WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2015

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CONSTRUCTIVELY OCCUPIED

What is it like to be away from Yale? Emma Platoff explores the experience of students whose mental health forces them off campus. //BY EMMA PLATOFF PAGE 3

24 HOURS

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5 SOCIETIES

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39 STEPS

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THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

WHICH ONE SHOULD YOU JOIN?

SPOOF MEETS SUSPENSE

Caroline Wray goes where no Yalie has gone before: “Good Nature Market.” For a full day.

Find out what real/fake society is right for you by taking our failproof flow-chart quiz.

A Hitchcock-inspired stairway to...hilarity!

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

PHILLIPS AND MCHENRY

WEEKEND VIEWS

STRAWBERRY ICE CREAM, AND WHY IT’S THE WORST // BY GRACE PHILLIPS AND JACKSON MCHENRY

You walk into the dining hall and you know something is wrong. You have a leaden feeling in your stomach. You do not yet know why, but you make a beeline to the ice cream. You open the lid. You look down.

Strawberry. Another lid. Strawberry. A third lid. Strawberry. Fourth. Purple; but still, the damage is done. People of Yale, have we not all experienced this horror, this atrocity?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that everyone hates strawberry ice cream. “Foucault once said ‘Strawberry ice cream is the worst,’” Grace Phillips ’15 said. An extensive survey of YDN readers concluded that 97.7 percent of people despise strawberry ice cream, and the remaining 2.3 percent have neutral feelings about it (data falsified). And strawberry ice cream is particularly pernicious because it prevents us from fully enjoying other flavors. While a cookies and cream tub lasts about two hours, a strawberry one stays in the dining hall for three days, stealing precious real estate from other, more popular flavors (Fig. 1).

These statistics may seem frightening on their own, but the effect of strawberry ice cream on the collective Yale psyche is even more frightening. Students interviewed all revealed that the dangerous overabundance of strawberry ice cream in dining halls had ruined their days, weeks and even semesters.

Shikha Garg ’15 recounted her experience during reading week in Dec. 2014. She had hoped to find relief from the stress of finals in the dining hall, but instead found only strawberry ice cream in the ice cream bin.

She immediately collapsed to the floor, letting out a wail, as a single tear fell down her cheek. Garg was willing to share this painful experience because she knows she is not alone. Indeed, 69 survey respondents

// CAROLINE TISDALE

reported experiencing intense pain as a result of the strawberry ice cream epidemic on campus.

However, not everyone hates strawberry.

Jackson McHenry ’15, campus cultural critic, mover and shaker, says, “Strawberry ice cream is not that bad.” He is wrong. Because data (Fig. 1).

All is not hopeless in the land of frozen dairy desserts. There are avenues for change, though they may be fraught with obstacles.

Recently, the Yale Dining survey arrived in your inbox. YCC elections are approaching.

In other words, the time has come for us to demand that Yale Dining give us more of the ice cream we want. The time has come for us to ask — no, insist — that YCC President Michael Herbert speak on our behalf.

But even outside of the typical, shopworn systems of power, individuals can find ways to enact change. If you see strawberry ice cream in the dining hall, bring it to the dish return. If you see strawberry ice cream, carve “I hate this” into its surface. If you see strawberry ice cream, remove it from the dining hall entirely.

You may think that this is a trivial concern.

You may believe that there are more important dishes on the proverbial menu of stressors afflicting our student body. This is not the case. Change begins with the smallest of actions, the quietest of statements.

Let our voices be heard. Let our palates be satisfied. Let our taste buds be freed.

How long is your flavor there?

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Contact GRACE PHILLIPS and JACKSON MCHENRY at grace.phillips@yale.edu and jackson.mchenry@yale.edu .

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ADAMS

A Desire to Be Heard // BY WILL ADAMS If you ever want your mind bent, try going through your Facebook history. If you don’t have a Facebook account, good job on getting into heaven.

Blame the throes of winter, or the mountains of schoolwork, or the behemoth known in some circles as A Job Search, but a few weeks ago I found myself in desperate need of positive reinforcement. Not feeling bold enough to post the Facebook status, “Hey everyone I’m in desperate need of positive reinforcement because life right now feels like a trash compactor,” I searched for a piece of my Facebook past. And I ended up finding a lot more.

Six years ago, when I was a sophomore in high school, two senior girls posted a video to my Facebook wall. The premise

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was cheeky — they pretended to have accidentally hit the record button and then talked to each other about me — but they said some wonderful things. When I first saw it, my heart lifted, and that night, I went to sleep smiling. Cut to present day: I knew they posted the video sometime in the spring of 2009, so I used Facebook’s timeline feature to bring up everything: high school friends’ posts, tagged photos and, most horrifyingly, old status updates. I trawled through months of myself at sixteen, unearthing every post (example gem: “didn’t get an extension for his English project??? WTF?!?!?!”). I cringed at every awkward interaction with my friends, every complaint about my French assignments.

I couldn’t believe I talked the

way I did – without context, my sarcasm revealed an extremely jaded and unlikable kid.

But was my embarrassment a function of my immaturity then or my present-day self-policing? My Facebook presence today is carefully curated, composed of advertisements for my improv shows (come to them!) and my pun-filled Tweets (follow me on Twitter!). I never get very personal. It’s gauche, it’s overbearing, no one wants to hear that.

This shift from my high school to my college self was gradual. As our generation grew up on social media, we evolved from one set of concerns to another. In the beginning, you had to watch out for creeps with fake accounts. Later, you had to watch out for yourself;

SARA BAREILLES MASTERCLASS WHC // 5 p.m.

Actually, to attend this master class, you’re supposed to have submitted a sample in advance. In a nutshell: you gotta write a (love) song cuz they ask for it, cuz they need one, you see.

the Internet had permanence, we discovered, and we had to avoid posting any unflattering or compromising content. (My mom’s rule: “Never post something you wouldn’t want on the front page of the New York Times.”) Today, the Internet isn’t so scary (everyone’s on it!), but it serves as a talking point in all those hand-wringing thinkpieces about the problem with millennials. There’s this idea that Kids These Days are narcissistic, and social media sites like Facebook and Instagram just indulge their gross desire to post pics of themselves double-fisting daiquiris in Cabo. This prompted someone like me to write, on Oct. 22, 2009, “I keep promising myself that each Thursday night will be better than the last … and

they always get worse.” Oh, the hubris! Oh, the look-at-me!

Oh, the … deeply human desire to be heard?

As I grimaced at my Facebook past, I considered blocking off three hours of my day to go through and hide each and every post. I was terrified that anyone could jump back in time and see my warts. But I stopped.

First, because of laziness. Second, because I began to question my motives. What was so narcissistic about wanting to let my friends know how I was feeling? Even if my complaints were cheap calls for sympathy, what if I really needed it? I can’t remember how I felt when I posted every status, but given how generally trash-compacted I felt in high school, I wouldn’t put it past myself to be desper-

ately honest to the world. Back then, the few likes I’d get on my statuses would ease my nerves.

Looking at those likes today did too.

I never found the video — the girl who had posted it deactivated her account some time ago — and I eventually got out of my funk. I wondered what would have happened if I had posted something brutally honest about my feelings, something that didn’t hide behind wordplay or YouTube links.

I wondered if my Facebook friends would sneer or empathize. Would they reach out to me in my time of need? I believe that they would, and I would do the same for them.

Contact WILL ADAMS at william.adams@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: Items of interest for the scholar and the layman at the prerenovation Beinecke. First up: Hilda Doolittle’s papers.

Turns out she did do a lot.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND HEALTH

STILL A STUDENT ? // BY EMMA PLATOFF

or Michaela Macdonald ’18, it started in elementary school.

In and out of treatment for a depressive disorder she discovered early on, she was pleased when, after her senior year of high school, she was feeling better. She stopped treatment before starting at Yale, but soon into freshman fall, the depression returned. After an unsuccessful stint with a counselor at Yale Mental Health and Counseling, she turned to a therapist outside the University.

It worked for a time, but once sophomore year started, Macdonald found herself discussing her mental health with her dean in near weekly meetings.

Still, she was surprised when he first suggested time off from Yale.

And initially she refused.

“I was like, ‘absolutely not’ — I’d never gone off the beaten path before,” she says, sipping from an organic-looking tea that turns her tongue yellow-green. Home now, Macdonald has agreed to meet me in one of her many workplaces: Steam Coffee Bar, famous for its “locally acquired, chef inspired” drinks and treats.

She puts down her tea and continues. “But things didn’t really get better.”

During Thanksgiving break, realizing how daunting the thought of returning to Yale was, she broached the subject of withdrawing with her parents.

Her mom was more supportive than her dad, initially, but both came around — until they discovered the financial implications. Both Macdonald and her brother receive financial aid from their respective colleges, and her taking a semester off would have meant a nearly $20,000 hit for their family. After consulting Yale financial aid’s office, Macdonald and her parents realized withdrawing was simply not a financial possibility.

So she went back.

But the spring semester was “just miserable,” and by February, Macdonald knew she couldn’t stay at Yale. She was skipping class, dropping extracurricular activities and, in the process, becoming more and more socially isolated. Just weeks into the semester, after consulting with her dean, her parents agreed to shoulder the financial burden. Macdonald left in February. Since getting home her health has improved, but she remains conflicted about her feelings concerning the University.

“I love Yale, I really do,” Macdonald told me. “But it kind of feels like it turned on me when I needed something it couldn’t give me.”

Macdonald hasn’t been back to visit and is in touch with friends from school only infrequently. There are no hard feelings, she says. It’s just that everyone is so busy.

Social life at home isn’t much better. Two of her high school friends are also home taking time off from school, but she rarely sees them, also due to busy schedules. Her parents, especially given the added financial stress of her withdrawal, are “not the most fun to live with.” She spends a lot of time with coworkers from her restaurant job — many of whom are decades older than she is — but they are hard to

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relate to. It’s been a strange transition, returning to the restrictions of living in her parents’ house after the freedom of college.

Still, she feels good. The first few weeks home were difficult, but since finding ways to fill her time, it’s only been positive. Face flushed from a long gym session, she smiles throughout nearly our whole conversation. On top of spending most of each weekend as a restaurant hostess, Macdonald has recently started teaching English as a second language to immigrant women in a nearby city. She’s volunteering at the Humane Society. She’s helping Steam Coffee Bar’s owner handle the business and will soon manage the shop’s second location.

“I’m doing a lot better and more productive things with my time right now than when I was at school,” she said. “Everyone’s like, ‘I’m so sorry.’ But I feel great right now. I’m really taking control of my health.” *** Some students, like Macdonald, find peace away from Yale; others continue to struggle. Even so, policy treats everyone the same. Yale does not differentiate, for example, between students who withdraw in the fall and those who withdraw in the spring, and the four months of the summer mean students who leave around the same time can be required to spend drastically different amounts of time away.

Medical withdrawals require a student to take off one semester in addition to the one from which she withdraws, meaning a student who withdrew on medical leave in December 2014 would first be eligible for readmission in fall of 2015. But a student who withdrew in late January 2015 would have to wait nearly a full calendar year, until the beginning of the spring semester in mid-January 2016.

“It makes me angry that I had to take the entire year off,” Macdonald said. “Who’s to say I won’t be well enough to go back in the fall?”

