The College Hill Independent Vol. 31 Issue 8

Vol. 31 Issue 1 Vol. 31 Issue 8

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a Brown/RISD Weekly a Brown/RISD weekly

the NEWS 02 Week in Sightings Jane Argodale, Liz Cory & Camera Ford

Volume 31 No. 8

03 Can You See Me Now? Wilson Cusack, Dominique Pariso & Francis Torres METRO 08 What is Critique?

Jamie Packs, Shane Potts & Kim Sarnoff ARTS 05 Tracing Shadows Andrew J. Smyth

From the editors: Life’s pages are a puddle—prodable, but tough to sift, and too viscous to pull apart.

These pages peel back easy! They’re flippable, flappable. Solicitous of dissection.

But be prepared—the puddle peeled apart is a parable, and, though thin, this paper is not hollow. –LG

09 Space is the Place Yousef Hilmy & Alec Mapes-Frances FEATURES 11 The Other Rockies Sebastian Clark 15 Scribbles William Weatherly TECH 13 Poly Olly Oxen Free Dash Elhauge & Charlie Windolf OCCULT 12 Voodoo Child Eve Zelickson LITERARY 17 Beachcrumb EmmaJean Holley EPHEMERA 7 Lean In Jake Brodsky X 18 Crush the Rainbow Julia Wright

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

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

Interviews Madeleine Matsui 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 Elodie Freymann Design & Illustration Nikolas Bentel Polina Godz Alexa Terfloth

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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 Charlie Windolf

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WEEK IN

SIGHTINGS

by Jane Argodale, Liz Cory & Camera Ford illustration by Layla Ehsan

Now You See It...

It’s Saturday night and you’re at Disneyland, southeast of LA. You’re looking up at the Ferris wheel when a bright white object pierces the sky, seeming to drag it forward and leave a blue trail in its wake. You’re farther west, in Long Beach, and you see a blue light floating through the air. You’re south, in San Diego, when something that looks like a flare explodes in a puff of smoke and green light. You’re in Baja, Mexico, and you see a bright, bright light zooming through the sky. It’s unlike anything you’ve seen before. Enchanting, frightening.

It’s Sunday night and dark, because the days are shorter now as fall creeps toward winter. You’re at home with a friend when you hear a scream—something foreign, something perhaps not quite human. You open the door and step outside, scanning the yard. You see a grotesque figure lying in a patch of grass, covered by a glistening wet film. Two spindly, deformed legs—where are the feet? The toes?!—poke from one end of the body, splayed out at right angles. A round, fleshy bulb with deformed ears and a torn snout sits on its long neck. You post photos to Facebook as witness to this monstrosity, and hurry back to the safety of your house.

It’s Monday, and now the news has broken across the Internet. First, the sensational: UFO sightings across the skies of the Southwest. The next night, an alien corpse found in a backyard in San Jose. Then, the more mundane: The Navy was doing a missile test flight, launched from a submarine off the coast of southern California. A meteor shower was raining over the southwest that same weekend. A premature deer fetus, ejected from the womb by a mother in duress and then mauled by hungry predators, looks a lot like the creature found in the yard.

It’s Wednesday, and now the news cycle is almost complete. Claims of aliens and UFOs have been debunked for days, and the further reaches of Internet journalism have finally caught up. The conspiracy sites have dug their heels in, too, because these official reports are exactly What They Want You To Think. And maybe they’re right—if there really were aliens flying through the sky, the government probably wouldn’t want you to know.

It’s all a bit confusing. You just need some time to think; the truth is surely out there somewhere. –CF

Nov 13, 2015

Hide Your Cats, Hide Your Mice City dwellers ye be warned: Nature is coming. No longer is it just a rural thing to cohabitate with carnivorous beasts capable of slaughtering deer (and, with some teamwork, moose). The “coywolf ”—aka the “Eastern coyote,” aka “your cat’s worst nightmare”—is rapidly becoming the apex predator across the eastern US and Canada, and it’s not picky about its habitat. Experts say this creature’s unique biology, one-fourth wolf, one-tenth domestic dog, the rest coyote, has primed it over nearly 200 years of interbreeding to be an ultra killing machine: stealthy, strong, and undisturbed by human activity.

The coywolf can thrive in cities, eating basically whatever it finds, including cats, raccoons, and your leftovers.

In a recent report in the Economist, coywolf expert, Dr. Roland Kays, said he estimates the coywolf population is now in the millions—and it’s only increasing. As the 2014 PBS special “Meet the Coywolf ” warns in a foreboding voice-over: “This new top predator lives alongside us…It has mastered the art of blending into the background…” Coywolves know to look both ways when crossing the road. They follow railroad lines around town. And they’re pretty cute. It remains unknown what terrors they may truly be capable of.

The Internet has been abuzz this week with talk of the not-so-shy canid’s expansive invasion. “Coywolf ” was trending on Facebook for several days, and one concerned man cautioned in a post, “I’d think twice about letting your cat out, even in an urban area. In fact, you might have to watch your kids more closely, too.” The New York City police have also responded to the coywolf influx with concern. Sarah Aucoin, director of the city’s Urban Park Rangers program, says a sighting of one last spring incited a full-on chase through Manhattan’s Riverside Park. The NYPD even brought out a helicopter, but it was no match for the sneaky beast, who vanished into a bush by Grant’s Tomb.

For all the fear-ridden hype, many see the creature’s creep into human civilization as a more complicated matter. More coywolves around means fewer rodents, which could be a good thing—particularly for a city like New York, where rats roam free. And, after all, some ponder: are we not ourselves merely another of nature’s creations? One Facebooker expressed his own ambivalence: “I like ‘em but I also don’t. heard ‘em here again last night. o boy !!” O boy, indeed.

Whether in the spirit of fear or wonder, the coywolf is instilling a sense of awe in its fellow northeasterners. Providence, get ready. –LC

Fisheye In The Sky With its islands of floating debris and rainbow sheen of petroleum, the Gowanus Canal in New York is notorious for being one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States.

In September 2007, a report from New York University’s Science Line project found gonorrhea—among other bacteria— in the canal, which links New York Bay to several neighborhoods in Brooklyn. In March 2010, the canal was listed as a Superfund site, designating it for cleanup under federal law.

In January 2013, a dolphin was found in the canal, and died after failed attempts by rescuers to bring it into cleaner waters.

For New Yorkers, the Gowanus Canal has become an almost comical symbol of how human neglect can render a place fatal to the normal workings of nature. The wry title of a Gothamist article from April sums it up: “Man Swims In Gowanus Canal, Concludes ‘It’s Not Safe To Swim In There.’”

So when local news station ABC 7 aired a video clip that a tipster sent in of a catfish with three eyes that had apparently just been caught in the Gowanus, viewers were amused and horrified, but unsurprised. It was a real-life Blinky, the fish from the Simpsons whose nuclear waste-filled home in Springfield had given him an extra eye.

As it turns out, whoever sent in the video may have just catfished all of New York. In a comment on a Gothamist article about the clip, Queens College Biology Professor, John Waldman, pointed out that the species of catfish in the video was a freshwater variant, which would be unable to tolerate the canal’s salinity. Moreover, the fish appeared to be dead for a long time based on the advancement of rigor mortis.

Donald Stewart, an ichthyologist at the New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry also told Gothamist that an extra-eye mutation was unlikely.

Though the video is probably a hoax, it’s telling how easily New Yorkers believed the story. Pick a sludgy enough body of water for your mutant animal scam, and people will suspend their disbelief, even hope for it to be true. As commenter John Waldman wrote, “If you ever were inspired to do a threeeyed fish hoax, what better place than the legendary Gowanus? It’s too damned perfect to be true.” And so the search for a real-life Blinky continues. The depths of the Gowanus may still contain something even stranger than fiction. –JA

NEWS

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OFF TARGET ETHICS

Drone Warfare and Its Legitimation

On October 15, news outlet The Intercept released four classified documents that detail the Obama administration’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—commonly known as drones. The release flared an ongoing debate on their ethics and legality, attracting the attention of human rights activists, military analysts, journalists, and politicians from the far-right to the left and back again. Here, we review the history of drone use, the current legal framework that allows their use, and what The Intercept’s release brought to light.

The Birth of the Predator: An Abridged History of Drones From backyard playthings to Jeff Bezos’ ultimate delivery gimmick to militarized weapons and surveillance tools, drones are a strange symbol of modernity. The most common military drone is the MQ-1 Predator. The Predator’s white body weighs 1,130 pounds, has a wingspan of 55 feet, and cruises above the world at 135 mph. They look like birds of prey, or perhaps huge robotic bugs. According to the US Air Force, “The Predator system was designed in response to a Department of Defense requirement to provide to the warfighters persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance information combined with a strike capability.”

In its capacity for surveillance and brutal violence, everything about this machine is dystopian. But this is no dystopia, merely the current state of warfare in a post-9/11 world. The military apparatus that has developed since then perhaps sustains itself through a rhetoric of precision. The so-called ‘War on Terror’ is defined by its need to classify, identify, and measure elusive threats. The drone pretends to offer a clean excision of those threats. Who, however, is a threat and for what reason they are a threat, is unclear.

These concerns are inscribed in the history of aerial warfare. Humans have tried to harness the air to the ends of violence for at least two centuries. The first predecessor of drones came in 1849, when Austria launched 200 balloon-tied bombs into the city of Venice. In World War I, when the US Navy tried and failed to develop a fleet of “air torpedoes,” unmanned biplanes launched into flight by catapult and then flown over enemy positions. The technique was refined by the Navy in World War II when it launched Operation Anvil, a program to develop B-24 bombers guided by remote control that would target German bunkers.

And then in 1981, Abraham Karem wheeled out from his garage in Los Angeles an aircraft called the Albatross and the game changed. His Albatross could stay in the air for over 50 hours and carry a television camera. After being funded by DARPA, the military’s research and development department, Karem built the Amber and then the Gnat, which are the direct ancestors of the Predator. The rest, as they say, is history.

