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The new new criticism

by Adriana Miele

MFC% OC@@ @JJL< + D8I:? )'(,

4 6 7

Four pieces photo essay by WA LIU

Taking off story by JILLIAN KRAVATZ

Y* Y*Y* Y* Y* Y*

Y*16 Y*

24 quotations from the Yale Book of Quotations whatever by AARON GERTLER

19

Lend me your ears story by ELIZABETH MILES

26

29 31

Putting a typeface to the name

What if?

feature by STEPHANIE ADDENBROOKE

essay by AARON LEWIS

Conrad whom I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t care about story by IVY NYAYIEKA

11

20

Along for the ride A history of petals

feature by MICHELLE HACKMAN

essay by MATTHEW MATTIA

Sour cream

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

story by DALIA WOLFSON

In conversation: Gregory Crewdson and Richard Deming interview by GIDEON BROSHY

Editors Jennifer Gersten Oliver Preston

24

The new new criticism cover by ADRIANA MIELE

14

Managing Editors Yuval Ben-David Lucy Fleming Photography Editors Wa Liu Alex Schmeling Magazine Design Editor Amra Saric Design Editors Olivia Hamel Carter Levin

Illustrations Editor Thao Do Associate Editors Abigail Bessler Jessica Blau Elizabeth Miles Copy Editors Eva Landsberg Adam Mahler Isabel Sperry Sarah Sutphin Editor-in-chief Isaac Stanley-Becker Publisher Abdullah Hanif Cover photograph by Alex Schmeling

Four pieces P

by Wa Liu

assionate about Chinese crafts, I went to a traditional ceramic workshop in Jingdezhen, China, to make ceramic sculptures and paint on porcelain plates. In â&#x20AC;&#x153;Four Pieces of Life,â&#x20AC;? I portray the four steps in my life, from birth and kindergarten to elementary and high school, in a photographic style. I accompany these paintings with fragmentary sentences to describe the scenes and document my momentary feelings. While painting and writing, I used art as a form of diary to recollect sentimental moments in my life that evoked fleeting emotions.

by Jillian Kravatz

A

t circus arts studios like New Haven’s Air Temple Arts or Polefly Aerial Fitness, you won’t find sword swallowing or fire breathing, carnival lights, or big yellow tents.

Juggling, trapeze, lyra, clowning, Chinese pole and hand balancing are no longer the sole domain of circus performers. The circus arts, once a spectacle, are now a popular, increasingly accessible form of fitness.

Since opening in January 2013, Air Temple Arts, New Haven’s first aerial dance and circus studio center has had to move locations twice in need of more space to hold class and training hours.

They opened with only 19 students and a few classes a week. Now, the studio trains more than 115 students in its current session with eight different instructors. Classes, held in the evenings, cover hand balancing, Chinese pole, dance techniques, contortion, kid’s circus, partnering, and cirque fitness.

At the Air Temple studio on State Street, you won’t find a tent or a box of clown wigs, but floors covered in thick mats, colorful nylon material (known as “silks” in the industry) hanging from the ceiling ropes and various trapeze apparatuses. Polefly Fitness, in

6 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

Wooster Square, also offers lyra classes, hanging rings from the ceiling of a dance studio.

Stacey Kigner, founder of Air Temple, said that the studio’s students come from all different backgrounds — they are stay-at-home moms, kids who are good at somersaults, undergrads, mid-life bankers, psychologists.

All of them use circus as a different sort of outlet: “Some want to do a pullup. Some want to learn the art and get an act together.” Stacey says. Air Temple aims to introduce the idea of using physicality to interact creatively with the world in each of their classes.

People who train to perform benefit from growing popularity of circus as well: “The circus-fitness movement gives people a greater appreciation of what we do,” said Sam Gurwitt ’18.

On a chilly Thursday evening in February, I go to Polefly Fitness to try a class on the lyra — a hoop, suspended from the ceiling, that is used for acrobatics. The class was small with only two other students. No one looked particularly comfortable — we were all new to the practice, but I was the only one who had never tried circus before.

The lyra itself isn’t anything spectacular — a metal circle wrapped in purple

athletic tape dangling a few feet off the ground. I clasp my hands around its rim. Thumbs on one side, fingers on the other, wrapped tightly. Keep your grip firm and nothing bad can happen.

I press my feet into the mat, reminding myself that it’s not going anywhere.

Lifting my feet up towards the ring, my head drops towards the ground as I lock my elbows in place. I’m swinging upside down now, pressing my feet into the ring — thumbs on one side, fingers on the other.

Thirty seconds later, my palms ache.

Without my feet on the ground, the smallest movement swings the ring.

Shifting around and trying to hoist myself up, my only goal is not to fall.

Eventually I extend my legs to one side and balance with one hand. By the end of the class, I can barely hang upside down for thirty seconds before folding under the pain of my own body weight.

I leave the studio realizing just how much I can’t do. Circus is an extreme understanding of your body and its limitations. It causes you to know and remember the boundaries of your balance, strength, flexibility, and endurance, and then it asks you to push those boundaries. It pretends they don’t exist.

“Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of language and making it hard and inelastic.

This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.”

–Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic’s Word Book

“I never said most of the things I said.”

–Yogi Berra

24

“For also knowledge itself is power.”

–Francis Bacon, Of Heresies

Q “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

–Francis Bacon, Of Studies

“I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives.”

–Abigail Adams, in a letter to John Adams

uotations

“There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision… and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory… the first kind of intelligence and artistic personal-­ ity belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.”

—Isaiah Berlin “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

–Ronald Reagan

about the Yale Book of

uotations

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

–Douglas Adams

by Aaron Gertler

“My opinion is that the Northern States will manage somehow to muddle through.”

–John Bright, English politician, on the American Civil War

“Mother told me a couple of years ago, ‘Sweetheart, settle down and marry a rich man.’ I said, ‘Mom, I am a rich man.’”

–Cher, to a London newspaper

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Francis Bacon, Of Studies â&#x20AC;&#x153;Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ambrose Bierce, The Cynicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Word Book

T

he Yale Book of Quotations (YBQ) is a magnificent beast of a tome, a rare glittering creature found only in libraries and the homes of the most devoted littĂŠrateurs. Most books have one or two quotable lines.

The YBQ has over twelve thousand.

And though it is 1100 pages long, it remains, at heart, the project of a single man: Fred Shapiro, a librarian in the Yale Law School.

Shapiro keeps an untidy office, full of old law books and paper towers on the verge of tumbling. One could also see the YBQ as an untidy work: it includes five versions of the Golden Rule, dozens of pop songs from the 1930s, and 144 by Ambrose Bierce.

It was compiled with the help of hundreds of scholars and volunteers â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a collection of word nerds with blogs and mailing lists and access to cavernous archives of printed material.

It speaks with no clear voice, and has no underlying theme.

But when a quotation dictionary has a good editor â&#x20AC;&#x201D; someone with the judgment to separate the great quotes from the merely adequate â&#x20AC;&#x201D; it becomes one of the richest, most meaningful things a person can read.

Fred Shapiro is a very good editor, and he works with the editors at Yale University Press to cut through redundancy, platitudes, and clever, empty words. In the tradition of the Oxford English Dictionary, he researches every single quote until heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s as sure as a person can be of the original source. He makes new discoveries every month about where 8 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

our words really come from.

Shapiroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s research and personality go hand-in-hand. Like any good quotation, Shapiro doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t waste words; his speech is slow and careful. So are his movements. When he leafs through the YBQ to find quotes, he does so with the gentle precision of someone whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s done so a thousand times before.

He doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t slip quotations into his speech, but he could easily pick up the habit; he has the encyclopedic memory of a person who writes encyclopedias.

I brought dozens of quotations into our first conversation, and whenever I read one, he knew within a second whether heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d put it into the book.

For Shapiro, the YBQ is a labor of love; heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been working on it for longer than the average marriage. Some could argue that â&#x20AC;&#x153;the covers of his book are too far apartâ&#x20AC;? (Ambrose Bierce again), but Shapiro tells me, â&#x20AC;&#x153;If I had a million dollars, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d pay my publishers to make the book bigger!â&#x20AC;? Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m with him on that. After all, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re coming up with new quotes all the time. And Shapiro is struggling with the sequel as we speak.

The Trouble With Quotations

Q

uotations are the language of every age. They let us hear the voices of generations past, with minimum loss of fidelity. They fill your Tumblr and your grandmaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s journal from when she was a teenager.

Without them, every single author would be weaker, deprived not only of clever epigrams but of a thousand simple, elegant phrases.

As Philip Stanhope once said: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Anything worth doing at all is worth doing well.â&#x20AC;? Quotations are important enough that we ought to get them right. And yetâ&#x20AC;Ś we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t. We change around the words, making them ugly as we go. We take the most beautiful sentences in the English language and apply them willy-nilly to our own causes, heedless of the authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intent.

And sometimes, we replace the authors with our personal heroes.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I never said most of the things I said.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Yogi Berra Shapiroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s list of the people most often quoted saying things they never really said: R5 & ,.5 #(-. #( R5 , " '5 #( )&( R5 #(-.)(5 "/, "#&& R5 ),! 5 ,( , 5 " 1 R5 - ,5 #& And, most of all, Mark Twain: â&#x20AC;&#x153;These words just get stuck to his mouth [â&#x20AC;Ś] people want quotations to come from great geniuses, but most come from very ordinary people,â&#x20AC;?

Shapiro says.

Worse yet are the quotes that come from nobody. The Washington Post, in 1925, claimed that â&#x20AC;&#x153;one picture is worth ten thousand wordsâ&#x20AC;?, according .)5 ^ (5 )& 5 "#( - 5 *,)0 , _85 " *#,)5 searched high and low for the proverb, but none was ever found. Two years after the Post article, advertiser Frederick Barnard took off the â&#x20AC;&#x153;tenâ&#x20AC;? and gave us the quote we know today.

And so a seven-word quotation gets a third of a page of explanatory text, and Shapiro gets another gray hair.

(His hair is all gray by now â&#x20AC;&#x201C;â&#x20AC;&#x201C; there are a lot of quotes in this book.)

Even worse are the quotations we forget about. One of Shapiroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s motives in creating the YBQ was to compensate for certain failures in other quotation books. When he began, the most recent edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations only contained seven of the World Almanacâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;Top Ten Quotes ) 5 ." 5 hf."5 (./,38_5 ')(!5 .")- 5 they missed: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ronald Reagan If Oxford itself couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t keep up with the pace of the late 20th century, who else would stand a chance in our ever-busier modern world?

Fred Shapiro knew the task was enormous, but he also knew that something had to change. And so, with support from the Mellon Foundation and a pile of quotation dictionaries from Sterling Memorial Library, he began to work.

The Story of Shapiro â&#x20AC;&#x153;There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central visionâ&#x20AC;Ś and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictoryâ&#x20AC;Ś the first kind of intelligence and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Isaiah Berlin

T

he YBQ is a book for foxes.

Yes, the index â&#x20AC;&#x201D; which is over 200 pages long â&#x20AC;&#x201D; may appeal to hedgehogs, who can search for quotes on â&#x20AC;&#x153;warâ&#x20AC;? and â&#x20AC;&#x153;justiceâ&#x20AC;? and â&#x20AC;&#x153;cultureâ&#x20AC;? and â&#x20AC;&#x153;cruelty.â&#x20AC;? (The last brings up Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, the Marquis du Sade, and the U.S. Constitution.)

But the experience of reading the whole book is wild and unpredictable â&#x20AC;&#x201D; not to mention â&#x20AC;&#x153;chock-full of curiosities, melodrama, spectacle, instruction, and entertainmentâ&#x20AC;? ( John Barth, The Floating Opera).

Where else could you find Robert Burns1 and George Burns2 on the same page?

Shapiro is a fox himself: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m a dilettante, and this kind of book is compelling to me, because quotations let us view the full sweep of literature and politics and history.â&#x20AC;?

He began collecting famous words at age ten, when his father brought home a copy of Bartlettâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Familiar Quotations, still the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most popular series of quotation dictionaries. He later attended MIT, where he edited a column of quotations in a campus newspaper, collecting his favorites in a large binder.

When a colleague at the paper stole his binder, he lost a lot of words â&#x20AC;&#x201D; but the very best stayed inside his head, waiting to be used somewhere else.

When Oxford called, asking if he wanted to write them a legal reference book, Shapiro began work on The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations.

Writing in 1993, he had access to the earliest online databases and was able to create a work far more thorough than its predecessors.

This led him, naturally, to a new kind of general quotation book. Shapiro aimed to set the YBQ apart from Bartlettâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and Oxford with a focus on the vernacular, the modern, and the American: â&#x20AC;&#x153;My goal was to create a more comprehensive book of quotations than anything else available.â&#x20AC;?

