis, which included advocates, researchers, and entrepreneurs. The article described Wanda James, marijuana entrepreneur and director of the Cannabis Global Initiative, as “one of the few black women in an industry heavily dominated by white men.” James cited her brother’s decade in the criminal justice system for “$120 worth of weed” as her primary motivation. The one other black person who made their list was Snoop Dogg.

Support for legalization in Rhode Island is strong, and activists have pushed the state government to respond. Yet in the legislature’s last session, the bill never got a vote and the Senate President and Speaker of the House made no statements on the issue, in spite of their constituents’ widespread support of the bill. In April’s Judiciary Committee debate, more than 30 people testified in support of the legislation. That there’s been no response to this movement from the legislature’s leaders, even in opposition, seems strange. While it’s true that legal marijuana is still somewhat of an experiment being taken on by a handful of states, it’s also an issue with little chance of disappearing in Rhode Island until directly addressed.

JANE ARGODALE B’18 is a budding reporter.

Nov 6, 2015

METRO

04

Community and Resistance on the Big Island ‘Āhinahina blooms only once in its thirty to fifty years of life, and then dies. A member of the daisy family but hardly identifiable as such, this plant miraculously flowers in fleeting moments on the sacred summits of Haleakalā on Maui and Mauna Kea on the Big Island. The ‘āhinahina on Mauna Kea are scarce and, unlike on Haleakalā, are hardly ever seen flowering.

I am at Mauna Kea visiting a few activists on top of the mauna (mountain). They’ve built a tarp and a heiau (temple) on the small hill directly across from the US National Park Services Visitor’s Center. A sign leaning against the tarp says “Kū Kia’i Mauna,” a call to protect the mauna in the face of new development and continued desecration, a call that the activists have taken on in naming themselves the protectors of the mauna. Other signs welcome curious visitors to come inside the tarp for more information about who the protectors are and what their mission is. People visit the tarp from all over the Big Island, neighboring islands, and the world.

The protectors promptly ran out of brochures detailing the ways in which the US military and transnational corporations have wreaked havoc on the mauna, in particular the planned construction of a Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the summit. They call for an end to US occupation of Hawai’i and the restoration of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

There are only a dozen protectors up here today, volunteers who’ve chosen to hold down the fort in between larger protest demonstrations in which community activists from all over the Big Island and neighboring islands join. Their faces look tired from the morning: many of them had been served papers threatening detainment by the Department of Land and Natural Resources. Nonetheless, attention turns to making breakfast, and the makeshift stove set up under the tarp flickers to life as cooking begins.

Looking up from my ulu-stuffed sweet bread, I see my friend Hi’i gesture at the gate to a closed-off pen by the Visitor’s Center. I scramble down the hill towards her, following the line of her hand towards ‘āhinahina flowers hanging off of long stalks in the misty cloak of the morning.

“Have you seen these yet, Aanchal?” As she explains the rarity of what I am witnessing, I lean into one of the many bright magenta blooms, and the sweet fragrance hidden within surprises me.

“These are really related to daisies?” I ask in disbelief, processing the moment in full. Here I am, for a second summer, standing on top of this sacred summit at daybreak. This time last year, I was researching the ways in which US imperial occupation had been repackaged into corporate and military occupation, continuing to disadvantage Kānaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiians). A summer later, my face buried in an ‘āhinahina flower, surrounded by the people who’ve been up here fighting for their land for nearly six months straight, I more fully grasp the true complexity of the US’ illegal occupation of Hawai’i, an insidious force affecting the Hawaiian people and their natural environment. Hi’i nods at my question, and the patch of ‘āhinahina before us sways just as it may have when it was last in bloom In 1975, Hawai’i was in turmoil. The US military was bombing the island of Kaho’olawe for live-fire exercises, and Kānaka Maoli were devastated. Moanikeala Akaka, a longtime community activist, remembers sitting on her roof in Moloka’i and watching US navy ships detonate tons upon tons of TNT on Kaho’olawe. This violence enacted upon the island is a manifestation of the genocide waged against the Hawaiian people and their culture—but the activism born from a refusal to accept such violence signals the rebirth of both the sovereignty

movement and Hawaiian culture. Moani tells me about this revolutionary moment, in which she sat in a dimly lit room with a group of fellow young Kānaka activists and formed Protect Kaho’olawe ‘Ohana. This grassroots organization formed in response to a climate in which it had long been, as Moani relates, “illegal to be Hawaiian.” The US government had outlawed Hawaiian language and cultural practice a century earlier, and only in the 1970s could Moani and those in her community decriminalize and formalize Hawaiian language education and cultural practice. Hawaiian was incentivized as a language course in secondary and postsecondary schools, and kumus (teachers) of cultural practice were sought out and revered openly rather than clandestinely.

Moani recounts, “It was always about the ‘āina [land]. Kaho’olawe brought the islands together. We in the neighbor islands would go to Oahu to sort things out.” Eventually they did sort things out: in 1990, after a decade of organizing and protests, the US military ended their live-fire exercises under the command of President Bush. The Hawaiian State Legislature reestablished Kaho’olawe as an island reserve, which meant no one, save Kānaka Maoli exercising native gathering rights, could commercially use the island.

In many ways, the struggle over Kaho’olawe marked a clear beginning for the Kānaka Maoli push for sovereignty. The struggle went underground in the ‘80s, with protests for sovereignty and calls to action scattered throughout the later half of the 20th century. However, once the threat of the construction of a Thirty Meter Telescope, a massive structure spanning five acres and eighteen stories, loomed over the summit of Mauna Kea, the sovereignty movement once more became front page news. In this period, the organizing base could easily have faltered, and the momentum behind the movement to protect the Hawaiian islands could have dissapated. In fact, the opposite occurred. In the previous half-century, Hawaiians had been revitalizing their culture, their language, and their communities through the help and support of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), a semi-autonomous department of the state that was created in 1978. OHA had given Hawaiians the tools to grow an organizing base and to maintain a rootedness and obligation to place, to ‘āina. In Moani’s words, OHA was to thank. “We’re a product of what [they’ve] done and now we’re taking over the mountain.” +++ The Thirty Meter Telescope may be in the headlines now, but it has long been protested: community activists have been contesting its construction for the past seven years. According to KAHEA, a thousands-strong alliance of Kānaka Maoli, the TMT would be visible from many points on the Big Island. It would produce around 200 cubic feet of solid waste a week and impact the fragile ecosystems on Mauna Kea, both in the invasive construction process and increase in vehicular traffic. There is no indication that restoration would take place following the lease’s expiration in 2033, at which time TMT investors could just as easily opt for a lease renewal without any additional environmental assessments. Renowned cultural historian and resource specialist, Kepa Maly, conducted a comprehensive cultural assessment of the proposed construction of the TMT, reaching the conclusion that the construction of such a massive telescope would be irrevocably harmful to the cultural and spiritual value of the summit. The partners on the TMT ignored this report, however, and went forward with a groundbreaking ceremony, though further construction has been deterred by protests and physical blockades erected by the protectors on the summit.

The corporate funding behind the TMT is its own can of worms, with several domestic universities and international partners signed on to help pay for its construction. Moani recalls seeing the investors from Japan and India on the mauna, yelling out to them, “Don’t you have a sacred mountain, too? Think of Fuji, think of the Himalayas. Would you build this telescope there?” She tells me she didn’t feel as if they paid her any heed, funnelling in their money despite what she feels should have been a shared understanding of the sacredness of certain places.

She remembers telling a Sikh investor, “I know you’re a religious man. Can’t you understand, this is our religion? What you’re doing is desecrating that.” At the time, she had been sitting, blocking the road with her arms linked on either side to two other women. “He just walked right by me,” she admits, “didn’t even look down.” +++ “Don’t get me wrong, we always practiced kapu aloha,” Moani tells me. The protectors of the mauna adopted kapu aloha, a concept inspired and developed by their kupuna (elders). Pua Case, another community activist and leader, describes kapu aloha as a discipline of compassion, in which aloha (love) is shown to all those involved in the dispute. This is not just love between the protectors themselves, but love to the officers and investors who stand in opposition to the protectors as they wage this battle. It is, put simply, the practice of restraint and the channeling of anger into a desire to act with love and empathy. But Moani has some differing interpretations on the concept, as do some of the younger protectors.

“They weren’t paying any attention to us until we got arrested,” she says of the eleven protectors detained in the first wave of arrests in June 2015. Eventually, twenty additional protectors—primarily young people—were arrested for violating the state’s new emergency rules

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FEATURES

The College Hill Independent

by Aanchal Saraf illustration by Angela Hsieh

against camping on Mauna Kea). “I don’t see us allowing ourselves to get arrested as a violation of kapu aloha. We came peacefully. We made our statements.” But the rules and arrests led to a decline in the number of protectors, with only a dozen or so left occupying the summit.

“If you look at those rules, it’s very clear that they’re targeting us specifically,” mentions Lā K. Ea, one of the eleven original arrestees, sitting in a folding chair under the tarp at Mauna Kea’s summit. He uses the dim light of his phone to show me the sheet of new rules that outlaw camping on the summit, among other arbitrary restrictions. He refers to their actions as “settler paternalism,” a condescending rhetoric that comes “on the heels of 122 years of denationalization and cultural appropriation.” In Lā’s eyes, the state has long been infantilizing the Hawaiian people, deciding when and to what extent to recognize indigenous needs in ways that placate rather than liberate. Lā tells me that he feels a kuleana (responsibility) to be political, and that his multiple arrests since June have allowed him to draw attention to the cause. He has quit his job as a substitute teacher, fresh out of college, to be here on the mountain championing his cause.

