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4 8 14

The Gist “This is not writing.”

feature by ARIELLE STABLER

Sex and the Seminary observer by KELSEY DALLAS

GETTING The LUCKY

06 17

Leaving the Valley

To Get It Right

feature by YI-LING LIU

profile by GABRIELLE HOYT-DISICK

UNDER THE SCAFFOLD

photo essay by KEN YANAGISAWA

UNDOCUMENTED

42nd Street Shuttle

crit by MADELEINE WITT

personal essay by VINCENT TOLENTINO

Cicadas

DAILY NEWS

fiction by MAGGIE YELLEN

small talk by ISABELLE TAFT

THE TENURE GAME cover story byTHERESA STEINMEYER

MAGAZINE Editors Sarah Maslin Joy Shan Managing Editors Abigail Carney Alec Joyner Photography Editor Henry Ehrenberg Design Editors Jennifer Lu Daniel Roza Mohan Yin Associate Editors Jennifer Gersten Andrea Januta Claire Mufson

Copy Editors Adrian Chiem Ian Gonzalez Elizabeth Malchione Douglas Plume Copy Staff Adam Mahler Design Staff Jilly Horowitz Marisa Lowe Amra Saric Editor in Chief Julia Zorthian Publisher Julie Leong Cover design by Mohan Yin

Corner

LAUGHING MATTER

Collector’s

by Alec Joyner

riscilla Kellert ’74 FES ’81, all-around outdoorswoman and director of Yale’s Freshman Outdoor Orientation Program (FOOT), has been collecting pig magnets for nearly 25 years. Her favorites — especially during the frosty winter months — are the sunbathing pigs from the Caribbean. “They remind me of warmer days!” she says. Kellert’s house in East Rock is home to dozens of pigs: stuffed animals, statues, paintings, cards and piggy banks. But at her house in Vermont, she says, “I have cows on my refrigerator!”

BLACK PANTHERS REAL TALK

by Eric Boodman In 1969, Black Panther Alex Rackley was tortured and killed by other members of his party. The resulting trials, held in New Haven, sparked enormous antigovernment protests, including a May Day rally in 1970 on the Green. Yale opened its doors to the protesters, allowing them to sleep and eat in the residential colleges. On Feb. 26, 2014, MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES, Yale hosted a panel in which former Panthers YALE UNIVERSITY discussed their experiences of the events. The panelists included Kathleen Cleaver, researcher at Yale Law School and former Panthers communications secretary; John Williams, lawyer for the Panthers; Ann Froines, one of the May Day rally organizers; and Beverly Gage, Yale history professor.

CLEAVER, ON THE STATE OF U.S. POLITICS “Democracy was going down the tubes every day of the Vietnam War, and I don’t think it’s existed since.” WILLIAMS, ON HIS GENERATION “We drank the 1950s Kool-Aid deep. A lot happened in the 1960s that were so profoundly disillusioning — the war, the assassinations — and we were pissed.” WILLIAMS, ON YALE’S INVOLVEMENT WITH THE MAY DAY RALLY “New Haven is unlike New York 4 | Vol. XLI, No. 5 | March 2014

because it’s a one-industry town, and that industry happens to be thinking.” CLEAVER, ON J. EDGAR HOOVER’S FEAR “The Black Panthers was a national organization of mostly teenagers. We had a few people over 30. How was that the biggest internal threat to the United States?” CLEAVER, ON THE NHPD’S WIRETAPPING OF PANTHERS’ PHONES “The New Haven Police’s wiretap was so wide that they were tapping my phone in San Francisco.”

Dear the makers of Arthur: Over the last decade, your show has really fallen off in quality. Like, a lot. I’m a double-major in French and Film Studies at Yale and I’d like to think I know a thing or two about le cinéma and la télévision and le Nétflix. Back when I was ten, Arthur was killing it: the scripts were well-paced, the plots were suspenseful, the voice acting was on point. I felt like I could really relate to all the characters, even whiny-ass D.W. And at the end of every episode, I felt like I had learned an important life lesson. Like, it’s cool to wet the bed, sometimes — you know, in moderation. Now, I can barely even watch the show. You guys totally abandoned your audience. I’d like to see some character development. Dimension. Nuance. Narrative arc, morons, ever heard of it? These animals are still doing the exact same stuff they were doing ten years ago! When are you gonna have the episode where Arthur takes way too much Adderall and starts psychoanalyzing his own shrink? How about a bottle episode where he and Buster hitchhike crosscountry with a grizzly bear voiced by Nick Nolte? A bottle episode is a separate thing, as if it’s sealed inside a bottle. Oh wait, that’s every episode of your show. Anyways, here’s one for you: have Season 18 center on Arthur taking over his dad’s catering business. Slowly, he discovers that it’s just a money-laundering front for the Elwood City mafia and the inherent moral dilemma just breaks him. Make the mob boss a weasel, like literally a weasel. That’s free of charge. You’re welcome. Don’t even list me in the credits, I don’t want anything to do with your crappy show. Here’s another idea: Kill off The Brain. Think about it. Irony. You wouldn’t understand. Thanks for nothing, Cliff Whippleton III

The Compound of Alchymy

FROM THE BEINECKE

MAP OF THE MONTH

Holy Land

YALE DIGITAL ARCHIVES

his map of Jerusalem and the Holy Land is a mosaic on the floor of the early Byzantine church of Saint George in Madaba, Jordan. From the sixth century, the mosaic contains the oldest surviving cartographic depiction of Jerusalem. In 746, an earthquake devastated Madaba, and the city was abandoned. This map was uncovered in 1884 during the construction of a Greek Orthodox church at the same site. It originally contained over two million tessera tiles. When it was new, the mosaic likely helped pilgrims orient themselves within the Holy Land. Today, it is useful for locating Biblical sites. Excavations in Jerusalem at sites depicted in the map revealed the Nea Church and the important road Cardo Maximus.

by Elizabeth Miles

f you seek more magic in your life, consult The Compound of Alchymy (George Ripley, London, 1591), a manuscript that contains the “right and perfectest meanes to make the Philosophers Stone.” As Ripley points out, the secret to changing BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY metal to gold has been sought by thousands of people throughout history, but few have succeeded. Ripley laments arduous years of experimentation, probing the “rare inscrutable secrets of natural Philosophie” by “distillation and other transmutation of Plants, Hearbs, Stones and Mineralls of all sortes.” Ripley dedicated his work to “the Most High and Mightie Princesse, Elizabeth,” imploring her Majesty to allow him to “profit some ways this Royall kingdome and State” by publishing his mystical guidebook.

DESKSIDE WITH HAZEL CARBY 3

PROFESSOR OF AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

1 Praline cookies

from a grad student, a thank you for writing a letter of recommendation.

2 Exelento, an artist book by Ellen Gallagher.

3 Class blog and

Black Britain: A Photographic History, materials from her seminar Carribean Diasporic Literature.

1 2 4

4 Her favorite Wangechi

Mutu collection. She just went to see her exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.

5 Assam tea yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

Under the Scaffold KEN YANAGISAWA EXPLORES THE RENOVATIONS AT STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY

But is it literature? BY ARIELLE STAMBLER

’m zooming through a corridor made Ottinger, the poem’s author, stands English majors like me. Now it is of words. On either side, chunky text beside me, controlling this simulation ready to reveal itself to the masses and passes by my shoulders. My eyes flit with a pair of motion-detecting 3-D revolutionize the way we think about from one wall to the other, trying to glasses and a modified Wii controller. the book, whether we’re prepared for absorb the letters. I am inside a poem. She is a college senior completing a it or not. Then the corridor ends. The space dual degree from Brown and RISD widens, curves, and pinches together in literary arts with a concentration ’m a technophobe. C++ sounds like above me to form a dome. I look in “electronic writing” — poetry and a mediocre grade given by a pitying upward and see “The Sun.” But the prose written within a digital medium teacher. Java is coffee. Books allow only light in this virtual reality space that cannot be read outside of that me long periods of quiet, of calm, of comes from the six projectors behind medium without losing some or all of deep concentration, and I was skeptical the screen walls that surround me. its significance. Her project required that a literature based on digital The words lining the walls form a her to write both the text of the poem mediums could successfully command poem that can be read in many ways. and the code for the program that my full attention. You can read in columns. You can read projects the colorful, moving displays Then I read “Translation”, a work in rows. You can read in circles. You onto the walls. by Brown literary arts professor John can read words at random, stopping on Walking into Brown’s CAVE is Cayley. The piece starts with a screen whichever ones catch your eye. Their kind of like walking out of Plato’s. I divided in two, half black and half meaning is fluidly conveyed, and you can’t decide whether to be dazzled or white. After a moment of quiet, a deep are the fluid interpreter. paralyzed by the light — whether I’m piano note sounds, and little fragments This is electronic literature. thrilled that the artistic possibilities for of German text appear on the black I’m standing inside the CAVE, an “writers” are expanding ever outward, half of the screen. More fragments 8-foot cube in Brown University’s or terrified that my definition of what appear with each pulsing note, and Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. literature is has been shattered. new instruments join in as the notes The CAVE is Brown’s interactive For the past 20 years, the field quicken. The text, which appears in virtual-reality environment, designed of electronic literature has been German, French, and English, concerns to display immersive 3-D visualizations developing beneath the noses of the nature of translation. A symphony programmed by students. Kathleen academics, book lovers, and college of occasionally harmonious, but often

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feature dissonant sounds both clarifies and mystifies the text. I was mesmerized. But not all e-literature resembles “Translation”. Previous forms of e-literature were less grounded in visual stimuli. The first generation was mostly fiction: authors wrote short stories composed of various “lexia,” pieces of narrative designed for the Internet, where they were linked together and could be rearranged by the reader to produce variations on the stories. The first work of this kind, Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story, was published in 1990 on a CD-ROM. The introduction of Flash Player software allowed for the emergence of a second generation of e-lit: digital poetics, which often incorporates more visuals, animation, and other elements that require a computer to be appreciated. Cayley is among the field’s biggest names, but he doesn’t like using the term “electronic literature” to describe his work. In his opinion, it focuses too much on literature as a finished product; he prefers to call it “writing in networked and programmable media,” which emphasizes first the process of creating e-lit, then the medium through which it is communicated. While doing computer research in Chinese studies and translation in the late 1970s, Cayley started conducting poetic experiments with personal computers. For Cayley, a poem is not limited to the words it encompasses, but also includes the rules by which it is made. He wanted to see how deconstructing that process using computers could create interesting poetic effects. “Computation is integral to the processes of composition,” he says. “A computer is like a complex surface upon which one can write.” Nowadays, Cayley uses computers to create programs and algorithms that generate poetry. Sometimes he works with existing texts or with words gleaned from Google’s Ngram Viewer and uses computer programming to impose a set of rules upon the text that

could be poetically interesting. Other times, the poem’s text is designed to change with every reading, so that a reader experiences the same process each time but not necessarily the same words. For Cayley, the literal text of the poem is not the poem; the poem is the process generated by the program. When I visited Ottinger at Brown, she showed me one of Cayley’s CAVE sketches: not quite a poem, but a piece of art that expressed a poetic idea. Cayley worked with a RISD professor of graphic design to create a virtual 3-D rendering of Magritte’s famous pipe painting. They called it “This is Not Writing.” The words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” floated beneath the virtual pipe, just as they do in the painting. When you put on the motion-detecting glasses, you can “walk” inside the pipe and interact with it virtually. But how can I describe to you, using only words, what it means to interact with a virtually-created pipe? How can I describe the smooth, realisticallyrendered mahogany of the pipe’s inner contours? “Stepping inside” the virtual pipe, I understood how Jonah must have felt inside the whale. The space was claustrophobic, the roof of the pipe curving downward above my head in the shape of the whale’s back. The crawlspace I had entered grew smaller as Ottinger pressed the remote control forward. Light, not among Jonah’s luxuries, emanated from an unknown source. This is not a pipe. This was true — it wasn’t a real pipe. But Ottinger pointed out to me that the pipe was, in some ways, more of a pipe than an actual pipe. This pipe opened itself up to me, and let me see its entrails. It was communicating something to me that would have been inexpressible on the page.