Macdonald said Yale would do well to examine each readmission candidate on an individual basis.

Mental health is incredibly personal; the policies should be personalized as well.

In fact, this lack of individualization is one of the most common criticisms of Yale’s withdrawal and readmission rules.

Among many other reforms suggested in the spring of 2013, the Yale College Council proposed that the University consider withdrawn students on a case by case basis, taking into account their financial needs and home lives. A committee charged with reexamining the University’s withdrawal and readmission policies has promised to consider the YCC’s list of recommendations along with other student feedback. But so far there has been no response to the YCC’s call to personalize readmission policy.

Among many ambiguities in Yale’s withdrawal and readmission policies, perhaps the most confusing is the phrase “constructively occupied,” the state Yale requires its withdrawn students to maintain before seeking readmission. The University explicitly requires withdrawn students to take two courses

before reapplying, but beyond that, students must define “constructive” for themselves. Some residential college deans give more advice than others, and many students are confused about how they are meant to fill the time they spend away. Is a minimum wage job constructive, they wonder? What about an internship? And what if the most “constructive” thing to do would be to simply focus on therapy?

Even while fulfilling Yale’s most unambiguous requirement — the two courses — students often feel like they’re wasting their time. This semester, Peter* is taking “Issues in Sustainability” and “Introduction to Psychology” at a nearby community college, but he feels like he would be more constructive outside the classroom. Peter appreciates that readmission committee chair Pamela George made an exception to the course rule by allowing him to enroll at a community college instead of a fouryear institution in order to save money. But the requirement still kept him from accepting a tempting job offer that would have involved fully funded travel across Asia, and it’s frustrating to sit through “joke classes” just to show Yale he’s ready to come back.

“A more individualized approach would make a big difference,” he said. “A person can show that they’re ready to come back without following an exact procedure.”

of some of her medications. She jokes that she takes twice as long as most people to do things — get out of the car, gather her belongings and her thoughts. But she is not the kind of person who cansit still all day.

A month after leaving Yale, Zhukovsky spent 10 days in Israel on a Birthright trip – a good experience, she said, although her medication sometimes left her feeling unlike herself, as she was still struggling to find the right dosages. Now back home in Stony Brook, Long Island, Zhukovsky has worked a total of four jobs, with a maximum of three at any one time. On weekday afternoons, she dons a red polo and heads to a job supervising an after-school activities program at a nearby junior high. Recently, the kids in the performing arts contingent — an especially rambunctious group that the rest of the staffers studiously avoid — have discovered Zhukovsky’s background in gymnastics, and recruited her to spot cartwheels and coach other acrobatics. The day I’m there is especially hectic,

she tells me. The kids argue about whether the window should be left open, and someone has been left out of a dance number for the talent show. Zhukovsky tries to retain control without becoming a tyrant, but isn’t always successful.

Two or three days a week, she follows her first job with a shift at a local tutoring center. It’s chaotic in a whole different way: persuading kids to master the protractor when they might prefer to braid each other’s hair or throw Styrofoam dice at each other.

But both jobs are hard, and both jobs remind her of how much she wants to get back to Yale.

Compared to her hectic afternoons, mornings are relaxed — a stop at the neighborhood bagel shop, smoking cigarettes by one of the many local beaches with friends from home, a few errands. She sees both a psychiatrist and a therapist regularly, a routine she will likely continue when she returns to campus, though she said she will not seek psychiatric treatment from Yale again. On the weekends, she

has recently started attending a stand-up comedy class in Manhattan; while we talk, we brainstorm ideas for the three- minute monologue she has due the next Sunday.

A few friends from high school still live nearby, at Stony Brook University or Suffolk County Community College, but Zhukovsky mainly uses the time off for herself, doing things she wouldn’t have time for at Yale: pleasure reading, writing, taking the comedy class. It’s sometimes difficult to spend time with friends who are on such different pages in their lives, she said.

If she doesn’t see friends after work, she’ll go home, listen to her extensive record collection and sleep. The cycle begins again when she wakes up the next morning, usually around six — a new internal alarm clock that is likely a side effect of her medication.

Zhukovsky is not shy about her mental health — one of the problems with the stigma surSEE HEALTH PAGE 8

*** Eugenia Zhukovsky ’18 has been hearing questionable things from physicians all her life. Following a growth plate injury when she was eight, a doctor told her one leg would never grow again (currently, she stands at a petite but balanced 5’3”). After a year of drastic decline in the quality of her eyesight, a physician told her she’d be legally blind by age 16 (now 19, she wears contact lenses, but still sees and drives). Most recently, a few questionable prescriptions from psychiatrists at MH&C have left her doubting the quality of Yale’s medical resources.

At home, Zhukovsky works with doctors she trusts. After starting psychiatric medication the summer before her sophomore year at Yale, Zhukovsky spent much of her first semester struggling to settle on the right dosages. Back on campus, she tried to find the treatment with unsatisfying results.

“It wasn’t as consistent, it wasn’t really that accurate — it just wasn’t very good,” she said.

Instead, she tried commuting home each month to see doctors in Long Island. But this method was both unsatisfying and unfeasible. Following a particularly bad panic attack in late November, Zhukovsky decided to speak with her residential college dean.

“I was so nervous about what was going on — it just all caught up with me,” Zhukovsky said. “[My dean] suggested maybe taking medical leave, and to take Thanksgiving as time to decide.

I came back after Thanksgiving break already considering myself out of school for that semester.”

Zhukovsky now keeps track of her life in a small green notebook containing to-do lists in no particular order — her memory, she says, is a little fuzzy because

ZERO OR MORE DISPOSABLE LESSONS WHC // 8 p.m.

Objects, materials, and art interface in this devised theatrical experiment exploring the relation of space to time.

// SOPHIA ZHUKOVSKY

WKND RECOMMENDS: Marinetti’s scrapbooks. Turns out the fascist-anarchist founder of Futurism had a soft spot for the humble scrapbook.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND NAUSEA

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS IN NATTY-G (F.K.A. G-HEAV) // BY CAROLINE WRAY

I can tell that a day has passed in Good Nature Market (formerly Gourmet Heaven, tentatively Natty-G’s, forever GHeav) in the following ways: more than 400 purchases have been made, 115 eggs have been cooked and 75 avocados have been sliced. Also the radio has played One Direction 11 times.

I cannot tell by the light.

That’s because the light in GHeav is exactly the same at 3 a.m. and 3 p.m.

When you’re drunk and ask for a baconegg-cheese, and when you avoid eye contact and ask for tampons.

I hadn’t reflected on this much. I delighted in the convenience of GHeav, which I understood was open 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, no holidays.

Until, that is, I decided to live a full day at GHeav, and spent 24 consecutive hours, from 8:30 p.m. on Sunday night to 8:30 p.m. on Monday night, inside the walls of 15 Broadway.

At the end, when I finally staggered outside, I did not revel in the fresh air, but in the darkness. *** 8:46 p.m.

I tell Joshua, the cashier, and Victor, who’s working the deli, about my plan.

They’re nice enough, but think it’s a strange, pointless project. (Weird, right?)

Tonight, Joshua’s working overtime, from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. I ask what he’ll do for his 12-hour shift. Stay at the register?

“That, and watch television.” He gestures behind me, to a flat-screen equipped with several different security camera angles. I mention that it seems pretty intense, and Joshua explains that while there’s not a lot of in-store crime, thieves often go for the outside goods.

He and Victor tell me about the criminals I like to call “flower bandits.”

Apparently, a mysterious group — Victor actually suspects many groups — enjoys stealing the flowers outside. Or, not really stealing them. Taking them, throwing them all over the street and running away.

“If someone like you were to come and steal a flower, I don’t know, whatever,” Victor says. But the flower bandits are a nuisance. And if you’ve never seen a mess of flowers and produce around 15 Broadway, that’s because the workers always clean it up.

The employees have had to grapple with far more troubling criminal activity: Namely, the massive wage theft crisis that preceded Gourmet Heaven’s closing.

Last January, Gourmet Heaven owner Chung Cho was charged with wage theft totaling more than $100,000 and 20 counts of defrauding an immigrant worker. These charges followed months of protests, during which participants

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alleged that Cho forced employees to work 72-hour weeks, sometimes paying them less than half of the Connecticut minimum wage. Additionally, it was reported that six employees were housed in a small room in Cho’s basement, where they paid $50 per week in rent. While the New Haven Superior Court granted Cho probation, he could have received a sentence of 145 years.

Three weeks ago, Gourmet Heaven officially closed, and University Properties replaced it with Good Nature Market, owned by Sun Yup Kim. The judge declared that Cho owes his workers $120,000 in overtime and minimum wage. According to members of the New Haven social justice organization Unidad Latina en Accion, Cho has not yet paid this sum.

1:45 a.m.

I take my first bathroom break. I see the letters “SACE” graffitied onto the back of the door. Not quite, but almost, “safe.”

When I get back to the Penthouse — what I now call the upstairs level — I check Urban Dictionary. “SACE,” it turns out, means “[ball] sack in face” or, alternatively, “a woman of the most exquisite appeal.”

Note to self: Remember, you are a SACE. (The second type, obviously.)

2:32 a.m.

I meet Saul Ali, who has been camped out in the Penthouse for a couple of hours now. For him, this place only exists at night — even though he’s here three or four times per week, and typically stays for several hours, he’s never been during the daytime.

“Mostly I come here for a change of scenery,” he says, “I can only be in a library for so long, and most places close late at night. I guess the other option is Mamoun’s, but they only take cash.”

Ali values the opportunities for serendipity at GHeav. Once, as he was leaving Blue State, he noticed a girl. They started walking, talking and both decided — since GHeav was the only open venue — to continue hanging out in the Penthouse for a few hours.

There’s a certain romance in a 24-hour deli.

You would be surprised, actually, by the number of dates at GHeav. (Alternatively, you wouldn’t be surprised at all, because you go on more dates than I do.) Between 8:30 and 9:15, I noticed two couples come upstairs.

Someone carrying a dry-cleaned blue-and-white-striped blazer comes in and buys a single pink rose. I am comforted that someone besides the flower bandits is taking advantage of the flowers.

In 17.5 hours, tomorrow afternoon, I

will find myself sitting alone in the Penthouse with a teenage couple. They will make out. I will sigh, and type aggressively on my keyboard. They will not notice.

But, for now, I am enjoying thoughts of pink roses and couples sharing tin foil trays, eating with plastic silverware.

2:54 a.m.

It’s almost 3 a.m. on a Monday and the store has yet to be totally quiet. It seems like someone is always buying a Gatorade or a yogurt. A couple of people are studying in the Penthouse. I have this persistent, inexplicable feeling that someone in the building is sleeping. (Maybe that’s just because I want to be sleeping.)

Steam continues to rise from the buffet. I wonder if the food will ever be taken away. I decide maybe it just runs out and replenishes on its own — like some alternate-universe, deep-frying spring.

3 a.m.

It’s official, if you ever wondered: They throw out the hot food at 3 a.m. While I’m grateful that they don’t leave it out indefinitely, it does seem a little wasteful, watching Luis fill a garbage bag with neon globs of macaroni and cheese.

3:42 a.m.

