Volume 33 - Issue 3

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THE Naw JouRNAL

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TheNewJournal

Volume 33, Number 3 N ovember 10, 2000

FEATURES 8

Masters ofthe Universe A new Yale seminar teaches students how to rule the world.

by Alexander Dworkowitz

12

The Last Picture Show With its survival at stake, York Square Cinema takes on Hollywood.

by Andrew Cowdery

18

Carnival Knowledge Photos and essay by Bidisha Banerjee

21

Poet of the Land of Promises The archives ofIsrael's best-known writer have traveled far to rest at Yale.

by Anya Kamenetz

STANDARDS 4

Points of Departure

26

Essay: Deliverance by Danitl Kurtz-Phtlan

28

The Critical Angle: A Stover for Our Time by Alan Schomfold rtvitwing ] ot College by Tom Ptrrotta Endnote: Bringing up the Rear by Matthtw Undtrwood

30

'Jiq Nw }ououw. is publithed live times during the academic year by TH£ N., Jououw. at Yak. Inc., P.O. Box 3-431 Yale Station, ~Haven, CT o6s>o. Office addras: 1p Park Strttt. Phone: (aoJ) 431¡ ltn. All contena copyright aooo by Tut N., }OUJU<AL at Yale, Inc. All Righu Raerved. Reproduction either in whole or in pan without written pemilision of the publisher and editor in chief is probibired.

'Wiaile this maguine is published by Yale CoUege srudenu, Yale Universiry is not resporuible for iu conten a . Seven thoutand s~ hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New ~ a>mmunity. Subscriptiont are available to thotc ouuide the area. Rates: One year, s t8. Two years. $}~ Tua Nnr }OUIUIAL iJ printed by Tutley Publicatiollt, Palmer. WA; bookkeeping and billing services are ~by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. Tut Nnr }olllUIAL encourages letters to the editor and commena on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editoria!J, 3-431 Yale Station, New Haven, CT Olsao. All letters for publication mun indude addrm and tignature. We reserve the risJ>t to edit all letters for publication.

Renaissance Man JAZz AGE

liAtu.EM HOLDS

A SPECIAL PLACE

in the American popular imagination. The words "Harlem Renaissance" conjure up images of hip jazz clubs, stylish men and women strutting their finest on Lenox Avenue, and an artistic scene exploding with new black talent. Hot Harlem is no longer just a train ride away, but those who missed it can still catch a glimpse by heading for the silent sepulchre of Beinecke Library.

Beinecke may seem a bit of a let-down compared to the Harlem of the 1920s: A studious hush replaces the tunes of ragtime, suits are business, not zoot, and the place is more conducive to tedious scholarship than artistic inspiration. But deep within the vault lies the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of American Negro Arts and Letters, the world's defmitive collection of manuscripts, papers, and archives for black writers of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.

Almost as fascinating as the collection itself is the story of how the papers carne to Yale. They arrived through the efforts of a white man named Carl Van Vechten, a novelist, critic, photographer, and patron of the arrs. Van Vechten was a friend and patron of many artists of the Harlem Renaissance, and his own works clued a number of downtown whites into what was happening in uptown Harlem. Van Vechten was also friends with many white artists and intellectuals of the time and recognized the need to bridge the gap between the two groups. He envisioned having some of his black friends donate their papers and art to a predominantly white school, and a corresponding number of his white friends donate their works to a traditionally black school, in the hope that their gifts would encourage racial understanding.

Van Vechten decided upon Fisk University as the black school of choice, and then turned to the question of its white counterpart. He had become involved with lily-white Yale while helping Gertrude 4

Stein donate her papers. The school impressed Van Vechten with its strong collection, as well as its willingness to accept archival materials in addition to manuscripts. In 1941, Van Vechten and the widow of James Weldon Johnson, novelist, songwriter, and the fllst black head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), decided to donate Johnson's manuscripts, scrapbooks, correspondence, and photographs to Yale, forming the core of the current collection.

Walter White, the second black head of the NAACP, and Jean Toomer, of Can~ fame.

Meanwhile, the value of Fisk's collection boomed with the rise of modern art; today it is worth almost twice the University's $xoo million endowment. Fisk is forbidden from selling any of the collection but has recently taken to sending it on tour to raise money for the school.

Van Vecluen died in 1964. With the exception of the manuscripts of his novels, which he left to the New York Public Library in the 19305, he gave all of his papers to Yale, as well as his massive collection of original photographic prints and negatives, which includes many of the major artistic figures, black and white, of the 1930s and 1940s.

The James Weldon Johnson collection also includes scattered gems, such as w.E.B. DuBois's senior thesis, with corrections by his advisor William James, as well as fragments of]ames Baldwin's first, unpublished novel, written when he was 17 years old.

The library recently acquired the Simpson Collection, consisting of thousands of rare photographs of black families from the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Admirtedly, Yale doesn't buzz like Harlem on Saturday night, and bands at Toads can hardly compare to Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club. But deep within the Beinecke reside the eloquent remnants of the Harlem Renaissance. For those intrepid enough to look. they show the progress of genius in scribbles and sketches.

Soon after, Van Vechten convinced Georgia O'Keeffe to donate a number of paintings that had belonged to her husband Alfred Steiglicz-including works by Pablo Picasso, Paul cezanne, and O'Keeffe herself-to Fisk University.

In the following years the Yale collection expanded, as author Langston Hughes started to donate his papers in the 1950s and left the remainder upon his death in 1967. Other major collections followed, including those of author Richard Wright,

-Anthony Wast

Who Wants to

be a Millionaire?

WHEN YALE ATHLBTIC TEAMS bring .rKruits to campus throughout the year, they invariably end up showing them, in the words of one athlete, "a good time." Exactly what that means varies from team to team, but if the arrest of a crew .rKruit for alcohol possession at a frat party in September is any indication, it generally involves some form THE NEW joUitNAL

AUTHENTIC THAI CUISINE TAKE OUT MENU of debauchery. Beyond this, the uninitiated ~ can only guess, and so must relegate any further inquiry to movies like Porky's or PCU. The men's lacrosse team, a Yale Hxture since the late nineteenth century, is no exception to this tradition, with one subtle revision. The coaches make it exceedingly dear to their recruits that, should they matriculate at Yale, they stand a pretty good chance of living the good life well beyond their college years.

Before all men's lacrosse recruits apply to Yale, the coaching staff sends them a glossy folder packed with assorted papers.

The bulging left pocket of the folder consists solely of photocopied Blue Book course information, but in the right pocket, tucked behind boring documentS outlining the basics of a Yale education, lie the secrets to success that should send every lacrosse recruit on a fast-break to riches.

Recruits Hrst see three pages listing nearly all of Yale's illustrious alumni-this could be you, recruits!--cuegorized neatly into "politics," "entertainers and media,~ and "business leaders." Among those mentioned are actor "Vincint" Price, former Secretary of Defense Dick "Chaney" (who apparently picked up a degree from Yale

NOVEMBER 10, 2000

while no one was looking), former Pennsylvania Senator "Arron Spector," and wordsmith Noah Webster, who, in a da2zling and mostly unknown feat, graduated in 1978--cryogenically, we're to assume.

Next, after anoth~!r lengthy list of faculty and alumni Nobel Prize winners (a lucrative honor-prize winners receive around $1,ooo,ooo), recruitS Hnd a page entitled "Ivy League Millionaires."

Compiled by the Taft Group, a self-proclaimed "publisher of reference works on the philanthropic activities of wealthy individuals," this list ranks each Ivy League school according to irs success in churning out millionaires. Yale, not surprisingly, ranks number one, having produced 3,249 millionaire graduates, with rivals Harvard (2,789), Brown (869), and an especially suspect Princeton (a paltry 190) trailing behind.

And if recruitS haven't yet begun to salivate at their assured ascent to the ranks of aristocracy, there's more. The next sheet carries the title, "Where the CEo's Went to College," subtitled, "A Fortune survey of the nation's top bosses shows that Ivies and Big Ten schools rank high." According to a "recent study" (1990) by Fortune maga2ine, not only do 156 of Fortune 500 company CEOs come from the Ivy League, but a whopping 43 hail from Yale-that's nearly ten percent! "If you want to become the chief executive officer of a Fortune 500 company," Fortune asks, "where should you go to school?" The answer is Yale, of course, whose domination of the Fortune 500 putS it atop yet another list, leaving Princeton (32), Harvard (25), and a dozen other universities dawdling miserably behind.

For any lacrosse recruit still unconvinced that Yale is a one-way ticket to the top, the coaches furnish one Hnal ranking that outdoes them all-the "Power Factor."

As part of itS cro survey, Fortune took the average graduating class from Yale in the 1950s, did some fuzzy math, and came up with a number meant to "gauge which col-

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leges have been most successful on a per capita basis at schooling future chiefs." In other words, Forttm~ reduced potential power to a single number. Yale, with a powerfully staggering Power Factor of 4.87, once again takes the top spot, followed by familiar runners-up Princeton (4.66), Harvard (2.26), and Dartmouth (1.98) .

But do men's lacrosse recruits really buy any of this? Do they studiously compare Power Factors and millionaire rankings in deciding which college to attend?

And did Dick "Chaney" ever pick up a lacrosse stick in his life? With an impressive record of8-5lasr year and dismal results for most of the decade, it looks like most lacrosse stars would rather seek their fortunes elsewhsre.

- jacob Bkch~r

Sanctuary WALKING IN 1HROUGH the side entrance, I sit down in darkness, a hushed shuffling of feet around me the only sound. Douns of candles and the heavy smell of incense bring my mind to a strange calm. Then the singing: O ne male voice takes up a halfsong, half-chant; a chorus soon joins in.

The voices are strong, the notes clear and unwavering. The songs are prayers, pleas for mercy, and hymns of praise. Berween each song, all is silent; only candles and bent heads are visible.

