The College Hill Independent Volume 42 Issue 9

VOLUME 42 ISSUE 9 9 APR 2021

STAFF

THIS ISSUE COVER

Theoretical Geometry & Higher Dimensional Politics

Camille Gros Week in Whoops Peder Schaefer & Roxanne Barnes Privatizing School Nurses

Godzilla Nihilist Constantin Gardey Conversations with Things Cal Turner & Sara Van Horn After the Link Tammuz Frankel

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT IS PRINTED BY TCI PRESS IN SEEKONK, MASSACHUSETTS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

TWITTER @THEINDY_TWEETS

INSTAGRAM @THEINDYPVD

Olivia Cruz Mayeda & Mara Cavallaro

02 WEEK IN REVIEW 03 METRO 06 ARTS 07 FEATS

WEEK IN REVIEW Loughlin Neuert Nick Roblee-Strauss NEWS Bilal Memon Rhythm Rastogi Giacamo Sartorelli ARTS Amelia Anthony Nell Salzman METRO Mara Cavallaro Ricardo Gomez Deborah Marini SCIENCE + TECH Bowen Chen Anabelle Johnston LITERARY Audrey Buhain Alisa Caira

09 S&T

On Idleness Asher White

11

four poems Marissa Alfiero

12 LIT

Into the Lens of the Female Gaze Isabelle Yang

13

The Utopian Snare Anchita Dasgupta

15

The Game Justin Scheer

17

LIT

ARTS NEWS

FEATS Alan Dean Edie Elliott Granger Emily Rust DEAR INDY Gemma Sack Cal Turner Sara Van Horn EPHEMERA Liana Chaplain Anna Kerber X Yukti Agarwal Seth Israel SOCIAL MEDIA Justin Scheer

X

Spring Weekend 2021 Lineup: Leaked Liana Chaplain

18 EPHEMERA

Cal Turner & Gemma Sack

19 DEAR INDY

FROM THE EDITORS 1pm: In my bedroom at my desk in front of my window it is Spring and I am cold and I am installed in my chair eating my roommate’s cannoli, self-conscious as I launch Zoom. 1:30pm: I want the switch from red to blue to happen right on the fold, not above or below the fold but right on it. Eight and a half inches from the top, eight and a half from the bottom. 2pm: In the kitchen praying on the arrival of Hypertext D3 and receiving an iMessage from the author; he lets me know that Andy is giving Hypertext D2 a read and whether he means Rickert or van Dam is lost on me. 2:30pm: Senior Editors who you would think have heard of deadlines write a one-pager that is a two-pager. 3pm: Tabs amass and rectangled faces accumulate and InDesign quits and coffee spills all on a laptop overheating. 3:30pm: Receive X from the artist with the subject line “CUT MY PIECE FROM THE ISSUE.’’ 4pm: Nobody will run for ME. 4:30pm: In the attic cross-legged on the hardwood floor. A candle melts diagonally with the its slope as italics redden and I think of buttery baklava and the email emoji. 5pm: Observing flattened faces; being observed. 6pm: Indulging in all the words, buttery. 10pm: Thinking that these words are better than usual. 12am: Wednesday evenings are Thursday mornings. 2am: In my bedroom at my desk in front of my window writing the FTE, unearthing the magic of it all.

-AB

STAFF WRITERS Leela Berman Matthew Cuschieri Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo Tammuz Frankel CJ Gan DESIGN EDITOR Lucas Gelfond Ella Rosenblatt Leo Gordon Evie Hidysmith COVER Rose Houglet COORDINATOR Antonia Huth Sage Jennings Amelia Wyckoff Muram Ibrahim DESIGNERS Nicole Kim Malvika Agarwal Alina Kulman Anna Brinkhuis Olivia Mayeda Clara Epstein Drake Rebman Miya Lohmeier Issra Said Owen McCallumJustin Scheer Keeler Sacha Sloan Issac McKenna Jieun (Michelle) Song Ella Spungen Mehek Vohra COPY EDITORS Sojung (Erica) Yun Alyscia Batista Grace Berg ILLUSTRATION Elaine Chen EDITOR Megan Donohue Hannah Park Nina Fletcher Madison Lease ILLUSTRATORS Jasmine Li Sylvia Atwood Hannah Chang MANAGING Ophelia DuchesneEDITORS Malone Alana Baer Camille Gros Anchita Dasgupta Sophie Foulkes Peder Schaefer Baylor Fuller Mara Jovanovic SENIOR EDITORS Olivia Lunger Audrey Buhain Talia Mermin Andrew Rickert Jessica Minker Ivy Scott Rachelle Shao Xing Xing Shou Evelyn Tan Cal Turner Joyce Tullis Sara Van Horn Floria Tsui Dorothy Zhang MVP Cal Turner BUSINESS Jerry Chen Evan Lincoln Isabelle Yang

MISSION THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT IS A PROVIDENCE-BASED PUBLICATION WRITTEN, ILLUSTRATED, DESIGNED, AND EDITED BY STUDENTS FROM BROWN AND RISD. OUR PAPER IS DISTRIBUTED AROUND PROVIDENCE’S EAST SIDE AND DOWNTOWN, AS WELL AS ONLINE. IN ADDITION TO PUBLISHING 20 PAGES OF ORIGINAL WRITING, REPORTING, AND ART ONCE A WEEK, THE INDY FUNCTIONS AS AN OPEN WORKSHOP IN WHICH WRITERS, ARTISTS, AND DESIGNERS COLLABORATE AND PROVIDE FEEDBACK ON THEIR WORK. THROUGH AN EXTENSIVE EDITING PROCESS, WE CHALLENGE EACH OTHER TO BE RESPONSIBLE, INTENTIONAL, AND SELF-CRITICAL. WE ARE COMMITTED TO PUBLISHING POLITICALLY ENGAGED AND ACCESSIBLE WORK. WHILE THE INDY IS FINANCED BY BROWN UNIVERSITY, WE HOLD OURSELVES ACCOUNTABLE TO OUR READERS ACROSS THE PROVIDENCE COMMUNITY. THE INDY REJECTS CONTENT THAT EXPLICITLY OR IMPLICITLY PERPETUATES RACISM, SEXISM, HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA, XENOPHOBIA, ABLEISM AND/OR CLASSISM. THOUGH THIS LIST IS NOT EXHAUSTIVE, THE INDY STRIVES TO ADDRESS THESE SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION BY CENTERING THE VOICES, OPINIONS, AND EFFORTS OF MARGINALIZED PEOPLE IN PROVIDENCE AND BEYOND. THE INDY IS CONSTANTLY EVOLVING: WE ARE ALWAYS WORKING TO MAKE OUR STAFF AND CONTENT MORE INCLUSIVE. THOUGH OUR EDITING PROCESS PROVIDES AN INTERNAL STRUCTURE FOR ACCOUNTABILITY, WE ALWAYS WELCOME LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

WEEK IN REVIEW

WHOO IF 75 PERCENT OF READERS RESPOND TO THIS WEEK IN REVIEW...

BLOCKED IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE

- RB

On the morning of March 23, the crew of Ever Given, a 400-meter long cargo ship sailing from Malaysia to the Netherlands, drove the bow of their vessel 2.6 fathoms deep (16 feet) into the east bank of the Suez Canal. Satellite images show the ship diagonally blocking the passageway, with the stern (that’s the back of the ship you landlubbers) wedged in the west bank. Hundreds of cargo ships were prevented from passing, delaying 10 percent of global trade for almost a week. At the end of March, after days of dredging, the arrival of two giant sea tugs, and a chance new moon that led to higher-than-usual tides, the ship and globalism alike were freed. Authorities blamed high winds and low visibility from a khamsin, an Egyptian sand storm, for the accident, but an investigation by the Indy suggests that the grounding may have had more complex root causes.

An analysis of real-time tracking data from vesselfinder.com shows that Ever Given made some unexpected turns in the Red Sea while waiting to insert itself into the Suez Canal. Typically, vessels throw anchor—in a state of foreplay—while waiting patiently for their climactic passage through the Suez, but the crew of Ever Given decided to trace some sensuous curves instead. Steaming due north towards the canal’s entrance, Ever Given turned 90 degrees starboard, followed by 270 degrees port, after which the ship headed due north at full throttle, turned around, and steamed due south at a slow pace. The result? A phallic-shaped ocean wake, miles long, directed right at the canal entrance. “The captain must be a wanchor,” said a marine expert who viewed the tracking-data for the Indy.

In addition, the Indy has learned that one of the cargo ships blocked from entering the canal by Ever Given’s escapades was carrying 40 containers full of sex toys. This has caused widespread frustration for sexually-isolated customers in Europe, as vibrators, dildos, and anal beads sit unused. Ever Given’s unfortunate canal straddling contributed to continental cock-blocking.

Common sense, and watching one too many spy thrillers, would suggest that the Russians may have also played a hand in Ever Given’s accident. Due to climate change, the Northern Sea Passage, through the Arctic Circle on Russia’s coast, is becoming more and more accessible to shipping cargo. The route is 15 days shorter than a typical trip from Shanghai to large European ports and would increase Russian power over global trade. Rosatom, the Russian state-owned nuclear energy company advocating for the Arctic Passage, pushed the Northern route on Twitter in the wake of the Ever Given blockage.

In a thread titled, “reasons to consider Northern Sea Route as a viable alternative to the Suez Canal Route,” Rosatom opened its case: “Way more space to draw peculiar pictures using your giant ships.”

That’s true. As more and more Arctic Sea ice melts, future cargo captains on the Northern Sea Passage will have space for as much phallic imagery as they please. A score for phallus lovers, even if it’s an L for the polar bears.

Like most everything in life, there’s a silver lining to Ever Given’s fate. De-growth advocates worldwide have a crystal clear case study to show what happens when globalism goes too far. Big ships get stuck in narrow passages, phalli are drawn in the Red Sea, people can’t get their sex toys, and, somehow, the Russians use the incident to justify more shipping amidst melting icebergs and warming waters. If that’s not world weariness for late-stage capitalism—the Germans say weltschmerz—what is?

ILLUSTRATION GEMMA BRAND-WOLF

After approximately four hours, sympathetic goofballs Dean Zia and Vice President Estes sent their sincere apologies to the community for the email. They pledged to donate the full $10,000 amount to the Community Food Bank, the money now magically not dependent on the percentage of Brown students who answer their emails. Conveniently, they reminded campus that the survey provided a place for feedback, so any concerns about their ethics could filter right through the survey in a closed loop system. But this was not a satisfying end.

We at the College Hill Independent would like to offer some alternatives for enticement to take Brown’s survey: Dean Zia could put a bunch of puppies in a box and start swinging unless 25 percent of campus responds. If 50 percent of campus answers this survey, Eric Estes will not take a shit for 15 days.

If responses get as high at 75 percent, the building currently being built to serve as a performance arts space will instead be converted to be an outpost of the infamous seafood restaurant Long John Silvers, with a daily bottomless brunch buffet. If by some New England miracle participation reaches a full 100 percent, the Brown Daily Herald will be converted into an experimental softcore porn publication. If by divine intervention more than 100 percent of people respond, Eric Estes will be required to both eat and shit only during bottomless brunch at the performance-art-space-turned-Long-John-Silvers.

Providing life-saving resources to the Providence Community is a completely inappropriate prize in exchange for student involvement in a survey, and it has become urgently and abundantly clear that Brown is failing both communities. The Indy wants to remind this audience that nothing about that is funny.

DESIGN MEHEK VOHRA

On the unremarkable Monday morning of March 22 in Providence, Brown campus favorites Dean Rashid Zia and Vice President Eric Estes sent an email out to the entire student body making a donation from Brown of $10,000 to the Community Food Bank contingent on 75 percent participation in an online survey. It went over extremely well.

To be precise, the donation proposed a tiered plan: $2,500 would be donated regardless of involvement, $5,000 if participation reached 50 percent and a full $10,000 would go to the Community Food Bank if participation represented 75 percent of students (the total donation clocks in at 0.0002 percent of Brown Universities Endowment).

The letter described a dire situation in our state. One in four Rhode Islanders have experienced food insecurity in Providence during the pandemic, making Brown’s community-bonding participation antics a little more than a buzz-kill. This survey came at a crisis point when many students at Brown and elsewhere took to social media to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the mental health resources during this semester of Zoom university. Yet here Brown was, punishing the surrounding community because of burnt out students’ disconnection from campus life.

Here are some things about Brown that are not contingent upon participation: the amount of classes offered in the French department, the level of funding available for Model UN, whether there will be mussels at the dining halls on an otherwise random weekday, the surprising abundance of elementary school toys put in care packages at the COVID testing centers, the existence of the College Hill Independent.