lectronic literature has a way with converts. Kathi Inman Berens, a lecturer at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of

Communication, lives and breathes e-literature, but she wasn’t always on board. “I felt really alienated from the machine,” she says. Then, sitting outside with her iPad reading Michael Joyce’s “Twelve Blue” a number of years ago, she noticed that she could see her reflection in the screen. As she read, she saw herself reacting to the drama of the story. “[It was] this uncanny moment where the dark black screen was reflecting my own embodied reaction to the text,” she says. “I started to think, wait a moment, maybe a computational device can do things that a book can’t do. That’s when I realized I needed to embrace electronic literature in a systematic way.” Now, Berens is a member of the Electronic Literature Organization, which runs field conferences and has published two e-literature collections to make the medium’s best works easily accessible. Her scholarship focuses on 21st century digital communication practices, and she co-curated the first Electronic Literature Showcase at the Library of Congress last April. I had mentioned in an email that I still doubted whether or not electronic literature could convey the warmth and depth of human emotion, the way a good book can. She responded with a link to “Underbelly” by Christine Wilks. “Underbelly” was chilling. The piece tells the stories of female coal miners who chisel away at the treasures hidden in the earth, and a female sculptor who chisels away at stone to create a piece of art. It includes the eerie voices of women in the mines and a video clip of the sculptor describing her practice. The computer cursor that viewers use to navigate the story illuminates sections of an underground mine, highlighting animations of the coal miners crawling through the dark passages like ants. Although the piece features no text, Berens says it still feels like literature to her because of its ambiguities, allusions, and concerns, and because it

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feature

tells a spoken-word narrative. A work like “Underbelly” raises questions about how literature itself is defined in a world where books are no longer the default vessel for writing. Electronic literature demonstrates that literature can come to us today in an unexpected form. But the form itself is, of course, both a strength and shortcoming. A child can pick up a book and understand how the practice of reading works, but reading a hypertext novel can feel awkward to someone unfamiliar with the medium. You can’t dog ear pages, or flip forward or backward within seconds. When holding a Kindle in my hands, I find myself romanticizing the smell of an old book, the comfort of a library, the feel of different kinds of paper. There are problems with the accessibility of e-literature as well. Since the field is still a niche one, efforts have not been made on a grand scale to preserve older works of e-literature that were created using now-obsolete software. Berens says that ELO’s preservation strategy is to videotape sessions where people are interacting with a work of e-literature so that the various performances (“traversals”) of that work can be archived. At the 10 | Vol. XLI, No. 5 | March 2014

moment, there is no conceivable way for ELO to provide people with access to every piece of e-lit that was created using outdated technology. A work’s lifespan is as long as that of the computing software it runs on, and software lifespans decrease by the year. Even so, Berens believes e-lit can be spread to the masses. Our brains, she says, are becoming better suited to nonprint forms of reading. She mentions an Internet meme that became a YouTube video last year: a baby touching a magazine like it was an iPad, getting fed up because it didn’t respond to her touch, and tossing it aside. “There’s a whole generation [that] is being trained to read with their fingers and with swipe gestures and pinches, for whom games are a robust narrative experience, a world-making, worldbelieving experience. For those sorts of readers, the computational is just assumed, as opposed to a bizarre addon,” Berens says. Talking to Berens, I remember how in the CAVE at Brown, Ottinger showed me a programming effect called a “particle system.” You input a set of text or pictures into the computer, and then, projected on the CAVE walls, your input swirls around you like a tornado. The words and images fall out

of order, and you are inside the eye of a storm. In some ways, electronic literature is like a particle system. It is pulsating with creative ambition and possibility, but some of that enthusiasm gets tangled up in obstacles like obsolescence, technophobia, and general misunderstanding. Even so, it has the potential to be the medium we use to read literature in the future. My generation is a liminal one, Berens says. As millennials, we are both immersed in the print world that academia still promotes and drawn into the cyberspace world of our peers. We could swing either way, cowering inside a fort of print books or embracing the sounds, swipes, and Flash of electronic literature. We are the ones who will decide how to manage the limitless possibilities of the medium.

ut maybe seeing a print-digital divide is a false dichotomy. Maybe we don’t have to choose. For Jessica Pressman, studying e-literature is about looking back. A former Yale professor, she is now a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego. “The history of media shows that mediums overlap and are recursive in their relationships to each other,” she says. She has just written a book — a print book — that places electronic literature in the context of literary modernism of the 1920s. Although much of her critical study focuses on Generation Flash digital poetics, she says that what she loves about e-lit is the writing, not just the media incorporated to enhance the writing. “People tend to get lost in the bells and whistles of the Flash medium,” she says. Pressman hopes that her book will shift the field’s analytical emphasis from the newness of the medium to its connection to the past. She argues that digital literature can teach us important lessons about the canon of English

feature literature and open up new ways to We are viewing “Cubes,” an interpret that canon. “To understand interpretation of the Jorge Luis Borges contemporary literature,” she says, story “The Library of Babel” created “you have to understand the past.” by two former Brown Literary Arts Pressman taught a course on graduate students. The project is made electronic literature at Yale in fall up of twenty-seven cubes that fill the 2010 and 2008. Yale has a traditional physical space of the CAVE one at a English department, she says, but the time. Since only about eight cubes can department was on board with her be seen at any given moment while approach; her class was “taught within standing in the CAVE, the number of literary tradition.” Pressman left Yale rooms we can enter seems infinite. for family reasons, but she says that Each time Ottinger moves her Wii she knows there will be a future for remote, a new room comes into view, e-literature at Yale. “It’s no longer an and a specially selected chunk of avant-garde field,” she says. “It’s out Borges text appears before our eyes. there. And it’s happening. The outline of the CAVE is rimmed Because e-literature is literature, it with more text. The rooms are literally has to be studied in the context of what made of words. came before, and studying it, in turn, But Ottinger saves the best for last. can shed new light on the hallowed, The project imposes a “scaling effect” age-old canon of print literature. upon the text at the click of her remote. The letters rimming each side of the tanding in the CAVE with cube suddenly zoom toward us. They Ottinger, I remember why I love seem to glide over and under each other print books — their look, their as they grow larger in size. Sometimes smell, their feel. they flicker, an effect called “z-fighting”

that occurs when two letters are trying to occupy the same coordinates within the program. I am seeing the letters up close, watching them interact with each other in a way they never could when printed on the page. I think to myself — isn’t this exactly what I’d always wanted to do with my favorite books? Escape inside the words? I can’t resist the urge to grasp at the air, to feel the letters made real between my fingers. I see solid objects before me, and I reach for them like they are buoys in a mystical, floating world I can’t quite understand. All I feel is empty space. But I continue to see the words. I can’t tell you about them because they aren’t the words you see on this page right now. These words re-imagine words. These words, immaterial but pulsating, are a riddle. Empty, but limitless. PHOTOS PROVIDED BY THE GRANOFF CENTER FOR THE CREATIVE ARTS, BROWN UNIVERSITY

GETTING LUCKY BY ISABELLE TAFT PHOTOGRAPHS PROVIDED BY CONNECTICUT GAY MEN’S CHORUS

he third bingo game of the night was well underway when Joan Crawford, the mistress of ceremonies, announced one of the evening’s door prize winners. A tiny, white-haired woman also named Joan got up from her seat and shuffled to the front of the bingo hall, grinning. She celebrated the win by motorboating her fellow Joan, whose cleavage was prominently displayed in a hotpink ball gown. Hosted monthly by the Connecticut Gay Men’s Chorus at the Annex Club in East Haven to fundraise for their semiannual shows, Bingomania! is an evening of racy jokes, skits, singing, and intense competition. Joe Evangelista, the chorus member who plays Joan Crawford, calls it Gay Bingo. Its devotees — an eclectic mix of soccer moms,

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gay and straight couples, middle-aged friends, young hipsters, life-long bingo aficionados, and bachelorette partiers — come to test their luck, laugh at the PG-13 jokes, and admire Joan’s latest outfit, designed by chorus member Joe O’Brien to fit the month’s theme: “Hot For Teacher” in September, “Zombie Dearest” in October, “Baste Your Butterballs” in November, “Pop Your Cork” in December, and “I Have A Heart on For You” in February, when I attended.

oan’s outfits change, but her wig remains the same. And so does the edgy but friendly vibe of the event, best embodied by Joan Crawford herself. When a door prize went to a blushing man who said he was with his female fiancée, Crawford exclaimed,

small talk “You’re all shades of red! Is that ’cause of me? Well, I have something to match your face!” and presented the man with a cherry-red gift basket. When the chorus started hosting bingo eight years ago in the basement of a Unitarian church that lacked air conditioning and prohibited alcohol, Evangelista thought he would be Joan for one night only. But people loved the character, and she has been a Bingomania! staple ever since. Evangelista, 48, grew up in a devout Catholic family in Ossening, N.Y., where he participated in music and theater. But when he was 11, his family moved to Monroe, N.Y., which was farther from the city and more conservative. Evangelista thought singing or dancing would draw attention to his sexuality and worsen the bullying he already received in Monroe, so he stopped performing until he joined the Gay Men’s Chorus 12 years ago. When he came out to his parents at 26, his mother first asked if he was sure it wasn’t a phase, and then whether he’d been to see a priest. His family accepted his coming out, but the experience caused him to empathize with young gay people who feel they have to hide their sexual orientation. Behind the silliness of Bingomania! is a serious mission: reaching out to people who might be more inclined to participate in bingo than attend a gay chorus show. “No matter how accepting people think they are, there are still people out there who just have not experienced [being around gay people] yet, so they can’t share that same tolerance,” Evangelista said. “Through things like bingo we slowly start to enlighten people.”

n my way into the Annex Club at 6:15 on a rainy Sunday evening, I passed a straight couple smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. The woman was disgruntled because they had arrived later than she wanted. When doors open at six, attendees receive numbered cards marking the order in which they’ll pay the $20 entrance fee and select a spot at a bingo table. Arriving early is crucial

because the hall sometimes fills up long before the show starts at seven.

