Tuesday Magazine Fall 2009 by Tuesday Magazine

In Case You Find Yourself in Hong Kong ABROAD

CHELSEA SHOVER

Hearing that someone was off “finding himself ” always made me want to go on some such beautifully vague but impossibly tempting quest, a fantasy soul-search of healthful activities laced with leisurely introspection. When I got a job at the South China Morning Post, the prospect of a summer abroad conjured not cultural immersion or the broadening of horizons but inward exploration. I went to Hong Kong to “find myself.” Instead, I lost my mind. The directions to my apartment at 112 Chun Yeung Street led me to the middle of Chun Yeung Street Market, where vendors sold fruits and vegetables, live fish, wristwatches, knock-off handbags, raw meat, tailored silk dresses, tablecloths, umbrellas, cooking oil, and eels. A trolley track ran through the center of the road, and every few minutes the crowd cleared way for a double-decker tram. The stench of skinned pork legs dangling on butcher’s hooks and the odor of fish pieces hosed into the street at sunset perspired from canvas stretched between stalls, where rainwater collected into a perpetual drip. It was overwhelming, but it was exciting. I looked forward to a summer of solitary living and self-cultivation. Hong Kong was a place to read important books and journal my finally examined life. My solo utopia started falling apart when my air conditioner stopped working. Still soaked from a cold

of variety. On my first shopping trip, canned borscht was on sale. After a week of borscht with celery (before I found the worm), borscht plus canned corn (after the worm and the snail), and borscht and okra, I discovered restaurants all over my neighborhood. Summer in Hong Kong is typhoon season. On the first Saturday we had a low-level typhoon warning, I took a less than-literary novel to Central Ferry Pier and bought two cans of rice beer at 7-11. By the time I got to the second can, I was engrossed in a tale of forbidden love and filial piety, and seeing Hong Kong fictionalized made the place more real. The book gave me a reason to visit the neighborhood where the heroine, Rose, lived, to taste the food her mother cooked, and to stroll through the park where she met Paul, her secret lover, at dark. Reading what someone else wrote about my surroundings reminded me to be curious about them. I was here, and what was I doing? At the moment, I was getting drunk at four in the afternoon at a plastic table while wind and rain were stirring up waves in the harbor. Then, an elderly man whose shirt gaped between buttons to show his belly was sitting at my table and asking me what the sign above the dock meant. And I was shrugging and hoping he would go away while the protagonist wavered between her closeted gay husband

“I went to Hong Kong to

‘find myself.’ Instead, I lost my mind.” shower, I lay awake, sweating, missing America, and cursing tropical weather. The fear that someday I would be unable to bring myself to go to work spun out across the air conditioner’s ceiling display panel, where instead of issuing down cool breath, the metal maw clamped shut. A few days later, the security guard showed me I was pressing the wrong button on the air conditioner remote. Things looked less bleak in climate control. And stripping down during the hot week had shown me one of the best things about living alone: you don’t have to wear clothes. Initially, it was just to sleep. I experienced the thin white quilt more fully when it was right next to my skin. Gradually, I transitioned to waking nudity, and, eventually, I was cooking naked. By that point, my cooking aspirations had been met with a few obstacles: a worm in the celery heart, a tiny snail in the head of broccoli. There was also the problem

in Hong Kong and her New York lover. The man soon shuffled away, and the heroine gallivanted off to Malaysia. That afternoon was a turning point, but not the kind that comes from hitting rock bottom. This was no bottom; this was amazing! What was discipline if it came at the price of experience? It was time to engage with my surroundings and embrace irresponsibility. Thereafter, Hong Kong was a theater for my imagination. Everywhere I went was an adventure. Everyone I met was a character. On the public holiday for the July 1st anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, I took the ferry to Lamma Island, where I bought used books from a man with a two-and-a-half foot beard. The beach was uncrowded. A dozen people and their dogs relaxed on the sand while I discovered why fewer swam: shredded plastic bags and popsicle wrappers floated in the sea. I had mistaken the

trash for seaweed when it stuck to my skin. I read Madame Bovary on the shore, hoping to finish it in time to find the bearded man and give it to him. But after two hours, my skin was seared. Walking from the beach, I glimpsed him trundling his pack of books down an alley. No matter, I would come back. What I knew of him—his bent-over gait and too-small glasses and his location on the island where no one would admonish me for swimming with garbage—solved the problem of what to do with my books at the end of the summer. When I jogged around the harbor next to my office, I often saw a man about four feet tall with a pronounced hump in his back. Usually, he was stretching on the bridge, swinging his arms or kicking his legs one at a time, staring over the water. He was so short and his spine so misshapen that I stared from afar but looked away whenever I got closer. Then, one day, I let myself look. He was smiling at me. After that, every day when I passed, he raised his arm

in a right-angle wave. Each time I mirrored it and couldn’t help but grin widely. My unsuspecting summer friends also included anyone with whom I spoke Cantonese. There was the clerk at 7-11 who, on my second day in Hong Kong, understood my combination of “I want to buy…” and gestures for a cell phone card. There was the woman at the Indonesian supermarket who showed me a calculator when I successfully asked how much a bag of oatmeal cost but, lacking numerical vocabulary, did not understand her answer. On the home front, domestic habits deteriorated. My once orderly laundry routine devolved into attacking a heap of dirty clothes with the shower hose and strewing wet casualties all over the bathroom, or, if the pile was bigger, across any surface not covered in receipts, Japanese candy wrappers, and free newspapers from work. The clutter not only symbolized lagging discipline but also concealed the clearest sign of my dissolution. I saw the (see HONG KONG, page 23)

CONTRIBUTORS

PRINCIPAL BENEFACTOR

BRONZE CONTRIBUTORS

WENYI CAI

ARCADY MUSHEGIAN

GOLD CONTRIBUTORS

WE WOULD ALSO LIKE TO THANK :

ANDREA JONAS

THE UNDERGRADUATE COUNCIL

JOSHUA HAAS

THE OFFICE FOR THE ARTS HARVARD MEDIA VENTURES

SILVER CONTRIBUTORS

THE ENGISH DEPARTMENT

JOHN AND MARIAN BLEEKE

DANIEL DONOGHUE

JEFF AND ILENE LEVENSON

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THIS ISSUE IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF ARIEL SHAKER , STAFF WRITER AND FRIEND .

Table of Contents | Volume 7, Issue 1 IN CASE YOU FIND YOURSELF IN HONG KONG MOTEL

ANDREW NUNNELLY

POETRY

. MIXED MEDIA ALAS , IN WONDERLAND . RACHAEL GOLDBERG . EXPERIMENT UNTITLED . MOLLY DEKTAR . PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINTS FOAMY GOLD CAN ’ T STAY . KAYLA HAMMOND . EXPERIMENT MONTY . KAYLA ESCOBEDO . COMIC CAORLE . JULIA ROONEY . PAINTING HELLO ! . LEAH SCHECTER . EXPERIMENT TAMING OF THE SCREW . WENDY H . CHANG . COLLAGE I WILL MISS YOU . KAYLA ESCOBEDO . COMIC THE STICKMAN COMETH . SPENCER LENFIELD . COMMENTARY POEM TOWARDS FOUR WORDS FOR EARTH . TALIA LAVIN . POETRY RECLINE AND FALL . JASPER HENDERSON . CRITICISM GHOST BIKES . LOUIS EVANS . FICTION UNTITLED . KYLE DANCEWICZ . MIXED MEDIA CAKE . INTIYA ISAZA - FIGUEROA . MIXED MEDIA FROM ON HIGH . DOMINIC VITI . FICTION UNTITLED . VI VU . PAINTING ATHENS STREET . JULIA ROONEY . PAINTING THE DOCUMENTARY HYPOTHESIS . JONAH HASSENFELD . FROM THE NOTEBOOKS AUBERGINE . ANDREW NUNNELLY . POETRY EXCERPTS FROM KAFKA ’ S BETRACHTUNG . ANTON CHAEVITCH . TRANSLATION NAKED ANGEL . QICHEN ZHANG . DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY PLANS

. CHELSEA SHOVER . ABROAD

INTIYA ISAZA - FIGUEROA

1 5 5 6 8 10 11 12 14 15 16 17 23 24 26 28 29 30 32 36 37 38 40 41

www.tuesdaymagazine.org j ul i e w ri ght, presi dent may zhang, presi dent b .r. l i nd, managi ng edi tor e d itor ial boar d j a n e j i a n g , e d i tor-i n-chi ef c a n di ce kountz tal i a l avi n s p e n c er l enfi el d b. r. l i nd robert ni l es j u nyao peng b re tt rosenberg ar t boar d j u l i a ro o n ey, di rector i n ti y a i s a za-fi gueroa j i a j e nni fer di ng abi gai l l i nd k a te ri n a m a ntzavi nou s a s h a mi ronov j o s e ph morcos col i n teo j ul i e w ri ght d e s ign boar d me g h a n h o u s e r, c o-di rector d a n i e l l e k i m, co-di rector s a ra h bl umenthal yaa bofah abi gai l l i nd angel a su s hi rl ey zhou

business boar d deni se xu, di rector synne d. chapman, soci al chai r staff wr iter s j ack j ung, di rector l oui s evans rachael gol dberg cassandra rasmussen l eah schecter j ul i a w i nn j usti n w ymer staff illustr ator s yi l i u, di rector j i a j enni fer di ng kayl a escobedo l i l y fang l auren i anni emma w ang j i el i ang hao j ack j ung emma w ang stephani e w ang snow eri a zhang webm aster s ti ffany cai j ue w ang

Tuesday Magazine is a general interest publication that engages in and furthers Harvard’s intellectual and artistic dialogue by publishing art and writing, with an emphasis on student and non-professional work. Staﬀ applications are accepted at the beginning of each semester, and submissions are accepted on our website throughout the year. Copyright © 2009 by Tuesday Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.Tuesday Magazine is a publication of a Harvard College student-run organization. Harvard name and/or VERITAS shield are trademarks of the President and Fellows of Harvard College and are used by permission of Harvard University.

Motel POETRY

A N D R E W N U N N E L LY

There is dusk in the confusion Of feather down comforters Like small birds hiding With eyes open, waiting. Red digits onto the bedside table Without urgency. Only the strolling wink Of an after hours traﬃc light Flashing like the only streetlight After hours ﬂashing as the red light In any city large enough.

I pretend all of the wood in the room is real. I count the lines in the stain, The grain of these real trees to keep the room Together. I see droughts and ﬁres And unexplained deaths in the neighborhood. It’s all right there and it’s real. A man comes to the door of my room And disturbs this dusk, his frame Casts a shadow through my window, Blocking the last bit of light left In Mississippi. I tell him My room already has a Bible And close the door for good. —Andrew Nunnelly is an Arts columnist for the Crimson. You can read more of his poetry at bwass.blogspot.com.

Plans Intiya Isaza-Figueroa white-out, cover-up, ink on vellum 11” x 14”

STRANGER THINGS

You know the odd person who watches you on the subway? The girl you thought said “Hello” to you on the street the other day? For this issue, Tuesday asked some of our staﬀ writers to become those people. Among other things, they found Latin verse on Craiglist, a man who looks like Chinua Achebe, and a disintegrating hipster. Not everyone has a story. But we put them in one anyway.

LILY FANG

EXPERIMENTS

Alas, in Wonderland On the Blue Line RACHAEL GOLDBERG

‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat. ‘I don’t much care where—’ said Alice. ‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat. ‘—so long as I get SOMEWHERE,’ Alice added as an explanation. ‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk long enough.’ —Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

The man seated across the aisle and one seat to my left is reading The World’s Cheese Book: The Finest Selection of Over 750 Cheeses and How to Enjoy. I list on my fingers all the cheeses I know: Colby Jack, Cheddar, Parmesan, Brie, Münster, stinky, Swiss, Alpine Lace Swiss… Next to me, a man is cleaning his fingernails with a tiny screwdriver. Further down the car, a man in Army fatigues kisses his girlfriend on the neck. She pulls away. He flicks her nose. She punches him on the arm. They laugh. Two women are holding hands. “Sisters, or lesbians?” I wonder. A father and daughter leaf through brochures from Boston-area colleges: Emerson, Lesley, Suffolk, Emmanuel. They are both wearing sunglasses around their thick necks. The girl has her father’s wide nose, thick lips, and no-chin jaw. Her skin is purplish—almost lavender. She looks like the Cheshire Cat from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. Several women are hovering over their cell phones, engrossed in text messages. I am riding out to Wonderland on the Blue Line. I don’t know much about Wonderland—it’s the final stop on the Blue Line, named after an old theme park that is now long gone. There is a greyhound racetrack somewhere around there. I want to know who is going to Wonderland and why. I want to see who waits at the last stop. When I was younger, I’d stand on the beach, my feet barely in the water, thinking that I was as far as I could go on land before hitting ocean. I had reached the end of the map. This is it, I’d think. Then, I’d take one step forward, and another, until I was waist deep in water, cold and shivering, careful not to be

bowled over by waves. I would look back to the shore, anxious to see if my mother were watching me from under our wide umbrella. Sometimes she’d steal a glance over the top of her hardcover book, flash a smile, and then continue reading. I always feel the same way when I ride the T, like I’m being watched, then not at all. How everyone rides, suspiciously eyeing other passengers, then sneakily looking away, thinking, Where are you going? what are your plans? what are you thinking about? And always a subsequent distance. Eye contact is not maintained—swift aversions, drawings into the self, foldings of the body, hidden, into the seat backs. People ride as if they exist in their own individual compartments—reading books, tapping at Kindles, listening to iPods. Sometimes they smile, but almost always follow it with a shame-faced look in the opposite direction. I am riding to Wonderland, falling through the rabbithole, wondering who will smile on the way down. Aquarium The train suddenly fills with people carrying bags: luggage, ratty backpacks, duffels, suitcases. People crying, or about to cry. The long instant before the sobs—a heave, a shudder. One man unzips his suitcase, frantically muttering, “Cell-phone charger, cell-phone charger.” He digs into each pocket, drawing out shoes and belts, a book (Dan Brown), and some pressed shirts. He does not seem to find it (“Fuck cell-phone! Fuck cell-phone!” he mutters). A young father holds his daughter by the waist, and she hangs on to the upper rail, yelling, “I can monkey-bar!” He smiles at her, thinking, Yes you can. A mother and her teenaged daughter look on, endeared. A man with dreadlocks tells the father to get his daughter out of his fucking face before he starts something. Maverick An elderly woman gets on and sits next to me. She has an opal ring on her middle finger and she smacks her lips frequently.