The lights have become menacing, and I’m way too conscious of my own body to sleep. I try draping my coat over myself , using the hood to cover my face. But then I think, “Oh God, is this loitering?”

A friend once told me she saw a homeless man get kicked out of GHeav when he fell asleep at a table upstairs. Would Joshua, Victor or Luis do that to me? I peek over the balcony.

Luis has put on his coat, and carries a broom outside, returning moments later.

I wonder if he was beating away flower bandits.

4:51 a.m.

I’m staring at the wall of cereals, straight into the dead eyes of Sam the Toucan. He haunts me from his box of Fruit Loops.

3.5 hours … to halfway.

GHeav really is SACE. (I am determined to make SACE “happen.”) It is almost, but not quite, safe. Earlier, it seemed like an institution “of the most exquisite appeal,” with every imaginable amenity. Now, though, I’m deteriorating under the stinging lights, and it feels like I’m getting hit in the face. By, well, you know the definition.

I fall asleep. For 12 minutes.

5:55 a.m.

Luis mops the floor of the Penthouse.

“Did you sleepy?” he asks me.

“Not really,” I respond. “When do you get to go to sleep?”

He smiles. “No.” “No, I mean — do you sleep when you go home, after this?”

He keeps smiling, keeps mopping.

tomers I’ve seen drift in and out. I swear, the pirates on the Pirate’s Booty shelf, they’re reaching towards me.

I think I should stop reading.

6:30 a.m.

Luis, Victor and Joshua have all gone home. The new shift is here. I feel a little abandoned.

6:00 p.m.

Visiting friends have started to suggest that I shower before heading to bed tonight.

As this most recent round leaves, I take advantage of a quick lull to talk to the man behind the deli counter.

“Have you noticed how long I’ve been here?” I ask him, slurring a little.

He nods. I explain my project. He doesn’t understand. At 22 hours, neither do I. He tells me he’s been working here for seven years. I ask him if he likes it, and if he prefers Good Nature Market to Gourmet Heaven.

“Sure, it’s good. It was good before, too. It’s all good.”

I’m thirsting for a story. Anything.

“Does anything — I dunno — weird — ever happen?”

Nothing.

“I mean, do you ever see strange people in here?”

A moment of silence. My knees buckle a little just as Ed Sheeran breaks in — “When my legs don’t work like they used to before…”

“Oh! Did you hear that?” I ask. “That’s another one for Ed! He’s tied it up again!”

The deli worker looks at me, eyes full of worry.

10:02 a.m.

I’m surprised by the lack of breakfast customers. Business has been slow.

The hot bar is replenished in increments: fruit at 8:28, lettuce at 9:24, hot food at 10.

Sun Yup Kim, Good Nature Market’s owner, has arrived. His dress shoes click against the floor. He’s meeting with developers, holding up measuring tape and discussing potential changes to the store’s set-up. Renovations will start in a couple of weeks.

Kim plans to change the store’s layout, and says that Good Nature Market will institute its own sandwich and hot bar menu. But for now, the distinctions between Gourmet Heaven and Good Nature Market, at least in set-up and in merchandise, are essentially indiscernible.

Even the employees are basically the same. While Luis and Joshua, for instance, were hired after the transition, Lauren Zucker, Yale’s associate vice president for the Office of New Haven Affairs and University Properties, wrote in an email that Kim has retained 80 percent of Gourmet Heaven employees.

Though she and Kim are careful to distinguish Natty-G from GHeav, the niche — a 24-hour grocery/deli — hasn’t changed.

In other words: You can still get bacon-egg-cheeses at 3 a.m. and tampons at 3 p.m.

3:20 p.m.

“Love Me Like You Do” and Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” are now headand-head for most-played song on KC 101.3, surging ahead of “Uptown Funk.”

Current score: 12–12.

I start doing some reading, pulling out Jean-Paul Sartre’s “La Nausée” for my French Novel class. It explores “Nausea,” an existential crisis and ultimate detachment from reality.

“Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable,” I read. “I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.”

19 hours in, I think I’m experiencing Nausea.

The bags of Skinny Pop on the wall have become so much more real, so much more lasting, than the 300 cus-

8:29:59 p.m.

It is finished.

I glance behind me, at the Monday night workers. (Sadly, they’re not the same as the Sunday night crew, and so there is no one, really, to acknowledge my victory.)

The breeze! The sky! The infinite supply of air! It’s exhilarating, like diving into a cold pool in the summer, and I glide home, guided by some invisible force.

When I fall into bed, I pull the comforter all the way over my face, trying to kill any sliver of light that might peek into my room.

I think, in fear and in admiration, that I have been conquered. My day was one of 365 this year, one of thousands that have come before and thousands that will follow. GHeav, or Natty-G, or whatever the monster wants to be called, is still, at this very moment, glowing. Right now, steam rises from its buffet, eggs crack on the grill. It will still be glowing when I wake up.

It is like the solar system, the Word, or its own stock of kale chips — it never dies; it never changes.

Contact CAROLINE WRAY at caroline.wray@yale.edu .

GROOVE DANCE COMPANY SPRING SHOW Off Broadway Theater // 6, 9 p.m.

Think you can only see dance in the Off Broadway Theater during Camp Yale?

Groove Dance Company begs to differ.

The Most Peculiar History of the Chewing Gum Man — a nightmarish, illustrated children’s book by Gelett Burgess.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ARTS

“SEEN” — An Exhibit Worth Seeing // BY GRACE CASTILLO Change your perspective by visiting “SEEN.” The exhibit, put together by curator Jon Seals DIV ’15, explores our sense of sight and the relationship between an object and its viewer. Located in the Institute of Sacred Music at the Divinity School, it features five different contemporary artists — Ryan Foster, Bill Greiner, Camille Hoffman, Perry Obee and J.D. Richey.

All five work in extremely different ways, and the juxtaposition of their styles helps viewers understand the complexity of sight.

T h e exhibit i t s e l f spans the length of a hallw a y , w i t h e a c h

// JANE KIM

I show up to “Teratology: The Science and History of Human Monstrosity” on a rainy afternoon, having done little research but expecting some sort of blown-up, fully-realized version of all those creepy Wikipedia pages I sometimes find myself reading at 3 a.m. Instead, I am greeted by a selection of prints, book illustrations and photographs — each object small enough to hold in one hand. At first, this is kind of a letdown: The exhibit seems to domesticate monsters, reducing them to two dimensions. But then I recognize that teratology itself has a similar goal — the classification of the abnormal and the monstrous.

Meant as an accompaniment to the “Side Show” exhibit at the Yale School of Art, “Teratology” is a small affair, currently located in the rotunda of the Cushing/ Whitney Medical Library. The exhibit dives into the methodology by which scientists, doctors and explorers categorized and sought to understand these so-called monsters. Each glass case houses about a century or so of the science’s history, with an accompanying dense text label.

The boundaries of “nature” are a little nebulous for 15th century Western naturalists, or so the dense text label tells me.

These collectors threw the monsters and the marvels together, along with plants and rocks and whatever else made the cut. Sometimes, your own limited experience blurs the distinctions: Sure, you are trying to keep your real animals and your fake animals separate, but if you are Swiss naturalist Konrad Gesner, you might not know if that mermaid report is a lie or if those human-fish hybrids really do exist several thousand miles away! So you take the chance and include it in your book anyway.

As I walk around the rotunda, I realize I was expecting a sense of discovery. I want to leaf through pages, squint at the obscure and the unrecognizable. But all the books are already open. An anatomical drawing of a rhinoceros, pulled from a Dürer woodcut, fits neatly in a box no bigger than a sheet of printer paper. (The dense text label tells me the rhino belongs to a larger “discourse” on unicorns, none of which I see.)

The visual stunners are few: perhaps an illustration of a floating fetus, its limbs stick-straight? Or the engrossing representations of conjoined twins?

Teratology — both the exhibit

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3

artist’s collection displayed in succession. Obee’s work, which makes up the hallway’s first section, consists of more muted, pastel colors and simple shapes: He studies how light interacts with objects. Next comes Greiner’s watercolors, beautiful landscapes also highly dependent on light, yet totally different from Obee’s minimalistic studies.

As I examined them more closely, I soon noticed that even these realistic watercolors reflect Greiner’s unique ways of seeing — he depicts shadows with large blots and splatters, and uses a careful layering of bright colors. (Of all the art I saw, I like Gremer’s watercolors best. His work is simply beautiful, the illusion of nature and light captured in a precise yet expressive fashion.)

Hoffman’s pieces come next. She creates multidimensional, layered works using canvas, cloth, glass and paint. When viewed straight on, the layers meld to form a cohesive piece, but from side angles, they separate into individual parts. After admiring this first section for a while, I moved on to the next two artists. Richey primarily depicts street scenes, relying on pieces of overlapping canvas, bold colors and ever-so-slightly exaggerated perspectives. I reached Foster last, discovering his compelling mix of realistic still lifes and dramatic landscapes. Each painting is odd but exciting and dynamic.

Since the curator selected only paintings, I felt that I could pick out differences between the artists and their approaches to sight. I don’t think I could have noticed those nuances if the exhibit had included a wider

and the science itself — is sparing in its sympathy for the so-called monsters it depicts, opting for objectivity instead. I read about a 19th century woman named Julia Pastrana, a.k.a. “Baboon Lady” or “Bear Woman” (think excessive hair growth, face and body). Pastrana was purchased from her mother by a man named Theodore Lent, who became both her manager and her husband. When she and her young child died, Lent had them taxidermied and exhibited. (Something no good husband would do, you might think. But then again, Juan Perón had Evita embalmed, too.) Pastrana’s plight speaks to a common perception of abnormal bodies “as objects rather than subjects,” according to the curators. This is a succinct value judgment, breaking away from the science’s clinical remove.

The last few display cases ease into modernity: I see neatly arranged lineups of human chromosomes, scientific studies in scientific journals, all in all the suggestion that we are finally dispelling the myths. That everything can be broken down into numbers and birth defects and drugs you shouldn’t take while pregnant. So I know all of this, but I still don’t know the name of the girl (photographed, 1960s) who is missing a couple of limbs due to a sleep aid her mother took while she was still in the womb. This bothers me.

“Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power,” writes Jeanette Winterson in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In naming the monsters, mapping out their origins in linear and categorical fashions, we’re looking for the power of knowing, an explanation for the unfamiliar. What I want, though, is really the comfort of knowing things turn out to be okay, even if you’re touring the country on view for sharing a hip or a skull with your brother, or for being a Living Skeleton. I want to know the girl’s name.

In 30 minutes at the exhibit, I’ve drawn the stares of a few med students and a hasty conclusion on teratology itself. I understand the need to understand, but I’m looking for a little more compassion. The display can’t give me that, and maybe that’s the point.

range of media. After about five minutes in the Institute, I got the strange feeling that I could understand each artist’s gaze, which was both exciting and unsettling. Of course, I would have enjoyed any given piece on its own — there was raw skill, technical mastery and simplicity in every painting.

Though I liked the exhibit, I did take issue with aspects of the setup. It’s important to start from the beginning, since the display moves from simple depictions of light to increasingly nuanced pieces, but an extra set of doors allows people to begin their walk-through at the end.