And he did, though it may have taken longer than expected: â&#x20AC;&#x153;I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Douglas Adams Adams, author of A Hitchhikerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Guide to the Galaxy, isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t usually in this kind of book. But neither is Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew, who makes it in for the lyric â&#x20AC;&#x153;me so horny.â&#x20AC;? Or Jim Morrison, the drugged-out singer for The Doors, who once spent the night in a New Haven jail cell for insulting a police officer. Or the men of Monty Python â&#x20AC;&#x201D; who get not one, but thirteen quotations (the same number as Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige). And so on.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;This will be the place for a Village.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201C;John Batman, upon discovering the land which would later house the city of Melbourne, Australia ...and including perspectives that youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve likely never thought about. â&#x20AC;&#x153;My opinion is that the Northern States will manage somehow to muddle through.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201C;John Bright, English politician, on the American Civil War In addition to all this, the YBQ gives a history of feminism in a few hundred quotes, stretching back for centuries: â&#x20AC;&#x153;I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Abigail Adams, in a letter to John Adams â&#x20AC;&#x153;Mother told me a couple of years ago, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Sweetheart, settle down and marry a rich man.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; I said, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Mom, I am a rich man.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Cher, to a London newspaper The Book of Everything The book also offers a splendid satirical view of humanity. Even outside â&#x20AC;&#x153;For also knowledge itself is power.â&#x20AC;? of Dorothy Parker and Groucho Marx, â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Francis Bacon, Of Heresies we are entertained by the former mayor If I had to give my children a single of Washington D.C.: book to read that would provide as close â&#x20AC;&#x153;Other than the killings, we have one of to a complete education as possible, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d the lowest crime rates in the country.â&#x20AC;? choose the YBQ. It is, all at once: â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Marion Barry R5 5 )&& .#)(5 ) 5 -' &&5 Not to mention George H.W. Bush: biographies, identifying some of historyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;For seven and a half years I have greatest thinkers and explaining both worked alongside [Ronald Reagan] and their personal views and their place in I am proud to be his partner. We have the world had triumphs, we have made mistakes, R5 5 ()(]-5 1),."5 ) 5 !, .5 and we have had sex.â&#x20AC;? literature, packing in the best of the (He meant to say â&#x20AC;&#x153;setbacksâ&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Bible, Shakespeare, and a thousand context Shapiro gleefully provides.) novelists and poets Finally, the YBQ is a toolbox full of R5 5 , *)-#.),35 ) 5 ." 5 1), -5 ] 5 textual tricks to get you through the like my child to keep in their head â&#x20AC;&#x201D; day. When I turned in the first draft of mantras for patience and calm, eloquent this piece, late, to my managing editor, I remarks for use in sophisticated included Hofstadterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Law: company, and jokes that shake the whole â&#x20AC;&#x153;It always takes longer than you expect, room. even when you take into account Not to mention something like an Hofstadterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Law.â&#x20AC;? oral history of history itself, told both by â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Douglas Hofstadter, GĂśdel, Escher, its celebrities and by the people working Bach behind the scenesâ&#x20AC;Ś As far as I can tell, he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get mad! yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 9

“That Which Can Be Changed”

M

y interview with Shapiro also cued me into one of the 20th century’s most powerful thought-nuggets: Serenity Prayer, second only to the Lord’s Prayer in popularity.

“O God and Heavenly Father. Grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed; the courage to change that which can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.”

Before Shapiro began his research, the Serenity Prayer was thought to be the invention of Reinhold Niebuhr, “Barack Obama’s favorite theologian,” who first set it down in 1937.

But when Shapiro dug deeper, he found that something was amiss. Seven different newspapers quoted the prayer up to a year before its canonical date of invention. This cast serious doubt on Niebuhr’s invention — a big enough event in verbal history that the New York Times ran a front-page story on Shapiro’s research. Then Niebuhr’s daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, fired back, claiming that Shapiro didn’t understand the world of sermons and that “only my father could have written this prayer.”

Another front-page story in the New York Times covered the controversy.

This incident prompted more frantic research on Shapiro’s part, until, to his chagrin, his team (mostly volunteer quotation-lovers from around the country) found a journal from one of Niebuhr’s acolytes, with a 1932 entry acknowledging the prayer. It now appears in the YBQ as the definitive creation of Elisabeth Sifton’s father.

(Shapiro called the New York Times again, asking if they’d print a third story, but they told him enough was enough.) “…the courage to change that which can be changed.”

What can you change, in a book of quotes?

You can’t force the famous figures of your day to be articulate or funny.

(Sometimes — as Shapiro mourns — you lose Ronald Reagan and get

10 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

Herman Cain in return.) You also can’t change the fact that it’s hard to come across new ideas: “There is no new thing under the sun.”

– Ecclesiastes 1:9 “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

– Yogi Berra But you can change the quotes you select, and you can change your book’s emphasis on diversity and inclusion. For the first edition of the YBQ, Shapiro searched through books of quotations by women and African-Americans to counter the British-white-man bias of Bartlett’s. He’s ramping up that search for the next edition, and he also plans to communicate with scholars of Eastern literature to bring in more quotes from that half of the world.

But even with a new research team and a new collection of advanced quotation-finding technology, writing the sequel is not going to be easy. Now that the book’s index is finished, every new entry leads to dozens of small adjustments.

“I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.”

–Poul Anderson, quoted in New Scientist, 25 Sept. 1969 More troubling still, Shapiro isn’t in a good position to find the best quotes of the modern world — the YOLOs, the Imma-let-you-finishes, and the manyour-man-could-smell-likes.

I suggested these three, but Shapiro will need hundreds more if he wants to find quotes worthy of the book. After all, we live in what the well-known Chinese curse3 would call “interesting times.”

You, reader, are in a position to help.

If you have any favorite quotations spoken in the last ten years — political, musical, advertorial, whatever — send them to: aaronlgertler@gmail.com And I will format them and give them to Fred. Do this, and there is an excellent chance your words (well, your choice of someone else’s words) will end up in a book that sells tens of thousands of copies.

ENTONCES Corey Myers

On the Metro after beers and mezcal at Miralto overlooking all of D. F. Robin leans in with a warning. Once, on this line, Pantitlán towards Tacubaya, a man boards the train high probably on paint-thinner carrying a bag of broken glass into which he mashes his scarred fist and forearm while the whole car watches or doesn’t. The girl sitting across from him, five or six, asks What is he doing and her mother answers Thinking things that are not to be thought.

Do be warned, though: Fred has little patience for modern quotations, which tend towards “the sardonic and the stupid.” Even the New York Times, he tells me, has trouble finding good quotes from recent movies. What’s more, President Obama has delivered fewer good lines in the course of his presidency than JFK did in his first inaugural address. I try to fight back — why would presidential speechwriters or screenwriters be getting stupider over time? — but of course, he challenges me to name some good lines from a recent Hollywood film and I can’t remember anything.

Let’s prove him wrong together, readers. (He’d be very grateful if we did.)

I could quote this book for another thousand pages, but as a great man once said: “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

–Yogi Berra (It’s over.)

“The main thing about acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

1

“Man’s inhumanity to man // makes countless thousands mourn!”

2

”No authentic Chinese saying to this effect has ever been found.”

–Fred Shapiro, The Yale Book of Quotations 3

WHAT IF?

Making the choice to have a baby at Yale

by Stephanie Addenbrooke photography by Alex Schmeling and Brianna Loo

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

I

magine if I became pregnant tomorrow and wanted to keep the child. Besides having to explain myself to my parents, what would my next step be? Tell my Dean?

The chances of getting pregnant at Yale aren’t as low as one might hope. According to a recent Yale Daily News survey, 34 percent of sexually active female student respondents said they had experienced a pregnancy scare at some point in their lives.

So what would one do, when faced with the possibility of pregnancy? One would have to make a choice.

In that same survey, 15 percent of respondents said they had used Plan B at least once over the course of their four years at Yale. Only one respondent said she had terminated a pregnancy. Director of Yale Health Paul Genecin said terminations of pregnancies on campus are not common — only a few abortions are requested on campus a year. He attributed this decline to increased availability of free contraception.

Covered by the Yale Health Basics plan Abortion: covered Plan B: not covered Oral contraception: covered Prenatal care/obstetrics: not covered Infertility services: covered at 100% up to a lifetime maximum of $5000 per member Gynecology exams: covered

12 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

Genecin said determining whether a mother desires the pregnancy is the first priority. “We believe students have the right to choose,” he said.

The word “choice” implies more than one option, but the term “pro-choice” defines a movement that primarily supports the right to have an abortion. The pro-choice movement saw judicial endorsement of its central aim in Roe v. Wade, which made abortion an option for women across the country. Legalizing abortion is not an issue much contested at Yale, where there are annual ceremonies celebrating Roe v. Wade. But has campus sympathy for the prochoice movement eliminated the “choice” from discussions of what to do altogether?

I’ve never seen students pushing strollers into the library or leaving class early to make it to daycare.

Parenthood isn’t a visible feature of Yale’s landscape or a talking point on the minds of its students.

Pro-life activists on campus believe this is because students consider abortion the only answer to an unwanted pregnancy. Molly Michaels ’15, member of Choose Life At Yale (CLAY ), said that while the university does not push the option of abortion, an unshakeable campus mentality holds that the role of mother is mutually exclusive with the identity of an Ivy League student.

The perception of exclusivity between “Yale student” and “mother” is so deep-seated that for some it extends beyond four years.

In an anonymous post on Facebook discussion forum Yale PostSecret, one Yale student admitted that she felt like Yale culture criticized female students who wanted to get married and have children.

“It’s a stigma to want to be anything but an independent woman who don’t need no man for the rest of [her] life,” the post read.

Ultimately, I doubt the author of the anonymous post is the only one who fears that Yale’s proudly progressive campus would bristle at the idea of someone choosing motherhood while still a student.

Margaret Gleberman ’17, who identifies as prochoice, said that if she were to get pregnant during her

Yale career, she would seriously consider terminating the pregnancy. With education and an impending career to consider, she wouldn’t be ready for a child, she said. She doesn’t think many other Yale students would be, either.

Is it purely impractical to have a baby on campus? Michaels said she thinks having a child at Yale is a possibility.

With the right support systems in place, she believes, pregnant women could easily apply their “right to life” views.

She said the current stigma surrounding pregnancy on campus has prevented the emergence of a culture that is conducive to exercising this right. Instead, students perceive abortion to be the only option.

Courtney McEachon ‘15 is a biomedical engineer from East Amherst, NY. In high school, she began exploring what it meant to be pro-life after learning about conception and abortion in a science class. She wondered: with so many differing opinions on what stage of fetal development constitutes life, how should people begin to make that decision for themselves? Outside the classroom, she pursued pro-life discussion, and became president of CLAY as a sophomore.

Last year, the group was invited to a reading of a play for one student’s senior project. When she arrived at the theater, an usher handed her a pamphlet explaining the restrictions on abortion and why these restrictions should be lifted. There was a pro-life woman on stage, McEachon said, whose views were torn apart, criticized, and mocked. The scene upset her, but her overwhelming feeling was concern. Art that makes a statement is not difficult to find at Yale.

But finding art that discusses a less popular campus view? McEachon said it’s difficult.

“I wasn’t sure if this was an isolated experience or part of a bigger trend,” she said, explaining that she could not recall many instances of art or performance that even discussed the benefits of pro-life. But she could easily list examples of shows in which abortion was easily discussed, a trend she feels is yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

representative of an imbalance within the arts as a venue for conversation.

The play McEachon saw wasn’t the only one in recent memory to examine the issue of abortion onstage. In the spring of 2014, the Yale Dramat’s production of Dry Land, written by Ruby Spiegel ‘15, portrayed a high school girl, who, upon finding herself pregnant, immediately attempts to end the pregnancy with the aid of a classmate and friend — through the desperate means available to them.

The play was staged in New York City in September 2014 by Colt Coeur productions, a Brooklyn based theater company, and was reviewed positively

by Ben Brantley of the New York Times, who emphasized Spiegel’s maturity as a playwright.

Yale was placed under a far less positive media microscope when Aliza

Shvarts ‘08 proposed a controversial art piece for her senior project. On April 17, 2008, the Yale Daily News reported that Shvarts had artificially inseminated herself numerous times over the course of nine months and then induced miscarriages with abortifacient drugs.

These miscarriages were video taped and blood samples from the process were preserved, the News reported.

“I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity,” Shvarts told the News.

Several hours after the story was published, a statement from Yale spokesperson Helaine Klasky defined the miscarriages as a piece of “creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.” There was no human blood involved, the statement

BROKEN SKYLINE Jordana Cepelewicz 1.

