This Weekend

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013

//BY ANYA GRENIER PAGE 3

POOP

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PUNNY

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PUDENDA

B6-7

AFTER THE LAUNDRY SCANDAL

LEARNING TO GET A LAUGH

A NAKED JOURNEY

Lucy Fleming uncovers the deeper meaning behind a dirty prank.

Is Yale truly a breeding ground for up-andcoming comedy stars?

Our three brave sophomores bare it all (almost) during their trip to a nudist resort.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

FLEMING

WEEKEND VIEWS

AN EARTH(L)Y REVELATION // BY LUCY FLEMING

In the sixth grade, we took a test about what kind of learner we were.

Apparently it has something to do with how you draw an infinity sign — if the nexus of your sideways “8” is below the center line, you’re a visual learner; if it’s in the middle, you’re tactile, or something like that.

I was visual. This made sense. I, like many Yalies, respond well to words, symbols, diagrams. Ever since, I’ve basked in this self-knowledge, content to take meticulous notes and revel in following the written instructions on everything from problem sets to assembly-required IKEA furniture.

But there’s something about tactile experience that just can’t be paralleled. Especially when you’re holding your tactile experience tactilely in your tactile hands, cupped in a tactile paper towel, fresh out of the (need I mention, tactile) laundry machine.

Okay. So I found poop in my laundry.

By then, we were far enough into shopping period for Kant and the species development theory to have popped up at dinner. We were all, myself included, pleasantly sinking back into the intellectual soirée that is Yale, with all of the casual Chaucer and breakfast-time Bernoulli that it entails. Yes, GHeav and Woad’s have their place in our priorities, but the primeval calls for food and repro-

duction generally fade into the background as we face far more urgent lab reports and looming midterms. I was, only moments before the incident, considering frantically how to do two readings at the same time. Waft along the gauzy phraseology of “Gatsby”?

Or delve into the depths of psychological truth in Genesis 22?

But you know, it’s hard to weigh Fitzgerald against Biblical commentary when there’s poop next to your socks in the dryer. Actual poop. Not poop in the abstract. Not a drawing or diagram or description of poop. Not even a metaphor for poop. Real, physical, slightly dried-out poop.

SO I FOUND POOP IN MY LAUNDRY. In a matter of seconds, I fell several thousand feet, from the lofty heights of human sapience to, well, the ground.

And, surprisingly, shockingly even, it was an okay place to be. Where instead of asking, “Where am I on the plane of human existence?” I suddenly asked, “What the heck is in this dryer it’s awfully round those were

some pretty nice socks.”

We find ourselves at a unique juncture, here in college. We’re immature enough to find human excrement funny, yet mature enough to write policy papers on the use of force in Syria or Martin Luther’s approach to feminism. We’ve graduated from wearing diapers, but we’re not even thinking about changing them.

(Hopefully.) Toilet humor pops up when we’re trying to prove we’re still kids, but it’s just humor. When was the last time you actually saw someone else’s excrement? Ask yourself.

Probably not for a while.

But there it was. Poop. Someone else’s poop.

And yeah, as I walked to the bathroom in utter shock and horror, it did cross my mind that Martin Luther himself had an encounter with some poop, specifically when the Devil threw it at him to test his faith, and it’s usually translated into English as “ink,” but in the German, it’s “Scheiße,” plain and simple … and the visual learner in me wanted to know what it meant and what it symbolized and what it reflected about our society that someone would do this … but for once, I put my foot down, stopped thinking, grabbed a paper towel and went to clean it up.

Contact LUCY FLEMING at lucy.fleming@yale.edu .

Finding a start after Yale // BY RAISA BRUNER

I should have gone on a social media hiatus this month.

Instead, I obsessively trawled my feeds, which were filled with snapshots and comments about the start of the academic year. For many of you kids I like to call my friends, it was the “Last First Day.” For me and my 2013 cohort, it was the First Not-First Day. That’s right: I’m a graduate. School’s out … forever.

Sure, some people took gap years, or semesters off, or had unusual academic schedules. Whatever. In the end we are all bound to the biological clock of the classroom since age 5 (or younger), a solid 17 years of schooling in which summer came to a close at the end of August, marked by the annual trips to Staples for fresh mechanical pencils and the agonizing search for the perfect bookbag. (The phases were endless: classic Jansport backpack, glitzy leopard-print tote, hippie cross-body satchel…) And of course there was always the critical question: binders or notebooks? In college: Mead FiveStars or Moleskines? This was followed by the equally grave transition from forgiving, erasable pencils to permanent — gasp! — pens. I can trace my growing-up — my personal journey to adulthood (or some semblance of it) — through the materials I chose to carry with me to school, the things I decided were worthy of storing my accumulating knowledge.

But this year, for the first time in memory: no back-to-school. Just another day out here in California.

There’s something oddly final about missing out on that annual ritual. This must be what it’s like to be born on a leap year, when everyone just skips over your birthday. Or to miss New Year’s Eve while traveling across time zones.

Back-to-school is always more than just a day to show off some fresh kicks, your summer tan or a Lisa Frank sticker collection. Back-to-school is, each and every time, that most glorious of things: a new start. The night before, sleepless, I would resort to envisioning my new self for the year, reflecting with eager optimism on the bright possibilities. This year, I thought, I would be friends with her. I would hang out with him. I would talk like that. I would look like this.

This cyclical opportunity for reinvention is what gives school its everlasting charm, even as we get older and jaded by homework, studying, the mundane reality of the academic grind.

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 20

Finish off a semester or a summer, and then, no matter what had happened, the First Day provides a blank slate.

Wise people will tell you that every day is a blank slate. Today, they’ll say, is the first day of the rest of your life.

Whatever. I’m 22: I am not wise. I’m coming off of four years that were fueled by the energy of words like FOMO, YOLO, young-wild-free, livewhile-we’re-young, we-can’t-stop, till-the-world-ends. These are powerful mantras for recklessness and immaturity, and they’re a hard habit to kick.

Penny drinks are an objectively great deal, Box is just a block away, and a flirty text awaits your emoji-filled response.

The truth is, it’s not cool to be wise.

It’s hard to be wise. It’s hard to remember, without the classrooms and changing leaves, that not going back to school can still bring about some kind of metamorphosis. But I have trouble feeling the fizzy anticipation of a fresh start without everyone around me doing the same thing.

FOR ME AND MY 2013 COHORT, IT IS THE FIRST NOT-FIRST DAY.

On the flip side, though, now there’s a dark glamour in feeling personally responsible for any changes I might want to make to my life. (I’m hardly the first person to say this, but bear with me.) If this is the empowerment that comes with adulthood, it’s scary — but encouraging. As I go back through those social media feeds and see you kids these days having your back-to-school moments and settling into the rhythm of your semester, bringing in the year with a bang and plenty of booze, I’m not jealous of what I’m missing. I don’t envy your fun. Instead I envy how easy it is for you to engage in a structured reinvention of self.

You remind me that if I want to feel that First-Day fervor again, no one is going to serve it up to me. Like everyone else before me, I have to find it.

Contact RAISA BRUNER at raisabruner@gmail.com .

LUNCH WITH OLYMPIA OPENING RECEPTION 32 Edgewood Ave. // 4 p.m.

Feel cultured, rub shoulders with Manet’s ghost, hear some French. No food actually served.

KSIAZEK

BRUNER

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

In Amsterdam, rethinking prostitution // BY KAROLINA KSIAZEK

Maybe it was just because I had prostitutes on my mind already, but the click of my heels seemed especially loud in the Red Light District today. Ten minutes ago, my mind had been stuck on how bad I knew I smelled after a sweaty all-nighter.

My last load of laundry had left my clothes smelling like crotch, and I hadn’t shaved in over a week. In the dim classroom, I felt like what I was: a sleep-deprived college student with body odor.

But in the Red Light District, that overtired college student looked like a prostitute. A man in a large, black coat standing outside of the Casa Rosa Theater (the home of world famous live sex shows) nodded at me: “Hoi.” As I am wont to do, I smiled up at him — “Hey!” — and immediately regretted it. Somebody else asked me where an ATM was. Was that a hint? A man muttered something as I passed. By the third catcall, I started to ignore it.

I stopped looking men in the eyes, lest I give them the idea that I was looking for a client. Even on an early Wednesday afternoon, I felt the stigma of a woman walking alone in heels: The age-old cultural weight of that clickclick-click of a pair of vintage boots on a cobblestone street.

If you haven’t been to Amsterdam before, you might not know that the Red Light District is large and central; it’s easy to pass through it on your way to just about anywhere. A girl my age walking through is likely to be a student returning from class at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. I also happened to be looking like a prostitute.

Even though I’d already been awake for a few hours, I’d already talked to a prostitute that day, a guest speaker in my class on the Local and Global Complexity of Prostitution.

The woman was the founder and director of the Geisha Institute, a foundation that works to secure better working conditions for sex workers in the Netherlands. “I loved my job,” she told us. “I was an S&M mistress for 20 years. Men would tell me what they liked and I could tell a story.

It was very exciting for me.”

It’s hard for almost everybody to believe that a prostitute could enjoy her job. Even my classmates, liberal young people like me, self-selected

by the very fact that they’re taking a course on prostitution, were incredulous.

The thought of having sex as a full time job for years on end isn’t appealing to me either. But after sitting through a full time desk job this summer, maybe this prostitution gig wouldn’t be the worst way to go.

There are dozens of occupational hazards and lifestyle choices you can level against prostitution, but the only one that is unique to the job is the stigma it leaves on a person’s life forever once he or she enters the business. Millions of people spend their days doing jobs they hate. Millions of people are victims of “getting into it just for the money.” So what makes prostitutes different?

THE AGE-OLD CULTURAL WEIGHT OF THAT CLICL-CLICKCLICK ON A COBBLESTONE STREET. Well, for one, I paid 50 euros to talk to a second sex worker, which is much more than most people in the world can make in 20 minutes. After wandering through De Wallen, it was exhilarating to go past the other side of a red window, walk up the narrow staircase and enter the spacious but plainly furnished room where she worked. That’s when things got boring.

I imagined a prostitute’s room to look like an Arabian fantasy, with mirrors on the ceiling and luscious red curtains. I imagined there would be large closets, wooden shutters that were splintering, purple wallpaper. I imagined a wardrobe, sex toys and all sorts of things that would be sure to surprise me through their mere presence.

But the bed didn’t even have sheets. There was a mirror, a small table where she tossed my 50 euro bill, a standard bathroom and a few nondescript articles of clothing

hanging on the wall. Her first impulse was to head toward the bed, asking me what I wanted, but I assured her 10 times, “I just want to talk! I promise! I swear!”

She instantly got to talking: “It’s not a bad job, I like it. A lot of men just want to fuck. They fuck and leave.

Usually, it’s 50 euro for the basics …

But it’s not 20 minutes of fucking, of course … It’s five minutes undressing, five minutes sucking, five minutes fucking …”

It’s not that she was boring — she was just normal. We ended up talking about Bulgaria. When she told me my time was up, she gave me three kisses on the cheek and a hug. It was like meeting an aunt I hadn’t seen in so long that I didn’t remember her.

After a month in Amsterdam, walking past hundreds of girls just like me in red windows, I’m only starting to understand why prostitution is a career you may never turn back from. But in countries like the Netherlands, where some women would prefer being a prostitute to selling burgers at McDonald’s, why do we still treat sex workers like pariahs? How is prostitution different than any other kind of service a person can sell?

I don’t have an answer. I am inclined to believe it has to do with a discomfort with female sexuality, with the ancient idea that a woman’s vagina is sacred, and that anyone who would be willing to give up that sacred purity so many times must be immoral and unholy. I have a feeling that people are still uncertain about whether women even have the agency to decide what they do with their own bodies.

I could be wrong. A few years ago, I would have shuddered at the idea of becoming a prostitute. But I walked past a coffee shop in the Red Light District called the Bulldog and wondered what it would mean to take my education behind a window in Amsterdam. What if it made me happier than the more popular option of investment banking? The thought may make you uncomfortable. If it does, that’s okay.

Contact KAROLINA KSIAZEK at karolina.ksiazek@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sex on the YDN Boardroom Table First, remove the stick from your ass.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

WHEN WE TALK ABOUT CRAZY // BY ANYA GRENIER

Oh, she’s crazy.”

“Fuck her but don’t date her, she’s crazy.”

“She’s my friend, but she’s completely batshit.”

I don’t remember when I first started to notice, but it was hard to stop hearing these things once I did. I was hearing this word, I was hearing it everywhere and I had next to no idea what it actually meant. On a campus full of people with bizarre study habits and sleep schedules, what does it take to get called “crazy”?

In an unscientific survey conducted in Blue States and dining halls, students told me they think we’re all very sensitive when it comes to talking about our peers’ mental health.

Conversations about mental illn e ss ta ke place in hushed tones, full of

“

sympathy and euphemisms. They do not involve big, loud words like “crazy.”

“I think in my experience when I talk about people with mental illnesses, it’s pretty sympathetic,” said Maggie Zhou ’15, a member of my random sample. “The enemy is always Yale Health.”