The first Predator drone was flown in June 1994 over the Balkans and several were used for survaeillance over the following eight years. The CIA began to fly drones over Afghanistan in 2000. After September 11, they began to fly armed drones. The next big paradigm shift occured on February 4, 2002, when the CIA initiated the first targeted killing, outside of military support, by an unmanned Predator drone. The lurking threat of violence that pervasive surveillance inherently carries had finally been realized. The intended target was Osama bin Laden. The drone operators came across three men near Zhawar Kili, a former infamous mujahedeen base in Afghanistan, including a “tall man in robes” and two others. Of course, the tall man was not bin Laden, although officials insisted that he was an appropriate target. The tall man turned out to be a villager named Daraz Khan. He was in the area foraging for bits of shrapnel and bombs—leftover metal from US airstrikes could fetch a decent price.

Since 2004, the US has been conducting surveillance and targeted killings across Pakistan, the country that has bore the brunt of most American drone strikes. The most recent stats bring the number of total strikes to over 400, with anywhere from 2,400 to 4,000 people killed. There have been over 75 strikes in Yemen and Somalia since 2002, which has taken the lives of upwards of 833 people. The more recent strikes in Yemen and Somalia suggest that the hum and buzz of drones is spreading. And as the drone war drags on, questions are being raised about the legality of their use.

Drones in Law and Practice Indeed, the legality of drones has been scrutinized under both American and international law.

The terrifying implications of this new technology—the capacity to strike a target almost anywhere in the world remotely—naturally raise concerns about how armed drone are deployed, and how their use is legitimized.

American drone strikes find their legal backing in the “Authorization on the Use of Military Force,” or AUMF, a law approved by Congress and signed by President Bush within a week of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The bill gave the President to power to approve “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”

This expanded authority provided the juridical logic for all military actions against the groups thought to be responsible for the 9/11 attacks—namely, the Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their “associated organizations.” The Obama administration did not challenge this law but rather stretched its powers, leading to a peak in drone strikes against suspected terrorist targets during President Obama’s first term.

The lawfulness of American drone strikes relies on categorizing targets as enemy soldiers in an ongoing war. The term ‘enemy combatant’ historically applied to uniformed soldiers in opposing armies, and was meant to protect civilians from being targeted. There are no uniforms in the global ‘War on Terror’ though, and the line between civilians and combatants has become blurred. In an attempt to account for transnational nature of terrorist networks, the Bush administration redefined “enemy combatant” as “an individual who was part of or supporting the Taliban or al-Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” The degree of association with a target organization needed to be considered a combatant is undefined, and the power to decide if an individual is affiliated enough to be an enemy combatant lies in the President’s hands.

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by Wilson Cusack, Dominique Pariso & Francis Torres illustration by Gabriel Matesanz By assigning enemy status to targets, US drone strikes become subject to international laws of war. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the threat or use of force in international relations, though it allows for very a limited set of exceptions. President Obama himself maintains that extraterritorial drone strikes are a legitimate exercise of the United States’ right to selfdefense, sanctioned in Article 51 of the UN Charter. Going further, the Obama administration has declared its right to unilaterally pursue targets in foreign states—either American or foreign nationals—without the need for the other country’s consent if that country is “unwilling or unable to deal effectively with the threat.” This unorthodox reading of the sovereign right to self-defense provided the legal reasoning behind the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan without the Pakistani government’s approval.

In a 2013 speech at National Defense University in Washington, DC, President Obama went on the record defending the use of drones to target potential terrorists. Characterizing the conflict against al-Qaeda and “associated organizations” as a “just war” waged “proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense,” the President also assured listeners that there must be nearcertainty that no civilians will be killed or injured by a drone strike before he signs off on it. The President’s reaffirmation of the legal discourse around drone use has brought much contempt from civil rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, both of which have released reports on the US drone program’s breaches of international law. The main point of contention between the US government and these organizations involves the classification of drone victims as “enemy combatants,” especially in situations where this claim is hard to verify independently.

The Drone Papers The Drone Papers, published by The Intercept on October 15, is comprised of four classified US government documents and eight explanatory articles. The publication obtained the documents from “a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programs described in the slides.” Among other things, the documents bring to light the ways in which assassination decisions are made, the amount of civilians casualties in strikes, and the Obama administration’s preference of lethal drone strikes over capturing targets.

The papers also detail the high collateral damage of US drone strikes. For instance, in Operation Haymaker, a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan between January 2012 and February 2013, “US airstrikes killed 219 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets.” US intelligence on civilian casualties is most comprehensive in Afghanistan, but the number of civilian casualties is likely the same or greater in Yemen and Somalia. In Somalia, according to The Intercept, Obama authorized the assassinations of 20 people in 2012, yet the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported over 200 people were killed in 2012. The military designates all people killed in a strike as EKIA, enemy killed in action, even if they are not the targets, unless evidence emerges that they were not terrorist combatants. The articles do not shed light on the ways that this might be done.

The Intercept’s source said that official US government statements claiming minimal civilian casualties are “exaggerating at best, if not outright lies.” One of the documents includes a detailed diagram of the hierarchy of decision-making on high-value targets, with the POTUS at the top.

The source also stressed the poor quality of the intelligence going into assassination decisions: “It’s stunning the number of instances when selectors are misattributed to certain people.

And it isn’t until several months or years later that you all of a sudden realize that the entire time you thought you were going after this really hot target, you wind up realizing it was his mother’s phone the whole time.” If intelligence were strong, and three innocent people did not die for every target assasinated, the ethical dilemma at hand might be quite different.

Mediating Drones According to a 2013 Gallup Poll, “in the US, 65% support drone attacks on terrorists abroad.”

The Intercept’s publication of The Drone Papers caused a stir, but maybe not one quite as dramatic as the publishers had hoped. Many activists concerned about drone warfare considered the leaked documents just as significant as Edward Snowden’s. Snowden himself tweeted a link to The Drone Papers saying: “When we look back on today, we will find the most important national security story of the year.”

Most major US publications have covered the release to some extent, but the Washington Post has published nothing at all, and the New York Times only published two paragraphs about the release at the bottom of an article about Obama extending the stay of US troops in Afghanistan. The New York Times public editor, Margaret Sullivan, criticized the paper for their lack of coverage. The silence of these two publications—and the fact that the revelation that only 35 of 219 people killed in drone strikes were intended targets might not be considered newsworthy— speaks to the contentious nature of the current drone debate in the US. The Predator drone—much like the trench, the tank, the submarine, and the atom bomb that came before it—completely changed the way we engage in war in that it changed the methods and the distance of killing. One drone software, Ballista, allows the pilot to alter its interface and replace the image of the intended target with whatever image he wants, from an emoticon to a picture of Osama bin Laden. Drones open up a space wherein killing can be mediated by both distance and technology to hide the moral and ethical implications of what is happening. The killing here is remote-controlled, removed, distant.

It is a peculiar set of circumstances that makes drones so disturbing: this estrangement from violence, the distance, the minimization of risk, the anonymity, the lack of political accountability. All of these are enabling secretive and illegal killing.

WILSON CUSACK B’16, DOMINIQUE PARISO B’18 & FRANCIS TORRES B’16 are enemy combatants.

Nov 13, 2015

NEWS

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TRACE, BODY, AND CARE Into the Performance Archive with Joan Jonas

by Andrew J. Smyth

May was something of an event for American performance art. On the occasion of the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale, the United States Pavilion presented new work from Joan Jonas, one of the discipline’s certified ‘pioneers.’ (To give you a sense of the gravity of being selected, previous delegates have included Louise Bourgeois, Ann Hamilton, Fred Wilson, and Bruce Nauman.) Beginning in the late sixties Jonas conducted some of the earliest experiments with performance and video in New York. She’s almost eighty now, but hasn’t slowed down. The project Jonas debuted in Venice, They Come to Us Without a Word, explores the questions she has been working through for nearly fifty years. How images sustain manipulation, fragmentation, and combination. How objects figure in ritual, theater, and other performance activities.

How text, sound, and visuality feed and challenge one another. Jonas organized the architecture of the pavilion into four chambers of investigation, each of which submitted a general topic— bees, fish, wind, the “homeroom”—to pressure from video, drawings, objects, and quotations.

The central rotunda, which she outfitted with a crystal chandelier and 28 mirrors fabricated nearby on the island of Murano, supplied a kind of lyrical funhouse in which the prismatic surfaces of the pavilion, and the body of the viewer, were endlessly reflected and refracted. In July, Jonas and the musician Jason Moran, with whom she has often collaborated, collected and translated this material into a new performance work, They Come to Us without a Word II. The Biennale represented a long overdue opportunity to gather around one of the most radical practitioners of performance art.

Before long, the celebration was colored by mourning and loss. The Jonas show opened in Venice on May 9. The following afternoon, on May 10, word spread about the death of Chris Burden, another towering figure in the history of performance art. His death activated a kind of return. Back to the bullet and the blood, his now-wounded limb, the friend aiming the gun, its being fired and nobody’s intervening. These images belong to a work of performance Burden called Shoot. In 1971, he had himself been shot in the arm with a .22 caliber rifle inside a gallery in Santa Ana, California for an audience of about ten people. The power of that work does not reside with being shot in itself, or the idea that being shot should necessarily make for an artwork. Rather, Shoot unsettled and maimed due to the agreement between the work’s several parties—the artist, the shooter assistant, and the audience—to consent to violence, the fact that each of them allowed it to occur. In addition to the gun and Burden’s body, the work also consisted of the set of choices and outcomes that were available in that room. What ethics of the public, he seemed to demand, might the audience’s permission and spectatorship suggest? What did it mean for those witnesses not to intervene? Somewhere between ushering in new work like Jonas’ and revisiting classic examples like Burden’s, the institutions that tend to performance make choices about how to preserve and remember. Of course, Burden’s work was designed to circulate well beyond the confines of that room. Burden took care to have the performance photographed and filmed, ensuring that the event would be reproduced and reviewed. The documentation that resulted from Shoot not only testifies to but actually extends the work itself.