PS

TEXT ROXANNE BARNES + PEDER SCHAEFER

WEEK IN

- PS

02

03

TEXT OLIVIA CRUZ MAYEDA + MARA CAVALLARO

PRIVATIZING

SCHOOL NURSES

SMART Clinics in Providence Public Schools

DESIGN MIYA LOHMEIER

ILLUSTRATION MARA JOVANOVIC

METRO

METRO On February 3, the Providence Public School District removed Tammy Lafreniere and Madeline Crowell from their positions as school nurses following the launch of privately-run SMART Clinics at their respective schools. First proposed last March, the SMART Clinics—a self-proclaimed “business model” owned and directed by Ginn Group Consulting and locally staffed by employees of the non-profit Providence Community Health Center—offer access to medical and psychological services that go beyond the capacity of the schools’ previous facilities. Without school nurses, however, Band-aids, sanitary pads, prescription medications, and Tylenols for headaches all require interactions with the new private clinic. Clinic costs (including a flat rate paid to the for-profit Ginn Group Consulting firm) are covered by Partnership Rhode Island and CVS Health via the Rhode Island Foundation until June 30, 2023.

But when the SMART center deems provisions of care to be “office visits,” they bill students’ insurances and charge teachers copays. They treat uninsured students free of charge.

Overall, the district’s lack of transparency surrounding clinic access to medical records, billing, and their removal of three faculty members who voiced criticism continues to raise community concerns. The Indy investigated these removals and the impacts of SMART Clinic implementation. +++ For the last couple of weeks, faculty at Mount Pleasant High School in Providence have been wearing stickers that read, “SMART: Save Mt’s Awesome Registered (Nurse) Teacher.” In the upper left-hand corner of the white label—the kind you can buy in sheets of 30 at office supply stores—is a smiling cartoon Mickey Mouse, a reference to school nurse Tammy Lafreniere. “Everyone knows that she loves Disney,” Devon Johnson, a graduate of the school, told the Indy.

Just a little over five miles from Mount Pleasant, teachers at Roger Williams Middle School made T-shirts in support of their former nurse, Madeline Crowell. In one photo, 11 faculty members wearing the shirts sit on the concrete steps of the school in solidarity. One teacher holds a poster of Crowell with a stethoscope over her shoulders. Known to her students as Enfermera Maddy, Crowell graduated from Hope High School and later returned to serve the predominantly Latinx community that she was raised in. “I’m a product of Providence,” Crowell told the Indy. “My whole family lives in Providence, like, right near Roger Williams. And that’s my neighborhood.”

The district removed both Lafreniere and Crowell when their schools implemented School Health Model for Academics Reaching All Transforming Lives (SMART) Clinics, a privately-owned healthcare model focused on embedding integrative health services in schools. In sharp contrast to the rest of Mount Pleasant, which is fairly dated, the SMART Clinic is brand new. The entire facility—virtually indistinguishable from a typical private health clinic— is freshly coated in light blue, and the scented vapor of an aromatic diffuser sifts into the clinic hallway.

The SMART clinics can perform many of the roles and responsibilities of a primary care doctor—physicals, immunizations, diagnoses, prescriptions—as well as mental health assistance for faculty, students, and even family members of students regardless of their health insurance or documentation status.

Ginn Group Consulting (GGC) presents SMART as a “student centered tool to break the cycle of poverty” but has a clear financial motivation—the firm makes revenue from the existence and expansion of SMART clinics. According to Angela Elles, GGC’s director of communications, the firm charges donors, in this case the Rhode Island Foundation, an “agreed-upon flat rate… to implement the SMART Clinic Model.” GGC declined to reveal how much they were paid to implement SMART Clinics in Providence. The firm’s goal, as per their contract with the Providence Public School District (PPSD), is to “scale across the PPSD as an embedded infrastructure to create a legacy.” GGC has already announced a third clinic at a to-be-determined Providence public school.

“They painted a beautiful picture,” Crowell said.

Both she and Lafreniere voiced support for the initial concept behind the private clinics, and were falsely assured by Superintendent Harrison Peters that their roles would remain the same. However, when the clinics opened, Crowell and Lafreniere began to question the priorities and intentions of the SMART

“By removing union school nurses and implementing private clinics directed by a for-profit business, the district has fundamentally restructured relationships of care in its public schools. There are now private incentives governing care where there previously were none.” clinics and their director, the for-profit GGC. Like both nurses, State Representative David Morales supported implementation of the clinics when the district first discussed them. Now, alongside Representative Sam Bell, he is leading the charge on criticizing their presence. In February, after meeting with the two nurses, Morales and Bell released a statement addressed to Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green condemning the private clinics and the displacements of Crowell and Lafreniere. They denounced the district’s undermining of the teachers’ union for their “blatant lack of transparency surrounding for-profit services,” clinic billing of students’ health insurances, attempts to “gain private health information on students,” and distribution of $5 CVS gift cards to students who consented to treatment at the clinic.

By removing union school nurses and implementing private clinics directed by a for-profit business, the district has fundamentally restructured relationships of care in its public schools. There are now private incentives governing care where there previously were none. All of these concerns emphasize how privatization of healthcare undermines community control of basic medical and mental health services.

A union-busting private model A week before the district removed Crowell and Lafreniere from their respective schools, Superintendent Peters and Director of Policy and Planning at the School Board, Yvonne Graf, sent both nurses letters congratulating them on their “new roles” and asking them to confirm them by submitting a resume and application to the Providence Community Health Center (PCHC)/SMART clinic.

The district chose to keep the Providence Teachers Union—of which both nurses are members—in the dark. Maribeth Reynolds-Calabro, the president of the union, told the Indy, “we have been excluded from the process from the very beginning.” The new roles would have made both nurses subcontractors—half of their paycheck would have come from the school district and the other from the PCHC. This model would have saved the district money while undermining the union’s bargaining power and disempowering its teachers. It is yet another example of austerity policies working to defund education and undermine both community control over healthcare resources and established relationships of care. Crowell and Lafreniere refused to sign the paperwork that would make them part-time subcontractors, a transition that Reynolds-Calabro said would violate their union contracts and undermine their pensions and healthcare.

The Providence Teachers Union, Crowell, and Lafreniere filed three separate grievances to the school board, citing violations of the nurses’ union contracts and arguing that their removals took away the union’s ability to collectively bargain. On March 17, Crowell and Lafrienere met with the superintendent, a union representative, and a union lawyer in a Zoom meeting room. Here, the school committee insisted that the superintendent has the authority to require the role of the nurse to be a subcontracted one. “They never asked us a question,” Lafreniere told the Indy, “we never spoke, we never said anything. We just sat there.” Their grievance claims were denied by the school board, but will now go to arbitration—the nurses and the school board will choose an arbitrator who will hear their arguments and make a judgement. The union has also filed a Title 16 violation lawsuit against the district and an Unfair Labor Practice Claim that will go before the Labor Board.

Although Roger Williams and Mount Pleasant are the only schools in Rhode Island with SMART Clinics, they are not the first in the country. Gordo Elementary and Gordo High School in Alabama have shared a SMART Clinic since the fall of 2019, but Gordo High’s school nurse, Kandi Dyer, told the Indy that she was never asked to subcontract with

the clinics nor told that she would be removed if she refused. Dyer retains the same position and office space—the SMART clinic has its own separate facility.

However, the school nurse section of the SMART Clinic agreement signed by Melanie Ginn of GGC and Infante-Green reads, “no person or entity within the school shall serve as a gatekeeper between students and a SMART center.” This is a departure from the relationship between the school nurses and the SMART clinic at Gordo Elementary and High School, but the incentive that GGC has to prevent school nurses as ‘gatekeepers’ is clear. The more office visits the clinic books, the more student and faculty insurances they are able to bill, and the more successful the clinic appears, the more likely GGC is to continue receiving donor funding to direct SMART clinics.

GGC’s school/district application for SMART clinics requires answers to both “How are your school nurses allocated within the district?” and “Do your school nurses belong to a union?” The outcomes at Mount Pleasant High School and Roger Williams Middle School indicate the reasoning behind these questions: to assess how easy it will be for GGC to insert themselves as the first line of care.

At Oakman Elementary School in Alabama, GGC terminated an initial contract they had with the school from 2016. A nurse in Alabama told the Indy that the SMART Clinic wanted to require students to visit the clinic before they could see a school nurse. But the superintendent and the Alabama Board of Nurses intervened to ensure that the school nurse was the first line of care for students and faculty, at which point the clinic left the school.

Regarding the removals of Lafreniere and Crowell in Providence, where the district approved the SMART Clinics as gatekeepers to care, the Alabama nurse told the Indy, “It breaks my heart. [School nurses] do need to be the first line of who that child goes to because she’s probably known them for years.” Another school in the same Alabama district, Aliceville High, also ended their contract with their SMART Clinic in the last few years. GGC’s Angela Elles told the Indy that “the stakeholders at those schools did not continue to operate in fidelity to the SMART model,” but declined to clarify what that meant. Superintendent Jamie Chapman could not be reached for comment as to why both schools terminated their contracts.

Lack of transparency The implementation of SMART clinics and the privatization of healthcare in Providence public schools should have been community decisions.

Instead, they were institutional choices made by Infante-Green and the district that have thrived in obscurity. In a public letter to Commissioner Infante-Green, Senator Bell and Representative Morales named the “blatant lack of transparency surrounding the for-profit services being offered to students and their families, many of whom are low-income or non-English-speaking.”

SMART Clinic waivers were sent home to students with little to no explanation of what they were.

Mount Pleasant senior Aarifah Smith remembers getting the form in the mail and not understanding what exactly it was for. She told the Indy that she did not sign it. “I don’t like signing things I don’t know about,” she said.

Additionally, students and parents were not universally informed that Lafreniere and Crowell had been removed. “A lot of parents think that we’re still in the schools, taking care of their kids and we’re not,” Crowell told the Indy. Lafreniere still goes to MPHS to conduct COVID testing for the school’s sports teams every Thursday. When she sees her students, they ask her why she left them, as they were never officially notified of her removal or given an explanation. “I leave there and cry everytime I leave,” Lafrienere said. “It feels terrible. It feels like I let them down.”

04

METRO

Concerns regarding both the district and SMART clinics’ lack of transparency were echoed

by Enrique Sanchez, a former substitute teacher at Mount Pleasant. In February, Sanchez’s teaching assistant went to the clinic with a headache and was disturbed when clinic staff asked about her health insurance information. Sanchez raised concerns over Twitter about the impact that the privatization of nursing would have on students, teachers, and school nurses. He also questioned why the district and GGC had chosen two schools with some of the largest populations of English language learners—he felt that the clinics and the district were taking advantage of a community they knew would not have the time or resources to hold them accountable.

Sanchez’s March 2 Tweets read, “I am very disappointed with @pvdschools and @RIDeptEd. They never posted the Zoom links or made the information sessions open to the public in regards to the ‘Smart Clinics’... Parents are currently disengaged with school activities and their students’ academics in the Providence school district. What a complete lack of transparency, professionalism and responsibility for people who actually care about our kids...”

The information session to which he referred—on March 2—was poorly advertised and scheduled for 6:30 PM at Mount Pleasant. The district sent out emails to parents with Zoom information less than three hours before, at 3:55 PM. Clinic staff told Sanchez that only one parent attended.

A week later, on March 10, the district removed Sanchez, and school administrators told him that his recent Tweets had offended a parent. +++ Lafreniere, Crowell, Morales and Bell have also denounced the district’s lack of transparency surrounding the access that GGC has to students’ private health information. A memo from GGC to a Providence Public School District (PPSD) official reads, “the SMART Clinic has an agreement with the District that designates the SMART Team as ‘school officials providing institutional services and functions on behalf of Mt. Pleasant High School,’ and therefore they are included in the district FERPA guidelines.” This language is reproduced on the school’s website, and both Lafreniere and Crowell told the Indy that SMART Clinical Operations Manager at GGC, Dr. Tameka Hines, and the School Board’s Yvonne Graf referenced an ‘agreement’ while asking the nurses to provide information on student medical records. However, during a clinic tour and interview with the Indy, Principal David Conrady, PPSD Spokesperson Audrey Lucas, and PCHC Spokesperson Brett Davey all denied any knowledge of the referenced agreement.

Clinic staff, Dr. Hines, and district administrators also asked the nurses to hand over medical records of students without their individual consents, which both Crowell and Lafreniere refused, as this would have violated federal regulations that protect medical and educational information, namely Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPAA) and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), respectively.

In later joint email correspondences with Lucas, Davey, GGC CEO Melanie Ginn and GGC’s Elles, all three parties declined to comment on how the agreement legally grants the clinics access to student medical information without individual parental consent and while in compliance with HIPAA and FERPA. Lucas told the Indy over email that “the consent form signed by the patient or his/her parent or guardian authorizes access to medical records.” It remains unclear what information the SMART clinic has access to, and what legal document grants them the access they claim to have.

Relationships of Care For six years, students would visit Nurse Tammy’s office for medications and screenings, but also if they were struggling with anxiety or needed someone to talk to. Her office on the second floor—which the school converted into a break room for SMART Clinic staff—was usually adorned with seasonal decorations. When the Indy first spoke with Lafrienere over Zoom in early March, a paper shamrock dipped in glitter for St. Patrick’s Day hung on the wall behind her. A few years ago, when a student had told her that their parents could not get a Christmas tree that year, Lafrienere hauled one into her office and invited students to decorate the tree with her and eat cookies.

