“It depends on how you describe blue� 15 The race to breed blue roses
Refocusing the Lens 29 Etiquette and auto-rickshaw accidents in rural India
Business is Good 20 The perils of seduction by British accent
Table of Contents | Volume 7, Issue 2 5
Black Bush / Black Epaulet
22
We Live Here
6
The Life Archival
25
Notes Towards a Sijo
7
The W hittler
27
Untitled
8
W ho
29
Refocusing the Lens
9
Pow-Pow Barbie
.
Sarah Christian Sculpture
Curating our digital museums Sarah Zhang . Commentary Leah Schecter . Fiction
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10 Running Nowhere
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12 In the Land of the Thunder Dragon A meditation on place names Talia Lavin Reflections
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14 Herd / Nests
Riva Nathans . Digital Photography
15 “It depends on how you describe blue” One company’s quest for the Holy Grail of horticulture Elise Liu Reporting
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19 Salt Peter
Kayla Escobedo . Painting
20 Business Is Good
Matt Grzecki . Fiction
Cover image: Walking Map: Italy; Julia Rooney
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Scott Roben Painting Cross-cultural empathy on the world stage Marena Lin Dispatch
Bus Ride
33
Atop the Gorges at Gauley Bridge
.
Sarah Christian Sculpture
. Poetry
31
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Julie Wright Painting
.
Stephanie Wang Poetry
11 Black Glove
Anonymous
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Justin Wymer Poetry Memories of my ‘90s childhood sex education Julia Winn . From the Notebooks
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Meredith Sheldon Photography
Justin Wymer Poetry
35
A Sanguine Affair
37
Great Plains
38
Walking Map: Italy
39
1770
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Dwight Livingstone Curtis Fiction
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Andrew Nunnelly Poetry
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Julia Rooney Mixed Media A four-voice counterpoint Cassie Rasmussen Commentary
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41
The Coffee Revolution
43
Baby Food
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Qichen Zhang Fiction
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Intiya Isaza-Figueroa Drawing
Table of Contents | Tuesday Magazine | 3
www.tuesdaymagazine.org
Staff Abigail Lind, President Denise Xu, President Julia Rooney, Managing Editor Editorial Board Talia Lavin, Editor-in-Chief Spencer Lenfield, Editor-in-Chief Meghan Houser Jane Jiang Candice Kountz B. R. Lind Elise Liu Robert Niles Junyao Peng Stephanie M. Wang Art Board Colin Teo, Director Jia Jennifer Ding Marisa Beckley Intiya Isaza-Figueroa Katerina Mantzavinou Sasha Mironov Julia Rooney Julie Wright Emily Xie
Staff Writers Julia Winn, Director Justin Wymer, Director Katie Banks Louis Evans Julie Hansbrough Kayla Hammond Alice Li Cassie Rasmussen Grace Ryan Leah Schecter Sarah Zhang Design Board Yaa Bofah, Director Shirley Zhou, Director Danielle Kim Abigail Lind Social Chairs Jia Jennifer Ding Julie Wright
Business Board Synne D. Chapman, Director B.R. Lind, Director Denise Xu
Zip ties, medicine bottle, spray paint 3” x 8” x 1”
Staff Illustrators Kayla Escobedo Lily Fang Intiya Isaza-Figueroa Julia Rooney Julie Wright With Special Thanks To: Wenyi Cai Joshua Haas The Office of the Arts at Harvard The Undergraduate Council John and Marian Bleeke Ilene Levenson Arcady Mushegian Andrea Jonas Ska Konda
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. Visit tuesdaymagazine.org for more information. 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. 4 | Staff and Contributors | Tuesday Magazine
Black Bush Sarah Christian
Black Epaulet Sarah Christian
Glue bottle, foam, thread, seed pod, spray paint 3” x 8” x 1” Black Bush / Black Epaulet | Sarah Christian | Tuesday Magazine | 5
The Life Archival
Curating our digital museums COMMENTARY | SARAH ZHANG Buckminster Fuller—visionary, futurist, owner of twenty-eight patents (including the geodesic dome)—was also an obsessive archivist. From 1917 until his death in 1983, Fuller documented every fifteen minutes of his life in the Dymaxion Chronofile, which contained copies of all his correspondence as well as newspaper clippings, business cards, sketches, and even dry-cleaning bills. The complete collection, now at Stanford
future, technology has advanced to the point where infinite resources can be devoted to understanding the past: “Literature tells us the way people thought they were and wanted to be seen; but these random, personal, undeliberated traces of lives show us the way they really were. Evidence, not eloquence, is what we need to understand our origins.” For Kirsch, these “traces” are blogs and Facebook
Bowl. Competition for flashiness among Super Bowl ads is as intense as the competition between the football teams playing the Super Bowl, but Google went for something simple. A string of search terms appears on the familiar minimalistic Google page: “study abroad paris,” “how to impress a french girl,” “jobs in paris,” and finally “how to assemble a crib.” In essence, a love story unfolds across these individually meaningless search terms.
“ Evidence , not eloquence , is what we need to understand our origins . ” University, takes up 270 feet of shelf space. Ever the technology enthusiast, Fuller would have been delighted by the archival possibilities of the digital age. In fact, Fuller’s feat would not seem so impressive today, when anyone can fire off a tweet at fifteen-minute intervals and email correspondence is saved automatically and indefinitely on Google’s servers. With the explosion of digital memory capacity, to save rather than to delete is the default, not the exception. Digital bits, though not physically tangible, have become more enduring than pieces of paper. Even without active archiving, we each accumulate a massive dossier on our digital lives through emails, blogs, text messages, and the like. Now that this archive exists, what is its point? Who, if anyone, cares to wade through it? Critic and poet Adam Kirsch imagines a distant future when archeology is a matter of digital excavation. In this
profiles, but he mischaracterizes them here. Although more organic than the process of publishing literature, the creation of blogs and Facebook profiles is hardly “undeliberated,” and to claim them to be pure in expression would be naïve. Any content created for the public eye necessarily reflects how the creator wants to be seen. To see people as they really were, we have to look elsewhere. True privacy on the Internet exists only between man and machine. The search engine, with its precisely-timed blinking cursor, is an impersonal text box where one can pour the deepest desires and most embarrassing questions. (Unsurprisingly, pornography accounts for a quarter of search queries.) After all, what we search for is what we want, and what we want tells us something about ourselves. The most potent expression of this idea comes from, of all places, an advertisement. Google debuted its first television ad during the 2010 Super
6 | The Life Archival | Sarah Zhang | Tuesday Magazine
This digital ephemera, when properly curated, can tell a meaningful story. Curation is the key to unlocking the significance in even the most “undeliberated” data. The entire digital archive, growing at a frightening rate with every email, search query, and blog post, only makes sense when curated. An unassembled mass is as useful as nothing at all, and even a completely searchable archive lacks a natural entry point. Every one of us leaves behind piles of digital debris with each keystroke. So who is there to curate the mess? It seems all too conceivable that we will soon be poring over the collected emails and tweets of eminent figures, but just as there are thousands of books sitting forgotten in library basements, most digital debris will remain unmined. Kirsch optimistically postulates a far-off artificial intelligence to make sense of it all; Google, for its part, has its marketing department. Neither of these are real options.
For Fuller, the Chronofile was not just an archive; it was an extension of his biological memory. When looking for a fact—a person’s name or the price he paid for a car—he could intuit where to find it among the dozens of volumes, and his “life and experiences are brought into focus by using the Chronofile.” Curation and memory are thus intertwined. Fuller was the curator of his own archive. While this system worked for Fuller himself, the Chronofile was only indexed in his mind. After his death, the Chronofile became nothing more than a massive collection of papers—organized chronologically, granted, but the needles stitching together narrative and thematic threads are lost in the haystack. Crossreferencing the Chronofile is a still an ongoing endeavor for the Buckminster Fuller Institute at Stanford today. Fuller’s achievements ensure that an institute will devote resources to cataloguing his papers. Most of the digital debris that the rest of us leave behind will evince no such interest. Fuller had it half-right: curating the personal archive is a means of understanding ourselvess. But it is also a means of having others understand us. The fruits of curation should culminate in presentation. A pile of debris is uninteresting, but when carefully assembled, the insights gleaned from that process can engage an audience.
For the past six years, graphic designer Nicholas Felton has done just that with his Annual Felton Reports, each a beautifully designed infographic showcase of his life over a year. The things presented in his reports can best be described as minutiae: types of beers consumed, mode and duration of transportation, number of digital and analog photographs taken, etc. Felton’s reports are an Internet sensation, and his claim to fame as a designer. He sells copies through his website, not only to friends, who would naturally be interested in his life, but also to strangers. It is both the data and the presentation that make the Annual Felton Report so compelling. Aesthetically, they are works of art but there remains a fascination with details of daily life. Since the success of his reports, Felton has created Daytum.com, a website where users input such data from their lives. Infographics in the Felton style are automatically generated, and users can share them with friends. In an interview about his website, Felton says, “I can imagine how counting fireflies over the summer would make a poetic record of the way the summer was spent for an individual, but if 100 or 1,000 people are doing the same thing, does it start to tell an aggregate story that speaks more to global warming or habitat loss?” Felton identifies
why collecting and sifting through this data is worthwhile: there is an individual narrative to be found, and these individual narratives add up to a collective one. It would be a shame to allow such signals to drown in the noise. Curation tunes us into the right wavelengths. The writing of autobiography, which relies on letters and documents, has long had this kind of curatorial role. In Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov recounts two intertwined stories: a Russian general showing the young Nabokov a match trick, and years later, Nabokov’s father asking a peasant for a light while sneaking across the Russian border. The peasant lights a match, and Nabokov’s father recognizes him as the same general. “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life,” writes Nabokov, “should be the true purpose of autobiography.” Autobiographies written in the future will surely sift through the digital debris. With a digital memory of near infinite capacity today, it becomes essential to find the matches and generals that make up the designs of our own lives. The fear is not that we will forget, but that there will be so much to remember that we won’t be able to make sense of it. —Sarah Zhang is a 2010-11 Ledecky Fellow for Harvard Magazine and a Tuesday staff writer.
weren’t moving at all. My father stood solemnly on the deck with his eyes closed. I closed mine, too, and heard the muffled tickle of the ocean against the boat. Then, as the clouds began to dissipate and the world reappeared, I felt taller, lighter. Blue prairie stretched out in all directions, and above my head, the mast pierced the sky, a single steeple pointing to the sun. My father likes this story. He always ends it by telling how he watched my
expression as the fog lifted, and laughed, saying, “Juan, this is just a boat. We’re here to catch fish.” As the spray from the breaking waves sprinkled over my face, though, I imagined the icy flecks of water soaking through my skin and into my bloodstream. Today, on my father’s fishing boat, molded by his own thickly veined hands, the brush-stroke clouds and the usual mist speckling my cheeks are absent. I can’t feel them like I did nine
The Whittler FICTION | LEAH SCHECTER I was eight years old when my father finally let me on his fishing boat for the first time. I remember waving goodbye to the swarthy fisherman who sat on the docks sorting nets and ropes, his wide silhouette disappearing in the folds of the low morning clouds. Soft wisps of white shrouded everything, curling around the other boats in the harbor like whispers of snakes lovingly intertwined. The whispers encircled us, too, and in the ring of white it seemed like we
The Whittler | Leah Schecter | Tuesday Magazine | 7
years ago. A fish head rolls over my foot, the purple feather gills hardening. The rigging screams, and a rumbling voice summons me to throw in the nets. Fine grains of sawdust fill the tiny spaces underneath my fingernails. They pack in so tightly that my nails bend away from the skin, almost ready to snap off. I think about diving into the cold water and swimming until they all dissolve. Soon there is a break in the schools. The water that had bulged with the masses of silver bodies darkens and empties. My father begins to prepare more lines and nets, but I sprawl out on the deck and pull a tiny wooden figurine from my pocket. I’ve been working on her for a few days, and she really is as beautiful as I imagine she’d be running across the Serengeti. Her legs are thinner than our thinnest rope, but the wood is strong and durable. I shape her body now, shaving thin strips of wood off layer by layer. More sawdust packs under my fingernails. My father comes up behind me, and I quickly slip my knife and the gazelle into my pocket. His face is like granite as he summons me back to work. Hours of salt and wet rope gnaw my skin; hours of sweat and the smell of fish infuse my shirt. When we return to the harbor, the sky behind us is dripping pink and orange. We talk with some other fishermen before heading home, and my father discusses the tides, the weather, and the movements of the fish. He walks with a slight lift in his step, only the balls of his feet touching the ground. The rest of him belongs to the sea. I know he’ll stay excited and anxious until tomorrow, when we slither out into the white mist of curling snakes and splash, once again, into the water. I work more on the gazelle after dinner. The swirling grains of wood are fingerprints on her flank, and I trace the subtle contours for a few moments. I finish carving sooner than I thought I would, and I place her carefully on the shelf by my bed. She is frozen, midleap, next to a swan, horse, eagle, and elephant. I can almost feel the wind rushing past her. The only grey thought that slinks into my mind as I smile back
is that tomorrow I won’t have anything to focus on besides fish. Sometime in the night, I wake suddenly. Bewildered, I see a shadow next to my bed blocking out the moonlight. My throat convulses as the shadow turns slightly. Yellow light washes over my father’s face. I relax for a moment, but just for a moment; while the face glowing above me is his face, it’s a face I’ve never seen. He is staring at my wooden animals, unaware that I am awake, and his eyes are glistening. The corners of his mouth lift upward, and he looks like he’s listening to a faraway song, or to the memory of a song. His thin body sways forward, his left hand reaching up, and for a moment I think he’s going to fall. I must have made a noise, because he looks straight into my open eyes. His expression is that of someone caught; I feel like I’m intruding, and not the other way around. No words come. He turns and walks quickly out of my room. “I know that look,” my father says the next morning. We are on the boat again, and those are the first words he has said to me. I glance over my shoulder at him. I see my own face in thirty years’ time. He has kind brown eyes in a face eroded by the wind and sun. “Oh, yeah?” I laugh, confused. “It’s my I’m-going-to-catch-a-bigger-fishthan-you look.” “Yes,” he says simply, quietly. I grip the railing tightly. “Let’s take a break,” he suggests, pulling his lines in. I watch him warily as he springs to his feet, more agile than any worn, stone man. I can’t connect this new man to the fisherman with whom I spend every day. He has that laughing crease near his eyes, and I wonder again what this is about. As if I’d asked him, he nods at me, and I stare at him in amazement as he climbs over the railing and flings himself into the sky. I run to the starboard side, and he’s grinning like a boy, bobbing in the water, arms windmilling to keep him afloat. I hear two sounds, like yells, but less controlled—shorter and ecstatic. We’re both laughing. Before I know
8 | The Whittler | Leah Schecter | Tuesday Magazine
it, I’m climbing the rail too, and then flying, and then shocked from the water. The salt pricks my eyes in a good way, and I’m breathing deeply breathing in sharply and splashing. The current pulls at my legs, but I’m stronger, and I swim out away from the boat before circling to join my father. I can’t see the bottom, and; my feet dangle in the ocean. I let out a howl. I feel the sawdust lift out from under my nails. —Leah Schecter is a staff writer.
Who
JUSTIN WYMER and when I asked for the waking to stop, a frost gauzed over every nerve that could answer, who, a slit of clear was barely scraped from the window-ice, small rune, chipped away by the beak of some liquid breathing god, whose seedblood-soaked tongue licked visible oil palimpsests, thumbprints on glass, floes ripped, bobbined to red threads, new wet, in chest, who, I can never codify, cut, cull or love appropriately, what lashes over me, clotlight staining, knifing through eyelid, constant as the sinuous wet contortions of your sleeping anatomy, who, gone still on French leave, dunes dry to ruins, Colombian, Chinese, to re-summon your jasper calves I’ve touched is like excavating a fear, described once under hypnosis, the sudden fury of ten proud horses, the cruel tongue-prick of juniper — Justin Wymer is co-director of staff writers.