I had some trouble getting a good look at the paintings due to the narrow width of the hallway. Several of the pieces, especially the larger ones

by Richey, would really benefit from more space. And many of the pieces had either glass covers or heavy varnish, creating a bright glare. Though these may not be huge issues for most people, those looking to really study every detail will probably be a bit frustrated by the venue of “SEEN.” The art is really so wonderful that it deserves a bigger, betterlit space — it’s a shame to struggle to really see “SEEN.” I’m not sure that “SEEN” is worth its own trek up Science Hill, but if you’re already there, for a lab or a run, you really have no excuse to miss it. Anyone interested in the mechanics of perception — such as students who have learned basic drawing — should make an effort to visit the Institute of Sacred Music.

Contact GRACE CASTILLO at grace.castillo@yale.edu .

Monsters’ Ink // BY MICHELLE LIU

Contact MICHELLE LIU at michelle.liu@yale.edu .

THE 39 STEPS

Calhoun Cabaret // 8 p.m.

An adorably spoofy take on one of Hitchcock’s finest, campiest thrillers — WKND has already registered in advance.

A short home movie featuring Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. (lol)

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND TAP

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DANCES

WHAT ELITE SECRET SOCIETY SHOULD YOU BE IN? // BY WKND

Tap night approaches, and with it, the BIGGEST SINGLE DECISION that this year’s juniors will make during their time at Yale: What kind of alcohol to bring to pre-tap the week before. Oh and also which society they want to join. WKND knows that you will be expending most of your mental energy on the first question (hint: Scotch), so we’ve pulled together a quick questionnaire to help you make the second decision — provided, that is, that you’ve been tapped for all five of Yale’s most prestigious Secret Societies: Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, Book and Snake, Wolf’s Head and Porn’ n’ Chicken.

H o w many

genera-

Which

tions of your family

2. Three or more

ily been elected to the

If you

2

answered Yes to #2: How many terms has your family collectively served in office?

1. Two or fewer

Do

you

enjoy drinking rum?

3

4

1. Yes 2. No

5 D you

TO “TAP-ULATE” YOUR SCORE: Add

o enjoy

up the numbers of your answers to each

ties other than drinking

question: For each question, answer #1 is

rum?

1. ...nothing, and just stare

2. Yes

points.

at me quizzically.

4. Sit in a circle for hours without smiling.

11 10

How WASP-y are you?

1. Not very.

9

2. My dad has blond hair and blue eyes, makes us dress up on Easter and is afraid of showing affection.

3. My family came over on the Mayflower and all of my female ancestors born prior to 1850 were named “Prudence.” We now own a 10% stake in Vineyard Vines.

8

4. I literally have a stinger.

How crystallized are your plans for world domination?

1. Rough outline. Includes a giant drill and

a nuclear warhead. Seemed to work pretty well for Dr. Evil.

2. First draft. Settled on manipulation of global capital markets using complex financial instrument

much did you like

to short the Mongolian Tugrik currency and set off

the film “Dead Poets

a worldwide financial panic. Sketchy beyond

Society”?

that.

3. Quadruple-checked. Can’t tell

2. Pretty good

3. “…Rodger.”

3. Talk about politics, make fun of Skull and Bones.

1. Eh

2. “…Rancher.”

and Key and Skull and Bones.

decide.

H o w

“Jolly…” you say…

2. Talk about politics, make fun of Scroll

and could never be forced to

7

When I say

1. No

points, and so on. All the questions total 32

3. I love them both like children

6

pirate-themed activi-

worth one point, answer #2 is worth two

1. Drink vodka and howl at the moon.

1

2. Yes

and/or Clinton.

2. Chicken

?

1. No

3. My last name is Bush

with your society?

Yale.

judges, they’re boring.)

ties would you like to do

1. Porn

3. My last name is

Federal government? (No

What activi-

phy or fried chicken?

1. Two or fewer

one in your fam-

2. Three or more

you prefer, pornogra-

have gone to Yale?

Has any-

do

you?

3. Masterpiece

11 - 17 Points: Wolf’s Head 18-22 Points: Book and Snake Sure, you talk the elite-society talk, but can you walk the corresponding walk? WKND isn’t so sure. The most telling walk that we’ve ever seen a member of Wolf’s Head take was around the back of the tomb to take a midday leak during a barbecue. That experience has in turn colored our entire perception of Wolf’s Head, which we now view as the drunken fratboy of the elite societies. It doesn’t help that, given William Harkness’ membership in the society, we also blame Wolf’s Head for the Harkness Bells. But this is all just our opinion. And besides, the bells are OK. Wolf’s Head boasts among its other alumni Erastus Corning the 2nd, former Mayor of Albany and current contender for the Most Medieval Sounding Name award, as well as former Yale president A. Whitney Griswold, whose membership adds context to his famous dismissal of “Bonesy bullshit.” A little jealous, Whit? Current Wolf’s Head members deal with their inferiority complex by drinking a lot and then urinating on their own tomb.

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3

THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY Underbrook // 2, 8 p.m.

A folk musical set in Reconstructionera Appalachia, whose colorful cast of characters includes the devil and a snake-charmer.

Welcome to Yale’s fourth-oldest society. Before we discuss anything else, let’s be honest about one thing: The name sucks.

OK, “book” is just a less interesting version of “scroll,” but “snake?” Where the hell did that come from? Is this the Amazon rainforest? Have you ever seen a snake in New Haven? And what does the combination of books and snakes even signify?

Are you trying to kill the snake by hitting it with the book? Is it a book about snakes? Anyways, we’re sure you’ll do all sorts of interesting things with your fellow Bookworms.

27 - 31 Points: Skull and Bones

22-26 Points: Scroll and Key So close — yet so far! You should join Yale’s second-oldest, second-most illustrious society. We know you’re happy to be a member anyway, right? Being snubbed by the Bonesmen doesn’t hurt one bit! Anyway, God knows their pirate theme is getting old. Notable Scroll and Key alumni include Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau and the famed American mineralogist Edward Salisbury Dana. According to an authoritative source (Wikipedia), Scroll and Key is also the destination of choice for the descendants of Mayflower passengers. Your tomb’s proximity to Woodbridge Hall makes you look like a society of suckups, but that’s OK, because you are. At least you can take solace in knowing that your name, while not as cool as “Skull and Bones,” is at least cooler than “Book and Snake.” Who the hell came up with that? Oh, right, somebody in Book and Snake.

WKND RECOMMENDS:

FRI D AY APRIL

The Voynich Manuscript. (Warning: you need special approval to look at the indecipherable text.)

3

Congratulations! You should join Yale’s oldest and most illustrious pirate-themed society. Each member gets a nickname like “Magog,” “Sancho Panza,” or “Blackbeard.” If no one from your tap year ever filibusters a bill he or she doesn’t like, your year will have been a dud. Skull and Bones has given us FedEx, American football and the Iraq War. It’s a tradition you should be proud to join. You can look forward to lots of pirate jokes despite a conspicuous lack of rum. If you ever worry that the hooligans at Wolf’s Head or Book and Snake are having more fun than you, just remember that you have the coolest name by far. Work on your scowl- it’s a necessary accessory. Along with a parrot, of course.

UNMERCIFUL GOOD FORTUNE Davenport // 2, 8 p.m.

A magical realist play that tackles a laundry list of issues: “class, race, gender, family, friendship, love in all its forms, personal worth, and the ethics of euthanasia.”

32 Points (Perfect Score): Porn ‘n’ Chicken In fact, “Dead Poet’s Society” is only the second-best movie about an illustrious Yale society: Comedy Central’s made-for-TV “Porn ’n Chicken,” a 2002 release about the eponymous society, boasts a stellar 4.8 rating on IMDB. It tells the true story of how, against all odds, a group of Yale students came together to eat fried chicken and watch porn in the hopes of one day making a film of their own, which they would call “The StaXXX.” Although founder James Ponsoldt ’01, who went by “Sweet Jimmy the Benevolent Pimp,” would later say in a New Yorker profile (!) that Yale administrators were “pretty cool” about the entire project, the film was never completed. The fate of Yale’s greatest secret society thus lies in your hands. We are not making this up.

WKND RECOMMENDS: The papers of Jonathan Edwards, who has literally (literally!) the smallest handwriting in the world.

Almost as indecipherable as the Voynich Manuscript.

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND HEALTH

FAILING TO COMMUNICATE // BY EMMA PLATOFF

HEALTH FROM PAGE 3 rounding mental illness, she says, is that people are afraid to talk about it. When I ask about medications, I’m worried it will bother her, but she ticks dosages off on her fingers without any hesitation. She tells me about her sometimes contradictory, always confusing side effects — drowsiness, hyperactivity, anxiety — and explains that it’s hard to gauge which pills cause which.

Still, since coming home, she is feeling far better.

“I wouldn’t say it’s 100% perfect, because none of these things are 100% perfect ever,” Zhukovsky said. “But it’s definitely better — it’s in a place where I feel like, ‘I can live in this place.’”

For Zhukovsky, being home on medical withdrawal feels a lot like being back in high school — old friends, parent-imposed curfews, familiar landmarks. She does not regret taking the time off — being away was necessary for her to get medications and side effects in order, and she’s enjoyed having some time to herself.

But she really wants to go back as soon as possible, so she can put the experience behind her.

And being busy makes the time go by faster “I’m happy I took the time off,” she said. “But if I could have done

treatment at Yale, I would not have wanted to leave.” *** Being home, Zhukovsky says, is a constant reminder that once you were a Yale student, and now you’re not. Part of that is the physical landmarks — 7-Elevens that inspire nostalgia, that quintessential suburban bagel shop we visit two times in as many days, the countless beaches looking out over the Sound — but it’s also the people. During the workday I spend with her, both students and employers often forget why she’s away from school for a whole semester. Several ask if that’s “even allowed.” Each time she’s met with the question, she responds the same way.

“That’s a longer story, but we can have that conversation if you want,” Zhukovsky replies. Most

FRI D AY APRIL

3

kids don’t inquire further.

But their confusion resonates with many others, including withdrawn students themselves, who wonder: are you still a Yale student when you’re away from Yale?

At an open mental health forum in February, administrators acknowledged the role words like “withdrawal” and “readmission” play in this perception.

“A lot of us have discussed the term readmission,” English professor and the chair of the committee reviewing withdrawal and readmission policies John Rogers, said. “It suggests you are not a Yale student, and it isn’t true.”

But rhetoric is one thing, and realities another: students overwhelmingly disagree with Rogers’s statement. While withdrawn, students lose access to Yale resources like career services and libraries. They lose their netIDs and Yale emails, a puzzling policy that makes communicating — already difficult — even more of a challenge. Students aren’t allowed to be active in Yale extracurricular activities (barring special permission from Dean of Student Affairs Marichal Gentry), don’t retain swipe access to Yale buildings, and can’t participate in the housing draw for the semester they return.

Withdrawn students also

lose their Yale Health coverage, which makes it especially difficult for students like Ray Mejico ’17, who received full financial aid at Yale and relied on University insurance, to find treatment at home. Since withdrawing in early February, Mejico has had to apply for Medicaid in his home state of Nevada. But he isn’t sure how much mental health care the insurance covers, nor is he sure of how much treatment he — or Yale — will require before he can return. Medicaid covers 15 sessions, but prior to Mejico’s withdrawal, he heard from a Yale MH&C counselor that he would need to complete six months of therapy. Lorraine Siggins, chief psychiatrist at Yale Health, did not return request for comment on whether readmission requires a certain number of therapy sessions.