Students I spoke with had a wide range of horror stories about Yale Mental Health Services: waiting up to four months for an appointment, encountering therapists who didn’t recognize their patients, who cut them off in the middle of sentences when their time was up, who pushed medication on them after two sessions, who prescribed the wrong

kind of medication, who made them feel judged.

On the surface, we’re trying to fix this. Every Yale College Council presidential candidate in recent memory has made improving Yale’s mental health resources a prominent part of his or her platform.

When Cameron Dabaghi ’11 jumped off the Empire State Building in the March of 2010, we wrote op-eds and talked about boosting access to mental health services. When Zachary Brunt ’15 committed suicide two years later, we did much the same thing.

We hear that Yale’s mental health services are failing us. The failures are big and gaping and scary.

But we also hear about the stigma that makes so many students reluctant to seek help, or even articulate their

suffering in the first place. The source of this stigma seemed a little mysterious to me at first. Yale is famously inclusive, extremely PC. But then there’s the hard truth that based on the numbers, at least one in every two people we have no problem calling crazy on this campus have visited Yale Mental Health at least once during their Yale careers.

We hear that we don’t talk about mental health enough. But maybe we need to listen to what we’re saying. *** Abigail*, a junior who has struggled with clinical depression, insomnia and anxiety during her time at Yale, can describe, immediately and at length, the kinds of qualities that comprise craziness here.

“I hear the words ‘chill’ and ‘crazy’ so much at Yale, and it’s a problem I have had for a very long time,” she told me. “Crazy has the connotation of a girl who doesn’t really have a handle over her emotions … and chill is the positive way to be, if you can be chill and act like things don’t affect you.”

Thirteen students interviewed were unanimous about one aspect of “crazy”: Girls get called crazy more often and more casually than boys do.

Many identified strikingly similar characteristics that mark a “crazy” Yale woman. Elea-

nor Michotte ’15 said it can mean going out too much or not enough.

But she said that it’s applied especially often to girls who exhibit too much “clinginess” in romantic situations. Andrea Villena ’15 told me “crazy” is typically used to refer to girls who seem overly dramatic in dealing with their relationships.

Abigail said these are girls who seem immature or insecure, who publicly and dynamically react to things.

because of it. It’s something she’s been thinking about a lot post-Yale.

Jessica began feeling “very body conscious” at age 10 — and the feeling never went away. She believes those concerns helped feed her anxiety at Yale. When she was 20, she went to the beach and a male friend made a rude comment about her body. Jessica remembers going home, sitting on the floor of her bathroom and crying for hours.

ARE THOSE ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS EXPERIENCED DIFFERENTLY BY GENDERS, AND THE ANSWER IS PROBABLY YES. They are clearly socially anxious.

They don’t seem chill.

Jay Pabarue ’14 said the word is used so much and so generally that it’s hard to identify just one meaning. But he too associates the term with girls who seem to have a “pathological way of dealing with social scenes.”

The only guy Abigail has heard called crazy at Yale is “legitimately crazy,” she said. Several students said that calling a boy crazy is more serious than calling a girl crazy: It suggests more about their actual psychological state. When asked why they think so many girls do get called “crazy,” many blamed unjustified cultural stereotypes about girls being more neurotic and hysterical.

But the World Health Organization tells us women are far more likely to be afflicted with anxiety and depression. And they are twice as likely to develop generalized anxiety and panic disorders as men, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.

These disorders are also more tied to external influences than any genetic or internal predisposition, which means the environment we collectively create on campus each day matters. Psychology professor Tyrone Cannon, who is presently teaching a course on the neuroscience of mental disorders, said that depression and anxiety are only 35 percent determined by genetic factors, with environmental influences accounting for the remaining 65 percent. He contrasted this with disorders not particularly associated with one gender over another, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which are 85 percent determined by genetic factors.

“I think the mechanisms are similar across men and women,” Cannon told me. “The question is, are those environmental factors experienced differently by genders, and the answer is probably yes.”

According to June Gruber, one of Cannon’s colleagues in Yale’s Psychology Department, girls begin to experience the social world differently at a very young age.

Their parents encourage them to express t h e i r emotions. Girls mature more quickly and develop a strong social orientation earlier.

They tend to be more ruminative.

But all this introspection comes at a cost: Girls are much more likely to become depressed as they grow.

All through high school, 2013 grad Jessica* dealt with anxiety and insomnia. The summer after her freshman year at Yale, she found herself having panic attacks and even more extreme anxiety.

She took a year off. Jessica doesn’t think her experience of depression and anxiety can be divorced from her gender and the way she grew up

“I think there are these social expectations for girls to be a certain way, to act a certain way, to not be weird, to be attractive. A part of the education as a preteen girl is to learn how to be attractive to boys.

A lot of my friends and I are going through this experience where we’re unlearning that,” she said.

“Definitely there is a direct physiological connection to my mood and my body consciousness and anxieties about being a woman.”

Such feelings may be exacerbated on campus. Michotte said people at Yale, and girls especially, seem much more intense about their appearance than in her native England (an issue she discussed in one of her “Crit from the Brit” columns for WEEKEND). “I think there’s appearance inflation. As everyone grooms more, works out more … suddenly everyone falling short of that standard stands out, and the collective average creeps up and up,” she said.

Abigail thinks a lot of the girls she knows who get “crazy” thrown at them probably have mental health issues that people too easily overlook. She doesn’t think she’s crazy; she thinks she’s someone who feels things deeply and has problems with her brain chemistry that she’s working hard on.

“I’m sure people call me crazy, though no one’s ever called me crazy to my face,” Abigail tells me suddenly, 20 minutes into our conversation at the Hall of Graduate Studies dining hall. She sounds as though she is articulating this thought to herself for the first time.

In a culture where there’s so much silence about people’s diagnoses, it’s hard to know who might be suffering. Pabarue cited one girl he knows who often gets called crazy in an unsympathetic way by people not aware that she has a problem.

After a bad breakup her freshman year, Abigail found herself breaking down and crying multiple times a day, for several months. It never occurred to her that she was “actually depressed”; she thought she was just another girl who had been dumped. She’s always been someone who experiences higher highs and lower lows than other people, and the line between grief and illness wasn’t obvious.

“When your boyfriend and you have a really bad breakup, the time when you’re crying and mourning that’s not called clinical depression,” she said. “I thought I was just really sad.”

But though few students interviewed believed girls were legitimately at a greater risk for developing any mental disorder, society has no problem making judgment calls based on gender when it comes to one commonly reported disorder: eating issues.

When Sally*, now a junior, developed Crohn’s disease her freshman year, she lost 18 pounds in a month and was constantly vomiting. Yet as she sought treatment, she found herself under attack from all sides.

“Everyone was saying I was anorexic,” Sally said. “People at Yale Health, people at Yale. People just wouldn’t believe me when I was saying I was in pain.”

Sally had friends trying to force SEE RIGHT WORDS PAGE B8

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 20

“STRUCTURES OF MEANING IN THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK” Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library // 4:30 p.m.

Do the reading, Kastan will introduce.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sex on the 50-yard line at the Yale Bowl Touchdown!

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND ARTS

SOCIAL CROSSROADS IN HONG KONG // BY ELAINA PLOTT For most Americans, the city of Hong Kong evokes a glossy aesthetic — a glimmering skyline rendered even more radiant in its reflection along Victoria Harbor. We envision the hordes of brass-knuckled, Hermes-donning financiers peopling downtown, an ode to the city’s burgeoning status as the definitive portrait of wealth and glamour. But for all of these carefully ingrained motifs, Michael Sloan chooses to instead use his newest exhibit, “Paintings of Hong Kong Street Markets,” to illuminate the island’s lesser-told story.

Housed at the Yale-China Association at 442 Temple St., the collection confronts its viewers with the dominating theme of social crossroads. The paintings reflect what Sloan deems the “reality” of Hong Kong, one composed of scenes and characters found exclusively in the Tai Po and Mong Kok East street markets. He juxtaposes these locals — the butcher, the shoe shiner, the waiter — with those who often overshadow them — the tourists, the purveyors of glitz and kitsch.

Sloan sketches the latter in black and white, allowing the former to take on the color he finds missing in the Hong Kong cultural conscience.

This technique serves Sloan well, translated most literally in a piece depicting a poor, local couple at the MTA station standing below an advertisement featuring a hypersexualized supermodel. Her breasts dominate the painting in size, appearing to spill out of her blouse and occupy their own space within the train station. Her lips and eyelashes have been exaggerated in a similar fashion, both voluminous and bold. But despite the poster’s physical dominance within the sketch, Sloan renders it secondary to the local couple through his selective use of color. Cloaked in shoddy garments, the couple represents quite the opposite of the bourgeoisie displayed in the advertisement, yet the artist — by decorating them in striking hues of red, blue and green — portrays their lives as likely the most meaningful of all. In stark contrast stands the poster, a mere visage of black and white.

Such makes this particular piece most accessible to viewers in understanding the collection’s larger theme. It’s important to note, however, that Sloan does not universally condemn the pomp and circumstance of the city, but instead seeks to qualify it, positioning popular culture and local realities side by side. Indeed, a sketch featuring Hong Kong’s excessive neon lights and cosmopolitan waterfront scenes is complemented by a local waiter, who waits patiently to serve the throngs of tourists soon to take their seats.

Here, the social intersection is portrayed more subtly than the grotesquely exaggerated poster girl, but still sheds light on the crossroads that Sloan seeks to convey.

Organizationally, the exhibit is fashioned in a logical narrative for the viewer, but nearly fails in convincing one to continue looking.

The collection’s centerpieces are found in bird’s eye views of the respective street markets of Tai Po and Mong Kok — certainly a sound starting point for the viewer, but one lacking in aesthetic punch. Indeed, the exhibit’s most gripping and telling pieces, including one portraying an elderly man crafting Chinese poetry along the sidewalk of the People’s Park, are tucked away in the back corners of the room. It thus takes some searching to find Sloan’s true gems, but despite this structural lapse, the effort is well worth it.

But Sloan’s cultural commentary is not groundbreaking. The illuminating of two separate cultural spheres — with one historically glossing over the other — is a perspective oft communicated in prominent 20th century drawings (Bill Traylor comes to mind). However, by placing his work in a fresh context — the Tai Po and Mong Kok street markets — Sloan gives this familiar narrative a refreshing sense of novelty. This, coupled with the sheer beauty of the drawings themselves, ensures that even amidst a foreign context, nothing is lost in translation.

Contact ELAINA PLOTT at elaina.plott@yale.edu . // KATHRYN CRANDALL

Wagner: A Polemic Wunderkind // BY HELEN ROUNER

Fraught with adultery, debt, fierce rivalry and intensely isolating narcissism, Wagner’s own story was nearly as operatic as those he created for the stage.

“Master or Monster: Richard Wagner at 200,” an exhibit in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library in Sterling Library, celebrates the 200th anniversary of the German composer’s birth. The display includes letters, photographs, books and essays pertaining both to Wagner’s prolific career and to his scandalous personal life.

Many aficionados consider Wagner to be the father of modern classical music, as first conceived through his opera “Tristan und Isolde.” Wagner invented the revolutionary “music drama,” using leitmotif and “endless melody” to create cohesive, all-encompassing works of art rather than just collections of arias and recitatives. He was one of very few composers to write both the libretto and the score to each of his operas.

But the exhibit skates past Wagner’s artistic legacy and crashes headlong into the shrouded reality of his insufferable narcissism.

Of the five of Wagner’s letters on display, two are exceptionally ridiculous. In one, Wagner demands that a publishing house rectify a typo in a libretto of his (a substitution of “damned” [“verdammt”] for “cursed” [“verflucht”]). In another, he begs his American dentist to raise a million dollars to help the Wagner family relocate to the United States (which they never did).

“Master or Monster” derives its title from Deems Taylor’s radio talk for a 1936 concert of Wagner’s music by the New York Philharmonic. The talk, later published as “The Monster,” enumerates Wagner’s personal shortcomings — from his insatiable thirst for praise to his disproportionately large head. Wagner considered himself “Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolled into one,” Taylor says, ascribing to him “the emotional stability of a 6-year-old child.” Taylor also describes how Wagner poached his second wife from his best friend and most dedicated follower, and that even while seducing her, Wagner was searching for a wealthier woman to marry.

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 20

Conspicuously missing from the list of Wagner’s faults is his anti-Semitism.

In a less-than-subtle effort to compensate for those of Wagner’s modern admirers who have “sought to avoid or downplay his antiSemitism,” the exhibit’s curators have chosen to address the issue “head on,” as archivist Richard Boursy writes in the exhibit’s introductory remarks. Many descriptions of correspondence and photographs on display conclude with a non sequitur noting how many years elapsed between their authors’ deaths and Hitler’s rise.

BUT THE EXHIBIT SKATES PAST WAGNER’S ARTISTIC LEGACY AND CRASHES HEADLONG INTO THE SHROUDED REALITY OF HIS INSUFFERABLE NARCISSISM. The exhibit’s most controversial object is Wagner’s essay, “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” in which he argues that Jews cannot rise to musical greatness because they possess no creativity — only imitative capacities. Later in his life, however, Wagner admitted that much of this ethnic prejudice was a product of his rivalry with Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, both of whom were much more successful than Wagner at the time.