This is Compline, a service held at Christ Church on Broadway every Sunday night. Compline is the name for both this Episcopal public prayer service and the hour at which the service is held. It is the last of the Liturgical Hours, when a small choir sings scriptural hymns based on Old Testament psalms. This service is held at ten PM; other services--Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and Vespers-are held throughout the day.

The idea that half an hour of hymns could aetract a large follwing of Yale students is not necessarily intuitive, bur Compline attracts more than just Episcopalians: Many Compline regulars practice other religions or are atheists. Bur Christ Church does not seek to convert.

"We're deliberately no n-pressure, non-

TH£ New JouRNAL

proselytizing," says Rob Lehman, choirmaster of the Church. "We're not trying to sell anyone anything." That the C hurch welcomes people of all denominations and does not demand religious worship may explain why attendance at Compline, but not Church membership, has swelled since the service was opened to the public at the beginning of September. As news of ~ Compline services has spread through word of mouth and public announcements, the usual attendance has grown from about 40 to over 160 people.

Having been a Compline regular for the last month and a half, I'm beginning to understand the broad appeal. Since high school, I have passed through the gates of more religions than I can name. I've attempted to "become a flower" under the low-voiced exhortation of a Buddhist monk, fed the cows outside a Hare Krishna geodesic dome, and joined a group of whirling dervishes at a mystical gathering of Sufis, spinning and chanting the names of God. I've even spent a week at a monastery in Conyers, Georgia, waking before four in the morning to make it to the first service of the day. Compline is another way of satisfying my curiosity about other religious cultures.

For 30 minutes, the service continues; then, with no fanfare, it ends. People get up slowly and seem unwilling to leave. Some genuflect and cross themselves; others walk straight out.

Compline is moving, but it's hard to say exactly why. People leaving the Church don't provide answers in their parting conversations; walking down the Church steps, I hear mostly small talk: "I'm cold" or "I like the music here." But it seems that something deeper is happening that no one is expressing. Perhaps this traditional prayer service provides a needed spiritual ritual for students immersed in a secular World; perhaps Compline is a way to clear the mind before reentering Yale; or perhaps it is simply a quest for relief, a quiet haven within New Haven's much louder space.

And so each Sunday we take half an hour in Christ Church before spilling out onto Broadway, where we are greeted by the SOunds of screeching brakes and car horns.

It's the last night before the workweek starts up again, one among many brief ¥acations, hundreds of urban nights.

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7

ers o ne Monday last March, three CIA agents walked into a Yale classroom. Professor Paul Kennedy introduced them to his class--"Studies in Grand Strategy"-and they took their seats at the back of the classroom. The students gave the visit little thought; high-profile guestS often visited the class. Besides, the professors are pretty impressive in their own right: John Lewis Gaddis, Charles Hill, Paul Bracken, and Kennedy. The discussion went on as usual; the representatives from the CIA remained quiet. Kennedy later joked that "the Yalies kind of intimidated them."

According to Kennedy, the agents had come to the class not to recruit, but to learn.

"They had been asked by their bosses, 'What's the nature of international affairs going co be?'"

They sought the answer from "those eggheads in the university," and they looked to find those eggheads in the seminar.

This December marks the end of the first grand strategy seminar at Yale. Although the term "grand strategy" has military connotations, the mission statement of the class defines it more broadly, as "a comprehensive plan of action, based on calculated relations of means to large ends." Using history as a guide, the year-long course seeks to teach its students how ro make decisions from positions of power. The first semester, in the spring, looks for examples of grand strategy in authors as varied as Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Karl Marx, and Ronald Reagan. The fall semester, the "strategist's workshop," analyzes contemporary grand strategies.

The course also requires a summer project, either an internship or research paper, to be presented ro the class during the fall. Modeled after a class ar the Naval College, its founders claim that it is the only class of its kind at a civilian institution in the United States. It has received praise not only from Yale students and faculty, bur also from academics across the nation, and many institutions are considering implementing their own version of rhe class.

But what makes the class unique is nor so much its curriculum as its aspirations. The Grand Strategy Project, which includes a lecture series as well as the seminar, boasts "long-term reward" as one

0

of its primary benefits. "We aim not merely to shape current decision making," reads the mission statement, "bur, above all, to prepare future decision-makers. By exposing our students to the best of what has been thought, written, and r~membered about grand strategy ... we seek to provide them with the analytical skills they will need in whatever leadership positions they may occupy and whatever contingencies they confront." That is, the Grand Strategy Project aims to train the future leaders of the world. The statement concludes, "We see the revival of grand strategy as the best long-term investment we can make in the future."

''We see the revival of grand strategy as the best tong-term investment we can make in the future."

IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENâ&#x20AC;˘

Yale had a strong voice in national foreign policy discussions through the Yale Institute of International AfF.Urs. Bur in the 1950s, Yale President A. Whimey Griswold sought ro make Yale more of a commentator on than a participant in foreign affairs, and scrapped the Institute and the grand strategy classes.

Over the last two decades, however, Yale has reasserted its role as a player in international affairs. In the early 198os, a group of professors founded a think tank on arms control, bur it quickly became irrelevant with the advent of persestroika and the subsequent decrease of Cold War tensions. In 1988, professors such as Bruce Russett, Paul Bracken, Gaddis Smith, and H. Bradford Westerfield looked to start anew. After presenting their ideas to then Provost Frank Turner, they founded International Security Studies (IsS), and Kennedy became director a year later. With the reemergence of Yale onto the international scene, it was not long before ISS professors began thinking about a return to grand strategy and the train¡ ing of future leaders.

ISS is located on the second and third floors of 31 Hillhouse Avenue, a simple pale-yellow Georgian house with green shutters.

Kennedy's corner office is relatively spare, dominated by a large military poster, mounted, unframed, and set on the Aoor. Dressed in a red polo shirt and khakis, he leans back in his chair, puts his feet up, TURY,

A new Yale seminar teaches THÂŁ New JouRNAL

â&#x20AC;˘

n1ve.r se

By Alexander Dworkowitz and speaks plainly about the success of ISS, which has an annual budget of over $8oo,ooo. "When I talk to my buddies in the med school, going biking or running, they talk about grants of millions.

We look like small beans compared to them. But for somebody in the humanities, like Mideast studies, ISS looks like a 150-pound gorilla." Kennedy speaks enthusiastically and openly, and it is not hard to see why so many want him to stay in charge.

Kennedy is well aware of the academic trends that lie behind the rapid growth of ISS. "It means that when people worried that everyone was switching to gender studies or black studies, we can say that there are exceptions. We are one of the only places in the country that does this, and I think the foundations [that fund research] know this." It was this frustration with the current state of academics that led to the idea for the Grand Strategy Project.

About three years ago, Kennedy began speaking with his neighbor and friend John Gad<f!s who was giving a series of talks about globalization at the time. "We were both thinking that specialization in the academy had become horribly entrenched," explains Kennedy. "There were very few attempts to look at the thing as a whole." At an ISS sponsored weekend retreat attended by Kennedy, Hill, Bracken, Donald Kagan, and Nno York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the idea for a diplomatic and military history seminar emerged. The class would differ from the standard seminar in one key aspect: Its goal was not simply to teach what had happened, but to train students for what could happen. More than a class about ideas on international security, ISS became a class on leadership, and its instructors, who ask for a resume along with applications, acknowledge that they look to accept potential leaders into it.

Leadership is both stressed by and embodied in Charles Hill, one of the instructors of "Studies in Grand Strategy." A Distinguished Fellow at ISS, Hill has served as Chief of Staff of the Department of State and worked as Assistant Secretary General and

Special Policy Advisor to the United Nations. While Kennedy speaks of grand strategy as one of many aspects of the study of history, Hill suggests that it is the most important because it is the one that defines leadership. "This [has long been] part of the education of those who were expected to become leaders. If you're going to be in a position of leadership, you need to attend to every aspect from the budget to personalities to power to external limitations; you're going to need a comprehensive view of all aspects if you're going to make the institution work effectively."

Hill envisions the grand strategy course teaching its students a certain way to think. "In general, the understanding of how you approach things in a grand strategic way has eroded," he says. "Life has been more fragmented." Hill argues that there has been a decline in the use of grand strategy in diplomacy and business, and that this endangers world stability. Hill sees a direct connection between the changes in academia in the 196os--deparrments and specialization becoming standard features of the university and its faculty-and the lack of vision of many of today's leaders, especially in terms of foreign policy. In order to improve the world of tomorrow, one must improve the world's leaders, and in order to improve the world's leaders, one must change the way they are trained.

It is the idea that an institution like Yale exists to train leaders that attracts so much attention to ISS and the Grand Strategy Project. In his recent book, The Lexus and the Olive T"e, a "guidebook on how to follow the drama [of globalization)," Thomas Friedman writes, "The Yale International Relations historians Paul Kennedy and John Lewis Gaddis see,one of their jobs as training the next generation of American strategists. To their great credit, they have been exploring how to broaden the curriculum in order to produce a new generation of strategists who can think as globalists and not just particularists."

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But more importantly, ISS takes active steps to help its students reach positions of leadership. The Grand Strategy Network, as the ISS Annual Report explains, "has begun to build a network of individuals and institutions trained to think about and implement grand strategies in imaginative and effective ways." This networking often takes the form of dinner conversations, sometimes held at Mory's, between guest lecturers and the students of the class. While acknowledging the possibility that a student may get a job offer from the people he or she meets at such social functions, Kennedy states that, "It's much less profossionai networking than intelkctuai networking."

To an observer of the seminar, it becomes immediately clear that such a network has already formed. The class is much livelier than the typical Yale seminar, and the students know each other: well. "We've become more of a group than a class," says senior llneta Binienda. But all the undergraduates with whom I spoke shy away from the ideas of networks and leadership . Binienda does not consider herself "a future world leader," although she does want to be in "some sort of position of leadership eventually."

Senior David Slifka says, ''I've never been a very good networker." He adds, "I'm sure the professors would like to see us become world leaders, but I think you need more than taking 'Grand Strategy' to become one."

