Volume 30 - Issue 1

Migrant Workers in Connecticut's Fields • Nosing through Thornton Wilder's Letters

ewourna Volwne 30, Nwnber 1

The magazine about Yale and New Haven

September 5, 1997

Why Larry Kramer offered Yale $5 million, and why Yale turned him down.

FUTON TRUCKLOAD SALE SEPT. 5-1 3th 3 FLOORS WATERBED & FUTONS 101 WHALLEY AVE. , NEW HAV EN (203) 624-841 0

Best Quality Frame in New Haven

'WE MAKE OUR OWN"

s199 OQ •

Full size Frame+ six inch Gold Bond Futon

It's a LOUNGERI

It's a BEDI

It's a SOFA or CHAIRI

FREE CURB SERVICE DELIVERY IN NEW HAVEN ONLY DOOR BEADS

+

INDIA BED SPREADS

ROCK SHOP T-shirts •grateful dead• •lava lamps• •incense• • stickers• 20% OFF ABOVE WITH FlYER

Voted Best Futon Store 5 years In a row!

Full Service Waterbed Dealer •Mattress• •Liners• ~Heaters•

• Waterbed Sheets • 20% off

OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK - SUNDAY 1-5 AFTER LABOR DAY

TheNew

TT.Q__UJil(Ll_Vo-LUME-30 , N-uMB-ER ~.!_____ SEPTEMBER 5' 1997 I -

E A T U R E S _ __ __ _ _ _ _ __

6

Meditations on Meditation

From a hidden house on Mansfield Street, the New Haven Zen Center offers a welcome silence.

BY LAINIE RUTKOW

IO D4HCER.

An Honest's Day Work

Between june and August, hundreds ofmigrant workers from Jo:1exico and Guatemala leave their over-crowded New Haven apartments to work 14hour days in the tobacco fields ofthe Connecticut Valley.

BY LOREN BRODY WITH SARAH ROGERS

16

Straight from the Gift Horse's Mouth

After Yale refuses to accept his money, playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer tells ofhis not-so-bright college years.

BY GABRIEL SNYDER

2-2

Photoessay: Tower One-Tower East

BY MA PIYAKA

STAN DAR D S _ __ _ __ __ __ 4 5

26 28 30

From Our Perspective Points of Departure Between the Vines: Home Sweet Home, Again BY D ORJE BOUFIDES The Critical Angle: The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder BY DANA GOODYEAR Endnote: Coup at the Co-op BY ALEC HANLEY BEMIS

Cover by Maya Brym.

T HE NEW jOURNAL is published five rimes during <h< acadtmic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 3<4J~ Yale S12tion, New H•vcn, CT o6s~o. Office address: >s> Puk Srreet. Phone: 'wJ' 4J1-19S7All contenu copyright 1997 by The New Journal a1 Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction ei<her in whole or in pan without writlen permission of the publisher and editor in chief is prohibited. While this magaline is published by Yale College srudenrs, Yale University is nor responsible for iu contents. Ten thousand copies of each issue are distributed free ro memben of the Yale and New Haven community.

Subscriptions are available to those outsid< the area. Rates: One year, sr8. Two years, Sjo. THE NEW jOURNAL is printed by Turley Publicuions, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. THE NEW jOURNAL encourages letters 10 the edi!or and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Wri<e 10 Editorials, }4}2 Yal• Sl2tion, New Haven, cr o6sw. AJJJ.nen for publication must indude address and signacur~. We reserve rh< right ro edit allleners for publicacion.

TheNewJournal PUBLISHER

Dan Murphy EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Gabriel Snyder MANAGING EDITORS

Alec Hanley Bemis Dana Goodyear BusiNESS MANAGER

justin Sacks PRODUCTION MANAGER

Lainie Rutkow PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Asa Piyaka AssociATE PustiSHER

Catherine Olender AssociATE EDITOR

jay Dixit RESEARCH DIRECTORS

Vanessa Agard-fones Dorie Boufides CIRCULATION AND SuBSCRIPTION MANAGER

Daphna Renan Czro/in~ Adams • Lorm Brody • Sara Harkavy Kavita Mariwa/14 • Yuki Noguchi • Gmny Taft

Mnnbm and Diucum: Constance Clement Joshua Civin • Peter B. Cooper • Brooks Kelley Hillary Margolis • Kathy Reich • Elizabeth Sledge Fred Strebeigh • Thomas Strong

Fr:imds: Steve Ballou • Anson M. Beard, Jr. Edward B. Bennen, Jr. • Edward B. Bennett Ill Blaire Bennett • Paul S. Bennett • Gerald Bruck Barbara Burrell • Jay Carney • Jonathan M. Clark Constance Clemen£ • Peter B. Cooper • Andy Court • Jerry and Rae Court • Mesi Denison Mrs. Howard Fox • David Freeman • Geoffrey Fried • Sherwin Goldman • David Greenberg Stephen Hellman Brooks Kdley • Roger Kirwood Andrew J. Kuzneski, Jr. • Lewis E. Lehrman • Jim Lowe • E. Nobles Lowe • Hank Mansback • Martha E. Neil • Peter Neill • Sean O'Brien • Julie Peters Lewis & Joan Plan: • Josh Plaut • Julia Preston Lauren Rabin • Fairf.vc C. Randal • Rollin Riggs Mark Rindla • Nicholas X. Rizopoulos • Stuart Rohrer • Arleen and Anhur Sager • Dick and Debbie Sears • Richard Shidds • W. Hampton Sides • Lisa Silverman • Elizabeth & William Sledge • Thomas Strong • Elizabeth Tate • Alex & Betsy Torello • Allen and Sarah Warddl • Danid Yergin & Angda Stent Yergin

Shop 'til You Drop

Y

ale is at this moment thigh-deep in the semesterly phenomenon of shopping period, a ten-day experience which is at worst a crash course-- in contingency and at best a drive through higher education's Napa Valley. We shoppers sample the sweets; we hover, plunge, and dart off fast. Of this practice-this dabbling and momentary dilettantism which allows the Engineering major to entertain for one moment the thought of KunderaUniversity of Virginia Professor Mark Edmundson (GRD '85) has a thing or two to say. In a recent Harper's article, complaining of the market sensibility that dominates American universities, he wrote: "The common term for this time span-~hopping period-speaks volumes about the consumer mentality that's now in play."

Edmundson paints a picture of the climate of university life that is designed to depress. He depicts undergraduates as the dull, sad vehicles of commercial culture, desirous only of pleasure's gentle lullaby, to be followed by a sugarplum future in the suburban middle class. We are, in his view, slogging through our days, our edges softened by just enough TV to keep us from committing suicide. We are utterly dispassionate.

This is an uncomfortable image to any student, but not in the way that Edmundson intends. It is objectionable not because he pushes us toward a painful self-recognition, but precisely because what he writes does not ring true. Students act like customers, true

enough, but not to the detriment of Yale as a place of intellectual rigor. We act like grannies at the grocery store, prodding fruit and comparing prices, getting downright finicky. We demand the most for our twenty-nine ninety-five when we shop, and do so with an intensity that belies Edmundson's image of the apathetic yawning undergrad.

We understand that "shopping period," a term which semanticalequates pedagogical endeavors to wow students with 99¢ specials on Jell-0, is simply too alluring to pass up. Anyone_ can see that it's an example of how, surprise, surprise, a half a century's worth of consumer culture has infiltrated the ivory tower. The irony, though, is that during the next week of classes, we will actually give a damn.

That cleared up, we feel we must move on to Edmundson's larger condemnation: that we lack genius. Okay, we will admit that excitement does not equal genius. But we also know better (in that apathetic, cool-kid way) than to confuse perspiration with inspiration.

Edmundson concludes his essay with a short declaration of his plan to improve his teaching methods, in an effort to combat the consumer-driven soft-shelledness of his students: "I'm getting back to a more exuberant style; I'll be expostulating and arm waving straight into the millennium, yes I will." Such behavior, we savvy shoppers know, sometimes sours before its expiration date.

-The Editors

'Is'<

-t'A4~

-ao c.-\

THE NEW jOURNAL

First to

Be Last

The class of 1999 is the last class of this millennium. Any member of the junior class of 1999 knows that. Dean Brodhead (BR '68, GRD '72) told us so at our freshman address.

He said we are "Yale's last chance to get it right."

I certainly felt proud about that as I moved into Old Campus two years ago, Prince's "1999" blasting out of every dorm window. Just listen to the song, Prince knows what's going on.

1999 is our last chance to party before the new millennium. I presented m y father with this irrefutable evidence that I was part of this elite last class of the twentieth century. Of course, my dad rebutted this information. "Count to tat," he prodded. I started with one and continued on, his familiar smirk appearing before I reached ten. "See," he pointed out, "you start with one and end with ten, so 1991 is the first year of this decade and 2000 is the last."

I was not willing to concede so quickly. My dad is a lawyer, and if is my lifelong dream to win an argwnent against him. The Dean ofYale College wouldn't lie. Neither would Prince, or whatever his name is now. I turned to my trusty ~bsters Dictionary. I stumbled upon the Table of Numbers, which listed the cardinal and ordinal numbers. I could see the proof right there in front of me. The cardinal column started with zero. Adjacent to it, in the ordinal column, the word first; nine lined up perfeal.y with tenth.

I was still curious, and when all else fails, I head for the Encyclopedia Britannica. But I was foiled even there because the encyclopedia's explanation only confused me further.

In Biblical terms, the end of the millennium will mark the end of the world. Does that mean that the graduation of the class of 2000 will signal the apocalypse? Thankfully, I'll have my Yale degree before that happens.

I decided to rum to the ultimate authority in timekeeping: Greenwich, England.

After all, every day begins right there. On the first screen of the web site, bright cnlors announced the unveiling of the world's biggest dome in the year 2000. I thought I had SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

finally triumphed, but alas, the scientists over in Greenwich pointed out a fatal flaw. There is no year 0. We go from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. So year 1 is similar to zero on the Table of Numbers.

Consequently, 1999 is the 999th year of the second millennium and 2000 the lOOOth. Officially, 200 1 is the first year of the third millennium. Though disheartened, I thought I could at least remain secure in the knowledge that I had found the answer. But, oh no, even those seemingly trustworthy scientists conceded that, "The millennium officially starts on 1 January 2001 at Greenwich. But most people are regarding 1 January 2000 as a good day to start the party!"