05

Aarifah Smith told the Indy that Lafreniere was “very good at keeping our mental health together.

She was one of the only people we trusted.” A couple years ago, a student with agoraphobia completed an entire school year from the nurse’s office. As the student settled into the space each morning, Ms. Tammy would collect her classwork. Last spring, at the start of the pandemic, Lafreniere and the school social worker delivered groceries and goodie bags with coloring books to students’ homes. And at 10 AM every morning Lafreniere’s alarm still goes off, a reminder to text her former student to take her pills.

“I love [my students] like they’re my own,” Lafreniere told the Indy. “It’s not a joke when I say I get told I love you a million times a day.”

Though Crowell had been at Roger Williams for just over a year, she similarly had solidified relationships with her students and their parents.

When COVID hit, she too delivered food to students’ families. To honor Crowell’s commitment to her students, she was chosen for a portrait as part of the public art initiative Mi Gente Responde, which expresses gratitude for community healthcare professionals. A pastel banner outside America’s Food Basket on Broad Street features Crowell—or Enfermera Maddy—in pink scrubs and a white lab coat.

Crowell still maintains relationships of care with her former students that range from texts with concerned parents to raising money for students’ medical care.

“For them to just pluck us out of our schools, with no explanation to our families that the school nurse is no longer in the building is so disheartening.”

Neither Lafreniere nor Crowell have uncommon relationships with the students and families they serve. Rather, both understand and explain the role of a school nurse as requiring deep care for their communities. “[The clinicians are] wonderful people, and it’s not their fault. But they don’t have the relationship that we have built with these parents,” Crowell told the Indy. “It takes a lot of work to be able to make a parent comfortable having a stranger take care of your kids when they have medical issues.”

The district’s abrupt removal of Lafreniere and Crowell was an institutional undervaluing of long term reciprocal relationships of care. Displacing these

“The district’s abrupt removal of Lafreniere and Crowell was an institutional undervaluing of long term reciprocal relationships of care. Displacing these two nurses ruptured established connections and community trust, leaving students feeling abandoned and confused.” two nurses ruptured established connections and community trust, leaving students feeling abandoned and confused. Even during the week Lafreniere was stationed in the SMART clinic before her removal, the clinicians wouldn’t let her see the kids that came in looking for her. She told the Indy that when one student adamantly refused to see anyone but Nurse Tammy, she had to leave the clinic for a ‘visit’ with him in the locker-lined hallway. Most students were ushered into office visits, for which the SMART center would charge their insurances.

Provider-Patient Relationships The removal of school nurses from Mount Pleasant and Roger Williams has meant that all students seeking care must now pass through the SMART center.

Revealingly, SMART, PPSD, and PCHC representatives were unable to define what exactly constitutes an office visit and thus when and how much insurances get billed. A SMART clinician at Mount Pleasant told the Indy that visits are determined on a case-by-case basis, meaning a headache could potentially become an office visit if it turns into a consultation. Representatives similarly did not answer how much insurances are being billed, only that billing is done according to “standard protocols.”

Before, with a standing order—a parent authorization that allows nurse administration of medicines like Tylenol, Pepto Bismol, and Ibuprofen—students would be treated and sent back to class in minutes.

Now, a Mount Pleasant guidance counselor told the Indy, one student visit to the clinic for a headache and an Advil reportedly entailed a call home about insurance and took over 45 minutes. Although picking up sanitary pads does not constitute an office visit, senior Aarifah Smith told the Indy that one of her peers was asked about insurance when she requested a menstrual pad. “I already carried [pads] with me, so after that I really made sure I carried all my stuff with me, including headache medicine” she said.

“Who knows what [the SMART Clinic] is going to say or do the next time I need it?”

For students who have not signed the SMART clinic waiver and who had previously been administered medications by school nurses, care has become more complicated. Crowell told the Indy about a student whose mother refused to sign the waiver.

“I’m not signing anything for any clinic, and I don’t want my insurance charged,” she recalled the mom telling her. For situations like these, the nurse at the PPSD school closest to Roger Williams—the Juanita Sanchez Complex—has to travel to the school to administer the medication now that the district removed Crowell.

The clinic’s style of care cannot be separated from its structure as GGC’s privatized “business model.” The clinic and GGC are forced to balance inward-facing financial priorities and the outward-facing priority of care, and doing so means establishing bureaucratic provider/patient relationships with students. It means questions about insurance and waivers, it means rigid appointment scheduling, and it means billing. Although the clinic guarantees access to students without insurance, just being questioned about healthcare plans when seeking out care can be intimidating, and can feel both detached and invasive. +++ The SMART clinic is a private model that provides transactional bureaucratic care and is bound, out of necessity, to GGC and private revenue. While clinic costs are to be covered by Partnership Rhode Island and CVS Health via the Rhode Island Foundation until June 30, 2023, the clinic is operating with the goal of generating enough funds to sustain itself from that date on. A local Alabama paper reporting on the Oakman SMART clinic notes that following the center’s “three year plan,” the clinic “should be self-sustaining… according to GGC.” Elles told the Indy that the revenue that PCHC receives from billing insurance pays for the clinics’ medical supplies and pays the salaries of the clinic staff.

It makes sense, then, that the clinic denied Lafreniere opportunities to provide care prior to her removal. Student visits to the school nurse are not in the clinic’s financial self-interest, as is pointedly accounted for in the center’s own contract. The privatization of public services—exemplified by the SMART clinics—continues to undermine community relationships and input.

This tension between private services and public needs reinforces the idea that universal healthcare is necessary. In Rhode Island, the political winds are starting to turn towards this idea—a couple weeks ago, 77 people testified in favor of Rhode Island Senate Bill #0233, which would introduce a statewide Medicare for All system. Their stories totaled over six and a half hours of testimony, but the Senate, led

by Josh Miller, voted to hold the bill in committee.

While the SMART center does provide healthcare free of charge to students who are uninsured, as well as provide clinical treatments and preventative visits that school nurses couldn’t, at its core the clinic is still tied to corporate interests. Care has become liable to private incentive structures. SMART clinics are a reminder that healthcare at its best is provided publicly, without billing insurances, without copays or deductibles, and with transparent communication.

It is at its best when coming from a communal prioritization of healthcare as a human right.

OLIVIA CRUZ MAYEDA B’21 & MARA CAVALLARO B’22 are continuing to investigate this story.

ARTS

Godzilla (1954) introduced the gargantuan titan to the world for the first time, and it was mean and vengeful—the monster had been rudely awoken from a multi-millennia long slumber by United States underwater nuclear testing in the Pacific. The first Godzilla was irritated and irradiated, threatened by the emergent technology. Toho, the film’s Japanese production company, and Tomoyuki Tanaka, its producer, had set out to create a movie that explored the horrors of World War Two from the Japanese perspective. The unthinkable, monolithic terrors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weighed heavily over Japanese life in 1954. This year also marked the Daigo Fukuryū Maru incident, which saw a Japanese fishing boat of 23 sailors

Enter King Kong—Hollywood’s sweetheart. A colonially racist stereotype in his original 1933 incarnation, King Kong caricatured native peoples and included contemporary stereotyping of black men as bestial and primitive: the film’s story was the white man saving the white woman from a black ape. Kong’s troubled past has since been inexplicably forgotten. He was revived in 2017 with the CGI-spectacle that was Kong: Skull Island, and he returns once more. Godzilla and King Kong duked it out last week in Godzilla vs. Kong on HBO Max, the latest installment in a series of English-language film adaptations of Godzilla produced jointly by Legendary Entertainment and Warner Brothers. This is a conventional CGI-monster-movie blockbuster; Godzilla and Kong are drawn against one another in a winner-takes-all glory bout. The two first met in 1962, and that matchup resulted in a well-stomped Japanese countryside and yet another demolished Tokyo. The prospect of the 2021 title fight was thrilling; King Kong is a big monkey and Godzilla is massive with radioactive breath.

The contrast between these two gigantic icons is stark. In one corner, we have Hollywood’s simian sweetheart, a giant monkey who has starred alongside Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson. In the other, Godzilla is a 354-foot-tall allegory for nuclear war. Godzilla is pure nihilistic energy; it is a mirror to the west’s hypocrisies made in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘technological innovation,’ a contradiction of western superiority, and a condemnation of superhero-good-guy USA’s weapon of mass destruction.

Conversely, King Kong is overrated. In forgetting his racist origins, he is a gimmick for Hollywood to imbue with the same personality of all its heroes: misunderstood, romantic, sexy, protective of his allies. The dichotomy is clear, King Kong is a tool used by Hollywood for commercial success in the

In typical Hollywood fashion, there is no loser.

No hard decision was made, and both Godzilla and King Kong franchises can continue. Hollywood sacrificed Godzilla’s existential allegory for mass-marketability achieved through extravaganza. Gojira was too ambitious, too depressing, too anti-America for their focus groups, so instead they chose Godzilla for its face value sensation.

The original fable of Godzilla is an increasingly important touchstone for contemporary civilization, with man-made disasters exponentially more common and climate change giving us a long, mean look. Yet it seems as though nobody actually knows the Godzilla allegory anymore. It is simply a mega monster shown for us to gorge on the wonders of our home entertainment systems. I wonder what Ishirō Honda and Tomoyuki Tanaka, the creators of 1954 Godzilla, would make of a US über-production-studio-collab appropriating their terrifying and inevitable allegory of nuclear holocaust into the western mode of commercialization—a mode undoubtedly built off of the global supremacy made possible by the nuclear bomb.

Then again, the west never experiences the effects of the atrocities it commits, so how could it ever handle Godzilla correctly? Godzilla defeats the three-headed space monster while simultaneously stepping on an orphanage and a prison, an allegory for the end of the world that we cannot fully understand.

ILLUSTRATION CONSTANTIN GARDEY

+++

+++

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DESIGN MIYA LOHMEIER

Godzilla (Japanese: Gojira) is as normal to natural order as rain, or the rising sun, or ants. It is an ancient alpha predator, an evolutionary top dog who lives only to maintain the title of undisputed giga-weight champion of the World. Due to Godzilla’s immense size, contenders to its throne almost always present an extinction-level threat to the entire planetary ecosystem. By proxy, Godzilla becomes Earth’s protector—Earth is its territory and home—and it is perfectly content with things as they are. It only rises from its watery bed when something else on this planet so much as entertains the thought: “I am the most hard-est, most big-est, most magnificent-est Thing on this wet and green space rock.”

In the post-World War II, post-nuclear period, Godzilla emerged from the deep at an increasing rate as an unending stream of competitors flocked to our planet, hoping to be crowned the next Big Thing. It is as though pointed at our solar system is a great neon sign, erected on an exit off the intergalactic highway, that says: “Fight me. I dare you, sucka.” Since Godzilla’s 1954 debut, there have been 36 silver screen appearances and close to 70 monsters, making Godzilla the longest running film franchise. Just last week, it appeared again, in HBO Max’s Godzilla vs. Kong. To date, and thankfully so, Godzilla vanquished each and every foe; however, the showdowns have become more difficult for the scaled behemoth.

Godzilla was originally intended as an allegory for the irreparable consequences of the nuclear age, and so World War II and its nuclear finale are of particular importance here. Nuclear technology and its potential for gross natural interference served as the template for Godzilla’s story. Humans have since created innumerable technologies that encroach on the balance of nature, and Godzilla’s every emergence is a reaction to the imbalances caused by our rapid modernization. The increasing rate of Godzilla’s re-emergence in recent years is an indictment of the exponential threat our late-stage capitalist way of life presents to nature and ourselves. Godzilla wants equilibrium, by any means necessary.

mainstream market, whereas Godzilla has developed from an agent designed to process an entire nation’s grief to a universal symbol of the human cost on nature.

On paper, this movie could be brilliant. It presents Hollywood, and the west, the opportunity to critique itself within the frame of its favored blockbuster format. Surprisingly, this does not happen. Perhaps under more ambitious direction Godzilla vs. Kong would have taken the form of an introspective tale in which Kong (read Hollywood and the West) learns, through falling short against Godzilla, of his fallibility… or something…

This is a battle between a super ape and a madeup, prehistoric lizard after all, and who can blame Hollywood for choosing to flex their mighty SFX guns in this mega-monster showdown.

Godzilla vs. Kong is full of action. Nuclear aircraft carriers serve as combustible targets for Godzilla’s nuclear breath, and Kong shows himself to be an unrelenting pugilist, his bruising hooks startling the saurian leviathan. Everything is rendered in hyper-defined, ultra-polygonal detail: skyscraper sized beasts imagined realistically alongside actual skyscrapers in actual cities. But that is it.

TEXT CONSTANTIN GARDEY

I want to be Godzilla, I want to melt everything with my atomic breath…this paper, this city…even you.