Later, Hi’i speaks of the pain she’s felt growing up: “We’re used as token Hawaiians. The average day in the life of a Hawaiian person is getting your culture sold back to you. You shouldn’t feel entitled to being greeted by hula dances and a lei.” Hi’i is the youngest one here, knowing she’ll have to go back to school in Maui come September. But she is filled with a similar kuleana. She tells me of earlier in the year, when protectors blocked the road to the TMT with stones. “There’s this song that was written during the sovereignty movement, about Hawaiians rather starving than giving in. We’d rather eat rocks. So all those pohakus (stones) in the road? They say ‘fuck your money, we eat rocks, you go home.’” +++ One morning, other community members bring up some ono (delicious) fried rice and a beautiful kite emblazoned with the image of a pueo (owl). My friend, Pueo, takes a liking to his namesake, and rushes down the hill with string in tow. The kite soars above us in the glittering sun, and we all laugh as it suddenly veers downward toward the tarp before Pueo deftly redirects it back up. An officer arrives from the Department of Land and Natural Resources as we’re engaged in this cloud dance. He has a stack of papers in his hand. He quickly serves many of the protectors, indicating that they are breaking state laws by occupying this land on the summit.

Pueo defiantly tells the DLNR officer that the state is violating their rights as Kānaka Maoli.

The officer remarks that it seemed they weren’t praying or being “cultural,” but rather, simply wasting time flying kites. When the officer finally leaves, having delivered his message, Pueo looks frustrated.

Nov 6, 2015

“Telling a Hawaiian something is wrong is limiting their practice.” He encourages me to expand my own ideas of what cultural practice looks like, what survival looks like. It is doing morning pule (prayer) to thank akua (gods) for what they have given to Mauna Kea and its protectors. It is also flying kites on a sunny day, taking note of the wind, and being patient observers of its sudden crescendos and dips. Malama (to care for) and aloha are central concepts here, and to malama and aloha this ‘āina, each other, and even that officer seems to be a central idea of the protectors on and off the summit. +++ “They say we’re anti-science. What we really are is anti-occupation,” Jojo remarks to me over a shared gallon of kava in one of my final days visiting the protectors. “This is the 13th telescope up there, they keep telling us they’ll stop and yet they don’t.” Jojo says it is a lack of respect for the land, in addition to the potential environmental harm the TMT could create, that truly leads him in the movement. For Jojo and the other protectors, malama ‘āina operates as a political discourse. Hawaiian cosmology tells us that Kānaka Maoli are kama’āina, or the children of the land. The land is their mother, and the sky their father. This land has been broken up, privatized, and sold or leased to a multitude of corporations and private landowners, including the military. To malama fragmented land is near impossible, as Kānaka Maoli can no longer take care of it in a holistic and community-based manner.

This is a truth the protectors hold with great concern, and it is a truth that motivates them to this day, to remain on the summit in the name of the Hawaiian Kingdom. They post videos almost daily on their Facebook page, Na’au News Now. They fly a Maori flag from their tarp in fierce solidarity with indigenous communities in New Zealand. They continue to be arrested by the state as they work to change minds with their dedication and drive.

There is a passionate force blooming at the top of Mauna Kea, one that believes in the liberation and self-determination of the Hawaiian people. The Hawaiian sovereignty movement is blooming again. It stands alongside the ‘āhinahina in a fiery splendor, but it will not wither and reappear decades later. It is a bloom that is bursting with life and a deep commitment to aloha ‘āina.

AANCHAL SARAF B’16 thinks Kona Brewing Company’s Wailua Wheat is the perfect summer beer.

FEATURES

06

SEVERED

(Dis)embodied Art

by Adam Hunt Fertig illustration by Juan Tang Hon

In 2007, Shannon Whisnant, from rural North Carolina, buys a storage locker at auction. Inside the locker, he finds a smoker grill. Inside the grill, he finds a human leg. Like any reasonable person, he decides to keep it. But there’s a problem. John Wood—the biological owner who had left it there—wants it back.

The Lord of Uxbridge is hit by cannon fire at the Battle of Waterloo.

“By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!” he reports to a general.

“By God, sir, so you have!”

The limb is found and put on display. Years later, a scandal erupts when Uxbridge’s family demands that it be returned.

Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna has his leg blown off in the Franco-Mexican War. It is given a state funeral. Nine years later, he has his prosthetic leg stolen in the Mexican-American War. It is put in an Illinois museum.

Even for those who are willing to part with the actual leg, the mind may be reluctant to let go. Many amputees develop a “phantom limb” which feels as real as the original. The brain stubbornly perceives the leg as intact and keeps sending signals to its nerves. This often causes acute pain in the phantom limb as it clenches tighter and tighter, trying to convince itself of its own existence.

The image of the leg persists in the realm of art. Disembodied legs crop up throughout art history, from Dali’s surreal compositions to the phantasmagorical paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, to the performative work of Joan Jonas.

When Philip Guston, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionist painting, returned to figuration late in his career, he developed a fascination with disembodied legs. In Green Rug (1976), a pair of thin, hairy legs lie splayed on a half-finished floor, the thighs trailing off the edge of the canvas. In Discipline (1976), legs cascade across a brick wall. The soles of the shoes contort impossibly towards the viewer; the calves are mottled pink slabs. His paintings became crude, cartoonish, almost childish, and were vehemently rejected by Abstract Expressionist critics. But if his earlier work blurred subjects into pure abstraction, his leg paintings brought them into sharp, startling focus. It’s impossible to shake their raw, unbridled intensity. In Monument (1976), a tangled mass of legs stands as tall as the viewer. The scene might seem funny or menacing, but it demands a visceral reaction either way. The painting is as impenetrable as the “monument” itself: without the analytic escape of formal abstraction, the symbolism of the surreal, or the context of art brut, the viewer has no easy way in.

At the far end of this spectrum of realism and material is Robert Gober, who makes wax severed legs, complete with real human hair. Unlike Guston, Giacometti, or Lucas, he doesn’t place his legs on pedestals or mold them into monuments. Instead, they discreetly protrude from the gallery walls. Again, his work can be read as sexualized—according to the Tate Modern, Gober “describes glimpses of bare male legs as a symbol of homoerotic desire”—but much of the immediate impact of the piece comes simply from finding an unassuming leg in an unfamiliar context.

Equally monumental and just as enigmatic is Alberto Giacometti’s La Jambe (1958), a bronze sculpture of a disembodied leg fused to a rectangular pedestal. Giacometti’s approach to the figure is more realist than Guston’s, but the leg is still thin, mottled, and not quite human. Considering the weight of its material, the sculpture's presence in space reads as an uncanny series of contradictions. Withering, but eternal. Grounded, but ready to tip over at any moment. Full of anxious, unresolved energy, but completely still.

In art, the image of a disembodied leg has been made alternately phallic and holy, grotesque and sublime, uncannily familiar and shockingly foreign. But none of the artists above show the actual, visceral separation of leg from body. The trauma is implied. Its existence as a part detached from a whole is in some ways unsettling because it disrupts the idea of our bodies as complete, self-sufficient units—after all, our projection of a stable self collapses when a chunk suddenly goes missing. This contradiction might explain what makes the leg such a brutally compelling artistic subject. At the same time, though, its rendering as a disembodied fragment translates it from a biological part to a discrete object. As a symbol that’s viscerally familiar and emotionally charged, it becomes a vessel for ideological expression. Many artists have used disembodied legs as vehicles for commentary on horrible events: Guston’s work has been read in the context of the Holocaust, as has that of Gober in the context of the AIDS epidemic. Similarly, Sarah Lucas’ leg-objects can be taken as a feminist critique of the objectification of female bodies.

Contemporary sculptor Sarah Lucas puts disembodied legs on a different sort of weighty pedestal in Nice Tits (2011).

Thigh-high boots, cast in concrete, stand on a slab beneath an orb of breasts. In fact, she’s made legs out of a wide range of materials, from cast plaster to stuffed leggings. And while her work has explicit sexual undertones, it’s also a dynamic exploration of form and materiality. Whether they’re slumped in chairs, sprawled on tabletops or dangling from the ceiling, the legs have lives of their own.

Some artists have explored this idea of disembodied legs as an image in context, beyond pure form. In Graft (2013), for instance, Janine Antoni sculpted a pair of crossed legs, one complete and one skeletal, alluding to being told as a child to “cross her legs like a lady.” The legs themselves are literal representations, which by being permanently fixed in place become restricted within the bounds of feminine etiquette.

She takes this a step further in Coddle (1998), a print emulating the image of the Madonna and Child. Antoni, in a shawl, sits holding her leg, which glows at the center of the frame. By superimposing a photographed leg onto religious imagery, it adopts the symbolism of the realm it enters.

By being reduced to a form in art, a disembodied leg takes on new meaning as an independent entity, while still conveying a lingering sense of detachment from the body of which it was originally a part. Like the general’s actual leg on display in a museum, a disembodied leg in art defiantly remains upright, continuing to exist, standing as a monument to its own loss.