hen I arrived, attendance was down because the game had been postponed from the night before, so I was lucky to be 120th in line. But the man standing next to me who wore a shirt that said, “Do I look like a fucking people person?” scowled at the chorus manager when she told us to wait our turn. Bingomania! attendees come prepared for a long evening. As the hall filled up, pizzas, boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts, bags of baby carrots and potato chips, platters of sub sandwiches, containers of hummus, trays of baked ziti, and Tupperware full of cheese cubes piled up on the tables. The bartenders sold beer and wine, which the three women sitting next to me agreed was extraordinarily strong. They’d taken the night off from caring for their fourth-graders in Seymour, Conn. and were exchanging stories about their kids. One woman, Jacque, had been to Bingomania! before, but the other two, like me, were virgins — first-time players. The game begins when Joan makes a dramatic entrance from the back of the hall, waving and blowing kisses to the crowd as they twirl their bingo daubers in the air. “Just wait ‘til you see his legs!” Jacque whispered to her friends. After taking the stage, Joan calls out the numbers and interrupts game play to tell jokes. “Sometimes the best way I can figure out what you’d sound like in bed is to listen to how you sound when you lose at bingo!” Jacque assures me that this is a tame night. Usually, the jokes are bawdier and every seat in the hall is occupied. Evangelista tells me that the only negative reaction he’s ever received about Gay Bingo concerned his jokes. In the early days of Bingomania!, the chorus advertised their event at the Annex Club’s weekly bingo, which caters to a crowd that plays to win. They thought Joan Crawford was too distracting. “One woman wrote on our feedback

Joan Crawford holds up a trophy at Bingomania! form, ‘Joan Crawford just impedes the progress of the game,’” Evangelista said. That no one has criticized the fact that Evangelista dresses as Joan is a sign that Gay Bingo is already on the right side of history. Darren Sutphin of New Haven, attending his fourth Bingomania!, said he sees the event’s popularity as a powerful symbol of progress. When he graduated from high school in 1980, “gay was a bad word.” He served in the military from 1983 to 1987 and knew fellow soldiers who were dishonorably discharged after being diagnosed with AIDS. “Everybody hated gays,” Sutphin said. “They didn’t want to be around fags. And now everybody comes to bingo.” During intermission, I walked among the hall’s crowded tables. Sutphin was right. Young, old, white, black, gay, straight, wearing sweatshirts or skimpy Cupid costumes, everyone was there. Chorus members in red sequined vests chatted with greying, tuxedoed bartenders. The man who did not “look like a fucking people person” was sitting with a large group and eating a cookie, and he looked content. Near the stage, Joan and Joan posed for a photo together. One stood nearly six feet tall in high heels while the other, in white sneakers, came up to her chest. They were both beaming.

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observer

SEX AND THE SEMINARY

O BY KELSEY DALLAS PHOTOGRAPHY BY WILLIAM FREEDBERG

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ne humid August evening in a tipsy back-to-school crowd at GPSCY, a popular hangout for graduate and professional school students, Yale Divinity School seminarian Peter Thompson shared his class schedule with a friend from the music school. The musician raised his eyebrows when Thompson mentioned his sexual ethics course. “There are ethics for sex?” the music student asked. And you can learn about them at divinity school? Thompson, a second-year student preparing for ordination in the Episcopal Church, says it wasn’t the first time the idea of studying sex at a divinity school has confused his friends. When people think about a school that instructs future ministers, they rarely imagine a curriculum that includes conversations about

observer sex. But divinity schools teach students not only about theology and history, but also how to guide congregants and how to become healthy community leaders. This process requires seminarians to examine their own struggles — be it with family dynamics or with sexual relations. After all, in most religious denominations, celibacy is not a requirement for ordination. Religion is often criticized for its failures surrounding issues of sexuality, but Thompson explains that the sexual ethics discussed at Yale Divinity School (YDS) are surprisingly liberal. One student-led discussion group last spring talked about sexual pleasure, kink, and fantasy. Thompson’s musician friend wondered if “Sexual Ethics” would turn out to be a course focused on banning certain behavior in the bedroom. But Thompson says that’s not the case. “We’re just trying to look at sexuality and sexual issues in an ethical way,” he says.

any of Yale Divinity School’s students have come to seminary fresh from college. They still drink and party at bars, and some have casual sex. But now, they talk about it. Still, a more open dialogue around sex doesn’t mean that waking up next to a classmate after a night on the town is any easier. The awkwardness of running into a fling may be universal, but YDS Associate Dean for Student Affairs Dale Peterson says, “I think what makes us unique within Yale University is that we bring faith to our conversations about sex. That faith inherently means we’re going to talk about the sacred and the holy and that includes not just God, but the sacredness and the holiness of the people around us.” Talking about the sacredness of sex may elicit a few eye rolls, especially from people accustomed to church rhetoric that demands abstinence before marriage and instructs young believers to “leave room for the Holy

Spirit” between themselves and their dance partners. But, for the most part, Peterson sees the YDS community as a group of students eager to understand how spirituality can inform their sex lives.

o understand the growing importance of sexuality issues on the Yale Divinity School campus, it’s important to recognize that the topic of “sexuality” encompasses gender identity, sexual orientation, gender equality, sexual behavior, pastoral conduct, and a host of other related concerns. The topic of sexuality has taken center stage in recent years among student groups, professors, and school administrators, both in classrooms and out, as community members seek the best path between the bedroom and the pulpit. Many of the most visible changes at YDS can be traced back to alumna Kate Ott. Ott, an assistant professor of Christian social ethics at Drew University, directed the study “Sex and the Seminary: Preparing Ministers for Sexual Health and Ethics.” The study evaluated the way 36 different seminaries address sexuality on campus. It investigated each school’s curriculum, policy, student demographics, and the social justice work supported by campus leaders. The report compiled from the study’s results explained the practices that lead to sexually healthy religious professionals. When the study was first released, Yale Divinity School failed to make the list of leading institutions. Survey coordinators explained that Yale’s curriculum had a notable lack of courses focused on sexuality. As a result, academic coordinators at Yale worked with visiting professors to fill the gaps. The school hired Professor Linn Tonstad who, her first year on campus, offered a popular seminar on queer theology that explored the place of LGBTQ issues in Christianity. Additionally, administrators continued to work closely with Ott, who was invited to restructure the school’s

“Negotiating Boundaries” curriculum. The “Negotiating Boundaries” seminar is offered multiple times each year to students preparing to begin a ministry internship. Students in the class reflect on how to maintain appropriate relationships between ministers and church members. Under Ott’s direction, the course shifted its focus from solely how to avoid sexual misconduct with congregants, and now includes how to be sexually and spiritually whole while serving a church. Lucinda Huffaker, the director of supervised ministries at YDS, describes the curriculum change as a valuable part of a wider effort to encourage conversations about sexuality among seminarians. Echoing the “Negotiating Boundaries” textbook, she explains that it’s important for ministers to be understood as regular people who have sex and must navigate the same complicated issues (such as infidelity) that impact everyone. Efforts to sustain healthier and more fulfilling sex lives, according to Huffaker, are representative of the work ministers must do in all areas of their lives. “We all have such weirdness around sex because of our culture,” she says. “But that doesn’t keep us from being responsible for working on it, for leading in that area and helping others,” Huffaker says.

nce students start talking openly about sexuality in the classroom, they have to take the next step and apply abstract teachings to their own sex lives. Will Stanley, a second-year student seeking ordination as an Episcopalian, explains that life in the Yale Divinity School community doesn’t always differ from his days as an undergraduate. Hook-ups and break-ups are as much the focus of coffee-hour conversations as sermon suggestions or prayer requests. Wanting to be a pastor doesn’t affect an appetite for gossip. Stanley was amazed at the speed of the school’s rumor mill when he came

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observer out last year. “I wanted to wait and tell each of my good friends in person, but the waves were going too fast,” he says. “It felt like everyone in the world was going to know before I could even call my parents.” But Stanley appreciates the community that made him feel comfortable enough to come out in the first place. “It’s good to keep in perspective that the things we struggle with are only

work toward “a more thoughtful sexuality,” which has informed his dating life since. Ott’s seminar, entitled “Body and Soul: Ministry for Sexual Ethics, Education and Justice,” asked students to assess their own sexual history and work together to develop skills for sexuality-related educating, counseling, and preaching. “The class requires that you not only attend to what you think, but also to

“We aren’t going to be able to talk about sexuality openly and figure out what it means if we can’t authentically speak to our own experiences.” possible because we are fundamentally an affirming, real, loving community,” he says. Div School student Peter Thompson, however, cautions students against thinking any sex talk is good sex talk. He echoes Stanley’s sense of the student body’s good-heartedness, but believes that community members are too content talking about sexual orientation in abstract terms, instead of discussing how their own sexual experiences have influenced their understandings of sexuality. It’s difficult to ask students to share the intimate details of their personal lives, especially when sexuality is addressed in an academic setting. But Thompson believes that a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy isn’t helping anyone. “We’re more aware of sexuality and sexual ethics here than some of our counterpart [seminaries], but there’s still a sort of dichotomy where we don’t have a way of acknowledging our sexual experiences, even when they involve other community members,” he says. “We aren’t going to be able to talk about sexuality openly and figure out what it means if we can’t authentically speak to our own experiences.” Thompson says that the course he took with Ott last semester helped him 16 | Vol. XLI, No. 5 | March 2014

how you feel,” says Ott. She acknowledges that students finish the course with a variety of conclusions, but she hopes that, overall, her work within the YDS community will help encourage a sexually healthy ministry. Her research shows that ministers who have looked at their own sexual history and attitudes and beliefs about sex are better prepared to pastorally care for their congregations. After all, ministers are often the first people congregants turn to for help with relationship struggles or questions about the morality of certain sexual acts. On the Yale Divinity School campus, the conversation about sex is getting louder. One group of students has planned a symposium on sexual violence, which will be held in early April. Four different women’s groups have come together to host an event in which students will discuss sexual misconduct at Yale and the University’s response, in light of the high prevalence of sexual assaults on campuses across the country. “The [Sex and the Seminary] report urged improvement in the amount of education that seminarians receive to prepare us to minister to people with regard to their sexual lives,” explained Allyson McKinney, a second-year stu-

dent and the co-coordinator of the YDS Women’s Center. “One of the potential risks from the way in which sexuality has been treated in our Christian tradition is that there can be shame or secrecy around sexuality,” says McKinney. As conversations about sexuality become more frequent at YDS, many people wonder whether seminarians are actually changing the way they behave in the bedroom. During the “Body and Soul” class, Corinne Ellis, a third-year student preparing for ordination in the United Church of Christ, says she was most struck by how difficult it is to change sexual habits formed in adolescence. Her efforts to help fellow students incorporate their sexuality into their spirituality stem from her sense that, for many seminarians, the road to healthier choices may be a long one. “If you’re not learning what it is to have a sexual ethic until you’re twentysomething and in seminary, it’s hard to train yourself out of old habits,” Ellis says. “It makes me wish someone had better conversations with me when I was fifteen.” Ellis and her peers hope to have these conversations with others. As seminarians learn more about their own sexuality, they enable themselves to better minister to the young people in their future congregations. For example, “Body and Soul” students were required to read Sex + Faith, Ott’s book about the conversations on sexuality that should take place between birth and adulthood. The students also simulated small group activities that would help future congregants ask the questions that lead to safer sex lives. What’s most important to Dean Peterson is that students are doing what they can today to be better ministers tomorrow. In his words, “It matters to us who students are in their lives. We want them to be healthy and well and appropriate and respectful in everything that they do.” Which includes having sex.