Grand Strategy students are not only supposed to learn about the world's leaders but to become them.

over what is taught in the class, the foundations supporting ISS strongly approve of the Grand Strategy Project. The two largest donors are the John M. Olin and Smith Richardson Foundations, and even though most of the funds for the Grand Strategy Project come from Smith Richardson, both foundations' philosophies of leadership echo that of the Project. In "Buying A Movement: Right-Wmg Foundations in American Politics," a report by the liberal ALTHOUGH THEY HAVE NO INFLUENCE

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People for the American Way organization, James Piereson, Executive Direcror of the Olin Foundation, is quoted as saying, "We invested at the top of society, in Washington think tanks and the best universities, and the idea is [that} this would have a much larger impact because they were influential places."

The report suggests that this impact reflects the bias of the donors: "One Chronicle ofHigh" Education writer notes that critics charge Olin with spending 'millions of dollars to support activities that direct!,. challenge the spread of diversity and multiculturalism on campus. Far from promoting objective, dispassionate scholarship, as it claims, the Olin Foundation has an explicit political agenda, with ties to officials in the Republican party.'" The report suggests that the Olin Foundation is interested not merely in training leaders, but in training ·leaders to act according to Olin's conservative philosophy. casual To a observer of ISS, the link to the broader conservative movement, while well documented financially, seems tenuous ideologically. Afrer all, international security is an i~ue that transcends political distinctions. Even though the instructors of "Studies in Grand Strategy" are relatively conservative, none of the students with whom I spoke thought that a particular ideology drove the class.

So why then have rwo conservative foundations taken up ISS as their cause?

One answer lies in the nature of the study of history. "Every generation redefines what sort of history it is in," explains Kennedy.

"It's not surprising that the generation that was born between the wars wanted to understand war, because they just went through two of the biggest wars in history.

[Today], some people think diplomatic history is the study of power, and since power is bad and made of old white males, they replace military history with something like environmental history."

THE NEW JouRNAL

But does the study of power in the form of grand strategy necessarily lead to conservative conclusions? The answer may lie in how one defines grand strategy.

Some studenrs in the class, such as Ranjarl::' Goswani, doubt if grand strategy even exists. Hill is contented with a means-toan-end definition.

But Theodore Bromund, Associate Director of ISS, has a more specific concept of grand strategy.

"In the business context," he says, "grand strategy is profit maximization by obeying legal and ethical norms. In the government context, it is wealth distributed in a certain way." While he doesn't define these ethical norms, Bromund suggests that ethics are a necessary element of grand strategy. A poster of Winston Churchill behind his desk reflects this ideal: Churchill is drawn with his finger raised, saying "Deserve Victory." Bromund says that he likes the morality implied. One student in the class, Ram Fish of the School of Management, says, "Tactics is about how to win battles.

Strategy is about how to win the war. And grand strategy is about what wars to fight."

BUT GRANO STRATEGY, in its essence, is not about ends. Grand strategy is the study of means, a strategy of how to achieve one's desired ends. Grand strategy seeks to teach the powerful how to get what they want, whatever that may be.

Many of the studentS in the grand strategy seminar simply hope to learn from an interesting class, and are humble abo ut the idea of leadership. But despite their feelings, one thing is clear: Taught by some of the world's most influential professors, treated to d inners with corporate CEOs, observed by the CIA, and networked with one another, the handpicked studentS of the Grand Strategy Project are not only supposed to learn about the world's leaders, but to become them.

Alexander Dworkowitz, a smiorin Branford, is on the staffo[TNJ .

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II

H

¡alfway up Broadway, near the center ofNew Haven, the York Square Cinema readies for combat. Strategy requires a business-as--usual approach, which means that the promotional posters stay on the front windows and the postersize movie reviews remain in display cases by the doors, all below the giant marquee where mismatched letters announce the week's features. The reviews and posters were almost certainly put up by Peter Spodick, who manages the York Square and who also filed suit this past spring against the twelve largest movie studios in the country.

Spodick is a busy man. The lawsuit brings more work to a job that already provided plenty. It has brought a doz.en enemies who more or less comprise the American motion picture industry: Buena Vista (which includes Disney), Columbia, DreamWorks, MGM, Lion's Gate, Miramax, New Line Cinema, Paramount, USA Films, Sony, Universal Studios, and Warner Bros. Spodick claims the studios have systematically avoided Licensing first-run films in the city of New Haven, forcing residents to travel to neighboring towns to see new movies. The trial is tentatively set to begin December 31, 2001, creating a frantic year of preparation in the meantime.

As he dashes between legal and managerial chores, Spodick is hard to find. In fact, 15 minutes before theater doors open on a Thursday night, the only place to catch him is the men's restroom, where he is whisking across the tiles, paper towels bunched under his shoes. "Cleaning guy put too much soap on the floor," he says. He circles from stall co door co sink, where he stops to splash more water on the floor: "Nature's solvent."

"Don't be shy," he says, and tosses a mess of towels my way.

A young employee zips out of a stall and smiles as she grabs more rowels. She turns so that now she and Spodick are circling each other in the middle of the floor, like dance partners. If anyone brings this up later he'll just grin and say, "When scuff needs to get done, you shut the fuck up and you do it."

PETER SPODicK's FATHER, Robert Spodick, opened the Lincoln Theatre in New Haven with his cousin Lenny Sampson in 1945¡ Lenny was fresh back from fighting in Japan and Robert, 26, had just moved up from New York, where he went to school and managed the Little Carnegie, a popular foreign film theater next co Carnegie Hall. Neither man bad much money. How were they able to start their own theater? Peter laughs. He likes this part of the story.

During World War u, croops en route co Japan stayed in Honolulu before shipping out. The island was flooded with thousands of bored soldiers, one of whom was Lenny Sampson.

One day he approached the owner of the on-base movie house. which was doing poorly. Lenny said be could double the owner's business in exchange for a piece of the profits. Deal.

Lenny telegrammed Robert to send a reel of Ecstasy, the new Hedy Lamarr movie. "She was a great big star," Peter says.

"Very beautiful." The movie was indeed a business-doubler because, as every soldier-age male knew in 1945, .Eatasy has a THE NEW JouRNAL

A

nude swim scene. Jackpot. Robert, scill in New York, tracked down

a reel of the movie and shipped it to Honolulu, and ... what? Peter has quit mid-sentence, wallcing upstairs to his office in silence.

Afraid he has forgotten to finish the ~ory, I ask, "How did it do?" · Peter opens his office door co reveal the original promotional poster for Ecstmy. There are some words along the edges, but the poster is dominated by a large, simple sketch of a woman leaning back against a rock. She is beautiful, smiling, and naked.

"They broke the theater doors down," he says. Lenny's cut from the theater owner would be the seed money for the Lincoln Theatre in New Haven.

Lenny and Robert ran the Lincoln successfully until 1966, when the city informed them that their theater was in the way of an exit ramp-to-be off Interstate 91, and put the Theatre on 30-day destruction notice. Building maintenance was tough to justify when the only certainty in the building's future was destruction. The Lincoln spent the next 16 years a month's notice from death, finally closing in 1982. But Lenny and Robert still had the York Square Cinema, opened in 1970 at 6 1 Broadway.

Thirty years later, the York Square--all ducc screens and 687 seatS of it-is the only remaining theater within walking distance of Yale. where 10,000 studentS are packed inro a kw square miles, and within the city of New Haven, population 130,000. Jackpot. Or so it would seem. Unless Peter Spodick works a miracle, the York' Square could be out of bwiness by Christmas.

theater in "New Haven" can play a film while it is playing at the Showcase. These exclusive runs draw moviegoers from New Haven co "New Haven," and can extend for several months or longer.

Ammcan B~auty. for example, never came to our New H aven.

"Before the movie opened, we knew this would be a big one, maybe the big one," Spodick says of Ammcan &auty, the 1999 Dream Works blockbuster that grossed over $130 million nationwide. "It was one of those crossover picrures that was artistically significant and did tremendous business." The film opened at one of the "New Haven" Showcase locations in the suburbs, Spodick says, and played £here for nine months, switching between locations and even leaving the Showcase altogether for a while, d uring which Spodick still was not allowed to play the film. Spodick repeatedly requested the film from DreamWorks but was refused on the grounds of the exclusive-run contract. Spodick believed so strongly in Ammcan B~auty's potencial that he even contacted DreamWorks with an offer afrer the film had come out on video, nearly a year afrer the national release. Again the studio refused.

This is not the only movie the York Square has missed, and DreamWorks is not the only studio that has seemingly blacklisted the city of New Haven. Eleven others have all decided to play only in the suburbs despite evidence that the York Square can be very profitable wben allowed to play mainstream films, raising the question that tortures Spodick: Why? At the trial next year, the studios' response will probably amount co "Why what?" Studios profit directly from the success of their films, as theater owners must pay a fraction of each movie's ticket sales back co the studio. This fraction varies--studios tend to demand more return for films they expect to succeed, and especially in the film's opening weeks, when attendance is likely to be highesc. The fraction shrinks as the film's run continues, but can begin quite large, sometimes as high as 70 percent. Because the studios' income is so dependent on ticket sales, they are generally free to license films co whomever they choose.

Unless its owners work a miracle, the York Square Cinema could be out of business

by Christmas.

in recent years because major studios have been increasingly unwilling to allow their films to play at the only theater in New Haven . It's hard to say what's more absurd: that studios collectively boycott medium-sized cities with large captive audiences, or that Peter Spodick has decided to sue them all for it.

Spodick filed Broadway Theatre Corporation v. Buma Vista Piaures, a al on April 19, 2000, citing the studios' refusal to license films in New Haven as a violation of the Connecticut Unfair Trade Pncrices Act (CUTPA). "[CUTPA] is a consumer protection act," Spodick says. "The defmition in the law is unfairness to consumers.

How is it that some people get a little more f.Urness than others?"

He wants a court order to prevent the studios from denying movies to New Haven. Spodick's claim hinges on geography: The accused distributors all agree on the boundaries of a territory they call "New Haven" that is considerably larger than the real New Haven.