She asks me what I’m writing. Poetry, I tell her. She mentions that she likes Wordsworth. Have I ever heard of him, she asks. Airport Most of the people leave the train. People start to cry, hard. The last time I was at the airport, I could not stop crying. I rode the T, sniffling into my jacket. The boy next to me moved away—as if sitting so close made him complicit in my overwhelming sadness. An older woman with a large white tuft of hair above her upper lip offered me a wrinkled handkerchief. It was embroidered with flowers and birds in very simple stitching. I took it from her and she patted my knee. The train door closes. A mother and daughter with a floral suitcase hug tightly. I wonder where they are going. When will the daughter return? Who will she meet on her travels? What is the last thing she will say to her mother? Wood Island A man who smells like an Arabic perfume stall sits near me. He says hello. I say hi back. I ask him where he is going. He tells me to mind my own business, and I am very confused by his pseudo-friendliness. He looks away. He tells me he is getting off at the next stop. He doesn’t, though. He gets off two stops later. Orient Heights There is graffiti on the walls outside of the T. A woman was recently arrested in Boston for tagging everything with the word Utah. The letters were white and puffy like marshmallows. Here, the words are jagged and rough and so colorful. Two elderly women get on the T. They whisper to each other like schoolgirls, spilling secrets into each other’s ears. The taller one’s lips touch the other’s feathery hair.

LILY FANG

Suﬀolk Downs A man who looks like Chinua Achebe gets on. He asks, “Are we going inbound or outbound?” Then he sits down and closes his eyes. A man in a plaid button-down watches me watch him. (It is a very meta moment.) A boy in a purple sweater gets on, alone. He sits with his legs crossed at the ankles and his hands crossed on his lap. He starts to whistle Fur Elise. Within a few seconds, his hands are moving across his lap, as if he is playing on a Steinway. With his eyes closed his hands ﬂy up and down his thighs.

Beachmont A Hispanic boy with a Yankees hat gets on and sits across from me. He nods at me. He has a nystagmus. Next to him, a woman is crying into her cell phone. She is talking in Spanish about a water bill, an electric bill, a bill for her braces. “Of course I needed the braces,” she says. “My teeth were like a shark’s.” When she ends the phone call, she sighs deeply several times and buries her face in her chest. She runs her hands through her hair and throws stray strands onto the floor. Revere The Cheshire Cat and her father are still on the T, riding to Wonderland. I ask the father what’s in Wonderland— for them, I mean. He thinks I’m asking what’s actually in Wonderland, objectively speaking. He says there used to be a ballroom dance hall in the 1940s, but that it won’t help me because it’s been closed for years. I nod. I tell him it’s probably better that way—I don’t know how to dance. He says everyone knows how to dance—you just move your hips and your knees and your arms and your head and your toes and your feet, but in a one-two-one-two step. Wonderland I ask the woman next to me where I should go. She just looks at me. I ask her again. She doesn’t respond. Then she says, “Nowhere. This is the end of the line.” I ask her what’s in Wonderland. “Nothing,” she says. Then, “There’s a beach. Somewhere.” I decide to walk to the beach, but change my mind almost immediately. It’s too cold, and no one would be waiting for me on the shore. The T stops. We both shuffle off. She turns left. I turn right. It’s cold, but sunny. I start to walk. It doesn’t matter which way I go—as long as I go somewhere. I see two boys chasing another, smaller boy with a red streamer flying wildly behind him. The boys are thick—thick fingers, thick necks. They have shaved heads. One has an earring. They breathe heavily as they run, the small boy quick and lithe. But he is not fast enough. They catch the boy and push him to the ground, the back of his head pressed into the asphalt. I am worried for him, the boy with the earring pinning him down by the arms, the other standing over him. They tackle him to the ground and tickle him. All three laugh as if they can never stop. The small boy’s fingers release the streamer as his fingers curl and his body shakes. The streamer tumbles away, rolling, rolling, through Wonderland. — Rachael Goldberg is a staff writer. She does laundry most Friday nights.

Un ti tl e d (a l l ) Molly Dektar photographs 4â&#x20AC;? x 6â&#x20AC;? photographic prints

Foamy Gold Can’t Stay Exploring Craigslist’s “Missed Connections” K AY L A H A M M O N D

Electric yellow was the girl. Matching micro-shorts and suspenders. Young enough to wear pigtails without attempting irony, but old enough to know how to sit sideways, bend her knees, and draw her ankles into the backs of her thighs. She could curve herself in such a way that the boy, the one she wouldn’t talk to, was helpless but to run his eye over the length of those bare legs. Legs capped on one end by oversize and untied sneakers, the other end by cuffs, electric yellow. My eyes were helpless, too, even if it hadn’t been for the yellow or the leg. We three were alone in the last compartment of the U-Bahn between the stops Moritzplatz and Kottbusser Tor. Early June, mid-afternoon, and I was witnessing a rift in afterschool love. Arms crossed, the girl turned a pouting face from her boy. He sighed and smiled, then tried to smooth a flyaway wisp at her hairline. But the girl made a squeaking sound in defiance. She jerked her head forward, and then—I caught her—knowingly pushed her hips against his side, independent of the subway’s toss. He smiled more at every haughty, teasing wiggle. They had a past together, a present and, depending on the outcome of the afternoon, possibly a future. But what if two people have never met, or spoken, and one or the other or both rely only on an imagined present? Is proximity so powerful as they hope? Can it beget intimacy? Craigslist’s Missed Connections forum tries to give men and women in over 150 cities worldwide a chance to get in touch with the person they should have slipped their number to but didn’t. The barebones format of a post: June 11 at 9:31 pm - you must live nearby...because i’ve seen you more than once. rode all the way from park street sitting across from you—and then we got off at the same stop. you: nice suit, ipod, obviously professional. me: stressed out, sleep-deprived, obviously student. i just moved here and you look nice.

More peculiar, but retaining the spirit of the ﬁrst: May 07 at 9:22 pm - Thanks for sneezing in my face. I know everyone is sick right now, but did you really have to sneeze in my fucking face on the train today? I mean really? You’re lucky you’re hot...i’m going to tell my friends I got sick from making out with a really cute sick girl. hit me up and we can share some cold medicine. Otherwise, fuck you.

Insert kink: March 13 at 1:03 pm – Young Middle Aged Couple, South Station. I watched you walk and kiss (and I know you saw me!). Great blonde in great shoes! I’d hoped we

would have gotten on the same train. I would love to join you sometime. Provided she wears those shoes! Any other shoes in your closet?

Cartoonist-writer Julia Wertz recently edited an anthology of comics called “I Saw You…” based on Missed Connections posts collected from Craigslist. When asked what she thought of the people who write these posts, Wertz’s response was cutting. “I think it’s a way for people who wish they’d talked to someone to kind of vent online, like they won’t feel as guilty/pathetic for having not spoken to someone if they can tell themselves: ‘Well, it’s OK because I posted an ad. So I’m not a total failure at life.’” I was troubled by her words. These people were trying to gain something more than closure and effort for effort’s sake. Slim as the chance may be of finding that one stranger in a city of unfamiliar faces, I believed that the posters were genuinely hopeful. I wanted to become an advocate for the men and the women of the world who were missing their connections. But first I had to gain an understanding of them: what were really the mechanics of and motivations for their posts? I also wanted to know if and how a Missed Connection became a Connection. On Boston’s Missed Connections, over 100 posts appear a day, and more on weekends. People look for people they see at the gym, on planes, in coffee shops, and especially on the subway. It was here that I attached myself. I looked first to the text for patterns and answers. I found, for instance, that some writers divulge long-term fascination with the object of their interest over days or even longer periods of time. One woman wrote, “After a 9 month stretch of not seeing you in your smart specs on the orange line during late afternoon rush hour, reading Palahniuk or Vonnegut, I saw you yesterday (Sunday) heading down the stairs at the Boylston Street T.” She had never spoken to this man, but was nonetheless convinced that they had “chemistry.” Other writers are compelled to post following a single, brief interaction with their object. Eye contact. Brushing shoulders. A glimpse of common ground as indicator of soul compatibility. If you and I both laugh nervously when the power goes out and the train slows to a stop. If your haircut reminds me of a favorite cousin. If you realize, as one writer posted, that you and the man sitting next to you have just taken a breath in perfect synchronization: Our arms touched as our chests expanded. I kept

(see FOAMY, page 13) 10

Monty Kayla Escobedo pen on paper 8.5” x 11”

C a o rl e Julia Rooney oil on canvas 39” x 55”

(FOAMY, cont. from page 10) pretending to read, but I couldn’t concentrate for the life of me... We took another breath in and out, together, and I felt his arm touch mine again. On the next inhale, I saw him glance at me out of the corner of his eye, and I felt myself turn red. I remember thinking that it was totally bizarre/creepy that I was feeling a connection.... This continued all the way down Beacon until he got off a stop or two before me. I felt like I was on fire, and when he got up to leave, I felt a rush of cold where his arm used to be. He stood up, and he hesitated a minute. He turned back just a fraction of a degree, but when I caught his eye, I got embarrassed and turned back to my book again. He hesitated just a second longer, and then quickly got off the train.

There was even Latin verse: March 13 at 6:47pm - Agnosco Veteris Vestigia Flamea. Amere et sappere vix deo conceditur. Amor animi arbitrio sumitur non ponitur. Bis miser et illie qui ante felix fuit. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

I had found a kernel of something significant. These posts were grounded in more than physical attraction. People wanted their invisible, intangible cores shaken. They didn’t want sex. Well, maybe they did want sex, but they also wanted evidence of a certain human essence common to us all. I was encouraged. I resolved to meet the posters halfway—somewhere between bodice-ripper romance novels and the Classics—with 19th century French Symbolist poetry, Baudelaire’s “To A Passer-By.” I would go into the field at its true source, the subway trains. If the Missed Connections posts rose from a desire to find deeper understanding with another being, then the stanzas would speak for themselves. The Missed Connection writer would not need to look for poetic sentiment in the still and silent face of his fellow commuter, in breaths or eyes or laughs, because the poetry would resonate from the start. I tore out seven pieces of notebook paper, and handwrote the following on each: The street about me roared with a deafening sound. Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief, A woman passed, with a glittering hand Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt; Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue’s. Tense as in a delirium, I drank From her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate, The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills. A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty By whose glance I was suddenly reborn, Will I see you no more before eternity? Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never perhaps! For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go, O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!

And then at the bottom of each page: foamygold@gmail.com Post to craigslist missed connections if you are the passer-by…

I was curious whether a potential reader would opt to contact me by privately by email, or publicly on the forum— after all, people tend to be more comfortable meeting a blind date in well-lit, crowded places. I’d created the email account especially for this project. “Foamy Gold” was taken from the soap dispenser in our bathroom. The liquid was, in fact, gold, and transformed into a puff of white with the push of a button. I thought the enchanting image evoked by such a pairing of concepts would surely ensnare someone. Foamy Gold sounds trustworthy and… nurturing? I set off after scribbling Baudelaire’s inviting title outside each folded piece of paper. Most of the subway posts on Boston’s Craiglist came from the Green and Red lines; these would be the best stocked for my fishing. I would board a train, leave a letter, get off, board another train, and so on until I had the area covered to my satisfaction. Each time I placed a letter on the seat, I hid it until the last possible moment, when I would rise and rush toward the doors. I feared that someone would see me drop it and hurry after me to return it, or worse, read it and then return it with puzzlement or pity. But this never happened. Seven pieces of white lined paper with messy torn fringes at the left border may appear to a subway rider more like garbage that houses spit-out gum than like a love letter written to the collective You. And with this in mind, I made a half-hearted attempt at a side project while waiting between stops. The aim was to live out the experience of a Missed Connections poster. I picked out a man on the Green Line C Train. Brown hair and eyes, a little stubbly beard, black Red Sox cap and grey Patriots sweatshirt. I stared at him until I caught his eye, and then looked away. He looked away. I stared at him again and caught him again. And then looked away. He got off at Copley. My work was done. I came home and refreshed the Missed Connections page every ten minutes to comb for Passer-Bys. Passers-By, I suppose. After several hours with no luck, I posted my first legitimate Missed Connection, titled “Little Stubbly Beard – Green Line.” I put down his description and tacked no frills, no declarations of love at first sight. Twenty hours later my heart did leap when foamygold@gmail.com received its first message. The subject read, “Not your greenline guy but...” In the body of the email he (or she? it was never made clear) continued: ...had a redline missed connection as well that I’m about to post looking for, which is how I came across yours. Mine was a fairly interesting note left on a seat. Anyway, if neither of our MC’s turn out, any chance you’d be interested in not letting our encounters go to total waste and perhaps a quick chat could come of it? -r

I was astounded. At first. And then paranoid. And terrified. I responded, “That’s very interesting. What sort of a note was it?” How did he find me out? Are there cameras on trains? Is it illegal to leave pieces of paper on the seats? Is this guy a Fed? I had thought of putting the letters in (see FOAMY, page 39) 13