I have been made a doll— Needle sinks into gum, and cheek and chin turn to rubber.

I cannot stop touching my face. I want to know how it feels— all of it, my skin under your touch, my touch on your skin.

For a moment, can I be both of us? But the caress is lost on a subject too solid to be loved.

2.

In my palm my tooth feels smooth and hard, like the inside of a geode. There is a hole in the horizon, a window looking into a dark wet place. The rest of me is full of stuffing, a cloud with a human skin.

3.

About spaces— It’s not that I feel something missing. Instead something does not belong, like a word misplaced, hidden, the sock that goes missing when you’re down to your last pair.

14 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

confirmed.

Surprisingly, despite the controversial content, many pro-life students cite the University’s closure of the project as a negative consequence of a wider administrative reluctance to discuss abortion.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re pro-life or pro-choice, people just don’t want to talk about abortion,” McEachon said. For her, the willingness of writers, directors and artists to do so does not stem from administrative policies, or from wider campus culture.

B

ut, students who have approached Yale Health with questions were met with the same uncertainty. Laura (whose real name I’ve withheld at her request) recently acquired Plan B from Yale Health. After having unprotected sex in a different city, Laura returned to New Haven assuming that the emergency contraception would be subsidized by her Yale Basics health plan. Yale Health offers students and Yale affiliates two kinds of coverage: the Yale Basics health plan and the Hospitalization/Specialty plan. The basic plan that Laura had is given only to students who also have outside insurance. However, despite the difference in coverage options, Laura assumed that Plan B would be free, given that most contraception is covered by Yale Basics.

Unable to confirm this online, Laura called Yale Health directly. She was referred to three different departments, including OB/GYN and the pharmacy, none of which could tell her whether the drug was covered by her health plan.

After being referred a final time, she was told Plan B was not covered and she would have to pay retail price. At Yale Health, no student — whether on the basic plan or the complete one — can access the drug at a reduced price.

“I might as well have gone to Walgreens,” she said.

But Laura was most confused by a policy she described as “ludicrous.”

While Plan B costs $40, abortion,

which, according to the Planned Parenthood website, can cost up to $800, is completely covered under both Yale Basics and the full health plan.

More robust coverage for contraception would provide students with more options when they are facing medical scares, she said.

F

or some college students, having children in college is an option.

In 2011, The Dartmouth reported that five students had seen their pregnancies to term the previous year.

Each of the students continued living on campus and graduated shortly after.

When asked if there was a policy that would cater to the living situation of a student mother, members of Yale administration did not return a request for comment. The current housing policy does not allow a freshman or sophomore to live off campus unless the student is married or over the age of 21.

While Dartmouth housing policy does not specifically address what would happen in the incident of a pregnancy, it does not require students living with a “dependent” to live on campus – even as early as freshman year.

Amidst campus-wide discussion about withdrawal regulations and financial aid, Genecin said the decision to stay in school depends on the personal circumstances of the student.

“Naturally a student with good social supports will have an easier time balancing the needs of her studies,” he said. An undergraduate student with a spouse or partner, or the means to pay for daycare, could be better equipped to carry her pregnancy to term. Genecin added that there is no standard recommendation given to students, but Michaels wonders if a student who became pregnant would ever be advised to stay in school.

Michaels said she does not think that the physical structures on campus can currently accommodate for a student mother. As she moves forward with the work of CLAY, she said she hopes to see baby-changing facilities in

Fifteen percent of sexually active female students in the News’ survey have used Plan B at least once, averaging 2.4 uses per person. The highest usage for one person was 11 times.

bathrooms, and options for mothers to live in special housing and have options for daycare.

For me, the idea of balancing the hormonal and physical changes of pregnancy alongside taking midterms and operating on an already nocturnal body clock is terrifying. And what about what happens when the baby is born?

According to a 2013 report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, about four million or 25 percent of college students in the United States had dependent children, according to institute researchers’ analysis of the 2008 National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey. But being a parent, the report continues, “substantially increases” the chance of leaving college without a degree. Fifty-three percent of parents, compared with 31 percent of

nonparents, with no degree after six years.

left

T

he concept of a pregnant student on campus may remain an imaginary situation for a long time to come — it can be reduced to a point of political contention, or a hypothetical question for medical policy setters. But what if someone chooses to carry a pregnancy to term?.

We might not all be required to make the choice for ourselves, but the idea of “choice” — whether a cultural, medical or administrative one — is something students should be able to discuss.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

Y* Y* Y* Y* Y* Y* Y* PUTTING A Y* Y* TYPEFACE Y* Y* Y* TO THEY* Y* Y* Y*NAMEY* Y

Y* Y* Y* Y* Y* Y*

by Aaron Lewis typeface by Matthew Carter

16 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

*

I

n the late 90s, Yale’s visual identity had a case of multiple personality disorder. Yale’s branding—seen on everything from its admissions brochures to its signs to its official stationery—was extremely disjointed.

There was, and still is, only one person in charge of crafting and maintaining Yale’s brand: the University Printer. At the time, this person was Greer Allen, a designer who firmly believed that each department deserved a brand unto its own—unique colors, typefaces, icons, and all. Allen thought the variety of visual marks reflected the intellectual diversity of the university.

“This is a university,” he would say.

“We don’t have a corporate identity.”

Then, in 1998, John Gambell became the new University Printer. With the help of his small team, Gambell kick started what was perhaps the university’s most ambitious branding project in its three hundred year history.

Gambell didn’t agree with Allen’s approach to branding, and neither did Gambell’s supervisor Linda Lorimer, then-Vice President for Global and Strategic Initiatives at Yale. “When you look at all the work of Yale,” Lorimer told him at the time, “You’d have no sense of it coming from the same place.

I want Yale’s work to have a family resemblance.”

The campus, as Gambell described it, was “unintelligible graphically to its public.” So, in April 2000, the university published a report called A Framework for Campus Planning, laying out a plan to address the problem of Yale’s disorienting signage. But, according to Gambell, the project was about more than just the signs themselves. It forced Yale to coalesce around a single visual identity for the very first time. The signage initiative, Gambell said, “got at the heart of the university community’s sense of itself.”

Many people were resistant to the plan at first. It asked that departments hand over ownership of the presentation of the “Yale look” to the University.

Departments often didn’t understand

why they needed to give up control of their graphic identity. But Gambell pushed forward, determined to make the campus more intelligible.

The initial designs for Yale signage were relatively complex and ornate—a far cry from the minimalism that characterizes them today. About the new signs, Gambell said “It struck me that any particularity about them should come from the material and the letterforms themselves. It seemed to me the perfect moment to create a typeface that was unique to the university.”

Gambell reached out to Matthew Carter, a typographer famous for designing typefaces like Georgia, Verdana, and Tahoma. Now 77, Carter crafts type with the precision of an industrial designer and the artfulness of a sculptor. He is obsessed with letterforms and takes care to perfect every last curve, serif, and extender.

“I think it was the first typeface I’d designed that had this sort of dual identity,” Carter said of the Yale font.

“It needed to be used for ordinary printing and for signs.”

Creating a typeface that works well on street signs posed a number of interesting problems. “Unlike a book or a computer screen, you never see a sign for the first time in ideal conditions.

You’re at a distance, or at an angle, or driving 70 miles-per-hour around a corner at night.” he said. “The challenge

was figuring out how to make the type both elegant and legible under a wide variety of conditions.

Carter was inspired by a latefifteenth-century Venetian typeface that first appeared in De Aetna by Aldus Manutius—a book published in 1495 that is part of the rare book collection at Beinecke Library. He chose De Aetna as his inspiration because he felt it was the first book in history where the upper and lowercase letters looked as though they were from the same typeface. Every type designer struggles with making upper- and lowercase letters work well together, since capitals came from the classical Roman alphabet while lowercase letters did not emerge until much later.

Carter and Gambell then collaborated for years to perfect the Yale typeface, the first version of which was released in 2004. The two worked at a level of detail that is perhaps unimaginable to the average reader.

An early draft of the typeface hangs on the wall at the office of the University Printer. “Matthew [Carter] felt that the bottoms of the letters needed a little more footing,” Gambell said, pointing to the part of a T where the stem meets the base. “They needed a little more weight—a sense of horizontality. There was a feeling for me in some of the settings that the e was trying to do a forward roll. And so, he moved it back

Now 77, Carter crafts type with the precision of an industrial designer and the artfulness of a sculptor. yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

a little bit.” Every letter, Carter said, was equally important and equally difficult to create. What made the process even more challenging was that the type changed shape ever so slightly when it was fired onto the porcelain and enamel of the signs.

“Once they started to implement [the Yale typeface] around the campus,” Carter said, “it was a pleasant and funny experience for me. Yale had never had campus signs, and suddenly they were everywhere. They were on trash barrels, on the fire department, on the sides of buses. That was a little unexpected.” He simply hadn’t thought of his typeface being applied in such a wide variety of contexts. “I’d walk on the street and say, ‘Oh my God—there it is again!’”

Gambell believes the signs have had a profound effect on the collective psyche of the university. Because of the signs, “the buildings became fungible,” he said. “And the programs became, maybe paradoxically, even more important as entities that existed quite independent of their physical locations.”

Even as Yale’s signage system became more consistent, its overall brand remained largely incoherent.

Many departments still had their own visual marks, and the university wasn’t yet in the mood to enforce strict branding guidelines. Graphic design simply wasn’t something that most administrators or department heads thought much about. So Gambell organized what he called a “stealth campaign” to push people to care more for the Yale brand and to create a family resemblance across the university’s many entities.

One of Gambell’s first attempts at creating the university’s logo was the Yale shield, a mark that his office developed after a conversation with Linda Lorimer. President Levin used this logo to represent the college from 2005 to 2006, but he became convinced that his audience did not understand what the shield was supposed 18 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

to represent. Levin encouraged Gambell to move away from imagery and towards a simple typographic approach. “It startled me, to be frank,” Gambell said. “We’d already put a lot of effort into promoting [the shield.]”

Despite his initial surprise, Gambell now sees Levin’s request as a positive turning point in the development of Yale’s graphic identity. At last, top administrators were taking a direct interest in branding. “They began to understand that it would be to their advantage to create a clear, consistent, memorable, distinct brand,” he said.

After talking with Levin, Gambell partnered with Michael Beirut of Pentagram, a storied design agency that has designed logos for the likes of Citibank, United Airlines, Tiffany & Co, and Nike. “We tried it in a number of different typefaces and configurations. In a circle. Just a Y. All kinds of different things.” Eventually, the two men settled on a decidedly simple solution: the Yale name. The Yale typeface. Four letters. Compact.

Memorable. Well known around the world. “That’s what we ought to do,” said Beirut.

Despite his excitement at the new development, Gambell couldn’t singlehandedly force departments to use Yale’s new logo on their materials.

“I had to persuade people,” he said.

He’s spent the better part of the last few years convincing departments and administrators to use Yale blue (a specific color trademarked by the university) and the Yale logo, which was officially released in 2007. He also holds workshops in his office for faculty to teach them about the principles of good graphic design.

“It’s one of the least prescriptive of all branding programs I’ve ever run into,” he said. “It only asks one thing absolutely: and that is put the Yale logo somewhere in some form. That’s the only thing we ask everybody to do.” The gesture is a small one, but Gambell says it goes a long way towards unifying the work of Yale.

Not everyone has embraced the new logo with open arms. Many of the STEM areas of the university, in particular, feel that the Yale typeface is too evocative of literature and history. Too old-school. “I think John [Gambell] would be concerned not so much that a department would decline to use the typeface, but that they would come up with a really bad design for their identity,” said Matthew Carter, laughing. “How you deal with that administratively—well, I’m glad I don’t have to do that.”

Part of Gambell’s job, however, is doing exactly the sort of administrative work that Carter seemed to dislike.

The University Printer is trying to figure out whether it will introduce another typeface—another iteration of the Yale identity. Gambell didn’t seem very excited about the prospect.

“I personally think that the logo as it stands is great,” he said. But his office is open to new ideas. They are currently playing with the idea of reintroducing shields or creating a more modern, sans-serif version of the Yale typeface for the STEM departments.

Gambell pointed to the Yale University Art Gallery’s graphic design as an example of beautiful branding that doesn’t quite fit with the current guidelines. “There has to be a way in which Yale’s identity and branding are articulated such that the YUAG is encouraged rather than discouraged,” he said, then adding, “I cannot get them, for the life of me, just to put a plain old Yale logo on their stuff, which would totally solve the problem as far as I’m concerned.”

Yale is a world-renowned institution, but its logo has a sole keeper. So Gambell sees his job as bigger than just administrative work.