A 1869 magazine caricature depicts the composer as a tiny, round man hammering a pointed object into a disembodied ear. Here, Wagner seems as acerbic and irritating as the other objects in this exhibit make him out to be. The cartoon bears a resemblance to Wagner’s most animated tenor, Elmer Fudd, whose rendition of “Kill the Wabbit” seems more sinister in the context of Wagner’s life than Fudd’s anti-lapin libretto could ever suggest.

Contact HELEN ROUNER at helen.rouner@yale.edu .

“Don Jon”: Porn in the morn (and afternoon, and night) // BY PATRICE BOWMAN

With all the news of former Disney stars trying too hard to be shocking and tent-pole franchises becoming more bloated and more ridiculous with each new announcement, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s feature-length directorial debut “Don Jon” is a bright spot in current American pop culture. He and his movie are more impressive within the context of his Hollywood career, which began when he was just a child.

Fun fact: I’ve kept track of Gordon-Levitt’s career since the 1990s. Clarifying fact: I’m not an obsessed fan girl; he just happened to be in some movies, such as “Angels in the Outfield” (1994) and “Treasure Planet” (2002), that I saw back then. When I saw him in “(500) Days of Summer” (2009), I thought, who is this guy? He was so charming, vulnerable and funny. It was that kid from those Disney flicks! Since then, he’s had some duds along the way — seriously, whose idea was it to cast him as the villain in “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” (2009)? — but Gordon-Levitt has redeemed himself in such films as “50/50” (2011), “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012) and now “Don Jon.” In the most recent film, Jon (Gordon-Levitt) is a bro from the Jersey Shore: He pumps iron, curses out people as he drives to Mass, keeps his hair oozing with gel and bags ladies every time he goes out with his buds. And he’s addicted to porn. Even after meeting the stunning Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), Jon can’t kick the habit that requires so many tissues. After his relationship with Barbara deteriorates, he finds himself drawn to the odd Esther (Julianne Moore) at his local college.

Even as I congratulate Gordon-Levitt for juggling writing, directing and starring in this production, the movie often has signs of an artist stretched too thinly. What we end up seeing is that Gordon-Levitt the actor succeeds more than GordonLevitt the director and the writer.

Although Jon’s character is the focus of the picture, GordonLevitt never makes him out to be some idealized version of masculinity. To be frank, I wouldn’t want to be friends with Jon, let alone date him. I was so used to Gordon-Levitt playing nice guys that when I saw him transform into a selfish womanizer who somehow continues to gain the audience’s sympathy, I had an even greater appreciation for his acting abilities.

Gordon-Levitt the director, however, focuses so much on his own acting that his love interests are left with less substantialness. Johansson’s character comes across as the plot-designated battle-ax, turning into a mean girl in the blink of an eye.

Moore’s likeable role as an earthmother type who doesn’t wear makeup, smokes weed and gives Jon advice on how to really connect with women during sex suffers because she does not have enough screen time. She’s the (perhaps predictable) wake-up call that Jon needs. She’s eccentric without becoming one of those Manic Pixie Dream Girls from days of old, but she’s not really in the movie as much as she should be. In fact, the movie screen goes to black just as Esther and Jon reach the peak of their relationship. Imagine if “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012) ended just as Pat and Tiffany were really hitting it off.

YALE PHILHARMONIA: “THE RITE OF SPRING”

Contact PATRICE BOWMAN at patrice.bowman@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Woolsey Hall // 8 p.m.

Spring into fall.

But his direction isn’t a total failure. What I did like was the first half of the film’s extreme hyperbole. Ear-splitting dance music punctuates each sexual conquest, parts of women’s bodies glow and people go to watch movies with such titles as “So Hard, So Fast 3D.” This wild take slows down as Jon’s self-confidence breaks down, and the steady camera angles and funny musical cues give way to shaky cam and uncomfortable silence.

But even as his direction becomes serious, Gordon-Levitt can’t quite grasp the full depth of the story that he has in his hands.

He’s holding back. Not with the pornographic images and unfulfilling sexual encounters with real women — there’s plenty of that — but with the emotional dysfunction on screen. For example, Jon’s family is scary; his father is very close to attacking him, his mother is a borderline idiot and his sister mostly refuses to talk to anyone. Yeah, it’s funny, but there’s a serious problem here.

In fact, that statement applies to the whole movie. The movie is almost the lighthearted version of “Shame” (2011), filled with laughter to avoid confronting the core of a bunch of messedup folks. But while Don Jon lacks “Shame”’s explicit and cold tone, it does have some insight into the many ways people fill in the numb voids in their lives with media.

“Don Jon” may not be the total knockout that I expected it to be, but it stands as a look into the growing talent of a star who has great skill both in front of and behind the camera.

Sex on the stage at the Yale University Theater Put on a real show.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B5

WEEKEND CHUCKLES

LAUGH FACTORY // BY JULIA ZORTHIAN

Ari Berkowitz ’12 may live in Los Angeles like Zooey Deschanel, have the same glasses-bangs combination as Zooey Deschanel and spend her time inventing ways to meet Zooey Deschanel, but Berkowitz wants you to know she is not a “Zooey stalker.”

She only plays one in her new, six-episode webseries called “Me & Zooey D.” Unlike Berkowitz, many recent alumni pursue jobs for the money, and students pursue courses for grades, but for members of Yale’s comedy scene, all are after one thing — the laughs.

The first three-minute installment features Berkowitz’s character Alex in a “New Girl”-esque red dress, staking out an LA Sprinkles cupcake shop and waiting for Deschanel to pick up some gluten-free red velvet treats. In the next episode, Alex and her best friend get in a serious fight over Zooey’s acting talent, but make up over a friendship frittata. The third episode sees Alex try her hand at scriptwriting.

For Berkowitz, who writes, coproduces and edits the series, the subject matter isn’t very far removed from her own life. While she may not have moved to L.A. to become best friends with a famous actress, Berkowitz’s own L.A. relocation after college parallels the show’s storyline.

The recent alumna said she knew she wanted to pursue comedy writing her senior year so she shaped her American Studies major around television. She was also a member of The Purple Crayon improv group for four years and joined the sketch comedy group Red Hot Poker to hone her writing abilities as a senior. Berkowitz said Yale’s vibrant comedy culture and alumni network prepared her for her current role as an assistant to the executive producers of the ABC show, “Trophy Wife.”

With Yale’s sketch-comedy form, Berkowitz said she began to think about jokes more precisely.

“Those are great muscles to develop,” she added. “Writing a scene in a sitcom is like writing a mini-sketch.”

With numerous comedy outlets, Yale students don’t have to look far for some comedic distraction. Students interested in drawing laughs from others can devote their time to comedic groups or even some classes, with the possibility of pursuing humor after shedding their caps and gowns.

it.”

Plenty of Yale alumni have moved on to careers in improv and standup comedy — including comedian Demetri Martin ’95 and “Girls” cast member Allison Williams ’10. Pictures of Williams from her Just Add Water days surfaced on the Internet last month in a Huffington Post story, titled “Allison Williams’ College Improv Team Photos Make Her Seem Way More Fun Than Her ‘Girls’ Character.”

In fact, Williams told the News in 2011 that she would not have landed the role on “Girls” if she had not prepared with JAW, because she had to improvise with Lena Dunham in her audition.

“The best decision I made at Yale was to audition for [the improv comedy troupe] Just Add Water. Again and again, improv proves to be the most profitable skill that I have,” she said. *** On an average Wednesday in professor Ryan Wepler’s English 121 humor writing class, Wepler reads funny pieces — 75 percent of the time, belonging to the students themselves — aloud to the mix of sophomores, juniors and seniors.

Hopefully there’s laughter.

“My goal is to teach students to try to be funny,” Wepler said.

Wepler has taught an English 114 seminar on laughter and an English 115 course on humorous literature, but this is his first time focusing the class on writing itself.

So far this semester, he has assigned one two-page essay per week, with a prompt somewhat lacking in direction.

“The prompt of the two-page essay is ‘Be as funny as you can in 500-700 words,” Wepler added. “It’s open intentionally. I want students to work with their own sense of humor, generate their own sense of humor.”

But students also read classic humorists like Mark Twain, along with more contemporary writers such as Jack Handy and Joel Stein.

Wepler’s classes are not the only ones that deal with humor within the curriculum; filmmaker Michael

game during shows where they run a scene over and over, with audience members shouting out new genres or iterations.

“When we play on campus, it’s a lot of ‘The Western canon!’ ‘Kant!’

‘Surrealist novel!’” Sircus said. “I think Yalies appreciate this esoteric and a little more pedantic style of humor,” he said.

“When you’re at a show you can make a joke about the nuances of ‘Othello.’ Maybe not everyone gets it, but they laugh.” *** But the consensus on whether comedy is just an extracurricular is split.

Greenspan pointed to Yale’s extensive theater studies program and drama productions supported

by University funding. He said that while the student body is hugely supportive of comedy shows on campus, he has rarely seen an administrator at a JAW show the way he has at theater performances.

“The thing about improv is, it really is a couple of people standing around and lying. Just making [stuff] up on the spot,” Greenspan explained, laughing. “It’s harder to get funding to do that because technically, anyone has that ability.”

Yale’s humor publications, though circulated widely on campus, may face a similar brush-off in the professional world.

People say 80 percent of “The Simpson’s” writing staff is from the Harvard Lampoon. There is no such saying about any Yale humor publications.

As a senior who submitted a television script as her senior thesis,

Berkowitz said she did not find enough support on and beyond campus for humor writing. “[The Lampoon has] a really good network, and we don’t really,” Berkowitz said. “That was something that I think surprised me. As much as there’s a lot of support for any level of student writing on campus, I don’t think there’s enough for comedy writing, “ Compared with the Lampoon, the Harvard magazine with a long list of venerated alumni like Conan O’Brien and B.J. Novak, Yale’s comedic publications are viewed as less established in the comedy world.

Still, Yale prints a base of publications that produce generally funny content, like the Yale Herald, Rumpus and The Record. And since Rumpus established the Rump Chat blog two years ago, students have turned to other peoples’ written gossip tips as another source of humor.

“People really like taking pleasure in other people’s pains,” said Andrea Villena ’15, editor in chief of Rumpus.

“I think [Rump Chat] keeps people honest and stops us from taking ourselves too seriously.”

And the new form of comedic writing certainly has an audience.

Villena said when the site printed a report of the laundry vandal scandal to hit campus last week — titled “Poopgate” by Rump Chat — the site received about 3000 hits in one day.

Villena added that humor writing is definitely gaining traction on campus, though she is not sure if students want humor to digest their

news or use humor to gain readership. But Berkowitz said readership on campus does align with prestige in the entertainment industry.

“If you make it on the Lampoon, it gives you street cred,” she said. “The Record is great, but I don’t think its competitive, well-respected or known enough to give you that.”

Yet students in comedy groups interviewed pointed to the more well-known comedy writers who came from Yale as success stories, such as Elizabeth Meriwether ’04, the head writer for “New Girl,” and Steve Bodow ’89, former head writer and now producer of “The Daily Show.”

And even if their careers take different turns, students agreed that the take-away from their work with comedy on campus has formed their characters. Blackwell pointed to his developed ability to react well to different situations as helpful while he works on the farm. Greenspan said he appreciates the importance of working in sync with a partner or team.

“Improv is definitely a life-lesson thing. I know it sounds so cheesy but our whole lives are so improvised,” Madison said. “The rules that apply to good improv apply to having a good day.”

Contact JULIA ZORTHIAN at julia.zorthian@yale.edu .

*** The average American college or University has an improv troupe on campus. Yale has five. And two sketch comedy groups. And a standup collective.

“There’s such a large comedy scene at Yale,” said Caleb Madison ’15, the director of the Viola Question and a member of the Just the Tip stand-up comedy collective. “If you’re in it, you know everyone in it.

That’s kind of nice.”

Madison added that while he doesn’t want to jinx his chances, he would be happy to pursue a career in comedy after graduation.

Gabe Greenspan ’14, former director of Red Hot Poker and a member of Just Add Water, said he hopes to move to one of three meccas of humor: L.A., Chicago or New York City.

Zeke Blackwell ’13, former director of The Purple Crayon, is currently working on a farm, but said he hopes to continue a career in improv in the future. He would want to go to Chicago, which he called “the birthplace of modern improv.” Chicago houses The Second City Comedy Troupe, and Blackwell said the city has more opportunities for beginners in the business.

In addition to learning long-form improv comedy with The Purple Crayon — a popular form professionally — Blackwell said the group, like most comedy groups at Yale, gave him an alumni network to fall back on. “[It’s] really cool that if in six months I decided I wanted to move to Chicago, it’s much easier to enter that world knowing people than trying to go in with nothing,” Blackwell said. “The Purple Crayon gave me a really great network, if I want to use

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 20

Roemer is teaching “American Film Comedy” this semester, and professor Albert Laguna is teaching the class “Race and Comedy.”