Annihilation I want. Stop bothering me with nuclear tests and sonar and that stupid Evergreen boat, no one cares, literally. Your meddling has really fucked me off, and now I am here to restore balance. I am tired; I want to sleep in the ocean, in peace. I am genderless; I am it.

I am lonely but I do not know this. I am ambivalent; I am a made-up, pre-historic lizard after all, and I am fucking massive with radioactive breath.

caught in the fallout of a US thermonuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll. The crew returned to Japan with all the symptoms of acute radiation sickness. One of the men died directly as a result, and several others developed lifelong illnesses associated with radiation exposure. Godzilla developed out of Japan’s collective memory of these tragedies.

Japan is still the only country to have experienced the nuclear age in its horrifying totality, and it was once common knowledge that Godzilla was intended as an allegory for nuclear war. Godzilla’s creators have explicitly cited America’s final acts of World War Two as their muse for the nuclear-powered goliath. Godzilla is a horrifying totality, inevitable and massive with radioactive breath. How can you present the instantaneous and sum liquidation of an entire city, a cataclysmic and colossal event caused by the beyond-microscopic act of splitting an atom? This was the question the 1954 film’s makers endeavored to answer. Much like imagining an answer to that question, the destruction of nuclear warfare remains unfathomable, and it happened twice.

Godzilla’s early movies gradually developed a concept of Godzilla’s protective ambivalence.

Godzilla became terrestrial life’s circa-90,000-ton champion who probably sees us the same way humans see insects. From an immovable force of nature laying waste to Tokyo to tag teaming with other immovable forces of nature to defeat the immovable force of outer space, the three-headed space monster King Ghidorah (RIP DOOM), Godzilla went from a supernatural threat to humanity to our supernatural, last-gasp Hail Mary against the supernatural.

Godzilla does not care for our existence; it knows only when another circa-90,000-ton hulk starts getting too big for its boots. Our cities become its destructible and interactive arenas, Mortal Combat style, crashing challengers through skyscrapers, using boats and trucks as projectiles all the while negligently stomping awestruck and terrified spectators with each footfall.

CONSTANTIN GARDEY B’22 steps on orphans.

06

CONVERSATIONS WITH THINGS Status as fetish in Sally

TEXT CAL TURNER & SARA VAN HORN

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION QUINN ERICKSON

FEATS

Rooney’s romantic novels

07

If Jane Austen relies on eye contact—or a skirt rustle or a finger twitch—to imbue her novels with unbearable sexual tension, Sally Rooney employs text conversations, transcribed in full and formatted in bold, to quicken the novel’s pacing and showcase her characters’ intense awareness of the literary craft that is iMessage flirtation. She also uses actual sex.

Unlike Austen, however, Rooney does not gesture towards physical intimacy as a private yet thoroughly knowable act—one whose peculiarities are assumed to follow directly from what we know of her characters—but as something preeminently political and continuously surprising, crucial terrain in which to explore the identities and anxieties of her characters.

Alongside their contemporary romantic storylines, Rooney’s characters take Marxist political perspectives. Both Normal People and Conversations With Friends are laden with casual conversation about the necessity of state government, among a number of other leftist flashpoints, and Conversations With Friends features a protagonist who identifies unequivocally as a communist. For her mixing of a contemporary aesthetic with diegetic discussion of Marxist politics, Rooney has been heralded in the New York Times as “the first great millennial novelist,” and the release of her third novel this September has been eagerly described as “one of this year’s most anticipated books.”

For its updated romantic intrigue as well as the political and cultural postures of its characters, Rooney’s work has drawn particular praise for its “relatability.” The Brown Daily Herald, alongside British Vogue, the BBC, Business Insider, and TheRinger, has described the novel as such, presuming that Rooney’s fans devour her work because they see themselves in her protagonists. However, many readers level relatability as a criticism against Rooney’s work. For many haters of her novels—and there are many of them—these novels amount to nothing more than indulgent contributions to the echo chambers that their presumptively bourgeois, millennial audiences occupy. By and large, though, Rooney’s fans and detractors agree: her novels are straightforward reflections of a certain strain of millennial life.

Both criticism and praise on the grounds of Rooney’s relatability rests on a particular understanding of Rooney’s readership. Her audience has been regarded, variously, as rich, literary, female, socialist, not-socialist, and, perhaps above all else, millennial. Such diagnoses, however, quickly become circular, as these demographics are extrapolated directly from the characters that Rooney depicts.

Rooney’s essential reader is understood as someone who could relate, in these culturally determined ways, to Rooney’s protagonists.

What this argument about relatability takes for granted is that identification is what Rooney’s readership actually experiences. Given these novels’ place on worldwide bestseller lists, it seems very likely that not every single reader is a bird-boned academic wunderkind spending their summers in Italy or France. To call plots that center rarefied cultural and economic capital primarily appealing for their ‘relatability’ is to ignore the actual function these descriptions serve within their stories. Rooney’s work often veers into what author Elif Batuman calls, in her wry review of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, “‘Sex and the City’-style lifestyle porn.” Like A Little Life, Rooney’s novels follow young adults navigating careers and relationships against status-laden urban backdrops. Rather than presenting relational details, Rooney’s work, like Yanagihara’s, presents aspirational ones.

Conversations With Friends and Normal People follow similar characters in similar plots: college

students talking about books and politics, having sex, arguing, and reconnecting, in a variety of configurations. In both books, Rooney is highly economical in her application of actual plot and profligate in her use of status symbol-laden description. The story beats of Conversations With Friends are dictated primarily by contact with, and accruement of, status.

Arguably, the decisive moment of Conversations With Friends is the introduction of Frances, the novel’s protagonist, to a couple that consists of a famous artist, Melissa, and the moderately successful actor, Nick, with whom Frances begins an affair. Outside of this primary brush with the rich and culturally powerful, Frances works a publishing internship, gets a short story published in a literary magazine, and writes papers that professors mark as “brilliant.” In Normal People, Connell and Marianne, the protagonists and mutual love interests, both receive prestigious scholarships, and Marianne studies abroad at a program in Sweden. The novel concludes with Connell’s admission into some unnamed New York City creative writing MFA program. In novels so light on overt narrative movement, these affirmations of status take the place of plot points, demarcating one era from another.

Even more striking are the material worlds of these novels. Both describe European summer homes in lush detail. In Conversations With Friends, Frances narrates, “The house had a huge stoneword façade, with blue-painted shutters on the windows and white stairs running up to the front door. Inside, everything was pristinely tidy and smelled faintly of cleaning agents and suncream. The walls were papered with a pattern of sailboats, and I saw the shelves were full of French-language novels.” Here, she, her friend Bobbi, and two literary adult couples eat “lots of fresh croissants and various preserves and hot coffee” every morning, with painstakingly-noted variations in the amount of coffee Frances drinks depending on her mood. In Normal People, Marianne’s Italian summer home receives similar treatment, narrated by Connell: “Inside the hall a stone archway leads down a short flight of steps. The kitchen is a long room with terracotta tiles, white cupboards and a table by the garden doors, flooded with sunlight.”

Here, they eat delicious, if slightly too al dente, pasta and drink champagne from coupes instead of flutes.

In both these settings, the novel’s narrator feels set apart from their surroundings. Connell and Frances, both of working-class families, enter these spheres with fresh eyes; Rooney initiates her narrators and her readers into these worlds in tandem. But rather than undermining the flashy appeal of these worlds, the sparkling novelty these settings hold for the narrators who confront them heightens their power. Rooney’s narrators meet these settings as aspirants, not as insiders, and the setting themselves are accordingly imbued with an aspirational glow.

Her readers, along for the ride, meet these settings from the same position.

The novels also account in similarly painstaking detail for the clothes worn by their female characters.

Normal People, for example, features two separate descriptions—one from Connell’s point of view, one from Marianne’s—of a presumably fetching felt beret of Marianne’s. In Conversations With Friends, Frances catalogues her outfits in extensive detail according to her modus operandi of “a lot of dark colors and severe necklines.” The bodies of Rooney’s women are conscripted into these captivating fashion descriptions: her protagonists doubt their own beauty, but the narration continually emphasizes their extreme thinness, their striking faces, the otherworldly glamor of their clothes, and the relationship between all of these factors. Readers are not asked to see their own faces in these characters; they are instructed

to want what they have. Rooney’s archetype of the impeccably dressed and ethereally beautiful young woman is not relatable but powerfully aspirational. +++ Reading about these lives, surroundings, and bodies create the Gestalt effect of playing with a very old, very beautiful doll house. Rooney’s words provide omniscient access to an ornately perfect world. It seems, then, that these are not novels primarily intended to traffic in universal human truths. The richly textured descriptions of houses and food and clothes, the namedrop-burdened intellectual repartee, the sense that each and every major character hovers on the edge of literary, political, or artistic notoriety—only a person who is abnormally lucky, abnormally self-congratulatory, or both, would really class these as relatable narrative elements.

The work these touchpoints do in the novels is not necessarily inviting identification from readers.

Instead, the world Rooney creates inspires a certain kind of aspirational distance. Aspiration is kitty-corner to relation, but it’s a different affect with its own motivations and its own logics. Rooney describes stuff in such a way that her reader has little choice but to want it.

For novels that critics have lauded as the Marxist work that millennials have been itching for, this effect would seem to amount to a glaring political contradiction. Why would ostensibly Marxist novels lavish so much glamorous and genuinely appealing description on the wealth of the secondary characters? Rooney compels us to fetishize these perfect meals, perfect bodies, and perfect lives, and none of these is of particular Marxist feminist value.

But Rooney’s argument is that they are not, after all, perfect. Underneath the surfaces, these characters’ souls teem with misery. Batuman’s diagnosis of A Little Life’s lifestyle porn also points to this dynamic. Batuman writes that A Little Life, a novel famous for heaping a staggering quantity of tragic backstory onto a staggeringly perfect corporate lawyer, blends “two of [her] least-favorite literary topoi (pedophilia, lifestyles of the rich and glamorous)” to irresistibly compelling effect: “It’s as if you get to see all the misery—the moral compromise, inequality, jealousy, and self-doubt—that we know lies behind every gorgeously finished brownstone floor through, every ‘prestigious’ career, every ‘major award,’ every super-expensive sushi dinner at a New York City restaurant with only six seats ... displaced onto this one guy. That’s why his suffering has to be so far over the top.”

Batuman’s insight that seeing status symbols juxtaposed with misery makes for good reading explains some of the appeal of Rooney’s novels. We see these characters suffer terribly even in their aspirational statuses. Marianne’s wealth is connected to an abusive family and an interior life that, as a reader, is often dizzying in the vertiginous depths of its self-contempt. Connell has an agonizing conversation with a university psychologist during a depressive episode.

Most strikingly, Frances, in the lead-up and fallout from an endometriosis diagnosis, stumbles around Dublin broke due to issues with her alcoholic father and in terrible pelvic pain, sometimes fainting. Many of the sequences that ensue from these protagonists’ grimmer life situations are genuinely moving. The draw of Sally Rooney is that she shows us something perfect, then lets us pierce its surface to a fundamentally alienated, unhappy inner core.

Arguments against envy are old hat. Rooney’s intervention lies in her genuine subversion, and neutralization, of the appeal of all this literal and abstract stuff. The feeling that many of Rooney’s readers

FEATS

mistake for ‘relating’ is something else entirely: the feeling of being soothed. Rooney lets readers—even, and especially, the ones without summer homes, bylines, and berets—revel in the seductive luxuries of cultural capital. She plays on the currents that make these things desirable, the dynamics that make them inspire envy. But she neutralizes the pain of not having them by tagging each with a steep price. Rooney inspires envy and then redirects it by showing, in often dramatic and sometimes unsubtle terms, that envy’s objects come with high personal costs, that the glamorous suffer in ways we would not actually have much interest in emulating. Rooney does not chastise her reader for their desire for stuff, but she unburdens her reader of the imperative to actually obtain it. She offers an escape route from the status games that occupy her novels. Indeed, she interrupts the process through which status is endlessly reproduced by severing aspiration from its usual outcome—that is, mimetic achievement.

It is here, not in the stated views of her characters, that Rooney’s novels do their real political work. By first glamourising status symbols and then revealing their attendant miseries, Rooney achieves a far more effective distance in her readers than if she had simply told us, at the outset, not to yearn for wealth, prestige, or expensive felt berets. It is, perhaps, a Marxist undertaking—or, at the very least, a bourgeois self-help project toward some genuinely anti-capitalist political end—to convince readers that it is not enviable to be wealthy, and Rooney succeeds to the extent that she attaches psychic price tags to the status symbols she romanticizes.

Rooney’s analysis of the role of status symbols within social relationships—of the way that wealth, prestige, and beauty are idealized and objectified—extrapolates on Marx’s theory of commodity

fetishism: the false perception that social relationships among people are actually relationships among statured things. By naming, glamourising, and then deromanticizing objects of social value—be they mansions, champagne flutes, or accolades—Rooney explicitly counters her characters’ persistent fetishizing of status objects and reveals the extent to which relationships are shaped by dynamics of social power. +++ Yet Rooney fails to extend her critical interruption of the process of fetishization to Marianne and Connell’s relationship. Her unchallenged idealization of this central romance, which evolves from a friendship marked by significant and shifting power differentials to a romance, constitutes her one glaring blind spot: Normal People successfully defetishizes many status objects, but in leaving untouched this idealized and seemingly transcendent romantic relationship, Rooney betrays the Marxist project she assigns herself.