Leaving the Valley

Valley Deep Springs College graduates reflect on the Yale experience

BY YI-LING LIU ILLUSTRATIONS BY AUBE REY LESCURE

f the few dozen transfer students currently attending Yale College, nine hail from a two-year, 26-person, all-male college located on a ranch in the middle of the Californian desert: Deep Springs. When people at Yale ask about the college, Deep Springers usually have a couple of short sentences prepared. “It’s a cult on the desert, and we read a lot of books and ride a lot of horses. That’s my description,” says Ben Shaver ’15. “If someone needs a good explanation, I’ll talk more in detail. But most of the time it’s easier to just give a caricature.” The basic facts do conjure up something of a caricature — brooding cowboy scholars riding horses and reading Nietzsche together in a radical utopian commune. Students spend their days doing labor: milking cows, digging ditches, driving tractors. On Friday nights, they meet in committees to discuss the governance of the school. Students are not allowed to visit the

nearest town, which is a 45-minute drive away, except on official school business. Students get most of their entertainment from the outdoors, going for long walks in the desert, swimming in the reservoir, and sliding down 800-foot sand dunes. Yale welcomed one transfer student from Deep Springs in 2011, four in 2012, and another four last fall. With more and more Deep Springers arriving here to finish their college education, the Deep Springs experience warrants more than just a caricature and a couple of sentences. Last semester, I spoke with four Deep Springers, seeking a more nuanced understanding of who these young men are, why they chose Yale, and what light their experiences might shed on our lifestyle and culture here in New Haven.

wo years ago, Cory Myers ’15 would spend his mornings waking up early to move irrigation lines. At 5:30 a.m. he would watch the sun rise

over the White Mountains as he made his way to one of the college’s 11 fields. Today, at 5:30 a.m., you’d probably find Myers deep in slumber, still hours away from waking for a day of lectures, brisk walks through the bustle of Cross Campus, and email exchanges with the editorial board of the Helicon, Yale’s undergraduate classics journal. The biggest change between his time at Deep Springs and his time at Yale, Myers says, has been the shift in his sense of community. “I can hold my 25 Deep Springs classmates in my mind at once, but by comparison, I don’t know all of Berkeley by name — and that’s just my own college.” At Deep Springs, students are united by common purpose, by working together to create something tangible. Responsibility is not optional: neglecting one’s tasks can have direct and even dire consequences on everybody else. People are left waiting for a delayed dinner; neglected crops wither; calves fed the

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feature wrong stack of hay bloat to death. If water pipes start leaking at midnight, somebody has to go and fix them. This “ongoing war against entropy,” as Shaver calls it, demands a real and immediate sense of responsibility for the preservation of the Deep Springs community. The sense of responsibility also translates into academic and intellectual accountability. It is difficult to be flippant in class when the people in your seminar are those with whom you plow the fields and govern the college. It is virtually unheard of that a Deep Springs student doesn’t do his readings. “In order to take my time at Yale seriously as an education, I want also to be able to take my classmates seriously as people,” says Myers. “And yet I’ve had discussion sections and even seminars in which, at the end of an entire semester, we didn’t all know one another’s name.” “Discussions at Deep Springs feel humane and committed,” Shaver says, “whereas for the first six classes of [an average Yale seminar], you’re sort of still feeling each other out, establishing a kind of pecking order.” Myers has found relationships with Yale faculty anonymous and bureaucratic. At Deep Springs, professors live with the students and assume roles in running the community. They leave porch lights on in the evening if they are available to talk, and students wander over to chat. It’s hard to imagine a member of the Yale faculty, at the end of a class in WLH, joining a group of students on Cross Campus for a casual game of ultimate frisbee.

n a weekday afternoon in January, I find Shaver and Brendan Bashin-Sullivan ’15 in the College Street building of the literary society St. Anthony Hall, which BashinSullivan joined in his sophomore year. Sitting in a quiet, warmly lit basement room, I quickly forget that we’ve just come in from a dreary, chilly winter day. A small community organized around a special location and devoted

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to intellectual inquiry, St. A’s is in many ways evocative of Deep Springs. “It’s a place where you share a space in a meaningful way, where you get to feel cozy with people, where you can feel safe,” says Bashin-Sullivan. “In Deep Springs, you’re standing in the middle of a circular lawn where nobody can reach you for 45 minutes. So you can be kind of raw, and confident that no one is going to jump out and rub salt all over your wounds — similar sensation with St. A’s. You feel like you are among people you can trust.” This year, Bashin-Sullivan and Shaver live with Myers and Terrell Carter ’14, another Deep Springs graduate, off-campus on Edgewood Avenue. (Carter declined to be interviewed for this article.) Just as St. A’s provides Bashin-Sullivan with a familiar smallcommunity context, the off-campus house provides the four roommates with an intimate living situation redolent of Deep Springs. Most mornings, Shaver bumps into the others having breakfast in the kitchen, grabs a coffee and a piece of fruit, then heads to class. During the day, the three disperse across the campus: while Shaver hits the rugby field to train with the club team, Bashin-Sullivan might be working on a model at the architecture studio, and Myers perhaps at a chaplaincy fellows meeting. As the sun sets, Shaver usually returns to the house to find everyone back home. Myers, the house’s resident musician and an expert in the Renaissance and Baroque music scene, might be practicing the piano in the back room. In the living room, BashinSullivan might be kicking back with a beer on the hideous pink couch, one of the many items inherited from the previous owners that they’ve never gotten around to tossing. A decrepit trumpet, another inheritance, hangs on the wall. It’s a novelty item for bemused guests at the parties the roommates throw at the house every week or so. A small plaque on the jamb of the front door reads: “Built in 1812.”

One might expect that Deep Springs students would gravitate toward their residential colleges, which could provide an approximation of the smaller, more cohesive community that Deep Springs offered. “Given that Deep Springs is a self-governing school,” Jeremiah Quinlan, Yale’s dean of Undergraduate Admissions, told me, “many [Deep Springs] students have a strong sense of community which translates well into Yale’s residential college system.” But Bashin-Sullivan and Shaver agree that they have enjoyed their experiences at Yale despite, not because of, the residential college system. “Deep Springers have a really hard time living on campus,” says Shaver. “[Being inside a college] creeps me out because there is a lot of servitude. There are always people cleaning things or trimming bushes. And the dining halls make me really uncomfortable.” The house on Edgewood has a completely different vibe. The kitchen is the heart of the home, says Shaver — “people are always cooking and feeding each other” — and they are “OK with setting mousetraps occasionally.” Bashin-Sullivan chuckles. “I love the squalor,” he says, glancing at the chairs scattered around the St. A’s basement. “It gives a little bit of reality in the Disneyland atmosphere of Yale.” Off-campus life echoes not only the hands-on aspect of Deep Springs, but also the spirit of self-governance. At Deep Springs, the entire student body is split into four committees: applications, curriculum, communications, and review. Every Friday, the student body comes together — in the winter, at the boarding house; in the summer, at a remote campfire spot in the desert. They might elect a treasurer, evaluate a professor, deliberate a motion to ban certain technologies, or just share their general thoughts on the day. Students at Yale have significantly less control in shaping their academic, intellectual, and social lives. Besides the YCC and the residential college councils,

feature the forums through which students can shape the way their community operates are highly limited, both in number and in power. Simply by virtue of the difference in population, Yale College students will never have as significant a stake in the path their institution follows as students do at Deep Springs. But in BashinSullivan’s opinion, the potential exists for students to foster a greater spirit of communal responsibility on the Yale campus. “Obviously, you’re not going to run Yale College,” he says. “But what if, for example, you organized a dorm where people could take care of a communal kitchen? What if we open up more opportunities for Yale students to take care of some function in their lives through self-organization and accountability?” As Bashin-Sullivan notes, while it is difficult to create a cohesive community on the Yale campus at large, many Deep Springs alumni have nevertheless been able to recreate this spirit of communal belonging and responsibility in the nooks and crannies of the environment that they have come to inhabit. Shaver goes on camping trips with Yale Outdoors; Bashin-Sullivan works as a farm intern for the Yale Sustainable Food Project and enjoys the boons of membership in St. A’s. Bashin-Sullivan and Shaver seem at ease in the St. A’s basement, as if they could go on talking long into the evening. But an hour has passed, and we all have things to do, appointments to keep. Bashin-Sullivan turns off the lights, and we head up the spiral staircase, back out into the cold.

espite the difficulties of transitioning from the warm heart of the California desert to New Haven, Yale clearly has a lot to offer Deep Springs graduates. The large size and diversity of the Yale community, and the rich variety of available opportunities, appear to be among the prime motivations for many

Deep Springers who decide to finish their studies here. Yale’s diversity — in activities, in friends and aspirations, in the vast wealth of resources, and in what Myers calls the university’s “luxuriously sprawling curriculum” — makes for a stark contrast with the sparse selection available to students at Deep Springs. Rhys Dubin ’16, an avid scholar of continental political theory, ultimately decided to come to Yale in order to take classes with Seyla Behnabib, whose works he read and loved while studying at Deep Springs. Although a general feeling among Deep Springs alumni is that Deep Springs was the high point of their academic experience, another general feeling is that it led them towards what Bashin-Sullivan calls “un-employability.” Yale boasts broad and vibrant networks among students and alumni that Deep Springs simply can’t match. “Before, I never had connections,” BashinSullivan says. “I didn’t understand what connections were. Now I could look in my phone and find people who could give me work or point me towards work.” Yale also has actual, tangible service opportunities. Despite Deep Springs’s slightly “grandiose and enigmatic” mission statement — “to help young men prepare themselves for lives of service to humanity” — Dubin attests that “in reality, there were not many opportunities to serve a community other than the one we were existing in.” He currently works for the Roosevelt Institute at Yale, a student-run policy think tank, and is a member of the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project. All in all, Yale has built up a fine reputation within the Deep Springs community. From speaking with fellow alumni who’ve proceeded to various “elite” schools, Shaver has found that the institutions all “seem to have a reputation.” Harvard is seen as “soulless and crazy-ambitious”; at U. Chicago, Deep Springers have been “intellectually satisfied but not happy,” while at Brown, they have been happy

but not intellectually satisfied. At Yale, he says, “they have both — somewhere in between, relatively satisfied on both fronts.” The Deep Springs experience, though in many ways ideal, is also incredibly taxing. “You have to intellectually justify everything that you do,” Shaver says. “It’s completely, emotionally exhausting.” After Deep Springs, Yale can feel like a breather. “At DS,” Shaver says, “there’s this sense that if someone else cares about something, you have to care about it, too, because you care about them. Here, we do support each other — Cory is involved in music and we go to his concerts. But we don’t feel like we have to go.” Your intensity, according to Bashin-Sullivan, “goes into remission” when you leave the desert valley. Still, the Deep Springs spirit, though perhaps constrained by the demands of the “real world,” remains with the college’s graduates. A large percentage of Deep Springs alumni end up working in public service. Dubin intends to go into diplomacy; Shaver hopes to work for a nonprofit intelligence agency. Bashin-Sullivan, for his part, has a less conventional plan for his postYale future: he’s going to “hitchhike” on container ships and take notes for what will ideally turn into a project on port cities. He wants to do some kind of work that allows him to “go dirty, go places, and keep a notebook of stellar observations.” He is not the first Deep Springs graduate, he says, to make such a plan. For Deep Springers, Shaver says, “some kind of adventure is necessary” in a career path. He emphasizes that you won’t find any of them doing an internship at McKinsey. For the foreseeable future, however, you will find plenty of Deep Springs graduates getting Yale degrees. Whatever adventures they might eventually pursue after leaving New Haven, they keep applying and keep coming to Yale, tempering their ideals in the complex realities of this somewhere-in-between.