Hello! Talking to strangers on Mass. Ave. LEAH SCHECTER

I said hello to six strangers the other day. I didn’t know them, and they didn’t know me. My greeting was pleasant and clear: a concise “Hello” accompanied by a bright smile. I expected only the busy city dweller's brief, uncaring nod of acknowledgement. I named the first formidable woman I approached Severity. “Hello,” the woman replied tersely. It was a quick word; an annoyance flung off the tongue like lint flicked off a coat. The woman crammed it all into one syllable, too, the faster to be rid of it, and punctuated her stunted answer with a sharp jerk of her head. The tendons in her neck stood out like thin metal wires tapping out Morse code. Her features were angular and abrupt; her nose was as straight as a knife blade and her cheekbones protruded, the skin of her face stretching tightly over them, as if they were about to burst through. Her boots clacked along with her steel ligaments, and they sped up as she spat out her greeting. Slightly shaken, I continued until I came across Urchin. He had an uneven gait, lurching to one side as he scuttled down the street. He wore ripped, bleached jeans that were so worn they didn’t appear to be denim anymore. Instead, the material formed a mothy, disintegrating cloth. A plaid shirt hung on his thin frame, and heavy boots and grey whiskers were his only accessories. He started when he heard me. Surprise, confusion, and fear all washed over his grungy face. Behind his circular, red-tinted glasses, though, it looked like he almost wanted to respond—but didn’t quite know how. His eyebrows jumped up to the middle of his forehead, and his arms, which were swinging as he scampered, froze for a second, midstride. I thought we were nearing the brink, about to reach that pivotal second when something life-altering happens. Urchin squirmed, and then scuttled away rapidly, glancing back over his shoulder for a moment. I guess not. When I crossed the street, I met Bland. Her eyes were a nondescript color, not really brown or blue or hazel or even grey. They were a non-color, and they gazed out monotonously from her skull. Her plump face, in contrast, was full and warm, with some wrinkles, but not many. It made me think of apple cider and holidays, of sitting next to the hearth of a lit fire after playing outside in the cold. Then I glanced at her eyes again, and I thought of the ashes and cold stone left after a fire is extinguished. Her pale hair was thin, wispy, and short, just clinging to her head, in danger of being swept away by the wind. Her reply to my greeting was as lackluster as her irises. She moved her head vaguely in

my direction, her eyes almost focusing for a second before slipping back to stare straight ahead. No one had responded positively or directly to my greeting thus far. The trend continued as I encountered Discombobulated. He didn’t hear the greeting. His laptop bag was slipping off of his arm, the shoulder pad of his tailored suit barely keeping it from falling completely. He raised his shoulder towards his ear to help stop it, and he nearly lost hold of his coffee with the other hand. His crisp shirt was pulled to one side, gravity dragging both the laptop and the rest of him along with it. As he flung out his right hand to save the laptop once and for all, the coffee leapt from the cup to kiss his white collar. He swore. Or maybe that was his greeting. Finally I started to see a change with Grace. “Hi,” the woman smiled politely. The corners of her mouth turned up, and her head bobbed forward slightly. She was at that point in middle age when hair begins to gray and skin starts to loosen. Her long skirt swirled as she walked, her stride purposeful. She looked up at the sky after passing me. My excursion finished with Bubbly. He looked up with a wide grin. His teeth were crooked, some were missing, and a golden laugh whistled through his open lips. Curly blond hair sprouted abundantly from his head, looking as soft and fine as silk. “Helloooo!” he yelled triumphantly, dragging out the last syllable. He waved enthusiastically. The woman next to him looked over and good-naturedly explained, “He just turned four,” with a proud smile and nod of her own. For that tenth of a second when people cross paths, I looked at those six right in the face, when they were probably least expecting it. The experience took me back to my middle school English class, where each student had to write a short story about a photograph taped on the board. We would share and laugh then at how many different ideas were produced. Maybe Severity is actually a professor who was rushing to a conference with a student. Or maybe she was anxiously hurrying to meet the curvy new receptionist of the scarlet lipstick and stilettos. When Urchin and his friends are smoking cigarettes outside the subway, he will mention a strange girl who said hi to him on the street, and suddenly I will be a part of their conversation. Or perhaps he’ll mention me but he won’t be an urchin at all—an eccentric artist, a political activist. As for Bubbly—Ryan or Evan or whoever he may grow to be—he has already forgotten me, because the world for him is such a riot of color and joy that a girl

who says hello is nothing exciting. All of these people have a story that I don’t know and almost certainly never will. But looking straight in their faces, I was presented with the possibility of their uniqueness. Sure, Bland might really be as dispassionate as her blank stare seemed to indicate, but perhaps not. Maybe she is heartbroken. Maybe she is tired. I recognize the naïveté of imagining that each of these people is an enthralling character. To the contrary, they might each walk the streets in a daze, uninspiring and thoughtless. Often, though, we look at something not because it is interesting, but rather it is interesting because

we take the time to look. After being completely ignored by Discombobulated, I pictured myself walking around town, saying hello to complete strangers, not only in spite of but for the very fact that I did not know them. This struck me as inﬁnitely hilarious, and as I was laughing, clutching a railing in support, a person passing me nodded in greeting. I immediately stopped, mid-giggle, forgetting to smile back, and as the man walked away looking slightly puzzled, I couldn’t help but grin. —Leah Schecter is a staﬀ writer.

Taming of t he Screw Wendy H. Chang coffee stirrers, razor blades, screw, photo reproductions, acrylic on canvas 10” x 20”

I Wi l l Mis s Yo u Kayla Escobedo pen on paper 8.5” x 11”

The Stickman Cometh xkcd, the comics, and common culture C O M M E N TA R Y

SPENCER LENFIELD

It seems odd that the fate of the comic strip should not be tied to that of the newspaper. After all, the first comics were commissioned in order to boost newspaper sales. The great comic strips of the past—Krazy Kat, Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes—not only found their audiences through the newspaper, but acquired their very form by first mastering their medium and then straining against it. How else would comics reach readers? There’s the Internet, of course; but if no one will pay even to get the actual news online—not even from the New York Times—why would anyone pay to read the comics? One would think that a crisis of purpose in the news industry would necessarily mean hard times for cartoonists. If Nat Hentoff no longer has a job, how much longer can Jim Davis hold on? But while traditional newspaper comic strips are indeed struggling, some online comics—webcomics, rather—have proven to be remarkably good at sustaining themselves, or at least at covering their own hosting costs through advertising or merchandise. (Cartoonists have the upper hand over journalists in this regard: you can write and post a webcomic with only a scanner and a bit of web design experience, whereas you cannot send yourself to Afghanistan on your own.) Thousands of webcomics exist, of course, many of which are no more than hobbies for their creators; only a few dozen have significant readerships. The variation in quality between webcomics is about the same as that of a printed comics page. Their relationship to traditional comics is much like that of blogs to print reporting—more informal, more idiosyncratic, and markedly less censored. (Most of these strips would not pass the syndicates’ standard of family-friendliness.) The fact that a few dozen cartoonists have built a following for themselves online, independent of the syndicates that have traditionally managed cartoonists, is nevertheless remarkable. Few of these webcomics, though, have the same cultural currency as the major comics of the past—the Peanutses and the Calvins and the Doonesburys. (Mass media are good at creating these: television shows and movies have this currency, as do Internet trends like certain YouTube videos.) There is a significant difference between having a community of fans and having a cultural presence, and it has to do with context. A group of people who are enthusiastic about a particular thing (say, knitting, or perhaps manga) will discuss it where they know the object of their enthusiasm is shared

by those around them, as evidenced by knitting circles and Japanese comic book conventions. Not having a cultural presence is not the same as being cloistered from the rest of the world; we all know what knitting and Japanese comics are. But some things are only brought up at certain times with certain people, and some things can be brought up at anytime with anyone—the things that bridge communities rather than reinforce them. Most webcomics seem to focus on developing a community of fans. Despite the fact that they exist online, where they are open to anyone, webcomics usually cater (with various degrees of self-consciousness) to coterie audiences; becoming a pop-cultural touchstone is not the point. Most webcomics build a following around injokes, and frequently these are the references and quirks of communities that have an identity closely tied to the Internet: gamers, computer programmers, graduate students, the sort of people that hang around message boards and start flame wars. The humor often seems weak or incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Like the topics to which they refer, they have a fan base, and an audience beyond that base is neither desired nor especially helpful, because the raison d’être of these comics is exclusivity. It is true in the same sense that there would be no point in being a Star Trek fan if everyone were a Star Trek fan: all the fun would be gone. No clear line, of course, exists between subculture and mainstream culture. But there seems to be only one webcomic that has come close to venturing over that line, and that would be Randall Munroe’s xkcd. It is not the sort of thing that you could bring up and simply expect someone to know, but neither is it the sort of thing that you would feel embarrassed to explain. Objectively quantifying the popularity of websites is difficult; page views are not as good an index as subscription numbers. But in November of 2007, Wired pegged xkcd’s page views at between 60 and 70 million for the month of October—a bit more than two million a day. Two million is lousy for a network television show, but pretty astounding for an online-only cartoon strip whose jokes repeatedly refer to programming languages and higher mathematics. xkcd is the only webcomic I’ve ever seen on a t-shirt or posted on an office door; it is the only webcomic I have ever heard come up in a conversation with friends—liberal arts major friends, moreover. While I can only claim anecdotal evidence, it seems relatively clear that xkcd is unique among webcomics

in its success at appealing to people who would not normally read webcomics. And that means that, to at least some extent, xkcd has crossed from being part of a subculture to being part of mainstream culture. ~ xkcd does not strike one as visually sophisticated the first time one reads it. Its cast consists of stick figures— literally, as though it were a parody of the idiosyncrasy and originality for which other comics strive. In all but a handful of exceptions, backgrounds are also minimal. The stick figures don’t even have facial features. xkcd looks like it could be a comic strip drawn by an idiot. Except, though, for what it signifies. The punch lines of xkcd never seem to be dumb in the same way as those of other webcomics, even when they’re rather crass (which is not infrequently the case); that crass conclusion usually comes at the end of a setup that takes a minute to get, or, conversely, that provides the setup to a more difficult punch line. The jokes are, as the subtitle of the strip itself claims, a mix of “romance, sarcasm, math, and language”; that description could be extended, however, to cover video games, computer programming, most pop culture of the past twenty years, and—like any source of humor—odd observations about daily life. In its subject matter, xkcd does not seem significantly different from any other webcomic: it would seem to address the same limited audience, and none of the subjects of the strip are inherently more or less refined than those of the average Garfield. But the way in which Munroe crafts the moments of humor in xkcd never makes one feel dumber after the joke than before it, even when it doesn’t produce a full laugh. Even when the gag involves a basic play on words or the most vacuous pop-culture reference, it asks of its readers some sort of mental exercise in order to get the joke. Intelligence or sophistication are not the point—humor tends to debase any pretensions to sophistication of any sort,

produce a real laugh. Laughter is an imprecise and highly variable art, and even the best cartoonist cannot make the most devoted fan laugh all the time. And yet comics, like sitcoms, exist because we are constantly seeking that next laugh so greedily that we will put up with quite a bit of dross in order to get to the ore. What we really want is a vein: some regular, reliable source of humor to give us that moment of immoderate, honest laughter when we need it. The joke may not be a human need, but it is definitely a human want. And yet as we grow older, the demand for humor becomes harder and harder to satisfy. A joke can be told a hundred times, but it only truly works once; every retelling can only attempt to recapture the force of the first encounter. It has often been noted that most, if not all, humor finds its origin in a displacement or incongruity of some sort. Children find the simplest things funny because, in a state of true naïveté, nearly anything can seem incongruous. The loss of innocence which we all experience is partly a loss of easy laughter. Our worlds become more complicated, and, while the greater range of expectations we learn to have of the world makes it possible to find more displacements, they become more difficult to create. As we become more jaded, the moments of humor demand more wit and craft. Experience works against laughter: the most important type of displacement in an effective joke is that which exists between the experience of the teller and the listener. The “cheap laugh” is cheap because novelty comes at a high price—one which only inflates with time. Mature humor, then, cannot exist in a vacuum. It must play off the norms and expectations of some existing structure with which we are already familiar. In this sense, we become more inclined towards the humor of subcultures as we get older. We specialize, we age; our generational experience falls out of the mainstream, and our individual experience becomes even more particular.