Madison is c u r rently enrolled i n R o e m e r ’s class, and said the opportunity to study humor, instead of only perform it, gives him a new way to look at comedy. “[Roemer] takes comedy very seriously, which I think is something all the people at Yale do. Which I love,” Madison said. “They apply that academic serious-minded discipline to comedy. Some may say it takes the joy out of it, but I would say it only adds to it.”

Joel Sircus ’14, a member of Viola Question, said Yale’s intellectual culture changes the sort of comedy the troupes focus on. He explained how the VQ plays a

// SARA LEE

JAZZ AT THE UNDERBROOK

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Saybrook College // 8 p.m.

Surprise guest and jam session to follow!

Sex in the Saybrook laundry room Don’t shit on your tit.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND STRIPS

SUN ON MY RIDGE: WKND GETS NAKED // BY JENNIFER GERSTEN, YUVAL BEN-DAVID AND LEAH MOTZKIN

Thrust.

A relentless pattern; a relentless panting. Thump. Thump. Back and forth. Thrust and groan.

The wind caressed our naked bodies.

Sweat ran down our sun-kissed skin.

Leah heaved. Yuvie squealed. He hit hard.

Jennifer watched from the sidelines.

We were playing tennis.

Just three college students looking to blow off some steam. And we’d found a surprising sanctuary out in the Connecticut boondocks: Sun Ridge Nudist Resort in Sterling, Conn.

Thought you were too young, you know/ So I just watched you sleeping.” We giggled awkwardly. We were about to come face to face with nakedness — our own, and that of others.

While we had assured each other that there would be no funny business at this camp, each of us secretly wondered if that would really be the case. When we reached the climax of the hill, would we find only promiscuity or sexual abnormality? Would the people we’d meet be perverts?

Was taking our clothes off in front of each other and these strangers, going bare in the unrelenting sunlight on this nippy day, something we really wanted to do? Were we prepared for the parade of pudenda and penis?

WERE WE PREPARED FOR THE PARADE OF PUDENDA AND PENIS? *** We took a collective deep breath as our borrowed black Ford inched up the hill to the resort. The easy banter of the drive waned to a heavy silence, in which the lyrics of a Jim Croce ballad became painfully audible: “I was so afraid to touch you/

At first we could only see some buildings, a small clearing and the pool area. A fully clothed woman, tanned to a crisp, told us where to leave our car, and motioned to the checkin cabin. As we walked up the steps, we spotted our first bare butt-cheeks under a sign that decreed “Party N a k e d .”

Lydia, Sun Ridge’s owner and founder, gave us copies of the ground rules.

“There’ll be a chowder bake at 4 — you should come!” she said, waving as we headed for the bathrooms. *** Yuval and Leah went first. They had said they were going to change, but it was into their birthday suits. Walking out into the sun in only her neon salmon Nikes, Leah briefly panicked about the gazes that would soon fall on her exposed body. Then she saw Yuvie, as comfortable nude as he had been in clothes. She was there among friends, and as she looked at the visitors passing by, nobody seemed to fulfill her fears. Together, she, Yuvie and a still-clothed Jennifer walked through the campground.

And it was by herself, some time after we had gotten our bearings, that Jennifer chose to strip in a field far removed from the main campground.

First went her shirt: an oatmeal-colored tee she had worn in an attempt to blend in. Then: a camisole with elastic bands that at first entangled her in its straps; shorts, whose clasp she turned in her hand like she would a key; underwear, sliding abashedly onto the grass; shoes, kicked off; socks, pared from her feet; ponytail, unbridled.

The first sight anyone has of an infant is of it alone, naked. But then it is quickly swaddled in blankets, and it permanently joins the ranks of the covered. To wear clothes is not only this

infant’s right, but also a societal mandate. After the exposure the infant experiences in birth, being nude among others becomes a privilege that it is unlikely to take.

Most who do lay claim to this privilege, like those at Sun Ridge, do so in groups. It is easier to be naked alone — take a shower, and look at yourself as you scrub. You will probably not look for long, but even a glimpse is enough to confirm that everything is in its place. You know what you are seeing, yet in public you cannot be sure of how you appear; the eyes of others reflect poorly. If you slam your eyes shut in the shower and then quickly don a robe as though your bare skin had never touched water, then what you look like will be a mystery even to you. You are a house whose furniture you know well, though your exterior is entirely unfamiliar.

Awkwardly at first, Jennifer sat cross-legged on a towel, reading “The Canterbury Tales.” For her, nudity among others, even so far away from them, was a pilgrimage to a wilderness she had known only at birth.

Small sounds disturbed her; then, less so. Within minutes, her hyperawareness had quieted.

Thoreau, it is said, took daily walks in the nude he called “air walks.” No evidence exists that Emerson did the same, but he could have been won over to the practice — he did expound upon seeing everything in nature, after all. Free should the scholar be, and brave; “Know thyself” and “Study nature” become at last one fused maxim, espoused by this

Girl Thinking.

The American scholar will discover herself outdoors. In the middle of the woods, Jennifer entertained the possibility that she was doing Yale right. *** Jennifer dressed and headed back to the swimming pool, where she spoke with Lisa. Lisa had grown up with nudism.

“My dad was a hippie,” Lisa said. “[Going nude] feels natural.”

Waving a hand over the floral place mats set out for the afternoon chowder bake, she said, “Out there, I work for corporate America. But here … here, I’m Momma Lisa. You need food, someone to talk to, whatever, you come to me. My door’s always open. My husband, Mike, he’s the camp DJ — he probably has any song you want.”

It was chilly despite the sun, and Lisa was wearing pink terry sweatpants, but no shoes. No shirt, either.

“Clothing … it puts a label on you. Be this, be that.” Scowling, Lisa described her preparations for the daily grind: “I have to fix my hair.

Then I have to one by one do up my shirt buttons.” She mimed the action, her fingers inching up her bare stomach and breasts like a spider weaving its web. “It’s just so complicated. …

Here, you can be what you want to be, do what you want to do. Wear clothes, or don’t wear clothes, whatever you want.”

To get to Sun Ridge, you must wait at the bottom of the hill and call the office to inform them of your impending arrival. According to Lisa, the resort’s unofficial motto is “Leave your stress at the bottom of the hill.”

On the weekends, Lisa leaves her corporate persona behind for her trailer (“the one with the Christmas lights”) at Sun Ridge, where she says she has made friends who live all along the Eastern Seaboard.

Lisa has mentioned her weekly jaunts to her co-workers. Some of her Sun Ridge friends, however, have chosen to keep quiet about their pastime — what Lydia, the owner, calls the “fastest growing social sport.”

If camp visitors, mostly in their 40s and 50s, choose not to disclose their activities, it is often not out of shame but an unwillingness to defend themselves from public ignorance. Lisa spoke of a couple, both ultra-conservative Catholics, that have declined to tell even their children of their weekend whereabouts. They haven’t even mentioned Sun Ridge’s location to their emergency contacts.

What Sun Ridge is not is a voyeurs’ or hedonists’ haven. As in the clothed world, staring or ogling is a breach of etiquette. Visitors to Sun Ridge engage in activities like tennis, tanning, swimming and cooking; the facility is not a space to indulge wanton sexual fantasies.

“If it was the orgy everyone thought it would be, I wouldn’t need c o u n s e l i n g ,” L i s a

said dryly.

If we are surprised by anything, it should be not the content of our physicality, but rather how little it matters to Sun Ridge’s patrons. They are just human beings, but humans being — what? Beyond the borders of Sun Ridge, who are they actually, and who are they supposed to be? The patrons, when at Sun Ridge, aren’t looking for the answer. For them, it is sufficient that humans simply be. *** At Sun Ridge, people play tennis.

So, when in Rome, right? We walked down to the courts. A woman in a golf cart pulled up to offer us tennis balls.

We struggled to balance the balls in our arms before dropping them, finally, all over the concrete. After flailing about for several minutes, we abandoned the effort.

“Giving up so soon?” a large lobster-red man asked.

“Maybe another time,” we promised.

We had come to Sun Ridge with high expectations. They weren’t met — instead, they were subverted. The debauchery that we feared and longed for did not exist in the community we joined for the day. Rather, we watched people come together in their natural state to find some respite. ***

Yom Kippur fell on the Saturday we drove up. Do the math: three Jews, skipping synagogue for a nudist resort on the holiest day on the Jewish calendar — the day when most of us apologize for skipping synagogue the rest of the year, for all the sick and nasty things we do in the nude. We reconsidered the trip. On Yom Kippur, Jews beat their chests and name their sins before God. We’d be beating our chests, too, but more in the Neanderthalic tradition.

It’s a day of abstinence, Yom Kippur — from food and drink, work, leather, washing, sex. Free of desire and shallow self-regard, it’s a day to dwell sincerely on oneself. And our itinerary didn’t jive with that. As gonzo journalists, however amateur, our task would be to live the lives of others: nudists, serial nudists, people who can’t get enough of airing their privates. That wasn’t us we’d be writing about.

Frankly, it felt like we missed the train to heaven. It wasn’t even a close shave. We were too busy chasing other gods, naked. We took on the project for its sensationalism.

We thought it would be cool to write about our brush with that subculture.

So very Swedish of us. God probably loves Sweden, but he doesn’t care much about cool. Especially not on Yom Kippur.

We rationalized. Yuval ran to his rabbi to seek encouragement. The fasting would just be sexual. Imagine forsaking that deli of naked bodies, he said;

having to not get a public erection — that’s hyperfasting right there. The rabbi wasn’t buying it. She wondered if the clientele at the resort wasn’t a bit old for his taste, anyways.

There’s an old libel that the Jews run Hollywood. True or not, it’s often the case that synagogue feels like a feature film. “Who shall live and who shall die,” the rabbi intones on Yom Kippur, “who by fire and who by water.” The Jewish God’s all about lightning-bolt theatrics, and while Leah’s driving certainly forced us to reckon with mortality, so did getting naked with a bunch of pensioners. Staring at shriveled testicles is one way of staring death in the face.

Nudity testifies to gravity’s slow, sad conquests.

It’s an Enlightenment project, really — things come to light with nudism. Truth triumphs. It was a cold day in upstate Connecticut, and there was a temptation to cover up with a towel on the pretext of the chill. At some point, we cut that bullshit: We knew the towel was an excuse to not expose ourselves. In stripping, we got honest with ourselves. That’s what Yom Kippur’s all about. If you’re so inclined, you could say we stood naked before God that Saturday.

Hopefully God recognized our newly tanned bottoms.

Contact JENNIFER GERSTEN, YUVAL BEN-DAVID and LEAH MOTZKIN at jennifer.gersten@yale.edu, yuval. bendavid@yale.edu and leah.motzkin@ yale.edu .

// KAREN TIAN

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 21

UP WORKSHOP: TECH BOOT CAMPFALL SESSION Stiles-Morse Crescent Theater // 11 a.m.

Freshman techies, get schooled.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sex under the Calder mobile on Beinecke Plaza Get inspired, send her spinning.

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 21

CLASSICAL INDIAN DANCE

Whitney Humanities Center // 6 p.m.

Featuring Madhavi Mudgal and her troupe.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sex at the top of Harkness

Ring the bell when you reach the climax.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND STRIPS

SUN ON MY RIDGE: WKND GETS NAKED // BY JENNIFER GERSTEN, YUVAL BEN-DAVID AND LEAH MOTZKIN

Thrust.

A relentless pattern; a relentless panting. Thump. Thump. Back and forth. Thrust and groan.

The wind caressed our naked bodies.

Sweat ran down our sun-kissed skin.

Leah heaved. Yuvie squealed. He hit hard.

Jennifer watched from the sidelines.

We were playing tennis.

Just three college students looking to blow off some steam. And we’d found a surprising sanctuary out in the Connecticut boondocks: Sun Ridge Nudist Resort in Sterling, Conn.

Thought you were too young, you know/ So I just watched you sleeping.” We giggled awkwardly. We were about to come face to face with nakedness — our own, and that of others.

While we had assured each other that there would be no funny business at this camp, each of us secretly wondered if that would really be the case. When we reached the climax of the hill, would we find only promiscuity or sexual abnormality? Would the people we’d meet be perverts?

Was taking our clothes off in front of each other and these strangers, going bare in the unrelenting sunlight on this nippy day, something we really wanted to do? Were we prepared for the parade of pudenda and penis?

WERE WE PREPARED FOR THE PARADE OF PUDENDA AND PENIS? *** We took a collective deep breath as our borrowed black Ford inched up the hill to the resort. The easy banter of the drive waned to a heavy silence, in which the lyrics of a Jim Croce ballad became painfully audible: “I was so afraid to touch you/

At first we could only see some buildings, a small clearing and the pool area. A fully clothed woman, tanned to a crisp, told us where to leave our car, and motioned to the checkin cabin. As we walked up the steps, we spotted our first bare butt-cheeks under a sign that decreed “Party N a k e d .”

Lydia, Sun Ridge’s owner and founder, gave us copies of the ground rules.