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To Get It

Right

BY GABRIELLE HOYT-DISICK PHOTOGRAPHY BY HENRY EHRENBERG

o tune a cello, you play its strings two at a time and listen for the magic interval: a perfect fifth. One string stays constant, and you adjust the other by twisting a tuning peg, loosening to lower the tone, tightening to raise it. When you hit just the right pitch, the strings emit a buzzing overtone; this emergence of the “perfect perfect fifth” engenders a feeling akin to a champagne bottle being uncorked with a satisfying pop. The interval’s magical quality is due to simple physics. The bow dragging across two strings tuned to perfection causes the higher string to vibrate three times every time the lower vibrates twice. It is the simplicity of this ratio of vibrations — three to two — that appeals to our ears. If the violin (my instrument, once upon a time) sounds like milk chocolate, silky and sweet, then the cello’s sound is dark and deep, too rich to consume in large quantities. The one and only time I played a perfect fifth on the cello, I felt small and overpowered, as vibrations seeped through my skin and hummed their way to my bones. A virgin cello player, I was unused to the thick strings. They’re necessary to produce so deep a sound, but they’re more difficult to coax into vibrating. On my first try, I pulled my bow too quickly; instead of digging yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 23

ewing our mouths BY IVY NYAYIEKA ILLUSTRATION BY ANNELISA LEINBACH

he girl behind me speaks French on the phone. There is something about the way she speaks that reminds me of Anna, my Senegalese friend, and I conclude that she too must be from francophone Africa. Raucous laughter and storytelling emanates from the three African-Americans at the back of the Greyhound bus, and I find myself chuckling at their humor. The driver turns off the light in the bus, and after he makes an announcement in his Spanish accent, everything seems quiet, despite the activities of these diverse people. I consider calling my Kenyan friends so I can add my Swahili to the ecosystem of languages in the bus. That, and I need a distraction from thinking about Boston, and about how Muthoni, a friend at MIT, is currently embodying the problems that some African students face at competitive American colleges. I recall Anna, who is learning Swahili, saying that in Swahili, when one asks, “How are you?” the only answer is, “Fine.” When I think about

profile says. Rehairing means replacing the horsehair that stretches tight from one end of a bow to the other. Huge bundles of the stuff hang in the back of Audubon Strings. Nancy remarks that the hair came from specially-bred Mongolian stallions. Next to the horsehair lies the belt sander. A string instrument’s bridge (the thin piece of wood that keeps up the strings) needs to be sanded down to perfectly fit each violin, viola, cello, or bass. The belt sander makes the bridge thinner, one millimeter at a time. As I watch in horror, Nancy holds her precious fingers close to the belt — a tiny treadmill that whirs with demonic noise. “I’ve sanded off a few fingertips, yeah,” Nancy says, her eyes intent on the bridge. “And I’ve put a few bridges into the wall.” Nancy doesn’t like sanding; it’s too easy to make a mistake. She much prefers varnishing, the next step to preparing the arched wood for its eventual place beneath the strings. Painting on this outer liquid layer is surprisingly crucial; varnish does not simply determine the sheen and color of an instrument, but also decides whether the sound it emits will be mellow or raw. Nancy’s hands unscrew a squat jar filled with brown goop. Once open to the air, the varnish emits a cold, sterile smell; acrid, almost, except for an undertone of sweetness. The mixture is turpentine, linseed oil, and oil paint, she explains while dipping the bridge of a child’s violin into the liquid and watching as the wood’s light color deepens. But every luthier mixes the proportions differently. Nancy loves the smell and how it influences her mixture: too chemical-y, and there’s too much turpentine; too goopy, and there’s too much linseed. “That’s how you can tell it’s right,” she says.

ndrea Amati constructed the first modern cello in 1538; it has since earned the nickname “The King.” The near-mythical instrument maker lived in Cremona, the cosmopolitan hub

that was home to the three great Italian music houses: Guarneri, Amati, and of course, Stradivari. One Guarneri cello has survived the ages, and one Amati. Meanwhile, sixty-three Stradivari still exist. Yo-Yo Ma plays on one. Another lives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A third was actually built by Antonio Stradivarius’s supposed teacher, Nicolo Amati, in the form of the smaller and now obsolete viola da gamba. Stradivarius resized the instrument, and the modern cello was born. Originally, musicians and audiences appreciated the cello because its low voice, devoid of edge or harshness, blended in ensembles. The violin, considered the more virtuosic instrument, hogged all the solos, while the patient cello provided background accompaniment. As the 17th century dawned, however, luthiers began using wire-wrapped strings (instead of the traditional sheep gut) on their instruments. This innovation made the cello’s sound even finer and clearer than before, and began the tradition of solo cello repertoire. The cellos, violas, and violins of Stradivarius, Guarneri, and Amati are revered in the music world, and regarded as having near-magical properties. But even though the Italian

masters made beautiful instruments, they did not necessarily build the most flawless instruments mankind has ever played upon. A study in 2009 found that the varnish used on a Stradivarius violin was nearly identical to Nancy’s recipe, complete with linseed and oil paint. In 2012, a group of professional string players engaged in a blind test, playing both a Stradivarius and a high-quality modern instrument. They were almost universally unable to tell the difference. The truth is that the luthiers of Cremona did not somehow create instruments more perfect than all others to come after. Instead, they perfected the form itself; they were the first to get it right.

fter practicing sitting, Nancy and I begin the basics. The cello nestles into her body as she plays a scale, the deep growling sound of the open C-string (the lowest on the cello) giving way to the smooth upper registers, each note made fuller by wide, even vibrato. The ladder of ever-higher pitches carries with it a momentum that makes even this simplest of musical exercises compelling. I strive to mimic the nimbleness of Nancy’s left hand and to match the graceful weight of her right. Yet again, what looks natural on her

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profile body is anything but on mine. Nancy’s fingers easily span the intimidating length of the cello’s thick neck; mine stretch and stumble. Her right elbow traces a gentle arc through the air with every bow stroke; mine makes a clumsy sawing motion, my right shoulder hiked up and tense. When I used to play violin, I sometimes cried from the cramping it caused in my back. Practicing would

SUPPER When you came home for the first time like a thing I might keep, my father sweat out the kitchen with a whole ham. I told him we’d need more. You have the mouth of a truck. It feeds four times an hour, mostly on trap music and barbecue sauce — whatever’s closer. Your mother stopped cooking ages ago. My father called you a vacuum. There’s a dream where you’re eating all my family pictures off the walls. They angle out the skin of your belly. I think it means something about loving in the wrong ways, or how hunger is sometimes a verb. It’s automatic, you explained once. You are not thinking when you grab the last slice of bread, “This is how I own a thing” or “This is how I rend it apart.” There’s a dream where you’re eating me alive. Sometimes I am enough. Sophie Dillon 26 | Vol. XLI, No. 5 | March 2014

leave my hands numb and tingling. After my junior year of high school — during which a swollen tendon robbed my right hand of mobility three days before my PSATs — I dialed back the playing. My three hours of daily practice slipped to two-and-a-half, then two, then ninety minutes. By the time I got to college, I barely played at all. My fingers have lost much of their old skill now, more accustomed to typing on a laptop than tapping on a fingerboard. And the question isn’t whether or not I’ll play my $5,000 violin again, but whether or not I’ll sell it to a luthier. I tell myself that the negative physical effects forced me to stop playing, rather than simply my lack of dedication. That I physically couldn’t continue to play, despite the hours I’d slaved over scales and exercises, despite the aching beauty of Rachmaninoff ’s Vocalise and Gluck’s Melodie from Orfeo ed Euridice, and despite my perfect pitch. I used to love it when my friends would sing notes for me, and I would identify them correctly. But by the end of high school, I had started calling my perfect pitch a “party trick.” I never mentioned it to Nancy. I was no longer a musician, and it no longer mattered that I had perfect pitch. Nancy was diagnosed with carpal tunnel last December. She didn’t miss an elementary school concert, a holiday party, or a church service. Now she wears a brace to sleep every night, and still plays cello every day. “You should really keep playing the violin,” she told me every time I mentioned that I no longer practiced. She didn’t mean to guilt me; she simply couldn’t comprehend why I — or anyone — wouldn’t. To call the cello an appendage of Nancy’s body would be inaccurate; she does not romanticize it in this way. Her love is more matter-of-fact, rooted not in the idea of the cello, but in its physical form. She has, in her years at Audubon Strings, seen violins tossed and smashed by elementary schoolers, and a cello whose ribs were decimated by a six-year-old’s foot. To repair such damaged instruments, she must

disembowel them, removing strings, bridges, and even soundposts (a thin rod of wood within the hollow body of a string instrument, meant to transfer sound vibrations from the front of an instrument to its back). “It’s weird to see them all put together, at this point,” she says. “I’m so used to seeing them naked.”

hen I met Marshall, who is in his sixties and is Nancy’s oldest student, he was obsessing over the ideal shade of blue for his new cello case. He does this every week, staring at the cases in the window and commenting on the variations in their materials and colors. “Don’t judge him,” Nancy told me. Marshall, a gregarious lawyer in a monogrammed yellow shirt, told us about his daughter, his arthritis, and the time he saw Midori perform. When he began to play, though, it became clear that while there might be a perfect shade of blue cello case in the world, there would be no perfect cello notes in this lesson. I began to stop listening. Everything he did with and on the cello required effort. It didn’t sit right between his knees, nor did it fall back onto his chest. He had trouble reading music, and his strokes were halting, slow, and small. Because of his arthritis — this was the reason that he started cello in the first place, because he couldn’t manage the smaller violin — he used a large grip on his bow, which Nancy called “the elephant,” and which was, indeed, shaped like an elephant. Even then, his grip was gingerly and loose; this was the real reason that he couldn’t get any traction on the strings. Nancy, next to him, was all ease. Although Marshall is far taller than his five-foot-two teacher, he treats the cello as if it is burdensome, cumbersome. Nancy, meanwhile, mirrored the cello’s shape with her own body, her back extended in order to lean into her instrument, and the wide vibrato on her left hand matching the vibrations of the strings. Of the three of us, only she was

profile comfortable exactly where she was.

efore my own lesson with Nancy, I wondered how she would go about teaching me. I was no Marshall, after all, picking up the cello late in life as a hobby. Nor was I a raw beginner requiring games and cello parades. But Nancy knew her audience. Whenever she spotted something wrong in my nascent cello technique, she responded by comparing my motions to those of a violinist. I needed to use my right elbow to pull the bow to its fullest length, rather than my right wrist. To keep my fingers still rather than bending and flexing them with each bow stroke. To skip the second finger on the highest string while playing a scale. My intonation, Nancy commented, must be a remnant of my violin-playing days. I didn’t mention my perfect pitch. I asked Nancy what piece a beginner

would learn first. When she answered, I realized that I should have known all along: “Twinkle.” “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is

my digits lost and fumbling. Halfway through the piece, Nancy began playing along. I relaxed in relief as her clear, true tone augmented my chicken scratching.