“What are Beetle Bailey, Dagwood Bumstead, or Dilbert other than variations on the same

overgrown, lazy kindergartner?” showing that what we think is smart not to be so clever after all. But by playing oﬀ what we know and making us work to get it, Munroe develops what one could call a mature or experienced sense of humor: one that builds laughter not from what we all ﬁnd funny, but from what we’ve never thought of as funny until the moment when we read the comic. Good comic strips are hard to come by. On the comics page of a daily newspaper, perhaps only one or two will

But laughter is not something that happens primarily to individuals. A joke that makes only one person laugh is not a very good joke at all. Humor is a social phenomenon, and while there of course exists such a thing as a personal sense of humor—no one would deny that—pieces of mass culture, like comic strips, only become funny when the culture at hand ﬁnds them to be funny. Laughter builds upon itself; that’s why sitcoms use laugh tracks. While humor is a personal response, it is toned and regulated by a

complex bundle of expectations and norms. The movie that In this sense, mature humor can be just as earthy and you think is funny despite the fact that none of your friends juvenile as any other type of humor, because all humor tends are laughing would be far funnier if they were roaring with to oppose and deface conventions, rules, and the authorities laughter, or even merely chuckling. Humor may not provide that make them. Nothing is sacred; laughter knows no the foundation of a community, but it is an important part of bounds. “Laughter,” observed Mikhail Bakhtin from a desk the cement that holds it in place. This is why in-jokes thrive in Soviet Russia in the middle of the Second World War, in subcultures: they perpetuate the subculture and reinforce “demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, the feelings of solidarity and validation that come along with making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing it. In this sense, a mainstream culture is nothing more than the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it.” In a subculture large enough to have transcended the qualities other words, there is not a man or woman who has ever which first defined it. When other people start getting your been imposing while sitting on the toilet. Even the most jokes—when a teenager understands a joke about their sophisticated of scatological jokes is, in the end, still about parents’ favorite band, or a history major understands a poop. joke about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—the walls The comic strip is especially predisposed to the juvenile; of subcultural humor have been breached, and the in-joke all attempts to do otherwise end in failure (as evidenced by becomes a joke open to all. those awful serials like Judge Parker). Consider a brief history A mature sense of humor thus often eludes mainstream of major comics: starting from the Katzenjammer Kids, culture, because so often the one stumbles across Dennis XKCD #397 , “ UNSCIENTIFIC ” common knowledge upon the Menace, Little Orphan which that humor builds Annie, Peanuts (originally itself lacks the complexity or titled L’il Folks), and Calvin originality to bear the weight and his pet tiger Hobbes. of real wit. The problem is Even those comic strips not the loss of a common that are ostensibly about culture—is such a thing even adults have children at their possible?—but rather the heart: what are Beetle Bailey, loss of a common culture Dagwood Bumstead, or sufficiently sophisticated to Dilbert other than variations produce moments of real, on the same overgrown, lazy resonant, mature humor. The kindergartner? Who are the point-and-laugh humor of flobby, beady-eyed denizens Judd Apatow, for example, of James Thurber’s cartoons is self-contained and requires if not quasi-adults who have fewer shared experiences to the same expectations of the get the joke—but as a result Last week, we busted the myth that electroweak gauge symmetry is world as children would? it can do nothing new, and broken by the Higgs mechanism. We’ll also examine the existence of And, of course, almost no God and whether true love exists. the joke goes stale after five one on the comics page ever minutes. Subcultural senses of humor often come with a ages. The world of comics is a Neverland where nothing is certain degree of elitism, or at least a feeling of superiority: they beyond mockery, and which in the proper context allows allow both teller and listener to feel that they have something us to look at the world with clear eyes and a fresh mind. more in common than the lowest common denominator. Laughter gives us, both individually and collectively, a Mature humor can only develop in the mainstream when certain degree of courage. there is some sort of reliable common knowledge that humor It is odd to speak of comic strips in such terms. No one can play upon—when the specialization normally associated looks to Dilbert to get themselves through the day, not even with subculture becomes part of the culture at large. Thus the people who own the Dilbert desk calendars. Yet it is the relatively mature mainstream humor of The Daily Show: nevertheless with a certain type of courage in mind that we it assumes that its audience knows the news, which is always, ask far more of our comic strips than that they simply be tautologically enough, new. It’s not a radical assumption. But funny. A good comic strip must also be visually engaging it provides enough of a foundation for a comic mind to find and should progress logically; the artwork must be incongruities in its novelty, and thereby to make us laugh idiosyncratic yet flexible, the comic pacing both visually without premeditation. It works by making the world seem and verbally precise; and, most importantly, it should young again. make us truly laugh, which is to say that it should make ~ us laugh at something we’ve never laughed at before.

We therefore charge the cartoonists we read with a common ground of his readership that the likes of Krazy responsibility we give to few in our society: make us see and Annie never ventured. So what if there are kids reading? the world in a new way—and do it in color on Sundays. They can ask their parents, and so much the better for Make us feel like kids again, while at the same time them for having been exposed to Yeats. To the best of my acknowledging the extent of our adult experiences. knowledge, there is no daily cartoonist who did this on a The problem that thus faces the comic strip as a piece of regular basis before Schulz. mainstream culture is this: how to affect a broad audience in The assumption of common knowledge allows for the such a way, day in and day out, over the course of years or even development of an entirely different kind of daily comic— decades? For a long time, no comic strip aspired to this sort the sort that uses jokes not just as the means to a laugh, but of mature humor, with its corollary imperatives to innovate as a lens through which the incongruities, standards, and and take responsibility. Comic strips like Krazy Kat and Little incongruous standards of the world can be revealed and Orphan Annie and Blondie ran off the same set of stock gags day evaluated. Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury belongs to this group, after day; novelty, much less topicality, were neither possible as does Gary Larson’s The Far Side. But the master of the form nor desirable. Writing in 1946, Robert Warshow observed, would seem to be Bill Watterson and his Calvin and Hobbes, “There is no internal reason why Orphan Annie, for instance, which is perpetually being discovered and rediscovered by should not continue to face up to her troubles for ten million generations of ten-year-olds, and whose reputation as the years.” They assumed no common culture. To take the plot on nonesuch of the comics seems secure, as no serious challengers which Krazy Kat ran—for thirty-one years, no less: the mouse for the title have arisen in the fourteen years since it ceased throws the brick at the cat, only to be arrested by the dog. It publication. Watterson famously stopped writing Calvin and XKCD #514 , “ SIMULTANEOUS ” is a joke that can be understood by anyone, Hobbes after precisely ten years, feeling that and which, in itself, gets tired quickly. The he had exhausted what he could do. But in repetition is almost zoetropic; the humor, that time, he managed to create a body of suitable only for those too naïve to know any work that was novel and funny a surprising better. amount of the time. Visually, the strip owes The magic of Peanuts was and always will far more to the frenetic energy of Krazy Kat be manifold, but was due in no small part than to the demure conservatism of Peanuts, to the breach in the cycle of regurgitated but in terms of content, Watterson took the gags and timeless distance from reality. This key conceit of Schulz and managed invert it, is not to say, of course, that Peanuts didn’t thereby doing him one better. have its stock tropes—to the contrary, they The fun of Peanuts is predicated were its lifeblood. Lucy will always sit at upon the fundamental variability among Schroeder’s piano, Linus will always carry children. You have the bossy one, the baby, a blanket, and, of course, Charlie Brown the prodigy, the one wise beyond his years, will never get to kick the football. (The fact etc. Yet the often-remarked moral cruelty that we call it “the” football rather than “a” of the Peanuts universe—Charlie Brown football is telling.) But that was never quite always loses—springs from the basic failure the entirety of the strip: there were always I’m leaving you for your twin. He’s of these same children’s imaginations. They characters coming in and out, disappearing more mature than you by now. are each deeply prejudiced and solipsistic for a few weeks, and then reappearing—and even that never in the way that only early-elementary-age children can be. in the exact same configuration. Some variation upon an Even Snoopy, who has more imagination than any character established theme was always at work, and not just the silly in the strip, uses his gifts not to sympathize with others, but alterations of Little Orphan Annie, wherein the outcome was for self-aggrandizement. Snoopy is the punch line of the always the same. Different things tended to take place. Yes, joke that defines the entire comic: the world is full of people Charlie Brown never quite wooed the little red-haired girl, who will laugh but not cry, and we are in fact those people. but the time he got his sleeve stuck in the pencil sharpener (It’s a sadist’s joke, but a joke nevertheless.) was entirely different from the time he ran into her while In contrast to Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes involves skiing. Every time Schroeder rejected Lucy, there was a a principal cast of exactly two, and in ten years’ worth of different aperçu waiting at the end of the strip. strips, we never once see the world through any perspective And, crucially, Charles Schulz worked in many other than Calvin’s. Other children exist, but they are few different layers of cultural references, so that Joe DiMaggio, and usually nameless. Calvin is cast in the same mold as Beethoven, Yeats, and the Red Baron coexisted in the Snoopy; he has the same devilish capacity for mischief, the same universe. When Marcie asks Peppermint Patty, who same remarkable ability to translate imagination into visual is dressed as a sheep for a Christmas pageant, “Slouching reality, and the same utter obliviousness to the feelings and towards Bethlehem, sir?” Schulz is assuming a cultural standards of others. Yet because we are limited to his view of

the world, we realize that his imagination is far from narrowminded; to the contrary, the fact that his imagination is all he has means that an inﬁnite range of ideas and insights is open to him, and therefore there is no thing that the universe of Calvin and Hobbes cannot touch. This six-year old has a literally boundless imagination, and so there is nothing that can escape Calvin, and no piece of knowledge

by the time the strip reached its midpoint in the late eighties. Most cartoonists’ styles evolve over the first few years of their comic’s existence, gradually settling into the sharp, refined idiosyncrasies that define the rest of their print existence. Lines become crisper; characters almost always become less rotund than they were at the start. Gesture sharpens, and this is where Calvin’s development was most impressive: XKCD #529 ,

“ SLEDDING

DISCUSSION ”

If you get your hands on that one, it’s the worst place to have a breaking-up conversation.

that the comic cannot assume. Through sheer imagination, Calvin comprises everything, and so when he speaks there is no need for Watterson to assume a base of cultural knowledge, because Calvin speaks as cultural knowledge itself. He is the capacity within each of us to understand, contemplate, and criticize, and even in his most childish moments what he expresses is not mere slapstick but a conscious recognition of something new that we might not have seen before. When Calvin decides to cut school and go wagon-racing in the woods, this is not a slapstick prop; instead, we are all implicated in Calvin’s critique of formal education and his valuing of nature and spontaneity. Even when the wagon crashes off a cliff, the laughter comes not from Punch-and-Judy Schadenfreude, but a sympathetic understanding of Calvin’s stoic acceptance of consequences without acknowledging their causal relationship to his actions. And when, by means of his snowmen, Calvin makes fun of critics who overthink things with big words, it is an expression of “what everyone knows.” The brilliance and maturity of Bill Watterson’s wit created a comic that did not just play off common knowledge, but became it. Calvin was also one of the most visually sophisticated daily comic strips. Watterson’s fight with the syndicates for greater creative control of his Sunday strips is well known; his ultimate success led to the later Sunday Calvins, lavishly washed in watercolor, pastel, and acrylic inks. As Charles Schulz wrote in his preface to The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, “In short, it is fun to look at, and that is what has made Bill’s work such an admirable success.” Coming as it did at a point in the history of newsprint when color reproduction had reached an acme and the newspaper itself was alive and well, it is possible that the likes of the Calvin Sunday strips may never appear again. Such things take time, time takes money, and few cartoonists are independently wealthy. Even the Calvin dailies became amazingly sophisticated

already able to draw a swinging arm convincingly from the strip’s inception, by the time he ended, Watterson was able to distinguish between an arm swinging in frustration and an arm swinging in stoic resignation. (The very fact that a cartoonist would ever need to communicate stoic resignation speaks volumes about the strip.) No cartoonist I have ever seen or heard interviewed has not cited Calvin and Hobbes as an influence, including Randall Munroe. And while xkcd’s sense of humor clearly owes much to Calvin, with its rapid four-panel shifts from the ridiculous to the sublime and back again, its visual aspect at first appears to be the furthest thing from Watterson’s incredible subtleties. To repeat a point made earlier, the characters are literally stick figures; there is rarely a background; the line width is uniform. xkcd has pared down the comic strip to its most basic elements. To further abuse a debased term, it is, perhaps, a minimalist cartoon, eschewing the visceral complexity of Calvin or For Better And For Worse in favor of almost brutal simplicity. It is the sort of thing that one tends to look at and think, “I could do that.” But these are no ordinary stick figures. Munroe manipulates those wiry limbs and almost perfectly circular heads in lithe, immediately communicative ways; through angle alone, he manages an impressive array of effects and positions, from making a stickman look shocked to placing a stickwoman convincingly in an armchair—just try drawing the latter at home if you think it sounds easy. What is most impressive is that Munroe almost never draws a face, meaning that all motion and emotion must be suggested through gross movement. The entirety of the strip’s run is available online in chronological order, so that one can see the style and control develop over time. It becomes clear at some point that, while Munroe never shoots for Watterson’s mastery of color and noise, the incidental elements of

the strip are actually quite highly developed, as well: computer desks, beds, blimps, squid, subway cars, etc. (It took me a long time to appreciate the diﬃculties of drawing a stick-ﬁgure computer desk as well as Munroe does.) The style of the space in which the xkcd characters move is usually congruent with the style of the characters themselves, although there are a few exceptions; it is a universe devoid of shadows, faces, and particulars. Everything has been generalized, and could be taking place anywhere with anyone. The occasional use of actual people (e.g., Richard Feynman, Cory Doctorow, Summer Glau) only provides the rare exceptions that enforce the rule: the central cast of xkcd

into which we can cast ourselves; every time there is a new strip, there is a new, anonymous stickman, and we have no indication whether or not his experience is contiguous with those who preceded him. There’s nothing to play off of in the characters; we can rely only our own life experience and our own perspective to get the joke. Absent a character who can serve as our lens, our only option is to take the interactions of these stick figures and view them as an expression of what we ourselves know: to imagine ourselves, or at least our friends, saying these things, impressing some face upon the blank circles of the comic and thus transforming whatever we know into that body of common knowledge upon which the cartoon plays. Those stick figures are variables that can

“A joke can be told a hundred times,

but it only truly works once.” is comprised of a stickman, a stickwoman, a stickman in a black hat, and a stickman in a beret. No one has a name or a specific identity. They could be anyone. They could be us. Munroe thereby translates the perspectival conceit of Calvin and Hobbes into a visual conceit: the universal scope of Calvin’s vivid imagination becomes the generalized, anonymous world of xkcd. Rather than attributing the humor to personalities with characteristics and idiosyncrasies developed over time, he fixes these observations and behaviors to the faceless denizens of the strip, who could be anyone out on the street. Liberated from a fixed identity, they cannot express the personalities, quirks, or knowledge of individuals for any longer than the duration of a single cartoon; their actions and thoughts are generalized and anonymized, allowing Munroe to speak with the voice of “common knowledge,” as Calvin allowed Watterson to do. But there is an important difference: in order to understand Calvin, we had to enter Calvin’s mind. In order to understand xkcd, we have to take the stickmen and turn them into ourselves. With Calvin, as with the Peanuts gang and most other cartoon characters, the presence of a distinct personality allows one to view the humor that they reveal to us as the work of another mind, something crafted by the author, yes, but ultimately attributed to “Calvin” or “Lucy” or so forth. Calvin’s plays on common knowledge, on “the things everyone knows,” are mediated by his position as a hyperactive, imaginative first-grader; part of the gag of the strip is the incongruity between Calvin’s lackluster school performance and the real extent of his knowledge and insight. We get the jokes of Calvin and Hobbes by learning to see the incongruities of the world through Calvin’s eyes; we have to cast ourselves into the fantasy of the strip. xkcd is different in that there is no pre-existing mind

stand for any one of us, and in order for the expression to be useful, we have to substitute actual values. The visual form of xkcd is not just an idiosyncrasy; it’s the heart of the strip itself. xkcd is, then, an aggressive comic. It does not merely assume that we have the body of common knowledge necessary to make the humor work; it actually implies— imposes, even—that knowledge upon us. One of the charms of xkcd, of course, like any comic strip, is that it’s relatively easygoing most of the time: most of the strips can be understood by any adult American without much trouble, and beneath it always runs that certain childish sensitivity to novelty that underpins all great comics. But it remains a comic that refers frequently to pieces of math, science, and computer trivia: it assumes, for example, that a reader knows about the simultaneous discovery of calculus by Newton and Leibniz, or who Paul Erdös was, or the principle that “correlation does not imply causation”—things that seem like commonplaces to most of my generation, but which a few decades ago could not have been taken for granted. xkcd goes a step further than even this; it doesn’t just assume that one knows the things to which it refers, it says that you should know them. Some fifty years ago, Charles Schulz was the first cartoonist to assume that a reader understood a Yeats allusion or could recognize the Waldstein Sonata on sight. Now, Randall Munroe can not only assume that his readers know something about C++, but he can make them feel as though they ought to, because that’s where all the new jokes are coming from. And, as everyone knows, nothing feels worse than being left out of a joke. —Spencer Lenfield is an associate editor and 2009-10 Ledecky Fellow at Harvard Magazine.