ADAM HUNT FERTIG B/RISD’19 is withering, but eternal.

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The College Hill Independent

“QUEL MONDE!” On Literary Rivalries

The Spanish Baroque poet Francisco de Quevedo clanked rapiers with lyric poet Luis de Góngora on the page, sparring over the use of wordplay, neologisms, syntax, and grammar.

Style, for each poet, was a personal matter—both wrote pieces devoted to the other’s awfulness, but rarely with any explicit mention of names. In his prose and poetry, Quevedo accused Góngora of being a sodomite (a capital crime in the 17th century), an unworthy priest, and a writer of indecent verse with intentionally obscure language. This last criticism, of Góngora’s obscurantism, was certainly the most substantiated.

Despite his mastery of the Spanish language—he was known as the ‘Spanish Homer’—Góngora was quite the embellisher, a quality for which Quevedo and co. lampooned him, believing it produced grandiose, stilted poetry. Poetry qua nonsense.

Most of Góngora’s opponents were rebelling against his ‘new poetry,’ which was ostensibly more difficult than his earlier work. The style in which these poems were written came to be known as culteranismo, or Góngorismo, a type of writing marked by its extremities: overly complex syntax, heavy use of metaphor, ostentatious vocabulary, and general prolixity.

For example, Góngora would write, “Era del año la estación florida” (“It was the flowery season of the year”) instead of simply writing, “It was spring.” A portmanteau of the words culto (cultivated) and “Luteranismo” (Lutheranism), the term culteranismo was meant to indicate Góngora’s poetry, and others like it, as heretical to ‘true poetry.’ Indeed, Quevedo thought the poetry had a corrosive effect, contributing to Spain’s moral, political, and cultural depravity. It’s worth mentioning that when he was alive, Góngora was by no means passive to this criticism. He responded vehemently to attacks on his style, declaring that he sought to raise Spanish to the perfection of Latin, that he did not write for idiots, and that difficult poetry could sharpen his readers’ intellects.

Scholars have traced examples of attacks and defenses of Góngora’s poetry to as early as 1613, but the most salient criticism didn’t occur until the years around his death, in 1627. In 1629, for example, Quevedo penned a dedicatory essay, addressed to his friend Olivares, in which he extolled the poetry of Fray Luis. Along with other polemical points, the essay contained a kind of archive—a series of quotations—of what Quevedo considered good style. Citing passages from ancient and modern thinkers such as Socrates, Aristotle, Erasmus, and Quintilian, Quevedo argued for, as one source elegantly puts it, “decorous clarity as opposed to the pleasure in deliberate obscurity.” The essay was a veiled attack at Góngora and his followers; for Quevedo, writing was principally about moral instruction, a feature he thought was essentially lost in culteranismo, with its swirling arabesques and purple language.

Quevedo also responded with his own style of poetry, conceptismo (‘concept’ being the 17th century Spanish word for ‘conceit’). This style eschewed syntactical complexity for simple, witty, and direct lyricism, with quick rhythm and frequent use of puns. It was, however, still Baroque, so it reads today as being relatively ornate. The funniest of his poems, and by the far the one most pointed at Góngora, was a satirical sonnet he wrote titled “A un Hombre de Gran Nariz” (“To a Man with a Big Nose”). The sonnet is a complex series of puns and hyperboles, in which Quevedo’s concepto (what he systematically exploits throughout the poem) is Góngora’s nose. One hilarious stanza: “He was an ominous nasal missile; / A pyramid, a colossal nipple, / Alas, of nostrils he was the twelve tribes.”

Although culteranismo and conceptismo both emerged as the seminal literary styles of the Spanish Baroque period, it is said that Góngora and Quevedo’s personal rivalry ended when, in an attempt to uproot Góngora (who was facing debt issues), Quevedo purchased his house, in Madrid. Historians are uncertain whether or not he removed the wallpaper. –YH

Nov 6, 2015

“Quel Monde!” is the abbreviation of the French phrase “dans quel monde vivons-nous?” loosely equivalent to the English expression “what is the world coming to?” Every era finds reason to ask this question, but it would seem an especially apt phrase to drop if the year were 1969. In August of that year, sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno would use it to punctuate the end of a letter to his friend, former colleague, and sometimes adversary, the philosopher and theorist Herbert Marcuse. It was the last phrase they shared, appearing in a letter Adorno’s secretary typed up as Adorno lay dying in the Swiss mountains.

The letter was the last in a contentious personal correspondence the two held over the student movement in Germany. Earlier that year, the Socialist German Student Union occupied a room at the Institute for Social Research, more commonly remembered as the Frankfurt School, the metonymic birthplace of Critical Theory. Students were dismayed with the Institute’s lack of action regarding the Vietnam War and the administration’s decision to shorten the study period. They began to camp out in rooms and disrupt lectures. That summer, Adorno, a professor at the Institute, had one of his lectures interrupted when three female students decided to approach his podium, shower him with rose peddles, and flash their breasts at him. During another related occupation, Adorno called the police, a decision that led to the arrest and seizure of 76 students. Commentators chided Adorno for not realizing that these activities were the consequences of his ideological suggestions. Adorno defended himself: “I proposed a theoretical model for thought. How could I suspect that people would want to realize it with Molotov cocktails?” He held that the occupations and disruptions were unjustified when directed at a liberal institution, examples of the movement’s degeneration into what he called ‘left fascism.’

Marcuse, who had left the Institute for California during the Second World War, told Adorno that his use of the term ‘left fascism’ was a “contradictio in adjecto” (a conceptual oxymoron) and was appalled that Adorno would intervene on any sort of praxis coming from students undeniably influenced by theory that the two of them developed together.

He admitted that the movement felt like a patricidal gesture against their generation and would be inconsequential—not even “pre-revolutionary” at best. Yet Marcuse told his “Dear Teddie” that he was “inhuman” for choosing the armchair over the soapbox, the pen instead of the megaphone, when there was an ongoing opportunity to confront the brutalities of the War and police repression. Adorno felt that Marcuse’s defense of the students’ aggression evidenced that Marcuse had a “cold streak” in his heart. He questioned Marcuse’s intellectual rigor and commitment to dialectics. Aside from the exchange of aspersions, the letters exhausted ink reminiscing over the old days (the thirties) and planning for Marcuse to meet up with Adorno in Italy. Adorno warned that, if this meeting took place, Herbert would have to prepare himself to see a “badly damaged Teddie.” Adorno’s health was more damaged than even he knew, and Marcuse never made it to see him.

Critical Theory’s ambition was to combine different modes of thought in order to answer what the world was coming to.

Marcuse died ten years after Adorno; the student movement died somewhere in between. Marcuse would have a decade on Adorno to try to answer “dans quel monde vivons-nous?” His conclusions likely felt less rewarding: dear Teddie, his comrade-in-dialectics (certainly not in-arms), was not around to contest him. –HS

by Piper French, Yousef Hilmy & Henry Staley illustration by Ivan Rios-Fetchko

More often than we’d admit, love and hate are two sides of the same coin. The French Symbolist poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud had a relationship so troubled and tumultuous that Bob Dylan, the master of failed love affairs, uses them as a point of comparison in a song on his 1975 breakup album Blood on the Tracks. Their first contact, in 1871, contained a hint of what was to come: a sixteen-year-old Rimbaud sent the decade-older, already famous Verlaine a few of his poems, and in return received a card from Paris with the words We await you; we desire you. Rimbaud, eager to be free of his provincial home, broke quickly into Verlaine’s social and literary milieu—and, inevitably, his personal life. The two poets spun wildly about each other for a few years, high off opium and absinthe and their own complicated passion. The climax of their relationship came in 1873, when, during a drunken dispute in a Brussels hotel room, Verlaine fired his revolver at Rimbaud. Though the gun went off three times, it struck Rimbaud only once, in the left wrist. The older poet was sent to prison and his lover, just 18, returned to his childhood home. They would only meet once more, just after Verlaine’s release two years later.

In the end, despite all efforts to the contrary, the dissolution of each man’s career was really self-imposed.

Rimbaud quit poetry at the age of 20, having burnt himself out in four turbulent and luminous years. His departure from the Parisian literary world was so abrupt and absolute that many believed him to be dead. In reality, he had turned to other things—construction work in Cyprus, coffee exportation and arms trading in Ethiopia—and died, still young, at 37.

He was always one to immerse himself suddenly and fully in something, and, after exhausting it, to move on just as quickly.

Verlaine outlived him, but only by a few years. After a descent into poverty and serious drug and alcohol addictions, he spent his last days in public housing, supported by the generosity of people who had admired and loved his work.

On the agony that had been their relationship, the two poets could at least agree. Verlaine, in a poem written from his Belgian jail cell, called Rimbaud an “adolescent Satan.”

Rimbaud, who devoted an entire work—Une Saison en Enfer, or A Season in Hell—to the affair, wrote of himself from the imagined perspective of his lover: He is a demon, you know, he is not a man. –PF

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On October 19, the official trailer for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens debuted during halftime of ESPN’s Monday Night Football. The spike in Monday’s ratings seems to prove that even sci-fi enthusiasts will watch the Philadelphia Eagles blow out the New York Giants 27-7, if given enough motivation. Since then, the video on the official Star Wars YouTube page has amassed over 53 million views in less than one week.