Start the party? I guess people will do anything to find an excuse to have a good time. So, despite all that Dean Brodhead, my father, WMster's Dictionary, and Encycloped.Uz Britannica told me, it turns out Prince was right after all.

-justin Sacks

New Haven Transfer The opening days of school are hectic for every Yale student, as we flip distractedly through blue books and make desperate attempts to secure a network connection.

Carmelo Rivera (DC '00) and Nathaniel Birdsall (DC '01) have more challenges ahead of them than the standard scheduling, unboxing, and rearranging burdens of the average Yalie.

The roommates are two of the 25 transfer students entering Yale this semester.

I remember the mixture of excitement and terror I felt as a transfer student in this same room one year ago as I attempted to decipher an overwhelmingly complicated university system, most of which was written in a language I could hardly understand. Who is this residential college master person?

Can anybody cell me what classes I'm supposed to take, no, shop for? Why is there a man shaving his head in my bathroom? You mean I have to share it with him? Where is my freshman counselor?!

Rivera and Birdsall may enjoy a smoother

transition than I did, but like me and my transfer classmates of last year, they arrive at Yale several years out of high schooL Their varied life experiences give each student a unique perspective that combines the na1vete of the Yale freshman with the assumptions of a veteran college student.

For Rivera, starting at Yale is an unexpected homecoming. He grew up on Frank Street in New Haven. After graduating from high school four years ago, Rivera packed his bags and stepped onto a Greyhound bus, vowing never to return. Rivera worked at various jobs across the country: as a welder in Ohio, on an oil rig in Louisiana, and in a Aorida power plant. In Florida, Rivera decided to go back to school.

After two successful years at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa,¡ Rivera moved back to New Haven with plans to study biology. "I used to walk construction beams here five years ago," he says. "I can't believe I'm back."

Nathaniel Birdsall's post-high school experience has been as sedentary as Rivera's has been unsettled. Birdsall spent his last two years at Deep Springs College near Death Valley, California, 30 miles from the nearest man-made structure. The academically prestigious, twoyear, all-male school has a student body of 26 and is also a working cattle ranch and alfalfa farm. Three transfer students this year come from Deep Springs. Most recently, Birdsall worked as a dairy boy, milking cows and making butter, in addition to studying for his classes. One of the hardest things about moving to New Haven, Birdsall says, is getting used to buying products instead ofgrowing them. "The last two years I knew the man who cooked the meat, I knew the man who slaughtered the cow, I knew the cow's name," Birdsall says. "It's been hard co readjust to consumer society."

In many ways, Rivera and Birdsall are typical Yale students, however they must endure the evolutionary process every Yale freshman undergoes without the nourishing primordial soup of Old Campus. After dteir inaugural year at Yale is behind them, though, perhaps these students will get to play the role of seasoned Yalie co a new group of transfer students who will arrive on campus next falL -Cathmne 0/mdn

5

In a hidden house on Mansfield Street, the New Haven Zen Center offers a welcome silence.

Meditations on Meditation lainie Rutkow erched on a black pillow on the floor of Battell Chapel, my figure completes a small ring of people. They begin to chant. I flip through a book of Zen chants whose frailty implies years of use.

The words are spoken first in Korean and then in English. For ten minutes I stumble through Korean phonetics, relieved only briefly by the translation. After chanting, we start a 30-minute sitting meditation. I sit up straighter, centering my shoulders above my hips; someone inhales deeply. My legs are already experiencing the dull ache that the lotus posicion often causes.

I focus my eyes on the grayed carpet beneath me, wondering just how I am to empty my mind of thoughts that seem to have nowhere else to go. I funively glance up to check the status of the other practitioners and catch a glimpse of the Biblical scenes formed by stainedglass panels above my head. This allegedly "non-denominational" chapel triggers the onset of my non-secular anxieties.

I have not attended a religious service in years, and non-meditative thoughts begin racing through my head. I think back to ten minutes earlier when I opened the chapel doors and discerned only thick silence.

Squinting, I detected five figures sitting in the pipe organ's massive shadow. They were so still that they appeared the phantom remains of some earlier gathering. As I approached them, my footsteps and even my breathing resonated ftom every crevice of the building. I became guiltily conscious of each creak and thud that accompanied me toward them.

Suddenly, the sharp pain in my back reminds me that I am supposed to be meditating. Recalling my recent sequence of thoughts, I determine that the first 15 minutes of this meditation caused me more stress than relaxation. Maybe I missed some unspoken but crucial rule

P

6

of"sitcing." I wonder if any of my fellow contortionists are suffering. To them, I do appear to be meditating, since I sit in the way that Dushko Petrovich (DC '97) explained when I first arrived at the chapel: shoeless, with feet over knees, back straightened, hands overlapped, shoulders relaxed, tongue "parked" behind the teeth. I now understand why he cautioned me not to be discouraged by my first attempt at meditation. "Meditation practice is not special. You don't go in and have this special experience. It's not a vacation-you don't go in to relax. As many things as you can do to make it a part of your everyday life, the better it can engage that everyday life. It's a process that has to work ¡ itself out," he said.

Dushko claps rwo pieces of wood together to mark the end of the meditation. My head jerks up and I feel somewhat dazed, though I notice that I am not the only one who jumped at the unexpected clack.

As we gather our belongings and tie our shoes, the people who shared this experience speak in low tones. One woman mentions that she meditates as pan of a religious studies class, a second remarks that she is a New Haven resident who practices Zen. I learn that of the six participants, only three are Yale students.

The dynamic is similar at the next morning's meditation session.

Of the seven attendees, four are Yale srudents and three are New Haven residents. I mention this to Dushko and he is not at all surprised by my mundane observation. He explains that the meditation sessions are open to Yale students as well as those in the surrounding community. A community organization, not the university, supports the on-campus meditation sessions. He tells me that the New Haven Zen Center is responsible for nearly all Zen activities on campus. When Dushko

THE NEW jOURNAL

Pillows mark seats ofthose who meditate, while stark walls and large windows provide a sense oftranquility at the New Haven Zen Center.

began to sit, about four years ago, it was Bruce Blair (TC '81), the abbot of the Zen Center, who led meditation sessions.

T

he New Haven Zen Center sits at 193 Mansfield Street, tucked among Prospect Street, Ingalls Rink, and a number of New Haven residences. As I walk toward Mansfield Street on a late spring afternoon, I watch the urban drift lazily into the suburban. The rumbling traffic two blocks away is a distant buzz. Broken bottles and chips of peeled paint liner the sidewalk. Under this film of decay, Mansfield Street is an exhausted version ofsuburbia.

The Zen Center is a substantial walk up Mansfield Street, and I pass by it twice expecting to find a more distinctive building. The center's structure mimics that of nearly every other house on the street; its new coat of pale blue paint and oval-shaped front window offer it only minimal distinction. Looking at the house from a distance, one might imagine that it contained anything but a spiritual community center. A sign rests inside the front door. It reads, "Welcome. If you are here for practice or instructiqn and the door is open, please come in. If the door is locked, please ring the bell. Someone will come down to let you in."

Though I can't believe that anyone leaves their door unlocked in this neighborhood, I try twisting the doorknob. It is locked, so I ring the bell, feeling a tinge of apprehension at disturbing this house.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

Someone comes to the door, as the sign promised. He introduces ~ himself as Tom Dickinson (SY '78, MUS '83), a practitioner of Zen 5 who lives at the center. As we walk upstairs through air heavy with ~ incense, he invites me to look around. Shoeless, I slip noiselessly ~ through a library and into a sitting room that connectS to a kitchen. ~ Tom mentions that the center can house up to six people. He leads me ~ to the meditation room, which is the largest space in the center. He ~ bows so quickly as we enter that I barely notice, but I do the same, for ~ fear of exhibiting ignorant disrespect. The room looks the way one ~ expects a place called the "dharma room" to look: it boasts hard-wood floors, pictures of past Zen Masters on the white walls, a large bell in ~ one corner, and an altar topped with an immense golden buddha against the far wall.

Tom speaks in a whisper in this room, offering information about the center. He explains that this center was one of the first three in the United States to practice the Kwan Urn School of Zen. On the far wall hangs a picture of Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn who started the first center of this kind in Providence in 1971. As we complete the tour, Tom bids me to rerum whenever I feel the need. He gives me a copy of the center's newsletter, Lotus Root. Reading it on the way out, I learn that the Zen Center offers free morning and evening meditation, and monthly retreats.

g

7

'' T

Call Kaplan now for classes in Connecticut.

he center was born in a Calhoun Master's living room," Bruce Blair tells me several days later.

"The Calhoun Master's wife was interested in meditation, and several students were really taken with the practice. Eventually, the practice was relocated to a professor's house on Mansfield Street, and when he moved, he sold his house to the center. That was over 22 years ago, and the center was dedicated in 1975."

Bruce came to the Zen Center as an undergraduate, and though it is an unpaid position, has served as the center's abbot for nearly a decade. He explains that the Zen Center and the universiry have traditionally had a dose relationship. Their most formal connection is the center's membership to the Yale Religious Ministry. Though iis voice on campus is often soft-spoken, the Zen Center

has at times been more visible in the undergraduate communiry. When Reverend Jerry Streets (DIV '75) became university chaplain in 1992, his installation service opened with the ringing of the Zen Center bell, which members of the center carried down from Mansfield Street.

Currently, the Zen Center maintains its ties to the universiry in several scarcely-publicized venues. As a member of the Common Quest Foundation, Bruce serves on a committee that works to broaden and deepen the religious life of the school. On a more tangible level, the Zen Center and Yale are partners in the Mansfield Street Neighborhood Garden.

The public garden serves as a place for walking meditation and communiry events. This summer, when the center hosted a reading by New Haven poet Naomi Ayala in the garden,

Ask about Private Tutoring!