Throughout Normal People, both Marianne and Connell offer each other a healing recognition of the other’s interiority. In doing so, they develop a shared social language that serves to keep them protected from—and more knowing than—the outside world.

The exclusivity of their connection, emerging from the idea that they will never again experience such a degree of understanding, seems to offer each protagonist a type of necessary transcendence. At the novel’s close, Rooney’s readers are left with a lingering envy: to achieve the shared recognition of the secret, separate, singular language between Marianne and Connell. This relationship itself becomes an object, fetishized for its ultimate purity and its transcendence of attendant status-based pressures.

Perhaps ironically, this blind spot is the result of Rooney’s attempt to offer her characters—and her readers—an alternative to the seemingly endless and insidious identification with various status symbols.

The novel’s epigraph, a quote from George Eliot, argues that “to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.” The idea that each of us has the power to profoundly affect each other is a central thesis of Rooney’s work: Marianne, at the close of Normal People, reflects on the ways in which both Connell and Marianne have “done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.”

Rooney seeks to emphasize the importance of relationships in informing what is meaningful and worthwhile amid a plethora of insidious status symbols within the social world. In attempting to offer relationships as a refuge from status and social hierarchy, Rooney idealizes—and ultimately fetishizes—the relationship between Connell and Marianne.

Their romance, in its singularity and its transcendence, is ultimately the social object that Rooney refuses to touch.

CAL TURNER B’21 & SARA VAN HORN B’21 are failing to defetishize the literature review.

08

After the link: S+T

A brief (!) history (?) of hypertext (here) [0] After the link: A brief (!) history (?) of hypertext (here) [1] Hypertext and history [2] Measuring hypertext [3] Hypertext and Brown University [4] Hypertext and else (database) [5] Living with hypertext The College Hill Independent forwards the following open-ended hypertext system for no particular anniversary of hypertext at Brown University.

[1a] We cannot think otherwise: Hypertext [2a, 1] is all nothing but trace.

[1b, 1] My computer is, as usual, littered. The 47 tabs and 9 windows index my last 24 hours of work (and non-work). Everything is at once [3b, 4]. I cannot accurately retrace my steps; everything appears flattened before me [4b].

TEXT TAMMUZ FRANKEL

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION SYLVIA ATWOOD

[1b, 2] An incomplete inventory in-progress, in no order:

09

Window 1: Canvas assignments, Zoom launch, Wikipedia hypertext, archive.org Selected Papers, 1977, open.spotify.com, Vimeo Andy van Dam talk, Google search “Melissa Clark anchovies,” Wikipedia hypertext again Window 2: Gmail, Zoom launch Window 3: Google doc, Canvas discussion, Google drive search, Google doc, Google doc, Google doc, Google slide, Gutenberg.org, Panopto India Song, Canvas Zoom launch, Brown. edu academic calendar, Canvas dashboard, Wordreference.com, when2meet, Google slides, Google Window 4: Frankel, Tammuz Hypertext Draft 2 Window 5: Notes Window 6: Dropbox (Brown) [1b, 3] Every click forward is also a click backwards [1b, 3]. Within a tab, I might follow the preceding sequence of hyperlinks by pressing the back arrow on the top left of my browser. Unlike when I view my desktop, I experience this regression as extraordinarily disjunctive: I cannot observe a singular sequence but am instead forced to relive each movement. This feature is enabled through memory: the browser remembers me, but I cannot see it remembering me. With each click I give away a privacy I cannot perceive.

[1b, 4] I am reluctant to rely on analogies to print media, as much as they abound in writings on hypertext. But I cannot help but wonder what my work environment might look like if it were physicalized.

Hundreds of books (some duplicates) scattered about on an immense desk, each flipped open to a page so that I can move quickly between them.

Hypertext makes possible a kind of delocalized thought that was previously unthinkable but is now impossible to think outside of.

[1c, 1] The twentieth-century pioneers of hypertext (Andy van Dam [3a, 2], Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, etc.) assert that their invention was perhaps never an ‘invention’ at all, inasmuch as it constitutes an elaboration of a storied mode of textual engagement. Marginalia can be found as early as there are texts—we have never not associated.

[1c, 2] What does it mean to write the history of an entity for which there is no first instance, no point

of origin? It is a history of nothing and everything at once. Nothing, in that it is impossible to isolate hypertext as an object of analysis; everything, in that it is inextricable from any given object of analysis.

Every history is, to some extent, already a hypertext: a layer of text grafted upon another.

[2a, 1] Quote from Ted Nelson’s Selected Papers (1977): “(...)’Hypertext’ is a recent coinage. ‘Hyper-’ is used in the mathematical sense of extension and generality (as in ‘hyperspace,’ ‘hypercube’) rather than the medical sense of ‘excessive’ (‘hyperactivity’). There is no implication about size—a hypertext could contain only 500 words or so. ‘Hyper-’ refers to structure and not size.”

Reproduced on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Hypertext) as “Theodor H. Nelson, Brief Words on the Hypertext, 23 January 1967,” last edited on 31 March 2021, at 22:03 (UTC).

[2a, 2] It remains unclear what orientation ‘hypertext’ provokes. Some proponents describe hypertext as if it were a mode, a recognizable form of eccentric overlay; others write of hypertext as a comportment [3a, 1], suggesting that hypertext merely formalizes a reading process [1b, 4].

[2a, 3] “There is no implication about size”... indeed, this lack of implication leaves a hole of ambiguity.

The “recent coinage” of the term “hypertext” implies specificity, i.e., it is a particular textual configuration that can only be accessed from a discrete point (e.g. the hyperlink). At the same time, claims that hypertext is omnipresent [1c, 1] treat it as if it might be used to label all textual excesses, and in doing so project it immeasurably outward [4c].

[2b, 1] Hypertext is clingy [1b, 3]: it liberates and latches, scatters and centralizes [4b]. I read hypertext as linked play. Play: the reader’s path as they deviate and differ from the text. Linked: it follows the

reader’s path, it retains connectivity.

[2b, 2] Hypertext generates connections between hyperlink and hyperlinked, free play and structure, as well as between divergent understandings of hypertext itself [2a, 2]. Hypertext connects the two definitions of style: style as generic reception (a style of writing) and as the production of genre (as in the Latin stilus, a kind of writing implement). Reading-writing: hypertext presents a written pattern at the same time as it enables those reading to inscribe themselves into that pattern.

[2c, 1] Hypertext is often described as nonlinear—a strange claim given the arguably straight line that hypertext draws between two points, e.g., on Wikipedia [2a, 1] between a hyperlink and a page. Nonlinearity only becomes apparent with a shift in scale [4c]. Deviations from more normative, linear narrative are only visible if one zooms out and views the hypertextual system as a whole with all its detours, redirections, and reroutings. Yet it is unclear whether hypertext permits the reader this kind of agency— facing the hyperlink [5a, 1], one is encountered not by multiplicity but by radical singularity [2a, 3].

[2c, 2] We might also locate non-linearity in the activity of hypertextual engagement. Hypertext changes our relation to speed: the speed of research, the speed of writing, the speed of flicking between tabs [1b, 5].

What are extension and generality if not hyperactive? Hyper-, both in the sense of speeding up (as in “hyper”) and in the sense of depth (as in “hyper-focused”); -active as in the activation of the link in the moment of our involvement [5a, 1]. For hypertext does not necessarily accelerate, but can slow us down, force us to work in starts and stops.

[2c, 3] Hypertext aids us through the very same principle by which it is at odds with us. Hypertext

S+T helps us to remember [4a], but in doing so exposes a collective failure of memory that must be sutured technologically. Hypertext extends just as it contests—the deeper the hypertext, the more it enables and the more it exceeds us.

[3a, 1] Excerpted from the first page of Charles Landow’s (professor emeritus of English at Brown, developer of the Victorian Web hypertext project) Hypertext 3.0 (2006): “When designers of computer software examine the pages of Glas or Of Grammatology, they encounter a digitalized, hypertextual Derrida; and when literary theorists examine Literary Machines, they encounter a deconstructionist or poststructuralist Nelson […]

Jacques Derrida and Theodor Nelson, Roland Barthes and Andries van Dam. I expect that one name in each pair will be unknown to most of my readers.”

[3a, 2] Duplicate of notes from an interview with Andy van Dam (professor of Computer Science at Brown, led early experiments in hypertext), March 23, 2021, conducted by Tammuz Frankel.

•

•

•

• • […]

Met Ted Nelson at 1967 computer conference, had been at Swarthmore together • Ted graduated a year ahead in 1959, got to know decently well • Acted in what may be the first rock musical?

• Did standard catching up Wonderful new graphics display, which was about yea big (shows with hands) [2a, 3] • Uppercase characters, vectors • More than 1000 dollars in 1967 money, 100K today • Huge amount of hardware • Attached to Brown’s mainframe, less powerful than any little microcomputer that you would have in a digital watch Brown had this system/360 model 50 mainframe, display was hooked up to it • Research projects sponsored by IBM research center in NYC • IBM mainframe, IBM display, 2250 Model 1—a phenomenal thing to have it, very few universities had one of these • Computing almost entirely on punch cards and paper in those days when timesharing was just beginning • Interactive, put up simple vector drawings, a pge of text so that we could manipulate text • Andy explained graphics system to Ted, Ted explained Xanadu vision Hypertext system • Maybe it would be fun to try and prototype some of the ideas Ted came to Brown for some weekends

[3a, 3] When Andy van Dam and Ted Nelson collaborated on their first iteration of hypertext in 1967, all of Brown University shared a single computer.

The system, located at 180 George Street, had only half a megabyte of memory—of which van Dam and Nelson were permitted a quarter (128kb) during pre-assigned slots. Though meager by today’s standards, Brown’s access to such a cutting-edge display system helped position it as a leading institution for computer science research in the 1960s (at the time still under the umbrella of applied mathematics).

From its genesis, hypertext balanced idealistic and pragmatic aims, in part reflective of the somewhat conflicting interests of Nelson and van Dam. Nelson came to Brown after beginning to design another hypertext project, “Project Xanadu,” that was far more expansive, aiming at the creation of an interlinked repository of all human knowledge [4c]. (In 1995, a Wired Magazine article titled “The Curse of Xanadu” commemorated Nelson’s project as a “universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form.”) Van Dam, by contrast, was more invested in getting a working prototype off the ground and using it to produce academic documents.

Van Dam continues to research and develop hypertext at Brown. Nelson has long since disowned his own work at Brown as a mistake, claiming it was overly limited in its scope.

[3b, 1] From the National Endowment for the Humanities public records of approved grants: TITLE: An Experiment in Computer Based Education Using Hypertext

GRANTEE: Brown University PI: Dr. Andries van Dam LOCATION: Providence, RI TYPE OF GRANTEE: University SPEC. CHARAC.: Private, enrl. 6,292 FROM 11-1-74 THRU 6-30-76 NOTES: Computer/film DESCRIPTION: To support an experimental program to teach a college-level English poetry course, utilizing a new form of computer based “manuscript”, called a hypertext. A documentary film about the project is being produced. An evaluation is being performed to determine the usefulness of this technique as an aid to humanities education.

[3b, 2] In 1974, Brown English professor Robert Scholes (who later founded Semiotics, the precursor to Modern Culture and Media) approached van Dam with a proposal: a seminar in which English students would read and annotate poems using van Dam’s hypertext software FRESS (the File Retrieval and Editing SyStem, a nod to the Yiddish/German verb for excessive snacking). The semester-long poetry seminar (run during the fall of 1975) was divided into three groups: a group completely on FRESS, a group simulating FRESS on paper (manually cutting and pasting with scissors) [1b, 4], and a control group approaching the course as a regular seminar (with the library as their only resource).

[3b, 3] Watching the documentary that came out of this collaboration (“HYPERTEXT: an Educational Experiment in English and Computer Science at Brown University”) is a deeply disorienting experience [4c]. In certain regards, the Brown of the 1970s is unshakably familiar. Those depicted in the documentary work and converse in libraries and classrooms still in use today (the shelves of the Rockefeller Library figure prominently in the film in order to illustrate ‘print’ materiality). Moreover, FRESS undoubtedly prefigures many familiar contemporary technologies [4a]—word processing systems, online collaborative work environments, and so forth. Nevertheless, the attitudes expressed by the students and teachers interviewed could not feel more alien. On the one hand, there is a level of suspicion surrounding computers that feels at odds with today’s computer-dominated university; on the other hand, there is a degree of optimism surrounding the possibilities of technology that seems misguided in the present.