Other than one response email

from his college dean and Yale’s official withdrawal letter, sent to all students when they leave, Mejico said he has not received any formal communication from the University, from George or from other administrators. He remains close with many of his school friends, but describes the University’s attitude as “pretty exclusionary.”

“We’re taught to buy into the idea that Yale is our home for the next four years. If I choose to leave my home, I like to feel that I’m still part of a family there,” Mejico said. “I withdrew and they washed their hands of me.” *** Mejico had been struggling with depression since high school and considering taking time off from Yale since his freshman year. Once he came to his decision, though, the process began to move much more quickly.

Mejico and his residential college dean, Camille Lizarribar of Ezra Stiles, were close for most of his time at Yale — they would often meet in her house for casual conversations over an episode of “The Walking Dead.” But their talk one Sunday evening in early February was far shorter than a 42-minute episode. He told her he had decided to leave, and she

submitted his official request for withdrawal that Tuesday night.

By Wednesday, he was gone.

Mejico said the process felt routine, but not necessarily in a bad way. Neither his dean nor the counselor was aloof, but Mejico still felt like he was being nudged through an impersonal process. “[The counselor’s] general indifference was beneficial to the situation. I really wasn’t looking to talk to anyone anyway,” Mejico said. “He wasn’t cold or distant or anything — but it did seem like he was just following protocol, passing me on to the next person to check a box.”

At home now for nearly two months, Mejico has only recently found a therapist and a job working part-time at a local movie theater. Still, he’s unsure how his financial aid situation will look upon his return. He recently received a letter informing him that because he is no longer a student, he must repay his federal financial aid loans, which most students don’t have to worry about until after graduation. He’ll also have to find a way to pay for two courses at the University of Las Vegas, as Yale financial aid does not extend to classes taken outside the University. But many other institutions, UNLV included, do not offer financial aid to students who are merely visiting.

Many students, Mejico among them, said the process of withdrawal is explained as a simple one before they leave, but once they are home, complexities and challenges reveal themselves. In retrospect, Mejico wishes he had waited until the fall and instead taken a leave of absence, which requires students to leave within the first 10 days of a semester, but allows them to return without reapplying. A leave of absence would have left Mejico eligible to keep his Yale Health coverage and would not have required him to pay for any courses outside Yale. Because students are generally not required to begin repaying loans until six months after the last day of formal enrollment at Yale, a semester-long leave of absence would likely have elim-

inated his financial aid issues as well.

“If I had known how much of a hassle the financial burden would be, I probably wouldn’t have [withdrawn],” he said. “I’m withdrawing to work on myself, but because the whole readmissions process is so unnecessarily stressful, I’m not really given any time to work on myself.”

Much of the stress of withdrawal comes from uncertainty.

Zhukovsky, like others, said that the main issue is not the policies themselves, but the lack of clarity surrounding them. Without any University-initiated communication after the withdrawal letter, students feel not just confused but alienated.

“I have so many questions still,” she said. “I email people asking questions all the time and no one really responds to me.”

Zhukovsky said the answers she does get are vague and sporadic, and often leave her with a new question: Why didn’t anyone tell me this before? Because she no longer receives communications about such concerns, Zhukovsky hadn’t even considered where she would live upon her return to campus until her former roommate asked about her plans.

While George did not return request for comment on the communications that come out of her office, several withdrawn students said that after the official withdrawal letter, they did not receive any further communication from the University.

Peter has already had to reapply for financial aid, even before Yale’s official re-application deadline. But since he’s no longer enrolled, the financial aid office is no longer in touch; he has to initiate all these communications himself to ensure he won’t miss deadlines.

Every withdrawn student interviewed said the University would do well to send routine, if occasional, emails reminding them of important dates.

“I want them to consider us a priority, but they do kind of seem like they don’t care,” Zhukovsky said. “I want some reassurance that they’re still looking out for us, and still want us back at the school. It doesn’t help if you’re an anxious or depressed person, and the school you felt like you really belonged to doesn’t help you. It’s like they want you to be fixed and then come back.”

That lack of communication often extends up until the moment that students are readmitted — or not. Unlike students being admitted the first time, reapplying students don’t know when they’ll hear a decision. They aren’t told when their readmission interviews will be, so they have to be ready to come to Yale at a moment’s notice.

Interviews have to be held in person; Peter heard from his dean that there is no flexibility. This restriction has kept withdrawn students from studying abroad, or pursuing other avenues of “constructive” occupation.

And for many it seems that these policies could be easily improved. *** That frustration hardly dissipates when a student returns to campus. After being forced to withdraw November of her freshman year when she revealed suicidal thoughts to a counselor

at MH&C, Marie Cain ’16 did — she thought — everything she was supposed to do in order to come back. She enrolled in two courses at the University of Connecticut and received an A in each; her therapist and psychiatrist both recommended her for readmission to Yale; she interned at a law office. But Cain’s initial application for readmission was rejected. Although she has since returned to campus, she still doesn’t know why she wasn’t accepted the first time. Her only guess is the interview: the first time they met, Cain said George was “very critical.”

“Even though I had the full support of my psychiatrist and therapist, and good reviews from the law office, I was denied readmission without being told why,” Cain said. “They never specified.

They don’t have to.”

All withdrawn students interviewed expressed some worry about their prospects of readmission. Many worry for reasons particular to them. Mejico, for example, was ex-commed by George last year for an unrelated incident, and is not optimistic about his next encounter with her. And Macdonald worries that the positive spin her residential college dean has put on the whole process will prove unrealistic when readmission rolls around.

But for the most part, students worry about whether they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and even if they are, whether it will prove enough.

Most withdrawn students are readmitted. Still, in January she said that Yale’s readmission policies have room for “immediate improvement.”

The same month, Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway said that withdrawal from Yale, a deeply personal process, will likely never be completely satisfying for anyone who goes through it, no matter what policies Yale puts in place. Legal issues govern withdrawal, and students who have to leave are unlikely to ever be pleased. But readmission, he said, is more under Yale’s control, because Yale can set the terms. Readmission is where Yale has the most freedom to improve.

With the review committee set to release its report anytime, the University could starting implementing new policies as soon as the summer, Holloway hopes.

The committee’s formation and the February forum signal that the University is taking student frustration seriously.

But it seems that students are unlikely to stay quiet if no substantive changes are made. Many students — withdrawn students among them — were unsatisfied by the University’s efforts earlier this year to expand Yale’s MH&C resources, complaining that the changes did not go far enough.

And some have seen the committee’s efforts to solicit student feedback as insufficient and even insincere. This has left students far from optimistic about the potential for change.

“I’m kind of mad at Yale all the time. I want to respect their decisions, but I have not seen any reason to, because they haven’t explained any of the reasons behind any of their decisions,” Zhukovsky said. “I love the school and I believe the administration has good intentions. But I need more proof.” ** Name has been changed to

presented him with two options: Mejico could take a medical leave or a personal leave, the latter of which requires the student to be gone one semester longer. Mejico chose a medical withdrawal so that he could return to campus more quickly, and Lizarribar set up an appointment at Yale Health for the next day: before he could leave, Mejico’s medical withdrawal had to be authorized by a doctor from Yale MH&C. Mejico met with a Yale Health counselor the next afternoon for just twenty minutes. After this meeting, his first with a Yale counselor — Mejico, like many students, said he was afraid to speak openly or at all with MH&C staff, for fear of being forcibly sent home — the counselor gave him an informal diagnosis of depression and authorized him to leave.

At his dean’s prodding, Mejico

HOTEL DALLAS Loria // 4 p.m.

Ceausescu-era Romania and a Texan city become inextricably tied when the star of “Dallas” travels to the Soviet bloc.

Directed by a Yale School of Art student.

WKND RECOMMENDS: The Romanov family albums, including pictures of the literal (now-deceased) Anastasia.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B9

WEEKEND SOARS

FLYING // BY MADELINE KAPLAN

Jamie wrote me a song once. He only came up with the chorus, though, so I don’t know if that counts. The song was a guitar and a voice. It went like: Girl, you’re like a rainbow And I just wanna see all the colors of that rainbow It was a good song, even if he rhymed rainbow with rainbow. The tune was catchy. You have to hear it, I think, to really get that it was good.

Jamie is in a band called Fuckleberry Hinn. Like the Mark Twain book. Fuckleberry Hinn used to be Jamie and Max and Stella, but Max moved to Vermont and Stella just sort of stopped showing up, so now it’s a one-man band.

Some people wouldn’t want to be in a band by themselves, but not Jamie. He is kind of a lone wolf type. He came in third at this year’s Battle of the Bands, just him and his guitar. Some people say he’s like a young Steven Daiber. Steven Daiber is a guy who went to our high school a few years ago and came in first at the Battle of the Bands, and now he works at the Arby’s in the mall food court.

Jamie first played the song for me in August. We were in our usual spots: me on the small couch with the big rip on the side and him on the ugly yellow armchair.

“This one’s called ‘Renée,’” he said.

“Like my name?”

“Uh huh.”

He started playing. Even though one of the strings on his guitar was missing, it sounded awesome. I felt very lucky to be sitting there with him, listening to the song he made for me.

Then my left foot lifted off the carpet.

At first I thought that I was just getting into the song or something. But then it was like I couldn’t control it, the foot just kept rising, higher and higher, and then the right one followed and then I was floating. I was about eye level with this poster of Michael Jordan that Jamie has in his basement. It’s a life-size poster, for reference.

“Whoa,” said Jamie. He put down the guitar.

“No! Don’t stop playing!” But I kept on floating. I was trying my best to think of heavy things like elephants and paperweights, like maybe I could will myself back onto the ground. After a few seconds it worked, and I drifted back to the orange shag carpeting.

“Are you okay?” Jamie asked. I nodded. “That hasn’t happened before, has it?” I shook my head. “So, does that mean you liked the song?”

“It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.” I asked him if he was planning to finish “Renée,” since it was so beautiful and could probably be a hit if he recorded it. He said he would work on it, but why was I always trying to pressure him to work on stuff, and I said I just believed in him was all, and he said something about how hard it was to think of words that rhyme with Renée and it turned into this whole big thing.

But anyways, that’s when I realized I could fly. *** Mom made me go to the doctor, just to make sure.

“Flying?”

“Yup.” Dr. Vraiman looked confused. He

asked if I could show him what I meant by that.

I hovered a bit, like I had at Jamie’s house. I was able to move around the doctor’s office on my own. I’d been practicing in front of the mirror for a few days by that point.

“It definitely seems like flying,” said Dr. Vraiman. He frowned. “There’s not really a space for that on the form, though.”

“Do you have any advice for how I should fly?” I asked. “I don’t want it to be dangerous.”

“Don’t go too fast, I guess. There aren’t too many specifics on that.” He paused and looked down at the form.

“Are you sexually active? Because, if so, there’s a whole checklist.”

I told my lunch table about the flying thing a few days later. Monday seemed too soon and Tuesday was Danielle’s birthday. I didn’t want her to think I was trying to steal the spotlight or anything.