•:tJQ!J~· 1·800-KAP·TEST www.ka plan.com

La Fortuna's

PIZZA Restaurant

LUNCH DINNER DAILY SPECIALS SUBS

Pizza Calzone Subs Beer Wine I

( lid 'I)'

.L

( l, '

I'

I';')

]',

\ ,,, t

)r

Hours: Mon-Thurs: llam-!Opm Fri: llam-1 lpm Sat: 12 noon-1lpm

996 State Street • New Haven Easy off street parking in rear!

of fresh roses and cut flowers in town !

Balloons and Plants.

(203) 772.2229 26 Whitney Avenue, New Haven Just .......t m. ~ bchnl

Tllnlllhy ~ Collc!Je

8

THE NEw JoURNAL

over 100 people attended.

Somehow being in the Zen Center does not arouse my non-secular anxieties. Without labelling it, the Zen C'enter delicately maintains a non-denominational spirit. Some of the people who practice here have no Buddhist affiliations. They meditate and leave as more devout Jews or Christians or Muslims.

T he center is a house, not a synagogue, not a chapel, not a mosque. Because it belongs to the world of the everyday, it imposes no spiritual loyalties.

A

s I prepare to leave my final meditation session, my legs and back still ache. After untangling my feet from my knees, it takes about five minutes before I can feel the entirety of my left leg. Most of us stand up and stretch, restoring ourselves to our proper heights. My body has not adjusted well to this daily dose of the lotus position. I think back to something Dushko said during my first session. "What's remarkable about Zen practice is the degree to which every human mind has the same kinds of experiences while engaging the practice." Maybe this lingering physical pain is just part of the practice. We return .our black pillows and chant books to their storage area and straighten the worn rug. I say goodbye to the three students and two New Haven residents with whom I have shared these five mornings.

What I am left with, after the group dissipates, is a sense of quietness. It is not the quietness of the chapel that strikes me so much as the quietness that pervades so much of Zen. It goes beyond the silent meditations and murmured chants. Many of the questions associated with the practice have answers that are known but not spoken. Meditation sessions leave individuals to work through their questions and unearth the answers in their own time. In my conversations with Bruce, he reminds me again and again of the difficulty of translating into words the thoughts and intentions of the center, and the gestures it makes toward the community. "How can I help you?" is the unspoken question that the center asks, but as he says, its meaning is sometimes lost in the articulation. li1J

Dive Inl Visit www.peterindorf.com and see our new, fine jewelry Webalog and save big on sale items not advertised anywhere else. + Custom Designs + Expert Repairs + +Appraisals + Diamonds + Precious Colored Gems+ Pearls+ Silver Jewelry+ + Official Yale Class Rings +

Surf our site today, or stop in!

1022 Chapel Street New Haven • CT 06510 800-597-0503 • 203-776-4833

IT'S YOUR BIKE

IF YOU PARK IT TONIGHT•••

•••WILL IT BE THERE TOMORIJOW? Use a good U-shaped lock to secure bikes to bicycle racks. Cables and chains are easily defeated. Register your bike with the Yale Police.

lainie Rutkow, a junior in Morse College, is production manager oJTNJ. SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

YALE UNIVERSITY POLICE 9

T

hese could be the vans. The early morning sky is pitchblack, but with the lighrs from the Honda directed at them, we can see two beat-up white vans parked outside a house on Fillmore Street in New Haven's Fair Haven neighborhood. No workers are getting in them yet. We circle.

We're looking for any sign of the migrant farm workers picked up by these vans between 4 and 5 a.m. each morning. We drive slowly on Lombard Street, heading back toward Fillmore. Just as we reach the corner, we notice two men sitting on the stoop of an apartment building. One of them is short and wears work boors and jeans. The taller man has an earring in one ear. We approach them and ask if they are waiting for their ride. At first neither man answers. We know that most _ of the workers are from Guatemala and Mexico, so we try asking in E Spanish. The taller man says he understands English. "No," he replies. ~ They are not going to work. We wonder if he is afraid to talk to us. We ~ get back in the car and stay close by.

At every rum junky vans with dark tinted windows speed by us, ~ but none stop. Is this the wrong place? It is 4:20 a.m. but even so sever~ al people roam the meets. A man seems to be watching us from his ~ front porch. The two of us are wary of the neighborhood's reputation as ~ a hang-out for drug dealers. We circle the block one more rime. }; ln our rearview mirror we see a van stop and pick up the two men ~ at the corner of Lombard and Poplar. We pull close. It has Florida S: license plates. As it passes under a sodium-orange streetlight, we can see

!

10

roughly ten people seated in the back. At the entrance to Interstate 91 on Ferry Street, the van races onto the highway. We speed behind.

At chis hour, l-91 traffic is predominantly trucks. We give the van space in front of us. If these are the migrant workers, they are going either to fruit and vegetable farms in North Haven or to tobacco farms near Hartford. The North Haven exirs come up quickly but the van stays on 1-91. We begin our hour-long drive towards Hartford.

T

he migrant farm workers became big news in New Haven this summer. This August morning we are seeking out the residences of the migrant workers on Fillmore Street-near to the house closed down by police last week, where more than 30 migrant workers and their families slept on bare floors and ditty mattresses.

Rafael Ramos, a senior neighborhood specialist with New Haven's Livable City Initiative, says that city officials investigated the property afrer receiving complaints from neighbors about garbage and noxious odors coming from the building. The house had a dangerously unstable chimney and stairs, illegal hook-ups to water and electricity, and crash was srrewn everywhere. Newspapers also reponed that the house was infested with vermin and reeked of raw sewage. Police arrested the landlord, 33-year-old Larry Etolue. Since then, the city has closed down similar propenies Etolue had renred to the migrant workers on Fillmore Street, Cedar Hill Avenue, May Street, Warren Place, and Woolsey

Street.

THE NEW jOURNAL

...,.~¡rv.rtr.:~~~n June and August, hundreds of migrant workers from Mexico and

Guatemala le9ve their over-crowded New Haven apartments to work 14-hour days in the tobacco fields of the Connecticut Valley.

_,

"Because of who these people are and me situation they are in, they may not complain," Ramos says. Many of the migrant workers have come from Mexico and Guatemala and are in this country illegally working on Florida farms during me winter harvest and moving up north for me summer. The U.S. Immigration and Naruralization Service has arrested 50 suspected illegal aliens at one North Haven farm.

The Florida license plate on me brown van we are following is a clue that we are on me right track. We pass through Hartford, swarming with big buildings and city lights. Soon me van rums off me highway at exit 37 in Windsor. It pulls into a Citgo gas station between me highway and a small hill to me west. We stop our car and watch from a road at me top of me hill. Within minutes, four other vans arrive. The doors of me vans slide open and at least 12 people hop out of each one and walk into me convenience Store connected to me station. We follow. Inside me store, about 50 men and women pick out various foods.

They are dressed like farm workers, wearing earth-tone slacks and work boots. A group of men heating soup in a microwave speak to each other in Spanish. Thirty people are waiting in line at the checkout counter.

Some of me women balance soda bottles on their heads. They are buying burritos, cornbread, and chips. This food will nourish them through me 14-some-odd hours of backbreaking work at me Culbro tobacco farm in West Suffidd, north of Windsor. Their jobs entail picking tobacco leaves, gathering them and putting them into baskets, hauling the baskets to trucks, and sewing the leaves together.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

A young man waiting in line has a University of Auburn cap. His clothes are similar to those worn by the rest of me farm workers, but he is taller than many of me others. He has a thin mustache and a young face. Like almost every other migrant worker we meet, this man speaks Spanish. He is sofr-spoken and friendly. He says his name is Lalo, he is 18 years old, and he comes from Florida. He is driving a car full of migrants, including himself, to the Culbro farm. Some of me other migrant workers in me store are wearing maroon baseball caps with "Culbro" printed in white. Lalo likes the work at Culbro because the pay is good, $6.30 per hour. Workers also make time-and-a-half on the weekends and after 5:30 p.m., and they get bonuses for increased volume. This encourages them to work long days. He asks if we are looking for farm work. When he learns that we are Yale srudents who live in New Haven, he says mat he has been living in New Haven for the summer. But he says he does not know which street.

Lalo and me others hand their food to Joe Cicero, the Citgo manager behind the checkout counter. Cicero, a heavy-set man with a thick beard, is enthusiastic to meet us. He says that a couple hundred migrant workers come through the Citgo between 5:15 and 6,:15 a.m., seven days a week. The 34-year-old manager has always lived in me Windsor area. When he was in junior high 20 years ago, he remembers that he was one of me only srudents who did not pick tobacco during the summer. Ar least one farm in the area-Arnold's --still employs srudents.

Cicero believes mat because of increased concern for children's safety,

II

O ur success is based on customer satisfaction through: •quality •custom alteration •vast selection •and th e knowledge to help you make the right choice for interviews Complete line of accessories, including shoes.

Jack Victor ·~· Hugo Boss Mani by Giorgio Armani · Sanyo •:• M ezlan Hart Schaffner & Marx Cable & Co.

f\8B'O:

§PEI:TOR

.~. ~.

EYE CARE EMPORIUM

e vcg_e•

~s

Comprehensive Eye Exams Contact Lenses Fashion Eyewear

nt -~

Featuring the finest seledion of better eyewear at guaranteed lowest prices.

1st Place

~ .-----Ey-=a~Ex:-a..m:.==-lna -=t=lo==--n ---__,·J~~

ie

Now$25 Eye Examination on pr.,mises by Or. Larry Spector, Optometrist. Includes glaucoma & cataract testing.

Dally Wear Contact Lenses

$1 24

Complete

Includes "Y" exam, fitting, foUow-up ="- Sp«ialty lenses available at an additional cost.

1044 CHAPEL ST. • SHERMAN'S ALLEY NEW HAVEN • 787-7111

12

fewer students have been allowed to work at the farms. In the past few years, he has noticed a large group of migrant workers.

"They're the most honest, polite people you could ever hope to meet," he says.

Susan, Citgo's other manager, is more hesitant to talk and she keeps repeating that she hopes the migrant workers are not in trouble.

She says she heard nasty comments directed at them on the radio. "They can be taken advantage of so easily," she says. O nce a migrant worker gave her a $100 bill instead of a $1 bill before she showed him his mistake.