Pow-Pow Barbie
Memories of my ‘90s childhood sex education FROM THE NOTEBOOKS | JULIA WINN When I was three and a half years old, my parents informed me that in a few months I would no longer be an only child. They took me to childbirth education class for kids, where a kindly earth mother told us how wonderful it would be to get a little brother or sister while our parents watched approvingly. At the end of the class, we were each given a large baby doll and shown the proper way to cradle it. The doll had hardly been in my arms a few seconds when, overcome with revulsion, I threw it on the ground and stamped its head with my foot as hard as I could. After my new baby sister, Lydia, was brought home, I was not permitted to touch her, no matter how many times I asked. But I never hated my sister. It was dolls that repulsed me. At four, my best friend Jacob had several dolls, but if I came into contact with one, I would throw it across the room immediately, much to Jacob’s confusion. When given a doll as a gift, it was exchanged the next day at Toys “R” Us for an art kit or a gumball machine. When cast as Mary in the church production of the nativity scene, I refused to touch or even be within five feet of the baby Jesus. When I was five, some relative sent me a Barbie doll for Christmas. This was different. Instead of a lumpy ball for a head, this doll had elegantly defined features with purple eyelids and breasts. My parents put the doll in the pile that needed to be exchanged, but when no one was looking, I grabbed the unopened box, took it into my room, and opened it. Barbie’s sexy clothes could come off, be put back on, and promptly be taken off once more. I was intrigued. My sister Lydia received her first Barbie one year later. Not sure what to do with it, she tried pointing it at people and shouting, “Pow pow Barbie.” Guns were a no-no in my house, and even imaginary violence was frowned upon. My mother forbade us from using our Barbie dolls as pretend guns. Naturally, I encouraged Lydia to keep it up.
When I was six, I was introduced to cable television, and subsequently the “Cut ‘N Style Barbie.” The commercial showed the multi-racial little girls gradually cutting off all of Barbie’s hair until she had the equivalent of a crew cut. While the voice sang, “You can cut and style it, over and over. Long hair like magic, over and over,” the hair sparkled, and an instant later was as long as if it had never been cut. I was less impressed by the opportunity to cut and style a doll’s hair than I was intrigued by the magic that would make hair grow long in mere seconds. I imagined all the things I could do with this newfound power. Determined to see this magic happen in my living room, I diligently
same year I discovered the my-size Barbie Car. After seeing it on the shelf of Toys “R” Us, I could think of little else. All day at kindergarten, I daydreamed about how I would make my escape, zipping down the road like a grown-up headed to a pink hotel with turquoise walls as my parents begged me not to go. I asked Santa for a pink one but he made no promises. Undeterred by the foot-long “Barbie Glam Convertible Car” I found under the tree, I resolved to force myself to dream about driving one every night henceforth so as to enjoy the experience in my imagination. My recitation of the words “Barbie Car, Barbie Car, Barbie Car” before falling asleep failed to make
“ Cut ‘N Style Barbie would the first of many Barbies to lose her head . ”
be
saved my two dollar per week allowance for five weeks, until “Cut ‘N Style Barbie” was mine. Expecting a magic wand, I was surprised to find a foot long hunk of Barbie hair. Nevertheless, I avidly cut off all of Barbie’s hair and incanted the lines of the commercial. After several varied attempts, my crying attracted the attention of my parents, who gently explained that “long hair like magic” meant Velcro on the back of Barbie’s head. This disappointed me even more than the absence of a shower of foam berries after taking a bite of Berry Berry Kix. Cut ‘N Style Barbie would be the first of many Barbies to lose her head. We buried her in the back yard next to our dead cat. Cut ‘N Style Barbie was not the last advertisement to catch my attention. That
this happen, although they did succeed in aggravating three year old Lydia sleeping the bunk bed below me. One night my wish did come true, except that my “dream car” was equipped with an en suite toilet as well as a miniature version for the forty or so stuffed bears that were along for the ride. As our collection of Barbies grew, so did the intensity of our games. The addition of a Ken doll changed everything, as all the women now had to compete for the one man. Our Barbies developed a violent streak, and our collection was divided into villains and heroines. I instructed darkhaired Lydia to bite off the hands of the brunette Barbies, in order to mark them as villains who would then antagonize the blonde heroines more closely resembling
Pow-Pow Barbie | Julia Winn | Tuesday Magazine | 9
myself. Several years later, she asked if I knew how her Aqua Barbie lost her hand. I told her that I couldn’t remember. There was often trouble in the paradise of Barbie and Ken’s romance. Barbie disappointed Ken the day after their marriage in her refusal to wear sexy lingerie. Every time they passed by Victoria’s Secret, he would offer to buy her a sexy present only to be reviled as a “Terrible pervert!” and that he mustn’t say such things in front of the imaginary children. In art class, I made small ceramic plates (after finishing my clay dinosaur) that Barbie could then throw at Ken during their innumerable marital fights. Only one of our many Kens managed to keep his neck whole throughout his life and was permanently christened “The Ken Without a Broken Neck.” However, domestic scenes of tax arguments grew stale when Lydia and I learned about the mechanics of sex. Our mother was very straightforward in her description of the process. But it was Barbie and Ken who taught us about sexuality. When Barbie was adorned in one particular pink and gold dress, we knew just how badly Ken wanted her. Our family discussions about sex were so frank and without taboo that some social cues did not come naturally to us. We were very confused when our mother told us that the airplane was not an appropriate place to shout, “She’s sooooo irresistible,” nor was it a good place for naked Barbie and Ken thrashing. To prevent another scene, she temporarily confiscated our Barbies before visiting our seventy-one year old grandmother. The discovery of our grandmother’s collection of harlequin romances from the 1970s kept us occupied during the trip and inspired many new storylines for our Barbies to reenact. At thirteen, I could no longer publicly admit to playing with Barbies. While I may have “given” my Barbies to Lydia, I still could be found “watching” her Barbie plays continually, giving her extensive directions on what the plot should be. It came to Lydia’s attention after seven years of sharing Barbies that I had made it a habit to suck on Barbie shoes. We could never find two of a kind, and the shape fit so comfortably in my mouth
that I never thought of them as good for anything else. Lydia was appalled by my behavior and blamed me for the absence of matching shoes. She informed me that I was no longer permitted to “assist” her in the Barbie storylines. I proceeded to object, but she pointed out that the Barbies were now her property. When she wasn’t looking, I pocketed four highheeled shoes. They vanished from my desk the next day and were found in the back of the piano (our new cat’s favorite hiding place) one year later, along with a dozen other tiny shoes.
10 | Running Nowhere | Stephanie Wang | Tuesday Magazine
The day came when even Lydia would abandon her Barbie games in favor of real boys and evening gowns she could fit into herself. Our favorite surviving dolls, who, coincidentally, were all blonde, and “The Ken Without a Broken Neck” rest peacefully in an Adidas box at the bottom of my closet until the day when our children will be old enough to discover the keys to their own innocent childhood imaginations. —Julia Winn is co-director of staff writers.
Running Nowhere STEPHANIE WANG
Flat-colored gecko, sun-bathed mossy back, shovel nose, one eye gleaming, the other half-asleep and twitching behind damp eucalyptus leaves. Tail curls into the corner of the cell, whipping green to glass. Twitching, the runners race on treadmills to the clouds, a whirring, gasping rush, sabotaged air streaming. Their backs are leaking, nostrils bloom and collapse, one eye is glazed, the other, rolled toward the clock. The effort and the heat foam, gurgling over reddened cheeks and spinning strips of rubber. So, tap, the crush of green and smooth, shrill translucence, mime cages with real glass, the other side, untouched snow, white even in shadow. Leaping off the supply of sweat-heavy air, like stepping from Earth’s atmosphere to watch far planets swim in thick jelly, large marbles in a deliciously silent jar, sealed tight, not one breath to move the space, nothing to break it. —Stephanie Wang is an associate editor.
B l a c k G l o v e Sarah Christian Leather glove, p a p e r, r o p e , p u s h pin, plastic packaging, lily stamen 4” x 8” x 2”
For the past several months I've been obsessed with Piero di Cosimo's painting
"Death of Procris." The work has a stillness that just mutes a narrative I find triumphant, pathetic and sadly funny all at once. A pretty maiden lies dead, arms contorted and squished beneath her, blood squirting from the neck, while a half-man figure kneels over her. A big brown dog looks on. All these elements together lend the painting a sad morbidity that is funny to us today with its feebly squirting blood and house pet mixed in. I guess I try to channel the tone of this work in my smaller sculptures, while using organic and man made materials. The epaulet, for example, and the bush, stand seriously, triumphantly, forcefully with their protruding plastic branches or head and their graphic black silhouette.. And yet they're stunted at their farthest reaches as they end in organic objects, like the wilting berries or the split pod. Their diminutive size and faltering appendages deflate them, turn them pathetic. I hope we pity them a little and laugh, too, at their funny statures, their halted attempts at strength and stability. They're just little bits of plastic, plant and paint after all. Black Glove | Sarah Christian | Tuesday Magazine | 11
A meditation on place names REFLECTIONS | TALIA LAVIN Remember when academic disciplines were divided into five categories: English, science, math, social studies, and foreign language? (Foreign Language was one category, no matter what the foreign language.) This may have been roughly the same period in which members of the opposite sex were smelly, distasteful bundles of limbs, to be shunned on the playground if acknowledged at all. Since then, academics (like everything else) have become a lot more complicated. Each day new disciplines appear, like fresh-faced, hunky cashiers at the grocery store: first Social Studies split off into History and Government and Economics, then Math spawned Algebra and Calculus and God knows what else… and then you got to college. Suddenly, academic disciplines were as plentiful as cuties to covertly covet at the library. I saw you… limniology, the study of inland waters, lookin’ fresh. I saw you… memetics, the study of selfreplicating units of culture… and did I mention that I saw you? The newest raisin studding the musty fruitcake of my academic knowledge is toponymy: the study of place names, or toponyms, a subdivision of onomastics (the study of names in general). I uncovered it in a late night Wiki-frenzy, hidden, like all good things in life, in a related article. “It can be argued that the first toponymists were the storytellers and poets who explained the origin of certain place names as part of their tales,” said Wikipedia, and so began my fascination with a discipline as variegated as the names it classifies. “It can be argued that the first toponymists were the storytellers and poets who explained the origin of certain place names as part of their tales,” said Wikipedia. I have yet to determine whether this is factual or just Wikipedia spinning tales, but the idea of some beard-shrouded bard reading a country’s name like a tea leaf for its story amused and fascinated me. Thus began my fascination with a discipline as variegated as the names it classifies.
Toponymy contains elements of many different disciplines. It is principally a linguistic discipline, as it traces etymologies, but the nature of place names means that historical, political, and even mythological considerations are fair game for an aspiring toponymist. Toponymists have the strange task of guarding the map; they are the frontmen, the go-to guys, for your questions about the ever-shifting nomenclature of embattled regions, or just who, for example, the town of Jeff, Missouri, was named after. The political end of the spectrum is perhaps the most institutionalized: the UN has a toponymy commission, with the unsightly acronym UNGEGN: The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names. It’s part of the UN’s Statistics Division. According to UNGEGN’s brochure, “UNGEGN is involved in outreach to countries that do not have name standardization mechanisms, databases, or national gazetteers, as well as supporting the use of single romanization systems.” (For those outside the name standardization community, single romanization is not the process of being unattached while wearing a toga—it refers to a standardized method of representing a certain word or sound in the Roman (i.e, Latin) alphabet.) Though the earnest rhetoric of UNGEGN calls to mind a somewhat comical secretariat of map-checkers (“Hey, Joe, is Chile still called Chile today?” “Yep.” “OK, coffee break!”), the staff of this organization includes “names experts, cartographers, geographers, historians, linguists, planners and surveyors”—testament to the diverse elements of the toponymic discipline. And though UNGEGN relies on local governments to implement their changes (making their slogan, “Making It Happen—UNGEGN,” rather silly), the very existence of an international regulatory body for place names makes me reconsider their unique character. A quick glance at a European map from 1595 reveals just how far toponymy
12 | In the Land of the Thunder Dragon | Talia Lavin | Tuesday Magazine
(and its companion discipline, geography) has come. A few scrawled names dot the borders of most of the continents, and their bellies gape blankly; whole regions are labeled only with directional suffixes (India orientalis, or “eastern India,” for example, covers… all of eastern India). Only Europe contains both city and country names; the whole of Australia is a green orb with nothing but Terra Australis (“Southern Land”) written on it, in outsize letters that seem to overcompensate for the emptiness that surrounds them. Flash forward to a map from 2010, and suddenly the earth is a rainbow patchwork filled with cramped letters: everywhere, names strain to fit on even the smallest specks of island, Africa bristles with outsized monikers, and the only huge masses of land with just one name are Canada and Russia, stewards of enormous, frigid wastes. These four-hundred-odd years of progress towards single romanization have been complex, and often ugly. Students of history will cringe at the process that turned Africa into the heavily named continent it is today—the torrents of blood that washed away each of the Congo’s successive names, or held “Rhodesia” in place for eighty years. And yet, born in a colonized land, I can’t help but imagine the consummate excitement of naming an unknown shore. A name is intangible, but absolute: there is no square inch under its dominion it does not fill completely. Though it’s primarily a tool of communication, there is a kind of primal power in a name. To turn a frothing, gleaming river into a tidy blue line is the work of a few syllables, and you don’t have to leave sea level to proclaim your name from the highest of hills if you’re the first to label them. A name is a covenant, a contract: it can bind a country with the chains of empire, or proclaim its freedom from those chains. It can even, like Palestine, proclaim the desire for that freedom. The change from “Rhodesia” to “Zimbabwe” is the final rejection of the
conqueror; it ousts him from every rock, every tree, every brick of every hovel, nullifies his dominion completely. And yet, even independent of historical conquests and ruptures, toponyms are powerful: they provide insight into changing residential patterns, testify about historical relationships between countries, express national myths and cultural signifiers. Country names differ in different languages, and the dissonances often have enormous (or simply peculiar) significance. For example, the Russian term for “a German” is Nimyetz: the folk etymology of this term claims that it derives from “ni moy,” “not mine,” an expression of historic animosity between the two peoples; relatedly, it may also stem from a Slavic root which means “mute” or “those who do not speak our language.” The Hebrew word for India is Hodu; this name is derived from the Book of Esther, in which a Medo-Persian emperor rules “from Hodu (the Indus river) to the kingdom of Kush (in modern Ethiopia)”; modern Hebrew, oddly, retains the ancient Persian name of the country. Hodu, like “India,” is itself a corruption of Sindhu, the Sanskrit name for the Indus river; ironically, the Indus river is now located in Pakistan. The endonym (self-appellation)
LILY FANG | STAFF ILLUSTRATOR
In the Land of the Thunder Dragon
of India is Bharat—derived from Bharata, a king in Hindu legend who was the first person to conquer and unite ancient India. The subject of endonyms (a name used by a people or country to represent themselves) versus exonyms (names applied by foreigners) is touchy, and enormously complex. Endonyms often relate to a national founding myth, legendary figure, or ancient ethnic group: for example, Armenia’s endonym is Hayk’, derived from Hayk, the name of a legendary founder-king who freed his people from the wicked giant Bel and established his kingdom at the foot of the mountain of Ararat. (Hayk slew Bel with a longbow—so the Orion constellation is also called Hayk in Armenian.) The etymology of “Armenia” is unknown, but it is first attested to in a sixth-century Persian scroll. A better-known endonym is Japan’s: Nihon means “land of the rising sun,” a name established by Japanese rulers in the 670s during diplomatic relations with China. The ancient name for Japan, Wa, was represented in Chinese with a character that meant “dwarf,” which can’t have helped its case. Bhutan has the excellent endonym of Druk-yul, meaning “Land of the Thunder Dragon,” which refers to the violent thunderstorms that come down from the Himalayas. Exonyms tend to describe countries based on geographical features, such as
Anguilla, named for its long, skinny shape (anguilla means eel in Italian and Spanish). They can also refer to ancient ethnic groups—the Russian name for China, Kitai, stems from the Khitan people, nomadic Mongols who conquered China in the tenth century; “Bhutan” derives from the Bhotia, a group of ethnic Tibetans who emigrated to Bhutan in the same period. Where attested etymologies are unavailable, there is often a rich tradition of folk etymology to draw on: for example, the unknown origin of the Latin exonym Germania has given rise to theories as various as “land of the spear men” (from the Germanic gar, spear) and a compound stemming from the Celtic word for “neighbor.” In his short story “On Rigor in Science,” Jorge Luis Borges describes an improbable map of an empire that “had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point by point,” covering the entire territory it described. A physical map may be useless if too large, but a name is infinitely expandable, and generations can peacefully live under its auspices. It is, of course, impossible to make meaningful concrete generalizations about toponyms—there are as many toponyms as there are places on earth to describe, each with their own significance, history, and etymology (or etymologies). After all, toponymy doesn’t stop at the level of countries—its domain extends to territories as large as continents and as small as three-house cul-de-sacs. (For the names of oceans and lakes, see its companion discipline, hydronymy— but that’s for another article.) But every toponym shares the power of a name: they bind together disparate geographic and ethnic elements, tying them to a common history, government, ethos. They provide clarity in communication, a powerful medium for national self-expression, and symbolic dominion over even the most unruly natural territory. They also make great material for Wikipedia articles, and thus for procrastination. You never know—the name of Chile might change while you’re writing that essay, and so you might as well check. Just to be sure. —Talia Lavin is Tuesday’s co-editor-inchief. Her “Poem A Day” project can be read at apoemadayfromharvard.blogspot.com.