[3b, 4] Most fascinating is the documentary’s celebration of FRESS as enabling a more collective learning experience. While technically FRESS could support several dozen users at once, there was only one graphics terminal (an IMLAC vector display) with the capacity to display multiple windows, a variety of fonts, and many lines of text. For this reason, many students participating in Scholes’s seminar worked serially [2c, 1], reading and commenting on poems one after the other. Perhaps a better analogue than the now all-too familiar simultaneous work environments of Canvas, Zoom, and Google Drive is the experience of watching the documentary itself: an engagement with a shared space (FRESS, the library, the documentary) in a later time [4b].

[3b, 5] Hypertext and word processing have been naturalized in the academy—every course today might be said to retain some vestige of this early experiment on FRESS. And yet, it is difficult to imagine the same collaborative energy across the humanities and sciences today: just as certain disciplinary boundaries have disappeared, new ones have developed.

[4a] From Vannevar Bush’s July 1945 article in The Atlantic, “As We May Think”:

mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

[4b] In Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Albert speaks: “Before unearthing this letter, I had questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I could think of nothing other than a cyclic volume, a circular one. A book whose last page was identical with the first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely. I remembered too that night which is at the middle of the Thousand and One Nights when Scheherazade (through a magical oversight of the copyist) begins to relate word for word the story of the Thousand and One Nights, establishing the risk of coming once again to the night when she must repeat it, and thus on to infinity. [...] I lingered, naturally, on the sentence: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. Almost instantly, I understood: ‘the garden of forking paths’ was the chaotic novel; the phrase ‘the various futures (not to all)’ suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork”

[4c] From Chapter 11 of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893): “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

“Have you used it much?” I enquired.

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

[5a] Descriptions of hypertext are often limited to the schematic [2c, 1] without accounting for what it means to live with hypertext. Hypertext promises passage (moving towards or away from the text) [1b, 3] and even prosthesis (connecting with the text).

But the encounter with the hypertextual is also an encounter with the unknown, as the augmentation of the textual necessitates distance from the text [2c, 3].

The hyperlink is always partially illegible, what lies after (behind, next) the link is obscured in shadows.

[5b, 1] A history of hypertext is impossible [1c, 2] because, even when restricted to 20th-century computer science, it is a history of too much [1a]. Hypertext is inextricable from the development of the World Wide Web, itself infinitely open-ended. But it is also inextricable from—and quickly becomes—the history of books, language, and text.

[5b, 2] Tammuz Frankel, Notes App, April 2, 2021 at 5:33 PM What is a link without the linked?

Like a series of annotations without an annotated feigningly apodeictic / suspended /fleetingly ambiguous cannot discuss hypertext because absent text Open-ended Yet to be finished (unfinished and yet to be) TAMMUZ FRANKEL B’22 thinks the internet of the world.

“Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do.

A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is

10

TEXT ASHER WHITE

DESIGN MICHELLE SONG

ILLUSTRATION OPHELIA DUCHESNE-MALONE

ON IDLENESS

11

Your uncharacteristic purchase of what is, ostensibly, a luxury item—the installable bidet feature for your toilet (the TUSHY)—happened suddenly, as part of a pledge to take real initiative over your life. But it means you no longer spend six minutes obsessively wiping, which consequently reduces the overall time you spend in the bathroom, which in turn makes obsolete a large percentage of the apps on your phone. The TUSHY expedites your shitting process so dramatically that you now no longer have any time to look at Tinder, and you find yourself swiping through the app on the way to the bathroom down the hall, just a few paces away. Sometimes on breaks from Zoom class—your professor suggests you rest your eyes—you simply transition your eyes to another screen, blankly swiping left and right until there is no one left in your radius.

You find that your thumb instinctively knows the app’s placement on your phone screen. You hear NPR or The Atlantic or your aunt warn against the neuro-chemical addictive properties of apps like Tinder. Hearing these warnings is as fatiguing as the neuro-chemical addiction itself; you know the concern to be valid but the app has not adversely affected your life materially enough for you to turn away. You rely on the sense of distance you maintain from its binary parameters, like ‘of course this isn’t me, its tacit rules make no sense.’ For men, Tinder is the college campus’ “online red light district,” where girls are spectacle and sex is to be solicited; for women, Tinder is “vibe confirmation software,” where you can check if the looks you were getting from that one person in class meant anything. You use it to both celebrate and eliminate your romantic idle time: to revel in the possibilities, but also to seek refuge from the arena. Mostly, you want something to happen.

Or at least something to change. Every six months or so you switch deodorants, to switch things up, to mark time, and as a result different smells are now projected onto seasons for you: October is the soft, ripe Dove Cucumber scent that your first boyfriend used to wear, April is the Arm and Hammer that’s supposed to be unscented but smells like cedar wood, December the Tom’s of Maine that is unnameably cursed. The hope is that these pivots give momentum to the wheel of the year and keep it spinning forward. Up to this point it has seemed like success is mobility: some type of trajectory, some type of movement. Taking control over your life means making it go faster, getting more done. So you’ve planned your life around things happening.

Your day takes shape around a meeting at 2 PM, your year takes shape around a new partner, your career takes shape around a mounting sequence of jobs. Maybe you clear out periods before and after each meeting, relationship, job to prepare or decompress, but these periods are transitionary—the empty connective tissue of your life. The spaces in between are meant to be expedited and minimized: a shit, a meal, a hookup. Sometimes you are successful in accelerating these moments, and you feel them like the transitions in sitcoms: cut to exterior, cue music.

You realize you’re sometimes trying to reflect the pace of the shows you watched as a kid—the correct number of jokes, of subplots. It was thrilling in middle school. In iCarly, each scene is contained in a browser window; a disembodied mouse navigates around the screen as scenes are periodically opened and dragged, closed and trashed.

This is how you feel casting through a handful of potential lovers during the 15-second walk to the bathroom, and it’s how you feel queuing up 10 minutes of music for the walk home, or spending time using a calendar to plot out the chunks of time you will spend completing homework. This is what initiative is: it is initiating more things. You buy a wrist watch on eBay because an ex told you that when you look at your phone to check the time, you end up ignoring the actual time and instead scrolling through your notifications. And that buying a watch will give you intention and moderation.

LIT

This is what your daily walks are for. In iCarly, the characters never leave their apartment-suite set.

Since quarantine, your life has begun to feel alarmingly similar (though there are no spaghetti tacos in your apartment) so you make sure to include scenes in your life that take place outside. It sometimes makes you feel like an alien simulating a human’s life, curating it to maintain the illusion of a healthy life: eat these vitamins, acquire these Tinder matches, walk around outside.

You are driving and listening to music with the windows closed under a canopy of skeletal trees.

The “34+35 (Remix)” by Ariana Grande features Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion and it is perfect.

Seriously, it is perfect—it is the best pop song you’ve heard in a long time, and it is irresistible in the way that pop songs are every so often. “Uptown Funk” was like this, and you can even remember the first time you heard it on the radio in 2014 at night in the backseat of your dad’s car. You felt instantly it would be a contemporary classic. “34+35 (Remix)” brings the same feeling—one of ineffable joy and satisfaction, clarity and hope. It is so immediate, so memorable, that you can imagine yourself feeling nostalgic for it in the future, remembering hearing it in the car.

It feels classic, like the next thing is here, important, now, and will continue. It reminds you that new classics are generated constantly and continuously, that the wheel of pop music spins forward. As you leave your car, you are humming it.

Now, at every opportunity, you want to listen to “34+35 (Remix).” It is promising and instantly rewarding like a new love, a new match, a Super Like. There is potential for its complete integration into your life. You play it for your roommates, your friends. You queue it up for the walk home. It fills space, but substantively, and memorably. It becomes your theme song for these few months, and soon it enters the canon of your life and attaches itself to the other sensory information of this period: the evening light in your living room, your Women’s Degree deodorant.

In middle school, you flirted with wearing AXE as you learned how to discern your own personal style and tastes, as you learned to communicate and articulate your ideas. You remember an English teacher demanding that you and your classmates avoid “like,” “uh,” and “literally” when you spoke publicly. That these are verbal impediments that

Live life, breathe air / I know somehow we’re gonna get there / And feel so wonderful

slow one down, wasting breath and time. That they dull the edge of one’s idea. That one should speak deliberately, with intention and purpose. At that time, and still now, you thought this was pointless and offensive in its vision of an ideal public speaker.

You’ve always used your words as a way to articulate your thoughts in real time, to discover the contours of the next idea as it forms in the distance, approaches, and passes.

You continue to swipe through Tinder, in an elevator or waiting in line, just to make sure, just to gauge the potential, to see if maybe the accumulating matches will eventually weigh enough to throw the wheel into motion. But the matches add up, and there is no traction. Ultimately, the generative force is not in the confirmation of a vibe, it is not in the purchase of a new scent, not in knowing the iCarly episode synopsis, not in the expediency of your daily tasks or the acceleration of the plot of your life. Since the pandemic, it has not been hard to find occupations, it has been hard to find and accept idleness; it has not been hard to find intimacy, it has been hard to find casualness. The relationships you’ve lost are the ones that were the least remarkable, and the interactions you miss are the informal, awkward, transitory moments: as you file into a class, as you order food in line, as you wash hands at the sinks in the bathroom. While walking down a small side street, you accidentally meet eyes with a passerby walking parallel to you on the other side of the street.

You both look away and look back because it’s useless to pretend that neither of you saw the other.

So you wave, and they wave, and you can see their eyes crinkle, and you keep walking apart from each other, and you turn at the next block, to go home, to end the uncertainty of the potential new person, to stop the buzzing feeling in your fingers, to get back to what you want to do and what you need to do, to excise the time you spend shitting or waiting between loves, to the next music cue, and to exercise total agency over your life, get your vibes in order, to take initiative as you peddle your year forward, like a bicycle, gaining momentum, picking up speed.

ASHER WHITE RISD’22 needs to empty her purse of a bunch of gum wrappers and crumbs.

four poems i. beets fermenting in a jar, week one

you are a necessary and godly preservation.

rox tells me how she admires the futurity in my projects with time frames. long-term endeavors essential for those wellacquainted with fancies of brevity— like years ago when we were one as i huddled in my duvet under growlight, your humble & flawed messenger. controlled rot a source of self-pickling, salvation in microorganisms when the only open ears live in inanimate things & an audio recorder. the next room over, i am held in saline bath; a daring bud of caper from the land we once called home— whisper it, barbarbietola. soil to lactobacillus, you’ve graced me in endless pursuits of meaning, a rooted tangibility in your detroit red badger flame and chioggia. soothe me from inside out, nourish my breath— this is my promise of reciprocity:

i can pretend like nothing ever hurt but emergence of your burgundy shoulders.

ii. red maple you explode onto the scene as a riot of scarlet searing paradigm burning like a needle thru nipple, stigma / stamen blown prickling lick the wound clean, pollen cauterized by tongue as march ash of ice dissipates a flurry of abjection, finger cut on a can of

crushed tomatoes the blood won’t staunch arms leaden heavy with the flow sap runs fast from the sugars and your sweetness of inflorescence as divine beloved, you are flustered ubiquity, my ignorance hitherto a striking oversight limbs akimbo kindle flames into the spring rain you’re hurtling off to mars the planet red who touched your mouth, deep delicate as a twining fury of some sanguine showers i’ve never pricked you before, ruby-stunned empress, call me a traitor

is

admirable sunny sisters the asiatic dogwood movie theater popcorn machine overturned to carotene chartreuse in the smallest possible snifter making way for berries that drop down burgundy tart ripening flourish of lemon dominion zesting spirals to rival a luminous ball of gas

iv. blue spruce

ILLUSTRATION KATIA ROZENBERG

orange zest tango with lactic acid, the means of your survival, as in, salt as resilience. your yeast communing through cheesecloth pores with spears of carrots on the shelf below, shaking whiskey bottle or quarts of kraut, the koji firmed acorn tucked into a dark pantry corner.

my heart left my body, o willow how desperately you want to be alive firm wherever graft finds earth ophelia’s nemesis, or rather, opposite, rooting hormones something fierce bark of salicin aspirin salicylic acid for skin female catkin thread-like petals pluming something magic burst from silver-furred bracts hairs compose globular form hope a peppering of kisses won’t leave the stain of lips

DESIGN ELLA ROSENBLATT

o, sucrose taproot of vulgaris, purr to me in burbles of hydrogen the aching heartbeat of betanin and ginger rhizome as that brine like cloyed residual from wound tides over a cap of cabbage leaf.

to carry your seeds, sow & thin & weed keep your breath ebullient in pH dropping we’ll dance as we did in the august that saw my heart as crimson shards illumed by blood moon.