(HONG KONG, cont. from page 2) first cockroach in the middle of July. It ran across the stove and disappeared into the crack where the sink met the wall. I saw it again—or a different one—a few days later. Then there were more. I tried swatting them with a ladle, but they scurried too fast. I slept fully clothed to protect as much of my own surface area as possible. Then, one evening, I was pouring a second bowl of Cocoa Chex when a cockroach jumped out of the bag. That should have been a call to action. But by that point, it was the middle of August, and I didn’t want to spend my last week in Hong Kong chasing cockroaches. Instead I named my new roommates Monty, Manny, Moby, and Nimbus so I could to pretend there were only four. The morning of my flight home, I woke up three hours earlier than usual and turned the lights on to reveal a party. One cockroach scooted out from under my suitcase, another scuttled across the floor. Two crawled at the edge of the ceiling. There was one in the shower. I knew there were more than I had hoped, but my only precaution was to wear more clothes in case they crawled over me in my sleep. The one on the wall was twice as long as any I had ever seen. It was another turning point. How did I get here, facing a three-inch cockroach? Had I, instead of finding myself, lost some of my humanity? These were not Monty, Manny, Moby, and Nimbus; they were insects whose presence should be revolting. Back in the company of people I know, I would never have let a cockroach live on. If a cockroach skittered across my desk now, I would try to kill it. Had I gone too far or just adapted? I grabbed my luggage and ran out the door. I had returned twice to Lamma Island, but both times I forgot the books that I wanted to give away. The bearded bookseller wasn’t there anyway. I had half-heartedly considered asking him to tell me his life story, but I was glad for the excuse not to. On my last day, I took my novels to my office. I planned to leave them somewhere in the newsroom with a sign on top that said “Free,” where I could watch people take them all day. But on the advice of the secretary, I left them on the desk of Steve, the books editor. Steve had a stud earring and a blue bicycle. He spoke to me my first day and asked if I were British, too. I shook my head. “Oh, the way you said your name, it sounded like you had a Manchester accent,” he explained. I did not talk to him much over the summer, beyond elevator greetings; once, I asked him if he cycled around the harbor. As I was packing up my things, Steve paused by my desk. He held up the stack of books. “Thanks,” he nodded, and then kept walking.

Poem Towards Four Words for Earth POETRY

TA L I A L AV I N

I sat on your porch today and taught you the word for earth in four languages. I picked them up piecemeal talking to friends who write in foreign alphabets all night. Zemlya is my favorite—it sounds black as the Russian steppe that steams pungent and deep with snowmelt, Gaia gutted with tremors. We rocked back against the warming wood, stammering again, the ﬂowers your mother spent so many hours on recover enough to strain to the light, and while their tender, pulpy heads fall open, while the dinner herbs describe good smells on the breeze, we are writing the same characters over and over in the dust that gathers on wood arms and wicker bodies of sunchairs while wicked hungers sudden and unsaid as the deaths of strangers pass murmuring through our chests. —Talia Lavin is an associate editor. You can read more of her poetry at apoemadayfromharvard.blogspot.com.

—Chelsea Shover is a staﬀ writer for The Crimson.

Recline and Fall Sitting and sitting in the widening gyre CRITICISM

JASPER N HENDERSON

JIELIANG HAO

To paraphrase Orwell, to sit up straight in a dorm room needs a constant struggle. While working on an essay, one first must resist the idea of working in bed, where the Siren song of drowsiness seduces the wordweary. Then, one must choose not to sit on the futon couch around which friendly distractions swirl, impeding paragraph from following paragraph. This leaves two options: to compose while sitting on the toilet—a strategy employed both by Vladimir Nabokov, who composed atop a suitcase, and by this author during a few sleepless nights—or to sit, at a desk, in a Harvard-issue chair. This last option seems the most promising, but only as the least of many evils: it too conspires to make its occupant slouch. This chair, wide and low, seems to scream, Relax! every time one leans back. The seat and back of the chair are covered in a blue, carpet-style textile through which run strands of white string. At a stingy inch’s width, the arms of the chair are too narrow to rest an elbow on. They appear included solely for the purpose of preventing the sitter from sliding—oozing—onto the floor. And the whole chair is fashioned from that blonde wood which captures the imagination of Northern European designers and few others. This much would make any chair ugly, but it would not necessarily make it unpleasant to sit in. Yet this one is unpleasant—the chair relates poorly to the ground. It is a sort of hybrid between a standard, fourlegged chair and a rocking chair. It sits flat and then, as one shifts his weight backwards, lurches suddenly, only to be stopped again by a second tread of the chair. The tipping point of the chair comes abruptly, just before one has properly leaned against the seatback, and it invariably unnerves the sitter. Eventually one chooses either to perch heavily on the front edge of the chair or to slouch, angled back, as if in a broken rocker.

The selection of these chairs seems to be a college administrator’s response to the stereotypical dorm room accoutrements: the classic beanbag chair, the mouthlike couch that would swallow its victims but for lack of teeth, the hard-topped pillow designed to gently perch on the lap of one diligently toiling, like an invalid, in bed. These all prefigure the semi-rocker, the great compromise. Just as dorm room beds lengthened in response to a new generation’s lofty height, so too did dorm room chairs widen and recline as a result of increased student obesity and laziness. The chair will not let the student sit up straight because it assumes the student does not want to sit up straight. A similar trend can be seen in cafeteria chairs. As cafeterias modernize, they tend to scrap the heavy wooden seats of yore and replace them with lightweight, well-padded, and wide rectangular seats. These chairs are often challenging to sit up straight in because their arms don’t fit under the table and their wide seats are too flat. But they fulfill a separate set of needs: students feel comfortable sitting in them, regularly attending meals in pajamas and slippers and staying after to do their homework; the chairs rarely break and can be cheaply replaced if they do; and they accommodate—in their homogenous manner—students of all sizes, from the most petite girls to their football-playing boyfriends. This is not necessarily a bad thing for college dining. In fact, the new seats are quite egalitarian towards the obese and the pajama-clad. Still, it is hard both to think seriously and to be taken seriously if one is not sitting erect. It is as hard to write an essay in a slouch-happy dorm room chair as it is to take a favorite professor to a studentfaculty dinner in an over-padded cafeteria. One of the author’s professors, an expert in both the symbolism of landscape and of body language, remarked

to his seminar that all the students there slouched in the same way. He conveyed this not because he was insulted or disappointed in the students but merely, he said, because it showed a promising solidarity among them. Still, to describe a class as slouching is rarely to compliment it. This strange situation—the professor was, after all, correct in his observation—only shows what the whole class knew: the students slouched not out of disinterest in the professor or out of sleepiness but because of environmental factors. The chairs in that classroom enforce bad posture. They are made of single-molded plastic and have springy backs that ﬂex farther as more pressure is placed on them. In combination with a downward slope, the slippery seats force the student to sit back fully in the chair, making it almost impossible to sit up straight. One either leans forward, elbows on the table, or leans back—way back. These chairs, among others, are the end result of decades of purchases that Harvard has made while slowly phasing out its once-standard wooden chairs. These were chairs of distinctive design, embossed with the University crest, and they still occupy the oﬃces of many professors

chair and straightening his spine. But the other chairs have no such easy solution. For the serious scholar, it is increasingly hard to sustain a tone of serious academic inquiry. Even if one manages not to slouch through an entire discussion, there is always one more YouTube video to watch instead of memorizing vocabulary, always a vibrating cell phone to distract one from what the professor is saying. As libraries fill with overstuffed couches, as common rooms blare with televisions that constantly scream news and sports, and as carefully ordered, formerly contemplative quadrangles mass with pastel-colored metal chairs that have been welded into a state of permanent recline, the mind can never settle on one idea for very long. In 1920, Yeats famously asked, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Evidence indicates that the sloucher has reached Bethlehem. And he is us. Yet all hope is not lost; it rarely is. At the same moment as the perfect chairs made by the Shakers sit in dusty museums with little placards saying Please do not sit here, ﬁne

“An optimist or a university president would say that this new era emphasizes freedom of thought over the uncomfortable rigidity of tradition. A pessimist would say that in the academic world comfort has replaced rigor.” and certain classrooms in the philosophy building, serving, in this diminished role, as little more than a clear reminder that the University has made a deliberate choice to move away from this history and to sit down in other, newer chairs. This decision is deﬁnitely not a monetary one, although the relative inexpensiveness of the replacement chairs probably reinforced the change. Instead, the new chairs are a formal concession to an era in which students do not attend class in a tie and jacket or sit at their desks while they read. The chairs represent a turn towards informality in academic life. An optimist or a university president would say that this new era emphasizes freedom of thought over the uncomfortable rigidity of tradition. A pessimist would say that in the academic world comfort has replaced rigor. The rebellious essayist solves the problem of his dorm room’s not-quite-rocking chair by shoving its arms under his desk, transforming it into a fixed-back

woodworking is a blossoming artisanal trade. Throughout the U.S.A., dozens of institutes offer multi-year courses whose main goal is the creation of the perfect chair. The author’s best friend had, by the age of fifteen, finished a chair that is handsome, light, durable, and, most importantly, truly comfortable to sit in while sitting up straight. Another friend makes chairs in a woodworking studio on the same campus that contains so many contemporary abominations of the form. Clearly, the good chair is not a forgotten art form but merely a neglected one. What is now mainly the providence of those who care about and can afford it may, in time, once again become available for every scholar—a seat in which to sit. Until then, John Harvard will slouch gently in his heavy bronze chair, his foot rubbed by Asian tourists, his legs peed on by drunk Harvard students, his spine pitied by chiropractors, and his intellect unremarked by scholars. —Jasper N Henderson is a student at Harvard College.

Ghost Bikes FICTION

L O U I S E VA N S

This is a story that really happened. I know that’s a pro forma beginning to a ghost story, but, hell, if it’s true, I’m going to say it. It begins on a brisk Tuesday in January. I’d just moved back to NYC, the city of my birth, and was still adjusting to life in a shitty loft in Brooklyn instead of the spacious SoHo apartment my parents still lived in. So,I decided to confront the problem head-on and took a walk with my father, north from his apartment, towards Houston. Well, edge-on more than head-on, really. My father and I were—I wouldn’t say distant—almost traditional in our relationship. We spoke superficially of his work— profitable, sophisticated—and mine—dreary. We looked ahead, turning to face each other only briefly, when stalled at intersections. Sometimes the streets narrowed to alleys and we walked single-file, and I marveled at the silver in his hair, rising above his jacket. It hadn’t been there when I left, for college and then grad school. Still, his step was springy, and his voice, as it wove in and out of the intricacies of securities law, was clear and graceful. And it was by this means that we reached Houston. And because, as he explained his new IPO, we were looking across the street rather than at each other, I saw the bicycle. It was small and old and shabby. It had only one speed, and its handlebars were straight metal, unadorned with grips. It leaned, chained against a lamppost, and was painted an ugly, flat white. Rain and age had turned that white to the yellow of old bone, making it run in exposed spots. Roses—red faded to pink—were woven across its frame. “What’s that?” I asked, when my dad paused between the rules for public and private offerings. “A ghost bike,” he said. “They, you know, they put them up where a cyclist has been killed.” And then he told me about tender offers. It feels like the same talk each time, though I know it isn’t. But I’m sure much of it is review, at least. I used to wonder why I’d provoke him into talking about the same stuff, over and over, until I realized that it was the familiarity itself I sought. The rise and fall of the Securities and Exchange Act was as soothing as any Thomas the Tank Engine story. And we kept walking, and we went home, and I took the train to my shitty loft in Brooklyn, and I went to sleep. The story skips several months. In the course of these months, I write three short stories, two of which I send

out and one of which is actually published in a small lit magazine. I head down to the abandoned warehouse in the meatpacking district, bought just before gentrification, where the mag is printed, and pick up my free copy. I consume three jars of peanut butter and four bags of corn chips. I decide to quit corn chips, and shortly thereafter I eat two more bags of corn chips. I buy a new laptop. This sets me back a staggering amount of money, and when I move my files over, it runs as slowly as the old one. Most importantly, for the purposes of the story, I fall in love. Fiona worked, as is traditional in cases such as these, in a coffee shop. Her hair fell in cascades and cataracts, straddling the border of brunette and blonde. Her eyes had a slightly misty look to them, as though she were always about to cry, but those tears would almost certainly have been of laughter. “How do you seduce women?” CJ from The West Wing asks, from deep in my adolescence. “You do it with humor.” So. I told Fiona a joke. It was a bad joke, bad enough that I won’t repeat it here—for fear of not being taken seriously as an author of comedies—but she laughed, and smiled at me, and scribbled her number on my wrist with her left hand. She held it steady with her right, and her thumb slid up and down my arm and I shivered. So maybe you seduce women with your leonine good looks, instead of humor. I guess? I can’t imagine why she did it. We met up a week later, when she got off work. I asked, in my joking voice, if she wanted to go for coffee. And she smiled, and laughed, and punched my shoulder, and called me a dumbass. And we went and got pizza. The story at this point skips six slices between the two of us, and three fountain sodas, the third one shared, and the smile in the eyes of someone that makes you so blank-mindedly ecstatic that you forget to even make a joke. I can’t even watch the damn Lady and the Tramp scene ironically anymore. Later that night, at her place; her leather jacket, balled in the corner—the sway in her hips and her shoulders as she wordlessly shook off her shirt. The curves of her, moving like the silence at the end of a symphony, and the high blue notes of the next movement, coming from her far-off, aching eyes. A moment, then: appreciation of absolute spinewrenching grace. Her, rising above me, untouched, but not untouchable. A kiss. And after, exhausted and spent, I collapsed next to her, sweaty, unashamed of it. She was crying soundlessly,

each tear welling up, flowering, dropping off. Softly, like raindrops. She saw the look I gave her. “It’s just so… glorious,” she said, grinning. It wasn’t even a compliment. It was just the way things were. And that was that, really. Another month raced by, accompanied by the crescendo of drums and heartbeats and the speed-freak synth-pop that she would play, jokingly, as we fucked. And later, reggae. As we made love.