In the Land of the Thunder Dragon | Talia Lavin | Tuesday Magazine | 13
“It depends on how you describe blue” One company’s quest for the Holy Grail of horticulture REPORTING | ELISE LIU
“Your absence is as of the blue rose from the kingdom of flowers. Who knows, some day you may yet appear.” —From Seven Poems, Benoy Mojumdar, 1969 Translated from the Bengali by Jyotirmoy Datta
Herd Riva Nathans
Digital Photography
It’s what they have been waiting for: a statuesque model in a black evening gown strides onstage, a bouquet of roses in her gold-bangled arms. She waves at the audience, some of whom oooh and ahhh in appreciation, some only breaking into polite applause. Cameras flash on her cocktail dress and luminous smile, the photographers jostling each other for a better view—not of the woman herself, who is after all only the last in a row of models displaying Suntory Ltd.’s newest product line. It’s the pale mauve roses she holds that they have come to see. The date is October 26, 2009, more than twenty-three years after the first scientists and biochemical engineers at a small Australian firm set upon their quest to create a true blue rose. They could not have known then that their effort would eventually span four continents, involve hundreds of researchers, and cost over forty million dollars. And at the end of the road, this. “A rose the color of the sky just before sunset,” the announcer booms out at the crowd. “The Suntory Applause!”
...
N e sts R i va Nathans
Digital Photography
14 | Herd / Nests | Riva Nathans | Tuesday Magazine
As long as the rose has symbolized love and beauty, the blue rose has been its missing counterpart: the symbol of a beauty that does not exist. Of literally hundreds of rose varieties, nearly all developed through artificial breeding methods, none naturally contain pigments in the blue range—a fact that has frustrated breeders for centuries. In terms of natural selection, there is no reason why they should. Rose blooms, like all flowers, exist for the sole reason of attracting pollinators, and only recently in evolutionary time have human aesthetic preferences exerted any influence. Biolo-
gists theorize that, unlike violets or petunias, which often rely on bees that favor the blue wavelength of light, roses evolved alongside pollinators that prefer red and yellow: moths, small birds, and differnet types of bees. The function of any pigment is to signal nectar resources to pollinators, and roses differentiated themselves with a distinctive scent. The blue rose stands out so clearly in the human imagination today precisely because it has for so long evaded human grasp. Unattainable, it came to symbolize unrequited love; transcendental, it came to evoke moral perfection; ethereal, it has been co-opted to name cultural ephemera from rock bands to mystery novels. The very fact of its nonexistence made it possible for blue roses to mean all things to all people, whether as the symbol of immortality in the 2006 movie “Pan’s Labyrinth,” or as a badge of surreal creativity to Moscow symbolists, including Wassily Kadinsky, whose Blue Rose group comprised leading figures of the Russian avant-garde.
... The world market for cut flowers generates $10 billion a year in sales, out of which roses account for nearly half. Bridal roses, ceremonial roses, Valentine’s and Mother’s Day and anniversary roses: an entire industry is built on the classic symbol of romantic love. When you actually consider what it is you are buying in a rose—a few ounces of dead plant matter much like a stalk of celery or a switch from a tree—the fact that the average bouquet of a dozen long-stemmed red roses costs nearly sixty dollars is evidence enough that the whole industry is based on one of the most successful marketing schemes in the history of the world.
It is no wonder, then, that a group of Australian biological engineers saw in flower genetics a promising business application for one of the great scientific breakthroughs of the 1980s. Genetic engineers had just made significant strides in the splicing and manipulation of plant DNA, and they hoped to apply new genetic methods to the yetuntouched field of horticulture. With the promise of gene transfer, anything seemed possible. With those high hopes, and only a little capital, Calgene Pacific Pty Ltd. was born. From their first day of work, the Calgene Pacific researchers were on a mission to create an authentic and marketable blue rose. But to copy the indigo-violet hue of grapes, blueberries, blackberries, and eggplants—which all have different genes contributing to the same function—presented a complex puzzle that all involved knew would take years to decipher. They entertained the possibility of testing their techniques— and consumer demand—by simultaneously working on the development of blue carnations and other decorative blooms, but as managing director Richard Dalling had no qualms assuring the world, perfecting the blue rose was the firm’s raison d’être. When questioned on the firm’s single-minded object, his reply was always blunt, and clear: “It’s the Holy Grail.” Edwina Cornish, a petite woman with a halo of auburn hair curling at her chin, can still remember the day she entered Calgene Pacific’s labs for the first time nearly twenty years ago. “I was so impressed by the new IBM computers,” she says today. “That, and the camaraderie. We danced to Michael Jackson on our late-night breaks.” She also remembers the incredible goals they immediately set for themselves: “Five
“It depends on how you describe blue” | Elise Liu | Tuesday Magazine | 15
years. Five years at the most.” She laughs, now. “How wrong we were.”
... Whenever they were asked whom their product was meant to serve—in a tone that unerringly meant that it had no audience at all—the Calgene Pacific executives had the same quick answer: the Japanese. They weren’t merely being facetious. Even the scientists themselves worried that Western markets might be disappointing. It is the red rose, after all, that European culture had indoctrinated most of the world to love. Lost to the legacy of Shakespeare and Donne, most Americans and Europeans can only imagine the blue alternative as a novelty, a touch of dramatic flair. There’s a touch of the ridiculous about them, like purple cows or green ketchup, and romance rarely sits well with ridicule. At the crucial juncture, could risk-averse men seeking only a conflict-free anniversary be counted upon to reach past the comfort of deep red blooms for a pricier blue alternative? Calgene Pacific’s stategists doubted it. They chose a very different market instead: wealthy businessmen and women in Japan who might give them to their peers—not as symbols of love, but merely in the course of conducting their mundane but critical daily affairs “The Japanese are ritualistic gift-givers,” Dalling explained to investors and journalists alike. He described to them a culture in which the word novelty had no negative connotations, in which a blue rose might be worth its $78 price tag simply “because they are unique.” A typical end-user might send roses when a business associate won a new contract, or to a new client if he did; when her boss’s daughter graduated from university, or to ensure that her own got in. The price tag of a dozen blue roses alone—nearly a thousand dollars—would prove well enough how much one admired its recipient. As with a bottle of Chateau Margaux or an ice sculpture, the fact that a bouquet of midnight blue blooms has neither longevity nor purpose could only add to its appeal. Even skeptical media critics were eventually convinced that the odd habits of the
Japanese were yet again the proper targets of scorn. “It’s important to their whole social being,” Dalling said. His subtext may have been insidious, but it was certainly a comfort to Calgene Pacific’s investors. “We are merely mercenaries of another culture’s inane whims,” he seemed to be saying: his team had not fallen under the blue rose’s spell—they were simply in it for the money.
... Five years later, Calgene Pacific’s original funding had nearly dried up, and it was in desperate need of more money. Progress on mapping the rose’s genome was not coming as quickly as the team had hoped—as they now admitted to one possible investor after another, getting the rose onto the market might cost upwards of $20 million. The first of these funds had come from an unlikely source. When the company was first founded in 1986, the state-sponsored Victorian Investment Corporation (VIC) pledged $1 million as part of an initiative to increase employment in the Melbourne area. The effort soon became a political disaster, losing nearly a third of its $60 million budget in a single year. By 1991, a change in government meant the VIC was facing dissolution. But the blue rose happened to be one of the government’s few winning calls—and in order to win investors, the team decided to publicize their advances and shocked the horticultural world with the announcement that they had identified a gene that created the delphinidin pigment responsible for the shade of deep, incandescent blue found in delphiniums and petunias—and were now looking for a way to integrate it into the right strain of rose. Steve Chandler had only been with the firm for two years when the first media attention descended upon Calgene Pacific. He recalls his colleagues’ shock when they started to receive calls from The Economist, The New York Times, and every major newspaper in Australia. “It was a great moment,” he says in a clipped British accent. “But we were kind of bemused that the journalists kept calling about the blue rose project. It seemed to fascinate them, I don’t know why.”
16 | “It depends on how you describe blue” | Elise Liu | Tuesday Magazine
With Calgene Pacific’s budget woes, public interest in the blue roses had come just in time. The publicity brought new business relationships, and within months, the firm found a more traditional investor whose interest seemed to confirm everything Dalling had claimed in the early years. Suntory Ltd., the leading beverage manufacturer in Japan, approached him about acquiring fifteen percent of Calgene Pacific’s shares. As they had always known, Japan would be their first market, and their best. If the small team of Australians were not the only ones interested in horticulture’s Holy Grail, they were now its bestfunded. By early 1992, Calgene Pacific had acquired its main rival, the Dutch biotechnology company Florigene, gaining entrée to the European flower market as well as strategic alliances with its previous owners, the DNA Plant Technology Corporation and Zaadunie, both leaders in gene insertion techniques. The genetichorticulture world lauded the marriage of two companies that, between them, held the patents to technologies isolating the gene for delphinidin and the method for inserting it into the rose genome. Newly invigorated, the firm renamed itself Florigene Ltd. (“Essentially for marketing purposes,” Chandler admits) and set about completing its mission. “We expect to complete the remaining technical objectives by 1992, and we are confident that trials of the first blue rose will begin in 1993,” Dalling told The New York Times.
... Nothing attracts charlatans and fools like the seemingly impossible, and so, like sightings of Elvis or El Dorado, tales of the mythical blue rose pepper history. Its first recorded false discovery can be traced to the thirteenth century, when the Moors first began using indigo dyes to create blue—or bluish—blooms out of white rosebushes. In those times as in all times, the rarity of blue roses gave them a regal and ethereal beauty. At that time, feeding blue water to a rosebush’s roots was the equivalent of magic, but a painfully expensive kind. The claim that these roses were naturally blue fell apart quickly. By Renaissance times, blue roses cre-
ated by simply soaking petals in indigo were common gifts among the merchant class. Breeders continued to pursue a ‘natural’ breed without success—except in the common imagination. In the nineteenth century, reports circulated of a rose breeder in Ulster discovering a single blue bloom in his seedling patch. It was said that he destroyed it immediately, believing that the mutant roses would corrupt public taste—and, perhaps, morals. But if the morally-torn rose breeder lived in myth, the unscrupulous peddler was very much a reality. In 1864, The American Agriculturalist reported a widespread scam involving blue roses and tree strawberries, cautioning readers to beware in their areas of peddlers selling ‘astonishing’ fruit. One such hack managed to scam a town magistrate in Mayer, Virginia, among other upstanding if gullible citizens, planting rosebushes he advertised as “absolutely Genuinne [sic] and real” in front the courthouse—when the original blue blooms fell, the original patriotic planters became a disappointing candycane stripe. Citizens were not amused. The local Dispatch ran a first-page article above the fold: “Blue Roses A Fraud!”
... Eight years had passed since the renamed Florigene boldly promised to take the cut-flower world by storm. By now, the blue rose project had burned through nearly $30 million dollars. To appease investors, the company decided to release what had originally been mere test subjects for the delphinidin-insertion experiments: the world’s first blue-spectrum carnation, the called Moonshadow, in a pale shade of mauve, and the Moondust, its deep violet cousin. “It’s very exciting—we already have some nice rose flowers with interesting mauve and lilac colors and hope to have several different shades of blue within the next few years,” boasted Chin-yi Lu, principal research scientist at Florigene’s Dutch laboratory, when The Economist called. Within the company itself, though, the mood was more ambivalent. The mauve carnations could only be described as a disappointment: Suntory wasn’t even interested in acquiring the rights to the
brand. It wasn’t that the scientific breakthroughs had ended—it was merely that the escape from each dead end seemed to lead to a new one. Florigene was now incorporating a special hairpin RNA interference technology developed by the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO) to switch off the existing color genes in roses and open pathways for the blue pigment to express itself. But even when all the right genes were turned on, and off, and on again, the rose remained frustratingly not-quite-blue. If once at the forefront of plant engineering, Florigene was rapidly becoming irrelevant. Cornish was beginning to feel hopeless about the entire ordeal. Somewhere on the pathway from lilac to blue, nature had stepped in and refused to yield. She con-
were aware that there were people in the world who had been interested in making colored flowers, especially a blue rose, for a number of years,” he explained happily to the journalists who suddenly descended upon his laboratory. The team at Florigene was thrust into the spotlight once again to defend their pallid blooms. “It depends on how you describe blue,” snapped John Mason, the Melbourne research manager, when his patience wore thin. “This is a very sensitive topic for us and unfortunately I cannot comment further.”
... If most gene modification technologies have a frankly utilitarian purpose— to develop disease-resistant crops and
“ S omewhere on the pathway from nature had
lilac to blue , stepped in and
refused to yield. ”
templated leaving the company—but the board offered her a promotion: with Dalling’s departure, she took over as managing director of the Melbourne laboratory.
... Halfway around the world, the team suddenly gained an unexpected adversary when researchers at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine stumbled upon an entirely new method of turning roses—and, really, anything else—blue. Amusingly enough, the answer lay within the human body itself. While studying how drugs metabolize in the liver, graduate student named Elizabeth Gillam stumbled across an enzyme taken from a human liver that had stained a flask of bacteria a deep cobalt blue. When she showed it to her boss, Peter Guengrich, he was confused—and then thrilled. “We
better-tasting animals, for example, or even to cure genetic disease—the blue rose, admittedly, does not. But with less social purpose comes less social baggage: the idea of an oddly-colored bloom inspires neither vague apprehension about carcinogen-fattened beef, nor full-fledged paranoia about Gattaca-style genetic class warfare. A few serious horticulturalists may be able to summon genuine concern over cross-pollination, but all in all, a rose is just a rose. Why, then, does the idea of so much money spent on creating a natural-born blue rose—when dyed ones are so cheaply accessible—somehow seem even more wrong? It’s not merely because they will be indulgences of the rich: not only are single blue roses within reach for most consumers, they are a far cry from the prices of most luxury goods. And it cannot derive from discomfort with genetic modifica-
“It depends on how you describe blue” | Elise Liu | Tuesday Magazine | 17
tion in general, since humans have been tinkering with the genetics of flowers nearly as long as we have noticed them. The kingdom of flora have always served as a canvas for imaginative gardeners—but their instruments were blunt and their genetic technique limited to crude meiosis. Centuries of human effort, then, yielded scores of pink roses and even red-orange ones—but the horizon of possibilities was firmly circumscribed by plant sex. Gene modification techniques are not so limited. Suddenly, traits can move between species—even, as the liver cell research demonstrated, between kingdoms. From blue roses, it is not so far a leap to glow-in-the-dark puppies (if you’ve ever met an eight year-old child, you know the market exists). Far more than passionate and futile attempts to combat death, this is what it means to play God: our mastery of science will finally give us mastery over life itself, with the rest of the plant and animal kingdom the canvas for human imagination. This vision is as seductive as it is surreal. With nothing to limit us but our humility, who knows what fad will dictate and science provide? History is full of examples of humans exerting their power over the animal kingdom, but genetic engineering, unlike growing kittens in bottles or training rats to locate mines (both of which raised PETA’s reasonable ire) would not cause animals any pain—certainly less so than factory farming. If Gelett Burgess’s infamous ditty is any indication (“I never saw a purple cow / I never hope to see one”), there is something about using science to create a purple cow that seems worse than using it to create a meatier one. In the end, of course, the violence of absurdity is much like any postmodern assault on preconceptions: it can only be wielded against ourselves. It’s all the same for the cow.