“We’re institutional therapists,” said Gambell. “We provide a mirror to the university’s communications. It’s nice when we can change their ideas not just for the sake of changing them, but when we can make them serve their purposes better.”

Lend me your ears W

hen they found the tapes, Max Weinreich ’16 and his father were exploring slot canyons in southern Utah, “Bilbo Baggins style,” as Max describes it. The nearest outpost of civilization was Boulder, Utah, population 226, and the last town in the US to receive its mail by horse and buggy. Shadowed by rock walls ten times the height of a man, they spotted a watertight, leathery black bag. Inside were seven cassette tapes.

On the tapes, which Max brought home and played on an old Walkman, four people narrate the story of the “Blackstone Expedition.” The story goes: on March 20, 1986, a team of canyoneers set out in search of a naturalist who had gone missing in 1981 in Kane County, Utah — a place where, according to the tapes, “no sane person would ever hope to end up.”

Weinreich, who has been involved with WYBC Yale Radio since his freshman year, was fascinated with the tapes, which he believes to be real audio journals. He decided to circulate the story beyond Utah’s Dry Fork Coyote Gulch, via WYBC. In spring of 2014, he and cohost Patrick Reed ’16 began Episode 1 of Primary Source with a disclaimer: “This is not going to be your standard music show fare.”

After listening to five hours of badly damaged audio, putting the tapes in order, editing them into a narrative, and finally broadcasting online, he also uploaded the episodes as podcasts on his personal website. “This was before the feeding frenzy which is Serial, so at the time I thought that experimental serial storytelling on radio was a complete shot in the dark,” he said.

Serial, hosted by NPR’s Sarah Koenig, investigated a murder that occurred fifteen years ago in Baltimore — on air, opening a new court of public opinion.

Koenig’s voice is frequently described as

“addictive,” and the show took just one month to hit five million downloads. By way of comparison, NPR’s This American Life, the storytelling podcast that inspired Serial, took four years to reach one million listeners.

Some say Serial, and other newly popular podcasts like Invisibilia and Welcome to Nightvale, are reviving radio’s Golden Age of audio storytelling.

In 1938, Orson Welles singlehandedly convinced America that an alien invasion was in progress by reading The War of the Worlds. Since then, television and the Internet have loosened the grip of pure audio on the American imagination.

That is, until a decade ago, when podcasts proliferated online. By some estimates, national podcast listening has tripled in the past five years, reaching 75 million unique monthly downloads.

So why are people tuning in now?

Andrew Horowitz, a professor at Tulane and former curator of the New Haven Oral History Project, believes the power of the spoken word, as opposed to an image or video, lies in its absence.

“The voice is real, set — you hear its particularities, the fact of pauses and breaths, hesitations and excitements. But it is not literal. You are forced to imagine the scene that the voice describes. The fullness of the story comes together not in the telling but in your own imagination.

You must participate in the process of recreating the past anew.”

Weinreich chose the medium of radio because “the joy of the [found] tapes is in the crackles and rumbles, which I could have never transcribed onto paper.”

The voices that formed the basis for Primary Source are by turns excited and ominous, forcing their hearer to imagine fantastical things. One expeditioner, lost in landscapes he describes as “eternal wastes,” addresses future listeners of the seventh tape: “We are of course standing

by Elizabeth Miles

in the throat of god. It’s a steam vent. In this trance we commune with the voice.”

Though Weinreich believes the expedition actually occurred, saying, “I take the story for what it is,” he acknowledges that it’s an open question.

Weinreich says many of the people he’s played the tapes for reacted with disbelief, and Everett Frame, the vanished man, yields no Google results. Weinreich began his broadcasts declaring that the tapes were the product of true events, but says that once the content became less grounded, he gave up on trying to prove the facts: “It’s valuable to play them anyway, as the tale is fascinating.”

The advancement of the podcast into America’s audio culture has lessons for student radio — and sometimes, inspiration. For WYBC, getting listeners to tune in to a broadcast at a specific time is a daily challenge, according to WYBC’s general manager Jeff Zhang ’16. WBYC programming director Chris Cappello ’17 believes that, for this reason, further podcasting is essential to the future of WYBC, making programming available to a much larger audience.

But while there may be a large audience for shows like Serial, Weinreich didn’t find corresponding success last spring.

When Serial became an international craze this year, Weinreich found himself both surprised and disappointed. “In my perfect world, Primary Source would have been that game-changer.”

To his knowledge, only three people listened to all of Primary Source. “My parents haven’t listened to the whole show, even though my dad was there when we found the tapes, but they have certainly listened to Serial in full.”

But Weinreich describes working in any capacity for a student radio station as the original dream: “Playing crazy desert tapes for a tiny listenership? Also awesome!”

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

ALONG FOR THE RIDE

by Michelle Hackman photography by Susan Schullman

I

t wasn’t working for Skylar Thompson, none of it. Not her parents’ relationship, not her friends at elementary school, not Vyvanse, the daily medication her doctor had prescribed for her recently-diagnosed Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Over the years, Skylar had grown increasingly impulsive and prone to fits of tears and anger. In school, she could not control what she said to her peers. She’s since blocked out the specifics, but she remembers bringing them to tears. If a friend asked her to keep a secret, she immediately shared it; if she misplaced a pair of scissors, she accused her desk neighbors of theft. “People really didn’t get along with me,” she recalls.

Life at home certainly wasn’t helping.

At her house in East Lyme, Connecticut, her mother and father argued without interruption. These episodes made Skylar hyperventilate as though, in her words, a snake were slowly coiling itself around her body and choking the air out of her lungs.

During one particularly virulent fight, when Skylar was three, she recalls running in between them, covering her ears, and shouting, “Stop arguing!” Her father left for an apartment in Rhode Island soon after.

The next time she saw her parents in the same room, her doctor gave a name to the behavioral and emotional turbulence that had defined her childhood: ADHD. The diagnosis joined existing diagnoses of anxiety and depression. Though she may have wanted help at the time, Skylar says, her mental state prevented her from asking for it.

Skylar’s case is far from unique. Over 43

20 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

million Americans were diagnosed with a mental illness in 2012, but only one third of those afflicted can or do seek professional help, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The rest, due to their location, lack of healthcare access, or insufficient information, are left to cope without the guidance of a qualified therapist or psychiatrist.

Moreover, for many people, especially children like Skylar, traditional talk therapy proves too challenging to help.

Yale researchers Alan Kazdin and Stacey Blase, writing in Perspectives on Psychological Science, have suggested that the medical community must pay attention to alternative forms of therapy as a way of reaching more people.

When Skylar was in fourth grade, her swimming instructor suggested an “up-and-coming” form of alternative treatment known as therapeutic horseback riding. The treatment, the swimming instructor claimed, confers many of the same benefits as traditional talk therapy for someone with a mental illness. But, rather than languishing on a therapy couch, patients ride horses. And rather than rehashing life events to a drowsy therapist, they learn character-building skills with a riding instructor.

I

was first attracted to profiling Skylar because her story echoed my own.

Unlike Skylar’s, my anxiety is a newer phenomenon, blossoming unexpectedly at the age of 18 like an unwanted growth.

But, like Skylar’s, my anxiety is intense, often without explanation.

In the fall of 2011, I arrived at Yale as the University’s only totally blind undergraduate at the time. College was much more debilitating than I’d anticipated. As my classmates acclimated, I seemed to be the only freshman who didn’t know how to travel to buildings a mere block away from where I lived. I couldn’t serve myself food in the dining hall or search the room for familiar faces to plop down beside. And I couldn’t go out at night without a dedicated set of friends, which I hadn’t yet found.

Each day brought with it the same

stressors. I panicked and withdrew further, until I was spending most of my time huddled in a ball on my dorm room bed.

Days passed in a fog, and I ended each night with a fistful of pills and muchdesired oblivion.

I started seeing a therapist. Slowly, I began to feel better, finding friends, clubs and evening plans. But the anxiety clung to me. Each time I sat to write a challenging paper, or venture somewhere new, my heart thumped, my limbs shook, my teeth chattered and the cycle once more repeated itself.

Even now, though life has otherwise returned to normal, the anxiety hasn’t much subsided. I still cry in most of my therapy sessions. At the conclusion of a particularly tumultuous session earlier this year, I began trembling and sobbing, not to be stopped. My therapist spent several unsuccessful minutes over our time limit trying to calm me, before meekly suggesting that I try calming down in the waiting room. I left, clenching a damp tissue, thinking for the first time that there must be some other way.

That night, I googled “alternatives to talk therapy for anxiety disorders.” The results were largely unhelpful. I could try different types of talk therapies. Perhaps hypnotism or electrocompulsive shock.

One wayward commenter prescribed shots of whiskey.

One treatment caught my attention: therapeutic horseback riding. I hadn’t grown up with animals; I thought they were smelly and dirty, and I didn’t fancy going near them. How could riding an animal help when the other therapies I’d tried — talk therapy and anxietydampening emergency pills, for starters — had not? Could a horse really calm me down? I didn’t feel convinced. But, for what I told myself would be a purely journalistic exercise, I copied down the contact information of a nearby riding facility.

A

t first, Skylar harbored the same skepticism. But, soon after speaking to her swimming instructor, Skylar and her mother came

to High Hopes, a therapeutic horseback riding center in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

The center is among a small but growing number of facilities across the country catering to individuals with physical and mental disabilities. It employs a staff of 30 people and offers individual and group lessons for a semesterly fee.

Skylar was placed atop a horse named Dolly, who began walking with Skylar fearfully astride. Never had she felt so disconnected from the ground and vulnerable to falling. But she let herself ride, and she did not falter. Six years later, she continues to take lessons at High Hopes twice a week. “It’s like they give you a best friend,” she tells me.

Proponents of this form of treatment say that horses have human-like social and responsive behaviors, making it easy for humans to bond with them. They posit that building a healthy relationship with a horse helps people navigate other social interactions as well.

But the passion surrounding therapeutic riding is not presently echoed by empirical research. A group of researchers at Southern Mississippi University and Emory stated in a 2014 paper that the few empirical studies conducted have yielded inconclusive results.

“Investing in therapeutic horseback riding is premature at this point,” said Molly Crossman, a psychology graduate student at Yale University working with Alan Kazdin, one of the few researchers across the country applying rigorous experimental methods to animal-assisted therapeutic treatments.

Crossman said there is preliminary evidence that other animals, such as dogs, may help alleviate anxiety. But, in the meantime, treatment seekers charging ahead with therapeutic horseback riding risk exposing themselves to unknown harm, and, without insurance companies’ backing, are spending excessively on a treatment with dubious benefits.

“We want people to use treatments that are empirically supported,” Crossman said. Right now, therapeutic horseback riding is not one of those treatments.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 21

W

ith equal parts curiosity and bemusement, I find myself one misty November morning on a train headed for Old Lyme. High Hopes’ program director Liz Adams, a willowy woman with long brown hair and full lips, ushers me into her office off the cozy waiting room.

I’ve come to ask about Skylar, whose family has given me consent to observe and interview her. But Liz declines to discuss the specifics of Skylar’s condition.

Though all students must submit medical forms with proof of a disability, she says, the specific diagnoses are irrelevant so long as riders can interact with horses safely. Liz emphasizes that her instructors are not licensed therapists: they can discuss riders’ behavior relative to that of their horses, but they are not qualified to delve into why particular emotions or behaviors may be surfacing.

A new rider starts on the ground, stroking the horse’s neck, petting its shoulders — even allowing it to sniff her.

I shudder at this, and Liz takes notice.

The key is to act calmly around the horse, she says, not to charge toward it or hold yourself back.

Once the rider feels comfortable, Liz transitions to mounted work. Participants at High Hopes are always accompanied by an instructor and a “side-walker,” a volunteer who steers the horse and ensures the rider knows she will not fall.

Gaining riders’ trust and confidence is itself a feat. But more important is being able to teach riders that they can control the horses through calm communication.

“A panic attack is a feeling of being out of control,” Liz says. “So finding a way to gain control over your emotions to help align with another is a good coping mechanism.”

I still feel skeptical. If therapeutic horseback riding really works, then why isn’t it a recognized treatment for mental illness? Liz cites a lack of research.

“The research that we have is small and not necessarily reliable,” she concedes.

“There’s been a lot more evidence-based research that’s been done with people with physical disabilities. But it’s a lot

22 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

easier to measure someone’s range of motion or balance reactions than it is to measure someone’s emotional wellbeing.”

Still, the therapy’s profile is on the rise. This past August, the Professional Association of Therapeutic Horsemanship International, the group shaping the treatment’s standards, was invited for the first time to exhibit at the annual American Psychological Association conference in Washington D.C. High Hopes is also partnering with therapists and school districts, which have referred a portion of their students to the program.