The performance and our knowledge of it both depend on these supplements.

According to one understanding of the art form, reproduction can only furnish a degraded, damaged knowledge. “Performance’s only life is in the present,” scholar Peggy Phelan wrote in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. “Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.” We begin, this argument goes, at the place of our not having been there. Absence from the scene of ‘the event’ and therefore its distance for us, the distance of it and its chase. An effort-failure of approximation that persists in its seductive wake. This is one scheme (of loss) that the historian of performance art has been said to find herself inside. Live art transpires in order to fade away, and so it occurs only at the cusp of its immediate, original presentation. This position yields certain credibilities and certain problems. Performance did

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begin as a practice of resistance to transaction, to the conception of art as an object-commodity around which commercial galleries, auction houses, and museums organize. In reply to this daisy chain of sale and valuation, in other words, performance artists like Burden, Carolee Schneeman, Suzanne Lacy, Joseph Beuys, and Vito Acconci furnished the body, the body and its being-together-with-others. “Performance resists the balanced circulations of finance,” Phelan insists. “It saves nothing; it only spends.” But if Phelan is right about performance’s resistance to Capital, her emphasis on the original, embodied debut of the work also lands it into an essentialist double bind. If the radical contact of the performance cannot be retrieved after the instant of its debut, if its gifts and pleasures cling to its disappearance, then where do we place Shoot and works like it, whose documentation was clearly a major concern of the artist? If the work is circumscribed to the container of an irretrievable past, practitioners and scholars face difficult questions about how to know, historicize, and care for it. And is it really in the best interests of the work to seal performance in an impermeable capsule? Can there be an archive of performance? Is performance art history?

The “parliament of forms” through which Jonas mediates her concerns, to borrow a term from curator Okwui Enwezor, elicits an expansive channel of shapes and media for thinking and knowing. Performance is a crucial realm of her practice, but it happens inside an open system into which video, drawing, installation, sound, and objects also feed. An image she has formulated in ink might surface in a video, which she may install in a gallery, which could project during a performance, in which she very well may draw the image live again. This rich circuit also occurs between and across her bodies of work, which revisit one another by manipulating earlier material. Because any given gesture in a Jonas work can travel seamlessly across time and media, it becomes impossible to find a proper, authentic, or original register. When the performance is always already mediated the idea of an auratic original dissolves. The art historian, Amelia Jones, has described her disdain for this ladder of authenticity. “There is no possibility of an unmediated relationship to any kind of cultural product, including body art,” she suggests. “Although I am respectful of the specificity of knowledges gained from participating in a live performance situation…this specificity should not be privileged over the specificity of knowledges that develop in relation to the documentary traces of such an event.”

This multiplicity of knowledges seems a more useful way of caring for and remembering a work of performance. Because an ephemeral, embodied event cannot be cryogenically sealed, performance, just like object-based practices in fact, will always mean different things to different moments and audiences. Reading Burden’s Shoot, for instance, in conversation with a deeply feminist practice like Jonas’ elucidates some of the masculinist bluster that Burden was staging and critiquing. Certainly the mass shootings that persist in American schools, houses of worship, and public spaces continue to demonstrate the permissions that are granted for violence. The work travels, and it is the responsibility of historians and curators to facilitate its movement in time for new audiences. Although Jonas’ career has been historically understudied—she has had, for instance, only one major retrospective at an American museum (at the Queens Museum in 2004)—the infrastructure for its preservation is being installed, even as she continues to challenge and reorder her previous output. In January 2014, for instance, the Getty Research Institute bought up the archives of New York’s performance space, the Kitchen, where Jonas debuted The Juniper Tree in 1977. In October 2014, the Hangar Bicocca in Milan opened Light Time Tales, an expansive survey of her video work from as far back as 1968. Choices are being made about the conventions for representing what is rapidly becoming a historical body of work. If Venice is a commemoration, it is also an announcement that her practice has become subject to more extensive scholarly scrutiny.

When performance is gathered and institutionalized into a kind of avant-garde canon, there are betrayals and distortions at stake. Consider the example of the Brazilian artist, Lygia Clark, who famously invited viewers to touch her art, to participate in it, and to play. Today

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“original versions” of Clark’s Bichos, or critters, small metal sculptures that can be folded and manipulated, have become subject to the very market logics they were expressly made to resist.

A 2014 Sotheby’s lot sold for over $1 million. In the same year, a MoMA retrospective, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, kept most of the Bichos examples on display behind glass; they have become too valuable to deliver the sensations for which they were designed. Essentialist understandings of performance hold real currency, and they can reinstate many of the hierarchies of objects and experience, connoisseurship and perception, that performance has sought to overthrow.

Another solution for historicizing performances, of course, is to redo them. The case for reenactment has its most famous ambassador in the person of Marina Abramović, whose 2010 MoMA retrospective, The Artist is Present, replayed some of her ‘classic’ pieces with trained, authorized performers. Earlier, in 2005, Abramović served as the instrument for Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim, in which she restaged seven landmark performance works from the ‘70s, all with permission either from the original artist or from her or his estate. On the one hand, transferring these gestures into another body and site allows performance to continue its work for new spectators, and refrains from insulating it in a kind of precious enclave. But does the cult of personality and celebrity that Abramović manages for herself, or the promise of these reenactments to deliver an official, authorized replication of an emerging performance canon really transmit the radical questions that this work instigated? Reviewing The Artist is Present in Artforum, performance scholar, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, clarified some of the concerns that attend to this particular vision for remembering. “More interesting than whether reenactments are art-historically correct,” she offered, “is what they are asked to do—whether they close down or open up the potentiality of performance.” Institutions like MoMA have even begun to “collect” performance, purchasing the copyrights, archives, and instructions for works deemed historically important. This practice not only requires that a single, certified version of the performance survives in the archive, but also restricts access to that work to sanctioned, ticketed instantiations of it. Curators and historians choose how to remember this work and how to care for that memory. To whom the archive will grant access, and whose hands will handle the remains. The radical pleasures and discoveries of Joan Jonas’ work require another kind of stewardship.

The fact of the body’s disappearance does not foreclose performance. Jonas herself has commented on “a desire to continue to perform, but in situations that did not always require a physical presence.” As performance scholar, Rebecca Schneider, has written, “We are challenged to think beyond the ways in which performance seems, according to our habituation to the archive, to disappear. We are also and simultaneously encouraged to articulate the ways in which performance...‘enters’ or begins again and again.” Finding a place for Jonas in the performance archive demands precisely this kind of open system. It is necessary to devise a place where her work might live on for multiple audiences without foreclosing the diversity of its forms and experiences. A combination of video archives, performance documentation, and objects ought to be gathered together with oral history, written records, and other ephemera. At the same time, embodied work needs to find itself into other bodies. Perhaps such a place would grant invitations for new generations of performance artists to study, rework, and reinterpret the work rather than allow it to harden it into an official, institutional facsimile. This is a utopian project.

It would require serious funding, institutional support, and a team of devoted scholars. But Joan Jonas deserves this treatment, because her work is an enormous landmark in the history of American art. Her work maps out an impossible circuit of live events, images, and objects that draw, erase, draw again. Jonas deserves an archive that will harbor these traces. The little hauntings that flicker and persist.

ANDREW J. SMYTH B’16 is a disappearing act.

Nov 13, 2015

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AIM FOR THE STARS Yelp Reviewers Take On Providence

by Jamie Packs, Shane Potts & Kim Sarnoff

Yelp is the democratic scream. Rate the restaurant, the local record store, the dental hygienist. People love your advice—from Yelp, we know that. That you and the world embed in each other, your words fly through each other. The relationships grow more robust each day—you log on, the economist checks the dataset, it’s growing, the data starts speaking. You log on, you’re putting the economist out of business. How is the dental hygienist with the gum pick? You know that. Where’s the record store? The economist knows you know that. We all sink and rise into each other’s webs. When you think where to go—your mental voice—it is now the voices of Yelp.

Yelp speaks for the city, too. She wants to impress you with her sewer songs, building hum, her street give. And if she gives enough, vibrations run from concrete to feet, to your heart to your brain, where the shouts and songs are stored. And you shout out on Yelp, the songs she moved through you.

Rhode Island State House (4.5 stars)

Waterfire (4 stars)

Providence City Hall (3.5 stars)

Swan Point Cemetery (4.5 stars)

Providence Train Station (3.5 stars)

Rhode Island Department of Motor Vehicles (2.5 stars)

Providence Public Library (3.5 stars)

City of Providence (4 stars)

Nov 13, 2015

METRO

08

Young Thug and the New Affects of Afrofuturism

In a video posted online this September, French journalist Mouloud Achour (from Clique TV) and rapper Young Thug are sitting on a lawn at the Parc de Saint-Cloud, just outside Paris.

Music from the nearby Rock en Seine festival filters in, reverberating from a distance: foggy, otherworldly.

“Yeah, I’m not from here,” says Thug, his bleached dreads quivering below a widebrimmed black hat. Under dark shades, his face is weathered and scarred, glinting with a couple of diamonds, a silver nose ring. He is wearing an Apple watch and a black Trapstar jersey.

“You heard of the new Earth that they found? It’s a new Earth, but it’s like ten times bigger than this Earth. It’s Earth, though. It looks identical, everything’s the same.” He leans forward, with a red Solo cup dangling from his hand, between bare legs and purple Nike’s. He looks to someone off-screen. “You ain’t heard of that yet? It’s ten times bigger than the Earth, but it’s Earth. It’s another Earth they just found, another planet. It looks just like Earth though, so they call it Earth. I’m probably from there.” He takes a moment, then shakes his head. “I don’t think I’m from here. […] I’m ready to go back, too. This shit petty.”

