Life & Arts | PAGE 7
VOLUME XXXIII NO. 17
Sports | PAGE 10
THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF UTD — WWW.UTDMERCURY.COM
NOVEMBER 4, 2013
1.4k likes on facebook.com/theutdmercury | Hundreds follow @utdmercury on Twitter | By UTD students, for UTD students: continuously in print for over 30 years
Collection features gritty stories from student and profs Mercury Special Report by ANWESHA BHATTACHARJEE Web Editor
It’s less than a month shy of 50 years since the JFK assassination. The grass is wet, the moon peeps through a jumble of confused clouds — black and white. The editor at the newspaper office stares at the copy; it’s all been the same for 50 years. A big bird — maybe the La Lechuza — spreads its wings and flies over a Walgreens, a 7-11, an uptown club, the dried Trinity river,
marking its prey, unknown to the sleeping city living its mundane existence. As the first rays of the sun hit the wet earth tomorrow, the mysteries, the dead, the intrigue of the night will give way to the normal buzz — Dallas will resume its life once again. Unsettling as it is, that is the feeling one is left with after reading each story in “Dallas Noir,” an anthology of short stories, the latest in the noir series by Akashic Books. Centered on the DFW metroplex, each story in the book is set on a Dallas street, maybe where the author lives, maybe where
legend lives. The works of arts and humanities professor Clay Reynolds and assistant professor Matt Bondurant, as well as a story from Lauren Davis, a graduate student in history, are featured in the anthology. While some stories have strong noir elements in them — an anti-hero, a tragic end — others render the reader bereft, emotions
Dallas Noir
in odd harmony with the protagonist’s fate, leaving them with the pain of a lost loved one, the haze of the West Nile virus pesticide or the hurt of onesided love. Yet, Dallas’ almostfleeting presence, the glaring contrasts of the stinking rich and the hapless poor, its buxom women and its Texan masculinity teamed with Hispanic folklore, all find their way into
Akashic Books David Hale Smith, Editor $12.76 (Amazon) Available Nov. 5
each of these 16 short stories. The pieces have a timeless quality to them, as if the stories could have happened 50 years ago or today; as if Dallas, despite all the leaps in business and technology, still has an angry score to settle, perhaps with fate. The stories bring out Dallas’ stubborn nature, people who take every challenge in their stride, a city that refuses to give up despite hardships and continues to reshape its constantly changing skyline as it grows, slow and steady.
CONNIE CHENG/STAFF
CHRISTOPHER WANG/PHOTO EDITOR
Assistant Professor Matt Bondurant’s short fiction, “Hole-Man” is based on reallife events that occured to him last summer on his relatively quiet suburban Dallas street, pictured above. An idyllic setting belies something more sinister in his story.
Professor Clay Reynolds is pictured above at Tavern on Main Street in old Richardson, a favorite haunt of the arts and humanities students and faculty for more than two decades. Reynolds said the atmosphere reminds him of a classic 20th century bar.
Bondurant: Suburbia hides indiscretions
Reynolds: Danger lurks in the darkness
Davis: Legends and folklore loom large
The two lamps stood craning their necks out, angled to shed light on a laptop and randomly organized stacks of paper on the big wooden desk; the potent silence interrupted only by the mechanical ping of the fifth floor elevator. Creative writing professor Matt Bondurant didn’t seem to mind the occasional intrusion of the real world as he punched away on his keyboard with brusque efficiency. Bondurant, whose book “The Wettest County in the World” was made into a motion picture in 2012, is a couple hundred pages into his fourth novel. He is scripting a TV show for HBO-Cinemax as well as adapting a graphic novel into a film and is one of the Dallas authors featured in “Dallas Noir.” He looks like a man unaccustomed to inactivity, and Anders, the protagonist of his noir fiction embodies that restlessness, that desire to socialize, even in a quiet suburb where people enter and exit out of back alleys, hardly ever meeting their neighbors. Bondurant’s “Hole-Man” is an open-ended story set in East Dallas, where Bondurant himself lives, that juxtaposes the humdrum of the ordinary suburban life and the tug of war within the author between his cynicism toward mankind and his faith in humanity that lives on, forever hopeful. Set in the backdrop of the deadly West Nile virus that held Dal-