“As more and more research happens, and as there’s more and more publicity for what we do, there’s less and less skepticism,” Liz says. “I mean,” she adds, “obviously it’s still out there, or else insurance companies would be paying for [the therapy] regularly.”

T

he next afternoon, I meet Skylar just before she enters the barn for grooming. She is wearing jeans, riding boots and a forest green High Hopes hoodie, faded from what appears to be too many washings. I take

note of her punk-looking hair, dyed bright orange-red with a purple streak.

Suddenly, I become conscious of my inappropriate attire: suede ballet flats and a gray knit sweater. As she leads me into the barn, I silently pray that the smell of manure doesn’t cling to me after I leave.

She leads me toward her regular riding partner, Gracie, a ladylike black bay horse with white splotches. “She’s very stubborn and nosy,” she says with a laugh. “She’s just like me, actually, now that I think about it.” The two even share a birthday: May 30, 1999. Skylar briefly grooms her horse, using an array of different-sized brushes, before mounting her.

In the facility’s indoor arena, a large rectangular room with a vaulted ceiling, Skylar and four other girls mount their horses and trot the perimeter under their instructor Lauren’s watch. A horse passing in front of me neighs loudly, and I spring backward; luckily, no one notices.

“We have to be proactive riders, not reactive riders,” Lauren tells the girls.

“What does it mean to be ‘proactive’?”

Skylar meekly offers “getting someone to do something.” Lauren latches on.

“That’s right! When you act reactively,

you are a passenger. You should not be a passenger when you are riding,” she says.

“We need to be active riders. You need to be thinking three to four steps ahead of where your horse is going.”

It all sounds a bit like an overwrought metaphor. But as I leave the arena, I realize that the message she is attempting to deliver to her girls is one that they must work harder than most to absorb.

And it’s easier to do so mounted on a horse, where they feel at ease.

S

kylar and I slip into Liz’s office, now vacant, to continue chatting. I ask her how therapeutic horseback riding has helped her cope. She says that when she first began, her depression actually worsened. Her mom remarried, and Skylar fell in with friends she describes as “fake.” Petty fights with her mother and stepfather grew frequent.

(Her mother Deborah declined to be interviewed herself.)

Skylar began cutting herself. First her wrists, then her thighs. She started seeing a psychotherapist. But riding still seemed to help more than anything else.

“Being here,” she says, “would always end up being the one place where I would really start smiling.”

In eighth grade, she realized “if people get through anxiety and depression without doing that to themselves, I can do it too. I just have to find the proper way.” She chose to continue with therapeutic horseback riding. “It’s like a dirty, smelly spa,” she says.

Around that time, she found friends in the “queer, emo crowd,” which inspired her conversion to paganism and interest in drawing comics. In ninth grade, a girl named Olivia in her art class caught Skylar’s eye. “We’ve been dating for six months,” she tells me excitedly.

Megan, her regular riding instructor, said that Skylar’s social skills have undeniably improved. “I would say in the last few years, she’s been getting into her teenage years, she’s come out of her shell a lot,” Megan told me. “She’s actually quite social now. Which is nice to see. I can see it pull her focus away

from horseback riding a bit, but it’s great to see her developing relationships and really getting a lot of joy out of that.”

W

hen I return after observing Skylar’s riding lesson, I give Molly Crossman, the Yale researcher, another call. Skylar seemed convinced of the effectiveness of horseback riding as a therapy; even I, despite my repulsion to horses, feel like I am beginning to understand. Why, then, has research on the treatment lagged so far behind?

“In the general population of people, there isn’t really a lot of skepticism about animal-assisted therapies, more than they almost believe in other kinds of therapies,” Molly says. “Maybe it historically has not been subjected to that kind of scrutiny because it has that sort of intuitive appeal.”

We hang up, and I realize that I will not be able to decide for myself unless I personally give therapeutic horseback riding a try.

I arrive again at High Hopes, shivering at the thought of climbing on a horse. The memory of the horse’s smell fills my nostrils, and I begin feeling nauseous.

Then my instructor, Megan, arrives.

She must notice I’m nervous, because she puts her hand on my arm as she begins to speak. She fits a helmet onto my head before I can adjust my hair.

I try to move on — I am a horseback rider now, after all.

As we walk towards the arena, Megan tells me a story. Several years ago, she says, one of her students, a woman who was prone to anxiety, became worried that she would lose control of her horse.

When the woman panicked, so did the horse, jumping higher and increasing its gait. Megan, fearing for the woman’s safety, advised her to dismount, but the horse remained antsy. Finally, Megan asked the woman to shut her eyes and visualize herself walking calmly through the field. The moment she did, Megan says, the horse neighed and came to a standstill. “It was really a fascinating

situation where the horse was so in tune with the human’s energy,” she says, “that when she was able to consciously lower her anxiety, the horse’s anxiety immediately lowered as well.”

At the arena, my horse Vixen stands in front of me, waiting to be mounted. I swing one leg over her back — Megan catches my arm so I don’t fall — and arrive mostly centered on Vixen’s saddle. When the horse begins walking, I feel myself teetering to the left and reflexively grab Vixen’s hair to steady myself. I wonder if I’ve hurt her. I wonder how many more times I will nearly fall.

Megan steps beside me and instructs me to hold Vixen’s rein. “Horseback riding is dangerous, you know? It is scary, it involves the need to balance on this narrow, moving creature that has its own mind and can be unpredictable, and there’s nothing strapping you down or holding you on. But I do think there is a sense of dignity in taking on a risk like that.”

Vixen and I fall into a rhythm, and I begin to relax. Megan asks me if I want to try a trot, one speed faster than walking, and I say sure. She tells me that when I want to slow down, I can clench my abdominal muscles to signal the horse. The pace quickens and I begin bouncing up and down, enjoying myself. I forget to signal until Megan, behind me, shouts at me to clench.

When I do, the horse comes to a quick halt.

“I can’t believe it was that easy to signal her,” I tell Megan in disbelief.

She laughs, moving Vixen and me back into a trot.

Soon, my surroundings begin to disappear — first the echoing noises in the arena, then Megan’s voice, and even the footfalls of Vixen below me.

I feel melded to my horse, peaceful as she moves forward. She slows as if to express her calm, but I am ready for her to go. With one gentle squeeze of my legs, she’s off, and any anxiety I had carried into the arena falls further and further away as the horse trots on.

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IN CON VER SA TION: Gregory Crewdson and Richard Deming

by Gideon Broshy photograph by Elizabeth Miles

A

cclaimed photographer Gregory Crewdson ART ’88, who directs the graduate program in photography at the School of Art, met poet and theorist Richard Deming, Senior Lecturer in English and Director of Creative Writing, when they co-planned a visit to Yale by the photographer Thomas Struth last spring.

The two professors got together one Wednesday afternoon for a conversation at the Study on Chapel Street.

On finding and keeping C: Do you envision a time when you’re not teaching?

D: No. Because it’s so lonely otherwise.

C: I think the big secret is that most of us who are artists or writers, one of the main reasons we teach is to learn something. And I’ve always said it’s important to remain connected to that next generation of artists, because they think about things very differently than

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we do, and they’ve been influenced in ways that we could never have. It’s a way of remaining relevant. When you get older you tend to narrow your vision — and I live in a church in Great Barrington, I live a pretty cloistered life, so this is an opportunity to open up in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise. I don’t do that through shows or talking to other artists. Once in a while you’ll be looking at something that a student made, maybe in a Crit — this has happened me so many times actually — and you’re like, oh yeah, okay, right. I’ll steal that.

D: Fair enough!

C: It goes both ways.

D: The students are hungry and lit up and they want to engage and be charged. For me, it’s about the possibilities of intensity in a public space. They’re so rare, but you get some taste of that in a classroom.

C: I am friends with a lot of artists of my generation — we never talk about

anything of real significance in terms of making art. It’s all, like, oh, did you hear that person left this gallery, or, that person went for that much [in] auction.

When I’m in the Crit room, it’s the only time I talk about what pictures mean.

On inheritance C: I strongly feel that you are defined as an artist in your early 20s. That’s when you inherit your influences and your loves and hates, and the artist that haunts you, and that’s when you carve out your place in the world, your sensibility, and that doesn’t really change. That’s sort of sad in a way, but it’s true. I was a graduate student here at Yale between ‘86 and ’88 — it was a very defining time for me. The program here was traditional in terms of the championing of the documentary approach to photography, but at the same time I was going to New York and looking at Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. All those diverse and conflicted influences became my field, to try to work out what I was attempting to do. I

count. What I learned in music school is that not only do you practice every day but you have to practice at the same time, because your muscles know, better than you, that you’re about to start doing that, and when you hit that room you’re more likely to be in the mode to do it.

And then fortune favors the prepared mind — if the conditions are right, that stuff might come. And it might not— and that’s the thing, too, about doing it every day, you get used to the fact that not every day is going to be a good day.

Although I know nothing about baseball, I know that .500 is an amazing average and you’re only hitting half the time.

On seeing C: I’ve been very clearly shaped by movies, but now I’m in this weird thing where my pictures are influencing movies.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the idea of me making a movie, which I never say no and I never say yes. still carry that with me.

On a daily swim and Daily Themes

D: That would be interesting.

D: Do you also have an awareness of or anxiety about tradition? This is something I am wrestling with, with the proliferation of MFA programs in creative writing in which there’s more attention on people’s peers and their own work — they lose that sense of this tradition, of the sense that you’re also in conversation with what came before. Not simply trying to transmit the greats, but at the same time also not being stuck in your moment.

C: I’m the most routine person there is. My life is best when it’s completely regimented. I have coffee at the same place; I’m a religious swimmer so I swim every single day. I don’t make a distinction between my life and my art. Making the same dinner every night is part of my artwork. And I’m unlike you in that the time that I’m actually making pictures is very limited — I’d say a couple times a year, to get a whole production going.

So there’s a lot of — not downtime — but there’s a lot of time that you’re not making pictures. I’ve often said that my life is divided between pre-production, production — when I’m making pictures, for a short period of time — and postproduction. That’s a very different way of working than a writer who’ll write every day or a painter who’ll go to their studio and paint every day.

C: It’s seductive, but I don’t think in terms of moving images, so it would be hard for me. But there are conversations happening. I don’t think I’ll ever make a movie … I’ll say no at the last minute.

C: I think it’s a complicated dance.

We inherit all these traditions and conventions and are obviously doomed to repeat them, but the challenge is to just change it one degree. Somehow through your own personal story or your own obsession, if you manage to take that stuff and change it by one degree, that’s all you can be expected to do. And then an artist will come and take that thing and change it one degree again. I think the movements, the radical movements, are very small.

D: There are periods where I have to write a certain amount every day to produce, to get something in for a deadline, and then for me it’s a word

D: This happened last fall and the fall before: I’m at the Union League with a visiting writer and some colleagues, and I’m sitting in the window and it’s late fall and I look out — C: Drinking martinis…

D: — and there’s a streetlight on Chapel, and there’s the leaves, and I think — two years in a row, it’s happened — this looks like one of Gregory’s photographs. Which is interesting because people talk about your work’s engagement with film, which is absolutely [important to me], but what was interesting to me was that, nope, his work has shaped not my sense of film but my sense of the real world. Which is I think what great art does, it gives you a way of seeing the world anew.

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Conrad whom I don’t care about

by Ivy Nyayieka illustration by Ashlyn Oakes

I

open my eyes that morning and see Dan’s head. It is raised higher than mine, because he is lying on a pillow.

I do not use pillows. Ever. I slept with my sister until I was five years old, and because she was older, she had a right to the pillow. By the time I had my own bed and my own pillow, my head would not allow itself to lie on anything but the mattress.

It is a little over a year since I was with Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About. Not that Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About was my first, or my last until now. Kissing

26 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

Dan felt different from kissing Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About. At first it felt offbeat—the way it feels every time you kiss someone new after you have been with one lover for a long time. It felt like we each had earphones in our ears and were moving to different music. But soon he got my rhythm, or I did his. I don’t know. And there we were. I felt him. I felt everything we did—with his fingers, with my nipples, with his pelvis, with my backside…

He felt different from Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About. Conrad Whom I

Don’t Care About’s fingers would touch my face and I would feel him already. It was like he touched my soul before he touched my body. Maybe even it was love.

But screw love. I was raised Catholic.

Dinner conversations on hell’s suffering are a staple for me, but only the love I had for Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About has ever come close to explaining to me unbearable suffering. And so here I am with Dan. This is the third or fourth time I am here in Dan’s house. Third. He studies medicine at the University of Nairobi. I

like his jokes. Not many people would— he told me last night that he was “Rikase,” as in Rika, the enzyme that digests me. I laughed. He said, “I like that you get my jokes.” I like how he laughs when I tell him things. His biceps enlarge and he makes a fist and he looks like he is about to do something that only men with big biceps do and he uses the fist to cover his mouth as he flashes his teeth and giggles a giggle men with big biceps do not have.