wanted cheap takeout. “Sure!” Diane said. She has red hair, hinting of cheap dye, kept in a too-cute bob. She probably tossed it as she spoke. It’s the sort of thing she would do. “And maybe then we could stop by your place for some coffee?” she asked. Normally, that would be my line. But what the hell. I let her keep it.

I won’t deny that my infidelities are pathological. They are. I’m not an attractive man, and so, I thought, I’d be able to stay faithful through dint of ugliness alone. A silver lining on a bulbous, low hanging cloud. I guess I wasn’t ugly enough. I cheated on my first girlfriend, twice, and on my second, at least once, and after that I lose track. I dunno. I never quite found the willpower. It’s a self-esteem question, really. I don’t feel like I can justify myself as a person unless I’m schtupping someone. Right then. It’s pretty stupid. But if you were dating me, you wouldn’t take that as an excuse, and she didn’t either. And I might not have enough self-control to stop screwing random women, but I did have enough to look Fiona in the eyes when she confronted me. I told her the truth. She left.

It was later that night, and I was very, very drunk, riding on the subway. Diane had met me outside of the wine bar in this tight little floral print dress, and I’d stared at her from behind for a moment, and felt vertiginous: as though I were looking down on some petty thing, lusting on autopilot. I had snuck up behind her, and she giggled, and we had gone inside. And drank. I don’t go to a wine bar to get drunk, but I had found myself just putting glasses away and feeling more and more bourgeois and piggish. Somewhere in the middle of a story Diane was telling about her friend Sheila I had seen the hint of calculation in her eyes. They’d said, “Hey, well, if he’s drunk, go for it.” So I’d gotten up, told her I wasn’t feeling well, and left. I didn’t ride the subway home. I owned an unlimited Metro Card, see, and it turns out that if you’re drunk enough and you ride the subway, around and around, bobbing and starting and stopping, you don’t get sober. A friend would tell you that that’s bullshit. A scientist would tell you it’s a placebo effect. Ricky, my scientist friend, calls it placebo bullshit. Nevertheless, it works. So I’m on a subway, one of them, somewhere in Manhattan. I’d ridden the Q back and forth across the bridge, that was clear, and the sun had been setting and tears had grown in the corner of my eyes but not fallen, until the already-streaky gold had smeared across everything. I remember changing at Times Square, to the beat of a mambo played by a man with thick hands and wide, tapping shoes. I remember getting off and back on at Union, where they danced to salsa booming out of an iBook balanced atop a solar-powered trash can. For a moment there, I thought of Fiona, dancing— I remember the mirror-image sky of Grand Central, where the Zodiac told me its secrets in a tongue I’d never learned before and couldn’t remember since. I remember the city that never sleeps closing its eyes, and swearing it was just resting, up by 70th Street and Central Park, maybe, where I got off and staggered into a grove of trees. Now, I know. A tale told by a drunkard has little currency, especially when that drunkard is about to fall asleep against the trunk of a tree, muttering imprecations against the fairer half of the human race. And that is what I did. But I woke up. I woke up to noise: the rattling of chains,

I called Diane. Another thing I’ve been proud of is that I don’t cheat like your average barfly or “HotChicksWithDouchebags.com” regular. I practically don’t cheat at all. I’ve never even kissed a woman I didn’t know, never slept with one I wouldn’t bring home to Mother. It’s just, well. Timing is difficult. I couldn’t jump rope, in kindergarten, and I couldn’t dance in sixth grade, or play the piano, either. So it’s not that I slept around. I just, well, had a lot of girlfriends. Of varying seriousness. At once. I wish I could slot them in, after one another, perfectly, but real life doesn’t work that way. All of which is to say that even though sleeping with Diane had just lost me the closest thing to “true love” I’d ever had, I called her. “I thought you were busy tonight,” she said. “That…fell through,” I replied. “Well, I’d love to meet up!” Her voice was springy and enthusiastic. She’s a fine girl—don’t get me wrong. But see, that’s exactly it. She’s not a fine woman. I suppose it may, in this context, seem wildly hypocritical, but I’ve always thought of myself as pretty mature. “Great,” I made myself say. “Want to meet up at The Bourgeois Pig?” It’s a wine bar; hipster-infected, oozing over with pretension and tight turtlenecks. Good wine, though, and it makes me feel grown up and independent. I wish I could say I hadn’t taken other women there before, but that would be a lie. Fiona, though, never. She always just

and the clatter of wheels. The sound of birds, startled in their sleep, beating their wings. I opened my eyes. I had a splitting headache, and I was quite sober. I saw the ghost bikes. Hundreds of them, large and small and a few heartbreakingly child-sized. They sped over the mottled park grounds in riderless concert, with wild abandon, glee. Their chains and occasionally signs—A Cyclist Died Here—streamed out behind them, whipping in the wind, instantly converted from bondage to liberation, flight. They glowed, not with the soft ephemeral glow ghosts are supposed to have but with a wild, flickering fire. Caged lightning, seen from afar. The stampede barreled past me, charging out the exit of the park. On the fringes, I saw my ghost bike, same shabby handlebars, same lousy paint job. Same intertwined roses, though now they glowed pink and gold, fading, not into nothingness, but brilliance. And then there were just a few stragglers, and then there were no bikes at all, as the last few exited. I cringed, not knowing why. And from outside the park came, loud as I’ve ever heard, a screech. And a thud. I closed my eyes. My chest clenched and I tasted blood, rising deep within my throat, and I had a sudden sensation that my ribs were broken and cracked and my jaw dislocated and strobe-light concussion jackhammers went off in my skull and my knees snapped and oh my god won’t somebody call for help and they’re screaming and running and one arm broke, the bone poking out through flesh and skin and— A flash of nothing, blank and cold and empty. And then it was over. I stood up, at a loss, looking around, patting myself down. I was in perfect condition. I strolled unsteadily, affecting nonchalance, over to the path the stampede had taken. The grass was crushed, battered, and the turf was all torn up. I wondered if, by sunrise, it would repair itself, or if some handful of groundskeepers swear each other to secrecy and come out, in the very early morning, to clean up. Under the light of the morning star and the prickling of the skyscrapers… Something caught the corner of my eye. It was a rose, lit from within by the last few shooting sparks of the night. I put it in my pocket, and I rode the subway all the way home, making every connection perfectly. Walking up the stairs at four in the morning, a pudgy man in a knit cap thrust a Metro newspaper into my hands, upside down. Below the fold was an article on “yesterday’s Ride of Silence.” Something like El Dìa de los Muertos for urban bikers. So if there was going to be a running of the ghost bikes, it was the right day for it. I felt a bit better for those unknown groundskeepers. Once a year isn’t that bad. It’s practically a holiday. And these sorts of things should be sanctified. I took the rose out of my pocket, and I sat at my laptop. I wrote down, clearly as I could despire the feeling that my head was about to come apart at the widow’s peak, everything that had happened. The screen glowed in the creeping dawn, persistently blue. That didn’t help my headache any. The rose sat on my desk. I thought about sending it to Fiona, but I could see the banked fire in its heart and I knew it would make her want to take me back, and want to run, and do neither of those things. It would keep her up nights, staring at nothing. Waiting. And I’m not that cruel. Not to other people, anyway, so I kept it. And then I took four Advil and drank a whole sports bottle of Crystal Light and crashed. Alone, in my shitty loft in Brooklyn, I slept. I did not dream. —Louis Evans is a staﬀ writer.

Unt it led Kyle Dancewicz glass, pen on paper 1” x 24”

C ake Intiya Isaza-Figueroa white-out, ink, pencil, pen on vellum 12â&#x20AC;? x 8â&#x20AC;?

From On High FICTION

DOMINIC VITI

It must have seemed perfectly logical to the natives. If they wanted to get some cargo of their own, the stuff they saw coming out of the Japanese planes on their airstrips, they’d need to make an airstrip of their own. The idea could have come from a child, simple as it was—a wide, flat, open area gives the metal birds a place to land—and any adult on the island would have inevitably embraced the idea at the mere mention of the potential rewards to be reaped. But it couldn’t have been so easily decided, Jim concluded, because he was pretty damn sure to look for an actual runway as The 3rd Street Harlot sputtered through its low arc toward a swath of grass amid the buzzing Pacific brush. Then again, those Polynesians had a way of getting around from island to island, and then again, the Japanese weren’t nearly as cordial as we, the liberating power, tended to be. But it stood to reason that they could have very well had enough of an infrastructure for a rumor to glide on, though clearly not enough to understand where the airplanes actually came from. So, with little aside from reserved excitement, the islanders must have set to work building their metal bird trap with no thought of consequences or collateral damage—and why should they? They didn’t understand a goddamn thing. Even when a B-24 with a dead bombardier, two dead gunners, and an off-color nickname was the only thing to have ever landed on their makeshift runway, and landed in flames, they remained alit with enthusiasm as they bounded over the short grass to the bright metal wreckage. They held their hands to their eyes in the equatorial sun, beaming like acolytes before the spoils of some newly performed ritual, and as Jim and his crew pulled themselves from the smoking aircraft, the wretches drew nearer and nearer to the billowing steel tinderbox, their almond backs freshly beaded with sweat. Not a goddamned thing, Jim thought. Over the past sixty years, memories of the war had piled on Jim like liver spots and sore joints, making themselves ever more visible. When Gloria passed, it got to the point where it was hard to make it from the bedroom to the kitchen in the morning without clutching his chest, steadying himself against the wall, and staring down at the time-worn sea foam carpet. Those days, it felt as though the house seemed to breathe heavily along with him. Every day brought another wheeze and creak. In the evening, he thought he could hear her busy humming unfolding itself from the walls, the house exhaling through its shingles into the cooling dusk. He called to her once. The house’s only answer was another silent inwards breath. The silence always

deepened after he broke it himself. The days sheared away the comfortable ambiguity of the nights, peeling away the close memories, always closer in the dark, to reveal the starkness of worn, rusted age. Each morning alone came after an abnormally long dream—the kind where Jim would awaken from what seemed like half a century—and whatever relief he found in returning to a familiar place was destroyed by the unfamiliarity that surprised him in the waking world. So Jim moved. He resisted the pleas from David to move in with him and the girls. David let out a gruff “O.K., Dad,” over the phone, unsatisfied with Jim’s excuse that he’d rather not move any farther east, west, north, or south of Barstow, just far away enough to leave Gloria’s humming, her smell, and her father’s old ranch house. “That town is one big yellow shit hole, Dad,” said David. “It’s warm here.” At some earlier time, Jim would have been more apt to defend the city in which he and his wife jointly decided to raise a family, riding high on the G.I. Bill like a strong tailwind. But David was right. Jim was sure of it every day that he gazed out the windshield of his Crown Victoria, squinting at the beating sun with the heap of his age bundled up in his chest. “Can I at least help you with the sale?” “I can take care of the old creaker myself.” Telling David he wanted to handle all the realty business himself was the same as telling him that he was going to let someone else handle it in order to retain what dignity he felt he had left with the boy. David knew his father was selfsufficient, a damn-near dynamo for a vet pushing ninety, but it was clear that Jim was getting worse. He was being more insistent on his independence, after all. “You don’t want to be alone still, do you?” “I’ll be fine.” Maybe he would be. Hopefully he would be. It didn’t seem so strange that he had no desire to move to the ‘piss cold’ of northern coastal Maine. David had hoped that all the time his father spent alone in that house would have left him hungry for more human contact, or at least enough to wear a coat. “See you at Christmas.” Jim left the sale to a big pearly-white grin of a woman, Kathy DeMendoza. She put herself in an ad in the free realty magazines with her four Pomeranians, standing next to a potted plant, wearing her royal purple pantsuit and bright red rose brooch. She had enough business sense to