After paying for their food, Lalo and the other migrant workers walk outside. The drivers pumping gas eye us suspiciously. Some of these drivers are guides who transport migrant workers from Florida and North Carolina to New Haven and then take the m igrant workers from their temporary New Haven homes to the farms, squeezing money from them at every step. These group leaders also make the living arrangements. Some ' of the migrant workers say these group leaders are recruiters from Connecticut farms. But some of the drivers are simply workers who take their families and friends with them.

A white van, another with Florida plates, is parked in the Citgo lot, the driver _standing beside it. He says he too is taking workers from New Haven to the Culbro farm. He looks concerned. He hesitates to answer our questions about his driving routes. H e heard about the work at Culbro from his brother-inlaw. He travels the country like many of the migrant workers picking tobacco in Connecticut in the summer, tobacco in North Carolina in the fall, and vegetables in Florida. during the winter.

As the sky begins to lighten around 6 a.m., vans start leaving the Citgo. We follow them back onto 1-91. Shonly, the vans tum off the highway onto windy, rural country roads. There are farms on both sides of the road covered with rows upon rows of tobacco plants. To people who normally think of the South when they think of tobacco, the sight of all th.is is surprising. In fact, the Connecticut Valley-which extends from central Connecticut through Massachusetts to the Vermont border-accounts for 10 percent of the worldwide supply of cigar tobacco. It is the third largest prOducer of cigar tobacco in the world, right behind Cu ba and Indonesia.

By 6: 15 a.m., ten vans, cars, and buses-

THE NEW jOURNAL

some with "Culbro" emblazoned on the side-drive into the Culb.rv farm on Babbs Road in West Suffield. The entrance to the farm is a dirt road. Beyond the "No Trespassing" sign hundreds of workers unload from the vehicles in a haze of dust.

We drive 30 yards past the "No Trespassing" sign to where me workers ace unloading.

A small wooden building to the left has a number of cars parked in front of it. We stop there and get out. Amazed that we've gotten as far as we have without being stopped, we decide to push our luck, asking a man standing outside the building for the manager. The man takes us inside the single-story building.

Signs on the door ace in both English and Spanish. In a room with one desk against the wall, we are introduced to a manager of the farm, a portly man With thinning gray hair and yellow-stained teeth. We tell him we would like to see what happens on the farm and what the workers do. He gives a laugh several times during our conversation even though no jokes have been told. It seems like a nervous laugh. We wonder if he's thinking about a New Haven Advocate article earlier in the week which quoted a lawyer for Culbro denying that the farm hired any workers from New Haven. Another manager, an older man with a cowboy hat, walks into the room. He seems less interested in talking to us. Neither manager offers his name. but they are willing to talk about the farm. The older manager responds tersely when ask,.'ed whether the workers cause problems. "Does a school

SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

teacher have problems with his children?" he asks us. Shortly afterward, he walks outside.

The other manager is more willing to help us and offers to drive us arQWld the farm.

We climb into his truck and sit next ro him. We learn that on this day 280 workers, a typical number, ace out in the fields and sheds where the tobacco leaves are stored. He does not need to recruit. Aside from the work they do on his farm, he claims not to know about other aspects of their lives, including where they live.

After a few minutes, he stops at one of the many sheds on the farm. The manager walks inside as we wait outside by his truck. At the side of the shed, we recognize the man with the earring who was sitting on the apartment building stoop in Fair Haven early this morning. He sees us but does not show any recognition, continuing his work. The manager comes back and we take off.

As we drive, we get the feeling that the manager is particularly glad about three things: the size of the farm, the booming cigar market, and our company this morning. Since June, he has been working the harvest seven days a week from 4:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Every day he drives 300 to 350 miles around the 141-acre farm to make sure everything is running okay. As we drive, he points to the tobacco plants in the fields: ·~ready sold.

People are crying for it." Culbro is a division of General Cigar Co., owned by the huge Culbro Corporation. "We make more cigars than anyone else," he says.

We see workers standing next to rows of tobacco. Normally they would be picking, but today there is a shortage of buckets in which to load the leaves. In the truck, the manager gives orders over his walkie-talkie to his subordinates to get the buckets right away.

The manager pulls the van up to one of the sheds where workers sew tobacco leaves.

From the outside, it looks like a big barn, about the area of a tennis court with a high roo£ The shed is filled with the sounds of 75 working laborers: shouting mixed with the methodical drone of sewing machines.

Dozens of men, women, and children with yellow, light-blue, and orange construction helmets are bent over buckets. Others ~ leaves together, while some baJance precariously high up on beams in the roo£ Sun streaming in through small h&les in the ceiling illuminates the fine dust which fills the air.

r------------------------------,~ ;:r

2.

0

"'cr

'<

> a; (')

m

CD

3

£[ ~

Q)

~ ~

~

The manager introduces us to the shed's ~ supervisor, Mark. Meanwhile our guide for !!!. the day walks around observing the operation.

Mark takes us over to one of the 12 or so sewing tables in the shed to explain how the process works. One or rwo people place tobacco leaves on the tables while others insert the leaves into sewing machines. Beside the machines are charts with the workers' identification numbers, which are entered into a computer in the central office. The charts keep track of the amount of time and work done.

The workers are not required to work seven days a week, but if they do not show up for three days in a row, the computer automatically erases their names and they are fired.

After the tobacco leaves are sewn onto racks, the racks must be lifted to the shed's ceiling for drying. We see boys, who look no older than 14, standing one above the other on narrow wooden beams. Referred to as "hangers," they are lifting the racks of tobacco leaves to the top of the shed by passing them up from one to the other. Mark tells us that sometimes the beams break and the boys catch themsdves by grabbing the beam above them to avoid falling. The boys take turns because they get tired. Mark proudly reports that none of his boys have gotten hurt, though at other farms he has heard that they have.

Although dangerous, the U.S. Department of Labor classifies this kind of work as legal for 14-year-olds, the youngest workers allowed on the f.um. Jim Peckham, Wage and

13

A condemnation notice posted on the door ofthe house at 3 71 Ferry Street demonstrates the price migrant workers pay for cheap .housing. a; Hour Division investigator, says that under ~

agricultural rules these teenagers cannot drive ~ tractors but can perform this task of balancing ~ on fragile wooden beams. ~ Using 14-year-old boys for this job is not ~ the only way in which Culbro clings closely to ¡~ the letter of the law. The $6.30 per hour wage ~ that Culbro farm pays its workers is below the ~ "prevailing wage" of $6.71 per hour deter~ mined by federal officials in Washington, D.C. ~ The prevailing wage must be adhered to by &. farms participating in the federal H-2A program, which allows those with an insufficient supply of U.S. workers to attain special visas for foreign workers. The ptevailing wage is meant to protect U.S. laborers from the extremely low wages for which the foreign laborers may be willing to work However, the Culbro farm does not participate in the H-2A program and does not claim an insufficient number of U.S. workers, says Walter Montes, who handles the program in Connecticut for the U.S. Depanment of Labor. Because migrant workers arrive en masse at Culbro every summer and because Culbro's workers must show at least rwo forms of photo identification as proof that they are legal before they start work, their fieldhands are considered U.S. workers. "My assumption is that one of the reasons Culbro is not participating is that they do not want to pay their workers the prevailing wage," Montes says.

Although it is only a $0.4 i difference, after two months of the tobacco harvest, the estimated 280 workers have accumulated a total of $64,288 less than they would have received at an H-2A farm.

In addition, under the H-2A program, unlike at the Culbro f.um, employers must provide transportation between the workers' living quarters and the employer's work sire without cost to the worker, if the living quarters are reasonably far from the farm. Montes says that the distance to the Culbro farm from Fair Haven would be considered reasonably far.

At the end of the summer, the money that the migrant workers rake home is far more than they would make in Mexico or other Latin American countries for the same work.

But along their journey from their home countries, then from the South up to Connecticut, then from their temporary quarters in areas like New Haven to the f.um, and all the way back, various people nibble at their earnings. Migrant workers who come to New Haven may already have considerable debt. Those who cross the border illegally often become indebted ro smugglers. Drivers charge them $200 for transportation to Connecticut and $20 a week for taking them to the farms. New Haven migrant workers have said that the reason they are taken to live far from the farm is exactly so that the drivers can make more money. Their rundown homes are ill-equipped for storing food,

so they must buy breakfast and lunch, which costs at least $8 per day. Their rent ranges from $600 to $1,500 per month split among the 30 or so people living in each apartment. With what is left, the workers support their families who either live temporarily in New Haven or remain in Latin America.

After a while in the shed, we separate from Mark, who walks around talking to workers.

We approach some of them ourselves. One woman, who loads tobacco leaves into a sewing machine, says she comes from Mexico. She explains that one day last week the shed was closed because of the dust. "Nobody could breathe in here," she says. "It was real bad."

Our conversations with the workers are cut off by the manager, who fetches us and says it is time to go.

Leaves liner the floor and the manager is upset. "There's no reason these leaves should be falling," he says to Mark on the way out. He reveals his agitation with Mark, comparing him to a Puerto Rican supervisor in a more organized shed. "The funny thing is I got the white guy in there and the Puerto Rican guy here and the Puerto Rican guy's doing better." We get back in the manager's truck and drive toward his office.

A

t noon, the workers are given a 30rninute lunch break. Workers from the fields pile into gteen Culbro buses to escape the sun. They eat the food purchased at the Cirgo station earlier in the morning. Under federal law, there are no required meal breaks for the migrant workers. If not for Connecticut state law, which requires the 30-minuce meal break for all laborers working more than seven and a half hours, the f.um could work them 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The workers are not given another break until 5:30p.m., this time for 15 to 30 minutes.

Each receives a McDonald's hamburger, a bag of potato chips, and a Pepsi, all paid for by Cuibro. The workers used to get french fries in addition to their burgers but it was costing the farm $1,1 00 per day, less than $4 per worker but more than Culbro wanted to spend. By eliminating the fries, Culbro slashed their food costs in half, down to less than $2 per worker.

After eating, the workers rerum to the fields and sheds.

Usually the f.um closes for the day at 8 p.m.

The migrant workers climb back into their vans, cars, and buses for the commute home.

THE NEW jOURNAL

Those going to New Haven prepare for their hour-and-a-half ride after an exhausting day.