The new film is set to take place 30 years after the events of The Return of the Jedi. It is also set to take place after the franchise changed hands between its creator, George Lucas, and the Walt Disney Company. In 2012, Lucasfilms was acquired by Disney for $4.05 billion dollars. A pretty penny for sure, but with it, Disney bought for themselves the single most successful film merchandising franchise of all time and access to an entire fictional universe that has been slowly expanding for decades. At the most recent estimate, also in 2012, the franchise was valued at a cool $30.7 billion. Basically, Disney stands to make money. A lot of money. One can almost hear the imagineers hard at work, tinkering into the dead of night, figuring out what the galaxy far, far away will look like once it’s turned into their newest theme park and moved from outer space to Orlando.

But what does it mean to further expand this world, both in fiction and in reality?

And who, if anyone, retains ownership over it in all its many representations? +++

Star Wars’ Next Chapter

by Dominique Pariso illustration by Pierie Korostoff

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The trailer does right in what little it reveals. It has been watched and rewatched by fans the world over, hungrily searching for clues about what the new movie has in store. And the wild fan theories run on; Though Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher will be making appearances for old times sake, the trailer promises a brand new cast and brand new story.

Despite this reimagining, the 2 minutes and 35 seconds of film we do see is drenched in nostalgia, perfectly deployed. It opens with a shot of a never-ending desert wasteland reminiscent of Tattoine, the world where we first met Luke Skywalker all those years ago.

Later, our new H.V.I.C. (head villian in charge) Kyoto Ren worships at an altar of Darth Vadar’s warped and melted helmet, while wearing a Vader-esque mask of his own. There is even a particularly potent meta-moment in which Ren, speaking to an aged Han Solo, says “there are stories about what happened,” suggesting that our new heroes were raised on the very same stories that we were. The movies we’ve seen have become just as deeply ingrained as mythologies inside the world in which they originated. While the last trilogy went deep into the past, this new trilogy will resync the series to coincide with our own timeline. And if the iconography doesn’t feel classic enough, all you have to do is listen to John Williams’ new score swell behind it all. The nostalgia is deeply embedded sonically in the slightly reimagined fanfare. This J.J. Abrams-helmed ship seems to know where it comes from and, by all accounts, is dedicated to preserving that legacy. Its subtle homages have certainly won over a large part of the fanbases’ trust. And yet, is this not corporate greed at its most refined, taking our collective childhood memories and magically turning them into profit?

After all, box office analysts are already predicting that The Force Awakens stands to easily earn over $1 billion.

But maybe that’s okay. If The Force Awakens is exploitation and it is only exploiting our memories, fine. But what happens if it decides to fundamentally change them? The Star Wars world has been slowly spreading out for years. If the space from which it takes its name has no edge, neither does the franchise’s reach. Beyond the bounds covered by the six featured films, The Clone Wars film series, and the Rebels series, we find the ‘Expanded Universe.’ This encompasses all of the novels, comics, video games, toys, and other new media that is considered canonically relevant. It should be noted that the largest chunk of overall revenue come from sources other than the box office, mostly toys and video games.

Over $1.6 billion comes from the video game development branch, LucasArts. Lucasfilms was the first production company to develop this level of pervasive franchising. Disney, upon acquisition, has pared this down considerably in its effort to unify the content.

They established Lucasfilm Story Group, a committee whose sole job is to keep track of and define the canon. One can imagine the boardroom meetings involved in determining whether or not Skippy the Jedi Droid was essential to the telling of the saga. On April 25, 2014 they announced that the ‘Expanded Universe’ is out, while the six features and The Clone Wars series remain the only ‘immovable objects’ in the storytelling.

And, to be fair, this may have been a necessary edit, considering how bloated and contradictory that universe had become. Take for instance, the 1984 made-for-TV movie Caravan of Courage: The Ewok Adventure in which a group of Ewoks reunite two stranded,

The College Hill Independent

plucky tykes with their parents instead of eating them, and learn a life lesson about trust along the way. These kinds of works—and there are a lot of them—fall primarily on Lucas’ shoulders. He never bothered to set any standards of the canon while still granting permission for these materials to be produced. But it does seem strange to think that George Lucas has given away his rights to a world in which he was once god, and that these kinds of edits can be made without him—even though he no longer seems to care. He is, after all, the one responsible for those blasted prequels and the introduction of the freaking midi-chlorians. Although he may be the original creator, he is not necessarily the best one for the job. +++ If Disney will, in fact, take on these new projects and all that they entail, it is in good company. Harry Potter, the other seminal franchise of the present moment, is attempting a similar expansion. For years, J.K. Rowling has been famous for her extradiegitic declarations that Dumbledore was gay and Hagrid never had kids. The series has begun to take on a kind of post-ending, in which an increasing number of conclusions are tacked onto to the epilogue or to what was once left to reader’s imaginations. The narrative grows past its ending point. And it is clear that doing so can be extremely profitable. In fact, it seems that both the literary and the economic are invested in a narrative of growth. Both, in this case, have an insatiable need to expand ever further. However, this kind of post-publication clarification is typically vilified by the literary community: authors, they argue, only have jurisdiction inside of what they wrote. The rest belongs to their readers. But when Rowling does it, we not only concede, we cheer. Because, as fans, we’re so starved for one more detail that we’re happy no matter what. For many, a large part of their childhoods are tied up in these stories. Many fans are also members of large online communities that revolve around the love of these books and movies. And through that, fans establish connections and friendships, that while initially stemming from shared devotion to the franchise, often grow beyond it. The same can be said for Star Wars. A vast network of discussions, fan theories, fan art, fanfiction, and cosplay are all archived online. And this network has roots beyond the virtual realm. More than 5 million people have ridden the Hogwarts Express at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter since it opened and there are over 400 college Quidditch teams. Not to mention the thousands of people who travel to attend conventions—from Leaky Con to Star Wars Celebration—across the country. And in this way the worlds can stay alive. Or rather, the fans can make the worlds real. And while people of all ages indulge in and enjoy these occasions, it is often the tendency of adults to play make-believe almost as a way of validating their upbringing and resultant identities. Or as a way of prolonging a feeling that was only found in childhood, when we still retained our ability to be spellbound. There is an investment involved in elevating these stories outside of the books and movies in which they are found. This goes past the experiential and into the material: through toys, memorabilia, and the physical structures of the theme parks, fans are able to literally own a piece of the fictional universe, as well as claim collective ownership over these worlds into which they invest so much. By transposing them onto reality, by making them concrete, fans are finally able to insert themselves into the narrative, to play at being the chosen ones, even if only for a day.

Industries know that they can leverage the degree of audience attachment to these characters to make a sizeable profit. It’s a far safer bet than investing in a new venture.

Even the Star Wars prequels, almost universally vilified by fans, still grossed over a billion dollars in box office.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros. recently announced that it will be making three new movies based on the figure of Newt Scamander, author of Hogwarts textbook Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. This movie is only tangentially applicable to Harry Potter. That is, it is of the fictional world but will never touch our version of it. It offers an entirely new imagining, taking place in the magical society of 1920s New York. But the money-making machine knows no bounds. On October 23, the official synopsis for a Rowling-approved play, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” was announced. The West End stage play is set to premiere this summer and will feature the Boy Who Lived as an “overworked Ministry of Magic employee, a husband and father of three school-age children.” It is extraordinarily significant that a large portion of the fan base, those who are now college-age, grew up alongside Harry Potter. An integral part of his charm, Harry’s youthful naiveté will feel misplaced in an adult’s body. Epilogue aside, the last image we get of Harry is of him surveying the rubble of his final battle, where he finally emerged victorious against Voldemort. Although that is going to be replaced by a Harry Potter with a mortgage and thin-

Nov 6, 2015

ning hairline, we can take heart that the image will only be seen by those who can afford a seat at the Palace Theatre in London. Harry would be 30 in 2015, but it is not fair to him to extend his lifespan as a fictional character to that of an actual human being. But there is still an excitement in getting to see him again, like visiting an old friend you haven’t seen in a while. The addiction to these escapist worlds leads to a desire for more, and the fulfillment of that desire leads to the slow erosion of that world’s magic. It is difficult, of course, to tell where that line lies in this clash of temporalities, and it seems only some things should be made real. Build your theme parks, but leave Harry be. +++ While lack of diversity on screen is a problem that permeates throughout Hollywood, it seems most serious when it comes to sci-fi and superhero genres. The casting of The Force Awakens is sensitive to this failure, having cast a woman and a person of color as its heroes.

Disney seems commited to having the film’s characters represent the actual demographics of the fanbase. Many fans are excited about this development, but a small faction of Twitter trolls reared their ugly heads. It began with #BoycottStarWarsVII, initially meant as a (tactless, insensitive) joke, and was quickly appropriated by racists and sexists to protest the films choice of casting John Boyega and Daisy Ridley as lead badasses. While the Twitterstorm in this case was small, it does fit into a larger historical trend of fans freaking out when casting does not go the way they want it to. Fans are defined by their love and commitment to their characters. But clearly there is a dark side to these notions of ownership.