“There’ll be a chowder bake at 4 — you should come!” she said, waving as we headed for the bathrooms. *** Yuval and Leah went first. They had said they were going to change, but it was into their birthday suits. Walking out into the sun in only her neon salmon Nikes, Leah briefly panicked about the gazes that would soon fall on her exposed body. Then she saw Yuvie, as comfortable nude as he had been in clothes. She was there among friends, and as she looked at the visitors passing by, nobody seemed to fulfill her fears. Together, she, Yuvie and a still-clothed Jennifer walked through the campground.

And it was by herself, some time after we had gotten our bearings, that Jennifer chose to strip in a field far removed from the main campground.

First went her shirt: an oatmeal-colored tee she had worn in an attempt to blend in. Then: a camisole with elastic bands that at first entangled her in its straps; shorts, whose clasp she turned in her hand like she would a key; underwear, sliding abashedly onto the grass; shoes, kicked off; socks, pared from her feet; ponytail, unbridled.

The first sight anyone has of an infant is of it alone, naked. But then it is quickly swaddled in blankets, and it permanently joins the ranks of the covered. To wear clothes is not only this

infant’s right, but also a societal mandate. After the exposure the infant experiences in birth, being nude among others becomes a privilege that it is unlikely to take.

Most who do lay claim to this privilege, like those at Sun Ridge, do so in groups. It is easier to be naked alone — take a shower, and look at yourself as you scrub. You will probably not look for long, but even a glimpse is enough to confirm that everything is in its place. You know what you are seeing, yet in public you cannot be sure of how you appear; the eyes of others reflect poorly. If you slam your eyes shut in the shower and then quickly don a robe as though your bare skin had never touched water, then what you look like will be a mystery even to you. You are a house whose furniture you know well, though your exterior is entirely unfamiliar.

Awkwardly at first, Jennifer sat cross-legged on a towel, reading “The Canterbury Tales.” For her, nudity among others, even so far away from them, was a pilgrimage to a wilderness she had known only at birth.

Small sounds disturbed her; then, less so. Within minutes, her hyperawareness had quieted.

Thoreau, it is said, took daily walks in the nude he called “air walks.” No evidence exists that Emerson did the same, but he could have been won over to the practice — he did expound upon seeing everything in nature, after all. Free should the scholar be, and brave; “Know thyself” and “Study nature” become at last one fused maxim, espoused by this

Girl Thinking.

The American scholar will discover herself outdoors. In the middle of the woods, Jennifer entertained the possibility that she was doing Yale right. *** Jennifer dressed and headed back to the swimming pool, where she spoke with Lisa. Lisa had grown up with nudism.

“My dad was a hippie,” Lisa said. “[Going nude] feels natural.”

Waving a hand over the floral place mats set out for the afternoon chowder bake, she said, “Out there, I work for corporate America. But here … here, I’m Momma Lisa. You need food, someone to talk to, whatever, you come to me. My door’s always open. My husband, Mike, he’s the camp DJ — he probably has any song you want.”

It was chilly despite the sun, and Lisa was wearing pink terry sweatpants, but no shoes. No shirt, either.

“Clothing … it puts a label on you. Be this, be that.” Scowling, Lisa described her preparations for the daily grind: “I have to fix my hair.

Then I have to one by one do up my shirt buttons.” She mimed the action, her fingers inching up her bare stomach and breasts like a spider weaving its web. “It’s just so complicated. …

Here, you can be what you want to be, do what you want to do. Wear clothes, or don’t wear clothes, whatever you want.”

To get to Sun Ridge, you must wait at the bottom of the hill and call the office to inform them of your impending arrival. According to Lisa, the resort’s unofficial motto is “Leave your stress at the bottom of the hill.”

On the weekends, Lisa leaves her corporate persona behind for her trailer (“the one with the Christmas lights”) at Sun Ridge, where she says she has made friends who live all along the Eastern Seaboard.

Lisa has mentioned her weekly jaunts to her co-workers. Some of her Sun Ridge friends, however, have chosen to keep quiet about their pastime — what Lydia, the owner, calls the “fastest growing social sport.”

If camp visitors, mostly in their 40s and 50s, choose not to disclose their activities, it is often not out of shame but an unwillingness to defend themselves from public ignorance. Lisa spoke of a couple, both ultra-conservative Catholics, that have declined to tell even their children of their weekend whereabouts. They haven’t even mentioned Sun Ridge’s location to their emergency contacts.

What Sun Ridge is not is a voyeurs’ or hedonists’ haven. As in the clothed world, staring or ogling is a breach of etiquette. Visitors to Sun Ridge engage in activities like tennis, tanning, swimming and cooking; the facility is not a space to indulge wanton sexual fantasies.

“If it was the orgy everyone thought it would be, I wouldn’t need c o u n s e l i n g ,” L i s a

said dryly.

If we are surprised by anything, it should be not the content of our physicality, but rather how little it matters to Sun Ridge’s patrons. They are just human beings, but humans being — what? Beyond the borders of Sun Ridge, who are they actually, and who are they supposed to be? The patrons, when at Sun Ridge, aren’t looking for the answer. For them, it is sufficient that humans simply be. *** At Sun Ridge, people play tennis.

So, when in Rome, right? We walked down to the courts. A woman in a golf cart pulled up to offer us tennis balls.

We struggled to balance the balls in our arms before dropping them, finally, all over the concrete. After flailing about for several minutes, we abandoned the effort.

“Giving up so soon?” a large lobster-red man asked.

“Maybe another time,” we promised.

We had come to Sun Ridge with high expectations. They weren’t met — instead, they were subverted. The debauchery that we feared and longed for did not exist in the community we joined for the day. Rather, we watched people come together in their natural state to find some respite. ***

Yom Kippur fell on the Saturday we drove up. Do the math: three Jews, skipping synagogue for a nudist resort on the holiest day on the Jewish calendar — the day when most of us apologize for skipping synagogue the rest of the year, for all the sick and nasty things we do in the nude. We reconsidered the trip. On Yom Kippur, Jews beat their chests and name their sins before God. We’d be beating our chests, too, but more in the Neanderthalic tradition.

It’s a day of abstinence, Yom Kippur — from food and drink, work, leather, washing, sex. Free of desire and shallow self-regard, it’s a day to dwell sincerely on oneself. And our itinerary didn’t jive with that. As gonzo journalists, however amateur, our task would be to live the lives of others: nudists, serial nudists, people who can’t get enough of airing their privates. That wasn’t us we’d be writing about.

Frankly, it felt like we missed the train to heaven. It wasn’t even a close shave. We were too busy chasing other gods, naked. We took on the project for its sensationalism.

We thought it would be cool to write about our brush with that subculture.

So very Swedish of us. God probably loves Sweden, but he doesn’t care much about cool. Especially not on Yom Kippur.

We rationalized. Yuval ran to his rabbi to seek encouragement. The fasting would just be sexual. Imagine forsaking that deli of naked bodies, he said;

having to not get a public erection — that’s hyperfasting right there. The rabbi wasn’t buying it. She wondered if the clientele at the resort wasn’t a bit old for his taste, anyways.

There’s an old libel that the Jews run Hollywood. True or not, it’s often the case that synagogue feels like a feature film. “Who shall live and who shall die,” the rabbi intones on Yom Kippur, “who by fire and who by water.” The Jewish God’s all about lightning-bolt theatrics, and while Leah’s driving certainly forced us to reckon with mortality, so did getting naked with a bunch of pensioners. Staring at shriveled testicles is one way of staring death in the face.

Nudity testifies to gravity’s slow, sad conquests.

It’s an Enlightenment project, really — things come to light with nudism. Truth triumphs. It was a cold day in upstate Connecticut, and there was a temptation to cover up with a towel on the pretext of the chill. At some point, we cut that bullshit: We knew the towel was an excuse to not expose ourselves. In stripping, we got honest with ourselves. That’s what Yom Kippur’s all about. If you’re so inclined, you could say we stood naked before God that Saturday.

Hopefully God recognized our newly tanned bottoms.

Contact JENNIFER GERSTEN, YUVAL BEN-DAVID and LEAH MOTZKIN at jennifer.gersten@yale.edu, yuval. bendavid@yale.edu and leah.motzkin@ yale.edu .

// KAREN TIAN

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 21

UP WORKSHOP: TECH BOOT CAMPFALL SESSION Stiles-Morse Crescent Theater // 11 a.m.

Freshman techies, get schooled.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sex under the Calder mobile on Beinecke Plaza Get inspired, send her spinning.

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 21

CLASSICAL INDIAN DANCE

Whitney Humanities Center // 6 p.m.

Featuring Madhavi Mudgal and her troupe.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sex at the top of Harkness

Ring the bell when you reach the climax.

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

FINDING THE RIGHT WORDS RIGHT WORDS FROM PAGE B3 her to eat, commenting on how skinny she was and telling her that it “didn’t look good.” She knew that people were talking about her behind her back. The experience made her close down and withdraw into herself. She began simply avoiding people altogether.

Pabarue experienced the opposite problem when he developed anorexia as a freshman in high school. For months, he saw his pediatrician in a clearly unhealthy state.

He remembers being told to drink more Boost and Ensure and that it seemed like his metabolism was simply getting faster. He was 6 foot 1 and 112 pounds when he fainted in the shower and was rushed to the emergency room. *** In her first year at Yale Law School, Elyn Saks LAW ’86 remembers thinking that she could kill hundreds of thousands of people with her thoughts alone. The TV was giving her commands.

Throughout all this, she believed that she alone had a “special premium on the truth.”

For years, she struggled against receiving medication for her schizophrenia. She was very reluctant to accept the diagnosis of being mentally ill and “needing a crutch,” but now she looks back on accepting her diagnosis as the key to liberating herself from the disease.

clude. There’s nothing she prefers about her unmedicated state.

But for others, navigating the threshold between normal and not normal is much less clear, and accepting a diagnosis an ongoing struggle. The language we use to discuss mental illness — or the lack thereof — only makes this process harder. “People who are sensitive and well-meaning and would never use racial slurs, use the words ‘nutcases’ or ‘looneytunes,’” Saks said.

“I’m happy to be called a patient. I have an illness; the words people use are hurtful. Even just changing that would be a small change to changing the culture around mental health disorders.”

Having more precise language to talk about mental health isn’t just about sensitivity — it’s also about helping inform people who may be vulnerable. Jessica did not have the words to describe what was wrong the first time she started crying for no reason. It was the middle of the day and she was sitting in a café.

The experience terrified her. After searching her symptoms online, she concluded that she was probably bipolar. This diagnosis did not prove to be correct.

“I felt like my feelings weren’t justified, and I didn’t have the language to express that,” she told me says. “I didn’t know what was happening, I didn’t have a language for understanding it. I thought something was wrong with me, that something was very, very wrong.”

Now she realizes that her diag-

I HAVE AN ILLNESS; THE WORDS PEOPLE USE ARE HURTFUL. “For me, a schizophrenic episode is like a waking nightmare, but you can’t just open your eyes and make it go away,” Saks said.

As a law professor at the University of Southern California studying the treatment and rights of the mentally ill, Saks lives a life her diagnosis had once seemed to pre-

noses are not at all uncommon. The more she talks to people, the more she realizes how many people have similar stories. She doesn’t feel so abnormal anymore.

Alison Greenberg ’14, who has struggled with depression at Yale, said the prevalence of terms like “crazy” has to do with the fact that

41.9%

WOMEN

people’s ideas about mental health are vague at best.

“Crazy is sort of a catch-all term for not normal, and normal at Yale is I think very different from normal in the real world,” Greenberg told me.

While Jessica was struggling with depression and anxiety at Yale, she found herself constantly worried about trying “to appear normal.” She felt she was doing everything she could to hide: She was seeking help, she was accepting all kinds of medications and therapies. At one point, she was on five types of medication.

It seemed excessive, but she did what her doctors told her to so as to appear “alright.”

Ellen*, a junior who has received many diagnoses over the years, said that the social norm at Yale is to appear high-functioning even when we’re “hanging by a thread.”

In a culture of glory tales and desperate work ethics, it’s easy for someone who is really suffering to think that their suffering is normal, too. Among her group of friends, a normal state of mental health could include low-level depression, or mania or suicidal thoughts.

Within these standards, labeling someone as “crazy” ends the conversation about him or her, Pabarue said. It’s a way to explain someone else’s behavior without engaging with what might be driving it. It lets you put a label on them, and move on with your own, non-crazy life.

“I think a lot of the failings are among us or born out of the way we talk about things,” Pabarue said.

“It’s too easy to blame the institution alone.”

Ellen says she won’t get offended when someone sad tells her that they’re feeling depressed. She understands words can take on different meaning in a casual context. Still, she has occasionally been upset by the glib way many at Yale discuss mental health.

“The casual context men-

Common mental disorders – depression, anxiety and somatic complaints – affect approximately

1 in 3 tal health is treated can hurt, anything that’s internal, anything people can’t see on the outside, can make you feel undercover in enemy waters,” she explained.