be flirtatious, which was enough strategic maneuvering to hook eighty-seven year old Jim. Once he had passed the obligation to Kathy, he became more anxious to leave than relieved to be rid of the confusion of selling a home. The creaker’s breath seemed to be getting shorter and shorter. He was particularly abrupt with anyone who spoke to him regarding the transaction—all brokered by Kathy of course—and when details became a bit too hazy for him, he chose to trust in the ample woman with the crisp perfume and the rich red high heels. “Let Kathy take care of me.” He picked out his new escape on his first outing with Kathy. She was a very hands-on agent, just as her advertisements said. Business strategies aside, she actually had taken a liking to the tall, stooped old man that demanded of her secretary who he be allowed to speak with “the pretty dog woman” immediately. “I’m certain that you’ll love this one, Mr. Allard. It’s a brand new build, just hit the market,” said Kathy. She held her posture firmly against the back pillow, the driver’s seat of her Avalanche looking more like a captain’s chair than a car seat. “And it’s near the airport?” he asked. “Oh.” Kathy’s lips curled back. “Well, the municipal one, yes. But the homeowner’s association in the development down the street’s gotten a number of ordinances passed. Pilots can’t fly at night. So noise pollution’s no issue at all.” Hunched in his seat, Jim turned and peered out the window. “Bastards,” he muttered. As she freed the door of 11639 Westchester Street from the jamb, Kathy flourished her arms, wafting her way past the reek of fresh paint into the living area. Her tremendous ring of keys jingled in her hand. As she pirouetted around in a pantomimed ‘Ta-da,’ she had already begun her routine, of which Jim took little notice. He was not surprised by the bare white walls or the white carpet and tile. Every house on the street, in the neighborhood, was either an exact replica of the adjacent house, or a perfectly mirrored replica with a different tone of sepia on the trim. The lawns were freshly planted, each proudly displaying a newly impaled FOR SALE sign. They still bore traces of white spray paint, just as the black road and white sidewalks still shone with the day-glow orange arrows, letters, and numbers from the construction. Kathy continued her compliments to the home, largely unheeded by Jim. He saw the place. It had a roof. It had a front door. It was for sale. Planes nearby. As she ran through her rhetorical stunt, Jim stopped her short. “You got that contract on you?” Kathy faltered. “Of course,” she said, reaching into her purse, “here.” Jim stood with an unexcited slump, his hands in his pockets. She slid the contract across the kitchen counter. He took his right hand out, clutching his pen. “You wouldn’t like to see the rest of the house?” She was

still keen on the reverie and persuasion of the sale. It was show time. ‘Roping and doping,’ her husband and business partner, Michael, called it. Bring the saps into their new home, gush over the high ceilings and the natural lighting, and slap the contract down on the kitchen counter. She never thought it was the best name for the strategy, but, by God, did it work. They had been running their own firm for a little more than two years now. He decided they should seize their chance when real estate sales in California became too many and too much to handle for anyone and everyone who made their way into the business. That was when he came up with the term. He knew the business; she could make the sales. Given the way she could get ink on paper, all Michael had to manage was to get mortgages that anyone could sign. “Have you read one of these contracts, Michael?” “Of course I have.” “And you still feel fine persuading people to sign it? We could be selling homes to corpses if we wanted.” “They might as well be corpses for all we care, Kath. It’s the banks’ problem. They’re the ones offering the damn thing. We’re just brokering the exchange of capital.” Though she didn’t like to think of what she was getting most people into, she couldn’t help it once the deal was sealed. While she was selling, it didn’t matter to her, but she’d found herself waking up in the middle of the night more and more often. Jim had cut that little window of blamelessness short. Without the exercise of the dream to soften the material bludgeon of reality, shaped like a dotted line and marked with an “x,” Kathy could feel her guilt showing. She seemed thrown by Jim’s request. Jim looked at her quizzically until he decided to break her silence. “So this ought to be manageable with what I got from the sale, right?” Snapping out of it, Kathy replied. “Y-yes. With that interest rate, you’ll be fine.” “This’ll be fine, then, darlin’. Thank you.” He scratched his name into the counter at 11639 Westchester Street and placed his pen on the counter. Jim sat cross-legged at the edge of the field and admired his landing job. The islanders had dispersed by then. They had spent some time waiting for all the fuel to burn away, and then took to rummaging through the bomber. At the time, Jim and the men were too dumbfounded by their surroundings to care about anything that the snoops could get their mitts on. They had managed to shoo them away long enough to find what was left of Steve and Herbert, burned to nothing but bones and brass buttons. The heat and the stench were enough to turn any airman’s stomach. Wilkins, the loud-mouthed Australian aviator mechanic and upper gunner, made a mess of the floor as they rummaged for any (see ON HIGH, page 34) 31

Unt it led ( all) Vi Vu acrylic, gauche and sharpie on canvas 11” x 14”

(ON HIGH, cont. from page 31) belongings they could find. As usual, he was all “Christ” and “bloody ‘ell,” and he made sure to complain of the stench as he and Jim went about their somber task. Only Wilkins had the wherewithal to keep chattering during and after a plane crash. They managed to pull Casey, the tail gunner, from his compartment with little trouble. The tail gunner’s position was a sphere of glass, made for visibility. It was a small coffin and a smaller cathedral. The round had broken one of the panes and tore right through his chest cavity, dead center, so he held together well enough for Hal, the radio operator, to drag him. Being the tail-gunner on the tail-end charlie plane made him the last damn man in the entire bomber formation, and the first bastard to hear bullet crack from the barrel of a Zero as they came up on the rear of the bombing run in a swarm. The presence of a body afforded him a more proper burial, unlike Steve and Gerald, who had dog tags and buttons dropped in a shallow divot at the feet of their gravestones. But now as Jim sat and examined The Harlot, it looked like it might as well have taxied to a gentle stop. Now that there wasn’t any smoke pouring from the engines and upper compartments, it could have been meant to be there. However, ‘there,’ as Jim and the others had found, was quite

a place. He was seated against what looked like a radio tower built of palm trunks and lashed together with some kind of rope. It was solid all the way around. There seemed to be no way inside, but he figured the base must have been somewhere around thirty feet high. It even had a nest at the top, another eight feet worth of height, which had no ladder to it. It tapered outward, and had openings where the large windowpanes would be on an actual tower. Across the runway were three hangars. They were made, again, from long palm trunks lashed together, though this time were embedded some depth into the soil and pulled into high arcs. Children were playing in the shade that they provided, most likely because no Americans were nearby. How they managed to get those thick trees into that shape was beyond Jim. Maybe gravity. Or teamwork. Maybe both. Further down the runway to the south were the final pieces of the islander’s game of pretend. Wilkins and Hal had walked over there to get a good look at them—four wooden airplanes. None of them seemed flightworthy, of course; they were made from what looked like more palm trunks, lashed together into a solid fuselage, and smaller trunks embedded into carved trenches on either side made

KAYLA ESCOBEDO

the wings and rear stabilizers. The two men circled the aircraft, climbed on top of them, kicked the log landing gear. It was another small marvel that the Polynesians managed to get the things off the ground long enough to stand them up on something. As they were examining the handiwork, Jim noticed the two men peer skyward and then drop to the ground near one of the wings. He stood up, and as he scanned the runway for angry natives, he noticed the familiar hum of an aircraft engine. “Damned scout,” said Wilkins. “Think they saw the Harlot?” “How couldn’t they see her? It’s a bloody beacon shining out there in the grass.” “And you managed radio contact with home again, Hal?” “As we came in I sent a distress, managed another call about an hour ago. Ought to be a duck here by tomorrow.” Jim looked skyward. “With any luck that’ll mean we’re gone before they can hear word from that scout and send anything else here—aerial or otherwise. We’ll find our way to the shore bright and early.” The sun was hanging low in the western sky by then. Jim and the remaining crew of The 3rd Street Harlot sat at the base of the wooden tower, waiting for night to pass and holding back thoughts of Casey, Steve and Gerald. The villagers had been coming and going all afternoon and evening, some emerging alone or in groups of three or four to examine The Harlot. They’d trudge over to the aircraft, maybe give it one full lap around, and sulk back into the brush. All of them looked disappointed. It was hard to think of them otherwise, because nearly all of them seemed emaciated into utter weakness. Their ribs held their dark yet oddly translucent skin taught across their sternums. The women walked with a hunch, and the children they held under either or both arms were always silent. The older children underneath the fake hangers were the only ones who showed any energy after the initial excitement of the landing, which, now that Jim thought of it, looked like a drunken game of tag. “What the hell could all this be for, you figure?” “Tossers probably wanna join the fight,” Wilkins answered, squinting as he dunked his C ration into his metal can. “Figure they’d be more hospitable if they were sympathetic.” “Could be helping the Japs,” offered Hal. “Bloody unlikely. Japs lay waste to any tribe so much as wanders near ‘em, or ‘appens to be in their way. If they wanted to do anything to us, they’d ‘ave done it already.” “Suppose they’re waiting for nightfall,” Hal said coldly. “Those things? We could fight ‘em all off with one ‘and.

All the same, we’ll be sleeping in shifts.” “So then why all of this? They didn’t lash together all this shit for nothing,” Hal had wrenched the package of rations from Wilkins, and began to open his own. “Whatever they want, they’ll be getting an eyeful of Jap warplanes or landing parties or something, with that plane here in the open. They aren’t taking any chances these days.” Wilkins took a slurp from his can. “Guess our hosts took the bigger chance, then.” Some five years after his rendezvous with Kathy DeMendoza, the driveways of Westchester Street were nearly deserted. Rid of the old creaker, Jim’s breathing had lightened. He saw David and the girls on holidays, went to the driving range every Tuesday and Thursday, and took to building plastic airplane models at his kitchen table. It wasn’t until he saw the first wide open garage, the Johnsons’ across the street, that he began to take notice of the reappearing real estate signs. He peered into their gaping door in his robe, having shuffled out one morning for the paper. It was a hard sight to miss. A brushed chrome floor lamp leaned bent against the far wall. The door inside was left ajar, revealing the laundry machine. The dryer hung open like a mouth. Crusted clothing spilled out of it like a thirsty dog’s tongue. A garbage bag full of toys lay strewn across the middle of the painted concrete floor. Their automatic sprinklers kicked on as Jim made his way back inside. They must have left that morning, he thought. Dropped everything. The rest of the neighborhood quickly followed suit. Some later morning, he took to the sidewalks to peruse the new real estate signs. He counted twelve since last week, and couldn’t find Kathy’s face on any of them. The lawns had nearly all turned to the Barstow piss-yellow that David was so keen to reminisce over. A few of them still had their utilities running, so their leaky sprinkler lines drew lanes of green. The islands of sand and yellow between them were left covetous and un-watered. Jim checked his mailbox. A stack of junk mail was laid as a pedestal underneath a plain envelope stamped with THIRD NOTICE in splotchy red ink. He sighed. David would have to hear about this eventually. He turned from the mailbox. Shading his eyes with his free hand, he scanned the street up and down. Fifty-five houses, two cars, fortyseven real estate signs. As Jim trudged up the driveway and into the garage, he could hear the busy hum of a singleengine airplane somewhere overhead. —Dominic Viti is a junior writing student at Savannah College of Art and Design and a Scribblers’ Writers’ Retreat Conference scholar.

A t h e n s S tree t Julia Rooney oil on canvas 54” x 48”

The Documentary Hypothesis In pursuit of the real Slim Shady FROM THE NOTEBOOKS

JONAH HASSENFELD

Introduction It has long been the considered opinion of the great majority of people that the Eminemic canon, including The Slim Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show, constitutes a literary unity. Although many communities are deeply committed to the belief that the above named collections of poetry are the work of a single author named Eminem, who composed them during the late 1990s, the scholarly work of the last several decades has begun to compile a considerable body of evidence and argumentation that makes the hypothesis of single authorship increasingly unlikely. Key arguments of the multi-document hypothesis The first argument rests on the obvious differences in the name by which the protagonist is called. Sometimes the protagonist is called “Slim Shady,” sometimes “Eminem,” and sometimes “Marshall Mathers.” (We refer to the three sources respectively as S, E, and M.) Secondly, one must contend with the clear differences in style and word choice in the three sources. S tends to include a second voice within his poems that repeats the words of the primary speaker. Finally, E has a more aloof style, insofar as he seems to be aware of the other two sources. It is primarily this fact that has led most researchers to conclude that E is the latest source. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the redactor is, in fact, none other than E himself, and that he should be given credit not merely as an editor, but also as a literary genius of the caliber of S and M. Differences in Style and Language It is difficult to read more than a couple of S’s poems before his poetic meter becomes easily recognizable. His style is characterized by long, densely packed polysyllabic phrases that all end in the same partial rhyme, as well as complicated internal rhyming schema. Here is one typical example: “Well, since age twelve, / I’ve felt like I’m someone else— / ‘Cause I hung my original self / From the top bunk with a belt” (“My Name Is,” vv. 12-15). In this one fourline segment, S introduces and manipulates the “el” sound in a variety of creative ways. When reading these lines, one is forced to pause after the word “twelve” and then read the final three lines without pause in order to fit in all the syllables. M’s style, in distinct contrast, is much simpler. It includes more straightforward rhymes and sparser lyrics: “Money is what makes a man act funny; / Money is the