Sa.d.ios have divided the nation into thousands of territories, and their "New Haven" combines the city of New Haven with more chan a dozen surrounding towns. In addition to the York Square, lbc studios' "New Haven" is home to four multiplexes, all owned by Sbowase Cinemas, a national chain. Since its first "New Haven" location opened in 1967, Showcase has licensed films from distribucon under an •exclusive run" agreement, meaning that no other BusiNESS HAS BUN BAD

NOVEMBER 10,

200

UNTIL R£CENTLY, AMERICA'S LARGEST FILM EXHIBITORS have been engaged in a furious building war. The result is 33 percent more screens than five years ago, and, for six major exhibitors, bankruptcy. Industry analyses say that the nation's 39,000 screens are about 12,000 too many. "Overscreening" has complicated the movie exhibition business, especially the relationship between national chains like Carmike Cinemas (the country's third largest exhibitor) and small movie houses like the York Square. The building spree contributed most to overscreening, but smaller, older theaters will most likely bear the cost of their competitors' mistake. Multiplexes, after all, have a lot to offer: digital sound, stadium searing, and conces-sion stands of occasionally intimidating selection (go ro the Manhattan AMC 25 for chicken quesadillas, the Plainville, cr, 2oplex for popcorn shrimp). O lder theaters' worn-out chairs and garbled sound may appeal to nostalgia, but not ro Hollywood. When

13

a new multiplex springs up near a mall and demands exclusive runs, what are the studios to do? Every town, it seems, now has an abandoned theater on Main Street and a multiplex ten miles away. The villain, Spodick explains, is not just one theater chain, but a juggernaut: National Amusements, a sprawling entity that contains Viacom, cas, Paramount, United International, and Showcase C inemas.

National Amusements has been captained almost singlehandedly in the last dozen years by a man named Sumner Redstone.

Redstone's Showcase Cinemas controls more than 1350 screens across the eastern half of the country, with high concentrations in Massachusetts and southern Connecticut. He has New Haven surrounded: to the southeast, eight screens in Orange; to the southwest, nine in Milford; to the north, twelve in North Haven. Redstone has constructed a ring approximately eight miles in radius around New Haven, drawing to the perimeter customers with personal transportation but neglecting everyone else; as Spodick often points out, "There is no bus."

And if this ring continues its "squeeze" on New Haven, Spodick says, there will be no movie theater here either. Spodick knows Redstone and his strategies, and fears they wiU work as well in New Haven as they did in Hamden, whose local theater found itself unable to get first-run films.

Showcase had screens in North Haven, and was not interested in neighbors. Showcase applied the "squeeze," and when the Hamden theater folded, Showcase bought their lease. T he theater later reopened under Showcase management. Then, "a few years later Schowcase opens an eightscreener in North Haven, and they close the theater in Hamden. It gets convened into a giant Blockbuster Video. The city of Hamden, population 50,000 is officially shit out of luck. There will never be theaters there. That's how it works," Spodick

says. "Fold 'em, take 'em over. Fold 'em, take 'em over. If Showcase doesn't do it, some competitor may go in there and make trouble for them, so they take it over."

Showcase does not build in the suburbs by accident, Spodick says. "They know when build these multimillion

doUar complexes who's going to come to the movies. New Haven has 20,000 people living on welf.ue. Showcase doesn't want these people." Spodick cites overscreening as one reason why Showcase "cannot allow downtown theaters access to first-run films," lest the York Square's central location begin drawing New Haven residents who usually venture to the suburbs for new movies. The suburbs are o ut of reach, however, for the poor and those without cars, most of whom will not pay a $25 cab fare on top of an $8.25 ticket for a first-run movie in North Haven, the nearest Showcase location.

"People who live in New Haven have been disenfranchised," Spodick says--to him movies are an urban dweller's basic right. "It's not a matter of money; it's about the quality of our shared urban lives. There is no successful downtown anywhere that does not have first-run movies. We have everything else. This is an industry that brings people out at night on a m ass basis.

Movies are an urgent catalyst for restaurants, downtown shopping. bookstores that stay open late, coffee shops that are open all night to accommodate people on the town."

As proof that crowds would foUow if first-run movies were to come, Spodick offers the example of Th~ Blair Wit'h Project, a horror film that cost $30,000 to make and grossed $140 million. Its success surprised just about everyone, including Redstone, who did not demand an exclusive run and let the York Square have it. With Yale empty for the summer, Blair Witch still grossed $6,000 on opening day and $27,000 for the week, and, according to Spodick, outgrossed most area theaters.

Nevertheless, when a sequel was announced, the studio told Spodick it would never play in New Haven. "New Haveners responded to Blair Witch, proved it could make a fortune downtown.

That's why [Redstone] will not allow us to play it anymore."

Since the York Square opened, perhaps no movie has belonged there as much as last year's The Situ/is, set at Yale. The Hartford Courant advised residents to come here just to watch it: "Those wanting to enjoy Th~ Situ/is to the fullest should journey ... to the theater closest to the campus of Yale University in order to rune in to the chorus of jeers and cheers from the sons of Eli." Redstone let the York Square have Th~ Skulls, but only because good business sense told him he had to.

What better way to pique national attention than to prevent a movie about Yale &om playing at the o nly theater on campus? Redstone convinced Universal Pictures to play it in the suburbs first for a few weeks anyway, then tossed it to the York Square just as school was ending. "We would have turned out the biggest gross in the United States for that movie," Spodick says wistfully. named in the suit all have the same lawyer. His office, it turns out, is a half mile from the York Square on the New Haven Green. He and Spodick have known each other since they were kids: They went to Amity Junior High School together.

THE TWELVE HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS

THE NEw JouRNAL

916 Whalley Ave. • New Haven • 3876799

Richard Bowerman works for Tyler Cooper & Alcorn, one of the city's top law firms. He represents--the studios, the outof-towners who in this fiercely local fight are perhaps too easily condemned simpTy because they are so big. They may even be ruthless and greedy, but does this distinguish them from other large corporations, much less make their actions illegal?

Bowerman is resolute: It is not unlawful for the studios to license their films, which are copyrighted products, as they wish. The studios "have a right to license them in any w.&y they deem proper, same as you would if you made a motion picture or wrote a book."

This challenge to the uniqueness of Spodick's claim can be expanded. The York Square's predicament reflects the widespread phenomenon of businesses' flight to the suburbs. Is it so awful that they might now see their movies there as well?

Yes, Spodick argues, because not everyone can get to the suburbs. There is bus service to the Showcase-managed Fourplex in Milford, but the round trip totals 21 miles, a distance described by Spodick in his legal complaint as "prohibitive." Nobody wants to ride on the bus for an hour to see a movie, but first-run movies being available by public transportation further blurs a complaint that already hinges on a jury's interpretation of what is.

"The York Square does not have the grossing potential of other houses in the area," Bowerman says. When, at his father's request, Peter Spodick became manager of the theater, he replaced Arnold Gorlick, who had managed the theater for 2.4 years and moved to the new Madison Art Cinemas in Madison, cr, 20 minutes from New Haven. Interestingly, Gorlick's new theater does better than the York Square.

The Madison quickly became one of the Rate's leading art theaters, playing a variety of films and, according to Gorlick, existing in harmony-even cooperation-with Showcase. Spodick brisdes at the notion that the Madison could even be called an an theater, and he has a point: Most art houses don't have eight channels of Dolby Ia surround sound :md sufficiendy elegant

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architecture to be photographed for the N~ York Times, like the Madison. Perhaps Spodick is bitter that the Madison occupies the niche he seeks, balancing art ftlms with mainstream movies, or worried because the Madison m:ty be claiming some of his already paltry business.

Spodick's old friends have now come forward as his adversaries, representing forces that could crush him before long.

Provided the York Square survives until the trial, life will become a lot harder, Spodick admits. "They want to go to trial," he says of the studios. "I believe they've already committed half a million dollars to keep movies out of New Haven. If we go to trial, it'll become millions." And who will combat greater Hollywood in the courts?

Peter Spodick, of course. He is also a lawyer-Cleveland State Law School, class of '78. He will represent himself against Hollywood and his junior high classmate, and he will do it while running the theater almost by himself. He will also have to surmount considerable obstacles just to reach the trial, as the next 13 months will be filled with battles and surprises, like the courtsupported request Spodick received several days ago from Richard Bowerman.

"He wants everything," Spodick says.

"All the details, statements, play dates, grosses, everything from the last 1,300 screen weeks." A screen week is the cinemarie equivalent of a kilowatt hour; the York Square, with three screens, goes through three screen weeks every calendar week. "That means everything we've ·done in the last seven years," Spodick says. "Our bookkeeper is going crazy."

There is only one bookkeeper, just as there is only one lawyer, who is also the manager, just as there is one 81-year-old promoter, who is also the owner and founder. Robert Spodick still works a full week. Although he was diagn~sed with

THE NEW JouRNAL

throat cancer two years ago-"Too many cigarettes," his son explains-Robert does most of the advertising. booking. and buying. Peter does everything else, often working 70-hour weeks during which he is manager, projectionist, publicist, janitor, and, now, lawyer. "If I don't do it, it won't get done," he says. "If it rains tonight, I'll be on the roof clearing leaves out of the gutter so we don't have a flood. If I were to get sick for awhile, forget it. The York Square closes."

When asked if his current situation reminds him of anything he's seen in the m ovies, Spodick answers quickly enough: "James Stewart ... It's A Wontkrfol Lifo." In the movie, George Bailey wants co leave town and live on his own, but his father dies and George has to take over the struggling fumily business. Bailey fights to keep the business alive and resist the evil Mr. Potter, a rival banker.

Spodick loves the movie, but doesn't take the parallel roo far. Mr. Potter may have been treacherous and powerful, but as an enemy, he's no march for Redstone, who is too large to attack directly. Instead, Spodick has had to fight him through the studios, which are smaller and more legally vulnerable. New Haven's townspeople appear less than ready co band together and save the theater, as many of them seem to harbor a belief that the York Square will never actually dose. They don't understand the many factors that contribute co a crisis of "imminent failure" for the only movie theater in a college town. They don't know Sumner Redstone. Spodick does, and wanes nothing more than to defeat him for the York Square and the countless small theaters that did nor survive the "squeez.e."