Crazy sets up a dichotomy between normal and everything else. For many at this school, deciding where you fall on this spectrum can be very difficult. Ellen said she feels herself intellectually and emotionally pushing back against the idea that the various mental health diagnoses she has received over the past four years — clinically depressed, bipolar 1, bipolar 2, anxiety — are legitimate. She doesn’t like the idea of the boxes these words create.

Some abandon the pursuit of normal altogether. For his entire freshman year, Charles* said he threw himself into the prescribed way of experiencing life at Yale.

He described buying into the “cultural hegemony” of what a weekend is supposed to look like, of how he should be dealing with drinking, sex and drugs.

“There’s kind of a dominant narrative of what your first year is supposed to be,” he said.

“You’re shopping classes, you’re shopping friends, you’re shopping organizations. You’re kind of walking around the campus consuming everything. …

It’s very oppressive.

I’m saying all this because I was the first to do it.”

All through freshman year, Charles was also taking medication which treated his narcolepsy and hypomania (a milder form of bipolar disorder). The medications made him feel dull, productive and

in the community and constitute a serious public health problem “sterile” throughout the year. He did his reading. He did what he was told to do. But when he ran out of pills one week his sophomore year, he decided to see what would happen.

That spring semester Charles wrote all five final papers — about 80 pages — without sleep, as though in a trance. He described the papers he wrote that semester as “the greatest work I’ve ever done.”

When he’s in a low phase, he can barely bring himself to do any schoolwork at all.

Still, he prefers this to the “stale,” consistently productive feeling he had on medication.

“It makes for a really intense form of existence. I know I suffer because of it. I know I could have a more tranquil, sterile kind of life,” Charles said. “I don’t want to be told that I’m sick; I think my life is so beautiful.”

After going on and off multiple medications, Ellen said she has come to accept that medicine can improve her quality of life. Now she is on a daily medication that changes her mood and behavior. She said she has had to learn to accept some degree of uncertainty in not knowing if what she’s doing is right.

“A lot of us have been given diagnoses … but not too many of us trust those diagnoses. There’s this terrible uncertainty in terms of if what you’re doing is right when it comes to your own mental health,” Ellen said. “Finally settling down with a treatment and accepting that as part of who you are is a really adult struggle, one that people don’t really talk about.” *Name changed to protect source identity/privacy Contact ANYA GRENIER at anna.grenier@yale.edu .

29.3% Depressive disorders account for close to 41.9% of the disability from neuropsychiatric disorders among women compared to 29.3% among men.

MEN

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 21

UNDERBROOK COFFEEHOUSE

Saybrook Underbrook Theater // 8 p.m.

Featuring artist Walden Davis ’16 and musician Matt Jaffe ’17. Go have a synesthetic experience!

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sex in the Yale Health Acute Care pavillion Go get your hot beef injection.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B9

WEEKEND POLITICS

HENRY FERNANDEZ: THE CANDIDATE WHO COULD HAVE

// SARAH BRULEY

// BY MONICA DISARE

On the night of the mayoral primary, State Sen. Toni Harp ARC ’78 held a victory party and Ward 10 Alderman Justin Elicker FES ’10 SOM ’10 announced to a cheering crowd that he would run again in November.

But the mood at Michael’s Trattoria on Court Street, where Henry Fernandez LAW ’94 supporters gathered, was decidedly more melancholy. Fernandez for Mayor signs and a lone podium sat in a corner of the restaurant, as members of the Fernandez campaign sported disappointed gazes directed at the wall in front of them displaying election results.

As the polls began to close, it became increasingly clear that Fernandez would take third place in the race. The final votes were 49.8 percent for Harp, followed by Elicker’s 23.2 percent. Fernandez trailed behind both of them with 18.9 percent of the vote, beating only Hillhouse High School Principal Kermit Carolina, who secured 8.1 percent of the vote.

Though the election results were a disappointment to Fernandez supporters, the biggest shock of the night was yet to come.

When Fernandez took the podium, his concession speech began as most expected. After thanking his supporters and sharing one more time his vision for the city, Fernandez continued, “We live in a democracy and the people of New Haven have spoken, and so I congratulate Kermit Carolina and Justin Elicker and I congratulate Toni Harp on races that were hard fought and on the campaigns that they ran.”

But then, he dropped the line that no one expected. “I believe that the

people of New Haven deserve a runoff between the top two candidates and I am not one of those two candidates.”

All of the people interviewed afterwards at the party said it came as a surprise that Fernandez was dropping out of the race. Even Fernandez’s friend, Brackston Poitier, who flew to New Haven all the way from Arizona to help him with the campaign had no idea that Fernandez was going to call it quits.

Fernandez’s third place finish paves the way for a two-way race for the mayoral seat in November, but it also raises questions about the state of the city. Those who believe he was the best candidate for the job, are not only disappointed by Fernandez’s loss, but also attribute the election results to a city culture that is not receptive to change.

HIDDEN PAST

Fernandez has been involved in progressive causes throughout his life. He founded LEAP, an academic and social enrichment program for youth in New Haven, while he was a law student at Yale. He served on the Obama-Biden transition team at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

He met his wife, Kica Matos, who is a prominent immigration reform activist in New Haven, at a death penalty conference in Washington DC. More recently, he served as New Haven’s economic development administrator where he helped bring Gateway Community College to downtown New Haven and IKEA to Long Wharf.

As candidates hopped in and out of early stages of the race, eager to be a

part of the first election in two decades that would not involve Mayor John DeStefano Jr, Matos said the she and her husband watched with interest, but from a distance. The idea to run for mayor began, she said, when she realized that her husband was more qualified for the job than the other candidates who had thrown their hats in the ring.

But most of these qualifications had never been in the public spotlight.

The projects that Fernandez brought to New Haven, like LEAP and Gateway Community College, have captured the city’s attention, but were not associated with the name, Henry Fernandez, said Kadeem Yearwood ’15, a student who worked on Fernandez’s campaign.

Fernandez agreed with this characterization the perception of his prior experience. “My goal in the work that I did was not to be the face of any of those projects,” Fernandez said. “I decided to run for Mayor a few weeks before I got into the race, so I wasn’t thinking at any point in my professional life, if I do this a certain way, it will help me be mayor.”

The public also had trouble pegging Fernandez into one cultural identity group. Though his last name is Fernandez and his wife is an immigration activist primarily for the hispanic community, Fernandez himself is not Hispanic.

In a diverse city like New Haven, this left Fernandez without a specific demographic voter base. “He sort of embodies what he talks about, the vision he has for unification,” said Emma Janger ’15, the president of Yale

for Henry Fernandez, referring to Fernandez’s campaign slogan of “One City.”

But then she added, “From a political standpoint, it can sometimes make it hard to win certain votes. I think he doesn’t necessarily have a natural constituency.”

And when people were familiar with Fernandez’s past involvement in city goverment, they often negatively associated it with DeStefano’s governing tactics which were notorious for being very assertive. Those like DeStefano and Fernandez are “a group of people who know each other very well and who kind of decide the agenda for everyone else,” said David Streever, a New Haven activist. Though Streever added that neither DeStefano of Fernandez did this out of “malice,” he thought the approach was not in the best interest of the city.

By the time he entered the race in March, many of the other candidates campaigns were in full swing. Fernandez’s loss, he said, may simply be due to his late entry into the race.

UNIONS IN NEW HAVEN

It is unclear, whether Fernandez, or any other candidate with the perfect platform or timing, could become mayor today without the backing of the city’s unions.

Union backed candidates have become a force to be reckoned with in New Haven. In 2011 UNITE HERE, Yale’s two labor unions, nearly swept the Board of Alderman, winning victories in 14 of the 15 seats in which they fielded a candidate. Though the reason for the original union push was to give more New Haven residents representation in their government, some are concerned that the unions have now become a dangerous political machine in their own right.

“The unions have become the boa constrictor of New Haven, sucking the life out of a city that is very much in need of true leadership,” Matos said.

She explained that the unions threatened to challenge any candidate in their primary race if they were not fully supportive of the union’s agenda.

Matos called this “stifling of political dissent” and said she finds it “frightening.” Fernandez agreed, saying that the unions have hindered creativity in the city.

Harp is currently the candidate supported by the unions in the mayoral race. With Fernandez and Carolina out of the race, the mayoral election will now be a true test of whether the anti-union force can prevail by throwing their weight behind one candidate.

“At the end of the day, it’s Toni Harp and the unions vs. Justin Elicker,” said community activist Gary Doyens. // NICOLE NAREA

Is Fernandez’s loss a sign of an unchanging city?

He added that he thinks it is possible for Elicker to prevail. The city, Doyens said, is in need of a fundamental change after 20 years of the same leadership. While Doyens thought at the beginning of the race that Fernandez would be the candidate most likely to channel DeStefano, he now thinks that person is Harp, who he said would maintain the “status quo.”

UNCERTAIN FUTURE

Last Wednesday, Carolina, who also dropped out of the mayoral race on the night of the democratic primary, announced his endorsement of Elicker for mayor.

The clearest way for Fernandez to make a difference in the race, now that he has forfeited, is to also endorse a candidate. His endorsement could have the power to significantly affect the outcome of the race. Carolina’s endorsement made headlines today although he secured less than half the votes that Fernandez did.

Though publically supporting a candidate may make a difference in the race, Fernandez said that he is not likely to endorse either Elicker or Harp. Both, he said, asked to meet with him after the primary. While he will meet with each candidate, Fernandez said that his substantial difference in opinion on important issues makes an endorsement difficult.

Harp’s union affiliation is a barrier to Fernandez’s support; he believes the union platform has not moved the city forward in the two years they have controlled the Board of Alderman.

As for Elicker, his platform does not appeal to a wide enough range of people, Fernandez said.

“Without significant changes in those areas I don’t see endorsing a candidate,” Fernandez said.

Some speculate that his decision not to endorse a candidate may mean another run for mayor in two years.

“I don’t think it would be intelligent for Henry to endorse anyone,” Yearwood said. “I believe Henry is the right man for mayor and I believe that he will run again.”

But Fernandez denies that this is the reason he is holding out on an endorsement. He said that he has not yet decided whether his future will include another run for any political office in New Haven.

For now, he is satisfied to have created a group of people who believe in his vision for the city. He hopes that his group of supporters will start a progressive movement. For example, many the young people who worked on his campaign, he said, are now considering entering city politics.

“Even though we were disappointed with the outcome of the primary,” Matos said, “what was really uplifting and heartwarming is there are thousands of New Haven residents who have … been the beginning of a movement about making New Haven the best that it can be.”

Contact MONICA DISARE at monica.disare@yale.edu .

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 21

“WE KNOW EDIE LA MINX HAD A GUN” Yale Cabaret // 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Grit, glam, crime, drag queens. Need we say more?

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sex in Woolsey Hall

Tickle her keys, play his organ.

PAGE B10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

SAY GOODBYE TO THE SUMMER WITH SAUVIGNON BLANC // BY BRYCE WIATRAK I, like most Yale undergrads have or will, turned 21 my junior year. Newly legal, I entered the world of wine with little knowledge other than the fact that I like it and felt classy while drinking it. But this summer, I received an eye-opening education interning for Bottlenotes, the leading digital media company in the wine industry. Not that Franzia shouldn’t have its place in the world (I can list a number of enjoyable Yale evenings in which Franzia played a crucial role), but if I’ve learned anything in the past five months, it’s that good wine is truly an experience to be savored, and probably not the most efficient refreshment of choice in your Toad’s pregame. As is true with art, literature and music, understanding and appreciating wine is a lifelong journey, both rooted in a grand historic and cultural tradition and living today as a vibrant and dynamic global industry.

Let’s start out and state the obvious: Wine comes from grapes. In fact, the vast majority of wine comes from a single species of grape, called Vitis vinifera. Vitis vinifera is the only species of wine grape indigenous to Europe, and most of the recognizable grape varieties — cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, pinot noir — all stem from this one species. Scientists predict that around 5,000 truly unique wine grape varieties exist, but only 150 or so significantly contribute to wine production.

You can think of wine grape varieties like dogs. While all our canine companions may technically be the same species, Handsome Dan is going to look and act a whole lot differently than Lassie. Similarly, you’re never going to confuse a glass of pinot grigio with a glass of merlot.

While the grape variety may be the most important indication of how a wine will taste,

many other factors come into play before the fruit gets to the bottle. Wine may come from grapes, but these grapes also come from a place. Oenophiles use the French term “terroir,” which literally means “land,” but in truth encompasses a lot more than the English translation provides. The concept of terroir speaks to the collective effect of a vineyard’s soil, elevation, slope, climate, orientation to the sun, etc., on the grapes that are grown there, and the wine that is subsequently produced. A great wine typically will be a great reflection of its terroir.

Today, I am going to explore my personal favorite white grape variety, sauvignon blanc.

A deliciously refreshing warm-weather sip, sauvignon blanc will make a great toast to summer’s end tomorrow night. Virtually every major wine-producing country in the world grows sauvignon blanc, but I’m going to focus on how this one grape can yield a spectrum of flavors depending on its terroir.

The most classic expression of sauvignon blanc comes from France’s Loire Valley.