root of all evil. / Money’ll make them same friends come back around, / Swearing that they was always down” (“If I Had,” vv. 14-17). In this four-line stanza, there are only two rhymes. M rhymes “money” and “funny,” a somewhat coarse rhyme more reminiscent of a grade school exercise than the work of a mature poet. He also makes the partial rhyme of “around” and “down.” Other than that, the stanza almost reads like prose. Although his verse is somewhat more immature than S’s, his content is far more subtle and complex. E’s verse is reminiscent of S, a fact that supports the thesis that E is aware of S and is consciously imitating his style. However, he more frequently uses perfect rhymes and seems to be less comfortable with long stretches of syllables than S. Here is a typical example: “I’m sorry, there must be a mix-up— / You want me to fix up lyrics while the President gets his dick sucked?” Here, E rhymes “mix up” with “fix up,” and then ends with an S-style flourish, “dick sucked.” Thematic Elements Although many proponents of the single-author hypothesis explain the differences in names as depicting three different aspects of one author, the differences in thematic material across the three sources begin to make this hypothesis increasingly tenuous. Each of the three sources possesses a unique Weltanschauung. Although it is conceivable that one author could simultaneously maintain and develop three such opposed views, the best argument that the three worldviews are mutually exclusive is the extent to which E (along with, perhaps, some redactive editing) argues vehemently for a position diametrically opposed to the worldview of S. S displays all the classic symptoms of psychosis, particularly obsessive fantasies of violence and sex and an apparent inability to distinguish those fantasies from reality. The three main themes that S explores are (1) violent images, often with Oedipal overtones; (2) antinomian behavior; and (3) an insistence that he is entirely serious. In the experimentally syncretic intergeneric narrative poem “Kill You,” he rhetorically demands, “Now he’s raping his mother, / Abusing a whore, snorting coke / And we gave him a Rolling Stone cover?” (Kill You). The repressed Oedipal desire erupts in violent fantasy distanced by attribution; the gratuitous drug use further surrounds this episode with a generalized flaunting of normative standards of behavior. S often laments that the reader may think he is playing with psychotic themes merely as a poetic device, as in the extant

text of “Who Knew”: “I’m in the back seat of your truck with duck tape stretched out. / Ducked the fuck way down, / Waiting to jump straight out, / Put it over your mouth, / And grab you by the face— what now?” (vv. 5-10) E addresses many of the same themes as S (as well as M), such as relationships and violence, but within the context of his own highly individuated, controlled Weltanschauung. E’s main goal is, in fact, to imply that he himself is the author of the S source and that he is simply a poet, not a psychopath. This assertion has led many scholars to hypothesize that in addition to producing his own works, E is also the redactor of the entire canon. E attempts to reduce the number of textual inconsistencies between S and M in order to strengthen the sense that the canon is the work of a single author. The thematic differences between the S and E sources should begin to convince the reader that there are at least two authors at work here. What begins to make the case for the multi-author hypothesis more compelling is the extent to which the naming hypothesis correlates with the thematic content. Thus, having already demonstrated the superior plausibility of a two-author hypothesis, in which the two authors are separated temporally, we add the intratextual assertion, never convincingly disproved, of a third author roughly contemporary with S. Conclusion The use of different names by the protagonist throughout the canon, the linguistic and stylistic differences, the thematic differences, and the conflicting parallel narratives—to be detailed in a future publication—within the Eminemic canon all provide support for the multi-author hypothesis. The reflective, honest reader must ask himself: Which is more likely: that a single author wrote all of these thematically, stylistically and narratively diverse poems, or that over time, a number of different authors, each writing within his particular historical context, each with his own concerns and worldview wrote different collections of poetry? Over perhaps hundreds of years, these texts were redacted, edited, and finally codified into one accepted canon of texts. Given the preponderance of evidence, the answer is clear: hewing to an outdated, non-empirical and unfalsifiable singleauthor hypothesis grows continually more irrational as the literary and archeological evidence mounts. —Jonah Hassenfeld is an educator and Eminem enthusiast.

Aubergine POETRY

A N D R E W N U N N E L LY

From beyond the barbed wire fence property line I watched the workers in the eggplant field The Mexican czars of the North with worn fingertips And prepaid phone cards. Hopelessness is a lung Condition suffered from spending hours in a phone booth Just off Highway One. The eggplants are purple, But that purple seems to have nothing of dancing Alma's evening skies Purple and becoming more so. These men are not colorblind Like the mourner. The sky is blue during the day and only darker blue As their shifts come to a close. Azul is azul and it has nothing To do with purple same as a poor old man And a five-day workweek without gloves. From between the rusted wires, They handle the amassed Fabergé delicately as paper dolls Made by careful ladies in waiting. These aren’t even their orders, But they fear for a crack, the inside a geode of all thirsting. In Pescadero, there is a taqueria in a gas station And in it, I sat among the dead czars of the Pacific While they spoke about alcohol and sea breeze And girls just old enough to fuck. Between rows of an old person’s favorite dish, dear babu ganoush The father of coquetry, Along the buffet line, catching senior eyes. He dines with them In the years before they die because they love what’s inside Both dinner and seed. Yet some still sit unripe Like the boy somewhere south of San Jose Who makes his collection in the chicken coop And receives a shell-white envelope From his bear flag comrade each month. He stays out of the sun while tiptoeing In the presence of hens and the yolk in his hands Is thankfully obscured. Once he heard a glass break As he passed the bar, and all the men in turn Began to shout and sing. I watched the moon emerge from the field Like a table set and ready for breaking The deep sunset over white porcelain plates Dragging forks and the sound of a wounded stray cat Who wanders the plants and footprints Of men who are between wine and women Searching for mice, weeping for companionship, Testing the bruised skin with claws. —Andrew Nunnelly is an Arts columnist for The Crimson. You can read more of his poetry at bwass.blogspot.com.

(FOAMY, cont. from page 13) envelopes but had decided against it. What if people were afraid dirty needles or Anthrax was inside and reported the letters instead of reading them and then the T would be shut down when the Hazmat team was called and everyone would be late and inconvenienced and it would cost the State thousands of dollars? Maybe my good intentions didn’t matter and I would go to jail anyhow. And then he replied: It said, “Hi There” on the outside, then leads in with “I thought you might read this, In fact, I hoped you would...” Unfortunately, just barely legible initials, no contact info. Interesting and ﬂattering note, which is why I thought MAYBE this person would post or possibly look for a reaction online. What did your boy look like?

So it wasn’t a sting. Or anything more than a cruel coincidence. But I’d been bested by this goddamn competing letter writer. And she didn’t even have to sink to my level of explicit Missed Connection solicitation. People were seeking her out. But never mind—it didn’t matter whether this person had read and responded to my lovely poem or any other anonymous letter to the collective You. My theory had been supported by the mere act of this response. The guy who was not my Green Line guy wanted his intangible core to be shaken. He’d found what he perceived to be a compatible soul. I pressed for conﬁrmation. I wrote back: The look of the guy on the Green Line didn’t really matter—there was nothing particular about the man himself that appealed to me. But there’s something about the eye contact… what do you suppose it is?

He responded. Very quickly: Well, I deﬁnitely have found ‘eye fucking’ to be pretty fun as of late. In the gym, just randomly in public, etc. Doesn’t have to be a long look, but I think both people can get a lot of mileage out of it.

I didn’t write back. Get a lot of ‘mileage’ out of it? This unexpected turn toward mechanical smut was a harsh one. A few days after this I noticed “Foamy Gold” was no longer written on our soap dispenser. It had been replaced by a container with a label that read “Choice System Gold,” a name as antiseptic as its contents. Now “Gold” was a lie— it looked light brown to me. I’d been warned about this sort of thing. Robert Frost had told me ﬁrst, and then Ponyboy from The Outsiders had said the same. Nothing gold can stay, but I looked for gold anyhow, unable to reconcile the proportions of Intimacy and Proximity necessary to mix and create the shock of Electric Yellow, like the girl in the suspenders and short shorts. Electric Yellow is the girl, her movements, the intimacy the boy on the train felt, but Electric Yellow is eye-fucking too. Eye-fucking sounds as

sad and base as Choice System Gold. But it’s more real than alchemy. Outside of Durham, North Carolina, there is a music theater collective called Rhymes with Opera. They’ve disavowed extravagant sets and costumes, favoring simpler things, small-scale performances in parks and cafes. One of their pieces is called “Missed Connections.” I contacted Ruby Fulton, the co-artistic director of the group, so that I might hear a recording. They didn’t have one. She tried to explain it to me: We made a quick libretto in each city we played, compiling entries from the past few days in that particular city. Three singers sat out scattered in the audience and read the text from two laptop computers and an iPhone. George and I played violin and accordion quietly in the background, from the stage. We experimented with having the audience snap their ﬁngers, starting at any speed and then snapping faster if they heard an entry which reminded them of someone they knew. Any time the word “miss” or “missed” was said, the snapping and the music suddenly stopped so it was only a lonely single voice at that moment, until the next entry began.

The goal, Ruby said, was to explore the bizarre combination of public and private. But in only listening to the description, it was hard for me to feel what the audience felt as they snapped their fingers, or what Ruby and her fellow performers felt as they acted and sang, or what I would have felt were I present. Ruby couldn’t tell me—she has no access to my personal relationship with the experience of sound, just as a Missed Connections poster can never know if the girl sitting across from him was looking back into his eyes and not at the reflection of the glass behind him. But then, maybe just the delusion that someone looked at him, even briefly, is enough. Maybe for the people who post, there doesn’t have to be the promise of Something Shared behind another’s eyes for those eyes to be satisfying. Proximity, in physical nearness or through hurried replies to an email chain, is not sufficient to predict the wants of another person. Proximity is not intimacy, nor does it produce intimacy. There is a third, a tie that binds the other two. And creating this third component is about as easy as picking out a person you see for thirty seconds from the corner of your eye who may or may not have looked at you askance, writing an open letter to the city of Boston, and finding this person again. So don’t disparage the devotees of Missed Connections. Sorry for staring. —Kayla Hammond is a staff writer. She is currently on leave from Harvard to work as a corporate research intern at The Atlantic.

Betrachtung T R A N S L AT I O N

FRANZ KAFKA

ANTON CHAEVITCH

Today Franz Kafka's later pieces eclipse his early work; when this early work first appeared in print, many readers thought Kafka was a pseudonym of the Swiss author Robert Walser. Betrachtung, first published in 1912, did share some qualities with Walser's writings: its texts are short, often whimsical and playful, and contain minute, seemingly irrelevant observations. As I was translating Betrachtung, however, I came to realize that it shows characteristics quite distinct from those found in either the later pieces or Walser's work. Betrachtung is experimental, written in an often awkward German I have come to characterize as “thought.” It is difficult to read, and is very much concerned with the relationship between the outer and the inner worlds. In my translation, I have sought to preserve these distinctive traits rather than to “improve” the text—where the German was awkward or unclear, I have tried to produce an equally awkward or unclear English, though without sacrificing clarity.

The Outing into the Mountains

Der Ausﬂug ins Gebirge

“I don’t know,” I shouted without sound, “I just don't know. If nobody comes, well, then nobody comes. I have done nobody any evil, nobody has done me any evil, but nobody wants to help me. Nobody at all. But that can't be how it is. Only that nobody helps me—, else nobody at all would be pretty. I would very much like to—whyever not—go on an outing with a party of Nobody at all. Naturally into the mountains, wherever else? How these Nobody press together, these many arms extended sideways and entangled, these many feet, separated by tiny steps. Needless to say, all are in evening dress. We go along lala, the wind drives through the gaps, which we and our limbs leave open. The throats become free in the mountains! It is a miracle, that we're not singing.”

"Ich weiß nicht", rief ich ohne Klang, "ich weiß ja nicht. Wenn niemand kommt, dann kommt eben niemand. Ich habe niemandem etwas Böses getan, niemand hat mir etwas Böses getan, niemand aber will mir helfen. Lauter niemand. Aber so ist es doch nicht. Nur daß mir niemand hilft — , sonst wäre lauter niemand hübsch. Ich würde ganz gern — warum denn nicht — einen Ausﬂug mit einer Gesellschaft von lauter Niemand machen. Natürlich ins Gebirge, wohin denn sonst? Wie sich diese Niemand aneinander drängen, diese vielen quer gestreckten und eingehängten Arme, diese vielen Füße, durch winzige Schritte getrennt! Versteht sich, daß alle in Frack sind. Wir gehen so lala, der Wind fährt durch die Lücken, die wir und unsere Gliedmaßen oﬀen lassen. Die Hälse werden im Gebirge frei! Es ist ein Wunder, daß wir nicht singen."

The Passers-by

Die Vorüberlaufenden

When one strolls through a street at night and a man, already visible from afar—for the street before us slopes up and there is a full moon—runs towards us, then we won't grab hold of him, even if he is weak and ragged, even when someone is running behind him and shouting, but we will let him run on. For it's night, and we can't do anything about it, that the street rises in front of us in the full moon, and what's more, perhaps these two have staged the chase for their own amusement, perhaps both are chasing a third, perhaps the first is pursued though innocent, perhaps the second wants to commit murder, and we will become party to the murder, perhaps the two know nothing of each other, and each is being run into his bed on his own accord, perhaps they are sleep-walkers, perhaps the first one has weapons. And finally, aren't we allowed to be tired, haven't we drunk so much wine? We are glad, that we don't see the second either anymore.

Wenn man in der Nacht durch eine Gasse spazieren geht, und ein Mann, von weitem schon sichtbar — denn die Gasse vor uns steigt an und es ist Vollmond — uns entgegenläuft, so werden wir ihn nicht anpacken, selbst wenn er schwach und zerlumpt ist, selbst wenn jemand hinter ihm läuft und schreit, sondern wir werden ihn weiter laufen lassen. Denn es ist Nacht, und wir können nicht dafür, daß die Gasse im Vollmond vor uns aufsteigt, und überdies, vielleicht haben diese zwei die Hetze zu ihrer Unterhaltung veranstaltet, vielleicht verfolgen beide einen dritten, vielleicht wird der erste unschuldig verfolgt, vielleicht will der zweite morden, und wir würden Mitschuldige des Mordes, vielleicht wissen die zwei nichts von einander, und es läuft nur jeder auf eigene Verantwortung in sein Bett, vielleicht sind es Nachtwandler, vielleicht hat der erste Waﬀen. Und endlich, dürfen wir nicht müde sein, haben wir nicht soviel Wein getrunken? Wir sind froh, daß wir auch den zweiten nicht mehr sehn.

—Anton Chaevitch is currently translating Goethe’s Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke as his senior thesis in Germanic Languages and Literature.

Naked A n g el Qichen Zhang digital photograph

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