Fans can feel that the conception of a character belongs to them and, when the appearance of that character does not look as they believe it ought, casting can be met with a lot of anger.

Oftentimes, this passion is a fan’s way of protecting characters from what they believe to be poor translation. While sometimes well-intentioned, in this instance, the reaction has been one of discrimination. This points to a larger reality of nerd culture in which white male fans get to be the hero, while people of color and woman are typically given secondary roles: best friend at best, sex object at worse. The very people attacking diverse castings are the ones used to seeing themselves represented on screen as the protagonist; and, when that is challenged, they are able to co-opt discourses of authenticity to shroud their own prejudiced ideals.Their passion here becomes a vehicle—or rather, a megaphone—for their racist and sexist understandings of what a hero can and should be.

Perhaps the best response has come from John Boyega himself. In an interview with V Magazine, the young actor quipped, “I’m in the movie, what are you going to do about it? You either enjoy it or you don’t. I’m not saying get used to the future…[it] is already happening. People of color and women are increasingly being shown on screen. For things to be whitewashed just doesn’t make any sense.” +++ There is a lot of debate about who owns Star Wars. First, it was George Lucas and now maybe it’s Mickey Mouse. But Lucas made sure to embed himself in the commercial universe of Star Wars. In a way, he is just as iconic as any of his characters, mythologizing himself alongside his work. And in that way, he’s really the same as any common fan.There is a possessive inclination on the part of the fanbase to be part of this cultural and fictional narrative; a pervasive feeling that these characters belong to us because we helped make them too. They haunt our childhood memories like friendly ghosts. Through this deep love, the legacy of Star Wars is solidified as a cultural touchstone for everyone, endlessly referenced and remade.

Everybody wants to be the hero, so it is only fair that the hero doesn’t always look the same. And maybe that’s the greatest testament to this series, that we can empty out the universe and repopulate it, casting it in our own image.

DOMINIQUE PARISO B’18 is polishing her lightsaber for the midnight screening.

NEWS

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FORBIDDEN NOMNOMS

by Liby Hays

Edibles From The Farthest Reaches of Our Blue Home Planet, The Earth, and Even Slightly Beyond

To set forth my aims: I am equally invested in tasting and parsing the multifarious ‘nommies’ brought forth from all corners of the globe (to meet their uniform demise in the slimy caverns of my gullet). The three-directional processes in which I am engaged are as follows: ‘eating-in,’ ‘licking-up,’ and ‘parsing-out.’ Because the titular ‘noms’ are shipped to me in lovely pre-sealed packages that crinkle to the touch, and in most instances require no pre-heating or refrigeration, I am able to enjoy said ‘noms’ from the comfort of my very own apartment. My appetite is usually quite small, but still, in all, said ‘nomnoms’ are not very filling or nutritious. Therefore the ‘licking-up’ consists of me scarfing down every last crumb of ‘nom,’ and then running my tongue obsessively over the empty, greasy packaging in order to sate myself. I will not share my snacks, although such esoteric edibles, particularly those from Japan, carry quite a bit of cultural capital among the hipster elite. Finally, and most importantly, there is a ‘parsing-out,’ an attempt to unpack the obscure and oft-inbred logic of these special edition snackfoods. (At the crossroads of novelty and absurdity, a polysaturated poetry might arise.) It’s a pseudo-Freudian adage that playing with one’s food arises from the desire to play with one’s shit—hence, these hyperplayful foods must be the most depraved and forbidden of all.

We can all agree that snacking is deeply political in its motivations, and I hope to treat it with the appropriate gravity.

Doritos Royal ‘Koubashi’ Burnt Butter Doritos I was unsure at first why these run-of-the-mill Japanese noms seemed so fascinatingly uncanny. Butter flavor in a corn product is nothing revolutionary, and certainly nothing forbidden, unless you’re a particularly rigorous vegan. But I was shocked at the idea that they were supposed to taste burnt. It’s rare for a snack product to reference its style of preparation, besides the ubiquitous ‘kettle-cooked’ (which refers to the cooking vessel). But it’s even rarer for a snackfood to make any reference to burning, the state of being over-cooked, because this would suggest a set cooking timeframe. Snacks, in the classical understanding, exist outside of conventional notions of time. They do not perish in accordance with normal laws of organic decay because they belong to the parallel sphere of mythic snack-time. The slogan of Frito-Lay Japan—“Pop Your Time”—is a testament to this. This phrase seems to suggest that snack-time is like a pustule, welling up with internal pressure until it must open onto our world in a grand, exultant burst. Indeed, when I placed the Dorito on my tongue it

Nov 6, 2015

was a near-orgasmic sensation. My enzymatic saliva worked to disclose an entire history of flavor—from the discovery of sweetness, of honeyed pleasure beyond pleasure to a saltiness of oceanic scale to creamy resplendence to a Promethean touch of umami, whisked by dancing flames. The Doritos are part of the ‘Royal’ chips line which includes other savory facsimiles like ‘Tandoori Chicken,’ ‘Garlic Shrimp,’ and ‘Beef Consommé.’ Their shape is also distinctive, with one rounded corner and two straight ones, simultaneously suggesting a royal hierarchy or referencing the shape of the crown. They are highly recommended. Snack-time truly engulfed me and I was nameless and ageless, a flush-faced daughter of Vesta with warm, bubbling butter pooling between my fingers and toes.

But as I took one last decadent sniff of the bag, I saw my face reflected in the inner foil and realized I was still myself, she of bow-legs, pixie features and scampish allure.

Astronaut-Neapolitan Ice Cream It might be helpful to mention that I am no fresh upstart, and in fact have had a long and unfulfilling relationship with mainstream Snackademia over the years. Ultimately I had to depart from it, in my rejection of many of its more conservative premises—for example, the prioritization of the crunch over other subtler forms of consumption. I hold that the new frontier is the slow-dissolve, as evidenced by this superb Astronaut Ice-Cream from the Air and Space Museum Gift Shop. It’s a palm-sized square chunk with three stripes of flavor—chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla. It is freeze-dried to allow for easy consumption in a zero-gravity environment, though it hasn’t been enjoyed by actual spacemen since 1972.

The consistency is almost chalky but super-light, similar to a Lucky Charms Marshmallow. But on the tongue it melts far quicker, flattening to nothingness like an astronaut in a black hole. The subtlety and ephemerality of snacking is its true loveliness—foods outside of your regimented diet, enjoyed in privacy and secrecy, like I enjoyed this intergalactic delight.

Shuffling between the four stomachs of a cow, the four teats of an udder, the four-fold desire for safety, love, self-esteem, and self-transcendence, the four daughters to entrust the farmland to, their four gingham kerchiefs soaked with tears as you catch the last train to Houston, the four kilos of G-force causing you to hurl cream all over the flight simulator, and the four horseman of the apocalypse who acquaint you after riding the coattails of an institution results in your ruin. You watch the space shuttle explode from your home in the alley.

At the crash sight burnt flesh intermingles with twisted metal in Neapolitan stripes of brown, pink, and white. A hunchbacked angel drags its feet through a long hallway. From the second you’re born to the second you die, you make this journey alone. For these reasons I have rejected the crunch as unnecessarily ostentatious and vulgar, demonstrating only the intellectual stagnation of the Snackademic community.

Juicy Drop Taffy If you are among the Acolytes of Nostalgia, you’ve already figured that Juicy Drop Taffy is a spin-off of Juicy Drop Pops, the postmodern lollies of your late youth that you were liable to shoplift from CVS after taekwondo practice. Juicy Drop Pops are premised on a sort of radical individuality of the snacker. Bazooka Candy Brands realized that the threshold for sourness varies greatly from tongue to tongue. Therefore, with Juicy Drop Pops, the snackers themselves can determine the amount of viscous sour goop “tanging up” their lollies—from a subtle queue to lip-puckering x-tremity. Juicy Drop Taffy, launched this past year, is imbued with even deeper metaphorical resonance. By replacing the squeezer with a pen and the pop with a small taffy tablet, they have transformed Juicy Dropping into an act of transcription. (One notable precedent is the bubble-gum notepads with food coloring markers previously available at Target.) Interestingly, this ties the generative act of writing with the passive/assimilative act of consumption in a self-censoring circuit. Derrida once said that “all spiritual pleasure can be expressed through eating,” in which case Juicy Drop Taffy can become a token of silent devotion. The name of the flavor, “Knock-out Punch,” also places an emphasis on the bodily—the balancing of sour fluid hearkening back to the balance of humors in medieval medicine. The radically individualist dream of Juicy Drop Taffy is for one to write a message with the blood of saints before one eats it. As I crouched at my desk in the dark of night, lit by a single Ikea desk lamp, mouth ringed in tutti-fruitti glop, I felt strangely ennobled. I wrote a short poem in the goo.

LIBY HAYS B/RISD’19 is crummy.