Beginning on the western coast and spanning nearly half the country’s width, the Loire Valley boasts some of the most diverse and exciting wines in the world. Sauvignon blanc is grown primarily in the Loire’s eastern edge, in appellations such as Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé. Today, I’m drinking a glass of 2012 sauvignon blanc from the smaller but mighty region Menetou-Salon, produced by Domaine de Bellevue. This Menetou-Salon is quintessential Loire Valley sauvignon blanc.

With notes of kiwi, lime and gunflint on the nose, the Menetou-Salon greets the palate with a rush of tropical flavors. The wine delivers a gentle finish with a hint of white flowers.

From the opposite end of the globe, I’m

also ta s t ing a sauvignon blanc from Uruguay, one of the world’s newest wine producers. This 2012 made by Bodegas Carrau comes from the Cerro Chapeu region, which sits 1000 feet above sea level among a series of flat hills.

If the MenetouSalon is soft and elegant, then this sauvignon blanc is crisp and zippy. With a bouquet of grapefruit, wet stone and freshly cut grass, this racy herbaceousness carries over to the mouth. Brightly acidic, this sauvignon blanc exits with a crisp, lively finish. As you can see, although they’re both sauvignon blanc, the places these grapes come from, their “terroir,” amount to excitingly different and diverse wines. I look forward to exploring all these details with you over the course of this next year.

Both the Domaine de Bellevue 2012 (Menetou-Salon, France) and the Bodegas Carrau Sauvignon Blanc “Sur Lie” 2012 (Cerro Chapeu, Uruguay) are available for purchase at The Wine Thief (181 Crown St., New Haven).

Yale Mail Fail Hey, you. Have you done anything bad, recently? Yes, girl cutting the Durfee’s line with your friends, I’m talking to you. Yes, guy who stole my bagel from the Commons toaster, you too. And you, kid who shoved me at Box the other day because you were taking a photo and I was “in your way,” this is aimed right at you, because you are just the worst.

If you’re squirming a little in your chair right now, don’t.

We’ve all been there. We’ve all cut lines and pinched printer paper and left dirty plates on the table. I understand: Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to get through the day.

That’s especially true at this time of year, when people are tired and grouchy, so feel ever freer to piss off others if it means they get the last chicken tender. And, honestly, if the rudeness index on campus inches up a little as the weather turns cold — so what?

Well, boys and girls, the Day of Judgment has finally rolled around. In England, there are all sorts of good-citizen/antihooliganism (are you leftist/ are you rightist?) laws to rap our knuckles. Yale is sneakier in its approach. Where some places have rules, regulations and repercussions, we have the USPS. I can think of no other reason why something so apocalyptically awful as the Yale Station package window could exist, if not to punish us for our wrongs. Have you been to 206 Elm recently? Over the past few weeks, whatever the time of day, a long line of people has been waiting underground, rarely speaking, never moving, with no hope of leaving. In other words, the Yale Post Office has literally become the tenth circle of Hell.

Skeptical? Pop down for a little look sometime. You see how the walls are covered with alcohol surveys and flyers for the Guild of Carillonneurs? That’s right.

This is a place marketed towards

S U N D AY SEPTEMBER 22

ELEANOR MICHOTTE CRIT FROM THE BRIT the worst of Yale. This is a place where bad Yalies go to get what we deserve.

For all you Bookstore patrons not acquainted with the horrors at your doorstep, let me paint the scene of the crime. Yesterday, I pitched up at the post office at 9:02 a.m., which felt so early that I was frankly surprised not to see the sunrise. The line was already snaking out the door. I waited dutifully to get my books, holding the one yellow slip I was praying stood for my five rushdeliveries, but it quickly became clear that seeing this through would make me late for my 10:30 a.m. class. As I left, I heard the boy behind me mutter “FUSPS.” As things stand, I honestly think it would be quicker for me to go into New York City and buy my books there.

MAYBE ALL OUR BAD KARMA FROM BEING LOWLEVEL BRATS HAS COME BACK AND BITTEN US IN THE REAR END. Now, I do know that the postal workers are working very hard to deal with this onslaught of our stuff. I don’t mean to do them down. I’m sure if I were dealing with entitled Yalies, I’d move like I was sleepwalking too. It’s just that — through no fault of their own — they’re woefully understaffed. But this is confusing to me. Surely the fact that they’re getting a lot of packages right now can’t come as a surprise?

We’re a school; they’re a school post office. We always get a lot

Contact BRYCE WIATRAK at bryce.wiatrak@yale.edu . // CREATIVE COMMONS

Those Summer Movies before Senior Year of books delivered at this time of year; their sole raison d’être is to get those books into our arms.

Supply? Demand? They’re not matching up!

Think about it this way: The Yale Station is staffed by about the same number of people as the Morse College Master’s Office.

It is currently receiving multiple books for nearly every person in this school. If the Morse College Master’s Office were fielding ten thousand parcels in one week, they would ship in more Master’s aides. Why has the USPS not done this? I don’t understand!

Why are people literally staking out their spot in the line half an hour before the place even opens in the morning? We are not Scott of the Antarctic; this is the 21st century; we should not need to camp to get mail from the outside world.

The UK Royal Mail probably still transports mail on horseback, so I’m very used to epistolary inefficiency. They’ve lost my mail, they’ve opened my mail, they’ve stolen my mail, they’ve damaged my mail, they’ve returned my mail to sender for no apparent reason. But they’ve never failed to get my mail 10 feet from delivery room to me in five days. So I feel well placed to tell you that darker forces must be at work here. Maybe all our bad karma from being low-level brats has come back and bitten us in the rear end. Maybe someone in the administration has decided to teach us a lesson for peeing in the Skull and Bones yard one too many times. Either way, if you decide to descend into the pits 206 Elm, come armed. As my chemistry teacher once ominously told me, fail to prepare, prepare to fail. So bring a sandwich, a futon, a tent — because just like the folks in the other nine circles of Hell, you won’t be emerging for a long, long time.

Contact ELEANOR MICHOTTE at eleanor.michotte@yale.edu .

All the best movies from the last few months hit the same kind of emotions. “Mud,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Star Trek Into Darkness,” “This Is the End,” “Man of Steel,” “The Heat,” “The Way Way Back,” “The Spectacular Now” — these have been truly sentimental films that have in many ways forced us to look a little inward. Especially now, at the start of what is, for many of us, the last eight months of our Yale career.

This is probably because so many of them were “coming-of-age” tales, in some manner or another. “Mud” is the one most people forget, with Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon teaming up with two kids named Ellis and Neckbone to drop a Southern slice of adolescent insecurity. “The Way Way Back” goes in a different direction, playing up the awkward kid/asshole stepfather dynamic to a tee. And “The Spectacular Now,” probably the best of the whole bunch, charts the journey of a lovable high school senior unwilling to take anything seriously.

Still though, it’s too easy talking about this particular subsection. (Becca Edelman ’14 already did a bang-up piece last week doing most of the heavy lifting.) But if you, like me, are caught now in that hazy funk just at the outset of what is your final year of college, you’re probably going to find something a little more profound in this bevy of self-proclaimed popcorn flicks.

These are films about youth and youthful passions. As everything starts to unravel around them, our two little boys from “Mud” begin to understand something truly important: the capacity to love. “The Way Way Back” and “The Spectacular Now,” both comedies, also deal with that young kind of love — the mushy puppy stuff that, whether you’re 14 or 21 or 35, is almost more real because of how much it can hurt when you’re not expecting the rug to get pulled out from under you.

Even the summer’s best movies that weren’t strictly “coming-of-age” somehow dealt with the concept. “The Great Gatsby” is a clear example: Jay’s doomed romance with Daisy is something of a cautionary tale about falling for someone whose mentality is starkly out of touch with your own. And I’d make the case that “Man of Steel” is about the same thing, just with superheroes.

Neither can we forget about the bromances.

“This Is the End” is absurd and hilarious. Seth Rogan’s friendship with Jay Baruchel goes straight to the core of youthful idiocy, in effect warming the hearts of anyone who’s ever had

ARTIST TALK: JIM GOLDBERG AND DONOVAN WYLIE

a best friend who drove them absolutely bonkers. Same with “The Heat” — Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy might as well be schoolchildren.

What’s amazing is that childish wonder even manifested itself in the mainstream summer hits, with “Star Trek Into Darkness” without a doubt the most significant. Here, the 47-year-old director J.J. Abrams poured himself into the production of something firmly rooted in his past. His next project?

“Star Wars: Episode VII.” That’s the thing about Summer ’13: It has been a reflective period for the movies. It’s like when “Toy Story 3” came out right after my high school graduation. Two or three buddies and I sat in the back of the theater with the sides of our faces cradled against our hands so no one else could see how teary-eyed we were all getting. And why were we all getting so teary-eyed? Because cinema’s Summer ’10 just clicked for us.

Now, I’m a college senior. I’ve had this column for two years, hopefully going on three.

I’ve seen a few cycles of editors. I’ve watched a ludicrous amount of movies. From May to now, we’ve been smacked over the head with a slew of great movies that all really get you thinking about the big WHAT’S NEXT. And if you’re a humanities major on financial aid, that can become a pretty terrifying question pretty quickly.

So why not turn to the movies for a little help? Mud, Ellis, Neckbone, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Captain Kirk, Superman, Sutter Keely and even James Franco — these are some of the characters to take with you as many of us move into our final Yale autumn.

And even if this summer didn’t provide the blockbuster punch that last year threw away like candy corns the day after Halloween, we still got a helluva crop — one that makes you think about how exactly you want to spend this next year. Toad’s or Science Hill? Box or East Rock? Old Campus or Wooster Square?

These are the kinds of movies that say it doesn’t matter which one you pick. Just stand by, have fun and enjoy it for what it is while you still got the chance.

Contact MICHAEL LOMAX at michael.lomax@yale.edu.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Yale University Art Gallery // 3 p.m.

Jim and Donovan, photographers and Doran Artists-in-Residence, will share their stories with us.

MICHAEL LOMAX CINEMA TO THE MAX

Sex at GPSCY

Cougars and daddies and silver foxes, oh my!

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND FICTION

AHAMKARA, part 2 // BY OLIVER PRESTON Slam door, toss keys on kitchen counter, get hot water running in sink (it’ll take at least five minutes to warm up — note: call plumber), read directions on side of box. After heaving a pile of dirty dishes out of the sink and starting the water, you bring the cardboard up to your eyes.

“Namaste,” it says. “Thank you for choosing ‘Ancient Secrets® Nasal Cleansing Pot!’ Before embracing the life-altering yogic powers of Neti, please, for your safety, consult the following directions:” A column of text runs down the box like an unfurled scroll. Beside it, a small, black and white instructional photo shows a woman properly inserting a Neti pot into her nose. As if swaying to music, her head is tilted, her hair hanging at an angle. Her nostril wraps eagerly around the spout and her mouth, agape, is smiling an inscrutable smile. Her eyes are wide — crazed, almost. They lack focus, staring past you as if into an abyss. Water pours out of her unoccupied nostril.

The directions call for a couple of teaspoons of non-coarse, water-soluble salt, to be stirred into the warm water. You set the box down and throw open the doors of your kitchen cabinet.

You push past boxes of soggy Triscuits, shove a jar of Skippy out of the way and throw an expired

can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup into the trash. You fish around for a while in the darkness, but your hand is met only with the back panel of your cabinet. Is it possible that you don’t have salt in your house? Desperate, you yank open the spice drawer, fully expecting to find it empty.

Instead, a plastic grinder, nearly spent, rolls forward. The label informs you of the cylinder’s contents: Morton brand sea salt.

There should be just enough left for two teaspoons, but — that’s right — you don’t have measuring spoons, so you set the grinder down next to the box and wait for the water to warm up. You drum your fingers on the countertop as the water swirls down the drain.

You glance at the box. As the woman stares past you, you are struck: It is yours; you own Ancient Secrets® Nasal Cleansing Pot. Take it out, hold it in your hands. You tear at the cardboard, but it’s sealed with tape, so you grab a knife and cut it open. You pull out the pot. The ceramic, a glowing white, is cold to the touch. You hold it up to the light. Look at the elegant lines, the tranquil curvature of the spout — the shape is equal parts sculptural and functional, a paragon of eastern sensibilities. You turn it over in your hands. On the bottom, three words,

printed in a simple font, declare the product’s authenticity: “Made in China.” You flick the side of the pot with your finger; a pleasant sound rings out.

As if pulled by a string, your head is lifted upwards, your gaze now directed towards the window above the sink. Outside, the weather has suddenly turned — thunderheads are collecting just beyond your backyard. The day is gray. Here, staring out of the window, clutching your pot, you imagine the clouds scattering as — look — The Great Lotus Flower crests over the horizon and pries apart the sky, its nine petals unfolding, spiraling outward in an eternal, pink dance. As it hovers, some kind of golden escalator emerges from its center, glides downward and touches down right in the middle of your yard. You hold your breath; silence for a moment. Then, as if giving birth to a whole new race of peoples, the Flower spews forth row after row of beautiful women, who descend the escalator and assemble into a circle in the grass. With a flourish, they turn in unison and look intently back to the Flower, waiting. A parade begins. An army of loinclothed men lead the way, scattering rose petals and laying down palm leaves on the steps.