A

t night we visiS some of the migrant workers who have returned from work to Fair Haven. Leaning on the dilapidated railing of a porch, one young Mexican man, who declined to give his name, seems used to the smell of the raw sewage seeping out into the warm air from his Fillmore Street house. He wears a soiled green polo shirt, bluejeans more black than blue, and he looks tired.

Curious but shy, he seems to hide behind a pole on the porch. He has picked tobacco since July and shares his excitement with us at the prospect of returning to see his family in Chiapas, Mexico.

A woman from Guatemala, who also lives in this house, stands on the porch next to the man from Chiapas while her four children play in the street. She has specks of gray in her dark hair and wears a homemade blouse, brown with dirt. An elderly white neighbor of theirs makes her way slowly down the street toward them carrying bags of groceries. She stops to speak to the children. "Nice day," she says as she pulls cookies from one of her grocery bags and gives them to the children. "They are nice people," she says of her-neighbors as she smiles.

"Sometimes I feel real sorry for them." She walks slowly away to her house next door and disappears inside.

Meanwhile, the children quickly munch the cookies and their smiles reveal sets of rotten teeth. When asked if they can speak English, the two girls nod their heads eagerly. They explain that they will rerum to Florida with their mother and father in a few weeks to resume school. Their mother watches cautiously from the front porch, unable to speak English. When asked where they consider their homes to be, the girls quickly answer, "Florida." They have lived there for ten years, they say, but traVel in the summer to places where their father can find better work. They hope their father, who is working in the Connecticut tobacco fields, will return home from work soon. Afrer finishing their cookies, they run off laughing. For them, this day is other.

liktMI

Lorm Brody, a senior in Silliman, is on tht staff oflNJ. Sarah Rogm, a junior at tht UnivmiIJ ofNorth Carolina, Chaptl Hill, attnukd tht Yak Summn Program.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

....

HAMA THE BEST JAPANESE RESTAURANT :&.

Enjoy a wonderful variety of fresh Sushi and traditional Japanese dishes.

Twice the seating area!

1206 Dixwell Ave., Hamden

Open for Dinner Seven Days a Week

(across from Chimney Square)

Din11er Sunday-Thursday 5-9:30pm Friday & Saturday 5-lO:OOpm Lunch Mondny-Friday 11:3Q-2:30pm

281-4542 Since 1934

America's largest and . . . . .1!111!1 Foremost Tobacconists Tobaccos Blended to Suit Your Individual Taste Expert Pipe Repairing Done on Premises The Widest Selection of World Class Cigars in the USA 268 College Street, New Haven, Tel. 624-3250

The New journal thanks: Nicky Beer Maya Brym Diane Ducharm Liz Goodman Maya Gurant7.

The New Haven Zen Center The Residencs ofTower One-Tower East Sarah Rogers Bruce Shapiro A. Tappan Wilder

15

c:

•E

~

0 (!)

N

::::;

..

>-

D

u

~

• (;

16

THE NEW jOURNAL

Straight from the Gift Horse's Mouth Gabriel Snyder

W

hen Larry Kramer (BR '57) first decided to bequest his entire estate to Yale, he thought it would be a simple affair. "I didn't think there'd be a problem in the world. I thought, hey shit, they're gonna love me. How many people show up with this?" Kramer's "this" was $5 million, money he made from writing screenplays which his brother profitably invest~d for him. According to Kramer, Yale would have received an original $5 million, and depending on the performance of his investments, an additional amount upon his death, which Kramer estimates could have been $5 to $10 million more.

The hitch, though, was that Kramer would only give Yale the money if it endowed a professor in a gay or lesbian topic or built a gay and lesbian student center.

The instant The New rork Times, U.S. News & World Report, and Time reported this past July that Yale had refused Kramer's terms and Kramer had withdrawn his offer, the H-word popped up: homophobia. William Rubenstein (MC '82), former director of the Lesbian and Gay Rights Project of the ACLU and presently a professor at the UCLA Law School, dashed off a letter to President Levin the day after the Times story appeared, threatening to withhold his donations to the university and scoffing at Yale's argument that gay and lesbian studies is too narrow a field to justify an endowed faculty chair. "This excuse, in the context of a university the size and depth of Yale, struck me as so preposterous that it revealed that Yale's decision must have been driven by little more than homophobia," Rubenstein wrote. "This seems especially so because a preeminent expression of homophobia is the denial and erasure of homosexual expression (this is, after all, 'the love that dare not speak its name'); Yale's actions reek of such prejudice."

As for Kramer, he points to the English department's decision to deny tenure to Wayne Koestenbaum as an example of Yale's hostility to scholars of gay literature. But Koestenbaum, now a professor at the City University of New York, is not as quick to come to the conclusion that Yale is a homophobic place. Koestenbaum

SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

appeals to the literal meaning of the word homophobia ("fear of homos") and argues that fear is a psychic condition. "And where is the psyche at Yale?" Koestenbaum asks. "Yale is complicated institution composed of many individuals, interests, histories, directions, and wills. We're not talking about a psyche here. We're talking about a governing body that doesn't act benignly all the time. About such a complicated place, you can't say: Yale is homophobic."

Koesrenbaum's comment highlights the crux of the dispute between Kramer and Yale: on the one side there is the institution, Yale University, and on the other there is Larry Kramer, the individual psyche. So far, discussions of Kramer's gift have attempted to equate Kramer and Yale as entities of the same order. An article in the Village \!Oice blew Kramer up co represent all of gay studies, pitting him against the entire academic establishment. The New rork Times presented Provost Alison Richard (Hon. MA '86), who reviews all bequests to the university, as the embodiment of Yalean individual going up against Larry Kramer mano a mano. Neither distortion approximates the truth. Kramer and Yale each acted according to vastly different motivations.

a

ven before Richard could consider whether Yale should host an endowed chair in gay and lesbian studies, the pressures of bureaucratic policies within the university prevented her from accepting Kramer's gift. In the early 1990s, budgetary concerns instigated a freeze on faculty hiring. Since that rime, for every new endowed chair, a senior faculty position elsewhere in the university must be eliminated. Even though Kramer's gift would have funded the cost of the position, Richard says she could not have accepted Kramer's offer because it would open the floodgates to more requests for new faculty positions. "As soon as there is one exception, I will have faculty from all corners of the campus saying, 'I have donors, too,'" Richard says. Though she claims Yale would not have accepted the gift even if the freeze was not in place, the

E

17

speculates, "He is concerned that students provost's commitment to administrative might have the same experience that he policy comes first.

Charles.Porter (GRD '62), chairman of had in the 1950s. I appreciate that concern the Research Fund for Lesbian and Gay on his part, but I don't chink that he recogStudies committee (REFIAGS), was put in nizes that the times have changed since the an equally awkward position. As the head 1950s." Since the time that Yale turned him down, Kramer says that many schools, of this group, he is responsible for assurincluding Columbia, the University of ing that Yale adeChicago, Johns Hopkins, and Brown, quately supports gay and I( have approached him about endowlesbian studies and ts ing a professor. But Kramer understandably in agreesays he is not interment with many of ested in donating his Kramer's criticisms of money to another Yale. However, Porter's school. He says, "Tony Kushcommittee recommendner teases me, 'Why do you ed against a gay and leswant your money to go bian student center and A ... to such an elitist institu:.1'1. ~ cion?"' Kramer made no recommendacion on the endowment -PROVOST ALISON RICHARD says it was his of a professor. "I must say I agree with miserable colthe university's posit.ion," Porter says. lege years at Yale that made him want to Porter feels that there is not a stron·g give money to the school. ''I don't know. It enough demand for a gay student center probably goes back to being so terribly and fears that one would marginalize gay unhappy there, trying to kill myself, sucand lesbian undergraduates. O n the proceeding almost in spite of Yale and not posal of a new professor, Porter says, because of it, and still having this almost "There should be a continuing interest in adolescent dream · that I would come back gay and lesbian studies," but accepting and make it a better place so that kids Kramer's gift was not feasible. ""If we are wouldn't have to go through what I went going to have one person who is going to through." be appointed, how would we ever decide "Yale then was fraternities and prep which field it would be in?" schools," Kramer explains. Kramer's older Kramer's pressure on Yale to show its brother, father, and two uncles all went to commitment to gay and lesbian studies has Yale before him, but he was hardly -a child benefitted REFIAGS. The fund will move of privilege; Kramer came from a middle into a staffed office this month and a class Jewish family. "I was a high school kid brochure is going out to alumni under the from Washington on a scholarship." aegis of the university to encourage more Though Kramer couldn't identify with the donor support of gay and lesbian studies. hordes of Andover and Exeter kids that surThese gains may look small, but Porter says rounded him, it was his sexuality that did his committee has been trying to do these the most to set him apart. "The word 'gay' things for years. "We were moving in that didn't exist," Kramer says, "but I knew that direction before, but I think we got there I had feelings that I didn't know what to do more quickly because of Kramer," he says. with. I don't know that I dwelled on them As the beneficiary of the administration's or could verbalize them. I just knew that I good will, REFIAGS was not in a position had strong emotional feelings for boys chat to battle with the provost's office. Porter I didn't have for girls. There was no place says, "I didn't find it appropriate to fight. " to put it. How do you find another person like yourself?" n the middle of Kramer's negotiations Kr-amer's first sexual experience with a with Yale, Richard asked him to meet boy occurred even before high school. "I with some lesbian, bisexual, and gay had sex with a kid in junior high school, so students currently attending Yale to get I knew what that was," he says. "But it was their comments on his proposals. Richard always something chat you did that you

I D 0 N 'T

THIN HE REC()

T }lA.T

GNI Z ES

THE TIMES HA'VE CH orGED

I 18

regretted, certainly because I didn't see anybody else around me and there wasn't anybody to talk to about it at all." Unable to find any other gay students at Yale, Kramer became involved with one of his professors.

"At the end of my freshman year, one of my professors seduced a very willing me. We had a brief affair since it was the end of the year and he was going off on a year's sabbatical." In Kramer's quasi-autobiographical novel Faggots, he writes of a similar situation: I'm going to be a faggod I'm going £O be a faggod Boo Boo had first realized with terror two years ago during his junior year at Yale when the distinguished gray-haired portly, gentile professor of his History of Art: Greek Sarcophagi class suggested they have a tete-atete in his book-walled house on Chapel Street ~to discuss the argument put forth in your paper on the marble frieze of Noxos." After six-and-one-half glasses of some fancy vintage wine, Boo from a very early age not being a cheap :date, he was laid back, as he somehow knew he would be, and, shivering with the apprehensions and expectations of the guilty, cursed, and damned, which he also knew he would be...