... Florigene’s quest concluded as those of nearly all plucky little companies do: with a buyout and a compromise. In December of 2003, Suntory Ltd. bought up nearly 99% of its subsidiary’s shares in order to
gain the rights to the pale mauve roses that stubbornly refused to become blue. Suntory quickly took the lead on the blue rose project, placing its own Tokyobased research team led by Yoshi Tanaka on the case. Chandler, who was still working with Florigene fifteen years later, was sorry to see it go, but he now claims there was little controversy over the decision. “They were going to use techniques they had gained from working with various artificial flavors in their beverage business,” he says, “and working on it in Japan would be better for marketing later on. It was the right business decision.” When their efforts failed to break though the Florigene team’s stalemate, however, Suntory decided to market the mauve roses they already had. By 2003, Tanaka was leading field trials and scouting for the right South American grower to produce his distinctive crop. Within a year, the beverage giant threw the weight of its marketing colossus into the blue rose, and its humble subsidiary Florigene once again became a media darling. But Edwina Cornish sensed her time there had reached its natural conclusion. She left the company and moved on to teach at Monash University, where she was soon named Deputy-Vice Chancellor of Research. “I don’t regret the time I spent at Calgene,” she says now. Florigene would continue to sell the Moondust and Moonshadow carnations under its own brand to the present day. But the blue rose project now belonged to Suntory and its hype machine alone.
... Even the Japanese are not willing to pay eighty dollars for a mauve rose when lilac ones sell for under ten. In the end, the Suntory Applause was priced at a mere $25 per bloom—and even then, it was greeted by the gardening world with a resounding yawn. To this day, authentically blue-ish roses have not seen significant release outside Japan; Suntory continues to list the project as one of its current research efforts. “More are in the pipeline—colors ranging from lavender to pale violet to, you know, mauve,” Chandler says. He can list the scientific puzzles still in their way: pH. Background
18 | “It depends on how you describe blue” | Elise Liu | Tuesday Magazine
pigments. Choosing the right variety of rose. “It’s that simple.” It’s that simple—but it has always been that simple. Perhaps Florigene and its investors simply placed too much faith the process of their discovery—and perhaps even a bluer rose would have eventually faded quickly from novelty into the mundane. But there is something to be said for their choice of subject: unlike other nonexistent things—hen’s teeth and bicycle-riding fish come to mind—blue roses have never suffered the irony of becoming laughable. They suffer instead the indignity of poor imitations—silk flowers, dyed white blooms, and now this travesty of mauve—each reminding us of what we have yet to find. Perhaps it’s not even the blue rose but the crazy quest itself that matters. Actually finding the Holy Grail, after all, would have ruined many a medieval story and at least one middlebrow action novel. Even Steve Chandler, who has spent twentyfour of his twenty-six working years at Florigene doing everything—“from research, to marketing, to operations, to press, oh yes, just about everything”—to create and sell blue roses and carnations, sometimes forgets why he is there. “Maybe paying a mortgage,” he says, “I don’t know.” A pause. “I got stuck here, I suppose. It’s a compelling business.” Just a business, then: the Grail, too, was cast in gold. Should we care that when Suntory’s competitors at Vanderbilt discovered their miraculous enzyme in the human liver, it was roses they chose to modify? As Guengerich willingly admitted, “We could have tried to create blue cotton, blue anything, really.” But the financial promise of the blue rose was ultimately too tempting to resist. “I would have called you crazy five years ago if you told me I would be pursuing a blue rose,” he told journalists who suddenly began to call, bemused at the attention after years of work on life-saving drugs went ignored. “It’s not something we set out to do,” he said, again and again, as if that was any justification, as if the search for a true blue rose required one at all. —Elise Liu is an associate editor.
S a l t P e t e r Kayla Escobedo Acrylic on canvas 8.5” x 11”
Salt Peter | Kayla Escobedo | Tuesday Magazine | 19
Business Is Good FICTION | MATTHEW GRZECKI When Kyle picked up Nora, he followed his usual pre-date routine: he rubbed Debenhams (Imported!) on his wrists and neck, turned his satellite radio to “BBC News,” and, the second she entered his car, told her how much he liked her “flat.” In response, most girls giggled, excited once again by the novelty of a “British guy.” Their own, local James Bond. A modern Paul McCartney. Some of them even asked him the expected questions immediately: “Do you go back overseas often?”, “Is it true that it rains every day?”, “Are you near the Big Ben?” etc. Given how annoying he found these questions, Kyle couldn’t help but imagine how annoying they must be for actual British people. “I really like your flat,” he said when Nora entered the car. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, adjusting her shoes. They were black ballet flats, and Kyle could see the bare tops of her feet. “My friend’s having a meltdown.” She finished and then looked through the windshield. “Where are we going?” He smiled and looked ahead. “I can’t tell you that,” he said, his hard final “t” hovering in the air between them. “It’s top-secret.” “Okay,” she said, slipping off her flats and curling up on the seat.
... Kyle always practiced his British accent first by listening to things—usually several Beatles songs, followed by a Mary Higgins Clark novel read by a British narrator— and then by trying out various words and phrases in the bathroom mirror. He had identified the phrases that he found himself using most often early on, and quickly mastered them. These included: “How are you?”, “What did you do today?”, “Interesting”, “How’s your meal?”, and “Do you want dessert?” But while he said these flawlessly, his favorite word to use was “solipsistic.” He loved the way it sounded, how the middle “s”
sounds hissed and took over the word, and because of this, he tried to use it in every possible conversation. Usually, he could do it pretty easily—he’d simply turn the conversation to the Old Testament and charge a minor prophet with solipsism. Recently he’d been ending his practice sessions the same way—he’d go into his closet, get out Bob’s Your Uncle, and study it while sitting on his bed. He’d bought the book at a garage sale the day he moved into his apartment, along with an unmarked book of horror stories and a brown leather ottoman. The latter two had proven generally useless—the only good story in the book was missing its last page, and the ottoman was filled with ants. But Bob’s Your Uncle was not useless; Kyle read it. In fact, he got through all 473 pages (not including appendices) in just under three hours. It was the most he’d ever read in one sitting, and by the far the most exciting. The book was about a teen-aged boy who, after learning a British accent for a school drama production, decides to keep the accent up for the rest of his life. But what Kyle liked most about the book was a glossy color chart in the back. “How To Speak With a British Accent If You Are American” was written at the top, in big block letters. He’d opened to this chart so many times that the book, when laid flat, automatically opened to it, as if mechanically powered. “Pronounce T as T, not as an American D” was one bullet point. “Unless it comes at the start of a word, don’t be afraid to completely omit R” was another. “Speak confidently and use slang as much as possible” was a third. Once he felt he’d seen enough, Kyle would close the book, neatly wrap it in a white cloth, and then put it back in his closet, deep behind his hats.
... Though the restaurant Kyle took his dates to was not British but Italian, it was nevertheless a very specific choice. During
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college, Kyle had taken dates there often, and in some stretches, very often. He knew everything about it—the layout, the wait staff, the little tricks to getting better service, and, most importantly, the menu. “So,” he said when they were settled at a table, “what did you do today?” Classic. “Talked to my friend,” Nora said, crunching a bread stick. “His girlfriend just told him she wanted to be ‘friends’ and nothing more. They’d been dating for three years! Anyway, he’s obviously a wreck.” “Do you think they’ll stay apart?” Kyle made sure to leave out the “r.” “Unclear,” she said. “She’s pretty skittish overall, so it’s hard to say. Plus, he’s moving away next week.” Suddenly, their waiter appeared. His nametag said “Julian.” “If it isn’t my good friend! What a pleasant surprise!” he said. Kyle had called ahead of time. “What will you two be having tonight?” That was the cue, and at this point, the two men launched into what was entirely an act, a practiced and perfected method of ordering. First, Kyle would ask for their best bottle of red wine. Then, after his date ordered, he’d concentrate on the menu for several seconds before looking up and saying “Maybe I’m being dim, but I think I’m up for the Grilled Veal Chop tonight.” Julian, who after four years of this charade, understood exactly what Kyle was doing, would then ask, “Would you like that to be a half- or full-portion?” to which Kyle would say in perfect English, “The Full Monty! Yes please!” Without fail, this mini-performance had been working for Kyle as a kind of aphrodisiac. Up to this point, all of Kyle’s dates had swooned after that last line. In fact, Melanie, one of his first dates, had been so taken by the exchange that she began blushing and didn’t stop for the entire meal. But Nora was different—she didn’t smile. Her eyes were on the menu. She’d missed everything.
Within minutes Julian brought out the bottle of wine. The label featured golden leaves entwined with words written in a thin cursive: “Domaine de la RomanéeConti Grands-Echezeaux 2004.” What was actually inside was a simple Candoni Merlot, a twelve-dollar wine. “I could pour you a taste,” Julian said, already filling Kyle’s glass. Kyle took a sip, paused, and then suddenly smiled at Julian. “Smashing,” he said, making sure to pronounce the final “g.”
... Part of the reason why Kyle kept the accent up was the immense success he’d encountered early on. A month after he started using it—also, a month into his freshman year of college—he’d lost his virginity. To Kyle, who couldn’t even talk to girls in high school, let alone date them, this outcome was clearly causal, so he kept the accent up, and cultivated it, until it was quite good. So good, in
the novelty of a new, pretty girl in his life. He wasn’t sure. As was his custom, right before dessert, Kyle steered the conversation to sports— specifically, European football. This was a topic he’d become pretty familiar with over the past two years. Mostly, it had happened through simple osmosis: Kyle’s two best friends—also his two largest friends—were huge fans of Manchester United. Often on weekends, they’d go to a bar, get drunk, and watch the game, and they sometimes brought Kyle along. As a result of these trips, he now knew all the rules, teams, and players. He knew which players were the fastest, which ones could kick the ball the farthest, and which ones, according to popular magazine articles, vigorously masturbated in the locker room minutes before every game. Recently, and to his own surprise, he’d started referencing players and game moments in his own daily interactions at work. He didn’t feel bad about this, since his older co-workers usually seemed excited to hear about something novel. But on dates it wasn’t
last minute decided to try to buy to some more time. “What do you mean?” “Well, my friend Paul, for example. He obviously has a British accent because he’s from there. But it’s actually noticeably different from the accents of other English people I know.” She looked at him and smiled. “And yours I’ve never heard before.” On the outside, Kyle appeared calm. His natural demeanor was a kind of scowl anyway, so even when he was stressed his face didn’t tell very much. But inside, he was anxious. “A bit off my trolley” is what he would’ve said, had she asked him if he was okay. Did she know he wasn’t British? Had she just been playing along the whole time? How many English people did she know? Suddenly, Julian emerged from the kitchen, carrying two large slices of key lime pie. As he moved, he apparently caught his foot on something and fell to the ground, the two slices neatly crashing down on top of him. This was the final act. Julian had come up with it the previous
“ ‘South of Parth,’ he’d always say,
confident that no one could call him on
a made up town . ”
fact, that often the first question people around him asked was where in England he was from. “South of Parth,” he’d always say, confident that no one could call him on a made up town.
... Kyle and Nora spent most of the meal discussing their respective college experiences. They had both majored in psychology, but hadn’t met until a mutual friend introduced them at a graduation party. Kyle was attracted to Nora immediately, though he wasn’t completely sure why. Maybe it was her brown bangs or the way she keeled over in silent laughter after he told a good joke. Maybe it was just
the same. For some reason, whenever he brought up European football, he thought about playing “UNO” with his little sister, and how she’d always save a “Wild Card” until the very end. “I’ve always been a Manchester United fan, myself,” he said, wiping his chin with his napkin. “Do you follow football?” In response, he expected the usual: “Do you mean soccer? Because here we use the term ‘football’ to refer to another sport,” etc., etc. “Where in England are you from?” Nora said. “You have an interesting accent.” Kyle froze. He looked at her, then at the people at the table behind her. He was about to say “South of Parth,” but at the
month, during Kyle’s first date with Brenda. As he explained to Kyle afterward, when you’re with someone, you can talk about three things: your life, her life, or what’s happening around you. The best conversations, he explained, always drew from the third. “I’m okay! I’m okay!” he shouted, wiping whipped cream from his face and hair. “Just a slip!” “Wow,” Nora said. “Wow is right,” Kyle said. “I feel like I’m watching an early Monty Python skit.” They talked about movies while they ate dessert. While talking, Kyle noticed writing on Nora’s left hand. “Did you run out of paper?” he said, pointing.
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We L i v e H e r e M e r e d i t h S h e l d on
Apple iPhone Polaroid application snapshots
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She smiled. “No, but I write on my hand when I really need to remember something.” He gently turned her hand and leaned in, so he could read the writing. The letters had a jagged, unpredictable look to them, as if she’d been on a bumpy car ride while writing. The e’s, particularly, stood out— the bottoms of them curled up sharply, more like v’s than u’s. Kyle looked confused. “Remember to roast porks?” She bent forward and laughed silently. “Remember to return books. I took some books out from the library and don’t want to get late fees.” Kyle wondered what library she belonged to, if it was the same as his, but decided to save that discussion for a future meeting. He drove her home and walked her to her door. “I’ll ring you this week,” he said. “Okay,” she said, and laughed.
... Most mornings Kyle went for a fivemile run before breakfast. On days when he slept through it, he lifted weights after work. Rarely, but occasionally, he was too busy to do either. On these days, he would do three sets of fifty push-ups before bed.
couldn’t stop thinking about her. This was a new development for Kyle; most girls dropped out of his mind quickly and easily. Even Belle, whom he’d really liked and possibly even loved, became an afterthought when his mom surprised him with a refurbished Playstation 3. Kyle still wasn’t sure what he liked so much about Nora. She was pretty, no doubt about that. Very pretty. What eyes! Those dark, dark eyes. And her hair. Boy, she had great hair—thick and brown and sweet-smelling, like she had just shampooed. But that wasn’t the only thing, was it? Her looks? He wasn’t one of those guys, was he? He hoped not, but, to be completely honest, he wasn’t sure. Whatever. He wanted to see her more.
... One of Nora’s phrases stuck in Kyle’s mind more than any other: “You have an interesting accent.” He kept playing it back. Interesting. She had said it in the smoothest way possible, as if the whole word were one prolonged syllable. Did she buy it? Or did she know enough about English accents to know that it was all a sham? Kyle knew from his studies that there were, indeed, many different kinds
“Great. You?” “Excellent.” He was gaining confidence. “A bit zonked from work, but doing well.” “That’s great,” she said. “Still got that British accent I hear.” He choked briefly before pressing on. “I was wondering if you might be up for another dinner later this week...perhaps Friday?” She paused. Through the receiver, he heard what sounded like a Beatles song in the background. He pictured her black flats. “I can do Friday.” “Great,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at seven.” “Actually, can I pick you up?” she said. “I’d like to see your place. You know, to make sure there are no bodies.” “Really?” He didn’t know what to think. He hadn’t been expecting this. He decided to play it cool. “I mean, sure. If you really want to.” “I really do.” “Okay. That works. I’ll make sure to hide the bodies.” “Smashing,” she said, and hung up.
... Immediately after the call, Kyle’s mind went into overdrive. Why did she want to see his place? That was a weird thing to ask.
“ Even Belle, whom he’d really liked and possibly even loved, became an afterthought when his mom surprised him with a refurbished Playstation 3. ” But on the Monday and Tuesday after his date with Nora, he did nothing. He couldn’t focus. He ate hardly anything—a couple slices of toast for breakfast, some cereal for dinner. At work, he struggled with simple tasks, and proofreading a basic client report took him all of Tuesday afternoon. The one thing he could focus on— really, the only thing—was Nora. He
of English accents: from Queen’s English to London Cockney to Estuary English to Kettering to Scouse and so on. He waited until Wednesday night to call her. Before calling, he got out a bottle of whiskey and took two shots to calm his nerves. Then he took two more and dialed. “Cheers,” he said when she picked up. “This is Kyle. I was wondering if...well, first: how are you?”
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Isn’t that a question you ask after dinner? Did she think he was hiding something? He looked around his apartment. He’d have some cleaning up to do, that was for sure. There were socks everywhere. A pair of red-striped underpants hung from the ceiling fan. His Green Bay Packers trashcan was overflowing with microwavable pizza boxes. He had yet to see any mice, but he often saw lines of
black ants vibrating along his walls, quietly slipping underneath his posters. He had two posters. One was a copy of an Edward Hopper painting that he’d bought at a garage sale a year ago. He didn’t know the official name of it, but it showed a lone man at a gas station in the country. The other poster featured Jimi Hendrix smoking while playing guitar. According to the caption, the photo was taken right before he went on stage to play the Star Spangled Banner. Reading this again, Kyle finally realized the root of all of his fear, why he was so worried about Nora coming over: his apartment was too American. It exuded Americanism. None of his things were things an actual British person would own. The posters, the Coca-Cola coin holder, the Paul Newman lemonade in his refrigerator—all of it, he decided, had to go. So, for the next forty-eight hours, Kyle gave his apartment a makeover. A “British invasion” is what he called it. He threw out all of his American food. He shredded his Ford Explorer warranty and his old TV Guides. The posters came down and went under his bed. In their place, he put up a huge Union Jack that he bought at flea market in Seattle. From the mall he got two soccer jerseys—one Liverpool, the other Tottenham Hotspur—as well as a glossy photo of the House of Commons, all of which he hung over his desk. He bought three new umbrellas and put them in the corners, in front of the ants. He bought the Fawlty Towers TV series and carefully placed the DVDs and their cases around the couch. During his lunch break on Friday, he went to the library and took out the following books: Churchill: A Life, The Love Poems of Lord Byron, Famous Historical Maps II: The Norman Conquest, and Underwater Guts: How I Swam the English Channel. Kyle’s car got a flat on the way home from work. He changed it successfully, but by the time he got home, he had just twenty minutes before Nora was scheduled to arrive. As a result, he had to rush through his routine. He listened to one Beatles song and just five minutes of Mary Higgins Clark’s Lucky Day. He practiced a couple of phrases in the bathroom mirror. Then he got out Bob’s Your Uncle.