So I waited for a lull in the conversation on Wednesday.

“Seriously? That’s frickin’ awesome.” said Annie.

“So close to my birthday,” said Danielle.

“Damn,” said Nora. “That’s gonna make a killer college essay.” *** Jamie wrote me a poem once. The poem was an acrostic, but still. It went like: Really beautiful smile English is her favorite subject Never forgets anyone’s birthday Éggplant pants (that one’s an inside joke) Everything about her makes me happy I taped the poem to the inside of my locker, next to my class schedule, so that I could see it at least seven times a day.

Jamie would walk up behind me and say “Eggplant pants!” and we would laugh, every time. *** My dad is always talking about longterm and short-term goals. My longterm goal is to be a writer who writes about music. My short-term goal is to go to college. My shortest-term goal is to write the essay that gets me into college.

I met with the college counselor a few weeks into the school year. Her name is Ms. Dreyfus. She swears in front of students, which is cool. Other than that she’s just okay.

“Here’s my essay,” I said, sliding the paper across her desk. “I wrote it a few days ago. It’s called ‘How Flying Helped Me Come to Terms with the Death of My Grandfather.’”

“Renée,” she said. She didn’t look happy. “My God, Renée. You turned this into a dead grandpa cliché?”

“It’s just that we were really close so —” “Jesus, Renee, it’s not about that. I’m sorry for your loss. But do you know how many essays about dead grandpas those admissions officers have read? It’s old news, Renée. It’s old hat.”

“Maybe if I wrote about something else then? Maybe something other than my grandpa or flying?”

“No, Renée, of course not. The fly-

ing is gold. Fucking gold. Maybe if you turned the flying into some sort of metaphor?”

“I don’t think —” “Turn it into a metaphor and get back to me.” *** Lots of days I did homework in Jamie’s basement while he messed around with his guitar. Sometimes that involved more tuning than playing. Jamie is pretty meticulous.

“Why did you get to leave Mr. Konetsky’s class early?” he asked, turning one of the knobs a little too far to the right, then too far to the left.

“They had me go to some physics class for a demonstration. About resistance or something, I don’t know.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah.”

We didn’t say anything for a few minutes while he tweaked an uncooperative string.

“It’s like you’re a celebrity or something,” Jamie said.

He strummed the guitar. It sounded terrible. *** “Do you think the flying is psychological?” Annie asked me one day in homeroom. The thing about Annie is that she is always trying to diagnose everybody.

So I usually take what she says with a grain of salt or whatever.

“It’s definitely physical flying. I go up in the air. I move really fast. I don’t think it’s a dream or anything.”

“No, I mean like maybe it has a psychological cause. Have you been unusually sad lately?”

“Nope.”

“Unusually happy?”

“Not really.”

“How are things with Jamie?”

“They’re good.” I was staring at my desk and chewing on my thumb. “Did I tell you he wrote me a song?”

“Yeah.” she said. “Multiple times.”

I looked up. It seemed like a good moment to make meaningful eye contact with her, to have my eyes say “figure me out” or “what’s the next move” or something, but it didn’t matter because Annie was looking away. I followed her gaze to a boy by the door. The boy wasn’t staring back at her. He just kept turning the pencil sharpener, even though there wasn’t a pencil in it. Annie shook her head.

“O.C.D.” *** Sometimes when Jamie and I were sitting in his basement, I would just look at him. There are some people you can look at forever and their faces stay interesting. That’s how my mom feels about Dennis Quaid. It’s also how I feel about Jamie.

He has good hair — brown and longish, so that it curls up from the sides of his neck. He opens the left side of his mouth wider than the right. He has movie-star teeth.

I wonder if Jamie ever thought about me like that. Not that I have an especially interesting face. But maybe he thinks my eyes are shaped like big grocery-store almonds, or that my ears are a good size for my head. I don’t know. It’s probably self-centered for me to think about that.

It didn’t seem like Jamie liked the fact that I could fly. Maybe he didn’t like that I was getting attention instead of him.

He never said that, outright. He isn’t really an outright person. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, obviously it’s just something I’ve noticed. When you spend a lot of time with someone, you realize things about them that even they don’t know. *** One of the neat things about being able to fly is that you get to be interviewed on the 6 o’clock news. My segment was third, after an exposé on some brand of 2% milk actually having an extra percent and the announcement of the Wisconsin State Lottery numbers.

The interview questions were easy to answer, especially since the redheaded anchor lady spoke very slowly.

“When did you first learn you could fly?”

“A few months ago.”

“What a surprise that must have been!”

“Yeah. Well, at first I didn’t know what was going on, so I was sort of calm I think.”

“And how does it feel when you’re up there, Renée?” the redheaded anchor lady asked. She didn’t seem to be blinking enough. I wondered if maybe her eyes would dry up and fall out of their sockets, and then the eye-raisins would roll off the desk and over to the weatherman, and he would pick them up and say something like “Looks like a dry one today!”

“Renée?” the redheaded anchor lady repeated. Her eyes were still socketed.

“How does it feel?”

“It feels…” I couldn’t think of anything good to say. “Like I’m flying.”

“What a sense of humor, Renée!” But she didn’t laugh.

There were a few more questions and then it was over, since they had to reveal more lottery numbers. We could hear the announcement from across the studio.

“3-45-23-6-7!”

“Shit,” said the redheaded anchor lady, ripping a Million-Dollar Winsconsin Lotto card in two. *** “I figured it out!” Annie told me a few days later.

“Figured what out?”

“The flying! It’s a metaphor!”

“A metaphor for what?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I dunno.

Life?” *** Jamie and I broke up last week. Well, he broke up with me. But I don’t have to tell people that.

We were in his basement, as usual.

“Is this because of the flying?” I asked.

“It’s not unrelated.”

“Is this about how I got to be on the news? I know you were jealous of that.”

“Of course not,” he said, but I could tell he was lying. I can always tell when Jamie is lying. “Mostly I think I just need time to myself, to focus on my music.”

“But you’re already focusing on your music. You spend all your time down here, working on the band.”

“That’s the thing,” Jamie said. “I don’t know if Fuckleberry Hinn is working out.

It’s kind of weird being the only one in the band. And it’s not even that funny a name.”

“It is if you’ve heard of the book,” I said. By this point I was definitely crying, mostly because I couldn’t help it but also because I knew it would make him feel bad.

I thought about the poem, which was still taped to my locker, and how I would have to take it down, and how the paper would rip. I thought about snapping one of his guitar strings, or at least twisting one of the knobs really far in one direction so that it would take hours for him to re-tune. But what I really wanted was to get out of that stupid basement.

“Oh, and by the way,” I said as I stood up, “it’s not that hard to think of words that rhyme with Renée.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Like what?’

If I had happened to have a rhyming dictionary with me, I could have told him parfait or display or soufflé. I could have said valet or survey or fillet. I could have made him feel really dumb.

But I guess it’s impossible to plan for these sorts of things, so I just gathered up my stuff and flew home. *** The second draft of my essay took a lot longer than the first. For one thing, I had a lot of stuff on my mind. For another, I couldn’t think of any good metaphors.

But eventually I thought of something to say.

I had a follow-up meeting with Ms. Dreyfus to show her the draft of my new essay. She had me read it out loud.

Flying

By Renée DuFrain Lots of kids dream about flying. They jump off of couches and diving boards into pillows and pools. They want to be pilots and astronauts and butterflies.

When I was little I wanted to be a pirate, or possibly a mermaid. I had no interest in soaring through the air or touching the clouds. And the funny thing is: I’m the only person I know who can actually fly.

Most people think that being able to fly would be great. They think it would be really peaceful to be all alone, up in the sky. The population density of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I live, is 6,214.3 people per square mile. In the sky it’s just me. And birds. But birds won’t throw you a surprise party or come to your little sister’s baptism or write you a song.

People don’t realize that it can be lonely up there.

Everyone says flying is some kind of metaphor, but for what? I don’t think it has to mean anything. Maybe one day I’ll want to be alone, speeding through the air like some kind of superhero. Right now I would rather be on the ground.

Flying didn’t make me more adventurous. It just made me confused. I’m still the same person, I think. So here’s a metaphor for you: Flying is like not flying. It’s just higher.

Ms. Dreyfus looked at me.

“Renée,” she said. “That’s a fucking simile.”

Contact MADELINE KAPLAN at madeline.kaplan@yale.edu .

//Laurie Wang

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THE ROBERT GLASPER TRIO Woolsey // 7 p.m.

If jazz is dying, then pianist Robert Glasper is one of its last breaths.

John Thomson’s photographs of China in the 19th century. A refreshingly non-Orientalist take from the Victorian age.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

“ACQUIESCENCE” IN THE 21ST CENTURY // BY SCOTT STERN Last semester, one of my classmates made an interesting observation: “Marx is back!” she exclaimed.

I said that I agreed, but only inside these ivy-covered walls. Within the academy, it’s a great time to be a Marxist scholar — that is, seeing events through the prism of class struggle (not necessarily embracing Marxism as a personal ideology). But outside of the academy, in the United States, at least, Marxism is a joke.

Or so argues Steve Fraser in his latest book, “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power.” In this book, Fraser, an historian and muckraking author, argues powerfully that America has had two so-called “Gilded Ages,” periods characterized by mediocre social mobility and an immense divide between rich and poor: the years between the Civil War and the Depression, and today. In both of these Gilded Ages, we see the vast majority of wealth concentrated in the hands of the very, very few.

But Fraser sees a critical — some might say heartbreaking — difference between the first Gilded Age and our current one: People aren’t angry anymore! In 1874, thousands of unemployed New Yorkers, primarily mothers accompanied by their children, descended on City Hall, crying, “Bread or blood.” For most of this nation’s history, going back well before the Revolution, the working class had no problem rising up against their moneyed rulers — the Revolution itself was the upper middle class’s attempt to attain greater economic and social mobility.

Certainly during the late 19th century and into the 20th, Americans constantly demonized the rich, the trusts, the monopolies, the fatcats, the robber barons, the royalists, the plutocrats. From slave revolts to union warfare, from trust-busting legislation to the creation of the New Deal, the American working-class has always, always fought back against the super-rich. The fight against slavery became, after the Civil War, a fight against “wage slavery.” And the fighters didn’t scruple to call out the bad guys while they were doing it: Think of muckraking journalists, exposing the perfidies of Standard Oil and the

// ZISHI LI

SCOTT STERN READING BETWEEN THE LINES meatpacking industry; think of politicians railing against Rockefeller and Morgan and Vanderbilt.

No longer.

According to Fraser, the working-class and bourgeois left has lost its mojo. It no longer rallies, protests or calls out the rich. It wants to work with them, to understand them; it wants the rich to be our partners in progress. It is no longer liberal; it is neoliberal (signifying a belief that a deregulated private sector can effectively replace the state in the performance of various social responsibilities).

Fraser blames these new developments on a number of factors: the failure of several so-called communist or socialist states; the rise of McCarthyism and the concomitant demonization of any system other than free market capitalism; the popularization of a libertarian up-by-the-bootstraps narrative; the rise of Reagan and the deregulation of the private sector; the cowardice of journalists, descendants of the muckrakers; the complicity of Democrats in taking corporate money and looking the other way when corporations do evil things; and the rise of corporate consumerism, wherein corporations are our friends!