Kramer says his actual relationship with the professor was healthy for him. "He was a nice man, and he was the first person who said, 'You know, there are more of us out there."' But Kramer learned this only after he tried to commit suicide because he felt like the "only gay kid at Yale." It was this memory that made Kramer initially more interested in building a gay student center than endowing a professor.

"Academic achievement back then was prized for zilch. A lot of people did well in school, but they had to show somehow that they did something else, a sport or the Glee Club or singing groups." Kramer was accepted into the Glee Club his sophomore year and was part of a singing group called the Augmented Seven which specialized in calypso songs. "That was basically what kept me alive. It gave me a social life and something to do."

After Kramer graduated with an English degree in 1957, he spent most of the 1960s in England writing screenplays, his most famous being W0men in £qv~. Kramer described his time in England in a recent interview with the British newspaper Th~

TH£ NEW JouRNAL

Guardian. "I was very happy in England," he said. "I was psychoanalyzed every day."

In the 1970s, Kramer returned to the U.S. and moved to N~ York. In Faggots, Kramer depicts the New York gay community at the time as a non-stop orgy. The point of the novel, though, is that promiscuity debases personal relationships, and the main character struggles to find a true emotional commitment. Today, Kramer, who is infected with HIV, says, "If you ask most gay men what being gay means, they will say it means having sex with another man. I'm saying that that's not only what gay means. But as long we continue to be so blinded, we're going to continue to lcill ourselves. We have to create a wider culture that doesn't murder us."

F

rom his secluded house on a lake somewhere in Connecticut, Kramer laments. "My pristine home in the country is becoming a warehouse."

Kramer's lover of four years, David Webster, an architect, is moving things into their house. Amidst stacks of boxes, Kramer says, with a slight satisfaction underneath his annoy- · ance, "It's what happens when you get married.

You'll see." At age 62, Kramer is trying to settle down and gain the sort of social legitimacy he has long sought.

Beyond the headaches of movmg, Kramer's new domestic life pushed his attention to other details. "With the relationship pretty solid now, I decided that it was time to get my will in order." The will he drew up would have left a certain percentage of his estate to his lover and given the rest to Yale. Now, unsure of where his money will go, Kramer is considering starting an independent foundation to support gay and lesbian research.

Kramer's approach to gay rights has long been integrationist. He says the inclusion of lesbians and gays in education is one of his new concerns, complete with a new mantra: "We pay taxes so we should be taught in schools the same way everybody

WE H

else is taught." Though his gift has been framed as a test of the legitimacy of gay studies in academia, Kramer sees it as a test of the legitimacy of gays in society in general. Kramer, who dismisses the supporters of gay studies as "fighting to have sex in the bushes and fuck on the subway," has criticized much of the queer theory that has been produced by gay studies. "There is a disturbing trend in gay studies, and in all studies, to teach things so annoyingly irrelevant to life as we live it," he says. The sort of research he would like to see done is the sort John Boswell (Hon. MA '82), the Yale history professor who died in 1994, did on same-sex unions in the Catholic Church of the middle ages.

Much as gay marriage has been supported as a way of normalizing gays and lesbians, Kramer believes that including gays in history and literature would change the way they are seen in society. Kramer has been writing a book called The American People for the last two decades which, when it is finished, will be a fictional account of American history highlighting the roles of gays. One of the pet theories he has formulated from research for the book is that Abraham Lincoln had a male lover.

"Everybody looks at me like I'm crazy when I say something like that," Kramer says, "because it is so out of the realm of possibility that the best president that this country ever had actually lived with another man for -LARRY KRAMER four years. He slept in the same bed with a man named Joshua Speed, and they exchanged love letters of great passion."

Kramer recognizes that few, if any, historians believe his theory, but that is the point.

"What if he were? Wouldn't it change the way this country thought about gay peaple? Wouldn't it change the way gay people thought about gay people?"

AVE T

0

CREATE W1DER CU

A

LTU RE TIIAT DOEg , NT MURDER US •

SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

ramer's gift and it's rejection has stoked a hot debate. Some are passionate in their belief that he tried to go too far as a donor. Was he trying to

K

• Arnette • Beausoleil • Lunor • Calvin Klein • Matsuda • Oakley

• Oliver Peoples • Francois Pinton • D.K.N.Y. • Esprit • Lafont • Ralph Lauren

Eye Examinations Complete Contact Lens Service

Student J)iscounts /c;GT~

~ll//t'~f]J6Au;,/J ~~~'31.

80 Whitney Avenue (one block from DUH) 624-3145

Which Way to Go?

Microcomputer Support Center (MCSC) can help you head in the right direction so you won't lose your way.

MCSC can help Yale faculty. staff and students chart their way to the new. promised land that you read about in magazines. We sell the IBM, HP, Apple computers and HP printers. We sell the most popular software so you can do something when you arrive. Our consultants can make sure you get everything you need to work at,Yale.

We won'tleave you direction less.

175 Wh1tney Ave~ 432-6660

C·3 SHM 785-5919

19

A Gourmet Vegetarian Restaurant Since 1975 Breakfast 8am-llam Lunc~ and Dinner 11 am -1 Opm 1000 C h apel Street New Haven, CT 06510

Restaurant 562-3888 Catering

The New Journal is looking for savvy writers, cutting-edge designers, innovative photographers, dynamic production staff, and business tycoons.

TNJ Organizational Meetings Tuesday, September 9 and

Wednesday, September 10 Spm in WLH Look out for tabletents and posten for more info

or call Gabriel at 764-7228 or Lainle at 6-0127.

buy gay studies' way into Yale? Kramer says, "Of course academia's not for sale, but it sells itself every day of the week." Case in point, earlier this year, the heads ofYahoo!, the Internet directory service, gave Stanford University $2 million to endow the Yahoo! Founders Professor of the Stanford School of Engineering.

At Yale, President Richard Levin (GRD '74) says the university attempts to discourage restricted donations. But a significant number of endowed positions are restricted to a specific field within a larger discipline. Levin says the administration draws the line when a gift is meant to change the direction of the curriculm.

"The basic principle," Levin says, "is th at we simply don't let donors determine the subjects of study at Yale. That is the job of the faculty, and it is, by and large, a job very well done."

But the history of a place like Yale, where every building, bench1 tree, and cobblestone is named for someone, is very much the history of headstrong donors. In the Faculty of Arts and Science, which includes Yale College and the Graduate School, Yale has 167 endowed full professors which make up about 40 percent of all senior faculry positions. The university depends on and aggressively solicits the financial support of its alumni. Interestingly, Kramer says that it was Yale that approached him first about leaving his money to the university. Seven or eigh t years ago, someone from the development office, which had heard he had a bit of money, went to New York to discuss the possibility. Kramer said he was only interested if he could leave the money to "something gay." The development office gave the initial go-ahead on the gift, but nothing came of it until last year.

Kramer protests that he isn't trying to buy into the university, but of course, to some degree, he is. He had very personal motivations for offering his gift. But in that, no doubt, Kramer is not very different than all the hundreds and thousands of donors whose names now garnish the camIDJ pus and the faculty directory.

Gabritl Snyder, a smior in Btrktky Coikgt, is tht tditor-in-chiifofTNJ.

20

THE NEW jOURNAL

Now that's a Sandwich!

Pick your favorite sub from our menu, and watch a Subway Sandwich Artise prepare it exactly the way you say!

927 Chapel St. . 497-9324 42 York St. â&#x20AC;¢ 787-3454

r- -----BUY ONE/ GET ONE

I

For49C:

Tower One-Tower East Asa Piyaka

F

or the last year I've been going to Tower One-Tower East, a home for elderly people, every week. Run through a Jewish organization, the two buildings house several hundred independent older people. I was paired with one man through the "Adopt-a-Grandparent" program. We talked about everything from 0.). Simpson to religion to race. Over time I began visiting others as well. Mostly I just listened to their stories. At first the hours of listening bored me and all the details seemed like heavy ballast. But somewhere during the in-betweens I caught glimpses of the way a story told and filtered and reshaped again pulses with a subtle energy. T he scory-cellers scick in my mind: Old Mrs. Kifare standing with arms outsuetched in the rain like Christ crucified. Bessie Frye who nightly grinds the wheels of her rusted exercise bike though her eyes can't see well enough to read.

And Morton Bernard-Cohen, who built a war-time canoe out of palm bark in the South Pacific and spent 40 years chained to a factory time-card, just to get copper poisoning and lay in a coma for seven years. A week after awakening he drove out into the countryside and began digging a pond. I wish I could have captured him there in a picture: intent upon some dream, for an unknown reason, but still to be done.

1111

Asa Piyaka, a smior in jonathan

Edwards Colkgt, is tdiwr ofTNJ.

22

phoUJgrt~phy

THE NEW jOURNAL

"Dying ain't nothing but a bunch of sleep and there I'll find my halcyon home."

-Mort Cohen

SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

23

"I tend my plants like liHie children and the rest I leave as iunk." -Bessie Frye

I

' THE NEW jOURNAL

"And if you haven't got honor and pride, then nothing maHers. Only there is something in you that doesn't care about honor and pride yet that lives, that even walks backward for a whole year iust to live; that probably even when this is over and there is not even defeat left, will still decline to sit still in the sun and die, but will be out in the woods, moving and seeking where iust will and endurance could not move it."

-William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!

SEPTEMBER 5â&#x20AC;˘ 1997

Home Sweet Home, Again Dorie Boufides

T

he housing proctor called out the name of my future roommate.

She calmly walked to the front of the Morse library and surveyed the fan of cards offered to her. Her eyes ran across them twice.

She took a deep breath.

Every student in the Morse class of 1999 stood in the room last April tensely awaiting the outcomes of the housing lottery. Each group of prospective roommates had appointed a representative who was to participate in a game of chance. The selection of a single card would determine which suite was to be banished to Old Campus annex housing. We waited as my roommate prepared to select the card containing our fare.