Notes Towards a Sijo ANONYMOUS
A pilgrim wind claws out the weathervane; Another turn, and brittles branches Of a young elm tree to the west, as if to start again. A step loaded against the leaf. Vibrating the gray grass. The light squeezes out their whole shape. Step by step, in unspoken studies. And the hour, and the day, And my lips not cold. Grasses are gardened; the tree sways to a stop, I go where I forget to go. He was reviewing the chart when he suddenly heard a rapid knocking on his door. “Help!” a voice cried. “Dear God, open up!” Kyle tip-toed to the door. He was pretty sure it was Nora trying to prank him, but the abruptness of the screaming had made him overly alert. He looked through the peephole but couldn’t see anything. “Please!” the voice said, before becoming a desperate whisper. “Please.” “Nora?” Kyle said. “Is that you?” “Nora?” the voice said. “Who the fuck is ‘Nora’? Jesus Christ, open up! I’m bleeding.” Kyle opened the door. Standing before him, with a huge, toothy grin on her face, was Nora. She was not bleeding but was wearing a stunning red blouse. She looked right at him and blinked several times, in a cartoonish sort of way. Her eyes looked very big today. “I was just trying to flirt with you,” she said, before stepping past Kyle. “Wow, what a room.” While he made drinks, she walked around his three rooms, occasionally calling out questions. “What’s Fawtly Towers?” she said. “Oh, it’s just this BBC show I used to watch.” “Who’s this guy above your desk?” “Why, the great Bard!” Kyle called out, smiling and pouring their drinks. “Ever heard of Shakespeare?” “Yes, many times,” she said, before
retrieving her drink and downing it in three gulps. “Let’s get going now.” “Wow, that impressed, huh?” She looked at him and smiled. “I’m very hungry.”
... For dinner, they went to Ed’s Diner. Kyle had wanted to go to a new seafood place by the bay, but it was closed, and anyway, Nora was allergic to shellfish. So, at Nora’s suggestion, they went to Ed’s. Ed’s was famous for almost going out of business every spring. Usually around February, the newspaper articles started coming out. Each week for several weeks, Ed would be quoted in papers saying things like “It’s obviously a tough situation, but it’s been a great run” and “We may be closing, but we’ll never forget our loyal patrons... thanks!” By May, the diner’s windows would be covered with signs reading “Come 4 a final meal!” Sometimes, late at night, Ed’s wife Glenda could be seen sitting alone at the countertop, crying. But then, usually during the first week of June, the signs would come down. The articles would stop. And the restaurant wouldn’t close—it would simply stay open as if nothing had happened. Waiters who had already started at other jobs would come back. Glenda would never work late. When people asked Ed what was going on, he’d knock on the nearest piece of wood and simply say, “Business is good, business is good.” The place was never crowded.
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The hostess seated Kyle and Nora at the table next to the kitchen. Whenever the doors swung open, Kyle felt steam on his back and Nora could see the chefs cooking. “So,” Nora said, closing her phone. “You’re not going to believe this, but I think my friend Paul might be bringing a date to this same restaurant tonight.” Kyle studied her face, looking for a sign that she was joking or plotting. But he saw nothing. She was just smiling. “He’s single again—maybe I said that already. He’s trying to get back into dating. Anyway, just warning you.” Warning him? Kyle pretended to look down at his menu but couldn’t get his mind off of Paul. Paul was from England. He was almost certainly going to know Kyle was a fake. Had Nora planned this all along? Pretending to be British around naïve Americans was one thing; convincing actual British people would be near impossible. The waiter came and took their orders. Nora forgot about Paul and moved the conversation to books. Kyle was thankful for the shift, even though he knew hardly anything about literary criticism. In college he’d joined a book club but accidentally slept through all the meetings. “My favorite books are ones where the author doesn’t throw all that bullshit at you,” Nora said. “You know what I’m talking about? Like philosophical shit.” “Right, right,” Kyle said. “Like all those existentialist books I had to read for school. Pure, unadulterated bullshit. I mean, there’s this one guy, I can’t remember his name, whose main point of all his books is that what he’s writing is meaningless. He spends chapters and chapters making this point, that it all means nothing.” “Were they long books?” “They were really long! Can you imagine? This guy was getting up every day and working on this thing that he knew was ultimately worthless.” “Wow.” Kyle studied Nora’s face. He still wasn’t sure how smart she actually was. Suddenly a tall man in a navy-striped sweater appeared behind Nora and gently placed his hand on her shoulder. “Pardon me for barging in,” the
man said in a flawless English accent. It sounded very natural. “Just wanted to say hello.” “Paul!” Nora said, putting down a piece of bread. “What a treat. This is Kyle.” They shook hands. “Are—are you alone?” Nora said. “No no,” Paul said, then laughed. “At least, not yet. She’s supposed to meet me here. I guess I’m a little early.” The three of them—Kyle and Nora sitting, Paul standing—chatted for a few minutes. No one mentioned England. Then Paul’s date appeared and they went off to a table across the room. Kyle and Nora got their food and ate slowly. They talked about their favorite bands and weird concerts they’d been to, and on several occasions Nora lost her breath laughing. One time this happened just after she took a drink and it almost came out of her nose.
... Nora liked him—Kyle could tell. He’d been blessed with few strengths when it came to girls, but one thing he knew was when they actually liked him. The way he found out was, he would lean in and say something very soft and sweet to a girl, and then immediately fake-sneeze in her face. If she smiled—or better yet, laughed—he knew she liked him. If she became annoyed, he’d sigh and sadly accept the truth. Kyle had learned the method from his uncle Dan. According to him, the suddenness of the sneeze within a previously intimate environment activates certain cells in the girl’s hippocampus. As a result, he said, her reaction has to be completely honest. “That’s how I knew Ann was the one,” he’d say when his wife was in the room. “He sneezed in my face,” Ann would say back. When Kyle sneezed in Nora’s face—it was a loud, wet one—she instantly turned her head away. But it wasn’t because she was upset—she was laughing too hard. She couldn’t catch her breath. She didn’t fall out of her chair, but Kyle could see that half of her butt had slipped off. At this point, Kyle knew he had her. Whatever she knew about it him at this
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moment, she liked. The only question left was: did he like her? He smiled. He did. So, then: it was his job not to lose her.
... At various points during the meal, Kyle noticed Paul glancing over his shoulder at their table. “I really liked your apartment,” Nora said after their food was cleared. “It’s got really good feng shui.” “Hey, thanks for noticing! I made sure to set it up using a Chinese compass.” Suddenly, Paul and his date appeared tableside. “And how were your meals?” he said, flawlessly omitting all the r’s. “Mutt’s nuts!” Kyle said with maybe too much energy. “And yours?” “Pardon me, I’ve been rude. This is Charlotte.” Charlotte stepped forward and shook Kyle’s hand. She apparently already knew Nora. “Mind if we sit for bit?” Paul said, bringing over chairs. They sat down—Charlotte next to Nora, Paul next to Kyle. The empty table now seemed comically undersized. Paul was heading back to England in the morning. For this reason, he explained, he was attempting to get “sloshed” tonight. “They don’t serve Sam Adams in London,” he kept saying. Kyle kept looking over at Nora, but she was talking quietly with Charlotte. “Don’t mean to be nosy,” Paul said abruptly turning to Kyle, “but I couldn’t help but notice your accent. You’re from England, I take it?” Paul’s face reminded Kyle of a character in a computer game he and his friends used to play. The game was called TortureWorld 3D. In the game, you played the role of a torturer and simply had to torture your victim. There was no back story. To accomplish this goal, you had to choose one of the following: a samurai sword, a heart extractor, an aluminum baseball bat, or a belt. Those were the only options. After you made your selection, the game went to a “Loading...” screen for several minutes
Untitled Scott Roben
Oil on canvas 26” x 26”; 15” x 15”; 15.5” x 15.5” and then finally reported what happened. The victim always died. “Yes,” Paul said. He was almost whispering. “Whereabouts?” Kyle had anticipated this question and thus prepared an answer, which, unlike his previous one, involved a real place. He just had to say what he’d rehearsed and he’d be all set. But he could hardly speak. “Roxton,” he finally got out. “In East Bedfordshire.” “Oh my God,” Paul said, bolting up, his voice now high and shining. “What an incredible coincidence. That’s where I grew up!” Kyle’s eye darted back to Nora, who was listening to Charlotte say something. He knew that if his own conversation went any further, that if he said, “Yeah, Roxton, let’s talk about it,” that Paul would very quickly figure out the truth. And he knew that if Paul knew the truth, Nora would know it. And that would be the end of things. Kyle pictured Julian interrogating him the next time he went to Puzzioli’s. “What happened to the girl?” “Nothing. We’re just friends.” “Something happened. You liked her.” “Nothing happened.”
“You fucked it up, didn’t you?” “Listen, I don’t want to talk about it.” “She was really hot!” “She wasn’t that hot.” “Good luck finding another one like that.” So, Kyle did the one thing he’d hoped he would never have to do: he gave the signal for the emergency plan. Kyle had invented the emergency plan right after he’d decided to start using the accent in the first place. The plan, Kyle knew, would almost definitely save him, but he’d never considered the possibility of actually having to carry it out. In fact, he and his friends often joked about how crazy it would be if he ever did give the cue. “That would be insane,” his friend Steve would always say. “That would be fucking insane.” Kyle excused himself, made a phone call outside, then waited in the bathroom for five minutes. Just as he was coming back to the table, two men—both very large—burst into the restaurant, pointing and screaming at him. “That’s the bloke!” the bald one said in a hoarse English accent. “That’s the one!” Kyle visibly tensed up and put a confused expression on his face. It was the same face his dad made whenever he looked at the burnt eggs he’d just
scrambled. “Me?” he said to the huge men. “Are you referring to me?” “Are you referring to me?’ Unbelievable. Give us our bloody money.” The one with hair yanked Kyle out of his seat so that he fell on the tiled floor. Then the bald one kicked him in the ribs. The kick didn’t look that bad, and actually sounded like it didn’t connect at all. But Kyle instantly clutched his ribs and grunted in pain. During all of this, Nora and Paul just sat and watched in horror. They were frozen—everyone was. Even the waitstaff didn’t move. The two men were so perfectly burly and had entered with so much bravado that people in the restaurant felt more as though they were watching a movie than witnessing actual events. One woman whispered “Bruce Willis” and snapped a picture. The bald one kept kicking Kyle, over and over again. Each time, Kyle would react by covering his face and drawing into an even tighter fetal position. “Beastly!” he’d cry out. “You’re beastly!” “We’re beastly? You must be bladdered!” The bald one momentarily stopped kicking Kyle. He tilted his head slightly upward— away from Kyle—so that everyone in the restaurant could hear him. “You’re the one who put it all on Devonshire Abbey ten years ago!” He paused and briefly squinted Untitled | Scott Roben | Tuesday Magazine | 27
his eyes. “Don’t you remember? The West Cheshire Football Championship? Of course you do. How could you not? You bet on it every year!” He paused again and squinted. This time, he did it for a while. After about ten seconds, he nodded at his partner, who then began speaking. “Listen you little shite, just give us our money and we’ll be gone. Simple as that. Otherwise, we’ll have to keep this up.” Now he paused and looked at the bald one, who shook his head and looked back. The one with the hair continued: “Oh, and one more thing: I was in Roxton last weekend and talked to a man who recently bonked your old mum. Says she’s quite a handful in the sack!” At that, Kyle shot up with newfound energy and charged at the one with hair. But before he could lay a hand on him, the bald one stepped him in and delivered a perfect uppercut to Kyle, who instantly fell flat on his back, knocked out cold. The bald man bowed his head and sighed. “Back to England, I guess.” The two exited the diner as police and ambulance sirens started coming closer.
... When Kyle finally opened his eyes, he desperately had to go to the bathroom. He was lying in a stiff hospital bed and even though the room’s shades were drawn, he could tell it was already late morning. He went to the bathroom. On his way back, he bumped into a nurse. “Excuse me,” he said in his normal, American accent. The nurse smiled. “Sir, I actually have a message for you. From your wife. Or the brown-haired woman...is that your wife?” “No, not my wife. Where is she?” Kyle knew exactly where she was because he’d heard her talking to the nurse earlier.
“Not here. Well, she stayed until eight but then said she had to drive someone to the airport. She wants you to call her as soon as you’re awake. Which I guess you are now.” Kyle nodded and waited until the nurse was gone and closed the door to his room. He cleared his throat. This was it— the last installment of the emergency plan. It didn’t depend on anyone else, and, to his pleasant surprise, he didn’t even need to talk to anyone face-to-face. He just had to make one call. The call went to Nora’s voicemail. For a brief moment, Kyle considered hanging up and trying again later, but then decided against it. He would leave a message. That way, he wouldn’t have to react to anything unexpected. He was sticking to the plan. After the beep, he took a deep breath. Then he began, speaking in his natural American accent: “Hi, Nora, it’s Kyle. First of all, thanks so much for coming to the hospital with me and staying so long. The nurse told me everything. Second, you probably realize my voice is different. I just realized this myself, and I’m not going to lie: it’s pretty shocking.” He paused and, for a splitsecond, remembered a magazine article he’d read about how rarely the Green Bay Packers practiced their trick plays. “Basically, what the doctors here tell me, is that last night, when I got knocked out, my brain was damaged. Specifically, my medial temporal lobes and hippocampus. Anyway, according to them, the result is that I now have a rare form of ‘posttraumatic amnesia.’ Parts of my past I can’t remember. One thing is, my linguistic retention has been damaged. The doctors aren’t sure how long it will last—a day, a week, forever—but at least right now, I no longer have my British accent. Also, I
definitely remember ‘being British,’ but I can’t remember anything about my past, not even where I used to live or who my parents are.” He paused. He was close. “I bet this is pretty confusing or startling. To tell you the truth, I can’t really believe it myself. I’m still in shock. Anyway, they’re letting me out soon, so I’ll be at home for the rest of the day. Maybe we can talk later. Okay. Goodbye.” And that was it. Now he just had to wait. He hated waiting, but he was happy to be done. He had run the plan to perfection.