METABOLICS

12

JUST SAY NO TO BAD ART

On Protest and Renoir

Over the course of these past months, protesters have gathered outside of various cultural institutions including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, demanding the removal of paintings by French impressionist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. These crowds, largely comprised of graduate students in various art history programs, toted signs reading: “God Hates Renoir,” “Renoir is Aesthetic Terrorism,” and “There is No Renoir.” The group’s leader—political activist and prankster Max Geller—also runs the now-popular Instagram page, renoir_sucks_at_painting, where he regularly espouses the belief that the works of Renoir are “irredeemable treacle.” In Renoir’s place, Geller and others argue, should be hung the works of other 19th century French artists; here the group has taken a particular liking to the work of Paul Gauguin. Though Geller’s gatherings themselves rarely host more than a few dozen attendees, his followers on social media number in the thousands. Apart from a single incident at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, neither museum security guards nor the police have thus far shut down the protests. +++ The simplest, most conservative reactions dismiss Renoir Sucks at Painting (RSAP) because it threatens a supposedly endangered Western canon, and humiliates the time-tested authority of art scholars and professionals who inducted Renoir long ago. Jonathan Jones, art critic for The Guardian, penned an entertainingly pedantic defense of Renoir entitled “To all you Renoir haters: he does not ‘suck at painting,’” in which he unironically calls RSAP a group of “daft philistines.” In a memorable Instagram exchange, the great-great-granddaughter of PierreAuguste, Genevieve Renoir (@gegereno), goes so far as to argue that the ‘protestors’ are trying to effectively undermine the divine edict of the market. “When your great-great-grandfather paints anything worth $78.1 million (which is $143.9 million today), then you can criticize,” she writes in a comment on one of RSAP’s photos. “In the meantime, it is safe to say that the free market has spoken and Renoir did NOT suck at painting.” (Geller shot back with a list of decidedly sucky things the “free market” has also validated, including “the Prison Industrial Complex; Slavery; Settler Colonialism; The destruction of sea otter habitats,” and “National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets.”)

One might more reasonably argue that the issue has nothing to do with a threat to the canon. Never mind the continuity of Eurocentric cultural dominance; in this day and age, what would it even mean, practically, to remove a painter from the canon? We know that institutions of power are no longer able to proceed by way of simple erasure—for one thing, the mass reproducibility and now digitizability of artwork have multiplied the storage centers of cultural memory. Sudden, calculated de-canonization, if it occurs at all, is governed by more shadowy, spectral logics. Forgetting happens as a function of market contingencies, or in the shape of gradual, imperceptible shifts. Meanwhile, museums and cultural institutions around the world are updating conservation practices and expanding their domains at an unprecedented rate, and often at a high human cost. Museum developments in the Persian Gulf region, for instance, have been recently undertaken by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Louvre, exploiting inhuman labor laws and massive amounts of migrant labor in the process. If anything is political in art today, it’s this accelerated, large-scale, multinational reproduction of the Western museum and its canon.

No, the ‘protests’ aren’t problematic because they threaten the Western canon; they’re problematic because they depoliticize both the Western canon and the act of protest at the same time. Political signifiers and protest tactics are ripped from their contexts and redeployed as parodic elements in an elaborate aestheticization of politics. What on the face of things appears as a war on “treacly” bourgeois art is quite clearly being waged on the bourgeoisie’s own terms: a purely aesthetic grounds from which any determinate political stakes have been intentionally evacuated and replaced with rhetoric resembling conservative accusations of ‘degeneracy.’ “We can talk about more pressing social issues but I do believe removing Renoir is just the first step in the long march to our cultural enlightenment,” says Geller in an interview with Dazed.

Of course, the RSAP ‘project,’ if it can be called that, is so couched in this sort of irony to make any such critical response seem ridiculous. Simply put, Geller is trolling, performing a joke whose absent ‘stakes’ and shifting positionality make any ‘position’ at all completely untenable. Everything is in quotation marks. From this perspective Geller appears to be merely

13

ARTS

imitating extant bankrupt, dissimulated forms of politics, or what could be called apolitics— incessant, unthinking mantras, facile or knee-jerk indignance, political ‘positions’ articulated from the side of power, and not from the side of the disenfranchised. The apolitics of viral fundamentalists like the Westboro Baptist Church, for instance, are a crystallization of what Geller calls “American absolutism”—“the sort of cocksureness that you see in political debates in my country.” So RSAP’s simulation of apolitics includes Westboro-esque signs like “God Hates Renoir,” alongside popular American conspiracy-theory shoutouts like “Renoir was an Inside Job.” Whatever intelligence this imitative tactic might have is obliterated when Geller, in character, returns to his main ‘thesis’: that Renoir really “just sucks at painting.” This is a thesis self-conscious of its own willful stupidity. Meanwhile RSAP revels, as only a cynic can, in the embarrassing ineffectuality of all opposition.

As an addendum, it should be noted that Max Geller has been a part of important and controversial political activism. Prior to RSAP, Geller was relatively well-known as a leading member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Northeastern University, a chapter of the national SJP organization which became notable in 2014 after it was suspended for distributing mock eviction notices to student residences during Israeli apartheid week. Granted, there’s simulation and a certain spectacularization operative in both the Northeastern SJP’s work and in the Renoir ‘actions,’ as well as a disturbing dissonance that arises when the two are juxtaposed. But one must make a distinction here between the trajectories of art and politics. To mistake RSAP for politics would be fatal. +++ In the early 1960s, avant-garde musician and philosopher, Henry Flynt, could be found outside of New York’s MoMA or Lincoln Center, picket in hand, chanting “down with art!” and “demolish serious culture!” In Flynt’s writings at the time, he expanded these mantras, declaring art a sort of “cultural imperialism” that is “surrounded by the stifling cultural mentality of the social-climbing snobs.” Flynt’s protests were intended as direct action against precisely this establishment, this “serious culture” of art. In addition to calling for the physical destruction of various museums and concert halls, Flynt also proposed another, perhaps even more quixotic solution to this problematic institution called art, proclaiming that “the first cultural task of radical intellectuals...is: not to produce more Art (there is too much already).”

As drastic as these demands were, they were by no means exceptional at the time. Conceptual artist and photographer, Douglas Huebler, echoed a similar ethos with his remark that, “the world is full of objects” to which he “[didn’t] wish to add any more.” Huebler’s artistic practice instead would center around indeterminacy and appropriation—often allowing others’ work and writing to function as a vehicle for his own ideas; Huelber’s Variable Piece 4—a book in which he reprinted secrets gathered from visitors at the Jewish Museum in New York—serves as a prime example. A few years after Flynt’s protests, Huebler’s work would be shown alongside other, similarly motivated Conceptual artists at Seth Siegelaub’s New York gallery. Much like Huebler and Flynt, Siegelaub was interested in doing away with the art object as such, preferring to show work which prized the idea behind an object rather than the object itself. In one of Siegelaub’s most famous exhibitions, titled “January 5-31, 1969,” the only work “on display,” apart from an exhibition catalogue, was Robert Barry’s 88mc Carrier Wave (FM). The piece, consisting simply of two radio waves, though present, was both formally unstable and wholly imperceptible to gallery visitors. These artistic and curatorial gestures purposefully protested the traditional practices of collection and accumulation.

And yet, what perhaps separates Flynt’s protests from the practices and writings of Siegelaub and Huebler is that Flynt sought to operate decidedly outside of the gallery space and the accompanying logic of the New York ‘art world.’ That is, while Siegelaub, Huebler, Barry, and others working in Conceptualism shared in Flynt’s disdain for the limitations of art and its institutions, they chose to pursue these very same criticisms through the arts, seeking to develop a practice that could at once critique and succeed. Hoping that their blank gallery spaces and dematerialized objects might undermine the art market’s ability to possess the products of their labor, Conceptual artists failed to realize that what they were doing was actually clearing the way for an even more exploitative market—no longer dependent on specific art objects—that could endow any artistic gesture, from an exhibition catalogue to a press release to a sketch-

The College Hill Independent

by Alec Mapes-Frances & Jonah Max

book, with outsized value. For reference, original copies of Siegelaub’s exhibition catalogue for the above mentioned “January 5-31, 1969” now sell for hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

Flynt, on the other hand, never seemed to concern himself with any ‘art world,’ instead choosing to abandon the gallery space and any group that would have him as a member—often commenting on his disinterest in the Fluxus and neo-Dada movements, which were often said to share Flynt’s sensibility. Before too long, Flynt began to fear that even his protests might be cast as some sort of performance piece. He ultimately abandoned them and chose instead to pursue philosophy and ethnomusicology.

Yet even now, as Flynt experiences something of a revival—having his limited work shown at various galleries and biennials—it remains unclear whether one can truly escape from the pervasive logic and economies of the art world, no matter how much one protests. If this is indeed the case, one possible answer may rest in the work of artists such as Adam Pendleton, who has scrawled “Black Lives Matter” across his most recent canvases: an overt gesture which at once acknowledges the inevitable circulation and fetishization present in the art market, and yet uses these very traits to distribute and transpose a potent political message. In a way, Pendleton’s work, by no longer attempting an exit from the arts and its economies, does far more than Siegelaub’s empty galleries or Flynt’s dramatic signs in showing how difficult this sort exit might be.

ALEC MAPES-FRANCES B’17 and JONAH MAX B’18 might be cast as some sort of performance piece.

Nov 6, 2015

ARTS

14

FORGOTTEN WORLDS

Neglect and Fragility at the Ends of the Earth Somewhere out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a giant floating garbage patch. But garbage continent might be a better term, since the debris actually covers a swath of the North Pacific reaching from Japan to North America. Imagine life on that eighth continent—ecosystems of tangled fishing nets and lost flip-flops, and runaway red balloons, all mixed up in a cloudy soup of familiar plastics. Fish and plankton and other sea creatures enter at their peril, risking bites of delicious-looking synthetic bits that might never exit their small bodies. An ecosystem where discarded objects take life as if to reinstate their own.