She’s not watching her husband, though. She’s smiling down at her cello. the first piece in every baby string player’s repertoire. On my deathbed, I’ll remember its pattern of open strings, perfect fifths, and scales. I used to show off by playing both the melody and its accompanying harmony simultaneously, my bow pressing my strings into double stops, and my fingers flitting from note to note two at a time. But on the cello, I found myself confronted with an unfamiliar “Twinkle” full of notes that petered out instead of flowing into each other, a jumble of fingerings that left

It hurt my hands to hold the cello up, and my legs to be so spread apart. As soon as I finished the piece, I laid the cello down on the floor, placing its bow on a nearby music stand, and rose to stretch. Nancy told me how much she enjoyed teaching people with musical talent; how she thought I could pick up the cello in no time. “You should really keep playing the violin,” she said. I looked back at her. She was still seated, her head craned around her cello’s neck, both body and instrument at ease.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 27

ILLUSTRATION BY THAO DO

BY VINCENT TOLENTINO

42nd Street Shuttle

28 | Vol. XLI, No. 5 | March 2014

man fell on the subway today. I was watching people slip through the metal doors connecting our car to the next, this door then that door sliding open, and shut, bouncing on the mechanism, open, and shut, when a woman said, “Oh…” Everyone turned to see him sprawled across the gap between our train and the platform, half onboard and half not. I had the sickly momentary thought that he might fall through. We all had this thought. We all braced to witness the tragedy of this poor nondescript in his faded black business suit. In the wildness of his spasms above the gap, he reminded me of a spider twitching in a drain. I wanted to look away. He would be drowned any moment — lost to the rat-strewn sub-train world, whose courses to me are as obscure, and as obliviating, as the inner sluices of sink-pipes sluicing on. The man caught himself. His elbow found purchase on the concrete platform. We watched as he turned onto his stomach, gingerly, as one turns

beneath sheets, not wanting to dislodge them. He brought one knee forward, then the other. And stood. A couple men had gotten up to help him. He waved them back and began to brush the dust from his slacks. Businessman, balding, early fifties — as unremarkable a schmoe as any. He didn’t seem to be in pain. He didn’t curse. He didn’t blush. He made no effort at levity, or sarcasm. Said nothing as he shouldered his bag and stepped forward. Still, there was something heavy and apologetic about the way he stared at the ground gathering his wits. “Are you OK?” A woman sitting opposite the doors. The man shut his eyes and nodded vigorously. “What happened?” she asked. Even in the greenish fluorescent light, the woman looked urbane, accomplished, concerned. She might have been in her early forties. Her off-white blouse was crisp and tailored. Her nubuck shoes had gold-tipped laces. “Just slipped.” He shrugged and

personal essay looked at a cruddy black streak on the floor, the mark his heel had left as it slid beneath him. “Graceful ,” he muttered. “It wakes you up!” the woman trilled. The conductor was announcing that the doors were closing, and the man didn’t hear. “Wakes you up!” she said again. “A shot of adrenaline!” A few more people rushed on. “Better to do it in front of strangers,” another man said. Someone chortled. A general murmur of assent. “That way you can change the narrative.” This man was wearing Buddy Holly frames and a tight forest-green sweater. His friend launched into a narrative about falling in the park, and everyone went back to their books and smartphones. I stared at the black skid mark his heel had left on the floor. In about five minutes, I thought, these doors will open and this car will empty, and a new group will walk on — another cast gathered for another minor tragedy, the trillionth iteration of this ritual. In five minutes, and until the end of time, nobody will notice this black streak. Nobody will know what it means. I thought of similar markings on concrete highway dividers, of tire marks veering nonsensically into the shoulder. My mother taught me a game when I was five. With a pencil she drew two lines, a start and a finish, and two dots on the starting line. It was a race: my dot against hers. She fixed the pencil’s tip on her dot and held it in place by pushing her finger against the eraser. She showed me how to push down, and down, and carefully — forward. The graphite tip skimmed up the page, leaving a trail like a comet. She marked the very last trace of the line with another dot and fixed the pencil’s tip again. Whoever crossed the finish line in fewer moves won. So I’d seen this mark before. The first slip of many slips all the way to the end. It was a simple record of that panicked half-second, the insufficient friction-coefficient, the collision of suit and skeleton and cement, and yes, why not, the sudden pounding surge of

adrenaline. All of it was there, smeared in coal crayon across the floor. “I love your shoes.” Someone complimenting Ms. Adrenaline on her nubuck loafers. The train slowed, pulling into Grand Central. “First day wearing them!” She was breathless. Everyone turned to admire. “Well, aren’t you glad I said something!” “Yes! If you get compliments the first day, then you know you’re onto something!” Et cetera. I looked at the man who fell. He, too, was looking at the shoes. I wondered, with him, whether anyone remembered his fall at all. I wondered, with him, what kind of material the

subway floor was made of, that it would support these gilt shoes, yet send his sensible rubber heel skidding. Some kind of slick poly-something, no doubt, made to resist chewing gum, made to be soiled, then cleaned, then soiled again. Anyway, plastic. Better to fall in front of strangers. That way you can change the narrative. The only narrative worth remembering here, the man must have thought, limping toward the terminal, aching in places he’d never ached, is that aging, like any calamity, happens in moments. From that moment on, he’d be walking more slowly. He’d be walking like a man in his fifties. I rode the train, restive, back to Times Square.

MAKROCOSMOS III MUSIC FOR A SUMMER EVENING Even then, we were cold. Joseph knew it so he started a fire in the basement after dinner, our whole family watching The Godfather. We are sailing from under the ship’s deck, the furnace room. His head and eyelids bobbing as a needle with a thread, stitching in the points of light—the eleven stars, the sun and the moon. I have never dreamed of fire. Then again I’m not a father, not so tired. How can it be so warm and so dark in here? I went outside to watch the real sky, flat and stiff, wrap around us like a pit in the wilderness, the dark dirt. Now we’re sailing through the thick of it, before it shallows onto day, and the real flames go to black velvet ashes. Then the morning: upstairs my palms trailed Joseph’s wife heaving, heavy sleeping in a black velvet dress. The room was empty—there was no water in it, but what a thing that would be. When she wakes, she leaves. The air rushes around in cold circles somewhere else, everywhere else, and not here. Jake Orbison yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

fiction

Cica d

by M ggie Yellen a io rat t s Illu

Luo drey u yA ns b

hey appeared in the night. Milo heard them first, from outside of his bedroom window — a low buzz, deep buzz, a buzz that sank down into his skin. He held Bobo, his stuffed tabby cat, up tight to his chest. He could not fall asleep. The noise sounded like a robot, probably an evil robot. What nice robot would come at night? He sunk the faded fur into his nose and breathed in a deep musty breath, the smell of sourness and home. He waited for the noise to stop. The noise grew louder. Moved up and down, into a steady hum. Definitely a robot, Milo thought, and he wondered whether to go get Mom. He stared at the window, waiting for it to burst open, until it all got too loud, loud enough to hurt his ears, and he whisked out of bed, down onto the sticky wooden floor. Pulling Bobo by one frayed paw, Milo scampered into the hall, past Jordan’s room, straight to Mom and Dad’s. They were still awake, propped up on the bed with glossy magazines. “Do you hear? Do you hear?” Milo pulled himself onto the bed, into his mom’s arms. Dad crunched down on a potato chip. “OK, Milo, very nice.” Crunch. “Do you hear the robot, though?” His voice dipped. He pressed his face into his mother’s chest, and she pulled her arms around him. “What’s wrong,

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baby? What are you talking about?” He twisted his head to peek up at the bottom of her chin. “Can’t you hear the sound, all that sound?” Mom closed her eyes, settled into the bed. Dad popped in another potato chip, then slowed his crunching. Mom turned her head away from him, and the buzz rose up around them. “Well goddamn, well goddamn.” Crunch. “That is some goddamn sound. Martha, why don’t you check on that?” He raised another chip, up into his mouth, looked back down at his magazine. Mom lowered Milo down onto the mattress and brushed aside the threading curtain. She jumped back with a shriek. A few creamy ovals pressed against the glass, little legs spindling out from the sides. “Bugs!” she shrieked. “Jordan, Jordan, come here!” She turned back to Milo and pressed him into her body.

Before Dad could crunch another chip, Jordan rushed in, swinging a baseball bat with his arms. It pulled his thin arms down towards the ground, towards his flannel Spiderman pajama pants. “Let me kill the fuckers, I’ll kill those fuckers” — the bat just missed the window. Mom pulled Milo and Bobo out, away from Jordan’s yelling. As they walked down the hallway, the shouts faded into a rising buzz.

hen the sun finally rose, mom refused to go outside. “They’re everywhere — they’re everywhere!” she said. Jordan offered to crush them all with his bat, but she wouldn’t calm down. She bustled around the house, locking every window and sliding the curtains closed; in the rays of filtered light, Milo could see little dust pieces floating in the air. Finally, when they could no

fiction longer hear the sweep of passing cars above the buzz, Jordan grabbed Milo’s hand, and they walked to summer school. On the way, they counted the long, sheer-winged bugs. Ten plastered on the yellow car, fifty waiting on the sidewalk. Two latched to the mailman’s wrinkled back. At school, Mrs. Wilkes told Milo’s class that the bugs were called cicadas. She pointed to a blown-up picture with her knobby fingers. “These insects — that’s another word for bugs, my dears — they sleep for many years underground. Sometimes, dears, they sleep there for thirteen years before they come out, and sometimes they sleep for seventeen years. And sometimes, they all come out at once. This year, that’s what’s happening! And you are very, very lucky kids, to get to see one of those years.” She smiled, pulled her scaly lips back over yellowy teeth. “Why do they buzz so much?” Milo asked. “No, not buzzing,” Mrs. Wilkes said. She smiled again and shook her head softly. “Not buzzing — singing! Most bugs buzz, but cicadas sing! How about that, Milo?” Singing? Milo was confused. As Mrs. Wilkes turned back to the diagram and pointed out different body parts, Milo turned back to the window. He shut his eyes and listened carefully for the words, for any words; maybe he knew the song. But all he heard was buzzing;, not like any singing he had ever heard. Mrs. Wilkes must be wrong, then. On the way home, he asked Jordan about it. “Singing?!” Jordan spat on the sidewalk. “Milo, that is the dumbest shit I have ever heard. You can’t believe everything teachers tell you, especially that old bitch Wilkes. Gotta grow up sometime, baby bro.” He crushed a cicada under his thick-soled shoes, and, for a second, the crunch penetrated the buzzing.

field trip to the museum, and the neighborhood kids started daring each other to eat cicadas. The mailman confused addresses: one afternoon, the family received a college admissions letter. Even though Jordan was only fourteen, he filed it in his room for later. “They just know how genius I am, Milo,” he said. “That’s why they want me already, ’cause they can just smell the smarts.” Dad, meanwhile, stocked up on chips and started sleeping on the downstairs couch. “Summer spot, Milo,” he explained. He crunched down on a chip, but Milo heard only the buzz. Mom never left the house anymore. In the dimmed light, she found a crack in the kitchen wall paint. One day, Milo and Jordan found buckets of paint dotting the kitchen floor. They all looked white to Milo, but Jordan pointed out the different numbers and names on the lids. “Don’t be stupid, Milo,” Jordan said. “Those numbers explain how long the paint takes to dry, so they’re all different.”