... When he got back to his apartment, he ate a sandwich and watched television. Then he fell asleep on the couch. Late in the afternoon, he woke up. It was still quite light out. He went through his bedroom to the bathroom, and when he came out—he saw it. Bob’s Your Uncle was lying on the other side of his bed. He’d forgotten to put it away the previous night. It was open, as usual, to the chart, but something about it looked different. It looked like there were marks on it. He walked around his bed, carefully side-stepping a stack of library books and the corner of a poster. On the chart was writing. It was done in pen, but was so faint that Kyle had to pick up the book and bring it closer to his eyes and squint to see it. Part of one of the bullet points—“Speak confidently”—was underlined. In the margins next to it was written the following, in a jagged hand: “We have to work on this, buster.” —Matthew Grzecki is a writer for the Harvard Lampoon. INTIYA ISAZA-FIGUEROA | STAFF ILLUSTRATOR
28 | Business is Good | Matthew Grzecki | Tuesday Magazine
Refocusing the Lens
Cross-cultural empathy on the world stage DISPATCH | MARENA LIN I had dozed off in the oppressive heat of the absent monsoon. Beside my sandal, several flies sipped at the syrupy dregs of my morning chai—one of many cups that had appeared on the dining table each morning. I was just starting my second week on the job as the American teacher at the neighboring grade school. In a community where the hobbies of an eleven year-old boy include farm work and cricket, where most children are barefoot, and where scorpions, toads, and cobras are common roadkill, my arrival had been greeted with a full parade, salutes from the school flag guard, and speeches from the principal and one of the directors of the Rural Development Foundation (RDF), the family-run charity that had sponsored my stay. They asked me for an inspirational speech. But what they received was a nervous incoherent ramble in English about the boundless opportunities offered by education, things they and their families clearly already knew. Despite the fact that most students did not understand any English, the director reminded them how lucky they were to have a student from the greatest university in the world speaking to them. For reasons other than the heat, I had sweated and squirmed throughout the ceremony. Rolling my head to the side, I caught sight of eleven girls from the junior college clad in brilliantly colored panjabis and saris coming toward me, chattering excitedly. Junior college in Andhra Pradesh is the equivalent of the last two years of high school in the U.S. “Madam. Photos, photos,” echoed the few that could speak some English. The other day, I had shown Priyanka photographs from my father’s birthday party. As the warden’s wife, she was like a mother to the girls, and accordingly, rumors of the questionable glamour of my southern California suburban life had spread quickly throughout the small
college. These girls had moved to the college from neighboring agricultural villages as far away as a couple hundred kilometers. The living arrangements were forty girls to three small bedrooms. They somehow managed to position themselves efficiently, sleeping on thin mats that offered little relief from the concrete floor. I gestured toward the empty chairs arrayed around me. “No,” they said, waving their hands as if I had just suggested that I had three eyes. As they settled at my feet, I stood up in protest. “We sit on the floor, madam.” Sensing that this arrangement did not sit well with me, a few of the girls reluctantly agreed and nervously scanned the courtyard before sinking into the chairs. Soon, the photographs were distracting them from the fact that we were seated on the same level. Nagini spoke English best, so she had been assigned the task of asking me questions. “Madam, this is your home?” she asked. “Yes,” I responded, stopping myself mid-nod as I remembered that nodding was a meaningless gesture in South India. “But this is my mother and father’s home,” I was careful to add, “not mine. I am a student, like you.” Suddenly, one of the girls gave a little scream. Priyanka had swatted her neck with a rolled up newspaper. On the floor! she seemed to say in Telugu. You know better than to do this. As they crossed their legs on the tile, I resisted my inclination to join them. As with most sentient Americans, the notion of equality had been seared into my consciousness at a young age. And it was noticeably missing in this context. But it seemed unfair to think that its absence meant that Indian society could be distilled into a relationship between the oppressed and their oppressors. However, this was often the easiest inference to arrive at. I encountered Westerners who found the hierarchy so offensive that they took matters into
their own hands. On his second day in the village, a fellow American visitor found himself accusing an Indian man of mistreating the students. “Stop barking at them. You intimidate them,” he said, knowingly. Then, carefully enunciating in English, he tried to explain his own more appropriate procedures to students who spoke only Telugu. This endeavor was futile, and perhaps the last time he tried to interact directly with the students. He spent the rest of the month photographing the villagers as they staged various activities for him—scaling toddy trees to tap the fermented juice that was the source of their livelihood, sacrificing goats and chickens so that their buffalo would enjoy greater prosperity, readying the fields for when the monsoon should choose to appear—and very seldom paused to exchange words with them. Dismay at the culture had transformed first into dismissal and then perhaps unintentionally into a sense of superiority. Other foreigners skipped the thought that the hierarchy should be “fixed” and instead took advantage of their default position at its top. Over sambhar and idli in a hotel in Chennai, I watched from another table as an Australian man forced his Indian waiter to consume marmite, a yeast paste. “You must try this,” he pressed, as if the waiter had a decision to make. But the waiter had been trained to obey every whim of the hotel guests and could not refuse. As the waiter gagged, smiling weakly, the Australian was unable to contain his laughter. These instances were notable, although rare. It was more common to encounter travelers who tried to understand India through the lens of their own culture than it was to find someone so blatantly cruel. Although the former was seldom deliberate, using one culture as a metric by which to label another as right or wrong invariably paved the way for misunderstanding.
Refocusing the Lens | Marena Lin | Tuesday Magazine | 29
In spite of the difference in our seating preferences, Priyanka and I were quite close. One monsoon-drenched night, as I stayed up taking video footage of the ubiquitous flashes of lightning, she and her husband remained awake out of concern that the crazy American would be struck dead by lightning. Later, she visited me when I was bedridden with the mosquito-borne fever that seemed to
in place reservations, which allocate a certain number of legislative and other government positions to each caste. Reservations function as a caste-based version of affirmative action. Although these reservations had been intended as a temporary measure, they have lasted to this day. In modern India, caste now serves more as a political tool than as a social marker. Rather than
“ I was in their home, after all. And my culture
had no place . ”
sweep the village in the days following each heavy rain. When she wasn’t busy taking care of the girls at the junior college, we sat together exchanging language lessons. Her abidance by the hierarchy was not indicative of her character or compassion. It also seems inappropriate to simply ascribe this hierarchy to India’s longstanding caste system. The history and former practices of the caste system bear little relevance to their modern function in India. Much has happened since the days of Hindu and Mughal rulers and British colonial social theory. A look at the trajectory of the subcontinent since it officially gained independence from British rule on August 15, 1947 reveals the unlikely unification of hundreds of minorities, twenty-two recognized languages and hundreds of variations on them, and perhaps just as many religious practices. In forming the world’s largest democracy, India’s Constitution was written with the diversity of its constituents in mind; chief among its principles are “freedom and equality before the law, the cultural rights of minorities, and the prohibition of such practices as untouchability and forced labour” (India After Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha). So invested in ridding itself of inequalities was this incipient nation that it put
eliminating the social stratification in India, reservations have simply rearranged it and highlighted the importance of categorization: there now exist impoverished communities of Brahmins, who were traditionally at the top of the Hindu caste system, while Christians are one of the fastest growing castes – in part due to the seats set aside for them at top political and educational institutions. Instead of caste and cleanly drawn historical roots, the true delineators in the hierarchy of the village are the same ones found in most societies: age, education and wealth. The primary difference is how these markers are treated. At one point, after not having heard my name in days, I tried to convince Priyanka’s son to call me Marena instead of “Madam,” one of two words in English that everyone in the village knew (the other being “Sir”). “I’m not happy when you call me that,” I said. “In my culture, everyone is the same.” “But, Madam, it shows respect in Indian culture to say ‘Madam,’” he replied. “We say ‘Madam’ and ‘Sir’ because we respect education and success. I am not happy to call you Marena. Then there is no respect.” When understood as the manifestation of respect rather than control, the hierarchy no longer felt so abrasive. One weekend, Priyanka dressed me in one of her saris and brought me to the naming ceremony of her newborn niece three villages away.
30 | Refocusing the Lens | Marena Lin | Tuesday Magazine
The two grandmothers were seated on the family bed, watching over the sleeping infant for whom the entire extended family had gathered. Priyanka, her husband, and their two teenage children sat on the concrete, massaging curry and rice with their hands. They brought a chair for me. For a brief moment, I considered refusing the chair, but it suddenly seemed wrong to disrupt the calm of this very personal occasion. I thanked my hosts for the chair and sat down. I was in their home, after all. And my culture had no place. As much as the hierarchy was evidenced by these formalities—where I had to sit, how I was to be addressed—my status as a foreigner and my general oblivion toward these traditions made my actual position in the hierarchy indeterminate. Unlike upper-class Indians, I had no expectations for the way I was to be treated. Barriers to friendship did not exist unless I created them myself. Although we continued to keep up appearances of madam and pupils in the presence of other madams and sirs, it was not long before the junior college girls were telling me what to do. Photography was something that continued to captivate their attention, and they often asked to use my digital camera. On one occasion, they had flattered me to the point that I was grinning very stupidly. After stringing my hair with jasmine, they corrected my pose, asking that I cross my arms and hold my chin—like a Tollywood starlet caught somewhere between coy and giddy. (Tollywood is the Telugu-language film industry, based in Hyderabad and analogous to Bollywood of Mumbai and Kollywood of Chennai.) Fifteen long seconds later, I read consternation on their faces as they reviewed the photographs they had taken. “Open your eyes!” they advised, their brows furrowed. My eyes had certainly been open. I tried my best to hold back my laughter and made an effort to raise my eyebrows. It was a special occasion to witness the possible birth of a stereotype in earnest. In other instances, photography greased conversations where language barriers caused them to stall. When the photographs of my father’s birthday
Bus Ride J u l i e Wr i g h t Oil on canvas 30” x 36”
Bus Ride | Julie Wright | Tuesday Magazine | 31
party had become old news, I resorted to showing pictures of my stay in China. As it had always been, food was a common subject of my photography in Beijing. My audience puzzled over the wooden sticks set atop a bowl of rice and eel. They were appalled by the fact that a pair of these sticks was all I needed to enjoy a good meal. At that time, I had not quite mastered the art of eating with my hands, which, in South India, was a skill acquired at birth. After using my right hand to work the curra and okra into the rice and transport the mixture to my mouth for consumption, I usually ended up looking a little like the Gerber baby. I could understand their skepticism of my ability to consume food with two wooden sticks if I had trouble eating with my hands. Beyond the humor they often generated, cultural differences had the potential of reshaping the same lenses through which they were observed. As a visitor from a town where the average household income was nearly a thousand times that of this village, it was hard not to notice the things that the villagers did not have: the man who sold samosas at 6 p.m. each day did not own a gas stove, Priyanka and her husband did not have a mosquito net, and most of the village did without indoor plumbing and endured frequent power outages. Yet, every day, I walked an extra three kilometers to the samosa stand in Parvatagiri, easily doubling my caloric intake through eating fresh samosas. On warm nights with only the pulsing stars and straggling clouds above, Priyanka and her husband preferred to sleep on the roof with a thin blanket beneath them. It was cooler there, among unidentified insects and geckos; below them, I baked on a bed shrouded by a mosquito net inside the brick walls of the junior college. (I had tried to sleep on the roof once. After a few hours of tossing around on a blanket and fending off phantom geckos and mosquitoes, I crept back into stifling heat of the building and took refuge beneath my mosquito net.) And when the power was out, fewer insects intruded and families did not think to light candles while they continued their conversations. As I came to know my friends, it became not a
matter of what they lacked, but how they flourished with the things they had. It took me a while to see the village as it was, to gain some understanding of the people hidden behind the often overwhelming categorization of economic poverty. Knowledge of village life occasionally came from tactless mistakes. In one lesson plan, I taught my students how to describe their parents’ professions, inadvertently defeating the purpose of their uniforms. Twelve year old Ravi went first. “My father is a toddy-tapper.” Then Pranitha, “My father is a farmer.” And then slowly, in perfect English, Kavitha said, “My father died in 2007. My mother is a teacher.” My breath caught in my throat. I apologized for asking and expressed my very belated condolences. “It is okay,” she said quietly, perhaps confused by my reaction. Later, when I visited her home, she pointed out a color photograph of her father hanging beside the doorway. It was wreathed in fresh yellow flowers. “Auto accident,” she explained. This was not hard to believe. My host in Hyderabad had told me that he absolutely refused to drive on the village roads after dark. At speeds of thirty kilometers an hour, motorbikes and auto-rickshaws would drift through the early evening while shining their high beams, blinding oncoming traffic and endangering the pedestrians and cyclists who braved the roads at those hours. Next to this memorial of her father was a photograph of her mother on a stage. Kavitha proudly described the teaching award her mother had received in Delhi and the national award ceremony that had been broadcasted on television. Her grandmother, a long-haired woman of sixty, offered me a chair and presented me with a bottle of water. Next to a bed that the entire family shared were a footpowered Singer sewing machine and spools of turquoise, pink and lime green thread. While Kavitha’s mother taught, her grandmother sold and tailored saris and panjabis from their home. Beside her mother’s teaching award and their thriving clothing business, the photograph of her father seemed to be a daily reminder of the tragic circumstances
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from which they had risen. Tragedy does not change with cultural background. However, it seemed to have greater immediacy and presence in the village than it would ever have in my hometown. Deaths—by suicide, natural causes, and accidents—were reported frankly as events that seemed especially commonplace. Kavitha was hardly the only student who had lost a parent. One morning, school was dismissed early due to the unexpected death of a young school attendant from heart problems. He left behind a wife and an eleven month-old daughter. On a walk back from a visit to the samosa stand with some boys at the junior college, we passed by a large crowd that stemmed from a home and spilled onto the dirt road. Drumming and chanting reverberated in the night air. I spotted Samskruthi’s father, a kindergarten English teacher, seated on a nearby ledge. He smiled when he saw me. “Funeral,” he said without much hesitation, “The laundry man died.” In the face of mounting debt, a clothes washer had killed himself with a draught of poison. He left behind a wife and children. The junior college boys did not seem the least bothered by this. Thinking that I had not understood the concept of suicide, one of them tried to describe to me how suicide could be accomplished with a rope, a stool and a ceiling fan. I stopped him. Perhaps I should not have been surprised that he had such an explicit understanding of suicide. Suicide has become much more common throughout rural India. In recent years, strings of farmer suicides throughout the South and West Indian states of Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh have claimed the attention of international media and academia. The livelihood of these small farmers relies on scarce and uncertain groundwater and rainfall and on prices dictated by the international market. As developed countries raised their exports, commodity prices, such as those for cotton, dropped precipitously. With nowhere to turn, poorer farmers borrowed against their next harvest through informal rural financial markets at very high interest rates, often without
considering the devastating risks of drought and an absent monsoon. In Andhra Pradesh, the monsoon had been expected in mid-June of 2009. Although there had been intermittent heavy showers, it had not yet appeared by the time I left in late July. Subsequently, the price of rice jumped to thirty-five rupees per kilogram, up from twenty-five rupees per kilogram at the same time the previous year. For entire families already struggling on a per capita income of less than five thousand rupees per year and whose diets were completely grain-based, this increase could only mean starvation and irrecoverable debt. Comparable circumstances are impossible to find in the United States. But their dependence on decisions made both domestically and abroad suggests that bridging these cultural chasms is as important globally as it was in the remote and isolated setting of my stay in this village. On one of my last evenings in the village, I visited Ramesh, whose daughter was in my eldest class. His family seated me in a plastic white chair. A breeze drifted through the doorway as dusk settled into darkness, rustling the dried mango leaves that hung above us and diffusing the fragrance of cardamom from a pot of semya, a dessert made with vermicelli noodles, cardamom, buffalo’s milk and sugar. I compulsively rubbed my bare shoulders in anticipation of the mosquitoes that often congregated at that time. This gesture met no language barrier, eliciting giggles from Upagna and her mother. She’s afraid of the mosquitoes. As with most of the families I had visited, Ramesh wanted to know what I thought of the village life. He was pleased when I told him that I enjoyed the slower pace and simplicity of it. Looking around me, it was clear that Ramesh was comparatively well-off—he had a gas stove, a motorbike, and a television. But Ramesh’s beginnings had been humble. His father had been a fisherman, and as a boy, Ramesh had ventured door-to-door, selling the day’s catch by the kilogram. When asked why he had not left the village after acquiring his physics degree, Ramesh responded that places like Delhi did not have the same values, the same sense of community. He expressed to me
that he did not view himself as a citizen of India. “I am a global citizen. A citizen of the world. The universe.” Earlier that week, Samskruthi’s father, a man whose family could afford to eat chicken once a month, had distilled life in the village into one phrase: “simple living, high thinking.” Even though the English he taught as a kindergarten teacher was limited, this was a phrase that he had chosen to learn well. Given the immense hardships associated with rural life and its apparent insularity, I had not expected the kind of happiness and worldliness that my friends expressed. I had been narrow-minded to even think that the material comfort that
I had associated with happiness could apply here. These understandings were as much a product of willingness to acknowledge and shed preconceptions as they were of a realization that we shared much more common ground than apparent cultural differences let on. When I contacted my mother, she often joked that she had emigrated from Taiwan to the US precisely to leave similar living conditions—only for me to undo her efforts by voluntarily moving back to them. Although 1960s Kaohsiung was a more developed place than today’s rural India, she could still relate to rural life, the relative poverty, and the valuing of
Atop the Gorges at Gauley Bridge JUSTIN WYMER
You never tell me swim more slowly. Try to harbor that little ship wobbling left of my intentions. And if you have the gulf to tell me, “Lay still,” watch the ripple heaving its signed vapor, quietly, without fear of erasure—a solid—the night’s unquenchable black. I still believe you’ll watch me huff and weave ignition from my mouth. An ethnic firework of city lights vaunts flexures of colors and the water has a hundred layered skins. I love them like Zanzibar oil, which is just as mesmeric in the way it spills, iridescent. Wafts of salt and elegies. You write them, as well, though you never let them out to play with my children. Though I have no children. And you don’t have the lung to house our sordid visits to the Gauley where our veins made bracelets from our fingers, grey quartz animals dipped in river purling, listening to Rachmaninoff with his own sound of opiates. Our lives are not ashtrays though they hold some equal, immeasurable taste of flaring skins past their burning points. My soot-black sock ebbs far below my ankle. Lunapale skin saying wait til dusk so you won’t crackle humanly. There is hope in waiting. There is peril in fastening oneself to things that won’t leave their hermit caves. — Justin Wymer is co-director of staff writers.