He makes me feel like I am funny. I don’t know that I will be able to understand his jokes when he starts his second year at school next week and they become more complex. It does not matter. This is the last time I am meeting him — at least in a bed.

“Dan,” I tap him.

“Rika,” he wakes up, presses his eyelids together as he yawns, looks down at his crotch and smiles saying, “Look what you did to him.”

I kiss him. And squeeze my body against his until he is wide-awake, kissing me back, everywhere. I let him. I think it is kind of selfish that I am the only one aware that I am enjoying this for the last time.

“I have to go,” I tell him.

“No, stay,” Dan says. “Where are you going?”

“I told you I have to go to Kitengela in the morning, to the children’s home, remember?” I know I did, because Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About used to get angry when I had to go places. He said it was because he loved me and wanted to be with me always.

“Stay a little,” he says, pushing himself against me, and I push myself against him too, and he feels good. I consider inviting him to Kitengela. He is good with children — tells them stories about hares and cheetahs, waving his hands around and bellowing so loud you would think he believed the stories himself. The last time we went I was glad he did not touch me in public. But I kind of wanted it to be his idea — coming with me. My friends already think that I like him. I like them — my friends with whom we visit children’s homes. They are a group of

university students called Wapenzi. Most Saturday mornings when I meet them I bring a new boy, so I have scared them enough that they expect it of me. My schoolmates know that I sleep around, but they think I am a slut for it, whisper “Malaya” as I walk down the hallways in the short dresses I love to wear. They whisper Malaya the way men with big biceps whisper, the way Dan whispers, and everybody around him hears what he is saying. It means prostitute, but in the way that although “prostitute” could mean a man, it is barely ever used to

mean that. Unlike my school friends, Amani people do not think I am a slut.

They just never volunteer me when they need someone to pray before beginning our sessions. And I don’t close my eyes when they pray. Someone needs to look at the children and make sure they are safe. When they sing hymns, I join in, because I know the lyrics and I like music and I like to dance. But I don’t know how much of what I sing I believe any more.

I am not one of those deep genius atheists who has thought about Creation and shit and “figured out” that God

FABLE

Hayley Kolding Six brown ferrets, sinuous, were winding themselves like living ropes around the legs of the dining room table, each as narrow as my wrist.

We all admired the ferrets.

Then I returned after a week and found six earthworms shriveled on the carpet, leathered, thinner even than my thinnest finger had become. Only the strongest of the six was still wriggling.

My poor ferrets, my unfed, shriveled ferrets.

We went to the vegetable patch, all six riding on my schooner palm.

The soil looked dry. So was my mouth, else I’d have spit in it. “Goodbye, my ferrets,” I said as the live ones burrowed pitifully into the earth.

The others rested dumbly at the surface as if watching the moon landing from a good distance.

“You’re too skinny,” said a carrot underground.

“Skinny girls forget to feed the ferrets, and then look.”

That’s what the carrot said when I grabbed its leaves close to the scalp and uprooted it, dirt flecks raining everywhere.

Can you trust a carrot? I asked my mother.

I don’t know. I’ve always just assumed. yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 27

does not exist. No. I was just chilling at Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About’s one day, and then we started making out, and then I said I had to go help my cousin cook nyama choma, because it is a lot of work, and because I had promised. But Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About said to please stay. And I said I could not. And he slipped his hands under my blouse and he started to kiss me. And I said stop.

And he continued to unbutton my blouse.

And my head shut down. And I froze the way you freeze when a man touches you after you have said no. And he kissed my neck. And his hands wandered. And I said, “Please…” And I think he heard “yes” because he pushed me so my nipples stuck to his chest muscles, perked, to me in protest, to him in arousal. But I was still. And my hands, held in a fist, did not move from my thighs. And Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About stopped in the middle of peeling my pants off. And I just stared back. And he kissed me again.

And my lips stayed limp, unable to feign interest. And he said, “Leave my house, now.” And I thought he was not serious.

But he buckled his belt, and took the remote control and switched on the TV and said, “Leave my house now.” And all the butterflies in my stomach settled into something solid and I wanted to cry. But my pride kept my tear gates closed. And I took my coat and walked out of the house. And I remembered all the ways Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About had been mean to me, and I cried and hoped I would not meet any of his neighbors as I walked away. I wondered how it had gotten to this — a boy humiliating me in a house his father was paying for. And then I told myself, “I prayed to God, and I ended up like this.” And then for the next few months, I replayed all the moments Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About had been mean to me, and I doubted this God that is all knowing had been watching.

My mother’s sister, who lives in my parents’ house, would be so sad if she heard that I doubted God because of my experience with Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About. I can already hear her in 28 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

my head saying, “Rika, never make a life decision because of a man.” She knows.

She has a child. Not the kind of children from pregnancies that are greeted with ululations and thanksgiving prayers. No. She has the kind of children who are talked about behind closed doors. The ones who appear as a ball in front of their mothers’ stomachs before their mothers tell you the news of their coming. People talk about my mother’s sister. They judge her for being pregnant. They judge me for buying condoms. They believe sex is dirty and immoral. My mother’s sister has the kind of children who are taught that God alone is their father. She looks up from her homework for her master’s degree when I go home from school during the weekends, and says, “Rika, put your education first, whatever any man tells you.”

But I am not being deep or empowered here. I just cannot trust this God that

taught me forgiveness. This — to forgive seventy times seven times a day-- is what allowed Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About to trample on me. He knew I would forgive him each time.

I am done showering and use Dan’s pink towel to dry myself up. I wonder who else has used it. I know Stacy likes him. But Stacy likes Dan the way I liked Conrad Whom I Don’t Care About — like being into the taste of poison. I also know she hates me. Last week when I saw Dan in the hallway at school, I walked out of the classroom, skipped on the brown cement slabs, reached Dan, hugged him, and kissed him on the lips.

Everyone noticed because his friends started whistling and making noise. Stacy looked out of the classroom window.

People looked at her, waiting for her to respond. I know Stacy thinks I am being mean to her. But I am not. I just want her to stop waiting for Dan to want her.

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A HISTORY OF PETALS

by Matthew Mattia

1. In Japanese, “petal” is a unit of measurement referring to (i) pages in a book (ii) clouds, or (iii) flowers. “Petal” is an aesthetic rather than literal measurement, useful not for its precision, but for an associative poetry: together these three images seem to tell us something about beauty but do so silently, magisterially, and like a tangent to some larger conversation.

(But there is no larger conversation. Life, after all, is only a series of digressions –– a series of exquisite contacts by which we apprehend what is left between parentheses.)

2. (Even now, and having overcome religion, I am struck by a line in the Book of Kings: “Behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.”)

3. (Between parentheses god exists –– and god is as fragile as a lily.)

4. The reputation of the seventh century

poet Liu Xiyi rests entirely on a single couplet. It is as notable for its history as for its excellence, having granted the poet, in one turn, both celebrity and death. The stories of this death are disputed; two emerge as more likely than the others. The first is simple: a courtier in the imperial palace of Empress Wu deemed the verse satirical, and ordered the poet’s execution.

The second, less believable (the result, I would wager, of a storyteller’s indecorous flourish) is, perhaps, most true. As soon as he had composed the poem, Liu presented it to his uncle, the poet Song Zhiwen. This uncle asked if anyone else had yet laid eyes on it; Liu replied that no one had; he had brought it to his uncle directly upon its completion. Song requested that Liu bequeath one of its couplets to him as a gift, for use in his own poem. Liu, overjoyed at his uncle’s approval, immediately agreed.

But, later that evening, he regretted the decision, and, appearing before his uncle the next day, recanted. Song smiled, agreed, and sent him off. That evening, however, as Liu lay dreaming, Song’s servant appeared in his doorway, and, approaching the

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bedside, forced soil down the throat of the sleeping poet, suffocating him to death. Though he is now largely forgotten, the couplet is not. It concerns the eternal life of flowers, and the briefness of our own.

5. Many of his poems were written with a woman’s eye. Was he stricken, perhaps, by a fever of spring blossoms?

6. In eleventh century Kyoto, the aristocracy popularized an architectural style known as shinden, constructing, on one acre estates, villas surrounded by vast gardens, which, in a miniaturized nature, represented the various topographies of Japan. The villas themselves were built largely without walls; were instead an architecture of doors, which slid easily back and forth, and were thus often opened during the day, facing southward onto the garden.

Beyond the doors lay a verandah, from which the noblemen and ladies-in-waiting could observe ornate theatrical productions, play games of chess, gossip, or whisper, to one another, sweet nothings.

On the verandah, civilization and nature met and mingled among bright kimonos and tea vapors.

7. (The streams that flowed through the gardens of the Kyoto aristocracy were set precisely upon the incline at which petals float most amicably.)

8. Shinden, however, was a metonym for the entire complex; literally, shinden referred to its primary structure. Translated, its name means, “Hall of Sleepers.”

9. This name suggests that the shinden is in fact an architecture, not only of doors, but of dreams.

The villa, lacking both walls and secure interior partitions (relying instead on painted screens), was as porous as the human mind; words lingered in the air; one conversation absorbing another; the hems of many-layered vermillion kimonos, or lapis-hued slippers, passed behind screens and columns; and poems were blown about on the floor by spring breezes. Just beyond was an imagined nature; a carefully orchestrated performance of bees and lilies and chirping sparrows; of pines and wild stags; of distant mountains borrowed from the horizon, framed by the hedges, such that the gardens resembled the painted screens which arranged and rearranged themselves daily inside the house, and life itself was made to reflect art; life itself was the dream of an aesthetic civilization.

10. The court dress of ladies-in-waiting was composed of twelve layers of luxuriously colored robes so heavy that they were left largely immobile in their homes, rarely traveling even past the edge of the verandahs; as such, they relied largely on gossip for information about the world beyond.

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an illusion created by the painted screens, was particularly suited to the enterprise. The thin screens were as much facilitators of gossip as they were partitions, or objects of art. This is evident in paintings of the period, where the exemplary physiological expression is the tilted head. This was a society of subtle listeners. Shinden is, above all, an illicit architecture.

11. In the most intimate writing, there is always this sense of a whispered conversation overheard from behind a screen –– paper thin and beautifully painted. Guilty enchantment, in place of a narrative, compels us on. (It is telling that one of the two most famous works of Japanese literature is a diary.)

12. The most famous episode of the classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber takes place in a garden vaster even than those of ancient Kyoto. Contained in it are rock gardens, waterfalls, pavilions on high cliffs, wild cranes, lacquered halls, peach orchards, petal-strewn paths, and young ladies-in-waiting. One of them, Lin Dai Yu, sits beside a small stream, weeping over the fallen blossoms. She fears they will be crushed by animals, so she collects them in a small silk bag and buries them in the soil. Afterwards, she composes a poem in their memory.

13. “What is the name of your novel?” asked Lord Fujiwara of Lady Murasaki. “The tale,” she replied, “of one thousand and one petals.”

14. Petals are symbolic to us; we touch them with our finger tips and think not of their beauty in themselves but their beauty as it relates to literature, to poems we recall in snatches; or to days of spring when we loved and were loved in return; or to forgotten dynasties and royal houses.

We touch them and are enveloped in rosy hues, in subtle shades of pink, which make us tremble intimately, for we do not feel the touch of a single petal but of all the petals we have ever touched, or dreamed of touching.

15. That is, the symbol of the petal has usurped the petal itself; the petal we perceive is a mere reflection of its poetic counterpart. This is peculiar perhaps to petals, whose beauty have so captivated the centuries of our literature that we have entombed them in language.

16. Language is a dreamed architecture, built only of doors and hallways. I pass through it, out into gardens, ponds, and pine forests, into other doors, other hallways, going nowhere, unable to return to where I have been, dreaming, aimlessly, of fallen blossoms. The kingdom of flowers is within us.

Sour cream

by Dalia Wolfson illustration by Laurie Wang

T

he contents of the fridge in 18 Wilhelmstrasse Apartment 7D: 1. Two pieces of celery, one bull’s heart tomato, nine plums 2. One large pot of cold borscht 3. Plateful of blintzes rolled tubelike with diced cabbage-egg filling 4. Fried chicken: one leg, one wing, one indistinguishable limb 5. Saure Sahne 6. Saure Sahne 7. Saure Sahne 8. Saure Sahne In the stale air of my grandmother Era Kuznetsova’s refrigerator stands a brigade of sour cream containers, tapered toward the bottom and puffed out at the chest. They wear sashes displaying their fat content and their lids have the telltale metallic crinkle of aluminum. Some are older, some are younger; others have expired and are soon to be reborn. Their numbers are replenished often — there is never enough.