Take, for example, songs like “Picacho,” which is in part about Pokémon, or his “Oh Ya,” which features odd bars like “You know we up, I’m not talking ‘bout no Folgers / We get 10,000 pounds of midget / The way she walk up on a player I really thought that baby know us / But she just wanna fuck them digits.” Or these obscene lines from “Chickens”: “How the hell these n****s cappin’ and get killed when clapping / Baby girl I want a camel toe just like Aladdin.” Thug is perhaps most well-known for his challenges to narrow definitions of masculinity and gender comportment that the climate of mainstream hip-hop has historically maintained.

He frequently wears dresses and paints his nails, and routinely calls his friends “bae” or “lover.”

All in all, Thug has managed to carve out a highly specific niche for himself in mainstream rap, making him, veritably, a self-described “alien.”

But this use of the alien as a figural element isn’t just a branding strategy, an origin story for ‘expressing uniqueness’ or ‘eccentricity.’ There is a history of the alien, of the interplanetary, one which points beyond the horizon of individual careerism, of garden-variety rap game selfaggrandizement.

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Young Thug was born Jeffrey Lamar Williams on August 9, 1991, in Atlanta, Georgia, Earth.

He grew up one of ten siblings in Jonesboro South, a now demolished housing project in Atlanta’s Zone 3. By his account, he was heavily involved in gang activity by age 8 or 9; some years later, he got kicked out of middle school for breaking a teacher’s arm, after which he served at least four years in juvenile hall. Now, at the age of 24, he already has at least six kids, from relationships with multiple women.

Thug came up as a member of the R.O.C. Crew (alternately Rich Off Crime, Raised on Cleve-land, or Ready on Command), a kind of hybrid gang / rap-clique based out of South East Atlanta. After encouragement from fellow members, he started rapping seriously in 2010.

He realized he had a real talent for it, and quickly accumulated buzz with his first series of mixtapes, Came From Nothing (2011-2012). In 2013, Thug got his big break—Gucci Mane, arguably the most important figure in the Atlanta rap scene, recruited him to his label 1017 Brick Squad, home to Wacka Flocka and Chief Keef. Thug later signed a management deal with Birdman (affiliated with rapper Lil Wayne). By January 2014 he was a major figure in the scene, landing a Nicki Minaj remix and approval from Kanye West and Drake.

Thug’s vocal acrobatics were, and still are, an essential aspect of his work. His delivery— high and elastic, with occasional angularity and emphatic staccato—was immediately compelling to hip-hop fans who’d already embraced what might be called, using the rapper’s own words, a “weird voice” approach, evident in artists such as Minaj, Lil Wayne, and Kendrick Lamar. Thug’s rapping style is certainly bizarre; he always seems to be contorting his words, extending them, playing with their limits, so much so that they become incoherent, even “post-verbal.” It’s a unique affect, or more precisely a lack of stable affect. His is a wackiness that refuses to flatten out into consistent patterns, mannerisms, plateaus. All of which is to say that Thug’s style stands out among the current vogue of ‘schizophrenic’ rapping styles. And while it’s true that one can hear a similar ‘schizophrenic’ style in plenty of mainstream hip-hop music (Danny Brown, E-40, Chance the Rapper) Thug takes it to a much more experimental place.

This is what calling oneself an “alien” entails—being foreign to the game, speaking a language that’s sometimes literally incomprehensible.

October 1976: the Holy Mothership of Dr. Funkenstein (alter ego of George Clinton) and his “super-groovalisticprosifunkstication” crew lands for the first time on planet Earth, on the stage of the Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans. Clinton’s band, Parliament, had just released Mothership Connection, a landmark funk record which doubled as a mythological text. The conceit of the record, for Clinton, was the then-unlikely presence of black people in space, which was at that point the exclusive domain of Russians, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and so forth. Space was quickly becoming just another extension of the colonial white imaginary; Parliament intended to reclaim it for the disenfranchised masses, for “Afronauts, capable of funkitizing galaxies.”

A few years before, in 1974, the American jazz composer and bandleader Sun Ra produced a film called Space is the Place, based on a 1971 course he’d taught at UC Berkeley called “The Black Man in the Cosmos.” Featuring Ra and his ensemble, the Intergalactic Solar Arkestra, the film begins with the discovery of a new planet, presenting an alternative to various experiences of subjugation on Earth. “The music is different here; the vibrations are different,” says Ra’s character. “Not like planet Earth. Planet Earth sounds of guns, anger, frustration. There is no one to talk to on planet Earth to understand.” The plan is to settle on the new planet—a promised land, a new home for Earth’s Black race. As becomes clear, this will require a set of temporal adjustments, or technical interventions, in the structure of time itself: “Equation-wise, the first thing to do is consider internal link-time as officially ended. We’ll work on the other side of time. We’ll bring them here through either isotope, internal link-teleportation, transmolecularization—or better still, teleport the whole planet here through music.”

Like Parliament, and like a multitude of science-fiction authors before them, Sun Ra and the Arkestra imagine space as a screen onto which they can project a new future. The language they use is a poetic appropriation and redeployment of scientific jargon, full of neologisms, remixes of technical definitions. But with Ra, what seems like the language of an eccentric musician and his cohorts is really part of a radical tradition of mythmaking, weaponized against a dominant white, colonial scientific apparatus. As he asks us in Prophetika Book One, “If you are not a myth whose reality are you? If you are not a reality whose myth are you?” It’s the proprietary status of reality (and of the future) that’s being contested in this work. +++

09

ARTS

The College Hill Independent

by Yousef Hilmy & Alec Mapes-Frances illustration by Rob Polidoro

These projects from the 1970s are now seen as elements of Afrofuturism. Coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in 1994, Afrofuturism is an aesthetic that groups together a number of disparate artforms and artists according to their shared interest in the “link between Africa as a lost continent and Africa as an alien future,” as critic Kodwo Eshun puts it in The Last Angel of History (Black Audio Film Collective, 1996). While the hegemonic Modernist vision of the future implicitly or explicitly excludes black subjects, Afrofuturism insists on the centrality and agency of the Afrodiasporic subject in the construction of modernity. A particular moment in the late twentieth century arts is thus understood as having been prefigured by a whole collective experience of rupture, of loss, of dislocation, of hybridity. The transatlantic slave trade cuts a devastating wound in global space-time; the Afrodiaspora lives time as out of joint, space as out of place. In the thinking of Afrofuturism, the condition of life for the Afrodiasporic subject, therefore, is a perpetual “errantry,” or “rootlessness” (to borrow the terms of Martinican writer Édouard Glissant). Rather than despairing of this situation, however, she finds new ways to gather and mix disparate knowledges, languages, myths, and sciences. In a sense she has always been a time traveler, a cosmonaut, a semionaut—and not by choice.

Well into the 1980s and 90s, black artists continued to draw on new developments in science and technology as a way of imagining modes of escape. Time travel and space travel played a central role, but it was less about securing an uncolonized future destination and more about speeding things up, breaking things down. In the midst of Reagan/Thatcher-era neoliberalization, there were new imperatives. Try to reach escape velocity. Find a way out of the deadly orbit of the decaying American urban core. In places like Chicago and Detroit, at the crossroads of industrial and postindustrial production, techno and house emerged as musical forms. Groups such as Drexciya and Underground Resistance were part of a musical insurgency whose tactics included sci-fi mythologies not unlike those of Ra and Clinton. Drexciya’s seminal albums The Quest (1997) and Neptune’s Lair (1999) tell the story of an advanced underwater civilization, populated by the unborn children of dead mothers whose bodies had been discarded from ships along the middle passage. Underground Resistance, a militant, anti-corporate production collective, took on cyberpunk themes in records like The Final Frontier (1991) and Interstellar Fugitives (1998), drawing on biowarfare and computer viruses for inspiration. These were the sounds of an inertial era of localized, ruling-class “prosperity,” in which information technologies developed at rapid speeds while urban zones continued to decompose, hollowed out by deindustrialization and gradually recolonized by the advance guard of gentrification.

In late 1990s and early 2000s, Afrofuturism continued to find expression in black music genres. The Atlanta duo Outkast, comprised of Andre 3000 and Big Boi, drew critical acclaim for their ATLiens (1996), an outer space inspired album with elements of dub, gospel, and reggae. A year later, in 1997, Erykah Badu released her classic album Baduizm, which featured a fusion of free-soul and jazz. Its cover sets Badu against a black void, her head wrapped with a snake. A later Afrofuturist standout is Madvillain (2005), a collaboration between Madlib, the distributor of grooves, and MF DOOM, the man with the menacing silver mask. Obscure sci-fi and comic book citations surface in a lot of DOOM’s rhymes. The album even invokes Sun Ra—“Shadows of Tomorrow” stars Madlib’s high-pitched rap alias, Quasimoto, spitting a Ra poem over an eerie, dusty beat. The album’s stylistic influence can be seen in the music of contemporary artists such as Flying Lotus, Ras G, and Shabazz Palaces. And R&B is blessed by artists like Atlanta-based Janelle Monae, who deliberately integrates Afrofuturistic tropes— technology, space, androids—into her aesthetic, in what might be seen as a reproduction of the now-retro Afrofuturist genre, a nostalgia for the future.