Spodick will never give up, but victory is distant at best, and he is exhausted. "'There is a point where you get so tired you lose track," he says. Money is also an issue.

NOVEMBER

10,2000

Peter isn't paid much, and Robert hasn't taken a check in years. He works all week, and does it for free. "And y'know what?"

Peter says, "He's tired too." But while the real world generally supplies fewer happy endings than do the movies, there are hints lately that the city is awakening to the York Square.

KEviN McCLOuD HAD NOT MET Peter Spodick when he wrote a series of letters trying to save the York Square. McCloud, who moved to New Haven earlier this year, was a frequent theater-goer and had seen enough to know he wanted it to stick around . So he wrote three letters to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and New Haven Mayor John DeStefano. He used strong words and underlines, urging the Mayor to "~ ~ ~ work with the state attorney general" to save the theater.

"For many years, the practice of first distributing movies through such multiplexes has sapped the life from the cinema industry downtown," DeStefano wrote in response. "The Attorney General is considering active participation in securing the right of the York Square Cinemas' efforts to receive first-run movies."

"When I see that letter from the mayor," Spodick says, "I am a happy boy.

The Attorney General cannot take every case that comes along. bur he has the right to enter on an amicus basis, for harm to consumers, and take the case away [for a state investigation]." This would bring the prosecutorial power of the state to Spodick's case, which could convince the studios to settle out of court. "That would be a dream come true," Spodick says.

Whether the Attorney General takes the case or not, Spodick's mission is the same. Under CUTPA, plaintiffs must demonstrate immediate threat of irrepara-

ble harm if the defendant were not restrained. In this case, Spodick is attempting to restrain the studios' ability to keep movies out of downtown New Haven. If the York Square does not get fiCst-run movies immediately, Spodick says, New Haven will never get them again. T he York will go out of business and no replacement theater would spring up in its place.

Spodick is equally sure that Showcase would never open a theater in New Haven, as they have already overbuilt in the suburbs. "They're terrified of who else might poach on their rueÂŁ So they build to keep competitors out."

AN AR:riCLE IN THE Tccas Monthly lists a dozen stately, beautiful movie houses that have been, for various lengths of time, dead. They stand unpurchased and undemolished for two reasons: No unrelated business would fit snugly into the buildings as they are, and no one wants to knock them down. When two reporters opened up the Aztec Theatre in Eagle Pass, TX "a score of residentS crowded around to beg a quick peek inside or to relate anecdotes about the Aztec, and several-including a police detective and the city managerrevealed that they had mer their spouses there." The York Square and the Aztec share an idealistic belief that people do not want a movie theater that it sized for maximum efficiency, bur one that is beautiful in an intimate and utterly obsolete sort of way.

"The ghosts are gone," Spodick says.

"There is only one fighter, and it is us."

...

And~

Cowdny is a sopho1TUJ" in Ezra Stiks Co/kg~.

17

SHOTS IN THE DARK

carnival knowledge ..

j ~

1

-

photos and essay by Bidisha Banerjee

When evening hit the Cheshire County fair, the cotton-candy stalls, the games, and the rides ceased to operate one by one. All present moved to a nearby dark field for the crowning event of the night.

Springsteen's "Born in the USA" crackled on the outdoor speakers. The days were growing shorter and colder and oranger and counties across America were marking the occasion. A man interrupted the music to emphasize how long it had been since there had been fireworks at the Cheshire County Fall Festival: two year~. Everyone cheered and huddled into plastic furniture, gawking at the sparkly sky.

Most of the people present were longtime residents of the county. Some stood in makeshift stalls selling hearty New England fare to brace us against the cold. Others milled about, visiting old friends. Their hipper children sucked on glowsticks, which shone eerie lavender and toxic green rough their cheeks. Still others stood in the long line to buy tickets for the rides. Then there were e carnies: lounging against rusty rides, winking at children, and flirting with teenagers. Finally, was a crew of miscellaneous outsiders: a group of black-veiled Muslim women; their ornery not savvy enough to have glow-in-the-dark pacifiers; a few college students who had grown up far from this place. My friends and I breathed in the sky along with the rest, transfixed by such carnival energy only a few miles from campus.

We were hobked. Most weekends in September and October, we piled in a car and scoutout county fairs around New Haven. We checked out prize-winning pumpkins, complete with doctored pictures of the winners "surfing" on their pumpkins on an artificial sea. We ten. . . . . .~..... u scratched scrawny goats in petting zoos, trying not to offend the pancake-faced girls who jealously tended them. We stumbled into expositions where merchants hawked nail-buffers that would make our own nails shine like the classiest fakes, magical chamois that would gulp up stains no matter how stubborn, and cooking ware that would serve up meals so perfect that our intestines would rumble in appreciation for

days. We almost rode in a hot-air balloon, scrutinized a butter sculpture for hours, and watched a determined pack of Amish musicians serenade indigent fair-goers. We dangled upside-down in mid-air with small Pakistani children who complained that America was "stupid and boring" and grumbled about how loudly we were screaming. We won no prizes on the midway and missed seeing Def Leppard play, but chugged the best vanilla milkshakes ever and made our hands sticky with swirls and swirls of cotton candy.

When county fair season ended, the residents of each county retreated into their homes eager to plan next year's fun. My friends and I returned to our desolate dorm rooms, sulky and discontented.

20

THE NEW JouRNAL

l~e arc~ives of Israel's ~est -~nown writer ~ave travele~ far to rest at Yale.

8~ An~a ~amenetz

W

hen I was five years old, a poet came to my house and sat at my kitchen table. I couldn't pronounce his name, but I could see the respect my parents, both writing professors, had for him. He had a heavy-browed, gray-haired head and a gentle, accented voice, and he laughed with my father about passing the town of Pepsi-Cola (Pensacola, Florida) on the plane: "There must be a whole state of Coca-Cola," he said. When I was 16, we met again in his home city of Jerusalem. He read his poetry co a group of American teenagers in both Hebrew and English, and talked about the dream of peace. "Here is a man who has really figured out a way to live," I wrote in my journal that day.

On September 22, 2000, the poet passed away. Yehuda Amichai, whose career spanned half a cenrury, was the quintessential writer of Israel and Jerusalem. So how did his archives end up here in the u.s., ar the Beinecke Libraty? The answer illuminates a tension that ran through the poet's entire life.

Yehuda Amichai chose his own name, which means "My People Live." Born in Germany in 1924, he immigrated to Israel with his family in 1936. He was one of the few poets of his generation to attend a religious school, and although he was a lifetime agnostic, biblical and liturgical language flowed through his poetry.

Benjamin Harshav, Yale's Blaustein Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature, first met Amichai during Israel's War of Independence in 1948 in the Negev, Israel's southern desert, when his brigade was relieving Amichai's. Amichai, four years older, was already a seasoned soldier, having served during World War 11 in Britain's Jewish Brigade.

After the War of Independence and the establishment of the State of Israel, Harshav and his friends at Hebrew University Started a small literaty journal. Lilrrat (Toward) published "probably Arnichai's first poems," Harshav says. According to Harshav, it was a period of intellectual and social upheaval. "It was a very political time, the last days of Stalin," he says. "The whole country was on tuna (restraint). Very stricr rations; I mean, you got one egg a week.

In 1951 suddenly there was a feeling of detaching from the ideology.

NOVEMBER 10, 2000

We called it 'Putting Zionism in quotation marks.' Socialism, too.

We were tired of ideology, phraseology. 'Don't talk Zionism to me' meant don't talk abstracmess, philosophy." Arnichai's poetty fit right into this mood, with its insistence on the simple and the concrete. One early poem reads, in its entirety: Rain fills on the faces of my friends.

My living friends, who Cover their heads with blankers And my dead friends, who Don't.

These five short lines contain the essence of Amichai's poetry: emotion conveyed obliquely, through an instantly recognizable image.

Amichai studied literarure at Hebrew University and then taught primary and secondary school for a rime. His first book of poems, published in 1955, was called Now and in Other Times.

"That was so revolutionary in Israel, where the past was everything," says Harshav. "And suddenly he says 'Now.' What do you feel now? What do you experience now, personally? Love, making love. I would say Amichai was born in 1955 with this first book of poems. It was then that he became Amichai and he never went back." In Israel, Amichai was sometimes accused of "insufficient Zionism." But Arnichai never ignored politics, he simply drew a stronger line than most between the poetic and the political. "He wrote about peace and love," said Barbara Harshav, a lecrurer in Yale's Comparative Literature Department who, with her husband, translated much of Amichai's poetry into English, "[This,) in a country of war and hate, is a political statement." Amichai's poetry was also a statement about the future of the Hebrew language.

"Amichai was accused of not knowing Hebrew," Benjamin Harshav said, because his language was so stripped down and focused on the entities of the modem world: helicopters, oil rigs, tanks. "His real achievement was putting the language of the everyday into Hebrew poetry," Barbara Harshav said.

After initial critical reaction, Israel responded positively, raising Amichai to the starus of a national treasure over his career of five

21

decades. "Every soldier had in his kit bag a book of Amichai poetry," Barbara Harshav said. "I remember very clearly some years ago being in a bookstore in Jerusalem and seeing a grandmother come in ro buy a book of Amichai poems for her grandson as a bar mit'Lvah present." His front-page obituary in The ]erusakm Post noted that his last book of poems, Open Closed Open (1999) , stayed on the bestseller list for weeks, an almost unprecedented phenomenon in Israel for a book of poetry. He was the recipient of Israel's highest literary honors. And, as Benjamin Harshav notes, "He was able in his later years to make his living from the poetry. That's rare everywhere, but in a small country, it's incredible."

This popularity soon spread beyond his small home country.