TEXT MARISSA ALFIERO

astringence & alchemy, screaming tannins yellow miracle the house holding your skeletal wafts dazzling fractals boisterous against bare branches, arrest all attention, plow through my ribcage furrows

profound kin warm my blood i’m in love against the chill cradled me through the scarcity, the lean, steam of evergreen and boiling water if not for the blue i would have been gray numb void in which your fresh water bristled, full like a wash basin against a sleep-shadowed face stung to waking you kept me walking.

red for fortune, marry me and forgo the white for fever florid swallow the ceiling with wine from cornelian cherries; hold me for ransom fay heartwood captive shatter bittersweet an invocation for lust/or/rage grenadine or cardinal, geryon shatter scraped knees and angry leftovers remain

MARISSA ALFIERO B’2021.5 is probably stealing flowers from your yard & eating things off the street.

iii. yellow: witch hazel/dogwood/pussy willow it’s raining butter and cheer pussies and pups

or,

fragrance assaults upon me a wall of serotonin smiling blown up my brain scaling stone wall to sneak a few boughs

12

ARTS PHOTOGRAPHY LINDSAY ELLARY TEXT ISABELLE YANG DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

13

INTO THE LENS OF THE FEMALE GAZE A conversation with photographer Lindsay Ellary

In the photograph, twenty-two year old Mikaela Straus is seated outside with a glass of orange juice and a spoonful of dripping Cheerios. A thin line of milk connects the edge of the spoon to the bowl as Straus stares directly at the camera. Her face is bare, visible, and centered. Wearing a simple white tank top, her arm is stretched to expose her natural armpit. You most likely know her as King Princess, the Billboard-charting musician. And you’ve most likely seen Lindsay Ellary’s work capturing musicians.

Yet in this image, like many of Ellary’s works, any distance between the subject and the viewer is erased. Her photos feel instantaneously familiar and reachable.

Behind the camera for Phoebe Bridgers, Tame Impala, Thundercat, HAIM and more, Ellary is familiar with space that occupies photography in the music industry.

From shooting for the cover of TIME Magazine to working on Nike campaigns, Ellary defies fixed boundaries in marking her career as a photographer. When looking at Lindsay’s work today, there is an undeniable awareness of light, form, and the human object. Each image feels palpable, the subject’s skin and the surrounding light vivid at all moments. Her models—who range from children to musicians to strangers—are consciously dressed in jarring colors, accessories, and decor, while the background frame is oftentimes completely black. Beyond her commissioned projects, Lindsay stands at the forefront of portrait photography, capturing faces not typically championed by the industry.

And it’s only been three years since Lindsay moved to Los Angeles to pursue photography full time. Originally from Dallas, Texas, Lindsay grew up with a camera.

In middle school and high school she was always “that kid” inviting friends over to take portraits of them. Influenced by her dad, who paid his way through college by taking photos, she ventured into photography as a natural pursuit. Now recognized

by W Magazine in 2020 as one of the “10 New Fashion Photographers to Follow,” Ellary has been on everyone’s radar.

She video-called me from her house in Echo Park, Los Angeles. Her hair was in a casual bun and she sat comfortably in front of the screen. Behind her were some portraits she had taken hung against the wall. We talked about her creative process when shooting, the ever-evolving definition of the female gaze that her work dives into, and the intersections between gender and commercial success in photography.

ARTS

Isabelle Yang: Photography is often greeted with hurdles before one even attempts to meet the learning curve. It is a demanding industry—both financially and artistically. Keeping this in mind, how would you describe your relationship with photography?

Lindsay Ellary: The famous Alan Watts quote flashes in my head when I think about these things: what would you do if money was no object? I took this to heart when I heard it and my line of thinking became that if I keep doing exactly what I really like, then eventually I’ll get really really good. It’s a constant struggle though; I find myself checking in mentally to gauge where I’m at. But having this mentality ultimately is what helped me pursue photography.

IY: When you take photos, is there a certain objective you keep in mind? In other words, what does your thought process look like?

LE: To a certain degree it is very intuitive. The objectives are in my preparations, which includes everything that happens before the shoot. I typically prep my ideas, conceptualizing how the project will come to fruition. I have four different journals at any given time with specific individual purposes—it’s not a perfect system, but I’ll write down ideas that come sometimes by chance. I’ll be walking and see a building that light is hitting really nicely, or it could be inspired by a person, or an intense experience—I think a lot of my work comes from anger, unfortunately. I guess the prep is just figuring out an idea and sitting with it, asking myself: is this something I want to make tangibly?

IY: Anyone that goes through your collection of work will notice the recurring emphasis of the human object. Whether they may be children or friends or models, these projects involve people. Why photograph them?

LE: There is something very enjoyable about the ambiguity people bring to a shoot. You know, I can plan a project absolutely down to a T, but when the

model shows up, I can’t predict who they are or how they are feeling that day. Are they going to like me?

Am I going to like them? Photographing people takes on an organic quality as you move back and forth between the space you share with a subject.

IY: You mention organic quality. How do you manage to achieve this when there is so much conscious effort in preparing for a photo?

LE: When I started my career, I primarily photographed children. Being in LA, surrounding myself in the industry, getting bookings because the female models in the photos are seductive—this was all infuriating to me. Seeing male photographers blow up because their body of work is the bodies of nameless, replaceable women was frustrating. I was very aware of the male gaze that photography seemed suited for. So when I was working with those models, I felt like I was doing the same thing to them. She’d be gorgeous but there was nothing for me to say at that point in time. So I started photographing children because that felt more organic to me; I felt like I could portray a child as a person and not a vessel.

LE: I would like to think all of my photos have a cohesive style. I think my style is changing a lot right now as a result of having to adjust my process during COVID. But I would say that it is very driven by connectedness and intimacy. I really like strong qualities of light that feel tactile; I like things that are melancholy but with a touch of humor involved.

IY: The beauty of photos is that they often have layered visual meaning. Would you say your photos are driven by statements? Do you want them to say a message?

LE: It’s not that photos need to have layered meaning, it’s that I believe they inherently do have layered meaning. It’s happening whether you are aware of it or not. You flip through Tinder, through Bumble, and you look at pictures that people decided to publicize, and there are hidden meanings behind every single one of them. This one says I’m outgoing, that one says I have a good body! People communicate

hidden meanings behind photos no matter what. It’s present. Every photo has subtext. So you might as well think about them.

IY: I want to transition to your recent work. It seems that you have almost ‘outgrown’ what was so off-putting about working with models. As you gradually go back into that space, what is different this time around?

LE: At all times I am very aware that I’m a woman in a still very male-driven environment. The female gaze movement feels like an outcome of the male gaze. I work predominantly with women models, because I’m very interested in the experience of women and the way they’ve been photographed for so long. These newer photos feel like an evolution of my work. They exemplify my attempt in trying to photograph models again. The subject matter is in a way sexual, they are in their underwear at home but the goal is to take a picture of a nude female without connecting a sex element to it.

IY: If these photos came out as a by-product of the same sentiments but the work was done by a male— would it achieve a similar effect?

LE: It’s that classic case of ‘can you separate the art from the artist.’ There are a lot of male photographers that shoot beautiful nudes. I don’t have an answer for it, but the closest thing I’ve come to is that I would hope that having the body of work before this will provide some anchor to the work I’m going towards now. To have these photos as small guiding points—to show that nude women can be portrayed in ways other than enticing and sexual.

ISABELLE YANG B’22 is digging through old boxes to find her camera.

14

The Utopian Snare

TEXT ANCHITA DASGUPTA

DESIGN MEHEK VOHRA

ILLUSTRATION FLORIA TSUI

NEWS

Racial and caste capitalism’s tussle with Dalit liberation in India

15

“Our government is your government,” said Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, addressing a conference of Dalit entrepreneurs in December 2015. “We are working for your empowerment.”

At a perfunctory glance, such a statement would appear inconsistent with the Modi regime’s divisive politics directed at caste minorities in India. Ever since Modi’s right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party rose to power in 2014, caste-based violence has skyrocketed nationally. Sexual violence against Dalit women and Dalit people with disabilities headlines human rights reports on India annually. Human rights watchdogs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch rebuke the Indian criminal justice system’s failure to intervene and prosecute those who perpetrate anti-Dalit hate crimes, pointing out that the Indian police are often behind the very violence inflicted on Dalits. In lieu of the dreary conditions of state violence in which Dalits find themselves trapped, Modi’s 2015 message recognizing and promoting Dalit entrepreneurialism would appear confounding, but when the element of ownership of wealth is injected into this simple equation about caste, the tone of Modi’s message is easier explained.

Modi’s empathy toward the Dalit community came with a caveat. “We want to create job-creators, not job seekers,” he told the entrepreneurs. The persistent and systemic disenfranchisement of caste minorities from the economic system that had denied Dalits jobs—especially in the wake of liberalization, privatization, and globalization that swept Indian markets post the Cold War in 1991—went unacknowledged. Instead, capitalism as an emancipatory arena where the oppressed caste could create its own jobs was extolled.

Modi’s ‘wooing’ of Dalit entrepreneurs, not to be mistaken as support for Dalit liberation, is in line with the neo-liberal economics of privatization and liberalization propounded and embedded by his conservative government. Since the onslaught of globalization in 1991, Dalit intellectuals and activists, finding their community unprotected within the private sector, jumped on the leftist bandwagon of a complete repudiation of neo-liberal capitalism. In the early 2000s, exhausted by their continued marginalization within the private sector as globalization permeated every aspect of Indian society, a new strand of political thought emerged within the Dalit liberation movement. Led by Chandra Bhan Prasad—the young Dalit journalist, intellectual, and cult figure of sorts—this stream of revisionism in the Dalit movement relinquished its prior uncritical alliance with the left, calling for the emancipatory employment of capitalism by Dalits to liberate themselves. Prasad wanted greater ownership of capital by Dalits, as he believed the path to liberation stemmed from equal participation of the oppressor and the oppressed in the economy. Consequently relieved to have been offered an alternative path to Dalit liberation divorced from radical leftism, neoliberal right-wingers like Modi are keen to jump into bed with the revisionist Dalit theorists—those who call for liberation through capitalism rather than liberation from it. +++ In December 2005, Prasad organized a party in a modest New Delhi apartment to celebrate ‘Dalit capitalism.’ The invitation letter for this party was a two-paged treatise explaining this newly coined phrase. Described in this letter and later expanded upon in the book Defying the Odds, written by

Prasad, Devesh Kapur, and D. Shyam Babu, was the core tenet of Dalit capitalism: the “democratization of capital.” Prasad, Kapur, and Babu, the torchbearers of Dalit capitalism, also founded the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DICCI) that aims to fight caste with capital. To members of DICCI, capitalism is an egalitarian ideology. They idealize a moment of Dalit capital forces sitting together on an equal plane to negotiate with their dominant-caste oppressors. They believe that because Dalits have been historically disenfranchised from owning capital, they deserve equal participation in the ownership of public resources. They seek to decrease impediments to Dalit capital accumulation, which will override the economic inequalities that induce caste-based marginalization of Dalits. In sum, this can empower Dalits to assert agency within a system that has shackled them for centuries.

The push for Dalit capitalism arose from a disillusionment with other forms of economic systems.

Bhan argued that because feudalism was defeated, and socialism was “self-defeated,” capitalism remained the only hope for liberation. In 1991, India entered a period of neo-liberal reforms subdued by the wake of American unilateralism, following the collapse of the erstwhile Soviet Union. Prior to 1991, the Indian welfare state, patronized by the Soviet Union, was characterized by state ownership of capital, particularly nationalization of heavy industries, which boosted the public sector as a protector of the economically marginalized, despite stagnating national growth. Under this system, Dalits, like other caste, class, and religious minorities, benefited greatly from a system of reservation that held a select few seats for the upliftment of the disenfranchised in the public sector. This was a “safeguard” designed into the Indian constitution by its writer and iconic leader of the Dalit liberation movement, Bhim Rao Ambedkar. Therefore, in the period immediately after 1991, Dalit activists and intellectuals mobilized around a defense of the public sector and opposed globalization.

However, Prasad began to articulate an alternative position realizing that globalization and neoliberalism would stay in perpetuity. He argued that rather than wasting time by opposing the private sector, Dalits needed to stake a claim within it. Because the Indian capitalist system was itself casteist and sought to exclude Dalits who wanted to own capital, Prasad lobbied for the ownership of more capital

by Dalits. For instance, there was a near complete exclusion of Dalits from the media and the academy. The solution to this, according to Prasad, was for Dalits to own their own newspapers. This was impossible given the scale of investments necessary if the community did not have its own entrepreneurs.

Thus the push for Dalit capitalism. +++ Toward the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rift between leftist Dalit activism and Dalit capitalism in modern-day India was mirrored within the movement for Black liberation in the United States.

Spearheaded by Booker T. Washington, a form of Black capitalism emerged predicated around the notion that formerly enslaved African-Americans deserved equal participation in private ownership of public resources. This movement, built around the controversial premise of ‘racial uplift,’ laid the foundations of a capitalist enterprise for the marginalized in America, creating a model for ‘emancipatory capitalism’ in different political and social contexts across the world.

“Dalit capitalism is a paradox, designed to elevate some among the marginalized, creating hierarchies of class within caste, and recasting structural power hierarchies along new lines, instead of dismantling them. The marginalization of the subaltern Dalit through all of this remains persistent, even as who constitutes this category shifts.”