Atop the Gorges at Gauley Bridge | Justin Wymer | Tuesday Magazine | 33
greater destitution throughout Africa. Although there is a tendency to say that global market forces are independent of moral decision-making or character, let alone any cross-cultural empathy, the fact is that the prices of commodities are almost entirely the product of human decisions in developed countries. Human decisions are the reason that a quarter of the corn harvested in the United States is used for the production of ethanol fuel. It is estimated that the grain used to produce twenty-five gallons of ethanol is enough to feed one person for an entire year. This allocation was a product of the US 2008 Farm Bill, which also imposed tariffs on refined sugar that are nearly half their world market price per pound, severely limiting imports and raising the price of domestic sweeteners. Worldwide, sugarcane is in such abundance that Brazil uses it to derive ethanol, trailing only the US in ethanol production. However, the differences between Brazil’s ethanol and ours are stark: sugarcane-based ethanol is produced at a lower cost and is at least three times as sustainable as grain-based ethanol, and its production does not compete with the ability of an impoverished family to feed itself. Despite these benefits of
JULIE WRIGHT | STAFF ILLUSTRATOR
education as a mechanism to escape it. My own family’s background is perhaps not as far removed from this village as the United Nations and the CIA World Factbook statistics have suggested. However, although 1960s Taiwan suffered from political instability, it was in the midst of rapidly rising incomes and literacy rates. Today, about 70% of the Indian population continues to live in rural agricultural villages, mired by fickle monsoons, a government too slow and corrupt to build roads and fairly allocate resources in rural areas, and an international grain market that is insensitive to the plight of the small rural farmer. Mahatma Gandhi’s words from nearly seventy years ago suggest that not much has changed: “We town-dwellers have believed that India is to be found in its towns, and the villages were created to minister to our needs. We have hardly ever paused to inquire if those poor folk get sufficient to eat and clothe themselves with and whether they have a roof to shelter themselves from sun and rain.” Today, “town-dweller” can be extended to the rest of the developed world. And rural villagers are hardly unique to the Indian subcontinent. They can be found throughout the developing world in South America, the Caribbean, Asia, and in much
34 | Refocusing the Lens | Marena Lin | Tuesday Magazine
sugarcane-based ethanol, sugar trade agreements continue to prevent its economic viability in the United States. The American allocation of grain for fuel is thus entirely manmade rather than the direction of market forces. Domestically and internationally, these legislative decisions are made by people—rarely with any consideration of the population that bears the true costs of these choices. At the time, my friendships with villagers in Andhra Pradesh seemed completely detached from their wellbeing and livelihoods, but the relationship is clear now. Until the devastating earthquake, Haiti and its already dire economic and political state were seldom given a second thought by most Americans. Many weeks after the deadly earthquake, headlines and images of the tragedy continued to be a fixture in newspapers and on television screens. In the aftermath, two of the solutions for reviving Haiti’s fallen economy have been proposed: one involving the rejuvenation of its rice production, which was replaced by imports of US rice in the 1980s, and another that aims to spur sugar production in Haiti by revising the prohibitive US quotas on sugar imports. For India, however, analogous devastation is more likely to come in the form of severe droughts and the emptying of its aquifers. Resource exhaustion could be the nail in the coffin of stability, as many rural regions in northern India already suffer from joint corporate-government exploitation and politicized religious tensions, which continue to breed a new generation of militants. Hopefully, it will not take a tragedy of this scale to understand the value of cross-cultural empathy in motivating a change of heart in developed countries. Perhaps Ramesh encapsulated it best that night: we are not really citizens of individual countries. Given the worldwide repercussions of our decisions, it may be fair to say that we are indeed global citizens.
A Sanguine Affair
—Marena Lin blogs at theacademicvagrant. wordpress.com, where you can see pictures of and read more about her time in India.
In the dining room the old man prepared his breakfast tray. On it he arranged a plate, a bowl, a clear glass
FICTION | DWIGHT LIVINGSTONE CURTIS Emmanuel Arquito had the habit of waking up with his eyes closed. Often he stayed that way for minutes, listening to his body, sensing its mechanisms, following blood and air. Often, too, he imagined the things in his body that he would never be able to sense: unconscious processes that beat on for lifetimes, soft valves that opened and closed longer and tighter than plastic or steel, tiny circuits that ran complex currents through fat dense grey fluid. He understood the circadian rhythm. He had begun studying it, in books and
mug, a tall drinking glass, and silverware: a fork, a knife, a teaspoon, and a serrated grapefruit spoon. This he brought with him into the kitchen. He put bread in to toast, placed the second half of yesterday’s grapefruit in his bowl, activated his water boiler, unwrapped a teabag, and poured a glass of orange juice. When the bread emerged, brown, he applied butter and jam, and after pouring hot water over the teabag he took up the tray and reentered the dining room. At the head of the table, open, lay a medical journal. Emmanuel Arquito resumed reading
like a crying child from column three page right. Wring me out. I am refuse. He slid his chair back from the table. The article would remain as yet unfinished. He stood and assembled the tray, listening attentively for the familiar pops and groans of his waking body. He walked slowly to the sink. His muscles felt strong and elastic this morning, and his bones moved in quiet and painless harmony with his tendons and ligaments. He hummed while he washed his dishes, coupling the splashes and clinks of his work with a tune he hadn’t heard since
“ Emmanuel Arquito took this advice with
an ounce of submission and a
dash of bitters . ”
in careful private experiments in his own bed, when he was in medical school nearly seven decades ago; in the years since, as a careful poet, one yet with the propensities of a doctor, he nurtured precise habits around that understanding. This morning, upon waking, he opened his eyes immediately. It was earlier than usual. He glanced at the digital clock on his bedside table for confirmation, though he hardly needed it: it was five-forty in the morning. He pulled his light blanket down off his chest and swung his feet carefully off the side of the bed to where his leather slippers waited, heels squared to the carpet.
...
precisely where he had left off a little less than a day earlier.
... Despite a fastidious treatment of the grapefruit, the old man finished his breakfast well before he could finish the article. He cleared his throat and slid his breakfast tray to the farthest end of the dining room table. He scanned the journal for his place, in the third column of the right-hand page, but found that he could not reengage with the sentence. This was because of the breakfast tray: Emmanuel Arquito had never been comfortable around the remnants of a meal. The crust of his toast became loathsome once he had put down his knife and folded his napkin. The empty grapefruit rind sagged. The wet teabag in the clear glass mug dragged his attention
he was a child. When he was finished, he opened a high cupboard and withdrew a canister of coffee grounds, which he converted with anticipation into the first cup of strong black coffee he had brewed in months. Emmanuel Arquito stood by the dining room window with his steaming mug, watching the buoyant sun. He had stopped drinking coffee when his own physician—as if he needed another set of eyes and ears beyond his own—told him that his morning cup was raising his blood pressure. Emmanuel Arquito took this advice with an ounce of submission and a dash of bitters.
... Washed and dressed, with a tentative exhilaration, the old man began his daily walk in the direction of the beach. The
A Sanguine Affair | Dwight Livingstone Curtis | Tuesday Magazine | 35
walk would take him down his hill toward the sea, where he would rinse his hands and face in the cold saltwater and walk carefully, for his ankles were weak, through the deep hot sand. Then, he would follow the paved road that led from the top of the beach up another large hill to the old royal palace, on a cliff overlooking the water. There he would rest on a bench and feed the crusts of his breakfast toast, which he carried in a blue plastic newspaper bag folded neatly in the hip pocket of his shorts, to the palace gulls. Their nests peppered the sheer cliff. They rose and dropped effortlessly in the hot drafts that swelled up from the baking sand. Rested, he would walk from the palace back down the hill toward the outdoor market on Calle de Ramón y Cajal. From there, he would weave up Avenida de la Reina Victoria, past the t-shirt vendors and street performers, until he got to his little hill and his little house near the Plaza de las Brisas.
... At found which of his
the beach Emmanuel Arquito a large piece of blue sea glass, he slipped into the breast pocket linen shirt. As he walked back
humming again as he rose up over the final dune, and when he set his foot down on the sandy asphalt of the palace road, it was with such exuberance that his toes buckled against the front end of his canvas shoe, and he experienced a sharp and juvenile pain.
... After finding an unoccupied, sunlit bench overlooking the cliff and the water below, Emmanuel Arquito extracted the newspaper bag from his pocket and withdrew a small piece of crust. The dark brown bread was slick with cold butter. A large gull landed on the ground in front of the bench and cocked its head to one side. It looked at Emmanuel Arquito. The old man held out the crust and watched the gull’s gaze follow his hand. He dropped the chunk of bread and the gull leapt at it, gripping it first in its beak and then snapping its head back. As it opened and closed its beak the length of crust dropped incrementally down its throat. The gull again cocked its head at Emmanuel Arquito, and a second gull rose up from behind the cliff and landed quietly behind the first. He reached again into the blue plastic
He again looked down at the gulls. They had finished the second crust and were gazing intently at the blue bag on his lap. Emmanuel Arquito withdrew another length of crust. The bird heads twitched. He stuck the crust, stained with jam, into his own mouth. He chewed with relish the remains of his breakfast. A third gull landed with a flutter and a thump behind the first two. He ate a corner piece, slick and cold. A fourth gull rose on a breeze from below the cliff’s edge. He slowly ate a long piece of crust, sour with soaked-up grapefruit juice. The twitching audience grew and he smiled. He grinned in delight. He loaded his mouth with sticky crusts. He balled up the empty newspaper bag and let out a loud whistle, sending the gulls scattering in low flight, expelling from his full mouth breadcrumbs and spittle. He stood triumphantly from his seat, whistling, conducting the screeching gulls with his sticky wet fingers.
... He whistled all the way down the hill to Calle de Ramón y Cajal. The stalls were already set up under white canvas tents, covered in fresh fruit and fish on
“ He balled up the empty newspaper bag and let out a loud
gulls
whistle , sending the
scattering in low flight. ”
like disco balls cried out in English; round red women shouted rebukes from apartment balconies as they folded linens and listened to radio shows. Old men plodded meaningfully through the shifting street, stooped, judicious, examining produce with withered hands and quietly singing extinct songs through sun-dried lips that opened and closed as slowly as clamshells. Emmanuel Arquito walked with loping strides past the meat and fish tents, inhaling deeply the sanguine bouquets of the exposed flesh. As he strode ambitiously over a wide oily puddle he thought suddenly of his bony knees, but his heel landed squarely and he paused proudly on the other side of the puddle. Next to him, a young boy had stopped to gape. “I’m ninety-two years old,” said Emmanuel Arquito, smiling broadly and lilting slightly forward toward the startled boy with a gymnast’s unsteady bow. And then he walked on, smiling, as the boy expelled one quick small sneeze. Passing through another narrow passageway at the end of the market plaza, Emmanuel Arquito emerged into a much larger stone plaza, bordered on the opposite side by the busy Avenida de la Reina Victoria. Next to the archway were the stately granite steps of the handsome Nuestra Señora de la Anunciación church, lit in jagged diagonals by the morning sun. A group of university students smoked on a shaded corner of the steps, twisting and miming and exhorting in fluid displays of youth. The old man assumed a dignified posture and stepped with grace into the harsh light.
... up the beach from the water, over wet, firm, shifting flats, then the small humps and ridges that high tide had carved out earlier that morning, and finally the hot, white, weeded dunes that cooked in the sun, he felt a surge of energy. He unbuttoned his shirt. The sea glass in his breast pocket swung out into the air and then back against his chest as he climbed, ballooning his shirt and thumping against his ribs, and he inhaled deeply, sucking hot air into his dusty lungs. He began
bag and withdrew another crust, this one stained with dark red jam. He tossed the crust over the backs of the two birds. They leapt back, squawking, and pecked at the scrap of bread until it split apart. Emmanuel Arquito looked down at the fingers of his left hand. They were shiny with butter and, here and there, sticky with a film of jam, to which clung crumbs. He put his index finger in his mouth and licked off the jam and butter. He did the same to his thumb.
36 | A Sanguine Affair | Dwight Livingstone Curtis | Tuesday Magazine
beds of ice. Thick flank steaks, chucks, legs, briskets, hocks, and rolls of sausage hung from the edges of the white tents by loops of thick white twine. Emmanuel Arquito crossed the street and passed down a small alley into the fray: children ran along the cobblestones, splitting walking couples with shouts and leaping puddles of dripped ice; teenagers in t-shirts and loosened helmets eased heavy scooters over curbstones; men with racks of sunglasses that flashed
He ambled up to the group of boys. Two sat on the steps, out of the way of the birds’ nests on the granite lip above, and the other three stood against the closed wooden doors. They had been laughing lazily at something, and now they smiled. He stepped up onto the first step and took a seat so that he, too, faced the plaza. “Why doesn’t one of you give an old man a smoke,” he asked the plaza. A cigarette appeared over his left shoulder. He accepted it with parted fingers and
placed it between his skinny lips. He heard in his ear the click of a disposable lighter and he turned slightly to receive the flame. He inhaled slowly at first. He had not had a cigarette in forty years. The hot smoke caught and he coughed, deeply and loudly, and the boys laughed. Lazily they resumed their conversation, and now Emmanuel Arquito inhaled again, a smoker’s drag, sucking down through the tightness of his aged and contracted chest. His thoughts broke apart into coiling red snakes and he steadied himself against the side of the church as the plaza wilted in the sun. His heart throbbed against the inside of his thin ribcage, forcing blood down his frail arms, out between the tendons that rose up from the underside of his wrists and past the jutting knuckles of his hands into his long, dry, branchlike fingers. The cigarette bobbed in front of his face as the blood inflated and deflated the veins and vessels that ran under his papery skin. “I am obliged,” he intoned loudly toward the students, crescendoing slightly as he struggled to his feet. Carefully,
he descended the stairs, staggering into the sunlight and noise of the plaza. He made a slow and imperfect beeline across the plaza, pausing for a moment to rest as the thick red snakes drifted past his eyes, fibrillating colorfully. When he reached the other side, he sat down on an empty bench and listened carefully to the sounds of his body. The shivering, ancient valves of his heart opened and closed, undamming rhythmically the slow, sloshing rivers in his veins. His lungs billowed like sails into the vacuum of his contracted diaphragm. His muscles, quietly tensed, clung to his old bones. In his skull tiny circuits buzzed and flickered, sending small sparks outward into grey fat and across pools of dense, dark fluid. When his headache receded Emmanuel Arquito rose and walked slowly back through the streets of the city toward his home, where his routine like a spurned lover awaited him impatiently. —Dwight Livingstone Curtis received The Harvard Advocate’s 2009 Louis Begley Prize for Fiction for his story “Saturation.”
Great Plains ANDREW NUNNELLY
The sky is a glass of whiskey left to sit For too long, a candle forgotten until morning In this night. Set to the sad howl of trains, Moving east into deeper darkness with its bovine cargo, A crowded black steerage echoing the rails And grease and blurred grain elevators. If Kansas were a woman older than myself, I would touch her breasts with the lamp off. Even in the deep blue gas flame of twilight. Because I am rapt and restless enough to think That I am whole and wise with words. To heal a heart that wasn’t even broken. —Andrew Nunnelly is an arts columnist for The Harvard Crimson. More of his poetry can be found at bwass. blogspot.com.
Great Plains | Andrew Nunnelly | Tuesday Magazine | 37
1770
A four-voice counterpoint COMMENTARY | CASSIE RASMUSSEN
Wa l k i n g M a p : I taly: 5/ 2 5 / 0 8 - 7 / 2 4 / 0 8; 6/ 0 3 / 0 9 - 8 / 11 / 0 9 Ju l i a R o o n e y Tracing paper, thread, wooden frame 24” x 48”
I started making walking maps as a way to reconcile the physical geography of a city with my psychological experience of it. In the aftermath of my trip to 33 Italian cities in 2008-2009, I became interested in both the visual and conceptual nature of the maps I used to navigate the places – their focus on touristic and urban centers as opposed to residential peripheries, and the way they abstracted the cities into geometries – regular grids, concentric circles, or linear sprawls. I became critical of the way these objective renderings of the cities’ structure were either reflective of or contradictory to my own perception of them.