Anyone familiar with the phenomenon of Yale housing draws has seen or experienced a scene like this. Droves offrightened students cluster into small groups like cattle waiting to be slaughtered; neither cunning nor caution can spare them. Luck rules supremely and indiscriminately.

In anticipation of this event, students scramble to mold themselves into perfect rooming material. This process includes paring down groups of friends into convenient numbers or hunting down those gullible unfottunates willing to take a double.

Unfortunately, the hunger for the perfect room often brings out a student's ugly side. I have seen secret plots to oust roommates and suites split into rival factions. Some become so blinded by their goal that they are willing to do anything to achieve it. One Stiles student was so desperate for a single room that he posted signs offering a television and a bicycle in exchange for a place in a suite with an open single. Friendships crash and burn; tension created by the housing process amplifies the tiniest pet peeves, nurturing them into bitter animosity. I know a group of Morse women who refused to live with a roommate again simply because she would constantly lock the phone in her bedroom. More shouting matches occur during the weeks before the draw than any other time of year.

Not all students cope with the stress of housing in the same way, of course. Men and women react very differently. Every year at the housing draw I see men cheering the misfottunes of others, while women superficially console one another. Men seize the rare opportunity to to war.

They become self-preservational and combative. Wary of commitment, they end up in small groups. Men are unwilling to, as Ben Franklin said, "hang together." Women, on the other hand, are too afraid to "hang separately." Impractical groups of ten or 12 women are common. We hate to say no. What kind of bitch would reject her own roommate?-well, at least to her face. The gender gap is alive and well, thanks to the Yale housing draw.

My group had managed to avoid these pitfalls. We numbered fiy~ women, a conveniently small, but not too small, number. Other students eager to join us and other groups looking to relieve us ofa member made us offers, but we had the self-possession to politely decline. And most impottantly, we managed to keep our friendships intact. Never once did any of us, roommates and friends since freshman year, let discussion about rooming plans affect how we felt about each other.

So we were set-or so we thought. All we had to worry about was the night of the draw. Our overcrowded class of 1999 needed to squeeze into every available bed in Morse, but even that was not enough; the fifth floor of Durfee was opened as a junior annex. My roommates and I knew this part of Durfee, or the Gables, as it is popularly known, quite well.

We had lived there freshman year. It had fantastic suites, with vaulted ceilings, skylights, and the biggest common rooms at Yale. It was well worth the steep five-flight climb.

Every suite in our class had an equal chance of being annexed, but the five of us considered ourselves immune. What were the odds of being placed in the same room twice? We planned on a fresh start for the new year, a comfortable suite in Morse College near our friends. Durfee was

go

THE NEW jOURNAL

fun while it lasted, but we had moved on.

And now, at the crowded housing lottery, our fate was about to be determined. My roommate's eyes lingered on the cards. Finally, she thrust her hand to one and pulled it from the rest. After a barely perceptible hesitation she turned it over, gazing at its face with a blank expression.

She held the card up for all to see.

"Two ofspades!" cried the housing proctor. I sank into my chair. The two ofspades! A sympathetic murmur, tinged with relief, ran through the room. Such a low card could mean only one thing: the annex. Morse annexed us to the same suite we had lived in two years before. It was almost as if an invisible hand had reached down and erased all the time that had elapsed. I was to be a nai\re freshman once again, moving onto Old Campus, wondering who my friends would be, which classes to pick. Every room, every comer, every footfall would remind me of an old Aame, an old argument, an estranged friend The memories seemed insurmountable.

A summer later, it was moving day. I let our a sigh as I looked up at Durfee. Lapsing into an old habit, I craned my neck to try to see my rooftop window. I lugged my first box up the familiar five flights. As I approached the top, wheezing, I cursed each srep. But the steps had known me for a long time; I'm sure they understood. Fmally, I reached the summit and strode into the old suite. I was immediately overwhelmed by the size of the common room. The ceiling seemed to stretch into infinity. Light bounced off the walls. A breeze swirled about, so fresh I could smell ic; someone must have already arrived and opened the windows.

As I looked around the room, I visualized our old furniture arrangement. The 1V there, the pink chair there. \'V'hen I pictured our favorite blue couch I could almost see my younger self sitting on it. I remembered holding a camcorder, videotaping my friends as they did inane

SEPTa.iBER 5¡ 1997

things. They moved in and out of the frame self-consciously, laughing, ~ making bad jokes. "Are you hungry?" one boy asked the camera. Then, as if it were a person, he tried co feed it a cookie. !i I shifted my gaze to the corner of the common room and again I saw ~ a son of apparition, recalling a memory long forgotten. I saw myself ~ studying for Arc History 115 at 6 a.m., only hours before the final. A ~ roommate and I, both in the same class, had crafted a miniature mural g: made up of every painting we were required to identify. ; "What's this one?" she fired, pointing to a tiny picture. i "Um ... no wait, I know chis ... Girl Untkr japan~~ Um~/ia, by...

Kirchner, 1909!" ~ My reverie was broken as one of my roommates emerged from her 3 room. We squealed and hugged each other in delight. Obligatory how- ~ was-your-summer-mine-was-fine's followed. Then we trailed off into a strange silence. After a moment I turned to find her gazing about the room, as was I. "It's not how I thought it would be, being back here," I offered.

"Me neither," she replied.

Another silence. "Do you remember when we bought the Christmas rree? It was covered with ice, and we had to drag it all the way up here. It was so beautifuJ when we finished decorating it, though, wasn't it?" We both smiled at the memory, which led to another, then another. As we reminisced a kind of weight lifred from my chest. Perhaps our history in chis great room would not hold us back. We would join our old memories with our future ones in a way no ocher Yale studen~ could.

"You know, this might not be so bad, after all," my friend said.

I agreed. It mighr nor be so bad.

1111

s

f

Dori~ Bou.fo:ks, a junior in Mors~ Co/kg~. is a m~arch di"ctor oJTNJ.

27

Winged Words The trans-Atlantic correspondence of two literary giants

by Dan a Goodyear The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, Edited by Edward Burns and Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice (Yale University Press, 1.996), pp. 452. â&#x20AC;˘

''0

H, DEAR, I WISH I WERE THERE

instead of in this New Haven that I never did and never shall like," Thornton Wilder sighed in a letter to Gertrude Stein on the seventh of June 1938.

The letter is now published among The Letters ofGertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, a work containing the correspondence from 1934 ¡to 1946 of this literary Caseor and Pollux. Or rather, Jack Sprat and spouse, for Wilder and Stein had little in common excepting their fume. Their utterly different styles are arranged next to each other in this volume as point and counterpoint, but the dialogue is little like a correspondence in the true sense of that word.

There is no accord or conformity to their epistolary effortS; one letter does not provide the analogue for its answer.

On the seventh of June, Stein was presiding over the domus she shared with Alice B. Toklas outside of Paris in Bilignin, doting on her pup Basket, lunching with the Picabias, and struggling to publish. Wilder was berween engagements. He roosted momentarily at the home of his mother and sisters on Deepwood Drive. In his letter he yearns himself out of New Haven to the place they are, casting out to "Gertralicitude" with a series of rhetorical questions.

Aie you all well?

And the dogs?

And Madame Giroud and Ia baronne?

Are you driving carefully around the funher side of the Lake?

Are you honking devastatingly in from of the bread, butter, and vegetable shops?

Are the paths in great need of attention?

Gestures from this same school of longingfor transportation, for alternative experience-filled my letters of this summer, from this New Haven that I never did like (no, it's not truly so, but for the sake of identity with Gertrude's "Thomi dear") to the far reaches of the postal

service. The Thornton Wtl.der stamps that facilitated my armchair traveling, in this centennial year of his birth, heightened my identification with his mad wavings and blown kisses. My letters reached Costa Rica and Switzerland, Greece and Italy, along with Wilder's round wire specs. We were a pair of yoyeurs.

Neither Wilder -nor l meant truly or only that we wished to be in Italy, Costa Rica, Bilignin. The voyeur-par-avian intends some- . thing a little bit more. The impulse to write, "Oh, dear, I wish t were there instead of here" is a more sociable, acceptable way of writing "Oh, dear, I wish I were you, where you are reading this account of me." Letter-writing is a form of travel that moves at once toward the letter's destination and into the psyche of the person reading the letter.

In those pauses, hand on the coffee. cup, pen bleeding on the quilt, when I consider the next phrase to turn or event to chronicle, the reverie is one of my own life and the life of the person who will read the letter. When I write letters, the reader's voice ricochetS through my brain.

My representations are based on how it is that I imagine they imagine me. Through and with them I experience vicariously my degree of sarcasm or wistfulness or bravado. In letters, as perhaps in no other literary form, one crafts a self for a reader with complete intentionality and transparency. The letter is the confluence of the journal and the novella, autobiographical and fictional, and panicular to a single reader.

A letter takes its form from its occasion. The self that it constructs is created to impact the reader in a specific way, to impart certain tidbits, omit others. My thank-you notes are chipper and sturdy without fail. Love letters at once guarded and swollen with description. Letters to long-lost friends both tentative and intimate;

to strangers, humble with a sl_ow drip of irony.

It is important to remember mreading the letters that passed berween Wilder and Stein that there was an agenda to these letters as well, determining in more and less subtle ways the matter of each letter.

The Wtl.der-Stein correspondence was not a spontaneous bloom of love and admiration that developed organically alongside a fleshand-blood friendship. They began their exchange nearly as strangers, gushing from the get-go. The number of times in their lives that they saw each other lagged far behind the number of letters that they wrote back and forth.

Though Wtl.der read Stein's work attentively, by his estimate she only ever read Heaven's My

Destination.

Wilder's position as the darling of the American literary scene gave Stein a pragmatic reason for pursuing a relationship with the younger writer. She sought publication ardently; Wtl.der had his finger on the pulse. He literally introduced Stein, more than once writing the foreword to a book of hers which made it publishable and saleable. The editors of the collection explicate this dynamic in a footnote.

Stein and Wtl.der played elaborate parts in a ~ relationship. Wtl.der, well connected, succrssful, and expert at popularizing ideas, helped to introduce Stein's work ro resistant American readers in books that might not have been published without his intervention: the Namllitm lectures, the GrographicaJ Hiswry ofAmerica. and, after her death, Four in Ammca. Wtlder in rum gained greatly

THE NEW jOURNAL

from Srein's friendship and from the power of her mind to free him from excessive constraints.