Booker T. Washington’s approach was vehemently opposed by W.E.B. Du Bois in multiple works throughout his lifetime. In The Souls of the Black Folk, Du Bois critiques Booker’s Atlanta Compromise, a statement on race relations welcomed by white leaders in the American south, that argued economic security of Black Americans superseded the need for political and intellectual liberation.

DuBois critiqued the statement for its narrow interpretation of emancipation as the attainment of self-sufficiency. Washington sought not to transcend the idea of race and the inequities that follow in its wake. Instead, he wanted to enable formerly enslaved Black Americans, who had been historically denied access to the closed quarters of white capital, to participate in the structure itself. Here, Dalit capitalism’s desire to carve out space for the minority caste into the system resonated with Booker’s Black capitalism. On the other hand, for DuBois, much like Dalit activists who resist capitalism, materialistic gain had no meaning if dignity and freedom had to be compromised to attain economic power.

Washington and DuBois’ differences diverged further on the education of formerly enslaved African-Americans. Washington set up the Tuskegee Institute for vocational training that would promote education among African Americans and in turn convert masses of underpaid Black artisanal labourers into a bourgeois class of business people. Washington explicitly sought to elevate Black labor into “honorable labor”. He believed that accumulation of wealth by the first and second generations of formerly enslaved people was the path to emancipation.

He believed in the importance of honing productive skills that Black people had been stripped of many decades ago, questioning why modern education for Black people focused on subjects like mathematics, English, and sciences when Black people, according to him, were 250 years behind in economic skill development. In 1900, he established the National Negro Business league with the intent to “promote the commercial and financial development of the Negro.” In many ways, what Washington hoped Tuskegee would be to the aspiring Black capitalists in the early 20th century, DICCI is to Dalit entrpeneurs in India today—a network of marginalized capitalists attempting to appropriate space within

NEWS an economic system that structurally denies them equality. +++ The debate between Washington and Du Bois finds renewed historical significance in charting out the trajectory of Dalit capitalism and the discourse centering it. In fact, DICCI, the organization empowering Dalit capitalists, have invoked the work of Booker T. Washington as its inspiration. Prasad has argued that as DICCI is an entity catering to marginalized business persons, 19th century African-American capitalism is central to the understanding of the historiography of Dalit capitalism. Prasad also compared the founder of DICCI, Milind Kamble, to Washington.

However, much like the DuBois-Washington rift, there exists another stream within Dalit scholarship and activism that challenges the ethics of Dalit capitalism. Of these, one of the most prominent is Suraj Yengde, a leading public intellectual and young Dalit scholar. Yengde wrote a chapter titled “Dalit Capitalism” in his book Caste Matters, where he draws from the Washington versus Du Bois debate to establish the paradox within this movement’s ideological premise. According to Yengde, castebased capitalism reiterates the divisions and marginalizations that abound within the capitalist set-up, rather than challenge them. This further accentuates caste-based divisions in the country instead of diminishing them, an argument voiced by DuBois about Washington’s attempt at Black emancipatory capitalism. For instance, Dalit capitalists do not own profitable businesses in the heavy metal industry.

Rather, upper caste capitalists monopolize ownership of such industries.

Yengde and Prasad agree that the Indian capitalist system is innately casteist, but they disagree on the tools of its dismantlement. Prasad argues that to percolate such a system, a few Dalits must be billionaires, a few hundred multi-millionaires, and a few thousand millionaires. “A few dozen Dalits as

market speculators, a few Dalit-owned corporations traded on stock-exchanges, a few Dalits with private Jets, and a few of them with Golf caps, would make democratic Capitalism loveable.” This in turn will democratize capitalism in India.

Yengde rejects this claim, arguing that this prioritizes private gain and success rather than communal liberation. The projection of some successful Dalit capitalists on mass media creates the “myth” that particpating in similar trajectories of capital accumulation, as the few successful will, fetch emancipation for the community. In reality, there is no on-theground assistance for credit or support to establish a start-up for budding Dalit entrepreneurs. He argues, “By brandishing the image of Dalit success stories, the capitalist framework paints an ideal picture: one day you will also win the lottery and ascend to the top; that is, win the 21 inch colour TV you had dreamt of. Such lies are constantly penetrated into poor neighbourhoods and working-class Dalit shanties.” In turn, Dalits—who were formerly desirous of political and economic emancipation—now seek validation of their identity, meaning, and self-worth.

This is a layer of marginalization inflicted upon the low-income, subaltern Dalit by the Dalit capitalist. By succeeding and peddling success within a structure that is biased against the Dalit, the Dalit capitalist injects self-doubt into the “working-class Dalit” who questions why they are unable to acquire the success that they witness in the Dalit icons portrayed on media. +++ At the same time, to dismiss the emancipatory utopia of capitalism invoked by Dalit capitalists without criticality would be wrong. Take, for instance, the dimension of cultural emancipation that capitalism has fetched the community, that offers Dalits a flamboyant and “carnivalesque” escape from their plight. In 2003, when the first Dalit woman chief minister of a central Indian state, Mayawati, threw a dazzling birthday party that recreated the set of a

Bollywood blockbuster, Dalits, including low income communities, reveled in the shadow of her glory.

This pride in representation undercut the legitimate New York Times critique that juxtaposed her failure as a Dalit leader with her garish opulence. As Nivedita Menon, a postcolonial scholar of caste in India, has noted, Mayawati’s birthday offered to the historically oppressed Dalit an opportunity to occupy space.

To Dalits, the ostentatious experience of capitalism, even second-hand, felt justified and long overdue.

In lieu of this, Yengde’s academic dismissal of caste capitalism—set in terms of a historical academic debate between DuBois and Washington—appears out of touch.

The unfortunate truth is there is little to Dalit capitalism beyond its imaginative utopia. For, as Yengde shows, albeit in often inaccessible terms, Dalit capitalism is a paradox, designed to elevate some among the marginalized, create hierarchies of class within caste, and recast structural power hierarchies along new lines instead of dismantling them.

The marginalization of the subaltern Dalit through all of this remains persistent, even as who constitutes this category shifts. To remedy this, radical theories of liberation embodied by DuBois and now Yengde must be recast in a manner that empowers the Dalit subaltern both materially and spiritually. Leftist theory for Dalit emancipation must therefore make room for a working class Dalit’s desire to own a 21 inch color teleivision while repudiating the system that deems this necessary. Only then can resistance to caste capitalism be truly emancipatory.

ANCHITA DASGUPTA B’21 asks that you replace all institutions with communities.

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ARTWORK “THE GAME” BY JUSTIN SCHEER

ARTWORK LIANA CHAPLAIN

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- CT

I went on the most fantastic date last week.

Being single during the pandemic is hard.

He was charming, the date lasted 3 hours.

Naturally I accepted his invitation for a second date. The thing is, when I arrived on the second date (indoors, unmasked) we sat down in the living room, chatted but then he did something really weird. He asked if I would read him a book out loud. The book was An Outrageous Proposal by April Kihlstrom. I indulged him for a few minutes before saying it really wasn’t satisfying. The book was very cringey and addressed “finding a woman to marry,” etc. The first date was so good, the second was so bad. Can we come back from this horrible reading-date? I really need advice. I want to be with him but his ideas for a good second date (and his taste in books) are so bad.

— Anti-Romance Romance Club My first impulse, ARRC, is to say that this must have been a joke. Of course, I wasn’t there, and I can’t infer from your letter how earnest he seemed in the moment. But I have to imagine that his fondness for An Outrageous Proposal is in some way humorous.

People often do jarring or weird things around the second date, which is certainly amplified by pandemic dating, since your best option to see someone indoors is to enter their home rather than a bar or a restaurant. Everyone has domestic peculiarities which are typically reserved for roommates, families, and very familiar partners. But COVID courtship forces these peculiarities into the open much more quickly in a budding relationship, which can be both a blessing and a curse. It’s much harder to put a mysterious crush on a pedestal if you’ve looked through their bathroom cabinet, literally and metaphorically.

It also may be worth noting that people have very different relationships to the act of reading aloud. In most scenarios, I would probably find it off-putting to be asked to read aloud on a second

date, but (for lack of better phrasing) if the vibes were right, I could be into it. One of my co-columnists would, after a three hour date, thoroughly enjoy both reading out loud and being read to. It might not be your first idea of a romantic activity, but I’m sure you could grow to appreciate it with the right person.

It can be very intimate for someone to gaze at you longingly while listening to your sultry voice, after all. Or, in this case, perhaps he thought you would find the book funny and you two could bond over its silliness.

My guess is that he picked the book up on a whim from the box of free romance novels that often sits on the stoop of Madeira Liquors and thinks it’s a funny conversation starter. I am, arguably, biased in favor of this scenario, as my roommates and I display on our living room bookshelf a romance novel we found in that very box, In Love With The Boss by Doreen Roberts (a novel about Sadie Milligan, a “primand-proper secretary” who “found herself putting in some very wifely overtime.”) I hope that any guest to whom we have shown this book does not think we are cringey, trad, or culturally illiterate.

ARRC, you can come back from this if you’re willing to (forgive me) reparatively read the date, and give him the benefit of the doubt that the reading was humorously intended. If you can’t do that, you probably don’t have very compatible senses of humor, and I don’t think this relationship can go on any further. And if I am wrong, and it wasn’t a joke at all, I don’t think you’re going to be able to come back from this. I’m sensing from what you say in the last line—that you “want to be with him”—that there’s a lot riding on this relationship going well from the get-go since pandemic dating is particularly burdensome and stressful. Still, neither the pandemic itself nor your will to make a relationship work are reasons to settle down with someone either whose humor you don’t find funny or is, at best, corny, and at worst, sexist. Perhaps this romance novel collector could be your Mr. Darcy. Perhaps he’s more of a Mr. Collins. Either way, ARRC, summer is just around the corner.

- GS

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

Your question, Jean Blues, leaves some ambiguity as to where the curse of these pants really comes from, or what exactly they’re cursing. Maybe they curse you to other people’s assumptions of a connection between you and your ex-friend; maybe they serve for you as an unwelcome reminder of this person. I would guess the curse comes from some combination of these factors. In any case, Jean, I’d like to start by exhorting you not to let these pants fester in your closet, emitting magically bad vibes, any longer. It can be very hard to decide what to do with a symbolic object of this kind, even—and maybe especially—when the value it holds is more negative than sentimental. But I can guarantee you’ll feel more in control of the pants situation at least, and possibly the lingering situation with your ex-friend in general, if you take some form of action.

Whether the pants are cool should be a non-negligible factor in what you decide to do with them. If they aren’t—that is, if your ex-friend was as bad at art as they seem to have been at treating people decently—I wouldn’t recommend giving them to Goodwill, where there are already plenty of discarded pants that aren’t festooned with mediocre student work. As for Depop, I’ll defer to a co-columnist with more experience than I have, who tells me that the experience of selling on Depop is a constant stressful reminder of what you’re selling and for how much, a surprisingly heavy emotional burden. Not to mention that, as far as other people associating you with these pants and thus with their designer goes, selling them on Depop would roughly equate to wearing them.

Another solution would be to remove these pants from their context. Separating art from artist is a lot easier when the artist in question is 22 and has fewer than 300 Instagram followers, so—assuming that the art is recognizable as your ex-friend’s and that this is a factor in the pants’ cursed status—giving these pants to someone far away from Providence, or wherever you and this ex-friend are located, would probably neutralize the curse.

But I’m also struck, Jean, by an option you didn’t deem fit to consider, or at least to list: disassembling or otherwise transforming the pants. I understand that substantially altering an object with some particular use or artistic value is a very charged thing, and that this is even truer when the object in question has (even, and maybe especially, upsetting) symbolic value for you. But the flipside is also true: transforming these pants into something you personally can use might be a cathartic process. You can keep the object in your life after stripping it of the symbolic meaning that has kept it gathering dust

in your closet. Some possibilities to keep in mind: making one of those horrible pants handbags middle schoolers with sewing machines seem biologically compelled to produce, convening a Siblinghood of the Traveling Pants to invest them with new significance, and cutting them up to use them as kitchen rags designated for wiping up especially gross spills (this serves the dual purpose of vengeance). You can try your hand at deflating the curse yourself, and you don’t necessarily have to contribute to the mountains of textile waste occupying landfills. In all seriousness, I think this may be the best option. You get back the space these pants have been taking up, you get newish stuff, and, hopefully, you get closure.

DESIGN XINGXING SHOU

I have this pair of cursed pants. I bought them from an ex-friend a few years ago, who designed them, but the ex-friend has since been thoroughly cancelled. I don’t ever want to wear the pants, which are covered with original artwork and designs. What should I do with them? I’m torn between selling them on Depop (which feels super public, but I wouldn’t feel bad making a profit off this friend, who was plenty terrible to me too, but they’re not even an actual brand) or just giving them to Goodwill or just letting them fester in my closet as they have been for the past few months.

— Jean Blues

TEXT GEMMA SACK, CAL TURNER, & SARA VAN HORN

DearIndy