The garbage patch moves at the whim of the tides, the ebb and flow controlled by the movement of the moon. But it’s beholden, also, to the ocean’s waves and to the wayward winds that direct them. Wind currents in the northern hemisphere follow a circular pattern of expansion based on the air’s heat content, cyclically creeping northward until they reach the pole. But the earth is always spinning—and this creates a peculiar effect on the direction of the winds. The earth spins more quickly at the equator, where most of its mass is centered. As the winds flow north, the ground beneath them is no longer travelling at the same rotational speed as the place they have just left behind. This constant, gradual slowing velocity leads the winds to lean slightly eastward in their trajectory—a phenomenon called the Coriolis Effect.

This effect governs the currents at the ocean’s surface.

The waters that guide the garbage patch are actually a collection of currents that glide south along the coast of California and turn northwestward again near Mexico, propelled by the Coriolis that pushes the winds eastward.

A similar set of currents exists in reverse off the coast of Japan, the winds stirring them into a large circular pattern that rings the Pacific. It’s in the midst of this ring of currents that a plastic water bottle, left carelessly behind on some sun-streaked California beach, might find itself six years later—or, if it had instead fallen into the clear shining waters of Okinawa, in only a year. It’s worth mentioning that the garbage patch is really two patches—one for each twirling set of ocean currents, which we call gyres. They are tumultuous and ever-moving, yet the expanse of ocean in between them is still. It’s here where all the discarded, abandoned, and forgotten items find their resting place, trapped from the outside by the currents that dragged them in. +++ Last year researchers examined a piece of aluminum that had been washed ashore on a remote island. It looked to be part of Amelia Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed Electra, the plane that carried her on her ill-fated journey around the world. Perhaps she too was a victim of a forgotten place—deep in the heart of the Pacific, on a small island (not of garbage) where no one had set foot for decades, if at all.

People searched the entire South Pacific for years after her disappearance, the goal of finding her alive eventually dwindling to hopes of finding closure. The world searched for that woman and turned up nothing but sporadic bits of conflicting evidence. Maybe she had wasted away on the heat of that island. Maybe she and her plane were swallowed whole by the ocean below, no currents to save them. Even the will of multiple governments wasn’t enough to discover the place where she lay. How is it any surprise, then, that islands of our own debris can float through those same waters, carefully unnoticed by anyone but the waves lapping at their tangled edges?

15

SCIENCE

by Camera Ford illustration by Polina Godz

Far north, on the top of the globe, are the gas fields of Siberia.

The Yamal peninsula juts out into the sea, spreading above the Arctic Circle. Loosely translated from Nenets, its name means “to the end of the world.” The entire northwestern area of the region hides ancient deposits of organic matter beneath the frozen ground: leaves, bones, and skin turned to fuel by thousands of years of intense heat and pressure deep within the earth.

It was indigenous land, once, governed by cautious agreement between man and nature. But gradually the cold, hard expanses of tundra have given way to the ravenous thirst for the energy stored within. The earth dies differently here; there is no bleached coral reef devoid of color and life, no animal exodus from a vibrant rainforest. Instead, industrial markers dot the permafrost, finally in construction after years of fight and stalled progress. Storage containers and processing machinery create new obstacles for wayward herds of reindeer.

Gas wells are drilled hundreds of feet into the ground, extracting the raw substance from the earth and separating away the unwanted wastewater that accompanies it. The gas is piped to processing plants, where unwanted compounds—for instance mercury and nitrogen—are stripped away until it reaches the accepted standards for human use. The process is streamlined, yet threatening in its efficiency. The sheer volume of gas lying in wait promises more drilling and more machinery, and more changes to the delicate balance of the ecosystem.

Last summer, a hole opened up in the tundra—and then another, and another. At least ten, with more still to burst into being. Wide-mouthed and extending far deeper than the eye can measure, the craters stoked fear of their unknown origins.

Some have turned into lakes too large even to swim across.

Some come dangerously close to the gas plants that support the region, threatening to topple livelihoods with the ignition of one wayward spark. Were they alien portals to another world? What of the flashes of green light as the earth collapsed in on itself? Could it be the remains of a meteors falling from the sky? Maybe, but the crater walls are smooth walls and there are no charred rock shards anywhere around the impact sites. Perhaps the steady march of rising temperatures melted large accumulations of ice, leaving nothing behind but empty space. Or, equally likely, the craters are windows into some cavernous space below the ground, opened by an eruption of the methane gas that lurks there. Scientists expect more to come—more sinking earth, more explosions, more caverns.

New gateways to the unknown.

CAMERA FORD B’16 is fragile, too.

The College Hill Independent

POINTS OF VIEW

An Interview with Chang-rae Lee

by Madeleine Matsui illustration by Polina Godz

It’s hard to believe that Chang-rae Lee fell into writing by accident and as a second career. He possesses a unique ability to write convincingly from the perspectives of a diverse array of characters—from a Korean American spy in Native Speaker (1995), to an aging Italian-American in Aloft (2004), to a Chinese-American fish farm worker in his most recent book, On Such A Full Sea (2014). Common among his literary creations is a nuanced understanding of what it means to be an outsider. Lee himself emigrated from Korea to the United States with his parents at the age of three and is no stranger to the themes of belonging, displacement, and identity. In his work, Lee has exposed readers to worlds as far apart as the suburbs of Long Island, and a dystopian version of Baltimore.

Through his understanding and command of language, Lee creates compelling, lifelike tales about acceptance, rejection, success, and failure. Lee speaks slowly, gently, and with a contemplative self-awareness. The Independent spoke with him from his home in Princeton, where he writes and currently teaches. +++ The College Hill Independent: After college, you worked briefly on Wall Street before turning to writing and teaching creative writing. Why writing?

Chang-rae Lee: I think it was an evolving process. I’d always enjoyed reading books and was a fan of literature. I think that, as all avid readers feel at some point or another in their reading lives, I thought I’d like to take a chance—take a shot at writing something myself to give someone else that feeling I got when I read something that I enjoyed, or thought was particularly different or fresh. [It was] something that I naturally put away because—most probably due to my immigrant upbringing—my parent’s vision for me, even though they were very cultured and educated people, was that I have a professional and economically stable life. So I think that that notion which I find totally honorable was probably ingrained in me in a way I wasn’t even cognizant of. And well, probably as a result, I always thought that writing was something I would do in my own time as a hobby, and not something I’d make any kind of career out of. So even though I ended up doing a lot of creative writing in high school—I actually didn’t do any in college for lots of reasons—it was kind of always in the back of my mind.

The Indy: If you weren’t in creative writing classes in college, what classes did you find most engaging?

CL: Definitely one of my favorite classes was taught by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., you know, who runs the Center for African American Studies at Harvard. He was an English professor back then at Yale. He taught a class that everyone had to take—but he made the class his own. It was a class in which the reading list was all autobiographies—Rousseau, Frederick Douglass—I can’t remember it all, but it was a fascinating reading list. So the discussion of the literature was great. And it was great because he was there—he was so dynamic, strutting around the room, being brilliant and profane. It was just great. But also he had us do some autobiographical writing, which was fun. It wasn’t pressured like a writing workshop. It was just kind of exploratory and fun.

I’m not a teacher like that but I think the best classes you’re in are the ones in which you surprise yourself, not just

Nov 6, 2015

the ones in which you learned a lot—the classes where you find things out about yourself that you didn’t know about and felt good. Even thirty years later, people from that class still get together, and we still talk about that class and how great it was. I think I was the only one who ended up a writer!

The Indy: Speaking of teaching—how does teaching inform your writing and vice versa?

CL: Well I’ve always taught since starting my writing career.

Frankly, I started it not because I’d always thought I’d be a teacher, but because it was a job and a way to pay bills. But over the years I’ve come to really enjoy teaching, and not because I see it as any part of the writing life. My job as a teacher is really quite the opposite of my work as a writer. My job as a teacher is to be focused on the consciousnesses and psychology of everybody else. Sure, I have opinions and everything like that, and certain notions of how narrative works.

But my job as a teacher is to be a guide to reading, how to read closely, and also [to be] an advisor about all these different forms that students come up with—kind of an analyst, as it were. So it’s all about them, and not about me. And writing is the opposite—I’m trying to completely shut out everything else, shut out the world. So it’s two very different activities. As a teacher I’ve always enjoyed the freshness and energy of the students. That’s maybe the one connection they always remind me about—about possibility, and being daring, and taking risks, and maybe the benefits of not being so studied, not knowing everything.

After graduating from college I think two things were catalysts for my taking the plunge [to being a writer], one of which was that my roommate at the time and good friend was embarking on a career as a writer. That inspired me and jolted me a little bit. The other was that my mother was terminally ill. I was very busy helping her and just being at home with her and checking out of my post-graduate, post-college life, which also gave me a different perspective on how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. Or at least how I was going to pursue the next thing in my life, which included, I suppose, my enduring interest in writing. That pushed me to the idea that I should at least try to write, for a period, and give it a chance.