Dallas is a city whose face alters with each darker shade of the twilight. Samuel Grand Avenue is menacing at 6:30 p.m. and Harry Hines is scary at midnight. Every vignette in arts and humanities professor Clay Reynolds’ “Night Work” could be about the dank Walgreens or the dilapidated convenience store around the dark-lit bend of a street in old Dallas. Reynolds’ piece in “Dallas Noir” is different from all other stories in the anthology. Devoid of a continuous plot or a central protagonist, the sketches manage to weave a tale of intrigue around unrelated characters that are as yet unaware of the danger that awaits them. Set in old East Dallas, the six vignettes portray a strange aloofness stereotypical of the average working neighborhood — misery, poverty, sex and death are all quasi-normal — no one has the leisure to dwell on morality when it comes at the expense of daily survival. Each of the vignettes is a narration through the eyes of a protagonist, someone working in the service industry worried about keeping a job yet scared for his life, not trusting the cops yet uneasy of not reporting a crime. Perhaps Reynolds, a man who comes across as rigidly upright
Lauren Davis is a fighter. She’s one of those that bravely faces down any challenges fate shoves her way — the only way she can see herself going is up. A New Orleans native, Davis found herself displaced to Dallas after Hurricane Katrina. Away from her roots, her whole life as she knew it was spinning out of control. After laboriously building her name as a hairdresser for 25 years, without a job or a clientele in a new city, Davis was at a crossroads. She could either spiral into the abyss of despair like the quintessential noir antihero, or she could start from scratch. Davis chose the latter. She enrolled at UTD as a history major with a minor in creative writing. “I decided it was time to reinvent myself, so I decided to go to school,” Davis, now a graduate student in history, said. In fall 2012, Davis was in Matt Bondurant’s creative writing class and David Hale Smith spoke to the class about publishing. As a parting note, Smith invited all students to submit a noir fiction for an anthology. Davis grabbed the opportunity and submitted her piece. Early in 2013, her story was accepted for publication in “Dallas Noir.” Although raised by her father and stepmother in Louisiana, Davis has been a visitor to Dallas since the 1970s when her mother
Alumni build therapeutic bots for autistic children Graduates use Kickstarter to fund innovative human, robot interaction project JOSEPH MANCUSO Mercury Staff
CHRISTOPHER WANG/PHOTO EDITOR
Tejeev Patel, graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas, expounds on the techical aspects of the various iterations of Robokind’s different models. The firm’s office on the seventh floor of a downtown Dallas skyscraper is littered with experimental models like the ones seen above, in various stages of development.
Robokind aims to change the way humans interact with robots with its latest model, the ZENO R25. The robot sports a variety of social features and is able to carry out a conversation with the user. Robokind stemmed from Hanson Robotics, founded by David Hanson, who received his Ph.D. in 2007 from UTD. He is well-known for his work on life-like robotics, including a 2009 TED talk where he presented a robotic Albert Einstein that responded to his emotions. The company employs many UTD graduates and has been developing similar robots for years. “We wanted to build (Hanson Robotics) into a larger company that could start mass producing robots and
get them out into people’s homes,” said Matthew Stevenson, Robokind’s director of software engineering and a computer science alumnus. “We are just about ready to launch our next line of robots, and we are trying to make that launch through Kickstarter. It’s a good way to make some of the first sales while bringing in money for future development.” While the R25 robots utilize open source software and can be programmed for a wide range of uses, some of the intended purposes for the robot include use as a teaching tool and for autism therapy. A touch screen on the R25’s chest can be used to display questions and accept multiple choice answers. Internal components of the robot can stream video to nearby tablet computers and conduct lessons or quizzes.
Arts & Technology alumnus Justin Holder said while the robot’s life-like features and expressions help to make it easy to relate with, the technology behind the R25 allows it to easily maintain dialog with autistic children. “We had one of the old R50 robots in a group with one of the children who hadn’t been talking to anyone at the facility in months,” Holder said. “After about 10 to 15 minutes with the robot, the child was talking to the robot and having conversations. The robots don’t have any sort of patience issue; they don’t get tired of what you’re saying.” Holder uses his ATEC training to serve as the middleman for the programmers in charge of the robot’s behavior and the modelers who manage