Extensive translation secured Amichai's world reputation. His work was translated into 33 languages, from Finnish ro Chinese. The unusual success of these translations is tied ro his particular poetic concern with image, not language as such. "He was one of the easiest poets to translate because of his images---except when he worked in Biblical language, where the allusions can get lost," Barbara Harshav said. "Benjamin and I worked with him very closely on [Even a Fist was Once An Open Palm with Fingers (1989)], and there were a few of the compliments you hope for as a translator. [Amichai] said, 'Really, for the first rime I feel that this is what I wrote."' Knowing English well enough to evaluate his own translations, Amichai was restless and worked with many different translators, from poets and others who knew little Hebrew, like Ted Hughes and Stephen Mitchell, to native Hebrew speakers like Chana Bloch.

Hughes, a longtime friend, said, "He was known and loved the world over." Benjamin Harshav points out that Yale professor J. D. McClatchy's Vintage Anthology of World Litn-ature included about 20 Amichai poems and says, "This is what Amichai always wanted, to be a world poet."

Rabbi James Ponec, who hosted Amichai in New Haven several times over the lase 20 years, recalls the first meeting between Amichai and American Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, which occurred at Yale in 1996: "Pinsky was very excited ro meet him-stretched our his hand and said 'Hello, maestro.' I think he really saw Amichai as the giant leading the way."

Yet no matter how well-respected, how universal his sentimentS, or how uanslatable his images, Amichai remained inextricably grounded in his home soil of Israel. He saw action in every major war of his country, serving as a sergeant major in the reserves until the age of 55¡ And it may have been the battlefields of Israel that kept Amichai from receiving literature's highest honor. Most of his obituaries noted that he was a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize, which is given only to living writers. "I think the issue was that they wouldn't give it to an Israeli until there was peace," said Benjamin Harshav. "His archives coming here, to a world university, is almost a consolation prize for his not receiving the Nobel," said Ponet.

So how exactly did they get co Yale? Amichai's friends and acquaintances here offer different explanations, but mostly they come down to money. "It could be argued that his archive belongs in Israel," said Geoffrey Hartman, Sterling Professor Emeritus of

22

English and Comparative Literature and a friend of Amichai's since the 1950s. "Unfortunately, Israel does not seem co have public funds to properly care for this important legacy. That is one reason why Amichai's manuscriptS are better off at Yale.'' Ponet adds another reason: "I know he wanted to be able co leave some money to his family, and the Beinecke was able ro pay him something substantial. I know he felt bad about it. He had to choose between leaving his papers in the country and leaving some money to his familyone of his daughters is in her early twenties." Vincent Giroud, the Beinecke's Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, hesitates ro give the Library's exact figure paid for Amichai's papers. He notes only that the prices for such acquisitions generally range from about "10,000 pounds" to "astronomical" figures adding, "I think we paid a fair price." How exactly the deal was made is another delicate matter. Hartman says he was originally approached by the Beinecke about Amichai's papers several years ago, and obtained the poet's provisional consent, but that "vasious complications ensued."

Giroud says the sale was negotiated through a few different dealers over a period of ten years. He adds, "It's obvious that for an archive so important as that of Amichai's we needed the permission of the national Israeli archivist." To the charge that the archives should have remained in Israel, Giroud says, "It's a legitimate concern, bur the only answer we can give is that it's available to them here."

Davi Bernstein, an undergraduate, is working on the initial inventory, translating Amichai's instructions for the archivists and purring a catalog online as quiclcly as possible.

In this information age, the resting place of scholarly material may be a matter of largely sentimental importance. Yet there is cause for sadness in the idea of a country that cannot afford to keep the letters and manuscripts of irs greatest poet. It is especially sad for Israel co lose him now, shaken as the country is by yet another convulsion of violence. Amichai's poetry sustained the theme of being twinned in fate with his country: "When I was young, the whole country was young," he wrote. A week afrer he died, on September 2.8, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon stepped onto the Temple Mount, revered by both Jews and Muslims, touching off the recent violence that has claimed over 160 lives to dare, the majority Palestinian. "I, may I rest in peace," read one of Amichai's lase poems, "I don't want to wait until I die to have peace ... I want peace right now, while I'm alive." As I listened to these words at Amichai's memorial service, in the hushed, translucent marble space of Beinecke, the ironies multiplied. An old man's wish for rest echoes his country's forgotten cry for peace; but even as we celebrate his life, the struggle rages on.

Anya .Kamenetz, a junior in Davenport College, is a managing editor for TNJ¡

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!Ezra Sti(es Master's rTea

Catherine Bush Author of Minus Time and, most recently, The Rules of Engagement " ...a high-risk author,. intellectually unafraid .... She traverses war zones- psychological, sexual , real- with a clear-eyed, cerebral sophistication ... exhilarating ... " Catherine Lockerbie, The New York Times Book Review "Suspenseful, minutely observed ... a sort of secular humanist manifesto ... " The Village Voice "Catherine Bush has written that rare book, an intriguing novel of ideas peopled with characters who live on in memory long after their issues have been resolved ... fiercely intelligent and ultimately romantic ......

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Ezra Stiles Master's House 9 Tower Parkway Tuesday, December 5

No~BER 10, 2ooo

23

ESSAY

â&#x20AC;˘

e 1verance B

rocher Stephen White, born-again Christian preacher, mod. ern-day "saint" and self-proclaimed "Soldier of Christ," has positioned himself no more than 50 yards from my dorm room window for the past two days. His constant stream of jeers and proclamations and the shouted responses of indignant Yale studencs seep in as I immerse myself in microeconomics and French philosophy.

Campus buzz is all about the "crazy Christian guy on Wall Street." Brother Stephen's arrival at Yale, with his wife, kids, and apprentice Brother Jeff in tow, coincides with National Coming Out Day 2000. Signs of support for the event are ubiquitous on our progressive campus: Small pink banners fly from campus windows, pink triangle and "Straight bur not narrow" pins adorn backpacks, and the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender Co-operative has sec up a door on Cross Campus with "The Closet" markered across it in large black letters. Just across Wall Street from this display, Brother Stephen attractS quire a crowd. Yalies usually are self-involved: Political rallies and demonstrations, even for causes that most studencs agree with, consistently draw fewer than 40 people. But for two days, a mass of at least chat number has surrounded Brother Stephen almost continuously as he prances and jumps and howls and shakes his fist, scathingly denouncing everyone from homosexuals to tree-huggers to potheads to Catholics. I skipped two classes just to listen.

It is a warm October afternoon and dozens of Yalies stop on their way home from class to watch the spectacle. Someone in the crowd mentions that Brother Stephen is leaving Yale this same evening and heading co Philadelphia. This lase point catches my attention: I coo am on my way to Philadelphia, co visit a friend at the University of Pennsylvania, and I need a ride.

After a moment's hesitation, I approach Laurie, Brother Stephen's wife, who is sitting on a collapsible lawn chair with their two children (Philip, 2, and Wesley, 9 months) in her lap, and strike up a conversation with her. I manage co bring up Philadelphia almost immediately and within minutes, feeling only a twinge of guile for so shamelessly taking advantage of her Christian charity, have secured a spot for myself in their car.

I run up co my room to grab a bag, let my roommates know where I'm going, and, more importantly, how I'm getting there.

Disbelief quickly turns into a mix of amusement and concern. They advise, "I wouldn't ride with him if I were you. That man is mentally ill. He thinks he's a saint." And, "Are you really going to deal with six hours of him preaching at you? I think I would kill him by the end." I smile, shrug, and head our the door, prepared for six righteous hours of hellfire and brimstone on the road co the City of Brotherly Love.

BROTHER STEPHEN SPEAKS IN A SQUEAKY AlucANSAS DRAWL, peppering short sentences with proclamations of "Praise the Lord" and "Praise be to Jesus." If written, his speech would contain frequent exclamation poincs and italicized phrases. He is an old-time Southern traveling preacher, straight out of a Flannery O 'Connor novel.

As we squeeze into his plain white Mazda, Brother Stephen tells me chat he's been craving a burger all day. I direct him to a Burger King down Whalley Avenue. I'm a bit nervous about the whole endeavor: In his preaching earlier in the day, Brother Stephen had taken some decisive swipes at inner cities and black culture, especially "reefer-sucking, fornicating" rap icons like Tupac Shakur.

Mixing Brother Stephen with the standard New Haven crowd seems like a recipe for disaster.

After seeing Brother Stephen in action for the past two days, his change in demeanor when we get in the car is disarming. We make small talk; he asks me where I'm from, what I'm studying, why I decided to go to Yale, what my parencs do. Though an occasional "Praise the Lord" or "Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" still pops up, he is low-key and down-to-earth, someone who has an easy time talking to people and clearly enjoys it. He's almost someone I'd like to sit down and have a beer with-if we'd met in a different context, and if he drank alcohol. Even when the conversation takes a tum towards religion and philosophy, he remains calm, and by the rime we reach the Burger King, he knows the basic faccs of my life: I am a Jew; I am agnostic; and I have violated more than one of the Ten CommandmentS. I go sit in a booth with Laurie and her two sons while Brother Stephen and Brother Jeff stand in line. The contrast is almost comic: The two preachers, blond hair gelled into submission, wait politdy in dark suics among the mostly black, casually dressed clientele. But after a minute, I look back and both are jabbering away at the person next to them in line, Brother Stephen animated, Brother Jeff poised. A minute later, Brother Stephen is offering his email address to a teenager wearing a leather Fubu Jacket, red Yankees hat turned sideways, and a thick gold chain around his neck. The teenager accepcs the card, and gives Brother Stephen his phone number.

BROTHER STEPHEN CLAJMS that he was called to preach when he was 19 years old, six years born again and living in Arkansas. He was "saved" at thirteen. I can only imagine what sins lay in his closet at that tender age. But, no matter-he was willing to make the "cransformative atonement."