The Indy: Your book, Native Speaker, came out of your MFA thesis, and is centered around the experience of Henry Park, a Korean-American struggling to assimilate into American society. Given the impact of the class you took with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and all the things happening in your personal life, did you begin by writing from personal experience? What is the role of your own experiences in your writing?

CL: Well my novels haven’t really been based upon my personal experience very much. Except perhaps my first novel, Aloft, is probably most based on my personal experience, even though that novel is narrated by an Italian-American fellow in the sixties. People always assume that Native Speaker hews closely to my experience. But it’s really not been that way. All novels of course come out of one’s consciousness, but that doesn’t necessarily mean exactly experience. Consciousness does not mirror experience necessarily. For example in Native Speaker—again, people would always assume that character

was me—and I always said: “No, he’s a version of someone who perhaps had some of the same concerns I had, but of course was intensified and shaped to being more dramatically interesting than me.” I have written about my experience in non-fictional essays. But the novels are different. I think they need to be. Every once in a while someone can have a personal experience or period that might very well lend itself to be a good novel—but typically not. Novels require so many other things than just someone’s life. But I’m always trying to find experience outside, whether it’s historical or imagined, through which I might be able to explore those concerns.

The Indy: Your work is distinct because you manage to explore such different concerns and backgrounds while generating empathy and understanding for these characters that may be from an unfamiliar culture, place, or time. Have you found that there are particular themes that audiences universally respond to in your writing?

CL: I think they tend to focus on questions of alienation and dislocation, the position of the observer or outsider. But I think also people remark a lot about the form of the writing and the language, which isn’t thematic so much as an aesthetic quality. Maybe that in itself ends up being thematic—a certain kind of vision of what language is and how it forms us and how central it is to us.

The Indy: Your most recent book, On Such A Full Sea, presents a change in terms of genre and style. It’s a dystopian novel that addresses concerns such as income inequality, materialism and climate change. Are there any particular issues—perhaps political issues—you have been interested in writing about lately?

CL: All my books have been quite different. The book I’m working on now is different still. So I guess I’m loathe to say that there are certain things that I want to address. I’m not constituted that way. I hope that all my books address issues! That’s not to say that I hope that they are political. If I’m looking truthfully at the world as I imagine it or see it, it necessarily becomes political. But that’s not where I start. I think that maybe right now with this project that I’m working on—I don’t want to talk about it that much—I’m looking at certain centers of global commerce and psychic energy and so my thoughts are more centered on Asia as a place with a critical mass of energy and all the implications therein. Is that political? I don’t know. Again, as a writer and novelist I’m trying to embrace and focus on just one little perspective I have on the world, to try to make it as vital and interesting as possible.

Interviews

16

LETTERS FROM DOULA CAMP

17

LiTERARY

by Julia Tompkins

The College Hill Independent

“Please Allow Me to Re-Introduce Myself ” – Jay-Z Hello. My name is Eric Writer Turangalila (Writer is my middle name— I know ;-P). I am not the LW—he disappeared after he wandered into a parade of dyspeptic Catholic priests in the Italian city of Milan. Beats me

THE LW ASKED FOR THIS POEM TO BE PUBLISHED. WE RECEIVED IT IN THE MAIL ON A PIECE OF CLOTH EVIDENTLY SHEARED FROM THE MITER OF A VATICAN CITY CARDINAL.

why he was there! Anywho, I’m his cousin (people call me EW).

I got an e-mail from the editors inquiring about the LW’s whereabouts, Those cowardly and immoral among us

given that I’m his only living relative, and when I mentioned that I’m a

Those vile and unbelieving

writer, too, (albeit in between jobs :-O) they went ahead and offered

Those who practice the magic arts

me the back page for the week. Wahoo! They were originally reticent to

The idolaters of Babylon

offer this to me,but I managed to track the LW down using his bank

We will not see a new heaven and a new earth

statements (I’m a private eye on the side) and located a news story in the

Those who preach the word of God in Genesis

local Milanese paper which described the strange behavior of a beady

Are sinners, too

eyed man who was shouting in Pig Latin about Hildegard, Bach, Josh Gro-

Groban is a sinner, too

ban, and the destructive and desiccated blandness of art inspired by the

Heaven, like an overfull birthday party, Will turn away even friends

God of the Christian bible in the 21st century under capitalism. Sounds

Because we have gone on too long

like my cuz ;-). A bit about me: I’m a hip-hop head (Eminem, Biggie,

We are implicated in the desecration of the earth

Atmosphere, Aesop Rock, Nas are my top 5!) with a background in com-

We have fettered ourselves to her

puter programming and graphic design. I love House of Cards, Dashiell

And rhapsodize her exploitation

Hammett, and my dog, Prego. Thanks for reading! Here’s the list.

Our music does not preach transcendence But appreciable suffering We depreciate the earth by depreciating the human We depreciate the earth by depreciating nature We project our logics onto dirt Only to return to it As a synthesis: Dirt become dirt again

Saturday 11.7 Friday 11.6 Ja RuleThe Chance, Poughkeepsie, NY // 8PM // $25 “Livin’ It Up” is totally my early 2000s jam.

Ja Rule is total fun. I wouldn’t put him up there with the greats, but he’s fun. It’s all the way Poughkeepsie, NY, though.

Lupe Fiasco & Wale Hofheinz Pavilion, Houston, TX // 8PM // $15 Holy crap, Lupe and Wale together in the same building! I’d kill to be at this show. Lupe is cool, he samples indie artists like MGMT and Modest Mouse. I like those bands, when I’m in a certain mood. Like when I’m sleepy, I guess.

Not good party music, ha ha. Anywho, I’m all the way in Fremont, Nebraska so I prob won’t be headed to Houston, TX for this (road trip anyone??? Ha ha) but it looks fun.

Legends of the Old School (Ft. Vanilla Ice, Salt N Pepa, 2 Live Crew, Kid N Play, and more) CFE Arena, Orlando, FL // 7:30PM // $30 $30 to see all these legends! Wow. “Ice, Ice Baby”! So cool. Salt N Pepa were in that commercial? I think it was Verizon. Or something.

Cool! Actually I haven’t heard much of these guys? But they’re all totally legends! Actually I saw Vanilla Ice on Arsenio Hall? I can’t remember if he was cool or kind of a jerk (Vanilla Ice that is—Arsenio is pure class!).

Too bad it’s all the way in Orlando.

The Art of War: Imagery, Ideology, Impact Rhode Island Hall, Room 108, 60 George Street // 9:30AM-6PM // Free I was looking through some of my cousin’s lists and this is the type of thing he would put. Like an academic conference? It seems pretty cool!

I never really think about how war and art might be similar but this says they both deal with “ideology”. Ha ha, I guess so! It also says it will talk about how art and war are “entangled”—like how art is about war.

I saw The Patriot starring Mel Gibson and also Cold Mountain. Saving Private Ryan is about war. Maybe they’ll show those? Check it out if you wanna see those.

Revival! Featuring Kishi Bashi, The Low Anthem, Screaming Females Columbus Theatre // 7PM // $18 This seems like a cool music show. I heard the Low Anthem once when my girlfriend Jan played them at a baby shower for her sister. The other bands seem weird but cool?

Like cool but in a weird way ;-).

Rhode Island Comic-Con Dunkin Donuts Center // All day // $40 Whoa there’s a Rhode Island Comic-Con too?

I looked at the vehicle appearances and frickin’ Herbie the anthropomorphic punch buggy will be there. Wow so cool. This looks cool. Carrie Fisher will be there; Jan says she’s from Star Wars. I’ve never seen it, ha ha, everyone goes crazy when I tell them, like, “You’ve got to see it!” I will eventually but you get busy.

I GOT AN EMAIL FROM THE EDITORS - EW EW HERE. I JUST GOT AN EMAIL FROM THE EDITORS. TURNS OUT I’M ONLY SUPPOSED TO BE WRITING ABOUT COOL EVENTS IN PROVIDENCE NOT COOL EVENTS ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. I’LL AMEND THIS FOR THE REST OF THE LIST. THANK YOU FOR UNDERSTANDING. THINGS ARE GOOD HERE IN NEBRASKA. THANKS.

Sunday 11.8 Animation Show of Shows RISD Auditorium // 7-9PM // Free Cool an animation show? This seems cool. It doesn’t say what animations they will show but maybe like “Hey Arnold”? Or maybe more like “Looney Tunes”. Or “Tom and Jerry”?

Tuesday 11.10 Frankie Cosmos Aurora Providence // 9PM // $10 I’ve never heard of Frankie Cosmos but 1) I like her name and 2) my friend Palance knows more about cool hipster music and he said Frankie Cosmos is cool ;-).

Check it out

A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS HI THIS IS EW HERE. I KNOW I DID NOT FILL ALL THE DAYS BUT I’M BEING TOLD I HAVE RUN OUT OF WORDS BECAUSE I AM NEARING 1,000 WORDS. I’D LIKE TO JUST SAY THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME GUEST EDIT THE LIST THIS WEEK I HAD A GREAT TIME I AM ERIC WRITER TURANGALILA. EMAIL ME ERIC.TURANGALILA.WRITER@GMAIL.COM. THANKS FOR READING I HOPE I DON’T RUN OUT