After that, Mom spent every afternoon and evening in the kitchen, painting the crack over and over. “I can’t get the color right,” she sighed. She started skipping dinner to brush the spot up and down, so Jordan faked a low voice and ordered pizza on the phone. Some mornings, the entire kitchen dripped with wet paint. Again: “I can’t get it,” she sighed. The wall always looked white to Milo, though, and he wondered if grown-ups saw more colors than kids. The whole house started smelling sour, so Jordan and Milo spent most of their time outside. Jordan led killing raids on cicadas, pulled out matches and drew them closer and closer to the shiny wings. After a week or two, he found a pair of rusty tweezers and straight ripped the wings out. “These little fuckers, that’ll make them shut up.” He stored wings in a dirt-smeared ziplock bag. He explained that he would sell them later to buy a video game player.

he buzzing drove the town a bit mad. Traffic wouldn’t move, Mrs. Wilkes forgot about the yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 31

fiction Jordan made Milo rip out their wings, too. “If you want to play the games with me,” Jordan said, “you gotta put in some work now.” Milo looked down at the cicada cupped in his hand. “Jesus, Milo, I can’t deal with your lazy ass. Are you gonna help me or not?” He grabbed Milo’s other hand and pressed the tweezers in. Jordan then sat there, staring. Milo looked back at Jordan and gulped. The tweezers shook in his hand, and he lowered them towards the shining wings. Slowly, he pulled the wings out, one at a time. Jordan held out the Ziploc bag, wordlessly, and then moved on to catch more. Milo remained, staring down at the wingless, silent cicada. It squirmed a bit, flailed its legs around — all without buzzing. Eventually, it stopped moving. Milo knelt down and grabbed a handful of dirt. He glanced to make sure that Jordan wasn’t looking, and lowered the cicada into the ground. Softly, he pressed the dirt back over the cold, firm body. The buzz rose around them. “Milo, you lazy-ass. Get over here and help.”

he end of summer school, for Milo, brought empty days at home, all words replaced with buzz. With the freedom of real summer, Jordan started disappearing to hang out with his crew — his “bros.” He left Milo at home, nose pressed against the window. “We do big boy stuff, Milo,” he said. “You’ll get there eventually, don’t worry.” So Jordan, then, was gone. Milo couldn’t go to Mom, unless he wanted to help with painting, and Dad wasn’t around very much, anymore. “A guy’s gotta work, Milo,” he said. “Grown-ups can’t stay at home painting walls all day.” And so Milo found friends in the cicadas. He let them crawl up and down his arms, gave them names like Georgie and Vanessa and Buggerbug. In the hot afternoons, he grabbed sticks from front lawns and built a cicada castle in the shade; every night, he picked up a few chirping cicadas and tucked them

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inside the front gates. Before breakfast, he rushed out to see how many remained. Counted them, asked them if they had sweet dreams, stroked their sleek, scaly backs. He introduced them to Bobo, who liked to visit for discussions and dinner parties.

nce, he brought his favorite cicada, Geo, into the house for a field trip. He thought Geo might be afraid, so he talked it through with him beforehand and brought him some water in a bottle cap. Then, Milo tucked Geo into his pocket and edged into the house, pushed the screen door open. Inside, Mom had stopped painting, sat slumped sleeping on a wooden chair; one of her arms curled around an empty glass bottle. Milo softly walked towards her, weaving through paint buckets. He reached out with one hand and touched her face — she drew in a long, noisy breath, but she did not wake up.

ilo left her in the kitchen — after all, Geo needed to see the whole house. He brought him upstairs to his room; let him out to walk a round a bit on the rug. Milo pulled out Superman and Batman from a bin of toys, and he helped them fly over to Geo. “Geo, these are superheroes,” Milo said. “They’re super strong, and they always get the bad guys. If you want, you can be a superhero too! Because you can buzz, and that’s kinda like a superpower.” And so, all afternoon, Milo and the heroes saved the day. After beating the Joker and a bedmonster and a pirate, Milo curled up on the floor next to his cicada. “Hey, Geo,” Milo said, “maybe you should move in and join our family. I bet you could live in my room, if you wanted.” Geo rubbed his wings together, let out a short chirp. In the end, though, Milo brought him back outside. He belonged there, after all.

t was already dark by dinner. Mom had finally taken a break from painting to cook, and she called Jordan five times to make sure he would be back to eat. When she finally caught him, she spit the words out fast, before he could hang up: “It’s going to be a family dinner. It’s going to be really nice, the family together, and you have to come back.” She pulled out stacks of recipes, and Milo helped make the sauces, gravy and tomato. When the sauces were just bubbling, the pasta soaking out in the sink, Jordan strolled in with a fish-netted girl (just a friend, he winked). They pulled around the table, chipped plates, while mom poured out ice water. Dad’s usual chair, the one with the embroidered seat back, was empty. From across the table, Milo could count the lumpy stitches. “Well,” Mom breathed, “are you guys all excited for school this year?” The girlfriend spooned gravy into her mouth, letting out a low slurp and clack. “Mom, we’re not babies,” Jordan said. “Not me or Milo, so stop pretending.” Mom lowered her eyes and stared down at the table, at the empty bowl. “Well, looks like the potatoes were a hit! Those were always a favorite.” She smiled tightly, and silverware clinked. Milo noticed an ache, a pressure building on the insides of his ears. It crushed the inside of his head, like on an airplane when you’re falling fast, too fast, and Mom gives you a gummy bear to suck out the pain, pull out flavor to balance the air pushing in. The voices — that was the problem. Mom’s voice tore into his ears, shrieked a bit at the ends of sentences. Jordan yelled when he wanted the salt, leaned forward to throw words across the table. “PASS THE TURKEY, MOM — PASS THE TURKEY!” “OK JORDAN, NO NEED TO SHOUT,” she threw back. “IS THE MEAT COOKED OK?” She pressed the plate over. “I TRIED A NEW RECIPE THIS YEAR, SO I HOPE —” “Mom, it’s FINE.” “— I HOPE YOU ALL ENJOY IT

fiction AND —” “MOM, IT’S FINE!” Jordan dug his fork down, sharp, into a chunk of turkey. The words echoed wide in Milo’s ears. Jordan leaned over the table. Mom looked down at her plate. The girl’s knife drew a long scratch across the porcelain. Milo felt the pain in his ears relax, dull down — he looked at Jordan’s mouth, hanging open with that bottom heavy lip, and he listened to the air flow in and out. Jordan rasped in and out; Mom stood up to fill the potatoes. Milo stared at the embroidery on the empty chair — and then, in the moment between breaths, between footsteps, between words, he understood. “Do you hear that?” “Hear what, Milo?” Mom said, leaning over the white heaps. “Do you hear, do you hear?” Milo pressed himself up from the table. Jordan shook his head: “What the hell are you talking about? What do you hear?” Milo looked around the room. “Nothing,” he said. “I hear nothing.” Jordan stared at him, stared with flat, black eyes. “They’re gone,” Milo said. “They’re gone! Don’t you understand? They must all be gone.” At the countertop, Mom stopped spooning potatoes, looked down at the white lumps of potato and butter, all congealed together. Jordan squeezed his eyes shut. Milo dropped his silverware on the table and propelled himself into the screen door. He rushed outside, across the faded grass to the elm tree that sheltered his cicada palace. He called the names of his friends, called to Vanessa and Elvis and Buggerbug and Lewis and Maria, called to them all, called to Geo, Geo, Geo, but he heard only silence. He began to pull apart the palace, spraying twigs everywhere, still calling out the names over and over and over.

nside, he found only shells. Crusty, yellowy shells — gone the sparkling wings, the green bodies. Gone, the strange buzzing sound. The shells still clung to the twig floor, and, as Milo slowed his breathing and looked around the backyard, he could see shells everywhere. Lying on the grass, on the tree trunks, on the old, rusting bicycle that no one cared to move. Gently, he lifted a shell up, close to his face, so he could inspect the skin. It felt dry and brittle, a little sticky too. “Geo, is that you?” No response — it was empty. He dropped the shell to the ground and put his hands on his cheeks. Mom and Jordan and the fishnet girl were

still inside, and the sun had started to set. Milo sat down flat on the ground and looked at the landscape of empty shells. His headache returned. And then, alone on the cooling ground, Milo began to sing. He started with “Row, row, row your boat,” but he forgot the words after “stream.” Wordless, he let his voice wander up and down. Mom called, at some point; he didn’t notice, just brushed her voice aside. He simply sat there, singing without words or melody, brushing his fingers against the brown, sticky shells. If the cicada sound counted as singing, he figured, this must be too.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 33

The

White

Total Ladder Faculty Members By Race and Gender 2013-2014

375 men 130 women

In 2006, Yale launched a faculty diversity initiative to increase the number of female and minority professors. The University made the hires, but was not able to retain enough female and minority professors to meets its original goals. What obstacles do underrepresented faculty member face on the path to promotion at Yale? Is it up to the University or the individuals to fix the problems?

Hispanic 13 men 6 women

Pacific Islander 1 man 1 woman

BY THERESA STEINMEYER OPENING GRAPHIC BY MOHAN YIN PHOTOGRAPHY BY TASNIM ELBOUTE AND ALANA THYNG

C Black

17 men 7 women

Native American 1 man 0 women

Asian

32 men 29 women

ongratulations! You are a female or minority professor, and you’ve been selected to play Yale’s Tenure Game. With a strict time limit of nine years, your objective is to teach, research, and publish your way across the board to meet your department’s expectations for promotion. Your final goal? Tenure. Academic freedom, job security, and a salary increase of roughly 50%. Along the way, you may face additional challenges, like being asked to sit on a committee, mentoring an undergrad, or raising a family. Don’t let these obstacles distract you too much, because you’ve only got one shot at this: if you don’t win tenure, you might be able to stay at Yale, but you’ll likely have to restart the game at another university. The clock starts now. Go!

ale, like many institutions across the country, has struggled in recent years to increase the diversity of its faculty. Out of this year’s tenured faculty, only 24.1% are female and 13.4% are non-white — that’s 262 women, 146 minorities, and 689 white men. One way Yale has begun to address this disparity is by examining its procedures for faculty promotion and asking whether those procedures are fair for female and minority members. In 2006, Yale began a seven-year initiative to increase the percentage of female and minority faculty. At the time, only 19.4% of tenured faculty members were women, and 10.4% were minorities. As part of the initiative, Yale planned to hire 30 minority professors and 30 women in science and engineering departments.

By 2011, Yale had hired 30 new female and 56 new minority faculty members. At first glance, these are promising numbers. But during the same five-year period (2006-2011), 12 female faculty members and 34 minority faculty members left the university, yielding a net gain lower than was hoped for. Statistics from 2013 reveal that Yale is still falling short of its original goals. Obstacles along the path to tenure represent only a fraction of the challenges women and minorities face in academia. Some of these challenges affect would-be professors long before they begin their careers. But the obstacles presented by the promotion process deserve a thoughtful examination because they are within Yale’s power to address. What should Yale be doing to support its female and minority professors as they navigate the path to tenure? Or does the responsibility to figure out the system, and overcome its flaws, lie with the female and minority professors?

he path to tenure at Yale begins with an appointment to Assistant Professor. During your third year, your department will conduct an internal review to decide whether or not to renew your appointment. In your fifth or sixth year, you’ll be evaluated for promotion to Associate Professor based on your scholarship, teaching, and your commitment to the university. As an Associate Professor, you may take a full year of leave before your tenure review, which must occur by the end of your eighth year on the tenure track. This review measures your contribution to Yale and to your field. After nine years, your time is up: you’ve either achieved tenure or lost your only chance to do so at Yale.