38 | Walking Map: Italy | Julia Rooney | Tuesday Magazine
In making my walking maps, I used tourist maps which I had collected on the road as a foundation for my own reconstructions, first tracing my walked routes over them and then transferring these tracings to white surfaces – tracing paper, foam core or fabric. In this way, they are true to scale, but have become contours merely suggestive of a topographical layout, necessarily located in an anonymous and blank space. In making “Italy: 5/25/08-7/24/08; 6/03/098/11/09,” I am concerned with the translucency of the tracing paper – the way it reveals whatever is behind it – and the fragility of the surface when string is sewn through it – the way it tears and creates “glitches” where the thread becomes knotted or bunched up. These imperfections, as well as the ambiguity of the white space, are more reflective of my experience on the road than politically and geographically “accurate” maps could ever be. Through these renderings, I am interested in dismantling the notion that maps tell us how a city or a country “is” and instead proposing that personally constructed routes are just as valid indications of place.
The Lycée Louis-le-Grand is an academy in Paris so prestigious that Louis XIV, the Sun King, gave it his patronage and renamed it after himself; previously, it had been simply the Collège de Clermont. It would go through many name changes again after the revolution, but in the end, it was the king’s name that survived the centuries. Thanks to the monarchy’s money, the academy has nurtured some of the greatest intellectuals in French history. There, young Lafayette resolved to go to America to aid its revolution. And it was there that Voltaire found his calling as a writer and political philosopher. In 1770, royal funds provided a scholarship for a poor yet brilliant young man who would use his education to change his homeland forever: Maximilien
usually required several hours), Mozart was admitted by a unanimous vote from the academy’s board. If there was ever a doubt about the young musician’s future, it was eradicated then and there. For all anyone could see, he was neatly on the path to someday become the court composer of a powerful and wealthy patron. Any alternative was unthinkable; unthinkable, that is, except for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. 1770 also found Marie Antoinette receiving a different kind of education. At fourteen, the same age as Mozart, she left behind her Austrian homeland to become the wife of Louis XVI. In France, she was stripped of her Austrian clothing, Austrian customs, and even her Austrian name, Antonia. They adorned her with fashionable silks and satins
Every now and then, the threads of history cross, tangling in subtle knots, and its most noteworthy inhabitants cross paths. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did not know in 1787 that he was four years away from death. Mozart was far too young to care that sixteen year old Ludwig van Beethoven was clumsily making his way through the streets of Vienna for the first time. The bright and gilded world of the imperial capital provided a stark contrast to the home where Beethoven had practiced through the night while his father drank himself into a rage and his mother lay dying of tuberculosis. An appointment was arranged for Beethoven to visit and play for Mozart. As he listened to the teenager perform, Mozart was initially indifferent. He was not concerned much about his influence
“ Years later , Robespierre would refer to the
king’s school as his “Republican
Nursery.”
One day the king and clergy would discover that they had been some of the most hated
nursemaids in history. ”
Robespierre. At only eleven, Robespierre was plucked from a life of poverty and entered the rigorous world that would mold him over the next twelve years. In the same year, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was accepted to the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna, then one of the world’s premier schools of music. Mozart was only fourteen years old, but he was already loved across Europe. After completing the entrance exam in a mere thirty minutes (the composition exam
and thrust her onto the stage of France, where she was forced to quickly adopt French culture under the fierce eye of the public. And, on December 16 of that very same year, Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany, to a father who would grow obsessed with fashioning his musically gifted son into a second Mozart.
...
on the coming generation of composers; as he saw it, he was the coming generation, and he was poised to be the future of music for many years to come. In many ways, he was still the child that had performed for the royal family in Vienna, then run off to play with their children. As nimble as his tiny hands were on the harpsichord, he was clumsy enough on his feet to slip and fall right into the arms of little Marie Antoinette. Impulsively, he kissed her and cried, “I am going to marry you someday!”
1770: A four-voice counterpoint | Cassie Rasmussen | Tuesday Magazine | 39
She might have been better off that way. Instead, in 1774, she became queen of France. That was the year that Robespierre knelt before her. Every morning at 5:30, when classes commenced, and each evening at 9:00, when they finally adjourned, Robespierre walked under the name of the king, which was wrought on the gate of the school. He was as loyal to the monarch as any other Frenchman; perhaps even more so, because it was the monarchy that provided the money to lay the wealth of the world’s wisdom at Robespierre’s eager fingertips: Cicero, Aristotle, and (likely through slightly illicit means) contemporary writers like Voltaire, who had attended Lycée only a generation before. Discipline was law, and classes dealt with history, religion, and morality. Music and the arts were not encouraged. But what was encouraged, despite the strict standards, was the spirit of independent thought that blossomed in the Enlightenment. Years later, Robespierre would refer to the king’s school as his “Republican Nursery.” One day the king and clergy would discover that they had been some of the most hated nursemaids in history. But for the time being, the republican ideals seeped into Robespierre’s young mind and simmered. Robespierre had been chosen to read an ode for the new royal couple when the coronation tour visited the Lycée Louis-leGrand. The ode was in Latin. In its words he infused with sincerity his gratitude and devotion; through the generosity of the nobility, he could not only read, but read Latin. But even as he knelt at the base of the carriage, the dirty cobblestones digging into his knee, Marie Antoinette was disinterested and preoccupied. (She
may not have understood the Latin.) She scarcely turned to look into the face of the man who would one day kill her. If she had, it may have made no difference in the end. But then again, maybe that was the catalyst after all. Maybe even then, a storm was brewing beneath her silk-clad feet, behind the downcast eyes of the young man speaking fervently to the closed door of her carriage. Robespierre completed his education with rebellious tendencies. He haunted the Paris coffee houses and political clubs where talk of the Enlightenment flourished and the boundaries of French society were pressed, if only in conversation. But in 1787, Louis XVI ordered that the political clubs be closed. The soft rumblings of the coming revolution had risen enough to meet the ears of the king. Enlightened music, as Mozart was taught at the Accademia, was similar to the Enlightened view of many things. Reason was key; form and grace were sovereign. Delicate balance must be maintained between loud and soft, high and low. Structures were well defined. A sonata invariably began with the subject, the main theme, was followed by the transition, the second theme, and finally came to a close with a codetta. Mozart mastered the formulas, but sometimes he tried to break free from the structure. He composed operas in his vernacular German, rather than in Italian. And most revolutionary of all was his struggle to survive not as a court musician kept by a master patron, but as a freelance
composer relying on his own skill and inspiration. Mozart was wiser than Marie Antoinette, or so the story goes. We cannot be sure of what happened, but according to legend, his demeanor changed at some point as he stood looking down at young Beethoven’s furious performance. Perhaps it was some whisper of his own mortality. Perhaps it was a sudden burst of empathy. Whatever it was that moved him, legend has it that Mozart turned to those surrounding him and said, “Keep your eye on this one. He will make a noise in the world someday.” It was all cut short; Beethoven’s performance, his time in Vienna, Mozart’s own life. By the time Beethoven returned, Mozart was dead. Had he lived longer, Beethoven would have been his contemporary, and likely his competitor. But as things stood, Mozart could instead reach briefly from the end of his life to touch the beginning of Beethoven’s. He may not have directly taught much of anything to the talented sixteen-year-old, but he was able, in a manner, to pass him the baton, and approve the man who would become his heir. Which was, after all, exactly what Beethoven and his father had wanted all along. When Beethoven’s father had claimed, at his son’s performance in 1778, that the boy was seven, not eight, he was
JULIA ROONEY | STAFF ILLUSTRATOR
40 | 1770: A four-voice counterpoint | Cassie Rasmussen | Tuesday Magazine
competing with the famous child prodigy Mozart. Even in the midst of his intensive recital for Mozart, Beethoven may have stolen a glance at the great man and tried to imagine himself someday in those shoes. It was granted him; Beethoven became the next great renowned and innovative composer, with all the same emotional turbulence and instability. Marie Antoinette could have seen her future like a prophecy, as well, had she been perceptive enough to see that the student she met on her coronation tour bowed to her with a head heavy with the words of Rousseau and Voltaire. Robespierre, infamous and inflammatory orator that he was, could not speak at the hour of his death because he had been silenced by a bullet to the jaw. In silence, his mouth shrouded in bloody bandages, he mounted the steps to the Guillotine to which he had sent so many, and by which Marie Antoinette had met her death just a year before.
Beethoven, too, was barred from what he loved. When he realized he was deaf, he sawed the legs from his piano and pressed his ear to the ground, desperate to hear the vibrations spin across his eardrums, across his heartbeat. After that music was a kind of dream for Beethoven; he could know only the music he created for himself. Yet the music did not become trapped in the confines of his mind. Even after going deaf, Beethoven could pour out an Ode to Joy. Whether he knew it or not, when Ludwig van Beethoven sat down to write his music, it was with the weight of this legacy behind his pen. His revolution was of an entirely different kind. Where Robespierre followed the dogma of reason literally to the point of worship, Beethoven composed music that needed no reason. He forever altered the world of music, turning away from the structure of the Classical era into the passionate, dramatic music of the Romantics. Before
his death on March 26, 1827, Beethoven had poured out ingenious scores, beautiful music riddled with pain. In his own way, his music had become a sort of warped reflection on Mozart. I wonder if he realized this as he lay dying in his bed, or if Robespierre, condemned to silence as he mounted the steps to his doom, remembered that the queen had done the same a year before. Her words had also been stifled, for her prepared speech was cut short by the brashness of the executioner and the blood-thirst of the crowd. In the frenzy of her final moment, her last words were only, “Pardon me, monsieur, I did not mean to do it.” None of them meant to do it—to collide as they did. Yet I wonder if they could have envisioned how their brief and seemingly trifling collisions could split the thread of history. —Cassie Rasmussen is a staff writer.
The Coffee Revolution FICTION | QICHEN ZHANG According to legend, the French Revolution began in the Café de Foy in Paris, one of a multitude of Palais Royal coffee houses toward the end of the 18th century. Here, the smell of coffee beans wafted through a milieu of plotting, contrivance, and intrigue, as French roast and Colombian dark wrapped the regime of the Liberals in a cloud of mystery, purpose, and caffeine. Imagine a young journalist named Camille Desmoulins jumping on top of a table to proclaim indignantly, triumphantly, and naively on July 12, 1789, “Quelle couleur voulez-vous?!” This youthful energy may have catalyzed the storming of the Bastille by le peuple a mere two days later. As an outpouring of collective rage and uncontrolled fervor, it signified the beginning of a decade-long fight of an entire nation, an omnipresent aggression agitated by unified vigor, a
turmoil in which everyone craved to partake. Desmoulins spilled some coffee in the process. Nowadays, the Café de Foy is but an ephemeral memory in a garden. Occasionally, you can find it in a Wikipedia entry in French, in a history book somewhere buried in the back of the library, or on some obscure European travel website. On average, the tourists give it two or three stars.
... Two hundred years later, somewhere in an arrondissement, there sits a girl waiting to order. In the chair, she becomes enveloped by the emptiness of the coffee shop and lets herself go in a nothing kind of afternoon. The smell of coffee beans wafts in the cold air and infiltrates her senses. She wishes that caffeine didn’t
make her so jittery and incapable of calming down, because hot damn, she wants to jump on the table and do something revolutionary. But you can’t swallow your cake whole and expect to taste the sweetness, she guesses. When the waiter comes to take her order, she butchers the French, but at least she tries, because he smiles at her knowingly and asks, “Êtes-vous americaine?” And as he walks away, she’s actually hoping that he comes back with whole milk instead of skim, so that she’ll have an excuse to yell at him. She doesn’t often get chances to be hostile, but she’s not sure she can muster up her voice in time. But that isn’t par for the course today. No one except her is in the shop because, of course, they have places to be. The music playing on the radio sitting in the back sends a strange disembodied voice into the air, its
The Coffee Revolution | Qichen Zhang | Tuesday Magazine | 41
muffled warbling floating through the shop, like dust with nowhere to settle. The only other sound comes from the waiter’s hard-soled shoes as he drifts by with her small coffee on a flimsy tray.
... On July 9, 1793, a woman named Charlotte Corday bought a six-inch kitchen knife with a wooden handle in
people that bubbled under the surface for centuries and eventually erupted. As she sits there percolating, she figures that maybe today is the day courage will make her leap on the table. I can be revolutionary, too. She imagines herself tearing off the tablecloth and kicking aside the porcelain astray in her own fit of righteous fury. Like a six-inch knife piercing through her chest, the sharp
“ Today will be remembered as a Wednesday . ” Paris. Four days later, she knocked on the door of Jean-Paul Marat’s home, asking to speak with him about the Jacobins’ political trouble with the Girondins in Caen. After wrapping up the brief interview, Jean-Paul Marat, a Jacobin himself, is claimed to have said about members of the opposing faction, “Their heads will fall in a fortnight.” Before Marat could dismiss Corday from his bathroom, she pulled out the weapon from her corset and plunged the blade into Marat’s chest. Even though Corday’s sudden attack left Marat momentarily paralyzed with shock, he refused to be remembered as a speechless corpse. As Marat bled to death, he managed to utter to his wife the sentence that would become eternalized as his one last act of impulsiveness—“Help me, my dear friend!”
... The girl reaches for a book lying on top of a pile of magazines. The cover is a dilapidated image of Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Marat.” The book gives a trivial—almost ridiculing— overview of the French Revolution. She flips through the pages, barely glancing at the paragraphs, glossing over the righteousness of the Republic, the Reign of Terror, the rage of the
edge of passion slices through her, carving marks that she can feel but not see. But instead of an acute pain, the carvings only leave behind a dull ache. She raises her head from the coffee table book and peers outside the window at the people shuffling amongst each other. One woman, carrying three plastic bags, maybe filled with a package of manufactured cheese, a bridal magazine, and a toothbrush, sidesteps a man tapping furiously on his phone. A little boy asks his mother why the pigeon on the corner doesn’t fly away like all other birds, but instead of responding, she scolds him for not watching where he’s going. Rarely does anyone make eye contact with each other, and if they do, it’s only by accident. The lethargy surrounding each person outside like a transparent pocket of air isolates each one in an invisible cocoon. It can’t be seen, but somehow, everyone knows it’s there. Every sharp intake of surprise, every sharp stab of pain, every single word uttered ricochets inside that seethrough sphere and bounces around until it settles into nothing. It is only because of its transparency that the girl can ever see through her own pocket. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to see anything at all. Today will be remembered as a Wednesday.
42 | The Coffee Revolution | Qichen Zhang | Tuesday Magazine
... Eventually, the revolution, despite the intensity of its decade-long wrath, ended. On November 10, 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte entered the Jacobin chamber in the Château de Saint-Cloud on the outskirts of Paris. “La révolution, c’est fini. Je suis la révolution!” exclaimed Napoleon as he burst into the Directory’s meeting. During his attempts to put an end to the Jacobin coup, the leaders of the political disturbance accosted him, harassing him to the brink of consciousness. Lucien, his brother, acted quickly—appealing to the guards outside, he demanded they seize the armed deputies. In a desperate effort, he threatened to stab his own brother to testify to his loyalty to France. The troops responded as Lucien hoped they would—soldiers took immediate action in disintegrating the Council. The French Revolution was over.
... She doesn’t leave her chair, not once, until the waiter comes over and gently says that they are closing. Fermez. Closing the shop, closing the door, closing the book. After the second to last person leaves with the trailing sound of the door’s chime decrescendoing after his departure, she slips on her thick coat with a similarly heavy exhale. The winter chill outside hits her lungs like a shot of espresso, but without the wakefulness or the warmth. Maybe in some other kind of afternoon, she’ll finally come through with her end of the bargain in this caffeinated treaty of ambivalence. It’s an ambivalence of the saddest kind. It leaves those unsaid words burning in her chest as the book on the French Revolution sits atop of the pile of magazines in a nondescript shop in a nondescript arrondissement. She remembers that this battle wasn’t for her to win after all—at least not today. And so the revolution waits.
Baby Food Intiya Isaza-Figueroa Marker on Vellum 6” x 14”
—Qichen Zhang blogs for This Recording and tumbls at qichenz.net. Baby Food | Intiya Isaza-Figueroa | Tuesday Magazine | 43