For anyone who has read Marcuse, Fraser’s hatred of corporate consumerism will sound familiar: The workers’ love of TVs and refrigerators has temporarily slaked their thirst for capitalist blood.

And if Marx foretold an epic battle between the landed bosses and the proletariat, Fraser sees a proletariat that is, for the most part, resigned to its fate. The bosses, on the other hand, never stopped fighting, and they continue to decimate unions, scale back the social safety net, and combat any attempt to check their fabulous wealth.

There is much to like in “The Age of Acquiescence.” It is fluidly written and you can tell from the very first

page that Fraser really knows his stuff.

His arguments are hard not to agree with. He makes little effort to hide his anger or his anti-capitalism, and that’s fine — part of what he’s arguing for is scholars and journalists who don’t hide behind ostensible objectivity. Fraser’s is a mostly hopeless book — the super-rich have won, and there’s little the rest of us can do about it. To be sure, he opens the book with Occupy Wall Street, which he sees as a spot of hope. However, he uses Occupy to pose a disturbing question: With income inequality so high, why didn’t Occupy emerge sooner?

Yet there are a few drawbacks. Fraser seems to have little understanding of the role of the courts in creating the current Gilded Age (e.g. corporations as people). More importantly, he completely overlooks the current protesters who are engaging in exactly the kind of angry activism he so hungrily desires: fast food picketers; teachers and retail workers fighting for unionization; environmental activists; student debt strikers. Perhaps these movements don’t rise to the level Fraser wants, but in writing this book he should have done more to acknowledge their presence. Furthermore, one can see the growing protest movements against police violence and mass incarceration as indicative of a growing skepticism of corporate capitalism (i.e. an economic system that leaves so many people of color unemployed, unable to buy a home, sometimes forced to turn to crime and ultimately put in prisons, some of them even private).

Fraser’s book resonates with me, particularly at a place like Yale.

Here, we’re surrounded by so many of the super-rich of Fraser’s nightmares. They’re our friends! Everything’s great! Here we find ourselves surrounded by so many people going to work in finance, in private equity, in consulting — industries that are actively facilitating economic inequality. They’re our friends! It’s all fine! Surrounded by these people, it’s easy to understand Fraser’s central argument: We’re reluctant to demonize our friends. We, at Yale, are part of the problem.

Contact SCOTT STERN at scott.stern@yale.edu .

Titus Andronicus at Appomattox // BY NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH The cannon fell silent at Appomattox nearly 150 years ago, as Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant in the antechamber of a small house.

Just over two weeks later, Joseph Johnston and his Army of the South also surrendered, this time to the marauding William Tecumseh Sherman, finally bringing an end to four years of civil war. In the summer of 2009, a group of New Jersey punk rockers — named after Shakespeare’s most violent play, Titus Andronicus — assembled to record an album that would examine that terrible conflict.

I know of no other record quite like “The Monitor.” Named after the Union’s first ironclad warship, the album loses itself in the infinitude of the Civil War, dives headfirst into American history and wades through our complicated memory. Between most songs comes a lengthy quotation of sorts, spoken through a distorted microphone, as if from behind a veil — from Lincoln and Douglass, or perhaps from Garrison or an anonymous soldier.

“A More Perfect Union,” the album’s opening track, a microcosm of the record. It opens with a prescient speech from Lincoln, delivered twenty years before the war began: “As a nation of free men,” Lincoln says, “we will live forever or die by suicide,” a prophecy at once terrifying and thrilling. Soon, Titus Andronicus is off and running, as the percussion propels the band forward and singer Patrick Stickles spits out images of the rusting modern Northeast. He re-appropriates Springsteen — “Tramps

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NOAH DAPONTESMITH CRITIC OF NOTES like us, baby we were born to die” — and the guitar breaks into an untamed solo. Two minutes later he borrows extensively from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” urging his ragged band of Jersey punk warriors to rally round the flag and shout the battle cry of freedom. The song moves with rebellious spirit — the result of its lo-fi production and unruly instrumentation. But the record has much more in store.

For “The Monitor” reaches stunning heights. Unlike most other modern rock albums, this is no mere assortment of songs — no, this is a symphony, in which the music comes and goes but never ceases; it demands total attention throughout. One brilliant riff comes after another, and melodies arrive in rapid succession, all coming together to create a violent, rowdy work of punk rock. There are no choruses in this album, only repeated anthemic refrains, shouted with an intensity and fervor rarely heard in modern music. Those refrains provide the record’s most dramatic and poignant lines: the volcanic “You will always be a loser” in “No Future Part III,” strangely triumphant in its defeatism; the nervous “The enemy is everywhere” in “Titus Andronicus Forever,” reassuring in its paranoia; the frantic “It’s

still us against them” on “Four Score and Seven,” unvanquished in its defiance. Titus Andronicus uses a musical structure that few other artists have dared to use, and the results attest to their success.

I doubt that any other bands approaching the mainstream could have pulled this album off. Titus Andronicus — fundamentally rebellious, but with an intensely cerebral bent — seems perfect for the job, bringing just the right combination of perfectionism and innovation. One cannot understate the importance of Stickles himself to this undertaking; without the distinctiveness of his voice, the record would have little chance of success. Like all good punk rock singers, he has a predisposition to rage, an inclination to which he often succumbs, letting his voice rise into a swelling fury, seeming to hit all notes at once. But at times, he betrays a remarkable tenderness. “To Old Friends and New,” the album’s finest ballad, is a gorgeous track, and it thrives on guest singer Cassie Ramone’s electric ambience and the undeniable authenticity of Stickles’ own voice. No one would claim that Stickles has the vocal ability of, say, Kurt Cobain, but he sure knows how to use it his range.

After 49 minutes of nearly continuous sound, Stickles and his band arrive at their closing number: the hugely ambitious, 14-minute “The Battle of Hampton Roads.” It begins simply, with Stickles narrating the aftermath of the clash between the USS Monitor and CSS Merrimack over a bare electric gui-

// CREATIVE COMMONS

tar. Steadily it grows, ever tenser as it progresses and Stickles sings of a world that has lost all morality. For ten minutes it goes on, until finally it breaks, now ready to reveal the album’s culmination: bagpipes, piercing through the music like Joseph Chamberlain’s men sprinting down Little Round Top. Whether they call the retreat or sound the advance we know not.

Those bagpipes force us to reconsider the entirety of the album. “The Monitor” is a work of existential conflict, of the bitter divide between the burdensome past and the bleak future.

Quotations from men long since interred alternate with deadend visions of the Northeast, where I-95 is the lifeblood, and the promise of a raucous Saturday night the only reason to keep on going. The songs themselves come across as abortive attempts at catharsis, at liberation — an impossible task, for the ghosts of the Civil War reappear again and again. By the time the album fades into ambient noise, any attempt to try to leave the past behind has lost all purpose.

Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

This country has never quite

shaken the Civil War. As a society we feel we have lost all direction; far from being a cohesive polity, we are nothing more than a group of people all looking their own ways. Titus Andronicus cannot accept that reality; something about it disturbs them to their core. “The Monitor” is a desperate attempt to find meaning in the modern world by looking back a century and a half to the men who made the country into its modern form. Perhaps we should all do the same.

Contact NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH at noah.daponte-smith@yale.edu .

DEEP TIME WITH BROKEN LANDSCAPE SOM // 8 p.m.

A film about fossil fuels and man’s evolving relationship thereunto. Run by the Environmental Film Festival at Yale, which has the awesome email account, effy@yale.edu.

25 illustrated book covers from the golden age of lesbian pulp. Our personal favorite: “Three Women — an intimate portrait of women in love… with each other!”

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND THEATER

NOT SO UTTERLY POINTLESS AFTER ALL // BY CLAIRE WILLIAMSON If someone asked me to describe “The 39 Steps,” I would be hard pressed to answer them.

It’s like the setup for a joke: What do you get when you combine a Hitchcock-style mystery, a femme fatale (or three), the Scottish Highlands, in-your-face comedy and the breaking of the fourth wall?

At the beginning of the play, our dashing hero, Richard Hannay (Simon Schaitkin ’17), is contemplating what to do with his lonely Saturday evening. “Find something to do you bloody fool!” he berates himself, as so many enterprising Yale students do. “Some-

thing mindless and trivial. Something utterly pointless. Something — I know! A West End show!”

And, as is so often the case, the beginning of everything is at the theater.

From the first gunshot at the evening spectacle, our hapless hero is drawn into a national conspiracy by the seductive and secretive Annabella Schmidt (Stefani Kuo ’17). After alerting Richard to the existence of a plot to steal British secrets, Annabella is fatally stabbed in the middle of the night. Framed for murder, the now-wanted Richard flees to Altna-Shellach (cue ominous thun-

der) in Scotland. Along the way he runs into a colorful cast of characters all played by the versatile duo of Eliza Hopkins ’17 and Charlie Bardey ’17. Stumbling into love, loss, friends and foes, Richard struggles to clear his name, save the country and get the girl. Saying anything more would spoil the surprise. (I’ll just leave you with the essential question: “What ARE the 39 Steps?”)

Though “The 39 Steps” is most certainly a comedy, that’s not to say it doesn’t have a few deep themes. Like any hero, Richard is forced to face a world that’s not always out to help him. Con-

fronted by the mastermind of the conspiracy — shh! — Richard lauds the human qualities of loyalty, selflessness, sacrifice and love, only to be scoffed at because they are “not in his nature.” Like any dapper young man faced with sudden hardship, Richard must face the trials of character development in the face of imminent danger.

The Calhoun Cabaret is the perfect venue for a show like “The 39 Steps,” which requires lightningfast costume and scenery changes.

The minimalist space is used to full advantage: Several chairs and a rolling cart are arranged and rear-

ranged to become a study, a car or an airplane. But the Cabaret truly shone at the beginning and end of the show, when it acted as a metatheater presenting a show within a show. Hopkins and Bardey, wearing matching red cummerbunds and bowties, welcome viewers to the world of “The 39 Steps” with fanfare and perfectly-timed studio laughter (which is clearly unnecessary — the audience will be laughing along with their antics from their first “Thank you, thank you.”). While I thought the comedy was occasionally a little bangthe-frying pan-over-your-head thick, it was obvious that every-

one loved their respective roles.

Several times actors cracked up at each other’s’ jokes and physical gags, but somehow it worked — it’s hard not to laugh along with actors who are obviously enjoying themselves.

So if you find yourself with a free or lonely weekend, go see “The 39 Steps.” As Bardey adlibbed during the performance, it’s “something you just won’t understand” unless you see it. Doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it, though.

Thank you, thank you.

Contact CLAIRE WILLIAMSON at claire.williamson@yale.edu .

// LIZ MILES

// LIZ MILES

A FroShow Full of Fluff and Fun // BY GRAHAM AMBROSE

“The Trouble with Summer People,” the Yale Dramatic Association’s annual Freshman Show, starts off with a bang. In this farce

by Tim Kelly, a gruesome, inexplicable murder has occurred on the premises of Wind Chimes, a low-profile summer spot off the Massachusetts coast.

Left dead is Morton Pitkin, played by Alex Swanson ’18, a local boarder hiding a hoard of rare coins and a trove of secrets.