Brother Stephen has spent most of the past ten years 9f his life

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Six righteous hours of hellfire and britnstone on the road to..- the City of Brotherly Love preaching at eastern universities like Penn, Princeton, and Yale. The routine is more or less the same each time: Set up shop on a busy campus thoroughfare, straighten the tie and bring out the Bible, then launch an epic session of heckling, prostrating, haranguing, condemning, and proclaiming. At first, passers-by glance nervously at the gray-suited Soldier of God and try to avoid his taunts, bigoted censures, and hallelujahs. Soon, a crowd gathers around him and the spectacle begins. Students, dripping with righteous indignation, confront the preacher. They get in his face and yell: denunciations, streams of obscenities, insults. At Princeton, Brother Stephen tells me, one student, "a Jewish boy," actually hit him. "We're going to cake that kid to court," Laurie assures me.

At Yale, students' responses have ranged from outrage co mild amusement. One student walked up to Brother Stephen and blew smoke in his eyes. Two female friends of mine talked about standing in front of him and licking each ochers' faces. Most Yalies stop to watch for a bit, then move on, casually mentioning the "freak on Wall Street" or the "crazy Christian guy" in the dining hall or before class. I wonder if Brother Stephen knows chat his shoucing and jumping and frantic arm-waving is co most of us merely a freak show, and chat his devotion and faith are just further evidence of his insanity, something to be laughed about and mocked, then forgotten. I don't want to tell him, as ifl have some reason to protect him and his feeltogs.

So we talk about the righteous objectors, the students who confront him and argue with him. Brother Stephen's act is meant to be interactive--he mocks, he jeers, he accuses listeners of sin and informs them that they will "spend eternity in a lake of fire," and he expects them to talk back. That is why, Laurie tells me, Stephen likes to preach at Ivy League schools: Here students argue with him. They talk philosophy and theology and sociology and politics and the Bible, even if discussion is not always civil. At some schools, UConn for example, students just walk by and tell him to fuck off, not even taking the cime to stop and watch the show.

No one is more outraged by Brother Stephen than the handful of devout Christians on campus. To them, his Christianity is an egregious perversion of their religion and their Bible. I have trouble ascertaining just what kind of Christian Brother Stephen is--according to him, there is only one kind, and his kind is it. "All those ChristiAns at Yak,,. he cells me, "aren't really Christians. Ifyou are a true Christian, you devore yourself co spreading the word of the Bible and helping people realize Jesus as the son of God." Those Christians at Yale have, for the most part, been fierce and vocal in their opposition to him. But, Brother Stephen tells me, this opposition does not reflect the feelings of the true Christians at the University. '"I ask Christians if they chink homosexuals att going to hell," he elaborates, "and they say yes. But they whisper-

NOVEMBER 10, 2000

By Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

they're afraid to shout it out. I'm here to make Christians know that they can shout out their beliefs and their faith in Jesus Christ!"

I TELL BROTHER STEPHEN that I am a writer, and ask whether I can write about the trip. His reply is an unequivocal, "Absolutely." Brother Stephen, it seems, loves publicity. He brags about frequent articles in the Daily Pennsylvanian and the Princetonian, and claims that he was mentioned in the New York Times in an article about evangelical preachers disrupting Republican convention-goers in Philadelphia this summer. On the dashboard, there is a stack of copies (presumably to hand out back home) of the October 12 Yale Daily News, the front page of which is dominated by a picture of Stephen, looking wild-eyed and possessed with a Bible in hand, and the headline "Zealot preaches to Yale masses." Still, he is not happy about the paper's coverage. "The Yale Daily News printed nasty info about me and the Gospel of Jesus Christ," he calmly explains. "One Yale student actually said 'I have not been to Sunday school in 10 years and I know the Bible better than Brother Stephen.' Of course, this freshman wouldn't dare humiliate himself by making himself known to me."

By the time we get on 1-95 and head towards New York City, Stephen, Jeff, and Laurie are discussing the day. They sound like high school athletes on their way home from a big victory, recounting the events play by play. "Remember when that one kid came up and argued with me about

Romans?" Stephen asks us, grinning, victorious. "Yeah, you told him," Brother Jeff shoots back, and they all shake their heads and smile. It occurs ro me that Brother Stephen, Brother Jeff, and Laurie do not see even a hint of validity in the various arguments-Biblical, philosophical, sociological, political-brought against them by the academic elite of America. Every anecdote they mention ends with the same con~ tented smile and sense of victory; to them, their logic is impeccable.

At Yale there was an almost endless stream of cock-sure kids marching up to Brother Stephen and declaring their own grain of incontrovertible evidence or undeniable reasoning that would prove, without a doubt, that he is wrong. Yet his beliefs have not changed, nor has he been converted to the truth through some flawlessly argued philosophy or a student's assertion that "God is love." "People come up to hjm and they think that they can change his mind," Laurie says, "but he hears the same arguments everywhere, and if they didn't work the first time, they're not going to work now."

After all this talk of preaching, I'm curious: How many converts has Brother Stephen won in the past 18 years? For his entire adult life, he has spent nearly every day either studying the Bible or spreading the Gospel at a mall or baseball game or on a college campus. He often preaches for ten or twelve hours at a time, shaking his fist and shouting and waving his Bible at all who care to listen and many who don't. His answer surprises me: "I've never actually saved someone." But he does not seem

bothered in the least, presumably because of his faith. To his mind, every true Christian is driven to preach this same message of the Gospel-otherwise, you would not be a true Christian, he asserts, just like the silent ones at Yale. Laurie chimes in, supporting her husband: "You have to take a radical stand for righteousness. "

BY THE TIME WE GET ON 1-295 to Philadelphia, Philip is asleep and Brother Stephen and Brother Jeff are in the front, unabashedly belting out the lyrics of the acoustic evangelical music on the stereo.

The words have something to do with Jesus being there for you when your belief is threatened by the cold and hard world, but I stopped paying attention after the first few songs, all of which sounded the same to my ear. I am in the back with Laurie, her youngest son asleep in her arms. "You know," she begins, eyeing me, "I used to be a sinner." I nod and look away. The silence is easier.

But she goes on, unprompted. "I used to sin. I fornicated. I would, like, go co parties. I cursed all the time, it was always, like, 'F' this and 'F' that." She grew up in New Jersey in a non-religious family and went to college jaded and indulgent. I try to imagine her as a college student, someone I would see drinking keg-beer at a party or huddled, smoking a joint, laughing on a dark quadrangle. She is looking at me earnestly. I ask her when she changed, when she was "saved," and, more importantly, how. Her answer is matter-of-fact.

When she was a sophomore .at West

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Chester University, she "just didn't like going to parties anymore." I press her for an explanation. "I didn't curse, I didn't drink, I just didn't want to go out for, like, a few weekends in a row." And? "It was a sign from God." Laurie joined a campus crusade, gradually gave up her old sinning friends, and "devoted her life to Christ." She met':'Stephen rwo years later, at a college ministry retreat. They continued running into each other over the next several years. In 1997, Stephen "thought about all the men of God who had great wives" and decided to pray for one. Lo and behold, he soon unexpectedly bumped into Laurie and wondered if "this could be the Lord." After subjecting her to a strict set of criteria (for example, "she had to want to have many children" and ''be a good cook and like caring for the home"), he approached her father to ask for his daughter's hand in marriage.

What surprises me more than anything is that Laurie is not the meek, unopinionated, old-fashioned wife I expected her to be. At one point earlier in the day, as I watched Brother Stephen, a female friend approached me, pointed at Laurie, and whispered, "God, I wonder what the wife is thinking." Indeed, the scene did seem easy enough to pigeonhole: the Good Christian, an old-fashioned chauvinist, and his subservient wife who smiles approvingly and minds the children.

But unless Brother Stephen and his wife's interaction in the car ride is an elaborate charade for my benefit, this prejudice is far from true.

Laurie is girlish-looking, with a few lingering freckles and mousy brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she wears a simple brown dress with a white turtleneck underneath. While her husband drives, singing along to his favorite evangelical rock tape, we talk politics and the history of the evangelical movement and childrearing. Laurie is a social worker in the poor, rundown area of West Philadelphia where they live. "Some of the higher-up people in [the company where I work] are homosexuals," she tells me, as if searching for approval by demonstrating her capacity for tolerance. Yet she also explains the ongoing homosexual plot to inftltrate the public school system, a fact affirmed by "a mass of evidence" that she refrains from explaining. Her kids, of course, will be home-schooled.

The presence of the kids has made me uncomfortable since the ride began. Before he fell asleep, Philip taught me the "B-I-BL-E" song and we read the story of Noah's Ark (he also quoted Bible passages to me while his parents coached him). Earlier in the ride, Laurie slapped him for hitting his brother. Noticing my gaze, she explained, "You have to show them pain when they do something wrong."

THE PHILADELPHIA NIGHT is clear and crisp and at midnight we pull up to a large house near the Penn campus with Greek letters above the door. Heavy bass can be heard from inside, and, occasionally, a group of students goes in or out. My friend the frat boy stands outside, beer in hand, the stupefied smile of drunkenness plastered on

his face. I squirm uncomfortably-! am loath to let Brother Stephen, Brother Jeff, and Laurie see the world I'll enter (or, more accurately, reenter} after I leave the car.

Brother Stephen turns around in his seat to face me. He is smiling, his blue eyes friendly. I thank them, trying to be profuse while still rushing to escape this awkward state of limbo. But, as I express my gratitude, Brother Stephen interrupts me: "No, thank you. Thank you and your people for the Holy Bible. Thank you for spending these hours with us." He gives me a pamphlet. "Take this," he tells me and I look down at the paper. "Soldiers of Christ" is printed boldly across the top. I pretend to study it, nod, and start to get out of the car.

Brother Stephen stops me. "Brother Daniel," he addresses me. His voice drips with earnestness; his gaze is magnetic.

"Atont'with me, Brother Daniel. You could die at any moment, and you wi/J go to hell.