White horses follow, their bridles studded with rubies and plumed with blue feathers; then pachyderms, lumbering, their backs fitted with carriage-pavilions overflowing with laughing people; now more women, gyrating, pirouetting; now Saracens, brandishing scimitars and pennants; now children; now

more children; now waves of children, all of them herded along by their beaming mothers; now nothing: the procession has stopped and the escalator is cleared and your yard is filled, brimming with costumed people, all of them staring back up at the Flower, mouths agape. Silence again. The elephants shift. The pennants flap in the breeze. Suddenly, an ivory palanquin appears at the mouth of the flower, carried by four men. It slowly descends. The sea of bodies parts, and the palanquin sidles right up to your window. A purple veil obscures the carriage’s interior, but, squinting your eyes, you manage to work out the silhouette of a woman swaying inside. A white arm slips out from behind the veil and beckons. As if prompted by the gesture, the entire Ancient Secrets® line of products appears in the sky, forming a halo around the Flower. The people rejoice. Suddenly, from all corners of the earth: music.

It fills the air. It is unlike any kind of music you’ve ever heard before. It is subtle, gentle, fluid, like a babbling brook.

The water’s still running. You test it with your finger — it’s hot.

You fill the pot to the brim, and, defying gravity, a couple spurts leap from the spout. Now, salt. With only a few turns you empty the grinder into the water. You rinse off a dirty spoon and use it to s t i r.

The salt refuses to dissolve; granules collect at the bottom of the pot and scrape against the spoon. Remember, though: You are determined. Mimicking the lady on the box, you tilt your head and lift Ancient Secrets® Nasal Cleansing Pot to your nose.

Coarse, salty, hot water — too hot — immediately fills your mouth and flows down your throat, burning your tongue, your esophagus. You splutter into the sink.

Deep breaths. You reposition your head — better be more careful this time. Better concentrate on the woman, mirror her movements exactly. Again you lift the pot to your nose, but nothing comes. Sighing, you tuck your chin in towards your chest. Still nothing. You twist your spine, hang your head at an impossible angle. Nothing, nothing. Is this what happens? After it all, this? You’ve been like this for so long, always the same, nothing changing, everything broken — this is what happens, isn’t it?

With one last bit of grunting effort, you manage to lift your right leg onto the countertop.

Leverage, you figure. With your foot up, you stretch out horizontally and press your cheek against your shoulder. You tip the pot.

Wa t e r

floods into your head as if it were a hollow vessel, a mold. Water fills your brain. Water spills out of every orifice, every pore. It sprays out of your mouth, out of your ears; it streams from your eyes and bubbles out of your nostrils. You’re coughing, now gagging into the sink.

Mucus is coming from somewhere, thwacking into the metal basin and lingering at the drain.

You try to breathe; you can’t; more mucus; now more water; now, for whatever reason, flecks of blood. You drop the thing. It goes skidding across the tiles, unscathed. You’re crying. Why are you crying?

You decide to visit your mother for the weekend. It’s been a while since you’ve made the trip out to see her, and God knows she’ll jump at the opportunity to take care of you, so you catch a train on Friday evening.

She hugs you at the door, forces you onto the couch and feeds you chicken soup for three days. At one point, as she’s drifting through the living room, she asks if you got the chance to try out a Neti pot. You answer yes.

She seems happy to hear it, but makes no comment. She goes humming out of the room.

On the train ride home, you sit facing backwards and watch as the landscape flits by in reverse, hoping to feel, if only for a moment, that you are erasing yourself.

Contact OLIVER PRESTON at oliver.preston@yale.edu .

// KEVIN KLAKOUSKI

WOADS: Women Only Appreciate Dancing Solo // BY LUCIE LEDBETTER For 13-year-olds, the stakes are always high. But never are the stakes more brutal than at a middle school dance. Fluorescent hallway lights seep into the gym ballroom, threatening to reveal the pimples on the faces of the pubescent crowd cowering in the corners. And for a particular brownhaired girl with little to no fashion or social sensibility, those dances meant hovering around the outside of the bobbing dancers, heart beating.

Being asked to dance meant something. First, “Hello, world, I’ve made it!” and then, “Hello, every other mousy girl in this room, I hit puberty earlier than you!” The girls who had

S U N D AY SEPTEMBER 22

really made it swayed back and forth with their arms around the boys’ necks, slouching just a little to make up for a disparity in height, and the brown-haired girl wished more than anything in the world that she would suddenly be graced by the need to buy a tampon, or a training bra.

But her first high school dance was different. One boy had decided that he was finally mature enough to have a dance party of his own for his 15th birthday. So to his dark-green, carpeted basement tromped a mass of tittering girls clinging to each other in half-inch heels. When the single slow song of the evening, “Stick-

YALE SWING AND BLUES DANCE PRACTICUM Slifka Center // 8 p.m.

Coolness makes a comeback.

witu,” finally came on the speakers as parents’ SUVs pulled up in the driveway, the brown-haired girl in deliberately overly tight jeans still hovered, hoping. And then, halfway through the breathy Pussycat drawl, “I don’t wanna go another day,” a miracle.

“D’youwannadance?” She did. But when he placed his palms halfway up her back, she felt the sweat of his hands seeping through her T-shirt.

For 21-year-olds at Toad’s, the stakes are significantly less life-ordeath. One brown-haired 21-year-old had been asked to dance many times.

Or, not asked to dance, as the case may be, but rather approached from

behind and thrust into proper grind position. Freshman year, she might have paid more attention to the bodies approaching from behind, but now that she was an elite senior lady, she understood what it was to practice the proper amount of Toad’s discretion.

And so it was that Woad’s became her watering hole, where she was determined to practice the art of “SWAG,” not “SWUG,” on a weekly basis.

This Woad’s was ostensibly like every other, and with their dance moves, a group of senior women preached some Miley, “to my home girls here with the big butt, shakin’ it like we’re at a strip club.” And it was

then, with these words on her lips and the sticky hands of a sophomore boy on her hips, that the 13-year-old girl from the gym had an epiphany. She peeled off the palms of the unidentified male behind her and turned to find her girl friends. Rejecting the Pussycat Dolls’ praise for monogamy, Miley’s words resonated deep in her senior soul, “Remember only God can judge us, forget the haters, cause somebody loves ya.” Hello, world, she’s made it!

Contact LUCIE LEDBETTER at lucie.ledbetter@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sex at the Temple Street garage

It’s sketchy and it’s dirty and you love it.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

DELIA EPHRON

ESSAYIST, DOG LOVER, CRONUT CYNIC

// BRIAN ULICKY

// BY HAYLEY BYRNES

Q. Your latest work, “Sister Mother Husband Dog” came out today. How did this collection differ from other pieces you’ve written?

A. I hadn’t written a collection of essays for ages, not since I wrote about being a stepmother, when I published a book called “Funny Sausages” — God, I don’t even know how many years ago.

My last book was a novel that came out last year called “The Lion Is In,” and the two books before that were novels. I had been writing for the New York Times op-ed section, but really, it was the death of my sister that started it. I would go into the office, sit down and just start writing. It was a way for us to be together — we were sisters, writers, collaborators. It was a complicated life and I wanted to understand it. And I needed a way out of this world I was in. It was like living in a world where the street signs were missing.

At one point, later, I was at a Jewish bookshop, and I was being bombarded with questions about how Jewish I was — and I was raised in a very non-religious family — and so I wrote an essay about religion that made its way into the collection.

So I had these two things, and then I realized I was on a journey. Somehow I branched into all my major food groups, writing these essays.

Q. The essay is having its “moment” — hailed, I think, as this Mason Jar of literary form: simple and versatile. What do you see as the future of the craft?

Have we arrived at what the New York Times dubbed the “essayification of everything”?

A. I don’t think of essays as trendy. I think of blogs as trendy, and I don’t think blogs are essays. I liked writing the essays because there’s a whole way to weave in and out of storytell-

ing. I’m a dramatist, I deal with drama, I write screenplays, and you can create a drama in an essay. I have no idea what the future of it is, I’m not comfortable predicting that — I mean, maybe the essay will be reduced to 140 characters and we’ll tweet them. I don’t know.

Q. Do you have a “favorite” piece of writing, or writer?

A. I’m a huge E.B. White fan. Someone recently sent me an essay on his dog Daisy’s death, and I had a dog named Daisy, so … so, well, I feel an enormous bond to E.B. White, not so much his essays, but his children’s work. “The Trumpet of the Swan,” “Charlotte’s Web” — the way he combines whimsy and emotion — there’s a whimsicality to his work that I worship.

Q. Often, writing is characterized as a solitary profession by nature. How did your relationship with your sister, Nora, influence your creative process?

A. My rule for writing is, “Only do what you can do.” It keeps you looking inside, instead of becoming obsessed with what’s popular. Since I come from a family of writers, it seemed important to figure out who I was through writing.

It was my fingerprint.

When we collaborated, it was best to find material that was personal to both of us — but not personal to one more than the other. Collaboration is a shared interest, and the two collaborators have to like the same things, they have to have a mutual investment, because it’s very important that the material be a place where you can be creative equally.

Q. You champion a style of enviable familiarity, a breezy authenticity mastered by many successful screenwriters. Have you always

approached writing with this informality?

A. I remember my mother saying that if you want to be a good writer, write a letter and take off the salutation.

I’ve always remembered that. Writing must come from a more natural place.

The important thing is that you access truth — and I take that really seriously.

You can be conversational and be emotionally thoughtful. For me, it’s always, “Can I make you laugh and can I make you cry?” I want to do both.

Q. How do you explain your approach to writing?

A. When I first started, I thought that I needed to try something new every year. I wrote these craft books in my 20s, but in my 30s I really started my career and I thought I was late and that, no matter what I did I had to learn all these new things. I had wasted my 20s, absolutely wasted them, so I thought I better figure this out.

But an idea, a plot, a story, a notion — if I’ve started to fantasize about something — I think good ideas stay with you. Is this a novel, a screenplay, an essay? You have to figure out what the idea is.

Q. Your family has a dynastic dynamism. Nora, of course, but also two screenwriter-parents and two more writer-sisters. Did your childhood feel exceptional as a result? I can only parallel the eccentricities of the Kennedys or the Foers.

A. Everyone’s childhood … Everybody has different parents. You are born in and you relate to your parents differently. I think my experience with my parents, for example, was different from my sisters’.

I think something very exceptional about my childhood was that I was

raised at a time when women didn’t work, and my mother worked. But she was an alcoholic. One version, a sane version during the day and then at night, she was … she was another person.

I had, on the one hand, blessing, and on the other hand, trouble. But it was my experience — and it was different than how my siblings might relate to our parents.

And, I think this is especially true given your audience. You start to look at your parents differently when you go to college. But I think that all of your 20s is such a major shock to the system.

Some people have it all figured out, but there’s this humongous group of us who are still floundering. And sometimes finding your way later is better.

I truly believe that. My essay “Blame it on the Movies,” from the collection, is about my 20s and I think that really explains a lot.

Q. Do you describe yourself as a “career writer”? That is, have you always wanted to be a writer?

A. I was raised in a family where it was the expectation, but I just got — well, I had the genes! And the temperament. I like to be alone. It’s been a blessing that I’ve been able to do that professionally, that I’ve been able to make a living at it.

Q. Any advice for stumbling

“

undergraduates (Yale is full of them!) with an interest in the craft?

A. That piece, “Blame it on the Movies,” is extremely useful for getting yourself into writing. The most important thing, if you want to be a writer, is that you develop work habits. It means gluing yourself to a chair several hours a day. And it’s so hard now, with all the social networking, but you’ve just got to get into the habit. You have to do it five days a week, until you start to like it.

Q. Thoughts on the merits of writing classes?

A. I never took any writing classes. I’m sure a great teacher is very helpful — and for some people, it’s the right thing.

Q. I want to end with a reference to your latest opinion piece in the New York Times on bakeries. Thoughts on the cronut — is it the latest version of the “depressingly American” idea of “having it all”? Or worth the hybrid hype?

A. I personally did not like the cronut.

It’s certainly not my version of having it all. It’s this way overdesigned pastry — it’s a pastry that’s also a punchline!

Way too sweet for me.

Contact HAYLEY BYRNES at hayley.byrnes@yale.edu .

I REMEMBER MY MOTHER SAYING THAT IF YOU WANT TO BE A GOOD WRITER, WRITE A LETTER AND TAKE OFF THE SALUTATION.

“

D

elia Ephron can claim all the major titles of the literary world — novelist, screenwriter, playwright, essayist. Her latest work,“Sister Mother Husband Dog,” came out on Tuesday, and on Wednesday Ephron stopped by the Yale University Art Gallery to talk about the book. She wrote this collection of essays in the wake of her sister Nora’s death in 2012, which ended a lifelong creative partnership between the two. Their collaboration spawned the films “You’ve Got Mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” With sporadic asides to her dog — “honey, down!” — she spoke to WEEKEND over the phone about her writerly genealogy, the tweetable future of essays and trendy New York pastries.