Soon, the small island-community erupts into a panic as convoluted as it is comedic. Rupert Baxter (Dillon Miller ’18), a disgraced army dropout newly married to the benevolent Janis (Emily Harburg ’18) leads the search for the culprit, helped along by a host of characters.

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In this dynamic cast full of comic foils, the audience scrutinizes every character’s potential to commit murder. The rambunctious Danny, an aspiring criminologist with a knack for annoying everyone who listens to his wild theories, investigates the crime with good intentions and humorous consequences.

Sam Gurwitt ’18 gives a convincing performance, embodying the familiar archetype of the twerp as frustratingly immature as he is precocious.

Danny’s antics rival those of Fluff (Erica Wachs ’18), a naive young girl who brilliantly lightens the dispositions of the dour adults in the room. The curmudgeonly grown-ups include the ever-somber aunt and lover

of the deceased, Caroline Francisco ’18; the incompetent chief of police, Josh Toro ’18, who occupies the sweet spot between awkward and insane; Alex Swanson ’18, an exemplar of fine acting, who returns as the dead man’s long-estranged brother; and a sprightly cast of figures stumbling about in pursuit of the assailant.

The summer people laugh, entertain, and seem to move beyond the multipurpose common room in which the work unfolds. Paying homage to the murder mystery tradition, director Emma Healy ’18 blends the cultural relevance of Arthur Miller with the fast-paced fun of Jonathan Lynn’s “Clue.”

Kelly’s script brings little

MLB OPENING NIGHT ESPN2 // 8 p.m.

The 2015 season kicks off with a classic rivalry featuring the powerhouse Cardinals against the restocked Cubs squad on … ESPN2?? Come on.

innovation to a familiar genre.

The work proceeds along predictable lines by gradually piling the facts of the case onto the narratives of various interwoven characters. By the show’s end, the drama climaxes in a fiery revelation of whodunnit.

The denouement, which almost too-perfectly ties together loose ends, closes an Agatha Christie-inspired plot with a fairytale ending.

“Summer People” is a show for all ages. Children will enjoy a spectacle rife with playful shenanigans from the first scene to the last. Fluff and Danny, the resident youngsters of Wind Chimes, successfully connect to a younger audience with countless jokes.

The script too helps anchor the audience. Simple dialogue and straightforward relationships comfortably steer an otherwise crowded stage of personalities. At times, the text relies too heavily on cliché, particularly in the one-line zingers that seem to close about every scene.

But the actors take the banalities in stride, adding a layer of professional irony to the alreadyjokey script.

In particular, the twin Puckle sisters, who finish one another’s sentences, walk in perfect lockstep, and represent a maddeningly hackneyed archetype of the genre, teetering on the fine line between fresh comedic material and stale foils. Erin Hebert ’18 and Sarah Householder ’18

elegantly push their characters toward something new, never taking themselves too seriously while delivering pitch-perfect performances of impressive style and grace.

The two hours spent watching the Freshman Show at the Yale Repertory Theatre will tantalize eager vacationers. The summer people of a desolate Cape Cod lodge-town are causing all sorts of problems — murder, lost love, growing up, unfulfilled dreams.

But the class of 2018 emerges unfazed. After perpetual New Haven winter, whatever trouble with summer people we see might just be worth the wait.

Contact GRAHAM AMBROSE at graham.ambrose@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: “Spring Training,” by William Zinsser. This celebration of America’s favorite sport is found not in the Beinecke, but the mysterious location known as LSF.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

WRITING AS DISEASE: PAUL AUSTER // BY MERT DILEK

P

aul Auster is an American

author whose books have been translated into over 40 languages. The recipient of several awards for both writing and film directing, Auster has penned numerous novels, memoirs, volumes of poetry and essay collections. Blending elements of postmodernism, metafiction and existentialism, he has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature with books like “The New York Trilogy” and “Moon Palace.” He visited Yale this Tuesday as part of the Schlesinger Visiting Writer Series to read excerpts from his work. WKND sat down with Auster to talk about reading too much, mysterious phonecalls and the “disease” of writing.

Q: Let’s start with writing on writing.

Some of your characters are writers who try to find meaning in their lives through writing. Do you see them as reflections of yourself?

A: Those characters are writing in different areas and in different ways.

In any case, they are a way to think about how to be alive, I suppose. I think that’s the function they serve.

It’s not that I follow their literary careers or anything like that. Their writing reflects a state of inwardness and self-questioning.

Q: Given the characteristically experimental nature of your writing, to what extent do you consider yourself connected to the past or to some literary tradition?

A: I feel very connected to older forms of literature. The greatest inspiration for me, the thing that I think about most often, is fairy tales.

In fact, most of the time I don’t think of myself as a novelist so much as a storyteller. The writers I most care about are the 19th-century Americans. Yes, there are things that I like very much from the 20th century, but nothing as much as Melville or Hawthorne or Thoreau. These writers have had much more to say to me than the others.

I wouldn’t categorize myself in any way whatsoever as “experimental” or “traditional.” Every book demands its own form. I am not

Q: How do you write after that initial spark of an idea?

A: Most of my books are improvisations. I have a general idea of what I want to do, a sense of where I think the story is going — a feeling for what we might call the drift. But I can assure you that not one of the books I

have published so far has ever turned out the way I thought it would when I started. Something different has always happened. The book takes on a life of its own as you are working on it; it tells you what it wants to be. You, as the writer, are the instrument of the process and you are trying to listen to, more than dictate, what’s happening. That’s why writing is such a great adventure for me.

I really don’t know when I sit down every morning exactly what I will be doing that day. There are writers who map out their books in advance and sometimes write quite extensive outlines of what’s going to happen in the novel. And then they doggedly go through it day by day, page by page, and reproduce in a more elaborate form what’s in the outline. I can’t do that. I think it would be very dull, and I would lose the excitement of not knowing. On the other hand, when I was younger and very confused about how to do any of this, I thought that was what you had to do. I thought you had to know it in advance. It was the plague of going to a very good school [Columbia] and reading too much literature and literary criticism. Of course, it had a great impact on my education, and I have learned so much, but at the same time, it held me back. If you want to become an artist, you have to learn everything you possibly can and then you have to do everything you possibly can to forget it. And the things that you cannot forget will form the foundation of your work.

Q: Does your method of improvisational writing change when you work on autobiographical pieces?

Everything tends to collapse into a state of ambiguity.

And some conflicting truths somehow coexist. These are the things that interest me the most, because this is how I think we really live.

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someone who says to himself, “Well, I will write a sonnet today. Fourteen lines and a certain rhyme pattern.”

Nor am I someone who says, “I will sit down and write a book about the state of man’s anxiety in the early 21st century.” Books begin in much more concrete ways. A character will flip through my imagination; somebody will do something and will trigger off a memory that will trigger off a thought. Little by little, clusters of images and words swirl around in my head and then they congeal and come together. Then something starts to form.

It’s all very hard to talk about in any articulate and coherent way because I don’t really know what’s happening. Nor have I ever witnessed the birth of an idea. I have never seen, or felt, or quite understood how something will get into my head. One moment there is nothing, and the next moment there is something. It’s a quantum leap. There is no thread linking the nothing to the something. It’s all very bizarre. I have been thinking about it all my life, and I have never understood.

A: Each of my five nonfictional books is a different approach to autobiographical writing. They are all very bizarre. They don’t fit any conventional form, and they are certainly not memoirs. The material is known to me, but the shaping of it is just as difficult as shaping a novel. The effort to write a good sentence is the same effort whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction. In a novel you are free to invent, but at the same time, once you set up the boundaries of the work you are engaged in, you have to stick to them. You can’t go past the boundaries — then you destroy what you are trying to do. In nonfiction, you are circumscribed by the truth, with a capital “t.” The truth, in this case, is things as you remember them as clearly as possible, because often you misremember or make a mistake; it is at least not to write down anything that is a conscious mistake or distortion of what

you think is the truth. That’s one of the pacts you make with yourself and the reader.

Q: In a past interview you have claimed that “unless it’s absolutely urgent, there’s no point in writing.” What do you mean by urgency?

A: It’s a personal urgency. It’s about whether you really need to do this.

Whether your life will be possible if you don’t do it. It’s all coming from so deeply within that it is really the unconscious that is telling you what to do. That’s why it’s difficult for me to discuss my own work.

Q: On what grounds do you see the books in “The New York Trilogy” as “urgent?”

A: They are very short books, but they were the product of years and years of thinking and writing. When I started as a published writer, I was publishing poems, translations of poetry, essays, and critical pieces.

But back when I was an undergraduate, the burning ambition of my life was to write novels. And I had around a thousand pages of manuscripts of books that I started but didn’t finish. They all later became real books, when I got older and was able to sift through the material that I have been obsessed with during that time.

They became “City of Glass,” “In the Country of Last Things,” and “Moon Palace.” I was working on versions of these works throughout my college years but never in a way that satisfied me.

But when I finally found the courage to go back to fiction, when I was around 33, I still had those notebooks in which I had written the earlier drafts. And I just lifted up some passages from them. Some things I had written at the age of 21 are more or less the same in “City of Glass,” for example. I have grown up to the degree that I could pull all these things together in a more coherent way.

Q: In “The New York Trilogy,” why did you choose to manipulate the genre of the detective story? What about that genre appealed to you?

A: I was working on my first prose book, “The Invention of Solitude,” and the telephone rang. I picked up the phone, and the person on the other end said, “Is this the Pinkerton Agency?” The Pinkerton Agency is the oldest and most famous detec-

tive agency in America. And I said he had the wrong number and hung up.

The next day, more or less the same time in the afternoon, the same thing happened and I hung up again. When I hung up that second time, I said to myself, “Why did I do that? Why did I not say that this was the Pinkerton Agency? Maybe I could have found out what this person wanted and what the case was.”

About a year later, when I sat down to start writing the book, that turned out to be the incident that triggers all the action. Someone calls Quinn not for the Pinkerton Agency but for the private detective Paul Auster. And on the third call, Quinn says, “Yes, I am Paul Auster.” I wanted to remain true to the inspiring event which had to do with detectives, and I stuck with it.

Q: What attracts you to the paradoxical and the uncanny, which we frequently encounter in your work?

A: I am really interested in ambiguity.

Things in life are not always so clear. I am talking not only about phenomenological questions, but about moral, psychological, and even judicial and political issues. Everything tends to collapse into a state of ambiguity.

And some conflicting truths somehow coexist. These are the things that interest me the most, because this is how I think we really live.

Q: You have written a lot about the nature of language and its impact on human life. Why? A: Language gives us the world, but it also takes it away from us. We constantly live in this duality.

Q: Yale is teeming with aspiring writers.

Is there any golden advice that you would like to give them?

A: Don’t do it. You are asking for a life of penury, solitude, and a kind of invisibility in the world. It’s almost like taking orders in a religious sect.

Writing is a disease, it’s not anything more than that. If a young person says, “You are right, it would be a stupid thing to do,” then that person shouldn’t be a writer. If a young person says, “I don’t agree with you, I will do it anyway,” alright, good luck!

But you’ll have to figure it out on your own, because everyone’s path is different.

Contact MERT DILEK at mert.dilek@yale.edu .