Nov 13, 2015

Moving into the 2010s, it’s clear that there’s an intimacy between Afrofuturist experimentation and innovative forms like trap and drill music. These genres make very few explicit references to historical Afrofuturism, yet the connections are indisputable, and many of the desires and affects and even tonalities are shared. Today’s futurists are mostly located in Atlanta, though some are part of the Chicago scene. Like the best of Detroit techno, the new sonics of Lex Luger, Young Chop, Metro Boomin, Zaytoven, and London on da Track—producers who are most responsible for shaping Thug’s music, along with that of Gucci Mane, Chief Keef, Migos, Waka Flocka Flame, Future, and more—are dark, gritty, mechanized. The pulsing regularities of techno have been reduced in tempo and layered with jittery, scattering hi-hats—little concentrations of intensity radiating outward over somber, synthetic instrumentation. +++ Young Thug’s casual invocation of a doubled, “other Earth” thus opens onto a deep continuity, one that seems to have been recently repressed, or at the very least overlooked. No doubt, the Afrofuturist drive to find a line of flight from this planet, a thrust against inertia, a way out of the present, remains dominant in recent rap music. In the most immediate sense, to leave the projects and to leave poverty behind are the primary goals of creative production—even if leaving never becomes possible in a real sense. As Young Thug points out in his Clique interview, one can make music and escape without moving.

Trace the lines of a network between utopian jazz and exuberant funkadelia, through Fordist four-on-the-floor to post-Fordist jungle and footwork. In every case it’s possible to identify a speculative engagement with alterity or alienness, with the status of futurity, and with the prospect of getting out of here. Young Thug and his Atlanta contemporaries are only the latest generation of black artists and thinkers to participate in the reopening of a consistently foreclosed future. What appears as idle fantasy or even simply idleness is political: the Thug ethos of generalized resistance, not giving a fuck, punk anti-authoritarianism, gender experimentation, even nihilism and so forth is set against a present dominated by state-sanctioned poverty, militarized police and incarceration, and ubiquitous anti-Black racism. In this music, the absence of a future, or the abyss that is the future, is reactivated and made to resonate.

YOUSEF HILMY B’16 & ALEC MAPES-FRANCES B’17 are remixes of technical definitions.

ARTS

10

Sleeping beneath the rockline

by Sebastian Clark

by Eve Zelickson illustration by Yuko Okabe

A LONG REIGN

The Life and Times of Marie Laveau Marie Laveau was born a free Creole woman in New Orleans on September 10, 1801. She lived in a quaint house on St. Ann Street, in the French Quarter, her whole life. It was in this dwelling that lawyers, merchants, and politicians received her personal consultations. Her divinations were grounded in both her spiritual education and information she acquired from a network of accomplices who worked as slaves in elite households. The precision of her predictions, her training under the famous Voodoo Doctor Jean Montaigne, and her high societal position as a freed black woman won her the respect of the Voodoo community, who named her the first Voodoo Queen.

Laveau’s obituary in the New York Times, published the week of her death in 1881, describes her hold on the New Orleans Voodoo community: “besides knowing the secret healing qualities of various herbs which grew in abundance in the woods...her advice was valuable and her penetration remarkable.” The obituary depicts Laveau as a compassionate woman of “warm heart and tender nature” who “never refused summons from the suffering,” praying beside the beds of people stricken with yellow fever and cholera. However, prefacing the stories of Laveau’s altruism and intelligence, a disclaimer reads “to the superstitious Creoles, Marie appeared as a dealer in the black arts and a person to be dreaded and avoided.” The New York Times obituary is one of the only written records of Laveau’s mysterious life, providing limited insight into conflicting portrayals of Laveau as a benevolent saint and a manipulator of supposed ‘black magic.’ People both inside and outside the Voodoo community have leveraged Laveau’s murky identity, assuming rights over what remains of her story, and often embellishing the rest. The question remains, who, if anyone, has license to Voodoo’s most prized priestess? +++ Many Hollywood films have taken their own liberties with Marie Laveau’s life, casting her as the perfect villainess. In Mirrors, a 1978 horror film directed by Noel Black, a couple’s honeymoon in New Orleans turns dark when the wife, Marianne, is cursed by Marie Laveau. The Voodoo Queen plagues Marianne with bloody nightmares that begin to come true.

More recently, the third season of the television series American Horror Story has taken advantage of the mists of ambiguity surrounding Marie Laveau, turning her into a beautiful, blood-spilling witch. Set in Louisiana in 2013, Angela Basset plays Marie Laveau, who seeks revenge on the descendants of Salem witches residing in New Orleans. In the plot, Laveau makes a murderous pact with Papa Legba, god of the crossroads where heave and earth meet, who is misrepresented by the show as the Devil. Creators of American Horror Story, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, opted to turn the Voodoo Queen into a tormentor, having her sacrifice babies and murder the innocent. In one scene, Laveau conducts a fertility ritual in which she boils a man’s semen and pours goat’s blood on his wife’s vagina while half-naked dancers circle the room.

No records of Laveau performing this ritual exist, and the use of semen and goat’s blood isn’t cited in any documented Voodoo rituals. Turning an esteemed Voodoo figure into a manipulative criminal not only transforms Laveau’s legacy, but fetishizes the religion of Voodoo. Hollywood propagates a plethora of misconceptions of Voodoo, portraying it as a religion of black magic, depicting Voodoo practitioners as digging up graves, sacrificing children, and poking pins in dolls that cause faraway enemies to wither in pain.

Even some Voodoo practitioners package these fabricated Hollywood stereotypes, like Marie Laveau’s alleged dark powers, and sell them to an unknowing audience. Marie

Nov 13, 2015

Laveau’s House of Voodoo, located on Bourbon Street in the historic French Quarter of New Orleans is one such place.

One can purchase Marie Laveau’s “authentic voodoo doll” for $8.95, her love and passion spell kit for $24.95, or her spirit offering bag, “to be a catalyst for spiritual evolution and social progress” for $29.95. Ezrulie’s Voodoo Store, named after the Voodoo goddess of love and passion, is another shop that takes advantage of Laveau’s seductive public image. Located on Royal Street, Ezrulie’s offers “Marie Laveau Love Spells” to “draw passion into your life” by summoning the Voodoo Queen whose “love spells are infallible.” F. & F. Botanica, located in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans, is a tourist hotbed that sells everything from court-case spell kits to sweet-smelling oils that serve as offerings to Marie Laveau.

They pride themselves on creating an “authentic Voodoo experience” for their customers. Maretza Murillo, the store manager, explains the motivation behind purchasing some of their products. Picking a black break-up candle with a snake emblem on it, she says, “if your husband is messing around with somebody else, and you want to break that relationship up, you light this candle, say their names, and it should help.”

Some practitioners within the Voodoo community aren’t supportive of the commodification of the religion. Voodoo Priestess Ava Kay Jones, who leads Voodoo rituals in her home in New Orleans and has devoted her life to educating the public on the Voodoo religion, says in the documentary Voodoo From the Inside, “when you go into these so-called Voodoo shops, you will find all sorts of paraphernalia, some of these things are obviously meant as jokes.” She cites break-up candles and win-the-lottery mojo bags as examples, saying that the “discerning person can tell what is actually meant as a spiritual aid and what is a lark.” Brandi Kelley, director of the Historic Voodoo Museum in New Orleans, comments in the documentary that since “evil sells and Satan sells,” the practitioners embracing Voodoo fallacies and exaggerations take “advantage of the misinformed public image of this religion” and profit from it.

While Hollywood has pounced on Laveau’s allure as a mysterious enchantress, and some Voodoo followers have embraced this appeal and packaged her for consumption, there are many Voodoo practitioners who evoke her spirit daily, worshipping her as a Loa, or Voodoo spirit force. Priestess Miriam Chamani, owner of a Voodoo shop in New Orleans that houses many portraits of Laveau, believes “Voodoo is about finding ways to survive conflict and trouble,” and “as long as you’re doing the work of helping people get through difficult times, you’re doing the work that Marie Laveau was all about.” On St. John’s Eve, the evening before the feast of St. John the Baptist on June 24, a few hundred Voodoo practitioners gather on Magnolia Bridge over Bayou St. John, where Laveau held many extravagant ceremonies between the 1830s and 1870s. There, they engage in an annual head-washing ceremony, commemorating and honoring Marie Laveau.

They dress in all white, adorned with Laveau’s trademark white headscarf, and bring offerings of hair ribbons, blue and white candles, and oils for the Voodoo Queen. These Voodoo practitioners call on Laveau to uplift and enhance their spiritual practice. Sallie Ann Glassman, Voodoo Priestess who leads the head-washing ceremonies on Magnolia Bridge, says “we honor Marie Laveau and her spirit 150 years after her death. She is still very active in New Orleans and people still go to her for help, healing, and empowerment.”

It is these practicing Voodooists who struggle to preserve the Marie Laveau described in the New York Times obituary, the patron saint of Voodoo who led many followers to powerful, spiritual awakening. Laveau’s ability to transcend paradigms and appeal to people outside the Voodoo religion

has left devout practitioners grasping tighter on their Queen.

Angela Basset, when talking with Summer TV Tour about playing Laveau in American Horror Story, said, “the writers have room to just create whatever out of their imaginations. I get a chance to play also.” It is this view of Marie Laveau—as an outline of a woman to be colored in however one wishes— that causes practitioners to wince. Laveau’s rise in popularity has Voodoo practitioners speaking out against the distorted representations across media and within New Orleans.

Voodoo Priestess Severina KarunaMayi Singh writes on her website, Voodoo Crossroads, “In Voodoo, the word “Queen” is used to denote respect and honor for one who was a great priestess and of immeasurable service to her community,” and Singh notes that today, “few understand how to continue to serve her so her blessings may be brought forth.” The ardent practitioners encourage the public, Hollywood, and Voodooists commodifying Laveau to study her positive historical and spiritual impact before casting her in a movie, selling Laveau love oils, or calling on her in prayer ceremonies. +++ Today, Laveau’s grave remains a site of pilgrimage for Voodooists, and a popular tourist attraction; with a whopping number of visitors only surpassed in the US by the grave of Elvis Presley. Plot 347 in St. Louis Cemetery in New Orleans is splattered with Xs, for it is said that if you draw three Xs, spin three times, and knock three times on her grave, Laveau will answer your deepest prayer. Martha Ward, Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans, who has written a book about Laveau, explains, “Marie Laveau rules the imagination of this city. People think about her, see her, have visions of her, dream about her, talk to her. I know because these people are showing up at my doorstep almost every day.” It may be the plethora of incredible legends surrounding Marie Laveau, and the inability to determine fact from fiction that entices both practitioners and outsiders. One is left with two memories of the Voodoo Queen: the falsified version that finds form in movies, perfumes, and dolls, and the true Queen, whose reign continues, kept painstakingly alive by the practitioners who recall her spirit daily.