I don't want that, Brother Daniel!" He goes on. I don't move. Can all of this really be honest, genuine care for all of the sinners like me whom be believes will spend an eternity burning in hell? At the moment, I feel like it is. But, I guess that's exactly what Brother Stephen wants me to feel. "Pray with me, praise the Lord! Atone with me.... " With Brother Stephen's words still ringing in my head, I step out of the car and head for the keg. a1J

Daniel Kurtz-Pht'lan, a sophomo~ in Bt'T'Iuley Co/kgt', is rt'St'arch dirt'ctor for TNJ.

. '

NOVEMBER 10, 2000

27

A. STOVER FOR

By Alan Schoenfeld

J

ust as every high school student in America knows a Tracy Flick, the painfully overachieving protagonist from Tom Perrotta's novel Election, every Yalie knows a Kristin Willard. She is the "prep school girl from Greenwich, a long-limbed beauty with an overactive social conscience" who works in the Branford Dining Hall with Danny, the working-class hero of Perrotta's latest book, joe College. Kristin Willard is the first of many eerily familiar characters that Perrotta, himself a Yale graduate and English instructor at HarÂĽard, offers throughout the novel.

Despite certain fajlings, Perrotta pulls off the best fictional rendering of modern Yale in recent memory.

The novel begins and ends in a few tumultuous weeks during the spring semester of 1982. Danny, a feckless junior English major, passes his days trudging through Middlnnarch and complaining bitterly about his reading even though he doesn't mean a word of it.

Like his fellow Yale weenies, he is dumbfounded by the centrality of singing groups to campus life and constantly questions the veracity of rumors about the sex everyone is having in CCL. At Naples, he "jockeys for position among the mob of ex-National Merit Scholars and former student council presidents" who wave "plastic plates in the air like extras in a movie about the Depression."

Though Danny is comfortable in the bi2arre universe that is Yale-where Whlffenpoofs spontaneously break into song in stairwells and where be is surrounded by the likes of classmate Jodie Foster-he is torn between his collegiate home and his workingclass roots in an Icalian New Jersey neighborhood. At Yale, he "plays up the working-class angle," which his wealthier friends find "vaguely exotic." He tells chivalrous tales of his exploits aboard the Roach Coach (so named because of the grinning cockroach on the passenger door), the lunch truck his father operates at various office parking lots and construction sites throughout the Garden State.

At the same time, though, he downplays his relationship with Cindy, the secretary with whom he had a more-than-a-fling the previous summer. He prefers to cavort around campus with Polly, a fellow writer for Reality, the campus literary magazine "devoted to everything but college, [a magazine] that focused on exploited workers, violent crime, urban

poverty, and moral squalor." The cover of the first issue features a picture of a dog defecating, and the magnine refuses to accommodate any "sonnets about menstruation" or "wacky stories about summer jobs." Despite his best efforts, Danny's affection for Polly goes mostly unrequited: She is engaged in a torrid, dramatic, on-again-offagain relationship with Peter Preston, a young professor in the English department. ¡ Danny's relationships with Cindy and Polly highlight the tension between the two worlds in which our hero lives. At school, Danny's women of choice "favored baggy sweaters and objected to makeup on political grounds."

Cindy, though, "chewed Juicy Fruit, painted her nails, and didn't skimp on the eyeshadow." Her appeal, therefore, is less as a girlfriend than "as a potential anecdote, a puzzling and amusing srory I would share with my roommates in one of those hilarious late-night conversations that I missed so much when I was away from college."

Danny is honest with himself and wjch the reader, but rarely, if ever, with the people who surround him.

The greatest strength of the novel is Danny's relentless candor, his searing introspection and self-criticism.

Perrotta has a real gift for capturing the idiosyncratic Yale undergraduate experience in all its glorious self-discovery and self-loathing. He understands the strange interpersonal dynamics of late bloomers who must prove their mettle by saying things like, "You ever try to read George Eliot stoned?" And he understands how the largest steps toward maturity and autonomy are ofren taken on the least dangerous roads. For example, after months of mockery and pressure from his Korean roommate Sang, Danny finally decides to taste kimchi, the spicy Korean cabbage delicacy. With all the bravado of a knight about to go into battle, Danny downs a tiny piece of the briny cabbage. All in his presence approvingly proclaim that he has lost his "kimchi virginity."

As Danny matures, his acts of bravery increase in their intensity. When he returns home for spring break, he must once again take the helm of the Roach Coach because his father is

OUR TIME "t·

bedridden, recovering from a long-overdue hemorrhoid operation. A family of bullies--the Lunch Monsters, led by Vito M eatballs--has invaded the town and intends to take over Danny's and all the other lunch truck operators' businesses.

When one of Vito's henchmen stops Danny at a traffic light and tells him not to show up for work dte next day, Danny promptly tells him to "fuck off." At the warehouse where all the truck operators pick up their provisions for the day, Fat Teddy and Pete the Polack, men three times Danny's age, inform him that "he's got balls."

But dlls bravado does not easily translate into the emotional bravery he needs to deal successfully with either of his love interests. Perrotta does a solid job of exploring the intricacies of Danny's double life, in which small successes are coupled with much greater setbacks. As things begin to improve with Polly, Cindy announces that she is pregnant with Danny's child, and Danny effectively loses both women. Individual crises do not destroy Danny, but each teaches him a small lesson that contributes to his discovery of who he is, what he wants, and how be fits into one or both of the worlds he inhabits.

As Danny makes his journey from inexperienced 2.o-year old to seasoned 2.oyear old, it is dte people around him who motivate, enable, and demand the transition. In order to ensure that me transition is believable, Perrotta treats everyone fairly, from Lorelei, dte hapless New Haven high school student who works widt Danny in the dining hall, to Matt, the son of a GM executive who tells everyone his father is a car salesman. Throughout the novel Perrotta also sprinkles characters familiar co anyone who has spent some time at Yale: the American Studies graduate studan willing to advise Danny's friend on an independent srudy of presidential assassins NOVEMBE R 10,

2.000

f oe College, Tom Perrotta (St. Martin's Press, 2000), pp. 306. and their pop culture appeal, the neighbor who invites friends over to parry on his "conceptual patio," and the conservative Yak Daily NL"Wscolumnist who laments the loss of tradition at fair olde Yale. foe Colkge, however, is far from perfect. Perrotta does not always avoid facile characterization, and several characters are flat and barely believable. Cindy's mother is almost too perfectly pitiful as the ex-stripper, ex-junky schizophrenic, and Nick is dte always-cursing, belligerent-dining-hallworker everyman. Without the least bit of irony, Perrotta envisions a sort of class utopia where left-leaning, bourgeois Yalies and real live working-class folks get along and might even learn a little bit from each oilier. In addition, the turns and endings of many plot lines are absurdly simple and convenient. The appearance of an erstwhile boyfriend itching to be a father solves Cindy's pregnancy problem and an incident of plagiarism is nearly covered up.

Despite its faults, Joe Colkge is a tremendously readable book. Danny's humor and candor make him a fantastic narrator while his teen angst makes him a believable and sympathetic hero. For those who want to read about the trials of an intelligent and nobly lost protagonist, the book is entertaining, albeit simplistic. But for Yale readers who have a prurient interest in seeing their alma mater in print, the book's weaknesses are far less important dtan the accuracy of most of Perrotta's descriptions; foe College is a captivating portrait of life on this side of Phelps Gate.

18]

Alan Schomfold. a junior in Saybrook Co/lege, is editor-in-chiiffor TNJ.

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out "Imperial theme from Chariots standing next to me; in an those two British sprinters, all in him, I awkwardly explain that "You see," I say, "I finish last."

I can act, I can sing, "husky" (so said my blue keep a pace comparable

gests, for Connecticut's top joke--Steve Swift. As we cross the pass me by, followed closely by Frenchmen, and even, in a crushing ter-than-I Yale President Richard Levin. I'm with the beer-bellied ex-Marines and the miniature hum-vees. I cross the finish line 32 onds later, gasping, exhausted, and in 1,434th 1,822 competitors, so even though I finish uu-~.u·-•v-.... group, I feel fully justified in declaring that I have of people.

At this point, I ought to be happy. After weeks of training, I finally catch my breath, and the pain recedes. I'm still aware, however, that my race is not yet over. In fact, the road race season has just begun in southern Connecticut, and I have to keep training to

stay in shape. Of course, everything that can stand between me and the track inevitably does. Late nights studying leave me exhausted.

I'm tripped up by a malicious case of the grippe--no doubt a gift from the scheming Frenchmen who haunted the start line. A battle with a microscopic but ferocious little fungus keeps me stepping lightly for weeks, my wide strides reminiscent of John Wayne's dismounting his horse.

Yet while my body mounts a stiaightforward attack, my mind strikes more subtly. Everyday comments remind me of my pending fate. "Come as we rush to class, "we're running late." I get homework assignments with warnings that Even in the dining hall, I'm haunted. "Hey, " yells a voice in the slow-moving "Where's the another. I begin to wonder soJneno·w beyond my control, an inertia

sadist has laid out plete the first of raise my hands · ing their another mile throwing age group, I've The Yale day. As I survey the group, and they're school years, how they all breath. The race begins with a the beginning I'm bringing up · my forehead, lungs burning, dead last. There are no cheers, even any people: Half of my own gather up the line marker as I as the sun sets, bringing an end to the year. There will be plenty of races next year for a while, at least, I can relax and take it slow.

MatthnQ Untkrwood, a sophomo" in Davenport Co/kg~. is on

th~ staffofTNJ.

winners, complec1 trudge through three-year-olds out of 170. In my

me

TERCENTENNIAL a time for the Yale Community to reflect on our accomplishments and our vision for the future More than two dozen new books highlight the many ways Yale University and its graduates have contributed to culture.

The Yale Bookstore has a wide selection, including Richard Benson's beautiful look at Yale University during the 20th Century entitled A Yale Album ($39.95).

Other titles now available include the Michelin Green Guide to Yale University and New Haven.

We're going all out to celebrate Yale's first 300 years, with everything from t-shirts to unique collector's items. If your catalog hasn't arrived in your mailbox, call us toll-free and we'll send you one: 1-888-730-YALE (9253), ext. 166.

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