In the Young Wife’s Guide to the Traditional Household, a classic manual for newlywed Russian brides looking for quick but sophisticated recipes, sour cream is not listed more than once in a list of ingredients. The book details amounts in a simple, straightforward manner: add a tablespoon of sour cream over a bowl of crumbly farmer’s cheese, a teaspoon of sour cream for cucumber-

dill salad, and a smeared paste for the classic “herring in a fur coat.”

But my grandmother never had time to use this cookbook, and besides, she does not seem to have a sense of proportion. She does not consult recipes when approaching sour cream.

As far as I know, in Russian there isn’t much of a distinction made between abstract and quantifiable numbers for nouns. In English, though, there are countable and noncountable nouns: precise amounts and general conglomerates of innumerable stuff.

Countries — countable. Statehood — uncountable. Homes — countable.

Houses — countable. Nationality — questionable. So on and so forth, and we mentally sort words, quantifiable and immeasurable, until it’s all rather neat.

My grandmother — who has only ever really mastered Russian — conceives of sour cream in a not-socountable way. She will pile the white matter high on her plate. Sometimes she will retrieve it aggressively with a spoon, other times a playful nudge and push on the container bottom. She is generous, open-handed with the saure sahne in her fridge.

One time when I came to visit her in her apartment on Wilhelmstrasse I found my grandmother boiling sour cream. It says in the Bible that the

manna had many different flavors and could be prepared any which way, yielding a gourmet buffet of one-primary-ingredient meals. No one really knows what the modern equivalent would be. But surely in this kitchen the manna is on the stove. My grandmother knows how to get by and transform one object into several. She has a special technique: make sour cream into tvorog, cottage cheese, by brewing it, stirring absent-mindedly every so often.

I used to think it was a matter of economy. I still remember how we went to the discounted-discount store.

The path itself was difficult: getting over cobblestones with a walker is no easy task. We walked painfully slowly through the aisles, piling the cart high with bruised beets and beat-up apples.

Passing by the dairy aisle, I must have said: Babushka, why don’t we just buy the tvorog right here? I pull out a few euros and call it a gift.

But she pushes my hand away with a generous sweep of the arm and says: Lapochka, darling, there are four sour cream containers open in the fridge!

We can’t let that opportunity go to waste.

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our cream isn’t good for you. I mean, it isn’t good for you like that. We tell my grandmother

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that she needs get into better shape.

On the iPad that she doesn’t really know how to use, we download exercise videos of older women in neon leggings vigorously swinging their limbs. My cousin buys her a pool membership; my brother and I accompany her with slow, slow steps to the supermarket.

My grandmother is embarrassed to use a walker, and refuses to use a wheelchair. Only in a museum will she sit in the dreadful thing, and this is for two reasons: a. she can be pushed within inches of the painting and b. just then she is at her most mobile.

So she develops her own strategy for weight loss.

How to lose the weight gained from sour cream: Close the fridge door, but be very careful — the magnetic side wall is full of souvenirs from the Trevi Fountain and the Eiffel Tower and both sides of the Hungarian capital, Buda and pesht.

Walk past Volodya Berezin’s gifts of hand-carved wooden vases, past the candied orange boxes, out onto the balcony. Careful, again, not to overturn the delicate mesh net that holds many onion skin flakes.

Walk up to the window.

Thrust open the panes.

Stamp as if choreographing a march for a federal parade.

Spine straight, shoulders back! High knees!

To the little Turkish-German children below in the playground, to the drab buildings, to the big skies, to the cranes flying in victory formations above your head, yell: “I am going for a walk! Yes” — punctuate with rigorous stomping — “I am walking!”

See how all of a sudden some unimportant laws of physics are broken as she walks, always forward, purposedriven, and is going shpatziren, as they say in Deutsch. How she can tell you where she went today, the architecture of this and that building, the former look of Potsdamer Platz, the twinkle of trapped bugs in amber over Klaipeda, the blue of the Baltic, all the way until Vassilievsky Island. The only 32 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

things that could possibly block her going for a walk are the still-standing portions of the Berlin Wall, which is immutable, and the uplifted bridges of St. Petersburg, which arise at 2 a.m. in the blank nights of the summer and descend near dawn.

Later tonight she will wake up screaming from white-hot threads of pain running up and down her legs.

She will drink Shweppes Tonic Water to soften the spasms. Young, redheaded, lithe Era was once the regional Gymnastic Champion and could do a full-length split. She would never call herself disabled nowadays, but her legs have not been the same since the accident.

But here she is, going farther than one might imagine. My grandmother can walk many, many miles from here and can manage barely more than 5 steps without wincing. It is a rigorous fitness program.

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ow my grandmother earns miles from her armchair: Because she has the 20-some-odd countries crammed into her apartment. I reduce this from Europe’s 50 because the world that she is fluent in is not as independent and variegated. Czechoslovakia is one color. The Polish-Lithuanian duchy is another. There is no need for [fill me in]–stans because it is all Soviet Union or the Great Imperial Russia. On her wall sit the travel guides for obsolete maps. From them, it is possible to visit cities with names that are no longer chartable, like Leningrad or Vilna, or West and East Berlin.

Era’s day-to-day life cannot be grounded in Berlin because my grandmother lives the world through its representations. She can prepare a three-course lecture in a few days on a country-specific history of the visual arts. Boomeranging back through the centuries, she is not so fluent in Old Testament themes through time (although that is what the Russian Jewish community in Berlin wants, give us more Abrahams and Josephs), but

she can lecture endlessly about goldleaf triptychs with New Testament motifs. She can occupy the settings, narrate from a first-person perspective, and recount historical scenes with the gusto of a reenactment actor. She is the darling, eloquent Era Kuznetsova, head of the Russian Museum lectorium, expert on everything from Rublyev to Repin.

In her cabinets she has an unfathomable number of ill-fitting slides pressed together like thin mints into slim chocolate boxes. These are the negatives of her art travels. Each delicate translucent brown-black film is in a frame. I suppose all these frames once belonged to their own standard sets but she has given so many lectures that there is no longer a set order.

Many of the photos were taken by her.

Other photos were taken by friends, still others pre-bought. Everything is familiar.

My grandmother has three pairs of glasses, but her eyes are sharp as she sorts her collection. If the museum is a succession of frames bearing pictures, then my grandmother does not need to go anywhere. Just turn off the light, turn on the projector, and click.

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y grandmother wasn’t looking one day and crashed straight into a glass wall that she thought was a door. Since then it has been difficult for her to take long-term, long-distance trips. The notion of a leisurely walk has become foreign to her. I remember feeling the apartment become tighter and sadder as I thought about how she must spend hours inside.

The dark corners of her living room leered at me. I thought I could sense the staleness of the same four walls, that repeating vision day after day.

There is no solution for wanderlust, particularly when one is physically disabled. But, do you hear that? It’s bubbling over on the stove, all the leftover Sahne that I’d almost disposed of. There remains, still, the capacity to imagine a tub of cottage cheese from some expired sour cream.

The new new criticism

by Adriana Miele photography by Alex Schmeling

Questioning the canon

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came to Yale two and a half years ago with a feeling that I was going to major in English. What made me sure was Readings in American Literature (ENGL 127) with Jacqueline Goldsby, which I took the spring of my freshman year.

The syllabus included Junot Díaz, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Frederick Douglass.

Professor Goldsby discussed the personal backgrounds of the writers extensively as we read their work, including women of color like Jhumpa Lahiri. We even met United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey when she came to the Beinecke for a reading that semester, where she discussed her biracial identity.

During my sophomore year I took the required, foundational courses in English: Major English Poets (English 125 and 126). In two semesters, I read exactly one female writer between two courses. The last poet we studied in 126 was Louise Glück, whom my professor, Leslie Brisman, chose as an example of a living poet.

I greatly enjoyed reading Glück’s work, especially because I’ve taken two courses in poetry writing with her here at Yale. I feel incredibly fortunate to have worked with such an influential, graceful writer. As much as I admire Louise’s voice, I was troubled that she

was the single female voice reflected in the foundational courses of my major.

The study of the humanities is centered on the development of the Western canon, and Yale’s curricula are no exception. Many bemoan the fact that older, mostly heterosexual, white men dominate the literary, theatrical, and artistic canons. Even so, within discussions about gender representation in academia, the focus remains on the hard sciences.

The lack of female voices in the Western canon isn’t news to anyone. But it bothered me. It still does.

Eve pointed out that the Yale English Department’s approach to literary analysis is varied, but that the Major English Poets courses overwhelmingly teach students to close-read. I learned midway through my junior year that the Yale English Department’s approach to analysis is influenced by New Criticism, a movement in literary theory popular throughout the mid-20th century that emphasized close reading. Close reading, as defined by New Criticism, rejects biographical or sociological concerns.

Readers are supposed to derive meaning from the text as if it exists in a vacuum.

New Criticism isn’t the only spoke with Eve Houghton ’17 over approach to literary theory, but it’s the the phone on a Friday morning. most prevalent one at Yale — something A sophomore English major in I didn’t know until well after I declared Davenport, Eve expressed her love for my major. Professors often laud close the Yale English Department — and reading as an analytical technique, Major English Poets. Eve’s literary but I can’t recall New Criticism being interests lie in the Early Modern period, discussed at length in any English which 125 and 126 cover with broad seminar. Because this is rarely talked strokes. about, I didn’t realize that my professor In her other courses, such as Minor Goldsby’s approach to discussion wasn’t English Poets taught by professor universally accepted.

Catherine Nicholson, and her individual At my public charter high school in research, Houghton said she’s “interested Florida, my sophomore year English in authors that are really understudied … teacher had a different approach to I’m interested in thinking about people teaching. Born in Iran, he loved to repeat who are perhaps outside the mainstream the phrase, “It’s all about the context.” of what would make it into Major As an underclassman, Yale English’s English Poets because I’m interested New Critical approach baffled me. Why in the period and a whole range of weren’t we talking more extensively personalities and literature.” about the historical moments that influenced the writers? Why weren’t we talking about postcolonialism while reading work produced during the heyday of imperialism? As we read more American authors, why weren’t we talking about nationalism? How might issues of ethnicity and race be more relevant in English language texts written outside of Great Britain?

I’m also very interested in asking questions about gender and sexuality. In many of my courses in the humanities, I feel like we don’t address issues of gender as holistically relevant to the material.

As someone who’s very concerned about gender, I find this to be unsettling. Last year, when I expressed distaste for a

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Maybe the fact is there’s something to be said about the way gender affects the way we inhabit spaces.

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poem that discussed rape, one tenured professor leaped out of his chair and mocked me. He stood in the corner of the room and said that he could set up a punching bag on which to take out my frustrations.

After that experience, I’ve struggled with how to approach conversations in the classroom. It’s often unclear what different professors may deem relevant or appropriate questioning. This semester, in my 17th Century Literature junior seminar with John Rogers ’84 GRD ’89, we read masques by Ben Jonson.

One of his masques, a text intended for a one-time performance, was written for the British royal family at the time and describes Queen Anne performing in blackface. Our discussion touched upon modern conceptions of race, though Jonson wrote his piece centuries before there existed a postcolonial understanding of ethnic identity. Rogers has encouraged his students to critically engage with the works with a broader sense of cultural context.

The English Department requires undergraduates to take three courses in English literature before 1800, one course in English literature before 1900, and only one course in American literature. According to the department’s website, the major aims to provide its students with a broad understanding of Anglophone literary history. But that history is narrowly defined, focused only on white, male, English poets. The canon’s writers are studied, but the lack of diversity among them isn’t always discussed. I feel like the department’s overall relationship with sociological context is strained.

In the first fifteen minutes of his introductory lecture in Milton last fall, Rogers cited A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf in which she argued with Milton’s patriarchal values by using his own logic from work he wrote centuries before Woolf ’s birth.

I didn’t enjoy reading Paradise Lost earlier that calendar year in 126, but Rogers’s approach of actively engaging with foundational feminist theory cast

the text in a new light. The semester concluded with a conversation on Milton’s influence on the American Christian awakening of the 19th century, when Paradise Lost was a very popular text throughout the United States.

Milton was and is still relevant, but we didn’t shy away from contextualizing his writing in Roger’s lecture course. We probed Milton’s biography and political views; we considered his academic experiences and social anxieties. We discussed him as a person.

There have been many conversations on campus about the role that gender plays in the undergraduate experience.