EVE ZELICKSON B’19 is a catalyst for spiritual evolution.

OCCULT

12

THE PERFECT BUBBLE The Polynomial Guide to the Universe

Everyday, I cut through the alleyway off Angell and Thayer street. There’s a dumpster, there. On a good day, whatever’s left in there reeks to high hell and I hold my nose and shimmy past. On a bad day, I carefully leap over some broken glass and weave over a piece of what appears to be a wooden fence sprawled across the entryway, balancing myself against the wall and placing my hand on what I tell myself is graffiti, but if we’re being perfectly honest here is probably some sort of mold.

Why the hell do I do this? It’s the shortest route to my apartment. Every moment that I waste walking in some inefficient way, I will pay for later. I will sit at my desk, frantically typing out code as the clock dings on my last hour to finish a project before the deadline, and every wasted moment of my day will rush into my head and I will vow to never waste so much time again.

Computer programmers are taught to think obsessively about time efficiency. Can a program read less, store less, process less, and still complete the same task? They’re trained to know the answer to these questions before their hands hit the keyboard.

The problem is, time is like a slowly depleting gas tank on a plane. We all know we’re going to run out eventually. Unlike other limits in computer science like computer memory or Internet bandwidth, there isn’t always some way to generate more of it. All we can do is try to optimize, or, in the case of the plane, to tweak altitude and engine speed over and over to keep the plane in the air as long as possible.

When I’m trying to navigate the city efficiently, finding an optimal path isn’t hard. There’s what, 3, maybe 4 ways to get to Amy’s on Wickenden from my apartment? But not all problems that we encounter are this easy. Suppose, for instance, that I walk out of my apartment and someone has placed a very large hedge maze between myself and Amy’s. “Agh,” I’d probably say. “I guess it was only a matter of time.”

I go into the hedge maze and come to a fork. I choose one option, and then come to a fork. I choose a path again, and come to another fork. And another. And another. I soon realize there are thirty forks in each path through the hedge maze. To find the only path through the maze, I’d have to turn correctly, right or left, at all thirty forks. That’s one out of about a billion possible paths.

Solving mazes like this one can’t be done easily. The only possible strategy is trial and error, randomly guessing a single path out of a billion each time. Without the maze, things are different. Walking through the city blocks, I only have to make a couple of decisions, so there are very few possibilities. I can quickly decide which path to take. In the maze, however, there are many more decisions to make, leading to an explosion in the number of choices I face. In fact, if there are 30 forks, then I have 230 paths, an exponential number, to choose from. It’ll take me a huge amount of time to find the shortest path. Exponential functions grow very rapidly, so increasing the number of forks will make the situation even worse. Contrast this with algorithms that run in less than exponential time: if, for example, we only had one fork in our maze with n choices. Then, the number of paths we have to search through to find the shortest is exactly n. Instead of choosing from an exponential number of paths, we’re now choosing from a polynomial number of paths. Polynomials are a type of mathematical expression that grow much less rapidly than exponentials, so an algorithm that finds its solution in an amount of time that grows according to a polynomial will run relatively quickly.

Problems like maze-solving, where there is no better strategy than trial and error, are known to computational complexity theorists as NP. Formally, NP is the set of problems where the time to solve each problem is not given by a polynomial expression. For the purposes of this article, let’s just say that problems in NP take super long to solve, and in contrast P problems— or as mathematicians call them polynomial time problems—are problems that can be solved quickly.

But how can we be sure that there’s no better way to solve the maze? Actually, we can’t. No one has been able to definitively prove that P≠NP, or in other words, that some problems can’t be solved in polynomial time and, therefore, can only be solved in non-polynomial time (NP).

The Clay Math Institute in New Hampshire listed this question, known as P versus NP, as one of their seven Millennium Problems in 2000, offering $1 million to whomever can provide a valid proof. Though it’s unsolved, P versus NP is a relatively old problem. It was first mentioned in 1956, in a now-famous letter from Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel to Hungarian polymath John von Neumann. The NP question so interested Gödel that he sent this letter to a seriously ill von Neumann’s sickbed, wishing him health in the first paragraph. Fifty years later, the study of computational complexity has evolved into a fully-fledged field of its own.

It’s done so with good reason. So much of modern technology, and increasingly society, is based around the assumption that P≠NP. When we’re encrypting a password, for instance, we want it to be extremely difficult to crack so that a hacker can’t figure out what the password is without having to test billions and billions of possibilities. But, if there was, say, a way for a hacker to figure out a password in P time, then all our online accounts—everything from money in the bank, to Facebook photos, to our precious Spotify playlists—would be up for grabs. And it’s not just computer programs whose capability is limited by P≠NP. If it takes computers a long time to find exact answers to certain problems, then it will take just as long for us to do so.

13

TECH

And finding the best way through the maze to Amy’s isn’t the only NP problem out there waiting to be solved. Nowadays, the medical field constructs massive causality networks, which, if they could be solved, would determine the best way to identify a patient’s disease based only on their symptoms, and what their best course of treatment would be. Unfortunately, solving these networks cannot be done in polynomial time. These same models could be used in lieu of macroeconomic approximations, and could tell us how exactly to increase GDP. If all algorithms ran quickly, artificial intelligence would move forward leaps and bounds, and it would become easy to construct inorganic brains with the tremendous learning power of the human brain. If P=NP, we’d find ourselves in a very different world from the one we live in today. +++ One famous NP-hard problem is that of finding so-called minimal surface areas: if you have in your hand some loop of string, whose interior creates a gap in space, what’s the least amount of material that could span this gap? Filling such gaps with the least possible material is a problem of great interest, especially for economical roofers who’d like to know how many shingles to buy before attempting to fix a hole in a strangely shaped roof.

It’s an old piece of folklore in the computer science community that soap bubbles find these minimal surface areas. Dip your loop of string in soapy water, and the resulting bubblefilm uses the least possible amount of soap. Since the surface area problem lives in NP, it was only a matter of time before someone put two and two together. In 2005, Selmer Bringsjord and Joshua Taylor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute published a paper, modestly titled “P=NP,” laying claim to that million-dollar prize by means of a proof involving soap bubbles.

Since finding minimal surface areas is NP-hard, they argue, and since soap bubbles are supposed to do this quickly, it would seem that our physical reality was somehow solving an NP problem almost instantly. Therefore, they announce, P must be equal to NP. Scott Aaronson, a researcher and computer scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study­­— an independent postdoctoral research center located in Princeton, New Jersey that has been home to famous intellectuals like Albert Einstein and Alan Turing—wouldn’t stand for this claim. He started obsessively dipping complicated loops of string in soapy water, with fortunate results. He found that not only do soap bubbles not use the least possible area, but also that even when they do, it takes them a really long time. In this sense, P≠NP would have profound implications. It seems not to be restricted merely to algorithms running on computers or inside human heads. In fact, it seems to limit the behavior of our physical reality in a very real way, ensuring that even physical systems cannot simulate solutions to NP-hard problems.

What makes an academic like Aaronson so riled up that he decides to get his hands dirty (or rather, extremely clean)? NP problems have the property that they “reduce” to one another.

This means that, if you have a computer program that can solve a particular NP problem and then you’re given a new NP problem, there’s always some way for you to rethink the new NP problem so that you can use the same computer program to solve it as well. How that rethinking takes place is often very complex so we won’t explore it here, but the concept is a powerful one. If there is a computer program that can solve an NP problem in polynomial time, then we can use it to solve all NP problems in polynomial time. That would mean that basically there’s no such thing as an NP problem, because they could all be solved as quickly as P problems.

That’s what it means for P to equal NP. And if that happens, the floodgates open.

For Aaronson, P=NP would lead to total disaster. He references one particular problem from NP to make this point, which is the problem of constructing the most succinct program that’s capable of intelligently recreating some piece of real world data. This problem, in Aaronson’s view, is difficult for a reason: in order to simplify something really complex—like a table of all historical stock market data, or Shakespeare’s complete works—to its simplest form, one must really understand what they’re working with. Aaronson’s idea seems far-fetched, but it makes sense: it seems like a succinct and intelligent representation of all stock market data would encode within itself the laws governing the market, and that the most condensed version of Shakespeare’s works would contain the principles at the heart of his work. But if P=NP, computers could construct these representations extremely quickly. Having constructed these representations, we’d acquire the knowledge necessary to game the stock market and invest our way to the 1%, or to write a play just as good as one of Shakespeare’s. Stock brokers and playwrights (or at least those playwrights who are Shakespeare wannabes) spend their lives trying to accomplish precisely these things, but P = NP would imply that their life works could be trivially comprehended by an algorithm. +++ Aaronson explored this idea of work and time with an example from the movie 1986 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. This film finds the Enterprise crew in the year 1986, to which they’ve time traveled from 2286 in order to get some humpback whales (which are needed because a “probe” that is wreaking havoc on Earth will only stop if, you guessed it, it hears the call of a real life humpback whale). Aaronson summarizes, “The problem is that building a tank to transport the whales requires a type of plexiglass that has not yet been invented [in the year 1986]. In desperation, the crew seeks out the company that will invent the plexiglass in the future, and reveals the molecular formula to that company so they will make it for them. The question is, where did the work of inventing the formula take place?”