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cover

Kathleen Cleaver, senior lecturer in Yale’s Department of African American Studies This process may sound straightforward on paper, but, in practice, the tenure track is fraught with uncertainty: what defines excellent scholarship at Yale, and how do you prove that you’ve achieved it? In a Faculty of Arts and Sciences satisfaction survey published in 2007, junior faculty respondents said that Yale’s review and promotion process was the greatest of seventeen potential causes of “extensive stress.” If you’re an assistant professor 36 | Vol. XLI, No. 5 | March 2014

navigating this tenure process, you’ll need a mentor — a tenured colleague who can advise you on strategy, give you a sense of the quality of your work, and discuss the everyday difficulties of seeking promotion. The 2007 faculty satisfaction survey found that women and minorities tend to have more difficulty finding mentors and building relationships that are often critical to getting ahead. To understand this difficulty, it’s important to know the difference

between formal and informal mentors. Formal mentors are senior professors who’ve been assigned by each academic department to offer guidance to new professors. Informal mentors are found through unofficial channels: at a department meeting, through teamteaching a course, or simply during a chat over coffee. Frederick Wherry, a young, AfricanAmerican professor in the Department of Sociology at Yale, encountered little trouble navigating the informal mentoring system. His journey to a full professorship at Yale began at a conference in Montreal in 2006. At the time, he was on the tenure track at the University of Michigan. The conference was his first contact with Yale’s sociology department: Wherry met Philip Smith, then the associate director of Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology. Smith mentioned Wherry’s work to the other directors at the Center, and, a month after the conference in Montreal, Wherry was asked to give a talk at Yale. Then the invitations from Yale kept coming — Wherry was welcomed for the Center’s spring conference, and again for the sociology department’s fall colloquium. But when Yale approached Wherry with a job offer in 2008, he turned it down: the position wasn’t tenure-track, and at Michigan, Wherry was working his way up one of the nation’s top sociology departments. Still, Wherry maintained communication with Yale. He continued to network with Yale professors at national conferences, and, in the spring of 2012, he received a second Yale job offer — this time, with tenure attached from the moment he walked on Yale’s campus. Wherry accepted the professorship. Wherry’s case is exceptional. Not only did he achieve tenure in one leap, but he also succeeded by relying on his own networking and informal mentoring connections, not requiring assistance from any departmentprovided formal mentors. But according to the 2007 faculty satisfaction survey, for many woman

cover and minority faculty members on Yale’s tenure track, the informal mentoring strategy wasn’t working. Women and underrepresented minorities were nearly three times more likely than men to report that a lack of mentors was barrier to career advancement, and female and underrepresented minority junior faculty were about twice as likely to report that they felt excluded from informal networks. There are many possible explanations for why women and minority faculty members might feel underserved by the informal mentoring system: they may face unconscious bias from their white male senior faculty members, who may be less likely to actively seek them out to offer advice. Women and minority faculty members may also be less assertive, an observation made by several professors interviewed including Cristina Rodríguez, the first tenured Hispanic professor at the Yale Law School. From the time she was an undergraduate at Yale, Rodríguez knew that she’d need to be assertive in finding informal mentors. But this assertiveness didn’t come easily — at Yale College and later as a rising law professor — because she had to overcome her own tentativeness around authority and take risks in sharing her academic ideas with others for evaluation. In recent years, in part to assist women and minority faculty, Yale has begun encouraging departments to provide formal mentoring to their professors. In a recent interview, Julia Adams, the deputy provost of faculty development and diversity, said that it is Yale’s responsibility to provide formal mentoring for new professors as soon as they begin their careers at Yale. If women and minority faculty need the option of formal mentoring to successfully strategize their way to tenure, she said, then Yale should provide it.

eceiving tenure and a full professorship at Yale is the ultimate mark of respect: it’s your department recognizing you as a

JUNIOR FACULTY PERCENT CITING INFORMAL BARRIERS TO ADVANCEMENT AT YALE BY GENDER AND RACE EXCLUSION FROM INFORMAL NETWORKS Women 29% (n = 92)

Men 9% (n = 62)

URM 61% (n = 18) Non-URM 11% (n = 136)

LACK OF INTEREST IN YOUR RESEARCH AREAS Women 32% Men 11% URMs 50% Non-URMs 15% leader in your field. However, getting recognition for their scholarship is another barrier to tenure for female and minority faculty. In the 2007 faculty satisfaction survey, 32% of women and 50% of under-represented minority faculty claimed that a lack of interest in their research areas was an informal barrier to career advancement at Yale, compared to only 15% of non-underrepresented-minorities and 11% of men. Some professors feel that they have to prove not only the merit of their individual work, but also the value of their field’s existence in the first place. Mary Ting Yi Lui, the only professor of Asian American Studies at Yale, has grown accustomed to defending

her work to colleagues who perceive it as an “identity project” rather than legitimate academic scholarship. Lui says that during graduate school and while teaching at Yale, she’s had to fight the perception that her work — in the history of Chinese Americans — is merely “activism” or “service”. Her colleagues are sometimes surprised, she says, to hear that she teaches meaningful topics such as immigration law. In universities across the country, gender and ethnic studies are gaining acceptance as legitimate areas of study. Still, they are much newer than traditional fields like history or economics, and, as a result, the legitimacy of professors’ work in

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cover gender and ethnic studies may be questioned more frequently. This affects faculty diversity, because gender and ethnic studies departments are disproportionately filled by women and minority faculty. According to a report published by the Women Faculty Forum in 2012, all Yale faculty members appointed by the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program in 2011-2012 were female. Six out seven faculty members appointed in the African American Studies Department in 2011 - 2012 were also female. Of the 23 total faculty currently affiliated with the African American Studies Department, thirteen are African American. Establishing more recognition for ethnic and gender studies is an area in which Yale can continue to grow. Although African American Studies became a department in 2002, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies both remain only programs at Yale. Without their own funding, programs have less autonomy to hire, recognize, and promote exemplary scholars.

aula Kavathas is the current chair of the Women Faculty Forum and a professor at the medical school. When she began as a young medical school professor, Kavathas understood that she may need to work up to 80 hours per week between managing her lab, giving talks, and writing papers. But she wanted to have a family. Kavathas had her first child after completing her post-doctorate, and her second child during her first teaching job at Yale. In those early years, Kavathas felt that women were criticized at Yale for trying to maintain careers and families, and she avoided this criticism by keeping her familial commitment quiet. The criticism is less harsh today, but women are still more likely than men to place their family before their careers. 43% of female professors who took the 2007 FAS satisfaction survey strongly agreed that care-giving responsibilities for children slowed career progression, whereas only 19% of men recognized this challenge. Anna Zayaruznaya, who will be joining Yale’s music department as an assistant professor in the fall, recalls her female

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senior faculty mentors saying that she’d have to choose two of the following three: husband, children, or career. Zayaruznaya’s job search itself was driven by the need to find a tenure track job at the same university as her husband. Constance Bagley, a professor at the Yale School of Management, felt that she understood the requirements for promotion, and that she deserved it based on the merits of her work. But when her professorship was not renewed in May 2012 despite her review committee’s unanimous recommendation, Bagley felt that she had been discriminated against for her age and gender. Unable to overturn the decision, she filed a suit against the university in December 2013. While Bagley fights for recognition, she balances a commitment even more critical: caring for her son as a single mother. In the Yale Women’s Center in the February following the lawsuit, Bagley conversed about the challenges of being a woman in the classroom, and then hurried out to pick up her son from school. As a professor at Stanford, Bagley had him on the waiting list for the campus childcare center before he was born, and childcare became a hiring condition for her — she wouldn’t take a job unless her son could be placed in a nearby. When Bagley came to Yale in 2007, her son was eight — old enough to sit in the back of the lecture hall while she taught if his school was cancelled that day.

rystal Feimster is an AfricanAmerican assistant professor in Yale’s departments of African American Studies, American Studies, and History. When an AfricanAmerican pre-med student asked her to be her sophomore advisor, Feimster felt that she couldn’t say no. She recognizes that African-American students sometimes seek her out because of her ethnicity, and she counts advising as an opportunity to “give back.” This year, Feimster has taken on two undergraduate mentees despite

cover being on leave — a critical period for academic study before her review for promotion to associate professor. During her period of writing and research, Feimster sets aside time to make trips to campus to meet with her advisees. When extra commitments like this add up, they can make attaining tenure more difficult. Academic departments don’t want to overload female and minority professors with additional responsibilities because of their gender or race. But because these demographics are underrepresented among faculty at Yale, departments have little option when selecting professors to give minority or female viewpoints on committees. Similarly, students who wish to connect with mentors to whom they can relate on a demographic level flock disproportionately to female and minority professors. Yale currently has eight tenured female African-American professors. The “problem” in these situations, Wherry explains, occurs when “the faculty member is just not saying ‘no.’” While working toward tenure at Michigan, Wherry was also asked to take on additional commitments in his department. He didn’t feel that there were “evil machinations” demanding that female and minority professors take on more commitments, but he realized that female and minority colleagues had more difficulty turning these commitments down. Saying “no” wasn’t easy, especially when students asked for specific professors to teach courses, or when faculty members were told that their extra commitments would help the department. So he had to decide: which commitments were important enough to take time from his tenure pursuit? After completing two years of courses that required time assisting students with independent projects, Wherry was asked by the Michigan Sociology department to take on a three-semester honors seminar. With a book to finish, Wherry made the strategic call to decline, explaining to his department that he needed the time to finish the

Frederick Wherry, a professor of sociology at Yale who specializes in cultural and economic sociology final version of his book so it could be published. Jonathan Holloway, an AfricanAmerican professor who is Chair of the African American Studies department and Master of Calhoun College, knows this balancing act all too well. When he shares his experiences as a minority professor at Yale, his recollections are firm and practiced: it is clear he’s shared them many times before. Holloway is often asked to serve on committees, including committees regarding academic resources and the new residential colleges. He is “absolutely sure” that he has served on more committees than his other colleagues with the same senior rank, even though he isn’t compensated for the extra time. Instead, his motivations are personal. “I’m happy to be on those committees … asking really deep questions about what Yale is going to be,” he says, “but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been the only black person in the room, and it gets kind of wearying after a while. I would like for there to be some other people who would do the job of ‘representing the race.’”

ale is still developing its Tenure Game. Sometimes, the game won’t be fair: female and minority professors may have more trouble with informal networking, having their work recognized, or managing additional responsibilities. Yale needs to ensure that these faculty members can be recognized for their work and for extra commitments to their departments. But perhaps the question that Yale ought to be asking is not if its female and minority faculty are winning the Tenure Game, but how. Yale can rework those the game board to give each of its faculty members a chance at finishing, but the challenges for female and minority faculty members extend beyond the board. Women and minority faculty are asked to play a strategy that their white male colleagues are not: to choose their careers over other critical commitments, even over helping other female and minority students achieve in academia. As a female or minority faculty member, you, too, can win the Tenure Game. But you might find that it’s an unsatisfying victory.

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