I’ve taken to making lots of jokes with my friends about my oppression as a woman; it’s my way of dealing with the fact that one-in-four women will be assaulted by the time we graduate. It’s my way of dealing with the fact that I know literally one female engineering major. Gender is a controversial issue, and I struggle with it on campus. Figures from the Office of Institutional Research reflect a massive underrepresentation of

women within STEM. This past year, Connor Szostak ’17 switched his major to English from statistics. When he started enrolling in English courses, he noticed a shift: There were more girls.

Though there may be more women taking English courses, the majority of the curricula revolve around male voices: Wordsworth, Eliot, Milton, Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc. Because classes such as 125 and 126 are mandatory for the major, students are left with the impression that canonical works are the English language’s greatest hits. There’s no question that the canon privileges male voices. Through examining this issue, I wonder if maybe the classroom privileges male voices as well.

According to the Yale Office of Institutional Research, in the 2013 — 14 academic year, there were about 100 more female upperclassmen than males majoring in the humanities. The majority of Yale students devoting their time as undergrads to the humanities are women. Yet there seems to be huge disagreement about how to approach the

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topic of gender in the classroom. Women have been admitted to Yale College for 45 years. Since then, has gender been a defining feature of each individual student’s academic experience? Does such questioning force us to focus too much on gender? Shouldn’t we preclude ourselves from defining one another?

Should we ask these questions at all?

For centuries, men wrote the most discussed literary and philosophical texts. “I think my understanding of the past is that it is what it is.”

Today, Victoria feels that there are fewer excuses for male-dominated curriculum. Victoria feels that as the Directed Studies syllabus approaches texts from the 19th and 20th centuries, there’s a wealth of influential female ome people say we should. authors from whom to draw. “We need Victoria Hall-Palerm ’15, who to consider other writers now that majors in Ethics, Politics, and we’re moving into the 21st century. So Economics, enrolled in Directed Studies many of the greatest writers of the 20th during her freshman year. In the pages [century] were women. I’d really love of the Yale Daily News and beyond, to see writers like Toni Morrison on a the program has drawn much criticism syllabus — like, God forbid, maybe we for its lack of diversity in terms of its add a person of color.” authors. Directed Studies intends to In Victoria’s experience, the lack provide freshmen with foundational of female representation in the canon knowledge of the greatest works and never translated to a lack of female thoughts of the Western canon with participation in the classroom. I asked courses on literature, philosophy, and Victoria about the transition to coed at history. Victoria told me that as much Yale after she had attended an all-girls as she values some of the criticism high school, Nightingale, in Manhattan. aimed at Directed Studies for its lack of She said questions such as, “Is it proper diversity, she feels that adding authors or safe, to talk as a girl? That never or thinkers to the curriculum just for the crossed my mind.” She acknowledges sake of diversity would be a “disservice.” that she “came in very fortunate to speak “I think that Directed Studies is trying with some degree of self-assurance,” to cover a lot of work in a short period especially in a demanding program like of time, so you obviously need to narrow Directed Studies. the focus while discussing thousands of Jennifer Lu ’16, another Nightingale years of history [within two semesters].” alumna, expressed a similar experience.

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36 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

She says she has never felt silenced or inclined not to speak in her time at Yale.

Jennifer’s interests lie in the humanities and literature, but she chose the literature major over English. Jennifer said, “Due to a quirk of major requirements, every English major ends up talking about the Milton class [126], the Shakespeare lectures and seminars, Romanticism, and a few other seemingly if not actually core English classes, all of which don’t fit my interests. There are plenty of English classes … that are more up my alley, but they’re not as talked about. I ended up associating English with those classes, while I felt like I had a broader range of choices with lit.”

For Jennifer, her decision was more about personal preferences. She was also able to count the courses she’s taken in classical Latin literature toward her major. Lit was a better fit.

Within the much smaller Lit Department, Jennifer has had mostly positive experiences. Like English, literature at Yale has more female students. When I spoke to Jennifer about this piece, she said that she’s “hesitant to draw any conclusions between the levels of engagement or discussion and gender because that has more to do with the individual qualities of each class and professor.”

Zachary Blickensderfer ’16, a

computer science major, has taken a number of courses within the humanities at Yale. In his experience, he’s noticed a huge disparity between genders.

The Computer Science Department is heavily male, which bothers Zach.

While he’s also hesitant to make a blanket statement about gender in the classroom, he told me that, “The people who in [his] experience in seminars and lecture settings who are most aggressive in making their voice heard and making their opinion accepted tend to be men.”

I asked him if he had any thoughts on why that might be.

He giggled and then said, “The patriarchy, but I can’t know for sure.” He also noted that, without exception, he generally feels more comfortable if the class is being led by a female instructor. “[My] comfort with a professor is about how good [the] teacher is. [Whether the teacher] makes you at ease with your knowledge and ignorance. If we’re not comfortable, everyone throws out their obligatory ration of waffle and then you move on, and the discussion is mediocre.”

Gary Sharp ’16 has also noticed a discrepancy between male and female

behavior in the classroom. “Girls are actively trying to push the class forward or explain something, whereas when a guy does it, he’s trying to assert his opinion,” he said. I asked if he attempts to be more assertive. He said, “For sure.”

Moreover, he said that in his experience, “Girls tend to be asking questions and more likely to work through their response with a professor.”

Victoria also noted that women tend to be “more open.”

Zach believes that “there are lots of different factors” that make someone more verbal in classes. He believes gender is just one of them.

I realized through my conversations that unanimously, students and professors alike have noticed that women seem less inclined to prove their opinions as correct. Of course it’s not true that women are universally diplomatic, or that all men are rude, brutish conversationalists. But along with most people I’ve spoken to, I’ve noticed that women tend to be more open. When they speak, there’s a willingness to say, “This is what I think,” instead of saying, “This is the correct

way of thinking.”

I don’t think women are better classmates than men, but I do think that we need to be considerate and respectful of other people’s views. I think it’s in our hands to make our classrooms comfortable for one another. Students and instructors can work together to create spaces to talk about meaningful texts, even if that makes discussions more complicated.

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y mother often gets frustrated with me because I can be very idealistic in my approach to defining gender. I want to really believe that gender is a spectrum. As much as I closely identify with feminine attributes and my own womanhood, I don’t think everyone fits precisely into prescribed cultural norms for gendered behavior.

As I write this, I am listening to Taylor Swift and sitting with my legs crossed.

Maybe if I were born a boy, I’d be doing the same thing.

But there’s no denying that women are underrepresented in positions of authority in our world. And because women account for 50 percent of the

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human experience, this is a problem.

The majority of current undergraduates in the U.S. are women.

Even so, the majority of upper-level faculty in the academy at Yale is male, according to the Office of Institutional Research. A great deal of this can be explained by how many of these men are older; there were just fewer women going into academia several decades ago. We can’t just say that gender is exclusively an issue at Yale or even at the English Department when there are so many other factors that have influenced the gender imbalance within academia.

There are cultural and historical explanations for the lack of upper-level female faculty, as well as for the lack of female representation within the canon. The English Department isn’t an inherently sexist, silencing entity. The issue of gender is complex and deeply embedded in our society; we can’t easily unpack how gender affects how much authority a person may possess — whether they’re taking a class or teaching it.

According to the Yale Office of Institutional Research, the ratio of male-to-female faculty within the humanities at Yale is roughly 2:1. When so much of the canonical history is 38 | Vol. XLII, No. 4 | March 2015

And what risk do we run by trying to “fix” it? Morrison mentioned that in film theory, there’s great discussion surrounding the gender of “voice-offs.”

Voice-off is a term to describe narrative voices in film that belong to a figure not visually represented on the screen. In the majority of films, “we [the audience] respond to vocal framing of [this] male, intrepid guy.” In film, female voice isn’t prescribed as much authority.

Morrison said that she decided from the beginning of the over-enrolled course to keep the gender ratio balanced, resulting in six men and six women.

All twelve had to deal with issues of body language and diction when they addressed the class. But Morrison was concerned, most of all, by how much the women in her course struggled to take up space. Female body language often includes folding: arms over the chest, legs crossed. Studies have suggested that these poses indicate less confidence.

Amy Cuddy, a professor at Harvard Business School, has produced a volume of work in the field of social psychology about the way that occupying space reflects one’s confidence and authority.

Her work questions whether people may feel more powerful by the way they move their bodies. While teaching a course on gathering authority in public, Morrison had to address her female students much more frequently about habits that Cuddy observes in her research.

“Women are trained to take up less space,” Morrison said.

In summary: Men and women are both at Yale. Men and women are both successful at Yale and beyond.

Both speak. Both are involved in the humanities. But maybe the fact that women are trained to take up less space is still reflected here. Maybe the fact is there’s something to be said about the way gender affects the way we inhabit spaces.

dominated by men, and so many of the influential figures within the academy are still men, how much does this affect the experience for women or individuals who don’t conform to the traditional gender binary?

Through professor Elise Morrison’s experience in performance, public speaking, and feminist theory, she’s become aware of “scrutiny of how young women voice their own authority.” In her course last semester on public speaking, she noticed that everybody had something to work on, like vocal fry and up-speak.

Up-speak, or Valley Girl Talk, has been heavily criticized, especially in academia. In the past year, The New York Times published a piece on the myth of Valley Girl talk — a manner of speaking (not at all exclusive to the West Coast), typically associated with females, in which speakers raise the pitch of their voices at the end of sentences, often making statements sound like questions.

Morrison said that many of her students used up-speak, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation.

We discussed our concern about the n 1994, a year in which many impression that this manner of speaking current undergraduates were born, is gendered. What does it imply that the acclaimed and controversial we so often degrade Valley Girl talk? literary critic Harold Bloom published

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The Western Canon. The Yale professor claimed that Deconstructionists and Feminists were all part of “the School of Resentment.” He said that to veer away from the canon as readers, we deprive ourselves of valuable solitude. Bloom’s criticism reveres writers such as Emerson and Thoreau: wealthy, educated, white men who find themselves in nature.

As a feminist, issues of gender and representation are close to my heart. I voraciously consume theory related to gender and ethnic identity, and outside of English and art, I’ve taken a number of courses in the WGSS department. I have very purposefully constructed an academic experience that allows me to question the Western canon as an aspiring writer and performer.

Balancing an understanding of the institutional nature of identity politics while attending a prestigious academic institution is difficult. As I worked on this piece, I constantly struggled with concerns that this wouldn’t be taken seriously, or that few people would care for my progressive views. Also, I felt hypocritical. I loved The Great Gatsby and Charles Dickens when I took AP Literature in high school. I have wellworn paperback copies of Shakespeare on my bookshelves at home. So much of my identity has revolved around the texts that I read.

I’m well aware that questioning the Academy is a large task to undertake, but it seems like many students consume canonical texts without questioning why they are, in fact, canonical.

address the fact that gender still affects our lives here. We are safe to express how.

I’ve been engaging with feminist theory for years out of personal interest, but what about people who believe in gender equality but don’t engage with it so deeply? I can’t expect everyone to just care, but it’s so incredibly important to me. If the study of the humanities is supposedly about the human his semester, in my nine-person, experience, I think we need to take a feminist performance seminar holistic look at what that means. What taught by Morrison, which are we potentially missing if we don’t includes one man of color and eight consider issues of gender as an integral women, we’ve read texts that describe component of a liberal arts education? categories of race and gender as Thinking about gender is a way of “haunting” constructs because they make thinking about people. Gender is an people feel confined to certain aspects inherent part of the human experience, of their identity, whereas the majority of and I think we should acknowledge that the cultural texts that we consume tend identity is essential to the cultivation of to portray white, straight men as more works that make meaning from life. complex, nuanced individuals.

I’m well aware that questioning the Each week, we open the class by Academy is a large task to undertake, but sharing performances and events with it seems like many students consume one another. We also complain about canonical texts without questioning occasions when we feel uncomfortable why they are, in fact, canonical. When as performers and writers on campus. students look back on the beginning The seminar is a space where we can of the 21st century, what voices will

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they consider canonical? How can our actions today influence what will come? I’ve thought a lot about professor Morrison’s words as I consider where the study of the humanities should go: How do we talk about literature? Morrison’s thought that women are taught to take up less space continues to echoes in my mind.

This semester, in Roger’s 17th Century Literature course, I was thrilled to see three women on the syllabus. Because women exist, and women have written — a fact we need to start recognizing.

In Rebecca Schneider’s Explicit Bodies, a book on applying intersectional feminist theory to the art of theatrical text and performance, she states the following in her introduction: “This book is about the effort of turning, with the logic of the twister.

But the ultimate aim of such turning is not to arrive, as T.S. Eliot hoped, to ‘know [ourselves] for the first time,’ but to keep on turning and turning and turning again, to take, always, a second look.”

I think we need to take a second look.

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