The College Hill Independent

by Dash Elhauge & Charlie Windolf illustration by Yuko Okabe

Spock and gang escape the notion that tasks must take a certain amount of time to complete. They give the formula to the people in the past without them having to go through all the billions of molecular formulas for plexiglass that won’t work. Time travel offers free human accomplishments. The same absurdity arises when P = NP: computer programs can quickly do that people would normally do, offering up free human accomplishments. Any notion that time has value, that it can be saved, spent, or obtained – is thrown out the window.

In this sense, P versus NP is a question about the value of human work. Computers have replaced humans in a wide array of fields, but we maintain that they will never be able to perform tasks that we consider intrinsically human, like the creation of art. But if P=NP, these processes that we have set aside as “human” may suddenly become computable and meaningless. +++ Jorge Luis Borges’ 1944 story “The Library of Babel” is set in a universe composed entirely of small hexagonal rooms filled with books. A society, living in this library, believes that it stretches on forever, and also that each book is unique. One prominent early librarian offered the following syllogism: if no two books are alike, and there are infinitely many books, the library must contain every possible book. The society is awed by this proof, which implies that all possible knowledge exists in the books surrounding them. At first, they celebrate: somewhere, on some shelf, there must exist a book containing the solutions to all personal issues, or a book containing the procedure for world peace. The citizens of the library comb through the shelves obsessively. But they soon grow disillusioned and stop, for how can they expect to find the texts they desire with so many meaningless others to search through? Just like someone trying to solve a tough maze, these librarians are reduced to the process of elimination. They can do no better than to read through each and every book until they happen upon their grail.

So a superstition develops among the citizens of the library. They say that some librarian, in some hexagon, has found “a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books.” This librarian is known as the Book-Man, and his omniscience is godly. The Book-Man knows what others could only know from a task that would take them an infinite amount of time, all from reading a single book. He is, in this way, the P=NP-Man, wielding the power of having completed an immeasurably large task in only a short amount of time.

The narrator of “The Library of Babel,” who has been describing the library as a hypothetical to the reader, finishes by deriving a certain satisfaction from the nonexistence of the BookMan. It’s somehow comforting to him that the key to life’s greatest questions is not readily available. Aaronson seems intent on trying to show P≠NP with similar motivations: those time consuming tasks which we devote our lives to can’t be done in an instant by some computer.

Even if our solutions to life’s problems are “sub-optimal,” there seems to be a comfort in not knowing for sure.

In fact, it seems this desire to have P≠NP is nothing new. The Old Testament had an omniscient God with limitless knowledge, like our Book-Man. But Christianity reformed this notion in the New Testament, responding with a form of God who was human and limited, who had to spend time to achieve goals. This was 2000 or so years ago, but the desire for these limits seems suggestive of a particular way of deriving meaning from life. Without these limits, spending time to achieve future goals is a useless exercise. Thinking P=NP might not just be difficult (if not impossible) to prove mathematically—it may be a terrifying proposition, one which challenges a fundamental belief almost all humans share about the value of work and life: that the time we spend doing things we don’t want to do is worthwhile, and that our problems can’t instantly be solved by a computer. Maybe the proposition is so terrifying that it’s precisely what would drive a computer scientist to spend hundreds of hours dipping slightly differently bent strings into a vat of bubble juice.

Speculating about what precisely makes P vs NP such a difficult problem is hard to pin down, but it seems like the question is poking at a fundamental assumption of humanity.

It may be that, in a way, P≠NP is axiomatic—that proving it is so difficult because it’s been assumed to be true for so long. Or it may be that instead P=NP, but that proving so is so fundamentally scary that many of the best mathematicians avoid it.

The nature of P vs NP seems to be that it challenges the way we think about everything from literature to economics. Actually finding the answer to P vs NP might not actually be as important as considering the question itself, of finding the ways in which it challenges the limits of our knowledge. There are hundreds of mathematicians and computer scientists all over the world ruthlessly trying to solve this problem. Answers to P vs NP are presented and struck down almost monthly. The point being, maybe sometimes, it makes sense not to jump the broken glass behind Angell Street. Maybe sometimes you should walk by the crêperie and peak into the tattoo parlor. After all, if P=NP, you haven’t been as efficient you thought, anyway.

DASH ELHAUGE B’17 & CHARLIE WINDOLF B’17 suck at mazes.

Nov 13, 2015

TECH

14

On Robert Walser’s Microscripts

Writing, by nature, is a physical trade. It has motion, exertion, exactitude. Handwriting is formed by the tracing of a pen along set routes, the strain of muscles in your hands to make the movements precise. Keyboards haven’t abolished this practice; fingertips must still fly to keys, must still enact a rhythm. Writing has as much to do with corporeality as it does with communication. A writer, sitting down at a desk, shares the posture of a craftsman at his bench, practicing and refining the labor of his hands.

The conception of “the writer” is now an artistic identity rather than a practice. It is a romantic vision, as tied to a notion of celebrity as it is to the art of writing itself. Some writers attempt to monetize their craft, while others do it for the sheer pleasure, not seeking wide readership for their writing to have meaning. Both kinds of writer are far from our culture’s fixation on the author as a public intellectual. This is not always flashy work—there is little room to acquire widespread status and prestige, the consequence of an abundance of talented writers within a culture that praises a few prominent figures. While some may acquire specialized followings, a large portion of writers today, from bloggers to online columnists, lie in stages of relative obscurity.

Judged by the allure of writerly fame, this obscurity is a failure. But it doesn’t have to be.

For the Swiss writer, Robert Walser, creating art on the humblest, most workmanlike of fringes saved his art. Some of the best works of his career were also some of the twentieth century’s most fascinating and enigmatic. These pieces, called microscripts, were so obscure, so physically tiny, they could not be read with the human eye. Walser embodied their miniscule nature throughout his career—in a profile for the New Yorker, contributor Benjamin Kunkel called him “the incredible shrinking writer.” His work constantly strived for a full retreat—its ideas were so quavering and uncertain as to hardly seem present at all—but his craft gained meaning in its move towards humility. As it shrank, it grew. +++ Robert Walser was born in Biel, Switzerland, in 1878, to a father who ran a meager bookbinding enterprise and a mother who descended from a family of nail smiths. Like his parents, Walser often worked modest professions. He was forced to leave school at the age of 14; his first jobs included working as both a bank clerk and an office clerk. In 1906, after working as a servant at Daubrau Castle, he moved to Berlin. There, he wrote his first three books, Fritz Kocher’s Essays, The Tanner Siblings, and The Assistant. These early novels centered around topics Walser would obsess over his entire career: subservience, practicality, and those honorable people who have no need for honor.

Franz Kafka, upon his debut, was called “a special case of the Walser type” by the Austrian writer, Robert Musil. The comparison is apt; both Kafka and Walser avoided emulating the bravura of other modernist experimenters of their time. Instead, their styles were both progressive and discreet. For Kafka, this meant revealing the alienation in powerlessness, the disconnections and crises brought by power’s interventions. Walser’s subjects were just as characterized by their suppression, and were relegated to professions on the periphery: clerks, servants, assistants. The magic of Walser comes when his characters’ emotions grow larger than their marginal status.

His characters are eternally cheery, even as they ruminate on their insignificance. The titular protagonist of his most famous novel, Jakob von Gunten, finds uncanny delight in being nonessential: “In later life I shall be a charming, utterly spherical zero. As an old man I shall have to serve young and confident and badly educated ruffians, or I shall be a beggar, or I shall perish.” Walser admires his protagonist for wanting to be of use, but he affords Jakob more freedom than Jakob allows himself. Jakob is a dreamer, and often slips into reveries of castles and medieval dames. As he dreams, his descriptions becomes more emotional and abstract; we can see Walser allowing himself glimpses of impressionism and fantasy before staring back down at his shoes.

15

FEATURES

The experimentation of Walser’s first novels garnered the most attention he would ever receive in his career, and Walser soon found himself praised by the literary elite of his time, including the Czech writer and Kafka’s close confidante, Max Brod. Even with his newfound acclaim, Walser preferred humility over vanity. Turning to Hugo van Hofmannsthal, then one of Austrian literature’s crown jewels, at a soirée, he chided: “Couldn’t you forget for a bit that you’re famous?”

Even the quality of his prose seems to eschew formal ambitions. In few other bodies of work can you come across a phrase as beautifully clumsy as this: “Yesterday I engaged a more uncomely than pulchritudinous member of the solicitude-requiring faction of the collectivity of humanity—at what hour of the day need scarcely be divulged—in a suitable location, that is to say amidst the city’s hustle and bustle, in a to my mind appropriate conversation, which touched, among other things, on the, as I am surely justified in asserting, most certainly not uninteresting topic of astrology, a science which, to underscore this in passing, is currently all the rage.”

This is unstylishly stylish writing. Like all of Walser’s subjects, each word gains importance by being almost entirely unnecessary. German literary critic, Walter Benjamin, observed that in Walser’s writing, as soon as the sentence leads somewhere, a qualifier makes a quick reversal, causing “a torrent of words…in which the only point of every sentence is to make the reader forget the previous one.”

As nationalist sentiments took hold of the German literary establishment in the years before World War I, Walser lost the favor of the publications that had supported his odd endeavors in poetry and prose, forcing him to return to Switzerland in 1913. Walser struggled to write, first in his sister’s apartment, then in a miserable room in the attic of the Hotel zum blauen Kreuz. It was here that Walser stooped at his desk, in his dusty military jacket, for 13 hours a day. German writer, W.G. Sebald, writes that Walser’s shoes were “slippers [Walser] fashioned himself from leftover scraps of material.” Walser’s writing, once defined by its miniature revelries, had become claustrophobic. Observing the character of ash and his own diminution, he writes: “Ash is submissiveness, worthlessness, irrelevance itself...tread on ash, and you will barely notice that you have stepped on anything.”