-;.

It seems dear from the nature of their letters and from the objective knowledge of their respective prospects, that despite this editorial attempt to demonstrate reciprocity, and despite Wt.lder's own excessive protestations of how much he owed Stein, Stein had more to gain from her pen pal than he had from her.

Stein often hinted at ways beyond writing introductions that Wtlder could be of help to her. Using his connections in Hollywood would do wonders: we just want to run around and do nothing and be payed largely for it... it is a pleasant xtravagance and we are just pining for pleasant xrravagance, so keep your eyes and ears open, if they want us we will come, we would love to be payed largely and we are tired of just staying here and beside it is becoming roo high to live in Europe like that, we are nutting in the woods and then Alice makes cakes of the nuts, which is a pleasant life too, but a vacance paye and it might be with you dear Thornton and lots oflove Gtde.

There was a certain utility to the relationship that Stein leaves ~biguous. She steadily insists on "collaboration" with Wtlder: will you but you would never say no to me but wiU you really will you, ever since my earliest days when I read Erckman Chatrian's !'Ami Fritz. in what language I do not know I have loved the word collaborate and I always always wanted to and now wiU you oh Thornton will you coUaborate on Ida the Novel, we must do it together not now like you did the commentaries and the other [facsimile...... ?] but really and really and truly just like Erckman and Chatrian, a really truly novel is too much for me all alone we must do it together.

called "Our Town" and its third acr is based on your ideas, as on great pillars, and whether you know it or nor, until further notice, you're in a deep-knit coUaboration already.

This was the kind of collaboration in which Wtlder was interested: digestion and reformulation of ideas raised by Stein. She was in charge of metaphysics, he wrote. He attributes the philosophical basis for Our Town to The Making of Americans. But the fact that Wt.lder did not want anything per se from Stein does not mean that their relationship was useless to him. The distinction remains that his work profited, while Stein may have sought profit in a more concrete sense.

This difference between them is legible.

W1Jder's are the letters of an interested reader and scholar of Stein's work, who wrote both in exploration of these ideas and for the sake of writing itselÂŁ Wtlder's letters also carried out a social courtesy, responding to the attentions of the famed Miss Stein. There is, on the other hand, an urgency about Stein's letters which her characteristic open syntax-non-syntax--exacerbates. Every letter documents a want, a need, a desperate please please please, don't say don't say no. Stein's letters demand (contacts, favors, American books, visits by Wtlder), while Wilder's deflect, reflect, and describe. The result is that a letter by Wtlder is vaguely intoxicating, piquant, deft. A Stein letter reads like a waterdrinking COntest.

The roles they played were staged, or one

might say, written. They defined themselves along the slanting, smeared border of ink where their relationship was born and where it ulcimatdy died. Stein was the genius of the faraway place of ideas who could not negotiate the world ofcommercial literature on her own; Wt.lder was the snappy student v0to could spin the big ideas into marketable litde packages. These are the selves that they constructed and, through the course of their correspondence, conspired to nunure.

Their correspondence broke offsuddenly, due in part to the exigencies of World War 11Wilder was serving as a lieutenant colond and Stein was in occupied France-and in part to Wtlder's failure to write back. Stein died. Wtlder had not written. In his letter of condolence to Alice (dated October 8, 1946, over two months after Stein's death) Wilder excuses himself with a piece of wisdom gleaned from Gertrude: My poignant self-reproach at not having wrinen her is acute. It doesn't help that I remember that she taught me how all those audience-acriviries--"anicles," lener-writing, and conversation itself are impure at the source.

Post-facto, when his correspondent can no

longer respond, Wtlder admits what every letter-writer knows: that the reader is an audience, that the written self is a mere perIIIJ formance.

Dana Goodyear, a senior in Davenport Colkge, is a managing editor ofTNJ.

It cannot have been far from Stein's thoughts that Wtlder had by this time won the first of his three Pulitzer prizes {for The Bridge ofSan Luis &y, 1928). He had earned both fortune and a place in the rarefied circle of American letters. Co-authorship would ensure publication.

Wt.lder's motivations are less scrutable. He certainly took inspiration from his conversations with Stein, and more importandy from his reading of her work.

I can no longer conceal from you that I am writing the mosr beautiful little play you can imagine.... This play is an immersion, immersion into a New Hampshire town. It's

SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

A postcard smt by Stein to WiU/er-from the Yale Collection ofAmeric4n Literatu" at the Beineclu Library, which inclu.Ms the papers ofboth Thornton Wiltkr and Gertrtuk Stein.

29

Coup at the Co·op The Co-op has been ou sted .

Let th e revolution begin!

by Alec

P

Hanley Bemis

resident Harry Berkowitz answers his phone. "Executive offices ... ?" No answer. "Executive offices ... ?" No answer. There are problems with the phone lines but this kind of thing is to be expected in the midst of a revolution.

Berkowitz, the leader of the Yale Co-op, sits in his fifth-floor bunker at 900 Chapel Street, right off the New Haven Green. He is just setcling into the command center of the Yale Co-op's provisional business offices and, as with any new base of operations, there. are some kinks to be worked out.

Appealing to the public's perpetual fascination with civic unrest, the Co-op began touting its new revolutionary program via Byers and advertisements placed at strategic points throughout New Haven.

"Stop by sometime and hatch a plot to overthrow the bourgeois capitalist elite," the Co-op's new slogan invites. The tag line is illustrated with the disembodied head of a sunglasses- and beret-dad rendition of the archetypical revolutionary Vladimir llyich Lenin. While this slogan is considerably less fiery than your run-of-the-mill leftist insurgent broadside--one would expect something more along the lines of"Workers of the world unite, and shop!"-it is a manifesto well in keeping with the liberation marketing sweeping America's corporate promotion departments. Drink Mountain Dew and gain the self-confidence to cliff-dive with your closest friends. Wear Reeboks and join in their declaration for Human Rights Now!TM Buy guava-avocado moisturizer at the Body Shop and help save the 19 Ogoni tribesmen whom Nigeria's military dictatorship plans to send to the gallows. Scarf down a pint of Ben and Jerry's Rain Forest Crunch TM and keep the ozone in place one more day. Yeah, right. Right?

In the case of the Co-op's new marketing stratagem, however, there may just be something behind the revolutionary rhetoric. The Co-op was ousted from its long-time Broadway location next to Morse and Stiles this past June after Yale leased the building to Barnes & Noble, which opened the Yale Bookstore, the latest in the corporation's line of college bookstores. The Co-op, unlike the new Yale Bookstore, is owned by members who actually shop there, not far-off shareholders.

In fact, at times the Co-op even manages to pay its members a small dividend, something that the Barnes & Noble establishment will never do, no maner how high the profit margins run.

When Yale handed the Co-op over to Barnes & Noble, it was another blow against the locally-owned character of the Broadway strip. What was once a street marked by a cheesy local dance dub, a

buffalo wing dive, and a small office supply store is slowly but surely being turned into a battleground where Au Bon Pain and Bruegger's pit their corporate bagels against one another in a dance to the death. As the posters in ABP tell us to grab for sourdough bagels with a chocolate swirl and as Bruegger's lures us in to try out an Herby Turkey™ meal . deal, the Co-op is, in a way, fighting for the voice of the people.

Take a short stroll inside the new Co-op, now entrenched in the Chapel Square Mall, and you will discover that the revolutionary aesthetic has been taken a step beyond advertising pitches. The new Coop is a reasonable simulacrum of a revolutionary headquarters under siege: wires dangle from unfinished light fixtures, shelves remain bare as an obvious casualty of the breakdown in supply lines, and £!le newly constructed mezzanine level connecting the first and second floors remains definitively unfinished perhaps due to a lack of building supplies and proletarian spirit. The only thing missing in the Co-op's new makeover are USSR-style lines at the checkout aisles.

Despi~ the relatively disheveled appearance of the store, there are signs that the Co-op may make it through the long hard winter months. First of all, this is a case of a revolutionary administration actually managing to make the trains run on time. The Co-op has rented its very own trolley on wheels to shunle students to their new. location and indoctrinate them at their leisure. Judging by the texts in the course book section-it's packed with tracts for classes taught by left-leaning professors such as labor historian David Montgomery and "Roots of Radicalism" professor Emilia Vioni da Costa-the Co-op also has a dedicated cadre of freedom fighters among its ranks of supporters.

Perhaps the most obvious question to ask of all this talk of revolution, is this: How exactly does a business that has been the reigning power in student retail for 113 years end up in charge of the revolution? Aren't small but feisty bands of dissatisfied citizens the ones who lead revolts?

Berkowitz, following in the rhetoric of the 1930s Communist International, puts it this way, "We have to retrain people to walk to a different location, to travel in a new direction, to walk a different way, to follow us." While all this talk of gaining fellow travelers may strike perspicacious readers as a bit arch, the Co-op hopes that its bohemian brand identity will keep its leadership from succumbing to a corporate .:::::

coup d'!tat.

18]

Alec Hanley Bemis, o senior in Berkeley College, is o managing editor of TNj .

30

THE NEw jouRNAL

Store Hours Monday thru Friday 7am-7pm Saturday 9am-Spm .

Sunday l0am-4pm

Staples, 84 Whalley Ave., Hew Haven, CT â&#x20AC;¢ 77 3-3353

a walk dOWRIJroadw and you'll .see that.~ even before ur new store opens, were ' open.

u/ ......-.. ~

~. [ake ~"'<t

'anl)}

()Ul~

ANNEX STOltES HAVE WHAT YC1U NEE I)!

SPECIAL ORDERS TEXTBOOK BUYBACK THE YALE BOOKSTORE VISA SUPPLIES, SOFTWARE &YALE CLOTHING 5%STUDENT DISCOUNT ON NEW HARDCOVER TEXT

HOURS: Monday- Thursday 9a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday & Saturday 9a.m. to 10 p.m., Sunday 12n-6p.m.

Book & Supplies Annex: 777-0477 â&#x20AC;¢ Temporary H.Q.: 787-5555