Sebald named Walser a “clairvoyant of the small” precisely because of this—he was the prophet of his own obscurity. In this period of suffering, Walser produced some of the most beautifully enigmatic work of the era; unseen and unpublished for decades, only now can this work be read with eyes not attuned to the infinitesimal. +++ In order to overcome his stifling self-doubt, Walser developed a writing technique that was, quite literally, too tiny to be read and criticized. In what is now called his method of “micrography,” Walser used a pencil to scribble tiny prose and poetry pieces on scraps of paper. Business cards, theater tickets, pulp novel covers. No longer simply depicting life’s detritus, he began to use this method in his work. In order to fit two or three pieces on a single paper fragment, Walser wrote in the German Kurrent script, which used letters so abstracted and simplified their difference was often indiscernible. The transcription in the 1970s of the 526 surviving fragments was painstaking, and required literature scholars Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte to study the text using a thread counter, speculating and reconstructing meanings for many of the unintelligible words. They found, amidst the piles of loose pages, an entire lost novel (The Robber, Walser’s last) written on twenty-four 13 x 21.5 cm cards.

In a 1927 letter to journal editor Max Rychner, Walser explains the reasoning behind what appears to be a maddening writing process: “I suffered a real breakdown in my hand on account of the pen, a sort of cramp from whose clutches I slowly, laboriously freed myself by means of the pencil. A swoon, a cramp, a stupor—these are always both physical and mental. So I experienced a period of disruption...I learned again, like a little boy, to write.” The microscripts— clumped and grey on each paper scrap like so many particles of ash—are some of Walser’s best prose. Their condensed form typifies Walser in prime ironic form. One microscript begins: “Usually I first put on a prose piece jacket, a sort of writer’s smock, before venturing to begin with a composition, but I’m in a rush right now, and besides, this is just a tiny little piece, a

The College Hill Independent

by Will Weatherly illustration by Julie Kwon silly trifle featuring beer coasters as round as plates.” Walser goes on, but neglects to provide a reason for the piece’s existence. Ultimately, he was a writer who constantly attempted (and failed) to justify the oddness of his work. He found the best self-expression when he didn’t have any justification to offer, or when his work didn’t need any. After all, what does writing gain if it never asks to be read?

It would be too easy to call the microscripts Walser’s solution to the suffering brought by the difficulty of his writing. Instead, the microscripts were that suffering’s logical fulfillment; if the prose of his novels receded into slightness and ambiguity, the microscripts were its vanishing point. While Walser was able to put words on paper after an immense battle with writer’s block, few of the microscripts actually found their way to print. Some he transcribed and sent off to magazines, whose readership balked at the fragments’ apparent nonsense. Other microscripts were only unearthed after Walser’s death. Perplexed at the ream of enigmatic work, his literary executor, Carl Seelig, had stored them away as undecipherable artifacts of his late friend.

For Seelig, it was easy to dismiss them this way. After more than a decade of artistic and financial struggle, Walser was brought by his sister, Lisa, to a Waldau sanatorium in 1929. There he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, an evaluation that remains dubious. Walser, showing few schizophrenic symptoms, seemed merely to have been exhausted and depressed; the strain of writing had whittled down to almost nothing. He was later forcibly moved to an asylum at Herisau, and though he told a visitor, “I am not here to write, I am here to be mad,” a guard reported seeing Walser hunched over a tiny leaflet, scribbling away.

Even in his decline, Walser’s passions were irreducible. The microscripts show this: in the absence of an audience, Walser was able to retain the art of his writing. He was able to find strength in marginality by writing in the literal margins of book pages, play programs, and index cards. The microscripts perfectly unified Walser’s subject and form, utilizing their tiny medium to demonstrate what beauty could be found in reality’s slightest details. Though just as provocative as well-known high modernists, Walser was never interested in making grand statements. But pulled by contemporary tastes, Walser’s readers came and went. Walser’s constant was writing, in its purest form—pencil on paper. It was as mundane and profound as the aspects of a simpler life he celebrated.

Although Walser never traveled beyond his modest existence in Switzerland and Germany, he was prone to taking long walks in the country. In 1925, Walser trekked around 150 kilometers between Berne and Geneva, though we are not left with many records of the journey. He walked alone, saw small wonders alone, scrawled them on paper scraps for him alone to read.

The microscripts offer a perspective of this time as well. They envision the possibility of truly personal writing, writing that is not only about oneself, but formed and recorded in one’s solitude. One microscript shows this walking Walser as a kind of beggar, taking private alms from the laughter of children, and finding joy in the way that “beggarly little faces” were reflected in the autumn trees.

Robert Walser died of a heart attack while on a stroll through the winter landscape of Herisau, Christmas Day, 1956. We can credit him for his celebration of the mundane, his strive towards what is real and practical and minute in the beauty of writing. The fact that he died while doing what he loved, walking, was perhaps the last of his tiny tricks, his small miracles.

WILL WEATHERLY B’19 is more uncomely than pulchritudinous.

Nov 13, 2015

features

16

ABOUT A ROCK

by EmmaJean Holley

If you grew up on the island, you called it The Rock. To use it in a sentence: “I can’t wait to get off this Rock for good.” But I’ll tell you a secret: no one ever does. At least, no more than anyone ever leaves the beach without finding crumbs of it days later in their pockets, in their hairlines, on their skin.

In a world with such clearly defined edges, space is at a premium and most people I know have learned to use it with startling economy. Instead of beginning a new page we reuse the same one over and over again, writing in the spaces between the lines, until life loops back on itself like the self-consuming tides. To give an example: my high school English teacher said I reminded him of thirty years ago on a Saturday, when he secretly drove a shy, bookish girl to the SATs because her father forbade her from going to college. It was eerie, he said, how much we had in common.

He mixed up our names at one point while writing my college recommendation letter, never did manage to wash off all the sand.

Later we found out the girl was an aunt of mine, who I’ve never met. But she was so determined to get off the Rock for good that I think she must still find bits of it where she hasn’t cleaned in years. But her brother—my dad—let the tides pull him back to what he already knew, like where to find the ponds with floating docks and no snapping turtles, and how to navigate the dirt roads that intersected in the woods where the deer jumped out in twos and threes, as if from nowhere.

Recently, on a walk, I got lost in these roads. I couldn’t believe it at first because I thought by now I should have known where I was going. But somehow, instead of looping back around to familiar territory, I stumbled out into some strange, indecipherable network of dirt roads I’d never seen before, all splaying out and way off into the pillar-world of white oaks that seemed to mirror endlessly in every direction. The roads themselves were pockmarked with small caverns, each filled with water so old and brown that they gave back none of the sky, and in fact seemed continuous with the sand.

And so I wandered. What else could I do? I had no survival skills. My phone, anemic from living off the grid all day, had died. My ankles were scratched all silver from the thistly underbrush. My stomach began to whimper. I did, too.

And then, suddenly, twin headlights came rolling ungainly toward me, like the bright blind eyes of some trundling beast, and it was like a divine intervention, it was like a deux es machina, but of course it wasn’t really like anything except itself. And when I collapsed into the passenger seat, and the driver navigated us out of the endless dirt roads, it came up in our conversation that she and I were somehow connected, she was the sister of the woman who’d given me violin lessons in kindergarten until I’d cried and quit. And I could hardly hold back my surprise when suddenly the darkening woods diverged and we turned out onto the flat black predictable tongue of pavement, and I instantly recognized where we were because it was just about across the street from my own driveway.

Years later the metaphor only now begins to dawn on me. Lost, I’d wandered farther than I’d ever thought possible. And yet I still wound up right back where I came from.

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LiTERARY

The College Hill Independent

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*******Ed. Note: I, James Mamana, the List Editor, want to apologize for the behavior of the List Writer this week, for rendering some of his meanings incomprehensible through his frankly amateurish grasp of the Akkadian and Elamite scripts. Please enjoy any of the terrific events he thankfully still chose to list above.—JRM

List Editor’s note: I am the List Editor, James Richard Mamana.

This week’s list reached the editors via snail mail and was addressed to us (without a return address, though we’ve traced the letter to within 100 miles of Tehran) in the Ancient Greek (it is unclear how USPS successfully delivered the artifact). The list was handwritten, half in English and half in a seemingly arbitrary selection of cuneiform scripts derived from the Behistun Inscription in western Iran, that is, in a combination of the Elamite and Babylonian/Akkadian scripts. Our handwriting analyses indicate that it indeed has been written by our faithful List Writer (LW). Unfortunately, we could not translate all of the cuneiform, but the list is for the most part legible aside from a few remaining nonsense phrases and puns, which we have printed in the original language. The following is the text we received, though I will periodically comment on what I perceive are flaws in the LW’s methodology.—JRM* *Ed. Note: The list editor and the LW are, of course, different people, as should be clear to faithful readers.—JRM

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Thus antiquarianism is associated with imperial and colonial enterprises, and so has been (for the most part) critiqued and disowned by historians and anthropologists as a hobby and as an historical/archaeological practice—an essentially larcenous holdover of empire—even though it carries on to this day under the guise of cultural interest in the form of the museum. This conference is specifically about antiquarianisms in the Americas and in the Eastern Mediterranean, and will attempt to engage with the distinction between “colonial” and “local” antiquarianisms by demonstrating that antiquarianism happens locally, too, say in the way that the archaeological history of the Incas is presented in parts of present day Peru. Do not colonize the insides.

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****Ed. Note: This reads phonetically, “Knowledge has imperial force,” and, yes, you the reader can already tell that a theme has emerged. That LW, he is the child of Beelzebub Himself with his dastardly tricks of the tongue. Care to let us know in advance before traipsing across the Atlantic and catching rays on the Caspian Sea?! The wretch. He thinks he’s proved a point, huh? Surely something about cultural appropriation and form. Anywho, because he didn’t care to do his job and inform you about this event, it’s a course on how “ancient artists” learned to work and sculpt stone.

Care to elaborate, LW?—JRM

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